A print copy of this blog's greatest hits is in the final stages.
I hired an editor through Reedsy to format the book for IngramSpark submission - I just couldn't figure out getting the gutters aligned! - both paperback and eBook, and I already had the cover done through Fiverr.
Should see the book on the market mid-May, just as I'll be heading to the FLA annual conference.
We'll see how it goes.
Several things on my mind this Sunday:
The vote yesterday by the Republican-controlled House to renew financial and military aid to Ukraine was a stunning break by the Rational factions of the House GOP against the pro-Putin (and pro-trump) Irrational factions. It now becomes a question how long Speaker Johnson remains Speaker before Marjorie Trump Greene gets her revenge, and if the resulting chaos by a leaderless Republican caucus will grant the House Democrats to take the reins.
How quickly the military aid - what we're doing is "selling" them existing equipment and buying up replacement ammo and supplies to ourselves - gets to Ukraine depends on how many transport planes the US Air Force and Army have ready to go the second Biden signs the bill.
Putin's not happy. Ukrainians are. If we can replenish their ammo - and stock them with anti-drone and anti-missile defense systems - we can prevent or seriously hamper any summer offensive Russia has planned.
The vote also passed military aid for Israel, which is a more troubling matter because Netanyahu is NOT de-escalating hostilities with Iran and is NOT delaying the ongoing slaughter and starvation in Gaza. The problem in this matter is both a Hamas organization that wants to spill Israeli blood and a Netanyahu government that wants to spill Palestinian blood. This IS a situation where both sides are at fault and BY GOD both of them need removing so that the Israelis and Palestinians who DON'T want to kill each other can resolve this damn mess.
The passage of the aid bills is a blow to donald trump's direct control of House Republicans... for the moment. Right now, trump has full control of the party's national committee, and trump has finally sent the order out - knew this was coming - demanding all the lower-ballot candidates "donate" at least five percent of their own fund-raising into the RNC if they use trump - and many of them have to, as he's the banner carrier - as part of their campaigning.
It's the shakedown, kiddos. This is where the mob boss demands from all his street-level capos "fuck you, pay me." This is how trump's grift operates: Everything as much as possible goes upward to himself, never downward. Everyone else has to fight for breadcrumbs and his "magnanimity" whenever he feels like it. There is no guarantee that trump will use any of this tribute money towards supporting the GOP in full: It's more likely this money is going towards paying his expanding legal bills.
Speaking of, trump's criminal trial is moving faster than expected. The jury - 12 members, 6 alternates - are picked and sworn in, and the first witness is set to testify Monday. The prosecutors are holding back announcing who the witnesses will be until absolutely necessary, out of precaution that trump will threaten/intimidate them. The first one up is of key interest: David Pecker, owner of the media chain accused of aiding trump's efforts to squash - "catch and kill" - any stories about his affairs (especially the one with Stormy Daniels). Michael Cohen and Daniels are both expected to testify although no idea when.
But that's not all: trump and his lawyers are facing different matters all week long. Even as trump sits in on his criminal trial (required) that Monday morning, his civil court lawyers have to go before Judge Engoron to determine if that $175 million bond trump got was even legal. AG Letitia James argues the bond company does not fulfill requirements under state law, and that trump is lying about his worth (again).
Then on Tuesday at 9:30 am, Judge Merchan will hold a hearing to determine if trump's been violating - the prosecutors count at least seven separate instances on Friday, and trump's tweeted out more attacks over the weekend - the judge's gag order regarding the criminal trial. We are facing the possibility Judge Merchan will hold trump in contempt of violating the gag order, and it's a question of how severe - from fines, to changing trump's bail, to even physically holding trump in a jail cell - the ruling could go. trump and his allies will scream "free speech" and "witch hunt" no matter how harsh the penalty will be: But this is a criminal trial now, and trump has been crossing lines no other defendant has outside of Sicilian mob bosses.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear the Absolute Immunity argument trump insists will protect him from his federal criminal trials, and one that would have serious ramifications on presidential abuse of power should the Justices agree with trump. This is the scary one: If five out of the six Republican Justices show favor towards trump's argument - even if they try to squeeze out a narrow finding that trump alone has absolute immunity (which would violate every form of legal logic on the planet) - we are facing the greatest threat to the Constitutional system since 1860.
And then Friday, trump will get his car towed because he parked it illegally in front of the courthouse. Well, it's possible this could happen...
So. Crazy week still ahead. Crazy month of April still ahead. Crazy summer still ahead.
Good thing I'm already crazy. It keeps me sane while this is all happening.
When last we left the Congressional Republicans, they were happily sitting around a campfire singing "Kumbaya My Lord" ahem happily shivving their own Speaker - their second in a row - for actually allowing some legislation to reach the House floor, and for not being aggressive enough chasing after "Biden Crime Family" bullshit.
Speaker(ish) Mike Johnson promptly called a week's vacation - which Congressional Republicans do every other week anyway - in order to find ways to pander to the Freedom Caucus even further, to the point where he made a pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss trump's ring orange buttocks by announcing legislation to ban illegal immigrants from voting in elections (something every pundit noticed was a law already on the books, and was not a source of any mass voter fraud).
In the meantime, the House Republicans succeeded in doing something... which was the unnecessary, partisan, and purely performative impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, on charges of failing to be absolutely cruel towards migrant families at the southern border. This was something that A) was never going to succeed in a Democratic-controlled Senate anyway, and B) papered over the fact that the House Republicans themselves refused to pass any meaningful border security bill - on trump's orders no less - because they didn't want to give Biden an election year win.
So earlier this week, the House Republicans made a big show out of signing the impeachment order and walking it over to the Senate for their process. There's a video of it somewhere, here we go:
It was, to be honest, performative nonsense.
And like all things done by these House Republicans, it fell apart within a day. It had to set a land-speed record for fastest dismissal of an impeachment (via Griffin Eckstein at Salon):
In a 3-hour proceeding, the 51-member Democratic majority voted to dismiss both charges on Wednesday, concluding that the charges did not reach the magnitude of “high crimes and misdemeanors” outlined by the constitution and avoiding a trial.
Republicans in the chamber objected to the lack of a trial in the matter, with Eric Schmitt (R-MO) describing the vote as “unprecedented.” The dismissal isn’t fully unprecedented, though, as the GOP caucus in the Senate attempted a similar move in 2021, when all but 5 voted to kill the impeachment proceedings against President Trump...
Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) argued that a trial would set a dangerous precedent in future politically-motivated impeachment proceedings.
“For the sake of the Senate’s integrity and to protect impeachment for those rare cases we truly need it, senators should dismiss today’s charges,” Schumer said...
Schumer of course wants to keep up the pretense that impeachment is a functional system, when all evidence is pointing to it being a broken, partisan mess.
In the meantime, Johnson's attempt to appease the wingnut elements of his caucus went nowhere because his primary attacker Marjorie Taylor Trump Greene renewed her Motion to Vacate calls, and getting another congresscritter to sign on to her push. Alongside this was an effort by the Democrats and a handful of pro-Ukrainian Republicans to sign a Discharge Petition to bring the foreign military aid bills - Ukrainian, Israeli, and Taiwan - to the floor in spite of the Speaker's block.
Possibly in spite of Greene and her Freedom Caucus knee-capping buddies, Johnson made the move to have those financial military aid bills brought to a vote by this Saturday. Which of course enraged the pro-Putin Freedom Caucus puppets even more.
It will be nice if the House can function - even for a day - to pass something that will genuinely serve our nation's foreign policy interests and the defense of our allies.
But it's not stopping the clown car madness of the extremist Far Right desperate to crash every vehicle over the cliffs.
This is going to get crazier and crazier. Until we Americans vote these Republican crazy clowns out of power.
Get the damn vote out this November, people. And for the LOVE OF GOD - and women, and Blacks, and children, and families, and poor people, and... well, everyone who's not evil rich white guys - don't vote Republican.
Just a quick notice tonight that Bob Graham, former Governor of Florida and later Senator, passed away yesterday (via AP News):
Former U.S. Sen. and two-term Florida Gov. Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died. He was 87...
Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq invasion.
But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.
Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores...
Graham's name came up often during the 2008 Presidential cycle as a possible Veep pick for Barack Obama, but the thing about his diaries came up and it got to be a joke that having someone that dedicated to writing everything down wouldn't be a good thing in the Oval Office. Alas.
Graham was a major figure in Florida in my youth - when my family moved here in 1977 - and had put his name to a lot of early efforts towards wildlife and shoreline preservation as the development boom of the 1980s shook the state. They literally added his name to the reconstructed Sunshine Skyway Bridge as he was a major proponent of getting a larger, grander span installed after the 1980 tragedy that collapsed the first one.
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| See the sail-like cables holding up the span? Graham signed off on that. One of the earliest bridge designs using that look, and quickly became popular for a lot of other bridges. from Wikipedia Commons. |
Graham was also one of those national figures from the days when bipartisanship actually worked, who had built up a solid reputation for inquiry and administrative detail. He was one of the few who challenged Dubya's claims to invade (and occupy) Iraq. He was also the last of the big-name Democrats - alongside Lawton Chiles - who helped lead Florida before the partisan takeover by the Far Right Republicans by the early 2000s.
Graham was also a Florida alum (Class of 1959) with a dedicated Bob Graham Center for Public Service named after him (I'll be lucky - with my resume - to get a brick outside Library West graffitied with my name on it).
So, for all the party-goers at the Swamp restaurant across the campus on University Avenue, pour a glass out for Bob.
(Gets told they tore that restaurant down for a Wawa convenience store)
WHAT THE HELL?! Bloody developers took over the city council, didn't they? /headdesk
Are there ANY drinking pubs across the street from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium? ANY?!
Ugh. Thank the Gods that Bob's not around to see this travesty.
Go Gators.
IT'S HAPPENING. AT LAST.
did the judge hold him in contempt yet?
— Witty Librarian 2024 (@PaulWartenberg) April 15, 2024
did the judge hold him in contempt yet?
did the judge hold him in contempt yet?
did the judge hold him in contempt yet?
did the judge hold him in contempt yet?
did the judge hold him in contempt yet?
did the judge... #trumptrial
Ahem.
Today is the pre-trial stuff, where the judge is setting out the parameters of what evidence will get presented, denying trump's attempts at recusal and delay, and setting the calendar so that the Wednesdays are off-days (awwwwww). Not sure if jury selection officially starts in the afternoon, so we'll see about that.
The whole thing is a media circus even without cameras allowed in the court - no surprise, this IS a Trial of the Century - and with any luck the chaos will settle down once the actual testimony begins.
But this is it. Finally. trump getting held accountable for all the shit he thought he could commit for the last 50 years.
You might notice that despite all on the harrumphing from me about how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter that I'm still on there. Like spotting a car wreck on I-4, I can't look away and need to fulfill my Reply Guy urges. (Also, I want to be there when Musk implodes Twitter: Screw you, Elon, I'm deadnaming it 'cause calling it X is stupid)
Having mentioned how donald trump (lowercase-naming him) spent the past week filing last-minute legal appeals against the pending April 15th Manhattan criminal trial over his hush money payments, I had a Reply Guy moment on Twitter that I'd like to share on this blog:
Top 10 trump excuses to delay trial
— Witty Librarian 2024 (@PaulWartenberg) April 13, 2024
10) Dog ate paperwork
9) Eric ate paperwork
8) Blinded by staring at eclipse AGAIN
7) Accidentally mailed himself to Guam
6) Taking over OJ's hunt for real killer
5) Claims he already won
4) (redacted)
3) Cofveve
2) The Boogie
1) BUT HER EMAILS
I had to take the "thes" out of the sentences to fit Twitter character count, by the by.
Ron Filipkowski is someone I follow and reply/requote often, also by the by.
It's a little bit of levity - and a shit-ton of schadenfreude - waiting for Monday to roll up tomorrow, with trump forced to sit in the courtroom during jury selection knowing that this is no longer something he can control.
Justice is coming, trump. No more delays. Cower like the coward you are.
P.S.: Tank the stock. SELL MORTIMER, SELL!
Damn. While I'd been busy writing a previous article, it looks like the War between Israel and Hamas expanded to include Iran sending missiles and drones to strike targets in Israel (via Becky Sullivan at NPR):
Air raid sirens sounded across Israel and the occupied West Bank and Israeli officials urged people to seek shelter after Iran launched dozens of drones toward Israel late Saturday night in an attack that marked a major escalation of conflict in the Middle East.
Iran had vowed to retaliate after an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria earlier this month killed seven Iranian military officials. It is the first time that Iran has launched an attack on Israel from Iranian soil, Israeli officials said. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the attack also included missiles.
There was already international outrage that Israel struck a foreign embassy, but this is Netanyahu we're talking about: Any excuse to expand the war so he can stay in power:
In a Saturday night address to Israelis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country was ready for "any scenario, both defensively and offensively."
"We have determined a clear principle: Whoever harms us, we will harm them. We will defend ourselves against any threat and will do so level-headedly and with determination," Netanyahu said.
Caught in the middle of all this was the United States, bound by treaty and historical obligations to defend Israel. While our military in the region responded by shooting down as many of the drones and missiles as possible to reduce civilian targets, there now comes the dread that we're getting caught in an escalating cycle of retaliation between two sides: Israel backed by the U.S. and European allies vs. Hamas and Hezbollah backed by Iran... and Russia.
It's pretty clear that Russia and Iran are closely tied: Russia is relying on Iranian drone manufacturing to supply the ongoing bombardment of civilian targets in Ukraine. It's also clear - once you step back and look at the bigger picture of the global chaos all this fighting in Gaza and Israel generates - that the ones who profit most in any escalation of hostilities between Israel and Iran are Putin and his lackeys (both in Russia and here in the United States).
I've argued before against any American involvement in a war against Iran. The dynamics were different then: The reason to avoid it now revolves around how we dare not get suckered into a fight that can distract us from aiding Ukraine.
If Biden is smart enough, if he can see the bigger picture here - that the real threat remains PUTIN, and that we need to bolster aid to Ukraine - then we can hope that the United States will play a more moderating conciliatory role in the coming days. Biden needs to - with whatever force and influence we've got left - rein in Netanyahu's warmongering here and now, and end the human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank to signal Iran to step back on their saber-rattling (the Ayatollahs should worry about engaging in a fight that could trigger political protests at home).
Biden may try to use the moment to bring Republicans over to his side on providing aid to Israel - which he and the Democrats are tying to aid for Ukraine and Taiwan - but given how too many of trump's allies - along with trump himself - are already Putin's puppets, that's unlikely to happen.
As an aside in one of those grand ironies: If Biden tries to get authorization from Congress to expand our military's efforts against Iran (and Russia), those same Republicans could vote against it out of fear that Biden will win over 2024 voters as a war-time leader, and thus prevent the U.S. from getting dragged into another Middle East quagmire.
All in all, it's another complete mess where the simplest solution is to get Hamas and Hezbollah and Israeli Right Wingers to STOP KILLING EACH OTHER SO THAT NORMAL ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS COULD JUST GET ON WITH THEIR LIVES, THAT WOULD BE GRAND AND DANDY.
(deep inhale)
In the meantime, we can hope that Biden's diplomacy works its way through the narrowest of paths to a solution of some kind that doesn't involve nuking half of everything between Cairo to Tehran.
Good luck.
It's been noted that as the presidential campaigning shifts away from the primaries - it's all over but the tears - that Joe Biden's ground game is extensive and well-funded while donald trump's is... well... (via Peter Nicholas, Allan Smith, Vaughn Hillyard, Adam Edelman and Ben Kamisar at NBC News):
President Joe Biden has been scooping up record-making donations and plowing the money into an expanding campaign operation in battleground states that appears to surpass what Donald Trump has built thus far.
Flush with $71 million cash at the end of February — more than twice that of Trump's campaign — Biden parlayed his fundraising advantage into a hiring spree that now boasts 300 paid staffers across nine states and 100 offices in parts of the country that will decide the 2024 election, according to details provided by the campaign.
Trump’s advisers would not disclose staffing levels, but his ground game still seems to be at a nascent stage. His campaign hired state directors in Pennsylvania and Michigan last week, people familiar with the recruitment process said.
Combined, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have fewer than five staff members in each of the battleground states, said two Republicans familiar with the committee and the Trump campaign’s organizational structures in 2020 and 2024.
It's looking like trump isn't even trying to get the vote out - even for his Republican base.
That's the danger: trump sort of doesn't want voter turnout at all.
If the past two presidential elections taught trump anything, it's that he's not going to win the Popular Vote. Oh, he gaslights that he "won the most votes ever," but he lost the majority of voters to Hillary and he lost also to Joe. The only thing he won was the Electoral count in 2016.
trump can lie all he wants about the Popular vote, but he knows nothing's really changed to his favor this 2024. With his pending criminal trials - especially the one starting this Monday - he risks losing even more voters across the nation before November.
So he's going to take the other route: The cheaters' route. trump's going to sow chaos to prevent the electoral system from working at all.
trump's going to scream - falsely - about "stolen votes" and illegal voters. (via Nicholas Riccardi at AP News):
Former President Donald Trump turned to one of his favorite themes on Friday — the specter of immigrants improperly voting in federal elections. House Speaker Mike Johnson came to the former president’s Florida compound to announce that he would introduce a bill to stop those who are not citizens from voting in elections.
Trump has made baseless claims about this subject before, like in 2016, when he blamed his loss of the popular vote on voting by immigrants, and then appointed a commission to investigate the issue. It disbanded without identifying a single case of a noncitizen casting a vote...
This has actually been a gambit of the Far Right for decades now. Don't forget Kris Kobach has been working as an election denialist out of Kansas for years, always getting into court battles trying to prove there's mass voter fraud... and always failing because there's no proof of it.
What's happening here is the Conservative mindset - the fear - that there are "undesirables" or "non-citizens" threatening to undermine the power and privileges of the "elite" (themselves), getting projected into a Narrative of mass voter fraud that isn't taking place.
And yet, trump is running with this because it justifies his delusions that he's "really popular" and always winning. And the Republicans are happy to play to those delusions because it fits into their belief that "non-Americans" - the ethnic minorities, the women, the young - shouldn't have the right to vote in the first place.
Instead of working a ground game of voter registrations and "get out the vote" drives, trump and his ilk are going to figure out way to sabotage the vote, disrupt precincts and harass poll workers, throw off early voting and mail-in ballot efforts. With trump's takeover of the national-level RNC, the GOP is already spreading the lie that there was massive fraud in 2020 to lay the foundation to trump's claims of unproven voter fraud for 2024.
trump doesn't want to win the Popular Vote. he doesn't even want to win the Electoral College. trump is planning on breaking the entire voting process so that the results all come down to who controls the US House in January 2025, so he can get his MAGA allies in the House to reject any Biden win and just hand the Presidency to trump even if trump got his ass stomped in November 2024.
It depends on two things: How the Electoral College works out and how many state the Republicans control in the House when January 2025 rolls around. If the Electoral College clearly goes to Biden - and trump can't bully or trick enough Blue states to disrupt their Electoral numbers - then it comes down to if the Republicans control either the House or Senate to forcibly reject those results (like trump wanted on January 6th when he sent in the rioters) and send the whole thing to the House where it'll be rigged for the cheater to cheat.
This will all come down to voter turnout for Congress and the state legislatures as much as turnout for the Presidential election.
Elections matter, everybody. And it matters that the Republicans be in NO position to disrupt the results if they don't go their way.
Get the damn vote out, Democrats and Indy voters and whatever Moderate Republicans are left out there. Deny trump any chance to deny OUR votes.
