Damned If You trump, Damned If You Don't

As you might know, donald trump former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) is facing a set of investigations in New York regarding his business dealings and his questionable tax dodging. It's a twofer: One investigation is pursuing the evidence as a Civil matter, another grand jury investigation is looking at the Criminal violations.

And yes, in our legal system you can get investigated in both Civil and Criminal systems over the same alleged acts (SEE: OJ Simpson's trial for murdering his ex-wife and another man AND the wrongful death lawsuits of those murders) without it violating Double Jeopardy.

The newsworthy thing happening today was that trump and his children involved with his businesses were in court arguing to prevent the Civil case from forcing them to testify to that particular grand jury. Their case was that anything they said - or didn't say - regarding civil violations could get handed over to the criminal grand jury and violate their Fifth Amendment rights over self-incrimination.

If we go to the AP News coverage for an explainer:

(New York Attorney General Letitia) James, a Democrat, is considering whether to sue Trump or his company, the Trump Organization, over the way they have valued his assets over the years. Essentially, her investigators contend Trump and his company had a “fraudulent or misleading” pattern of saying properties they own such as golf courses and skyscrapers were worth more when they wanted better deals on loans, and less when they wanted tax breaks...

Trump has bristled at allegations that he lied about his wealth. He and his lawyers have pointed out that asset valuations can be subjective. They’ve repeatedly ripped the investigation as purely political, and even sued James to try to stop her probe.

IS THERE A CRIMINAL PROBE, TOO?

Yes. The Manhattan district attorney is also investigating. A grand jury has been hearing testimony and reviewing documents covering much of the same subject material as James’ civil probe.

WHAT IS A DEPOSITION?

A deposition is like an interview, usually held in a law office or conference room, except witnesses must swear an oath and could be subject to penalties if they commit perjury. They’re typically recorded.

Depositions, frequently depicted in legal dramas as pitting one side against the other across a table, are most common in civil litigation and are often used to obtain information or get someone’s answers on the record.

WILL TRUMP HAVE TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS?

Since anything a person says in a civil deposition could also be used against them in a criminal investigation, witnesses are free to invoke their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent at any time.

So if he chooses, Trump could simply refuse to answer many questions...

Refusing to answer the toughest questions could hurt Trump in any Civil trial. A jury is allowed to know if a person has refused to answer, and is also allowed to infer that if the person had answered the question, it might make them look bad...

The problem apparently is that trump (and his family members as well) could plead the Fifth out of a fear that any testimony will incriminate himself in the Criminal proceedings at the other end of the courthouse, and if the Criminal investigation leads to charges and a trial his pleading the Fifth can't be used against him. However, the likely Civil court case can present his refusal to testify to the jury, which makes him vulnerable to any "guilty" or "culpable" findings there.

An interesting thing about the differences between a deposition - which Civil cases rely on - vs. grand jury Criminal testimony:

IS THIS LIKE TESTIFYING BEFORE A GRAND JURY?

There are some similarities, but in New York, anyone who testifies before a grand jury automatically gets immunity from prosecution for any crimes they discuss.

For this reason, New York prosecutors are unlikely to call Trump before a grand jury...

Hence trump's argument that James' Civil investigation is a witch-hunt trying to work around the limits of a Criminal probe.

Thing is, the judge wasn't buying trump's argument (Also via AP News but article by Michael R. Sisak):

Former President Donald Trump must answer questions under oath in New York state’s civil investigation into his business practices, a judge ruled Thursday.

Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump and his two eldest children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., to comply with subpoenas issued in December by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump and his two children must sit for depositions within 21 days, Engoron said following a two-hour hearing with lawyers for the Trumps and James’ office...

21 DAYS! (checks calendar) Holy shit, that's March 10. MARK IT DOWN, PEOPLE.

“In the final analysis, a State Attorney General commences investigating a business entity, uncovers copious evidence of possible financial fraud, and wants to question, under oath, several of the entities’ principals, including its namesake. She has the clear right to do so.” Engoron wrote in his decision...

Suck it, trump.

Trump’s lawyers told Engoron that having him sit for a civil deposition now, while his company is also the subject of a parallel criminal investigation, is an improper attempt to get around a state law barring prosecutors from calling someone to testify before a criminal grand jury without giving them immunity.

“If she wants sworn testimony from my client, he’s entitled to immunity. He gets immunity for what he says, or he says nothing,” Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, Ronald Fischetti, said in the hearing, which was conducted by video conference.

Anything Trump says in a civil deposition could be used against him in the criminal probe being overseen by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. If Trump invokes the Fifth Amendment, Fischetti said it could still hurt a potential criminal defense.

“That’ll be on every front page in the newspaper in the world,” Fischetti said. “How can I possibly pick a jury in that case...?”

If you're wondering why pleading the Fifth is so damaging, you'll need to do some research on "Fifth Amendment Commies." Back in the days of the McCarthyist witch hunts for Communists, it was a favorite tactic of the Far Right to summon people before public hearings and get them to refuse to self-incriminate. Back then in the 1950s, in an era of Loyalty Oaths, people could actually lose their jobs if they admitted they were ever members of the Communist Party (which a number of people were back in the 1930s and the Great Depression) even for a day. So they plead the Fifth, after which McCarthy and his allies would accuse them anyway of being "Fifth Amendment Commies," forcing their employers to fire them anyway.

As a result, even though it's perfectly legal under the Constitution, the Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination has a bad reputation in the public discourse. Republicans still enjoy pummeling anyone who goes to that legal tactic in any way: trump himself bashed the Fifth Amendment as a "refuge for mobsters" and that you shouldn't plead the Fifth "if you're innocent." So this has to burn for him. You can't claim to be a winner and you can't claim the legality of your actions if you have to go on court record pleading the Fifth (and pleading it more than 500 times like son eric trump recently did).

Another thing that has to bother trump - and especially his lawyers - is how any deposition runs the risk of trump committing perjury in any way. It's been noted before: trump can contradict himself on testimony at any given time if forced to answer questions. Driven by the need to look perfect - to look like a winner at all times - trump will say one thing about an incident in one sentence and then say the exact opposite about the same incident in a later question if it makes him look good. He'll make grand statements about any meetings or conversations he has, opening himself up to counter-testimony from other people who'll remember those conversations differently... and have records to prove what happened.

If trump is compelled in the Civic deposition to say something other than pleading the Fifth, he opens himself up to the risk of countering the thousands of receipts AG James already has (especially from the Mazars accounting firm that just pushed trump under the bus).

No matter which way trump is forced to testify, he's in deep trouble.

Which is probably why he doesn't want to testify at all.

But the legal system is no longer treating him with the kid gloves they've used back when he merely filed for bankruptcy four (or six?) times back in the 1990s and 2000s.

He's in deep trouble now.

And the best thing the rest of us can do is break out the popcorn GIFs, as always.

via GIPHY

Say It, Florida. Gays Exist.

(Update: Many thanks again to Batocchio for including this blog in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please read this and many other articles and please leave comments, I wanna feel the love from time to time...)

Well, this is a pretty sick attempt by the Florida Republicans to take us back 20 years into denial and homophobia. The state legislature is about ready to pass a "Don't Say Gay" bill (via Joe Hernandez at NPR):

Proposed legislation in Florida would restrict how teachers can discuss sexuality and gender in the classroom, the latest effort by Republican lawmakers to remove the teaching of LGBTQ issues from schools.

Supporters say the measure empowers parents who deserve to have a say in what their children learn, but critics — who've dubbed the proposal the "Don't Say Gay" bill — argue that it will strip protections from LGBTQ kids and have a chilling effect on educators...

Under the House bill, a Florida school district "may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The bill doesn't specify how "age-appropriate" and "developmentally appropriate" would be defined.

The bills would also give parents the ability to sue schools if they believed the schools violated any provisions of the law...

That lawsuit empowerment is tied into the "bounty" concept that the Far Right have championed to go after abortion rights, civil rights, and any other rights by granting haters the ability to bankrupt their targets. Back to the report:

The group Equality Florida, which advocates for ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, said the bill is "dangerous" and accused lawmakers of targeting LGBTQ young people.

"This legislation is meant to stigmatize LGBTQ people, isolate LGBTQ kids, and make teachers fearful of providing a safe, inclusive classroom," the group said in a statement. "The existence of LGBTQ students and parents is not a taboo topic that has to be regulated by the Florida Legislature."

All of this is happening even though last decade we saw the Supreme Court guarantee Gay Marriage as a right, even though we've undergone serious changes in our military and other institutions recognizing gays exist and can serve the public trust as well as the heterosexuals.

This isn't only an issue of free speech and free identity for our residents and for our kids. This is going to get worse than just banning books about LGBTQ fictional characters or real-life biographical figures. This is going to get worse than shutting down talk about social roles as our children grow into the adults - hetero and gay and genderfluid - we need them to be.

This law is going to grant license to the bullies and the gay-bashers to let loose, allow them to accuse anyone of even uttering a word about homosexuality or gender identity. This is a license to go after the teens who are gay, who are trans, who are genderfluid, and who aren't harming anyone else by their existence despite what the haters fear.

All the current problems we have in our schools with bullying will multiply as the haters will encourage their kids in schools to harass and punish anyone they deem as LGBTQ/Other and get away with it because we DARE NOT say "gay" in those schools. Teachers will get pressured to look the other way. The kids who are finding themselves LGBTQ as they grow up will suffer emotionally, if not physically. Even the kids who AREN'T gay/lesbian are going to get picked on out of fear and rumor, and will have nowhere to go for help.

Basically, the state of Florida is happy to turn their public schools into even more hostile and violent war zones.

All because to the Far Right running this state the very concept of non-heterosexual identity still terrifies them. Even after all the research that there are biological and psychological factors that are well beyond any religious morality.

Always remember this kids: The imposters, the bullies, the haters, they all will employ force instead of argument, impose silence where they cannot convince, and propagate their character - lack of - by the sword.

The Far Right religious wingnuts are desperate to impose silence about gay rights - about gays existing at all - because they cannot convince us to be as hateful and judgmental as they are.

Fight back. 

Recognize that we should not be bullies to our fellows. 

Recognize that real Christian Faith calls on us to love each other, without restriction or hinderance. 

Recognize that fear is an enemy, it drives us to hate and to hurt others.

Recognize that the Republican Party is running on Hate because they cannot run on anything else.

The Darkest Habit That Could End trump's Reign of Error (w/ Update)

Can you imagine it? Twenty years from now, Netflix will produce a miniseries where an intrepid reporter will meet with a shadowy deep informant from the donald trump Administration, and the informant - whom the producers will label "Deep Stoat" and look suspiciously like John Bolton (no, the idiot with the mustache, not the Michael Bolton with a pirate hat) - will reveal how chaotic the White House was, due to trump's insane habit of trashing every document that came his way.

Deep Stoat will lean back into the shadows of the dimly lit parking garage and utter the immortal line, "Follow the clogged toilets."

...

No, I am NOT making that detail up.

Okay, getting serious here. This week saw a number of revelatory reports regarding the National Archives recovering at least fifteen boxes from trump's Mar-a-Lago resort of White House documents he took with him once his administration ended back in January 2021. Quoting from Jonathan Franklin's article at NPR:

As first reported by The Washington Post, the documents retrieved last month from the Florida property contained important records of communication along with Trump's self-described "love letters" with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, as well as a letter addressed to Trump from his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.

According to the newspaper, keeping the boxes of records at Mar-a-Lago violated the Presidential Records Act — which requires that the government keep all forms of documents and communications related to a president's or vice president's official duties.

As required by the act, the records discovered at Mar-a-Lago should have been transferred to NARA from the White House at the end of the Trump administration in January 2021.

"The Presidential Records Act mandates that all Presidential records must be properly preserved by each Administration so that a complete set of Presidential records is transferred to the National Archives at the end of the Administration," said David Ferriero, archivist of the United States...

I've mentioned the National Archives before, when discussing how Presidential Libraries come into existence as depositories of paperwork for each administration. It's their job to sort through the hundreds of daily documents generated by the actions and decisions that comes out of each presidency, especially because a lot of those documents were - and perhaps still are - highly classified pertaining to national security matters.

These are matters that have to go through a vetting process independent of the President in order to determine what can go public and what remains under security clearance... which trump and his people interfered with by taking at least 15 boxes worth of stuff and holding them for a year without likely safeguards for those classified documents. Ever hear of Chain Of Custody, the means of protecting sensitive documents to ensure the information is not compromised or broken? The minute trump took papers that had to go to NARA, he broke that chain. 

And he made matters worse by taking all this to Mar-A-Lago, well-known trumpian retreat notoriously vulnerable to spies and leaks. You could pretty much imagine the joy a lot of trump's "guests" had being in close proximity to paperwork most likely shoved into some office cubicle without supervision.

It doesn't help trump's argument - whatever it is, probably along the lines of "The papers belong to ME, donald trump" - about why he took all these papers. What we do know is that the National Archives did ask the Department of Justice to open an investigation into this because they DID find classified materials among the boxes making it likely there were national security breaches (Via Charles R. Davis at Business Insider because I can't link to the original Washington Post article behind its firewall, yes I operate on the cheap):

Former President Donald Trump took documents that were clearly marked as "top secret" with him to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing two unnamed sources.

"Top Secret" is the highest level of classification, referring to material that could harm national security if released.

According to The Post, the documents were found by the National Archives, which stores and preserves presidential records...

After uncovering the documents, officials referred the matter to the Department of Justice, which in turn asked for the National Archives' inspector general to conduct an investigation.

Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the last administration's records are owned by the public, not the former president.

In addition to taking documents, Trump has also been accused of destroying them. Reporters at The New York Times and Bloomberg have both said sources confirmed that torn-up records were found near White House toilets...

Yes, this is when you'll see more reports of toilets as the story deepens.

Just as an aside, the national media punditry accused Hillary Clinton back in the 2016 election cycle of ignoring or violating national security matters by maintaining her own email server, and their constant jumping on half-baked reports that turned into nothingburgers is often viewed in hindsight as a major reason she failed to secure more votes in close-contested states. "But Her Emails" enjoined with trump followers' cries of "LOCK HER UP" kind of points out a serious case of irony here. Hillary turned out to be better with national security stuff than trump ever did.

Because trump never took any of that shit serious. Look at his history with top secret materials. He blabbed in 2017 about an ongoing joint US-Israeli operation to a couple of Russian buddies that ended up shutting it all down. He Tweeted out sensitive surveillance photos of a failed Iranian rocket launch that pretty much told Iran how much info we're getting on them (and likely exposing human resources our intel agencies had in Iran's government). That was so egregious a reveal that the intelligence experts in the media couldn't even look at those photos without risking their own clearances (Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice had a massive meltdown over this one).

All of this because trump has no understanding or respect for anything outside of his own limited world-view. This is a man who does not read much as a hobby, nor a man known for focusing on the topics at hand other than if it's something that makes him richer or more worshiped.

His mistreatment of paperwork, his willingness to hide documents and visitor logs and phone conservations, all of it tied into trump's background as a businessman where hiding questionable paper trails seem to be a habit... and in trump's case an obsession, considering all the failed business dealings he'd committed over the decades.

This is a man in trump who spent more time - allegedly, as the ongoing criminal investigation in New York keeps uncovering on a weekly basis - figuring out tax loopholes and rigging accounting ledgers to cheat the legal system as much as possible.

So what happened when trump jumped from the private sector of his business dealings into the public sector of government paperwork and accountability was a clash of styles. trump's willingness to shred everything ran into the legal requirements that nothing gets shredded (until vetted by the proper agencies).

There have been stories for years about trump's mishandling of White House papers. In 2017, Politico reported the National Archives had to remind trump not to destroy any documents. In 2018, Time published a report about trump staffers retaping torn up shreds in order to comply with NARA demands. By 2020, the watchdog group CREW sought to file a restraining order on trump's outgoing administration - because yes by then trump lost the November elections - because there were still reports that trump and his aides were destroying files.

All of this leading up to reports from Maggie Haberman coming out with a tell-all book later this year about it (via Igor Derysh at Salon): 

Trump, who reportedly had a habit of tearing up documents and failing to follow federal document preservation laws, needed a repairman on more than one occasion to fix his bathroom plumbing, according to Haberman's upcoming book "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America," which was recently excerpted by Axios.

Staff at the "White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged," Haberman told CNN on Thursday. "The engineer would have to come and fix it, and what the engineer would find would be wads of, you know, clumped up printed wet paper."

Haberman stressed that this was "not toilet paper."

No duh. Anyone who survived middle school bathroom hazings will tell you that printing paper is too thick to disintegrate or soften in water the way toilet paper does. Yet trump kept trying like the blabbing idiot that he is to flush unwanted documents away. It never occurred to trump that there are working fireplaces in the White House and he could have easily burnt all that paper along with the kindling on cold nights when nobody else was looking. (Not like I'm trying to give out tips here... You're not supposed to destroy any of these papers in the first place, okay!)

(Also, Haberman deserves some scorn here for failing to adequately report these stories to media outlets when the damn reporting mattered between 2017 and 2020. She's one of the people responsible for the over-reaction to Hillary's emails and in some ways trump is her bloody fault.)

I'm not going to comment yet on the alleged report from 2018 of trump caught in the act of EATING some of those papers because so far it's just one source and we need more verification. 

With all of this in play - trump's history of destroying documents, trump's horrifying habits of mishandling classified top secret documents, and the fact he rolled out of the White House with 15 boxes of documents he shouldn't have taken - the question arises, "Is this one more legal scandal that trump is going to have to weasel his way out of?"

Because yes Virginia, it is looking like trump violated a couple of serious laws here.

First off is the Presidential Records Act, a set of laws created after Nixon's Watergate and other scandalous fiascos. It ranges from 44 USC s2202 that spells out the UNITED STATES and not the President owns those papers, to 44 USC s2203 how the President and his office cannot dispose of such papers until the National Archivist says so (44 USC s2203(f)) AND that the Archivist is the one who possesses all the documents when the President's term ends (44 USC s2203(g)(1) so skating off to Mar-A-Lago with 15 boxes is a serious no-no).

Then you get to Title 18 of the US Code, where the criminal penalties kick in. 18 USC s2071 makes it clear: 

(a)Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b)Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

In short: donald trump has been caught red-handed violating various provisions of the Presidential Records Act and can get punished for willfully - you have to go out of your way to flush documents down a toilet for God's sake - destroying and willfully concealing/removing all those documents, records, maps - yes, he took the hurricane map he Sharpied, remember THAT one boys and girls! - and other things that SHOULD HAVE gone to the Archivist instead.

Consider this: For all the illegal things trump has done, documented over all these years but that he's never had to answer for, with all the criminal and civil trials he's still facing... The one thing that is fucking airtight is that trump broke the rules over his mishandling, destruction, and theft of official documents. The one person who can push for trump's downfall, imprisonment, and banishment from any hope of future political office will be a career civil servant in our National Archivist.

Basically, trump can go to jail for pissing off one of the highest-ranking librarians in the United States.

Schadenfreude, do your thing!

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

(Update 2/12/22): Two national security experts - John Gans and Jon Wolfsthal - weigh in at The Atlantic on how serious this matter is, and why trump must answer for the rules he broke (paywalled):

...Everyone from the president down to the most junior federal bureaucrat swears an oath to protect the Constitution and is informed that keeping records is a crime. Many citizens, including those who are in or have left office, have been charged in violation of these rules, their careers destroyed or damaged, some sent to prison. Even with these “lesser” cases, it is the Nixon example that sets the bar, indicating that this is not some minor issue or mere convention. Protecting the paper of a presidency is about nothing less than the rule of law, government accountability, and whether everyone in our government, and in this country, is held to the same standards...

...The president has to follow the same rules as anyone else. This is part of why we were infuriated to learn that former President Donald Trump is reported to have removed unique materials from the White House that later had to be recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort. And it is why we believe that the Department of Justice must investigate Trump for his handling of government records and, if the facts justify it, prosecute him, just as other less prominent Americans have been for similar behavior.

The Presidential Records Act and other archival regulations are intended to ensure that all documents and materials are protected and preserved for posterity. Executive privilege protects the president while in office; afterward these documents explain what the commander in chief and his teams did or did not do, as well as why. This accountability is linked directly to the core of the American government’s creed—that the governed, not an individual sitting in government, are the source of all authority. The law ensures that Americans will eventually know just what their government and their elected and appointed officials do with the power granted by the people. Although reasonable disagreements exist over how and when the National Archives can make these records accessible, advocates for good government and democracy agree as to the importance of eventual disclosure and accountability.

This is why Trump’s behavior has caused an uproar, and why the National Archives has also asked the DOJ to investigate. Although the 45th president’s predilection for tearing up documents (and also reportedly flushing some down the toilet) has gotten the most attention, the brazen theft—and it is theft—of at least 15 boxes of materials from the White House is most alarming... On Thursday The Washington Post reported that some of the information taken to Mar-a-Lago was designated “top secret.” This is no longer just a case of removing materials important for historians and accountability. This has morphed into a full-blown intelligence scandal that could undermine both national security now and democratic norms in the future...

If the DOJ does not hold a president accountable for misconduct, it will weaken a standard, perhaps irrevocably, that has prevailed for nearly 50 years. When you serve at the pleasure of a president, as so many in the federal government do, knowing whether the person in the office will be held accountable matters. If they are not, anyone taking the oath on their first day or closing up their files on their last will do so with the understanding that the rules only matter in certain cases, or that they do not matter at all...

For the LOVE OF GOD, Merrick Garland, investigate trump for his theft of Presidential records.

Cross-Posting From My Librarian Blog: Time to Defend Your Libraries!

I posted this at my other blog - the professional librarianship / amateur writing one - but it's also a political call to action so:

Well, this is unsettling (Via Nikoel Hytrek at the Iowa Starting Line):

The effort to ban books has expanded beyond the classroom now to public libraries, with a new GOP-backed bill adding librarians to their target for prosecution and civil fines of those they believe give access to materials that are “obscene or harmful to minors.”

A collection of 14 Iowa Republican representatives introduced a bill Tuesday that makes it illegal for a person affiliated with a public school or public library to knowingly spread “material the person knows or reasonably should know, is obscene or harmful to minors.” Colleges and universities are exempted.

The penalty would be an aggravated misdemeanor, upgraded to a class D felony if the person was previously guilty of this.

Aggravated misdemeanors can be punishable by up to two years in jail and a fine between $625 and $6,250. Class D felonies are punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine between $750 and $7,500.

In short, Iowa Republicans want to turn librarianship into a criminal profession. Putting us up there with robbers, drug dealers, and people who talk at the theater...

Goddamn wingnuts. They know it's not enough to ban books at the school libraries. They're going after the public libraries as well.

Unable to ban books due to First Amendment restrictions, these Republican bastards are going to do the next-best thing: Make it impossible for public librarians to do their jobs lest they fear getting fined and jailed.

You want to know how this game will get played if Iowa makes this a law?

Say a mature-looking young adult comes in, claiming they're a college student, asking for a book on sexual identity from the 306 Dewey Decimal (DDC) shelves. As a librarian, I would direct them to the shelf area, show them the titles we've got there. And then WHAMMO the "college student" turns out to be a 17-year-old high schooler on "dual enrollment" with the local community college and they call in the cops to arrest you for "knowingly spreading obscene material" to a minor.

You think that if this law passes, the courts will only rely on the fines to punish librarians, I mean who wants to send a sad little librarian to jail over an obscene book? Thing is you WILL get judges who will punish sad little librarians "to send a message," because those judges may agree with the Far Right religious conservatives who want to ban "obscene" books from the face of the Earth. Even then, those fines aren't cheap: A full-time librarian usually makes between $35,000 to $45,000 a year. Even a $625 fine is cutting into rent or mortgage, not to mention the costs of fighting these charges in court. Want to take care of $1000 fines every month? There goes most of a monthly paycheck for librarians. This would bankrupt most of us...

I'd really like it if you went to that blog and read the rest of my rant. Suffice to say, I am calling on every honest American to stand with your public library. Join your Friends of the Library group. Tell the religious wingnuts they will not take away your right to access a great public service.

You are going to pry my library catalog
from my cold dead hands, Republican wingnuts.

This is where the Far Right war against libraries is taking us, America. Fight back.

 

An Insurrection By Any Other Name Is Still Damaging To Our Nation, Stop Lying About It Republicans

So during this weekend, the national-level leadership of the Republican Party censured the Congresscritters who called trump out for his January 6th insurrection - Liz Cheney, Republican Or Not? - and also decided that the rioting mob that smashed their way into Capitol Hill were, and I quote, "A Legitimate Political Discourse."

About as brazen a lie as anything trump himself could cook up. Then again, the GOP have gone all in to defend the indefensible since 2016...

Lemme refer to Vixen at Strangely Blogged for some observations:

The phrase "legitimate political discourse" sounds, in the phrasing of the Republican party, like a new and not-improved version of "the Aristocrats": there are a lot of ways to tell that joke, but the point of it is its filthiness. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have been censured by the gutless old party for bothering to look into a national security incident affecting the seat of our democracy, but the party chooses to see them as persecuting "ordinary citizens"...

Who stuffed their brains with the nonsense of German servers, Venezuelan voting machines, Chinese thermostats, and Italian satellites? And how are the people who perpetuated that level of absurd fraud, and a White House that not only tolerated but encouraged it, not anything but illegitimate? This isn't legitimate discourse, but weaponized bullshit. It was dangerous agitprop designed to produce a chaotic and violent result on the ground, and a disruption to the country's leadership at the top, and Ms. McDaniel wants to argue semantics? 

The interest of justice lies in the pursuit of truth with neither fear nor favor, and the oath to the Constitution deserves no less fervor...

But this is where the Republican Party HAS been for years now, well since before 2015 when I declared it dead and void of principle, well before trump became its standard bearer, its guarantor of crassness, and the wingnut's golden calf. OF COURSE the Republican Party leadership would rebuke even a conservative stalwart like Liz Cheney, all because she dared to point out that rallying to trump is a bad idea.

Whatever conservative principles Cheney may think she's defending, those principles are meaningless to the Republican leadership's utter obsession with winning at ALL costs even if it alienates them further with more Americans. Because those leaders genuinely think they still have enough of a voting base to eke them through, and that they're successfully rigging future elections to favor only themselves.

We're at the point the Republicans - as a Minority Party in all but name - are getting to where they're kicking to the curb every other American who could actually give them hope to stay in power anyway.

If David A Graham at The Atlantic (paywalled) is right about any of this: 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Republican Party prided itself on being a big-tent party. This didn’t mean that anything went—generally, members were expected to adhere to a philosophy of free markets and small government—but the party tolerated the left-leaning Nelson Rockefeller as well as the rock-ribbed Barry Goldwater, the conservative Ronald Reagan and the moderate Arlen Specter. The GOP no longer has many coherent policy goals, mixing free traders and tariff fanatics, entitlement-cutters with populists. The single unifying requirement is paying fealty to Donald Trump. Pretty much anyone willing to do that is welcome. This resolution is a demonstration of that fealty...

The RNC is trying to be cute here, winking at the insurrectionists without actually endorsing the violent assault on the Capitol. Trump allies have been working on this quickstep for months, downplaying the violence without explicitly accepting it, while supporting other parts of the attempt to overturn the election. The censure appears to have been written so that everyone could read into it what they wanted; McDaniel’s amendment is evidence this worked all too well...

One might say that these contortions to pacify Trump are really just attempts to respond to the desires of Republican voters, but this defense is flawed. First, pandering to voters who wanted to overturn a legitimate election (and coddling their false claims that the election was stolen) is an abdication of citizenship and leadership.

Second, if Trump service is intended as voter service, it’s at least a second-order effect; the participants seem most concerned about what the former president will do. Trump is still the favorite for the GOP nomination in 2024, but there are signs that voters are a bit weary of Trump. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial race showed that a candidate can win while keeping Trump at arm’s reach. Some recent polls have even found that fewer than half of Republican voters—including many Trump fans—want to see him run again in 2024...

Thing is, nobody can rile up that fervent, violent base of the Republican Party like trump can. He may seem weak now, but that's only because he doesn't have the primary rallies and the constant media attention that nets him. If he's still out and about by 2024, smashing his way through every state primary like he did in 2016, all of the nightmares and threats he represents are coming back with him.

The Republican leadership still doesn't seem to understand just how dangerous this all is: Not just to Democrats and to Americans outside of their power circle, but to Republicans themselves. They're debasing themselves into lesser creatures, unthinking and unfeeling and unable to take care of the simple basic things that keeps us a civilized society.

Yet the GOP will lie to us, lie to themselves about how they are in control, oh yes they are please believe us, of their own party ranks and their own party standard bearers and their own violent angry voting base.

I said it before and saying it again: This is not going to end well.

Still In a 2016 Nightmare, Searching for a Wakeup Call in 2022

Saw this on Twitter today from Emma Lord (the Tumblr is from Deadnightguard but I can't find the original post so):

this tumblr post deserves to be put in history textbooks pic.twitter.com/FNf8NgwZNk

— emma lord (@dilemmalord) January 18, 2022

And GODDAMMIT THE WHOLE THING MAKES SENSE.

Looking back, everything went to hell the moment donald trump came down that escalator to a paid crowd announcing his Presidential campaign.

I mean, we can look back at when it happened in June 2015, the sheer madness of it seemed like it would quickly go away like a bad fart. I can still remember how Rude Pundit described the scene (seriously NSFW). I can't even sharequote from that, as brilliant as it was, due to the sheer vulgarity. Not from Rude's vivid descriptions, but from the reality that trump himself WAS THAT VULGAR to begin with.

And yet, the absurdity of trump never dissipated. Lacking any political record to run on, he ran on himself, his own racism and sexism and vulgar consumption. trump overwhelmed the election cycle, running on the sheer fact that the mainstream media - some of them controlled by his closest allies like Jeff Zucker, who turned out to share trump's sexism and amorality - gave him free coverage 24/7 that he fed from like a soul vampire.

Everything in my life still feels like it's been on hold since 2016, since that dark election result where Hillary still won the Popular vote but the Electoral vote was rigged in favor for trump. I can't be the only one who feels this way, even in 2022. Even with trump officially out of power, even with Biden sitting in office trying to get this nation back on track.

All because trump hasn't gone away. The remnants of his January 6th Coup Attempt haven't ended, the ongoing investigations revealing just how deep the rot sank into trump's White House, trump and his allies are still threatening to call out for more violence, and the Republican Party is pretty much running on this madness for their 2022 Midterms (and beyond).

None of that madness is going to end until trump himself is in handcuffs for his criminal bullshit, and even then THAT will trigger the Far Right violence we can all sense is right there on the edge of our nightmares.

Thing is, we dare not look away. We dare not pretend we can avoid that nightmare. We dare not - not as a nation, not with the danger to our individual rights - ignore the Far Right Fascist storm that's coming. 

We may be stressed out by six (or seven) years of trumpian disaster, but the disaster isn't over and it's threatening to get worse. We need to steel ourselves, prepare for the moment when destiny stares us in the eye, and we have to stand up and keep everything that's right about America - our families, our friends, our personal honor, our best selves - from getting taken away or burned in the firepits of fascism. 

It's all hard work. But our liberty and our rights are worth fighting for. Thomas Paine told us that centuries ago:

THESE are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Those lessons have not changed. Our rights as Americans - our need to express ourselves by vote, by voice, by conviction, by community - are still a celestial good, and dare not let it get stolen by that Eternal Grifter trump.

One Sentence Thought About Biden's Chance for a Supreme Court Pick

With Justice Stephen Breyer finally (!) announcing his retirement, giving President Biden the opportunity to select a honorable and qualified Supreme Court Justice to affect our jurisprudence for the next 20-30 years, we need to understand this won't put a dent in the 6-seat majority the wingnut conservatives have on a Court that's set to roll back 50 years of women's rights and civil rights, but it will at best provide better diversity on a bench that's supposed to represent ALL of the United States in terms of having more women AND more Blacks when Biden selects a woman African-American - who WILL be qualified, suck it you haters - to perform much-needed acts of Judicial Review: As well as providing a foundation that hopefully Biden will fill other upcoming vacancies (Thomas and Alito are both close to retirement age) as long as there's no goddamned obstruction out of that goddamned Mitch McConnell and his Republican cronies in the Senate so please for the LOVE OF GOD AMERICA vote more Democratic candidates into the Senate this 2022 election cycle because THE GODDAMN ELECTION RESULTS MATTER (hi, 2016! /cries).

Whew.

The Book Burners Are Back, 2022 Edition (w/ Update)

First they came for the books about Critical Race Theory, except that Critical Race Theory wasn't taught in the public schools and they were just going after the books that made them "uncomfortable" having White folks depicted as racists.

NOW, they're coming for everything else in the libraries. I am not joking.

They're banning the graphic novel Maus in East Tennessee (via AP News):

A Tennessee school district has voted to ban a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust due to “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman, according to minutes from a board meeting.

The McMinn County School Board decided Jan. 10 to remove “Maus” from its curriculum, news outlets reported.

Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for the work that tells the story of his Jewish parents living in 1940s Poland and depicts him interviewing his father about his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.

In an interview, Spiegelman told CNBC he was “baffled” by the school board’s decision and called the action “Orwellian...”

The excuses this school board are making - that it contains "language" and nudity (which is non-sexual) - ignores the reality that as a memoir the book is documenting events as they happened, documenting the human suffering and cruelty and coarseness, with no sugarcoating. And there is no GODDAMN WAY you can sugercoat something as horrifying as the Holocaust.

The decision comes as conservative officials across the country have increasingly tried to limit the type of books that children are exposed to, including books that address structural racism and LGBTQ issues. The Republican governors in South Carolina and Texas have called on superintendents to perform a systemic review of “inappropriate” materials in their states’ schools...

This is happening in every Red state, every Republican-controlled school district, and I am not joking.

This is happening in Texas (via Ja'han Jones for NBC News):

In the last year, conservative lawmakers, school officials and parents across the country have embarked on a crusade against school lesson plans focused on social inequality. 

Laws and bans, ostensibly introduced to protect students from these allegedly “obscene” materials, have actually been crafted to coddle white parents — and by extension, their children —  who don’t want to be reminded of the ways they benefit from oppression. But we’ve rarely heard from students themselves about how they view the conservative assault on school lesson plans. 

High school students in Granbury, Texas, helped solve that problem Monday. Several of them teed off on education officials during a public meeting about their school district's efforts to review and potentially ban hundreds of books from school libraries...

“No government — and public school is an extension of government — has ever banned books and banned information from its public and been remembered in history as the good guys,” one student said.

Another student demanded the school district "stop the censorship."

“It’s plain and simple: If you don’t like it, put the book down,” another student said. “No one is forcing you to read it."

"Wake up to the reality that we are all different and we should all embrace each other with love — not blatant hate," she added...

This is happening in my own backyard (via Kimberly C. Moore at the Lakeland Ledger):

Polk County Public Schools Regional Assistant Superintendent John Hill and several of his colleagues spent Tuesday morning going to area middle and high schools to gather 16 books out of media centers after County Citizens Defending Freedom, a conservative political group, complained to Superintendent Frederick Heid that the novels, graphic novels, autobiographies, and sex education books contain pornographic material harmful to children...

PCPS spokesman Jason Geary said in an email that the books have been placed “in quarantine” and will not be available for checkout at this time.  

“It is important to note that these 16 books have NOT been censored or banned at this time,” Geary said. “They have been removed so a thorough, thoughtful review of their content can take place...”

Bullshit. This is censorship, and bending backwards for a partisan group desperate to convert the world around them to their hateful ways of thinking. That County Citizens group has also been protesting against mask mandates for schools, and complained about biology textbooks that depicted the human body as though our kids can't handle the reality we have anuses.

This is happening everywhere the wingnuts are terrified of people reading about different races, different religions, different identities. And not just in the high schools: They are going after public libraries to stop even the adults from our own reading choices. (via Nick Judan with the Mississippi Free Press): 

Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.

Tonja Johnson, executive director for the Madison County Library System, told the Mississippi Free Press in an afternoon interview that she first reached out to Mayor McGee after failing to receive the City of Ridgeland’s first quarterly payment of 2022.

Johnson said the mayor informed her that no payment was forthcoming. “He explained his opposition to what he called ‘homosexual materials’ in the library, that it went against his Christian beliefs, and that he would not release the money as the long as the materials were there,” the library director said.

The director then explained to the mayor that the library system, as a public entity, was not a religious institution. “I explained that we are a public library and we serve the entire community. I told him our collection reflects the diversity of our community,” Johnson said.

Apparently, the mayor was unmoved. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above,” she finished...

That goddamned mayor (yes, he is) is putting HIS religious beliefs over everyone else's in that community. Straight-up First Amendment violation: We're not stopping him from praying to his Lord, but he's stopping the rest of us.

McGee’s office did not respond to several requests for an interview from the Mississippi Free Press before press time, though he did speak with this reporter on Wednesday morning, acknowledging that he was withholding the funds from the library system. Nor did he attend a Tuesday board meeting at 5 p.m. at Ridgeland Library, which addressed the matter firmly in defense of the library system’s current collection. The board voted unanimously to bring the issue to the board of aldermen before seeking legal remedies.

At the meeting, attendees asked Bob Sanders, counsel for the library board, if the mayor had any legal authority to override the contract with the library system and the decision of the aldermen.

“Uh, no.” Sanders said flatly...

Whatever authority the mayor intends to serve, it’s unclear as of press time if his action is legally defensible.

“This is taxpayer money that was already approved by the board of aldermen,” Johnson explained. “It was included in the city budget for 2021-2022. It’s the general-fund appropriation that the City of Ridgeland sends every year for daily operation of the library. That money goes to everything from purchasing materials to supporting programs and staff salaries.”

While the city’s aldermen may have approved the funds, Johnson said it was the mayor alone who is withholding it. “I asked the mayor specifically on the phone call if this had been decided by the board of aldermen. And he told me no, but (that) he could have them make that decision,” she said.

That $110,000 represents roughly 5% of the annual budget of the entire Madison County Library System, the removal of which could have far-reaching consequences beyond the City of Ridgeland itself.

“It would definitely impact services,” Johnson said. “I can tell you that there’s a potential for staff members to lose their positions if the board is not able to move funding from something else to keep those positions open...”

That mayor is intentionally sabotaging a public service to serve his private faith. Again, GODDAMN him.

But that's how the haters roll, isn't it? Their fear of the Dread Other - by skin color, by faith, by gender, by identity - drives that hate to make the world around them bend to their fears.

These haters want to hide the reality that there are people of difference walking among us, they want to hide the history of the crimes our ancestors committed against those who were different - be they Native tribes, be they African slaves, be they Chinese laborers, be they Japanese families demonized after Pearl Harbor, be they Arabs and Hindi and Middle Easterners and Muslims after 9/11, be they Jews, be they agnostics or atheists, be they women, be they gay and lesbian, be they transgender. They want to cover up the sins of the past to excuse the sins of the present and justify the persecutions of the future.

Only Nazis would presume to ban something like Maus. https://t.co/RsRxxIQ5HZ

— Joseph Brassey (@JosephBrassey) January 27, 2022

This is where we are at, America. We've been through this before. Earlier generations had to cope with the holier-than-thou judgmental mobs, screeching against what they deemed unholy and communist, seeking to whitewash - literally - the dark history and dirty little truths about our Manifest Destiny and our Christian bullying.

They're not banning the books out of any sense of Christian "decency" or modesty.

They're banning books to make it easier to convince others later on to ban the people these books speak for and reach out to.

Never fall for these lies, America.

Support your libraries, support your schools.

And for the LOVE OF GOD, vote out of power the hypocrites and haters who are destroying our institutions over the power of the book.

(Update: 2/3/22) It is official, the book burners are in Tennessee and exposing their viciousness to the world (via Alejandro Ramirez at the Nashville Scene):

Last night, Mt. Juliet pastor and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Greg Locke decided to turn it up a notch by organizing an old-fashioned book burning. The books included millennial staples like Harry Potter and Twilight — hits of the early Aughts that were targeted by Christian book burnings back in the day.

In a sermon preceding the bonfire, Locke described beefing with "Free Mason devils" and said "I ain't gonna be 'suiciding myself' no time soon." Locke also said people aren't mad that they were burning books, but mad because of the books they were burning — implying that his critics, even other pastors, were devil and witchcraft supporters...

Everyone not of the Flock are the Other, everyone in Locke's world must either stand with him or burn forever. This is how far into extremism the Far Right has fallen.

Another Grand Jury Investigating trump: Georgia On My Mind Edition (w/ Update)

Kind of breaking news: Remember when Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) donald trump called the Georgia Secretary of State to intimidate him into "finding" 11,780 votes that trump could use to overturn Biden's election results in that state?

Welp. In the latest stage of the criminal investigation, the county DA in charge of things is asking the judge for a special grand jury to compel testimony. Via Tamar Hallerman at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 

In a Thursday letter to Christopher S. Brasher, chief judge of Fulton County’s Superior Court, Willis said the move was needed because a “significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”

She cited comments Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made during an October 2021 interview with NBC News, in which he said “if (Willis) wants to interview me, there’s a process for that.”

Raffensperger is a loyal Republican. He won't willingly spill the beans unless legally compelled to do so. It wouldn't be surprising if he or any other potential witnesses delay this stage of the investigation, but this IS a serious turn of events for trump. Back to Hallerman:

Willis’ probe, launched in February, is centered on the Jan. 2 phone call Trump placed to Raffensperger, in which he urged the Republican to “find” the 11,780 votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win in Georgia in November 2020. But it could also include other actions from Trump’s allies who sowed doubts about the election results, including testimony his attorney Rudy Giuliani gave at a state legislative hearing.

In her letter to Brasher, Willis said the DA’s office “has received information indicating a reasonable probability that the State of Georgia’s administration of elections in 2020, including the State’s election of the President of the United States, was subject to possible criminal disruptions.”

Special grand juries, which typically have 16 to 23 members, can’t issue indictments. But they can subpoena witnesses, compel the production of documents and information, and enter into certain offices for the purposes of an investigation...

Those criminal disruptions Willis alleges revolve around election fraud and election interference, which at the state level would mean a minimum of one year in jail on either count if found guilty.

This would be the third criminal probe currently ongoing into trump's various misdeeds, with the one investigating tax and financial fraud in New York and the federal investigations into the January 6th insurrection. 

There is a substantial amount of documented evidence of what trump attempted to do. What's needed here is the testimony of those involved: I'm not a legal expert but I think it has something to do with proving trump's intent to coerce others to commit these acts.

According to Hallerman's article, DA Willis is hoping to get this done in the first half of this year (meaning wrapping up the grand jury by July). With luck, it'll happen on the same day they bring out criminal charges in New York and criminal charges in D.C.

trump attempted to subvert a legal election. trump keeps lying about "stolen votes" he can't prove in any court of law.

Someone needs to arrest trump, drag him to the courtroom, put him under oath and see if he keeps lying then about something he didn't win. Make him confront the facts that there was no mass fraud, there were no stolen votes, that he IS the damn loser he keeps denying to himself. This case is the best possible way to do that.

Hold trump and the Republicans aiding him accountable for the Big Lie he keeps spewing.

The future of America depends on it.

(Update 1/22): David French at the Atlantic (possible paywall) spells out how this could be serious trouble for trump:

But the question remains: Were Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome in Georgia (and nationally) criminal? There is compelling evidence that they were, under both Georgia state law and federal criminal statutes.

Perhaps the best guide to why is a Brookings Institution report, published in October, that assessed Trump’s actions in light of Georgia criminal law. Among the seven lawyers and scholars who wrote the report was Gwen Keyes Fleming, an experienced former Georgia prosecutor and the former DeKalb County district attorney. The report concluded that “Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.” The crimes include “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” and “conspiracy to commit election fraud,” among others.

I highlight those two statutes because they most plainly apply on their face. Georgia’s conspiracy-to-commit-election-fraud statute makes it a crime when one “conspires or agrees with another” to violate Georgia’s election laws and, crucially, states that “the crime shall be complete when the conspiracy or agreement is effected and an overt act in furtherance thereof has been committed, regardless of whether the violation of this chapter is consummated.” In other words, the scheme does not have to succeed to be criminal...

The Georgia investigation is a consequential victory for the rule of law in this country. Its very existence signals that no man or woman is above the law, a concept foundational to the American experiment. When you walk through the evidence of Trump’s brazen effort to bully, threaten, and command subordinates and state officials to steal an election, his actions quite obviously demand a close criminal inquiry...

The questions also still remaining: How soon will trump be charged with violating those state laws, and how badly will Republicans respond to their false god getting handcuffed?

Tories Partied Like There Was No Tomorrow...

...and for Boris Badhair, there might not be a tomorrow the rate the current scandals are overtaking his UK government.

When last we left the United Kingdom/Brexit news (my last full comment on it was 2019): Boris Johnson had pulled off an electoral stunner over Labour in spite of his unpopularity, and was poised to make a hard No-Deal exit from the EU to fulfill his dream of an economically-independent UK happen. 

What happened since then got a little overwhelmed by this minor inconvenience of a COVID-19 PANDEMIC, but since then the news about the UK's economic hardships piled up fast and often. Some of it tied to the overall economic hardships of surviving a global pandemic, but a lot of tied to Johnson's and his fellow Conservatives' (Tories) delusions about how to pull off their Brexit policy changes without hassles. (P.S. If you want better details, please follow Chris Grey's excellent blog updates for more)

The biggest problem has been their nation's supply chain woes: As predicted by several pro-EU critics, Brexit created a staffing shortage with truck (or lorry, in their terminology) drivers that the existing UK population can't sustain. 

Overall economic growth has been sluggish, even against what the pandemic did to bring a lot of business to a temporary halt: It is all well below the promises Johnson and other Leave advocates made from 2016 onward.

And now piling onto that is an energy crisis during a hard winter where energy bills for many residents are skyrocketing, creating conflict over Brexit ideology that Johnson's intraparty factions can't resolve.

So speaking of parties... Guess what it is that's pulling Boris Johnson and his political allies downward to the brink of resignation/no-confidence votes/all-out government collapse?

If you hadn't heard - and I think there's two ensigns on Deck 39 who haven't heard yet - Johnson is facing harsh scrutiny for allowing office parties to take place at 10 Downing Street and elsewhere back in 2020/2021 during the COVID Pandemic when rules were issued to the whole United Kingdom to disallow such gatherings. In short, the Tories - and Boris himself, who got caught on camera indulging in the shenanigans, oh Boris no, not with a LIGHTSABER - partied like the rules didn't apply to them.

From this Guardian opinion essay from Andrew Rawnsley:

The defenestration of a prime minister between elections is usually triggered by a seismic event. Neville Chamberlain was forced out after Norway was gobbled up by Hitler. The national humiliation of the Suez debacle did for Anthony Eden. The epic unpopularity of the riot-provoking poll tax impelled Margaret Thatcher towards her unwilling exit. David Cameron felt compelled to quit when he lost his gamble on the Brexit referendum. If Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson soon joins the gallery of toppled PMs, it will be because he attended a “bring your own booze” party in the back garden of Number 10 and his aides had a lockdown-busting piss-up in Downing Street the night before the Queen buried her husband...

True, the optics of that - Queen Elizabeth II, the human symbol of Great Britain's storied history and global importance, the Crown, beloved mother figure to an entire kingdom, and Doctor Who Number One Fan, sitting alone at her husband's grave while Rome burned Tories partied - should have caused mass resignations out of sheer British decency, but I digress. Back to Rawnsley:

No other premiership has had such a pathetically shabby ending. No finale to his slummy reign would be more appropriate. It has always been highly likely that cavalier and blatant rule-breaking, and then lying about it, would be the undoing of a prime minister with a career history of casual contempt for truth and integrity.

In its relatively short life, his premiership has been splattered with scandal. There was the “crony express” that sped lucrative Covid contracts to Tory mates down a “VIP lane”, which the high court has just ruled unlawful. There was the decanting of infected elderly patients from hospitals into vulnerable care homes at the height of the pandemic. Nor should we forget the multiple-sourced accounts that Mr Johnson callously declared that he would let the bodies “pile high in their thousands” in the winter of last year rather than take timely action to contain a resurgence of Covid, an appalling choice that resulted in many avoidable fatalities and has left Britain with the highest death toll in Europe.

These and other outrages ought to have deeply troubled Tories, but many in his parliamentary party responded to scandal after scandal with a dismissive shrug... When previous charges of moral turpitude bounced off him, Tories told themselves that their leader was coated with a lacquer of Teflon so thick that nothing could stick. Some cynically opined that voters knew that Mr Johnson was a mendacious scoundrel when he won the election in 2019 and so appalling behaviour was expected and – ghastly phrase – “in the price”. It was often averred that a substantial chunk of the public enjoyed having a “lovable rogue” at Number 10. “Everyone loves a sinner.” So one senior Tory chortled to me last autumn when his party was still sitting on a poll lead even as Wallpapergate and several other scandals were on the boil. He went on: “If Boris was caught shagging a goat in Downing Street, people would immediately make a goat beer and drink to his health...”

If this all sounds familiar, to a certain person's claim in the States that he could "shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn't lose voters," you wouldn't be wrong. What you are reading/hearing/seeing is the arrogance of a political elite that holds themselves above all rules even their own, at the expense of any ethics or integrity we should expect from our elected leaders. Again, I digress:

It is hard to say which is the more jaw-dropping. The flagrancy of the rule-breaking. The arrogant stupidity of it. Or the stunning frequency with which the denizens of Number 10 behaved as if laws did not apply to them. The prime minister’s feeble plea in mitigation for the garden party that he admits to attending is that he thought it was a “work event”. This laughable excuse asks us to believe that he failed to notice that alcohol was flowing and that his wife and her chums were present. He had to fall back on such a risible defence because the alternative is to confess that he flouted his government’s regulations and afterwards sought to dupe the public and deceive parliament...

Even if he (Boris) was not physically present for all the parties, he was at every one in spirit. What possessed Number 10 staffers to think that it was sensible or decent to turn Downing Street into a drinking den while people were dying? As I like to remark from time to time, the culture of organizations is greatly shaped by the character of the person at the top. The most egregious rule-breaking became habitual at Number 10 and that is surely directly connected to the fact that the most senior person in the building is a compulsively shameless rule-trasher. “Fish stink from the head,” remarks one former Tory cabinet minister. “So does Number 10...”

It seems a bit off that with all of the chaos afflicting the United Kingdom right now it would be a set of ill-advised drunken bacchanals that would drive out a sitting Prime Minister, one of the most politically powerful figures across the world.

Under other circumstances, such rule-breaking would likely involve the civil workers caught partying to quit or get fired, a shake-up of the lesser Cabinet seats of expendable party members to bring in more "reform-minded" replacements, and then brush it all under the rug of "I apologize, lesson learned."

But it seems Boris and his ilk are receiving the full force of national outrage, with 63 percent of the general UK population calling for his resignation. While the intraparty support isn't wavering - it never will until the party faithful are told it's okay to support someone else - the Conservative Party itself is under serious threat. Two recent by-elections to fill seats vacated by this scandal both went Liberal-Democratic (a staunch pro-EU party) in what were heavily-Conservative gerrymandered districts (well, not rotten boroughs but along the same lines).

From where I'm sitting, the PartyGate situation has less to do with the rule-breaking and more to do with the general outrage most Brits were feeling after several years of Brexit follies and COVID mishandles. Unable to express full anger over the supply woes, unable to express outrage over rising costs both Brexit and COVID related, all because a strong plurality of the population are Conservative-leaning (what we'd call Center-Right) and couldn't complain about a Brexit process they supported, these party scandals seem like an outlet granting the citizenry their chance and their right to vent at bad leadership caught lying to them over and over again. And not just the leadership under the clownish Boris Johnson, but a decade or more of questionable leadership from the likes of Theresa May and David Cameron who held onto hard-line Conservative values that left the UK unprepared for the crises happening today.

Yes, leadership ought to be held accountable. Yes, leadership needs reminding that they themselves are not above the laws. But this outrage is a rupture of scope and anger somewhat disproportionate to the damage actually caused by these reckless parties the Tories sought to indulge in.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm breaking out the popcorn - well, okay, the Nestle Buncha Crunches because I got out of eating popcorn as a teenager, damn you braces! - watching all of this just like everybody else who's Center-Left enjoying the schadenfreude of the Right-leaning wingnuts crash and burn.

There's supposed to be an official government report investigating these parties due next week. Thing is, as Prime Minister Boris will get the first look at it, and God knows if he'll try to redact it or suppress it in some way. Of course, something this big will be bound to leak out, so any suppression effort will hurt him anyway.

(keeps munching on those Buncha Crunches) Would it be tacky of us to throw a Farewell/"GET THE FOOK OUT" party if/when Boris is forced to resign...?

Bring on that tomorrow, Tories. It's the bill for decades of mismanagement and self-entitled bullshit come due.

Do Call It Sedition, Do Hold Insurrectionists Accountable

At last, some good news in the year-long case into the trumpian rioters who stormed the nation's Capitol to disrupt our electoral system. The Department of Justice arrested the leader of the Oath Keepers - one of trump's militant backers - on the charge of seditious conspiracy, a more serious charge than the Obstruction charges most of the 725 previously detained rioters have been hit with (via Carrie Johnson and Ryan Lucas at NPR): 

Federal authorities arrested Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes in Texas on Thursday morning and also took Edward Vallejo into custody in Arizona. The other nine people had already been accused of some crimes related to the siege on the Capitol last year.

The grand jury indictment in the District of Columbia is the most serious and sweeping case to emerge from the federal investigation into the Capitol riot and the first to include the seditious conspiracy charge, which carries a maximum of 20 years in prison. Rarely seen in recent years, seditious conspiracy charges are made against those who plot to prevent the execution of U.S. law.

The Justice Department said the Oath Keepers were determined to stop the lawful transfer of power, with two groups marching in military-style formations toward the Capitol that day and other personnel labeled "quick reaction forces" waiting outside D.C. to transport firearms and other weapons. Vallejo allegedly helped coordinate one of those quick-reaction teams.

The court papers said the defendants organized teams to use force and bring firearms to the Capitol, recruited members to participate, organized trainings and brought paramilitary gear, knives, batons and radio equipment to Washington.

Rhodes communicated with other leaders on Jan. 6 using a chat group on the encrypted app Signal, according to court documents.

"Pence is doing nothing. As I predicted," Rhodes typed to the group that day. "All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the Patriots are taking it into their own hands. They've had enough..."

Just in case you're interested, the actual law being enforced here is 18 USC 2384:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

It may have taken a year, but it likely involved the slow digging through the 700-plus foot soldiers of Rhodes' army to flip enough documented evidence to bring this charge to the judges. This is big league stuff now, and the organizers of this planned riot - hi, trump's inner circle working the war room at the Willard Hotel! - are the next link in this flowchart of shame.

Let's go to Emptywheel - who's been covering this with great detail - and see what she has to say about it:

The charges are, at once, no big deal, because they’re really just the same conspiracy charged in a different way with two conspiracies added. They’re a huge deal, because now Republicans will be hard pressed to continue to downplay January 6. And they’re a solution to some problems and a tool to move on...

Though Kenneth Harrelson released some of the key communications from the Willard Hotel from earlier in the day, those still don’t show up in this indictment. So the government is remaining coy about what it knows about coordination with people at the Willard Hotel. That’s probably because it still needs others to flip — Joshua James would be ideal, but Roberto Minuta might be useful as well — to confirm whatever Mark Grods and Mike Simmons (if he is cooperating) were able to offer about it.

But they are making it clear that they know more about some communications they’ve been talking about for some time...

This indictment will, presumably, impress all those who’ve been wailing the existing 20 year charges the Oath Keepers were facing were not adequate. But it may also clear a path to move up the chain...

The rioters doing the dirty work busting into Congressional chambers and offices have ties to the Oath Keepers. This seditious conspiracy charge shows the coordination between the Oath Keepers, and provides a link to trump's people. And trump's people are linked to trump himself: NONE of them could have done this without his blessing. 

Where Mueller had a problem proving a link between trump's 2016 campaign to Russian business and political allies - because of the Obstruction that the Congressional Democrats failed to investigate towards impeachment - there's already a lot of evidence between the rioters to the war rooms (there were two, one at Willard Hotel and one in the Eisenhower Executive Office (!)) and between the war rooms and trump.

Evidence but not enough proof yet to take to a court of law. THAT'S where the Justice Department needs to hurry up. There's not a lot of time between now and November 2022 when the midterms could lead to the Republicans reclaimed part or all of Congressional control to obstruct any further investigations and arrests.

I know they want to get it right, but dammit the clock is not on the nation's side. If any accountability, if any justice can be done to punish trump for his coup attempt, it's got to be soon.

The Omicron Overwhelm and DeSantis Deceit

Welcome to Hell, Florida United States (via Ian Hodgson and Christopher O'Donnell for the Tampa Bay Times): 

The omicron variant is spreading like wildfire across Florida and infecting a record number of people.

The state averaged nearly 57,000 COVID-19 infections a day from Dec. 31 to Thursday, according to the weekly report released Friday. That is the highest weekly infection rate thus far during the 22-month pandemic. It is also more than 150 percent higher than the peak of the Delta wave that swept through the state last summer.

Florida accounted for one out of every 10 infections in the U.S. last week and had the seventh-highest rates of infection per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Florida hospitals are seeing the effects of omicron firsthand: There were 8,548 confirmed COVID-19 cases filling state hospital beds as of Friday, four times as many as two weeks ago, according to federal data.

There were 12,353 patients admitted in the past seven days, a nearly 75 percent jump from last week. It’s the highest number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations since the end of August. That number includes 570 children under 18 — the highest number of kids hospitalized in one week throughout the pandemic...

I said earlier, before the holidays, that a kind of pandemic fatigue has settled in, that too many Americans have given up on masking in public and enough of a minority of us have refused to get vaccinated out of misinformed belief or intentional partisan spite.

Making this situation with the Omicron variant wave worse than the earlier pandemic spikes has been the failure of leadership - including Biden and the CDC - caving to pressure to force our schools to stay open guaranteeing that our teachers and students - our families! - expose each other to COVID that even in its mildest forms can leave damage in its wake.

But that's nothing compared to the outright sabotage committed by Republican / Red State Governors refusing to take the pandemic serious and stubbornly refuse to admit there's still any problem at all. Especially Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, who has been flailing and FAILING to lead the state as the pandemic overwhelms our hospitals again.

It's particularly horrifying that DeSantis and his administration were caught WASTING test kits for months that could have helped people track their health. From Stephen Adams via the Tampa Bay 10 Action News:

Back on Dec. 30, (Agricultural Commissioner Nikki) Fried accused the Florida Department of Health of storing a large number of a particular type of COVID-19 tests that were about to expire.

“It’s come to my attention that Governor DeSantis’ Department of Health has a significant number of COVID-19 tests stockpiled that are set to expire imminently," Fried wrote at the time.

"Given the Governor’s lack of transparency throughout this pandemic, there’s no known public information about these tests or how soon they expire," Fried continued in her prior statement. "With omicron infections exploding throughout Florida, I beg of him to release these tests immediately to local counties and cities, and to stand up state-sponsored testing sites. To let these tests expire while Floridians anxiously wait for hours in testing lines is negligent at best, and heartless at worst...”

Some clarity on the matter came during a news conference DeSantis held on Thursday in West Palm Beach. Asked by a reporter about Fried's claim the state was stockpiling tests, DeSantis turned the podium over to Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie.

“We had between 800,000 and a million test kits – Abbott rapid test kits in our warehouse – that did expire," Guthrie explained. "We tried to give them out prior to that, but there was not a demand for it...”

DeSantis and his spokespeople are, by the by, gaslighting like brazen children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

NO DEMAND FOR THE TESTS?! Nearly every store in Florida had run out of them before Christmas. If you drove out to the drive-through rapid test locations, you ran into lines of cars that circled the testing area and sometimes blocked traffic on the nearby highways. We're still dealing with long lines this weekend:

I need to mention when I drove by the Bartow FL Medical Center yesterday, the rapid test drive-thru line was all the way out to US 98. It was the longest I'd ever seen that line.

— Witty Librarian (@PaulWartenberg) January 7, 2022

DeSantis is LYING when he claims that demand for the test kits is low. Demand is so high it'd be easier to find toilet paper in March 2020 than it is to find a home test kit at Walgreens today.

And why is DeSantis lying?

Because he wants to project the illusion that Florida is safe, that COVID-19 isn't ravaging our population, that the numbers are down so he can lie later when he's campaigning - for the Governor's office this November, for the Presidency in 2024 - that he beat COVID... when the truth is he's letting the pandemic run wild to appease the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who make up the rabid GOP voting base.

To quote my fellow Floridian survivor Betty Cracker:

I think the state almost certainly sat on those tests and is now issuing this guidance that contradicts the public health expert consensus because they want to limit political damage to DeSantis for his ongoing mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis. DeSantis claims he didn’t know about the stockpile of now-expired tests, and possibly that’s even true.

But DeSantis has loaded every state agency with Republican hacks, sycophants and donors whose primary job is to turn the organizations into political assets for DeSantis as he gears up to run for president...

I keep hoping the growing evidence that DeSantis is focused on self-promotion at the expense of everything else — our health, our university and K-12 education system, the state’s economy — will finally motivate Floridians to kick his ass out of office later this year...

It all depends on if people see past DeSantis' deceit. It all depends on if every Floridian gets hit hard - either themselves or their families or their closest friends - with this Omicron wave and make them realize DeSantis allowed this all to happen because he sacrificed our health for his benefit.

Goddamn him. We ALL can't be blind to the idiocy coming out of the governor's office.