Not Only Did trump Piss Off Archivists, He May Have Violated National Security

Following up on the big story about the FBI's warrant to recover materials at Mar-A-Lago.

It always helps to follow Emptywheel: A good place IMHO to check on any legal matters. With regards to trump's legal woes over the warrant and seizure at his luxury resort/fake home this past Monday, she's pointing out a few things of interest:

1) The Department of Justice visited trump at Mar-A-Lago back in June to discuss additional boxes of documents he failed to turned over earlier this February (he was forced to hand over 15 boxes back then). There were apparently attempts to subpoena for the documents - a means to get trump to voluntarily return the papers as part of an ongoing investigation into what happened - but trump refused. It seems these papers were so important to him that he wouldn't give them up... and they were so valuable to him he wouldn't shred them either, meaning the DOJ had to get the warrant to get those docs back.

2) As discussed earlier about the Presidential Records Act of 1978, trump wasn't supposed to flee the White House with any documents at all (they were supposed to go to National Archives), and yet he did so in January 2021. trump has also been documented destroying papers during his time in the Oval Office, meaning he's violated the US Code in multiple ways when it comes to concealing, destroying, or mutilating documents.

3) The documents in question were verified back in February of being "Classified" in nature, meaning trump's ongoing possession of them became a national security risk. Turns out, when Biden became President he refused to give trump clearance to receive any more intelligence briefings (ex-Presidents may retain the privilege in case the current President needs to consult with them on ongoing matters. It is after all a very exclusive club...). Whatever security status trump had between 2016 to 2020 no longer applies, meaning his possession of those boxes of documents were illegal, and above all he had no authority to share those documents (which the DOJ investigation may have found out, hence the urgency to get that warrant).

Remember kids: While trump served as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), trump behaved rather... poorly with national security intel. He revealed in 2017 a then-undercover operation shared between US Intelligence and Israel's Mossad to a pair of Russian buddies, which blew the operation and may have risked the lives of Mossad agents. He later gloated in 2019 over a failed Iranian rocket launch by sharing a top-secret high-orbital photograph of the launch site, which exposed our nation's intelligence gathering capabilities. THAT was so egregiously stupid it enraged Adam L Silverman - a paid professional expert on foreign intel - at Balloon-Juice to infinity and beyond. Yet in spite of the security blunders, trump was untouchable because there was a standing policy that the President - as Commander-in-Chief - can declassify anything he likes. As Silverman noted "...the President can just put classified information out there, claim he has the right to do it, even if it hasn’t been formerly and properly declassified, and he faces no jeopardy and the rest of us with clearances do, it is because THE RULES WERE NOT CONCEIVED OF AND WRITTEN WITH (trump) IN MIND!!!!! NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM!!!! The assumption was, based on historic performance of previous presidents, that NO FUTURE PRESIDENT WOULD BE THIS STUPID AND CARELESS!!!!"

Once out of office, however (and THANK GOD), trump no longer has that power to declassify a damn thing. Meaning if he DID do that with any of those 15 actually 25 no wait it's been bumped up to 27 (!) boxes of national security documents he took to Mar-A-Lago, he could be in real serious trouble.

According to Emptywheel, trump's handling of those docs at Mar-A-Lago might involve violating 18 US Code sect.793, Gathering, Transmitting or Losing Defense Information (!), specifically part e). Whoa, what:

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it... Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both...

In short: If trump even offered to share any one of those classified documents to another person - especially to a foreign agent - he's toast. That trump failed to deliver those documents to the officer/employee of the United States entitled to receive it (cough National Archivist cough) means he's toast.

That trump resisted to deliver the entirety of the remaining boxes he basically stole from the White House from June onward tells this observer that trump intended to willfully communicate, deliver, transit those documents to any person not entitled to receive them. Which could not only mean adversarial nations like Russia getting access to them, but even allied nations like Saudi Arabia (there are things at some point we dare not share with allies due to competing economic and foreign policy interests).

Even Emptywheel has her concerns:

Trump is such a psychopath that the answer to this might normally be in question. After all, he routinely treated top secret intelligence like it was toilet paper or party favors for visiting Russians.

Except DOJ went to Trump’s residence in June and told him this information could harm the US. Then they wrote him a letter, saying that it could harm the US and could he please put a padlock on the basement room that had, up until that point, been accessible to all the suspected foreign assets who’ve paid the price of admission to Mar-a-Lago...

Again, DOJ asked and asked and asked. Trump exhibited awareness the Archives were asking. He stopped in to say “hi!” when Jay Bratt, the head of DOJ’s espionage section, came to visit. And he still hoarded the document.

This may be why Trump claims that nothing was in the hotel safe in his bridal suite, by the way. Keeping these documents at Mar-a-Lago was willful by itself. But keeping such documents in his safe would be proof that he, personally, was hoarding it.

If the FBI really did scoop up highly sensitive documents when they were at Mar-a-Lago the other day, then there may be relatively few steps left to charging him — aside from cataloging the 12 new boxes of stolen documents. DOJ may only need permission from the agencies that own these documents to make the declassifications required to prosecute it.

By going to Mar-a-Lago and asking for these documents in person on June 3, DOJ made it very easy to prove that Trump had been asked, but refused, to give any classified documents found in Trump’s possession on Monday back...

Again, in short: trump is toast. It's now a question of how soon the Justice Dept. can declassify enough of what trump had in possession and whether Attorney General Merrick Garland - who has, after more than a year of seeming inaction, revealed he had the DOJ doing exactly what it needed to do - will file charges on a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) in a criminal proceeding our nation has never seen before.

Then again, we've never had a crook like trump in the White House before. trump's violations of national security, and disdain for executive responsibility, above all refusal to adhere to decent common sense brought us to this crisis. The partisan outrage may explode - literally - but for the LOVE OF GOD AND COUNTRY, Garland, trump is an ongoing threat to all of us. You HAVE to make this a matter for the courts, and trump HAS to answer to the law for the damage he's done (and still doing).

Quick Notes on a Big Biden Win August 2022 Version

I wanted to make a few comments about the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act:

The trick was finding out which trade-offs the Senatorial logjammers like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were willing to take in order for President Biden's agenda see moderate gains. As I noted before, there are few political forces as damaging as a self-serving Senator and Manchin had disrupted efforts at a massive liberal federal budget before. This time around, Majority Leader Schumer (and likely some back-room dealing from Biden) found out what Manchin's (and then Sinema's, which was apparently more money for drought rescue in her state) asking price was and got it done.

We should note that not everything the majority of Democrats wanted is in this bill, but as always there is still time for individual bills tackling those issues to get passed before the November midterms.

The optics on this passing the Senate can't be understated. For once in a long time, the Democratic Party does not look like it's in disarray and warring among its ranks. True, the factions persist - and the Far Left progressives like Bernie Sanders are upset they didn't get a "perfect" bill passed - but this Democratic-led Senate (and next up, a Democratic-led House effectively whipped into line by Speaker Pelosi) was able to get something done that the Republicans couldn't do the last time they ruled both parts of Congress (outside of a massive tax cut haul for the super-rich that no one else wanted).

With my thoughts spoken, let's go to what Emily Stewart, Li Zhou, and Rebecca Leber are saying at Vox:

It’s a lot smaller than the grand dreams Democrats had when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. But the bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, still does quite a lot. It contains historic provisions to tackle climate change and takes steps toward fulfilling a longtime Democratic policy goal: letting Medicare negotiate the prices of some prescription drugs.

The bill could affect what kind of car you buy and how you heat your home. It will prevent big price increases this year for some people who purchase individual health insurance. And if you aren’t paying your taxes, there’s a better chance that the IRS will find out.

Here’s what’s in the bill and what it would mean for American life in the coming years...

The Inflation Reduction Act would be the biggest thing the US has ever done to tackle climate change, and climate makes up the largest share of the bill’s spending: nearly $370 billion.

That’s smaller than the House version from last fall, and a fraction of what Biden originally envisioned for climate. Senate Democrats claim these investments will be enough to cut climate pollution by roughly 40 percent...

The policies overall aim to push American consumers and industry away from reliance on fossil fuels. The biggest share of the funding goes to tax credits and rebates for a host of renewable technologies — solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles. It includes incentives for companies to manufacture more of that technology in the United States. The bill would also invest in energy efficiency at industrial sites that can help lower the sector’s hefty carbon footprint, while also dedicating some funds to forest and coastal restoration.

The bill, if enacted, would break new ground on other problematic areas of the climate crisis. It sets the first methane fee that penalizes fossil fuel companies for excess emissions of the especially powerful climate pollutant. Another substantial part of the funding helps disadvantaged communities with monitoring and cleaning up pollution, and builds their resilience to climate impacts...

One way Obamacare expanded health care coverage was by creating marketplaces for people to purchase insurance and offering federal subsidies to help low- and middle-income households afford it. Households making up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line — about $106,000 for a family of four — could get federal help to pay their premiums. After that, they were on their own.

But in 2021, Congress eliminated those caps, instead saying that no household should have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income for health insurance. The change had the biggest effect on people making between 400 and 600 percent of the federal poverty line (for the same household of four, that would be up to $159,000 per year). As Vox’s Dylan Scott previously reported, the changes also enabled roughly 7 million people to qualify for free health insurance under the ACA.

Those policies, however, were set to sunset by the end of this year, leaving millions of people to face much higher health care expenses moving forward. The Inflation Reduction Act extends these subsidies for three years through the end of 2025, ensuring that people won’t face that surge for a while yet...

This bill allows them to finally fulfill that campaign promise by enabling Medicare to negotiate on prescription drugs — a major change that could lead to significant cost reductions for a small subset of drugs.

As outlined in the bill, Medicare will be able to negotiate on a handful of drugs, with those new prices taking effect in 2026. In 2026, Medicare will only be able to address costs for 10 drugs; over time, that will increase to 20 drugs. The drugs in question will be determined based on a slew of criteria, including how expensive they are...

This is mostly good news for Medicare users, which is most everyone ages 65 and up. As they're retirees on limited incomes, they need this protection. The bad news is that fixing drug prices for private insurers - those of us on HMOs - didn't pass. The failure to get insulin - a life-saving drug for millions - capped is a glaring problem, and one that Republicans refused to budge. Back to the report:

Actually raising taxes can be hard, politically. So Democrats are, in part, taking a different approach: getting people to pay more of the taxes they already owe. The Inflation Reduction Act agreement increases funding for the IRS so that it can up enforcement and go after unpaid taxes. Senate Democrats, drawing from Congressional Budget Office numbers, estimate that, by investing $80 billion in the IRS over a decade, it will collect $203 billion...

There is, in short, a large number of large corporations that have been tax dodging for years: Not just finding tax loopholes to exploit but basically refusing to hand over the taxes they still owe. There is a backlog of unpaid taxes, and there hasn't been enough IRS agents to deal with that backlog.

One 2019 paper by Natasha Sarin, now at the Treasury Department, and economist Larry Summers put the tax gap at $7.5 trillion from 2020 to 2029, with most of that figure linked to the wealthy. They calculated that underreporting was five times higher among people making more than $10 million annually than for those making under $200,000. Senate Democrats say that none of the funds directed to the IRS will be intended to increase taxes on anyone making under $400,000...

For all of the screaming by Republicans that the IRS is going to come audit you, relax. A solid majority of Americans earn well under $200,000 (the most common wage is around $45,000, and middle class would be somewhere around $65,000. If you are earning more than $100,000 you are NOT middle class, you're rich fuck you) and literally not worth the IRS' time to audit. Seriously, studies have shown most working Americans pay their taxes and with little cheating. What the IRS is going to do is go after the people and corporations who are over that $10 million cutoff, the ones who ARE most likely cheating and more deserving of those audits.

The agreement also includes a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion. Senate Democrats note that while the current corporate tax rate is 21 percent, dozens of major companies, including AT&T, Amazon, and ExxonMobil, pay much less than that. Originally, the provision was expected to raise $313 billion, though new carveouts were added to win Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) vote, which give manufacturers and private equity firms more leeway when it comes to the new minimum tax rate. Those changes are likely to reduce the revenue this measure will bring in.

There is also a 1 percent excise tax on corporations’ stock buybacks, which are currently not subject to any taxes at all. That excise tax is estimated to raise roughly $73 billion in revenue...

This last one poses a bit of a puzzler. One of the big reasons why large corporations kept making their stock buybacks was how easy it was: a Buyback increased your stock value and gave the corporation more ownership of its own stock without really doing anything of value to justify it. Instead of putting your profits into things like raising wages for employees or investing in more capital to expand your business, you just put it back into your stocks and made the boards and CEOs richer.

The puzzler is: Will corporations live with this tax? Given how these mega-businesses are loathe to pay any tax at all, how many of them would start refusing to run their own buybacks anymore? What would happen to their profits then? They'll probably ask their army of accountants to come up with fresh ways to hide their profits and deny the U.S. government any fresh revenue.

Well, it's certainly one more reason the corporations will not give up their dark money funding for Republican election attempts.

Do us a favor, Americans: If you want Big Business to pay their fair share in taxes, make sure to vote Democratic this midterms and keep the Republicans from another round of unnecessary, deficit-causing, only-for-the-rich tax cuts. 

Who's Dat Knocking At Mar-A-Lago? It's the Feds With a Warrant, Go Figure (w/ Update)

I was planning on blogging tonight about the victory lap President Biden and the Senate Democrats could enjoy this week after having passed major legislation that guarantees most of what Biden promised in 2020 would get done...

But then news broke early this evening about something more Schadenfreude-licious (ever so tasty), so I decided to distract myself with some malicious joy instead.

Apparently, mister donald trump, former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) is upset as hell tonight because FBI agents bearing a warrant to search Mar-A-Lago showed up and seized evidence, although it's not yet clear exactly what the investigation was looking for.

To Deepa Shivaram and Ryan Lucas at NPR for more:

Former President Donald Trump said on Monday that FBI agents had searched his Mar-a-Lago club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., and opened his safe.

The FBI and Department of Justice declined to comment, although the department is known to be investigating the possible mishandling of government secrets after the National Archives retrieved White House records from Mar-a-Lago

The search, which would have required a court order from a federal judge, signals the president is under greater scrutiny from federal investigators than was previously known...

As they note, a warrant means a federal judge had to sign off on this raid. And the only way the feds can do that is present enough existing evidence of wrong-doing to justify entering a location - be it home for trump or a resort business also for trump - and search for specific things. The fact his safe was targeted meant the FBI had evidence there was something there relevant to an ongoing investigation.

While Shivaram and Lucas point out that the Justice Department does have an ongoing investigation focusing on mishandled government documents - and Mar-A-Lago is where trump hid 15 boxes from NARA after he left the White House in January 2021 - there are other possible investigations at play here:

Monday's action also comes as the Justice Department was ramping up its investigations into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election — though there have not been reports of an investigation into Trump himself...

The ongoing House Committee investigation into the January 6th Insurrection has reportedly been sharing information - and referring materials for official investigation - with Justice, implying there is at least a federal grand jury digging into possible criminal charges into trump and his handlers for their involvement in the rioting that day.

One avenue of investigation the DoJ is reportedly working on are the efforts by some of trump's allies in various Red states where Biden won of organizing "Fake Electors" to trick the state legislatures into approving their set of Electors instead of Biden's. Wisconsin and Arizona in particular are under scrutiny, and there had been reports that trump was in direct contact with some of those organizers.

And of course, there's the taxes thing. Not just any investigation by the IRS into trump's financials, but also recent revelations that trump allegedly ordered the IRS to harass former administrative figures like James Comey and Andy McCabe, FBI officials whom trump fired when they wouldn't swear fealty to him.

With all this going on, of course trump is jumping onto social media to proclaim his innocence and how this is all a partisan witch-hunt. Of course the Far Right - Fox Not-News is reportedly enflamed with rage tonight - is screaming that the FBI is persecuting trump for political reasons (did one of the crazy congresscritters insist that the FBI should be dissolved for this?). They're all insisting that something like this has never happened to a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) before.

That's kind of true. The FBI has never gone after ex-Presidents before. Even the likes of Richard Nixon who was facing impeachment for serious federal crimes never had his personal safe hit with a warrant search. Then again, we've never had an openly corrupt and crooked ex-President like donald fucking trump before.

None of the others in recent history - not LBJ (and he had some dirty secrets to hide), not Nixon, not Ford, not Carter, not Reagan, not Bush the Elder, not even Bill Clinton who was under near-constant investigation due to Whitewater (and who faced public scandal regarding Lewinsky), not Bush the Lesser, not Obama in spite of all the screaming by the Far Right he was guilty of something - had personally violated so many laws while in office (with Reagan and Bush the Lesser overseeing some corrupt and broken administrations). Worse, none of them had violated so many laws while leaving office.

Any expectation that any former President should be exempt from criminal investigation is a fantasy (the OLC ruling about sitting Presidents being exempt is just when they're in office. Once out, they are exposed to liability as long as the clock on statute of limitations are ticking). No one person is above the law, and if trump broke any laws - and there's at least four things under investigation now that points to a solid "MAYBE" - then By God the FBI is going to show up knocking at the door with a warrant in hand.

There is always the fear in politics than a partisan autocrat - a wannabe dictator in the Jacksonian (and now trumpian) mold - would abuse the powers of the Justice Department and agencies like the FBI into hounding political opponents with unjustified "criminal" probes.

But as tonight's revelations are showing, the current Biden administration under Attorney General Garland isn't playing rough with those rules. Everything about the warrant search is by-the-book: The agents presented a case to a judge and that judge signed the warrant. It's not as though Biden himself penciled in the warrants or Garland rubber-stamping something, or even the FBI smashing the doors in without a warrant at all.

And given the sensitivity, nay the severity of the situation - the judge HAD to know issuing a warrant on a former President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) would raise legal questions - the feds still went through with it.

Let me just say this: I'm not fearing the FBI knocking on my door - or smashing it down - because I know I'm not breaking any laws that warrant their attention.

This is happening because there is solid evidence donald trump broke various laws, and there was evidence today he possessed additional proof of his misdeeds that required this "home/business" search.

The Far Right outrage will be out of control over this, we're seeing the first wave of it tonight. But let justice be done though the heavens fall. 

trump's been laughing at the legal system for 50 years. It's way past time to hold him accountable to the law.

Unleash all the schadenfreude this night, people. Let the popcorn pop and the wine flow.

(Update 8/9): It's turning out the warrant search IS in relation to the National Archives investigation. Speculation is no longer wondering if trump kept possession of highly classified documents after he was supposed to hand them over ('cause he clearly and illegally kept them): Speculation is now ruminating if trump exposed those documents to a third party (which is when the seriousness of this kicks to the next level up), and who tipped off the feds that trump still had these papers (which suggests someone real close to him just ratted trump out big time).

The likelihood of donald trump getting charged for violating the Presidential Records Act just went from "Toss Up" to "Leans Yes."

(pops open another champagne bottle)

Official: Strangely Funny IX Now Available

To all nine readers of the blog here, if you don't follow the librarian/writing one, I want to inform you that the latest volume of the Strangely Funny humor-horror anthology is available via Amazon!

(I know, some of you are philosophically opposed to Amazon, but Kindle Direct is one of the few ways small-press publishers can get the work out there, so be kind...)

Yes yes, they've heard that song...

My short "The Brides Of Wi-Fi," a modern-day take on the vampire brides of lore, is part of Volume IX, so if you enjoy humorous takes on horror tropes, the entire series should be a good read from Volumes I to now.

If you need to know which other volumes to peruse:

"I Must Be Your First" in Strangely Funny

"Minette Dances With the Golem of Albany" in Strangely Funny III

"The Pumpkin Spice Must Flow" in Strangely Funny V

"How a Vampire Gets a Tan" in Strangely Funny VI

"War of the Murder Hornets" in Strangely Funny VIII

Also check out "Why The Mask" in Mardi Gras Murder and "The Secret of the Battle of Los Angeles" in History and Mystery Oh My! 

I shall resume some political angst blogging shortly. But in the meantime, please, BUY MY BOOKS. ;-)

The Pro-Choice News Out of Kansas

I don't want to always be "doom and gloom" around here, so when a bright ray of hope shines through I'd like to make a few comments about it (well, also refer to other people's comments to reinforce my own arguments, but that's how I roll son).

It's taken me a few days to blog about this development, but after all the bad news about Republicans banning abortion and trying to punish women across every Red state they control we've finally got one state where the majority of voters who are pro-choice pushed back. 

While Kansas has been a reliably Red state for ages - I have a personal joke that Kansas is so old-school Republican they make Ohio look Blue - it's also a state that had written a personal rights clause into their state constitution that their supreme court back in 2019 ruled meant women had a right to choose an abortion if they needed one. Angry that they couldn't punish women as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court nuked Roe with their Dobbs ruling, the state Republicans pushed a referendum onto the 2022 midterm ballots that would have cut that part of their state constitution and allow the state legislature to issue their anti-abortion laws.

And just to make sure not enough people would vote on it, they set the referendum along with the primary election cycle of the midterm, when usually only the party voters turn up (meaning a low-enough turnout to ensure the GOP plurality dominating Kansas politics would cast their likely YES vote to gut the abortion protection).

Funny thing. It turns out a lot of voters in Kansas turned up to vote on the referendum, a lot more than expected, and enough of them - not just Democrats by the looks of things, but also the Indy voters AND enough Kansas Republicans - voted NO to stop the ballot from passing. I shouldn't say "enough" as though it was a close vote: It was a DAMN BLOWOUT (it was 63-39 percent at one point but it's settled to 59-41 percent) in a clear sign Kansas voters across the spectrum wanted to keep abortion a legal right.

I could go into more detail, but Rani Molla over at Vox went there and so let's refer to her findings:

More than 900,000 Kansans showed up to the polls to vote on the state’s abortion referendum. That’s the biggest turnout for a primary election in the state’s history, according to the Kansas Secretary of State’s office. That number is closer to what we’d expect to see in a general election turnout, which is always vastly higher than primaries. And it suggests we could also see high turnout in upcoming primaries where abortion is on the docket...

Molla also included a number of charts, so let's take a look:

This is for primary cycle turnout. Reportedly, the Kansas Sec of State was expecting turnout around 36 percent, which would have matched the 2020 primary numbers. But look at that chart: 2022 turnout at near 50 percent of registered voters saw the greatest jump between 2-year election gaps. Something really got the voter turnout to spike higher than usual.

Molla provided some interesting context by pointing out the voter makeup of Kansas itself:

Seriously, I'm not kidding about Kansas being a Republican stronghold. Hell, If the "Unaffiliated" voting bloc formed its own party, it would put Democrats in THIRD place in that state.

So you would think that given the dominance of Republican voters would equate to dominance of conservative thought (if you consider the Indy voters between equally divided in leaning either way), and that conservative thought would equate to being anti-abortion enough to vote YES.

And yet, they did not.

Because, if it's been noted here already, a majority of Americans - a number that crosses into Republican ranks just a bit - are pro-choice when push comes to shove.

Ever since the Dobbs decision dropped, reports about the horrors of the Far Right war on women's rights have gone up. The reality that Republican leaders are using their state powers to force-birth pregnancies on 10-year-old rape victims. Stories about how women are denied medications because the pharmacies and doctors issuing them might get charged for triggering miscarriages. The growing realization that GOP-controlled states are passing "No Travel" bans that would intrude on women's privacy rights even when they're not pregnant.

In her Vox article, Molla points to evidence that women were key to the voter turnout against the referendum:

The referendum in particular seems to have brought out women, who are considered to be most affected by abortion laws. As Tom Bonier, CEO of a Democratic data firm TargetSmart, pointed out, the share of new Kansas registrants who were women skyrocketed after news of US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

The Dobbs decision engaged women in Kansas to an unprecedented degree.

This chart shows the percent of new registrants in the state who were women (as a 7 day average). Note the spike after the Dobbs decision leaked, and huge jump after the Supreme Court handed it down. pic.twitter.com/pvi3WpuR86

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 3, 2022

One of the concerns before this conservative Supreme Court made their move to end Roe turned on what might happen, what might the public's response be to women losing a personal right. Word is Chief Justice Roberts wanted to rein in Alito's wording (which made it an absolute ban) to create some wriggle room where reasonable exceptions like allowing it for cases of rape/incest and "health of mother" were involved. Which was why Alito's first draft got leaked, because someone in SCOTUS wanted to make sure the hard-liner stance stayed firm.

Well, now we're seeing what the public's response could be. In even the Reddest of Republican states, a solid majority of voters want to protect abortion as a right. Before Dobbs, there may have been a number of moderate/centrist-leaning Americans who disapproved of abortion but saw it as necessary to protect at-risk women suffering life-threatening situations, and to protect rape victims from the psychological (and for pre-teens, physical) harms of forcing them to birth. (Note: I do not want to underscore the reality that women SHOULD HAVE their personal right to choose no matter what, but I am pointing out how moderates view this issue, where they focus on guaranteeing those exceptions...) By denying the reality that there are times when abortion is a necessity to save the life of the mother, the Far Right have likely pushed Indy/Moderate voters to the side of Pro-Choice. As well as driving away whatever Moderate Republicans were still left after all the RINO purging.

Even in Red States like Kansas, alienating those Indy voters - who may now give Democrats a fighting chance to win statewide elections - as well as driving up voter registration for women - who may have tuned out political issues before, but now realize they've been turned into second-class breeding stock - can well add to the likelihood of another midterm Blue Wave much like 2018.

Everyone, this is where voter turnout matters. To every Democrat suffering in Republican-controlled states, you have a chance to turn the tables. To every Independent/No-Party Affiliate voter out there, you have an opportunity to show up and vote the anti-abortion bastards out of office. To every Pro-Choice Republican still out there - and yes, the Kansas referendum proves you're there - you have every reason to turn against a Republican party that no longer respects you or the women in your lives.

Get the damn vote out, America. If you believe women are equal, if you believe women have the right to control their own selves, if you believe Roe should be restored as the law of the land, YOU GOT TO VOTE DAMMIT, vote for every Democrat, vote against every Republican, VOTE VOTE VOTE.

Your vote is your power. Republicans are trying to deny you that power. Don't let them. 

VOTE VOTE VOTE.

London Burning (And the Heat Wave Is Only One Reason Why)

When last we checked in on the United Kingdom, a lot has changed.

For starters, there's a new Doctor Who announced as Jodie Whittaker wraps up her tenure as the first official female Doctor. It'll be Ncuti Gatwa stepping up - Good Lord, he's younger (born 1992) than my flip-flops (bought 1991) - to take on the Fourteenth Doctor (which may not be the fourteenth regeneration, they're starting to really wibbly-wobbly with the Doctor's already messy origin story).

Let's see, um, there's been big news in women's soccer oh right football to the European continent. The Lionesses rule!

There's been a brutal heatwave across the UK, as well as much of Europe. It's bad enough that airport tarmacs and roads are melting back into tar.

Oh, and the Tories finally had enough of Boris Johnson's scandal-paloozas and forced him to resign as Prime Minister (although being the cheating git he is, he won't leave until September and even then may back out of it).

The last big scandal Boris was mishandling was the Partygate Affair at the beginning of the year, where his administration ignored the COVID-19 protocols they were enforcing on everyone else. While he skated in public, due to putting a clamp down on the official report before it got completely out, he faced turmoil among his fellow Conservative Tories ranks. A party Vote of No Confidence got called back in June.

Even with Boris surviving that No Confidence vote, the fact it even happened is usually a sign the PM isn't going to last another year. Margaret Thatcher faced a No Confidence, Theresa May faced a No Confidence, and while they both survived they resigned within a year because further intraparty conflicts made their positions untenable.

And Boris only got 59 percent support where Maggie had 84 percent and Theresa 68 percent. He may have been on a lifeboat, but it had 41 leaks already and was sinking like a miniature Titanic.

All it would take was one more scandal - one wafer thin mint of a headache - and it came with the aptly named MP Pincher getting caught a little "hands on" with other members of a social club. As stories of Pincher's behavior going back years got out, Boris Johnson publicly proclaimed he and his government hadn't heard of those stories... except it turned out Boris himself was warned even as he promoted Pincher to a high position.

Basically, Boris had been caught in yet another lie.

This was a problem with him even back in 2019, when I covered his rise to the Prime Minister's post. I relied on Sam Knight's reporting from the New Yorker so let's refer back to that again: 

This is the Johnsonian way. The lies, the performative phrases, the layers of persona—they accrete, one on top of another, flecked here and there with Latin, until everyone has forgotten what the big deal was... In 2001, at the age of thirty-six, Johnson was elected a Member of Parliament for Henley, a safe Conservative seat in Oxfordshire. When he came under pressure to resign from The Spectator, because of the conflict of interest, he demurred, and coined what has become his best-known political aphorism: “I want to have my cake and eat it.” Johnson hates choosing between things, even right and wrong... 

One of the undercurrents of Knight's story was how Boris pushed his persona and his political stances not with facts but with half-truths and empty promises (the title of Knight's article). The Brexit campaign in 2016, in alliance with other anti-EU fringe groups, was the culmination of Johnson's efforts:

At first, Johnson promised that he would not take a high-profile role in the Brexit campaign—or criticize Conservatives who were backing Remain—but that pledge lasted only a few days. The referendum debate was made for him. It pitched the government, which was boring, cautious, and cognizant of the flaws in Britain’s relationship with the E.U., against the Brexiteers, whose very name carried a whiff of japes and derring-do. While Cameron and his loyal ministers presented fact sheets warning of the economic and political risks of Brexit, Johnson and the gang toured the country in a bright-red bus, waving asparagus (to promote British farming) and promising to return three hundred and fifty million pounds a week to the National Health Service, which was a lie...

The jolly feel around Johnson enables him to air sinister ideas and dodge the consequences. When Barack Obama told reporters that Brexit would hurt the U.K.’s trading prospects, Johnson wrote a column referring to “the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” (Johnson has also written of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with their “watermelon smiles,” in Africa, and described Muslim women wearing niqabs as “letter boxes.”) At a climactic TV debate between Leave and Remain figures, on the last day of the campaign, Johnson adopted a line—previously used by Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party and now the Brexit Party leader—describing the day of the referendum as Britain’s independence day, a nationalist slogan that brought the house down...

And yet, all those lies Boris spilled had (still have) consequences: The Leave Vote forced then-PM Cameron to resign (Never the smartest or best Tory leader ever, even he knew exactly what the damage would be and fled before he could get held accountable himself). It created a leadership crisis among the Tories that Boris could have easily filled in that moment but even he faltered, overwhelmed by the immenseness of the damage he himself caused. For a politician who never really figured out an agenda other than to fulfill his own crass desires, he still stayed afloat because no one else - especially after Theresa May tried and failed multiple times - could complete the disaster that a full No-Deal Brexit would bring to the nation.

As much as Republicans in the colonies United States have to cope with the reality that their leader donald trump is a consistent (and terrible) liar, the Tories back in "this earth this realm this England" had to cope with the reality Boris is a consistent (and terrible) liar as well. Everyone saw this was coming and still the Conservatives had no one else to turn to. As Helen Lewis over at the Atlantic (paywalled) noted:

As I said, though, this was a long road to an inevitable end point. For years, Johnson has been making his aides and supporters look stupid by sending them out to peddle lines that turn out to be untrue. Back in July 2019—that last blessed pre-pandemic summer—Johnson was the favorite to win the Conservative Party leadership election, and thus to become Britain’s next prime minister, and I had just joined a magazine you might have heard of called The Atlantic. My second-ever Atlantic article explored an arresting modern phenomenon: the political outriders forced to humiliate themselves on behalf of charismatic, chaotic leaders. Think of all the Republicans who thought that, surely, Donald Trump wouldn’t lie to them...

These contortions could be attributed to “Johnson’s own vagueness and hatred of commitment,” as I wrote at the time. But there was a shorter word for the problem. Boris Johnson lies...

Or as noted by Jonathan Freedland over at The Guardian:

Lies and a brazen contempt for the rules powered his rise; lies and a brazen contempt for the rules brought his fall. Which means the political odyssey of Boris Johnson has a curious symmetry. Except that what began as defects in the personality of one man ended as defects in his party and his government, inflicting great damage on the entire country...

None of this was a surprise, because dishonesty has been the one constant through Johnson’s career. Famously, he was sacked from his first job, at the Times, for making up a quote, and later he was sacked from Michael Howard’s frontbench for lying to the then party leader about an affair...

Ordinarily, a reputation for serial deceit would close off the route to the top, or at least prove an impediment. Yet for Johnson it proved no obstacle at all. On the contrary, his route to No 10 was smoothed with lies. How come? What were the forces that propelled a man whose flaws were so clear and well documented into the most powerful job in the land...?

He turned the Tory party away from the values it once held dear, so that Johnson’s party cheerfully jeopardized the union, tramped on parliamentary sovereignty and even insulted the monarchy. He purged it of some of its best people and debased several of the great offices of state by filling them with obvious incompetents. Above all, he drained what remained of the public reservoir of trust.

In the spring of 2020, Britons were ready to follow their prime minister into a long period of collective self-discipline, even at the expense of hardship and emotional pain. They did it because they believed him when he said we would all be doing it, every last one of us. The Queen believed it, which is why she sat alone as she buried her husband of 73 years. But it was not true.

That will leave its own legacy, in distrust and cynicism that will endure long after Boris Johnson leaves Downing Street, his brief but toxic spell in the office he craved since childhood finally over...

Deceitful leadership from the Tories. From Conservatives in general, when you lump them in with trump's deceitful following here in the States. All to extend their political power at the expense of the realities that didn't fit their narratives: To the U.S. under trump, the falsehood of "Making America Great Again" with tariff wars, punishing minorities, and dragging the nation into a theocratic Stone Age; To the Brits under Johnson, the falsehood of freeing themselves from the EU with broken promises, a dysfunctional border system, and the likelihood of both Scotland AND Northern Ireland leaving the UK as Brexit ruins their local economies.

I should stop throwing in trump as a comparative model: This should be focusing more on the damage Boris Johnson is leaving behind when he departs (unless he tries to pull off another stunt and cancel his resignation). One last referral to the always-excellent Brexit & Beyond blog by Chris Grey: 

As the dust begins to settle on Boris Johnson’s downfall, it’s worth emphasizing that it was inextricably bound up with Brexit even though Brexit wasn’t its direct cause. Unusually and fittingly, it was his character and conduct rather than any particular policy which ended his premiership. Not, I think, because the Tory Party had some collective outbreak of moral rectitude – they all knew what Johnson was like from the outset – but more because the thumping loss of two by-elections demonstrated that the voters were finally starting to see through him, in large part because of ‘partygate’.

In some ways that’s a good thing. It arguably shows that, eventually and creakingly, the British polity still has some kind of moral compass. But it also means that, even though it ought to be, this is not a moment of reckoning for the Brexit he did so much to promote and shape...

Yet in truth, Johnson’s deficiencies of character are inseparable from Brexit. He was far from the only liar in 2016, but the casual and brazen dishonesty with which he fronted Vote Leave certainly embodied and perhaps swung its campaign. He even embodied many of the particular hues of that dishonesty, in his insistence not just that facts don’t matter but that belief matters more, in his endless sense of his own victimhood, still on display in his resignation announcement and mirroring that of the Brexiters generally, in his refusal to take responsibility for his choices even to the extent of denying choices have to be made, and in his constant bogus and half-baked invocations of the Second World War...

It's now widely accepted, including, if only superficially, by most of the candidates to succeed him, that Johnson’s legacy is a constitution and political culture horribly damaged by dishonesty and immorality, with accompanying public distrust and cynicism. But simply laying this at the door of his own character, without recognizing its roots in Brexit, means it will not be addressed.

There’s actually an even wider point to be made. The referendum didn’t just result in leaving the EU. It also created a massive and ongoing destabilization of British politics. It is not coincidence that we have had two general elections and are about to have the fourth Prime Minister in the space of just six years. That is astonishing in itself, but what is far more astonishing is that at each of the pivotal moments – the general elections and the leadership elections – Brexit itself was only discussed in the most cursory of ways.

This may seem a strange thing to say given how dominant an issue Brexit has been since 2016, but my point is that it has rarely, if ever, been talked about in depth, spelling out its actual practical implications and the choices and trade-offs involved...

So neither at these decisive points nor in the periods between them has there ever been any sustained, honest, realistic political conversation about the practical realities of Brexit. Instead, throughout the May years there were suggestions of securing ‘frictionless trade’ and the ‘exact same benefits’ of membership and in the Johnson years the claim of cakeism and denial of the coming costs, with Labour all the while just talking vaguely of the ‘better deal’ they would achieve. Equally, throughout these years there was virtually no honesty about the actual choices and problems posed by and for Northern Ireland. Instead there was endless nonsense about non-existent ‘alternative arrangements’ and, ultimately, the creation of an Irish Sea border whilst denying that that was what had been agreed. Thereafter, since the end of the transition the political silence about the damaging effects of Brexit has been deafening, whilst all the denial and dishonesty about Northern Ireland has been re-activated...

Boris may be getting kicked out of the Prime Minister's chair, but the damage his efforts to push and achieve Brexit remain ongoing. Not so much because Boris is still lying about Brexit - he is - it's because the rest of the political leadership in the United Kingdom are still lying to themselves about the far-reaching implications that they're stuck with.

Whoever is going to be the next Prime Minister is going to inherit the lies and delusions of Boris' false narratives, and it's not going to end pretty for them either. 

All of London - all of the UK - is going to keep burning hotter than hell for anyone inheriting No. 10 Downing Street.

Floriduh Republicans Earning the Dunce Cap

In the "Yes, Florida Is This Crazy and Stupid Category," let us take a look at the latest mad idea from our state's Republican leaders: Allowing uncertified unqualified military veterans and their spouses fill in as teachers to cover the expanding void of classrooms lacking actual teachers.

I am not the only one who sees how ridiculous this is: Frank Cerabino at the Palm Beach Post is skewering the whole thing (paywalled):

It’s part of a new state law that directs the Florida Department of Education to provide teaching jobs in schools to former military members who have served a minimum of four years of service, do not have bachelor’s degrees, but have a 2.5 or higher grade point average in at least 60 college credits.

So, if you were a C+ student with the equivalent of a community college education and you’ve managed to get through a single enlistment in the military without getting a dishonorable discharge, you can bypass the certification requirements to be a new breed of Florida classroom teachers.

Seriously.

It’s hard to tell with Florida whether the aim of Gov. DeSantis and the state lawmakers is to come up with yet another way to degrade public education, or to pander shamelessly to the 1.5 million military veterans in the state...

Considering how Republicans across the board sneer at public education - and are constantly searching for ways to either privatize schools into bankruptcy, or take away actual learning in order to turn future generations into cabbages - I'm betting on the first reason. Cerabino seems to think so as well:

Don’t get me wrong. Encouraging former military members to consider a career as a teacher after they leave the service is laudable. But not if the way you do it is by degrading the teaching profession...

So forgive me, if I figure Florida’s slap-dash effort to offer teaching jobs to veterans with as little as 48 months of military service is little more than something designed to provide an applause line in an upcoming DeSantis campaign speech, and little else...

The new state law seems to acknowledge its shortcomings by requiring schools to provide chaperones to the unqualified veterans for the first two years they are teaching. The law says these assigned “teacher mentors”, must be an existing teacher at the school who is certified, has three years teaching experience, and has earned an effective or highly effective rating on the prior year’s performance evaluation.

Oh, so certification is important after all.

This cockamamie new law is another unfunded mandate on public schools that is more of a new burden on them, not a help...

One can see a long-term effect here is DeSantis and other Republicans using this as an argument years down the line that teaching shouldn't require higher education credentials at all, and basically open the schools to get filled by the most unqualified hacks in the state. Hacks who are more interested in converting young minds to their quack science, bunk history, and religious bullshit.

What's missing in all of this Republican push to fill hiring gaps among teacher ranks is the reason WHY good education requires qualified teachers. If you're teaching, (and you want to do it well) you not only have to be an expert in the subjects you're teaching you also have to be an expert in HOW to teach those subjects. Mental skill is one thing, but psychological preparation and effective temperament matters as well. You have to have the patience to teach. These are things they teach the teachers, through those Education colleges earning those Masters and Bachelors on your way to the classrooms.

Lemme ask you this: Do you think a veteran - not exactly one with battlefield experience in the first place - is going to be able to handle 30 to 35 preteens in a classroom? Do you remember what it was like when YOU were a Sixth grader, and how much of a punk you were (even if you were a straight-A student) to certain teachers you couldn't respect?

How do you think these vets are going to handle a classroom - no matter if they're kindergarteners or high school seniors - the second the kids realize those vets have no idea what they're teaching and no idea HOW they're going to teach it? If we're lucky, half of them will quit before they cross the wrong line. And given how unlucky this whole situation reeks, we're bound to get horror stories of vets - some of them coping with Post-Traumatic Stress to begin with - getting triggered and getting physical against a kid who needles them the wrong way.

Part of me dreads how this will affect our public schools across the whole state, but I particularly dread the likelihood how DeSantis and some of the school boards are going to manipulate staffing at the schools by packing certified teachers into the privileged suburban (White) districts and shipping the unprepared veteran teachers into the poorer (Black/Latino) districts. Not only creating an economic and racial divide between the haves/have-nots but now an educational divide. The poor kids that need better teachers will instead get the ones who aren't really teachers at all, just glorified babysitters. The failure to educate all our children equally will bring us back to the bad days of segregation and dashing any merit-driven chances for kids from poor communities to rise up and flourish.

DeSantis' plan isn't going to save our schools: It's going to abandon our children.

Goddamn him and his fellow Republican elites. Sacrificing the best and brightest kids before they can even learn.

What Did The Secret Service Know...?

As the House Select Committee investigation the January 6 Insurrection offers a - for now - final presentation about donald trump's refusal to stop the riot he started, one major development in their ongoing pursuit of the facts is how the Presidential security detail - aka The Secret Service - deleted text messages from their phones when they shouldn't have (via Paul Rosenzweig at the Atlantic (paywall)):

The United States Secret Service is reported to have permanently deleted or lost a host of data, including text messages, that relate to the January 6 insurrection. The Secret Service says that the deletions came about as part of a routine, long-planned update to its phone system and that, as part of this update, it factory-reset its agents’ mobile devices, deleting all data. Skeptical observers suspect a cover-up of the agency’s errors, and more apocalyptic critics see the data deletion as part of a possible conspiracy to support President Donald Trump’s attempted coup. The entire episode is now under criminal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general...

Those texts, like emails, are considered government records, and there's supposed to be procedures in place to secure them for review by the proper authorities (National Archives) before anything else happens to them:

Secret Service officials told The Washington Post that the deletions were not malicious—that they were simply part of a phone-system update. But best practice today for any system update is for the new system to be backward-compatible with older systems. Nobody who isn’t trying to conceal something wants to lose message history—not for messages about January 6 and not for more mundane ones about, say, procurement or leave approval. Migrating without the capacity to roll back is simply unheard-of these days.

Furthermore, why did the planned migration continue after the Secret Service received a data-retention notice from Congress on January 16? Was that notice not transmitted to the IT department? Were the Secret Service’s lawyers unaware of the retention notice—to say nothing of the agency’s obligations under federal law to preserve records for the National Archives...?

The entire situation reeks of coverup and obstruction. The timing of this move is questionable at best. And the people involved in the decision-making at the White House and Secret Service agency happen to have every reason to make those text messages disappear (via Amanda Carpenter at The Bulwark):

One person Hutchinson testified communicating with at length is shaping up to become a central figure in the investigation—and his involvement raises further troubling questions about the Secret Service.

Tony Ornato is a Secret Service agent who, in a highly unusual move, left his position leading Trump’s security detail to serve as Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff for operations. In that post, he oversaw the Secret Service—the agency that had employed him and to which he has since returned. He is now the assistant director of the Secret Service Office of Training.

The fact that a Secret Service agent who left the agency to work for one president as a high-ranking official in the service of his administration—effectively leaving the civil service to become a political appointee—was then allowed to just slide back into the Secret Service under the next president of another party raises obvious questions about potential political bias in the agency...

Ornato was a person in close personal contact with trump through much of trump's tenure as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice). This was someone likely prone to accede to trump's demands regardless of the legality. At another point in the narrative coming from Carol Leonnig (author of the must-read Zero Fail book detailing the modern corruption within the Secret Service itself), she documents a confrontation between Ornato and another senior official about what was happening with Vice President Pence's security situation on January 6th as the rioters swarmed the Capitol building:

Around this time, (National Security Advisor Keith) Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.

“You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it...”

While Ornato claims that conversation didn't happen, and Kellogg testified favorably about Ornato to the Committee, that little moment plays into the skeptics' accusations that the Secret Service was about to spirit Pence away from Congress in an attempt to sabotage the Electoral Count certification.

This part of the Insurrection plot would have been where - as trump failed to convince Pence to overturn the Electoral Count - the riot would force Pence to flee before certification could be done. Senator Chuck Grassley, as Senate Pro Tempore (backup leader of the Senate based on age/seniority), had promised the day before he would step in for Pence and accept the fake Electors trump and his handlers were trying to submit for certain states to flip the Electoral Count his way.

If trump couldn't get Pence to do him the big favor, Grassley sure as hell would.

Stories abound about how - at the point where VP Pence's Secret Service agents were encouraging him to jump into a limo and drive to safety - Pence refused to let his guards escort him away from a genuine threat rioting just on the other side of the Capitol building wall from himself, implying he knew full well if he did that he was pretty much kidnapped. "I trust you, but I know you're not the one behind the wheel."

The missing Secret Service texts would likely have revealed communications between the agents back at the White House following trump's orders and the agents at the Hill trying to protect Pence. At the best, those messages would have exposed trump's demands to get Pence to either play ball or make way for someone who would. At worst, those messages might have exposed more violent threats from trump to Pence. We may not know, if those texts are indeed long gone.

Either way, whatever was on those text messages were more damaging to trump's situation than whatever punishments - destroying evidence and committing obstruction - that the Secret Service agents involved could live with.

The sad thing about the Secret Service: They're supposed to do the right thing. They're hired to protect people, they're trained to go against the instinct of self-preservation, they're drilled into the noble idea of taking a bullet for the President (and the President's Family, and anyone else assigned to their care).

But this is how corrupt the agency has become. It's not that they're taking a bullet for donald trump: It's that they're committing crimes like obstruction, and covering up the possibility they were going to commit other crimes against Pence (someone else who deserved their protection).

This is how corrupting an influence donald trump has been. However bent the Secret Service was - again, go read Zero Fail - before trump entered the White House in 2017, when he left in 2021 the Secret Service was completely broken.

Gods help our Executive Branch. Not President Biden, not Vice President Harris, not their families and not anybody else that the Secret Service is supposed to protect. 

The guards can no longer be trusted.

 

Uvalde Followup: The Sound of Shameless Cowards (w/ Update)

The ongoing terror and ongoing shame in our nation regarding the plague of mass shootings and widespread sorrow of gun violence just keeps getting worse.

Back in late May, the community of Uvalde Texas suffered the unimaginable loss of 19 children and 2 teachers killed by a gun-wielding angry guy. Ever since then, there had been questions about how the school security and later how the local police mishandled the situation. For months, stories kept dribbling out about how the police waited for minutes during the most critical moments; how the police detained mothers who heard the screams and wanted to rush in to save their babies; how the local police chief failed to understand the severity of the situation to the point of criminal negligence; and even how one of the cops at the scene had to be restrained because he was getting text messages from his dying wife who was one of the teachers killed.

Well, this past week, a video recording from security cameras inside the school leaked out. And while the mayor began screaming about going after the leaker(s), everyone else was horrified by the visual evidence that police did nothing (via Justin Peters at Slate (paywall)):

Though the video does not include any gory footage, and though we do not see inside the classrooms in which Ramos shot and killed 21 people, it is nevertheless hard to watch. (You can hear a lot of gunshots in the video; an “editor’s note” appears periodically informing viewers that “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”) Almost exactly three minutes after Ramos enters the school, three police officers enter and head down the hallway toward him. A minute later, after receiving fire, they retreat. More and more police officers show up. For over 40 minutes, as the video makes irrefutably clear, they more or less just stand there...

The one thing every viewer and pundit focused on when the video got out: The inhuman line "The sound of children screaming has been removed." Stephen King could never write a line more horrifying than that.

On Wednesday in Slate, my colleague Rebecca Onion nicely captured the excruciating experience of watching over an hour’s worth of footage of officers sanitizing their hands, checking their phones, standing around, and doing pretty much everything but intervening to stop the shooter...

It’s one thing to read about the police inaction at Robb Elementary; it’s another, much more viscerally maddening thing to see it with your own eyes. The written accounts that I’ve read of the police response have contained excuses and rationales and official statements; they’ve left room for doubt over what happened and why, and for the prospect that the police on the scene actually acted heroically after all. But the video has no bandwidth for  such shades of gray. It is an indelible partial record of what happened that afternoon. It sticks in a way that the stories I’ve read did not...

And when the video leaked, what was the official response from Uvalde officials like the city mayor?

On Tuesday, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin announced that the news outlets were “chicken” for publishing the video before the victims’ families had had a chance to see it...

The mayor’s response, in which he appealed to emotion in order to criticize the media for doing their jobs, is worth analyzing. On its face it sounds reasonable, even humane. The victims’ families have indeed been through enough, and it’s natural to want to spare them additional gratuitous trauma. But this plea to consider the families’ emotional welfare reads as smarmy and self-serving when uttered by the mayor of a town whose first responders failed the students and teachers of Robb Elementary on the day of the shooting, and whose authorities have been trying to duck responsibility for their own behavior ever since then...

More than an hour elapsed between when the first police officers arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary and when the police finally confronted and killed Ramos. This gap was not initially public knowledge, and in the aftermath of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw announced that “the bottom line is that law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in the classroom.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, meanwhile, praised the police on the scene for showing “amazing courage by running toward gunfire..

The video proves that Abbott's praise is absolute bullshit. Even when the cops had body armor, helmets, even those bulletproof shields clearly visible on camera, they waited like chickens for the gunman to finish his bloody agenda.

Every goddamned Uvalde and Texas law officer who failed to act on that day, and every goddamned Uvalde and Texas elected official all the way up to the goddamned Governor who tried to cover up this shame, should have the phrase "The sound of children screaming" tattooed to their foreheads for the rest of their gutless miserable lives.

This is, by the by, absolute proof that the Far Right wingnut fantasy of "Good guys with guns" is a goddamned lie. We had a platoon, nay an entire police force of "good guys with guns" and even they were too terrified to go after a lone gun nut who just happened to carry assault weapons with enough firepower to scare them.

The widespread availability of military-grade assault rifles - thanks to the blind and inhuman misreading of the goddamned Second Amendment by conservative wingnut justices and politicians - is a serious problem for law enforcement across the United States. You wanna know the excuse for why every police department is stocked with riot gear and firepower that even our own military thinks is excessive? The excuse is that the cops want to be "prepared" to face off against any large-scale riot where the rioters may have these AR-15s and similar semi-auto (and illegally converted full auto) firearms.

But even that excuse is a lie. Watch how the cops behaved at Uvalde - when there was just one gunman - and how they cowered behind their shields for a full hour. Then watch how these cops behaved at Black Lives Matters protests: Where most of the protestors were waving signs and carrying water bottles, and where the cops responded with rubber (and real) bullets, smashing in heads with batons and the butt of their own rifles because the cops fucking knew they held all the firepower on those streets.

If our nation's law enforcement were truly honestly serious about protecting themselves in dangerous situations, if they truly wanted to live with the belief that they should "go home to their families at the end of every shift," you'd think every sheriff's department and police union out there would be fighting tooth-and-nail to pass assault weapon bans to make their lives easier. 

But they don't. You barely hear a peep from police unions when it comes to debate for assault weapon bans or any other gun safety option.

Part of cop rationale is that they want that excuse of mad gunmen running around so they can play soldier with overpowered gear of their own. Part of it is that the cops are on the same page with the National Rifle Body Count Association when it comes to ensuring the goddamned White Nationalist Christianist "Rapture Is Coming" Gun-Worshipping wingnuts are locked and loaded for the Second Civil War vs. bleeding heart liberals.

The anxiety cops have with every traffic stop could easily go away when the open-carry prevalence of guns go away. But no: they would rather live with the fear, all because it lets them impose their fear and firepower on the ethnic minorities they deem to punish and harass.

In the meantime, the shameless cowards in Texas will keep bleating the same excuses and the same lies until they are held accountable. Until each and every cop who failed in their duty, each and every official who failed to be honest and upfront, each and every demagoguing politician who blustered and lied are either in jail or out of office.

The sound of children screaming should haunt them forever.

Update 7/18: Am waking up this morning to reports that there were 376 officers that eventually showed up at Uvalde. All those cops, and they STILL could not work up the nerve to apprehend a single gunman. All because the gunman had AR-15 murdersticks with him. /rage 

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GUNS

IT'S THE GODDAMNED GUNS.

Get rid of the assault rifles and maybe just maybe the cops will stop being cowards and bullies.

The Ties That Bind trump To the Insurrection

There's another hearing this Tuesday from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Insurrection.

This one is a big fcking deal because this hearing will focus on  the extremist groups - Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and the QAnon conspiracists - and those groups connection to Trump associates, especially Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.

The House committee has already established strong cases that donald trump knew - was at least informed by multiple people in his own circle - that he lost the 2020 Presidential election; that trump likely committed wire fraud by falsely fund-raising for legal issues that went to other people's pockets (his own especially) to the tune of $250 million; that trump was working to nullify or interfere with election results; and that trump knew that the rally he held that January 6th before the riot overwhelmed Capitol Hill was armed and ready to riot on his behalf.

Any one of these would be reason enough for the Department of Justice to file charges of some kind against trump. What would really tie everything together would be proof that the two halves of this insurrection - the one half (trump) that planned it and encouraged it, and the second half (the rioters) who acted on the plan - were in direct communication and supporting each other (the Conspiracy, which I think falls under this US Code). 

Without legal proof of a conspiracy, trump's lawyers could well argue that trump himself had nothing to do with the violence that took lives and destroyed property (and nearly wrecked the federal government itself). But if you can prove the plotters hiding back in their hotel rooms at the Willard were coordinating with the leaders of the actual rioters, they're all - trump to Stone to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers - linked together. trump may not have known the specifics of what was happening - the way Don Vito never really knows how Luca Brasi took care of that movie producer at the beginning of The Godfather (that poor horse) - but trump asked for something to happen to overturn a legal election and he benefitted from that crime in some way.

Or as they discussed in the Congressional hearings in Godfather Part II, there were a lot of buffers! Hence the need to find a direct link like Frankie Pentangeli between the street soldiers of the Mafia to mob boss Michael Corleone.

Find that link from donald trump to the Proud Boy street soldiers - be it Roger Stone or Steve Bannon or Michael Flynn - and you've got a criminal case against trump to condemn him to federal prison.

Here's hoping today the House committee proves trump's dirty fingerprints were all over this insurrection.

"Is You Filming Yourselves Plotting a Criminal EFFING Conspiracy?"

Back in 2019, maybe a little earlier, Adam Serwer at the Atlantic made an observation about the general incompetence and lack of awareness of both donald trump and the lackeys he was relying on to corrupt the political system of the United States: 

If Donald Trump’s advisers had only watched The Wire, many of the president’s aides and associates might have saved themselves a great deal of legal trouble.

A scene from the HBO crime drama shows a character named Stringer Bell trying to broker peace between rival drug dealers, and trying to get them to abide by Robert’s Rules of Order. When the meeting adjourns, Bell walks up to a subordinate, who is busy scribbling on a legal pad.

“Motherfucker, what is that?” Bell asks.

“The Robert Rules say we gotta have minutes for a meeting. These the minutes,” he replies.

Astonished, Bell snatches the paper out of his hand. “(N-word), is you takin’ notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy? What the fuck is you thinking, man?”

And thus the Stringer Bell Rule was born: You shouldn't be documenting the criminal activities you're committing.

And yet, trump and his own people - some of whom were at the game of political dirty tricks for 50 years like Roger Stone - kept ignoring that rule.

Because one of the more hilarious revelations from the ongoing House Select Committee investigation into the January 6th Insurrection is that the people setting up and executing the riots hired filmmakers - multiple! - to document themselves in the weeks before the riot took place. Via Hugo Lowell at the Guardian:

Weeks before the Capitol attack, top Republican political activists Roger Stone and Ali Alexander identified the January 6 congressional certification as the final chance for Donald Trump to attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The focus on the congressional certification, according to sources familiar with the matter, was one of several areas they marked as potential flashpoints to exploit as leaders of the “Stop the Steal” movement to help Trump reverse his defeat to Joe Biden.

As Stone and Alexander mounted their political operation, their activities were recorded by two conservative film-makers in the post-2020 election period and in the weeks before January 6.

The access meant the film-makers, Jason Rink and Paul Escandon, captured footage of the leaders of the Stop the Steal movement and their interactions with top Trump allies, according to a teaser for the documentary titled The Steal.

In following Stop the Steal, the film-makers’ project documented key moments in the timeline leading up to the Capitol attack, including an “occupation” of the Georgia state capitol in November, and rallies in Washington that almost seemed like dry runs for January 6.

They also caught on camera public and private moments at Stop the Steal events. Among others who appear in the documentary are the House Republican Paul Gosar, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn...

Stone also allowed himself to be filmed by a Danish documentary film crew that recorded his activities in his room at the Willard hotel as the Capitol attack unfolded, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.

The House January 6 select committee emailed a letter earlier in January asking to review the footage, but a lawyer for Rink declined the request, citing the need to maintain journalistic independence and fears the content would leak from the inquiry.

House investigators did not ultimately pursue the matter after the lawyer indicated he would litigate a subpoena; unless film-makers have said they would only turn over footage in response to a subpoena, the panel has generally avoided that route...

At this point Idris Elba pops up in front of Roger Stone and drops the Stringer Bell Rule, complete with N-word.

I mean, common sense should have told these guys that "Hey wait a second, bringing in gun-toting protestors to break into a federal building like the Capitol is slightly frowned upon by a shitload of anti-terrorist laws. So why should we film ourselves planning out such an attack?"

This is where my former (now retired) co-worker Barbara back in 2016 informed me of the word Kakistocracy: Rule by the dumbest morons available. These riot planners - Stone especially - should have learned from the Mueller investigation that they shouldn't leave emails and paperwork and video recordings of themselves breaking federal laws. Instead, the trumpian elites doubled down and hired outside parties to film them breaking the law for future documentaries.

They haven't explained why they did, at least not publicly, and they probably won't admit it to themselves. But I guarantee you a big reason why they filmed these documentaries is because these insurrectionists saw themselves as heroes against what they believe is a corrupt and evil liberal government.

Look at how the rioters and the political figures like Lauren Boebert leading the charge excused their actions as replaying 1776 as though they were modern-day Washingtons. These Proud Boy / Oath Keeper types really do view themselves as fighting against tyranny instead of being the violent psychopaths they really are. They're living out their Turner Diaries fantasies, and they don't care who else knows about it... until they're in jail and the reality of their lawbreaking makes them change their tune.

And so you get these Roger Stones, these Rudys, these drum-banging sycophants happy to take selfies in the middle of the riots, eager to pose for interviews with Fox Not-News after the blood has spilled, thrilled to hire film crews to stage their very own Triumph of the Will documentaries for future generations of fascists.

Another thing to consider: These ringleaders agreed to have cameras record themselves for posterity because they never believed these recordings could be used against them at formal hearings and in courts of law.

Guys like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon have enough smarts to know what it is they're doing could be criminally wrong... but after decades of never getting held to count for what they've done - Stone got pardoned by trump after a jury agreed with Mueller's charges that Stone was guilty - they've tossed all precaution into the nearest burning dumpster. 

To say it another way: The corruption in trump's inner circle of power runs so deep that they openly flaunted their actions believing they would never get held accountable.

Bet any odds on how Roger Stone and the others still believe that hiring these film crews was a good idea, that they believe that in spite of what the House committee finds they will still get away with it?

Gods help us if they do.

The Undignified Surrender of Hollow Republicans

Oft times, I share a big read from another's online article because of how good and impactful that article is.

This time, I'm pointing y'all if you haven't read it already to Mark Leibovich's article in The Atlantic titled "The Most Pathetic Men In America." The introductory artwork to the article ought to clue you right away to whom he's accusing (it is paywalled): 

I will admit I never loved the Trump story. This sometimes surprises people. I have been covering Washington for many years; I’ve been accused of being a “keen observer” of the capital. Surely, I must have been thrilled to have such a ridiculous piece of work at the center of it all, right?

Well, no. I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative. His promise to “drain the swamp” was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to “Make America Great Again” in 1980.

Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I’m genuinely asking...

Better objects of our scrutiny—and far more compelling to me—are the slavishly devoted Republicans whom Trump drew to his side. It’s been said before, but can never be emphasized enough: Without the complicity of the Republican Party, Donald Trump would be just a glorified geriatric Fox-watching golfer. I’ve interviewed scores of these collaborators, trying to understand why they did what they did and how they could live with it. These were the McCarthys and the Grahams and all the other busy parasitic suck-ups who made the Trump era work for them, who humored and indulged him all the way down to the last, exhausted strains of American democracy...

It's been noted elsewhere and here at this blog that trump simply wouldn't have gotten as far as he had if only the Republican Party leadership had enough spine and enough self-respect to kick him to the curb before the first round of 2016 primaries took place. They could have arguably denied him a spot on the ballot on ethical concerns alone (not just his failed businesses - he was facing fraud charges over his "Trump University" when the primaries began! - but also ongoing complaints of sexual misconduct), his refusal to accept certain guidelines and requirements demanded of other candidates, anything.

But the GOP failed to stop him. They feared trump's threat to run an independent campaign much like Ross Perot in 1992 would split the Far Right vote and guarantee a Hillary Clinton win. trump had them in a terrible Catch-22. The Republicans dreaded trump's corruption but outright hated the possibility Hillary could become President: Not out of any fear Hillary would wreck the nation, but that Hillary out of basic competence would prove that all the hathos and fearmongering about her was a big lie. 

So the Republicans let trump play. Worse, the party leadership indulged trump in 2016, allowing him to bully his way across the debate stages and drag the Republican brand into a toxic mud pit of open racism and ignorance.

But back to Leibovich:

What would you do to stay relevant? That’s always been a definitional question for D.C.’s prime movers, especially the super-thirsty likes of McCarthy and Graham. If they’d never stooped this low before, maybe it’s just because no one ever asked them to...

Early on, when wary Republicans were still publicly dreading where the Trump experiment might lead, you’d hear flashes of concern over how it—or they—might be adjudicated by those ever-hovering future historians. As his own presidential campaign was ending in 2016, Marco Rubio predicted that there would one day be a “reckoning” inside the GOP. “You mark my words, there will be prominent people in American politics who will spend years explaining to people how they fell into this,” Rubio told The New York Times (Update: Rubio cleaned up his act, became a stalwart Trump patron, and we’re still waiting on that reckoning.)...

Two decades on and many rungs up the org chart, McCarthy can be sensitive to perceptions that he is a lightweight whose career trajectory is owed purely to his Olympian brownnosing and backslapping capabilities. “I like that reputation,” McCarthy claimed to me, not persuasively, “because it helps people underestimate me.” McCarthy had come close to becoming speaker before, in 2015, but a Benghazi-related gaffe knocked him out of the running. Now the ultimate job is again within reach. Blinders on. Legacies are for losers. McCarthy learned from the master.

“My legacy doesn’t matter,” Trump told his longtime aide Hope Hicks a few days after the 2020 election, according to an account in Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “If I lose, that will be my legacy.” This became the essential ethos of Republican nihilism. By lashing themselves so tightly to Trump, Republicans could act as if the president’s impunity and shamelessness extended to them. His strut of cavalier disregard became their own...

trump not only bought the souls of most leading Republicans who all proved to be hollow ambitious vessels, he bought them cheap.

trump defeated the Republican Party when he became so openly racist and sexist that the Far Right voter base rallied to him like no other, compelling these ambitious hollow Republican officials to bend the knee to their own mobs. It's been said before: trump gave the Far Right base license to be rude, violent, and racist, and they will worship him forever for it.

And that Far Right base will go to war for trump because there's nothing left to Republican ideology but cruelty, greed, and power.

Read all of Leibovich's article (again, paywalled), to see in full just how far gone the Republicans have fallen.

And then for the LOVE OF GOD never vote Republican again.