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Monthly Archives: October 2022

Chickens Returning To The Roost?


Heather Cox RichardsonOct 13
 
 

Today, a jury in a civil trial in Connecticut determined that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems, the parent company of his “InfoWars” network, must pay $965 million to the families of eight of those murdered at Sandy Hook and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. A previous decision in a similar case left Jones with an order to pay almost $50 million to the parents of one of the other Sandy Hook victims, and a third Sandy Hook damages trial is pending.

Twenty first-graders and six educators died in the 2012 attack, but Jones insisted the massacre was a hoax and the victims’ families actors, all part of a plot to create an excuse for confiscating guns.

Jones’s followers have harassed the families ever since. Jones has admitted his theories were wrong and the massacre happened, but he says that he is not to blame for the actions of his followers and that the harassment was not as bad as the plaintiffs claim.

A judge earlier ruled that Jones is liable for defamation, invasion of privacy, inflicting emotional distress, and violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act by lying about the massacre to sell his products on InfoWars. A representative from Free Speech Systems testified that Jones and the company made at least $100 million in the last ten years.

Jones was not at the court today. He was broadcasting, making fun of the proceedings, and begging his followers for money, promising it would not go to pay the damages because he had declared bankruptcy and, in any case, he intended to appeal.

What we are seeing is what happens when the MAGA narrative meets a legal system that requires sworn testimony and recognizes perjury as a crime.

Jones and InfoWars pushed the lies that fueled the rise of today’s Republican extremists, and Jones is a prominent Trump supporter who was part of the events in Washington on January 5 and 6, 2021. Tonight, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) defended him, saying that “all he did was speak words,” and suggesting the case against him was “political persecution.” Like others on the right, Greene suggests this case is about free speech, when in fact, the First Amendment to the Constitution protects us only from the government silencing us. It does not stop legal responsibility for damage our words cause, for which Jones has been found liable. A jury—not the government—has assigned the $965 million award to those whose lives Jones harmed.

This legal reckoning is a significant blow to Jones’s ability to continue spreading lies.

Meanwhile, the $1.6 billion lawsuit in which Dominion Voting Systems is suing the Fox News Corporation for its lies about Dominion’s voting machines in the 2020 election is moving forward. The FNC is apparently planning to argue that FNC personalities were simply expressing opinions when they said the machines were rigged, much as FNC has argued to defend host Tucker Carlson from lawsuits, saying that he was not reporting facts and that no “reasonable viewer” would take him seriously.

Dominion’s $1.3 billion lawsuit against Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who was a leading figure in pushing the lies that the voting machines were rigged, is also moving forward, although in March she asked a federal judge to dismiss the case against her, saying that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.” On September 28, a federal judge dismissed her countersuit, in which Powell claimed Dominion was suing her “to punish and make an example of her.”

The clash between reality and image was in the news again tonight when Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that a Mar-a-Lago employee has placed Trump directly at the center of the retention of government documents in defiance of a subpoena. The employee told federal agents that Trump himself supervised the moving of boxes of documents, and that the shift happened after Trump’s team received a subpoena to return any documents bearing classified markings that were still at Mar-a-Lago.

Security camera footage backed up the employee’s story.

Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich tried to spin the news by telling Barrett and Dawsey: “The Biden administration has weaponized law enforcement and fabricated a Document Hoax in a desperate attempt to retain political power,” but that narrative is running up against the rush of Trump’s lawyers to get away from this case.

Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, a former commentator on the right-wing One America News Network, signed a letter on June 3 certifying that Trump had returned all the records marked “classified,” “based upon the information that has been provided to me.” But the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago turned up more than 100 more.

Bobb has hired a criminal defense attorney and is cooperating with the Department of Justice. She told investigators that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran had drafted the letter and told her to sign it; she insisted on the disclaimer. Now Corcoran, too, has an incentive to work with the Department of Justice and to tell the truth, rather than doubling down on a lie.

Trump has ridden a false narrative in the past by managing to delay legal reckonings.

But today, New York federal judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied former president Donald Trump’s attempt to delay his deposition, set for October 19, in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll.

Carroll has sued Trump for defaming her by claiming she lied when she said Trump raped her in the mid-1990s. Trump has appealed to substitute the United States for himself as the defendant in the case, since he was president when he said he had not committed the assault. A previous attempt on the part of Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr to substitute the U.S. for Trump failed, so, the judge pointed out, “this is a second bite at that apple.” Still, Trump wanted to pause the case while that appeal is pending.

“As this Court previously has observed,” Judge Kaplan wrote, “Mr. Trump has litigated this case since it began in 2019 with the effect and probably the purpose of delaying it.” He denied the attempt to stop Trump’s deposition, saying Trump “should not be permitted to run the clock out.”

The judge also pointed out that New York has recently passed the Adult Survivors Act, providing a one-year window for civil lawsuits based on sex crimes that are otherwise outside the statute of limitations, and that Carroll might want to sue Trump for damages under that law.

After Kaplan’s decision, Trump called the U.S. legal system a “broken disgrace,” claimed he had no idea who Carroll is, and called her story “a Hoax and a lie, just like all the other Hoaxes that have been played on me for the past seven years.” But he will have to testify.

Tomorrow, in yet another example of the power of reality, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold another public hearing at 1:00 Eastern time.

—

Notes:

Zoe Tillman @ZoeTillman

Now: A NY federal judge denied Donald Trump’s bid to delay discovery in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case — incl. his scheduled deposition — while his appeal is pending. Trump “should not be permitted to run the clock out…” More to come. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

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Image

3:53 PM ∙ Oct 12, 2022

2,472Likes638Retweets

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/12/alex-jones-sandy-hook-verdict/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/explainer-jurors-weigh-cost-alex-jones-sandy-hook-91149950

Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 @RonFilipkowski

Let’s let all the Alex defenders come out publicly tonight for the whole country to see. Keep them coming.

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8:43 PM ∙ Oct 12, 202228,293Likes4,477Retweets

Click to access gov.uscourts.nysd.543790.96.0.pdf

https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-karen-mcdougal-case-tucker-carlson-2020-9

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/judge-tosses-sidney-powells-counterclaims-dominion-defamation-case-2022-09-28/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/12/maralago-witness-trump-boxes-moved/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-lawyer-christina-bobb-speaks-federal-investigators-mar-lago-case-rcna51459

Renato Mariotti @renato_mariotti

Christina Bobb spoke to the Feds and told them that another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, was the source of the false info in the certification she made regarding the Mar-a-Lago documents. If true, she is likely right that she has no liability. But now *he* is in the hot seat. https://t.co/o1gKHocuvF

Ken Dilanian @KenDilanianNBC

Exclusive: Trump lawyer Christina Bobb speaks to federal investigators in Mar-a-Lago case via ⁦@MarcACaputo⁩ https://t.co/PC5LssRrAI5:28 PM ∙ Oct 10, 20221,293Likes352Retweets

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-lawsuits-manhattan-donald-trum-lewis-a-kaplan-ce7b11f1f0e3ea1bec35e8f1f1b929d9

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/sidney-powell-s-legal-defensei-reasonable-people-wouldn-t-believe-n1261809

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/jan-6-trump-riot-house-probe-next-hearing-to-show-new-material.html

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Russia’s Hold on OPEC or Just Greed?


Heather Cox RichardsonOct 6
 
 

Today the OPEC+ oil cartel announced it will cut output by 2 million barrels a day, beginning in November. Since the world currently consumes about 100 million barrels of oil a day, this will be a cut of about 2%.

OPEC is short for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It includes 13 member states, led by Saudi Arabia, and produces 44% of the world’s oil. Eleven other countries work alongside OPEC and make up OPEC+. Those additional countries include Russia, and together with OPEC, they control more than half of the world’s oil, about 55% of it. 

OPEC+ countries cooperate to reduce market competition and raise prices. 

The cost of oil has dropped steadily during the course of the summer, falling about 32% until it fell below $80 a barrel for the American oil the U.S. uses as a benchmark. With today’s announcement, the price of a barrel of oil started to move upward again. 

The decision of OPEC+ to cut production is not simply about prices. It is about the ongoing struggle over democracy playing out in Ukraine, as the Ukrainians fight off the Russian invaders. 

The Russian economy depends upon oil sales, and the U.S. and European Union have sought to cut into that money to hurt Russia’s ability to continue its attack in Ukraine. A day ago, after Russia illegally annexed four regions of Ukraine, the 27 member nations in the European Union joined the G7 (which is made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) to set a price cap on Russian oil, in addition to another round of sanctions. Theoretically, this plan should have enabled countries that need Russian oil for heat this winter to get it, while keeping the prices low enough to starve Putin’s war efforts.

Russia is co-chair of OPEC+ and is desperate for oil money, on which its economy depends. That economy is crumbling under international sanctions, and Russia’s oil production has dropped about a million barrels a day at the same time that the country has been forced to discount its oil to sell it. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is failing, it needs more money, and Russia asked for the OPEC+ cuts to increase prices. 

“It’s clear that OPEC+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, and OPEC+ delegates said the move was, indeed, a big win for Russia.

Biden took heat earlier this year when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask leaders to increase production, in part to ease gas prices here in the U.S., which soared after the economy came roaring back after the worst of the pandemic passed and after Putin invaded Ukraine. At the time, the Saudis increased production slightly, but this announced cut makes Saudi Arabia’s rejection of Biden’s request clear, even though the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said that OPEC+ was simply trying to stabilize markets in the face of a cooling global economy.

It is not immediately clear just how badly this development will hurt prices as the global economy slows and there is less demand for oil. Still, the announcement of the cuts a month before the U.S. midterms certainly seems like an attempt to influence U.S. politics. It is no secret that Saudi leaders cultivated the Trump family, which returned their overtures, and last year, Saudi leader Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled the advisors of the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund to invest $2 billion of the fund in a new investment company run by Jared Kushner, former president Trump’s son-in-law. 

Of today’s news, the Biden White House said: “The president is disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. At a time when maintaining a global supply of energy is of paramount importance, this decision will have the most negative impact on lower- and middle-income countries that are already reeling from elevated energy prices.” 

Apparently recognizing that higher oil prices could well translate into higher gas prices and hamstring the Democrats right before the midterms, the White House statement touted how the president and allies around the world have helped to bring gas prices down by $1.20 to an average of $3.29 a gallon. It said that the administration would continue to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a release that has significantly lowered oil prices and is part of why OPEC+ is upset. The administration will also continue to increase domestic production and has asked U.S. energy companies, which have been making record profits, to close “the historically large gap between wholesale and retail gas prices—so that American consumers are paying less at the pump.” 

The administration also said that “in light of today’s action,” it would “consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices.” 

“Finally,” it said, “today’s announcement is a reminder of why it is so critical that the United States reduce its reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels.” It reminded Americans that the Inflation Reduction Act was the nation’s most significant investment ever in transitioning to clean energy and increasing energy security by fulfilling our energy needs at home. 

(Folks: Perhaps fittingly, our power is out. I won’t be able to make corrections tonight, so apologies in advance if I’ve messed something up. And don’t worry– we are perfectly safe– this just happens here sometimes.)

—

Notes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2018/06/29/opec-is-dead-long-live-opec/?sh=b64c2652217a

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05/1126754169/opec-oil-production-cut

https://www.wsj.com/articles/opec-agrees-to-biggest-oil-production-cut-since-start-of-pandemic-11664978144

Vivian Salama @vmsalama

Statement by President Biden’s top national security and economic advisors expressing his disappointment in OPEC’s decision to cut production quotas in the midst of a global economic crisis.

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3:27 PM ∙ Oct 5, 2022138Likes63Retweets

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/05/statement-from-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-and-nec-director-brian-deese/

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-brussels-european-union-258c0a5a0ada0433fa6dd0cc8e435a1d

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62770283

https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/25.htm

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Unchanged- Just Updated Thinking


Heather Cox RichardsonOct 9
 
 

On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless.

The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.

The Chicago Fire is the one people remember.

The difference is in part because Chicago was a city, of course, easy for newspapers to cover, while the Pestigo fire killed people in lumber camps and small towns. But the Great Chicago Fire also told a political story that fit into an emerging narrative about the danger of organized labor.

It was not clear, coming out of the Civil War, how Republicans would stand with regard to workers. After all, the U.S. government had fought the war to protect the right of every man to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But immediately after the war, workers had started organizing to demand adjustments to the wartime financial policies that favored men with money. By 1866 the Democratic Party had begun to listen to them, and leaders called for rewriting the terms of the Civil War debt, which had been generous to investors in the days when they were a risky investment. After the war, with the U.S. secure, the calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred, and added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

They were also concerned when more than 60,000 people came together in August 1866 to launch the National Labor Union, calling for the government to level the playing field between workers and their employers. They asked for an eight-hour day, an end to monopolies, and cooperation between Black and white workers. In 1867, in what was almost certainly a misquoted comment, stories spread that Republican lawmaker Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio had told an audience in Kansas that “property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be wrought out.”

Also in 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, which divided the ten unreconstructed states into five military districts and required new state constitutional conventions to rewrite the state constitutions. For the first time in history, the new law permitted Black men to vote for delegates to those conventions.

When former Confederates preferred to live under military rule rather than share political power with their Black neighbors, Congress amended the Military Reconstruction Act to permit the military to enroll voters. In 1868, Congress passed and then states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, protecting the right of all citizens to the due process of the laws. In 1870, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting Black male voting. And then, when white reactionaries organized as the Ku Klux Klan to keep Black men and white Republicans from voting for the constitutions the conventions had written, Congress created the Department of Justice to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members and protect Black rights in the South.

Attacks on Black political rights on grounds of race were now unconstitutional, and the federal government seemed prepared to back that principle up with the law. So reactionary southerners took a new tack.

Beginning in 1871, they argued that they had no objection to their Black neighbors on racial grounds. What they objected to, they said, was that these folks, newly out of enslavement, were poor. White leaders claimed that the South remained in a recession not because India and Egypt had taken over the cotton market during the war, but because Black southerners were lazy and hoped to use their new political power to redistribute the wealth of white landowners into their own pockets.

When South Carolina voters put into office a majority-Black legislature, white South Carolinians railed against the Black voters “plundering” taxpayers. One observer commented that “a proletariat Parliament has been constituted, the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern States.” Democrats organized a “Tax-Payers’ Convention” to protest new taxes levied by the legislature.

While Republicans were unwilling to bow to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence against their Black colleagues on racial grounds, this attack had legs, thanks, in part, to events in Europe.

For two months in spring 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, workers took over the city of Paris and established the Paris Commune. American newspapers plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare. They highlighted the murder of priests, the burning of the Tuileries Palace, and the bombing of buildings by women who lobbed burning bottles of newfangled petroleum through cellar windows. American newspapers portrayed the Communards as a “wild, reckless, irresponsible, murderous mobocracy” who brought to life a chaotic world in which workers had taken over the government with a plan to confiscate all property and transfer all money, factories, and land to workers.

Republicans’ fear of workers grew. Organized laborers “are agrarians, levelers, revolutionists, inciters of anarchy, and, in fact, promoters of indiscriminate pillage and murder,” the Boston Evening Transcript charged. The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted the redistribution of wealth through law appealed to poor, lazy, vicious men who would rather steal from the nation’s small farmers and mechanics than work themselves. Scribner’s Monthly warned in italics: “the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”

Turning first against Black southerners, Republican newspapers began to claim that African Americans were radical levelers. They were “ignorant, superstitious, semi-barbarians” who were “extremely indolent, and will make no exertion beyond what is necessary to obtain food enough to satisfy their hunger.” To these lazy louts, Republicans had given the vote, which gave them “absolute political supremacy.” They elected to office leaders who promised to confiscate wealth through taxation and give it to Black citizens in the form of roads, schools, and hospitals. “The most intelligent, the influential, the educated, the really useful men of the South, deprived of all political power,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, “[are] taxed and swindled by a horde of rascally foreign adventurers, and by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen.”

After the Paris Commune, Republicans began to sweep white workers into this equation as well, taking the lead of former Confederates. An article in the New York Daily Tribune quoted Georgia Democrat Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state, who explicitly compared formerly enslaved people to the Paris Communards. He called for a property requirement for voting, without which “the lower classes…the dangerous, irresponsible element,” would control government and “attack the interests of the landed proprietors.” According to Toombs: “Only those who owned the country should govern it, and men who had no property had no right to make laws for property-holders.”

When Chicago went up in flames in October 1871, some Americans blamed the Great Fire on “communists” eager to take over the country. Even those unconvinced a deadly fire in a wooden city was part of a deliberate plot blamed the fire on stupid immigrant workers careless about fire. They blamed “Mrs. O’Leary and her cow,” claiming the animal had kicked over a lantern near straw, and even children knew not to put fire near straw.

The Great Chicago Fire spoke to politics as the rural Peshtigo Fire did not. It fanned the flames of fear that workers were trying to destroy America and must be cut out of the body politic. Famous reformer Charles Loring Brace wrote, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with our ‘dangerous classes’ for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”

And the Great Chicago Fire was an illustration of precisely that.

—

Notes:

Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872), p 29.

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The Hidden Facts of Politics



Heather Cox Richardson
Oct 8/ 2022
The day began with news that during Trump’s first impeachment trial, all the Republican senators believed Trump had broken the law when he tried to force President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to smear Hunter Biden before he would release the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight off Russia. “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” warned Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), according to a forthcoming book by Politico reporter Rachael Bade and Washington Post reporter Karoun Demirjian. But then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) kept the Republican senators behind Trump by telling them: “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”Republicans did not manage to hold the Senate, of course, in part because Trump’s fury at Republican leaders’ refusal to force Georgia to throw out its electoral votes made him depress Republican voting in the special Senate election that ultimately yielded two Democratic senators—Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—and gave Democrats 50 seats. Because Vice President Kamala Harris, the deciding vote in the tied Senate, is a Democrat, control of the Senate shifted to the Democrats.Democratic control of the House, Senate, and presidency ushered in an economic strategy discredited by Republicans since 1981. Rather than cutting taxes and regulations to move money upward to the “supply side” of the economy in the hope that wealthy investors would expand industries and hire more workers, the Democrats focused on getting money into the hands of ordinary Americans. This investment in the “demand side” was the heart of government economic policy between 1933 and 1981 and brought about what economists know as the “great compression,” in which the wealth gap that had characterized the country in the 1920s shrank considerably. After President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and shifted the country toward supply side economics, that compression reversed to become the “great divergence.” Their approach to the economy made Democrats invest in economic recovery from the worst of the pandemic with the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill passed in March 2021 with no Republican votes. That bill ushered in a dramatic economic recovery—the most rapid of any of the G7 wealthy nations—with the U.S. adding ten million jobs since Biden’s inauguration. No other president in our history has seen this level of job growth in his first two years in office. Today a new jobs report revealed that the U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell to 3.5%. That was more jobs and a lower unemployment rate than economists expected. That job growth has affected all Americans. The Hispanic jobless rate has fallen from 8.6% in Trump’s last month to 3.8% now; the Black jobless rate went from 9.2% to 5.8%. Notable in the numbers, though, was that K–12 education lost more than 21,000 workers in September, putting the number of teachers and support staff 309,000 people lower than it was before the pandemic.That extraordinary job growth, along with money saved during the pandemic, helped to drive inflation, as people were able to pay higher prices for goods and services jacked up by supply chain tangles, transportation shortages, and price gouging. But so far, it does not seem that we are locked into an inflationary spiral as we were in the 1970s.Seemingly paradoxically, today’s good news about jobs drove the stock market downward. Investors are guessing that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates to slow down the economy. If it costs more to borrow, businesses will likely cut back hiring and wages. Less money in people’s hands should slow the inflation that’s still high. The Democrats have also hammered out legislation to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. Last November, they passed the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges and to extend broadband to rural areas. More than 60% of Americans wanted infrastructure investment, and for that bill, which is often called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Democrats picked up “aye” votes from 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican representatives.But former president Trump attacked those Republicans who voted for the measure, insisting that Republicans’ main goal was to keep Biden from accomplishing anything. “Very sad that the RINOs in the House and Senate gave Biden and Democrats a victory on the ‘Non-Infrastructure’ Bill,” Trump said. “All Republicans who voted for Democrat longevity should be ashamed of themselves, in particular Mitch McConnell, for granting a two month stay which allowed the Democrats time to work things out at our Country’s, and the Republican Party’s, expense!”Trump loyalists threatened to strip committee assignments from Republicans who supported the bill. They complained about what Minnesota representative Tom Emmer called “President Biden’s multi-trillion dollar socialist wish list.” Arizona representative Paul Gosar said: “this bill only serves to advance the America Last’s socialist agenda, while completely lacking fiscal responsibility.” Kentucky representative Andy Barr said the measure was a “big government socialist agenda.” Iowa representative Ashley Hinson said the law was a “socialist spending spree.” Representative Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said: “I will not support funding for policies that drive our country into socialism.”In the CNN piece today that collected all those quotations, authors Edward-Isaac Dovere and Sarah Fortinsky went on to point out that, despite their insistence that government investment in infrastructure is socialism (it is not, by the way), all these representatives and more have been quietly applying to take that money to their districts, often in the same language Democrats used to justify the bill in the first place. Improving highways would “serve as a social justice measure,” Emmer wrote. “The completion of this project means improved economic opportunities for ethnically underserved communities.” Adding bicycle lanes to a rural area, Mullin wrote, “would greatly improve sustainability by reducing emissions and redeveloping an existing infrastructure plan.”The president has directed his administration not to let politics or votes for the bill influence how project grants are awarded. But for all their talk of socialism and wasteful spending, Republicans clearly understand that the American people want investment in the country and that such investment improves their quality of life. They just don’t want to vote for it after years of rallying voters with a narrative that any Democratic investments in the country are far-left radicalism.Today Biden named the Republicans who voted against the infrastructure law and then asked for money. Biden said, “I was surprised to see so many socialists in the Republican caucus.”—Notes:https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-impeachment-ukraine-mcconnell_n_633b2f9be4b0b7f89f43aa5ahttps://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/biden-heads-for-the-midterms-with-ten-million-new-jobshttps://thehill.com/policy/finance/overnights/3678505-on-the-money-job-growth-remains-strong-as-economy-slows/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/republicans-senate-infrastructure.htmlhttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/25/most-back-bidens-infrastructure-bill-and-budget-plan-poll/5577143001/https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/09/politics/trump-reaction-republicans-voting-infrastrcutre/index.htmlhttps://www.cnn.com/2022/10/07/politics/infrastructure-spending-republican-critics/index.htmlhttps://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2021/01/the-astronomical-price-of-insulin-hurts-american-families.htmlhttps://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3678314-senate-republican-bill-would-repeal-dem-drug-pricing-law/Sarah Reese Jones @PoliticusSarahBiden names names of Republicans who voted against infrastructure and then asked for money. The President said, “I was surprised to see so many socialists in the  Republican caucus.” 6:22 PM ∙ Oct 7, 20228,114Likes2,708RetweetsHeather Long @byHeatherLongBig red flag: K-12 education lost more than 21,000 workers in September. Public education remains one of the least recovered industries from the pandemic. **There are 309,000 fewer teachers and support staff than pre-pandemic** 12:53 PM ∙ Oct 7, 20221,543Likes760RetweetsShareLikeCommentShareYou’re a free subscriber to Letters from an American. For the full experience, become a paid subscriber.Upgrade to paid© 2022 Heather Cox Richardson
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Week’s Snapshot


Heather Cox RichardsonOct 7
 
 

The scandal involving Herschel Walker, the staunchly anti-abortion Georgia candidate for the Senate who appears to have paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, got worse today. After he claimed he did not know the woman who said he paid for an abortion, the woman said she was the mother of one of his other, newly acknowledged, children, so of course he knows her.

Just five years ago, Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), who belonged to the Republican Pro-Life Caucus, resigned just hours after the story broke that he pressured a woman with whom he was having an affair to get an abortion. Now, Republicans are rallying around Walker, with former NRA spokesperson and former Breitbart writer Dana Loesch saying: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Will Bunch pointed out that Republican leaders have not condemned Walker for his hypocrisy on abortion, his lies about it and about the many other things he has lied about during the campaign, or the many allegations of domestic violence women have made about him. Instead, his campaign says it has raised half a million dollars since the news broke, while Walker recorded an ad claiming he has been “saved by grace.”

Bunch noted what many observers have already called out: that the Republicans no longer care about anything but winning. But he went on: they insist on winning so they can put their vision of Christian domination into effect. “[T]he so-called ‘family values’ of American fundamentalists…turn out to be mere window dressing that can be tossed for the movement’s true aim: authoritarianism,” he wrote.

Bunch linked to a piece that scholar of fascism Brynn Tannehill published in today’s New Republic, noting that religion in the U.S. is declining among younger folks and that older evangelicals are increasingly concerned they are losing power, at the same time that their Christianity has become a political identity. Tannehill wrote: “The real danger of this widening schism…lies in this creating the conditions for a future that looks more like present-day Russia or Iran.”

The Republican Party’s shift toward authoritarianism is clear in the refusal of a majority of the party’s nominees for office this fall to agree that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Amy Gardner of the Washington Post ran the numbers and found that 299 Republican candidates for the House, Senate, and important state offices are election deniers, and that 174 of them are running in districts that are safely Republican. If Republicans win the House in November, election deniers will form a strong voting bloc that will affect the choice of the next speaker; some are already complaining that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is too moderate. Many of those elected in states will oversee state elections.

The Republican narrative that Democrats can win only by cheating began back in 1994, after the Democrats made registering to vote easier with the 1993 so-called Motor Voter Act. In 1994, losing Republican candidates complained their opponents had cheated, and congressional Republicans kept that narrative alive with congressional investigations. Over time, “voter fraud” became the way Republicans explained away the unpopularity of their ideas.

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

In Arizona, where the Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, has said that Biden is an illegitimate president and the Republican nominee for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, has said that he would not have certified the true 2020 election results in Arizona, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night at an event at Arizona State University urged Arizona voters to elect Democrats.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

The trial of five Oath Keepers in Washington, D.C., for seditious conspiracy has provided more insight into how far members of the gang were willing to go to keep Trump in office. Today, former Oath Keeper John Zimmerman, who left the gang before January 6, 2021, testified that he heard Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes talking in September 2020 with someone Zimmerman believed was a member of the Secret Service.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Bertino, a leader of the extremist right-wing Proud Boys gang that worked alongside the Oath Keepers on January 6, 2021, today told a federal judge he will plead guilty to seditious conspiracy. Bertino, who was not in Washington on January 6, was a top lieutenant to Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and is now cooperating with the Justice Department. Like others involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Bertino appeared to believe they were “SAVING THE CONSTITUTION,” as he posted to the rioters. He later wrote: “1776 motherf*ck*rs.”

Lawyers for Trump have told New York Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, and Katie Benner that the Justice Department does not think Trump has returned all the documents he stole from the White House. That information came from Jay I. Bratt, who leads the Justice Department’s counterintelligence operations, and it has split Trump’s lawyers between those who want him to cooperate and those backing Trump’s instinct to fight.

We still don’t know just what is in those documents, and who else has seen them. This is an unfortunate wild card as Biden is trying to rebuild alliances to defend democracy. In the trial of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., an investor and Trump backer being prosecuted for secretly working for the United Arab Emirates during Trump’s term, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson today said he did not know about the contacts between Barrack, Jared Kushner, and representatives for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are coming to light in trial testimony.

In contrast to those backing Trump, Biden today worked toward equal justice before the law when he pardoned all U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been convicted of possession of marijuana. Many state governments have already made possession legal—a position that Americans overwhelmingly support—and since arrests for possession fall far more heavily on minorities than on white offenders although their rates of marijuana use are similar, advocates for fairness in the criminal justice code have called for this reform. While the pardon will free few if any incarcerated people, it will get rid of criminal records that make it harder to get jobs, housing, and educational opportunities.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has advocated for a comprehensive marijuana reform bill for years, tweeted: “This is a step forward in correcting the historical injustices of failed drug policies.”

Biden called for governors to pardon possession offenses at the state level and asked officials to look into moving marijuana to a less dangerous category of drug, but he made it clear he wanted to keep “important limitations on trafficking, marketing, and under-age sales.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/herschel-walkers-abortion-accuser-mother-one-children-report-says-rcna50983

https://newrepublic.com/article/167972/american-christianity-path-toward-tool-theocratic-authoritarianism

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/herschel-walker-abortion-christian-right-20221006.html

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

Herschel Walker just held a gaggle with reporters in Georgia and MSNBC carried it. It did not go well.

Image

5:57 PM ∙ Oct 6, 202210,370Likes2,903Retweets

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/06/elections-deniers-midterm-elections-2022/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/liz-cheney-urges-voters-reject-kari-lake-mark-finchem-rcna50960

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/stewart-rhodes-claimed-secret-service-contact-months-jan-6-attack-form-rcna51027

Ryan J. Reilly @ryanjreilly

NEW: Former Oath Keeper testifies that Stewart Rhodes informed him that he was in contact with a Secret Service agent.3:58 PM ∙ Oct 6, 202230,457Likes9,706Retweets

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/politics/proud-boys-bertino-seditious-conspiracy-guilty-plea/index.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/10/06/granting-pardon-for-the-offense-of-simple-possession-of-marijuana/

​​https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/06/statement-from-president-biden-on-marijuana-reform/

Vice President Kamala Harris @VP

Today, @POTUS pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession. He has asked @SecBecerra and the Attorney General to review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. This is a step forward in correcting the historical injustices of failed drug policies.8:53 PM ∙ Oct 6, 20227,874Likes2,929Retweets

Neal Rapoport @nealrap

@BennettAC29 @VP @POTUS @SecBecerra Nah, she’s been trying for a long time.

Image

2:28 AM ∙ Oct 7, 2022

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https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/16/americans-overwhelmingly-say-marijuana-should-be-legal-for-recreational-or-medical-use/

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GOP Proves Their Worth?


Heather Cox RichardsonOct 3
 
 

There’s a moment in Representative Adam Schiff’s 2021 book Midnight in Washington that jumps out. The book centers around the first impeachment of former president Trump for withholding congressionally approved funds for Ukraine to fight off Russian incursions. In managing the impeachment trial before the Senate, Schiff (D-CA) and his team had prepared thoroughly and carefully to demonstrate that Trump had, in fact, withheld the money in order to force Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to help Trump rig the 2020 election. 

Trump’s team wanted Zelensky to announce that he was launching an investigation into Hunter Biden, whose father, Joe Biden, was the opponent Trump most feared for the 2020 presidential election. The media would jump at such an announcement and chew it over until by the time the election came around, voters would associate Biden with criminality, just as they had condemned Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, over her use of a private email server. 

As Schiff prepared to summarize the powerful testimony that supported the case for impeachment, a member of his staff stopped him. Schiff recalled the staffer telling him: “They think we’ve proven him guilty. They need to know why he should be removed.” 

Schiff interpreted that question to mean that senators wanted to know why they should remove him. After all, he was giving them the judges they wanted and permitting them to run the country as they wished. 

Schiff’s masterful summary of the case both at the trial and in his book answered that question, explaining that senators should have taken on themselves the responsibility for removing Trump from office because he threatened the country’s national security and, if not checked, would continue to abuse his power. 

In the end, only Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted to convict Trump of abuse of power (but not obstruction of Congress), but that one vote from “one brave man,” Schiff recalled, “had validated my belief and that of the Founders, that the people possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing.”

But there is another interpretation of the reason senators wanted to know why Trump should be removed even though they admitted he was guilty of trying to rig an election with machinations that hurt the country’s national security: The leaders of the Republican Party had abandoned the rule of law.

After World War II, political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained that lies are central to the rise of authoritarianism. In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.” Ordinary people embraced such lies because they believed everyone lied anyhow, and if caught trusting a lie, they would “take refuge in cynicism,” saying they had known all along they were being lied to and admiring their leaders “for their superior tactical cleverness.” But leaders embraced the lies because they reinforced those leaders’ superiority, and gave them power, over those who did believe them. 

That pattern, in which lies undermine the rule of law, seems to be going around these days. It is in the news internationally as Russian president Vladimir Putin is directly challenging international law both by taking Ukrainian territory by force and by committing war crimes. He justifies that destruction of the rule of law by claiming that sham referenda in four regions of Ukraine have made those regions Russian, and that any attempt of Ukrainians to reclaim their territory will be an attack on Russia that may require a nuclear response. 

The rejection of the rule of law is also in the news at home, as Republican leaders appear to be following Trump’s lead. Tonight, New York Times reporters Edgar Sandoval, Miriam Jordan, Patricia Mazzei, and J. David Goodman explained the lies behind Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s dumping of migrants at Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts last month. 

Since Biden took office, Republicans have tried to make unauthorized immigration a key election issue. In June 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Arizona governor Doug Ducey invoked the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement that lets states send aid to each other after a governor has declared a disaster or an emergency. Abbott has declared a disaster and Ducey an emergency over the influx of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that the Biden administration is “unwilling or unable” to secure the border. They called for governors of other states to send “additional law enforcement personnel and equipment” to “arrest migrants who illegally cross the border into our territory.” 

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis all pledged to send law enforcement to Texas and Arizona; South Dakota governor Kristi Noem one-upped them by announcing that she would send 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and that billionaires Willis and Reba Johnson from Franklin, Tennessee, would pay for the troops.

Florida’s budget this year—signed in June—continued this trend with a $12 million fund “to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens out of Florida.” According to Douglas Soule of the Tallahassee Democrat, that money came from interest on the $8.8 billion Florida got from the American Rescue Plan to address the coronavirus pandemic. Because it was interest, rather than principal, it was not covered by the federal requirement to address Covid-19, as the federal money itself was. 

The idea was to highlight federal transportation of “unauthorized” migrants into Florida, but by August the money was untouched because there actually weren’t large groups of migrants coming to the state. So DeSantis focused instead on Texas, where a woman the New York Times reporters identified as Perla Huerta, a U.S. Army veteran who was a combat medic and a counterintelligence agent for two decades before being discharged last month, recruited destitute migrants to go north with the promise of work. Vertol Systems, which charters airplanes and is well connected with Florida Republican politicians, was paid more than $1.5 million, but how they were hired and by whom is not clear.

The people the operation targeted were legal asylum seekers, who were provided with fake maps and misled about where they were going. 

Putin has to reckon with reality, in the form of Russian men fleeing the country, protests in Dagestan and elsewhere, the international community standing firm on the law, and Ukrainian forces continuing to gain ground. Less than a day after Putin announced he had taken the Ukrainian regions, Russian troops fled from the key transport city of Lyman.

Whether DeSantis and the Republican Party will have to reckon with reality in 2022 remains unclear. But it seems unlikely that any reality check will come from Republican leaders. Just this weekend, they have refused to comment on Trump’s inflammatory statement about Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), which seemed to encourage violence against him and included a racist smear against McConnell’s wife, Trump transportation secretary Elaine Chao. 

In the Washington Post, columnist Karen Tumulty concluded that while Trump was outrageous, “there is plenty of fault to go around. The Republican Party’s refusal to denounce him makes them complicit.” 

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/with-his-vote-to-convict-trump-on-abuse-of-power-romney-will-break-with-his-party–and-awaits-the-consequences/2020/02/05/a76dce74-4841-11ea-ab15-b5df3261b710_story.html

Click to access Freedom-First-Highlights.pdf

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2022/08/26/ron-desantis-plan-relocate-undocumented-immigrants-florida-worries-advocates/7895029001/

Click to access Abbott-Ducey_Compact_Letter_to_Governors.pdf

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/30/republicans-immigration-political-weapon-497227

https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2021/06/28/kristi-noem-governor-gov-south-dakota-deploy-national-guard-troops-texas-us-mexico-border/7787945002/

https://www.axios.com/kristi-noem-south-dakota-texas-national-guard-7f679fa9-5312-4185-b614-198ebbc0feaf.html

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/auto-scrap-billionaire-who-paid-to-send-national-guard-to-southern-border-sounds-off-on-why-he-did-it

​​https://www.voanews.com/a/latest-developments-in-ukraine-oct-2/6772232.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/01/trump-mcconnell-death-wish/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/01/trump-mcconnell-attack/

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