THE OWLS' NEST - Mostly U.S. Politics
Paste this into your address bar and play the video -- it's 1 minute, 4 seconds.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1608178388157566976
The Republicans hate Marc Elias not because he's done anything wrong, but because he's such an effective lawyer. It drives Bannon crazy (a short trip) that the GOP don't have anyone comparable on their side.
In reply to this mashup of Republican denunciations, Elias posts a quote from FDR: "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."
Click here for an article by Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale, entitled "January 6: The Facts." Laurence Tribe describes it as "a very concise summary of the Select Committee's Final Report."
Here is my very brief summary of the factual part of the report, in fifteen quick points. I am deliberately understating here; the evidence, in the Final Report itself, permits much broader conclusions:
1. Trump knew that he was likely to lose the 3 November 2020 election, and planned in advance to declare victory (to tell a Big Lie) if he lost.
2. On 3 November 2020, Trump knew that he was very unlikely to have won the election of that day, and declared victory anyway. In the days following, aware that he had lost, he continued to declare victory.
3. Over and over again in November, December, and January, Trump publicized specific claims of electoral fraud shortly after being informed that they were false.
4. Aware that his advisors, campaign officials, and cabinet knew his claims of fraud to be false, Trump promoted people, such as Rudolph Giuliani, who would lie for him in public.
5. In the full knowledge that he had lost the election and that his claims of fraud were false, Trump made several deliberate efforts to overturn the election results and thus American democracy.
6. In states he had lost, Trump personally pressured state officials to fraudulently and illegally alter the electoral outcome.
7. Informed that the Department of Justice had investigated and found no evidence of fraud, Trump nevertheless sought to use its powers, via Jeffrey Clark, to intimidate state officials to change electoral outcomes.
8. Knowing that he had lost the electoral college vote, Trump oversaw an effort to create fake slates of electors. These entirely bogus documents were then sent to the vice-president (who refused them).
9. Though aware that it was the vice-president's role only to count the electoral votes, Trump pressured the vice-president not to do so, on the theory that the vice-president could, in effect, choose the president.
10. Even the person who devised the plan regarding the vice-president, John Eastman, knew it to be illegal.
11. Knowing by January 6th that all that remained was the formality of certifying Biden's victory, Trump encouraged supporters he knew to be armed and angry to halt this procedure and violently overthrow our form of government.
12. Trump's call to violence was successful because enough of his supporters believed his lies and understood what he wanted them to do: prevent a peaceful transition of power.
13. At a time when the Capitol was under attack, the vice-president was in flight, and the members of the vice-president's security detail feared for their lives, Trump urged his supporters on to further violence.
14. After the failed coup attempt, a number of Republican legislators sought presidential pardons, thereby acknowledging their fears that they had acted illegally.
15. Even had Trump believed that he had won the 2020 election, which he did not, his coup attempt would remain a coup attempt, and his crimes would remain crimes.
Click here for a post by Keith "Retired lawyer & Army vet in The Villages of Florida. Lifelong: Republican (pre-Trump), Constitution buff, science nerd & dog lover," which details events culminating in the testimony we've all seen before the January 6 Committee.
"Trump world," as the people referred to themselves, put a lot of pressure on Hutchinson to lie to the Committee -- and she initially did. I read in another article quoting her as saying she needed to pass "the mirror test," and she went through a personal moral crisis before ditching her "Trump world" lawyer, who had been urging her to lie, promising her a great job if she came through, and telling the truth in her bombshell televised interview.
She testified with poise and dignity and was obviously telling the truth: I hope she comes out of this okay -- even though at one point she said to her mother, "I’m fucked . . . I am completely indebted to these people. And they will ruin my life, Mom, if I do anything that they don’t want me to do.”
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's daily article, today describing the rebellion of the Santee Sioux native tribe, and the December 26, 1862, hanging of 38 Santee men in the largest mass execution in American history.
The struggle did not involve all of the Santees, but rather those driven to war in August 1862 after the U.S. government, financially strapped by the Civil War, did not appropriate the money necessary to pay for the food promised to the Santees by treaty. Nine years before, in 1851, settlers had poured into the territory demanding land to farm, and the government had forced the Santees onto a reservation too small to feed their people. The government promised the Santees provisions to make up for the loss of their economic base not as a one-time payment but as a fifty-year contract. Then, when Minnesota became a state in 1858, its leaders took even more Santee land.
But by summer 1862, the Civil War had drained the Treasury, and so-called Indian appropriations fell behind.
Starving and unable to provide for themselves on the small reservation onto which they had been corralled, some Santees demanded the provisions for which they had exchanged their lands. At least one of the agents who had contracted to provide that food had some on hand but refused to hand it over until he had been paid. Furious, young Santee men considered their agreement broken and attacked the settlers who had built homes on the land the Santees had ceded.
On August 17, four young Santee men killed five settlers, and violence escalated. By September, both Minnesota militia and U.S. Army regiments were battling the Santees, and the struggles would leave more than 600 settlers, at least 100 to 300 Santees, and more than a hundred soldiers dead before the last of the Santee warriors surrendered to the military at the end of the month. Another 300 Santees—at least—would die from conditions of their imprisonment after the war or from exposure as they fled the state.
HCR further explains:
Over the course of five weeks in the fall of 1862, a military commission tried 393 Santees for their part in the conflict. The prisoners did not have lawyers, and many of them did not speak English. Those who did understand the questions put to them did not understand the legal process that permitted them to avoid self-incrimination; they told the truth about their part in the fighting and thus cemented their convictions. Many of the trials took fewer than ten minutes before the judges reached a guilty verdict: in one two-day span, 82 men were tried.
In early November the commission convicted 303 Indians of murder or rape and sentenced them to death. Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey wrote to President Abraham Lincoln, expressing his hope that “the execution of every Sioux Indian condemned by the military court will be at once ordered.” But by law, the president had to sign off on executions, and Lincoln refused.
Repelled by the idea of mass executions, Lincoln examined the facts and found that 265 of the Santee were behaving as soldiers in battle, and refused to sign their death warrants, effectively pardoning them. But 38 had apparently committed murder or rape against civilians, and those men were hanged on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota.
In the aftermath of the hangings, the Lincoln administration continued to develop the concept of war crimes. On April 24, 1863, the administration issued what became known as the Lieber Code after its author, legal philosopher Francis Lieber. It tried to establish rules for wartime, prohibiting the execution of prisoners of war, for example, and outlawing rape and torture. The Lieber Code helped to make up the international Hague Conventions of the turn of the century, which set out to establish rules of war.
On December 28, HCR posted another diary entry concerning the slaughter of about 250 men, women, and children of the Lacota, or Teton Sioux, tribe on December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota -- another massacre airbrushed from American history. Click here.
Click here for an article in The American Prospect, by Hannah Story Brown and Glenna Lee, entitled "It's Past Time to Replace IRS Chief Charles Rettig.
Surprise, surprise. Hand-picked and appointed by Trump in 2018, Rettig is a walking conflict of interest. Like the "disastrous USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy," Rettig was retained by Joe Biden, who chose not to dump either of the two wildly inappropriate office-holders, apparently to avoid controversy and criticism from Republicans.
Rettig has been entangled in Trump’s affairs since well before he became IRS commissioner. During his confirmation process back in 2018, Rettig initially failed to disclose that he co-owned two Trump-branded rentals in Hawaii, from which he’d made as much as $1 million in income since his purchase in 2006. Trump likely made a profit from Rettig’s purchase. That’s not all: In 2016, over a year before Trump chose Rettig as commissioner, Rettig publicly defended Trump’s refusal to publicly disclose his taxes in a Forbes piece.
Before his IRS appointment, Rettig had worked for almost 40 years at "a Beverly Hills law firm specializing in tax avoidance." The article says, "The very nature of Rettig’s pre-government career is antagonistic to his responsibilities as commissioner."
Rettig has been entangled in Trump’s affairs since well before he became IRS commissioner. During his confirmation process back in 2018, Rettig initially failed to disclose that he co-owned two Trump-branded rentals in Hawaii, from which he’d made as much as $1 million in income since his purchase in 2006. Trump likely made a profit from Rettig’s purchase. That’s not all: In 2016, over a year before Trump chose Rettig as commissioner, Rettig publicly defended Trump’s refusal to publicly disclose his taxes in a Forbes piece.
Rettig's term ended on November 12, 2022, and he was replaced by Acting Commissioner Douglas O'Donnell; Biden has nominated Danny Werfel — a former budget official and private sector leader — to become the next IRS commissioner.
Wikipedia says that "Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an American historian and cultural critic. She is a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders. Ben-Ghiat is professor of history and Italian studies at New York University."
She has some excellent essays, particularly on Italian politics (she's an expert on fascism), but also on fascism and politics in the U.S. and worldwide (she's U.S.-born to an Israeli father).
Click here for an essay entitled "The GOP might have a new neo-fascist fave," subtitled "Italy is ending an era of male monopoly of authoritarian governance."
The "new neo-fascist fave" is Giorgia Meloni, recently elected prime minister of Italy.
Now Italy is the country to have the first female-led far-right government, ending an era of male monopoly of authoritarian governance. What can we expect from Meloni? For starters, Italy will become more enmeshed in far-right networks that stretch from Vladimir Putin's Russia to Viktor Orban's Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil to Republican America.
The connection to the Republicans? Ben-Ghiat says:
If this sounds like Fox News's Tucker Carlson or other Republican figures, there's a reason. As Meloni told The Washington Post, her party feels a kinship with the GOP, and she is in frequent dialogue with Steve Bannon and Republican politicians. "We have networks connecting us, our think tanks work with the International Republican Institute, with the Heritage Foundation, we do cultural exchanges, and many of their fights are about things we have talked about."As a result of her fascism in Italy (the country where fascism was born):
That is a lesson Americans can pay attention to as Republicans bring their own extremists into government, supporting the campaigns of election deniers, Oath Keepers and participants in the Jan. 6 coup attempt. Republicans have continued to cultivate Orban as a mentor in all things autocratic. Meloni's fascist credentials will likely make her another GOP favorite as Republican America creates its own new political reality to support its dream of illiberal rule.
Sorry, I don't know how to embed a Facebook post. This is titled "Renoir's Women," a slideshow with accompanying music, posted by Barry Cyr.
https://www.facebook.com/ArtsEmotions/videos/691177489313129
Heather Cox Richardson hits it ot of the park again. Click here for her diary entry for December 14.
Senator Joe Manchin (Democrat, West Virginia) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 -- simultaneously proving his machismo, his hatred of environmental regulation, and his support for the Second Amendment, I guess -- but no Democrat has used a gun in an ad since then. In 2020, there were 100 Republican ads which featured a gun.
The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.
Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.
Since its formation after the Civil War, the NRA had been a basically nonpolitical association, promoting marksmanship and gun safety. But that all changed in the mid-'70s -- and Ronald Reagan became the pro-gun candidate for president in 1980.
In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.
But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
The PAC formed in 1975 became a financial and political powerhouse:
Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
Ten years ago, 20 children aged six and seven and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, were murdered by a deranged gunman. People thought the NRA would be chastened, but the opposite was true: They came out, guns blazing (forgive the metaphor), proclaiming their unwavering support for "the right to keep and bear arms." Even after that horrific massacre, a modest gun control bill proposed by Obama's Democratic House of Representatives was thwarted by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
If the atrocity at Sandy Hook could not curb the NRA and Republican blood lust, what can? In 2021, Richardson says, there were 692 mass shootings in the U.S. (a mass shooting being defined as four people shot, not including the shooter).
Merry Christmas.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for December 3, 2022.
Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral.
In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.”
Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator.
Today, both Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and deputy counsel, Patrick Philbin, testified before a federal grand jury for several hours. They had previously refused to testify, citing executive privilege, but another court struck that argument down, and they were forced to testify to what Trump had said to them.
Judge Aileen Cannon's appointment of a special master to review the documents seized from Trump's residence at Mar-A-Lago last August was struck down, so the DOJ now has the documents in their possession.
The Trump Organization's fraud trial is concluding -- and Trump lost yet another lawsuit and has finally been forced to turn over tax records to the Senate Finance Committee. What will the committee find in the documents Trump fought so hard for six years against turning over?
But Trump's demand to overturn the Constitution and establish him as president is the newsworthy event of the day:
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement: “The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country. The Constitution brings the American people together—regardless of party—and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights. Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned. You cannot only love America when you win.”
But Republicans, so far, are silent on Trump’s profound attack on the Constitution, the basis of our democratic government.
That is the story, and it is earth shattering.
Click here for an article entitled "The one thing you need to know about the railroads," by Robert Reich.
Reich says that "legislation effectively prohibiting a strike would impose unfair working conditions on employees in one of the most profitable industries in America — further tilting the nation’s economic imbalance toward large corporations and Wall Street, and against working people."
An example of the railroads' profitability: "Union Pacific, the largest publicly traded US railroad, paid its investors more than $41 billion in dividends and share buybacks over five years through 2021. In the first six months of 2022, it heaped an additional $5 billion on them."
Reich asks: "Why is it that whenever lawmakers confront the social costs of corporate greed, they roll over? They allow the greed to prevail while penalizing workers and others who are most immediately harmed by it."
He ends the article as follows:
In the age-old battle between labor and capital, labor is taking it on the chin. In some respects, the US economy is back to where it was in the late nineteenth century.
After all, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 began with a work stoppage by railroad employees in West Virginia protesting a reduction in their wages. Railroad workers in other states soon joined them. Commerce in the East and Midwest was seriously disrupted. The economy was threatened.
The strikes were ended within a few weeks, largely because the federal government sided with the railroads. President Rutherford B. Hayes called out federal troops to quell the strikes.
Honestly, how far have we come since then?
Dog having fun.. 😊 pic.twitter.com/Rdhi6JGlQh
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 1, 2022
