Right-Wing Federal Courts

Click here for an article at Slate by By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, entitled "A Federal Judge Condemned the 'Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.’ It’s About Time."

U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman criticizes the five conservative justices on the Roberts Supreme Court in an upcoming Harvard Law & Policy review article. The article begins, brutally:

By now, it is a truism that Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a Supreme Court justice’s role is the passive one of a neutral baseball “umpire who [merely] calls the balls and strikes” was a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Roberts’ misleading testimony inevitably comes to mind when one considers the course of decision-making by the Court over which he presides. This is so because the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to insuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.

The article says:

[Adelman's] article brings into clear relief the court’s systemic attack on voting rights for minority and other marginalized communities, by way of striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, as well as repeated blessing of voter suppression and decisions not to adjudicate political gerrymandering. He notes that the court privileges the wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of the public. He lays out in detail the rise of the conservative legal movement, starting with the infamous 1971 Lewis Powell memo that served as a right-wing call to arms and tracing its progress through the current well-funded effort to reverse the New Deal in the courts. The article ultimately portrays the slow movement of the Supreme Court to the right—and then the far right—through a long line of cases that reversed the Warren court’s protections for minority groups and poor and working-class Americans. It shows how the court has undermined unions and boosted corporate interests. The court, he notes, has greatly contributed to income inequality, health care inequality, and the hollowing out of the American middle class.

Adelman says:

We are thus in a new and arguably dangerous phase in American history. Democracy is inherently fragile, and it is even more so when government eschews policies that benefit all classes of Americans. We desperately need public officials who will work to revitalize our democratic republic. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the Roberts Court are not among them.

The article continues:

Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has assumed the role of robed Fox News commentator. He disparages women who get abortions, as well as judges who uphold their right to do so. He claims that we can stop mass shootings by shielding police from lawsuits when they accidentally murder innocent people. He intentionally misgenders transgender litigants—as does his colleague, Kyle Duncan, a fellow Trump appointee. Another judge on the 5th Circuit, Edith Brown Clement (a George W. Bush appointee), penned a partisan attack on her colleagues. And, under the influence of Trump’s judges, the 5th Circuit as a whole has begun defying Supreme Court precedent in a series of blatantly political decisions.

A startling number of Trump judges appear to believe that, like Ho, their job is mainly to own the libs in print. Neomi Rao, a Trump judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has created a cottage industry out of writing preposterous Trump-friendly polemics. On the same morning that South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman expressed his outrage at Adelman’s article, Rao issued yet another dissent that would protect Trump, this time by denying the House of Representatives access to the unredacted Mueller report. Rao’s position is so extreme that Thomas Griffith, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, penned a separate concurrence just to shred it. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Rao keeps running interference for the Trump administration, making arguments that are promptly shunned. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that her lengthy, contorted dissents begin with the proposition that Trump must triumph and work backward from there.

The U.S. courts have been steadily drifting to the right since Lewis Powell's memo in 1971, and in recent years the drift has become much stronger. The nightmare scenario is Trump somehow being reelected; it's possible, if that were to happen, that Trump would get to replace a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices, presenting the country with a 7-2 conservative majority: disaster.

One-Liners

Copied from a post on Quora:

The first computer dates back to Adam and Eve. It was an Apple with limited memory, just one byte. And then everything crashed.

I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue stand for freedom until they are flashing behind you.

Alcohol is a perfect solvent: It dissolves marriages, families and careers.

What is the best thing about living in Switzerland? Well, the flag is a big plus.

My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance. We'll see about that.

A recent study has found that women who carry a little extra weight live longer than the men who mention it.

I was born to be a pessimist - my blood type is B Negative.

Louie Gohmert + Steve King = Stupidity Magnified

Here we go again: another vicious and baseless right-wing conspiracy.

On February 21, sheriff's deputies discovered the body of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) employee in a roadside pull-over area. Cause of death was determined to be a gunshot wound that was "self-inflicted." Unsurprisingly, deranged right-wing conspiracy theorists pounced on this incident as being a murder committed by "Deep State operatives" in order to silence explosive information Haney had been about to reveal about the Obama administration. It's been alleged that Haney wore a thumb drive around his neck that was filled with incriminating information.

Basis for these allegations? Zero. It's just a poisonous idea, another diseased product of the right-wing fever swamps that target the dead, who are unable to confirm or deny allegations about them (do a Google search for "Seth Rich").

In speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives on February 28, speeches by Louie Gohmert (R-IA, the stupidest member of Congress) and racist Steve King (R-TX) brought these dark and unsupported allegations into the mainstream of political thought.

“I’m standing on the floor here saying, Madame Speaker, I don’t believe that Phil Haney committed suicide,” King said. “I expect that we’re going to get a thorough investigation. The evidence that is coming to me indicates that he was murdered.”

Haney had briefly become a right-wing personality in the last years of the Obama administration, appearing on Fox News and Glenn Beck’s radio show to push his allegations that the government was ignoring radical Muslim groups. More recently, he’d claimed to be on a mysterious “special covert assignment” against Muslim-American politician Keith Ellison, now Minnesota’s attorney general.

In a nearly 30-minute speech, Gohmert claimed he had a pact with Haney to reveal unspecified secrets about the government in case either of them was murdered in a crime posed as a suicide. Gohmert claimed Haney was working on a book that would “name names of people that put this country at risk.”

I like a tweet on the subject from commenter Paula Duffy:

"Gohmert claimed Haney was working on a book that would “name names of people that put this country at risk.”

We already have that. It's called the Mueller Report.

Erik Prince + Project Veritas = Dirty Tricks Magnified

Click here for a story at The New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman entitled "Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups."

Erik Prince [of Blackwater fame], the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.

For example:

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

Democratic Candidates' "Debate"?

Conan O'Brien parodied the closed captioning of the tumultuous Democratic debate:

Frightening Video Graphic: Coronavirus vs. Other Epidemics

I can't seem to save this video graphic. You'll have to copy and paste the following into your address bar:

https://twitter.com/WelshGasDoc/status/1232208118899257344

I'd recommend when you play it that you stop it, make it full screen, mute the sound (it's just annoying music), and restart it to play from the beginning. Keep your eye on the turquoise Coronavirus line.

The graphic starts with Day 4 Since Outbreak, and tracks the spread of Coronavirus compared to SARS (Asia, 2003), Swine Flu (Mexico, 2009), MERS (Middle East, 2012), and Ebola (West Africa, 2014.

Skydive! Seoul Olympics, 1988

Opening ceremonies, Seoul, Korea, 1988 (an old friend of mine, Mike Zahar, is one of the jumpers):

Trump: Copied From The Young Turks

People with empathy and humane values are disgusted by trump. And here’s why...

Direct Quotes from trump...

”Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt anybody anymore."

“If you don't support me, you're going to be so god-damn poor.”

"Knock the crap out of them."

"Maybe he should have been roughed up."

"He should be carried out on a stretcher."

“Any guy that can do a body slam...he’s my guy.”

"The audience should hit people. That's what we need a little bit more of."

"I'd like to punch them in the face."

"In the good old days this doesn't happen because they used to treat them very, very rough."

"If you hurt him, I'll defend you in court. Don't worry about it."

"I don’t know if I’ll do the fighting myself or if other people will."

“Hundreds and hundreds of buses full of illegal immigrants were shipped up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire.” (to skew the election)

“They are going to take away everything. They are going to take away your guns. They are going to take away your wealth. They are going to take away everything.”

Trump said that “Jewish people who vote for democrats are either ignorant or disloyal.” (note: approximately 79% of Jews vote Democratic)

Trump has used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. -USA Today

“The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too Bad!”

"I did try to f*ck her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily...like a bitch. She’s got the big phony tits and everything. I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her. I just start kissing them. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p*ssy. You can do anything.”

While speaking to a crowd in Florida, Trump asked how to stop migrants from coming to America. A woman in the crowd yelled “Shoot them!” Trump laughed...then said, “Only in the Panhandle, you can get away with that. Only in the Panhandle!”

“I don’t do coverups.” But he is on tape impersonating at least 3 different people to inflate his wealth to newspapers: John Barron, John Miller, and David Dennison (all fakes)

“I have the support of bikers and the tough people...but they don’t play it tough until they get pushed to a certain point...and then it gets bad...very bad."

“I’m an extremely stable genius.” 05/23/19

“I know words, I have the best words.” 12/30/15

“I have great and unmatched wisdom." 09/10/19

“I am The Chosen One.” 08/21/19

“Justin Trudeau (prime minister of Canada) is two-faced.”

“Emmanuel Macron (prime minister of France) is very nasty.”

“The mayor of London reminds me of our very dumb Mayor of NYC...but he’s only half his height. He’s a stone cold loser.”

Trump said that four black congresswomen should "go back to the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." However, the Congresswomen are Americans and all but one were born in America.

“Where’s My African American.”

“I am very rich. I’m funding my own campaign.” (His campaign was funded by several billionaire donors)

His Disgraceful Rhetoric:

Lyin Ted, Low Energy Jeb, Low-Life Amarosa, Little Rocket Man, Psycho Joe, Little Marco, Low IQ Maxine, Dumb As A Rock Mika, Pocahontas, Sloppy Steve, Crazy Megyn, Al Frankenstein, Wacky Wilson, Jeff Flakey, Dicky Durbin, Liddle Bob, Da Nang Dick, Moonbeam Brown, Slimeball Comey, Puppet Jones, Lamb the Sham, Deranged Omarosa, McMuffin McMullin, Fat Jerry, Wacky Jackie, Mr Peepers, Pencil Neck Schiff, Shifty Schiff, Mr Magoo Sessions, Dumb Southerner, Dumb As A Rock Tillerson, No Talent Samantha, Flunky Begala, Sloppy Carl, Marbles Brokaw, Nut Job Coulter, Sour Lemon, The Dumbest Man On TV, Shorty Bloomberg, Minnie Mike, and dozens more...

Donald inherited $413 Million in cash, assets, and an established business from his father...plus rental income from his father’s buildings. All Donald had to do was slap his gold-plated name on buildings and pretend he earned it...and low-info #Foxwashed consumers would believe it. Meanwhile, he piled up 6 bankruptcies...but he still collects rental income from his father’s business...while no other banks (except Deutsche) will loan him a penny. He owes Deutsche Bank over $300 Million.

“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the emails that are missing."

“The media is the enemy of the people.”

“I prefer soldiers who don’t get captured.” (Referring to John McCain)

“I love the poorly educated.”

Flopping and flailing around, mocking a disabled person: “Uhh, I don’t know what I said. Uhh, I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”

He called a woman “Horseface” after it was revealed that he paid her hush-money (for sex after his 5th child was born from his 3rd wife) 3 weeks before the election...AND...after the election...AND...as ‘president’.

“She had blood coming out of her eyes....and blood coming out of her whatever.” (Assuming a woman on television was menstruating)

“What you are hearing and seeing is not what’s happening.”

“She wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although, for the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”

He sent a violent tweet (video) with one of his golf balls hitting the former Secretary of State in the back.

"If we have so many nuclear weapons, why can't we use them?"

“She is a fat ugly slob.” (Referring to a successful actor)

When accused by the 22nd woman of sexual assault or rape, he said “She’s not my type".

“We have a representative in Congress who has been here a long time. I call her Pocahontas.” (Referring to a Senator who has some proof-positive Native American heritage)

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”

“3,000 people did not die by the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico.” [they did]

“I call her Maxine ‘Low-IQ’ Waters’.

“Be prepared for violence in the streets, if we don’t win the midterms.”

"If the Democrats are successful in removing me from office, it will cause a Civil War in this Nation from which our Country will never heal."

“I don’t like people who say ‘I pray for you.’”

Since she spoke out about corruption, “Marie Yovanovitch (American Ambassador to the Ukraine) is going to go through some things.”

He denied knowing Lev Parnas. Then an audio surfaced with Trump telling Parnas to "take her out"...in reference to former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

🚩”I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody...and I wouldn't lose voters."

ps...trump said EVERY SINGLE ONE of these vulgar rotten comments...verbatim🤦🏻‍♂️ ps...An amoral leader has a way of revealing the character of his supporters while dragging them into the deepest furrow of the inferno

Flynn's New MAGA Lawyer - Sidney Powell

Click here for an article at Politico by Keith Kloor entitled "The #MAGA Lawyer Behind Michael Flynn's Scorched-Earth Legal Strategy."

"Flynn fired his team at Covington & Burling [a well-respected world-class law firm] and hired Powell as his lead attorney. It was a striking turnabout: Flynn went from seeming to take the high road, by cooperating with the Mueller investigation, to seeking legal counsel from a Fox News pundit who thought Mueller was the perpetrator and Flynn the victim."

Flynn seemed to be meekly cooperating, and Mueller recommended that he receive no prison time because of the substantial help he had provided to the prosecutors.

"In August, she moved to have Flynn’s case dismissed for what she called “pernicious” prosecutorial misconduct, and requested that Emmet Sullivan, the presiding District Court judge, hold prosecutors in contempt for allegedly hiding FBI documents and communications that she said proved Flynn was pressured to plead guilty. In a court brief filed in October, she asserted that Flynn had been “deliberately targeted for destruction” by the intelligence community. The government countered that it had already relinquished any relevant material and that Powell was advancing “conspiracy theories” to fish for evidence that did not exist."

“'I don’t know how, but I can read the way these particular government lawyers say things to know that they are lying and hiding things,' she explained, referring to the prosecutors in the Flynn case. 'And I knew as soon as I started hearing and seeing what was going on with General Flynn that he had been set up'"

She wasn't initially successful: "Sullivan unequivocally rejected Powell’s requests for additional government documents and for the case to be dismissed. He also spurned her argument that Flynn had been framed, writing in an icy 92-page opinion that the retired general’s false statements to the FBI were 'undisputed.' Sullivan set January 28 as Flynn’s new sentencing date. Shortly afterward, government prosecutors recommended that Flynn receive up to six months in prison -- a reversal of the earlier recommendation that he not be incarcerated. 'Maybe Hiring Sidney Powell Was a Huge, Monstrous Mistake for Michael Flynn,' one headline suggested."

Powell is more than just a right-wing crank: She was a successful federal prosecutor for years, working in the Western District of Texas at the height of the drug wars, when judges were being assassinated and federal prosecutors wore bullet-proof vests, accompanied by armed guards. She went on her own and had good success as a defense lawyer, culminating in nearly a decade of work on the Enron case. She felt that Enron had been victimized:

"Powell, for her part, came away from the experience believing the prosecutors had bent the law to unfairly prosecute her clients and were never held to account for their actions. She became convinced that “prosecutorial misconduct,” in the form of suppression of evidence favorable to the defense, was a widespread problem in the judicial system."

She started crusading against prosecutorial overreach, and in 2014 she self-published a book entitled "License to Lie -- Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice." The book, Powell says, "'reveals the strong-arm, illegal, and unethical tactics used by headline-grabbing federal prosecutors in their narcissistic pursuit of power to the highest halls of our government.'"

Largely apolitical, she eagerly jumped on the Trump train in 2016. Her book, which had received very little attention, caught fire in sales when the Mueller team appointed to his prosecutorial team a number of people Powell had mentioned in her book. She tweeted that Mueller was "hiring out of my book!" Conservatives like Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity started to take notice, and "Powell rode her sudden wave of celebrity to political relevance and began appearing on the shows that had previously ignored her, embracing Trumpian talking points about not only the Mueller report but other issues, too. On Dobbs’ show, to take one example, Powell suggested that 'the continued invasion of this country' by immigrants might be the cause of 'diseases spreading across the country that are causing polio-like paralysis of our children.'”

One of her supporters and fundraisers, John B. Wells, "... appeared on Alex Jones’ show, 'Infowars,' in 2013 and talked about how 'it’s been pretty much established that the CIA and al Qaeda are almost one.' In his opening remarks at 'Operation Classified [a fundraising event he put on],' he spoke of the 'criminal cabal we refer to as government,' and he praised QAnon, the conspiracy movement that seems to believe a global gang of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the media, Hollywood and the political establishment is secretly running the world. 'Q is a real thing,' Wells said to cheers in the audience."

She thought she had found a kindred spirit in the judge on the case: "Sullivan actually is known for bringing the hammer down on overreaching prosecutors, as in the trial of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. 'Emmet G. Sullivan is one judge who knows a cover-up when he sees one,' she wrote in a 2014 Observer column. 'I love this man!' Powell has exclaimed in some of her public talks."

"Her conviction was bolstered by the release, in early December, of the long-awaited report by the inspector general for the Justice Department, which found that the FBI’s initial investigation into possible ties between Russia and Trump campaign officials (the precursor to the Mueller probe) was marred by sloppy and improper methods. Powell felt that the IG findings lent weight to a key component of her argument: that FBI agents manipulated the notes from their interview with Flynn to make him look guilty.

But in mid-December, Sullivan rejected the idea that the original FBI counterintelligence investigation of former Trump officials—Flynn included—was a deep state plot against Trump, and that Flynn had been tricked into his perjury by unscrupulous FBI agents. At the close of his ruling, Sullivan wrote: 'the Court summarily disposes of Mr. Flynn’s arguments that the FBI conducted an ambush interview for the purpose of trapping him into making false statements and that the government pressured him to enter a guilty plea. The record proves otherwise.'”

Yes, They Really Were Watching You

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by Greg Miller, entitled "The intelligence coup of the century," subtitled "For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries."

The CIA, in partnership with the BND (West German spy agency), ran a company called Crypto AG which had its roots in programs similar to Enigma. Crypto got its start encoding transmissions by U.S. troops in WWII. Secretly taken over by the CIA, it spent decades selling encryption hardware, software, and techniques to foreign governments and businesses. Then the CIA and the BND sat back and read what everybody was saying -- secretly, they thought. "... the United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets."

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

"They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco."

Consider Trump's bumbling release of intelligence secrets: "Foreign targets were tipped off by the careless statements of public officials including President Ronald Reagan."

"The German spy agency, the BND, came to believe the risk of exposure was too great and left the operation in the early 1990s. But the CIA bought the Germans’ stake and simply kept going, wringing Crypto for all its espionage worth until 2018, when the agency sold off the company’s assets, according to current and former officials."

"The company’s importance to the global security market had fallen by then, squeezed by the spread of online encryption technology. Once the province of governments and major corporations, strong encryption is now as ubiquitous as apps on cellphones."

Who Are You, And What Have You Done With Marco Rubio?

Excerpts from an interview of Marco Rubio by Jake Tapper, Mar 13, 2016:

Look, I think people have to make up their minds -- I can tell you this, no matter what happens in this election for years to come there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well one way or the other. He's going to be the nominee and he's going to lose. Or he'll have thrown this party into its most chaotic and divisive period of and that's unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government, free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or divide or it splits apart, it will be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level of the government until we can bring the party back together.

*****

You see images of Americans now at -- literally at each other's throats, pointing fingers in each other's face. Look, some of these protesters that you saw in Chicago apparently, obviously, were organized, maybe even paid to disrupt an event, so I'm not excusing their behavior.

But this not just the protesters in Chicago. These is now multiple rallies where people are assaulted and beat up, where a guy gets sucker-punched by one of the Trump supporters. And then, instead of condemning it, Trump is silent. When the guy is released from jail, he says, the next time, we -- maybe we should kill the protester against -- again, there is silence.

Then he goes on stage and makes -- just makes things up. He keeps telling the story about general -- a general who dipped bullets in the pig blood and shot a bunch of prisoners of -- Muslim prisoners up. Not only is it outrageous. It's a lie. And then he claims that the guy that stormed the stage was linked to ISIS.

He has turned the most important election in a generation into a circus, into a complete fiasco and a carnival. And it's -- this country deserves better. I mean, we -- at some point, people have to wake up here. This is really going to do damage to America.

*****

Here is the bottom line. He has said to people, why don't we basically beat up the protesters and beat up the hecklers, and I will pay your legal bills?

And here is what people have to understand. Maybe you think it's a joke, but there are people out there that are not balanced. There are people out there that -- that are not completely in control of themselves. And they hear something like this from a leader, you don't know what they're going to do next.

And when someone is seeking a position of leadership and is already in a position of influence, you speak responsibly. This notion that a president can just say anything they want, or even a presidential candidate can say anything they want, whatever comes to mind, it's just not true, and it's reckless, and it's dangerous.

And I -- look, I hope people wake up on time and realize what's happening here, because, if we reach a point in this country where we can't have a debate about politics without it getting to levels of violence and anger, where people think that just because you're angry, you can say and almost do anything you want, we're going to lose our republic.

*****

But, look, this is an ongoing thing, OK? So, every day, something new comes up, and I try not to escalate things, because you don't want to exaggerate them, and you don't want to make something bigger than it really is.

But just in the last, you know, five days, we he have had stories about the guy getting sucker-punched at the Trump rally. You have supporters basically -- you have a campaign employee now allegedly assaulted a reporter at an event.

So, every day, it's something new. And so there comes a point here where there's a tipping point, right? And you look at it and say enough is enough. So, I think, at the end of the day, we should all examine our behavior moving -- over the last year on this issue. We should all examine whether we have been quick enough.

*****

I'm very concerned. We don't know what's going to happen next here. I know that we have reached the point now where people in American politics have decided that, if they don't agree with you, that they can get angry at you, that you're a bad and evil person, that they can say anything they want about you.

I think that the -- all the gates of civility have been blown apart, and we have now reached a point where, on both sides, everyone is just saying or doing whatever they want. And, you know, you can't just say or do whatever you want. This is not about political correctness. This is about rules of civility and a way a society talks to each other.

And let me ask everybody this. Do we really want to live a -- in a country where everybody hates each other, where everybody is at each other's throat, where, because we disagree on the role of government or the tax rate or Obamacare or foreign policy, we now in this nation cannot have a discourse or agree on any other issue and end up hating each other?

Because that's what it feels like. It feels like we're reaching a point now where, in America, everyone hates each other. I'm so tired of arguing and fighting with other Americans.

Yes, we have serious disagreements, and let's debate those through our republic, but we have reached a point now where, if I don't agree with you on something, it's not just that you're wrong, but you're a bad person, you're an evil person, you deserve nothing.

I mean, we -- all the gates of -- all the rules that once governed our discourse have been blown away. And we're headed in a very dangerous direction. And, yes, there are people out there that are unbalanced. There are people out there that do not have control of themselves. We don't know what they will do.

*****

You know, he's running for president so no matter what he won't be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles which I don't anticipate it will. But yes, here's what happens in many countries around the world. You have a leader that emerges and basically says, don't put your faith in yourselves. Don't put your faith in society. Put your faith in me, I'm a strong leader, and I'm going to make things better all by myself.

This is very typical. You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It's basically the argument that he's making that he single handedly is going to turn the country around. We've never been that kind of country. We have a president.

The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the constitutions and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people. Not the people for the president.

And if you listen to the way he describes himself of what he's going to do he's going to single handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it's legal or not. Ah, poor little Marco. When Romney lost in 2012 and Reince Preibus led the Republicans in thsir inward-gazing, self-described "autopsy" which determined that to win the presidency in the future, the Republican party would have to be more inclusive -- more friendly to women and minorities -- poor little Marco thught he had a good thing going, and as a fresh new Latino face, he would ride the wave to the presidency by championing and spearheading a drive to liberalize the Republican approach to immigration. He sponsored such a bill in the Senate which won widespread bipartisan approval -- and then it went to the House, which had been captured by the Tea Party, and defeated the liberal bill in a humiliating defeat for young Marco, who has never really recovered his rising-star status with Republicans. *****

Character And Decency? No: Trump.

Click here for another article by Dana Milbank in The Washington Post, entitled "This vulgar man has squandered our decency."

“Character is the only secure foundation of the state.”

— President Calvin Coolidge, addressing the National Republican Club in New York, 1924.

“It was all bullshit.”

— President Trump, addressing Republicans in the White House and a national television audience on Thursday after his acquittal.

Trump Speaks, Post Impeachment

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Dana Milbank entitled "Trump learned his lesson. He’s going to be even more vulgar."

The morning after his acquittal in the Senate, Trump attended the National Prayer Breakfast, where political opponents have always set aside their differences. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urged the assembled to “raise our voices in prayer as one.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) prayed for his colleagues, including Pelosi, and said God couldn’t have “picked a better day to bring us all together.”

And then there was Trump. He complained that he was “put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people.”

Referring to Mitt Romney, the lone Republican to support impeachment, Trump said, “I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong.” Referring to Pelosi, just a few feet away, he added: “Nor do I like people who say, ‘I pray for you’ when they know that’s not so.”

Later, in a gathering of his strongest supporters at the White House:

He described his political opponents and government bureaucrats as “bad,” “dirty,” “horrible,” “evil,” “sick,” “corrupt,” “scum,” “leakers,” “liars,” “vicious,” “mean,” “lowlifes,” “non-people,” “stone-cold crazy” and “the crookedest, most dishonest, dirtiest people I’ve ever seen.”

In what was billed as an address to the nation, Trump declared to every American man, woman and child: “It was all bullshit.”

The Republicans laughed.

Trump: How Low Can You Go?

Click here for an article at Slate by William Saletan entitled "Trump Is a Remorseless Advocate of Crimes Against Humanity," chronicling Trump's offenses.

Ridiculous Rudy

Click here for an article in The New York Times Magazine, by Jonathan Mahler, entitled "The Fog of Rudy," subtitled "Did he change -- or did America?"

It's a longish article trying to untangle the mess that is Rudy Giuliani, just as the impeachment trial is about to start.

George Will: "Mea Culpa"

Here is an article at CNN, dated June 26, 2016, by Daniella Diaz, entitled "George Will: Trump's judge comments prompted exit from GOP":

George Will, the conservative commentator and columnist, said Sunday that he changed his voter registration to "unaffiliated" 23 days ago and has left the Republican Party because of Donald Trump.

"After Trump went after the 'Mexican' judge from northern Indiana then (House Speaker) Paul Ryan endorsed him, I decided that in fact this was not my party anymore," Will said on "Fox News Sunday."

Trump attacked Will on Twitter over his decision to leave the GOP Sunday morning, writing: "George Will, one of the most overrated political pundits (who lost his way long ago), has left the Republican Party. He's made many bad calls."

Will responded on "Fox News Sunday," saying: "He has an advantage on me, because he can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters and I can't."

He said he'd joined the Republican Party in 1964, inspired by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a founder of the conservative movement and a key figure in the party then.

"I joined it because I was a conservative, and I leave it for the same reason: I'm a conservative," Will said. "The long and the short of it is, as Ronald Reagan said when he changed his registration, 'I did not leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me,' " he said.

Will first announced his decision to leave the GOP at a Federalist Society luncheon Friday. He told the audience: "This is not my party," according to PJ Media, a conservative news website.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner confirmed to PJM in an interview after his speech that he had left the party and was now "an unaffiliated voter in the state of Maryland" before switching the subject.

PJM reported that Will cited Ryan's endorsement of Trump is one of the reasons why he decided to leave the party. Will didn't say whether he'd vote for either Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton or a third-party candidate, such as Libertarian Gary Johnson.

Will, who worked on President Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, also said at the luncheon that Trump as president with "no opposition" from a Republican-led Congress would be worse than Clinton as president with a Republican-led Congress. When asked by PJ Media about his message to conservatives regarding Trump, Will responded, "Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House."

Steve Schmidt: "Mea Culpa"

Click here for an article in Rolling Stone magazine by Andy Kroll, entitled "Ex-Republican Operative Steve Schmidt: ‘The Party of Trump Must Be Obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed.’" It's an old article, dated June 26, 2018.

The article begins:

Steve Schmidt has worked at the highest levels of Republican politics. He helped run George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign and oversaw the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He led Sen. John McCain’s ’08 presidential bid and helped introduce Sarah Palin to the world. The American Association of Political Consultants once named him its “GOP Campaign Manager of the Year.”

But today, Schmidt is finished with the Republican Party. He renounced his membership last week in a series of withering tweets that quickly went viral. Under Trump, he wrote, the party had become “corrupt, indecent, and immoral.” With the exception of a select few, the GOP was “filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders.” He pointed to the Trump administration’s family separation policy and use of detention centers for young immigrant children – “internment camps for babies” – and the refusal of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to repudiate the president.

Here's the rest of the article, in its entirety:

Why did you finally decide to leave the Republican Party?
I think it’s fair to say I’ve been estranged from the party on a number of issues going back to my advocacy and support for marriage equality in 2009 and then my opposition to the populism and the nationalism that we’ve seen. The reality that I’ve come to is that the party stands at an hour at which it is irredeemable, where it has died and bled out because of the cowardice and fecklessness of its leaders.

When Trump was elected, there were three parties in Washington: the Trump party, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The Republican Party had every chance to put a check on his vile personal conduct, his administration’s outlandish corruption, his fetishizing and affinity for autocrats around the world and his undermining of the western alliance.

How did it get to this point?
I think it’s important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

The Republican Party remained the party of the North and the West culturally in this country until the Civil Rights Act. On the day that LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act, he says, “I feel like I’ve lost the South.” Over time, beginning with Richard Nixon in ’68, with the Southern Strategy and the appeal to white working-class Southerners, the Republican Party is uprooted from the North and the West. That is the party I was born into.

This present strain of know-nothingism has long been in the party’s DNA.
This cancer has always been there. This dormant cancer. But it has become fully embraced in this moment. We’re seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like “invade” and “infest.” The third thing he does is a create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces – the “deep state.” And the fifth thing is the assertion that “I am the law, that I am above it.” He just said immigrants don’t get a hearing; they don’t get a court representation.

So the party’s evolution is as much cultural as it is political or ideological.
The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we’re in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you’re able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.

What you’ve seen is this rapid devolution over the last 18 months of the Republican Party becoming a white ethno-nationalist party, a blood-and-soil party that is protectionist, isolationist, that is rooted in resentment and grievance.

The Republican Party isn’t going to die because of Trump. It’s going to die because of Ryan and McConnell. You’re now left with one political party in support of liberal democracy.

Would these same forces have reared their heads if we’d had a Marco Rubio or a Hillary Clinton presidency?
It’s always been there. It’s been there from the Know-Nothing movement in the 1840s. The effect of Trump is the justification it gives to people who are angered by Trump to act more like Trump. To debase themselves into opposition. If you want to oppose Trump, the first thing you should do is say, “I’m not going to do one thing that makes it worse.” Because making it worse helps Trump. Part of the damage of this era is his debasement and his purposeful divisions. That’s unique in all of history.

President Obama said he draws a straight line from McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate to Trump’s election. You helped McCain pick Palin in 2008. Did she usher in the Trump era?
I think people miss the point on Sarah Palin. She’s not the cause. She’s a symptom. The sickness is how people reacted to her after you knew what she was. There’s never been an era absent of demagogues. What there hasn’t been is an ability of those demagogues to gain actual power – certainly not at a national level. We threw the ball down the field [by picking Palin] and it didn’t work. I had no idea what she was and didn’t know until a couple days after we picked her. But by the time the race ends, everybody knows. Yet what happens? Palin gets a million-dollar TV contract on Fox.

Can the Republican Party be saved?
If the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan is to be redeemed and resurrected, then the party of Trump must be obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed. And all of the collaborators, the complicit enablers, the school of cowards, need to go down. Maybe something can regenerate from that.

I don’t view it so much differently than I view a forest fire. A forest fire is part of a natural cycle of the forest. The forest burns, and through its burning and destruction, it is regenerated and made healthy again. For the Republican Party and the conservative movement, with its rot, its corruption, its indecency … before there can be any talk of restoration, there must be a season of burning.

Max Boot: "Mea Culpa"

Click here for an article by David Corn, entitled "'We Need to Destroy the Republican Party': A Conservative Luminary Calls for a Clean Start (In which Max Boot says the GOP is racist, the Iraq War was wrong, and Trumpism is a cancer)."

Corn kicks things off as follows:

David Corn: You were a golden boy of conservative punditry. You joined the Wall Street Journal editorial page in 1994 at 24. You were the op-ed editor four years later. You became a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a blogger for Commentary. You were in neocon heaven—a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. You were one of the major voices in favor of the Iraq War. And in your forthcoming book, you write with great introspection and humility, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” I mean, Max, this is almost, maybe it is, an apology. What brought you to that point?

Corn quotes Boot as saying:

“I am now convinced that coded racial appeals—those dog whistles—had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Repub­lican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-­intentioned analysts like me. This is what liberals have been saying for decades while accusing the Republican Party of racism. I never believed them. Now I do.”

How did he fail to see what was going on with the Republican party, right under his nose? Boot says:

I was in my conservative bunker, and I thought this was a gross libel against the Republican Party to claim that we were catering to racism, or that it was a libel on America to claim that America was a pervasively racist society. And then Trump came along and I realized, “Wait a second. There is a much larger constituency for racism and xenophobia than I had realized.” And it made me think, “Oh, my goodness. This is why a lot of people were voting Republican.” It wasn’t because they loved supply-side economics. It wasn’t because they supported NATO. It was because they were looking for a candidate who would champion the interests of white people. And Donald Trump did that more unabashedly and more unapologetically than previous Republican candidates had done. That was a wake-up call.

And: "It makes me realize how much of American politics is tribal and how little of it has to do with principles or ideas. The reason why so many people are Republicans is because they hate Democrats; the actual substance of what Republicans stand for almost doesn’t matter. And that’s been a shocking realization."

Later in the article, he says: "Within the grassroots, a lot of people really love the Trump message, the racism, the xenophobia, the nonstop insults against liberals. That’s actually what they like most about him."

When Boot started to become more skeptical, he saw racist treatment of African Americans by police officers differently, and the injustices of the male establishment towards women: “Hey, feminists have a point when they talk about the abuses of patriarchal society and the suffering that women endure in America.”

On the subject of race, Boot says:

I can talk about my own blindness. I thought, “I’m not racist. And I’m a Republican. So it seems like a gross libel to accuse Republicans and conservatives of being racist if I personally am not racist.” And what I’ve realized is there are a lot of racists that the Republican Party is appealing to. There’s also been a disconnect between what Republicans do in office and what they do on the campaign trail. Because going back to 1964, when the parties basically switched positions on civil rights, Republicans have been appealing for white votes with coded racial appeals. Whether it was Nixon’s Southern strategy, or in 1980 Ronald Reagan kicking off his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, or the Willie Horton ad from George H.W. Bush.

He adds this tidbit: "Before Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a majority conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white nationalist party with a conservative fringe."

What is wrong with the leaders of the party? "These people that I used to admire have sold out their principles. Nobody’s more shocked and surprised than I am. This is a movement to which I dedicated my whole life. And now I realize, what the hell was that about? Who were these people? They’re not who I thought they were."

Again, how did he fail to see what liberals saw, what was becoming of the Republican party? He says:

I think it’s crazy that Republicans are opposed to all gun control when we have such a rampant problem with gun violence. But I just never tackled it. Or when Republicans deny climate change, which is a scientific fact, I didn’t deal with it. I just stayed in my lane, foreign policy and national security policy, and ignored the craziness all around me. I went with the tribe. I took the path of least resistance, and now it’s making me realize, no, I’ve got to think for myself, and that’s something very few people do, because being part of one of these political tribes, as much as anything, is a substitute for thought.

What can be done to change the party? Boot says:

"... my hope is that the Republican Party will suffer massive and repeated drubbings at the ballot box. That’s why I urge everybody to vote straight-ticket Democratic even though I have a lot of disagreements with Democrats. I’m not a Democrat; I’m an independent. But for the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party. We need congressional oversight of Donald Trump, which you’re never going to get out of Republicans. I think you need to punish the Republicans for taking these appalling positions, abusing minorities, championing white nationalism, isolationism, protectionism. The only way to wean them from that is to punish them electorally."

How does he feel about the future?

"I am a lot less optimistic or, if you like, Pollyannaish about the future of America than I used to be. I was this immigrant kid who came here in 1976 from the Soviet Union, and I’ve always believed in America and the goodness and greatness of America, and that’s really been my greatest faith. And that faith has been battered. This is a country that could elect Donald Trump. People like me kind of arrogantly assumed it can’t happen here, that there’s something in the water in America that renders us immune from this kind of threat to our democracy. And lo and behold, we’re not immune. We could easily go the way of countries that are backsliding from their democracy."

Notable Quotes From 2019

Click here for an article in The Washington Post by Aaron Blake entitled "37 quotes that defined American politics in 2019." Here are my favorites: 4. “The DNC server and that conspiracy theory has got to go. If he continues to focus on that white whale, it’s going to bring him down.” -Former White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert in September on Trump’s theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, might have interfered in the 2016 election. Trump has since been impeached over the push for the probes.

8. “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero.” -Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani to the Atlantic. Giuliani added: “Anything I did should be praised.”

12. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a con man. He is a cheat.” -Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, in his testimony to Congress.

16. “So, I guess I’m the Meryl Streep of generals.” -Former defense secretary Jim Mattis, responding to Trump calling him overrated. Mattis noted Trump had also called Streep overrated. Mattis departed over Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from Syria.

23. “It’s never a tough vote for me when I’m standing on principle.” -Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) to The Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim, explaining his opposition to Trump using a national emergency declaration to fund his border wall. Tillis, though, wound up voting to support the decision in the face of a conservative backlash back home.

29. “I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.” -White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who often channels her boss in her public comments, on former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly’s criticisms of Trump.

31. “He sees what’s going on, I guess, if you look at what’s happening in Los Angeles, where it’s so sad to look, and what’s happening in San Francisco and a couple of other cities, which are run by an extraordinary group of liberal people.” -Trump, when asked to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin saying Western-style liberalism was “obsolete.” Trump apparently thought Putin was referring to liberal politicians in the western United States, rather than the Western world’s belief in the freedom of the individual.

An Argument Against Congressional Term Limits

Click here for an article at Daily Kos by Joan McCarter entitled "https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/1/1905279/-No-Tom-Steyer-term-limits-aren-t-the-solution-for-fixing-Congress." She says:

Now we've got another wealthy businessman running for president while calling himself a reformer and, of course, pushing the old, tired, and simplistic notion that kicking the bums out on a rotating basis is the answer. Tom Steyer has an op-ed in Newsweek arguing just that. "I've been proposing congressional term limits of 12 years in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. If we want bold change, we need new and different people in charge," he writes. He says that term limits "reorient incentives away from campaign donations and toward the actual work of governing." He also argues that term limits would mean "lobbyists must now make their arguments on the strength of their merits, rather than on relationships alone." He says "We need new ideas, new people, new approaches to hard problems—and term limits deliver those incentives."

Sure, that all sounds great, and like every simple solution posed to a complex problem, it's woefully ill-informed. Does he really imagine that only getting 12 years in federal office would keep opportunists and fortune-seekers out? That they wouldn't get in, steal everything that's not nailed down in those 12 years, and get out to go right to a lobbying firm so they can keep on grifting? If so, he hasn't truly been paying attention. His ideas about lobbyists and how lobbying works are embarrassingly naive. He thinks they'll have less influence because they'll have to use their ideas instead of their friendship (and money)? Lobbyists will roll over newcomers because they'll know how to do it, since they'll know how it all works.

This applies not just to lobbyists, but also staff. The only way continual churn wouldn't destroy Congress would be having essentially permanent committee staff that stays in place.

And:

This anodyne and simplistic thinking is a distraction from the kind of reforms that would really solve the problem of an increasingly corrupt and partisan Congress: public financing of campaigns and real campaign finance reform. Start with new laws to overturn the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision, and just keep on going. If you want to get rid of the nefarious influence of big money in politics, get rid of the big money. Then start on the structural reforms that will fix the workings of Congress, like restoring the function of the committees in the legislative process.