Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere, MLK jr – Page 57

Republican blockade of Ukraine aid and Slovakia’s election play into Putin’s hands

CNN

Republican blockade of Ukraine aid and Slovakia’s election play into Putin’s hands

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN – October 2, 2023

Tom Brenner for The Washington Post/Getty Images

Republicans opposed to the US funding Ukraine’s lifeline against Russia scored their first major success when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy didn’t include a $6 billion request for aid in a stopgap bill that averted a government shutdown.

The result, which left President Joe Biden demanding swift action to fulfill Kyiv’s needs, made for a good weekend for Russian President Vladimir Putin. But it left Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with plenty more to worry about after shifts elsewhere in global politics played into Moscow’s push to outlast the West in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Biden suggested he had a “deal” with McCarthy on moving assistance for Ukraine in a separate measure, but the Republican speaker’s office declined to confirm any such agreement.

Drama in the US coincided with another development this weekend that will cause concern in Ukraine. In neighboring Slovakia, former pro-Russia Prime Minister Robert Fico’s populist party won parliamentary elections. Fico anchored his campaign on his anti-US rhetoric, vows to stop sending weapons to Ukraine and a pledge to thwart Kyiv’s NATO ambitions.

Blows to Ukraine in the US and Slovakia came on top of its spat over grain exports with Poland – one of Kyiv’s earliest and most staunch allies – which led Warsaw to warn it could stop arms shipments to its neighbor.

Each of these developments stresses a rising danger for Ukraine – that the arms and aid it needs to sustain its fight against Russia’s onslaught are increasingly getting dragged into the bitter politics of national elections in the West.

Any sign of weakening resolve for arming Ukraine among Western leaders and legislatures is an added incentive for Putin to try to extend the conflict into a war of attrition in the hope that Western publics will tire of the fight and that leaders like ex-President Donald Trump might win power next year and ditch Kyiv.

The headlines are alarming for Ukraine. And while the realities of international politics suggest that time is not yet running out for the remarkable pipeline of arms and aid that fueled its heroic resistance to Russia’s onslaught, the political ground could be shifting and augur serious long-term concerns for Kyiv.

A potential propaganda coup for Putin

In Slovakia, Fico’s SMER party won Saturday’s parliamentary elections in a swing of the political pendulum back toward the populism and nationalism that delivered Trump, Brexit and gains by far-right parties in France and Germany in recent years. In the glow of victory, Fico warned, “Slovakia and people in Slovakia have bigger problems than Ukraine,” and added he would push for peace talks.

Slovakia, a member of NATO, was previously a vocal ally of Ukraine, and a turn against its neighbor would hand Putin valuable propaganda openings. Yet on its own, Slovakia has no power to push negotiations to start. In any case, there’s no sign Ukraine is ready to talk as its offensive grinds on, or that Putin has any political or strategic motivations to do so either. And Fico has to worry about his own coalition-building before he starts deciding Ukraine policy.

And a Slovakian halt to arms shipments is unlikely to tilt the battlefield toward Russia. It did send Kyiv old Soviet MiG jets and other equipment for which it was compensated by the European Union. But its contributions are dwarfed by those of larger European powers and the United States.

A threat to block Ukraine’s entry into NATO sounds alarming. But the NATO summit this year showed that there is no prospect of Kyiv joining the Western alliance soon anyhow. And even before the Slovakian election, getting all alliance members to back its eventual membership was already a struggle. Turkey, for instance, is still blocking the accession of Sweden, a far less controversial new member of the self-defense club.

Slovakia might be home to many voters sympathetic to Moscow given its decades as part of the former Czechoslovakia in the Warsaw Pact under the iron grip of the Soviet Union. But as a NATO member, it is still dependent on the group – and, ultimately, the US – for its defense. And its economy is reliant on its European Union membership. This gives the West substantial leverage in Bratislava.

Geopolitical realities may also be decisive in Poland’s dispute with Ukraine. Many analysts believe temperatures will cool after a tense election later this month. Poland’s antipathy to Russia and desire to prevent it from winning a victory in Ukraine are borne out of decades of bitter political history unlikely to be diluted by shifting political winds. And its posture is also critical to its rising importance to the United States as one of Washington’s most important European allies.

The GOP tide against Ukraine gathers strength

Zelensky’s visit to Washington to shore up Ukraine aid last month looks prescient. But after a wild week, it’s clear that future tranches of US assistance will be far harder for the Biden administration to drive through Congress.

McCarthy, whose speakership is wobbling, pushed through a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open through mid-November, without $6 billion in Ukraine funding the Senate hoped to add to the package – which in itself represented only about a quarter of Biden’s latest Ukraine aid request. The move will not immediately imperil Ukraine on the battlefield, but a longer delay could have serious consequences. And politically, it could embolden Putin and fuel doubts about US staying power in the war among allied European leaders who are standing firm but also need to manage public opinion.

Some of Ukraine’s loudest supporters in Congress were deeply disappointed. “Putin is celebrating,” Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois told CNN. “I don’t see how the dynamics change in 45 days.” The co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus was the only House Democrat to vote against the stopgap measure.

House Republican rebels, some of whom are threatening to topple McCarthy after he used Democratic votes to temporarily keep the government open at current spending levels, are largely opposed to more aid for Ukraine. They include Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and pro-Trump Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote on social media Saturday that “Joe Biden treats Ukraine as the 51st state” after previously warning that more funds for Kyiv would be “blood money.”

Ukraine refused to panic over the interruption to its latest injection of aid in a multi-billion-dollar initiative on which its war effort largely depends, at least in its current scale. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said his country is working with the US Congress on the issue.

“We do not feel that US support has been shattered, because the US understands that what is at stake in Ukraine is much bigger than just Ukraine. It’s about the stability and predictability of the world, and therefore I believe that we will be able to find the necessary solutions,” Kuleba said.

The danger for Zelensky is that such rhetoric solidifies into a sense among voters that American interests and Ukraine’s interests are opposite. At Republican campaign events, voters often voice antipathy to sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, and polls show rising public skepticism.

Still, for now, there is a bipartisan Washington majority in favor of Ukraine aid, although the chaos in the GOP raises questions about how it will be delivered. Biden on Sunday seemed to indicate he had a deal with McCarthy on moving the funds in a separate bill, although the speaker may be too weak to deliver on any promises. “I fully expect the speaker to keep his commitment to secure the passage and support needed to help Ukraine as they defend themselves against aggression and brutality,” the president said.

McCarthy suggested that a framework that also sends more money to secure the southern US border might open the way for Ukraine funds. “They’re not going to get some package if the border is not secure,” the speaker said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I support being able to make sure Ukraine has the weapons that they need. But I firmly support the border first. So we’ve got to find a way that we can do this together.”

But if McCarthy is toppled and replaced by a more radical speaker, Ukraine could run out of luck.

Longer term, the US elections in November 2024 are critical. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has vowed to end the war in 24 hours if elected president, presumably on terms that would favor Putin, whom he has called a “genius” and before whom he has often genuflected.

And Ukraine’s would not be the only future on the line. A second Trump term could pose an existential threat to NATO and the entire post-World War II and Cold War concept of the West.

Putin’s Next Target: U.S. Support for Ukraine, Officials Say

The New York Times

Putin’s Next Target: U.S. Support for Ukraine, Officials Say

Julian E. Barnes – October 2, 2023

Marines of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during training exercises in Donetsk Region, Ukraine on Aug. 28, 2023. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Russia’s strategy to win the war in Ukraine is to outlast the West.

But how does President Vladimir Putin plan to do that?

U.S. officials said they are convinced that Putin intends to try to end U.S. and European support for Ukraine by using his spy agencies to push propaganda supporting pro-Russian political parties and by stoking conspiracy theories with new technologies.

The Russia disinformation aims to increase support for candidates opposing Ukraine aid with the ultimate goal of stopping international military assistance to Ukraine.

Russia has been frustrated that the United States and Europe have largely remained united on continued military and economic support for Ukraine, U.S. officials said.

That military aid has kept Ukraine in the fight, put Russia’s original goals of taking Kyiv, the capital, and Odesa out of reach and even halted its more modest objective to control all of the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine.

But Putin believes he can influence American politics to weaken support for Ukraine and potentially restore his battlefield advantage, U.S. officials said.

Putin, the officials said, appears to be closely watching U.S. political debates over Ukraine assistance. Republican opposition to sending more money to Ukraine forced congressional leaders to pass a stopgap spending bill Saturday that did not include additional aid for the country.

Moscow is also likely to try to boost pro-Russian candidates in Europe, seeing potential fertile ground with recent results. A pro-Russian candidate won Slovakia’s parliamentary elections Sunday. In addition to national elections, Russia could seek to influence the European parliamentary vote next year, officials said.

Russia has long used its intelligence services to influence democratic politics around the world.

U.S. intelligence assessments in 2017 and 2021 concluded that Russia had tried to influence elections in favor of Donald Trump. In 2016, Russia hacked and leaked Democratic National Committee emails that hurt Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign and pushed divisive messages on social media. In 2020, Russia sought to spread information denigrating Joe Biden — but many Republicans in Congress argued Russia’s goal was to intensify political fights, not to support Trump.

For the 2024 presidential election, U.S. intelligence agencies believe the stakes for Putin are even higher.

Biden has sent billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine and pledged that the United States and its allies would support the country for “as long as it takes.” Trump, far ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination, has said supporting Ukraine is not a vital U.S. interest.

Russia, according to U.S. officials, is constantly running information operations aimed at denigrating NATO and U.S. policies and is likely to ramp up efforts in the months to come. The U.S. officials spoke on the condition their names not be reported so they could discuss sensitive intelligence.

The ultimate goal of Russia would be to help undermine candidates who support Ukraine and to change U.S. policy. Some U.S. officials doubt Russia would be able to do that.

But even if Moscow cannot influence the final election result, Russians may believe they can stir up enough debate over Ukraine aid that a future Congress could find it more difficult to pass additional support, U.S. officials said.

Beth Sanner, a former senior intelligence official, says artificial intelligence and other new technologies will change how Russia conducts influence campaigns. Russia is also likely to conduct influence laundering efforts, sending messages to the American public through allies inside nominally independent organizations, according to a recent declassified analysis.

“Russia will not give up on disinformation campaigns,” Sanner said. “But we don’t know what it is going to look like. We should assume the Russians are getting smarter.”

It is easy to overstate Russia’s ability to influence U.S. politics. Some American officials and social media executives have questioned how effective Russia’s troll farms and influence operations were in 2016, as opposed to hack and dump operations targeting Clinton’s emails.

And the media landscape has shifted dramatically since then. U.S. and European consumers are more skeptical of what they see on social media. Russian state television, a source of Kremlin narratives, has been pushed off Google’s YouTube. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has bolstered its search for disinformation and de-emphasized news on its platforms.

But for every development making life harder for Russia’s online trolls, there are trends pushing in the opposite direction. The X platform, formerly known as Twitter, has dismantled teams that were hunting for election interference efforts. And the most influential platform among young people is now TikTok, a Chinese company. China has been stepping up its own influence operations, modeled after Moscow’s operations.

U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that several countries are seeking to influence American politics. In 2020, intelligence agencies outlined an Iranian scheme to influence voting in Florida. Cuba also conducted low-level intelligence operations, and Venezuela had the intent, but not the capabilities, to influence the vote.

But Russia is better than any other country at combining state media, private troll farms and intelligence service operations to attack in the digital space, U.S. officials said.

And it has continued to refine its efforts. Many of the disinformation experts who once worked for the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm active in American elections in 2016 and 2018, have migrated to new firms or joined Russian military intelligence. And the internet, one U.S. official said, is the one place Russia will never run out of ammunition.

Shifting the debate in Europe and America is so important to Putin that if those influence operations fail to gain traction, Russia could decide to escalate.

U.S. officials say that escalation could include additional financial support for pro-Russian political parties in Europe or even covert operations in Europe aimed at weakening support for the war in Ukraine.

As a result, underestimating Russia’s ability to conduct influence operations would be a mistake, U.S. officials said.

Russian disinformation that falsely claimed America had bioweapons labs in Ukraine continues to reverberate around the world, for example.

Russia used the accusations to justify its invasion of Ukraine and has repeatedly requested United Nations’ investigations of its false claims. But far-right groups, including QAnon, have picked up, expanded and amplified the Russian bioweapons accusations.

In a world divided by polarized politics, conspiracy theories and disinformation have proved more resilient than ever.

Supreme Court Weighs Fate of Consumer Agency That Vexes Banks, Riles GOP

Bloomberg

Supreme Court Weighs Fate of Consumer Agency That Vexes Banks, Riles GOP

Greg Stohr – October 2, 2023

Thirteen years after a Democratic-controlled Congress created the CFPB to regulate mortgages and other consumer-finance products, the high court on Tuesday will weigh a novel constitutional argument that the bureau’s supporters say could leave it decimated.

The clash will shape the future of an agency that critics see as the ultimate symbol of an unaccountable and overreaching federal bureaucracy – but that backers including President Joe Biden’s administration say has provided crucial safeguards and an independent check against corporate power in the years since the 2008 financial crisis.

“The CFPB is under attack because it’s good at what it does,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who spearheaded the bureau’s creation, said last week.

The justices, who open their new term Monday, are reviewing a ruling that said the agency’s funding system violates a constitutional provision requiring a congressional appropriation for government spending. The CFPB isn’t subject to the year-to-year congressional appropriation process and instead draws as much money as it needs – up to a cap it has never hit – from the Federal Reserve. In fiscal 2022, the agency received $641.5 million in funding, short of its $734 million cap.

“It’s not about the merits of CFPB,” said Michael Pepson, a lawyer with the conservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation. “It’s about ensuring that Congress doesn’t shirk its duties by passing off its exclusive funding authority to unelected officials.”

The case comes at a time when the CFPB under Biden-appointed Director Rohit Chopra is taking an especially aggressive tack. The agency has sought to stamp out abuses in the mortgage-lending market, scrutinize the use of artificial intelligence in credit underwriting and rein in so-called junk fees, a catch-all term that include charges for bounced checks and late credit-card payments.

The bureau last year reached a $3.7 billion settlement with Wells Fargo & Co. to resolve allegations that it mistreated its customers for years by illegally repossessing cars, bungling record-keeping on payments and improperly charging fees and interest. Beyond banks, the CFPB under Biden has sought to probe “buy-now-pay-later” firms and penalize student lending servicers and credit reporting agencies.

Since the CFPB was created in 2010, its enforcement actions have returned $20.2 billion in compensation, principal reductions, canceled debts, and other relief to consumers, agency spokesperson Samuel Gilford said.

The activity is only fueling longstanding Republican complaints that the agency is too powerful. At a hearing in June, GOP Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee told Chopra the bureau “should die a painful death.”

Mortgage Worries

Although the high court case centers on a never-enforced payday-lending rule, the impact is potentially far broader. In urging the justices to take up the case, the bureau said the ruling from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals cast a legal cloud over every action the agency has taken since its creation, providing an argument for re-opening even long-finalized rules and enforcement cases.

That’s a worry shared in part by the mortgage-banking industry, which filed a brief urging the court to limit any ruling against the CFPB. The bureau has issued dozens of rules affecting consumer mortgages and the industry has invested billions of dollars toward compliance, according to three trade groups led by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

A decision calling those rules into question “could set off a wave of challenges and the housing market could descend into chaos, to the detriment of all mortgage borrowers,” the groups argued.

The payday-lending trade group pressing the challenge, the Community Financial Services Association, calls those concerns overblown. Judges have a variety of tools to prevent disruption of the mortgage market, including the six-year statute of limitations that applies to CFPB rules, the group says.

“Lacking any viable legal argument, the bureau resorts to fear-mongering about significant disruption if all the CFPB’s past actions are vacated,” the trade group argued. “But the bureau grossly exaggerates the effects and implications of setting aside this rule.”

Delay Suggested

At a minimum, a decision striking down the payday-lending rule could provide a potent new argument for companies currently battling the CFPB, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Elliot Stein. Navient Corp., which is fighting a complaint over its student-loan servicing practices, could have an especially strong case because it has already raised the issue in its defense, Stein said.

Some industry groups – including the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association – have suggested the court could take the unusual step of ruling against the agency but delaying the decision’s effective date to give Congress time to set up a different funding system.

The 5th Circuit ruling marked the first time a federal appeals court had ever used the appropriations clause to strike down part of a federal statute. The Supreme Court has never interpreted the clause as a check on Congress, so far invoking it only as a limitation on the executive branch.

The case is part of a Supreme Court term that could put new constraints on federal administrative agencies. The justices are also considering restricting the use of in-house judges to handle cases at the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the court has agreed to revisit an important 1984 ruling that gives agencies latitude in interpreting ambiguous federal statutes.

The Supreme Court in 2020 gave the president broad power to fire the CFPB’s director, striking down job protections Congress had enacted. At the same time, the court stopped short of abolishing the agency altogether, as critics had sought.

The case is Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association, 22-448.

With assistance from Katanga Johnson.

Democrats tried to protect the CFPB from politics. The Supreme Court may blow up that plan.

Politico

Democrats tried to protect the CFPB from politics. The Supreme Court may blow up that plan.

Katy O’Donnell – October 2, 2023

Democrats who created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a decade ago thought they could shield the agency from political pressure by funding it through the Federal Reserve instead of Congress.

That decision, which drew condemnation from GOP lawmakers and has helped make the regulator a lightning rod for attacks ever since, is facing its biggest test Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears arguments on its constitutionality.

The case is highly anticipated since it could not only result in curbing the agency’s power and throwing its rules into question but potentially affect other regulators throughout the government — including the Fed and the FDIC — that are also not funded by annual congressional spending bills.

“The CFPB has returned $17 billion directly to Americans cheated by financial institutions,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told POLITICO. “If the Supreme Court disregards over a century of legal precedent, it risks undermining banking regulators safeguarding our economy, as well as Social Security and Medicare.”

Warren, who is credited with conceiving the agency that was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis before she became a senator, said the CFPB’s political independence was critical to its formation. Republicans and financial industry critics, many of whom have opposed the bureau since its inception, argue that the funding scheme allows the agency to escape accountability.

Many Democrats see the case as part of a broad-based attack on the regulatory state by Republicans eager to bring challenges before the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has proved willing to curtail the power of agencies.

In a 2022 ruling limiting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, the high court’s six GOP-appointed justices invoked the so-called major questions doctrine, saying that agencies like the EPA need congressional approval before “asserting highly consequential power.” The court has also taken up a case this term challenging the constitutionality of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s in-house enforcement proceedings.

The CFPB was created by the Dodd-Frank Act, the landmark 2010 law that rewrote the rules of finance. The funding mechanism set up by Obama-era Democrats allows the bureau to request the amount of money it needs each year from the Fed, which, in turn, is funded by fees it levies on financial institutions and interest on the securities it holds. The CFPB automatically receives the requested amount, subject to a cap set by Congress.

Among the options the Supreme Court has when it makes its ruling, probably next year, is kicking the matter back to Congress to overhaul the way the bureau is financed — a move that would open the door for other reforms to the agency in an election year.

The case was brought by small-dollar lenders challenging a 2017 CFPB rule restricting their activity. An appellate court ruled last year that the current funding system violates the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.

The court scrapped the 2017 rule on the grounds that the CFPB was unconstitutionally funded when it adopted the regulation. The ruling held that the agency’s self-determined budget drawn from an agency that is itself not funded by appropriations marked a “double insulation from Congress’ purse strings,” a unique setup even among financial regulators.

The government maintains that Congress’s decision to authorize the Fed to fund the agency up to a fixed level amounts to “a standing, capped lump-sum appropriation,” as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in an August brief.

Counsel for the payday lender groups, meanwhile, argued that “Congress does not possess unfettered discretion to authorize executive spending, let alone the power to cede virtually unfettered discretion to an agency to determine the size of its own purse in perpetuity,” in their brief to the high court.

If the Supreme Court does decide the funding stream is unconstitutional, the government is urging the justices to “sever” the funding provision from the rest of the law that created the agency.

“A decision invalidating the CFPB’s past actions would be deeply destabilizing” and “threaten profound disruption for consumers, regulated businesses, and the nation’s financial markets,” Prelogar said in the brief.

Housing industry representatives have also called on the high court to preserve existing CFPB regulations. They warned of “potentially catastrophic consequences that a decision drawing those rules into doubt could have on the mortgage and real-estate markets,” in an amicus brief submitted by three of the industry’s most powerful trade groups.

The Chamber of Commerce and nine other industry groups, meanwhile, urged the court to “avoid disruptions in consumer financial markets” in their own amicus brief. But the groups, which include the major banking trades, also stated that they “believe they are entitled to” the invalidation of CFPB actions they have challenged in pending lawsuits related to the agency’s funding mechanism. They also said CFPB “enforcement actions should be paused” until Congress resolves its funding.

Court watchers say wholesale invalidation of past CFPB actions is a remote possibility.

“Nobody wants a remedy where they throw every regulation out the window, and I doubt very much if they would do that,” said Alan Kaplinsky, former chair of the consumer financial services group at Ballard Spahr. “If they get to the point where they’ve got to decide the remedy, I think the conservatives and the liberals on that court would prefer to kick the ball over to Congress and let them try to deal with that.”’

The Supreme Court has already ruled that “the Dodd-Frank Act contains an express severability clause” in a 2020 decision holding that another part of the CFPB’s structure, a single director who could only be fired for cause, violated the separation of powers. While that decision eroded some of the bureau’s political insulation, separating out the removal clause from the rest of the law preserved the agency.

Both bureau backers and critics say a key question is whether a ruling against the agency could apply only to the CFPB and not to other regulators with independent funding.

“I think philosophically there are going to be five to six votes that probably would like to decide against the CFPB,” Kaplinsky said. “What they’re not going to want to do is decide the case and in doing that put a big cloud over the constitutionality of the Fed, FDIC and [the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] — that would be a horrendous result. I don’t think any of them would want that, it would create economic chaos.”

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

CNN

Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump

Jake Tapper, Anchor and Chief Wash. Cors. – October 2, 2023

John Kelly, the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Donald Trump, offered his harshest criticism yet of the former president in an exclusive statement to CNN.

Kelly set the record straight with on-the-record confirmation of a number of damning stories about statements Trump made behind closed doors attacking US service members and veterans, listing a number of objectionable comments Kelly witnessed Trump make firsthand.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story.

The Atlantic article also described Trump’s 2018 visit to France for the centennial anniversary of the end of World War I, where, according to several senior staff members, Trump said he did not want to visit the graves of American soldiers buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris because, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” During that same trip to France, the article reported, Trump said the 1,800 US Marines killed in the Belleau Wood were “suckers” for getting killed.

And Kelly’s statement adds context to a story in the book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, in which Trump, after a separate trip to France in 2017, tells Kelly he wants no wounded veterans in a military parade he’s trying to have planned in his honor. Inspired by the Bastille Day parade, except for the section of the parade featuring wounded French veterans in wheelchairs, Trump tells Kelly, “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade.”

“Those are the heroes,” Kelly said. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are – and they are buried over in Arlington.”

“I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

The story squares with another recent story from Goldberg in The Atlantic, a profile of retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, in which Trump does not react well to seeing severely wounded Army Captain Luis Avila singing “God Bless America” at a welcome event for the new chairman. “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”

Kelly’s statement also refers to a remark Trump made in response to that same article, which describes Milley, in the closing days of the Trump presidency in 2020, receiving intelligence that the Chinese military feared Trump was about to order a military strike on it. Milley, in a call authorized by Trump administration officials, reassured his Chinese counterparts that such a strike was not going to happen.

That call was first reported in 2021 in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, but Trump said this past week on his social media site that the call was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”

Asked for reaction to the suggestion that he deserves execution, Milley told Norah O’Donnell of “60 Minutes” that he wouldn’t “comment directly on those, those things. But I can tell you that this military, this soldier, me, will never turn our back on that Constitution.”

Kelly’s statement to CNN comes days after former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson sat down with CNN in an interview promoting her new book, “Enough,” and warned the public that “Donald Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”

“Enough,” interestingly, contains a scene in which Hutchinson and then-White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin push back against Goldberg’s 2020 story. Griffin issued a statement to The Atlantic after that story posted denying the report.

Reached for comment over the weekend, Griffin said, “Despite publicly praising the military and claiming to be the most pro-military president, there’s a demonstrable record of Trump bashing the most decorated service members in our country, from Gen. Mattis to Kelly to Milley, to criticizing the wounded or deceased like John McCain. Donald Trump will fundamentally never understand service the way those who have actually served in uniform will, and it’s one of the countless reasons he’s unfit to be commander in chief.”

No other presidential candidate in history has had so many detractors from his inner circle. His former secretary of defense, Mark Esper, told CNN in November 2022, “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, told CBS in June that “he is a consummate narcissist. And he constantly engages in reckless conduct. … He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. Our country can’t, you know, can’t be a therapy session for you know, a troubled man like this.”

CNN’s Kristen Holmes contributed to this story.

Biden says there’s ‘not much time’ to keep aid flowing to Ukraine and Congress must ‘stop the games’

Associated Press

Biden says there’s ‘not much time’ to keep aid flowing to Ukraine and Congress must ‘stop the games’

Kevin Freking and Colleen Long – October 1, 2023

President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Sunday, Oct. 1, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Sunday that American aid to Ukraine will keep flowing for now as he sought to reassure allies of continued U.S. financial support for the war effort. But time is running out, the president said in a warning to Congress.

“We cannot under any circumstances allow America’s support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” Biden said in remarks from the Roosevelt Room after Congress averted a government shutdown by passing a short-term funding package late Saturday that dropped assistance for Ukraine in the battle against Russia.

“We have time, not much time, and there’s an overwhelming sense of urgency,” he said, noting that the funding bill lasts only until mid-November. Biden urged Congress to negotiate an aid package as soon as possible.

“The vast majority of both parties — Democrats and Republicans, Senate and House — support helping Ukraine and the brutal aggression that is being thrust upon them by Russia,” Biden said. “Stop playing games, get this done.’’

But many lawmakers acknowledge that winning approval for Ukraine assistance in Congress is growing more difficult as the war grinds on. Republican resistance to the aid has been gaining momentum and the next steps are ahead, given the resistance from the hard-right flank.

While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has begun a process to potentially consider legislation providing additional Ukraine aid, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., faces a more difficult task in keeping the commitment he made over the objections of nearly half of his GOP majority.

He told CBS’ “Face on the Nation” that he supported “being able to make sure Ukraine has the weapons that they need,” but that his priority was security at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I firmly support the border first,” he said. “So we’ve got to find a way that we can do this together.”

By omitting additional Ukraine aid from the measure to keep the government running, McCarthy closed the door on a Senate package that would have funneled $6 billion to Ukraine, roughly one-third of what has been requested by the White House. Both the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved the stopgap measure, with members of both parties abandoning the increased aid in favor of avoiding a costly government shutdown.

Now Biden is working to reassure U.S. allies that more money will be there for Ukraine.

“Look at me,” he said turning his face to the cameras at the White House. “We’re going to get it done. I can’t believe those who voted for supporting Ukraine — overwhelming majority in the House and Senate, Democrat and Republican — will for pure political reasons let more people die needlessly in Ukraine.”

Foreign allies, though, were concerned. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Sunday from Kyiv that he believed it wouldn’t be the last word, but he noted the EU’s continued substantial financial support for Ukraine and a new proposal on the table.

“I have a hope that this will not be definitive decision and Ukraine will continue having the support of the U.S.,” he said.

The latest actions in Congress signal a gradual shift in the unwavering support that the United States has so far pledged Ukraine in its fight against Russia, and it is one of the clearest examples yet of the Republican Party’s movement toward a more isolationist stance. The exclusion of the money for Ukraine came little more than a week after lawmakers met in the Capitol with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He sought to assure them that his military was winning the war, but stressed that additional assistance would be crucial.

After that visit, Schumer said that one sentence summed up Zelenskyy’s message in his meeting with the Senate: “‘If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war,” Schumer said.

McCarthy, pressured by his right flank, has gone from saying “no blank checks” for Ukraine, with the focus being on accountability, to describing the Senate’s approach as putting “Ukraine in front of America.”

The next funding deadline, which comes during the U.S.-hosted meeting in San Francisco of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders, is likely to become a debate over border funding in exchange for additional Ukraine aid.

This was the scenario that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader who has championed Ukraine aid, was trying to avoid back in summer when he urged the White House team not to tangle the issue in the government shutdown debate, according to people familiar with his previously undisclosed conversations with the administration who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks. Now, all sides are blaming the other for the failure, straining to devise a path forward.

Voting in the House this past week pointed to the potential trouble ahead. Nearly half of House Republicans voted to strip $300 million from a defense spending bill to train Ukrainian soldiers and purchase weapons. The money later was approved separately, but opponents of Ukraine support celebrated their growing numbers.

The U.S. has approved four rounds of aid to Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion, totaling about $113 billion, with some of that money going toward replenishment of U.S. military equipment that was sent to the front lines. In August, Biden called on Congress to provide for an additional $24 billion.

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro and Associated Press writers Stephen Groves and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Susie Blann in London contributed to this report.

Trump’s retribution plan: Becoming America’s first dictator

Salon

Trump’s retribution plan: Becoming America’s first dictator

Chauncey DeVega – September 29, 2023

Donald Trump is a very honest liar.

When Trump says he is going to hurt you he means it. This is one of the primary reasons his political cultists are so loyal to him.

On this, journalist Masha Gessen warns and advises: “Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: Humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.”

In her new book, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson shares how during the Jan. 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol by his followers, Trump was heard chanting “hang” as Mike Pence was fleeing for his life. Cassidy’s account is but one more example of many showing how the disgraced and mentally unwell ex-president likely has what psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank suggests is an erotic relationship to violence.

In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Cassidy issued the following warning about her former boss: “I think that Donald Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”

Confirming Hutchinson’s warnings, in a Sunday post on his Truth Social disinformation platform, Trump again threatened to end freedom of the press and the First Amendment if he returns to power.

They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its “Country Threatening Treason.” Their endless coverage of the now fully debunked SCAM known as Russia, Russia, Russia, and much else, is one big Campaign Contribution to the Radical Left Democrat Party. I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events. Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!

Trump is not exaggerating, or posturing, or just being hyperbolic as too many in the American news media, the country’s political class, and among the general public would like to believe – which at this point is delusional. When Trump calls the news media “the enemy of the people” and invokes the Nazis and their attacks on the “lugenpresse“, he is threatening members of the news media (and public more broadly) with prison – and worse if they dare to oppose him.

At a rally in Iowa last Wednesday, Trump told his followers that he is going to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which is a little-used law that gives the president unilateral power to deport and detain non-citizens who are older than 14 years old. The Alien Enemies Act was last used by President Roosevelt during World War 2 to put Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Trump has also promised to reinstate a ban on travel to America from Muslim countries as well as his regime’s evil “family separation” policy – and presumably the concentration camp system that accompanied it.

Trump is threatening to use the Alien Enemies Act against “drug dealers” and “suspected gang members”. Trump should not be believed: given his past behavior and announced plans to become a dictator he will likely use that law to target his personal and political enemies. As seen in his recent attacks on Gen. Mark Milley, Trump is escalating his fascist threats of violence as part of his plan to become America’s first dictator.

In an interview earlier this month with Hugh Hewitt, Trump summoned the white supremacist conspiracy theory lie that the “Democrats” and “the left” are “importing” black and brown people from “Third World countries” in an attempt to replace “real Americans”, i.e. White “Christians”:

These are corrupt people. These are fascists. These are Marxists. These are communists. These are sick people that are destroying our country. We have millions of people coming in. I’m in New York right now, and I just rode through the streets. I’ve never seen anything like it. New York, I’ve never seen it looking like this. And you have thousands and thousands of people in plain sight that come from foreign countries that most people never even heard of. It’s not just countries adjoining us. It’s foreign countries that many people have never even heard of. They’re coming from all over Africa. They’re coming from areas of the world that nobody can believe, and how far it is away for them to get there. These cartels are making a fortune, and they’re destroying our country, and we’re doing nothing about it. And we have a president that’s incompetent and corrupt.

In his interviews and speeches and other communications, Trump is also continuing to announce his plans to deploy the military to occupy America’s cities (meaning major cities with large populations of nonwhites in “blue” parts of the country), put homeless people in camps, use the Department of Justice to punish and imprison his political rivals (including President Biden), and to criminalize transgendered people.

In all, Trump’s plans are an extension of a decades-long revolutionary project by the “conservative” movement and white right to end multiracial pluralistic democracy and replace it with a Christofascist plutocracy. These plans to end American democracy are detailed in Trump’s Agenda 47 and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

In a 2022 essay at Current, historian John Fea reflected upon the lessons for how to turn the United States into a fascist nation as instructed in the 1938 satirical novel “The School for Dictators”:

1. Encourage anti-intellectualism.
2. Undermine moral standards, especially among lawmakers.
3. Pursue power for power’s sake.
4. Develop a spiritual connection with loyal followers.
5. Rewrite national history.
6. Create political chaos.

Some eight decades later, “The School for Dictators” is a prophetic guidebook for the Trumpocene.

For more than seven years, the American news media has, largely, continued to fail in its responsibilities to defend American democracy against Trumpism and neofascism. In a time of democracy crisis, the news media should be speaking truth to the powerful, shining a light on the threats to democracy and civil society, and helping the public to understand the nature of the challenge and what they should do about it. Instead, the American news media has decided to play referee or alternatively to behave like a traffic cop who does not intervene to stop the crimes he or she is witnessing.

Donald Trump is an objective threat to American democracy and civil society. That is a fact. Instead of stating that fact consistently and plainly, the American news media has decided to be neutral and to create false standards of “fairness” and “balance” and “bothsideism” that reduce these existential dangers to being mere “partisanship” and “polarization” where the Democrats and Republicans, Biden and Trump, those Americans who believe in a real democracy vs the supporters of the MAGA movement and neofascism, are all more or less equivalent.

In all, profits and entertaining and distracting the public matter to the mainstream news media more than telling uncomfortable truths.

In a recent post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, author Stephen Beschloss described such irresponsible behavior by the country’s news media in the following way:

Trump is getting worse, more dangerous, more bent on inciting violence. This is not a presidential candidate; this is a criminal defendant seeking to save his own skin no matter how much damage it causes. The media must stop pretending this is a normal presidential horse race.

At New York magazine, Eric Levitz engages in this bold truth-telling:

In this context, a news outlet can cover Trump’s affronts to democracy. But it can’t quite internalize them. For such a publication to fully behave as though it has a working memory — and a capacity to rationally weigh the significance of disparate pieces of information — would be for it to resemble a partisan rag.
The most salient truth about the 2024 election is that the Republican Party is poised to nominate an authoritarian thug who publishes rationalizations for political violence and promises to abuse presidential authority on a near-daily basis. There is no way for a paper or news channel to appropriately emphasize this reality without sounding like a shrill, dull, Democratic propaganda outlet. So, like the nation writ large, the press comports itself as an amnesiac, or an abusive household committed to keeping up appearances, losing itself in the old routines, in an effortful approximation of normality until it almost forgets what it doesn’t want to know.

Once again, as Masha Gessen warns, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.”

The autocrat – and in the case of Donald Trump, he who wants to be a dictator – is not kidding. Denial, wishcasting, hope peddling, and hiding behind “centrism”, “norms”, “consensus”, “institutions”, “the guardrails”, “tradition”, “American Exceptionalism”, “our leaders”, “the adults in the room”, and other myths and fantasies and failed psychological coping mechanisms will not save you or American democracy from Trump and the Republican fascists’ cruelty and destruction and pain.

Donald Trump’s thrill ride is nearly over — but the media refuses to let go

Salon

Donald Trump’s thrill ride is nearly over — but the media refuses to let go

Brian Karem – September 28, 2023

Donald Trump Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Longtime White House correspondent Brian Karem writes a weekly column for Salon.

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of everything that stands — Jim Morrison

I take no joy in saying this, but we in the press are moral cowards.

Last Friday, former President Donald Trump called for the execution of U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, branding him a traitor. This was because Milley told his Chinese counterparts, toward the end of the Trump administration, that the U.S. was not planning to invade China and start World War III. In other words, Milley reiterated official U.S. policy since the end of World War II, which Trump is apparently unaware that we won. But forgive him: He also seems to think Jeb Bush was president.

A few days later, our actual president, Joe Biden, made history by standing on a picket line with striking UAW members in Michigan.

We in the press didn’t tell you much about that, but we wasted airtime, pixels and ink reporting that Trump calls himself “pro-worker” — though there is no evidence of that to be found anywhere. We also told you that Biden wears tennis shoes. We pretty much ignored Trump’s threat against the chairman of the Joint Chiefs — who Trump himself appointed, by the way. We have also done minimal reporting on the New York judge who imposed the “corporate death penalty” on Trump’s business enterprises this week and may end up confiscating Trump’s property, after issuing a summary judgment that Trump’s companies actively engaged in fraud over many years.

There’s a potential government shutdown coming this weekend, but that took a back seat to an outlier political poll that shows Trump leading Biden by 10 points.

Those still capable of cogent thought may well wonder: When did this country jump the shark?

Dahlia Lithwick, a member of Mary Trump’s “Nerd Avengers,” said on the podcast Wednesday, “We have achieved a point where lawlessness is the goal itself.” So while she may not pinpoint when we jumped, she certainly knows where we landed. This is the end, beautiful friend.

Take a look around. Who would want their children to grow up and become members of Congress? Bob Menendez, George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Kevin McCarthy . . . the list goes on and on with people we’d abhor if we met them in everyday life. There isn’t one of them I’d invite to a neighborhood barbecue. They are lawless without exception and without care. It’s not just Donald Trump.

They deflect from real issues by bombarding the public with facts taken out of context and outright lies. When that doesn’t work, they resort to bullying. “I’m at the point where, fine, investigate Joe Biden. Investigate Hunter Biden. But also hold Jared Kushner and Donald Trump accountable,” former GOP strategist Kurt Bardella said on the same podcast.

Bardella also said that after this week’s ruling by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, if the press doesn’t “mention fraud every time we mention Trump’s name,” then we’re not doing our job. Mind you, Trump was also labeled as a rapist in civil court, and we rarely mention that either. We routinely ignore his 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions when we talk about his so-called politics, and we seem to have forgotten he’s already been impeached twice. We pretend that his many lies are changes in policy. Anyone who expects the press to responsibly report the reality of Donald Trump at this point may, in fact, be as delusional as Trump.

And Trump is truly delusional. “Brick by brick, Donald Trump is a fantasy. He’s the biggest fraud there is,” political commentator Danielle Moodie told Mary Trump.

Every bit of reporting we do on him should stress that. It’s not like his delusion is a secret. “We in the family knew it,” Mary Trump said, explaining the fraud perpetrated by her uncle — before describing him as the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on America.

Agreed. But don’t count on the press to inform you about any of that. We’re too busy pretending, and entertaining you by treating Trump as if he were a charmer, or a savior.

It isn’t just the press that is filled with cowards. The Republicans in Congress are repugnant criminal cowards. The Democrats are eunuchs and moral cowards. While the Republicans pursue Hunter Biden — and if he’s guilty of something, so be it — the Democrats have not said one word about Jared Kushner, Eric Trump or Donald Trump Jr. There is more than enough evidence to investigate those three for trading White House access for billions in foreign investment. Yet so far, nothing.

The Democrats don’t want to look like they’re gutter-fighting quite as dirty as the GOP, and seem to lack any desire to pursue obvious corruption. Thus it appears to millions of American voters, including many potential voters still on the fence, that the Bidens have the most to hide.

I cannot say it enough. We have two political parties in this country: One has no heart. One has no head.

And the press? We have neither.

So busy are we trying to pretend we’re even-handed that we present propaganda as fact just to look fair. That’s not our job. The moronic desire to be “objective” blinds us from our true mission: providing vetted facts.

Exactly three years ago, I asked a simple question of Trump in the White House briefing room: Would he accept a peaceful transfer of power? Three years and 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions later, we know the answer. He continues to deny that he lost the 2020 election. He continues to obfuscate, confuse, lie and cheat. We continue to let him get away with it.

When he said to me in the White House briefing room that if we stopped counting ballots at the moment of his choosing “there would be no change” in power, that should have been enough. Hell, when he made fun of a reporter with a disability, that should have been enough. When he made fun of veterans or called dead Marines “suckers,” that should have been enough. It wasn’t. It’s never enough, and we never doggedly pursue the facts.

Lithwick said that Trump has never been caught. I respectfully disagree: He is always getting caught in his own lies. We just allow him to go free without forcing him to take responsibility for his actions.

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane — Jim Morrison

The rest of the insane clown posse of children in the GOP got together Wednesday night for their latest attempt to stop Trump — who won’t attend a debate because he’s scared s**tless. How deeply disturbing it must be to be running against Trump as a member of the Republican party.

Not only do you have to run against a seditious criminal fool, but you have to do so in an environment where he has risen far above the other candidates who, while guilty of a great deal of stupidity, are not facing 91 felony charges. That alone should give them a leg up.

Nope. And they continued to support their near-certain standard-bearer on Wednesday night, even as they tried to run against him. Sure, there was slightly more negative treatment of him from some, like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. But in the end, the also-rans lived up to their name.

If you want to defend Trump, go ahead. Defend a man who is a fraud, a rapist and an insurrectionist. He has been impeached twice and indicted in four different jurisdictions on 91 felony charges. Don’t forget he also kept classified information in his bathroom and refused to return it when asked. Defend all of that. Defend his criminality by using false equivalency and “whataboutism.” Defend it all with aplomb and own it.

I won’t. I was in Trump’s White House every day of that administration. If you weren’t, then you can stick your opinions someplace where ignorance and information are equal, like the nether regions of Trump’s mind.

Donald Trump is a menace. That’s not “politics.” That’s just a fact.

He is facing charges because he’s a dangerous would-be despot. There is no evidence any part of the electoral process was hijacked — except for the ballot boxes he tried to steal and the witnesses he desperately tried to intimidate.

Donald Trump is a traitor, a moron and a goon. If you believe he’s the second coming, mind your Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

The Biden White House and the Democrats have no heart for the fight they face, and no head for it either. In an attempt to avoid getting their hands dirty, they’re allowing the country to bathe in Trump’s filth without responding to it. We heard a rare exception from Biden this week in San Francisco when he said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy this democracy.”

White House spokesman Andrew Base backed that up by saying that “to abuse presidential power and violate the constitutional rights of reporters would be an outrageous attack on our democracy and the rule of law.”

We need more of that and a lot less of people in my profession giving false equivalency between Trump and his GOP competitors, much less the current president. If this is the end, then let it be Trump’s end — not our country’s.

At the end of the day, will some of my fellow journalists grow a pair? We make decisions every day based on money and audience share, not journalism. Trump went on “Meet the Press” because he’s good for ratings. We cover him as if he were equal to Biden for the same reason.

I encourage my professional comrades to consider this: There are millions of people who will tune into the facts if we consistently deliver them. Facts are the true coin of our realm. Ratings could be had if we did our job the way we’re supposed to. There is a market for solid reporting.

Here are some facts: Donald Trump is despotic and deranged. His politics are nothing but grift. His life is about fleecing others. We should preface every mention of him by stating that he’s been indicted in four jurisdictions for 91 felonies. He’s been labeled a rapist and a business cheat in civil court and he was impeached twice.

Report that every single day. Don’t tell me he’s “pro-worker.” He’s only pro-Trump.

Late on Wednesday evening, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan told Trump that she won’t recuse herself in his federal election interference case. That news, along with the New York summary judgment that could force Trump to forfeit all his real estate holdings in and around his hometown, offer the latest signs that Donald Trump’s prominence on the world stage is ending. He’s had a good run to ruin, and has never had to clean up any of his many expensive messes.

If he’d looked at the ticket he swindled to get on this ride, he might have seen that the bill comes due when the ride ends. It’s a bitch being held accountable. Just ask your average crossroads demon.

For Trump, the accountability ride has begun, and it promises to get much darker for him than the thrill ride that preceded it.

On that ride, anything goes and he always got what he wanted, no matter what.

But guess what? This is the end of that ride.

The West is the best
Get here and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is calling us — Jim Morrison

Union Workers Who Support Trump Are Delusional Morons

Jalopnik

Union Workers Who Support Trump Are Delusional Morons

Collin Woodard – September 28, 2023

Instead of attending last night’s debate over which unpopular loser would make a better vice presidential candidate, Donald Trump decided instead to speak at Drake Enterprises, a small parts supplier in Michigan’s Clinton Township that is notably not unionized. Somehow, that got spun into a few stories and posts about Trump speaking to union members, which is only true in the sense that some people at the event claimed to be union members. We have no real reason to doubt them, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a delusional moron if you think Trump is in any way pro-union.

Now, it’s not surprising that some UAW members are also Trump voters. His support among voters without college degrees is scarily high, and you can probably find a few MAGA chuds in pretty much any industry. It would also be understandable if they focused on how excited they were for Trump to hurt the people they hate, which is basically his whole schtick. Yeah, he’ll probably gut worker protections, make it harder for workers to unionize and make it easier for the rich to continue getting richer, but you can also guarantee that if he’s elected again, he’ll make life hell for queer people, women and racial minorities, which is what bigots care about most.

To anyone with basic reading comprehension skills, it’s clear that Trump is anti-worker and anti-union. And a lot of Republicans love that, especially business owners. But if you think for a second that Trump actually supports the UAW or unions in general, you’re a delusional moron. The only unions Trump is ever going to help out are police unions. But hey, at least he’ll probably hurt the people that UAW Trump supporters hate even more.

3 reasons the 2024 election will be very different from 2020

Yahoo! News

3 reasons the 2024 election will be very different from 2020

Andrew Romano, West Coast Correspondent – September 27, 2023

Two photos show Donald Trump and Joe Biden speaking. — Donald Trump and Joe Biden. (Artie Walker Jr./AP, Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

With every passing poll, it looks more and more likely that the 2024 presidential general election will star the same two protagonists as 2020: President Biden and former President Donald Trump.

In the Republican primary, Trump now leads his nearest rival by 46 percentage points, according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov survey. On the Democratic side, Biden is ahead by 61.

History says that such leads tend to be insurmountable.

Yet even if America ends up with a Biden-Trump rematch, that doesn’t mean November 2024 will be a rerun of November 2020.

In part that’s because Trump and Biden have changed, with the former now facing four criminal trials and the latter fending off questions about his advanced age.

But it’s also because key electoral dynamics have been changing as well.

The map

The Electoral College has long favored Republicans, and that advantage has grown in recent elections. Both Trump and George W. Bush were able to win the presidency while losing the popular vote because they fared far better in the pivotal battleground states than they did nationwide.

But a recent New York Times analysis notes that the GOP’s Electoral College edge might be fading.

The main reason is that Trump has been improving his standing among nonwhite voters at the same time Biden has been holding his ground among white voters (especially college graduates).

Nonwhite voters are generally underrepresented in critical battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and overrepresented in solidly blue states like California and New York. As a result, “Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters nationwide would tend to do more to improve his standing in the national vote than in the battleground states,” as the Times put it. Trump flipping a voter in Democratic Oregon is worth less than Biden flipping a voter in purple Pennsylvania.

Voters pass a sign reading: Voter entrance. — Voters outside a polling site in Warwick, R.I., on Nov. 7, 2022. (David Goldman/AP) (AP)

Recent special-election outcomes in swing states like Wisconsin and New Hampshire reflect this emerging shift. So far in this year’s special elections, Democrats have been performing better than expected by an average of 11 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight.

That doesn’t mean Biden is heading for a blowout in 2024. In fact, current polling suggests a closer race than last time, when Biden won by more than 4 points.

But it may mean a shifting landscape. While more diverse battlegrounds such as Arizona, Georgia and Nevada are likely to retain their nail-biter status, the whiter swing states across the Northeast and Upper Midwest could become harder for Trump to win — and a state like North Carolina (which Biden lost by just 1.35% in 2020, and where Republicans face brewing abortion-ban backlash) could play a bigger role than ever before.

The electorate

The nominees might not be different in 2024, but the electorate certainly will be. According to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, 1 in 5 eligible voters will now be members of Gen Z, born in the late 1990s or after.

Compared to their older counterparts — two and a half million of whom die each year — that figure represents a net gain of 52 million potential Gen Z voters since 2016.

It also represents a potential advantage for Biden in a rematch with Trump. It’s not that Gen Z voters are loyal to the elderly president (or to any politician or party, for that matter). But 48% of them identify as people of color (compared to baby boomers, who are 72% white), and they’re more likely to be highly educated, to support LGBTQ rights and to list racism among their greatest concerns than the generations that preceded them.

Driven less, then, by party or personality than by “strong passion on one or more issues” — such as climate change or abortion access — young people in recent years have “vote[d] more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age,” according to Lake.

Although still voting at much lower rates than older people, they’ve also turned out to vote in greater numbers than their forebears. As Lake writes, “average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.”

The third-party spoilers

A third-party candidate ran in 2020: Libertarian Jo Jorgensen. But her candidacy barely registered, attracting just 1.2% of the vote. The Green Party’s Howie Hawkins did even worse (0.26%).

The possibility of a spoiler could be a lot higher this cycle, however.

For one thing, the left-wing Green Party is running a far more prominent candidate in Cornel West, the charismatic Princeton philosophy professor.

Cornel West points into the air as he speaks into a microphone. — Scholar and activist Cornel West. (Damian Dovarganes/AP) (AP)

Meanwhile, the centrist group known as No Labels is also barreling ahead with a controversial plan to field a third-party “unity” ticket in 2024 — one Republican, one Democrat. Two politicians with ties to the group, former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican from Maryland, and Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, have already expressed interest in teaming up.

No Labels has said it has until March 2024 to decide whether to get into the race — and that it will announce its candidates no later than April 15, 2024, ahead of the group’s own convention in Dallas.

In the meantime, the group is amassing $70 million — from donors it has repeatedly refused to disclose — to purchase its own presidential ballot line in all 50 states. In 34 of those states, No Labels can hold a spot on the 2024 ballot for a potential third-party ticket by collecting and submitting a certain number of signatures. The group has already cleared that bar in Arizona, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon, and it says it’s “on track” to add another 24 states “by year’s end” (including battlegrounds such as Florida, North Carolina and Nevada). Elsewhere, it’s up to the candidates themselves — if any end up materializing — to secure their own ballot access.

Democrats fear that No Labels would siphon anti-Trump voters away from Biden — and help Trump win back the White House.