MAGA Mayoral Candidate Seemingly Promotes White Nationalists in News Release
Josh Fiallo – October 4, 2023
Office of Alderman Gabrielle Hanson
Gabrielle Hanson, the MAGA-loving mayoral candidate who’s become embroiled in controversy after controversy this year, has done it again—this time inserting screenshots of messages from a known white nationalist group into her own news release.
Hanson, who’s vying to become the mayor of Franklin, Tennessee, shared the messages in an attempt to prove that the Tennessee Active Club—a recognized hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—weren’t invited to provide security for her outside a mayoral forum on Monday. She claimed they instead showed up and acted on their own.
But Hanson never condemned the neo-Nazis in her news release, nor did she ask them to not show up at future forums and events. Instead, she embedded three Telegram messages to a news release that did more to promote the hate group than it did to denounce it.
The posts claimed the current Franklin mayor, Ken Moore, has connections to “antifa”—a blanket term for a loosely-affiliated network of anti-fascist groups that have battled right-wing demonstrators at various public gatherings over the past few years—and that the group of white nationalists showed up to provide security for community members.
“Our group is not backing any political entity but is protecting the public from Antifa,” the first message said. “Remember there is no political solution.”
The other messages emphasized that the group showed up “for free at our own expense” and that they’ll continue to pop up at municipal gatherings until Franklin—a wealthy suburb of Nashville that’s famously home to scores of country musicians and their families—is free of antifa.
Hanson emphasized in her release that she’s never been associated with a neo-Nazi group. She also took a shot at the local TV news reporter Phil Williams—who’s been a thorn in Hanson’s side—by claiming he published a “baseless hit piece” for pointing out that white supremacists escorted Hanson and her husband inside Monday’s forum.
Others involved in Franklin politics quickly denounced the Active Club’s presence, including Moore and State Rep. Sam Whitson, but Hanson never did. In a News Channel 5 report, Williams said that masked neo-Nazis told reporters on Monday that they were “just here to protect Gabrielle.”
One of the men working as security detail reportedly identified himself as Sean Kauffmann, who was described by the Stop Antisemitism watchdog group as being a “disturbed neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier with a documented history of violence and a massive cache of firearms.” He was reportedly spotted doing a Nazi salute outside a drag show in Cookeville, Tennessee, earlier this year.
Hanson’s beef with Williams escalated last week. The reporter’s station was the first to reveal on Sept. 27 that Hanson’s husband once rocked an American flag Speedo—and nothing else, save for a gold chain, glasses, and shoes—to a Pride event in Chicago, with Hanson’s blessing. The report exposed her hypocrisy on LGBTQ issues, as she’d earlier that year used her position as a city alderman to try to stop a local Pride festival because she feared it’d bring out drag queens and scantily clad revelers she deemed a threat to “innocent children.”
Later that day, drama broke out at a mayoral forum held inside a ritzy subdivision’s clubhouse, with Hanson-supporting residents getting into a nasty—and briefly physical—spat with Williams as he tried to enter the event with a cameraman.
One Hanson supporter was captured on video taking a swipe at Williams, which prompted a Franklin cop to scold the woman and say, “Stop touching him or you’re going to jail.” After the event, Hanson didn’t apologize for her supporters’ behavior, instead railing against Williams on Facebook and painting him as an agitator. A recording by a journalist at the event also captured Hanson telling someone, “No Channel 5. They have to leave.”
Even prior to last week’s forum, Hanson routinely put herself in the center of drama. She claimed in May that Audrey Hale, the shooter who gunned down six before being killed by cops at The Covenant School, was in a love triangle with staffers there. Cops immediately shot that rumor down as false, but Hanson has still insisted her sources know the truth.
Hanson has also been skewered for downplaying lynching and for opposing the addition of “racial terror” markers in Franklin. She was also criticized for bizarrely threatening to retaliate against the local airport for supporting a Juneteenth festival, and it was revealed in September that she was arrested in college for promoting prostitution—charges she claimed publicly amounted to a simple misdemeanor, though Williams confirmed last week that they were actually felony charges.
Whether Hanson’s laundry list of controversies will hurt her at the polls will be known soon, as Franklin’s mayoral election is slated to be held on Oct. 24.
Treasury’s Yellen says US overdependent on China for critical supply chains
Reuters – October 3, 2023
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Tuesday the United States has become overly dependent on China for critical supply chains, particularly in clean energy products and needs to broaden out sources of supply.
Yellen, speaking at a Fortune CEO event in Washington, repeated her longstanding view that the United States does not want to decouple economically from China.
She said that she has not been “a strong believer” in industrial policy, but that the United States had stood by for too long while other countries built up semiconductor industries with massive subsidies.
The U.S. would face national security concerns without a robust semiconductor sector of its own, she said, adding that last year’s Chips and Science Act will help reverse that trend.
“We’re fooling ourselves if we think that abandoning, for all practical purposes, semiconductor manufacturing, is a smart strategy for the United States,” Yellen said.
(Reporting by David Lawder and Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Deepa Babington)
The unsung hero behind Donald Trump’s crushing fraud case: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Amanda Marcotte – October 3, 2023
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images
The main hero of the Donald Trump fraud trial that kicked off Monday is, of course, Letitia James. New York’s attorney general has worked tirelessly for years on investigating Trump’s decades of criminal and corrupt behavior, resulting in a $250 million lawsuit accusing Trump and his two grown sons of running a fraudulent business. Her case is so airtight, in fact, that New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled Trump liable for fraud from the bench, rather than waste a jury’s time figuring out what was indisputable from the evidence. The ensuing trial — which drew Trump himself into the Manhattan courtroom this week — is entirely about how serious the penalities will be.
There are weeks, maybe months to go before we learn how much Trump will have to pay for defrauding investors, banks and insurance companies over several decades. So we’ll have to wait a bit for James to get her virtual ticker-tape parade for kicking the most hated man in New York real estate out of town. In the meantime, however, there’s another well-known New York City politician who is owed a debt of gratitude for bringing some accountability to Trump’s gold-painted front door: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In our era of 24/7 media onslaught, four years can seem like like four lifetimes, so it’s easy to forget that when Ocasio-Cortez arrived in Congress in January 2019, there was a lot of curiosity and outright skepticism about her among the Beltway press. She’d gotten there in improbable fashion, winning a 2018 primary against Rep. Joe Crowley — a power broker in Queens who chaired the House Democratic caucus and was seen as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi. Before that, Ocasio-Cortez had been working as a bartender in a Manhattan taco joint. So the media was watching eagerly to see whether she’d rise to the occasion or fall flat on her face.
Ocasio-Cortez’s first big test came in February 2019, when Trump’s former personal attorney and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee. Cohen was about to go to prison for a campaign finance crime committed at Trump’s behest, and told a genuinely moving story of crime and betrayal. But most of the Democrats on the committee whiffed this opportunity to ask questions of a guy who had been nestled within the Trump gang for years. Instead, they devoted their time to grandstanding for the cameras, rather than learning any new information about Trump’s illegal dealings.
Except, of course, for the young congresswoman from a working-class, multiracial district in Queens and the Bronx. Much to the surprise and delight of mainstream journalists, Ocasio-Cortez was all business. She showed up with a long list of questions about how much Cohen knew about Trump’s business dealings and whether the man currently in the White House had spent his previous career defrauding creditors and investors. Cohen’s answer: Trump was criming all the time. The transcript is worth re-reading and relishing:
Ocasio-Cortez: To your knowledge, did the president ever provide inflated assets to an insurance company?
Cohen: Yes.
Ocasio-Cortez: Who else knows that the president did this?
Cohen: Allen Weisselberg, Ron Lieberman and Matthew Calamari.
Ocasio-Cortez: And where would the committee find more information on this? Do you think we need to review his financial statements and his tax returns in order to compare them?
Cohen: Yes, and you would find it at the Trump Org.
That line of questioning, in which Cohen confirmed that Trump routinely manipulated numbers to evade taxes while defrauding banks and insurance companies, was the first step on the long road to Trump making a stink-face in court on Monday morning. New York state regulators started to sniff around Trump’s business. James had already been dealing with a smaller case involving Trump’s charitable foundation, but Cohen’s testimony opened the door to a much bigger investigation.
Three years later, James came out with the stunning — and largely irrefutable — accusations she’s presenting in court this week: Trump’s wealth is built on a sandcastle of lies. He doubles, triples or quadruples the valuations of his assets in order to get loans from creditors, and drastically undervalues them to evade taxes. With this shell game, the four-times-indicted ex-president lives like a rich man despite his proven inability to make much money from his business ventures. Everything Cohen said before that committee has pretty much proven true, and only AOC even thought to ask him about it.
The near-certainty that Trump’s allegedly enormous wealth is an illusion has already been documented in reporting on his tax documents showing that he is deep in debt — perhaps as much $1 billion — even though inherited nearly half a billion from his father and earned another $427 million from his reality-TV star turn on “The Apprentice.” All available evidence suggests Trump blew through that money and kept digging, creating a money pit so enormous that banks likely had given up hope of seeing any of it repaid. Yet Trump has kept up the illusion of immense wealth with his private jets and entourages, all paid for through dozens of opaque shell companies — and, as James’ evidence suggests, through massive fraud.
He might have gotten away with it, too, if not for that nosy congresswoman from the outer boroughs. I’m a little surprised that almost no one seems to remember the crucial role Ocasio-Cortez played in this. At the time of the hearing, after all, she got an avalanche of good coverage for her showing, especially from journalists who were sick of listening to politicians bloviate rather than perform their constitutional duties of legislative oversight. Her willingness to do her actual job, however, didn’t just make her look good by comparison. It got a very big ball rolling that could eventually demollish Trump’s “business” in New York.
One reason AOC’s role has been forgotten, I suspect, is that the Beltway press tends to think of “progressives” as entirely distinct from the people who really want to see Trump go to jail. Turn on MSNBC or CNN, after all, and the people talking on the Trump crime-and-punishment beat are often centrist Democrats and never-Trump Republicans, your Claire McCaskills and George Conways and the like. Progressive Democrats are usually called upon to talk about policy issues: health care, climate change, jobs programs and so on. So there’s this unspoken assumption that progressives don’t much care about corruption and accountability.
In fact, there’s substantial evidence that progressives may put an even higher value on opposing corruption than their more moderate colleagues. For instance, progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania were among the first to call for the resignation of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., after his recent indictment on bribery and corruption charges. This isn’t just about political progressives also being people of conscience. I think they understand how intertwined corruption and authoritarian politics are, and understand you can’t fight one without fighting the other.
Authoritarians like Trump gain power by exploiting public cynicism. The more that voters believe that all politicians cheat the system, the more decent citizens will give up engaging meaningfully in politics at all. Eventually, the only people left in politics are the ones with no vision of a better world beyond a bitter desire to stick it to racial minorities, LGBTQ people and women. Getting people to believe in equal justice and functional government is a necessary prerequisite if folks like Fetterman and Ocasio-Cortez are to make any progress on the social and economic issues that matter most to them.
It makes sense that AOC opened the door for the massive lawsuit that may bring Donald Trump’s business empire crashing down. Maybe the main reason she’s not taking more credit for that is that in the here and now she’s busy trying to expose the corruption of House Republicans.
“Crooked as a barrel of fish hooks”: Whistleblower accuses Sarah Huckabee Sanders of ethics scandal
Gabriella Ferrigine – October 2, 2023
Sarah Huckabee Sanders Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
The lawyer for an anonymous whistleblower has renewed his client’s claim that Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders altered and withheld public records in connection to her office’s spending habits. Attorney Tom Mars, in a letter sent to state Sen. Jimmy Hickey, provided client testimony and supporting documents for a request for a legislative audit. Hickey last month asked the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee to investigate the purchase of a $19,000 lectern by Sanders’ office. He also asked the committee to scrutinize the “retroactive shielding of several government records after Sanders signed additional Freedom of Information Act exemptions into law this month after a special legislative session,” according to The Arkansas Advocate. “I have seen a copy of the letter you sent to Sen. Wallace and Rep. Gazaway, Chairpersons of the Legislative Joint Audit Committee,” Mars wrote, “requesting an audit of the following matters: (1) the purchase of a podium or lectern from Beckett Events LLC for the use of the Governor’s Office; and (2) all matters, involving the Governor or the Governor’s Office, made confidential by Section 4(a) of Act 7 of the First Extraordinary Session of 2023.”
“Does item (2) in your request encompass any documents that were: (a) altered by the Governor’s Office before being produced in response to a request for copies of public records made pursuant to the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) and (b) non-exempt documents that were knowingly withheld from production under the FOIA at the direction of the Governor’s office?” The letter adds that Mars’ client, a “witness with firsthand knowledge of these matters,” can “provide clear and convincing evidence of those occurrences to the Legislative Joint Audit Committee.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison blasted Sanders and her father, Mike Huckabee — the former governor of Arkansas — over the alleged scandal. “Her daddy is Mike Huckabee,” Harrison wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “She lied every day to the press on behalf of Trump … who on this spinning blue ball called Earth is surprised that Sarah is as crooked as a barrel of fish hooks?!”
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.
Democrats tried to protect the CFPB from politics. The Supreme Court may blow up that plan.
Katy O’Donnell – October 2, 2023
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
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
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.”
We didn’t have a Pure Michigan summer. Pay attention to those climate warning signs.
Ali Abazeed – September 29, 2023
As summer draws to a close, it would be easy to forget the weather patterns and disruptions that took us about as far from a Pure Michigan summer as you can get. But we’re moving into an uncertain future, and we must pay attention to these warning signs.
Metro Detroit experienced unprecedented air quality alerts this summer, with over 23 days of air quality gauged unhealthy or worse, the first-ever air quality alert for the entire state, our own rash of fires due to unprecedented hot and dry conditions, and, thanks to Canadian wildfire smoke in early June, another air-quality alert first: a warning based on PM2.5, a form of fine particulate matter that wreaks havoc on the respiratory system.
Hospitals across the state reported increased admissions of patients suffering breathing problems due to poor air quality. For a region of the country that already ranks poorly in particle pollution, this summer’s alerts serve as a clarion call for action.
And it wasn’t just poor air quality. We’ve witnessed increases in extreme flooding, extreme heat, tornadoes and high winds, just this summer. If left unchecked, we are looking at scenarios that will lead to profound environmental degradation — and this for a state deemed a potential “climate haven” for its ability to weather the even more destructive effects of climate change.
Beyond the ‘hottest summer ever’: How climate extremes impact us
Flooding and erosion will likely disrupt Michigan’s precious freshwater systems, and could contribute to harmful algal blooms that damage aquatic life and pose a risk to human health. Just last week, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources added two new invasive species to the state’s watch list, likely the result of alterations in habitat conditions due to climate change. These environmental flags have far-reaching consequences for the region, our state’s social fabric, and public health.
The consequences of climate extremes extend beyond just the environment and health. The stress and uncertainty generated by extreme weather events also corrode our built environment and social square.
Upheaval due to extreme weather is leading to significant changes in the fabric of society. Research shows that climate change is causing “social tipping points”: fast and fundamental changes in human values, behaviors, the nature of relationships, technologies and institutions that are just as intractable and hard to undo as climate change itself.
Constant worry about the next flood or extreme weather event takes a toll on interpersonal relationships, and has a deleterious effect on community bonds. Neighborhood squares, once the bedrock of local culture and interaction, face an existential crisis as people are forced to move, houses are abandoned and the pressures of climate change reshape communities. The ironclad law of climate change is this: Underserved communities and communities closest to the pain will always bear the brunt of displacement, insecurity and devastation due to extreme weather.
This is to say nothing of the already growing political tensions likely to rise due to extreme weather.
Research has repeatedly shown that more extreme weather contributes to many adverse outcomes, including violent crime, political instability and even the collapse of global regimes. Locally, we have diverging views on accepting the science of climate change, let alone addressing its disastrous effects. Politicizing what should be a shared concern for our state will make it harder to enact meaningful change.
Climate change is a public health crisis – and a social challenge
So, what can we do?
First, we must accept that extreme weather is not just an environmental issue, but a public health crisis and a social challenge. A public health approach centers on the health and well-being of communities near and far, but also emphasizes the importance of our built environment and its effect on our health. If our built environment is constantly reconfigured and disrupted by the ensuing floods, droughts, storms, or wildfires, the consequences on our health will continue to be disastrous.
We must adopt and enforce policies that limit emissions and promote sustainable practices now.
It’s important to expand our conception of community, and invest in regional efforts vital to increasing the resilience of communities, like long overdue investments in regional transit.
Downstream communities like Dearborn cannot solve flooding alone — we need cooperation and support from upstream communities to improve resiliency.
Though climate change is often globalized, seen as a concept far removed from our day-to-day, local actions can provide significant outcomes in the short term. For example, research shows that though most climate-related actions save money and provide benefits in the long run, the benefits of emission reductions for improved air quality provide immediate results regarding improved health outcomes, agricultural benefits, medical expenses and economic benefits.
Actions at the local level matter, and there are essential steps you can take now in your own community: Encourage investment in green infrastructure that makes our terrain more resilient to inevitable extreme weather, shift toward renewable energy sources, and educate yourself and others on climate adaptation. Ask your local government whether it has a sustainability plan. When new developments are proposed in your community, make sure those developments move us closer to a green future. Political leaders should incorporate public health concepts and terminology into their climate policies to engage communities that are facing the brunt of the devastation.
The summer of 2023 was a glaring preview of what’s at stake for Michigan’s future. Our health, communities and shared social bonds are on the line.
The time for more decisive action was yesterday.
Ali Abazeed is a Dearborn native, founding director of public health for the City of Dearborn, where is is currently the city’s chief public health officer, and is a faculty member at Wayne State University.
Trump’s retribution plan: Becoming America’s first dictator
Chauncey DeVega – September 29, 2023
Donald Trump Sean Rayford/Getty Images
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 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.”
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.
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.
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
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
