Politics, Everyday, All day... morning, noon and night....II

[FIGJAM]

The hearings are renewing my belief that the adults are still in charge of our government.

The republicans that I meet, and the ones in my family sound closer to the diehard Trumpests than the stalwart people of principal giving testimony in the hearings.

I don't know if all the criminals will wind up where they belong, but we'll see.

Every time I hear Trump speak, he's scrambling so hard to say the thing that helps his agenda that he can't speak in complete
sentences.

And still 75% of republican voters belief the lies.

[Simon of the Playa]

nearly 60% of americans now believe mr. trump should be criminally charged.

thats up from 41% in january.


the 37% of americans who vote republican need to finally admit they got suckered by the greatest con man ever.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 678110001/

[FIGJAM]

Disregard my previous post.

They just reversed roe v wade.

Maybe it's just two steps forward, one step back.....

TO THE 50s!!!!! :roll:

[Simon of the Playa]

There is a term for
living creatures
who are not
permitted to control
their own
reproduction. That
term is "livestock."

[Simon of the Playa]

[Simon of the Playa]

let's try again...


https://www.instagram.com/tv/CfPU6spDjOW/

[The Rod]

you know who else doesn't have the power to decide whether or not to give birth?

livestock.

[Simon of the Playa]

Barrett: Lied Under Oath

Kavanaugh: Lied Under Oath

Gorsuch : Lied Under Oath

Thomas : Involved in a Coup


impeach them all.

[some seeing eye]

This is a piece from the NYT by a congressional staffer

""
In the room

The House Jan. 6 committee’s hearings have revealed unseen footage, unheard testimony and new details about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They’ve also stirred painful memories for those who experienced the attack firsthand. I asked my colleague Emily Cochrane, who’s covered Congress since 2018 and was inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, about how the hearings have landed.

How did Jan. 6 change Capitol Hill?

The Capitol is like a little city. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lawmaker, a staff member, a police officer, a reporter, someone who works in the cafeteria or the person who delivers the mail: You end up spending a good portion of your life there. And to see it breached in that manner, to see this mob come in, to see the violence, to see them disrespect a place you’ve come to respect, is difficult. A lot of people are wrestling with that as these hearings go on, publicly and privately.

How do these hearings differ from others you’ve covered?

Obviously, the substance is extraordinary. But they’re also produced in a way that congressional hearings normally aren’t: the videos, the tightly worded statements, the teasers of what’s to come. They’re structured like television episodes.

They also present much more of a seamless narrative because the Republicans aren’t participating, with the exception of two handpicked by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most congressional hearings are so polarized, with questions designed to tease out political points rather than information. Here, there’s none of that partisan bickering. They’re just dropping new information and speeding right along.

We’ve all seen big congressional hearings on TV. What’s it like to be in the room?

The hearings are generally somber. The videos of the attack were hard to watch during the first hearing, particularly for people who were in the House chamber on Jan. 6. The hearing I attended, about the behind-the-scenes efforts to tell Trump he’d lost the election, wasn’t as visceral, but when Liz Cheney made the reference to “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani,” there was some chuckling.

During breaks, particularly after emotional testimony, people who are in the back watching often make a point of thanking the witnesses and checking in with each other.

Who’s been there watching?

Lawmakers, police officers, aides, people who want to witness history, essentially, or who experienced the riot personally. The House chaplain has been there regularly. There’s the “Gallery Group” — they’re Democratic House members who were trapped in the upper gallery of the House chamber during the attack. At least a couple have been at every hearing. Their presence is a reminder of how personal this is.

You hid with them during the attack, right?

I was on the opposite side of the chamber. At one point, I was behind a chair with other reporters because they had stopped the evacuation, and I wasn’t sure if the chamber was going to be breached. We could see rioters on the other side of the door.

Eventually, Capitol Police resumed the evacuation. I’m still not sure why — I think they felt they had stopped enough rioters for lawmakers to leave safely — but all of a sudden, the people in front of me started moving again, climbing over chairs and banisters, so I did the same.

We were eventually able to leave the chamber, and, as we did, we merged into one evacuation line with the lawmakers across from us.

It must be difficult to watch videos and hear testimony that dredge up memories of the attack.

The hearings are bringing many people back to the rawness of the day. People have found coping mechanisms — they’ve talked to therapists, they’ve checked in with others. The Gallery Group lawmakers stay in touch. An informal Capitol Hill support group started meeting more frequently. I’ve had people ask me how I’m doing, and I’ve reached out to a couple others. These aren’t the easiest hearings to cover, but then you compartmentalize and do your job.

You and your colleagues have written about how the attack prompted a spike in threats against lawmakers, led some congressional staffers to quit and caused others to push for a union. How did it bring about these big changes?

Capitol Hill has never been an easy place to work. It’s unpredictable. The hours are long. The workload is intense. When you layer on the pandemic, the mad dash to get legislation through and everything that happened on the 6th, they all put the jobs in perspective for lawmakers and their aides. For them, there are now questions like, do you want to stay on Capitol Hill where you had this traumatic experience? Can you work with the Republicans in Congress who have downplayed what happened that day?

Congressional staffers keep Capitol Hill running. When someone picks up a phone to threaten a lawmaker, the person on the other end is not the lawmaker. It’s a staff member, probably a junior staff member, sitting on the phone, listening to threats and reporting them to police. It’s not a part of the job you sign up for. Unionization has been batted around for a while, but Jan. 6 helped push it to the forefront. People are more open to it.

""

[Simon of the Playa]

"what's up, scumbag?"


https://www.thedailybeast.com/rudy-giul ... upermarket

[Simon of the Playa]

“There is new evidence that is coming to [the committee’s] attention on an almost daily basis," said a source familiar with the hearing. The committee was “just planning on working this week in preparation for the final two hearings, so this is unplanned. You can deduce from that that there will be a lot of significance to the hearing.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congre ... -rcna35509

[Simon of the Playa]

The FBI seized the phone of former President Donald Trump's election attorney John Eastman last week, according to a new court filing from the lawyer.

Eastman disclosed the search and seizure in federal court in a lawsuit that he filed in New Mexico on Monday, calling it improper.
About six federal investigators approached the right-wing lawyer in New Mexico when he was exiting a restaurant after dinner with his wife and a friend, according to the court filings. Agents were able to get access to Eastman's email accounts on his iPhone 12 Pro, the filings said.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/27/politics ... index.html

[some seeing eye]

The supreme court has decided to take a case on the fringe legal theory "independent state legislature theory," Moore v. Harper.

It says each state legislature can do whatever the fuck it wants in federal elections no matter what the state constitution or the state supreme court say.

It was the legal theory promoted by Gini Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, to attempt to overturn the presidential election results in Arizona on behalf of Trump.

It is believed there are 4 votes on the court for institutionalizing the theory across 50 states. This is the Trump Court at work. It is the continuing coup against democracy.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/11068668 ... n-law-case

[Dr. Pyro]

Adam Schiff testified no less than nine times before Congress that he had written, irrefutable proof that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election and would produce it when needed. We know that is not only not true, but about as bald-faced lie imaginable. Where are the people demanding his impeachment? And no, I don't want to see Trump anywhere near the White House ever again.

[Miura-7]

The Russian Ukraine war is a bigger problem then Donald Chump. I’ve been binging on this catastrophe for awhile, and frankly it’s the most depressing shit I’ve followed in forever. My heart goes out to all the civilians caught in the crossfire, and all the soldiers forced to fight this $hitstorm. A few greedy scumbags need to be hung out to dry yesterday!!!

[Simon of the Playa]

"If we nominate
Trump, we will
get destroyed
... and we
will deserve it."
- Lindsey Graham, 2016.

[Simon of the Playa]

i want you to watch every second of this video.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CfhPDohD1_i/

[M F Bonz]

i want you to watch every second of this video.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CfhPDohD1_i/

That’s fucking disgusting.

[Miura-7]

Yup! Moronic.

[Simon of the Playa]

Crimo was highly active on forums focusing on violent videos and extremism in the years before the attack. Crimo was also an active participant on a forum that exclusively aggregated videos of murders and violent incidents on the web, last posting in the week before the shooting. On the chat app Discord, Crimo railed against “commies” under his rap name Awake. The Discord channel, titled “SS,” was first discovered by researchers at the website Unicorn Riot, a nonprofit media group that tracks the far right.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/y ... -rcna36753

[Simon of the Playa]

[Simon of the Playa]

"For all but a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew the election was fully legitimate and Donald Trump was a joke. The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn't even funny anymore."

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/11101516 ... ts-motives

[art walsh]

Another political payoff.....

Biden just signed a bill authorizing the partial bailout of union pension fund. For years workers/employers have been paying into union retirement plans. Plans which were mismanaged. Now we taxpayers are bailing out the Biden supported unions - a payoff and hoping for votes.
If I have a financial advisor mismanage my retirement funds will Biden bail me out ? Fat chance !!!! Let the unions solve their own mis-management problem.

[BBadger]

“When we look back, Kevin’s trip to Mar-a-Lago will, I think, turn out to be a key moment,” Cheney told me when we talked again this April. It would, she said, go down as one of the most shameful episodes in one of the country’s most shameful chapters. More than anyone, McCarthy ensured that the Republican Party would remain stuck in its 2020 post-election purgatory, still working to placate America’s neediest man.

The Most Pathetic Men in America
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... on/661508/

[Simon of the Playa]

The Supreme Court has shown in Dobbs and other cases such as New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen that originalism is the only proper method to answer these questions. My own originalist analysis of this issue leads me to conclude that no such right to dinner exists in our legal heritage. Accordingly, I do not think such a right should be recognized now.

https://newrepublic.com/article/167019/ ... ght-dinner

[some seeing eye]

Originalism is completely made up for policy war on people.

Let's get serious. Under originalism let's completely erase corporate personhood overnight and return it to each state to decide.

Thomas and buds: "Oh, we didn't mean that originalism"

[some seeing eye]

Biden brings out the big guns...

"Hospitals that decline to provide abortions in these cases [medical emergency] could have their Medicare provider agreements terminated" Becerra said. Of course many of those states probably think Medicare is a communist plot they can do without.

And https://www.reuters.com/world/us/some-u ... 022-07-11/ may result in destroying the college industrial complex in the backwards states.

[Simon of the Playa]

There are some follow-up stories today from yesterday’s public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive officer of Overstock, who was mentioned in the hearing yesterday as having attended the December 18 meeting in which lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn called for Trump to seize voting machines, will talk with the committee on Friday.

Byrne ran Overstock for twenty years before having to resign in 2019 after admitting to an affair with Maria Butina, an apparent guns rights activist from Russia who ingratiated herself with Republican politicians and who later pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to act as a Russian agent without registering with the Department of Justice. She now sits in the Russian parliament, or Duma, which critics say is a reward from the Kremlin.

Byrne has trafficked in conspiracy theories, and after the 2020 election, he became increasingly convinced that Trump was right when he claimed to have been cheated of victory.

Former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, who now works for CNN, told CNN today that when she told Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that she was resigning after the election to move on as Trump’s term ended, Meadows said to her: “What if I could tell you that we’re actually going to be staying?”

In a different story, CNN reported that the recipient of the phone call Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) called attention to yesterday from Trump to a witness was a White House support staff member who could corroborate the testimony provided by Meadows’s aide Cassidy Hutchinson. This person didn’t usually communicate with Trump and was concerned about the call.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continues to fight his subpoena from a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that wants to hear from him about at least two phone calls he made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to talk about the 2020 election. As of tonight, a judge has stayed the subpoena and on July 20 will hear arguments on whether to reject it.

The editorial board of the Charleston, South Carolina, Post and Courier today ran an editorial titled: “Just testify, Sen[ator] Graham.” It says Graham’s claim that the calls were about election procedures “never made sense.” Now his lawyers say that he was talking about elections to do his job as the chair of the U.S. Judiciary Committee—a top-ranking committee, by the way—which makes even less sense. The board says it doesn’t think Graham did anything illegal, but asserted that it is the duty of every U.S. citizen to “comply with a subpoena to testify.”

“We expect and deserve better from our senator,” it concluded.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? We are hearing now, 18 months after the fact, that our president tried to overturn our democracy, forcing his own will onto unwilling voters. And, at the time, no one in the White House said anything to the public or to our law enforcement officials to stop this deadly attack.

Worse, it appears that a number of our lawmakers were complicit in the attempt to overturn our democracy. The committee has named at least ten representatives who conspired with the president, and another, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), who gave a tour through the Capitol complex on January 5, but there have been hints that others knew something was up as well, and that some might have been helping with the scheme.

There is still the question of which senators and representatives saw a presentation of the 38-page PowerPoint titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” referred to by the committee in mid-December 2021. That anyone went to the trouble of making a 38-page PowerPoint suggests they expected a decent-sized audience.

Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a top aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy called her, angry, when he thought Trump was going to go to the Capitol.

“‘[T]he president just said he’s marching to the Capitol,” McCarthy allegedly told Hutchinson. “You told me this whole week you aren’t coming up here, why would you lie to me?’”

Why had McCarthy been hearing for a week about Trump’s plans with regard to the Capitol?

On January 5, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), who was the president pro tempore of the Senate, the second highest-ranking person in the Senate after the vice president, told reporters about the next day: “Well, first of all, I will be—if the Vice President isn’t there and we don't expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate.” His office immediately clarified that Grassley meant only that he would preside over counting of the Electoral Votes only if Vice President Mike Pence “had to step away during Wednesday’s proceedings,” and that “‘[e]very indication we have is that the vice president will be there.” But considering everything we know now about the plans to get Pence out of the way, Grassley’s comment continues to bother me.

The silence from Republicans over what we have been hearing from the January 6th committee is deafening.

It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that they were willing to permit Trump to overturn the will of the voters—to overturn our democratic form of government—if it meant they could retain power.

We ignore this willingness to destroy our democracy at our peril.

Two days ago, a spokesperson for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán announced that the Conservative Political Action Conference has invited Orbán to give an opening address at their gathering in Dallas, Texas, next month. Trump, who has endorsed Orbán in his recent election, will also be speaking.

America’s self-styled “conservatives” have gotten increasingly close to Orbán, thanks in part to the enthusiasm of Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson for the Hungarian leader. This spring, Carlson broadcast his show from Hungary, which, with fewer than 10 million people, is about the size of Michigan. (It always strikes me as exceedingly odd that the same people who claim to champion America are using this small central European country as a model for the United States.) In April, CPAC met in Hungary, where Orbán gave a long address.

Orbán has eroded democracy in his country, replacing it with what he calls “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” His country still holds nominal elections, but their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.

When he spoke at CPAC in April, Orbán told the attendees that the right wing in Europe and the United States must fight together to “reconquer” institutions in Brussels and Washington, D.C., before the 2024 election because those “liberals” who currently control them are destroying western civilization.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ly-13-2022

[Simon of the Playa]

fuck these fucking fucks

[Simon of the Playa]

Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, yesterday sent a surprising letter to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and its House counterpart. The letter said that the Department of Homeland Security had notified Cuffari’s office that “many U.S. Secret Service (USSS) text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021, were erased as part of a device-replacement program. The USSS erased those text messages after OIG [Office of Inspector General] requested records of electronic communications from the USSS, as part of our evaluation of events at the Capitol on January 6.” Further, the letter said, DHS personnel had repeatedly refused to produce records without first showing them to attorneys, which had created long delays and confusion over “whether all records had been produced.”

In other words, an inspector general thought the Secret Service had deleted texts from agents on January 5 and 6 after being instructed to produce them. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) chairs both the House Homeland Security committee and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cuffari’s letter sent the information about deleted texts directly to the top.

The Secret Service immediately responded that “the insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false. In fact, the Secret Service has been fully cooperating with the OIG in every respect—whether it be interviews, documents, emails, or texts.”

But this information raises questions about the role of Secret Service members in the events of January 6. Trump blurred the lines between the Secret Service and the presidency when he appointed Secret Service assistant director Anthony Ornato his deputy chief of staff in December 2019. We know Vice President Mike Pence refused to get into a car driven by a Secret Service agent on January 6, apparently concerned that the driver might not follow his instruction, and that President-elect Biden had to be assigned a new Secret Service team out of concerns that the presidential detail was allied with Trump. And last week, the Trump-appointed director of the Secret Service, James Murray, resigned.

The only good news here for Republicans is that the outrage over these deleted (or lost) texts has distracted from the firestorm over the 10-year-old child from Ohio forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion after being raped. That story, reported by the doctor who performed the abortion, was picked up by national news and by President Joe Biden, who asked people to “imagine being that little girl” in a speech about abortion rights.

Ohio’s attorney general Dave Yost told the Fox News Channel that he doubted the story because he had not heard that there had been any report of a rape, although as journalist Magdi Semrau noted on Twitter, sexual assault, especially sexual assault of a child, is rarely reported. Yost later said “there is not a damn scintilla of evidence” that such a thing happened. Right-wing media immediately began to assert that the story was false, and the Indiana attorney general, Todd Rokita, went further, telling Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters that his office would investigate the doctor who provided abortion care to the child, suggesting she had not filed a report on the case as legally required.

Today, law enforcement officers in Columbus, Ohio, arrested a 27-year-old man who confessed to raping the child. In addition, Politico found the required report filed correctly. A lawyer for the doctor released a statement saying the doctor “took every appropriate and proper action in accordance with the law and both her medical and ethical training as a physician. She followed all relevant policies, procedures, and regulations in this case, just as she does every day to provide the best possible care for her patients. She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client.”

When this Supreme Court, packed by former president Trump and the Republican Senators with three new “originalists,” handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision on June 24, 2022, many people observed that the dog had caught the car. Republicans have turned out evangelical voters for years with the promise of overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationally, but the truth is that Roe was popular, and legal abortion hid the many terrible events that led to its legalization in the first place. According to one estimate, in the 1960s there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions annually, which created such a public health crisis that doctors set out to decriminalize abortion and keep that medical issue between a woman and her doctor.

Now, right off the bat of the Dobbs decision, Americans have to grapple with precisely the sort of case that dramatically illustrates why people require abortion rights.

In response, some anti-abortion activists have doubled down on the idea that no abortion is acceptable. Lawyer Jim Bopp, who is the general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, told Megan Messerly and Adam Wren of Politico that under the laws he would like to enact, the 10-year-old victim “would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”

Since few people can stomach the idea of a 10-year-old rape victim forced to bear a child, other anti-abortion activists are suddenly saying that such an abortion is not an abortion at all because it is necessary to save the life of the mother, although many of the new state laws make no such exception. They have also suddenly begun to say that abortion care for an ectopic pregnancy, which is never viable and which poses a deadly threat to the pregnant person, is not an abortion either. In both cases, this is a sudden carve out that is inaccurate: both of these medical procedures are abortion, and both are illegal now in certain states.

President Biden responded to the Dobbs decision with federal rules clarifying that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, doctors in hospitals that use federal money must provide appropriate treatment to patients experiencing ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or other life-threatening conditions, or transfer them to places that will, “irrespective of any state laws or mandates that apply to specific procedures.”

But Republicans are pushing for even greater restrictions over abortion. Today, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who was indicted seven years ago for felony securities fraud but has yet to stand trial, sued the Biden administration over that rule, claiming that it is an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in this country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Meanwhile, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today blocked an attempt by Senate Democrats to pass a law protecting the right of women to cross state lines to get abortion care. Apparently unaware that one of the key hallmarks of an authoritarian state is its refusal to let citizens cross borders, Lankford indicated he was willing to keep pregnant people from crossing state lines. “Does that child in the womb have the right to travel in their future?” Lankford said. “Do they get to live?”

And although the Supreme Court justified the Dobbs decision with the argument that it would simply send the question of abortion back to the states, a federal abortion ban is already on the table. Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) has introduced HR 705, the so-called Heartbeat Protection Act, to make abortion illegal everywhere.

Today, when asked if Democrats would compromise over abortion, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “We’re not going to negotiate a woman’s right to choose.” She added, “Republicans have sometimes said on the floor that Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope. Yes I do, and I think any Pope would agree.”

Pelosi has five children.

That the extremism of those now in charge of the Republican Party might convince voters to crush the party in the midterms is evident in today’s responses to that extremism. On the same day that Trump teased the idea that he might announce that he’s running for president in 2024 before the midterms, a group of conservative intellectuals released a document proving with extensive evidence that the 2020 election was not stolen, Trump lost it.

That document, “Lost, Not Stolen,” destroys the Big Lie but does not call for getting rid of the many new state laws based on that lie, laws that seem designed to cement the rule of Republicans in certain states regardless of the will of the majorities in those states. It also doesn’t discuss the independent state legislature doctrine, which would enable state legislatures to name whatever slate of presidential electors they wished, regardless of the will of the voters, a doctrine that would have given Trump a second term and that the Supreme Court has said it will consider.

It appears that old-line conservatives would like to push Trump offstage, but his role in the January 6 insurrection got more attention today when a police officer from Washington, D.C., corroborated the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’s aide, who said she had heard that Trump attacked a Secret Service agent on January 6.

Trump and his children Don Jr. and Ivanka were scheduled to testify under oath tomorrow in New York City in the New York attorney general’s investigation into the Trump Organization's business practices, but that testimony will be put off because of the death today of Ivana Trump, Trump’s first wife and mother of his three eldest children. Ivana Trump, 73, was found dead at the foot of a stairway. Trump announced her death on his social media network, calling her “a wonderful, beautiful, and amazing woman, who led a great and inspirational life.”

At the bottom of the announcement was a button to donate to Trump’s political action committee.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... ly-14-2022