;)
June 11, 2022
Maggie Haberman & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: "In the first of six planned public hearings, the [January 6] committee presented a detailed case against Mr. Trump and the rioters who stormed the Capitol and delayed the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.... The committee's next hearing is scheduled for Monday, where the panel plans to lay out how Mr. Trump and his allies stoked the 'Big Lie' that the election had been stolen. Two more hearings are scheduled for next week -- one on Wednesday about the attempt at the Justice Department to oust the acting attorney general, and another on Thursday about the pressure campaign on Mr. Pence to block or delay certification of the electoral vote count."
The Hearing as TV Drama. James Poniewozik of the New York Times: "The first night of the congressional Jan. 6 hearings ... was deadly serious reality, offering a panorama and a terrifying close-up of a real nightmare: The attempt, through violence, to effectively end American democracy by overturning the will of the voters and keeping ... Donald J. Trump installed in an office that he lost.... What we saw in this first installment was impressive: a well-crafted, passionate and disciplined two-hour opening act. It made the committee's case in miniature, that the attack on the Capitol was no spontaneous outburst but rather the 'culmination of an attempted coup,' in the words of the committee chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi. And it promised, tantalizingly, to flesh out the larger plot with fine detail and an expansive cast.... The broadcast's structure ... recalled 2022's most ubiquitous TV format: The true-crime and true-scandal limited series." ~~~
~~~ John Koblin of the New York Times: "An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee's investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen. By scheduling a congressional hearing for 8 to 10 p.m., committee members and Democrats were hoping to make the case to the biggest audience possible. ABC, CBS and NBC pre-empted their prime-time programming and went into special-report mode to cover it live.... Viewers who tuned in mostly stuck around for the entire congressional proceeding.... Fox's counterprogramming efforts drew an average audience of three million, which is just about normal."
Dominick Mastrangelo & Rebecca Beitsch of the Hill: "A former top editor at Fox News said on Friday that he has been called to testify next week before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Chris Stirewalt, who was ousted from the network following the 2020 presidential election and is now a political editor at NewsNation, said the committee had requested his testimony during its next hearing on Monday.... Stirewalt was part of the team at Fox News that made the decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night 2020, a move that infuriated former President Trump and his top aides, some of whom reportedly complained directly to Fox leadership about the relatively early race call." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
AP: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol siege ... will hear live testimony on Wednesday from the highest levels of the late-Trump-era Department of Justice == acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen; his top deputy, Richard Donoghue; and Steven Engel, the former head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel -- according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss their appearances."
Trump Blasts Ivanka. Kristen Holmes of CNN: "A day after the House January 6 committee revealed previously unseen video of ... Donald Trump's daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, saying she accepted then-Attorney General Bill Barr's statement that the Justice Department found no fraud sufficient to overturn the election, the former President is responding... 'Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!),' Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: “Pushing back on his daughter's comments was only one way in which Mr. Trump assailed the hearing.... He denied having responded approvingly to the 'Hang Mike Pence!' chants.... 'I NEVER said, or even thought of saying, "Hang Mike Pence,"' Mr. Trump wrote on [his] social media site. 'This is either a made up story by somebody looking to become a star, or FAKE NEWS!'... In another post on the site, Mr. Trump described the committee as a 'totally partisan, POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!' And in two other posts, he attacked Mr. Barr, calling him a 'coward,' 'weak and frightened,' 'stupid' and 'scared stiff of being impeached.'" Haberman points out, the committee did not claim Trump said "Hang Mike Pence!"' rather, he reportedly said Pence 'deserves it.'" MB: So that was a non-denial denial. ~~~
~~~ Marie: According to the WashPo story by Harwell & Oremus, linked next, "On Trump's fledgling Twitter clone, Truth Social, he posted a dozen messages after the hearing, criticizing it for showing 'only negative footage' of the brutal siege." Uh, what exactly would be "positive footage" of a bloody siege of the Capitol?
Drew Harwell & Will Oremus of the Washington Post: "... Donald Trump's supporters scrambled to defend him online in the hours after the Jan. 6 committee's hearings began, seeking to sow doubt about his involvement via the same social media channels that had captured clear evidence linking him to the Capitol assault.... [The response] underscored how the social media landscape has shifted in the 17 months since Trump was suspended by the leading online platforms for his role in fanning the violent attempts to overturn Joe Biden's election as president. For the most part, Trump and some of his most ardent backers were relegated to smaller platforms as they sought to respond.... Trump had used Twitter aggressively to rally his supporters to overturn what he falsely labeled a fraudulent election.... [But] is Truth Social account has about 3 million followers, or less than 4 percent of the 88 million Twitter followers he had before his ban."
Philip Bump of the Washington Post has some thoughts on Fox "News" "coverage" of Thursday's Jan. 6 committee hearing: "The hearing began just as Tucker Carlson's show kicked off, and few people in America have been more energetically engaged than Carlson in casting the Jan. 6 riot as not worthy of discussion. Or as largely innocuous, save for some vandalism. Or maybe it's a government false flag aimed at casting Republicans as racists or something. Rhetorical consistency is not Carlson's strength, but that is happily for him not a limitation for his job." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Betsy Swan of Politico: "In the days before the electoral college certification, then-Vice President Mike Pence's legal team laid out that they found most of the Trump campaign's assertions of election fraud minor or unverifiable according to a previously unseen memo obtained by Politico.... The National Archives and Records Administration provided the memo to the select committee, according to a person familiar with the document. The 10-page memo ... notes that ... alleged procedural violations worried Pence's team, but that the actual accusations of voter fraud were mostly unpersuasive.... Marc Short, Pence's chief of staff at the White House, told Politico that the memo accurately reflects the thinking of the vice president's team." MB: This is the pence team's version of Bill Barr's "bullshit" testimony.
Guardian: "Rudy Giuliani has been hit with ethics charges over baseless claims he made about the 2020 presidential election being stolen while serving as an attorney for Donald Trump. The charges were filed on Friday by the District of Columbia office that polices attorneys for ethical misconduct.The DC office of disciplinary counsel alleges that Giuliani, who is a member of the DC bar, made baseless claims in federal court filings about the results of the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania. The charges were filed with the District of Columbia court of appeals board on professional responsibility."
Ginni Blasts Emails. Emma Brown of the Washington Post: "Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona -- 27 more than previously known -- to set aside Joe Biden's popular vote victory and 'choose' presidential electors, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.... On Nov. 9, she sent identical emails to 20 members of the Arizona House and seven Arizona state senators. That represents more than half of the Republican members of the state legislature at the time. The message, just days after media organizations called the race for Biden in Arizona and nationwide, urged lawmakers to 'stand strong in the face of political and media pressure' and claimed that the responsibility to choose electors was 'yours and yours alone.'... On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden's victory, Thomas emailed 22 House members and one senator. 'Before you choose your state's Electors ... consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don't stand up and lead,' the email said." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: If you read way down the page, you'll find that a pal of Ginni & Clarence's says that the email Ginni sent to Arizona legislators in December was a form letter that "thousands" of people had signed. Maybe so, but Ginni has a law degree & she has that legal expert husband of hers sitting right there in the den watching old 8-track porn movies or whatever. You would think she would know better than to be giving legal advice (and the emails do that) to strangers, especially when that advice is bullocks.
Dan Morse of the Washington Post provides some new details on how Nicholas Roske abandoned his plan to murder Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then turn the gun on himself. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Michael Shear of the New York Times: "President Biden and leaders of Latin American countries signed a new agreement on Friday to confront the consequences of mass migration, making specific numerical pledges to allow more people fleeing political and economic strife to cross their borders. The agreement, called the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, commits the United States to taking 20,000 refugees from Latin America during the next two years, a threefold increase, according to White House officials. Mr. Biden also pledged to increase the number of seasonal worker visas from Central America and Haiti by 11,500." ~~~
~~~ Cleve Wootson & Seung Min Kim of the Washington Post: "President Biden offered his vision for a flourishing democratic Western Hemisphere before dozens of delegations Thursday, but he quickly faced pushback from leaders upset that Biden had excluded a trio of authoritarian regimes from the summit.... John Briceño, the prime minister of Belize, said the summit belongs to 'all of the Americas' and that it was 'inexcusable' that some countries were barred from attending.... 'We definitely would have wished for a different Summit of the Americas. The silence of those who are absent is calling to us,' [Argentine President Alberto] Fernández said, proposing that the host country not exclude nations from future summits.... The question of democracy's future in many ways hung over the conference. While Biden shut out Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, some of the leaders he did invite, such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, have themselves been accused of anti-democratic actions."
Zeke Miller of the AP: "The Biden administration is lifting its requirement that international air travelers to the U.S. take a COVID-19 test within a day before boarding their flights, easing one of the last remaining government mandates meant to contain the spread of the coronavirus. A senior administration official said Friday that the mandate will expire Sunday at 12:01 a.m. EDT, adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined it is no longer necessary." (Also linked yesterday.)
Beyond the Beltway
Missouri. Weird News. Ramon Vargas of the Guardian: "The insurance giant Geico must give more than $5m to a woman who had sex with a motorist in his car and contracted a sexually transmitted disease, a Missouri appellate court ruled.... Geico can still go to the state supreme court to seek a reprieve, and may get a more favorable ruling in a related federal case. The plaintiff -- identified in court records as 'MO' -- alleged that in 2017, during sexual encounters in a 2014 Hyundai Genesis, her boyfriend infected her with a virus that causes genital warts. The woman accused the man of acting negligently and argued that the Geico policy which insured the car should cover her 'injuries and losses' from the disease." MB: BUT. Good news for the carrier of her homeowner's policy.
Texas. Nick Miroff, et al., of the Washington Post: "Much is still unclear about how the [Uvalde] massacre unfolded.... But the design of the classroom doors significantly added to the challenge officers were facing, according to experts and officials briefed on what happened. As teachers and their students were bleeding, and children called 911 to plead for help, agents and officers who had been told the doors were locked struggled to locate keys and the tools to force their way in, officials have said.... Curtis S. Lavarello, executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, said ... authorities have to have a way to quickly open [secure doors] -- and should practice doing so during safety drills." The article also suggests that the police had to wait a long time for someone to bring them anti-ballistic shields. ~~~
~~~ Marie: That "had been told the doors were locked" clause may be significant. According to a NYT report linked here several days ago, a teacher inside the classroom struggled to find her key, & by the time she found it, the gunman had entered the room. Did he take time to get the key and lock the door? He was a crazed lunatic, so that's sort of hard to imagine. David Goodman, the NYT's Houston Bureau Chief, said last night on MSNBC that while the police loitered in the hall waiting for an hour for someone to unlock the classroom door, it may have been unlocked all the time. Tests of other classroom doors at the school, Goodman said, showed that the locks didn't secure the doors.
Texas. Julian Mark of the Washington Post: In late 1980, police found "... the bodies of a young couple [in the Houston area].... It appeared that the man had been beaten to death and that the woman had been strangled. For decades, the bodies went unidentified, until last year when DNA analysis identified the remains as those of [Tina Gail Linn Clouse and Harold Dean Clouse Jr]. What puzzled their family members after the discovery, however, were the whereabouts of the couple's infant, Holly, who had gone missing with Tina and Harold in 1980. On Thursday, the Texas Attorney General's Office announced that Holly, now 42 and a married mother of five, has been found living in Oklahoma, the [Houston] Chronicle reported. She was adopted after being left at a church by two members of a nomadic religious group, officials said. Her adoptive parents are not suspected of any wrongdoing, according to investigators."
Way Beyond
Ukraine, et al.
Siobhán O'Grady, et al., of the Washington Post: "The euphoria that accompanied Ukraine's unforeseen early victories against bumbling Russian troops is fading as Moscow adapts its tactics, recovers its stride and asserts its overwhelming firepower against heavily outgunned Ukrainian forces. Newly promised Western weapons systems are arriving, but too slowly and in insufficient quantities to prevent incremental but inexorable Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which is now the focus of the fight. The Ukrainians are still fighting back, but they are running out of ammunition and suffering casualties at a far higher rate than in the initial stages of the war. Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday.... The Russians are still making mistakes and are also losing men and equipment, albeit at a lesser rate than in the first months of the conflict.... But the overall trajectory of the war has unmistakably shifted away from one of unexpectedly dismal Russian failures and tilted in favor of Russia as the demonstrably stronger force."
The New York Times' live updates of developments Saturday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "On the ground in eastern Ukraine ... 'very fierce fighting' continued to rage, reducing cities and communities to charred ruins, the country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said in his nightly address. Ukrainians' ability to ward off Russian troops is becoming more limited because of their unmatched weaponry and a rapidly dwindling supply of ammunition for their Soviet-era artillery.... McDonald's restaurants are reopening in Russia this weekend, but without the Golden Arches. After the American fast-food giant pulled out this spring to protest ... Vladimir V. Putin's invasion of Ukraine, a Siberian oil mogul bought its 840 Russian stores. There are signs that a partisan insurgency is executing strikes in Russian-controlled territory.... Russia is struggling to provide basic services to people living in its occupied territories in Ukraine, Britain's Defense Ministry said on Friday.... Western governments on Friday condemned the death sentences that court in a Russian-occupied area of eastern Ukraine gave to two Britons and a Moroccan." ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's live updates for Saturday are here: "Ukraine, on the brink of losing the eastern region of Luhansk to Russia, is warning that its outgunned military desperately needs faster Western arms deliveries. Moscow's relentless shelling campaign 'wants to destroy every city' in the eastern Donbas region, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, as his government said Ukraine could only respond with about one artillery round for every 10 fired by Russia. In the latest sign of the humanitarian catastrophe in the east, a regional official said the Ice Palace, a sports complex in the city of Severodonetsk that had served as a relief center, was destroyed. Russian forces now control most of the city although fighting still gripped the streets of the key battleground, the Luhansk governor said Saturday." ~~~
~~~ The Guardian's live updates for Saturday are here: (at 08:32) "Speaking at a fundraising reception in Los Angeles on Friday, [President Biden] said ... Volodymyr Zelenskiy, 'didn't want to hear' America's warnings of a Russian invasion, AFP reports. Joe Biden ... reportedly said a lot of people thought he was exaggerating[.]"
Bolivia. Megan Janetsky & María Trigo of the New York Times: "Jeanine Añez, the former president of Bolivia, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday following accusations that she illegally took over the presidency after the resignation of her predecessor, Evo Morales. The trial, the latest chapter in Bolivia's long-running political turmoil, has raised concerns that the country's leaders are using the courts to target political adversaries, and that the sentencing represents a larger democratic crisis in the small South American country and across the region." A Reuters story, via the Guardian, is here.
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Reader Comments (12)
How I know I'm losing it: Here's the lede sentence in a WashPo story, linked above:
"Months after family members stopped hearing from Tina Gail Linn Clouse and Harold Dean Clouse Jr. in late 1980, a German shepherd discovered a decomposed arm in eastern Harris County, Tex., and brought it home."
I'm guessing you'll read that sentence, and have no trouble picturing what happened. Not I. I read that sentence three times before I figured it out. I wondered why a German shepherd would relocate to Houston. Running out of sheep-grazing land in Germany? Change of German ag policies for sheep farmers? And why did the guy bring the arm home instead of calling police to the place he found it?
Oh. It's a dog. I should suggest to the WashPo editors that henceforth they refer to the canine as "German Shepherd" or "german shepherd" to help out the easily-confused.
You might say the German shepherd was armed.
Too bad a Greyhound wasn't involved. Tickets please.
Marie: that's really very funny––-German shepherds tending their flock, especially in Germany, would have a field day with your misunderstanding. The "losing it" is something I tend to say almost everyday––-it's the way of it living as we do in this land of false gods and shoddy goods. Yesterday I could not for the life of me remember what the name of a vegetable (broccoli rabe) I had just put in the fridge.
That bit about the committee showing only “negative footage” is a hoot. Kinda like “Why didn’t that movie show all the good parts of the Titanic sinking?”.
To Fatty the “positive footage” would have been more video of him.
Lots more.
I guess this is one time when his claim of “good people on both sides” wouldn’t work. For him, the only good people that day were armed thugs storming the capitol to attack and murder elected representatives. The other (bad) side consisted of those officials doing their job according to the results of the election and the Constitution. Bad, bad, bad!
I read a lede this morning that seemed both querulous and just plain dim. It was along the lines of “Hearing tries to portray Trump as a would be autocrat who would do anything to stay in power”. Um, yeah. That’s exactly right. Is that a problem?
Marie,
Perhaps a lifelong habit of reading, bringing with it implicit and automatic grammar triggers, sunk me as well. I read that sentence exactly as you did and wondered what in the holy hell a German shepherd was doing in Texas. It had all the makings of a fantastic cold open for a story about a German ex-pat hiding out in the Texas hill country from neo-Nazis, pretending to be a sheep herder, whose cover was suddenly blown by the discovery of this body. And why bring home the arm?? Whoa. Stranger than strange.
Seriously. I did have to do little mental jig to try to figure this German shepherd in Texas thing. Either it was because I hadn’t had my morning tea yet, or this was some out there stuff.
But then I thought. Nah. Why would he go to Texas to escape neo-Nazis? Plenty of that shit in Texas.
Think I've mentioned here before McWhorter provokes me, and in often annoys. But I go back just to see what he has to say. Oddly (there must be an explanation) the Times doesn't allow comments on his columns, just responses directed to him. Complained about it to the Times when they requested I fill out a survey, which I dutifully did.
Anyway, thought his latest worth the time. And of course couldn't help myself. Sent him a letter...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/opinion/pandemic-police-race.html
Mr. McWhorter
Glad to see you approach the racial reckoning subject with a little more delicacy that is occasionally the case in your writing, when you too easily default to gadfly.
I think all you said is true. Had a little trouble following what you said about the impact of social media on human relations, giving permission as it does, to name-calling and shouting at one another from a safe distance, and how that might have affected the response to Floyd's murder, but the argument about the pandemic’s influence was clear and spot on.
I would add only that demographic and political shifts in the last few decades also had their effect. Just as Blacks have become more closely allied to the Democratic Party over the years, non-Blacks who also identify as Democrat have been drawn more closely and consciously to the anti-racism cause. In other words, as Republicans have solidified their identity as the racism denial party, so have Democrats, with the push provided by the not-so-subtly racist Trump interregnum and recent decisions by a SCOTUS in denial, unified behind a heightened perception that racism remains embedded in our culture and it’s long past time something should be done about it.
I expect that pattern to continue and expand, pandemic or not.
Thanks for the thoughtful essay. There is a lot of random in our lives, isn’t there?
The papers today report that 20 million people watched the hearings Thursday.
I listened to the first half-hour on C-SPAN while driving, and watched the remainder on the local CBS .com stream on a desktop.
Did I get counted in that 20 million? How about the people who watched it the next day on data feeds?
I'm just curious, I don't even know how they come up with the 20 million broadcast and cable watchers, much less the listeners on radio.
Audience measurements, the kind done by companies like Nielsen, use a representative sampling of viewership from which they can extrapolate to the wider population using metrics like HUT (homes using televisions) which also rely on estimates of televisions being on. In the old days, Nielsen relied on families or individuals keeping viewership diaries. Today that information is collected almost entirely online.
The numbers are extremely valuable, since these ratings (both locally and nationally) are the basis for ad charges. Nielsen numbers have typically been considered pretty accurate over the years but they’ve had some competition lately.
As for the opening salvo hearing, I read that the 20 million number didn’t count PBS viewers since, apparently, those numbers weren’t immediately available. There has also been a lot of concern on the part of broadcasters that viewers opting to watch live or recorded streams online weren’t being accurately counted, or even counted at all. This is a much more difficult metric to calculate,
There has been a lot of complaints by online content providers concerned with this gap (because of the ad revenue charges) and since 2020, Nielsen has tentatively entered into online calculations, but this effort is still minuscule compared to TV screen viewing.
Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that far more than 20 million tuned in to watch the proceedings, giving the lie to the GOP pronouncements that no one would be interested.
Marie: I wondered if/why the shepherd took the decomposed arm back to Germany and how he got it through airport security.
@joynone:It was probably a seeing eye German Shepherd with a
note attached saying I'm bringing my master home by bits and bobs.
Me thinks I'm getting weirder by the day.
Passing this along as much for (maybe more for) the comment, which would seem to have wider application, as for the article--both from my older son who sent them my way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/11/us/us-military-soldiers-dna.html
This article just makes the whole MIA/POW delusion and debacle seem like an inevitable consequence of a complex and tragic human undertaking, involving many millions, each family/life searching for meaning in its own way, intersecting with a bureaucratic and scientific process that was necessarily inadequate and imprecise...may be better to believe that there was a conspiracy than believe that your loved one's remains are just lost in the muddle...better to be the victim of an evil plot than to just be lost, dead and confronted with unimportance.
Forrest,
You are. Join the club.