;)
March 30, 2022
Afternoon Update:
Kevin Liptak & Jeremy Diamond of CNN: "President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for nearly an hour Wednesday as airstrikes near Kyiv seemed to bear out Western skepticism that peace talks could ease Russia's assault on Ukraine. Biden told his counterpart the US would provide Ukraine another $500 million in 'direct budgetary aid,' the White House said afterward, and discussed 'how the United States is working around the clock to fulfill the main security assistance requests by Ukraine.'... A day after Russia claimed it was scaling back its military operation near the Ukrainian capital, strikes continued in the suburbs of Kyiv as well as in Chernihiv, whose mayor said the city was under 'colossal attack.'"
Paul Murphy, et al., of CNN: "The Red Cross warehouse in central Mariupol was hit by at least two military strikes, new satellite images from Maxar Technologies confirm. 'Under international humanitarian law, objects used for humanitarian relief operations must be respected and protected at all times,' [Red Cross spokesperson Jason] Straziuso said.... No Red Cross staff have been at the warehouse since March 15.... Straziuso said that intense fighting has prevented the Red Cross from bringing any humanitarian aid to the city.... Liudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament commissioner for human rights, called for the 'world community to condemn' the shelling of the building. 'This is another war crime of the Russian army in accordance with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and a gross violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions,' she said."
Woo-Hoo! Jackson Overcomes Collins' "Concerns." Carl Hulse of the New York Times: "Senator Susan Collins of Maine plans to vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, ensuring that President Biden's nominee and the first Black woman to be put forward for the post will receive at least one Republican backer. After a second personal meeting with the judge on Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Collins said Judge Jackson had alleviated some concerns that surfaced after last week's contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, when Republicans attacked the nominee for her record and grilled her on a host of divisive issues." An ABC News report is here.
Matt Viser, et al., of the Washington Post: "Over the course of 14 months, the Chinese energy conglomerate and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle, according to government records, court documents and newly disclosed bank statements, as well as emails contained on a copy of a laptop hard drive that purportedly once belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020. But the new documents -- which include a signed copy of a $1 million legal retainer, emails related to the wire transfers, and $3.8 million in consulting fees that are confirmed in new bank records and agreements signed by Hunter Biden -- illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden's decades in public service."
Taylor Lorenz & Drew Harwell of the Washington Post: "Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.... Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post."
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Wednesday are here: "President Biden will step up the pressure on Congress to approve billions of dollars in emergency coronavirus relief aid, using a speech at the White House on Wednesday to deliver what an official described as an urgent and direct message that will warn that U.S. progress against Covid-19 would be at severe risk if Congress fails to act. Mr. Biden will also spotlight a new one-stop-shopping coronavirus website, aimed at helping Americans navigate access to testing, treatment, vaccines and masks, and to assess the risk of Covid-19 in their neighborhoods, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the president's remarks. The site went live Wednesday morning."
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post is extremely skeptical that Donald Trump doesn't know what a burner phone is. MB: It does seem possible to me that Trump wasn't familiar with the term "burner phone." I think I've known of it for a long time because I watch a lot of police procedurals. Trump might have called burner phones "disposable phones" or something like that. But whether or not he is familiar with the term "burner phone" has nothing to do with the fact that 7-1/2 hours of the White House call logs on January 6 are missing. When he was president*, he was required under the law to make sure records of his phone calls were preserved. But, hey, maybe Trump thought it was okay to rely on Russian & Chinese hackers to keep track of his calls. And they probably have, as contributor Patrick suggested Tuesday. But the House committee won't have much luck subpoenaing foreign hackers' records.
~~~~~~~~~~
"Worse Than Watergate," Ctd.
Say, remember that infamous 18.5-minute gap in the Nixon tapes? Trump beat that by more than seven hours! ~~~
~~~ Bob Woodward of the Washington Post & Robert Costa of CBS News in the Washington Post: "Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in ... Donald Trump's phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted.... The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 -- from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. -- means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol, battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.... The seven-hour gap ... stands in stark contrast to the extensive public reporting about phone conversations he had with allies during the attack, such as a call Trump made to Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) -- seeking to talk to Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) -- and a phone conversation he had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or ... 'burner phones.'... One lawmaker on the panel said the committee is investigating a 'possible coverup' of the official White House record from that day." CBS News has an abbreviated version of the report here. (Also linked yesterday.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: Several funny comments on this at the end of yesterday's thread.
The Washington Post has published the White House call logs for January 6, 2021 here. The Post also publishes the "The Daily Diary of President Donald J. Trump" here. It turns out Trump did absolutely nothing between 1:21 pm ET when he met with his valet and 4:03 pm ET when he went to the Rose Garden. ~~~
~~~ Aaron Blake of the Washington Post: "The gap somehow neatly breaks down with the last recorded call -- with [then Sen. David] Perdue [R-Ga.] at 11:04 a.m. -- at end of a page, and the next one -- the request for [Trump aide Dan] Scavino at 6:54 p.m. -- at the top of the next page. We don't yet know if this gap is truly Nixonian. But it certainly raises all kinds of questions about whether people deliberately shielded Trump's actions on Jan. 6."
BUT. Trump couldn't possibly have done anything wrong because ~~~
~~~ Dylan Stableford of Yahoo! News: "'I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term,' Trump said in a statement after the report was published by CBS News and the Washington Post. A spokeswoman for the former president added that Trump had nothing to do with the records and had assumed any and all of his phone calls were recorded and preserved. [BUT!] Contradicting that statement, Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, said Tuesday that he had heard the former president discuss burner phones. [According to tweets from Robert Costa, Bolton said] 'that he recalls Trump using the term "burner phones" in several discussions and that Trump was aware of its meaning.... Bolton also said he and Trump have spoken about how people have used "burner phones" to avoid having their calls scrutinized.'" Update: Here's a CBS News article by Costa on Bolton's remarks.
Dennis Aftergut in Slate: "The gap's importance is difficult to exaggerate.... If, as some analysts have hypothesized, Trump is so detached from the factual world that he actually believed his own Big Lie that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, that would make conviction for trying to steal the election difficult. Under this analysis, he would not have thought he was acting 'wrongfully,' a necessary element for conviction on the charges to which he is most vulnerable. Hiding one's calls and conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, as it appears Trump did, rebuts his potential defense that he thought he was acting righteously. People who believe that their behavior is law-abiding do not cover it up in this way.... One of my favorite jury instructions ... covered consciousness of guilt: 'If you believe that [the defendant sought to conceal evidence], then you may consider this conduct, along with all the other evidence, in deciding whether ... [he/she] thought [he/she] was guilty of the crime charged and was trying to avoid punishment.'... Tellingly..., there is no report that Trump denied using others' phones." Firewalled.
Luke Broadwater & Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: "As part of his frenzied attempt to cling to power..., Donald J. Trump reached out repeatedly to members of Congress on Jan. 6 both before and during the siege of the Capitol, according to White House call logs and evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the attack. The logs, reported earlier by The Washington Post and CBS and authenticated by The New York Times, indicated that Mr. Trump had called Republican members of Congress, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, as he sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from several states.... [Despite the long gap in record-keeping,] the call logs ... show how personally involved Mr. Trump was in his last-ditch attempt to stay in office."
Stephen Collinson of CNN: "... Donald Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election is being revealed week-by-week to be deeper and broader than it initially appeared, sharpening the national dilemma of if and how he could ever be held to account. Even as a federal judge commented Monday that Trump 'more likely than not' sought to commit a crime to stay in office last year, the ex-President's attacks on democracy are intensifying. They were on display as recently as Saturday night in a lie-filled rally that underscored how his conspiracy to overturn the election -- whether it is criminal or not -- remains viscerally alive and able to damage future elections.... It's extraordinary that, more than 14 months on, new details of efforts by Trump and those around him to subvert President Joe Biden's victory are still emerging. It's also ironic that this threat to American democracy is being further exposed while Washington leads an international effort to save freedom in Ukraine, which is under much greater assault from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump still seems to hero worship." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Marie: Of the many qualities Trump admires in Vladimir Putin, one must be Putin's apparent ability to multi-task. Because, while the Butcher of Moscow is engaged in bombing Ukraine & slaughtering Ukrainians daily ~~~
~~~ Quint Forgey of Politico: "... Donald Trump in a new interview called on ... Vladimir Putin to release information regarding alleged dealings between Eastern European oligarchs and Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son. Trump's remarks, in an interview with discredited far-right journalist John Solomon, were published Tuesday by the 'Just the News' television show on the Real America's Voice network."
Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post: "A group of House and Senate Democrats sent a letter to the Supreme Court on Monday requesting that Justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from any future cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol or efforts to overturn the 2020 election, along with a 'written explanation for his failure to recuse himself' in previous cases on those subjects. The letter, spearheaded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), follows The Washington Post's reporting on repeated efforts by conservative activist Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas, the Supreme Court justice's wife, to pressure White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue various avenues to overturn the 2020 election." (Also linked yesterday.)
Dan Mangan of CNBC: "The New York Attorney General's Office has 'uncovered significant evidence' suggesting that financial statements by the Trump Organization relied on misleading valuations of its real estate assets for more than a decade, the office said in a court filing Tuesday. Those potentially misleading valuations 'and other misrepresentations' were used by the company owned by ... Donald Trump 'to secure economic benefits -- including loans, insurance coverage, and tax deductions -- on terms more favorable than the true facts warranted,' the filing alleged. The claims by Attorney General Letitia James were made in response to an appeal by the Trump Organization and Donald Trump of last month's order by a Manhattan state court judge directing Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump to submit to interviews by James' investigators." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Putin's War Crimes, Ctd.
The New York Times' live updates of developments Wednesday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "The first signs of significant progress emerged as Russia and Ukraine held three hours of peace talks in Istanbul on Tuesday, but Russia appeared determined to capture more territory in eastern Ukraine and officials predicted that weeks of further negotiation were needed." ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's live updates for Wednesday are here: "Russia pledged during Tuesday's peace talks in Turkey that it would 'drastically reduce' attacks near two Ukrainian cities as a confidence-building gesture. But Ukrainian military leaders said Russia was probably using the maneuvers to 'mislead' and was merely rotating its troops. Western leaders also expressed skepticism, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Kremlin should be judged by 'their actions, not their words.' It was not immediately clear whether the negotiations in Istanbul would continue for a second day. Ukrainian assertions that it was pushing back Russian forces near Kyiv -- where Moscow said it would scale back its assault -- generally appear to be true, according to a Washington Post reporter on the ground. But heavy shelling continues elsewhere, and new satellite images of the bombed-out southern port city of Mariupol document severe damage to civilian infrastructure.... Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a video address released late Tuesday, said Moscow's assurances 'do not silence the explosion of Russian shells.'"
De=Escalation Is Another Word for Retreat. Steven Erlanger of the New York Times: "As envoys made progress in peace talks on Tuesday, Russia offered concessions that signaled a more realistic course for the war in Ukraine, while indicating it is also in no hurry to end the conflict, according to diplomats and analysts.... But the Russian advance in the north had already stalled, with troops around Kyiv taking up defensive positions in the face of Ukrainian counterattacks, both there and near Sumy, where Russia has been having trouble encircling the main Ukrainian army east of the Dnieper River. 'De-escalation is a euphemism for retreat,' said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of War Studies at King's College London. 'Russia is adjusting its goals to reality, because war is quite empirical,' he said. 'It's not a ruse to say that they are concentrating on the Donbas, because in reality that's all they can do.' But retreat is hardly surrender, and others cautioned that the progress made Tuesday doesn't mean that Russia is ready for serious discussions on ending the war. That would require a better outcome for ... Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sell at home as a victory."
The Man Who Came to Istanbul. Valerie Hopkins of the New York Times: Russian oligarch "Roman Abramovich, the 55-year-old owner of Britain's storied Chelsea Football Club soccer team, [mysteriously showed up at the talks in Istabul. He] is not a member of the Russian side of the talks. He has been sanctioned by the British government -- but, curiously, not the United States -- for ties with ... Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who started the war.... Ukraine's ambassador to Britain, Vadym Prystaiko, told the BBC that he had 'no idea what Mr. Abramovich is claiming or doing' at the talks. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, would not specify what Mr. Abramovich was doing but said Moscow had 'approved' his participation to coordinate between both sides.... The oligarch, who did not comment on why he was attending the talks, appeared to be trying to present himself to the world as an earnest and trusted conduit between Kyiv and Moscow. Critics of Mr. Abramovich suggested he was grandstanding for publicity, part of an effort to save his empire."
Jim Sciutto of CNN: "Russia is beginning to withdraw some forces from the area around the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv in what the US assesses as a 'major' strategy shift by Moscow, two senior US officials tell CNN. The Russian forces now pulling back in some areas of the north will focus on gains in the south and east. The US is already observing these movements underway, including Russian Battalion Tactical Groups leaving the surrounding areas around Kyiv. The Russian Ministry of Defense said Tuesday that it has decided to 'drastically reduce hostilities' in the Kyiv and Chernigov directions, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said according to state media RIA." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Emma Bubola of the New York Times: "On Tuesday, the [Phi, a $50 million 192-foot] Russian-owned [superyacht], which is docked at London's Canary Wharf, was ... detained by the British authorities. The Phi is the first such vessel to be detained in British waters in what the government said was a warning to ... Vladimir V. Putin and his associates that Britain was going after those benefiting from their links to the Kremlin. Britain's National Crime Agency said the yacht was owned by a Russian businessman, whom it did not identify.... The [British National Crime A]gency said the ownership of the yacht had been deliberately well hidden...."
Greg Walters of Vice: "... Partying can be dangerous in the age of Instagram. Ask any oligarch. Their decades of fancy living at the highest possible level of luxury have turned out to be enormously useful for investigators tracking down the assets of Russia's sanctioned elite. That's because, in multiple cases, a few careless Instagram posts have blown up the best defense for their secret empires: Anonymity. Oligarchs themselves rarely use Instagram to accidentally crack open a window into their high living. Rather, it's the people partying with them...." Walters cites some examples.
Kate Sullivan & Maegan Vazquez of CNN: "President Joe Biden signed a bill into law on Tuesday that makes lynching a federal hate crime, acknowledging how racial violence has left a lasting scar on the nation and asserting that these crimes are not a relic of a bygone era. At a White House Rose Garden signing ceremony, the President ... said, 'Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone ... belongs in America, not everyone is created equal. Terror, to systematically undermine hard-fought civil rights. Terror, not just in the dark of the night but in broad daylight. Innocent men, women and children hung by nooses in trees, bodies burned and drowned and castrated.'" This is an update of a story linked yesterday. The New York Times' story is here.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday is set to sign into law a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime after Congress approved the legislation earlier this month with overwhelming bipartisan support. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022 is named after a 14-year-old Black boy from Mississippi who was brutally murdered by a group of White men for allegedly whistling at a White woman in 1955. His murder sparked national outraged and was a catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement. The legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois and only three Republicans -- Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas -- voted against the bill. The legislation then passed the Senate by unanimous consent." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Joe Realizes His Friends Are Rude SOBs. Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said the way Republican senators treated Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson at last week's hearings was 'disgraceful' and 'embarrassing' after they repeatedly brought up her record of sentencing child pornography offenders. Manchin said the behavior of GOP colleagues who repeatedly cut off Jackson while she tried to answer their questions about her sentencing decision crossed the line to become inappropriate. 'It was disgraceful, it really was, what I saw. And I met with her and I read all the transcripts. I listened to basically the hearings and it just was embarrassing,' he told reporters Tuesday morning. 'It's not who we are. It's not what we were sent here to do, to attack other people and just try to tear them down. I won't be part of that. I think she's extremely well qualified and I think she'll be an exemplary judge,' he added." (Also linked yesterday.)
Let's All Go to an Orgy. Alex Griffing of Mediaite: "Controversial Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) ... told host John Lovell on the Warrior Poet Society podcast last week that Washington, D.C. is rife with 'sexual perversion' and drug use.... 'The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington, the average age is probably 60 or 70,' Cawthorn said, adding, 'I look at a lot of these people, a lot of them that I've looked up to through my life -- I've always paid attention to politics -- then all of a sudden you get invited to, "Oh hey we're going to have a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come." "What did you just ask me to come to?" And then you realize they're asking you to come to an orgy,' Cawthorn continued." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: Who is it exactly who invited Madison to an orgy? Nancy Pelosi? Steny Hoyer? Nah, must have been a Republican. Mitch McConnell? Oh, I know: Chuck Grassley. ~~~
~~~ Oops! Paul Waldman & Greg Sargent of the Washington Post: "It takes a lot to get Republican members of Congress angry at one of their own. But Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) managed to do it, not just by being a uniquely repugnant figure, but also by claiming to reveal the dark underbelly of official Washington in a way that Republicans apparently found offensive.... Cawthorn told a podcast host that the 'sexual perversion' in Washington is so rampant that even Republicans are involved. His fellow Republicans are aghast, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has vowed to discipline him.... While we can't prove Cawthorn made this up, let's just say the idea that he's being invited to orgies by lawmakers in their 60s and 70s strains credulity. And Cawthorn's long history of making up stories is precisely what turned him into a right-wing superstar.... As this latest episode shows, these tendencies can boomerang: The lure of depicting Washington as a kind of bottomless cesspool of degeneracy -- a guaranteed right-wing applause line -- led Cawthorn to accidentally hit his own colleagues with friendly fire...." ~~~
~~~ Olivia Beavers of Politico: "Kevin McCarthy isn't the only senior Republican who wants to have a talk with Rep. Madison Cawthorn about his claim that some of his colleagues invited him to orgies and used cocaine. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who chairs the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus to which Cawthorn belongs, said he plans to speak to the North Carolina Republican one-on-one about the incendiary comment. Perry further indicated that Cawthorn should identify the individuals he alleges engaged in that behavior.... Cawthorn's claims caused an internal uproar at Tuesday's [House GOP] conference meeting. But as aggravated as Cawthorn's colleagues may be by his salacious tales, they also know that digging more deeply into his stories may cause them more political problems."
Ellen Gabler of the New York Times: Real estate companies are protecting their assets from liability for lead-paint poisoning "in a tangle of limited liability companies, and the property insurer[s are excluding] lead from [their] coverage. These practices are now the norm across the United States, The New York Times has found, part of a decades-long campaign by the real estate and insurance industries to shield themselves from liability in lead-poisoning cases. The effort has helped allow what is often considered a problem of the past to remain a silent epidemic today.... Not only is the illness a scourge in many of the country's poorer ZIP codes, but families ... have less recourse than ever.... With little public attention and the approval of state officials, insurance companies across the country [are] declining to pay out when children were poisoned on properties they covered.... The move also eased pressure on landlords to fix up their rentals."
Evan Perez & Katelyn Polantz of CNN: "A Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden's business activities has gained steam in recent months, with a flurry of witnesses providing testimony to federal investigators and more expected to provide interviews in the coming weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. The probe, led by the US Attorney in Wilmington, Delaware, began as early as 2018 and concerns multiple financial and business activities in foreign countries dating to when Biden's father was vice president. Investigators have examined whether Hunter Biden and some of his associates violated money laundering, tax and foreign lobbying laws, as well as firearm and other regulations, multiple sources said. To do so, law enforcement has gathered information from lobbyists connected to Hunter Biden, from his business partners, and from others who've observed his financial engagements, including a woman with whom he had a child."
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Aidan McLaughlin of Mediaite: "CBS News is under fire for hiring Mick Mulvaney, the former congressman, and Trump administration official, as a contributor.... The hire quickly drew outrage from journalists and pundits. Many pointed out Mulvaney's role in downplaying the Covid-19 pandemic, his defending ... Donald Trump's attempt to withhold military aid from Ukraine in exchange for dirt on the Biden family, and his bold claim in an op-ed before the 2020 election that Trump would gracefully concede if he lost." Includes numerous tweets by horrified commentators.
The Pandemic, Ctd.
Carolyn Johnson of the Washington Post: "The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized a second booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines for people 50 and older, a decision intended to help shore up protection against severe illness. The shots, which can be given at least four months after a first booster dose, are not a permanent solution to the pandemic. But with a still-more-transmissible version of the omicron coronavirus variant becoming dominant in the United States, even a short-term immunity boost among those at risk of severe illness could provide a valuable layer of protection." The article is free to nonsubscribers. (Also linked yesterday.)
Lori Aratani of the Washington Post: "Twenty-one states filed suit Tuesday seeking an immediate end to a federal mandate that requires people to wear masks when traveling on airplanes, buses, subways and other modes of public transportation. The effort in mostly Republican-led states is the latest effort seeking to abolish the mandate, put into place in February 2021, shortly after President Biden took office. The mandate was extended this month through April 18."
Way Beyond the Beltway
U.K. He Was Always My Favorite! Mark Landler of the New York Times: "Six weeks ago, Prince Andrew agreed to a multi-million-dollar legal settlement with a woman who accused him of raping her when she was a teenager. On Tuesday, he escorted his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, to a memorial service at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the life of her late husband, Prince Philip. The prince's very conspicuous public appearance on the queen's arm, his first since Philip's funeral last April, sent an unmistakable message of support by a 95-year-old mother for her disgraced son. But it struck some royal watchers as incongruous, given that she stripped Andrew of his military titles and all but banished him from public life after he was engulfed in the sexual abuse lawsuit. Andrew's sudden re-emergence came days after a trouble-prone tour of the Caribbean by Prince William and his wife, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, during which the couple confronted a backlash over issues of racial justice and rising sentiment to cast off the queen as head of state in Jamaica and other former colonies."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Six people were killed and two dozen others were injured in an 80-vehicle pileup on an interstate highway in Pennsylvania this week that began when a snow squall blinded drivers, the authorities said on Wednesday. The chain reaction started just after 10:30 a.m. Monday on Interstate 81 in Schuylkill County, about 50 miles northeast of Harrisburg, Pa., where an early spring burst of wintry weather overwhelmed drivers in the northbound lanes, who struggled to see past the wind-driven snow and fog in their path. The Pennsylvania State Police did not release details about the victims when it issued an update on deaths and injuries on Wednesday."
New York Times: Joan "Joyce, who died on Saturday in Boca Raton, Fla., at 81, was ... widely regarded as the most dominant player in the history of women's fast-pitch softball.... But softball was not the only arena in which Joyce excelled. As a rangy 5-foot-9 forward (some sources say 5 foot 10), she took multiple all-American honors in basketball playing for Connecticut teams in the Women's Basketball Association and the Amateur Athletic Union.... She was also a standout volleyball player.... And at 35, an age when many athletes are retiring, she tried her hand at golf.... Inducted into as many as 19 Halls of Fame, Joyce was frequently compared to Babe Didrikson Zaharias...." Joyce struck out legends Ted Williams & Henry Aaron in exhibition games. Williams once said she was the toughest pitcher he ever faced. Read on.
Share Article
Reader Comments (18)
What is it with sex obsessed traitors? Last week it’s a committee room full of R’s saying stuff like “You know, Judge, I pored over every single page of those child porn transcripts—17 times—but what I really wanted was a look at the pictures. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE PICTURES?!!!”
This week it’s funny boy Maddy Cawthorn telling tales of drug fueled orgies he gets invited to all the time, but he doesn’t go. No sir, not that nice Christian boy Maddy. But COCAINE! Sex! OOOOOORGIEEES!”
So who is it trying to inveigle poor Maddy Caw, attempting to corrupt him and blacken his lily white soul? And it weren’t Democrats. Nope. They don’t invite Republicans to their orgies. Besides, Nancy Pelosi’s coke is too stepped on.
Likely candidates:
Darling of the far right Jesus crowd, convicted child molester (only while he’s reading the Bible), Josh Duggar!
“Mads! Hey man! Swing by after your committee meeting on interstate commerce. I got the good stuff. They didn’t call my show ‘19 Kids and Counting’ for nothing. Know what-a mean, know what-a mean?”
Child sex trafficking fiend Matt Gaetz?
“I’m tellin’ you Maddy…cheerleaders! They might be 16 but they look 12! Whoa!”
Alabama’s own Roy Moore?
“Sure we have orgies, but I gotta swing by the mall first. I’ll get us a couple of 14 year olds.”
Or maybe it’s MTG, singing into his ear “Come on-a my house, I’m gonna give you some candy!”
Former speaker and noted sex offender Denny Hastert? Hmmm…isn’t he still in prison?
We know it’s not a Democrat, cuz, as Madison knows, they hold their orgies at Hillary Clinton’s pizza place where they traffic kids before eating them and selling their organs on the black market.
So much obsession with seeeeexxxx.
Republicans have been involved in orgies for decades. It's called
screwing the voters, screwing the taxpayers, screwing minorities,
etc., etc., etc.
As for the other kind of orgies, that's probably wishful thinking on
their part.
Forrest,
Good point. And they make sure to invite the guests of honor, their big money donors. It’s an orgy of greed.
Interesting how exercised so many traitors are about possibly being suspected of orgying it up when their three hour day is done.
How about being concerned that your party tried to overthrow a free and fair election and continues to shiv democracy in back?
On Douthat, my favorite sitting Duck
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/opinion/ukraine-clash-of-civilizations.html
The large, gargantuan in fact, problem with Huntington's (and your) interpretation of history is the confusion at its core: the assumed equivalence of Christianity and civilization.
While one could reasonably argue that the emergence of democratic traditions once had something to do with man's assumed place in in a created world, that time is long past.
In the present, the "clash" is between democracy and autocracy, now maybe too obviously at play in Ukraine, its stark drama dividing the world into a bad Russia and a good West.
But in the glare of Ukraine, it's easy to lose sight of that same struggle occurring everywhere, for anti-democratic forces are ubiquitous.
Among those forces are persistent racism. massive world-wide wealth inequality and yes, religion.
It is no accident that here at home Right Wing money underwrote the Jan. 6 Insurrection carried out by a large cohort of white, evangelical Christians whose purpose was to perpetuate the rule of their unelected "savior."
You don't have to look far afield for the clash of civilizations--or to put it another way, between civilization and barbarians, some of whom have far too much money.
A New Way to Screw the Public
Taking off from Forrest’s cogent observation and adding in Ken’s comment about certain people having too much money, I give you…baby powder!
Yup. So this morning I heard a follow up story on NPR to one that was reported about a month ago, which I missed. There’s only so much rat fucking and corporate skullduggery you can keep up with.
Over in New Joisey, there’s a little mom and pop operation called Johnson&Johnson. You may have heard of it. J&J is one of the most valuable (and profitable) companies in the world. In fact, it’s one of only two US based companies with a AAA credit rating, higher than Uncle Sam’s.
A big part of how they do that is by making sure they keep their money and showing shareholders that they’ll fuck over anyone to do that.
Currently, there are some 38,000 lawsuits against J&J because at some point, some knucklehead thought asbestos would make a dandy filler for fucking BABY POWDER! How this guy wasn’t scooped up by Putin’s political assassination department, I haven’t a clue. But anyway, asbestos being what it is and baby powder being where it’s used, mostly, you end up with loads of cancer in bad places, thus the lawsuits.
Clearly, J&J is at fault here (unless they can claim poor cellphone reception or that they hired Rose Mary Woods—that lady gets around!), so how to avoid paying dime one to people they’ve injured or caused to, ya know, die?
Why, we’ll try the old Donald Trump trick: bankruptcy! Oh, but not J&J. Some other company that they invented, then before the ink was dry on the incorporation documents, declare that company bankrupt. But not before saying “Oh, hey, ya know that baby powder that killed some-a youse guys? We din’ make it. This other spin off company made it, and Oops! it’s bankrupt. Sooorrryy.
I am not even kidding. And where did they get this idea? Let’s see…name a state controlled by the Party of Traitors that bends over backwards to help giant corporations fuck over consumers. All of them? Well, okay. Yeah. But I was thinking specifically of Texas where they long ago learned the dark corporate arts.
This particular scam is called the Texas Two Step. Create a bullshit company which is born bankrupt, then shift all shady assets to its “control”. Voila! Instant consumer fucking.
And, for your information, J&J is worth over $400 billion. And they’re keeping it all. Gotta save that AAA rating, amirite?
It was okayed by a federal judge, by the way. Capitalism is a bee-you-tee-ful thing, innit?
Here’s the original story:
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1083061992/johnson-johnson-wins-court-battle-bankruptcy-baby-powder
Aaron Blake's words from the W.P.:
"We don’t yet know if this gap is truly Nixonian. But it certainly raises all kinds of questions about whether people deliberately shielded Trump’s actions on Jan. 6."
I had to take a few deep breaths after reading that. One, can I suppose, compare the Nixon gap with the Trumpian 7 hour gap, but please! can we finally face the fact that what has happened here was a complicated mafia styled coup of the first order. There were multiple people involved who were meeting and planning at a place called The Plantation for months before the coup. When someone writes a book about this, "All the President's Men" will look like day old pablum compared with what has gone down during and after the reign of a man who thought he could rule like a King and do any old thing and then couldn't let go.
The other day I was telling the mister about a PBS Nature production all about butterflies –-how some during their caterpillar stage camouflage themselves to look like other caterpillars that are poisonous, whose enemies, the birds, stay away from. I made the leap from that to comparing those in power who take on the coats of a different color when facing an election or needing something from somebody until, unlike nature's beauties, fall prey to those who can smell a phony from a look way off.
And why, in our case, has it taken so very long to clip the wings of this deranged pretender?
Remember those books that used to talk about Word Power? They were essentially all about vocabulary words you could use to sound smart when sitting in a meeting at work, or maybe while arguing with your bookie. “Your request for vigorish is unpalatable this week, given my drastically reduced circumstances. But could I put a C note on Mother’s Lament in the fifth at Belmont?”
I’m thinking we all need to chip in and send one of these self help books to poor Josh Hawley. All that self abuse in the wake of his voluminous child porn “investigation” must have dimmed his bulb a bit (so to speak).
How else does one account for his response to calls for Long Dong Clarence to recuse himself from any cases related to Trump’s insurrection, declaring such demands “kind of misogynistic”.
Um…what? Misogyny against Clarence Thomas?
Seriously, kids. I give up.
https://jezebel.com/josh-hawley-noted-feminist-decries-misogyny-against-j-1848720313/amp
@Ken Winkes: I couldn't quite figure out what Douthat's point was other than that he was in search of a defining theory of "civilization" and there doesn't seem to be one. And I'm not sure he equates civilization with Christianity; for instance, he separates Orthodox Christianity (what about Greece?) from sects more popular in the West.
But to equate Christianity with civilization just doesn't work on any level, and not just because Putin lately has found it convenient to embrace Orthodox Christianity. Most importantly, Christianity is associated with the Dark Ages. It was the revival of non-Christian Greek culture that pulled Europe into the Renaissance, a movement that probably began in Florence, Italy, which at the time was already a capitalistic banking center. Of course, the Florentines remained Christian, but the ancient Greek influence on art, architecture, philosophy, & science was unmistakable and caused great change & disruption all throughout Europe (not to mention in Florence itself).
The "clash of civilizations" is enduring, IMO, but it can exist within a so-called civilization as strongly as it does between "civilizations." Whereas once that clash might have been most predominately expressed as religious differences, and sometimes still is, it seems to me that in these more secular times, the clash is more (tho not entirely) between forms -- or even styles -- of governance and between parochialism (tribalism) and liberalism (tolerance).
Akhilleus,
And probably a sheer coincidence that billionaire Robert Wood Johnson, the 78th or some such, a Pretender loyalist, was the Pretender's ambassador to London.
Got in a little trouble there as I remember but (what else?) managed to duck it. Goes with the corrupt territory he inhabits, I guess.
It's not turtles. It's slim balls, all the way down.
@Akhilleus: I think the Jezebel site is owned by New York mag & therefore is firewalled, so I didn't read the post you linked. But maybe the young wordsmith Josh (Stanford, Yale) meant "miscegenation."
"... to the best of my knowledge I have never ...", a phrase lifted from DiJiT's burner-phone disclaimer, is one of those "get out of perjury convictions free" cards that people in DiJiT's line of work (confidence games) are coached to use early and often, the way other peole use "uh", "like", and "well, " as verbal fillers. What it means is "everybody knows what a burner is, but you can't prove I do."
I live in a real media environment, where it is hard to miss accurate news descriptions. Anyone who lives in such an environment (as opposed to the Fox-OAN-Breitbart type of epistemiverse) has seen proof of DiJiT's perfidy exposed layer by layer over the past several months, where it is almost impossible to believe he is anything but guilty of conspiracy to incite insurrection. Even those who would give the benefit of doubt can no longer do so. Those who have been MAGA cultists since jump aren't going to concede, but they have to be less than 35% of sentient citizens. It seems to me that the time has come for the public to see some indictments. And I am not optimistic that the Fat Man won't weasel out, but I don't see how we can avoid putting him in the dock. As Driftglass puts on his banner from time to time, "Fiat justitia, ruat coelum." Let justice be done even if the heavens fall.
Marie,
I think you read Douthat more carefully than I did. Thanks.
Went back to a summary of Huntington and concluded that Douthat, as is his wont, made use of Huntington's argument's relative complexity in order to mount and ride his own hobby horse.
Religion is only one element in the Huntington cultural mix. He lays his argument out geographically and also talks about tribalism and ethnic identity. His thesis that there are multiple "civilizations" jockeying for position in the post Cold War world order (or disorder) understandably became prominent after 9/11.
And just as Douthat used Huntington, I used Douthat (perhaps unfairly but guiltlessly) as a stepping stone to support my worries about our "civilization," which is as you say largely represented by the forms of government we choose.
Even if Bolton hadn't already debunked Donald it's laughable that someone who watches as much television as Trump doesn't know what a burner phone is.
And I thought it was mighty progressive for the Wingers to invite the guy in the wheelchair to their orgies.
Won’t be reading Douthat. Not gonna do it. But Marie is correct about the revival of Greek arts, literature, and philosophy having a modernizing effect on the West. In fact, it was Islamic scholars who saved the likes of Plato and Aristotle for us. Their works had been largely lost after the collapse of the Roman Empire left Europe and the near East with a jumble of groups looking to grab whatever they could in the post-Roman world.
It’s true that there was (eventually) much philosophical investigation in the West, especially as we get into the 12th century (Aquinas, Abelard, the Scholastics, etc., but the rediscovery of Aristotle and Plato was huge. So thanks to those Islamic scholars, especially those on the Iberian peninsula.
Just read my post on R.W. Johnson. Otto at work again, I see. He's indefatigable. I know nothing about his weight--or his balls. Really.
Slime Balls...
Ken,
I wondered about that. I thought perhaps I had been waaay out of touch with contemporary tropes, but if so, I thought “slim balls” must have some weird-ass backstory I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn about.
Otto is a sneaky bastard.
Lookie see what we have here:
Russian State T.V. calls for for "partner" Trump to be reinstated:
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/03/russian-state-tv-calls-partner-trump-be
I'm laughing at the word "Partner"–––the Ruskskies done know what we thought we knew but the other side covered up and chided us for such nonsense.