Month: June 2021

Pew Research has released its major study of the 2020 presidential electorate and there are a few interesting results even if the numbers largely confirm what was already known or suspected. For example, we can get a sense of how identity worked differently for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost white women by two points, and in 2020 Biden lost them by seven. By contrast, Biden lost white Catholics by 15 points, which seems disappointing, but Clinton lost them by 33 points in 2016. It’s a safe bet these numbers reflect a good number of voters who made their decisions primarily based on gender or religious affinity, and therefore they’re not indicative of contest-specific issues or long-term trends. This isn’t rocket science; if you want to do better with white women, choose a white woman as your candidate, and if you wan’t to improve with white Catholics, choose a white Catholic. Unfortunately, the identify difference between Trump’s two opponents makes it harder to figure out how issues or Trump’s performance in office may have affected these two groups.

It’s easier to see identity drift in the non-Catholic religious numbers. White evangelicals gave Trump a 61 point edge in 2016 and that jumped all the way to 69 points in 2020. Clearly, they were happy with his performance. Despite this, Trump’s advantage with regular church-goers (of all denominations) actually declined by two points.

Trump’s effort to makes whites vote with racial consciousness looks to have been successful. This is most clearly seen in the rural vote where his 25-point advantage in 2016 ballooned to 32 points in 2020.  Despite this, white voters’ share of the Trump electorate declined from 88 percent in 2016 to 85 percent in 2016. White voters’ share of the Democratic vote actually went up by one point to 61 percent. There’s a lot of push and pull in these numbers which makes them difficult to interpret. The white share of the overall electorate was down two points in 2020, but suburban voters made up a much bigger percentage (55 percent) of Biden’s electorate than Clinton’s (48 percent). The overall impression is that the lower the education level, the more successful Trump was in getting white’s to identify with him (and the GOP) as their savior. But even this is complicated because the most straightforward measure doesn’t show it. The percentage of Trump voters with a college degree was actually up two points in 2020 and the share of non-degree white Trump voters was down by five points. That’s pretty much statistical noise that doesn’t indicate a major shift in voter preference. Still, education levels with Latinos were correlated with preference, with college graduates much more likely to prefer Biden.

The big shifts in the electorate show up clearly in the data. Biden won independents by nine points while Clinton lost them by one. Biden did substantially better than Clinton in the suburbs. Trump ramped up his rural and white evangelical support and made some inroads with less educated Latinos. He also did modestly better than in 2016 with voters under thirty.

The overall picture is favorable to Democrats because Trump’s strongest groups are aging out of the electorate and declining as a percentage of the electorate. But Biden saw some slippage with young voters and Latinos, and he also can’t depend on independents to favor him when he’s the incumbent since they tend to favor change.

The most concerning development is increased racial polarization, which is basically more white voters making decisions based on their own perceived racial self-interest. Another troubling development is the Republican Party’s increasing reliance on low education voters. This isn’t a problem in itself, but mainly due to how the Republicans go about winning their support–namely telling gigantic lies that are unconvincing to college graduates.

For Biden’s election prospects, the biggest warning sign is probably his reliance on independents in 2020. If he loses them in 2024, he’ll have to make it up somewhere else, and he could be close to maxed out in the suburbs. For the Republicans, the steady loss of natural voter share is a problem, but they also have to be concerned that a lot of their massive advantage with rural voters won’t transfer to a candidate who isn’t Trump.

It seems like both sides should be interested in eating into the other’s area of strength. For the GOP, this means improving in the suburbs and among low-education minorities. For the Democrats, it means reducing the rural disadvantage back down to pre-2016 levels. This ought to result in a reduction in the heat level of the culture wars, but it’s highly doubtful that either party will seriously pursue that strategy. Organizing and fundraising are highly dependent on boiling cultural issues, and cultural moderates are dead ducks in most partisan primaries.

Even if neither party will pursue an optimized strategy, someone has to win. I’d rather be the incumbent party with an ascendent base and a mostly friendly media than whatever shitshow best describes the Republicans.

It looks like almost all the news coverage on the impending legal action against the Trump Organization is colored by the input of attorney Ronald Fischetti, who represents former president Donald J. Trump. I don’t begrudge reporters from CBS News, Politico and Reuters using Fischetti as a source, but it has definitely colored how the issue is being discussed. The result is downright confusion.

Fischetti’s agenda is pretty obvious. He wants to pre-spin some really bad news that is likely going to be announced in the near future by Cy Vance Jr., the Manhattan prosecutor. Specifically, he wants to prepare people to hear that Donald Trump’s corporation is being charged with serious crimes and that some of his top employees are facing felony charges. Importantly, however, Fischetti wants to emphasize that his client is not being charged, at least not yet. And he wants people to know that the charges don’t pertain to payoffs to porn stars and Penthouse models. He’s also suggested that the pending indictments don’t touch on over- and undervaluation of the corporation’s assets.

If all of that is true, and we have to take Fischetti’s self-interested word for that right now, then it appears that the charges will be limited in scope and confined to a failure to properly account for company perks like cars, apartments and even college tuition. The argument then goes that in similar circumstances, companies are ordinarily allowed to pay back taxes with interest and fines rather than being hauled into criminal court. The same is true of corporate management.

So far, so good. Charges are brought, and Trump-allied lawyers argue that it’s a selective prosecution and an abuse of discretion. This is unlikely to work in court, but it will be pretty effective with public opinion because it’s true that these crimes aren’t usually charged.

So, what’s missing here?

Everyone seems to agree that Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg is the true target of the coming indictments. The prosecutors want him to talk and he won’t cooperate, so they’re going to try to change his mind by threatening to put him in jail. That makes perfect sense except that he would not likely face any jail time for the crime of minor corporate or even personal tax evasion. The types of back taxes and fines we’re talking about wouldn’t cripple a man of his wealth either. If some of his family members are ensnared here, that could help focus his mind, but they’re not likely to face jail time or crippling fines either.

Now, the reporters didn’t restrict themselves to taking to Fischetti. They also talked to knowledgeable attorneys and prosecutors who assured them that this could be just the beginning. More charges could be coming, including against the former president and his adult children. That’s all consistent with this being about getting Weisselberg or others to testify against Trump. But the charges under discussion seem insufficient to the task.

Perhaps for this reason, some of the speculation has drifted off a bit to discussion of what a conviction could mean for the Trump Organization. But there’s often no real specificity on this point. Take the CBS News version as an example:

If the Trump Organization were to be charged, [Keir] Dougall [a CBS News legal contributor and former federal prosecutor] said the company could face adverse business consequences from an indictment, and the environment for the Trump Organization could worsen if there is a conviction.

That’s tells almost nothing about the adverse consequences might be. Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, who for several years now has been on the Trump finances like white on rice, offered some ideas during an appearance on MSNBC.

“Not merely being indicted is going to change that much, but if they plead guilty to any of these crimes, there is a number of implications, the banks could call in the loans and the liquor licenses as the golf clubs and hotels, they could call in the liquor licenses, because companies with felony charges cannot own a liquor license,” he explained. “So it could have implications for companies that are nowhere near New York could not have a liquor license.”

It’s hard to run an attractive luxury hotel or golf resort without a liquor license, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the kind of thing that would get Weisselberg to talk, nor would the Trump Organization find it an insurmountable problem. If banks called in loans, that could be a different kettle of fish but it just seems unlikely that this threat would lead anywhere for the prosecutors.

So, maybe the problem here is that Fischetti’s understanding or account of the prosecutors’ intentions is not accurate. Maybe the indictments will be about a lot more than dishonest accounting of employee compensation.

Let’s go for a moment to the Politico version of this story:

According to Fischetti, members of Vance’s team said they were considering bringing charges against the Trump Organization and its individual employees related to alleged failures to pay taxes on corporate benefits and perks. It has been widely reported that those perks included cars and apartments and appear to only involve a small number of executives.

“We asked, ‘Is there anything else?’” Fischetti told POLITICO. “They said, ‘No.’”

“It’s crazy that that’s all they had,” he added.

If they actually have more than Fischetti is saying, then this isn’t the best pre-spin. His argument seems to be that the prosecutors did a major years-long investigation and found essentially nothing. If they found a lot more, then Fischetti isn’t doing a good job of prepping people.

When he says “it’s crazy” that they didn’t find more crimes to prosecute, I don’t think he means the prosecutors are incompetent investigators, but rather that they shouldn’t bother indicting anyone on such tacky-tack fouls. It’s a good talking point, but one that would be immediately rendered inoperative if Cy Vance Jr. comes in bigger than expected.

Which brings me back to the point that this doesn’t add up. This has never been an investigation over the Trump Organizations perks. As a step to something bigger, the subject seems wholly inadequate. So maybe Fischetti is confused or deliberately misrepresenting what he was told. It could be that the explanation is that Fischetti is a lousy lawyer, much like the attorneys who represented Trump in his second impeachment trial.

The only thing I know for sure is that things will only become clear when Cy Vance Jr. talks for himself. I hope we don’t have to wait too much longer.

Hi everyone! It’s another midweek and time for another midweek cafe.

Let’s enjoy Queen’s full set from Live Aid in 1985:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjXetWK-Ur8

I’ll add some more videos by Queen for good measure:

I always considered Queen one of the few prog rock bands from the 1970s that could actually adapt to the 1980s (Rush managed quite nicely as well).

Enjoy!

Cheers!

The advantage of having an independent investigative commission for the January 6 coup attempt is that it would take some of the politics out of the equation. It’s easy to see how this might be by imagining a different panel, for example one charged with discovering the causes of the Champlain Towers South condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. A commission like that would be made up of architects and engineers, not local politicians, some of whom might have an interest in covering their ass and others in inflicting political blame.

There were a variety of causes for the Capitol riot, including the behavior of some members of Congress. Under the circumstances, Congress is not an ideal investigator, and the Democrats understood this. They wanted an independent commission and only settled on a congressional select committee after the Senate Republicans rebuffed them.

Greg Sargent is eager to see the select committee investigate the role white rage played in the siege. He argues that it’s a debate the country needs to have. That might be true, but the true purpose of a fact-finding commission is to remove as much debate as possible.

Consider the case of Al Gore’s decision to focus on climate change in the immediate aftermath of the 2000 election. He later admitted that he set the cause back by politicizing it. It’s not that he made mistakes with his rhetoric, but simply that half the country had just voted against him and was disinclined to believe anything he had to say. He was the wrong messenger. A commission created and staffed by Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to be persuasive to most of the 70-plus million Americans who voted for Donald Trump. That’s doubly true if they attempt to make the investigation about speculative interpretations of the causes and motives.

On some level, approaching the January 6 question as a matter of motive is much like attempting to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. An investigation of that type is sociological in nature. It’s not about the tick-tock of establishing who did what when and whether or not crimes were committed. It’s not about figuring out how to better secure the Capitol complex and the transition of government.

A bunch of self-interested politicians are not going to give us a good sociological study.

That being said, the crowd that attacked the Capitol was fed a lot of disinformation. It’s important to know how they received this disinformation because that gets to the root cause of the riot. This is probably more important for understanding causality and assigning blame than for making reforms. After all, there is no way to legislate away people’s willingness to lie and no reforms can make people less gullible.

On another level, it’s much easier to get consensus around the fact that the election was not stolen (and that people who attacked the Capitol in the mistaken belief that it was were deluded) than it is to delegitimize a racially-motivated movement that is almost synonymous with the Republican Party at this point.

Dig a centimeter below the surface of any insurrectionist and you’ll find some race panic, but how people feel about the changing demographics and mores of the country isn’t something that can be canceled by an investigation. It’s criminal that the Republicans stoke these feelings of insecurity and rage, but it’s also unfortunately the playing field of our nation’s politics. We don’t need a partisan committee to take sides in that debate. Doing so would probably backfire in the sense that it would increase insecurity and rage rather than settle the matter in favor of non-racists.

The select committee should focus on the main actors who encouraged and enabled the insurrection. It should follow the money and the flows of bad information. It should look at the organizers and any congressional members who conspired with the insurrectionists. And of course it should look at the how the chain on command functioned, how the various police and security forces prepared and coordinated.

What it shouldn’t do is become a debating society dedicated to understanding racial insecurities. The investigation should yield a solid, corroborated narrative of events, and it should produce concrete proposals that the legislature can act upon. It should not try to disentangle all the undercurrents that made the riot possible. The Republican Party has traded in racial anxiety for decades now and that isn’t going to change anytime soon, but it’s only recently that they’ve become aggressively anti-Democratic. A partisan investigation can still produce something of value, but it should be humble about what can reasonably be accomplished, and remember that it is the wrong messenger for anything that’s politically contentious.

If the Democrats want a national discussion on white rage, they should have it during a debate over strengthening voting rights and improving our electoral system. In other words, it should be in the context of the law and what is (or ought to be) constitutionally protected. You can’t legislate away racial insecurity but you can make it illegal to deny black people the vote. That’s a debate and a battle the Democrats need to and can win.

Newsweek reports that QAnon supporters were bored and disappointed by Donald Trump’s speech Saturday from Wellington, Ohio. The main problem was apparently the stale material. In France, Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally (RN) party has suffered severely disappointing results in the country’s regional elections, owing mainly to record-low voter turnout that disproportionately hurt the far-right. Maybe her material is past its sell-by date, too.

Perhaps there is hope that the fever is breaking. Al Gore is trying to be optimistic, telling CNN:

“I’m hoping that this craziness will fade over time. We hear about ‘AI’ standing for ‘artificial intelligence.’ They’re putting another kind of AI out: artificial insanity. They’re putting out messages that create an alternate reality, and people get into these echo chambers on the internet, and it’s all they hear, and they begin to believe the alternate reality.”

Mitt Romney is acting like the light at the end of the tunnel might not be an oncoming train after all. At least, he thinks telling the truth still might matter.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Sunday said Donald Trump’s ongoing lying that he won the 2020 election is “like WWF,” comparing the former president’s return to rally events with the lurid theatrics of staged wrestling entertainment.

Trump held a rally in Ohio Saturday, during which he again repeated false claims that the presidential election was rigged against him, telling supporters it was “the scam of the century and the crime of the century.”

“I do think it’s important for each person to speak the truth and to make clear that the ‘Big Lie’ is exactly that,” Romney told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” when asked if more Republicans should call out those lies.

Whether it’s reading excerpts from Michael Wolff’s new book on what went down inside the White House on January 6 or it’s watching the dustup between Trump, William Barr and Mitch McConnell, it seems clear that there’s some time limit on how long Trump can impose his insanity of the right.

Chris Christie has written “a frank insider’s account of [the 2020] election and the tragic descent of some members of the Republican Party into cowardice and madness” aimed at rescuing the GOP from conspiracy theorists and madmen. The Washington Examiner says the Republicans are all set up for a big comeback just so long as Trump stops talking.

But I’m not convinced that things are about to improve. The Republicans have been convinced for some time that they cannot compete with the Democrats unless Trump’s base turns out, and they’re not going to turn out if he doesn’t tell them to turn out. They’re probably better off relying on redistricting and misinformation to lead them back to majorities than anything else, and no one is better at misinformation than Trump.

There was widespread reporting over the weekend that lawyers for the Trump Organization have been given a Monday deadline to convince New York prosecutors not to drop the hammer, and if that’s true we could soon be seeing the long-awaited next phase of Trump’s career–as a defendant. The U.S. House of Representatives will initiate a Select Committee investigation of the January 6 coup attempt sometime after the July 4 recess, and that also might shake things up a bit.

Still, I think outright boredom might be our best bet. At some point, Trump’s base will lose interest. When they do, the Republicans will see if they can win without him.

I’m very glad to see the New York Times Magazine feature on carbontech. I desperately needed an infusion of hope. When it’s 115 degrees fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon, it’s hard to see how there’s any future for humanity. It’s been a long time since I thought run-away global warming could be stopped, and it’s happening now rather than in the indeterminate future.

The all-time record high for British Columbia is 112 F (44 C), recorded on July 16 and 17, 1941, in Lytton and Lillooet, while the record for all of Canada is 113 F (45 C), set on July 5, 1937, in Midale and Yellowgrass, Saskatchewan.

AccuWeather meteorologists predict Kamloops, British Columbia, to reach 112 F (44 C) on Monday and 115 F (46 C) on Tuesday, which would set a new all-time record high for the country.

This kind of weather is an aberration today, but it’s a sign of things to come. To avoid this future we need to stop putting any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The goal, which seems completely unrealistic, is to accomplish this by 2050. But it looks like carbontech could be an important part of the solution.

The idea is to use carbon dioxide in everyday materials, like concrete, carpeting, and tires where it will essentially be captured. This can make some of the most carbon-intensive manufacturing processes carbon neutral or even carbon negative. This, in turn, will create a market for carbon dioxide as a raw material, so rather than drilling for fossil fuels and moving them around in pipelines, investment will go to gathering CO2 and piping it around to where it’s needed. This will also make it easier to bury CO2 where it won’t contribute to global warming.

By itself, carbontech won’t put much if a dent in emissions, but if it can help create a new infrastructure for carbon capture and distribution, it might accelerate how quickly we can transfer away from fossil fuels.

We’re past the point where we need to use science to make our arguments on climate change. When Republicans in Washington state have constituents dropping dead by the thousands because that’s what happens when it’s 125 degrees and no one has any air-conditioning, they’ll either stop reciting ExxonMobil talking points or they’ll be voted out office.

The problem is that it’s probably too late.

But human’s can be very intelligent and innovative–some of them anyway–and carbontech is a good example of this. Maybe we can wriggle out of this mess after all.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the 2003 Toyota for the upcoming “planes, trains and automobiles” show at the gallery where I sometimes show some of my pieces. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent car lot visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Since last time I have concentrated my efforts on the rear of the scene. I have now completed the shed and cars to the right. Note the white van to the center rear. Finally, there is the yellow text in the Toyota’s windshield, something I have waited to do. I have titled this one “Easy credit terms”.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager did a profile of Steve Ricchetti for the Washington Post. If you don’t know who Ricchetti is, that’s partly by his own design–he avoids the media spotlight. People in the nation’s capital know who is though, because he’s been a major mover and shaker there for years. He’s kind of an alter-ego of former White House counselor and chief of staff John Podesta. Like John, Steve has a brother who makes a killing as a lobbyist.

In 2000, Tony Podesta — another lobbyist whose brother, John, went in and out of politics — boasted to the New York Times about their and the Ricchettis’ influence: “The Medicis controlled everything. … We have it split into two families.”

Tony Podesta served as Obama’s counselor and Hillary’s campaign chairman. Ricchetti has served both of those roles for Joe Biden. There’s a bit of controversy swirling around him because three of his children have landed paying jobs in the Biden administration, but hardly anyone seems to hold any ill-will for Ricchetti. He has a gift for making people like him.

The reason the Post went live with their Ricchetti profile now is that he’s been intricately involved in the bipartisan infrastructure framework that the White House announced on Thursday.

Ricchetti was among the White House officials on Capitol Hill on Wednesday night securing the “framework” of an infrastructure deal with Senate Democrats and Republicans. Later in the evening, Ricchetti was among White House officials briefing top Democratic leaders about the next steps.

It’s debatable whether this is an accomplishment we should applaud. It’s basically an agreement between five Democratic senators, five Republican senators and the White House to spend a little under $700 billion new dollars, mostly on traditional infrastructure projects. The Biden administration says it’s a $1.2 trillion dollar bill, but that’s misleading because almost half the money was already allocated. We might not like how they pay for this bill either– particularly the public-private partnerships it envisions.

Predictably, the National Review is opposed to the deal, but this time they have a point. The whole thing is a charade. In fact, the possible success of this charade might be the bill’s greatest selling point.

Imagine if, in 2017, Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell announced a bipartisan deal with Democrats on some tax-reform provisions they agreed with, then passed the rest of the Republican tax bill anyway and called it bipartisan tax reform. It would be viewed as absurd, and rightly so. Such is the case this time around.

Republicans should reject this patently ridiculous and inaptly named “compromise.”

The comparison to Trump’s tax cut bill is apt. Trump enacted those cuts through the budget reconciliation process because he had no Democratic votes and needed to pass them with a simple majority to overcome a filibuster. The exact same thing is supposed to happen here for the bulk of Biden’s infrastructure plan. The “bipartisan infrastructure framework” announced this week is merely a subset of the total package that includes some provisions that Republicans agree with.

It’s not entirely clear why the Republicans would go along with this sham, and there’s a good possibility that they won’t. After all, only five Republican senators are a party to the deal, and the Biden administration needs ten Republicans to overcome a filibuster.

And this sham is not well-hidden. As the editors at the National Review say:

Democrats have made their plans very clear. They want to move the bipartisan plan through the Senate on a parallel track with a reconciliation bill stuffed with liberal wish-list items that will be rammed through on a pure party-line basis.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said both bills would be moved through the Senate next month, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House would not even consider acting on the bipartisan bill unless the far-left one also passes the Senate.

President Biden affirmed this, saying that if only one of the two bills land on his desk, he will not sign it.

Despite the transparent fraud of this whole arrangement, it still could work. The Republicans probably don’t want to stop all of Biden’s proposed infrastructure spending, and this gives some members a way to say yes. It’s also an effective way to blunt momentum for killing off the legislative filibuster. After all, if the Senate can still come together to craft big bipartisan deals, then maybe the place can still function, right?

From the Biden administration’s point of view, the important thing is that they get the money they need to push their priorities forward, and if they have to put on a kabuki play to get it done, then kudos to them for finding a solution.

To see what I mean, consider that Ryan Grim of The Intercept, a habitual critic of the Democrats and neoliberalism, is applauding this performance very loudly and is almost hyperbolic in how he describes its significance.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, the one thing political observers and participants around the globe seem to agree on is that the neoliberal world order that arose out of World War II, and became hegemonic after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is in deep crisis — and has been since the financial crisis of 2008.

What type of world order will emerge from this crisis is hotly disputed, a question that hasn’t been so open since the 1930s. How exactly the U.S. emerges from this crisis, and in what state, will be significantly determined by the legislative jockeying of the next few months…

…Yet the Biden administration agenda that is still very much alive carries arguably far more potential consequence for a fundamental reorienting of the American economy. If the neoliberal order is collapsing, the next few months offer Democrats a perhaps-final chance to build something new in its place.

He wouldn’t be saying this about the bipartisan infrastructure framework alone, built as it is on neoliberal public-private partnerships. Grim is looking at the “$2.3 trillion package dubbed the American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan” that will be included in the budget reconciliation bill.

All fifty Democratic senators have committed to this two-track plan, but centrist members like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona may insist that the latter bill be trimmed down, perhaps substantially.

So, there’s really two outstanding questions. First, will there be ten Republican senators who support the framework bill announced this week? The second question is what will happen if there is not.

In that case, the Democrats could go it alone by putting it all through the budget reconciliation process, but this is something Manchin in particular has said he would not support. Of course, he said that while he was working on a bipartisan deal. If that deal collapses, he may change his mind.

He may change his mind about the legislative filibuster entirely in that case. Preventing that from happening is one reason the Republicans may consent to getting rolled.

As one of the directors of this play, Ricchetti deserves more attention, and maybe acclaim. It’s a dirty business, but negotiating with Republicans is always dirty.

Rudy Giuliani lost his law license Thursday because he’s a giant liar. A New York appellate court serving as a disciplinary panel wrote a 33-page decision explaining their ruling. They found that his actions on behalf of his client Donald J. Trump constituted “an immediate threat” to the public interest.

“We conclude that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at re-election in 2020,” the decision read.

The state court issued an “interim suspension” which the former New York City mayor can appeal if he wants to waste some time.  This followed a different proceeding on Wednesday in federal court where 49-year-old Anna Morgan-Lloyd of Indiana begged for leniency after pleading guilty to a “misdemeanor count of demonstrating inside the Capitol” on January 6, 2021.

“I went there to support . . . President Trump peacefully,” she said. “I’m ashamed that it became a savage display of violence that day. . . . It was never my intent to be a part of something that’s so disgraceful to our American people and so disgraceful to our country. I just want to apologize.”

Inside our courtrooms, reality is in control. In Ms. Morgan-Lloyd’s case, the Reagan-appointed judge was in no mood for nonsense. He sentenced her to three years of probation and made clear that others should not expect similar leniency.

Referring to the words of Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), who last month suggested that many inside the Capitol following the pro-Trump mob’s attack on the building looked like they were on a “normal tourist visit,” the judge said that video introduced in court “will show the attempts of some congressmen to rewrite history . . . is utter nonsense.”

Referring to Morgan-Lloyd’s own statement, he noted, “You saw it for yourself and you were horrified.”
The judge also took time to dismiss “conspiracy theories” about FBI informants and address claims that the Capitol defendants are being treated more harshly than Black Lives Matter protesters. He said he couldn’t speak to what happens in state courts, but that Attorney General Merrick Garland has “promised the law will be applied equally . . . whatever the complexion of the demonstrator is.”

He noted that Martin Luther King Jr., although he was never violent, prepared to go to jail when he protested against violence.

“Some of my defendants in some of these other cases think there’s no consequence to this, and there is a consequence,” Lamberth said. “I don’t want to create the impression that probation is the automatic outcome here, because it’s not going to be.”

Reality is also prevailing in the Democrat-run U.S. of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that a Select Committee will investigate the January 6 coup attempt. In May, Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission but they have failed to sweep the assault on the Capitol under the rug.

The events of the day resulted in five deaths, and nearly 140 officers were assaulted during the attack, as they faced rioters armed with ax handles, bats, metal batons, wooden poles, hockey sticks and other weapons, authorities said.

Meanwhile, Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman, Emma Brown, Tom Hamburger and Josh Dawsey are detailing how “The Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump is propagating through right-wing media channels.

The baseless assertion, backed by millions of dollars from wealthy individuals, is reverberating across this alternative media ecosphere five months after Trump and many of his backers were pushed off Facebook and Twitter for spreading disinformation that inspired a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. While largely unnoticed by Americans who have accepted the fact of President Biden’s victory, the deluge of content has captured the attention of many who think the election was rigged, a belief that is an animating force inside the Republican Party.

At the moment, the courts and Congress have formed a firewall that protects reality. But make no mistake. We are all under siege. Barbarians are at the gates.

We all want and deserve peace and quiet after four years of political chaos and a global pandemic. We will not receive peace and quiet. Reality doesn’t protect itself and the Democrats’ control of Congress is tenuous at best. We’re going to lose this fight if we don’t recognize the threat and man the walls.

It’s hard to believe it has been 17 years since I worked for ACORN as a voter reg/GOTV county coordinator. When I launched Booman Tribune, it had only been two months since I’d left that job. The people I had worked with, the people I had hired, trained and managed, they were still fresh in my mind. Recollections are cloudy and scattered now, and distorted by subsequent experience. But I haven’t forgotten all the lessons those folks taught me, and I learned more in that job than any I ever held.

The office was in a shamefully ramshackle tenement on Broad St. in North Philadelphia. I spent most of my time on the road and in the field, but I did all my hiring and a lot of training in that office. It was a painful experience because the pool of applicants came ill-equipped for employment. They often didn’t have the basics, like a driver’s license, social security card, or any form of picture identification. They didn’t have cars and they didn’t have bank accounts. They often lacked any legitimate work experience, which showed in how they interviewed. Many were also pretty desperate. We had a lot of problems with payroll because everything came through the main office in New Orleans, and when anything went wrong with a paycheck I’d be on the phone with someone I’d never met trying to explain that my worker’s electricity was going to be cut off if they didn’t get their shit together.

I worked with what I had, and together as a team we did a remarkable job or registering voters and then getting them to the polls for John Kerry and John Edwards–although technically we were nonpartisan. Any snobbery I might have had when I came into that job was pretty well scrubbed out of me by the time I moved on. I saw the dignity in the people I worked with, and I came to understand the world they lived in, which was totally unlike my own. I had searing experiences that will never leave me, like the conversation I had with a kid who wanted advice on how to go to college, and when I sat down with him to discuss it, it just became clear that the obstacles were so great that he might as well have asked me to help me land on the moon. Every part of his life was like a tether holding him down, limiting his options, making even the simplest sounding efforts beyond his capacity to achieve. I don’t cry often, but I cried that night after our conversation was over.

He was one of my better workers and had a real talent for convincing people they should vote. But he couldn’t have voted if he’d needed a state-issued photo identification. He had no need for one since he had no bank account and no car, and it was two transfers on the bus to get to the nearest Division of Motor Vehicles where he’d have to pay for a non-driving ID. He was one of the workers whose heat was turned off when his check came late. Getting that ID was never going to be a priority for him and anyone like him.

So, how do you think I feel about Voter ID requirements? I know that in-person voter fraud almost never happens. I know that these laws are designed to disenfranchise my old employee rather than safeguard the integrity of our elections.

Yes, I know that 80 percent of the public, including 62 percent of Democrats, supports this requirement but that’s because they can’t understand why it’s an obstacle to people’s right to vote.

Democratic officeholders can read a poll. They’re ready to give up on fighting against Voter ID laws. What do you think of that?

Even the Republicans are mocking them for it.

Some conservatives say Democrats are now revealing their hypocrisy by suddenly accepting, for strategic reasons, measures they had long decried as racist and slammed Republicans for supporting.

I find this hard to stomach, as you might imagine. But I also get it. Capitulation might make good strategic sense, depending on the details. If it’s a trade that involves automatic registration and making Election Day a holiday, it might even come out as a net gain in the end. The plan Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia is bandying about would still allow folks to use a utility bill as proof of identity, and that would avoid the poll tax problem involved in mandating that people spend money on a state-issued card.

My problem is that there is no actual deal in the offing, so the Democrats are softening a principle in exchange for nothing. That’s concerning even if I can understand the rationale.