Month: June 2022

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a scene from the Navajo reservation, between Cameron and Page, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on 6×6 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.

I have made several changes for this week’s cycle. I have now revised the foreground as well as the various plants. Paint has been added to the roadway. Note also the shadowed areas of the two buildings.

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

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

If you read Margot Cleveland’s bio, you’d easily get the impression that she’s an upright and pious mother devoted to the tenets of the Catholic faith. Having a child with cystic fibrosis, she’s a strong advocate for those with special needs, and as an adjunct instructor at the University of Notre Dame and older Gen X mother, she feels qualified to provide a “a cross-generational perspective on culture and parenting, specifically through the lens of a Catholic woman.” She may be all of those things, but she’s also a liar. And if there’s one thing I know about the New Testament, it’s that Jesus of Nazareth really disliked pious liars. There are 18 different times that Jesus uses the word “hypocrite,” and none of them are polite.

Now, Donald Trump is obviously lamenting the fact that the January 6 investigatory committee is exposing his crimes day after day, and it’s making him act like a child.

Of course, he’s not going to get equal time, or any kind of time, because he insisted that the Republicans object to an independent commission and not participate in a congressional one. That leaves people like Margot Cleveland to do their best, but her perch at The Federalist is probably not adequate for the disgraced ex-president’s needs.

The simple fact is that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 presidential election fair and square, and it wasn’t all that close. In every election, there will be examples of mishaps by incompetent administrators and a handful of voters who attempt to, or even succeed in casting a fraudulent ballot. Election laws will be changed at the last minute, and lawyers will battle in court over all manner of issues.

Sometimes the Democrats will succeed in making it easier to vote and sometimes the Republicans will have success knocking people off the voters rolls, curtailing early/absentee voting, closing polling stations in urban areas, and demanding ID from legitimate voters who don’t possess ID.

In the end, the courts decide what floats and what sinks, and then we go on to fight these things out in the next election cycle.

Every reputable person who has looked at the presidential election, including especially in the closely contested states that Biden/Harris won, has concluded that the overall result was correct. Whatever irregularities have been discovered did not amount to enough to change the outcome in any state, and therefore the Electoral College count was correct. This is why Trump could not get any support for challenging the counting of the votes on January 6. He was rebuffed by his Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, by his own White House lawyers, by the courts, and by his own vice-president. If they really felt that the election had been stolen, they would have been willing to listen, but the stood resolute in opposition.

But Ms. Cleveland wants to rehash these things as if they represent anything more than a distraction from the plain truth that Trump lost, did not want to relinquish the presidency, and led a violent and bloody coup against the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Government and the U.S. Constitution.

You can’t aid and abet lies this big and consequential and call yourself an upright and pious person. I hope Notre Dame University takes notice, not because I’m all about cancel culture, but because they have to protect the integrity of their faith.

Trump wants equal time to tell his lies, and Cleveland has eagerly volunteered.

 

Maybe you’re not the most courageous type and ill-suited for participation in a civil war, but I have to ask what you would have done if, on January 6, 2021, Mike Pence had simply declared himself and Donald Trump as the winners of the 2020 presidential election. Would you have woken up the next day and packed your kids’ lunches as usual? Would you have had a normal work day? Because millions of people would not have done that. They would have begun preparing to fight for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and America’s representative form of government. I know that I personally would have considered it an act of war. I would have reached out to like-minded people to develop a plan of action. Whatever plans I might have had for my life on January 5th would have gone out the window. Much of what I had considered radical and irresponsible would have suddenly felt like a solemn duty.

The people who stormed the Capitol felt the same way, albeit based on their credulity and gullibility rather than a sober assessment of the facts. If January 6 had gone the way Trump was hoping, it would set off a violent conflict among the American populace, which would have been at war with itself. Not enough attention is paid to this irrefutable statement of reality. Trump wasn’t simply trying to stay in power or carry out a coup. He was trying to start, and then win, a war that would have cost countless lives. The fact that this did not happen should not prevent us from treating him as culpable. There’s a lot of talk about how he put Mike Pence’s live in danger, and not enough about how those who resisted him prevented him putting all of our lives in danger.

And I don’t really think the danger has dissipated all that much. Disputed elections seem to be on our horizon, and Republican officials are being nominated with increasing frequency who appear willing to do what Pence was not. So, I don’t think anyone can relax. The threat is that the American people will vote freely to effectively end their own Republic by putting people in charge of elections who will thereafter not accept defeat for their party even when legitimately defeated.

Before the voters go to the polls in November, it’s essential that the people who tried to start a civil war in January 2021 be indicted, prosecuted, and hopefully convicted, because that will send the strongest and most proper message to the electorate about what happened after Trump’s loss, and who they’re being asked to support now.

If this isn’t done out of some concern about precedent or divisiveness, the risk of civil war will go up.

 

I’ve noticed that members of the January 6 committee are being careful not to say that Donald Trump should be prosecuted. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, in particular, has stated that there should be a norm against the legislative or executive branch of government telling the Department of Justice who they should investigate. Trump destroyed this norm, including by interjecting to tell the DOJ who not to investigate (because they are “a good guy”), and Raskin doesn’t want to perpetuate that practice. I think this is an admirable position to take and I won’t criticize it.

What concerns me is the idea that the Establishment (and I use that term in the positive sense) thinking that they can turn back the tide of Trumpian fascism simply by exposing the truth. Like it or not, the Murdoch media empire is part of the Establishment and CNN’s Reliable Sources reports that they’re beginning to act like it, at least on the print side.

This happens from time to time, but it’s still notable: Rupert Murdoch-controlled publications are taking a tougher line against Trump than Murdoch-owned TV. The Wall Street Journal’s most-read Opinion piece this weekend was the Friday editorial that concluded, “Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on Jan. 6, and he is still doing it.” The New York Post’s editorial board struck a somewhat different tone, but urged readers to “unsubscribe from Trump’s daily emails begging for money” and “pick your favorite from a new crop of conservatives.” Move on from Trump, the editors wrote, and “Let’s make America sane again.”

In 2016, no major newspaper in the country endorsed Trump’s candidacy, including some who could fairly be called a part of the “right-wing media apparatus” dedicated to electing Republicans to office. It didn’t matter. And it might not matter now that some of the elite directors of the apparatus are eager to move on from Trump. Fascism has crept in so deeply to the GOP’s zeitgeist that truthful and accurate editorials aren’t going to move the needle.

As former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer, author of the new book “Battling the Big Lie,” said on Sunday’s “Reliable Sources,” “this entire right-wing media apparatus was designed for one purpose, to elect Republicans to office.” So “this is not a moral statement from Rupert Murdoch’s papers,” he said, it’s a practical statement to get a new crop of GOP leaders elected.

Pfeiffer talked about 1/6 in the sweep of history and argued that “January 6 is a shorthand for what is happening right now. You have a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan arrested in his house for participating in the insurrection,” he said. “You have a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate who’s [running] on the platform of giving Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, no matter what the voters say. This is a clear and present danger,” so the hearings are “focusing the mind on what is coming, not just what happened.”

The January 6 hearings are not designed to make a prosecutorial case against anyone, so they are inadequate to change the trajectory we’re on. They may very well change more minds than cynics anticipate, but what is needed is swift accountability, and that can only be provided by the Justice Department.

So far, the first two hearings have resembled a prosecutorial case, and a pretty compelling one. I am sure this is adding pressure and probably also creating some cover for the DOJ to act against Donald Trump. One reason this is important is because there’s no guarantee that the Establishment will prove more popular at the ballot box than fascism. This might sound like I am arguing that we should try to win an election by preemptively prosecuting our opponents, which is a very Putinesque thing to do. But what I’m actually arguing is that to fail to prosecute actual and very serious crimes out of some deference to norms or concerns about precedent, is risking losing the entire system to dictatorship. Remember that Adolf Hitler was asked to form a government after his party won a 33 percent plurality in the 1932 elections. It was the last free election a united Germany enjoyed until 1990.

Fascism defeated democracy at the ballot box, and this is always possible because under certain conditions fascism can temporarily be more popular than the status quo, particularly if the Established is gridlocked an ineffectual. Our situation is dire in large part because the Republican half of the Establishment lost control of their party and can no longer prevent people like Trump from winning primaries. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post can’t fix that problem.

In a democracy, the people get what they ask for, and if they want candidates who will take away their freedom to choose their leaders, then it’s up to courts to try to save democracy. We can’t take away freedom of speech in order to save it, or ban whole categories of candidates. But we absolutely can prosecute people who have provably committed crimes, including crimes against the U.S. government and the U.S. Constitution. And this must be done. It is the only available remedy, and even if it is pursued as it should be, it may not be adequate.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a scene from the Navajo reservation, between Cameron and Page, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on 6×6 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.

This week’s cycle brings further refinement of the various elements. Note the foreground greenery as well as the overpainted ground and far rear buttes.

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

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

The best summary of what the January 6 Committee has learned during its investigation was not done by co-chair Liz Cheney during the primetime hearing on Thursday night, but by several reporters at the New York Times: Jan. 6: The Story So Far. That’s not to say that Rep. Cheney did a poor job. Quite the contrary. It’s just that she couldn’t go into too much detail. She gave the nation just enough to know what to expect as the series of hearings unfold throughout the remainder of June. If you want to read ahead, the Times article is the way to go. I encourage you to share it with everyone you know.

I strongly believe that it forms the basis for the prosecution of Donald Trump on the most serious conceivable charges, including seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government. On May 18, CNN reported that the Justice Department “has asked the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection to hand over transcripts of the panel’s witness depositions as part of its investigation.” On Thursday we saw snippets from several depositions, including those of former Attorney General William Barr, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. The DOJ is presumably in possession of the entirety of those videotaped depositions. We still know relatively little. The Justice Department knows a lot more.

There is substantial evidence that President Trump was apprised repeatedly that he lost the election fair and square and that claims of fraud were “nonsense” and “bullshit,” as Barr characterized them. This is a key element in proving that Trump’s actions were not a good faith effort to protect his rights or uncover the truth, but rather an effort to remain in power despite having been voted out of office.

It remains to be seen how closely he can be tied to the coordinated and pre-planned effort to breach the Capitol on January 6. The committee’s presentation on Thursday has some compelling elements, including that the Proud Boys assembled mid-morning and moved to the Capitol rather than going to the White House Ellipse to watch the president’s speech. They only initiated their assault on the barricades when the crowd at the White House, on Trump’s instructions, began its march to the Capitol. This gave them the raw numbers they needed to overwhelm the police.

In some sense, Trump’s refusal to take any action to stop the attack stands by itself as a dereliction of duty and a testament to his intent. But if any of the cooperating witnesses from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who have pled guilty have established a more direct tie to the disgraced ex-president, the elements of a conspiracy charge will be very strong.

It’s well established that Trump was attempting to stay in power on January 6. He was crystal clear about this during his speech at the Ellipse. The election had been decided for good on December 14 when the Electoral College voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but Trump said he could still win. He said, if Vice-President Mike Pence did not prevent the ceremonial certification of the vote, it was the crowd’s job not to allow Biden to become president.

…I hope Mike [Pence] is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so.

Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it. We’re supposed to protect our country, support our country, support our Constitution, and protect our constitution.

States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify. They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.

And I actually, I just spoke to Mike. I said: “Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.” And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen.

Then he told them that they needed to march to the Capitol with no permit and “fight like hell,” which they did. He’d later insist that the expected them to protest peaceably, but that would not have accomplished his goal. By midday on January 6, after the failure of his legal challenges and his efforts to enlist the Justice Department in his lies about fraud, violence had become essential for any plan for a successful coup.

Still, proving that Trump intended violence in a legal sense, beyond any reasonable doubt, is the most difficult hurdle to successfully prosecuting him on a charge of sedition. I didn’t see that kind of proof on Thursday, but I did see the possibility that the proof exists and that the Justice Department already has it in hand.

Trump’s best legal defenses are that he was genuinely deluded and believed most of what he was saying about the election being stolen, and that he had no plan for violence–it was a protest that got out of hand. The committee did a lot of work to prove that Trump knew he had lost legitimately, and they will be providing more of it. The big question is still what can be demonstrated about his direct involvement in a plan to breach the Capitol. Circumstantially, it’s quite obvious that this must have been his intention. But successfully prosecuting an ex-president of sedition requires iron-clad evidence. It likely requires a John Dean figure who will turn on Trump and explain how the insurrection all came together.

The Department of Justice has a lot to work with, including piles of evidence we still haven’t seen.  I believe they can prove that Trump tried to orchestrate a coup, and that they can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. But I haven’t seen anything yet that gives me complete assurance.

 

Thanks to season 4 of Stranger Things, this hit by Kate Bush made its way back to the charts in recent weeks:

I’m always glad to see a new generation introduced to the world of Kate Bush, who is still quite a creative powerhouse.

Cheers!

I have to give a slow-clap to Jared Kushner for managing to get this Peter Baker piece published in New York Times on the eve of the January 6 committee hearings: How Jared Kushner Washed His Hands of Donald Trump Before Jan. 6.

Never mind that this casts Kushner in the role of Pontius Pilate and Donald Trump in the role of Jesus of Nazareth. The point is to create as much separation for Kushner (and his wife, Ivanka) as possible before the country is reminded of the fact that Trump led a deadly, seditious effort to overthrow the government.

And Baker was certainly cooperative. To be fair, Baker does briefly touch on the elephant in the room, which is that Kushner was busy in the post-election period enriching himself to a ludicrous degree by using “his position to secure a $2 billion investment in his new private equity firm from a prominent Saudi Arabian wealth fund.”

While the president’s son-in-law had arguably been the most influential adviser to the president through four years, weighing in at times and carefully cultivating his reputation, he chose at that pivotal moment to focus instead on his personal project of Middle East diplomacy. He returned to the region to meet with figures who would also be helpful to him later in making money after leaving the White House.

I think Baker pretty severely undersold this point, but at least he mentioned it. But it’s easily forgotten while reading through his article, which is nothing less than a major rehabilitation effort for Kushner’s reputation.

The important facts asserted here are that both Jared and Ivanka immediately concluded on election night that Trump was going to lose, and that they also realized that Trump was in some kind of deep denial about it and couldn’t be reasoned with. Supposedly, they believed that the president would slowly come to grips with reality, but in the meantime they weren’t putting their lives on hold. They quickly decided to relocate to South Florida and began looking at schools and real estate. Of course, Kushner secured their financial future, too.

When people called asking them to reason with Trump, they urged patience. And when Rudy Giuliani got deeply involved in fighting the election results, Jared simply walked away and would have nothing to do with the effort, largely because he blamed the disgraced former mayor for getting Trump impeached through his shenanigans in Ukraine.

On January 6, itself, Ivanka supposedly did her best to get her father to call off the coup attempt, while Kushner, who had only arrived home from the Middle East that morning, raced to the White House to do the same.

Now, this may all be a precursor to a much deeper rift in the Trump family. Both Kushner and Ivanka have cooperated with the committee’s investigation, and their testimony is likely to make up a big part of the January 6 committee’s presentation.

They’ve obviously been in an awkward situation, but it has mostly been a bit below the surface. Knowing that it was all going to blow tomorrow, it looks like Kushner succeeded in preparing the ground through this Baker article in the Times.

My best guess is that we all need to stock up on popcorn because this is going to get interesting.

The Senate Watergate Committee (formally known as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities) issued a final report which is really must reading for anyone who wants to feel informed about the Nixon administration. As the January 6 hearings are set to resume in primetime on Thursday, I think it’s a good time revisit how the Republicans prepared for the Watergate hearings. One of the more satisfying elements of the final report is that is has a section on how the Nixon and his allies tried to frustrate their investigation.

On page 76, we can see their playbook looks very similar to what we’re seeing from Trump and his allies today. The setting is a meeting between Nixon’s chief of staff Bob Haldeman, senior advisor John Ehrlichman, the White House Counsel John Dean (who would soon flip and start cooperating with the committee) and special counsel to the president Richard Moore.

The strategy was to be as uncooperative as possible, to accuse the Democrats of doing the same things, and to use friendly media to accuse the mainstream media of bias.

One difference which is immediately clear is that the Nixon strategizers did not believe it was viable to be openly unhelpful. They were willing to accuse the Democratically-controlled committee of partisanship, but not to attack its legitimacy or legality. They felt the need to adopt a “posture of full cooperation.”

Obviously, the January 6 committee does not get the same level of respect from Trump’s strategists. Only two Republicans (Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois) have agreed to serve on the committee, and they have both been ostracized from the party. The official Trump position is that the committee isn’t legal and has no authority, although the Supreme Court did not support them in that assertion.

The original idea was to set up an independent commission to study the events of January 6, 2021, but the Republicans ultimately refused to sign off because they insisted the commission also examine violence related to the protests stemming from the death of George Floyd, a black man murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. This was their twisted way of  “attempted to show that the Democrats have engaged in the same type of activities” as the MAGA-hatted mob that overran the Capitol on January 6 and injuring 114 police officers and leading to the deaths of several more.

Dean Obeidallah, writing for CNN, forecasts the Republican media strategy for the January 6 hearings, and it certainly looks reminiscent of Nixon’s media plan for the Watergate hearings.

The proceedings may prove quite damning for former President Donald Trump and also are expected to attract massive media coverage — which is why Trump and his allies are desperately trying to provide “counterprogramming” to distract from the hearings.

On Saturday, Rep. Elise Stefanik — the third-ranking member of the House GOP leadership — revealed part of their plan in an interview with Breitbart News.

“We’re working very closely with President Trump and his team” on a counter-messaging effort, she said, adding that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Jim Jordan “and really all of the House Republicans will be pushing back in a rapid response fashion.”

“You will see us all over the airwaves, we will be setting the record straight,” Stefanik promised, as they will argue that the bipartisan committee’s work is “illegitimate.” And they plan to assert the panel’s true goal will be to punish political opponents and target “patriotic Trump supporters.” Axios reported last week that Trump has not ruled out making media appearances to bolster this effort.

One of the more amazing aspects of this strategy is that it involves House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, both of whom refused subpoenas to appear before the committee. It should be noted here that all four of the participants in the above-cited Le Costa meeting (Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and Moore) testified in the Watergate hearings.

As for the idea that the hearings are simply an effort to “punish patriotic Trump supporters,” it should be noted that only yesterday the Department of Justice charged five more January 6 protestors with seditious conspiracy. In other words, these people stand accused of attempting to “use force to overthrow the government.”

There’s simply no way to make a convincing case that “the Democrats have engaged in the same type of activities,” which is why they must try to confuse matters with any distractions they can manufacture.

When Nixon resigned and most of his senior leadership went to prison, that largely cleaned house so that President Ford could try to re-establish the GOP as a law-abiding organization. But, in this case, we have most of the Republican leadership in Congress working to obstruct and delegitimize the investigation, largely because they believe, possibly correctly, that the voters are about to put them in charge after the 2022 midterm elections. They not only think they won’t be penalized for this behavior but that they will be positively rewarded.

Whether things turn out the way they’re planning or not, we can be sure that the house will not be cleaned and that the GOP will remain a criminal enterprise.

It’s kind of a revelation to me to contemplate what it means to say the COVID-19 pandemic is over. Is it 200 or fewer American deaths a day, a number which is slightly worse that a bad flu season’s toll, and which has been discussed (but not accepted) as a possible metric inside the Biden administration?

To be clear, we’ve never been that low since the pandemic began. The best we ever did was 230 deaths a day, and that number soon shot up to over 2,600 a day once the Delta and Omicron variants hit.  That experience highlights the difficulty of declaring an end to the pandemic, but even 200 deaths a day isn’t something we should just accept. What kind of message does it send to say that the pandemic is over, and what, really, is the point in saying it?

If the administration wants to take a victory lap, that’s always going to have a strong and distasteful element to it, even if it’s well-deserved. And there’s always the risk that they’ll look foolish if the virus evolves again into something far more lethal.

I actually don’t see the point in making some pronouncement, ever. Far better to just stick to numbers. If the numbers are low and steady or improving, then the responsible public health officials should be proud to discuss that, as well as ways that more progress can be made. But this isn’t a virus that is likely to be eradicated. What we call it isn’t that important. In the most important sense, the threat is never going to be over, but how much we need to worry about it is going to change.