Month: July 2022

Ezra Dyer of Car & Driver has a piece on the effort by freshman North Carolina state representative Ben Moss to physically destroy free electric car chargers. Which is kind of weird because his region of North Carolina has some jobs that participate in the electric car industry but nothing notable in oil and gas. But it does seem like the kind of pet issue that could make a state rep’s career.

Here’s the idea. Allocate $50,000 to tear down the existing chargers, unless free gasoline and diesel is offered side by side. Why should fossil fuel burners pay to power their cars while EV owners drive for free? As for small business owners, if they choose to offer charging stations as an inducement to customers, the bill specified that they must itemize how much of the cost for their goods and services is a result of the expense of providing electricity. Dyer puts it this way:

That way, anyone who showed up for dinner in an F-150 (not the electric one) can get mad that their jalapeño poppers helped pay for a business expense not directly related to them. It’s the same way you demand to know how much Applebee’s spends to keep the lights on in its parking lot overnight, when you’re not there.

Sometimes we see industries gain control of politicians through donations and other behind-the-scenes support, but it’s possible to basically apply to be a fossil fuel bitch. All you have to do is propose the most absurdly pro-fossil fuel bill imaginable and the right people are bound to notice, and it won’t even require a feature in Car & Driver.

I know this is a chicken and egg question in Rep. Moss’s case. Who’s to say his whole campaign wasn’t conceived in an American Petroleum Institute boardroom. If they didn’t own him from the start, he’s made it clear that he’s for sale going forward. Maybe this bill will go nowhere, but Moss could be a U.S. Senator or even the governor someday, if he wins the attention and support of the right people. Smart.

 

 

It’s been a minute since I last posted a Sharon Van Etten video. This one is from her latest album. Enjoy!

It’s been a busy week for me so far. I hope you all are doing okay.

Cheers!

The Grid’s feature on “the Insurrectionists’ Clubhouse” is must reading. It all relates to a Capitol Hill property leased by the Conservative Partnership Institute. Located at 300 Independence Avenue near the John Adams Building annex to the Library of Congress, the townhouse is listed as the headquarters of “roughly a dozen” Trump-aligned “dark money and advocacy groups.” It has studios for television and podcasting, which are utilized by a Who’s Who of Deplorables.

The offices at 300 Independence boast an in-house podcasting studio, a television studio and a host of employees with large Twitter followings. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert is a “frequent visitor” to CPI’s television studio, according to CPI’s annual report, and she records her podcast, “Bullet Points,” at CPI, as do Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona (“What’s the Biggs Idea?”) and Matt Gaetz of Florida (“Firebrand”), as well as several other right-wing figures.

CPI also opens its facilities to right-wing outlets who help promote Trump-friendly messaging. The Epoch Times, a far-right media company affiliated with the anti-Chinese Communist Party Falun Gong religious movement, films two shows in the building, according to CPI. Right-wing outlet Newsmax filmed a documentary about Jan. 6 at CPI’s television studio.

Please note and store for future reference the close working relationship between Trumpists and the Falun Gong. The cult’s presence at the “Clubhouse” is one strong indicator that the Conservative Partnership Institute is not a normal Washington policy shop. Consider that it’s run by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and ex-Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who was moved out of the Heritage Foundation in 2017 for turning it into “more of a tea party organization than a think tank.”

The Institute’s website is short on ideology and big on “winning.” It’s really just a support network for anyone who wants to promote Trump and attack his enemies.

The Conservative Partnership Institute is quickly becoming the most essential conservative organization in Washington.

While today’s Washington is designed to defeat conservatives, CPI is designed to build them up. CPI trains, equips, and brings together the movement’s best leaders—and we do it right here, where and when conservative heroes need us.

Traditional think tanks certainly serve some similar purposes. They’re both a landing spot for members of outgoing administrations and a launching pad for staffing future ones. But they’re mostly concerned with influencing a narrow group of people in Washington who actually have the power to put ideas into action. They don’t actually seek a national audience or focus on getting the most clicks. They do want some visibility for fundraising purposes, so they have media strategies, but that’s ancillary to their purpose.

The CPI, however, is all about influencing the electorate, mainly through gross misinformation.

CPI is structured in part to act as a 21st century megaphone for pro-Trump messaging, including media perpetuating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, furthering MAGA-friendly culture war battles and pushing back against efforts to hold Trumpworld figures accountable.

Its tools reflect a growing right-wing communications strategy, which largely avoids mainstream media in favor of direct-to-supporter platforms like podcasts and social media, or engagements with MAGA-friendly outlets.

Even though Trump was president for four years, his media strategy is completely anti-establishmentarian. And yet the CPI is well-funded, directly raising $20 million in 2021, and much more through it’s network of affiliates.

The left does not do this. Certainly, people associated with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama do not do this. When I was part of a vibrant community of progressive anti-war writers in Philadelphia during the Bush and early Obama years, we got absolutely no support from anyone important in the Democratic power structure, and there were no left-leaning philanthropists offering to promote our work or turn us into polished television or radio personalities. There are many reasons why this didn’t happen, and one of them is that we weren’t interested in taking money in return for selling the party line.

Maybe it was wise for the Democrats to keep an arm’s length from us, considering that right wound up losing control of their message and platform to a group of supposedly well-heeled radicals. We could have turned out to be a left-wing monster that couldn’t be controlled. But I can’t help feeling that a lot of talent and energy was squandered, and that when the Tea Party arose there was nothing on the other side that could compete on direct-to-supporter platforms.

The chickens really came home to roost in 2016 when Trump’s campaign was almost entirely subterranean and invisible to people not locked into conservative social networks. Why is there so little money being dedicated to promoting left-leaning podcasts and developing media talent?

It’s not that I think the left needs the equivalent of CPI in terms of radicalism or misinformation, but it does need something that can meet CPI on the battlefield.

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos details and endorses the House Democrats’ midterm messaging strategy of painting their opponents as radicals rather than focusing on kitchen table issues “which frankly only reminds voters about inflation and the cost of gas.” The premise is that the upcoming elections will be decided by (primarily suburban) swing voters and, as DCCC chairman Sean Patrick Maloney says, “Swing voters are, by definition, reasonable people.”

I think reasonable people think a lot about inflation and the cost of gas, and many other “kitchen table” issues besides. The Democrats, however, think this is their area of vulnerability.

Retiring Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky summed up the calculation this way: “If we win, it’s because we scared the crap out of people about the maniacs who will be in charge.”

At the extreme, this is like saying, “I have nothing constructive to offer but you have to vote for me because my opponent is a lunatic.”  And that runs into the problem of people not being content, at all, with the status quo in this country. The whole reason lunacy has become a politically viable electoral strategy is precisely because promising more of the same is now a complete loser in the eyes of the formerly “reasonable” American public.

Certainly, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell understands this better than the Democratic strategists. He voted for the last bill Congress passed before they went in the July 4 recess. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is the first significant gun control bill to come out of Congress in decades, and the Republicans relented precisely because they understood the public will not accept more of the same on guns in the wake of another mass shooting in an elementary school. The bill became law as part of an effort to blunt the Democrats’ ability to blame the Republicans for supporting an unacceptable status quo. Nonetheless, the shootings continue and the bill is actually quite tame, so there’s no reason for the Democrats not to go on the attack on this issue.

One area where the people were actually content is abortion law. Overturning Roe v. Wade is an unwelcome change. And a good part of the Democratic messaging strategy is devoted to highlighting extreme or crazy views about abortion held by various Republican candidates.

Take Yesli Vega, for instance, a local sheriff’s deputy running to unseat Rep. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia’s newly drawn 7th District that includes a mix of suburban, rural, and military communities.

In a leaked audio recording, Vega was recently heard downplaying the potential of a pregnancy resulting from rape. In the exchange, Vega was asked whether she’s heard that it’s “harder for a woman to get pregnant” if she’s been raped.

“Well, maybe because there’s so much going on in the body. I don’t know. I haven’t, you know, seen any studies,” Vega responded. “I can see why there is truth to that. It’s unfortunate.”

The idea that conception is rare in cases of rape has not proven to be a political winner, as Todd Akin found out in 2012 when he blew an easy win against incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill. But, frankly, “reasonable” parents who were thinking of sending their daughters to Vanderbilt or Tulane are now rethinking their plans. Rape is incredibly common on college campuses, as are unintended pregnancies of all types. The entire Republican Party is responsible for making anti-choice states a dangerous place for women, on campus and off. That’s the new status quo, and the Democrats shouldn’t restrict their strong condemnation to just the most nutty and outspoken GOP candidates. This issue is the rare one where the party in power can get real mileage out of attacking the mainstream of the opposition for the current state of affairs.

I definitely understand the value of highlighting the most extreme rhetoric and ideology and hanging it around the necks of so-called “moderates,” and the Democrats are not wrong to pursue this strategy. But it should not be the primary message. I think there’s more mileage in attacking the Republicans as a whole, and not conceding that there are any GOP moderates, because they’re rare, timid and ineffectual.

There are some areas where appealing to reason can be profitable, primarily on guns and abortion, but there needs to be more of a focus on appealing to people who are fed up with the status quo on kitchen table issues, too. Republicans should be attacked for gas prices and inflation. They should be attacked for the loss of opportunity created by rampant monopolization of the economy. The Democrats needs a message that resonates in small-town America and the hollers of Appalachia. The opioid epidemic, the cost of prescription drugs, the cost of housing, these are things that should not be ignored. If nothing else, the voters’ concerns have to be recognized and respected, and Republican obstruction should be blamed.

It’s okay to have different messages for different regions, but the Democrats will not be successful if they restrict themselves to appealing to “reasonable” suburban voters. They’re been trying that for several cycles, and they’re losing the country because the country is not reasonable.

 

Alan Rozenshtein and Jed Handelsman Shugerman of Lawfare are now convinced that Donald Trump can be prosecuted for inciting a riot. Yet, prior to Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6 committee last week, they did not believe that the Justice Department had sufficient evidence to charge the disgraced ex-president with a crime. I find it frustrating when experts think themselves into knots.

Here’s the problem. These gentlemen got caught up with looking a legal statutes and what kind of evidence would satisfy them, which is understandable because that’s how lawyers think and how they’re obligated to operate. No matter what, any prosecution will ultimately come down to proving the elements of the indictments.

But this type of thinking led them to think of January 6 in terms of the riot and violence rather than the illegal effort to remain in power after losing an election. January 6 was a long-planned coup attempt, and the armed struggle with the Capitol police was not necessarily part of the plan. We know, for example, that Trump was under the assumption that he’d be at the head of the mob storming the barricades. There he would face down the police and demand entry, which may have been granted without a fight.

Then he could arrive at the congressional Electoral College certification ceremony backed by tens of thousands of heavily armed citizens and pull the equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s 1979 Ba’ath Party purge on Congress. Trump was apoplectic when the Secret Service refused to allow him to travel to the Capitol, but he let the riot become his backup plan.

Because Rozenschtein and Shugerman were focused on the riot, they put their analytical effort into examining the content of Trump’s pre-riot speech at the Ellipse, and they felt that it was not sufficient to support an incitement charge. This was based solely on the speech and other public knowledge, and not any conjecture about what evidence might not be public or could emerge through investigatory efforts. In that extremely narrow set of parameters, their analysis was sound if not conclusive. If the only crime under consideration was the riot and the only evidence of complicity was the speech, then it would be a hard case to win in court.

Well, new evidence did emerge, which should have been predictable, and it added weight to the case that Trump knew the mob was heavily armed and wanted them to confront the Capitol police.

Our conclusion, which we each came to independently, was largely grounded in First Amendment concerns about criminalizing purely political speech.

But Tuesday’s explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, changed our minds. In particular, Hutchinson testified to hearing Trump order that the magnetometers (metal detectors) used to keep armed people away from the president be removed: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags [magnetometers] away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here; let the people in and take the mags away.” …

…These utterances by Trump (as alleged by Hutchinson) were not political speech. They serve as additional proof of intent and context, and—crucially—a material act to increase the likelihood of violence. This easily distinguishes Trump’s speech at the rally from other kinds of core political speech that should never be criminalized.

So, now Rozenschtein and Shugerman believe “if presented in a criminal trial, Hutchinson’s testimony would establish that Trump was at the very least willfully blind to the possibility of, and—as seems increasingly plausible—actively in favor of, the crowd causing violence at the Capitol.” In other words, now they think he can be charged with a crime.

But the violence was never the point. The point was that Trump had no intention of relinquishing power, and the mob had been assembled to intimidate Congress in the event that Vice-President Mike Pence didn’t go along with the plan to prevent congressional certification of the vote. This has long been known, if apparently not always well understood. Without question, Trump engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with an official act of Congress. Given what his goal was, he also committed a seditious conspiracy.

There should be a lot more clarity about the fact that Trump attempted a coup. When he woke up on January 6, 2001, his singular goal was to prevent Congress from recognizing Biden and Harris as the winners of the 2020 presidential election. Every action he took that morning and afternoon was in furtherance of that clearly illegal goal. He did not intend to step down as president.

He can argue that despite all the legal, expert and official analysis he was provided that he sincerely believed that he had won the election, but that’s a criminal defense he can try out in court. In no way is it a reason why he cannot be prosecuted. It doesn’t seem like much of a defense to me, but getting an American jury to unanimously convict an ex-president of either party is not an easy task, no matter the strength or weakness of the evidence. Admittedly, the evidence needs to be overwhelming to have a chance of conviction, but the case is already strong. As we’ve seen over the last week, there’s a lot more evidence that than we know about, and we can safely assume that any eventual prosecution will be armed with facts that we have not yet seen.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony wasn’t surprising to me because I’ve long understood what Trump was trying to do. He wan’t trying to get a bunch of police officers hurt or create tens of millions of dollars of property damage. He was trying to stage a coup, and all the evidence will support this because it’s what happened.

The incitement to riot charge is stronger because of Hutchinson’s testimony, but it also made clearer that the riot wasn’t the primary plan. Trump wanted to enter Congress at the head of that mob and stop the certification dead in its tracks. Given that, the riot was a minor and unintended distraction from the main crime.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a Sedona, Arizona scene. 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 a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over this I added some preliminary paint.

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.

Everything close to Trump World suffers from some a degree of ambiguity about the line between bad faith and bad reasoning. For example, Gary Abernathy describes himself among those “who identify and empathize with Trump supporters, but want the GOP to abandon the former president.” But his Friday column in the Washington Post reads like a typical Trumpist attack on the January 6 Committee. Is his critique sincere or just stupid?

To be clear, the ostensible purpose of the piece is constructive criticism. Abernathy and the committee have the shared goal of seeing a massive erosion of support for Donald Trump’s political career. But, for Abernathy, the committee is failing to be persuasive in this respect.

He begins with what can only be termed a completely disingenuous argument. He surely knows that the Democrats initially worked to create an independent commission made up of non-lawmakers, akin to the Warren or 9/11 commissions, and that they even struck a deal with House Republican negotiators. But Mitch McConnell rejected that structure and had the Senate Republicans filibuster the bill. Then Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to create a Select committee in the House and let House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy provide a list of House Republicans who would serve on the committee. Unfortunately, McCarthy selected some members, including Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who played an active role in the coup plot, meaning that they were likely to be called as witnesses. This made them completely unsuitable for sitting on the committee, and Pelosi did not accept them. At that point, McCarthy refused to allow any Republicans to participate, although Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois defied his wishes and chose to accept Pelosi’s invitation.

Based on this history, the committee that took shape does not resemble a normal congressional investigatory committee because it isn’t at war with itself. Some of the toughest questioning and rhetoric is coming from the two Republicans who are serving, and there isn’t any pushback on the evidence that’s being provided. Not only is this not the fault of the committee, since it was McConnell and McCarthy’s obstruction that led to this structure, but it is absurd to assert that Trump supporters would be more persuaded if only people like Jim Jordan were present to throw sand in everyone’s eyes. Yet, he leads with this:

Never have we seen such a scripted production masquerading as a congressional hearing. Narration and questions are carefully read from a teleprompter. The witnesses even appear to have been coached to pause at specific points to await the next prepackaged query. While chair Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) do the heavy lifting, other committee members sit in zombie-like silence, unless it’s a day designated for one of them to perform, too.

The committee’s tactics are particularly disturbing for those of us who identify and empathize with Trump supporters, but want the GOP to abandon the former president. We know that following a well-worn playbook pitting the same basic collection of usual adversaries against Trump will not succeed at changing minds.

If you read that carefully, you’ll see it’s already employing pretzel logic. Is the problem that the hearings are scripted, not adversarial enough, or that they only involve the “usual adversaries”? Which of those items make them unpersuasive to Trump supporters?

In any case, the entire point of Republican non-participation is so they can make the argument that the investigation is partisan and lacking in credibility. Naturally, they’re going to make that argument but it doesn’t mean that there is some flaw of the committee’s own making.

Perversely, for Abernathy, the credibility and persuasiveness of the committee would be enhanced if they feigned doubt where no doubt exists. In the following example, Abernathy argues that somehow supporters of Trump are not a clear and present danger to the United States.

It would be helpful for some committee members to at least feign some skepticism or curiosity regarding testimony. For example, when retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig testified on June 16 that “Trump and his allies and supporters” present a “clear and present danger to American democracy,” it would have been beneficial for a committee member to pipe up with, “Judge Luttig, do you mean to say that millions of Trump supporters across the nation are plotting to overthrow the 2024 election if it doesn’t go their way?” Luttig, in turn, might have clarified that the targets of his allegations were specific Trump associates or elected officials, not average Americans.

It’s hard to more aggressively miss the point that the January 6 Capitol breach was led, not by “specific Trump associates or elected officials” who had failed in both federal court and the court of public opinion, but by average Americans armed with bear spray, bike racks, and flagpole spears. That Trump emerged from January 6 more popular than ever with millions of supporters across the nation, shows that they were supportive of the plot to overthrow the 2020 election and would presumably be supportive of a repeat effort in 2022 and 2024 elections. It’s ordinary Americans who put Trump in office and filled his coffers with hundreds of millions of dollars, and it’s ordinary Americans who have gone to the polls and punished most Republicans who have dared to defy Trump.

We can’t avoid the key point that supporting Trump is the clear and present danger. If no one supported Trump, the danger would be latent but no longer “present.”

The Trump apologia reaches a higher point in this next bit:

This week’s hastily presented hearing featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, would have benefited immensely from some cynical inquiry. The nation was presented a gossipy mess of “here’s stuff I heard that Trump did,” some of which was immediately refuted.

The ordinary meaning of “refute” is “to prove wrong by argument or evidence.” What Abernathy should have said is that Hutchinson’s testimony about Trump attacking his Secret Service limo driver has been disputed.  In no way has it been disproved. Perhaps that error can be chalked up the editors, but as it stands it isn’t written in good faith.

More disingenuousness follows, including a classic example of begging the question.

The committee is anxious to prove that Trump knew the election wasn’t fraudulent and yet engaged in numerous unsavory tactics to engineer and encourage an attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden’s certification as president. It’s a misguided objective, and will likely never produce evidence that will be trial-worthy. It is clear that Trump acted irresponsibly on Jan. 6, but it remains highly unlikely that Trump was involved in actually planning the attack on the Capitol.

There are several problems here. Abernathy insists that this objective is misguided and that it will not succeed. This would make more sense if he wrote it was misguided because it won’t succeed. But he doesn’t provide evidence for either premise. Instead, he simply asserts that it is “highly unlikely” that Trump did what he is accused of doing. He also sounds like the only issue is what Trump planned versus what he actually did.

The evidence Hutchinson provided, which has so far been neither disputed nor refuted, is that Trump desperately wanted to lead a mob he knew to be heavily armed to the Capitol. In April, Trump told the Washington Post, “I wanted to go. I wanted to go so badly. Secret Service says you can’t go. I would have gone there in a minute.” There is other evidence that he planned to enter the building.

“I remember hearing a few different ideas discussed between Mark and Scott Perry, Mark and Rudy Giuliani,” Hutchinson said in videotaped testimony to the Jan. 6 committee played during Tuesday’s hearing. “I know that there were discussions about him having another speech outside of the Capitol before going in. I know that there is a conversation about him going into the House chamber at one point.”

The key point is that Trump was trying to stay in power when he had lost the election, and that on January 6 his plan was to prevent the congressional certification of the vote. That’s a planned coup. We know it didn’t go according to plan because he wasn’t allowed to lead the charge. But the riot served for several hours as his backup plan.

That’s all that really needs to be established to bring a seditious conspiracy charge against the president, as well as lesser charges related to inciting a riot and interfering with an official proceeding.

Had Trump been allowed to proceed to the Capitol, things would likely have unfolded differently and perhaps the mob would have been allowed entry without any need to wage prolonged combat with the police. What would Trump have had them do at that point? Would it have been any less seditious?

These are the things the committee is teaching the American people. The object isn’t simply to convince a bunch of Trump supporters, although that hopefully will be a byproduct. The object also is not to build an ironclad legal case. That’s a job for the Department of Justice.

Abernathy finishes this opinion piece with an astonishing assertion that Trump’s biggest crime was refusing to attend Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inaugural ceremony.

As shocking as they are, what is more damning than the images from Jan. 6 is the scene on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden took the oath of office with Trump nowhere in sight. Refusing to personally participate in the peaceful transfer of power for all the world to see is the mark that will forever stain Trump’s legacy. The Jan. 6 committee is distracting us from a dereliction of duty that Americans should really focus on the most, and of which Trump is most clearly guilty.

I don’t think Trump was even welcome at the ceremony. At that point, he was defending himself against impeachment. But the idea that his absence on January 20 was more serious than his attempt to stay in power is so powerfully stupid that it’s hard to believe this piece was published at all.