Month: December 2022

I am going to use Elon Musk’s shitty machine to show you testimony provided by two top aides to Donald Trump to the January 6 committee. The first is from Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as assistant the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1580619428286242817

The second is from Hope Hicks, a Counselor to the President, who resigned on January 12, 2021, “with officials saying at the time it was a previously arranged exit and not a resignation sparked by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.”

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1604914019307229184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1604914019307229184%7Ctwgr%5E55ec48c4f9a92b7470ba332c8f7ee8970839437c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fnews%2Fhouse%2Fjan-6-hearing-hope-hicks-trump-didnt-care-about-damaging-legacy

There’s a lot going on in these two Tweets. Most obviously, the Hutchinson testimony provides clear evidence that Trump knew he had lost the election and was deeply embarrassed about it. One motivation for pushing bogus claims of fraud was to convince as many people as possible that he had not actually lost.

But the Hicks testimony takes this further into an attempt to stay in power despite losing. Yet the motivation appears to be the same. He couldn’t face a legacy of being a loser. He preferred to risk much worse condemnation by history than to simply accept his fate as the runner-up in the 2020 election. And, again, even if all his efforts failed, and even if he faced legal consequences for his actions, if he could convince a lot of people that he’d been robbed rather than beaten, he’d take that trade.

In this he has so far been quite successful. And that’s in part because he’s spent the last two years spending all his political capital on punishing any Republican who acknowledges that he legitimately lost the election and rewarding and promoting any Republican who will trumpet his dishonest claims of fraud.

It didn’t help the GOP at the ballot box. In fact, it clearly hurt them badly in the midterm elections when many Big Lie candidates lost what should have been winnable races. But it’s held a lot of Republican voters in line, and Trump’s false claims are still widely believed by the Republican base.

Perhaps this makes Trump feel better. But the time has come for him to go to jail. His ego does not need further protection. We need to make his face the consequences of his actions which have been deadly, expensive, and catastrophic for the health of our political cohesion as a nation.

New York’s third congressional district covers the Northern Shore of Long Island. Its congressman, Democrat Tom Suozzi, made an unsuccessful bid for governor rather than seeking reelection. In his place, a Republican named George Santos was elected last November, helping the GOP win a tiny majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It was Santos’s second campaign for the seat. In 2020, he lost to Suozzi by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin. But in 2022, he beat Democrat Rob Zimmerman 52 percent to 44 percent. He is supposed to be be sworn into Congress on January 3, 2023.

It seems quite late for the New York Times to look into Santos’s resumé. It should have been done back when Santos was competing in a Republican primary in 2020. This oversight is especially unfortunate because now that the Times finally did an investigation, they’ve discovered that Santos is a complete fraud.

Here are some examples:

Santos says he attended New York University and graduated from Baruch College in 2010. Those institutions have never heard of him.

Santos says he worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions say that’s straight up bullshit.

Santos says he established a tax-exempt charity called Friends of Pets United but the Internal Revenue Service says there is no charity by that name in their records.

The Times visited “the address where he is registered to vote and that was associated with a campaign donation he made in October” but the resident there had never heard of him.

But, wait, because it gets better. Santos was twice evicted (in 2015 and 2017) from New York apartments for failure to pay rent. Despite this, during the early years of the pandemic he claimed to be an aggrieved landlord of 13 New York properties who couldn’t collect his rents. The Times investigators could locate none of these properties.

For a while, around the time he was supposed to graduating from Baruch College, he lived in Brazil with his mother, a nurse, but he was arrested for stealing a checkbook and writing bad checks. That case is unresolved because he didn’t show up to face the charges.

Then there’s the matter of his money. I’ve already told you that his real estate fortune is a myth. Everything else seems to be a myth, too, or a fraud.

His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and over $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Devolder is his mother’s maiden name.

Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Mr. Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Mr. Santos’s disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.

The places where he has had confirmed employment are just as problematic.

As he ran for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to take on a new role as regional director of Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based investment company.

Harbor City, which attracted investors with YouTube videos and guarantees of double-digit returns, soon garnered attention from the S.E.C., which filed a lawsuit accusing the company and its founder of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme.

…Two weeks later, a handful of former Harbor City executives formed a company called Red Strategies USA, as reported by The Daily Beast. Corporate filings listed the Devolder Organization as a partial owner — even though the papers to register Devolder would not be filed for another week.

Red Strategies was short lived: Federal campaign records show it did political consulting work for at least one politician — Tina Forte, a Republican who unsuccessfully challenged Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in November — before it was dissolved in September for failing to file an annual report.

As for the Devolder Organization, which has “has no public-facing assets or other property that The Times could locate,” it too was dissolved for failure to file required reports.

One has to wonder where this man got $700,000 to loan to his campaign. Unfortunately, he won’t talk to reporters to we have no explanation.

We don’t even know where he lives, but we know this: he appeared “earlier this month at a gala in Manhattan attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists .”

Will Congress actually seat this man? His financial disclosure forms are obviously criminally dishonest and he voted from a fake address, meaning he’s guilty of voter fraud.

There’s a lot of failure here, and not just from New York reporters who should have uncovered all this information before Election Day in 2020, let alone Election Day 2022. Why didn’t the Democrats’ opposition research teams find this derogatory information? Why didn’t the National Republican Congressional Committee discover it? Or, if they did, why did they say and do nothing about it?

The people of New York’s third congressional district should have known that Santos was lying to them about virtually everything, but they were in the dark. Now they’re stuck with a fraudster as a representative.

Kevin McCarthy is scrambling to come up with enough votes to become Speaker of the House, so he probably wants to seat Santos. But I can’t see how that can be justified. There’s no way Santos should ever become a congressman, even for a moment.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a Chincoteague, Virginia 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 5×7 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.
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Everything about Donald Trump is on some level simply ridiculous, so sometimes it seems like a waste of time to take anything about him seriously. But hoarding extremely sensitive documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate is something can’t be ignored.

Now, I knew that the FBI searched the premises and found documents in both a storage closet and his personal office, but I didn’t have more than a vague idea of how secure these locations were. Thankfully, the New York Times has fulfilled my desire to have a clearer picture. They’ve created a 3-D representation of the grounds and layout of the Palm Beach resort. They’ve also looked at a lot of photographs taken by guests who attended scores of events held at Mar-a-Lago since Trump left office.

By matching these things up, it’s clear that the storage closet was not remotely secure. The doors leading to the closet were wide open in many of the photos the Times examined, and anyone could have wandered in and starting poking around. Some of these events had as many as 800 guests, so you can imagine what level of vetting was going on. The main security for these documents was simply the hope that no one foreign intelligence agency knew they were there.

The documents in his office, which were located in both his desk and in a container in a closet, were easily accessible by both an external and an internal staircase, both of which were in heavily trafficked public spaces. There were no guards posted in any of the photos, and generally no barriers to the stairs either. Trump also invited scores of people into his office where they posed for photographs. The main security for the documents in his office was simply the risk of being caught there without an invitation.

Presumably, the storage area and the office were regularly locked when no one was using them, but after the FBI complained about the security at the storage area, the Trump team responded by adding an additional lock. Of course, chairs and umbrellas were also stored there, so it’s unlikely that access to the keys was strictly limited to those with the highest security clearances.

Now, I know there are Trump supporters who think the former president had the right to declassify anything he wanted and to hold on to any documents he wanted. But I don’t think anyone can honestly feel that the way Trump treated these documents was responsible.

I mean, Jesus, the man didn’t even use a safe.

At least half the problem here is that Trump never took his job very seriously, which is why highly classified documents wound up packed haphazardly in boxes containing clothes, mementos, magazine articles and newspaper clippings. They ultimately showed up not just at Mar-a-Lago but in a West Palm Beach storage unit containing documents shipped from a Northern Virginia office “used by Trump staffers.”

If he’d followed basic protocols about safeguarding national security secrets, his staffers in Northern Virginia wouldn’t have possession of them, and they wouldn’t be packing them up on pallets filled with “gifts, suits and clothes.”

It pays to remember that this is a broken promise. Trump very successfully and with some justification made a giant issue during the 2016 campaign about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to store sensitive government documents and communications. He said she should be locked up for her negligence. The premise was that he’d do a much better job of protecting our country’s secrets, and it’s obvious that he did an immeasurably worse job.

Trump is in trouble because of this carelessness. But if he is prosecuted over his handling of documents, it will be mainly because he lied about it and obstructed justice. None of this should be necessary, but his actions have made it impossible to give him a pass.

There’s a provision of the Alaska constitution that bars traitors from serving in government. Specifically, it provides that no one who “advocates, or who aids or belongs to any party or organization or association which advocates, the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States or of the State [of Alaska] shall be qualified to hold” public office. This possibly applies to state Rep. David Eastman of Sarah Palin’s Wasilla who was just reelected in November 2022.

Rep. Eastman is an acknowledged and unapologetic member of the Oath Keepers. The Anchorage Daily News notes the potential problem:

Nationally, a founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, and a Florida chapter leader have been convicted of seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. A trial against four other Oath Keepers is underway.

If a key founder and leader of an organization has been convicted of a seditious conspiracy involving force and violence, what does that mean for other members of that organization? The legal language is pretty inclusive, stating that aiding or belonging to a seditious organization is sufficient to disqualify someone from holding public office.

Prior to the November election, a group of citizens led by Randall Kowalke went to the Alaska Division of Elections arguing that Eastman should not be on the ballot. They lost that case but are now appealing in Alaska’s Superior Court.  The case, overseen by Judge Jack McKenna, got underway on Wednesday. McKenna will not allow Eastman’s victory to be certified until the loyalty provision is litigated in his courtroom.

Eastman was in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, but he has not been accused of entering the Capitol or committing any crimes that day. The issue is strictly whether his membership in the Oath Keepers is sufficient, on its own, to disqualify him.

The situation would probably be easier to resolve if Eastman disavowed his prior membership, but he’s done the opposite in court.

Republican Rep. David Eastman said he believed he remained a member of the group, saying he had not heard anything from the Oath Keepers about his membership in some time. Eastman was asked if he had made any public statements that he was resigning or renouncing his membership, to which he replied: “I have not made such a statement.”

So, I think the question could turn on whether the organization (as an organization) has ever explicitly called for the overthrow of the government by force. Perhaps Eastman can argue about the present tense language in the provision, arguing that the Oath Keepers do not presently advocate a violent coup even if they briefly took that position between Election Day 2021 and Inauguration Day 2022.

The difficulty is that the Oath Keepers were part of an actual insurrection, so it doesn’t necessarily matter what they said or advocated. What they did ought to be sufficient to meet the standard.

Having said this, I don’t think that anyone who has ever been a member of the Oath Keepers should be barred from holding public office. There ought to be some demonstration that they were an active member, like Eastman, at the time of the insurrection. And if they weren’t part of the planning or operation of the Oath Keeper conspiracy, they should be allowed to disavow the organization, including by renouncing their membership and ending any dues payments.

So, in my estimation, Eastman should be denied his seat not because he is a former Oath Keeper but because he is a present one. That makes his future loyalty suspect, and that’s clearly what relevant provision of the Alaska Constitution is intended to address.

I’ve written about Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become the next Speaker of the House before, and now I believe is the time to write about it again. The New York Times reports that he’s making little progress in securing the votes he needs. The problem appears to be entirely driven by Republican holdouts on the far right.

…Republicans agitating against him have insisted that Mr. McCarthy would not be able to win election on the floor, warning that more defectors would emerge in the coming weeks.

“I don’t think he has a plan, other than to hope that conservatives fold,” Russ Vought, the president of the right-wing Center for Renewing America, said of Mr. McCarthy in an interview. “And this is not the part of the Republican conference that folds.”

Before I get started, here are a few reminders. The election for Speaker begins when the new U.S. House of Representatives convenes on January 3, 2023. It’s the first order of business after the daily prayer, the pledge of allegiance and a quorum call. Normally, it’s primarily a contest between one Republican nominee and one Democratic nominee, each selected at earlier party caucus elections, but some protest votes are usually cast for other candidates. Technically, the Speaker does not have to be a member of the House. To win, the candidate must win an outright majority of those present and voting (a full House has 435 members so 218 votes are required).  Members can abstain, which lowers the vote threshold. Normally, candidates do not cast a vote but they are permitted to do so.

There should be two Democratic vacancies. One is due to the November 28, 2022 death of Donald McEachin from Virginia’s 4th District.  There will be a special election to fill his seat on February 21, 2023. The other will be created when Karen Bass resigns her seat to begin serving as the mayor of Los Angeles, California. Therefore, I anticipate that the Speaker’s election will involve 222 Republicans and 211 Democrats, so absent an abstention, 217 votes will be required for victory. Hakeem Jeffries of New York will be the Democrats’ candidate. McCarthy can lose no more than five votes.

Now, going back to Mr. Vought’s point above, the far right hardliners don’t seem inclined to back down. If they follow through and deny McCarthy a majority, the House will keep voting until someone gets a majority. There really aren’t an ironclad rules about how this will occur because no one is really in charge of the House until after a Speaker is selected. Prior to that, the clerk of the House and the sergeant at arms run the show, although a majority of members can overrule them.

The number one demand of the far right is that McCarthy agree to allow a snap vote at any time that would kick the Speaker out and cause a new election. McCarthy refuses to grant this because he knows it led to the downfall of Speaker John Boehner, and it would make it impossible for him make compromises with the Democrats–compromises that will be required to fund the government and pay its bills on time. The truth is, consenting to this condition would make winning the Speaker’s gavel pointless because he couldn’t responsibly hold on to it.

This problem isn’t particular to McCarthy. It would apply equally to any Republican Speaker relying strictly on Republican members’ support to maintain their position. So, if this condition doesn’t change, seemingly the only way around it is to elect a Speaker with at least enough Democratic support to overcome far right resistance.

Theoretically, there are some other things that could happen. After many failed ballots, a majority of the House could get frustrated and change the rules to allow the Speaker to be elected by a plurality, although getting a majority for the rule change would present similar challenges. And a minority Speaker couldn’t function without even more rule changes to protect their position.

So, at some point it may become necessary for the House to seek a very unconventional solution in which the majority caucus is bipartisan. Some Republicans could split off and vote for a Democrat or, far more likely, nearly all Democrats could agree to vote for a moderate Republican.

Either of these hard-to-envision scenarios would require a lot of horse trading about leadership positions, committee chairmanships, and committee memberships.

Here’s a reasonable compromise based on an arrangement for power sharing within a House governing caucus made up of all (or nearly all) the Democrats, a Republican Speaker, and 10-15 moderate Republicans.

The Republican Speaker would get most of the leadership positions, but not the second-in-command Majority Leader position. That would likely go to Hakeem Jeffries. The Speaker would also be able to appoint the chairpersons for key committees, including Rules, Budget, and Appropriations. This would give the Speaker firm control of how business is conducted, what comes to the floor and under what conditions, and the ultimate say-so on spending priorities and bills. In return, the Democrats would get a firm commitment to support Ukraine, raise the debt ceiling as needed and eschew government shutdowns as a negotiating strategy. They’d also get the chairs of most committees and subcommittees, including Judiciary and Oversight, which would protect against ridiculous investigations about Hunter Biden, Benghazi or whatever other nonsense the right wants to pursue.

Whether or not such a coalition could accomplish anything beyond the bare minimum, it would keep the government operational and allow the Biden administration to conduct foreign policy without congressional sabotage.

It’s easy to see why the Democrats would agree to this, as it’s preferable in every way to being in the minority and would give Biden huge advantages as he seeks reelection. The moderate Republicans would be in a much more ambiguous situation, and it’s not something they’d eagerly embrace. They’d only do it if the alternatives are worse.

Will they find a way to find a compromise with the far right rather than enter into such an agreement with the Democrats?

I think it’s likely, but maybe not before creating a credible threat of a bipartisan majority that forces the far right to back down on some of their demands, including their insistence on being able to recall the Speaker at any time.

The Democrats should be preparing now for these eventualities and the negotiations and voting strategies that will be required to pull it off.

Greetings, all who visit this space. This is the title track to Don Cherry’s mid-1970s LP Brown Rice. The whole LP is worth listening to, especially if you like to hear at least what some of avant-garde jazz was sounding like at the time. Although the music in the video that follows sounds very much as an artifact of the 1970s, it received something of a revival in the 1990s. DJs and musicians who were part of the acid jazz scene began to rediscover songs like this one as they dug through the used LP crates. In fact, a subgenre of jazz, called kozmigroov became something of a thing for much of the 1990s and the early aughts.

Let’s listen:

You can learn a bit more about kozmigroov here. Enjoy!

The bar is open, and the turntables are all yours to spin. Cheers!

Imagine if every day an American passenger jet was shot down by Mexican terrorists. What would we do about it?

The American fentanyl crisis deepened during the coronavirus pandemic. From 2019 to 2021, fatal overdoses surged 94 percent, and an estimated 196 Americans are now dying each day from the drug — the equivalent of a fully loaded Boeing 757-200 crashing and killing everyone on board.

We don’t call the people responsible “terrorists.” Instead, we call them “drug cartels.”

The DEA said it is now taking direct aim at the Mexican cartels and the fentanyl epidemic. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram acknowledged that the government remained too focused on heroin at the onset of the crisis, as Mexican traffickers ramped up production of synthetic opioids…

…San Diego is ground zero for fentanyl trafficking into the United States. More than half of all the fentanyl seized along the southern border is confiscated there, much of it produced in clandestine drug labs and pressed into tablets by cartel networks in northern Mexico. Drug loads that cross the border undetected go to stash houses in Los Angeles and Phoenix before spreading eastward across the country. In Southern California, the cartels are renting Airbnbs to store drugs before shipping them across the country…

…When the U.S. government cracked down on the U.S. opioid industry starting in 2005, it choked off street supplies of prescription narcotics but left behind a ravenous market. Mexican cartels filled it, first with crude heroin, then fentanyl. The cartels imported drugs and chemicals from China, hired chemists and purchased pill presses.

Everyone should know that the problem originates will the widespread prescription of opioid painkillers beginning in the 1990’s. This created a ravenous demand for opioids which was quickly filled by heroin and now by fentanyl. Our government’s corruption, negligence and just plain poor decision making created an almost infinitely lucrative market which makes the death merchants so wealthy and powerful that they can buy cops, judges and politicians, and intimidate anyone who remains in their way.

In 2015, Trump tapped into something when he focused on crime and drugs originating in Mexico, as countless parents who have buried their children before and since well understood. Unfortunately, his solution, building a wall, was not just useless but resulted in a misallocation of resources and served as a giant distraction. It’s one reason why the problem grew immensely worse on his watch.

Honestly, though, there’s plenty of blame to go around, including from the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.

The beginning point for dealing with this is to do everything possible to reduce demand by preventing people from using opioids in the first place. Pain management is a tricky issue, and many people undoubtedly need opioids. But prescribing opioids should be a last resort, and unfortunately for the convenience of people who need the drugs, it should be highly regulated and monitored. Kids in school should be inundated with factual information about how opioids work, how they are sold, how they cause addiction, and how quickly and often they will kill. This isn’t reefer madness hype. Opioids are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-49.

Treatment for opioid addiction is expensive and tragically low in its long-term effectiveness. But if it is sustained it does often work, and it’s not only the humane way to deal with the problem, it also serves to reduce demand. We need to explore best practices and invest in them.

There’s an argument that many of the policies advocated by progressives, including better access to health care, child care, and a stronger safety net in general can mitigate some of the pressure and despair people feel, and reduce the appeal of numbing drugs. I believe the antitrust enforcement I’ve long advocated is critical to revitalizing the economies of many dying small town and rural communities, and therefore can be a key component of an anti-opioid strategy.

But that still leaves these cartels that are directly killing a planeload of Americans every single day. I don’t necessarily see a reason to believe that interdiction efforts that have failed throughout the decades-long War on Drugs are suddenly start being effective. That said, there’s a reason fentanyl is manufactured in Mexico instead of, say, suburban St. Louis. Even with the added challenge and expense of importing the drugs over the border, it makes sense to operate out of Mexico because its governments are weaker and easier to corrupt and intimidate. I don’t think this problem will solve itself, so perhaps America needs to show some willingness to invest in Mexico’s institutions.

Of course, that’s tricky on every level. It’s a hard political sell at home, and it’s hard sell for Mexican politicians, too. There are historically freighted issues of sovereignty and imperialism, and there are nightmare scenarios for metrics and accountability.

Yet, the average Mexican does not like these cartels or the violence and corruption they create. They don’t like being too weak to stand up to them. All I know is that money talks and bullshit walks, and as long as the cartels have more money to throw around than the Mexican government, there is no way this situation can possibly improve. Obviously, building a wall or disrupting good/routine cross-boarder commerce is not the solution.

In any case, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve found some magic cure here. It’s a horror show that produces only unhappy endings. On a personal level, I advise you to not take opioids unless you can’t endure the pain for one more moment. Make sure you don’t let anyone steal pills you’ve been prescribed, and dispose of any that we you don’t need. I can’t think of a worse fate in life than being dependent on opioids. Don’t let it happen to you.

One of the reasons I am so upset about Vladimir Putin’s decision to start a massive war in Europe is that we human beings have giant challenges facing us on climate and biodiversity, and we require three things to succeed. The first is a high level of international cooperation backed by strong international organizations. The second is a lot of disposable wealth in developed countries that can be diverted to developing countries to help them do things in an environmentally sustainable way (something we did not do in our developing stage). And the third is basically an upgrade in human consciousness where we act in a more enlightened way that our contemporaries and ancestors. All three of these things are interrelated and co-dependent.

Putin is dividing the developed world, chewing up our disposable wealth, weakening our international organizations, and deliberately dumbing us down with relentless emotion-based propaganda and intellectual nonsense. That Russia is a wholly carbon-dependent country may help explain this, but it just makes matter worse.

We made a lot of good decisions after World War Two that laid the framework for the kind of systems we need. When this war in Ukraine is over, we’re going to have to repeat that experience and do an even better job of it. Time is running short, though, so the sooner Putin is knocked out of power the better. I’m convinced our species (and many other species, too) cannot survive in this kind of world with leaders behaving in the way Putin is behaving. His brand of politics and international relations has to be vanquished, just like fascism was vanquished in the 1940’s, so we can build a way forward that provides hope.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the painting of my neighborhood scene. The photo that I am using 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.

I have added to to the far rear. Note the trees at the skyline. Further, I have also added paint to the water ripples up front. I also want to add that the photo is less than ideal because of the glare.

The painting is now complete.

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.