Month: March 2023

As we wait around for twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president Donald Trump to be arrested, some people are concerned about the sequencing. Maybe it’s not the best idea to start out the accountability project with a false business records charge. Maybe Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should wait his turn.

On CNN, Van Jones is urging Bragg to stand down, at least until after Trump is charged in Georgia.

— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) March 21, 2023

The House Republicans are preoccupied with Trump during their “ideas retreat” in Orlando, and for the most part they’re eager to attack Bragg as a partisan tool of George Soros who is blowing off the statute of limitations in a fascist attempt to hurt Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy. Perhaps they wouldn’t be so willing to have Trump’s back if his arrest for seditious conspiracy and mishandling highly classified material was first in the queue. It might be harder to hold the line if Trump was about to be fingerprinted for a racketeering case in Fulton County, Georgia.

But I prefer things this way. Anyone lacking the foresight to see that defending Trump will only get more politically perilous deserves to be sucked into the vortex now when he has plausible gripes. This first case is just to get people’s feet wet. Even if found guilty, Trump doesn’t face much prospect of prison time in the Stormy Daniels case. His former lawyer went to prison on charges related to the case, it’s true, but mainly because he lied about it.

Where Trump’s real vulnerability lies is with the federal case looking into January 6 and documents, and the Fulton County case looking into his effort to steal Georgia’s Electoral College votes. Guilty verdicts on those charges could land him in prison for the rest of his life. That’s the kind of thing that might seriously concern his political supporters.

Rather than beginning with the highest stakes, why not start with the lowest so that people can calmly get acclimatized to a new reality where a former president is going to fucking jail. Boil Pepe the Frog slowly and the blowback will be less intense.

And, yet, at the same time, the consequences will be all the greater because more people will be sullied with having defended him on the record. Because, in the end, having been on Trump’s side will be a lot like having been an advocate for the war in Iraq. Literally no one gets credit for that today, even if the opposite was true for nearly a decade after the invasion. What seemed politically necessary in Republican circles can change. And it will change in Trump’s case.

But first he has to be convicted of the more serious charges. Once that happens, the page gets turned. Ten years after Nixon resigned, the only supporters he had were named Pat Buchanan, Roger Stone and G. Gordon Liddy. Ten years from now, Trump’s list of supporters will be no more robust and probably even less credible.

Maybe we’re not doomed, but we’re probably doomed.

Human activities have transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change. Leading scientists warned that the world’s plans to combat these changes are inadequate and that more aggressive actions must be taken to avert catastrophic warming.

The report released Monday from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found the world is likely to miss its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — within a decade. Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme people cannot adapt. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases will claim millions of additional lives. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered.

I don’t like it when scientists use the word “irrevocably.” It’s a nasty word. I have always considered myself a progressive because I believe in the potential for progress. The story of humanity isn’t stagnant. We don’t just live generation to generation, never improving and only changing when forced to change by external events outside of our control.

But our mastery of our environment has met a dead end because we haven’t developed morally or spiritually at a rate to match our technological prowess. We do not seem to be up to this challenge. I was raised in an era where we were always threatened by nuclear annihilation but we also had a plan for a future where catastrophes like the Great Depression didn’t necessarily lead to world war and Holocaust and radioactive bombs. For one thing, we knew we had no choice.

But that order is breaking down, most notably by United Nations Security Council member Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. We can’t manage world conflict when one of the pillars of the system is waging aggressive war in Europe. We couldn’t be less prepared to deal with the coming cataclysms.

This puts a lot of stress on my worldview, and I think a crisis in the faith in progress will lead to its own cataclysms, including widespread nihilism, a rise in apocalyptic cults and religions, and a general breakdown in law and order.

Yet, if people are the problem, they are also the only possible solution. So, resignation isn’t an option. We must fight on.

There is only one reason for Donald Trump to schedule his first major campaign rally in Waco, Texas. He wants to intimidate state, local and federal prosecutors who are in the late stages of brining criminal charges against him. Trump expects to be arrested on Tuesday by the Manhattan district attorney on charges stemming from the 2016 Stormy Daniels hush money payments, although that appears to be more of a personal prediction than anything he has been officially told. His arrest does seem imminent, however, most likely within a week’s time.  Charges out of Fulton County, Georgia, related to his effort to steal the 2020 presidential election, also seem likely to arrive before too long. And then there’s the federal case, led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, covering both the coup attempt and the illegal possession of classified material, which is looming and apparently loaded for bear.

Waco, of course, is best known for the 1993 standoff between the federal government and the Branch Davidian apocalyptic religious cult led by David Koresh. It began with a search warrant that went horribly wrong.

On February 28, 1993, at 4:20 am, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempted to execute a search warrant relating to alleged sexual abuse charges and illegal weapons violations. The ATF attempted to breach the compound for approximately two hours until their ammunition ran low. Four ATF agents (Steve Willis, Robert Williams, Todd McKeehan, and Conway Charles LeBleu) were killed and another 16 agents were wounded during the raid. The five Branch Davidians killed in the 9:45 am raid were Winston Blake (British), Peter Gent (Australian), Peter Hipsman, Perry Jones, and Jaydean Wendell; two were killed by the Branch Davidians.

This led to a much greater loss of life. The Branch Davidian compound caught fire while the Feds were trying to force their surrender and 76 people perished. Irrespective of the intent of the government, this sparked widespread outrage and it was to avenge the tragedy at Waco that Timothy McVeigh set off a massive truck bomb at the Oklahoma City federal building in April 1995.

Trump is essentially taking McVeigh’s side. He’s inviting his followers to attack the government in the same way that McVeigh attacked.

And if this isn’t entirely clear to you, look at what Trump had to say on Saturday about his impending arrest:

With a Manhattan grand jury indictment likely but its timing unclear, Donald J. Trump sought to rally supporters to his side, declaring that he would be arrested on Tuesday and calling for protests.

Mr. Trump made the declaration on his site, Truth Social, at 7:26 a.m. on Saturday in a post that ended with, “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE AND FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

The last time he asked his supporters to mobilize, it resulted in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol building. This time, however, Trump’s motivation is not to stay in the Oval Office. He knows that protests won’t put or keep him in power. He’s hoping that prosecutors will grow weak in their resolve in the face of major threats to national security.

The man is a menace, and capable of far worse than most can even imagine. He’s needs to be locked up as soon as possible.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Chincoteague, Virgina 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.

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 completed the foreground after many attempts. You can see that the paint started to get thick but I finally got there.

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.

Despite losing the national popular vote in the 2004 presidential election, Democrat John Kerry would have been elected president if he had carried Ohio. I believe Kerry had valid reasons to suspect that various shenanigans cost him the state of Ohio. Proving it would have been difficult, however, and prevailing even with proof was far from assured. He made the quick decision to concede. It was a frustrating decision for his supporters, but it went down a little easier than Gore’s disputed defeat knowing that at least George W. Bush had won more overall votes the second time around.

If Kerry had decided to stall a concession, the logical move would have been to hire some investigators to conduct an analysis of the returns and look for anomalies. This is what we would expect President Trump to do, too, if he truly believed that he was robbed in the 2020 election, as he has always claimed. Yet, to all appearances, Trump relied instead on a slapdash team of hacks and nut jobs like Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and the Pillow Guy. They made wild accusations that either could not be backed up or were quickly debunked, and lost in court over and over and over again.

But it turns out that the Trump campaign actually did hire a team to do a legitimate investigation, and they paid more than  $600,000 for the work. The problem was that they found that the election had a normal amount of low-level fraud, none of which would have changed the outcome. For this reason, the results were never published and the very existence of the report were kept secret.

The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public.

The Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena.

The version of the report viewed by the Washington Post is dated January 1, 2021, which is one day before Trump made his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. That doesn’t prove that Trump had actually seen the report by that time, but it’s potentially significant because the report debunks one of the claims the president made on that call.

“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters,” he said, without citing his study.

But a report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.

Considering how many Americans are still under the impression that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate, it’s important to have one more piece of evidence that he is the duly-elected president. The source, coming from the Trump campaign itself, carries more weight. But this is also more evidence that by January 6 Trump was fully aware that he had lost. He tried to stay in power anyway, and that’s about the most serious crime ever committed by anyone in this country. The penalty should be appropriately severe.

More whining about “wokeness”:

Cheers!

I think the difference between a ‘government’ and a ‘regime’ comes down to the quality of elections, assuming any are allowed at all. In a representative system with fair elections, we don’t talk about changing the regime. We reserve that term for countries like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. So, when Donald Trump says we don’t need ‘regime change‘ in Russia but rather here at home, that can mean only two things. Either he’s employing hyperbole or he doesn’t think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected in a fair election.

Trump has been absolutely clear in asserting that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t on the up-and-up, that he was robbed. Whether he truly believes this or not is debatable. Perhaps he believes it some of the time but not all of the time. It’s hard to say because the man is a psychological wreck. Importantly, the clear implication of what he ostensibly believes is that the Biden administration is illegitimate. In this view, it can be characterized as a ‘regime.’ And a regime can be removed by extralegal means because it has forfeited the right to have its laws respected.

That doesn’t mean necessarily, as David Badash insists, that Trump is calling for second coup attempt to follow on the failed effort of January 6, 2021. As of now, he’s going through the motions of removing the Biden administration in the traditional way, by running for the opposition party’s presidential nomination for 2024.

Out on the campaign trail, Trump is still arguing that he was the rightful winner in 2020.

DAVENPORT, Iowa — Donald Trump on Monday sharply rebuked Mike Pence’s assertion that history would hold him accountable for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, telling reporters that his former vice president should shoulder the blame for the violent riot that day by Trump’s supporters.

“Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6,” the former president said, referring to Pence’s refusal to reject the electoral college votes in Congress as Trump wanted him to do that day. “Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”

To be clear, Trump is saying that the January 6 coup attempt was supposed to go through his vice-president. Had Pence followed Trump’s instructions and refused to certify the Biden-Harris victory, and if this had miraculously led to Trump and Pence hanging onto power, they would no longer have been leading a government. In that case, they’d be leading a regime. The idea that this would have been accepted by the American people without violence is laughable, but most of Trump’s arguments are laughable.

The key is that we may not know what the disgraced ex-president meant on Monday when he said, “We should support regime change in the United States,” but we know that he wanted to transform America from a government to a regime so that he could remain in power and avoid legal trouble. We know that his own words indicate that he believes America ceased being a government after the 2020 election, and we know by his own actions that he reacted as if the American government had forfeited the right to expect that its laws be respected.

Some, like Alex Wagner of MSNBC, expressed surprise that Trump would so openly admit that he was asking Pence to carry out a coup by blaming him for the violence of January 6. But Trump has never made a secret about what he wanted. He sent a mob to the Capitol in the hope they would force Pence to follow his instructions. The supposed legitimacy of those instructions was always based on lies about fraud in the 2020 election, but if you accepted the lies as true then January 6 wasn’t a coup attempt but a desperate effort to prevent a coup by Biden and Harris.

By refusing to obey Trump, Pence avoided becoming a coconspirator, but the coup attempt began the moment the request not to certify was made to Pence. At that point, unless Trump backed down, violence was inevitable. Either we’d see exactly what we saw on January 6 after Pence refused to go along, or we’d see a more numerous segment of the American people rise up if Pence tried to steal the election.

It’s not clear why Trump was talking about regime change in Russia anyway, as that is not the policy of those countries supporting Ukraine, including the United States. But it’s fair to call the government in Russia a ‘regime’ because they no longer hold free elections. There’s no prospect of Vladimir Putin being voted out of office or leaving voluntarily even if he were. Whether you support Joe Biden’s policies or not, you know he will peacefully leave the White House if he loses his reelection bid. That’s the most important thing that distinguishes the United States and Russia, but for Trump it’s a distinction that either does not or should not exist.

I think that’s true of Trump’s strongest supporters, too. That’s why it’s fair to compare them to the fascist black and brownshirts who helped Mussolini and Hitler end representative government in their respective countries. So, no, Trump did not just call for a second coup attempt. It’s more accurate to say his entire political project is a coup attempt.

I wouldn’t rank Mike Pence as the worst vice-president in history. That’s a dishonor I bestow on the blood-gargling Dick Cheney. But I don’t find much to quibble with in the following:

The nonprofit group Human Rights Campaign once rated Pence “the worst vice president for LGBTQ people in modern history,” noting his long record of voting against LGBTQ equality as a member of Congress and then for supporting Trump administration policies that undermined LGBTQ rights.

Pence can appear almost as a statesman when compared with his twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president running-mate. But he’s still a dullard and a bully.

The White House is calling on former vice president Mike Pence to apologize for “offensive and inappropriate” jokes he made about Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s parental leave and about postpartum depression.

While speaking at the Gridiron dinner Saturday, an annual black-tie gathering of Washington politicians, journalists and public figures, Pence joked that nationwide transportation woes were prompted by Buttigieg taking two months of “maternity leave” to adopt newborn twins in 2021 with his husband.

“When Pete’s two children were born, he took two months’ maternity leave whereupon thousands of travelers were stranded in airports, the air traffic system shut down, and airplanes nearly collided on our runways,” Pence said.

“Pete is the only person in human history to have a child and everyone else gets postpartum depression,” Pence added.

If you want an easy laugh, tell a room full of self-satisfied “success stories” a joke about a gay guy being weak and effeminate. Make fun of gay marriage and wonder about which man took the “maternity” leave. Make light of postpartum depression, just to put him down some more. These are irresistible jokes for conservatives, and not only conservatives. Still, it’s striking to see Pence so explicitly make the case that Buttigieg is a bad cabinet officer because he’s a gay parent in a gay marriage.

Even if this were true, it would be an improvement on Pence who has no excuse at all for being a monumentally shitty public servant. Refusing to go along with a coup attempt to stay in power after losing a reelection bid does not meet the prerequisites for being considered a good leader. Good leaders don’t punch down when they tell jokes. They don’t appeal to the basest fears and hatreds of their followers.

Pence is a piece of shit, and it’s not because he isn’t “woke.” It’s because he’s part of a political movement that spends the vast majority of its energies picking on people for being different.

I would say that I don’t care that Donald Trump had an adulterous tryst with adult movie star Stormy Daniels and then made an impermissible campaign expenditure to cover it up, except for one thing. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, “spent about 13 1/2 months behind prison walls and a year and a half in home confinement” for his role in facilitating the transaction with Daniels. I don’t see how that can be fair and just if Trump (aka INDIVIDUAL-1) pays no price.

Manhattan attorney general Alvin Bragg appears to be wrapping up the grand jury that has been looking into this case, and Cohen is expected to testify on Monday. Under New York State law, Trump must be afforded an opportunity to appear for the grand jury, and an invitation has been offered to the twice-impeached disgraced ex-president. His attorney, Joe Tacopina, says that Trump has no plans to show up. That’s not unusual. It’s not generally a good idea for the accused to talk to grand jurors. It does indicate, however, that he’s likely to be arrested sometime soon.

Mr. Tacopina is still denying that his client actually had a sexual encounter with Daniels. In his telling, Trump authorized the payment, which he termed “extortion,” for no other reason than “to prevent something coming out false but embarrassing to himself and his family’s young son.” For this reason, it wasn’t a campaign contribution because it had nothing to do with possible harm to his chances in the 2016 presidential election: “It’s not a contribution to his campaign…That’s not a campaign finance violation, not by any stretch.”

I am not a lawyer and I don’t know which charges will be brought. But I do know that Trump’s best chance at acquittal is not actual innocence but jury nullification. If one or more jurors think this is no big deal and Trump is just being harassed by political adversaries, then he may get a pass. But it won’t help his credibility that he’s still insisting that Stormy Daniels is lying about their pathetic hotel room romp. No one is going to believe that.

Personally, I find it easier to offer forgiveness and cut someone a break if they admit what they’ve done and apologize. If they’re asking for special treatment while still insisting they’ve done no wrong, I’m going to feel obligated to teach them a lesson. I didn’t care about President Bill Clinton’s pathetic trysts with Monica Lewinsky, but I had no problem with seeing him pay a big price for lying about it under oath. And, in that case, he lost his Arkansas law license despite coming clean.

It just seems like a bad idea to continue on with the denial that he ever slept with Daniels.

In the end, he’s probably not going to face prison time unless he commits perjury during the trial. A conviction might make it illegal for him to vote in Florida, however.

I’d like to see him convicted on charges related to Stormy Daniels scandal for the simple reason that Cohen shouldn’t be the only one held accountable. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Chincoteague, Virgina 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.

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.

Big changes for this installment. I have completed the reflection. To the rear, I have revised the distant bank. The foreground has been revised but still needs more work.

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.