Month: June 2024

I’ve lost good friends, including my best friend, to addiction. I’ve lost a brother and a child. I’m coming up on ten years sober, and I know plenty of other people who’ve conquered their demons, so I know they are success stories, too. I hope Hunter Biden will be a success story. I don’t even want to contemplate Joe Biden having to bury another child. But now he has to cope with his last remaining son being a convicted felon who could conceivably go to jail if the judge isn’t merciful. It’s too much pain, and it upsets me. I don’t think Hunter should have been prosecuted. I think he should have been granted a plea agreement, paid some fines, done some community service, and spent some time on probation. His crimes were committed during a dark time in his life when he was mourning the death of his brother, and he’s turned things around.

But the plea agreement was tossed out by a Trump-appointed judge, he was convicted on gun charges, and he’s still facing tax charges in California. I don’t think similarly situated people would be getting this kind of treatment from the Department of Justice, but at least he really did commit the crimes. I can’t complain about the jury or argue that the trial was rigged.

I think I know how President Biden feels.

He absolutely could have intervened to protect his son, but he didn’t because that would be an abuse of power. He could have questioned the decision to prosecute his son and suggested it was done for purely political reasons, but he doesn’t want to denigrate the American system of justice. So, he takes this tragedy with a stiff upper lip and respects the judicial process.

Don’t let anyone argue that Biden uses the Department of Justice inappropriately or as a weapon against his political opponents. He just showed you that the opposite is true. What better demonstration of that truth can you imagine?

Now imagine how Trump will act if he’s reelected.

If you took a break from politics over the weekend, you may not have noticed the wind is at fascism’s back. Nowhere is this truer than France, where “the far-right National Rally, led by Euroskeptic and NATO-skeptic firebrands, completely crushed [President Emmanuel] Macron’s liberal Renaissance and all other contenders.” Macron was so rattled by the results in the European Union elections that he immediately dissolved France’s parliament and called for new elections, which seems risky considering the prevailing mood of the electorate. In Italy, fascist Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni “more than doubled her seats in the EU parliament.” In Germany, the Alternative for Germany, an extreme right-wing party of latter-day Nazis, finished ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. Austria’s latter-day Nazis, the Freedom Party (FPO), came in first place.

Fascists run Hungary, Slovakia and Italy, and are part (or soon to be a part) of governing coalitions in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the American Republican Party is led by a fascist Russophile and that is just fine with many actors on Wall Street. Even many financial masters who shunned Trump after January 6th, 2021, have come around to support him in 2024.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise. Fascism’s power came from capitalists who were more concerned about the labor movement and communism than they were about civil and human rights or the rule of law. Their shortsightedness doomed them in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and enough time has passed that the lessons have been forgotten.

I don’t know if the Western World is going to be able to hold its shit together and protect all it has accomplished since the fall of the last global fascist movement.

This isn’t a normal election cycle, folks. This is about more than control of the Supreme Court or climate policy. It’s about more than reproductive rights and social welfare.

This election cycle is more of a do or die situation for our whole way of life, our rights, freedoms, system of justice, and representative democracies.

And the wind is in our faces.

We’ve been here before. More precisely, our grandparents and great grandparents had to fight this fight, and now their victories are in doubt due to our generation’s amnesia and apathy.

If your hair wasn’t on fire last week, after the events of the weekend, you have no excuse to be complacent.

Steven Calabresi has joined the ranks of 2020 election fraud truthers but with some nuance. Writing in Reason, Calabresi rejects arguments that the 2020 election involved voting machine or tabulation fraud or error, but still sees Biden’s victory as illegitimate. His argument is a bit hard to follow but it comes down to three complaints. The first is that no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail was widely adopted to deal with the danger of the COVID-19 pandemic, and this led in some cases to the loss of the secret ballot, as canvassers went into people’s homes and watched them choose their candidates. Relatedly, many of these votes were “harvested” and dropped off en masse in public drop boxes. And, finally, that the extended period of early voting meant that people did not necessarily “vote on the same day, after the same news cycle, with the same information before them.” He also complains about mail-in votes being counted after Election Day, not for any particular reason except that it makes people suspicious. Here’s his thesis, in a nutshell:

I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions. I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. I simply do not believe that in an honestly held traditionally run presidential election that Joe Biden would get 181,866 more votes for President in 2020 in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama got in 2008.

As a result, many Republicans, myself included, thought that the 2020 presidential election was probably stolen, even though that fact could not be proved in a court of law. President Trump himself did not claim right after the election that mail in voting and the loss of the secret ballot had altered the vote count in the 2020 election. He waited for two weeks and asked for hopeless recounts instead.

Before I get started responding to this, I want to refer Calabresi to three articles I wrote during the 2020 campaign:

May 20, 2020: Trump Is An Idiot to Oppose Vote-By-Mail

June 15, 2020: Trump’s Campaign Against Vote-By-Mail is Killing Him

June 24, 2020: Trump Has Destroyed the GOP’s Vote-By-Mail Advantage in Florida

The headlines alone show that it’s simply not true that Trump didn’t complain that expanded vote-by-mail was an attempt by the Democrats to steal the 2020 election. In fact, his insistence on this point was so pronounced that as early as May I was arguing that it was going to be something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. In my first piece, I noted that Trump stood to gain by vote-by-mail because he had an advantage with people over 65 years of age who were the most likely to fear voting in person due to the risk of COVID-19.

In the second piece, I looked at how Republicans had banked an early advantage with mail-in votes in Florida during the 2016 election, which partially offset Hillary Clinton’s larger advantage with in-person early voting. I noted that Trump’s railing against mail-in votes had just showed up in a big way in the Michigan primaries where “1.3 million Democrats had requested mail ballots compared to only 524,000 Republicans {and] about 400,000 more votes were cast by Democrats than Republicans.” In other words, Trump had succeeded in creating a big advantage for Democrats with mail-in votes, but one that had not previously existed. It shouldn’t need mentioning, but it’s not just the raw early votes that matter. When one party banks more votes before Election Day, they can shift their focus to a smaller universe of supporters who still haven’t cast a ballot. By dissuading Republicans from using mail-in votes during a pandemic, Trump was hurting himself in more than one way.

In the third piece, I returned to Florida to note that “the Democrats have opened up a 302,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment,” which was a completely different situation from what happened in 2016 when the Republicans banked a roughly 30,000 advantage with voters choosing the mail option. I reiterated that Trump’s “fear mongering about the [vote-by-mail] practice was like a mental contagion that is ripping through conservative circles and Trump shouldn’t think his numbers won’t suffer in Florida to some degree, as well as in every state where mail is an option.”

I mention these pieces I wrote to demonstrate that it was completely foreseeable that Trump was creating a problem for himself by making his own supporters wary of trusting mail ballots. It meant that the Democrats wound up banking many more early votes. This prevented the Dems from losing votes in Election Day due to illness, competing work responsibilities, car mishaps, or other accidents. And it made it easier for the Dems’ turnout operation because they had fewer outstanding voters to cajole to the polls.

When you think about it this way, it’s fair to say that in a “traditionally run presidential election” (meaning one with a traditional level of mail-in voting) that Biden would not have won by as much as he did in 2020. But this not because of drop boxes or the loss of the secret ballot. It was entirely because Trump made Republicans distrustful of using the mail-in method, and thereby gave the Democrats an advantage they could not have gained on their own.

It’s true that the rules changed in 2020, but they change modestly in every presidential election cycle as states adjust their election laws. The courts rejected challenges to expanded early voting and vote-by-mail during the pandemic, so these changes weren’t illegal. And if they wound up favoring Biden, possibly even accounting for his victory, it was Trump himself who was most responsible for that outcome.

And everyone saw it coming. That’s what the early red wave predictions were about, where it was expected that Trump would initially look like the winner due to most states counting Election Day votes prior to counting mail-in votes which only needed to be postmarked by Election Day to count. It was as clear as day that more Democrats than Republicans had requested and cast mail ballots, and also why that was the case.

As for concerns about the secret ballot, this is overblown. Anyone who wanted to maintain the secrecy of their ballot had the option of filling out their mail-in or absentee ballot outside of searching eyes. And the drop boxes were merely receptacles for ballots, not some magic way of stuffing the ballot box.

You can make an argument that Trump blew a winnable election by demonizing mail-in votes. I certainly argued he was injuring his chances. What you can’t do is say that the election was stolen.

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If you consider climate change to be one of the most urgent problems that governments need to address, then you have a very good reason to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in November 2024.  If this wasn’t entirely clear to you before, actions taken this week by the Biden administration, and Trump’s response, should have convinced you.

On Friday, the Transportation Department announced new vehicle mileage standards:

The new standards require American automakers to increase fuel economy so that, across their product lines, their passenger cars would average 65 miles per gallon by 2031, up from 48.7 miles today. The average mileage for light trucks, including pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, would have to reach 45 miles per gallon, up from 35.1 miles per gallon.

This follows up on provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that give tax credits to buyers of new and used electric vehicles and regulations on tailpipe emissions released in April by the Environmental Protection Agency. They all combine to incentivize the manufacturing and purchase of electric vehicles in an effort to phase out the internal combustion engine which is a major cause of global warming. During the transition, these policies will also ensure that gasoline and diesel-fueled vehicles will be more efficient.

If there’s anything to criticize in these policies it’s that they do too little and they came too late, but that’s certainly no reason not support them. Trump, of course, is utterly opposed to doing anything that will hurt the oil and gas industry. That became crystal clear in April.

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

At the same dinner, Trump called the Biden administration’s new tailpipe emissions rule “ridiculous” and promised to scrap it. More generally, Trump has promised to end federal support for the electric vehicle industry, and he’s promised more drilling permits. Somewhat amusingly, the day before the new mileage standards were issued, Trump was in Arizona and he seemed to realize that his war on electric vehicles might not please one of his biggest supporters.

“We want to get rid of the electric mandate for the cars,” he began, calling it the “green new scam.” Then he added: “By the way, I’m a big fan of electric cars, I’m a fan of Elon. I like Elon but, you know, I like him. I think a lot of people are going to want to buy electric cars. But if you want to buy a different kind of car, you’re going to, you have to have a choice. Some people need to go far. Some people don’t want their car built in China.”

He didn’t mention that Biden has imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in an effort to protect the American car industry which has fallen far behind China and would otherwise face crippling price pressure from imports. Trump’s overall message, which dovetails precisely with the message from the oil and gas industry, is that Biden is trying to ban traditional cars. But if Biden wanted to ban the internal combustion engine, he wouldn’t set fuel efficiency and emission standards, since they would be unnecessary. He aims to phase traditional cars out over time, which is much different than an immediate ban.

“Not only will these new standards save Americans money at the pump every time they fill up, they will also decrease harmful pollution and make America less reliant on foreign oil,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “These standards will save car owners more than $600 in gasoline costs over the lifetime of their vehicle.”

So, when you’re talking to your Biden-skeptical but climate-conscious friends, make sure to tell them about how each campaign intends to deal with the electric car industry. It’s a choice that really matters.

Perhaps the most bizarre claim you might hear Republicans make is that the Democrats, in some states, have passed laws permitting infanticide. I don’t need to tell you this is not true because there’s no conceivable rationale for it. Nevertheless, you will hear this claim, including from Donald Trump who just made the accusation again during a Fox News interview on Wednesday: “Hard to believe, the [Democrats] have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth. It’s crazy.”

Thanks to Daniel Dale, CNN’s in-house fact-checker, Daniel Dale, we can at least identify an origin story for the claim.

Similar false claims have circulated about California. Some of those claims were based on criticism of vague language in an early version of a Democratic state legislator’s 2022 bill that was intended to protect people from being prosecuted over miscarriages, stillbirths and self-managed abortions.

But the vague language was revised before the bill was signed into law.

Months before passage, a Democratic-led legislative committee acknowledged that the early text’s vague use of the phrase “perinatal death” might have inadvertently left open the interpretation that the bill would immunize people from punishment in all cases in which their baby died in the first days of its life, even in cases where the death was caused by acts after the baby was born. The final bill that was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom clarified that the “perinatal death” immunity is specifically for “perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero.”

In other words, there is no basis for a claim that California passed a law legalizing post-birth executions.

There’s only one reason why a lawmaker would want to pass a law protecting women from being prosecuted for losing their baby to miscarriage, stillbirth, or .“perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero.” And that reason is that the Republicans are passing laws that make any non-live birth presumptively criminal. This includes cases where abortion is used to address a medical risk associated with fetal death, severe fetal abnormality, or other major health risks to the woman carrying the pregnancy.

Any couple that has experienced a lost pregnancy knows all too intimately how painful it is, and it’s unimaginable that people in that situation should be treated as criminal suspects who have to answer to investigators. Removing the possibility of prosecution only partially mitigates against this problem because it doesn’t eliminate a potential investigation even if it provides an absolute defense.

The California law was intended to deal with this monumental assholery, and not to prove the point, the Republican presidential nominee is accusing the Democrats of promoting infanticide.

Nice.

Every once in a while I like to highlight things that go on in Congress that don’t necessarily mean a whole lot or get much news coverage but help explain the place’s dysfunction. Consider the Senate’s consideration of Melissa Griffin Dalton, of Virginia, to be Under Secretary of the Air Force. She was confirmed to the position in a 56-39 roll call vote on May 23rd. Only eight Republicans supported her. That wouldn’t have been enough votes to overcome a filibuster, which requires three-fifths (sixty percent) of senators voting. Except, on the cloture vote to kill the filibuster one additional Republican (Josh Hawley of Missouri) didn’t vote. As a result, the 56-38 roll call rounded up from 59.5 percent and met the burden.

To be clear, Sen. Hawley allowed the confirmation vote to happen but switched his vote to oppose Dalton when the vote subsequently occurred. He allowed the position to be filled, but wanted it known that he didn’t support the person selected to fill it. Why was Dalton’s nomination handled in this way? When I tell you, you’ll think it’s silly.

Dalton has a B.A. undergraduate degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and a M.A. in international relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He started out as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst before earning a job in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. She oversaw policy in Syria and Lebanon before being promoted to senior advisor to the commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. She left government during the Trump years to work as a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.. Biden tapped her to serve as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities. In that role she also managed the Nuclear Posture Review. In 2022, she was confirmed as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs.

During this career advancement she faced no opposition from Republicans. But while she was serving in the latter position overseeing homeland defense and the border, two things happened that irked members of the GOP. The first is that a Chinese spy balloon entered U.S. territory was allowed to traverse the entire country before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina. It later was determined by the Pentagon that the balloon had flown off course and did not collect or transit data back to China during its journey, but that was presumed to be its purpose at the time. While the balloon was in the air over the continental United States, U.S. Northern Command head Gen. Glen VanHerck’s advised that it was risky to shoot it down over populated areas and the best way to handle the situation was to wait for it to go out to sea. Yet, when Dalton sat for her confirmation hearing, she was held responsible for this decision.

Elsewhere in the hearing conservative lawmakers criticized Dalton for the Biden administration’s decision to allow what it said was a Chinese spy balloon last year to traverse North America before shooting it down off the coast of South Carolina. Dalton was an advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the process, though she said advice to not to shoot down the balloon over US territory was offered by “senior military officials.”

“This is an area which you will be challenged, on this particular one, because it’s a question of judgment and recommendations being made,” [South Dakota Senator Mike] Rounds told Dalton. “Between now and the time that a vote is held on your nomination, I think you’ve got some work to do to regain the confidence of a lot of the members on this committee.”

If this seems like a dumb reason to oppose her nomination to be Under Secretary of the Air Force, that’s because it’s completely unfair and concerns a national security risk that turned out to be a big nothingburger. The second bug up the GOP’s arse is they felt Dalton took her sweet time responding to an inquiry about leftover supplies for President Trump’s idiotic unfinished border wall. You know, the wall the Mexican government was supposed to finance…

In March 2023, Republican senators on the Armed Services committee sent Dalton a letter requesting information on unused border materials that were acquired under the Trump administration but warehoused by Biden. Dalton did not respond until Aug. 1, the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Roger Wicker, said today, by which time the DoD had moved to auction off the materials.

If you’re laughing, that’s because it’s funny that the Biden administration auctioned off Trump’s border wall materials. But, again, despite her portfolio including border security, Dalton wasn’t involved in the decision on the wall’s unused materials.

Dalton told the committee today that though the border wall issue was not in her portfolio, she embarked on a “fact-finding mission across the [Defense] Department” to muster a response since senators originally directed the questions to her. The fate of the materials, she said, was ultimately handled by the Defense Logistics Agency.

So, Republican senators directed an inquiry to the wrong person and were angry when it took too long for this person to gather information for a response.

Even assuming the Republican senators are correct that Dalton slow-walked her response, the normal way to handle this is get assurances from Dalton that she’ll be prompt on future inquiries in her new role at the Air Force. Punishing her because of their fetish for Trump’s border wall is misplaced and petty. To demonstrate how deep this sickness is with the GOP, even Mitt Romney supported the filibuster and opposed her confirmation.

But it was performative, because the filibuster could have been sustained if Senate Republicans were actually serious about blocking her. But they weren’t serious. They just wanted to find a new way to fluff up their feathers and act as if they’re really mad.

This is how Congress works now. Uncontroversial , well-credentialed and non-political nominees who have served in both Republican and Democratic administrations are muddied up by Republicans just to score cheap political points that hardly anyone will notice. When Dalton was confirmed to her prior position at the Pentagon, it passed on a unanimous voice-vote because there was no reason to oppose her. That’s what should have happened here with her appointment for Under Secretary of the Air Force. Instead, she suffered the indignity of having 39 Republicans say she’s unfit for the job.

In a Wilmington, Delaware federal courthouse on Monday, a jury is being selected to hear a case against Hunter Biden involving charges that he unlawfully possessed a gun as a drug user, lied on a federal form about his drug use when he purchased the gun and made a false statement about a federally licensed gun deal. For this, he faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. If convicted, it’s more likely that he’ll be sentenced to 18 months in prison, largely because he has no prior criminal convictions. He also faces federal tax charges in California in a trial scheduled to begin in September. A conviction in the first case won’t help with sentencing if he is also convicted in the second. In case you live under a rock, Hunter Biden is the son of the president of the United States, Joe Biden. The prosecutors who are putting Hunter on trial in two different states work for his father as members of the executive branch of the U.S. government.

It’s important to realize that President Biden has not intervened to pressure his employees to drop charges against his son. It’s also important to realize that Hunter is guilty of purchasing and possessing a gun during a time when he was addicted to crack cocaine. Whether he’s actually responsible for lying about this on forms will be adjudicated at trial. There is some evidence that at least one of the forms was altered by the gun dealer.

As for mitigating factors, Hunter’s drug abuse became a serious problem after his brother Beau died of cancer in 2015. In 2019, he got sober and by all accounts has remained sober. His defense is likely to argue that he was in denial about his drug problem when he filled out the forms. To get a sense of what was going on at the time, Hunter was dating his brother’s widow, Hallie Biden. Hallie discovered the gun shortly after Hunter bought it, and concerned that he might commit suicide with it, she tossed it into a dumpster. It was discovered there by a man who was collecting recyclables who then alerted the police.

So, in a very real sense, Hunter is being prosecuted only because Hallie Biden tried to save his life. Whether she was right or not about the risk, she was in a position to know Hunter’s emotional state of mind, and it’s obvious he was a complete mess. He did not commit a crime with the gun. He wasn’t conspiring to commit a crime with it. He only had possession of it for two weeks.

Does any of this make him innocent? No, it doesn’t. Would similarly situated people face the same charges? Possibly, but I think they’d be allowed to plea out of it in return for a fine, probation and perhaps some mandatory counseling. That was originally the government’s intent, including on the separate tax charges, but a Trump-appointed judge in Delaware rejected the plea agreement and so here we are.

President Biden is obviously distraught about all of this. He’s been through too much pain and anguish with his children as it is. But he’s not using his position to help his son avoid accountability.

So, when Donald Trump accuses Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department, just keep in mind that if that were true, he wouldn’t be passively watching jury selection in a federal Wilmington courthouse in a case concerning his son.

 

Writing about the proposed peace plan President Joe Biden discussed on Friday, David Horowitz of Times of Israel makes a point worth keeping front and center in your mind:

The Israel-Hamas conflict is a zero-sum game: Israel wants to destroy Hamas; Hamas wants to survive and get back to destroying Israel. Neither side will agree to terms that definitively thwart its core goals.

So, let’s look at the first phase of the plan.

Both sides would observe a six-week cease-fire. Israel would withdraw from major population centers in Gaza, and a number of hostages would be released, including women, the elderly and the wounded. The hostages would be exchanged for the release of hundreds of Palestinian detainees. Aid would begin flowing into Gaza, working up to some 600 trucks a day. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians would also be allowed to return to their homes in northern Gaza. Most Palestinians fled the north following Israel’s mass evacuation order before the ground invasion began.

During the first phase, Israel and Hamas would continue to negotiate to reach a permanent cease-fire. If the talks take more than six weeks, the first phase of the truce will continue until they reach a deal, Mr. Biden said.

Why would this appeal to Hamas? For starters, six weeks of relief from Israeli targeting and bombardment is not nothing. Then there’s their standing with the Gazan population, which has taken a major blow. Aid would begin in earnest and people could return to what’s left of their homes. Combined with Israel pulling out of the population centers and stopping their constant attacks, it’s easy to see how ordinary Palestinians in the Strip would be grateful for the deal. And, finally, a major goal for Hamas is securing the release of prisoners, and Phase One would provide that benefit. Nothing in this deal would doom Hamas or prevent them from reconstituting themselves for future attacks on Israel.

Why would the deal appeal to Israel? The country is currently suffering a catastrophic loss of legitimacy on the international stage, with its leaders being defined as war criminals. The government is also reeling from domestic criticism over its inability to win the release of hostages taken on October 7, 2023. A cease fire will take a lot of the foreign pressure off and the envisioned release of all elderly, female and injured hostages would be celebrated at home. For the more reasonable members of the government, ending a growing famine is also a major benefit.

Seems like there’s enough here for both sides to find reasons to agree on beginning Phase One of the agreement, but I can’t say I am optimistic.

For Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who actually proposed this deal, he doesn’t seem to be able to implement it without causing the splintering of his governing coalition. Horowitz explains:

The heads of the coalition’s two far-right parties, Religious Zionism’s Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit’s Itamar Ben Gvir, declared that the terms approved by a war cabinet they had themselves voted to establish were unacceptable. And they promised to bolt and thus bring down their own Netanyahu-led government.

National Unity head Gantz, by contrast, called for the urgent convening of the war cabinet in order to advance the process. Highlighting the return of the hostages as the most urgent of the war’s priorities, Gantz was potentially setting aside the ultimatum he delivered on May 18 to quit the coalition by June 8 if Netanyahu does not take urgent strategic decisions on the war. And Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, insisted that Israel “must do this deal, now… before the hostages die there [in Gaza],” and reiterated his promise to provide Netanyahu with a political safety net to ensure that the government does not fall over this issue.

Netanyahu’s political and indeed personal problem is that Ben Gvir and Smotrich have 14 seats between them, and his coalition will not long survive without them. Gantz is a rival, not an ally, whose party has just 8 Knesset seats, and Lapid will take down that safety net as soon as any hostage-ceasefire deal is completed. If and when the two far-right parties go, Netanyahu’s dependable majority goes with them.

As you can see, Biden put Netanyahu in a pickle by praising and publicizing Netanyahu’s own plan. It’s a clever gambit, which was immediately followed by Congress confirming its invitation for Bibi to address it in joint session. A plan that will end Netanyahu’s hold on power isn’t a plan he’s eager to implement even if he’s the one who proposed it. Beyond that, releasing prisoners, many of whom are considered dangerous and hardened terrorists, into the West Bank is  something that makes Israeli citizens feel insecure. And the goal of destroying Hamas is popular, so any deal that gives it breathing space is going to have strong detractors.

As far as Hamas’ reasons for opposing the plan, everything seems to be going badly for Israel, so why throw them a lifeline by agreeing to a cease fire? And, while ordinary Gazans might initially be grateful for some respite from the war, when they return to their shattered communities and have a moment to reflect on what the October 7 attacks have brought them, I imagine their rage against Hamas will grow. Hamas has brought them unimaginable ruin but as long as Palestinians are united in their struggle to survive, there’s no place for internal politics or accountability. The truth is, no one other than Iran wants a future for Hamas, and that is going to include most Gazans.

Of course, it’s delusional to think support for violent resistance to Israel has decreased as a result of the war. That’s why the obsession with destroying Hamas seems kind of hopeless. Israel could kill every last member of Hamas and still discover that those who remain aren’t friendlier in any respect. There’s something to be said for accountability for the October 7 attacks, but there’s also something to be said for achievable war aims. The ultimate goal for Israel is not accountability but enduring acceptance and security.

The war with Gaza has so far failed on both these fronts and the sooner hostilities end for Israel the better, but that’s not true for Netanyahu. He, like Hamas, would like to put off a reckoning for the catastrophe he’s brought to his people. The proposal Biden is pushing makes so much sense that it just might work, but the worst people on both sides will continue to stand in the way.

Section 17-152 of New York State law provides that “any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of conspiracy to promote or prevent an election.” Donald Trump was effectively but not actually convicted of violating this law as part of the “Russian nesting doll” element of the felony charges brought against him by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, Jr.

People are calling it a Russian nesting doll because of the confusing layers Bragg utilized to turn misdemeanor false business record charges into felonies, which also helped extend the statute of limitations so that it covered crimes committed eight years ago. To be clear, Trump wasn’t directly charged with violating Section 17-152. He was indicted on 34 separate charges of filing false business reports. These charges are ordinary treated as misdemeanors, but because Trump caused the filings in furtherance of a second crime (violating Section 17-152), the charges were brought as felonies.

The jury was unanimous on all 34 charges that Trump caused the business reports to be filed as part of an effort to promote his own election. In other words, by paying Stormy Daniels not to go public about their tryst before the 2016 election, his aim was to help his campaign. But how was this unlawful?

On this element, the jury was instructed by Judge Juan Merchan that it did not have to be unanimous. They were told that possible unlawful means could include violations of federal campaign finance law, New York State or federal tax law, or other false business record filings. As long as each juror found that Trump had violated at least one of those items on the menu, then the unlawful means requirement was satisfied, but they could differ on which one.

It’s hard to write about this in a clear and concise way, and it’s no wonder the jury asked the judge to read the instructions a second time while they were deliberating. The briefest way to explain it is that Trump caused 34 false business reports to be filed, and he did so to promote his own election. His promotion used unlawful means because it involved an impermissibly large campaign finance donation from Michael Cohen of $130,000 which was then covered up in a way that mischaracterized Cohen’s donation as legal services. Because this would cause Cohen to pay income tax for work he did not do, his repayment was “grossed up,” and this resulted in filing false tax documents.

So, it wasn’t illegal for Trump to enter into a non-disclosure agreement with Stormy Daniels but it was illegal for him to cause Cohen to pay her out of his own pocket because it was done to promote Trump’s campaign and was therefore an an illegally large campaign donation. Cohen actually went to prison in part for violating federal campaign finance law with his payment to Daniels. His donation was not reported by Trump’s campaign. When it came time to pay Cohen back,  Trump’s corporation falsely claimed it was paying Cohen for legal services.  Then tax documents were filed to that effect. All of this adds up to the menu of unlawful means the jury could choose from.

Supporters of Trump and even some dispassionate legal observers have various problems with how this was all structured, and in some cases on how the jury was instructed by Merchan. I can’t address all of these concerns in detail, but I want to clear about one thing. When you hear Trump supporters argue that the judge told the jury it did not need to be unanimous, that’s deeply deceptive. It’s a reference to Merchan’s instruction to the jury that “Although you must conclude unanimously that the defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means, you need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.”

The jury had to be unanimous that Trump used unlawful means, but it didn’t matter that they all agreed the unlawful means were campaign finance violations versus, say, filing false tax returns or business records. To some degree this matters because Trump’s defense will argue on appeal that New York State doesn’t have jurisdiction over federal elections, federal taxes or federal campaign finance law, and so these can’t be considered unlawful means. But the jury never even had to clarify that they unanimously found violations of federal law. The appeal will insist they had to defend against a moving target.

The overarching complaint about this case is that Trump has been convicted of nearly three dozen felonies for trying to promote his own campaign, and promoting your own campaign is what campaigns are supposed to do. Perhaps his campaign committed campaign finance violations but those are federal crimes and the federal government investigated this and declined to bring charges. Alvin Bragg didn’t charge him with finance violations either. As for filing false business reports, those are misdemeanor offenses for which the statute of limitations has long since passed, but here they are treated as felonies. And, finally, none of this would be possible without the determination that a second crime was committed, but the jury didn’t have to agree about the means by which that crime took place. Add it all up, and it looks like Trump is getting picked on. No one else would have faced these charges.

It’s true that Section 17-152 of New York State law is doing a lot of work here. It’s what makes it possible to consider it a crime to promote your own campaign. And as sketchy as it is to enter into a non-disclosure agreement to hide a tryst with a porn star, that is not a crime in and of itself, and it’s not ordinarily considered a crime even if you’re a candidate for office. The problem for Trump is mainly in how he paid Daniels. By using a third party private payment, he lost the ability to argue that he was making the payment himself. Instead, someone did it on his behalf, and clearly did it to help him get elected. Then, add to this that he orchestrated a fraud to conceal what he had done that involved deceiving New York State, the Federal Election Commission, and the Internal Revenue Service.

If Trump had written a private check to Daniels, none of these other problems would have arisen, but that would have risked direct exposure if his payment leaked. One question that isn’t clearly resolved here is if New York State believes the public had a legal right to know about Trump’s tryst with Daniels. It seems to me that Trump had a legal right to take steps to prevent the public from knowing, but that’s definitely being treated as suspect under Section 17-152.

In the end, it only matters politically, because the way Trump went about keeping the secret wasn’t legal, and that’s why he’s now a convict. Calling this election interference might seem like a stretch, but in a completely non-legal way it’s true that the success of the scheme was a necessary ingredient in Trump’s narrow Electoral College victory in 2016. If he had not done it, he may not have ever been president, so it’s a very big deal.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Trump achieved this through unlawful means, and now Bragg has made him pay for it.

I can see why this seems unfair to supporters of Trump. But breaking the law in order to win the presidency opens you up to being held to account. If he were smarter, he would have gotten away with it.

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Flagstaff, 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 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 now started the foreground area. More next week.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.
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I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.000550