Former President Donald Trump gave the green light on Jan. 6, so Dustin Thompson hit the gas.
He left his wife, Sarah Thompson, at home, however—and much to her delight.
“I was just enjoying the house being quiet,” she told jurors gathered in a federal courtroom in the nation’s capital on Wednesday.
The theme that Dustin Thompson, a 38-year-old man from Ohio, would have jurors focus on at his trial in Washington, D.C., is that it was Donald Trump who he served on Jan. 6 and whose “Big Lie” of a rigged election that he would believe.
It was Donald Trump who “authorized” the siege, his defense has argued.
Thompson faces multiple charges, including theft of government property—a coat rack—and obstruction of what his own attorney described this week as a “solemn and sacred proceeding” undertaken by Congress: the certification of electoral votes that ultimately leads to the peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.
Prosecutors slapped Thompson with six charges altogether last year and in court this week as the trial opened, his defense attorney Samuel Shamansky, according to NBC, amped up Thompson’s “foolishness” on Jan. 6.to jurors.
But he pointed the finger squarely at Trump as the one responsible for encouraging his client’s behavior and moreover, worsening his already “vulnerable” state in the face of the lies that spewed from the White House for months about so-called fraud in the 2020 election.
Dustin Thompson appears in a photo seized from co-defendant Robert Lyon’s phone. Prosecutors say Thompson stole the coat rack pictured here from inside of the Capitol as a “trophy.”
With his defense calling the events of Jan. 6 the byproduct of a “sinister plot,” “scheme,” and “conspiracy” originating with the “highest levels of our government,” Thompson is not arguing to jurors that he is innocent of charging into the Capitol.
He is not denying that he took government property or that he fled on foot from U.S. Capitol Police after they stopped him and his friend and former co-defendant, Robert Lyon.
At court Wednesday, Politico reported that Thompson testified on his own behalf and “sheepishly”.
He went over the thoughts running through his mind.
“We’re going to lose our country today if we don’t put a stop to these election results,” he recalled thinking.
As for Lyon, he flipped last week when he entered a guilty plea and agreed to cooperate with the Justice Department just as Thompson was days from his trial.
With the former president’s authorization of the insurrection being the cushion he hopes will acquit him of the charges at most or reduce his sentence at least, Thompson attempted to call Trump and the former president’s attorneys as witnesses.
The gambit failed quickly.
Thompson tried to subpoena attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and others inside Trump’s circle like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, but the judge shot him down.
Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton explained that their testimony would be inadmissible at Thompson’s trial. It would lead to a “mini-trial” about the intent of the speakers at the rally at the Ellipse—Trump included, of course.
And in short, Walton effectively ordered that it was not Trump’s intent, nor anyone else’s, that Thompson found himself on trial for.
Probing the meaning of those witnesses’ testimony could only confuse the jury and mislead them, Walton wrote.
Thompson and Lyon came into D.C. on the morning of Jan. 6 by Uber. They booked a stay at a nearby hotel in Maryland. They went to Trump’s rally at the Ellipse.
U.S. Capitol Police first spotted them sitting on the corner of a sidewalk in a secure zone decked out in Trump gear, a Trump flag in tow. Thompson was wearing a bulletproof vest.
It had only been a few hours since the Capitol was first breached, and D.C Mayor Muriel Bowser’s curfew was about to set in.
When the officers approached, Thompson and Lyon told them they were waiting for a ride, and police pointed them out of the secure zone to an area where they could stand. But as the men went to leave, Thompson picked up a coat rack sitting just behind him.
Prosecutors say it was then that Capitol Police realized it was likely stolen and that the men had come from inside the complex where police officers had already spent hours fighting off the thousands-strong mob, often in brutal hand-to-hand combat.
Thompson dropped the coat rack and took off running. Lyon stayed behind and let the police search his bag. They found marijuana, two pipes, and an open bottle of bourbon.
Police reviewed Lyon’s phone, identified Thompson from texts and pictures the men had exchanged, questioned Lyon, confirmed Thompson’s identity, and set him free.
The FBI caught back up with Lyon exactly a week later at his home in Ohio. During that interview, Lyon heaped the blame on Thompson saying it was his idea to go to D.C.
Hours into the melee, Lyon first told investigators his friend had walked away from him, returned, and suddenly had the wooden coat rack.
A review of Lyon’s phone showed officers a text message to Thompson, however, where Lyon urged his friend, “We need to get the fuck out with this trophy.”
Capitol security footage presented by prosecutors showed both Thompson and Lyon inside the Capitol and at one point exiting the Senate Parliamentarian’s office together. Thompson is allegedly seen holding the coat rack as they leave. Minutes before, prosecutors say he is seen on video carrying a bottle of bourbon.
Thompson, prosecutors say, appears in the Trump beanie at the top right carrying a coat rack taken from inside the U.S. Capitol. Robert Lyon appears at bottom left in a striped beanie. Dustin Thompson appears to be carrying a bottle of bourbon in this still taken from Capitol security footage. (Attribution: Court records)
Before prosecutors rested their case Wednesday, jurors heard testimony from U.S. Capitol Police officer Ronald Lucarino who recounted the intense violence of the day. On cross-examination, according to Politico, the defense asked Lucarino if he felt rioters did what Trump asked that morning.
Trump told them to “fight like hell.”
They chanted back, “Fight for Trump!”
“Absolutely,” Lucarino told jurors.
The word “fight” appeared no less than two dozen times in Trump’s remarks on Jan. 6, and always couched in the lie that a 2020 election victory had been snatched away from him by thieving Democrats.
“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said on Jan. 6.
Lucarino also told jurors when he was squeezed up against members of the mob, he could feel “the butts of guns” under some people’s clothing.
When Capitol Police officer Craig Atkinson took the stand, NBC reported, he recalled to jurors how chaotic the scene was inside of the Parliamentarian’s office where Thompson, prosecutors say, was later seen emerging with Lyon.
“It was like a bomb had gone off,” Atkinson said.
Another Capitol Police official, Craig Atkinson, described what the Senate Parliamentarian’s office looked like after the mob stormed the Capitol. “It was like a bomb had gone off,” he said, describing overturned furniture and papers scattered everywhere.
Dustin Thompson’s wife, Sarah, told jurors Wednesday she did not believe what her husband did about the November 2020 election, nor other conspiracy theories he had espoused.
She is a Democrat, and confirmed that she voted for now-President Joe Biden. She voted for former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well.
When the pandemic hit, her husband lost his job, she said.
And from there it was a free fall into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory but he was still, “very smart.”
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
●AL-Gov: While Alabama’s Republican Senate primary has attracted considerably more attention than any other race on the May 24 ballot, the expensive GOP contest for governor may beat it for sheer bigotry. Incumbent Kay Ivey’s latest spot attempts to rally the party’s xenophobic base, while a transphobic commercial from one of her challengers, businessman Tim James, forced a school to increase security. And former Ambassador to Slovenia Lindy Blanchard, who is the top spender in this race, made news earlier this month with a commercial of her own declaring, “Lindy believes the election was stolen from Trump. Kay Ivey thinks Biden’s victory was legitimate.”
Ivey has been running a series of ads trying to cultivate the far-right vote by embracing the Big Lie and attacking “[t]ransgender sports,” but now she’s hitting another topic. This time, the governor tells the audience, “If Joe Biden keeps shipping illegal immigrants into our states, we’re all going to have to learn Spanish.” She’s none too happy with that (delusional) prospect, continuing, “My message to Biden: no way, José. That’s why I sent national guard troops to protect the Southern border.” The head of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama blasted Ivey’s message, though unsurprisingly, she hasn’t backed off in the slightest.
Neither has James, who is continuing to focus almost completely on anti-trans bigotry in his advertising campaign. The challenger’s recent ad features him claiming that “right here in Alabama, millions of your tax dollars are paying for the first transgender public school in the South” as the on-screen text identifies the Magic City Acceptance Academy and features photos of its students.
The institution, which describes itself as an “LGBTQ-affirming learning environment,” said it had to boost its own security measures after someone showed up and attempted to film pupils while quoting Bible verses at them. The principal blamed James’ ad for the incident, as well as for “a carload or two” of people yelling at students. But when asked about what happened, James blithely responded, “The principal said that the TV ad scared the children. What should scare mothers and fathers of these children is what the faculty is doing by presenting this ungodly display through the drag show to which the children were subjected.”
So far, polls have found that Ivey, who earned the NRA’s endorsement this week, has largely been successful in outflanking both James and Blanchard on the far right. A mid-March survey for the local media put the governor at 46%, which is just shy of the majority she needs to avoid a runoff, with James and Blanchard far back at 12% and 10%, respectively; Ivey’s own internals from around that time, meanwhile, showed her taking about 60% of the vote.
However, we haven’t seen more recent numbers, and the governor’s opponents are hoping that their own heavy spending has helped them shift things. NBC reports that Blanchard, who has been self-funding her bid, has outspent Ivey $4.1 million to $3.2 million in ads, while James has deployed $2.2 million.
The Downballot
●This week on The Downballot, we nerd out with Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight, whose path from hobbyist to full-time election analyst closely mirrors the Daily Kos Elections story. Rakich discusses how gerrymandering might have made for a more equal congressional playing field but not necessarily a fair one; what kind of redistricting commissions have actually worked best; and some of the key bellwether districts he’ll be looking at to judge what sort of night Democrats can expect in November.
MI-07: Elissa Slotkin (D-inc): $1.3 million raised, $5.5 million cash-on-hand; Tom Barrett (R): $458,000 raised
NH-01: Chris Pappas (D-inc): $500,000 raised, $2 million cash-on-hand
NV-04: Steven Horsford (D-inc): $500,000 raised, $1.94 million cash-on-hand
NY-16: Vedat Gashi (D): $470,000 raised (in one month)
Senate
●AZ-Sen: Wealthy businessman Jim Lamon, who ran a commercial earlier this year that depicted him firing a gun at Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, is now embracing Easter hope and optimism in his new ad for the August GOP primary. “But we must never forget, even in our darkest days, Almighty God is in charge,” says Lamon, continuing, “With faith, he will show us the way. Easter—when darkness and despair were transformed into life and hope.” Lamon’s spot, which is also available in Spanish, doesn’t actually mention he’s even running for any office, much less Senate, except at the very end as he approves his message.
●NC-Sen: Cheri Beasley is spending six figures on her first TV spot for the May 17 Democratic primary, where she faces little opposition. Beasley emphasizes her past career as a public defender, saying, “I represented North Carolinians who couldn’t afford a lawyer—because everyone has a right to representation, no matter who you are or where you’re from.” She continues, “As a judge and chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, I led with a commitment to justice and integrity.”
●ND-Sen, ND-AL: Candidate filing closed Monday for North Dakota’s June 14 primary, and the secretary of state has a list of contenders here. There won’t be much to see, though, as Sen. John Hoeven faces only minor GOP primary opposition in this very red state while Rep. Kelly Armstrong, a fellow Republican, has no intra-party foe. Hoeven briefly faced a primary challenge from state Rep. Rick Becker, but Becker dropped out last month after he failed to win the state party endorsement.
●NH-Sen: A newly hired consultant for Republican Vikram Mansharamani, who is an author and investor, confirms that his client is considering entering the September primary to take on Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. WMUR says that Mansharamani “is expected to make a decision about launching a campaign within the next two weeks.”
●OH-Sen: Former GOP chair Jane Timken avoids going after any of her many intra-party rivals in her new spot for the May 3 primary and instead blames Joe Biden for inflation.
Governors
●GA-Gov: Last week a group called Get Georgia Right began airing an ad that echoed Trump by using the Big Lie against Gov. Brian Kemp, and Politico’s Alex Isenstadt now reports that the organization received $500,000 from Trump’s super PAC last month. Kemp, though, maintains a massive financial edge heading into his May 24 Republican primary against Trump’s candidate, former Sen. David Perdue: Isenstadt writes that the incumbent and his allies so far have spent $11.4 million on TV compared to just $2.7 million for Perdue’s side.
Kemp is also continuing to make use of his financial edge by running new ads where he praises himself for lifting Georgia’s “lockdown” all the way back in April of 2020, a move even Trump said at the time was happening “too soon.”
●KS-Gov: Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s allies at the Kansas Values Institute have launched a new ad against state Attorney General Derek Schmidt that ties the likely Republican nominee to former GOP Gov. Sam Brownback, who left office deeply unpopular in 2018. The spot quotes Schmidt saying that Brownback “delivered time and again” for the state before reminding viewers that the former governor’s draconian budget policies resulted in “devastating cuts to our schools” and “dismal job growth.” The narrator further quotes Brownback praising Schmidt as “like minded” and argues that electing the latter would “take Kansas back to Brownback.”
●MD-Gov: Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich has endorsed former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez ahead of the crowded July Democratic primary for governor. Montgomery County, a jurisdiction in the D.C. suburbs where Perez also served on the County Council from 2002 to 2006, is the largest in the state at just over one million residents.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Education Secretary John King has launched his first ads in the Democratic primary, which the campaign says is backed by a six-figure buy. One of the spots opens with King noting that it took his family “three generations to travel 25 miles” from the Maryland farm where his great-grandparents were enslaved to Silver Spring, where his daughter goes to public school, simultaneously highlighting King’s deep roots in the state and links to education. The other commercial relays how both of King’s parents died when he was a child but his public school teachers helped him succeed and go on to become a teacher, principal, and education secretary under President Obama.
●NE-Gov: The Nebraska Examiner has collected fundraising numbers from the first quarter for all the GOP candidates competing in the May 10 primary:
University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen: $2.4 million raised, $2.9 million cash-on-hand
State Sen. Brett Lindstrom: $420,000 raised, $580,000 cash-on-hand
Former State Sen. Theresa Thibodeau: $159,000 raised, additional $10,000 self-funded, $62,000
Agribusinessman Charles Herbster: $113,000 raised, additional $4.2 million self-funded, $543,000 cash-on-hand
State Sen. Carol Blood, who has no serious opposition for the Democratic nod, took in $50,000 during this time and had $36,000 on hand.
●NM-Gov: Fundraising reports are in covering the period spanning Oct. 5 to April 4, and they give us our first look at the financial strength for the entire GOP primary field:
2020 Senate nominee Mark Ronchetti: $2.1 million raised, $1.56 million cash-on-hand
The winner of the June nomination fight will take on Democratic incumbent Michelle Lujan Grisham, who raised $2.67 million and had $3.78 million on-hand.
●PA-Gov: A day after Donald Trump unloaded on former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain and told Republican primary voters not to vote for “a coward, who let our Country down,” McSwain’s allies at the Commonwealth Leaders Fund say they are “currently assessing what all this means for the primary election.” The group already spent roughly $6 million backing McSwain, who previously appeared to be a top contender in the crowded May 17 GOP primary until Trump issued his anti-endorsement of his one-time appointee over McSwain’s supposedly insufficient zeal in promoting the Big Lie.
House
●AK-AL: Anne Garland Young, who is the widow of Rep. Don Young, has endorsed state Sen. Josh Revak in the special June top-four primary to succeed the longtime congressman.
Meanwhile, the ANCSA Regional Association, which the Anchorage Daily News‘ Nathaniel Herz says is made up of the leaders of the “state’s 12 regional Native corporations,” has formed a super PAC called Alaskans for TARA to support another Republican, former state Interior Department official Tara Sweeney. (Sweeney, who is Iñupiaq, would be the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.) ANCSA’s members, writes Herz, represent six of the state’s eight largest companies by revenue.
Wealthy businessman Tim Reichert successfully collected enough signatures, so he was able to skip the event. Construction company owner Carl Andersen and attorney Brad Dempsey, though, are still waiting to see if they turned in enough valid petitions. Whoever wins the GOP nod will go up against state Sen. Brittany Pettersen, who faces no Democratic primary opposition, for a suburban Denver seat that Biden would have carried 56-42.
●NY-04: Former Hempstead Supervisor Laura Gillen has publicized an Impact Research internal that gives her a 40-11 lead over Nassau County Legislator Carrié Solages in the June Democratic primary. This is the first poll we’ve seen of the contest to replace retiring Rep. Kathleen Rice, who supports Gillen.
●OH-11: The crypto industry-aligned Protect Our Future PAC is spending at least $1 million to aid Rep. Shontel Brown in her May 3 Democratic primary rematch against former state Sen. Nina Turner.
●OR-05: Attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner’s opening ad for the May 17 Democratic primary begins with the candidate, who is shown working at a farm, asking what the difference is between her and moderate incumbent Kurt Schrader and answering, “He takes millions in corporate PAC money. I won’t take a dime.” McLeod-Skinner continues, “Oil and gas companies are bankrolling Kurt. I’m running for Congress to tackle climate change,” a statement that is accompanied by her shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow that contains a check from “Big Oil & Gas.”
After faulting Schrader for having “sold out to Big Pharma,” the challenger shreds a huge check with her vehicle as she exclaims, “Big Pharma can’t buy my vote!” Finally, McLeod-Skinner tosses a folder labeled “Congressional Stock Portfolio” into a flaming barrel before feeding a “Corporate PACs” check to a goat.
●TX-28: An attorney for Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, in new comments provided exclusively to Fox News, says the congressman “is not a target” of a federal investigation that saw law enforcement officials raid Cuellar’s home and campaign headquarters in January. There’s no corroboration of this claim, however, as Fox says the FBI and Department of Justice “declined to comment” on the matter.
●WV-02: The Club for Growth and its affiliate School Freedom Fund have announced a new $1.1 million TV, digital, and radio buy aiding Rep. Alex Mooney in his May 10 Republican primary fight against fellow incumbent David McKinley.
Both TV ads (here and here) make sure the audience knows that Mooney is Trump’s man while McKinley supported the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill. The first one is a version of the generic spot that the Club has been running in other races, while the other opens with sirens blaring as the narrator informs the audience, “Stand by for a Trump alert: Trump has endorsed Alex Mooney for Congress.” That endorsement happened in November, so clearly the Club’s early warning system is badly in need of a refit.
Mayors
●Washington, D.C. Mayor: The Washington Teachers’ Union is backing Councilmember Robert White’s bid to deny renomination to Mayor Muriel Bowser in the June Democratic primary, a development that came days after AFSCME also endorsed White.
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, April 14, 2022
Note: The C&J elevator is currently out of service. Please use the wicker basket attached to a string after leaving everything to me in your will. Thx. —Mgt.
Expected deficit reduction this year: $1.3 trillion
Percent of Americans who aren’t liberal economists and care about deficit reduction: 0%
Percent chance that the Maine Senate just approved the nomination of Rick Lawrence, who now becomes the first Black justice on Maine’s state Supreme Court: 100%
Age of Gilbert Gottfried when he died Tuesday: 67
Number of times you could circle the globe with the 16 billion jelly beans that’ll be eaten at Easter time: 3
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
As more and more rich people cheat on their taxes, the IRS is increasingly unable to go after them because it is so poorly funded.
For all this, we can thank the Republican Party.
Every year at this time, conservatives moan and groan and tell us how terribly, terribly overburdened we are by taxes. We wouldn’t be overburdened if the tax code hadn’t been rewritten by Republicans, and if Republicans hadn’t weakened the IRS so much it can barely function. Damn right, this is a partisan effort. And damn right, I’m bitter about it. We don’t need to raise taxes in this country, we need to collect them. We need tax cuts that don’t favor the obscenely rich. You are getting screwed.
CHEERS to previews of coming attractions. As if to make up for all the GOP obstruction of his former boss’s judicial nominees, President Biden has wisely made the appointment of federal judges a top priority during his presidency. Next week he plans to keep the conveyor belt rollin’ by announcing five new gavel thumpers…
Biden is nominating John Z. Lee, a district court judge in Illinois, to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Salvador Mendoza Jr., a district court judge in Washington, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Nancy Maldonado
He plans to nominate Stephen Henley Locher to the Southern District of Iowa; Nancy L. Maldonado to the Northern District of Illinois; and Gregory B. Williams to be district court judge in Delaware. The five additions bring Biden’s total to 90 judicial nominations. […]
The new nominees reflect Biden’s goals of adding racial, ethnic and professional diversity on the courts. If confirmed, Lee would be the first Asian American to serve on the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees numerous Midwestern states. Maldonado would be the first Hispanic woman to be a federal judge in Illinois, the official said.
Lee will subsequently become the first Asian-American associate justice on the Supreme Court when Clarence Thomas f… Oops! Almost spilled the beans.
CHEERS to the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Got him! Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they finally got the goods on that corrupt bastard in a real estate-related fraud scheme. He’s been arrested and booked, and now he’s headed to trial and quite possibly…the pokey! Best of all, his political career is over:
New York Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin resigned Tuesday in the wake of his arrest in a federal corruption investigation. […]
He was accused in an indictment of participating in a scheme to obtain campaign contributions from a real estate developer in exchange for Benjamin’s agreement to use his influence as a state senator to get a $50,000 grant of state funds for a nonprofit organization the developer controlled.
Facing charges including bribery, fraud, conspiracy and falsification of records, Benjamin pleaded not guilty Tuesday. He was released and bail was set at $250,000.
Having gotten that case out of the way, dare we hope that the Manhattan D.A. will now get around to arresting and indicting Donald Trump for his real estate-related fraud—a case that one of the former prosecutors said is rife with “numerous felony violations”? No. No, we dare not. Sadly, these days premature optimism has a tendency to inflame my lumbago.
JEERS to wacko thespians. A hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, John Wilkes Booth shot a derringer ball into Abe Lincoln’s head, snuffing out the life of a great (the greatest?) president who was then a year younger than I am now: 56. Here’s a pic of the 44th president gazing at the 16th president who made his ascension to the White House possible…
Tuck in your shirt and pay your respects here. They say that as an actor John Wilkes Booth was considered “the George Clooney of his day” when he killed Lincoln. As a “human being”? Not so much.
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BRIEF SANITY BREAK
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rest in peace to Gilbert Gottfried who has probably the best sequence in game show history on Hollywood Squares. if you’re not an old hag like me who remembers the rules, both contestants needed his square to secure the 5-square win, but he decided to troll both of them pic.twitter.com/Egzyzygudd
CHEERS to wurds. 204 yeers agow tooday, Noah Webster puhbilshed the fuhrst (frist??) Amarrican dikshunery. It hellpd peeple spull bettor. (Sorry about that…this is the one day of the year that we let our spellchecker have the keys to the liquor cabinet.)
CHEERS to telling Iowa where they can stick their corn dogs and New Hampshire where they can stick their…uhhhhh…granite dogs? Finally, a credible, boots-on-the-ground effort by a state to muscle its way to the front of the pack in a presidential primary season. Yes, ladies and germs, the great state of Nevada is…
…making a coordinated push like never before to remove the primacy of New Hampshire and Iowa. […]
Letting Nevada go first would be a nice tribute to Harry.
In an interview last week, [Democratic Sen. Jacky] Rosen stressed that Democrats in her state were working on the bid in unison. “This has been a team effort to push Nevada to be first in the nation,” Rosen said.
The late Sen. Harry Reid, who built a powerful political machine in the state, had fervently advocated for the party to oust Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary from their longtime leadoff perches in the Democratic presidential primary season.
I’m totally on board for NV going first before IA and NH. And you know who should go second? ME! ME! ME!
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Ten years ago in C&J: April 14, 2012
JEERS to academic flexibility. That’s a nice way of saying: Hey Tennessee public school kids, guess what? Thanks to the actions of your state’s governing bodies, you now have a license to rely on a collection of outlandish and ancient parables as actual science. That’s right—women are men’s ribs, Jesus rode a dinosaur to Wal-Mart, climate change is a hoax, and the universe is only 6,000 years old. Of course, the source of this “alternative” science is limited to The Bible, so the rest of you religious types can go straight to you-know-where with your silly “theories.” This is America, dammit—we have standards.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to horse power. You know what officially turns 57 this week? The original pony car, the “car that dreams are made of”—the Ford Mustang:
Making its debut at the New York World’s Fair, the first Ford Mustang proved to be one of the industry’s biggest hits ever, quickly requiring the automaker to fire up three assembly plants—two more than planned—to meet soaring demand. Interest was so intense, then-Ford President Lee Iacocca and Mustang landed on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, a unique coup.
Yet, the Mustang almost didn’t happen. The car was rushed to market only after another major Ford product program collapsed. … Ford’s designers and engineers worked feverishly to pull the project together in barely two years, about half the time it normally took to develop a new car from the ground up. But the first production models were already in dealer showrooms in time for the World’s Fair debut April 17, 1964.
Happy anniversary, Mustang fans. But don’t get cocky and challenge my Metro bus to a game of chicken. The driver mounts the losers’ hubcaps on the wall as trophies.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
It is time to nominate Cheers and Jeers for the Pulitzer Prize
We begin today with Ed Yong of The Atlantic writing about the continuing grief of those who loved ones died from COVID-19.
When covid grievers tell others about their loss, they tend to get the same responses. Do you know how they were exposed? Did they have a preexisting condition? Were they vaccinated? Every griever I interviewed has faced these questions, from online trolls and close friends alike, and with shocking immediacy. People regularly ask Rekha if her dead mother was vaccinated before they offer condolences or sympathies. “It’s not just one time; it’s all the time,” she said. “It’s all the time,” Kristin Urquiza echoed. “Pretty much from every person,” says Christina Faria, who lost her mother, Viola, late last year.
In 1989, the grief expert Kenneth Doka coined the term disenfranchised grief to describe situations where people struggle to cope with losses that aren’t “socially sanctioned, openly acknowledged, or publicly mourned.” That’s exactly what many Americans who have lost someone to COVID are experiencing. The words we normally use to console grievers honor the relationships that death disrupts: I’m sorry for your loss. But the questions that COVID grievers get “reduce the person to the disease,” Rebecca Morse, who studies death and loss at Divine Mercy University and is a former president of the Association for Death Education and Counseling, told me. And they cast judgment upon the circumstances around their infection, “which makes these deaths stigmatized and shameful,” Morse said. If the deceased was unvaccinated, went to a bar, or had preexisting health problems, their life becomes devalued, and their death becomes less tragic. When hearing about Viola’s death, “everyone is like, ‘Oh, she was 76’ or ‘She had heart surgery’ or ‘She was overweight. What did you expect? Of course she was going to be the one to die,’” Christina told me. Especially after vaccines became available, COVID became lumped with causes of death such as lung cancer, liver disease, and AIDS, which society classifies as self-inflicted and therefore worthy of blame rather than sympathy. Instead of getting support, many COVID grievers have been forced to defend their loved ones and justify their grief.
I lost a first cousin to COVID-19 in October 2021 and I’ve been in most (if not all) of the various states that Yong mentions including, I think, casting a bit of judgment (for reasons that I wrote about when my cousin R. was sick).
Charles M. Blow of The New York Times notes that, perhaps, the entire country is going through severe trauma not simply because of the deaths of one million Americans due to COVID but also changing ways in which we live as a society.
There can’t be that much death and mourning without severe consequences. But the deaths are only part of the story. There was also all of the sickness — 80 million Americans have caught Covid — and all of the havoc the virus has wreaked on our lives.
Our children couldn’t go to school. We couldn’t gather to celebrate weddings or graduations or the births of new babies. We couldn’t gather to properly mourn, to lay hands on one another, to hug tight enough to make the tears flow and hold the hug until they stopped.
Human beings are social creatures. We need to gather. We need to touch and be touched. We need community. But the virus put some of our basic humanity into suspended animation.
Society is aching, grasping, acting out, sometimes violently. We see the signs all around us. Sometimes it’s just a dramatic change in the way we live our lives.
Maayan Hoffman of The Washington Post notes that because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been a ripple affect with Russian attempts at “vaccine diplomacy.”
Russia hoped its vaccine would be used worldwide to help stop the pandemic, that the shot would bring geopolitical and economic gains and restore its glory as a superpower, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. The country named its vaccine Sputnik V after the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, developed in 1957, which beat out the United States in the space race.
Sputnik V has been approved in 71 countries with more than 4 billion people, and its newest jab, Sputnik Light, has gained recognition in 30 nations, according to data provided by Sputnik.
But nearly two years later, Gamaleya and RDIF have sold fewer than 300 million doses, and less than 2.5 percent of the people vaccinated worldwide have taken a Sputnik shot, according to data from the World Trade Organization.
By contrast, China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines — with lower reported efficacy — have accounted for more than 5.3 billion doses, the WTO data shows.
The Russian independent media outlet Meduza summarizes varied reporting on the evacuation of Ukrainian citizens to Russia.
Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova also reported that more than 700,000 Ukrainians were taken to Russia. However, the TASS source broke down this figure differently, claiming that more than 737,000 people “from Ukraine and from the Donbas” had crossed the border, including more than 200,000 Russian citizens, more than 400,000 “citizens” of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics,” and 117,000 “citizens of other countries” (apparently, this last figure includes Ukrainian nationals). Whether or not TASS and its source consider all residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine “citizens of the DNR and LNR” by default is unclear.[…]
People who were “evacuated” from Ukraine to Russia have confirmed the allegations of coercion and “filtration,” according to a number of testimonies published in the media. Accounts from refugees brought to Russia from Mariupol and surrounding areas have been published by CNN and Current Time TV, among others.
Some of these eyewitnesses said that Russian forces came to the places where they were sheltering from bombardments and ordered them to evacuate; others were forced to go to Russian checkpoints because it was physically impossible for them to evacuate to Ukrainian territory. Some described coming under psychological pressure from Russian forces, who told them that “Ukraine doesn’t care about you” and “no one will evacuate you from here.” Britain’s inews claims that refugees from Mariupol were made to sign documents alleging that the Ukrainian military was shelling the city, and were then told that they could no longer return to Ukraine due to the threat of persecution (the authenticity of these documents has not been independently confirmed).
Chris York of New Lines magazine looks at the preparations that some in Ukraine have made to battle Russian disinformation.
Whereas in the West, Russian disinformation is mainly associated with specific events such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Brexit or the Skripal poisonings, in Ukraine there has been a yearslong and unrelenting campaign to undermine the very state itself.
“We started noticing during the revolution of dignity in 2013 that Russia was actively pursuing narratives of Ukraine being either a Nazi state or a failed state,” says a Ukrainian program manager at an international NGO who wished to remain anonymous.
In the information warfare space, aside from an uptick in disinformation, nothing much changed on Feb. 24. On the ground things were obviously very different.
“We were launching a project on [Feb.] 24, and I remember I was hearing bombing outside my apartment, and I was like, ‘OK, we have to launch it anyway,’” says Iliuk.
“Maybe it was shock,” Iliuk explains. “I love my work and it calms me down, so I knew it was the only thing I could do to be useful.
Hans von der Burchard of POLITICO Europe reports on diplomatic tensions between Ukraine and Germany because of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s decision to not welcome German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to a meeting in Kyiv.
The move was a humiliation for Steinmeier — a former foreign minister closely associated with Berlin’s previous policy of pursuing close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia — but also for Germany as a whole. As federal president, Steinmeier is the highest-ranking representative of the German state.
The fact Zelenskyy communicated his decision just hours before Steinmeier’s planned secret trip, after days of preparation between Berlin and Kyiv, and that Ukrainian officials leaked the snub to German tabloid Bild, deepened the diplomatic insult for Germany.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he found Zelenskyy‘s decision not to welcome Steinmeier “irritating.”
Reacting to a Ukrainian invitation for him to visit Ukraine himself, Scholz told RBB24 radio he was not planning any such trip in the near future. The chancellor argued that he had been to Kyiv just about a week before the outbreak of the war and that he was speaking regularly to Zelenskyy on the phone, most recently on Sunday.
Melanie Amann and Veit Medick of Der Spiegel conduct a combative interview with German President Steinmeier about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
DER SPIEGEL: Putin is waging a war in Ukraine, has apparently had civilians murdered and has threatened the use of nuclear weapons. You saw all that coming?
Steinmeier: No. I have been a witness to the changes in Russia’s political course. But, to be honest, I still hoped that Vladimir Putin possessed a remnant of rationality. I did not think that the Russian president would risk his country’s complete political, economic and moral ruin in the pursuit of an imperial delusion. The attack has shaken me.
DER SPIEGEL: What prevented you from seeing Putin’s true face?
Steinmeier: His face hasn’t always been the same. But we also aren’t able to choose with whom we must deal. I consider myself to be among those who have worked hard to ensure that war never again returns to Europe. That effort was not successful. Were the goals therefore misguided? Was it wrong to work to achieve them? That is the debate that I, that we must now hold.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times says that inflation is probably about to decline soon…but don’t get too excited about it.
Why expect inflation to come down? Surging gasoline prices accounted for half of March’s price rise, but it now appears that the world oil market overshot in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A lot of Russian oil is probably still reaching world markets, and President Biden’s million-barrel-a-day release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve makes up for much of the shortfall. As of this morning, crude oil prices were barely above their pre-Ukraine level, and the wholesale price of gasoline was down about 60 cents a gallon from its peak last month.
Beyond that, there are growing indications that the bullwhip is about to flick back.
What? The bullwhip effect is a familiar issue for products that are at the end of long supply chains: Changes at the consumer end can lead to greatly exaggerated changes farther up the chain. Suppose, to take a non-random example, that a shift to working from home — then, coronavirus panic — leads to increased purchases of supermarket toilet paper (which is a somewhat different product from the stuff used in offices). Consumers, seeing a shortage, rush to stock up; supermarkets, trying to meet the demand, overorder; distributors who supply the supermarkets overorder even more; and suddenly there are no rolls to be had.
Christian Paz of Vox writes about the return old-school homophobia to mainstream discourse.
In the span of what seemed like a week, old-school bigotry felt mainstreamed. Sitting members of Congress, cable news hosts, and conservative intellectuals coalesced around “ok, groomer” discourse as a new way to attack LGBTQ Americans — not just the teachers these bills are targeting. Their attacks come in a country that is more accepting of queer Americans than at any other time in history; about eight in 10 Americans back nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ people. But suddenly, it seemed, 20th-century homophobia acquired a modern, QAnon-esque edge.
“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted at the beginning of March. On his talk radio show last week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk tied same-sex marriage and the acceptance of LGBTQ Americans to corrupting children: “We’re talking about gay stuff more than any other time. Why? Because they are not happy just having marriage. Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.”
The feedback loop of anti-LGBTQ legislation and “grooming” discourse reveals new dimensions to the conservative movement’s efforts to stymie the progress of recent years: Some members of the political right see opportunities to wield their advantages in the nation’s increasingly conservative courts against LGBTQ people — and opportunities to claw back the ground they’ve lost in the culture war as Americans’ opposition to discrimination grows.
As hurricane season approaches, Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News reports that studies show that Atlantic hurricane seasons will continue to get more severe.
A study published on Wednesday in the journal Weather and Climate Dynamics reinforces the growing consensus that the hurricane threat to vulnerable coastal communities will keep increasing. The research shows global warming has “contributed to a decisive increase in Atlantic Ocean hurricane activity” in the last 40 years and doubled the chances for extreme seasons like 2020.
That was the most active hurricane season on record, when tropical storms started early, ended late and included 11 tropical systems hitting the United States, with seven major hurricanes and one subtropical system even making it all the way to Portugal. Every single mile of the U.S. Atlantic coastline was under a tropical storm watch or warning during the 2020 season.
The study reinforces the growing consensus that vulnerable coastal communities need to prepare more for years like 2020, said lead author Peter Pfleiderer, a research scientist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit climate science and policy think tank.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post analyzes President Biden’s press conference on his executive order regarding “ghost guns.”
As he began his remarks, Biden emphasized that ghost guns do not look like toys and that they’re as lethal as any other weapon. He clarified to his audience that assembling one didn’t require a degree in mechanical engineering, only the most basic tools and the ability to put round pegs into round holes.
Then Biden interrupted his speech and moved away from the microphone and over to a nearby table. He kept talking and his sharp words, “Take a look. Take a look at this,” hung in the air. The ghost gun’s red case was propped open on the table and the weapon was displayed in front of it in a nature morte. Biden picked up the gun gingerly and positioned it sideways. He didn’t wrap his hands around the grip of the gun. He held it away from his body. He held it like a foreign object.
He let his audience of lawmakers, gun control advocates and folks who had suffered through gun violence — along with anyone watching remotely — get a good look at precisely the sort of weapon about which he was speaking. And his body language made plain how he felt about it.
Polly Toynbee of the Guardian says that the Tories should really care that Bojo the Clown has become the first British Prime Minister to be fined for breaking the law…but they don’t.
Breaking the law and lying about it or misleading the house would have seen any other prime minister and chancellor resign instantly. But nothing can make them go if they cling to their posts. Only their own MPs can oust them, with a flurry of those famous letters to the backbench 1922 committee chair. There should be queues forming outside Sir Graham Brady’s door right now, but don’t hold your breath. Instead, you hear calculating perplexity: without them, who would be our winning leader? But for the sake of their reputations, these MPs should only consider the probity of their party.
More sententiously, they pretend concern for the country: a war is no time to ditch a leader. Really? In both world wars, inadequate leaders were dumped unceremoniously for someone better suited for that serious and decisive role. None of them selected Boris Johnson expecting him to make a war leader. God knows how long the war in Ukraine may last, but the time may come, before long, when citizens across Nato countries will be asked to make sacrifices, in energy, in supply lines, in taxes. An immoral lawbreaker who has failed to acknowledge the grievousness of his own behaviour is hardly the man to call on others to tighten their belts in the national interest.
One of the more controversial issues in the news yesterday occurred in Minneapolis as the Minnesota Twins hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers.
If it’s a no-hitter, whatever. Yank him. Clayton Kershaw has thrown one. But there have been more than 220,000 games in MLB history. There have been 23 perfect games. Everything — especially a pitch count of 80 — is lining up to at least let Kershaw try. You cannot pull him.
Mr. October, himself, had a few words to say on it.
Clayton Kershaw Perfect game 80 pitches, take him OUT !!!!! WHAT THE! what’s the game coming to?1 of the era’s best, and you take him out with a perfect game in the 7th, 7-0 Dodgers winning. Take him OUT! THIS IS BASEBALL PLEASE PEOPLE THAT HAVE NEVER PLAYED GET OUT OF ITS WAY
I understand why Dodgers manager Dave Roberts pulled Kershaw. I’m with Mr. October on this one, though.
Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer on the poor grammar, language, and usage contained in a “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Pennsylvania.
Just three days after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was signed into law, one of Pennsylvania’s own state senators announced he’s introducing his own Keystone-flavored version, which would ban library books that someone — anyone? — decides are “sexually explicit.”
Lancaster County Sen. Ryan Aument is sponsoring the legislation because, he says, “Parents must be confident that their children are receiving a quality education in our schools without being exposed to inappropriate, sexually explicit content.”
Unfortunately, judging from the poor grammar and language in Aument’s cosponsorship memo, he wouldn’t know “quality education” if it burned up in a book bonfire.
First, there’s the memo’s lack of precision. It reads in part: “parents have identified books and assignments provided to their children that contain sexually explicit content that adults would be prohibited from viewing while at work.” That regulation depends on where those adults work — how many people have jobs where they can sit around reading for pleasure? — but “sexually explicit,” we’ve learned, means different things to different people. Effective writing, not to mention effective laws, must be precise to convey the proper meaning.
I think that imprecise grammar and language is the point of these bills to encourage the broadest and most bigoted of interpretations.
The day’s big war news is … it’s big. Ukraine has sunk the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the guided missile cruiser Moskva—the very ship Ukrainians told to go fuck themselves on the first day of the war.
The Russian MoD is claiming that ammunition exploded on the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the Moskva Project 1164 missile cruiser, and that it has sustained serious damage. https://t.co/oILnqUmdXfpic.twitter.com/ISQfGGFQ7I
Further reports say the ship has sunk, with Russia evacuating “some” of the ship’s sailors. While it’s doubtful we get a truthful account of casualties from the Russians, this is likely the largest mass-casualty event for the invaders this entire war, while losing a ship likely costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars. (An American guided missile cruiser costs around $1 billion.)
Piecing together reports from the Open Source Intelligence Community and Russian reports, we’re getting a picture of how the operation played out. (And note, there is a lot of misinformation floating around, like this, so I’ve been very careful piecing this together.)
First of all, there’s this bit of news that emerged today:
BREAKING: The Biden administration will share intelligence with Ukraine that will help them hit targets in Crimea and the occupied territories of Donbas, WSJ reports citing Pentagon sources.https://t.co/9F4xcYJtrg
No one will confirm, for a long time, whether targeting was aided by American intelligence, but Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) sources who track aircraft flights claim that all NATO intelligence planes had cleared out of the Black Sea prior to the attack (or at least turned off their transponders, making them go dark).
According to a supposed Russian intercept (consider information unconfirmed), Ukraine flew a TB2 Bayraktar around Mykolaiv, grabbing the Moskva’s attention, which has apparently been providing anti-air radar and missile services during the war. A translation by a random Twitter user translated the gist of the intercept (full of military slang that stymied a lot of people):
A “trojan horse” aircraft was flying between Voznesensk and Mykolaiv, around Kryviy Rih. Moskva was providing long range air defense for them and got distracted long enough, with the target AND poor weather as well, to have two Neptunes stick their tridents through the hull.
Thus, focused on the drone on the Ukrainian mainland, the Neptunes flew in under cover of distraction and stormy seas to hit the ship. Another Russian report, posted multiple times by several credible OSINT people, reported a similar sequence of events (running it through Google Translate):
According to preliminary information, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet cruiser “Moscow” sank.
The official information of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which appeared only at 2 o’clock in the morning, states that as a result of the fire there was a partial detonation of ammunition, and part of the crew was evacuated.
According to information from Ukraine, which appeared long before the statement of the Russian Defense Ministry, the cruiser “Moscow” was destroyed by the RCC “Neptune”.
According to our preliminary information, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moscow, was indeed attacked by the Neptune RCC from the coastline between Odessa and Nikolaev. The ship’s forces were also diverted to counter the Bayraktar TB-2 UAV. The blow hit the port side, as a result of which the ship took a strong roll. After the threat of detonation of ammunition, the crew of about ~ 500 people was evacuated. The buoyancy of the cruiser was complicated by marine weather conditions. As a result of all aggregate factors, according to preliminary information, and unfortunately, the cruiser joined the underwater satellite group “Roskomos”.
Roskomos is the Russian NASA. Someone else can try and figure out the reference, but it’s clearly some kind of cultural slang. I was going to make a joke about how Russian ships can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, but apparently that’s actually true. After some digging, turns out that the Moskva could only track a single target at a time. And for some crazy reason, there was no other anti-ship capability on board. On their expensive flagship!
The once-proud flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva guided missile cruiser.
Did we just learn that the Russian navy is as hollow as its army?
What took so long for Ukraine to deploy its Neptune anti-ship missiles? The Neptune project was first announced in 2015 and slated for deployment last year. Yet none had appeared, while Ukraine asked NATO for anti-ship capabilities. Maybe they had never been delivered. Weapons systems famously suffer from schedule delays.
Turns out Ukraine did have them. But if Ukraine only had a handful of these, their value would’ve been immeasurable during a contested amphibious assault on Odesa. Better to sink a landing ship with 1,000 naval infantry aboard than to fight them on land. With the threat of any assault on Odesa long gone, and Russia’s navy now complacent, the Moskva—named after Russia’s capital—was an irresistible target.
The missile has a known range of 100 kilometers (62 mi), so it might’ve just been a question of waiting for the right opportunity: For the ship to sail within range, for the weather to be right, for the ship’s radar to “paint” the drone attempting to distract it, and any number of other intangibles we can’t even begin to guess at. The rain and rough seas certainly helped mask the missiles’ approach and, just as importantly, any rescue and salvage efforts.
This is a military victory. Russia has just lost an anti-aircraft radar and missile system that could see deep into Ukraine. Survivability of Ukrainian air assets just improved. It is also a dramatic propaganda victory, yet another blow to Russian pride and morale, while dramatically increasing the cost of the war for Russia.
And Russia can’t blame NATO for this attack! The missiles taking down the Moskva were an all-Ukrainian production. Simply brilliant.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is taking a page from its Belgorod attack and cheekily pretending it had nothing to do with it. Check out Oleksiy Arestovych, military advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
“Who, us? It was probably a couple of cigarettes!” Freakin’ brilliant! Ukraine has really mastered the art of gloating without gloating. Oh, if only we could be a fly in the wall as Vladimir Putin got the news!
“This is a Russian warship. I propose you lay down arms and surrender to avoid bloodshed & unnecessary victims. Otherwise, you’ll be bombed.” Zmiinyi defenders: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” https://t.co/0V3749owtcpic.twitter.com/HtEEEpxNuc
For many of us, “throwing your life away” might look like refusing a safe and effective vaccine that keeps your lungs from turning into turbid sacks of wet cement. But Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has other ideas. To her way of thinking, military service really is for losers and suckers.
In an April 9 interview with once-and-future DJT rectal parasite Lou Dobbs, Greene disparaged our military, concluding that joining the U.S. armed forces is pretty much the worst thing you can do with your life.
How much longer will we let these Potemkin patriots claim they love freedom, democracy, and America more than they love off-white pr*sidents who disrespectfully dry-hump flags at Hitler Goof rallies?
“Can you imagine explaining to a recruit, you’re gonna be just fine, just like those Marines in Kabul,” Dobbs said in reference to the 13 service members who were killed in Afghanistan’s capital airport in August 2021 while the U.S. was withdrawing from the country prior to the Taliban takeover.
“We may not have time to come back and get you. But you know, it’ll work out all right […] We’re going to fight a third world country for two decades and walk out with our tail between our legs,” Dobbs added. “Who in his or her right mind would say ‘sign me up for that, Sarge?’”
In response, Greene said: “Not my son and I know a lot of young people don’t want to have anything to do with that. It’s like throwing your life away.”
Thirteen service members, huh? So how many American lives were wasted in George W. Bush’s vainglorious overseas adventures? I’ll wait.
Greene is also horrified that President Joe Biden has “forced” military personnel to take a safe, effective, and life-saving vaccine against the coronavirus—in addition to the nine vaccines already long-required.
“Not to mention how they’ve been forced to take the vaccine, and the ones that didn’t want to take it have been discharged,” said Greene. “Who wants to be treated that way?”
Well, anyone who signs up for the military, really. It’s a distinctly rules-based organization. That’s the impression I got from playing Call of Duty and watching Full Metal Jacket, anyway. Honestly, if taking a vaccine were the worst thing I was forced to do in the U.S. Army, I might have joined long ago. But as an effete Starbucks-slurping liberal, I’m kind of squeamish about blood—unless I’m doing one of my mandatory weekend shifts at George Soros’ secret baby plasma-harvesting facility in Wuhan, that is. But they wipe your memory afterward, so no big deal.
Not everyone appreciated a duly elected congresswoman’s blatant attempts to undermine our nation’s—and other NATO countries’—security in the middle of a raging military crisis.
In a statement, VoteVets, a group of progressive veterans, was unsparing in its criticism.
“For a United States representative to say that military service is ‘throwing your life away,’ is reprehensible. Let me be extraordinarily clear about this: Marjorie Taylor Greene hates this country. She hates the rule of law we have and the entire concept of free and fair elections. She also apparently thinks a higher calling of putting on the uniform to defend that way of life, and our Constitution, is a waste of someone’s life.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who’s part of the vanishingly small coterie of Republicans who still care about American democracy, was even more blunt.
Just an absolute idiot. Yet still will be praised by people like @GOPLeader because, well, money and speakership Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Joining Military Is ‘Throwing Your Life Away’ https://t.co/0URFaSwodZ
Tuesday was a truly chaotic day in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for governor that began with Donald Trump urging voters, “Do not vote for Bill McSwain, a coward, who let our Country down.” Multiple media sources reported minutes later that state Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman was about to drop out of the race, but while Corman himself essentially confirmed those stories in the afternoon by asking that his name be removed from the May 17 ballot, there was one last twist left: Corman announced in the early evening that he’d decided to stay in the contest because of “President Trump’s statement on the race and my conversation directly with the president.”
We’ll start with McSwain, who appeared to be in a good position until Trump declared he’d never endorse the man he’d once appointed as U.S. attorney for the eastern portion of the state. Trump reiterated the Big Lie to pummel the candidate, claiming that McSwain “did absolutely nothing on the massive Election Fraud that took place in Philadelphia and throughout the commonwealth.”
That was dismaying news for McSwain, who had in fact tried to use the Big Lie to gain, rather than lose, Trump’s support. His efforts included a letter to Trump last year claiming that his office had “received various allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities” and alleging that “Attorney General Barr, however, instructed me not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities.”
Trump was all too happy at the time to use McSwain’s missive to back up his own lies and bludgeon Barr, who responded by saying his old subordinate “wanted to not do the business of the department, which is to investigate cases, but instead go out and flap his gums about what he didn’t like about the election overall.” On Tuesday, though, McSwain got to be the victim of his own words when Trump claimed he “knew what was happening and let it go. It was there for the taking and he failed so badly.”
All of this drama inspired Corman to continue a once-promising campaign that he was about to end after several major setbacks. Corman was arguably the primary frontrunner when he entered the race to succeed termed-out Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf back in November, and he raised more money than any of his intra-party rivals in 2021. However, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that his team initially believed they would bring in considerably more during that time: The state Senate leader seemed to agree as he soon went through an intense staff shakeup, but he never managed to fix things.
Corman ended late March with just over $270,000 left in his campaign coffers, and McSwain ominously didn’t even bother to mention him in a recent ad targeting three other opponents. Corman himself seemed to recognize he was doomed on Tuesday when he formally sought to have a state court remove his name from the ballot, but hours later he filed a new petition asking the body to ignore that first request. He explained that he’d spoken to Trump, who “encouraged me to keep fighting, and that’s what I’m going to do – keep fighting for the people of Pennsylvania.” This saga may not be quite over, though, as ABC27 writes, “It is not guaranteed Corman will be able to remain in the race after his first petition was filed.”
Voters are currently bemoaning the high inflation rates that have bedeviled them over the last year or so. Hey, who can blame them? No one wants to pay more for all the same stuff. Last year at this time it cost $20 to get Scott Baio to wash your car, and now he’ll do it for $10 and the unlicked portion of your Arby’s Melt wrapper. Okay, so that’s a bad example. Most things are more expensive these days—unless Kevin Sorbo is holding a bake sale in his garage to raise cash for his next Pure Flix movie. But other than that, we’re seeing high prices. That’s just a fact.
But there are several other facts that Republicans are conveniently missing these days.
Donald Trump has the worst jobs record among presidents in modern American history.
Conversely, President Joe Biden’s jobs record has been stellar. Since Biden’s inauguration, the economy has created a robust 7.9 million jobs, far outstripping Trump’s minus-3 million.
Of course, Republicans will squeal that Trump faced significant economic headwinds as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—and that’s true. But 1) how does it make sense to let Trump off the hook for the impacts of a global economic downturn while simultaneously flogging Biden for today’s pandemic-related global inflation? And 2) I’m supposed to believe that Trump—who doesn’t know who pays for tariffs, once called his national security adviser in the middle of the night to ask what a strong dollar does, and thought he could eliminate the entire national debt in eight years—is some sort of macroeconomic savant?
Weird how Joe Biden hasn’t fixed inflation in… <checks notes> …England, France, Venezuela, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Australia, or globally. Also, is it weird that the LOWEST inflation rate right now is in Saudi Arabia? No? Ok. Damn that Joe Biden!
So, yeah, most Republicans screeching about so-called “Bidenflation” probably know better, but they’re depending on voters’ short memories to return the party of perpetual economic failure to power in 2022 and 2024.
But not all Democrats are sitting still for this nonsense. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, for example, is now castigating Senate Minority Bleater Mitch McConnell over his serial fiscal foolishness.
NEW: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) just shut down Mitch McConnell at a press conference: “There was $7 trillion in new debt and 2.6 million jobs lost during Trump. But when McConnell comes to this podium, all he does is complain that we’re not cleaning up their mess fast enough.”
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) April 12, 2022
For the nontweeters:
NEW: Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) just shut down Mitch McConnell at a press conference: “There was $7 trillion in new debt and 2.6 million jobs lost during Trump. But when McConnell comes to this podium, all he does is complain that we’re not cleaning up their mess fast enough.”
Now, if this cynical GOP sleight-of-hand feels familiar, there’s a very good reason for that. After George W. Bush walked away from the heap of smoldering goat entrails he’d conjured from the remains of the U.S. economy, Republicans spent the next eight years obstructing everything President Barack Obama tried to do to create jobs and lift us out of the abyss. Meanwhile, they whined nonstop that the recovery wasn’t progressing fast enough. At the time I remarked that this was a bit like Exxon complaining that the residents of Valdez, Alaska, were really mediocre at cleaning oil off ducks. And now here they go again.
Of course, fecklessly complaining is what Republicans are best at. Helping struggling Americans is way down their list of priorities, somewhere behind preventing white children from ever hearing about slavery and keeping Mr. Potato Head’s tuberous todger intact.
So why don’t people know that Democrats’ economic track record is so much better than Republicans’? Maybe we haven’t been telling them loudly enough—and maybe the media have simply decided to lean into a false narrative for God knows what reason.
It’s outrageous, and it has to stop. So spread the word, if you can.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania has announced that it has settled a 2019 lawsuit that alleged state police ethnically profiled Latino residents, who were then illegally detained for questioning by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One person targeted by Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) was a U.S. citizen, PBS affiliate WHYY reported in 2019.
These were not isolated incidents: While ten plaintiffs were ultimately part of the litigation, the ACLU of Pennsylvania said the ensuing investigation in fact revealed “a larger pattern and practice of PSP troopers acting as enforcers of the complex system of federal civil immigration laws.”
“The reason we filed this lawsuit is because we don’t want this to happen to anybody else,” said Rebecca Castro, the U.S. citizen harassed by police. “The police don’t know how many lives they affect on a daily basis. We hope our victory means that this will never happen again.”
“In 2018, Ms. Castro was driving with her now-husband and a co-worker in York County when a Pennsylvania State Police trooper pulled over the vehicle and began to interrogate the group because the vehicle ‘looked suspicious,’” the ACLU of Pennsylvania said. “The trooper wrongfully detained Ms. Castro and her passengers for several hours, interrogating them on the side of the road about their immigration status and detaining them until ICE officers arrived.“
While it appears that Castro was able to go home, WHYY reported that both her husband and coworker were put into deportation proceedings.
Under the settlement, PSP will pay the plaintiffs $865,000, which advocates said includes compensation and attorneys’ fees. But the settlement will also implement policy changes to help prevent further racial profiling, the ACLU of Pennsylvania said. Under the new PSP policy, “prolonging stops for the purposes of civil immigration enforcement is prohibited,” “running immigration checks when verifying a driver’s or passenger’s identification is no longer permitted,” and immigration detainers not signed by a judge “cannot legally justify extending a traffic stop.”
”PSP also agreed to implement more robust reporting and data-collection requirements, which will allow us to ensure they are in fact following the new policy,” ACLU of Pennsylvania continued.
“Police officers who take it upon themselves to try and enforce immigration law are continuing a long legacy of harmful policing that must be challenged at every turn,” said ACLU of Pennsylvania Executive Director Reggie Shuford. “We are pleased that the state police will be addressing the problem, but other Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies should be on notice that, if they violate the law and attempt to enforce civil immigration law, they too can count on getting sued.”
The lawsuit and settlement (at cost to state taxpayers) add to the case for why the Biden administration should end 287(g) agreements, which only encourage racial profiling by allowing local law enforcement to act as mass deportation agents.
“An investigation by the Department of Justice concluded that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona engaged in a pattern and practice of constitutional violations, including racial profiling of Latinos, after entering a 287(g) agreement,” the American Immigration Council wrote in a 2020 report. Maricopa County, of course, was ground zero of former sheriff Joe Arpaio’s racist campaign against brown and Black people.
Sheriffs have in fact campaigned on, and won, on ending these racist 287(g) agreements. Advocates in Georgia said that in the time since Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens ended the area’s agreement, immigrant families “have been able to breathe easier,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported.
