Category Archives: History and Politics

“When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral. 

In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.” 

Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!” 

In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator. 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/december-3-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

As anyone in his position would. As he told his crowd at the Ellipse, from behind bullet proof glass, after urging his crew to take away the magnetometers so his angry supporters could attack the Capitol fully armed to kill Pence, Pelosi and others “When you catch somebody in a fraud you’re allowed to go by a different set of rules.”

Is it a surprise that the same guy fell in love with a misogynistic 24 year-old Nazi at a recent Mar-a-Lago dinner with a deranged superstar of rap and self-hatred?

Eleventh Circuit smacks down MAGA judge Aileen “toward my benefactor” Cannon

Every lawyer who discussed this novel case of the target of a legal search warrant bringing a civil suit against the United States of America, to get as much delay as possible in the US criminal investigation into his theft of classified documents, knew Judge Aileen Cannon had no jurisdiction to hear the case.  In Trump v. US she claimed equitable (fairness) jurisdiction which is only available when there is no adequate remedy at law and the result would be grossly unfair without a court stepping in.  In this case, of course, Trump had an adequate remedy at law — to contest the legality of the search warrant.  A case he never brought because there was no chance of success.   The search warrant was not only legal, it turned up the evidence described in the warrant, found in the specific places described in the warrant.

So Trump did an end-run to prevent the evidence being used against him by the Department of Justice.  Ran his shabby Hail Mary lawsuit 70 miles up the coast to a courthouse where the supremely loyal Cannon was the only federal judge there.  He managed to buy about four months of delay.   Now his incoherent lawsuit against the US government has been dismissed and the government can review the thousands of papers seized pursuant to the legal search warrant.   He’ll probably go to the Supreme Court, because, why the fuck not?   They will make a 9-0 one sentence ruling upholding the Eleventh circuit’s decision overruling Cannon’s absurd, although highly loyal, order.  The Eleventh circuit appeals panel (two Trump appointees and a Dubya Bush appointee) sent the case back to Cannon to dismiss it herself for lack of jurisdiction, which is the most humiliating way they could have ended the case.

It was a major smackdown.  If they’d upheld Cannon’s order they’d be giving permission to every subject of a search warrant to sue the government in civil court to prevent the review of criminal evidence legally seized by the government.

“The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”

Next move — make a grim example of brand new, lawless federal MAGA judge Aileen Mercedes Canon by bringing her in front of a judicial ethics panel and disciplining her publicly. Or better still, remove her from the federal bench.

Party of the People

The corporations that own the railroads in our country have been playing hardball with the unions representing railroad workers. They have cut 40,000 jobs nationwide and have been demanding increased productivity from the remaining railroad workers (while reaping record profits). Shades of the air traffic controllers demanding safer working conditions back when Reagan smashed PATCO ( the only union, incidentally that endorsed the affable old reactionary).

This time Biden brokered a stopgap deal to avoid a supply chain crippling strike right before Christmas. The worst sticking point was that there was no increase in paid sick leave for the overworked remaining railroad workers. The House of Representatives took up that sticking point, to correct a (literally) fatal defect in Biden’s workaround compromise. Here was the vote today.

Say it with me “USA!! USA!!!”

Party of the people, MAGA, the very best people, the best people.

History of Thanksgiving

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

The past week has brought seven mass shootings in the United States. Twenty-two people have been killed and 44 wounded. I’ll have more to say later about our epidemic of gun violence, but tonight, on the night before Thanksgiving, when I traditionally post the story of the holiday’s history, I simply want to acknowledge the terrible sorrow behind tomorrow’s newly empty chairs.

Thanksgiving itself came from a time of violence: the Civil War.

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.

In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.

The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.

New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”

The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation.

They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming.

And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And they won.

My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2022.

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© 2022 Heather Cox Richardson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Nice nutshell, Maureen Dowd

“As I have said before, the gravest threats to our civilization are not from abroad, but from within,” Trump said at his flaccid, whiny announcement Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago.

That is actually true, but only because Trump exploited every dark division and base impulse he could find.

He would rather blow up our democracy than admit he’s a loser, and that makes him a traitor.

Trump flaunts his faux Macho Macho Man rhetoric. For decades, Republicans have lectured Americans to quit embracing victimhood and stand on their own two feet, and here’s their leader announcing his presidency on a platform of Woe is me because I’m a fall guy!

“I will tell you I’m a victim,” Trump said to a less-than-festive gathering where Melania seemed like a hostage and Ivanka was a no-show.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/opinion/trump-special-counsel.html

World’s richest man does what’s best for himself (and the rest of us…)

And, as promised (though minus the input of the ethics team he promised to consult, and then immediately fired) Musk (Elon Mullosk, as a friend called the slimy bastard recently) restored his fellow übercitizen Donald Trump to Twitter.  For Trump to go back on Twitter is to abandon his failing Truth Social but for him not to return to Twitter is to forgo a giant megaphone, which isn’t his way.  An excellent op-ed in the NY Times made some great observations:

As someone who has been studying Mr. Trump’s Twitter use since before he was elected president, I believe that his return would mean the heightened spread of both misinformation and disinformation, the proliferation of degrading and dehumanizing discourse, the further mainstreaming of hate speech and the erosion of democratic norms and institutions. But there is something else: Mr. Trump’s return to Twitter could escalate the likelihood of political violence.

Simply put, if you are surrounded by dry kindling, add an accelerant and light a match, conflagration is the predictable outcome. . .

. . . Twitter and Mr. Trump represent a dangerous fusion of form and content. Social media generally and Twitter specifically lend themselves to simple, urgent, unreflective and emotionally charged communication. When the message is one of intolerance and violence, the result is all but certain.

I Studied Trump’s Twitter Use for Six Years. Prepare for the Worst. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/opinion/donald-trump-twitter-return.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAybSRdkhrxqAwvTIxrU4ijriNjWQUXNe0OUJH4Wavl3Aebd5YZ0zwzGfDpdnAYMYecZTnKVZLlA_DE6huIeFk5AIZHk4oNm4BDNsms-TArl9rGe7NyzpdupxgefkskOMO2TvDPDahGYzZ1ow-esTflCs330PxqnHA7Q1joE4haF9c8g8ETQQZyCKvO3rCwF-OLiGbxLa7Ao3W4JJSG2Z3I7cu_9bLlIkWR-RR2h_4G089NtcJNoQWa39JBMlc8D-6q4DiWAPjCo4h4AbS8d8a7Sv5g

True dat, as certain as the continued mindless worship of our greediest, most rapacious citizens endangers us all.