News bits: Another reason to fear Trump; And another; And another; Whale research

The HuffPo reports:

Trump Calls On Supporters To Put A Stop To 

‘Bags Of Crap’ Arriving At Polling Places

Critics on social media alleged that the former president was engaging in "voter intimidation" by asking followers to monitor voting locations

Former President Donald Trump on Friday urged his supporters to put a stop to “bags of crap” arriving at polling places during this year’s election, warning of potential fraud. At a rally in Mason City, Iowa, Trump echoed his false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through tactics like ballot stuffing, and said that “we’re not going to let it happen again.” .... “You should all stay in those voting booths. You should stay there and watch it. If you see bags of crap coming into the voting areas, you’ve got to stop it. You can’t let it happen, because these guys are crooked as hell. They know how to cheat.”

Hm. That looks like treason and an invitation to a second insurrection to me. But heck, what do I know. I’m just a simple farm boy from the Midwest. Gosh, I hope this doesn’t amount to irrational DJT hysteria! ☹️

Q: What does a bag of crap in a voting booth or polling place look like? 

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The NYT Editorial Board opines:

By now, most American voters should have no illusions about who Mr. Trump is. During his many years as a real estate developer and a television personality, then as president and as a dominant figure in the Republican Party, Mr. Trump demonstrated a character and temperament that render him utterly unfit for high office.

As president, he wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country.

Yeah, well sure, most American voters should have no illusions. But tens of millions of ’em do.

Another commentator commentated: With the disreputable Donald Trump challenging the disfavored President Biden, the 2024 race has become the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about fox hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” .... “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” .... If people don’t know by now that Trump tried to overthrow the government he was running on Jan. 6; if they don’t know that the MAGA fanatics breaking into the Capitol, beating up cops and threatening to harm Pelosi and hang Mike Pence were criminals, not “patriots” and “hostages,” as Trump risibly calls them; if they don’t know that Trump created the radical Supreme Court that is stripping women of their rights, then they don’t want to know, or they just don’t care.

The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible? Good grief, what a stinking mess.

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The Hill reports: Former federal judge: Trump’s violation of 14th amendment ‘couldn’t be any clearer’ -- Former federal judge Michael Luttig, who said he has spent the last three years studying the amendment, believes the high court — which currently leans Republican — will “likely look for every legitimate way possible” to avoid an opinion on whether Trump can be disqualified from running for office again.

The USSC merely “leans Republican”?? . . . . Bwahahahahaha!

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Beluga whale melons are used as sonar sound wave receivers to help the whales communicate, hunt for food and locate large nearby objects.

A different perspective: Why all this Trump hysteria?

 Interesting article, whether you think it is bunk or savvy:

America won't descend into an authoritarian state

A giant landfill of words has been dumped out on the subject of Donald Trump. I hate to add to the pile, but I feel I must. Unlike most participants in this industrial disaster, though, I have no wish either to praise Trump or to bury him. What I want is clarity.

The word most often associated with Trump is “authoritarian”. From the New York Times, Atlantic and Economist to the Guardian, Vanity Fair and Politico, we are told, with ritual repetition, that Trump is the second coming of Hitler or Mussolini, an aspiring dictator eager to herd his opponents into the great American gulag. Naturally, people panic. I want to calm them down. Using as few words as possible, I’m going to show that the combination of Trump and authoritarianism is an impossibility.

If you expect to become an authoritarian, you have to wield absolute control over a key institution of government such as the military (Franco, Peron, Pinochet) or a mass movement with a paramilitary wing (Lenin, Mussolini, Mao). Neither condition applies to Trump. Every federal institution is set ferociously against him. What would happen if Trump ordered the FBI or the 101st Airborne Division to start shooting Democrats? Homeric laughter would happen.

What kind of a person becomes an authoritarian? Well, it may look like fun, but authoritarianism is really hard work. You need to be in the prime of life, in your 30s or 40s (Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Castro). Very rarely, an exceptional person such Caesar is granted literal dictatorship (the Romans invented the whole idea) in his early 50s. In a clear case of ageism, however, no septuagenarian has ever been offered the job.

The authoritarian personality favours clever manipulations and conspiracies. Best in class was Stalin, who held the purely administrative job of First Party Secretary but seized total power by seeding loyalists everywhere. Trump, who was a builder of buildings, a task with a beginning and an end, can scarcely think ahead from breakfast to lunch. This is a life playing out at the Short Attention Span Theatre.

So relax. Trump is too old, too isolated, and too ADD to have a shot at dictatorship — and if he tried, the result would be comedy rather than tyranny. You still want to join the ranks of the anti-Trump resistance? Hey, that’s wonderful. You want to do battle against authoritarianism? I’m there with you. Just don’t mix up the two. I promise it will make you clearer of mind and healthier of body, and it will free us to begin to call our politicians by those vile names that actually fit.

Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of 'The Revolt of the Public'.

https://unherd.com/2023/12/why-all-this-trump-hysteria/

As stated in the title - a different perspective. 

News bits: Tax avoidance; Biden’s attack speech; DJT’s school shooting response

Tax evasion is illegal non-payment of taxes owed. Annual tax evasion is running at about $690 billion (IRS underestimate in my opinion) to about $1 trillion/year (actual real estimate). 

Tax avoidance is the practice of legally avoiding paying any more taxes than are owed. As time passes rich people and rich businesses get their lawyers and lobbyists to (1) buy congress and order it to pass more laws that increase the scope of what is legally not taxable, and (2) infiltrate the IRS as employees** who write new multi-billion dollar tax loopholes into existing laws. Over time, this could lead wealthy people and entities to pay little or no taxes. Over the years, both Dems and Repubs in congress and the White House have supported increasing tax avoidance loopholes for the rich and powerful. 

** The NYT wrote in 2021:

Lawyers from top accounting firms do brief stints in the Treasury Department, with the expectation of big raises when they return

The largest U.S. accounting firms have perfected a remarkably effective behind-the-scenes system to promote their interests in Washington. Their tax lawyers take senior jobs at the Treasury Department, where they write policies that are frequently favorable to their former corporate clients, often with the expectation that they will soon return to their old employers. The firms welcome them back with loftier titles and higher pay, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with current and former government and industry officials.

From their government posts, many of the industry veterans approved loopholes long exploited by their former firms, gave tax breaks to former clients and rolled back efforts to rein in tax shelters — with enormous impact.  

After lobbying by PwC, a former PwC partner in the Trump Treasury Department helped write regulations that allowed large multinational companies to avoid tens of billions of dollars in taxes; he then returned to PwC.

An article the Rolling Stone published gives an update on tax avoidance:

AMERICA’S WEALTHIEST FAMILIES held an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed profits in 2022. According to a report from the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness, which analyzed Federal Reserve data, “one in every six dollars (18 percent of the nation’s unrealized gains is held by these roughly 64,000 ultra-wealthy households, who make up less than 0.05 percent of the population.” The report comes as the Supreme Court gears up to decide a case that could preemptively block any efforts to tax the wealth of billionaires.

Neener, neener, I got a bigger, . . . er boat!

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Everyone is reporting about Biden's speech attacking DJT as a threat to democracy. Some report it like this:

Joe Biden Just Delivered the Speech

Democrats Have Been Desperate for Him to Give

Biden delivered a point-by-point denunciation of Donald Trump’s actions around Jan. 6, casting the 2024 election as a stark choice and calling his predecessor a ‘loser’

Time will tell if Biden stays on the attack and if it changes public opinion.

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Rolling Stone reports:

A DAY AFTER a gunman killed a sixth grade student and wounded five other people at Perry High School northwest of Des Moines, Donald Trump returned to the state at a campaign event and told residents that they “have to get over it.”

During his speech at Sioux Center, Iowa, the former president gave his thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families, emphasizing that “we’re really with you as much as anybody can be.” After stating the tragedy was “terrible” and “horrible,” Trump insisted: “We have to get over it. We have to move forward. We have to move forward.”

Well, it appears that maybe the pro-mass school shooting crowd has moved sending beyond thoughts and prayers to really being with the directly affected as much as anybody can be. 

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The quiet part said out loud: 

Trump attorney Alina Habba on Thursday suggested that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would “step up” and rule in favor of the former president because he “fought for” him.

CNN host Phil Mattingly was taken aback as he played the clip on Friday.

“If a Democrat said that about the Justice Department or Merrick Garland or fill-in-the-blank here, there would be an absolute implosion. That's bonkers,” he said.

“She's saying the quiet part out loud,” replied panelist Jon Avlon. “She's saying that Brett Kavanaugh will step up and side with the president because he appointed him. That goes against every basic idea of law and independence of the judiciary. And frankly, it puts Kavanaugh in a bit of a box.” 

“That’s not how this works,” tweeted national security attorney Bradley Moss. “Imagine for a second if a lawyer for Clinton, Obama or Biden said this. It’d be a massive scandal at Fox,” he added.

“Alina Habba saying the quid pro quo part out loud here,” wrote MSNBC legal analyst Katie Phang.

There it is folks. The situation can’t be much clearer. The authoritarian radical right openly and publicly expects partisan loyalty and political payback even from Supreme Court justices, not loyalty to the democracy or the Constitution and rule of law. 

News chunks: A legal analysis of a DJT USSC filing; Wall Street's propaganda problem

A fascinating TPM article analyzes the implications of how DJT asked the USSC to rebut the Colorado lawsuit asking to keep him off the ballot under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Instead of focusing just on threshold issues (“technicalities”), any one of which could easily let Trump off the hook, he asked the USSC to hold that the Colorado trial court was wrong on its finding of facts that led it to decide that DJT did engage in insurrection. That’s a lot riskier tactic because the USSC does not have the power to decide if a state court’s fact findings are wrong. All the USSC can do is say that in finding facts, the Colorado court violated DJT's due process, equal protection or some other constitutional right(s) in the way it found the facts.

Unless the USSC goes full rogue and violates some key limits it is supposed to operate under, it will have to accept the Colorado state Supreme Court holdings about (i) questions of Colorado election law, (ii) questions about who in Colorado had standing to even bring a lawsuit, and (iii) the fact findings of the Colorado trial court. The USSC is empowered to decide constitutional issues, not matters of fact or state laws unless those laws violate the constitution. This is a significant limitation on what the radical Republicans controlling the USSC can do. It is expert at distorting the meaning of the Constitution to fit with its kleptocratic, Christotheocratic, plutocratic, autocratic and government-hating ideologies.

As a threshold issue, the USSC could rule that (i) Congress would need to act before the Disqualification Clause takes effect, or (ii) the insurrection clause applies to everyone who participated in an insurrection except the president. For DJT, those are easy ways out of the 14th Amendment disqualification clause problem. But that's not what DJT is asking the USSC to do. Despite that, I believe that the most likely outcome will be for the radical Republicans who control the USSC will decide to protect Trump by deciding to let him off the hook on a threshold issue.

As best I can tell, Trump’s galaxy-sized ego pushed him to demand that his corrupted, morally rotted radical Republican USSC totally reverses the entire legal record showing that he engaged in a treasonous coup attempt on 1/6. If that reasoning is wrong, then the next most likely reason for this riskier tactic is that he is scared out of his wits that he will lose on all threshold issues and thus needs to dispute every damn thing he and his lawyers can think of doing. By doing it this way, DJT openly invites the USSC to go full-blown rogue and establish itself as (1) an unaccountable political institution that is above the law and Constitution, but (2) loyal to DJT. 

How this plays out will be interesting to watch. If the USSC decides to go rogue, American democracy and its rule of law will have finally fallen. We will be more or less a fascist-Christofascist state. If the USSC lets DJT off on a technicality, the USSC simply keeps the path clear for DJT and the radical Repubs to establish a a fascist-Christofascist state, while the USSC can continue to pretend it isn't an political organ of the authoritarian radical right Repub Party. A fig leaf of dignity will be left in place for thew USSC to hide behind.

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A NYT opinion (not paywalled off) by Paul Krugman raises an interesting possibility about a Wall Street propaganda tactic that used to work but doesn’t seem to work so well any more:

All Wall Street wants is a good hypocrite — someone who can convince the Republican base that he or she shares its extremism, but whose real priority is to enrich the 1 percent. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, yes.  

If you’re not a politics groupie, you may find the drama surrounding Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, puzzling. Until recently, few would have considered her a significant contender for the Republican presidential nomination — indeed, she arguably still isn’t. But toward the end of last year, she suddenly attracted a lot of support from the big money. Among those endorsing her were Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, a new business-oriented super PAC called Independents Moving the Needle and the Koch political network. 

If this scramble sounds desperate, that’s because it is. 

What we’re witnessing are the death throes of a political strategy that served America’s plutocrats well for several decades but stopped working during the Obama years.

That political strategy was famously described by Thomas Frank in his diatribe “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” which drew criticism from some political scientists but nonetheless seemed to capture a key political dynamic: Wealthy political donors wanted policies, especially low taxes on high incomes, that were generally unpopular; but they could get these policies enacted by supporting politicians who won over working-class white voters by appealing to their social conservatism, then devoted their actual energy to right-wing economics.

Thus in 2004, Republicans mobilized socially conservative voters in part by organizing referendums banning gay marriage; then, having won re-election on social issues and the perception that he was strong on national security, President George W. Bush proceeded as if he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. (He didn’t.)

This strategy didn’t always succeed, but it worked pretty well for a long time — until the G.O.P. establishment lost control of the base, which wanted genuine extremists, not business-friendly politicians who just played extremists on TV.

If I had to identify the moment it all went wrong, I’d point to a largely forgotten event: Eric Cantor’s shocking June 2014 primary defeat by an obscure Tea Party challenger. Cantor, the House majority leader, was so deeply embedded in conservative economic ideology that he once marked Labor Day by celebrating … business owners. By booting him, Republican primary voters in effect signaled that they no longer trusted that kind of figure.

And then, of course, the 1 percent-friendly establishment was unable to block the rise of Donald Trump who, whatever else you may say about him, is the real thing when it comes to extremism. But Trump was more a consequence than a cause of the Republican unraveling.

What’s so striking to me is the political obtuseness of big money. Any moderately well-informed observer could have told big bankers that a MAGAfied Republican Party isn’t going to nominate anyone who might make them comfortable. Someday, perhaps, reasonable people will once again have a role to play within the G.O.P. But that day is at least several election cycles away.

For now, rationality has a well-known Democratic bias. And throwing money at Nikki Haley won’t change that.

Poor Wall Street. All they ask is no taxes, no regulations, no government, no social conscience and no blowback for social or environmental harm and human deaths or extinct species. Why can’t they just get what they want?