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? 

AS PROMISED.

 SNOWFLAKE Mod Germaine

4 hours ago 

agreed. watch for my next thread. it will say something about Biden.

SO, here it is, a thread that says something about Joe Biden.     

                                                                                                        

                                                                                        

Will Biden’s ego bring Trump back to the White House?

https://theconversation.com/will-bidens-ego-bring-trump-back-to-the-white-house-219469

 Is Biden’s evergreen ego — his scrappy Scranton Joe determination — outpacing his ability to win a tough election, much less govern a bitterly divided country until 2029?

Will there be dire consequences because the man who had been yearning to be president since he was 46 resists giving up the job at 81? Should he have stepped aside for someone younger?

Given Biden’s legislative achievements over just three years, these are difficult questions to answer.

High-achieving leaders are always at risk of crossing a line that separates self-confidence from over-confidence, ego from hubris. Has Biden crossed this line as he hungers for a second term, leading him to potentially disastrous decisions?

Biden is far from the first American president whose great achievements could be tarnished with hubris.

Details in the above link. But question remains:

Will Biden’s ego bring Trump back to the White House?

Firehose of Falsehood redux: He actually used it in a court filing!

My post yesterday discussed an unsigned, 32 page document (the Firehose of Falsehood) that claims there is no evidence the 2020 election was stolen or fraudulent, or that Biden won the 2020 election. I stated in my post that DJT had not used it in any court filings that I was aware of. That was basically wrong. I stand corrected and retract my statements about this. The WaPo reports that Trump actually did cite this pack of lies and slanders in a court filing:

Trump lawyers’ doozy of a filing on voter fraud

Tucked into Trump’s latest legal brief in his appeal for presidential immunity in his federal Jan. 6 case is a remarkable citation. His attorneys refer to a social media post from Trump the same day of the filing — Tuesday — which links to a report from an unnamed source running down various voter-fraud claims.

The filing cites the report to argue that there remain “vigorous disputes and questions about the actual outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.”

The report, to put it lightly, is a mess. And that Trump’s legal team would see fit to include it in a filing would not seem to augur well for his defense.

The report begins with a series of astonishing and false claims. “In actuality, there is no evidence Joe Biden won,” its first paragraph concludes. It then recounts how Trump led in key battleground states on election night and maintains that, as of that point, before millions of votes were counted, “the election was over.” But even Trump allies had acknowledged before the election that the expected late arrival of ballots from populous and heavily Democratic areas, as well as mail-in ballots, would create an illusion of an early Trump lead — a “red mirage.” There is nothing suspicious about how those states flipped as time went on.

The introductory paragraph also includes a footnote that says Arizona “was fraudulently called for Joe Biden by Fox News” on election night. A network’s calls on any given race do not determine the election, and Biden won Arizona.

The report goes on to cite multiple accounts of alleged fraud that don’t appear to be publicly available.

The report goes on to cite purported evidence of voter fraud and irregularities in five key states. A sampling:

• For Wisconsin, it begins by citing how the state Supreme Court declared ballot drop boxes illegal — but that was in 2022, two years after the 2020 election.

• For Pennsylvania, it cites the idea that there were more votes than voters. This is an oft-cited claim based on lagging data from a database called the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE). Such claims were debunked both before Jan. 6 and long after.

• For Arizona, it begins by claiming Maricopa County illegally accepted 20,000 absentee ballots after the deadline of 7 p.m. on Election Day. Multiple fact checks have noted that this assertion relies on a misreading of the dates; the dates actually indicate when the ballots were handed off to a private vendor for scanning, not when they were received.

These are just a few examples of the claims that have already been debunked or have no actual proximity to voter fraud. Many of the claims don’t appear to have been publicly lodged before the report’s release Tuesday and are difficult to trace because of the scant sourcing. Most of the report is devoted to supposed procedural irregularities that say nothing about a stolen election.

But it’s one thing to say these things in public; it’s quite another to include them in a legal filing. Trump’s attorneys have been careful not to actually vouch for his wildest claims, because doing so involves trying to substantiate them, and legal scrutiny has been unkind — to put it mildly.

Trump’s lawyers do not say that the claims in the report are true, instead using the document in an effort to substantiate the idea that there remain “vigorous disputes” and “questions” about the results. The aim is to apparently cite the smoke without actually claiming there’s fire.

But what it demonstrates is how much this entire effort was about manufacturing smoke. And in that way, the Trump lawyers in effect just proved the prosecutors’ point.

This is a clear example of aggressive contempt that DJT has for the courts, the rule of law and people’s intelligence. Equally disturbing, many of his supporters will believe this document speaks truth. Many will take this as just more evidence that DJT is an innocent, patriotic martyr that the Democrats are persecuting in the name of the law, but without evidence.

This gigantic lie to the court is well beyond a Whopper or double Whopper. It’s a quadruple bypass heart attack Whopper.

Quadruples, fortunately served by trained, 

qualified medical personnel (DJT’s lawyers)

(Hm, she looks a lot like Malaria Trump!?)

From the delusional files: Close to an immigration deal or a Lucy?

CONTEXT

For years bigoted/racist Republican Party elites have been sabotaging bipartisan deals in congress to fix the immigration problem at the border. The reason is simple. Keeping the border issue unresolved is a perfect way to demagogue the hell out of something to keep the rank and file engaged, e.g., enraged, terrified of the Great White Replacement by cruel immigrant hoards,  distracted from what the kleptocratic, authoritarian GOP actually stands for, i.e., tyranny and massive corruption, etc. 

One can reasonably see fixing the American immigration problem about the same way one can see the unresolvable Israel-Palestine problem. Neither is fixable except via one side getting everything it wants.

THE LATEST “DEAL”

The Hill reports: 

Schumer: Negotiators ‘closer than we have been’ on border deal

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) indicated negotiators are inching closer to a border deal that could unlock aid for Ukraine, while pressing the House to jump on board with the eventual agreement.

“We’re making progress. We’re closer than we have been, but this is a very difficult issue and there’s still different issues to be overcome with,” Schumer told reporters after opening the Senate for the second half of the 118th Congress.

“Everyone’s going to have to give something to get this done. No one can just get his or her own way,” he said.  

Schumer’s remarks came as a group of 60 House Republicans, headlined by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), is traveling to the border near Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday to highlight their concerns about border security. December marked an all-time high in border crossings with roughly 300,000 encounters, the Department of Homeland Security said earlier this week.

House Republicans passed their border bill last year, H.R.2, which received no Democratic votes.  

The Democratic leader declined to discuss how a potential bipartisan bill would move, given that Congress is staring down a pair of government funding deadlines on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2.

There’s no basis for belief that a deal can likely be reached. From the GOP’s point of view, working with Dems to fix immigration in a presidential election year makes absolutely no sense. But, it makes a lot of sense for Repubs to posture in that direction so they can demagogue that the Dems won’t compromise, while only wanting completely open borders.

I rate this a Lucy:

Left: Schumer

Right: Repubs

Crackpot conspiracies alive & well; The Firehose of Falsehood: The stolen 2020 election evidence

The WaPo reports a story about the American radical right crackpot & lies politics segment of the American experiment: 

The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”

The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.

But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.

According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s office and an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.

Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.

“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”

But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s home and whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.

The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.

Like it or not, there usually are no significant consequences for liars and slanderers. Most of it is shielded by free speech law. Defamation law captures maybe about 0.1% of it all, and maybe about 2% of the legally actionable spew ever winds up in court. The demagogues, grifters and radical freaks, e.g., Gateway Pundit, Faux News, etc., who rely on dark free speech are usually worse than immoral. They are evil when (i) their intent is to harm, or (ii) they don’t care about reasonably foreseeable harm. 

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DJT has released what he says is all the evidence showing that the 2020 election was stolen. It is an unsigned 32 page document that lists all the fraud and whatever else happened in GA, WI, PA, MI and AZ that led to DJT actually winning. One of the people cited as having found some fraud, illegality or irregularities is a guy named Kevin Moncla. He is reported to be a convicted pervert. 

The document lists dozens of instances of fraud, illegality or irregularity. There are lots of citations to various details, but important assertions are usually not supported by a citation. For example, there is not citation to the claim: “Not a single ballot purportedly cast during early in-person voting was witnessed to and signed off by poll managers, as required by Georgia election rules.” 

A couple of fact checks of a few assertions indicates that most are lies about non-existent things or gross distortions of actual things. For example, the document asserts that an estimated 289,866 absentee ballots were identified as sent to people who never requested them, “something that would be illegal,” according to the senate committee.

A fact check commented: The Voter Integrity Project, a right-wing group, has said that 289,866 “illegal votes” were cast in Michigan. The report’s authors called 40 people from the group’s list of supposed voters who received absentee ballots without requesting them and found just two who said they had been sent unrequested ballots. One was on the state’s permanent absentee voter list. The other voted absentee in the 2020 primary election and may have forgotten about checking a box then to request an absentee ballot in the general election.

Apparently, DJT has not cited this, or at least most of it, in the lawsuits against him. Presumably doing that would get him and his attorneys sanctioned for lying to the court. Since no one has signed it, no one is available to point fingers at in case this thing generates more lawsuits. This document appears to be part of DJT’s FTZWS* propaganda tactic. 

* Flood The Zone With Shit - a term coined by Steve Bannon

It’s also called the Firehose of Falsehood dark free speech tactic. Wikipedia comments: 

The Firehose of Falsehood is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. An outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques, the firehose of falsehood is a contemporary model for Russian propaganda under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Russian government used the technique during its offensive against Georgia in 2008, and continued to use it in Russia's war with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea, and the prelude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Politicians, governments, and movements in other countries have since used the same tactics, such as former US president Donald Trump.

I rate this document:

Q: How would America and its government, commerce and society change if, at least rhetorically speaking, liar’s pants really did catch on fire?

I bet they would change a heck of a lot.

News bits: Repubs up for re-election; Dark free speech in action

A WaPo opinion mentions some of the Repubs in congress and some of their fun, patriotic antics from recent years:

Some have already left office. But as many as 117 members of Congress are running for reelection in 2024. Here they are, drawn together; a collection of American politicians engaged in using democracy in order to attain the power to subvert it.

The whole House class of 2024

What a fine batch of patriots, from the crypt. With “people” like that in congress, America doesn’t need foreign enemies. Gosar is especially charming and witty, don’t you think? What a delightful person, as long as he doesn’t come over here.

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A WaPo article (not paywalled off) reports on how relentless authoritarian radical right dark free speech continues to convince all kinds of Americans that DJT’s coup attempt was, more or less, no big deal:

Three years after the Jan. 6 attack, Republicans are more sympathetic to those who stormed the U.S. Capitol and more likely to absolve Donald Trump of responsibility for the attack than they were in 2021, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll.