Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 149
July 18, 2023
July 17, 2023
A story in the New York Times today by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman outlined how former president Donald Trump and his allies are planning to create a dictatorship if voters return him to power in 2024. The article talks about how Trump and his loyalists plan to “centralize more power in the Oval Office” by “increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
They plan to take control over independent government agencies and get rid of the nonpartisan civil service, purging all but Trump loyalists from the U.S. intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the Defense Department. They plan to start “impounding funds,” that is, ignoring programs Congress has funded if those programs aren’t in line with Trump’s policies.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and who now advises the right-wing House Freedom Caucus. They envision a “president” who cannot be checked by the Congress or the courts.
Trump’s desire to grab the mechanics of our government and become a dictator is not new; both scholars and journalists have called it out since the early years of his administration. What is new here is the willingness of so-called establishment Republicans to support this authoritarian power grab.
Behind this initiative is “Project 2025,” a coalition of more than 65 right-wing organizations putting in place personnel and policies to recommend not just to Trump, but to any Republican who may win in 2024. Project 2025 is led by the Heritage Foundation, once considered a conservative think tank, that helped to lead the Reagan revolution.
A piece by Alexander Bolton in The Hill today said that Republican senators are “worried” by the MAGAs, but they have been notably silent in public at a time when every elected leader should be speaking out against this plot. Their silence suggests they are on board with it, as Trump apparently hoped to establish.
The party appears to have fully embraced the antidemocratic ideology advanced by authoritarian leaders like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who argue that the post–World War II era, in which democracy seemed to triumph, is over. They claim that the tenets of democracy—equality before the law, free speech, academic freedom, a market-based economy, immigration, and so on—weaken a nation by destroying a “traditional” society based in patriarchy and Christianity.
Instead of democracy, they have called for “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy, which uses the government to enforce their beliefs in a Christian, patriarchal order. What that looks like has a clear blueprint in the actions of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who has gathered extraordinary power into his own hands in the state and used that power to mirror Orbán’s destruction of democracy.
DeSantis has pushed through laws that ban abortion after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant; banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity (the “Don’t Say Gay” law); prevented recognition of transgender individuals; made it easier to sentence someone to death; allowed people to carry guns without training or permits; banned colleges and businesses from conversations about race; exerted control over state universities; made it harder for his opponents to vote, and tried to punish Disney World for speaking out against the Don’t Say Gay law. After rounding up migrants and sending them to other states, DeSantis recently has called for using “deadly force” on migrants crossing unlawfully.
Because all the institutions of our democracy are designed to support the tenets of democracy, right-wingers claim those institutions are weaponized against them. House Republicans are running hearings designed to prove that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice are both “weaponized” against Republicans. It doesn’t matter that they don’t seem to have any evidence of bias: the very fact that those institutions support democracy mean they support a system that right-wing Republicans see as hostile.
“Our current executive branch,” Trump loyalist John McEntee, who is in charge of planning to pack the government with Trump loyalists, told the New York Times reporters, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
It has taken decades for the modern-day Republican Party to get to a place where it rejects democracy. The roots of that rejection lie all the way back in the 1930s, when Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. That system ushered in a period from 1933 to 1981 that economists call the “Great Compression,” when disparities of income and wealth were significantly reduced, especially after the government also began to protect civil rights.
Members of both parties embraced this modern government in this period, and Americans still like what it accomplished. But businessmen who hated regulation joined with racists who hated federal protection of civil rights and traditionalists who opposed women’s rights and set out to destroy that government.
In West Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend, at the Turning Points Action Conference, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) compared President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society programs, which invested in “education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and big labor and labor unions.” She noted that under Biden, the U.S. has made “the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs, that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete.”
Well, yeah.
Greene incorrectly called this program “socialism,” which in fact means government ownership of production, as opposed to the government’s provision of benefits people cannot provide individually, a concept first put into practice in the United States by Abraham Lincoln and later expanded by leadership in both parties. The administration has stood firmly behind the idea—shared by LBJ and FDR, and also by Republicans Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others—that investing in programs that enable working people to prosper is the best way to strengthen the economy.
Certainly, Greene’s speech didn’t seem to be the “gotcha” that she apparently hoped. A March 2023 poll by independent health policy pollster KFF, for example, found that 80% of Americans like Social Security, 81% like Medicare, and 76% like Medicaid, a large majority of members of all political parties.
The White House Twitter account retweeted a clip of Greene’s speech, writing: “Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/07/house-republicans-mccarthy-russell-vought-trump/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/us/politics/ron-desantis-border-drug-traffickers.html
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1680582110636064768
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1680940415812354049
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4098609-gop-senators-rattled-by-radical-conservative-populism/
July 16, 2023
July 16, 2023
It has rained, and rained, and rained, and rained here in Maine since mid-June, and when it wasn’t raining, we’ve been fogged in. The rain and fog beats the hideous heat in the Southwest, the smoke in the middle of the country, the fires in the West, and the floods in New England and upstate New York, but we’re all a little soggy.
We had a summer of rain and fog when I was about 10, and my overwhelming memory of it is sitting on the floor day after day as the rain tapped on the roof and the windows were white with fog, with the friend I had known since we met in a playpen, building with my grandmother’s sets of faded mahjong blocks. We didn’t play the game itself. We built cities and roads and towers all over the floor, and then we knocked them all down and put the blocks back into their box in sets exactly as my grandmother had left them before we were born.
To this day, I could put those blocks back in perfect order, even though I still don’t know what the symbols mean or how the game is played.
And now, fifty years later, my friend and I are managing another rainy summer together, this time without the mahjong blocks— so far, anyway, although I know just where they are— but with lots more watery walks.
Stopping by her house for just such a walk had me standing in my friend's driveway a few days ago, where I caught this image in a puddle. I loved that it looked like a picture of a normal summer day... but it was reflected through rain.
It feels like this week is going to be busy. Going to take the night off and get a good night’s sleep to be ready for it.
I'll see you tomorrow.
How Should Historical Sites Memorialize Trauma?
The debate over whether to tear down the house where four students at the University of Idaho were murdered last year highlights a big question historians grapple with: how should a society commemorate the places where atrocities happen?
The Idaho case is not historical, yet, and the imperatives of the upcoming trial of the man accused of committing the …
July 15, 2023
July 15, 2023
[Warning: the 13th paragraph of this piece, beginning “They did,” graphically describes racial violence.]
July 16 marks the 160th anniversary of the most destructive riot in U.S. history. On July 13, 1863, certain Democrats in New York City rose up against the Lincoln administration. Four days later, at least 119 people were dead, another 2,000 wounded. Rioters destroyed between $1 and $5 million in property including about fifty buildings, two churches, and an asylum for orphaned Black children. In today’s dollars, that would be between $20 million and about $96 million in damage.
While the Republican and Democratic parties swapped ideologies almost exactly 100 years after the New York City draft riots, the questions of state and federal power, race, and political narratives, and how those things came together in the United States are still with us.
The story of the draft riots began years before 1863. As soon as South Carolina’s leaders announced in late December 1860 that the state was seceding from the Union, New York City’s Democratic leaders made it clear they sympathized with those white southerners who opposed the idea that the federal government had the power to stop the spread of enslavement. In early January 1861, just days after South Carolina announced it was leaving the Union, before any other state joined it, and months before Republican Abraham Lincoln took office, New York City Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that New York City should secede from the Union, too.
By 1858 the city was at the center of the cotton trade (the roots of the Lehman Brothers financial services firm, which collapsed spectacularly in 2008, were in pre–Civil War cotton trading), its harbor full of ships carrying cotton and the products it enabled enslavers to buy from Europe. Democrats, organized as Tammany Hall, controlled New York City thanks to the votes of workingmen, especially Irish immigrants.
By 1860, Democrats were losing ground to the Republicans, who rose rapidly to national power after 1854. Republicans believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the South but that Congress could stop the institution from moving to newly acquired lands in the West. Republicans controlled New York state.
In his address to the Common Council of the city calling for it to create a “Free City” of New York, Wood declared that “a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable” and claimed the city had “friendly relations and a common sympathy” with the “Slave States.” But his call was not only about the South. He complained bitterly about the government of New York state. He opposed the taxes the Republican legislature had levied, claiming it was plundering the city to “enrich their speculators, lobby agents, and Abolition politicians.” Wood claimed that New York City had lost the right of self-government. If it broke off from the United States, he argued, the city could “live free from taxes, and have cheap goods….”
Wood’s call didn’t get much traction on its own, but for the next two or three months it did prompt New Yorkers to argue about how much the federal government should offer to the southern states to induce them to return. That all changed when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard fired on federal Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. New Yorkers rushed to support the United States. In the largest public meeting held until that point in U.S. history, more than 100,000 people rallied in Union Square, a spot historian of Union Square Michael Shapiro notes they chose in part because of its name.
Growing Republican strength created a problem for Democrats. Republicans were attracting workingmen by promising to keep the West free for folks like them rather than hand it over to a few wealthy enslavers. And now the city was rallying behind the Republican war effort.
To hold on to their voters and thus to their power in New York City, Democratic leaders hammered on the idea that the Republicans intended to set Black Americans up over white men. In September 1862, Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation, issued at a time when Black men were prohibited from service in the army, enabled Democrats to argue that the Republicans were sending white men to their deaths for Black people.
Their racist argument worked: Lincoln’s Republicans got shellacked in the 1862 midterm elections, in part because of the Union’s terrible losses on the battlefields that year, but also because of the relentless racist campaign of the Democrats. Nonetheless, Lincoln went forward with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Furious, Democrats harped on the devastating news from the battlefields, where men were dying in firefights and of disease.
Then, in March, Congress passed a federal draft that took enrollment of soldiers away from the states and included all male citizens from ages 20 to 35 and all unmarried men between 35 and 45 in a lottery for military service. Because the Supreme Court had decided in 1857 that Black men were not citizens, they were not included in the draft. New York City’s Democratic leaders, led now by Mayor George Opdyke, railed against the federal government and its willingness to slaughter white men for Black people.
The Republican New York Times, in contrast, called the draft a “national blessing” that would settle, once and for all, whether the government was strong enough to compel men to fight for it. As for the Democrats threatening to stop the government’s enrollment of soldiers, the editor of the New York Times scoffed: “Let them do their worst.”
They did. The first lottery was held on July 11, and on the morning of July 13, Democrats attacked federal draft officers with rocks and clubs. Rioters then spread through the city, burning the homes and businesses of prominent Republicans. Storm clouds rolled up in the afternoon, mingling with the smoke to turn everything dark. Late in the day, the rioters turned their wrath onto the city’s Black residents. After burning the Orphan Asylum for Colored Children, they hunted down individual Black men, beating 12 to death before attacking a cart driver who stumbled into their path after putting up his horses. Symbolically killing him three times, several hundred men and boys beat him to death, then hanged him, then set fire to the body.
The rioters had thought they represented the will of the American people, only to find themselves confronted by U.S soldiers, including a number from New York. The soldiers had come straight from the battlefields to help put down the riots.
In fact, the tide of the war had abruptly turned just before the draft riots. At the Battle of Gettysburg in early July, U.S. soldiers wiped out a third of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s fighting force. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to General U.S. Grant, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and cutting the Confederacy in half, making it difficult for the Confederacy to move food, goods, and troops. The rioters seemed to be attacking the government just as it started to win.
And then, just two days after the draft riots ended, on July 18 the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment took heavy losses in an assault against Battery Wagner protecting Charleston Harbor. The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was one of the nation’s first Black regiments, raised after the Emancipation Proclamation permitted Black men to join the army. It suffered 42% casualties in the battle, losing more than 270 of the 650 soldiers who fought there. “The splendid 54th is cut to pieces,” wrote Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis, a soldier of the regiment. “The grape and canister shell and Minnie swept us down like chaff…but still our men went on and on.”
The contrast between white mobs railing against the government and murdering their Black neighbors while Black soldiers fought and died to defend the United States was stark. No fair-minded person could miss it.
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Notes:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/54th-massachusetts-regiment.htm
July 14, 2023
July 14, 2023
Traditionally, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the annual budget and appropriations of the Department of Defense, passes Congress on a bipartisan basis. Since 1961 it has been considered must-pass legislation, as it provides the funding for our national security. For all that there is grumbling on both sides over one thing or another in the measure, it is generally kept outside partisanship.
Late last night, House Republicans broke that tradition by loading the bill with a wish list from the far right. Republicans added amendments that eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the Defense Department; end the Defense Department program that reimburses military personnel who must travel for abortion services; bar healthcare for gender transition; prevent the military academies from using affirmative action in admissions (an exception the recent Supreme Court decision allowed); block the Pentagon from putting in place President Biden’s executive orders on climate change; prevent schools associated with the Defense Department from teaching that the United States of America is racist; and block military schools from having “pornographic and radical gender ideology books” in their libraries.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted: “We don’t want Disneyland to train our military. House Republicans just passed a bill that ENDS the wokism in the military and gives our troops their biggest pay raise in decades.”
In fact, the events of last night were a victory for right-wing extremists, demonstrating that they hold the upper hand in the House. Representatives Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), both military veterans, expressed shock that so many Republicans voted to strip abortion protections from military personnel. “[T]hey will say, ‘this is a really bad idea,’ ‘this is not where the party should be going,’ ‘this is a mistake,’” Sherill said. “[W]ell then why did everyone but two people in the Republican conference vote for this really bad amendment?”
The bill passed by a vote of 219 to 210, largely along partisan lines. This year’s budget is $886 billion as the U.S. modernizes the military to compete with new threats such as the rise of China, and it provides a 5.2% increase in pay for military personnel.
But Senate Democrats will not vote for it with the new partisan amendments and are working on their own measure. While there will be a conference committee to hammer out the differences between the two versions, McCarthy has offered a position on that committee to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), one of the extremists. This is an unusual offer, as she is not on the House Armed Services Committee.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: “Extreme MAGA Republicans have hijacked a bipartisan bill that is essential to our national security and taken it over and weaponized it in order to jam their extreme right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”
“We are not going to relent, we are not going to back down, we’re not going to give up on the cause that is righteous,” Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) said.
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) summed up the vote today on Twitter. “The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the bill that funds all of our military operations. It is typically bipartisan and is about as serious as Congress gets. What weapons of war we fund, which allies we share them with, how we recruit. National security is a BFD. We can have our political debates about any number of issues but it is generally understood that when Americans are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend us, it’s time to check the crazies at the door. But today, the crazies won.
“They won first because [McCarthy] put the crazies in positions of power. But second because none of the “moderate” Republicans had the courage to stay the hell out of KrazyTown…. Is every member of the [House Republican Conference] a homophobic, racist, science denying lunatic? No. But the lesson of today is that the ones who aren’t are massive cowards completely unfit for any position of leadership.
“There is space—and demand—for reasonable differences of opinion in our democracy. This isn’t about whether we agree. It’s about whether we can trust that—differences aside—we trust that we’ve got each other’s back if we ever find ourselves in a foxhole together. That’s usually a metaphor, conflating the horrors of war with the much lower-stakes lives that most of us are fortunate enough to lead. But today, the entire [House Republican Conference] told us—both literally and metaphorically—that they don’t give a damn about the rest of the unit.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/politics/house-ndaa-vote-amendments/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/14/us/politics/defense-bill-house-ndaa.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-affirmative-action-military-academies-exemption/
https://twitter.com/SpeakerMcCarthy/status/1679890062148874241
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/houlahan-sherrill-abortion-defense-house-republicans
July 13, 2023
July 13, 2023
Yesterday, Trump supporter James Ray Epps, Sr., sued the Fox News Network for having “destroyed” the lives of Epps and his wife. The suit blames the network for lying to its viewers that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, a lie that inspired Epps to travel from his home in Arizona to Washington, D.C., to protest on January 6, 2021.
In the aftermath of the riot, the suit says, “[h]aving promoted the lie that Joe Biden stole the election, having urged people to come to Washington, DC, and having helped light and then pour gasoline on a fire that resulted in an insurrection that interfered with the peaceful transition of power, Fox needed to mask its culpability. It also needed a narrative that did not alienate its viewers, who had grown distrustful of Fox because of its perceived lack of fealty to Trump.” And so, the suit says, the network—especially personality Tucker Carlson—turned on Epps, “promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol” even after federal officials had cleared him.
Epps is requesting compensatory and punitive damages, as well as court costs.
In April the Fox Corporation settled a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after Fox News personalities falsely claimed the voting machine system had switched votes meant for Trump. Fox paid $787.5 million. Fox and several of its on-air personalities are still facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit from another voting company, Smartmatic, for their disinformation campaign involving that company.
Both Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are also suing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who used his fortune to promote the idea that the election was stolen. Lindell vowed, “I’ll spend everything I have to save the country I love.” Tuesday, James Bickerton of Newsweek reported that Lindell claims he has lost $100 million and is selling off equipment after major retailers stopped carrying his products.
In Reliable Sources, CNN journalist Oliver Darcy reported today that three men associated with Rupert Murdoch in the early days of creating the Fox Corporation expressed their “deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company.” Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner wrote that they “never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become.”
In emails, Murdoch made it “very clear” to Padden “that he understood that the 2020 election had not been stolen,” but “Fox continued to perpetuate the ‘Big Lie’ and promote the Jan 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in D.C.” The men claimed that others who worked with them to establish Fox “share our resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news.”
Padden told Darcy that he sees an “obvious connection between January 6 and Fox News.”
Despite the costs of their past false allegations, the Fox News Channel continues to be a conduit for Trump’s misinformation. As Judd Legum wrote today in Popular Information, some of the same figures who pushed the Big Lie are continuing to push the story that President Biden took money from China, despite the fact the “informant” who provided that story has now been indicted as a Chinese spy and is on the run from U.S. authorities.
“A responsible news organization would respond to the indictment of a key source with self-reflection and incorporate new facts into their reporting,” Legum writes. “But not Fox News. When facts arise that cut against their narrative, Fox News simply enlarges their conspiracy theory to accommodate them.” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have called for an investigation into whether the Republicans on the committee have been duped by Chinese operatives.
The upcoming election is in the news not only because of the role of disinformation in our elections, but also because of voting challenges. Today, Sam Levine and Andrew Witherspoon of The Guardian reported that Florida Republicans are cracking down on voter registration groups that focus on people of color, levying more than $100,000 in fines since September 2022 on 26 groups for errors like submitting an application to the wrong county. Voter registrations have dropped compared to 2019, the most recent year preceding a presidential election.
A study by Doug Bock Clark today in ProPublica showed that about 89,000 of close to 100,000 challenges to voter registrations in Georgia were filed by just six right-wing activists. Most of the rest of the challenges came from just twelve more people. Those making the challenges were helped by right-wing organizations, and they appeared to target those believed to vote for Democrats.
House Republicans traveled to Georgia on Monday to reveal what they call the “most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years.” Four of the five Republicans on the House Administration Committee pushing the bill voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Committee markup on the bill began today.
Also today, in New York, the appellate division of the state Supreme Court has ordered the state to draw new congressional maps. In 2022 an independent redistricting commission deadlocked, and the state legislature, controlled by Democrats, drew districts that were so favorable to their party that Republican challenges won and the courts turned to a neutral expert to draw the districts. The resulting lines created highly competitive districts in which a number of Republicans won.
Now the court says that map was temporary and the commission should take another crack at redistricting. If it deadlocks again, Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo explained, the Democrat-dominated legislature can draw its own map and, so long as it stays within the court’s rules, might enable Democrats to pick up additional seats in New York to offset Republican gerrymanders elsewhere.
A rare bellwether for the election came from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a Washington Post op-ed on July 10, arguing that the Supreme Court is not, in fact, radical; it is, just as always, “a politically unpredictable center.” McConnell claims the Democrats want the court to “advance their party’s priorities” while instead it “weighs each case on its merits.”
Washington Post legal columnist Ruth Marcus sees McConnell’s attempt to minimize his own transformation of a center-right Supreme Court into a hard-right body as a sign that he recognizes the extremism of the court might well cost him the chance to regain the position of Senate majority leader. It was McConnell, after all, who blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in March 2016, arguing against all precedent that an appointment in March was too close to the 2016 presidential election. That stonewalling gave Trump the opportunity to nominate Neil Gorsuch. Then, in 2020, McConnell rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in late October when voting in the presidential election was already underway.
“Two seats that should have gone to Democratic presidents were instead handed to Trump,” Marcus notes. “Thank you, Senator McConnell.” She continued: “And the new justices delivered. Abortion rights, gone. Affirmative action, gone. Gun rights, dramatically expanded. The administrative state, deconstruction underway. Religious liberties, triumphant; separation of church and state, not so much. Does this sound ‘ideologically unpredictable’ to you?”
Marcus notes that these decisions, particularly the overturning of abortion rights, are unpopular, perhaps sparking McConnell’s eagerness to downplay the significance of his remaking of the court. Indeed, in Iowa, the first state to hold a Republican caucus, the state legislature just rushed through a ban on abortions after six weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant.
In Iowa, more than 60% of adults say abortion should be legal, while just 35% say it should be illegal. Nationally, an AP/NORC poll conducted in late June showed that only about 23% of Americans support a full ban on abortions.
Today, in a move that should significantly expand access to contraception, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved over-the-counter birth control pills for the first time. Seventeen FDA advisors from different scientific disciplines voted unanimously in May to expand access, saying that this type of pill, which contains the hormone progestin, has been used safely in the U.S. for 50 years and that its 93% success rate offers the significant public health benefit of preventing unintended pregnancies. The pills are expected to become available sometime in 2024.
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Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.83032/gov.uscourts.ded.83032.1.1_1.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/02/04/smartmatic-fox-lawsuit/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/04/18/fox-news-smartmatic-defamation-lawsuit/
https://www.newsweek.com/mike-lindell-mypillow-lost-100-million-auctioning-equipment-1812211
https://view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/1689210125470ca4240ec3efd/raw
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/13/florida-fines-voter-registration-groups
https://www.propublica.org/article/right-wing-activists-georgia-voter-challenges
https://rollcall.com/2023/07/10/republicans-unveil-election-bill-in-georgia-the-heart-of-the-fight/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/mitch-mcconnell-supreme-court-ideology/
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-poll-roe-dobbs-ban-opinion-fcfdfc5a799ac3be617d99999e92eabe
Popular InformationFox News won't let new facts get in the way of a good conspiracyToday’s edition is a special collaboration with Public Notice, a newsletter by my friend and former colleague Aaron Rupar. You can subscribe to Public Notice and get regular updates from Aaron and his excellent roster of contributors here…Read morea day ago · 402 likes · 61 comments · Judd Legum and Aaron Ruparhttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/health/otc-birth-control-pill.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/11/mcconnell-supreme-court-op-ed-reaction/
July 12, 2023
Today, in Vilnius, Lithuania, President Joe Biden spoke before a crowd at Vilnius University to champion democracy and the strengthening of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
“If I sound optimistic,” he told the crowd, “it’s because I am.”
“NATO is stronger, more energized, and, yes, more united than ever in its history,” he said and continued, “It didn’t happen by accident.” Faced with a threat to “democratic values we hold dear, to freedom itself” when Russian president Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine in a rejection of the rules-based international order, the United States, NATO, and all our partners stepped up to stand behind the brave people of Ukraine.
“After nearly a year and a half of Russia’s forces committing terrible atrocities, including crimes against humanity, the people of Ukraine remain unbroken…. Ukraine remains independent. It remains free. And the United States has built a coalition of more than 50 nations to make sure Ukraine defends itself both now and…in the future as well.”
“[O]ur commitment to our values, our freedom is something…[we] can never, never, ever, ever walk away from,” Biden said. “It’s who we are.”
“[A]s I look around the world today, at a moment of war and peril, a moment of competition and uncertainty, I also see a moment of unprecedented opportunity—unprecedented opportunity—opportunity to make real strides toward a world of greater peace and greater prosperity, liberty and dignity, equal justice under the law, human rights and fundamental freedoms which are the blessing and birthright of all of humanity.”
“My friends, at the most fundamental level, we face a choice…between a world defined by coercion and exploitation, where might makes right, or a world where we recognize that our own success is bound to the success of others."
“When others do better, we do better as well—where we understand that the challenges we face today, from the existential threat of climate change to building a global economy where no one gets left behind, are too great for any one nation to solve on their own, and that to achieve our goals and meet the challenges of this age, we have to work together.”
“The world is changing. We have a chance to change the dynamic.”
“That’s why I’ve been so focused as president on rebuilding and revitalizing the alliances that are the cornerstone of American leadership in the world,” Biden said. He recounted the strengthening of the relationship between the U.S. and Europe, as well as the U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific region with Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and India, saying that “we’re bringing major democracies of the region together to cooperate, keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open, prosperous, and secure.”
“[W]e’re working to deepen connections between the Atlantic and Pacific democracies so they can better work together toward the shared values we all seek: strong alliances, versatile partnerships, common purpose, collective action to meet our shared challenges….
“We have to step up together, building the broadest and deepest coalition…to preserve all the extraordinary benefits that stem from the international system grounded in the rule of law.
“We have to come together to protect the rights and freedoms that underwrite the flow of ideas and commerce and which have enabled decades of global growth. Yes, territorial integrity and sovereignty, but also principles like freedom of navigation and overflight, keeping our shared seas and skies open so that every nation has equal access to our global common space.
“And as we continue to explore this age of new possibilities, an age enabled by rapid advances in innovation, we have to stand together to ensure that the common spaces of our future reflect our highest…aspirations for ourselves and for others…so that artificial intelligence, engineering, biology, and other…emerging technologies are not made into weapons of oppression but rather are used as tools of opportunity.
“We’re working with our allies and partners to build…supply chains that are more resilient, more secure, so we never again face a situation like we had during the pandemic where we couldn’t get critical goods we needed for our daily lives….
“[W]e all must summon the common will to…address the existential threat of accelerating climate change. It’s real. It’s serious. We don’t have a lot of time. It is the…single greatest threat to humanity.
“And it’s only by working together that we’ll prevent the worst consequences of climate change from ravaging our future and that of our children and grandchildren.
“We also have to recognize our shared responsibility to help unlock the enormous potential that exists in low- and middle-income…[countries] around the world—not out of charity, [but] because it’s in our own self-interest. We all benefit when more partners stand together, working toward shared goals. We all benefit when people are healthier and more prosperous…. We all benefit when more entrepreneurs and innovators are able to pursue their dreams for a better tomorrow….
“[W]e stand at an inflection point, an inflection point in history, where the choices we make now are going to shape the direction of our world for decades to come. The world has changed.
“Will we turn back naked, unchecked aggression today to deter other…would-be aggressors tomorrow? Will we staunch the climate crisis before it’s too late? Will we harness the new technologies to advance freedom or will we diminish it? Will we advance opportunity in more places or allow instability and inequality to persist?
“How we answer these essential questions is literally going to determine the kind of future our children and grandchildren have.”
“I believe that with ambition, with confidence in ourselves and one another, with nations working together for common cause, we can answer these questions,” Biden said. “We can ensure the vision we share and the freedoms we cherish are not just empty words in a troubled time, but a roadmap…a plan of urgent action toward a future we can reach, and we’ll reach if we work together.
“[T]he road that lies before us is hard. It will challenge us, summon the best of ourselves to hold faith in one another and never give up, never lose hope. Never.
“Every day, we have to make the choice. Every day, we must summon the strength to stand for what is right, to stand for what is true, to stand for freedom, to stand together.”
Biden met in Vilnius with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, whose concerns about not getting a firm timeline for Ukraine’s admission to NATO seem to have been assuaged by significant security guarantees. “We are returning home with a good result for our country, and very importantly, for our warriors,” he wrote. “A good reinforcement with weapons.”
Meanwhile, in the U.S., a new report shows that inflation has slowed dramatically, dropping back to about 3%, the rate of March 2021, while the jobs market remains strong. Wages are rising faster than inflation. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, says the report suggests that the sharp inflation of the past sixteen months was, in fact, a result of supply shocks from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as administration officials said.
Other advanced economies continue to struggle with high inflation, and observers noted that U.S. inflation began to fall just after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
In Washington, D.C., today, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), questioned FBI director Christopher Wray for six hours to try to prove that the FBI is attacking Trump Republicans while giving Hunter Biden a free pass. It didn’t go particularly well. Wray is a lifelong Republican and member of the right-wing Federalist Society and was appointed by former president Trump. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray said.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin summed up the day’s news when she tweeted: “3% inflation. NATO growing and more solid than ever. huge investment in tech and infrastructure. And Rs? Screeching about Hunter Biden's laptop and defunding the FBI. Simply pathetic.”
—
Notes:
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1679260450263818240
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/politics/joe-biden-nato-summit-day-2/index.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/12/heres-the-inflation-breakdown-for-june-in-one-chart.html
https://www.ft.com/content/c86136db-17be-487d-aa8f-642b4b81aa1f?shareType=nongift
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1679111782688849923
https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1679200931148099608
July 11, 2023
July 11, 2023
Late last night, just before a court deadline, former president Trump’s lawyers requested that his trial for illegally keeping national security documents be postponed indefinitely. While the lawyers argued that they were interested in protecting American democracy, falsely accusing President Biden of advancing the case in hopes of weakening his “chief political rival,” in fact the desire to push off the trial suggests that Trump realizes he’s in big trouble. His advisors have told reporters that he expects to end that trouble by winning the election. In the filing, his lawyers warned that as the “likely Republican Party nominee,” he would not have enough time to manage a trial.
The Department of Justice has asked for a speedy trial to begin in December, getting it over with before the election, not afterward.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is in hot water today for calling white nationalists “true Americans” and refusing to admit that white nationalism, which quite literally means a nation built on the concept of white supremacy, is racist.
But Trump’s plea for delay until after the election so he can stack the DOJ with his own appointees is a reminder that, despite the distraction about white nationalism, we should not lose sight of Tuberville’s absolute unwillingness to drop his hold on about 250 senior military appointments. Keeping those positions open echoes then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) refusal to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016, holding the seat open for Trump to appoint someone when he took office. Tuberville was in close touch with Trump during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Meanwhile, Gal Luft, a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who is the key witness to what the Republican-dominated House Oversight Committee insists is President Biden’s corrupt ties to China, has been indicted by the Department of Justice for being a Chinese operative. Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Luft “subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.”
On July 7, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) called Luft “a very credible witness on Biden family corruption,” who “provided incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the DOJ in a meeting in Brussels in March 2019.” Luft also allegedly worked with a former Chinese government official to plant into Trump’s 2016 campaign someone who would push pro-Chinese policies and who then, for pay, funneled information to the Chinese. That person, who is not named in the indictment, was later under consideration for Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Homeland Security, or Director of National Intelligence.
Luft was indicted in absentia because he is a fugitive after jumping bail in April (which explains why Comer said he was “missing” in May). While Luft claims the indictment is retaliation for his revelations about Biden, in fact the sealed indictment was handed down on November 1, 2022, before he became a Republican witness. So he was charged first, arrested in Cyprus in February on related charges, and then became Comer’s star witness.
Also today, the Justice Department told lawyers for Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll, who has sued the former president for defamation, that it does not believe he was acting within the scope of his employment when he said he didn’t know her, she wasn’t his type, and he did not sexually assault her. While the DOJ focused on the statements Trump made as president, it said that it took into consideration the similar comments he made last October, which suggested that he was not, in fact, trying to protect and serve the U.S. when he made the initial comments. It also considered a jury’s verdict in May finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarding Carroll $5 million in damages.
This means that the Department of Justice will no longer defend Trump against Carroll’s lawsuit, forcing him to rely on his own lawyers. A Trump spokesperson said the DOJ’s decision showed that the department was “politically weaponizing the justice system” against Trump.
Meanwhile, the summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Vilnius, Lithuania, began with a surprise as Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan dropped his country’s opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. His shift likely comes from U.S. assurances that the deal for F-16 jets Turkey badly wants will probably materialize. At the same time, Erdogan likely recognizes that moving away from Russia and toward Europe is a smart move as Russia’s war continues to sap that country’s strength.
In the Washington Post, Asli Aydintasbas of the Brookings Institution, formerly a journalist in Turkey, gave Biden credit for bringing Erdogan to “yes.” “The cutthroat geopolitical competition against China and Russia does not give Washington the luxury to maintain its policy of social distancing toward Erdogan,” she wrote, “despite his awful record on democracy.”
To get Erdogan permission to purchase F-16s, Biden had to work to convince congressional leaders, notably chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez (D-NJ), that it would be easier to work with Turkey inside NATO than outside it. Aydintasbas also suggested that Biden had worked with members of the European Union to consider expanding Turkey’s access to trade with the E.U.
“This is an important moment—and an opening to try to reverse Turkey’s drift,” Aydintasbas wrote. “But the window of opportunity for better relations with NATO and the West will not be open forever. For more thawing, Turkey will have to be willing to work on domestic issues as well.”
So Sweden has the green light, but to the dismay of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is also at the meeting, Ukraine does not. It is not a surprise that the 31 NATO member nations are not eager to welcome Ukraine to NATO immediately, since the terms of the alliance mean that doing so would bring the member states into open war with Russia, but Zelensky had hoped at least for a date for future admission.
A declaration from the heads of state and government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s principal political decision-making body, blamed Russia for shattering peace in the Euro-Atlantic area and for violating the principles of a rules-based international order. Russia “is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area,” it declared, and must be “held fully accountable” for its “illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.”
“Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” it said, but for now it focused on additional security packages and the establishment of a new joint body, the NATO-Ukraine Council, “where Allies and Ukraine sit as equal members to advance political dialogue, engagement, cooperation, and Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.”
It is not as much as Zelensky wanted, but it is a good deal more than Trump ally Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) offered today when she called for President Biden to withdraw from NATO altogether, saying bizarrely that NATO, which was formed in 1949 to stand against Soviet aggression and now stands against Russian expansion, is “entirely beholden to Russia.” Indeed, Trump recently boasted that he could end the war in 24 hours, and his former vice president Mike Pence noted that “the only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.” And even that suggestion rather neatly ignores the reality that the Ukrainians have the ultimate say about the matter.
In contrast to Trump’s approach to U.S. foreign policy, Bo Erickson of CBS News noted today that Biden’s extensive foreign policy experience and personal appeal have enhanced U.S. credibility and moral authority, which is especially welcome after the previous administration undermined international alliances. Liana Fix, European fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Erickson: “For Europe, he represents a nostalgia for the 20th century, which was based on shared values, when the West was strong and the relations were clear with the Cold War…. President Biden is the old, great trans-Atlanticist.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/politics/trump-documents-trial-postponement.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/11/tuberville-pences-evacuation-trump-impeachment-46857
https://apnews.com/article/mike-lee-trump-misdialed-fact-check-3165726e16c990596218f61a88205304
https://twitter.com/kevinmkruse/status/1678821384183771136
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/11/trump-classified-documents-trial-after-2024-election
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648654/gov.uscourts.flsd.648654.66.0.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/11/gal-luft-biden-china-agent-charged
https://www.justice.gov/media/1304836/dl
https://abcnews.go.com/US/biden-critic-gal-luft-charged-failing-register-foreign/story
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/11/luft-indictment-comer-biden-gop/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/11/tuberville-military-racists-white-nationalist/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/11/politics/trump-carroll-justice-department-immunity/index.html
https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/r2hGat9ZWnH4/v0
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-joe-biden-age-asset-nato-allies/
https://www.dw.com/en/what-is-behind-turkish-president-erdogans-nato-u-turn/a-66194112
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/biden-erdogan-turkey-sweden-nato/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/11/nato-stops-short-of-ukraine-invitation-angering-zelenskyy
https://nato.cmail19.com/t/r-e-ttdyhrky-byuuuzydl-r/
July 10, 2023
July 10, 2023
For the first time since 1859, the Marine Corps does not have a confirmed commandant. For five months, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has held up the confirmation of about 250 Pentagon officers in protest of the Defense Department’s policy of enabling military personnel to travel to obtain abortion care. So when Commandant General David Berger retired today, there was no confirmed commandant to replace him. Assistant Commandant General Eric Smith will serve as the acting commandant until the Senate once again takes up military confirmations.
That a Republican is undermining the military belies the party’s traditional claim to be stronger on military issues than the Democrats. So does the attack of House Republicans on our nation’s key law enforcement entities—the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—after traditionally insisting their party works to defend “law and order.”
David Smith of The Guardian this weekend noted that those attacks are linked to former president Trump’s increasing legal trouble.
MAGA Republicans are seeking to protect Trump by calling for impeaching President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee), and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, who has prosecuted those who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), and a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan, have been out in front in the attacks on the DOJ and the FBI. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has been trying to dig up proof that Biden has “weaponized” the DOJ, the FBI, and the Department of Education against Republicans, especially those supporting former president Trump.
They have not turned up any official whistleblowers—the word “whistleblower” in government context means someone whose allegations have been found to be credible by an inspector general, but House Republicans seem to be using the word in a generic sense of someone with complaints—to support the idea that Biden has weaponized the government.
But Trump did. Last summer the New York Times reported that under Trump, the IRS launched a rare and invasive audit of former FBI director James Comey and Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, and Trump talked of using the IRS and the DOJ to harass Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post.
On Thursday, a sworn statement from Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly confirmed that Trump asked about using the IRS and other agencies to investigate Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI agents looking into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.
Another investigation has also backfired on the Trump Republicans. The House Ways and Means Committee has highlighted the testimony of Gary Shapley, a “whistleblower” from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland interfered with the investigation into Hunter Biden. Shapley said that Garland denied a request from U.S. attorney David Weiss, who was in charge of the case, to be appointed special counsel, which would officially have made him independent. On June 22 the committee released a transcript of Shapley’s testimony.
Garland promptly denied the allegation, but on June 28, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to David Weiss, U.S. attorney for Delaware, repeating the allegations. Weiss, a Trump appointee, replied today, saying he never requested special counsel status. Representative Jordan got around this direct contradiction of Shapley’s testimony by lumping Weiss in with those he’s attacking: “Do you trust Biden's DOJ to tell the truth?” he asked.
And while the radical right has claimed that Biden is on the take for millions of dollars from foreign countries, today the key witness to that allegation was indicted for being a Chinese agent. Also today, LIV Golf, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced it is moving its $50 million team championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump National Doral in Miami this October.
In May, LIV Golf allied with the nonprofit PGA Tour to create a new for-profit company in May, but today a prominent member of the PGA board, Randall Stephenson, resigned, saying he and most of the rest of the board were not involved in the deal and that he cannot “in good conscience support” it, “particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.” (The report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Khashoggi.) Stephenson had delayed his resignation at the request of the board’s chair while the PGA Tour commissioner was on medical leave.
The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to start hearings on that merger tomorrow, but they are having trouble lining up witnesses who were involved in making the deal, which was achieved in secret negotiations and has infuriated many of the PGA Tour players.
The MAGA attacks on the Biden administration are part of a larger story. Trump supporters are consolidating around the former president and so-called Christian democracy. They are enforcing loyalty so tightly that the far-right House Freedom Caucus recently expelled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) either because she is too close to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) or because she called Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” on the floor of Congress, or both. Like the far-right Southern Baptist Convention, which is hemorrhaging members but which nonetheless recently expelled one of its largest churches for permitting a female pastor, the MAGAs are purging their members for purity.
But their posturing worries Republicans from less safe districts who know such extremism is unpopular. Today, 21 members of the far right in the House wrote a letter to McCarthy saying they would oppose any appropriations bills that did not reject the June debt ceiling deal that kept the U.S. from defaulting on its debts, threatening to shut down the government. They also rejected any further support for Ukraine.
Larry Jacobs, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian’s Smith: “Independent voters, who tend to swing US elections that have become so close, don’t buy into the Trump line. You don’t see support for this unhinged view that the justice department and the FBI are somehow corrupt. There’s not support for that except in the fringe of the Republican party. The question, though, is does the fringe of the Republican party have enough leverage, particularly in the House of Representatives, to force impeachment votes and other measures?”
Alex Isenstadt of Politico wrote today that a new group called Win It Back, tied to the right-wing Club for Growth, which has ties to the Koch network, will run anti-Trump ads starting tomorrow. Americans for Prosperity, linked to billionaire Charles Koch, will also run ads opposing Trump.
Meanwhile, President Biden is on his way to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the 74th North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATO was formed in 1949 to stand against the Soviet Union, and now it stands against an expanding Russia. Today, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced that Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. Hungary, which had also been a holdout, said earlier this month it would back Sweden’s entry as soon as Turkey did.
This means that the key issues before NATO will be Ukraine’s defense, and climate change, a reality that U.S. politicians can no longer ignore (although MAGA Republicans later this month will start hearings to stop corporations from incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals into their future plans). Currently, forty-two million people in the U.S. South are locked in a devastating heat dome, and Vermont and New York are facing catastrophic flash floods.
President Biden told CNN yesterday that he does not support NATO membership for Ukraine while it is at war, noting that since NATO’s security pact means that a war on one automatically includes all, admitting Ukraine would commit U.S. troops to a war with Russia. Instead, NATO members will likely consider continuing significant military support for Ukraine.
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4088649-tuberville-hold-leaves-marines-leaderless/
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4063373-military-holds-fifth-month-republicans-tuberville/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/08/republicans-trump-assault-doj-fbi
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/02/politics/jim-jordan-whistleblowers-fbi-weaponization/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/07/us/politics/trump-kelly-irs-fbi-strozk-page.html
https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/07-10-2023/weiss-status-reportl/
https://www.espn.com/golf/story/_/id/37989450/liv-championship-moved-trump-national-doral
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/business/dealbook/pga-stephenson-resign-saudi.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/sports/golf/liv-pga-greg-norman-senate-hearing.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/10/turkey-nato-summit-eu-sweden/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/us/republicans-biden-inquiry.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/10/anti-trump-ads-iowa-south-mcarolina-00105338
https://twitter.com/jensstoltenberg/status/1678484703060324359
This is a spectacular article: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/03/the-shrinking-baptist-convention-is-doubling-down-on-the-culture-wars-00104174
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/10/heat-wave-phoenix-worsens-texas-florida
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66154757
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/09/politics/joe-biden-ukraine-nato-russia-cnntv/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10/politics/house-freedom-caucus-future-plans/index.html
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Club_for_Growth
https://twitter.com/emilybrooksnews/status/1678519882432782336
July 9, 2023
July 9, 2023
So many weeks of fog and rain here that it still barely feels like summer, but the gray skies make for interesting reflections in the water.
Taking tonight off. Will be back at it tomorrow.
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