Aaron Blake, WaPo, Trump’s Historic Legal Jeopardy. Trump may really become the first ex-POTUS to be convicted of a crime. See also Peter Stevenson, WaPo, The special grand jury used in Trump’s case, explained.
Philip Longman, Washington Monthly, Sickness in Health. This is a review of a book I haven’t read titled The Hospital by Brian Alexander. This could be a great book, but the review is worth reading in its own right. Alexander presents a fly-on-the-wall narrative about a small, independent hospital in Ohio, and in so doing presents the bigger picture of how our health care system got so screwed up.
Also at Washington Monthly, see Bill Scher, If Roe v. Wade is Struck Down, It’ll Cost Republicans. I’ve been thinking the same thing.
Paul Krugman, NY Times, The Banality of Democratic Collapse. It’s not the crazies in the Republican Party who are threatening democracy, Krugman argues. It’s “the acquiescence of Republican elites” to the crazy.
Political scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.
In any case, for a long time conservative cohesiveness made life relatively easy for Republican politicians and officials. Professional Democrats had to negotiate their way among sometimes competing demands from various constituencies. All Republicans had to do was follow the party line. Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net — “wing nut welfare” — in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.
Of course, the easy life of a professional Republican wasn’t appealing to everyone. The G.O.P. has long been an uncomfortable place for people with genuine policy expertise and real external reputations, who might find themselves expected to endorse claims they knew to be false….
… Matters may be even worse for politicians who actually care about policy, still have principles and have personal constituencies separate from their party affiliation. There’s no room in today’s G.O.P. for the equivalent of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, unless you count the extremely sui generis Mitt Romney.
And the predominance of craven careerists is what made the Republican Party so vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.
The fact that Mitt Romney has become sui generis among Republicans tells us a lot has changed in the past few years.
And speaking of crazy, see Jonathan Chait, New York, The Strange Anti-Semitism of the Pro-Jewish Right.
Now THAT's a great cartoon!
I'll always love great editorial cartoons!
Just like sometimes a single photo can summarize in one shot what 20,000 feet of film can't, one great editorial cartoon can tell you more about the character of an issue than a 20,000 word essay.
If she was capable of embarrassment, that one cartoon makes MTG look as small she really is in this universe – and she should feel lower than a dust-mite; but she's incapable of shame.
Oh, goodie. Great stuff to read!
Well, if a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich it shouldn't have much of a problem indicting a big bag of shit. Pray to that end.
I'm not sure if Trump will be convicted. If they flip his bookkeeper, he and possibly the kids will be in trouble. An interesting footnote is the consideration of whether the defendant is a flight risk. So they pull his passport (potentially) and monitor the location. In my case with an ankle monitor (GPS.)
Likewise for the kids if they are charged. Limiting mobility becomes an incentive to not drag out legal proceedings. A cooperating witness can get a break on restrictions – so if Daddy tries to throw the kids under the bus and the kids are imprisoned in their mult-million mansions, with the prospect of a much smaller cell if convicted… might the accountant and Don Jr. testify?
From what I read, the proof that Trump inflated the value of properties for loans and deflated the same property in the same year for taxes is open and shut. The defense will be that the bookkeeper did it w/out Trump knowing. And Dimwit Don never left a paper trail through emails.
If true, the trial will hinge on multiple, credible witnesses testifying that DJT knew and directed the fraud. Michael Cohen is eager to. The bookkeeper committed his own tax fraud so he may have to testify. Both of them have 'reason to lie.' I'm not sure how a jury will come down unless someone else testifies that DJT knew, a bank person who OKd the loan knowing it was fraudulent???
Proving that Trump is a cheat to the satisfaction of the voters doesn't require a conviction. If everyone in the Trump circle (except DJT) is a crook, what does that say about Trump's ability as a judge of character? The trial won't help Trump build support outside the bubble of loyalists. Not if the facts are there.
. If they flip his bookkeeper, he and possibly the kids will be in trouble.
If they haven't already flipped Weiselberg, they will. It's going to be a simple case of who is going to take the fall. With over 500 companies for Trump to use in carrying out his financial frauds and corruptions it's more than a safe assumption to expect that illegal activity will be uncovered.
The whole Trump enterprise is nothing more than one big shell game of dodging tax liability. He's already admitted to that but, not in those words, when as a candidate he claimed to have come to the light and fight corruption on behalf of the American people.
He's a criminal through and through. And all his bellowing about witch hunts and fake news isn't going to change the fact that he's going down. The mighty Trump is gonna go down like the Bismarck.
I'm saying my prayers!!!!
Weisselberg cooperated with the feds. Not sure of the terms.
He has no such deal with Vance.
In America, a movement starts as a crusade, turns into a business, and ends up as a racket.
Platitude. Address the collateral damage at each step.
If Roe v. Wade is struck down, I doubt it will cost Republicans. Republican voters have never cared that GOP policies hurt them as well; as long as we Americans don't like it, they're happy. It's pure hatred.
That said, abortion will never be completely banned, because rich Republicans' wives and mistresses need abortions too.
A significant majority of Americans don't want Roe overturned. The problem is that for most of these voters, abortion is just not a front-burner issue. It's not the first thing they consider when choosing candidates. Many probably don't believe abortion would ever be completely criminalized and haven't given it much thought. For anti-reproduction rights fanatics, it's the only issue they care about. Especially in close elections, single-issue voters often determine who wins.
But if Roe is overturned, and the reality of women being denied abortions or resorting to black market means to end pregnancies starts to sink in, abortion could become a front-burner issue for people who didn't want it criminalized.
In some ways, abortion may have some parallels with prohibition. Prohibition was, apparently, a popular idea. The 18th Amendment was ratified quickly and easily. At the time it went into effect, 33 states had already passed liquor bans. And then the 18th Amendment went into effect. The promised improvements in the quality of life did not appear. Instead, organized crime took over. Even honest people remembered they liked having a drink now and then. The eventual backlash was overwhelming. FDR's platform in 1933 included a call for ending Prohibition, and in fact the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933, in even less time than it took to ratify the 18th, before FDR took office.
IMO a ban on abortions that is strict enough to set up black markets on drugs and back-alley abortion networks will cause a backlash and make abortion a front-burner issue for a lot more people. Every time a woman dies from a botched abortion or from being denied an abortion in some extreme circumstances, this is going to be in the news. It will be very educational to many people who never thought about why women get abortions.