Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Goldwater is the politician most often credited with having sparked the resurgence of the American conservative political movement in the 1960s. Despite his loss of the 1964 U.S. presidential election in a landslide, many political pundits and historians believe he laid the foundation for the conservative revolution to follow, as the grassroots organization and conservative takeover of the Republican party began a long-term realignment in American politics, which helped to bring about the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s. He also had a substantial impact on the American libertarian movement.

Trump has made clear he expects unfleeting loyalty from the judges he appointed, referring to them as “my judges” and grousing publicly when they ruled against his administration.

“If it’s my judges, you know how they’re gonna decide,” Trump assured evangelical leaders during the 2016 campaign.

I don't doubt it, however, Trump filled the courts with judges with ties to the federalist society with McConnell's help starting when he blocked Garland.`Trump lured conservatives by campaigning on getting conservative judges.

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Trump has made clear he expects unfleeting loyalty from the judges he appointed, referring to them as “my judges” and grousing publicly when they ruled against his administration.

“If it’s my judges, you know how they’re gonna decide,” Trump assured evangelical leaders during the 2016 campaign.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/12/trump-judges-mar-a-lago-courts-00056071


Supreme Court Justices with Federalist Society ties: (clockwise from upper left) Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.

It appears that John Durham’s investigation into why the FBI opened an investigation into the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives is coming to an end.

Durham’s investigation was a prime example of Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice not to enforce the nation’s laws, but to hurt his enemies, a charge former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman has made in his new book. Trump, Berman said, wanted his friends protected and his enemies—including former secretaries of state John Kerry and Hillary Clinton—prosecuted.

In April 2019, the month after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election finally saw daylight, Attorney General William Barr tapped United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham to investigate the circumstances under which the FBI began to look into Russian interference in the election in the first place.

The appointment was clearly an attempt to continue to distract people from the results of the Mueller report, which Barr had had an instrumental role in diminishing. Barr took office on February 14, 2019, just as Mueller was finishing his report. As Mueller’s superior, Barr got a copy of the report before anyone else, and he spun it to the media, claiming it exonerated the president and his team. In fact, Mueller established that Russia had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump and that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller complained to Barr about the spin, but it was too late: the public had bought it.

Trump and his allies jumped on Durham’s investigation, promising it would prove that FBI agents were part of a “Deep State” and that Durham would uncover “the crime of the century.” In December 2020, after Trump had lost the election, Barr revealed that he had made Durham a special counsel the previous October so that Durham could continue his work into the next administration.

But the investigation itself fizzled. Durham pressed charges against only three people. One pleaded guilty to altering an email and was sentenced to probation and community service. A grand jury alleged two others lied to the FBI. One was acquitted of the charges last May. The other is supposed to go on trial next month but has asked a judge to throw out the case for lack of evidence. But Durham’s three-year investigation did provide talking points for those attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation, keeping alive Trump’s false claims that it was just a “witch hunt.”

Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice was a profound attack on the principles of democracy. Using the law to attack enemies is a hallmark of authoritarians—just ask opposition leader Alexsei Navalny in Russia, who has been sentenced to incarceration on trumped-up charges to get him out of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s way—while it also encourages lawbreaking from those who don’t fear legal consequences.

We have seen that sense of being above the law today in stories about the willingness of Mississippi officials, including former governor Phil Bryant, to work with former NFL player Brett Favre to divert about $5 million in federal welfare funds from helping people in poverty to building a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter was a volleyball player.

We have seen it in the anger that Trump allies show when law enforcement treats them as it would anyone suspected of lawbreaking. MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell explained by video that yesterday FBI agents took his phone and that “what we’ve done is weaponize the FBI…it’s disgusting….” Agents executed the search warrant as part of a federal investigation into the alleged breach of Colorado voting machines.

We have seen it in Jeffrey Clark’s response today to ethics charges brought against him by the D.C. Bar. Clark was employed by the Department of Justice in late 2020, when he worked to swing the department behind Trump’s lie that he had won the election, a shift that would have utterly destroyed the rule of law in the U.S. Now he claims the D.C. Bar cannot punish him because normal rules of behavior don’t apply. In a filing today, he told the bar: “[T]the President has an absolute right to seek legal and other forms of advice…and officers of the United States have an absolute duty and corresponding privilege to provide their opinions on a confidential basis.”

The turning of the courts into a tool for partisan advantage has been part of the Republican project since 1986, when Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese vowed to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” That partisan use of the courts inspired then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to help Trump replace about 30% of the federal bench and to swing the Supreme Court to the far right with three new justices.

An examination by Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney shows that Trump’s judges were less experienced on the bench and had spent more time in politics than the judges appointed by other presidents, and that Trump expected them to side with him, calling them “my judges.” “If it’s my judges, you know how they’re gonna decide,” he told evangelical leaders in 2016. And some of them have, indeed, sided with the former president in surprising ways, most recently when Judge Aileen Cannon, confirmed after Trump lost the 2020 election, agreed with his request for a special master to review the government documents recovered by the government from Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s judges have revealed a willingness to break precedent to achieve political ends, and nowhere is that clearer than in the willingness of the Supreme Court to replace long-settled law with their own preferences, most notably in their Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion, but also in West Virginia v. EPA, limiting Congress’s ability to delegate regulatory authority to agencies, and so on.

That replacement of settled law with what looks to be political preferences has tanked popular faith in the Supreme Court. On Monday, Justice Elena Kagan noted that, ​​“Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves…when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process or when they’re imposing their own personal preferences.” People should be able to expect that “changes in personnel don’t send the entire legal system up for grabs.”

President Joe Biden appears to be trying to restore the rule of law to the Department of Justice, going out of his way to note that he is not involved with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decisions. Increasingly, it looks like Garland’s Justice Department is bearing down on those who considered themselves untouchable.

The trials and convictions of those who participated in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continue. Yesterday, three more rioters were found guilty of multiple charges. Twenty-five year old Patrick McCaughey III, of Ridgefield, Connecticut, who crushed Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, faces decades in prison.

Also today, Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, Jeremy Herb, and Kristen Holmes reported at CNN that not all of Trump’s loyalists are still acting as if they are above the law. Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has complied with a Department of Justice subpoena.

Perhaps most revealing of the restoration of the rule of law at the Justice Department is that former attorney general Barr has been on the television circuit defending the FBI and Biden’s Department of Justice from Trump’s fury over the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago that yielded documents—or empty folders—bearing the highest classified markings.

That is, the same man who sponsored Durham’s political mission has recently begun to speak up for the rule of law.

Really cute – trafficking these victims and dumping them on the island where Obama's home is located.

After three days on a Greyhound bus, Lela Mae Williams was just an hour from her destination—Hyannis, Mass.—when she asked the bus driver to pull over. She needed to change into her finest clothes. She had been promised the Kennedy family would be waiting for her.

It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, nearly 60 years ago, when that Greyhound bus from Little Rock, Ark., pulled into Hyannis. It slowed to a stop near the summer home of President John F. Kennedy and his family. When the doors opened, Lela Mae and her nine youngest children stepped onto the pavement.

Reporters' microphones pointed at her, their cameras trained on her family. The photographs in the next day's newspaper show Lela Mae looking immaculate. In an elegant black dress, a triple string of pearls and a white hat, she was dressed to start a new life.

"She was going to have a job, and she was going to be able to support her family," one of Lela Mae's daughters, Betty Williams, remembered in a recent interview. Before coming north to Massachusetts, Lela Mae had been promised a good job, good housing and a presidential welcome.

But President Kennedy was not there to meet her. And there was no job or permanent housing waiting for her in Hyannis. Instead, Lela Mae and the others were unwitting pawns in a segregationist game.

"It was one of the most inhuman things I have ever seen," recalled Margaret Moseley, a longtime civil rights activist in Hyannis, in a televised interview a few years before her death.

US President Joe Biden has been mocked online after appearing to become "lost on stage"

Couldn't find his own ass in the shower with both hands free.

This morning we awoke to news that rail carriers and union leaders had reached an agreement to avoid a national rail strike that would have badly tangled the supply chains that are just now starting to move efficiently again. That, in turn, would have affected everything from drinking water—the chlorine to purify urban systems is shipped by train—to consumer goods, costing up to $2 billion a day and likely sparking job losses and contributing to the inflation that has only recently begun to ease.

Like many of the victories President Joe Biden has celebrated during his term, this deal was complicated, requiring the administration to bring together a number of moving pieces. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the U.S. railroad industry consolidated into seven main carriers, which are now making record profits. In 2021, profits for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S.—the Union Pacific and BNSF—jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.

But those profits have come from cost-cutting measures that included job losses from an industry that had remained stable for the previous 25 years. Between November 2018 and December 2020, the industry lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains, as the railroads adopted a new system called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR). This system made the trains far more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules that leave little time for anything but work. Any disruption in those schedules—a family emergency, for example—brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Although workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.

Union leaders and railroad management have been negotiating for more than two and a half years for new contracts, and in July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences before the September 16 deadline by which the railway workers could legally strike.

The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases but kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate”; not all of the 13 involved unions did.

Thanks to the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Congress can force railroad workers to stay on the job, and that is precisely what Republicans proposed in this crisis: forcing workers to accept the recommendations of the PEB. This had political fire just two months before the midterms, as Republicans were trying to force Biden and the Democrats either to abandon the workers they claim to champion or to accept responsibility for a devastating strike. The railroads, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and business groups all favored this approach.

The administration put its weight behind negotiations, including not only three cabinet secretaries—Labor Secretary Marty Walsh (who is himself a former union official), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack—as well as Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, but also the president, who worked the phones and got mad that management would not loosen scheduling rules. The details of the deal are not yet published, but it appears to have accepted most of the PEB recommendations on pay, given workers a day of paid sick leave—union leaders wanted 15, up from none—and, apparently, removed the penalties for missing time for illness or medical emergencies, one of the workers’ key demands.

The deal is a big deal, but it has not yet been accepted by the union members, who will still be on tight schedules although they can now take unpaid time off for medical emergencies without losing their jobs. (My guess is that higher pay is intended to make this seem like a workable solution to the scheduling issue.) Initial responses to the agreement seemed mixed.

The deal does, though, highlight that Biden is using the power of the presidency to protect the American people while trying to be fair to labor and management, a system pioneered by Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and adopted afterward by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, among others. It’s a very different principle than the idea that workers should accept whatever conditions management imposes on them.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board yesterday wrote: “You’d think some $5 trillion in new spending by this Congress, much of which will fatten union bottom lines, would be enough to buy some labor peace. If not, Democrats on Capitol Hill have the power to impose another cooling off period so the two sides can negotiate without a strike. Let’s see if Democrats side with their Big Labor allies, or with the U.S. economy that needs the trains to run on time.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Biden tweeted today. “To answer your question: yes, the trains are running on time.”

Yesterday, ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran pointed out that Biden and his team have “masterfully” handled “the greatest international security crisis since 9/11,” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They united NATO against Moscow and held the alliance together, wrecked the Russian economy, helped Europeans find energy from new sources, kept the U.S. and NATO out of the war, helped Ukraine with intelligence and weapons, all despite those at home working against him.

Long term, this will advance U.S. interests not only by strengthening alliances, but also by demonstrating that America can be a force for good and by showing Putin’s brand of authoritarianism “as a con, a cheap costume donned by the thieves and gangsters in the Kremlin.”

Today, the White House held a bipartisan summit against “hate-fueled violence in our country,” promising “that when Americans stand united to renew civic bonds and heal divides, we can help prevent acts of hate and violence.” At the “United We Stand” summit, Biden offered a “whole-of-society response to prevent, respond to, and recover from hate-fueled violence, and to foster national unity.” Attending the summit were survivors of gun violence, religious leaders, community organizers, law enforcement officers, philanthropists, journalists, and local politicians. Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, introduced the president.

“[T]here are core values that should bring us together as Americans,” Biden said, “And one of them is standing together against hate, racism, bigotry, and violence that have long haunted and plagued our nation.” “In the last few years, it’s been given much too much oxygen in our politics, in our media, and on the Internet; too much hate—all for power and profit.”

“[T]he vast majority of Americans are overwhelmingly united against such violence,” he said. “The vast majority of us believe in honesty, decency, and respect for others, patriotism, liberty, justice for all, hope, and possibilities.”

Biden announced new investments in community building and called for “a new era of national service” with a $15 hourly wage and for Congress to remove social media’s near immunity for hate speech. He called for individuals to step up as well, speaking out against hate and building bridges.

“We must choose to be a nation of hope, unity, and optimism or a nation of fear and division and hate,” he said.

Why do you persist in posting misinformation, lies, and wacky conspiracy theories?