Even in the Former East Germany ( as well as Poland Hungary Romania and the rest of the former Soviet empire) the differences with the Western European economies were stark. Perhaps the most vivid example was the Porsche, Mercedes Benz and Audi automobiles of West German, contrasted with the Trabant ( an ugly plastic body vehicle with a very dirty two cycle IC engine) produced in East Germany. That just one generation of Socialism did that to Germans is a truly remarkable thing.
As predicted, last week was an important one for the Republican Party.
The Republicans’ rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday stayed in the news throughout the weekend. On Friday, independent journalist Jonathan Katz figured out that a key story in it was false. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) described a twelve-year-old child sex trafficked by Mexican cartel members, implying that the young girl was trafficked because of President Joe Biden’s border policies.
Katz tracked down the facts. Britt was describing the life of Karla Jacinto, who was indeed trafficked as a child, but not in the present and not in the U.S. and not by cartels. She was trafficked from 2004 to 2008—during the George W. Bush administration—in Mexico, at the hands of a pimp who entrapped vulnerable girls. Jacinto has become an advocate for child victims and has told her story before Congress, and she met Britt at an event for government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.
Britt’s dramatic delivery of the rebuttal had already invited parody and concern about the religious themes she demonstrated. The news that a central image in it was a lie just made things worse. “Everyone’s f*cking losing it,” a Republican strategist told The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”
On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to replace former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who resigned effective Friday, with Trump loyalist Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. They will co-chair the organization and have made it clear their primary goal is to put Trump back in the White House.
Friday night, on Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a video announcing that the old Republican Party “no longer exists outside of the D.C. beltway…. The move that happened today…that’s the final blow. People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”
Just what that means was crystal clear on Friday night, when Trump hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the Trump Organization’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. The darling of the radical right, Orbán has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and hosted former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and his policies inspired the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation Florida governor Ron DeSantis has championed.
The right wing’s fondness for Orbán springs from his having rejected democracy and replaced it in Hungary with what he calls an “illiberal state.” Orbán and other far-right leaders working against democracy maintain that the central principle of democracy, equality before the law, undermines society. It permits immigration, which, in their minds, dilutes the “purity” of a people, and it requires that LGBTQ+ individuals and women have the same rights as heterosexual men. Such a world challenges the heteronormative patriarchal world traditionalists crave.
Orbán’s takeover of the press, elimination of rival political parties, partisan gerrymandering, capture of the courts, and control of Hungary’s government are not just ideological, though, but also economic. Corruption and the capture of valuable factories and properties for cronies have allowed Orbán and his allies to amass fortunes.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said on Friday. Trump said that Orbán simply says, “‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and…he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”
On Saturday, Republicans in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, censured Senator James Lankford (R-OK) over his work negotiating the border security measure. In January, state Republicans claimed they had passed a resolution “strongly” condemning Lankford; others said the vote for the resolution was “not legitimate and definitely does not represent the voice of all Oklahoma Republicans.”
Lankford is a far-right senator whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to represent the Republicans in the negotiations. House Republicans had demanded the border security measure before they would allow a vote on a national security supplemental bill that funds Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.
Because the Democrats are desperate to fund Ukraine, they were willing to give up things they had never laid on the table before, including a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States as children, making the bill that emerged from the negotiations strongly favor the Republican position on immigration. The Border Patrol Officers’ union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal all endorsed it.
But the House Republicans’ demand for a border measure appears to have been an attempt to kill the national security supplemental bill altogether. As soon as it became clear that there would be a deal, Trump came out against it. He demanded that Congress kill the measure, and his loyalists agreed.
Lankford, who had helped to produce the strongest border measure in years at the request of the nominal head of the party, has now been censured because he crossed Trump.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, Biden signed into law one of the consolidated appropriations bills that must be finished to fund the government. The other must be finished by March 22.
Biden has continued to ride the momentum built by Thursday’s State of the Union speech. His campaign has released a number of advertisements, and today he was in Georgia, where the largest political action committees representing communities of color—the AAPI Victory Fund, the Latino Victory Fund, and The Collective PAC—endorsed him and pledged $30 million to mobilize communities of color to vote in 2024.
Hi Frank. Thanks for the kind words. Very good to hear from you as well. A few takeaways from all this.
1. It isn't necessary to agree on every issue with those you like and respect.
2. No one is right about everything all the time.
3. Pay attention to your critics. Sometimes they're right and that is how you correct your errors.
4.When you are about to make a grave mistake the one who warns you is not necessarily your enemy, while the one who sees and keeps his mouth shut is certainly not your friend. ( the Navy had a cruder saying reflecting the same idea.)
Regarding Mussolini & Hitler, both were briefly effective in getting a few fairly obvious and easy things done but both had evil goals, serious character & moral defects, and each failed badly in leadership, though in different ways. If you are covertly implying that Trump's narcissisms & crudities put him in the same league, then I disagree.
We can't afford any more debacles such as the one occurring on our Southern border now.
Claremont Institute officials closely involved with Society for American Civic Renewal, which experts say is rooted in Christian nationalism
The president of the rightwing Claremont Institute and another senior Claremont official are both closely involved with the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”, and which experts say is rooted in extreme Christian nationalism and religious autocracy.
The revelations emerge from documents gathered in public records requests, including emails between several senior members of SACR: Claremont president Ryan P Williams; its director of state coalitions and Boise State University professor Scott Yenor; and others including former soap manufacturer and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood.
The trove also contains an “internal” SACR “mission statement” with a far more radical edge than the public “vision” now recorded on the organization’s website.
That document speaks of recruiting a “brotherhood” who will “form the backbone of a renewed American regime” and who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise”; whose “objectives” include to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime”.
The document does not indicate that such “renewal” will take place through participation in electoral contests, and nor does it make mention of the US constitution.
Along with the financial links between the SACR and Claremont – the Guardian previously reported Claremont’s $26,248 donation to SACR in 2020 – the documents raise questions as to what extent SACR is an initiative of the Claremont Institute, and to what extent its participants have abandoned liberal, secular or democratic politics.
The Guardian contacted Ryan Williams, Claremont’s president, for comment on his involvement in SACR, and on the extent of Claremont’s ties to the organization.
In an email he said: “While the Claremont Institute acted as a fiscal sponsor to help the Society for American Civic Renewal establish itself as an incorporated 501(c)(10), that was the end of any corporate collaboration between the Claremont Institute and SACR.”
He added: “As a founding board member of SACR in my personal capacity, obviously I think that a fraternal order dedicated to civic and cultural renaissance and rooted in community, virtue, and wisdom is a very good thing.”
Williams also confirmed that he continues to serve as a SACR board member.
The Guardian also contacted Scott Yenor and Boise State University for comment.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said of the SACR documents: “Their planned regime is obviously far from a multiracial democracy. The documents appear to be describing a religious autocracy.”
Laura K Field, a writer, political theorist and senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, a Washington thinktank, said the documents expressed “extreme Christian nationalism” where “a particular kind of Christianity should dominate as an ideal, and that it should dominate permanently”.
Yenor and SACR
Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Idaho’s Boise State University and simultaneously the senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute.
His Claremont appointment came in February 2023. Media reports at that time indicated that Yenor would be working closely with the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and DeSantis-aligned legislators; when the job was announced the governor’s wife, Casey Desantis, tweeted: “Thrilled to welcome Scott Yenor from the Claremont Institute to his new home in Tallahassee.”
Reporting in the New York Times last month put Yenor at the center of a network of activists tied to Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits to wage an “anti-DEI crusade” against diversity, equity, and inclusion measures in educational institutions, corporations and public agencies.
Unreported until now is Yenor’s place as an ideological and organizational leader in SACR, and the radical nature of that organization’s aims as understood by he and other core members.
SACR is structured as a 501(c)(10) body under the section of US tax law that provides nonprofit status for organizations “with a fraternal purpose”.
In 2020 the umbrella organization was incorporated in Indiana with Charles Haywood as principal, and the first local lodge was established in Dallas, Texas. Subsequently, three local lodges were established in Idaho: in Boise and Couer d’Alene in 2021, and Moscow in 2022.
Idaho company filings show that Scott Yenor became president and the only listed principal officer of the Boise lodge on 5 August 2023.
Secrecy at SACR
But emails indicate that he had taken a board role in the national organization even earlier than that date.
On 25 January 2023, lawyer Clyde Taylor – now at Wagenmaker Law but until 2019 an associate at the rightwing litigation firm the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty – wrote to Haywood and Skyler Kressin about their trademark application for the SACR logo.
Haywood forwarded the lawyer’s email to Yenor, Claremont president Williams, and Nathanial “Nate” Fischer, copying in Kressin on two addresses including one hosted at SACR’s sacr.us domain.
“We should probably have a board meeting to discuss this, finances, etc,” Haywood wrote in response to Yenor, suggesting Yenor and the others he copied in were members of that body.
Haywood added a suggestion on encrypted messaging services, indicating an imperative of secrecy inside SACR. “I vote we create a new Signal group and have a board meeting. Any takers?” he said. The group was then set up.
The Guardian reported last August that on his website Haywood has repeatedly envisioned serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” which might at some point find itself in conflict with the federal government.
Haywood has also expressed a desire to recruit “shooters” to help defend the “extended, quite sizeable, compound” he occupies on the western fringe of Carmel, Indiana. According to documents lodged with the city of Carmel, the latest construction project on Haywood’s compound is a six-bedroom faux-classical mansion with a central library room that occupies both of the building’s floors.
He has funded SACR through his Howdy Doody Good Times foundation to the tune of at least $50,000, according to 2021 and 2022 tax filings, along with at least $50,000 to the Claremont Institute.
In the same report, the Guardian revealed that Kressin, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, appears to serve a key administrative role in SACR. Idaho and Texas company records show that Kressin incorporated lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dallas; serves as a director of the Coeur d’Alene and Dallas lodges; and was named as the principal officer of the parent organization on its 2020-2021 tax return.
The Guardian reported last September that Fischer, a Claremont Lincoln fellow, was president of SACR’s Dallas lodge and owns a firm that has won hundreds of thousands of dollars in government ammunition contracts. He also owns another firm that helped produce videos in which Claremont chairman Thomas Klingenstein in which he exhorted rightwingers to join in a “cold civil war” against “woke communists”.
The Guardian contacted Nate Fischer, Skyler Kressin and Charles Haywood for comment.
Neither Kressin nor Haywood responded. Fischer did not respond directly, but on Friday morning on X, formerly Twitter, he left a 900-word post offering some material from internal SACR documents, admitting that the Guardian’s reporting had led him to the conclusion that “this is a good time to share more about the organization.
SACR’s mission: ‘dominance’ and ‘authority’ in an ‘new aligned regime’
Another document suggests reasons that SACR’s leadership might want to avoid scrutiny: in internal discussions. “Civic renewal” appears to equate to regime change in America.
The document is one of two Yenor attached to a 27 April 2021 email, sent from his Boise State email address to a personal email address. The email text simply says “print”.
The SACR document contains two versions of the organization’s “mission statement” – one “public” and one “internal” – along with a list of “objectives” for the organization.
Its authenticity as a working document is indicated by the current “vision” articulated on SACR’s website, which currently features what appears to be a reworked version of the “public” mission statement.
The 2021 document envisions “a vigorous civic renewal that will reflect the past while facing the future”, while the website sets out a “new thing for a new day, informed by the wisdom of the past but facing the future”. Each version promises to “reclaim a humane vision of society”.
A harder-edged “internal” mission statement, however, stands in stark contrast to these anodyne public presentations.
It first announces: “Our aim is to build and maintain a robust network of capable men who can reverse our society’s decline and return us to the successful path off which America has strayed.”
The document says the organization’s founders are “un-hyphenated Americans, and we believe in a particular Christianity that is not blurred by modernist philosophies.”
It says: “We are willing to act decisively to secure permanently, as much as anything is permanent, the political and social dominance” of their beliefs.
In terms of recruiting, the document says: “Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm.”
Further down, the document specifies five organizational “objectives” that encompass nepotistic business practices, the grooming of new and emerging “elites” within SACR, and, experts say, an apparently insurrectionary political project.
The first objective is to “identify and provide formation for local elites … capable of exercising authority and who are aligned with our goal of complete civic renewal”, and warning that “concrete temporal achievements, not furthering intellectual discussion”.
The second objective is to help those local elites build “fraternal networks which will advance both the members of those networks and our collective goals” including “direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business”.
The third objectives to coordinate across the “fraternal networks” to bring “political awareness” to matters such as “hiring and promotion; award of contracts; internal policies and procedures; and leadership succession”.
A fifth objective is to “collect, curate and document a list of potential appointees and hires for an aligned future regime”, who would likely not be founding participants, but “ … men who grow up in the system”.
Asked what an “aligned regime” might look like, Williams, the Claremont Institute’s president, wrote: “It would, more likely than not, be some form of the US constitutional order, but with much higher fidelity to that order before it was corrupted and subverted by modern progressivism.”
Perhaps ominously, a fourth objective is to “defend fraternal networks, our own and allies, against attacks by those opposed to civic renewal, and strongly deter such attacks”, though no details are offered on what form this defense or deterrence might take.
Although the document makes reference to America’s founding, Field, the Niskanen fellow, said that it contradicted its spirit.
“George Washington, Jefferson, [and] Madison all embraced religious pluralism very explicitly, and the constitution reflects that,” she said.
“This is anti-constitutional, and I think many, many faithful Christians would say it’s anti-Christian.”
Beirich, the extremism expert, said the mission statement and objectives were “essentially a stealth plan to replace everything about the current government with a religious autocracy”, with the addition of an effort to “fashion young people behind closed doors for the eventual takeover of the regime, right?”
“They’re going to grow them up as Christian autocrats.”
The accumulated evidence of the performance of planned economies (of which the Soviet and early (before Deng) China economies are the largest examples, indicates only slow growth, little new product development, widespread bureaucratic corruption and mass poverty.
The elites lived relatively well, but the people suffered.
It is far easier to moderate the adverse side effects of Free markets than those of Planned economies and the historical facts provide ample support for that principal.
Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.”
According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded.
The US and its allies have supported Ukraine but further US aid is held up in Congress, having passed the Senate with bipartisan support only to be blocked in the House, which is controlled by far-right Trump allies.
Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said: “If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.” (This would likely mean Ukraine losing the war to Russia.)
Despite facing 91 criminal charges and having suffered multimillion-dollar reverses in civil suits concerning his business affairs and a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true”, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
Long seen to demonstrate deference towards and enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Trump recently suggested that if re-elected he would encourage Russia to attack US allies he deemed not to contribute enough to the Nato alliance.
Joe Biden has condemned such remarks, as “dumb, shameful and un-American” and has recently accused Trump of capitulating to authoritarian leaders.
Orbán and Trump met at Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, last weekend.
In a statement, Orbán said: “President Trump was a president of peace, he commanded respect in the world, and thus he created the conditions for peace. During his presidency there was peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine. And there would be no war today if he were still president of the United States.
“We agreed that there will be peace when there are world leaders who want peace. I am proud that Hungary is one of those countries. We also agreed that there is still much potential in US-Hungarian economic relations.
“Here in America the campaign is in full swing, and indeed is rushing ahead. It is up to Americans to make their own decision, and it is up to us Hungarians to frankly admit that it would be better for the world – and better for Hungary, too – if President Donald Trump were to return to power.”
Trump said: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic, he’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”
On Saturday, Biden told supporters in Philadelphia: “You know who [Trump’s] meeting with today, down in Mar-a-Lago? Orbán of Hungary, who stated flatly he doesn’t think democracy works and is looking for dictatorship.”
Trump has said he will be a dictator on “day one” if he defeats Biden.
On Monday, the CNN national security analyst Jim Sciutto reported the views of former advisers who say Trump wants to be an authoritarian leader.
“He views himself as a big guy,” John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, told Sciutto. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys … get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”
Orbán’s takeover of the press, elimination of rival political parties, partisan gerrymandering, capture of the courts, and control of Hungary’s government are not just ideological, though, but also economic. Corruption and the capture of valuable factories and properties for cronies have allowed Orbán and his allies to amass fortunes.
“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said on Friday. Trump said that Orbán simply says, “‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and…he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”
Bloodbath at RNC: Trump team slashes staff at committee
Donald Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee on Monday began the process of pushing out dozens of officials, according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC.
All told, the expectation is that more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications and data departments will be let go. Those being asked to resign include five members of the senior staff, though the names were not made public. Additionally, some vendor contracts are expected to be cut.
In a letter to some political and data staff, Sean Cairncross, the RNC’s new chief operating officer, said that the new committee leadership was “in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned” with its vision. “During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team.”
The overhaul is aimed at cutting, what one of the people described as, “bureaucracy” at the RNC. But the move also underscores the swiftness with which Trump’s operation is moving to take over the Republican Party’s operations after the former president all but clinched the party’s presidential nomination last week.
Trump’s campaign took over operational control of the RNC on Monday. On Friday, former North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley was elected the RNC’s new chair, and Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump was elected as co-chair. Both had Trump’s endorsement. Additionally, Trump senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita was named as the RNC’s new chief of staff.
Whatley is replacing Ronna McDaniel, who stepped down last week after serving more than seven years in the post. Trump and McDaniel had been longtime allies, but the former president had soured on the chairperson as of late because he felt that she was not doing enough on “voter integrity”-related issues, and because she hosted Republican primary debates that she refused to participate in.
Trump advisers have described the RNC’s structure as overly bloated and bureaucratic, which they believe has contributed to the party’s cash woes. The RNC had about $8 million at the end of December, only about one-third as much as the Democratic National Committee.
Under the new structure, the Trump campaign is looking to merge its operations with the RNC. Key departments, such as communications, data and fundraising, will effectively be one and the same.
corey robin@CoreyRobin
5h
Trump basically looking to strip the Republican Party for parts. That's all this is. So...fascism without total war. Fascism without a revolution or left mass movement to oppose. Fascism without a working class. Fascism without futurism. And now fascism without a party.
Authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary visited former president Trump in Florida on Friday, and on Sunday, Orbán assured Hungarian state media that Trump “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” Russian state media gloated at the news, and that Trump’s MAGA allies in Congress are already helping him end support for Ukraine.
President Joe Biden and a strong majority of lawmakers in both chambers of Congress, as well as defense officials, support appropriating more aid to Ukraine, believing its defense is crucial to America’s national security. Today, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once again called such aid “critical.”
The Senate passed a national security supplemental bill early in the morning on February 13, by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29. The bill would be expected to pass the House, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, refuses to bring it up for a vote.
Trump loyalists have been obstructing aid to Ukraine since President Joe Biden asked for it in October 2023. Their insistence that they would not address the national security needs of the U.S. in Ukraine until they were addressed at the border now sure looks like a smokescreen to help Russian president Vladimir Putin take Ukraine, a plan that would explain why Trump urged Republicans to kill the national security supplemental bill even when it included a strong border component that favored Republican positions.
It appears as though Trump is deliberately undermining the national security of the United States.
In excerpts from his forthcoming book that appeared on the CNN website today, journalist Jim Sciutto reported conversations with Trump’s second chief of staff, General John Kelly, and Trump’s third national security advisor, John Bolton, in which the men recounted Trump’s fondness for dictators. “He views himself as a big guy,” Bolton told Sciutto. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.” “He’s not a tough guy by any means, but in fact quite the opposite,” Kelly said. “But that’s how he envisions himself.”
Kelly noted that Trump praised Hitler and what he thought was the loyalty of Hitler’s generals (some of whom actually tried to assassinate him), but both Kelly and Bolton noted that he “most consistently lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Certainly, Trump prizes loyalty to himself: today Alex Isenstadt of Politico reported a “bloodbath” at the Republican National Committee as the incoming Trump loyalists are pushing out more than 60 RNC officials and staffers to make sure everyone is “aligned” with Trump.
An exclusive interview today by Katelyn Polantz, Kaitlan Collins, and Jeremy Herb of CNN revealed that Brian Butler, who worked at Mar-a-Lago for twenty years, has come forward to give the public the same information he told to investigators looking into Trump’s theft of classified documents. On June 3, 2022, the day Trump and his family were scheduled to fly to New Jersey for the summer, Trump’s aide Walt Nauta asked Butler if he could borrow a car from the Mar-a-Lago car service, although Butler and his valets usually handled getting the Trump family luggage onto the plane. June 3 was the same day Trump and his lawyer were meeting with officials from the Department of Justice at Mar-a-Lago to arrange for Trump to turn over national security documents.
Butler loaded a vehicle with the luggage, then met Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira—at the time a close friend of Butler—driving a vehicle loaded with bankers boxes, at the West Palm Beach airport. Butler says he didn’t know the bankers boxes contained anything unusual, and he helped Nauta load the plane with the boxes as well as the luggage. “They were the boxes that were in the indictment, the white bankers boxes. That’s what I remember loading,” Butler added.
Butler was also present during conversations about hiding evidence from federal authorities.
While Trump opposes aid to Ukraine, President Joe Biden pushed for it once again when he released his fiscal year 2025 budget today. (There is overlap this year between funding fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025 because House Republicans have been unable to agree to last year’s appropriations bills. Those are supposed to be done before October 1, when the new fiscal year starts.)
In addition to funding for Ukraine, the president’s $7.3 trillion budget covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ benefits, all of which are mandatory, and expands investment in health care, child care, and housing. Biden would pay for all this—and reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over the next ten years—with higher taxes on those making more than $400,000 a year and on corporations.
In his defense of the middle class as the engine of economic growth and his declaration that the days of trickle-down economics are over, Biden sounds much like Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he ushered in the New Deal in the 1930s. In that era, Roosevelt and his Democratic allies replaced a government that worked for men of property with one that worked for ordinary Americans.
There were other echoes of the FDR administration today as Trump’s undermining of aid to Ukraine has become clear. Ukraine stands between an aggressive Russian dictator and a democratic Europe.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. had to decide whether to turn away from those standing against dictators like Hitler, or to stand behind them. There was a strong isolationist impulse in the United States. Some people resented that war industries had made fortunes supplying the devastating weaponry of World War I. Others believed that Hitler’s advance in Europe was a distraction from Asia, where their business interests were entwined. Congress passed laws to keep the U.S. from entanglement in Europe until Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Then Congress allowed other nations to buy munitions from the U.S. so long as they carried them away in their own ships.
The following year, FDR promised the American people he would not send troops into “any foreign wars.” But in July 1940, newly-appointed British prime minister Winston Churchill asked the U.S. for direct help after Britain lost eleven destroyers in ten days to the German Navy. Roosevelt exchanged 50 destroyers for 99-year leases on certain British bases, but that would not be enough. He asked Congress to provide military aid.
On this date in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.” The new law gave the president wide-ranging authority to sell, give, lease, or lend war supplies to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”
The law defined “war supplies” generously: they ranged from aircraft and boats to guns and tools, to information and technical designs, to food and supplies. The law also gave the president authority to authorize U.S. companies to manufacture such war supplies for other countries whose defense was important to the United States.
This law is the one we know as the Lend-Lease Act, and it was central to the ability of the Allied Powers—those standing against Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito—to fight off the Axis Powers who were trying to take over the globe in the 1940s. By the time the law ended on September 20, 1945, supplies worth more than $50 billion in 1940 dollars—equivalent to more than $770 billion today—had gone to the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France, China, and other allies.
Four days after he signed the Lend-Lease Act into law, on March 15, 1941, FDR told journalists at the White House Correspondents’ Association, “The big news story of this week is this: The world has been told that we, as a united Nation, realize the danger that confronts us—and that to meet that danger, our democracy has gone into action.”
FDR noted the “superb morale” of the British, who he said were “completely clear in their minds about the one essential fact—that they would rather die…free…than live as slaves.” He continued: “The British people and their Grecian allies need ships. From America, they will get ships. They need planes. From America, they will get planes. From America they need food. From America, they will get food. They need tanks and guns and ammunition and supplies of all kinds. From America, they will get tanks and guns and ammunition and supplies of all kinds….
“And so our country is going to be what our people have proclaimed it must be—the arsenal of democracy…. Never, in all our history, have Americans faced a job so well worth while.”
Today, Democratic voters in Georgia gave President Joe Biden enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president when the Democratic National Convention is held in August. Republican voters in Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Washington gave Trump enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination, although former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race last week, continues to win voters—more than 21% in Washington.
Also today, Special Counsel Robert Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee about his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents in his possession from his years as vice president. The hearing appeared to show that the Democrats have finally found a way to defang the tactic Republicans have been using since the 1990s. For decades now, under the guise of the important function of congressional oversight, Republicans have weaponized congressional hearings to smear Democrats in the media.
In this Congress, and especially today, rather than accept the framework the Republicans advance as they try to craft a narrative for right-wing media, Democrats have pushed back with facts and their own story.
In January 2023, apparently wishing to avoid accusations that the Department of Justice was favoring Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur, a partisan Republican whom Trump had appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland, to oversee the investigation into whether Biden had mishandled classified documents.
In his final report, released last month, Hur concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter...even if there was no policy against charging a sitting president.” But then Hur went on for more than 300 pages to offer a picture of Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Notably, Hur reported that Biden did not remember the date of his son Beau Biden’s death.
The media ran with that editorializing rather than the fact that Hur had concluded that criminal charges were not warranted. Stories about Biden’s age swamped the media. Judd Legum of Popular Information found that in the four days after Hur’s report appeared, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal together published 81 articles about Hur’s assessment of Biden’s memory, suggesting that Biden was sliding into dementia and should not be running for reelection.
Republicans immediately demanded the transcriptions of Biden’s interviews with Hur and his staff, saying they needed more information for their case for impeaching Biden. Republican House leadership issued a statement that “[a] man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen.
But while Republicans clearly designed their plans for this Congress’s investigations to seed smears of Democrats in the public mind, Democrats have come to hearings exceedingly well prepared to turn the tables back on the Republicans. That strategy was obvious today as it quickly became clear in the hearing that it was not Biden who was on the hot seat.
Hours before the hearing was about to begin, the Department of Justice released a transcript of Biden’s interviews, held in the two days after Hamas attacked Israel as he rushed to respond to that crisis. The transcripts belied Hur’s portrayal of Biden’s answers; among other things, he clearly knew the exact date Beau died.
The transcript also revealed a pointed contrast between Trump and Biden, with the president telling investigators he didn’t “own a stock or a bond that I’m aware of…. I never wanted to have any argument…. The thing I valued most my whole life, my reputation and integrity. So I never wanted to have anything that someone said, you bought that stock and it went up because you traded. Never did that.”
Democrats came to the hearing prepared to turn it into a hearing on Trump. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) called out Hur for unprofessional behavior in disparaging the president after finding the matter should be dismissed. Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) suggested Hur was angling for an appointment in a second Trump administration and asked him to demonstrate his credibility by pledging that he would not accept such an appointment. Hur declined to do so.
The hearing was covered live on various television channels, and the Democrats used that media time to show videos of Trump slurring his words, forgetting names, and speaking in word salad, getting their own sound bites to voters. They got Hur to spell out the clear contrast between Trump’s theft of documents and Biden’s cooperation with the government.
Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.
In other news today, pressure on House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring up the national security supplemental bill that includes aid for Ukraine continues to increase. Although the administration says it has found an additional $300 million from Pentagon cost savings to supply artillery rounds and munitions for Ukraine, national security advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters:
“It is nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine's battlefield needs and it will not prevent Ukraine from running out of ammunition."
House Democrats are working to get enough signatures on a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring up a vote on a supplemental bill—which is expected to pass if it makes it to a vote—and today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also added pressure, encouraging Johnson to bring up the measure that passed the Senate in mid-February. “Allow a vote,” he said. “A vote. Let the House speak.”
Johnson’s control of the House, such as it is, got a little weaker today as Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) announced he is leaving Congress at the end of next week. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress and having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress,” Buck told CNN’s Dana Bash. “But I’m leaving because I think there’s a job to do out there…. This place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people.”
The Internal Revenue Service today launched a pilot program in 12 states to enable taxpayers to file their federal tax returns directly, for free. The Treasury Department estimates that about one third of all tax returns are simple enough to use this new system and that about 19 million taxpayers could use it this season.
Across most of the battleground states, President Biden’s re-election campaign is trailed by worrisome polling, gripes about a slow ramp-up and Democratic calls to show more urgency to the threat posed by former President Donald J. Trump.
Then there is Wisconsin.
Mr. Biden — who is scheduled to travel to Milwaukee on Wednesday to visit his state campaign headquarters — did not have to rev up a re-election apparatus in Wisconsin. Local Democrats never shut down a vaunted organizing network they built for the 2020 presidential campaign and maintained through the 2022 midterm elections and a 2023 State Supreme Court contest that was the most expensive judicial race in American history.
While in other presidential battlegrounds, Democrats are still trying to explain the stakes of the 2024 election and what a second Trump term would mean, Wisconsin Democrats say their voters don’t need to be told the difference between winning and losing.
Democrats in Wisconsin spent eight years boxed out of power by Gov. Scott Walker and Republicans who held an iron grip on the state government, then four more with a gerrymandered Republican-led Legislature. Then they watched abortion become illegal overnight when a prohibition written in 1849 suddenly became law with the fall of Roe v. Wade. Party leaders in the state say there is a widespread understanding that the stakes are not theoretical.
“We organize year-round in Wisconsin,” said Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. “We already have the infrastructure in place. We know how to do this, and we’ve been able to activate the folks who know what’s on the line.”
Mr. Biden has come to Wisconsin so many times — eight visits since he became president, and six for Vice President Kamala Harris — that for many Wisconsin Democrats, his visit on Wednesday comes almost as an afterthought.
Just as big a deal for local organizers, Ms. Rodriguez said, are the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s canvass kickoff events, which are set to begin on Saturday at the 44 offices opened by the party and the Biden campaign throughout the state. Ms. Rodriguez said she was planning to be at one in Wausau, a central Wisconsin city where the progressive mayor is up for re-election in April.
It helps Mr. Biden that the two issues his campaign has placed at the heart of his campaign — abortion rights and democracy — have been at the center of Wisconsin’s political discussion in recent years.
Polling from The New York Times and Siena College in November found that while Mr. Biden had an advantage of three percentage points on the question of democracy across all of the top battleground states, he had a 13-point lead on the issue in Wisconsin alone. In those polls, Mr. Biden led in Wisconsin while trailing in each of the other battleground states.
More recent surveys from Marquette Law School and Fox News have found Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump effectively tied in a head-to-head contest; with third-party candidates included, the former president edges ahead by two or three points.
Republicans in Wisconsin contested Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory there, which came by just 20,608 votes, well into 2022. One of the party’s candidates for governor in 2022 ran on a platform of decertifying the 2020 election and rescinding Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes (which is not something the Constitution allows), and the State Assembly authorized a yearlong, $2 million investigation into election fraud that turned up no new evidence.
Last year, a liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won the crucial State Supreme Court election in a major victory for Democrats. Soon after, Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the State Assembly, floated the idea of impeaching her before she could cast deciding votes on cases that would eventually lead to overturning the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps and its abortion prohibition.
Internal polling by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin last September found that 70 percent of Democratic voters had heard about the Republican impeachment threats — an extraordinary figure considering it was a state issue in an era of weakened local news reporting.
And right-wing Wisconsin Republicans remain angry. On Monday, a group of them submitted more than 10,000 signatures to recall Mr. Vos, who despite his efforts to sow doubts about elections is widely viewed as being insufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump. (The Wisconsin Election Commission said on Tuesday that an initial review had found that the recall group’s petitions did not contain enough valid signatures to force a recall election for Mr. Vos.)
Senator Ron Johnson, the spiritual leader of Wisconsin Republicans, said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Biden’s standing in the state depended more on voters’ sour views about the economy than on questions about democracy and abortion rights.
“When you go to the grocery store and you take a look at what the bill is, when young people try and buy a house and realize it’s completely unaffordable, when you’re stuck in your house with your low-interest-rate mortgage and you can’t trade up because interest rates are so much higher, these are the things that actually impact people,” Mr. Johnson said. “They’re not economists. They’re not looking at the monthly economic figures that Biden tries to tout.”
Mr. Johnson said that he was “hoping Democrats won’t be able to scaremonger” on abortion rights and that he did not believe Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to question the validity of the 2020 election — some of which he was involved in — would have ramifications for 2024.
“I think those are pretty well-forgotten stories, personally,” he said. “The 2020 election mess is pretty well in the rearview mirror.”
Whether that’s true or not will become clearer at the Republican National Convention, to be held at Milwaukee’s professional basketball arena in July.
Abortion is also a far more tangible issue in Wisconsin than in the other political battlegrounds.
The procedure became illegal overnight in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the state’s 1849 law kicked in. Women across the state were enraged, and the issue powered victories for Gov. Tony Evers, Judge Protasiewicz and several mayors last spring.
By the time courts ruled in September that abortions could resume in the state, Gov. Tony Evers and other Democrats had carried out a 15-month campaign to remind voters that conservatives were responsible for the ban. When he won his bid for re-election to the Senate in 2022, Mr. Johnson campaigned on holding a statewide referendum on the issue — in part to deflect his party’s support for abortion restrictions.
Dianne Hesselbein, the Democratic minority leader in the State Senate, said abortion politics were still driving political discussions — including one at her birthday party this past weekend.
“My 24-year-old daughter was saying how excited she was to vote for Biden and how she never thought that this whole thing with abortion would really happen,” Ms. Hesselbein said.
One spot of danger for Wisconsin Democrats is the slow decline in turnout and enthusiasm from the state’s Black voters, many of whom live on Milwaukee’s north side. In January, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Election Commission wrote in an email to party members that a decline in the city’s Black turnout was “due to a ‘well thought out multifaceted plan.’”
Democrats, who have fought for years with little success against Republican efforts to require voter identification, limit drop boxes and enact other restrictions on voting, said in interviews that the elections of Black Democrats as the Milwaukee mayor and the Milwaukee County executive would give Mr. Biden key party surrogates that he did not have in his 2020 campaign.
“That’s really going to help us bring that enthusiasm to these neighborhoods, to the communities that we grew up in,” said David Crowley, the county executive. “We can talk about the work that we have been able to do.”
Quote:The accumulated evidence of the performance of planned economies (of which the Soviet and early (before Deng) China economies are the largest examples, indicates only slow growth, little new product development, widespread bureaucratic corruption and mass poverty.
And what do those two examples of planned economies have in common? They both emerged in underdeveloped countries, Russia under systematic oppression by the tsar, the church, and the secret police, China an impoverished colonized country exploited by European imperial powers. Both war-torn countries were subsequently overthrown by armed revolutionary vanguard parties who paid lip service to Marxism, adopting some of its vocabulary while developing there own systems of dictatorial rule. In neither country did the conditions necessary for the implementation of democratic socialism exist. The Soviet satellite states were under the domination of Moscow and homegrown attempts to democratize their imposed systems were brutally put down. [/unquote]
iI 1917 Russia was not at all an underdeveloped country. Its Economic growth was among the fastest in Europe. Industrialization and the rapidly growing railroad network were quickly transforming the country. Their steel production was slightly greater than that of France & Austria ( but behind Germany) . WWI and the Communist Revolution ended that. In 1921, after the defeat of the Whites. Lenin introduced the NEP which relaxed most of the communist economics provisions in a desperate effort to restore food & industrial production. Massive infrastructure development followed (using forced labor which as WWII approached was followed my similar forced military & weapons development & production. After WWII the Soviet Economy quickly stagnated. falling steadily farther behind its European competitors. Limousines, imitating Mercedes designs were produced for the party Bosses were produced , but the only mass produced vehicle was the "Lada" based on the 1974 Fiat 124 for which the factory & production tools were purchased by the Soviets.
The first Post colonial generation of African states mostly all embraced planned economies, which yielded only authoritarianism and little economic growth - a stark counterpoint to your unfounded claim that it is somehow better. China's growth after Deng's abandonment of the previously planned (and underperforming) economy was indeed spectacular, but it was all driven by free capitalist economic principles. The new contrails imposed by the current Xi regime are fast ending all that .
The stark differences in the economic development of Western and Eastern Germany so evident after the fall of the Berlin Wall tell the observer all he needs to know about the different results yielded by free markets and Socialists' Planned economies.
