Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Why oh why couldn't he have performed like that last night?

The Chevron ruling, in my opinion, is even worse than the repeal of Roe.

blatham, does Canada have similar regulatory agencies and if so do they face similarly significant well-funded opposition?

There is huge news today: in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron defense doctrine that underpins the administrative state.

I am putting that down as a marker because I’ve had a very busy week of travel and writing (the paperback edition of Democracy Awakening is coming out in October and I am working on a new afterword) and I am just too tired to cover it and its history well tonight.

Instead, tonight I want to make a note of something that has been nagging at me for weeks now: Trump’s focus on 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian officers in March 2023 and is currently on trial for the trumped-up charge of espionage. The State Department considers him “wrongfully detained,” a rare designation indicating that the person is being held by a hostile government as a bargaining chip. That designation means the U.S. government will do all it can to secure his release.

At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.

He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and then conduit to Russian operatives, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”

Manafort had helped to get the pro-Russian oligarch Yanukovych into office, and when Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Ukrainian people threw him out, Manafort was left unemployed and in debt to other oligarchs. When he went to work for Trump, for free, he promptly wrote to his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee identified in 2020 as a Russian operative, asking how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign (p. 135).

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine” (p. 140). The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if only Trump were elected….

And, in November 2016, he was.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor 'wink' (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying 'he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine' and a decision to be a 'special representative' and manage this process." Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration’” (p. 99).

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

In last night’s debate, Trump insisted that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch (although Putin in fact continued his 2014 assault during Trump’s term, and Trump tried to withhold support for Ukraine).

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over.

“Thirteen months later,” Rutenberg wrote, “Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.” Once his troops were there, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.

Last night, Trump claimed that the Ukrainians are losing the war and described how sad it was that their country is being destroyed (without mentioning that it is Putin’s unprovoked war that is doing that damage). He also significantly exaggerated how much money the U.S. has contributed to Ukraine’s defense.

That misrepresentation lines up with Putin’s offer of Friday, June 14, 2024, in a “peace proposal” to Ukraine: Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, in exchange for a ceasefire. Putin said, “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before, then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.” He also demanded an end to all sanctions and that Ukraine abandon its plan to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the plan and noted that there is no reason to think Putin will stop his land grab once his forces regroup.)

So when Trump last night said about the 2022 invasion, “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream,” it sounded as if he had been in on the Mariupol Plan. And when he talked about how the war needed to end, especially in light of Putin’s recent “peace” plan, it sounded as if perhaps he still is.

And he promised, yet again, that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released.

At the rally he probably had a teleprompter and was reading prepared statements.

The power to decide what is truth or lie, and censor it, should not rest in the hands of the most powerful politicians....this is, again, what dictatorships do.

It's not that difficult to identify a lie; people do it all the time

What's wrong with laying out what's known about the source of a specific piece of misinformation, marshaling some evidence and explaining why a statement is not factual?

I haven't heard any suggestion of censorship.

Then why are you so concerned about people lying?

The reality is...

The government can do this any time they want...

Did the US government not put pressure on the big social media companies to remove 'disinformation'?

...the court said that the plaintiffs could not prove that communications between the Biden administration and social media companies resulted in “direct censorship injuries.” In the majority opinion for Murthy v. Missouri, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that “the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”

While it is the government’s responsibility to make sure it refrains from jawboning—the practice in which governments and leaders appeal to the public in an effort to influence the behavior of private companies, and in ways that potentially violate free speech—Kate Ruane, director of the free expression project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, says that there are very valid reasons why government agencies might need to communicate with platforms.

“Communication between the government, social media platforms, and government entities is critical in providing information that social media companies can use to ensure social media users have authoritative information about where you're supposed to go to vote, or what to do in an emergency, or all of those things,” she says. “It is very useful for the government to have partnerships with social media to get that accurate information out there.” source

Your ongoing objection seems to be to my suggestion that in a democratic country, due process should exist in censorship...

I would like to see a rational process where particularly dangerous false stories are identified and publicized, with information on the source of the material, analysis of the claim, evidence to the contrary presented, accompanied by a clear explanation of the danger posed by the disinformation.

Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump.

This “blacklist” of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists.
[...]
In recent years, AAF has focused its efforts on derailing Biden’s political appointments. Now, according to a press release, the AAF is getting to work on a new mission: “Project Sovereignty 2025”.

Backed with a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank, AAF will compile information, including social media posts, about civil servants they suspect will “obstruct and sabotage a future conservative president”. They plan to publish dossiers on those non-public facing individuals, starting with the Department of Homeland Security, and expose them to scrutiny.

“WE ARE DECLARING WAR ON THE DEEP STATE,” AAF wrote in a post on Twitter/X earlier this week.

News of the project has reportedly sent alarm bells ringing among the civil service community, and it’s the latest sign that Trump and his allies are seeking to wrest control of Washington DC, which they believe has been overrun by their opponents.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union (and which has endorsed Joe Biden), described Project Sovereignty 2025 as “an intimidation tactic to try to menace federal workers and sow fear”.

“Civil servants are required to take an oath to the Constitution,” they wrote on X. “Not a loyalty test to a president.”

Project Sovereignty 2025 has also drawn comparisons to the anti-communist blacklisting techniques employed during the McCarthy era.
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