Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

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During this 2016 election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.
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What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
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I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.

the thought that's been bouncing around my noggin --

if SCOTUS had given 45 the presidency after january 6th (sadly no longer a preposterous notion),
we would be done with the orange putz for good in six months time...

But at what cost?

This morning, after a day of Republicans insisting that it is political polarization to suggest that Trump is a danger to our democracy, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in the last days of his presidency, dismissed the classified documents case against the former president. She wrote that “Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”

Other federal courts have tested this argument and dismissed it, but Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni was part of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, suggested earlier this month that it could be the basis for getting rid of Jack Smith. Cannon cited Thomas repeatedly in her decision.

When he left office in January 2021, Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of pages of classified national security documents, some of which bore the highest level of classification. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), where by law presidential papers must be deposited, noted that many documents were missing from the materials Trump released to them and, in May 2021, emailed Trump’s lawyers to get them back.

When his lawyers tried to push him to do as the law required, they told FBI investigators, Trump answered: “It’s not theirs, it’s mine.” Finally, in December 2021, after Trump had personally gone through the documents, a Trump representative told NARA that they had found “some records,” and in January 2022, NARA retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago. Archivists found more than 150 documents marked classified, making up hundreds of pages of classified national security information.

By April the Justice Department had convened a grand jury to investigate Trump’s removal of the documents. Trump’s lawyers tried to keep those documents out of the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by claiming they were covered by executive privilege, but in May 2022, NARA gave the FBI access to the records. In June 2022, Trump representative Christina Bobb certified that “a diligent search” at Mar-a-Lago had turned up nothing more and that they were returning “any and all documents” they had found. Concerned about the sheer number of documents turning up, the Department of Justice subpoenaed security video tapes, which showed people moving the documents.

Federal officials obtained a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago. When they executed it in August 2022, they found 13 more boxes with classified documents: a total of more than 11,000 government documents and photographs. They also found 48 empty folders labeled “classified,” but they did not check a locked closet on which Trump had recently changed the lock, or a “hidden room” in Trump’s bedroom. They found that the boxes, which contained the most valuable intelligence of the United States government, had been stored haphazardly in public areas, including a ballroom stage and a bathroom.

In November 2022, after Trump announced his presidential candidacy—an early announcement that many thought was an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the two federal investigations that touched on the former president, thus deliberately moving those investigations outside the department so they could not be seen as part of the presidential race.

In June 2023 a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 criminal counts under the Espionage Act, including scheming to conceal documents; three more charges were added the following month. Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence). He was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.

The case fell randomly to Cannon, who has appeared to be trying to delay the case since it came into her hands. Today, she threw it out altogether.

Former attorney general Eric Holder called Cannon’s dismissal “so bereft of legal reasoning as to be utterly absurd.” Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern called it “an extreme outlier view with no basis in precedent” and noted that “Cannon’s indefensible opinion will still serve its purpose of delaying this trial indefinitely.”

Global politics scholar Brian Klaas wrote “Trump appoints judge. Trump does something that virtually all legal experts—including Trump’s own former Attorney General—see as a clear-cut felony. Judge that Trump appointed dismisses case.” Washington Post global affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor wrote: “if this happened in another country, the DC establishment would immediately point to the erosion of the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary.”

Special Counsel Jack Smith has said he will appeal Cannon’s ruling.

Trump responded to the news exactly as yesterday’s Republican demands that Trump’s opponents stop calling out his lawlessness suggested he would. He posted: “As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—the January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to

END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!”

The Thomas opinion on which Cannon relied was his concurrence in the July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, the Supreme Court overturned the central principle of American democracy when it said that the U.S. president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties.” Cannon’s decision echoes the idea that Trump cannot be held accountable even for what is allegedly the most serious breach of our national security in our history. Indeed, MAGA Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) posted a picture of Cannon on social media with the heading: “Future Supreme Court Justice Cannon.”

Legal analyst Keith Boykin listed the many excuses and arguments Trump enablers have made over the years. “He can’t be prosecuted in office,” Boykin wrote. “He can’t be impeached because the courts should decide. He’s immune from prosecution after office. He can’t be prosecuted by Biden’s DOJ because that’s ‘lawfare.’ And he can’t be prosecuted by a special counsel. We have created a dictator.”

Legal analyst Norm Eisen noted that Cannon’s decision will boost Trump on the first day of the Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Monday through Thursday of this week. So will the weekend’s shooting, which has inspired MAGA Republicans to insist that all their party members must rally around Trump.

While Trump has been the presumptive nominee for years, that anointment was contested. Around 20% of Republican primary voters, who tend to be the most loyal and fervent partisans, consistently voted for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley rather than Trump. Those voters seemed to be concentrated in the suburbs, thus making up a constituency Trump needs to win.

On the other end of the party’s spectrum, the fringe right has been saying that Trump is too soft for them. Antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes has told his followers that he and his “groypers” are fed up with Trump because they are sick of “battling the Jews in the White House, battling the neocons, battling the Israel-firsters.”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and right-wing provocateur Ivan Raiklin have speculated for months that removing Trump from the running—they speculated about assassination—would open the way for Trump’s far-right former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and appeared to be putting pressure on Trump to name Flynn as vice president. Yesterday, Raiklin posted on social media a “Trump/Flynn 2024” graphic with the legend “FAFO,” under the words “Assassination-Proof.”

This afternoon, perhaps in hopes of avoiding an embarrassing floor fight, Trump dashed the hopes of both ends of the Republican spectrum by naming Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential pick. Vance is 39 and was elected to the Senate in 2022 with the help of $10 million from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. In the short time he has been in office, he has echoed Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential race was stolen, has said that he does not believe in rape or incest exceptions for abortion bans and that people should stay in violent marriages, and has praised Project 2025. He is pro-Russia and against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

It “will be interesting to see how the RNC attempts to spin Vance as a candidate of Unity,” journalist Anne Applebaum wrote. The Fox News Channel helpfully reminded viewers that Vance has, in the past, said that Trump “might be America’s Hitler,” “might be a cynical a**hole,” and is “cultural heroin,” “noxious,” and “reprehensible.”

Still, factional differences might not matter in today’s Republican Party. This afternoon, in the hall of the RNC convention, attendees chanted, “Fight, fight, fight,” as they punched an arm in the air, in an eerie echo of Germany in the 1930s.

How about you describe the damage he did, in the four years he had in office?

We're here seeing that he started zero new conflicts at all, and smoothed over relations with some very difficult world leaders during his time in office.

Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, said the UK could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon” after Labour won the election, it can be revealed.
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The jibe is likely to be embarrassing for the UK’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, who has attempted to build bridges with Vance in recent months, comparing their impoverished childhoods.

Vance was speaking at the National Conservatism conference last week, where he said: “I have to beat up on the UK – just one additional thing. I was talking with a friend recently and we were talking about, you know, one of the big dangers in the world, of course, is nuclear proliferation, though, of course, the Biden administration doesn’t care about it.

“And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”
[...]
Asked about Vance’s comments on Tuesday, the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, said she “doesn’t recognise” his characterisation of the UK under a Labour government. She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “I think he said quite a lot of fruity things in the past as well.

“Look, I don’t recognise that characterisation. I’m very proud of the election success that Labour had recently. We won votes across all different communities, across the whole of the country. And we’re interested in governing on behalf of Britain and also working with our international allies.”

Biden to push for Supreme Court reform

President Joe Biden is seriously considering publicly endorsing major reforms at the Supreme Court,
a move that would make him the first sitting president in generations to back seismic changes to the
way the nation’s highest court operates, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations.

Chief among the changes Biden is planning to publicly back are term limits for the nine justices,
who currently serve lifetime appointments. The president is also said to be preparing to throw his
support behind an ethics code for the court that would contain an enforcement mechanism,
which was notably absent from the code the court adopted last year.

For starters he did nothing to address climate change...

....the only "infrastructure" he promoted was a border wall which was never finished

he cut taxes for the wealthy unnecessarily and irresponsibly

.....he attempted to extort an ally by withholding promised military aid in exchange for allegedly damaging (false) information on his likely opponent

.....he refused to accept the results of a free and fair election

.....and he stacked the judiciary with right-wing ideologues and hacks.

Who's "we"?

A theoretical "science" being manipulated by the various interests who see profit only in that situation

We're being told to buy EVs while there's no intention to limit jetliner traffic, or the actions of the military in any way.

Half your nation, and ours, for starters.