Whenever life gets marginally better for the proles, the inflation whiners go to full screech.
7.
Martin
@Baud: Yeah, the right has no policy because Trump has no policy. It’s just reactionary 2nd Amendment takes and beating up on a handful of trans student athletes.
Dems are free to take whatever popular positions they want.
DOJ Will Not Prosecute Trump Officials After IG Referred Findings of False Testimony on Census
Investigators verified that former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross misled Congress, but the Biden administration said it won’t pursue prosecution.
Cool. Can’t wait for all those other investigations and “welp, yeah, but let’s all move on” non-prosecutions to come. Then Nov ’22 hits and they’ll act surprised at the absence of voters.
10.
Cacti
First January 6th rioter is sentenced.
Gets only 8 months vs. a recommended 18 from the DOJ.
Prosecuting appointees from a previous administration is a course that is vulnerable to grievous abuse. Therefore, on grounds of not setting banana-republican precedent, it is unlikely to happen when a Democratic administration is in office.
However, there’s plenty we can do to encourage Democratic voters to cast their votes in the 2022 midterms. I’m currently volunteering (at my own pace) with various voter-outreach projects, as are tens of thousands of others across the country.
How about you? It sounds as if you might like to help out. There are lots of local and national efforts underway – it’s easy to find one that suits a person’s time and energies. Let us know which one(s) you choose!
16.
trnc
@david: It sucks, but anyone who overlooks the obviously major advantages of a Biden administration over DT 2.0 and uses non-prosecution as an excuse for not voting is probably looking for reason not to vote anyway.
17.
taumaturgo
@Baud: IMO, the lack of pushback could be over-confidence by the GQP that their voter suppression laws and the gerrymandering of districts have heavily tilted the elections in their favor, populism notwithstanding. In addition, if and when court challenges by the D’s reach the conservative-dominated SC, they seem to be relaying it will decide to protect the vote suppression and gerrymandering laws.
Not sure what I think of the sentence — 8 months for someone who acted all contrite (he said in court “I believe Joe Biden is President”), committed no violence, did no vandalism, etc.
If that’s the bottom line, then there’s plenty of room for adding on
(Well, committed no violence except for storming the Capitol with a murderous mob)
It’s not “banana-republic precedent” if Ross actually committed wrong-doing and broke the law. It’s the inspector general’s office making this referral, not Biden himself
I’m certain that this convicted felon will feel the weight of the long-term, permanent consequences for his choice of action. That satisfies me more than a long term of imprisonment.
Who didn’t see that coming? More predictable than the chimes of Big Ben.
;)
23.
VeniceRiley
@david: That is (checks notes) approximately twice as infuriating as the MAGA unvaccinated idiot vendor I just had in my office…. coughing and wearing his mask under his nose!
…you didn’t like my play on words? I am disappoint. :)
My personal opinion is that the appointees of the previous administration were corrupt to a man. And I also comprehend the barriers that stand in the way of their prosecution.
And so I’m turning my disgust with corrupt Republicans into voter-outreach efforts, so that progress can be made at the legislative level. It’s stealthy, which is why I like it. :)
DOJ Will Not Prosecute Trump Officials After IG Referred Findings of False Testimony on Census
I really don’t think anybody votes based on whether Biden prosecutes people for being misleading in how they described the proposal process that put a question on the census. Similarly, it’s probably not the kind of thing the DoJ is going to go out on a limb to do.
the right has no policy because Trump has no policy. It’s just reactionary 2nd Amendment takes and beating up on a handful of trans student athletes.
The Right’s policy has not changed since before Trump, except that trans issues became the new abuse target during that period. White supremacy, all-around bigotry, and Cleek’s Law got Trump elected. He was an effect, not a cause. Flat-out lying about economic policy was the standard Republican policy before Trump was elected.
Monday, July 19, 2021 1:04 PM EST. [SOURCE: NY TIMES]
The sell-off on Wall Street was broad, reflecting a range of concerns about economic growth and the potential for rising Covid-19 infections to lead to the return of restrictions on travel and tourism.
28.
Elizabelle
Republicans (and other rightwingers) are BAD for business. Bad.
I hope some fingers get pointed at them, hard, for endangering the world’s attempted return from the pandemic. It could happen. Money talks. The needlessly dead: not so much.
@Elizabelle: Exactly! Preach! The negative repercussions from anti-vaxxism is not just owning the Libs. If the market continues to tank, it will also affect their donors and what’s left of the Republican’s traditional business base. Fuckers. Too steep of losses, and I might have to change my nym to “not quite as close to retired as I thought.”
Republicans (and other rightwingers) are BAD for business. Bad.
But they’re good for rich people who want to feel like they are superior beings whose most trivial selfish or cruel whim is genius.
33.
FelonyGovt
@H.E.Wolf: My local old lady Huddle group is going to be writing postcards to encourage voter registration in CA-25 (Katie Hill’s old district, where the awful R Mike Garcia won by 333 votes in 2020). Looking forward to seeing the ladies again and writing some postcards!
34.
Kent
@Frankensteinbeck:The Right’s policy has not changed since before Trump, except that trans issues became the new abuse target during that period. White supremacy, all-around bigotry, and Cleek’s Law got Trump elected. He was an effect, not a cause. Flat-out lying about economic policy was the standard Republican policy before Trump was elected.
Even the trans issue isn’t really new. It’s just the newest incarnation of anti-LGBT bigotry. A decade or so ago the panic was over gay marriage. After they lost that one they just pivoted to trans kids as the new focus for anti-LGBT bigotry. But it is the same hatred wrapped in Christianity that has always been part of the GOP agenda.
Do you think trans rights will follow the same trajectory as same-sex marriage did? I remember two years ago reading the results of annual survey of young American adults’ acceptance/tolerance of LGBT+ people. The survey found that LGBT+ tolerance and acceptance had dropped considerably, below 50%
Been meaning to ask you this, but I remember you predicting around 6 months ago that Trump would fade away and the GOP would only throw him bones from time to time. Given the thousands still attending his rallies and his continued hold over the party (I believe he won some CPAC straw poll recently), do you still think this will be the case?
Testing the Trumpified GOP’s newfound love for freedom of speech, a right-wing porn star planned to attend the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA’s annual Student Action Summit 2021, which began this weekend in Tampa, Florida.
…
Love, a self-branded “conservative porn star” who is a contributor to The Federalist, found herself besieged by the combination of white supremacists and moralizers, leading to her eventual expulsion from the event while triggering a debate on the right over whether the conservative movement should embrace Love.
You can just see the joy of the reporter writing that last sentence. I also find it highly entertaining that she’s a contributor to The Federalist, which I assume (and am not going to check because I don’t deserve to be wrong) is related to the Federalist Society.
41.
Soprano2
@H.E.Wolf:I’m certain that this convicted felon will feel the weight of the long-term, permanent consequences for his choice of action. That satisfies me more than a long term of imprisonment.
I care about the sentences, but what I really want is for all the people who overran the Capitol to have felony convictions that will follow them for life. That will be at least as painful, if not more so, than any prison time served. I hope they get long probationary periods, too, so they can find out first-hand how punishing being on probation actually is.
Yes, actually. If you look at who is holding the rallies, where they are held, and the attendance, he is definitely not A list anymore. The GOP goes out of its way to talk about the election being stolen and fraud and integrity and so on while barely mentioning Trump’s name. The RNC continues to fleece rubes with his name while not giving him a dime. CPAC loves him, but CPAC is a troll farm devoted solely to Triggering The Libs. He’d be gone already if the news weren’t so desperate to create a comeback story for him, and all they’re doing is dragging out his collapse as he struggles to find some way, any way to get back on the gravy train of fleecing his base. His websites got shit attendance. His press releases are every once in awhile repeated to the public but mostly totally ignored and lost. Yeah, he’s at the “It’s the pictures that got small!” stage.
43.
Soprano2
@david: I read a tweet by an attorney who says the problem is that to get a perjury conviction you have to be able to prove intent, and with Ross that would probably be impossible to do because might plead something like senility, which is actually a defense. Do we want the DOJ to spend a lot of time and money pursuing a prosecution where they almost certainly can’t get a conviction just to make us feel good?
44.
Patricia Kayden
Yes
68% of Americans believe that President Biden’s election victory was fair and legitimate.32% are friggin’ idiots.— Jon Cooper ?? (@joncoopertweets) July 19, 2021
Everyone wants an political earthquake, but a steady erosion is our friend.
46.
JoyceH
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m with you. I honestly expected Trump to fade as quickly as Sarah Palin did. And the fact that he hasn’t is a sign of the extreme weakness of the GOP. Because they are the ones propping him up. And they’re propping him up because he’s the best they got.
I saw news about that rally he held at a fairground, and breathless reporting it was a record breaking crowd. A record breaking crowd – for a COUNTY FAIRGROUND. Much of the crowd consisting of Trumpist Dead Heads who’ve made their lives revolve around attending these rallies because their lives are otherwise so empty. But he’s the best they’ve got.
47.
Hoodie
@Frankensteinbeck: You’re probably right. The GOP may hope that Trump would die so they could give him the Reagan hagiography treatment, and that one of their new crop of Trumpist pols (e.g., DeSantis, Noem, etc.) will be able to carry the torch. One problem with that is they have no one who is a celebrity like Trump, and each of these Trump wannabes represent various and sometimes conflicting subsections of the Trump base that only Trump is capable of uniting in any electorally stable fashion. He’s the Universal Asshole, hard to replace.
Do you think trans rights will follow the same trajectory as same-sex marriage did? I remember two years ago reading the results of annual survey of young American adults’ acceptance/tolerance of LGBT+ people. The survey found that LGBT+ tolerance and acceptance had dropped considerably, below 50%
Honestly no idea. But as a HS teacher I would say that LGBT kids of all flavors are MUCH MUCH more open and out today than they were even 10 years ago and generally more accepted/supported by their peers. I think the parents and grandparents are the bigger problem. They are the ones to tend to have the gay and trans panics
And honestly. I don’t really like the LGBT label myself. I think it is too expansive. The surveys I have read suggest that the majority of self-identified LGBT folks are bisexual women. Which honestly isn’t the same thing at all as being trans.
49.
Barbara
@Soprano2: That was my first thought. Ross is senile and even if he doesn’t use it as an affirmative defense, the jury might figure it out just by listening to the guy talk on the stand.
50.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2: For a lot of people, the answer is yes.
It took a little while for Sarah Palin to fade. Trump will take longer because he is a bigger figure to the right.
53.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara: probably doesn’t apply here, but as a non-lawyer, isn’t there also the factor that acquittals can serve as precedent, to the defendant’s advantage, in future prosecutions? Was Bob McDonnell’s reversal on appeal a factor in getting Bob Menendez off the hook? again, NAL, but it’s something that’s always on my mind when people start baying for criminal prosecutions. Not only are they not guaranteed to work, they can actually backfire
As an old fashioned romantic, I prefer public Congressional inquiries, get’ed under oath, on the record in public. And even that doesn’t always work the way we want. Alexander Butterfield moments are rare. Louis DeJoy double-talk and “I think I don’t remember” are more common.
54.
StringOnAStick
I saw a headline that BillO is talking about bringing lawsuits against the media outlets reporting that he and TFG’s stadium tour tickets are selling poorly. That should work…
and with Ross that would probably be impossible to do because might plead something like senility, which is actually a defense. Do we want the DOJ to spend a lot of time and money pursuing a prosecution where they almost certainly can’t get a conviction just to make us feel good?
another thing people miss about criminal prosecutions: Defendants can hire lawyers. And even with a conviction– a unanimous vote of twelve jurors– defendants can hire appellate lawyers. Immensely rich people like Wilbur Ross can hire lots of very good defense lawyers
ETA: Checking Wiki for Ross’s age– 83, I thought he was older– they estimate his net worth at $600M. And he used to be married to Betsy McCaughy, which name is a flashback to good ol’ days of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
56.
StringOnAStick
Also, I am grinning at realizing that Biden chose “The Former Guy” as a label because he knew it would get shortened to TFG and then people would start mentally reading it as “that fucking guy”; that’s how it has read in my head since the first week.
The sell-off on Wall Street was broad, reflecting a range of concerns about economic growth and the potential for rising Covid-19 infections to lead to the return of restrictions on travel and tourism.
Wake me when Fox News and the GOP advocate getting vaccinated to save the economy.
58.
Josie
@StringOnAStick: Yep. I’ll bet that’s how it reads in his head too.
I know, and to me that’s crazy, but in a way I understand it. We feel so abused by the Trump administration that we want every organ of the government to lash back at them as hard as they can, regardless of whether it would actually do anything or not. Just making the people who made us miserable also miserable is enough for some.
60.
Martin
@Kent: But, it is new. Gay marriage was at least focused on a demographic with some political power. But I can’t think of a smaller and less powerful target than trans student athletes. It’s like the smallest policy fight they could think of. It is of course massively consequential to those students, their families and anyone that can be extrapolated from their dipshit bigoted arguments, but they’ve ceded the entire policy space other than literally dozens of student athletes.
To me, a policy argument needs to flow from some kind of principle, otherwise it’s a ‘yes I can, no you can’t’ squabble, devoid of substance. Small government was at least anchored in some principles, even if it was really driven by ‘let us hate on black people’. There’s none of that. What’s the GOPs expression of their view of how we should be governed? There isn’t one. They’re down to ‘let the white Christians run everything’ which isn’t something they can express because they know what the backlash will be, and they can’t even offer up the Lee Atwater collection of substitutes. There’s just … nothing.
61.
Soprano2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Was Bob McDonnell’s reversal on appeal a factor in getting Bob Menendez off the hook?
Once the court ruled on the McDonnell case, IMHO the prosecution of Menendez should have been dropped, because that decision made it almost impossible to get a conviction.
The sell-off on Wall Street was broad, reflecting a range of concerns about economic growth and the potential for rising Covid-19 infections to lead to the return of restrictions on travel and tourism.
Yes, it had nothing to with extreme over-valuing of stocks prices in the last year.
ETA: the 5 year charts for the major indexes show the real story.
@Soprano2: Funny thing when you let people lie to congress. Everyone starts lying to congress, and testifying before congress loses all meaning and utility.
64.
Soprano2
@Martin: @Soprano2: Funny thing when you let people lie to congress. Everyone starts lying to congress, and testifying before congress loses all meaning and utility.
I don’t disagree about that. I am only addressing the probability of actually getting a conviction, which seems to be almost zero in this case. Perhaps there will be cases that are easier to prosecute that they will go after, but I can’t see wasting a bunch of time and money trying to get a conviction when it most likely will never happen. Sucks, but it’s the truth.
65.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Then you select winnable cases to prosecute.
66.
Kent
@Martin: I don’t know. I don’t think it is really that different. Two decades ago gay marriage had a pretty small constituency too. Until everyone started to realize they had gay friends, cousins, brothers, co-workers, and sons and daughters.
Trans kids also have parents, friends, classmates, etc. etc. It is the SAME EXACT Christian fundamentalists who are weaponizing and distorting the SAME EXACT bible verses to justify their anti-trans bigotry that they did two decades ago with their anti-gay bigotry. There is honestly no difference.
@WhatsMyNym: I love how when these sorts of big swings in the market happen we have all these expert commentators rushing out to explain WHY the market is going one way or the other. When most of it isn’t actual people making decisions based on news events. It is computer-algorithm based trading that triggers other computer-algorithm based trading and a bunch of machines are mostly leading the way, all of which are just looking at numbers and data and none of which are reading the news.
Delta variant? The Delta variant has been growing in both the US and Europe for weeks. Nothing new happened today.
An infrastructure package negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators and President Biden will no longer provide a funding surge to the cash-strapped Internal Revenue Service after Republican lawmakers balked at the proposal.
The bipartisan infrastructure framework had originally included the boost for IRS to offset the costs of the $1.2 trillion in spending on roads, bridges and other projects. The funding was expected to create net revenue by allowing IRS to hire more staff and launch more audits and investigations into non-filers and high-income tax cheats. Biden had originally requested $80 billion over the next decade for the tax agency—suggesting it would bring in $700 billion in revenue—but the bipartisan group negotiating the package never revealed the amount it had agreed to spend.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who is helping to lead the negotiations, confirmed to CNNon Sunday the proposal had been dropped.
“In terms of IRS reform, or IRS tax gap, which is what was in the original proposal, that will no longer be in our proposal,” Portman said, adding, “One reason it’s not part of the proposal is that we did have pushback.” Some Republicans, such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had expressed wariness of the funding increase, suggesting the agency would unfairly target some Americans.
….
Democrats are not willing to abandon their push to boost IRS resources. As part of Biden’s plan to further increase infrastructure spending and to pass other priorities, Democrats are planning to pass a larger package through a process called reconciliation. Republicans have voiced their opposition to that $3.5 trillion bill—the details of which are also still being hammered out—but Democrats can pass the measure unilaterally if they avoid any defections in the Senate.
76.
Kent
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m not arguing that point. But look what actually happened with gay marriage. Southern states were just as retrograde about gay marriage as they currently are with trans kids. Hell, even CA passed an anti-gay marriage initiative. There weren’t any victories at all on the gay marriage front anywhere in the south until SCOTUS actually intervened. Gay marriage isn’t legal in say Texas or Alabama because Texas or Alabama gay folks had a lot of money and local political clout. Same thing is happening now with trans kids. All the anti-trans stuff is happening in the south once again. And there isn’t going to be the political power to stop it locally, it will take Federal action from Congress or SCOTUS or executive action by Biden of some sort.
Emptywheel has been following Hodgkins’s sentencing and has an informative post today. The sentence includes the 8 months, two years of probation, and $2000 in restitution. As E. Points out, this first sentence must be seen in the context of the many sentences on similar but more serious crimes to be addressed in the coming months.
Anti-trans legislation is also targeted at any woman who is insufficiently feminine. They get harassed in bathrooms and kicked out of competitive sports. It’s already happening and every anti-trans law increases it. This is about policing gender roles, and the affected demographics are huge. Republicans are pushing the restrictions through before the public realizes that.
I hate to give Ryan Grim or The Intercept credit for anything, but…
Justin Baragona @justinbaragona 3h Hell of a scoop here from @ryangrim Fox News has a “FOX Clear Pass” for all vaccinated employees. Yep, the very vaccine passport that Tucker Carlson and other hosts have railed so loudly against on air.
82.
Kent
@Frankensteinbeck: All true. But the anti-gay hysteria of a generation ago spawned by the likes of Anita Bryant and various evangelicals was also about enforcing gender roles. Gender role enforcement is EXACTLY what they were talking about when they used terms like “traditional marriage” I’m not arguing that anti-trans legislation and sentiment isn’t bad. Just that it is the same exact people making the same exact arguments that they made 2 decades ago about gays. After losing that one they just pivoted to give their followers a new target to attack. Anti-trans bigotry isn’t anything new. It’s the same old Christian hysteria repackaged for the 2020s. Just like the anti-CRT hysteria is the same old racial bigotry only slightly repackaged for the 2020s.
I’m certain that this convicted felon will feel the weight of the long-term, permanent consequences for his choice of action. That satisfies me more than a long term of imprisonment.
Agreed. We humane liberal types should not be pushing for longer sentences, even if we are very angry.
I do wonder if this guy is confident that Trump will pardon him once he returns to office in August.
88.
germy
Paul Hodgkins, a 38-year-old crane operator, pleaded guilty last month to one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, and acknowledged that he took a selfie and joined a group of rioters who assembled at the front of the Senate chamber, with the intention to obstruct the certification of the 2020 Presidential election.
It’s safer to be a white man storming the US Capitol than it was for Breonna Taylor who was shot to death sleeping in her bed. That’s what every black person in America is taking away from the bullshit that happened today.
@germy: same guy discussed above? I missed the detail that he pleaded (even though it should be pled) guilty. I imagine that was a big factor in sentencing?
Do we want the DOJ to spend a lot of time and money pursuing a prosecution where they almost certainly can’t get a conviction just to make us feel good?
I get what you are saying, but the political question is whether we want to demonstrate he lied about something important or do we want him & all right-wing propaganda to say “Democrats admit he did nothing wrong?”
I’m not sure that Ross & his lies are important enough for the effort, but letting Trump and Trump-era Republicans off the hook is one of the reasons they will be able to march back into power in 2023.
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says the simple past tense and the past participle form are “pleaded or pled,” in that order. That means you can use both. … The Associated Press Stylebook states: “Do not use the colloquial past-tense form ‘pled.’”
Two decades ago gay marriage had a pretty small constituency too. Until everyone started to realize they had gay friends, cousins, brothers, co-workers, and sons and daughters.
I admit that I was in the Civil Unions group, because I didn’t want to upset the religious folks.
Two things changed my mind.
Stories about end of life situations where the partner of 25, 30, 35 years was excluded from the hospital by ‘ the family’, because said partner had ‘ no rights’. I would read those stories and want to pick up an AR-15 myself.
All the legal issues behind marriage. Going back to the partner of 25,30, 35 years who literally had no legal and financial standing to get the survivor benefits. I understood that. I understood the pension check my mother got when my father died, and how it helped her as she aged. And, gay partners deserved nothing less.
99.
Catherine D.
On a bright note, I hauled a load of glass pipettes to the common area this morning and ran into a guy fixing an autoclave. He laughed when I came in and said “I like your shirt” It was an old Mad Dog Pac GOP shirt where the O is the Soviet hammer and sickle. Made my morning!
100.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: I was just snarking. I know from months of close trial coverage that “pleaded” is the correct form, “pled” just sounds better to my ear
@James E Powell: As OO said above, choose a better case, there’s lots of them.
102.
Patricia Kayden
After tomorrow no secret service for Coke jr, Eric and Ivanka Crimealot.— Baligubadle (@Baligubadle1) July 19, 2021
103.
Chief Oshkosh
@trnc: Not prosecuting reinforces several bad things, not least of which it tells bad actors that they are free to act badly. It also reinforces the idea that some people are above the law.
I’m not sure that Ross & his lies are important enough for the effort, but letting Trump and Trump-era Republicans off the hook is one of the reasons they will be able to march back into power in 2023.
Getting back on my hobby-horse: Narrowing accountability down to criminal prosecutions, which to any AG, even someone more aggressive and creative than Garland apparently is, is going to mean violations of specific statutes that can be prosecuted, convicted and upheld not just by juries, but judges, many of them… quirky. And IANAL, but would a prosecution begun today be likely to go to trial by mid-term Election Day?
I don’t know what Biden could or would do in the way appointed some kind of special investigator, a Special Inspector General?, which I guess would be an Inspector Specific, but I think the best we’re going to get is the Thompson Committee.
Do we want the DOJ to spend a lot of time and money pursuing a prosecution where they almost certainly can’t get a conviction just to make us feel good?
Uh, is this a trick question? Fuck yes I want the DOJ to pursue these people. Not only does it serve justice, it’s good politics. If DOJ needs more resources to get that done, well, they should call up HR and get the wheels rolling.
Judas Priest, do I have to figure out EVERYTHING for you ingrates?! ;)
108.
patroclus
The stock market crash is not good news for the economy, but it seems likely to last only a few days as asset prices are re-valued quickly more in line with reality, rather than their over-valued levels of the past year or so. The rapid spike in COVID Delta variants, the massive flooding in Europe and our temps and fires out west, plus the bad news out of the Olympics with all the COVID stuff is the favorite day-by-day cause, but it’s really a much needed correction which brings everyone back to reality. It doesn’t look good, though, for Biden to be making an economy speech on the day it happens.
109.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chief Oshkosh: I’ll go along with the complaints if it becomes a pattern. A decision not to prosecute one person who appears to have a defense of dementia and/or an inability to aid in his own defense due to his dementia is not something I am going g to get too worked up over. Nor is a lenient sentence where a person has pleaded guilty, accepted responsibility, and expressed remorse. Sue me.
And choose better cases is dismissive and ignores the point I was arguing. Republicans never said what the Clintons did that was wrong in Whitewater. Al Gore committed no crime when he made phone calls from his residence. There was no chance that Hillary Clinton would be convicted for using her email server – Comey conceded that he knew that from the beginning. Nevertheless, those prosecutions changed the course of American history.
As I said, I’m not sure Ross & his lies are that big a deal, but there is a pattern developing here that is not making people happy.
And as we go into the midterms, I would caution against using “we would only be doing this to make our people happy” as an excuse not to do something that would help win votes.
111.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: I would caution against any kind of election related decision making with respect to prosecutions. That should never be a factor. Ever.
112.
Kent
@James E Powell: Yes, but Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were future top of the ticket Dem Candidates. And people like Hunter Biden were connected to future top of the ticket candidates.
Wilber Ross, on the other hand, is a has-been nobody. Taking him down accomplishes nothing in terms of political strategy. Going after Trump, Cruz, Hawley, et. al. That is a different story. Dirty up those fuckers as much as we can. That is the game that they created.
As for Wilber Ross. I have no doubt he has 10 pages worth of possible wrong-doing to investigate. I expect that misleading Congress on the Census is probably not even in the top 20.
Al Gore committed no crime when he made phone calls from his residence. There was no chance that Hillary Clinton would be convicted for using her email server
@Kent: one interesting thing about the obama-era LBGT rights wins is that pushing for marriage and military service were both sorta conservative ideas, advocated by folks like Andrew Sullivan, at least by the late 80s/90s.
If Ross was even close to innocent, I’d agree. But he is not. He is a liar and a crook and Democrats should be on the TV shows talking about how Ross is a liar & a crook just like everyone in the Trump administration.
The calculation that “we can’t be sure we can get a conviction” is not always a reason not to do it. As I said each comment, I’m not saying Ross is the hill I want to die on. Most people have no idea he exists. But somebody is going to have to start putting the wood to Republicans or they are going to skate on everything.
116.
Kent
@Omnes Omnibus:@James E Powell: I would caution against any kind of election related decision making with respect to prosecutions. That should never be a factor. Ever.
And honestly hasn’t really ever been, even for the GOP. They created a ginormous amount of noise about Hillary’s emails and Hunter Biden’s hard drives and all of that bullshit. But neither one of them was ever actually indicted much less prosecuted. Congressional investigations are not prosecutions.
117.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: I don’t care if it is the game they created, political prosecutions are a road down which we don’t want to travel.
Prosecuting Ross and not prosecuting more heinous people
# 2 would be far worse politically IMHO.
(And, yes, those are not the only two options).
119.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
How dirtied up was Al Gore by the whole fund-raising thing? As I recall, that was ’96. I remember Bob Dole howling “Where’s the outrage?” into the wind. I don’t remember it coming up that much in 2000.
My recollection is Gore was more damaged by the likes of Maureen Dowd’s pink-washing and Broderist political coverage and the “not a dime’s worth of difference” crowd
@James E Powell: Are prosecutions, or the lack thereof, of former administration officials really a factor in how people vote? Or whether they vote? It seems to me that this is more of a coffee table issue than a kitchen table issue like jobs, health care, or public safety.
122.
Kent
@Major Major Major Major: That’s true. But I think there were also a lot of wealthy white conservative gay men, especially back then. And selling gay marriage and gays in the military as conservative and patriotic was also a superb marketing strategy. After 4 years of Trump I think there are less of them in the GOP. But honestly I don’t even know.
Just making the people who made us miserable also miserable is enough for some.
I think it was Cheryl or another front pager who has opined a few times about the effects of “white collar” crime essentially never being prosecuted, and so there’s no deterrent. Additionally, the lack of even appearing to pursue justice adds to loss of faith in our government and society.
Well, if you have to start somewhere, and you don’t like your chances with Wilbur, who might be worth go after? Anyone? Because is sounds a little like several people here are just resigned to let this go on and on and on.
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Can’t win if you don’t play. Choosing not to pursue charges tells the voters that Ross didn’t do anything wrong and that the IG can go get stuffed. So then we go on to the next IG finding, and make the same calculation, and so the voters get told that Trump-guy No. 2 didn’t do anything wrong and the IG can go get stuffed. Then we go to the next IG finding, and make the same calculation, and so the voters get told that Trump-guy No. 3 didn’t do anything wrong and the IG can go get stuffed. Then we …
I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree.
But I’m right
;)
127.
Kent
@Geminid:@James E Powell: Are prosecutions, or the lack thereof, of former administration officials really a factor in how people vote? Or whether they vote? It seems to me that this is more of a coffee table issue than a kitchen table issue.
Hillary’s emails was an issue that came out of the endless Benghazi investigations. Without Benghazi one could reasonably argue there would have been no EMAILZ. No Andrew Weiner laptop. And arguably a Clinton win in 2016. None of that had to do with actual prosecutions. But it did have everything to do with congressional investigations who’s sole purpose was to dirty up the opponents. And it worked.
128.
sdhays
@rikyrah: I was for civil unions too, but I was more radical – eliminating state-sanctioned marriages. To me, the critical part was equality under the law, so if society was soooo set on having “marriage” defined according to religion, then the secular state should get out of the business of defining marriage and just establish civil unions for all.
I was young and didn’t appreciate how that wouldn’t actually make anyone happy.
He is a liar and a crook and Democrats should be on the TV shows talking about how Ross is a liar & a crook just like everyone in the Trump administration.
Democrats and liberals and even a lot of reporters I would qualify as Broderists (i.e. Jake Tapper) have spent the last five years trying to get the broad middle of Americans to get outraged about trump’s manifold corruption. We’re going to do it again with the Thompson Committee. And I hope there are cases that Garland– and more likely people under him– sees fit to prosecute.
Something has been done, and something will continue to be done. I hope something eventually works. But as Pelosi likes to say, with a quote she attributes to Lincoln but that I’ve never been able to pin down, without public sentiment on your side, it’s damn difficult to get something done in our system of government.
Prosecuting Ross and not prosecuting more heinous people
# 2 would be far worse politically IMHO.
(And, yes, those are not the only two options).
I think if you are the Justice Department and you are going to rank the wrong-doing by the former Trump Administration by severity of the crime, then Wilber Ross probably doesn’t even get into the top 100. Prosecutions take enormous manpower and resources. I can’t imagine a world in which Wilber Ross is going to be your top target, or even your top 99th target. Not when people like Bill Barr and Jared Kushner are out there to be investigated.
But as Pelosi likes to say, with a quote she attributes to Lincoln but that I’ve never been able to pin down, without public sentiment on your side, it’s damn difficult to get something done in our system of government.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. And how do you get public sentiment on your side?
134.
Martin
@Kent: Yeah, the mechanism is the same, but the target was very different. Going after gay marriage directly affected not a huge demographic, but one at least large enough to sway an election given our usual winning margins – just among the people directly affected, let alone the family and friends. There was some electoral risk in going after it – and policy differences matter only inasmuch as there is electoral risk involved.
And the bigotry is exactly the same, I agree, but the risk is trivial. They’re picking quite literally the smallest fight they can find to pick. They’re either out of policy ideas or too scared to fight around them
I don’t think so. I personally think we need to deeply investigate much of what went on during the Trump Administration and that likely means subpoenas and testimony under oath. I frankly don’t care that much if say…Bill Barr or Jared Kushner actually get prosecuted and go to jail. But their deeds should be exposed for all to see and stand as a lesson for what not do to if you are ever in a similar position of power. It is called accountability. And the only way we get there is by pulling off the cover and looking underneath.
136.
Gravenstone
@StringOnAStick: Streisand Effect on line 1 for Mr. O’reilly…
@Kent: Yeah, the mechanism is the same, but the target was very different. Going after gay marriage directly affected not a huge demographic, but one at least large enough to sway an election given our usual winning margins – just among the people directly affected, let alone the family and friends. There was some electoral risk in going after it – and policy differences matter only inasmuch as there is electoral risk involved.
And the bigotry is exactly the same, I agree, but the risk is trivial. They’re picking quite literally the smallest fight they can find to pick. They’re either out of policy ideas or too scared to fight around them
I think it is both. Also they have discovered that they can go to school board meetings and scream at public officials about bullshit like trans bathrooms and CRT with basically zero accountability. Because public officials like school board members can’t actually scream back.
The issues are actually astonishingly trivial when you get down to it. But the rage and fury is not.
138.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree. I think it’s pretty clear that when the public sees powerful people not held accountable, they get angry and wonder why they, little guy, are held to a higher standard. If they get off due to a bad ruling, or senility, or whatever, they may still be angry, but they’ll at least recognize the effort made.
139.
sdhays
@Martin: When was the last election that the GQP actually fought about actual policy? 2008 when McCain ran on bombing Iran? Every other election has been about nonsense or nonsense about how bad Democrats are.
In 2012, the biggest policy critique the Republicans had was against Obamacare, so they nominated…the governor who established the blueprint of Obamacare in Massachusetts. Even then, they were just gnashing their teeth.
140.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell: And how do you get public sentiment on your side?
Damned if I know. Even most Republicans thought the Grab’em tape would be the end of trump. I still think that even after the ’16 election, establishment Republicans thought all the roads leading to Russia would cripple him. I thought the revelations of the trump tower meeting would shake the lumpenmittel out of their torpor. He was impeached, twice. Mitch McConnell got him acquitted, and after the second time seemed to think trump was done. He later surveyed the political landscape, which he is very good at, and determined spiking a Senate inquiry into the insurrection was to his political advantage.
It’s not because Democrats aren’t telling people. It’s because too many people really don’t care. The great challenge of the trump era has been getting people to care.
@Martin: When was the last election that the GQP actually fought about actual policy? 2008 when McCain ran on bombing Iran? Every other election has been about nonsense or nonsense about how bad Democrats are.
In 2012, the biggest policy critique the Republicans had was against Obamacare, so they nominated…the governor who established the blueprint of Obamacare in Massachusetts. Even then, they were just gnashing their teeth.
The last actual policy proposal they had that wasn’t pure bullshit was Bush’s proposal to privatize social security. And that was back in what…2006 or so? And went down in flames.
All the repeal Obamacare bullshit wasn’t policy at all. It was performative bullshit. They are actually damn lucky they didn’t pull it off.
The rest of it is just carbon copy tax cuts for the rich and de-regulation for corporations. Which is a form of policy I suppose. Just not very popular policy, so they try to disguise it.
142.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
dupe deleted
143.
Gravenstone
@Baud: suggesting the agency would “unfairly” target some Americans Republicans.
Let’s call it what it was.
144.
sdhays
@Kent: That’s what I was actually thinking, but I figured McCain deserved credit for running on going to war with everyone.
145.
Martin
@sdhays: But it was at least based in something, and had an impact on the electorate. If you have a position that Martians shouldn’t get drivers licenses, yes, it’s structured like a policy, but it affects nothing. It doesn’t change anything.
My point being, how objectively something looks like a policy and how much energy is behind it doesn’t matter if there’s no real impact. If nothing else it risks nothing. Changing the age of Medicare is a tiny policy. You can write it out in a paragraph. You may not even be hugely committed to it, but it’s a big meaningful issue because it has a big meaningful impact. It contributes something.
To me, policy is something that has durable, measurable impact. That changes the landscape in a meaningful way such that it affects the base assumptions for the next policy debate. The public should be able to say that the world is somehow different after that policy than it was before, which will color their support for the next policy, the folks who brought it or opposed it, etc.
The trans student athlete policy and the CRT issues don’t do that. They give us meta information about what the GOP values and the kinds of fights they’re interested in taking, but they’re otherwise pointless. They’re less about fighting over what the country should be, and more about signaling who should be in the GOP, which is like, who fucking cares?
146.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
And it isn’t just Democrats telling people what trump is. He bragged about sexual assault and tax evasion, and a handful of butterflies flapping their wings in a handful of states last October, or Democrats making the wrong decision last spring, and we might well been looking at a second term
The last actual policy proposal they had that wasn’t pure bullshit was Bush’s proposal to privatize social security. And that was back in what…2006 or so? And went down in flames.
Bush proposed social security reform in Feb 2006. Remember he said he had political capital and he was going to spend it? Well, spend it he did. His approvals dropped and never recovered. The legend is that it was Katrina, but he was already despised before then. Later on, I think early 2007, he came out for immigration reform that wasn’t racist and didn’t include a wall or anything, so the R base hated him even more. By the end of that year, they considered him to be a Democrat.
148.
Geminid
@Kent: 2016 was a very close election, and even most marginal factors could have been consequential. But prosecuting Wilbur Ross, or twenty Wilbur Rosses, is not going make or break Democratic electoral prospects in 2022 and 2024. If you asked voters how they felt about the Wilbur Ross case I bet 90% or more would answer, who the hell is Wilbur Ross?
Setting aside the effects of Republican election subversion, I believe 2022 and 2024 will fought and won on the economy. Among secondary issues, health care and gun safety can be winners for Democrats. Virginia Democrats used these two issues to good effect in the 2017 and 2019 state elections. But former Governor McDonnell’s corruption case was not a factor..
149.
Soprano2
@James E Powell:I get what you are saying, but the political question is whether we want to demonstrate he lied about something important or do we want him & all right-wing propaganda to say “Democrats admit he did nothing wrong?”
They would say that regardless. If he were prosecuted it would be “it’s a witch hunt because they hate Trump”. The DOJ says he lied, they just don’t think it’s worth it to prosecute. How good would it be for them to prosecute and lose? I’m already worn out with the “Merrick Garland sold us out, he’s as corrupt as the rest of them” takes on Twitter I’ve been seeing for weeks now because he hasn’t immediately thrown everyone in jail.
Even most Republicans thought the Grab’em tape would be the end of trump.
They underestimated the press/media’s determination to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. In response to urgent requests from the Trump campaign, Wikileaks did an email dump and by the middle of the next week, EMAILS! was the top story.
It’s not because Democrats aren’t telling people. It’s because too many people really don’t care.
A persistent problem for our side is that we are a coalition of disparate populations who care about different things, or the same things with different priority rankings. We have to find a way to narrow cast to the relevant, movable populations.
Republican messaging is pretty easy – racism, misogyny, fear of foreigners, made up bullshit about banning police, golf courses, or hamburgers. Nearly all Republican voters respond the same way to the same messages.
In contrast, there is almost nothing any Democrat can do that doesn’t provoke a “but some Democrats . . . ” response.
I’m sure there are fewer gays in the GOP now, but they’re probably your Bloomberg 2020 sort of crowd.
I ran across this story from November 2020. I was a bit surprised at the implication of strong gay support for Trump.
According to the exit polls, 61% of LGBTQ-identifying people voted for President-elect Joe Biden (D), while 28% voted for President Donald Trump (R). In 2016, when he ran against Hillary Clinton, Trump only won 13% of the LGBTQ vote.
Conservatives loved these numbers
LGBTQ conservatives on Twitter took a victory lap, crowing about the end of identity politics and the Democratic Party’s weakening hold on minority voters in general.
I sometimes see comments from gay folk in social media claiming that they vote for Republicans because they favor fiscally conservative policies. I do not entirely understand this. Although Trump did not heavily slam gay marriage, etc., the GOP courts people who would push gays and others out of society. How can anyone support a political party which is iffy on your right to exist?
ETA. As background, I note that the exit poll numbers obviously miss the large number of mail ballots in 2020. Also, the estimate of pollsters is that gay people are about 4.5 percent of the total US population. For various technical reasons the proper weighting of small populations for polling purposes is often problematic.
152.
Fair Economist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: With the pull of the very phonologically similar, vivid, and lizard brain activating bleed/bled, I think it’s inevitable the past tense of plead will become pled.
The white christianists must run everything. It’s all about spiritual warfare against Satan right here right now. The rest of us are in league with him or his unwitting dupes. They must hold the line against us until the Rapture comes.
They ain’t Xians
154.
sdhays
@Martin: I don’t disagree. I was just pointing out that they’ve been iteratively removing all policy beyond tax cuts for the wealthy throwing women in prison for miscarriages for a long time. It didn’t just dry up all of a sudden. Even before that, Republican “policy” has mostly been defined by pretending societal problems don’t exist, from racism, to sexism, to climate change.
They stopped engaging on policy, as you define it, because it was clear they had nothing popular to say.
155.
Geminid
@James E Powell: The factors you mention all hurt Bush, but the Iraq war hurt him most. He talked about his political capital in early 2005, but he had barely survived his reelection, and what political capital he had was swirling around the Iraq drain. The 2006 midterms were politically a Republican bloodbath. I think that war cost Republicans voters they never got back. They welcomed the influx of tea party cranks in 2010 because they needed to fill their depleted ranks, but the radicals have just helped run the party further into the ground. If they did not have voter suppression and gerrymandering on their side, Republicans would be as marginalized nationally as they have been in Virginia.
Democrats should be on the TV shows talking about how Ross is a liar & a crook just like everyone in the Trump administration.
God, no. I had no idea who Ross was and had no idea he’d lied to congress until reading the article about the DoJ decision, and just by being here I demonstrate I’m at the top end of political awareness. Only the tiniest percentage of Americans will ever give a shit about whether Ross is prosecuted. Trying to make a public fuss over whether he lied about putting a question on the census will make us look like ultra-partisan dumbasses. In addition, there is only so much time Democrats have available on television, and a vast list of much more important things to use it to talk about. There is no political advantage to us in this topic.
Hey, did you get home from your burn and scrape dermo appointment? How did that go?
I used to drive my dad to a plastic surgeon who sliced out his melanoma outbreaks. He looked like he won a knife fight on the way home, with 4-6 pressure bandages taped all over. Didn’t scar too much, guy was pretty good.
158.
Kent
@Brachiator: Doesn’t surprise me at all. LGBTQ is way too big of a category to be meaningful in a political sense. Are you talking about rich white male 50-something real estate developers living in the suburbs? Black trans teens living in the inner city? or 20-something white bisexual professional women who live ordinary straight lives?
I knew gay Republicans when I lived and worked in Texas. They tended to be middle aged business types doing contracting, insurance sales, stuff like that. They hated Hillary and worried primarily about taxes and regulation and thought that Dems were going to throttle the economy.
Do we want the DOJ to spend a lot of time and money pursuing a prosecution where they almost certainly can’t get a conviction just to make us feel good?
If it costs Wilbur thousands of $$ an hour, sure, of course. Drive his net worth down to the maximum extent possible!!! I also think he’s guilty of facilitating money laundering via the National Bank of Cyprus he managed for many years. So prosecute that as well !!!
161.
Geminid
@J R in WV: I am all for prosecuting money laundering cases wherever possible. I’m not so sure about the value of prosecuting this census testimony case, though. I wouldn’t neccesarily say that about other matters of perjury that will come up.
162.
Geminid
@Brachiator: My friend Joan told me about a group of lesbians she met on the Eastern Shore who were largely pro-trump. She was not surprised, and I wasn’t when I heard it. We like to celebrate diversity, but it’s a fact that the different groups are themselves diverse.
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Baud
CNN is billing this as an inflation speech.
Baud
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: It is. He just said inflation is BS.
Baud
@Cheryl Rofer:
I hope he said Bull Fucking Shit, or I’ll be disappointed.
Cheryl Rofer
@Baud: I was paraphrasing.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
Whenever life gets marginally better for the proles, the inflation whiners go to full screech.
Martin
@Baud: Yeah, the right has no policy because Trump has no policy. It’s just reactionary 2nd Amendment takes and beating up on a handful of trans student athletes.
Dems are free to take whatever popular positions they want.
Dorothy A. Winsor
david
https://www.govexec.com/management/2021/07/doj-will-not-prosecute-trump-officials-after-ig-referred-findings-false-testimony-census/183843/
Cool. Can’t wait for all those other investigations and “welp, yeah, but let’s all move on” non-prosecutions to come. Then Nov ’22 hits and they’ll act surprised at the absence of voters.
Cacti
First January 6th rioter is sentenced.
Gets only 8 months vs. a recommended 18 from the DOJ.
Judge was convinced of his “remorse”.
Pathetic.
trnc
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Awesome. Tx for the alert.
Kent
@Baud: They are spending so much time on anti-vax and anti CRT bullshit that they have no space for actual policy criticism. Idiots.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kent:
Not to worry, we Dems will take care of that.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
Who needs policy when they’re just going to try to rig elections anyway?
H.E.Wolf
@david:
Prosecuting appointees from a previous administration is a course that is vulnerable to grievous abuse. Therefore, on grounds of not setting banana-republican precedent, it is unlikely to happen when a Democratic administration is in office.
However, there’s plenty we can do to encourage Democratic voters to cast their votes in the 2022 midterms. I’m currently volunteering (at my own pace) with various voter-outreach projects, as are tens of thousands of others across the country.
How about you? It sounds as if you might like to help out. There are lots of local and national efforts underway – it’s easy to find one that suits a person’s time and energies. Let us know which one(s) you choose!
trnc
@david: It sucks, but anyone who overlooks the obviously major advantages of a Biden administration over DT 2.0 and uses non-prosecution as an excuse for not voting is probably looking for reason not to vote anyway.
taumaturgo
@Baud: IMO, the lack of pushback could be over-confidence by the GQP that their voter suppression laws and the gerrymandering of districts have heavily tilted the elections in their favor, populism notwithstanding. In addition, if and when court challenges by the D’s reach the conservative-dominated SC, they seem to be relaying it will decide to protect the vote suppression and gerrymandering laws.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Yeah, why bother.
M31
Not sure what I think of the sentence — 8 months for someone who acted all contrite (he said in court “I believe Joe Biden is President”), committed no violence, did no vandalism, etc.
If that’s the bottom line, then there’s plenty of room for adding on
(Well, committed no violence except for storming the Capitol with a murderous mob)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@H.E.Wolf:
It’s not “banana-republic precedent” if Ross actually committed wrong-doing and broke the law. It’s the inspector general’s office making this referral, not Biden himself
H.E.Wolf
@Cacti:
A felony conviction carries many more penalties than just the time spent in prison.
https://www.appealslawgroup.com/the-impact-of-a-felony-conviction/
I’m certain that this convicted felon will feel the weight of the long-term, permanent consequences for his choice of action. That satisfies me more than a long term of imprisonment.
NotMax
@Dorothy A. Winsor
Who didn’t see that coming? More predictable than the chimes of Big Ben.
;)
VeniceRiley
@david: That is (checks notes) approximately twice as infuriating as the MAGA unvaccinated idiot vendor I just had in my office…. coughing and wearing his mask under his nose!
H.E.Wolf
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
…you didn’t like my play on words? I am disappoint. :)
My personal opinion is that the appointees of the previous administration were corrupt to a man. And I also comprehend the barriers that stand in the way of their prosecution.
And so I’m turning my disgust with corrupt Republicans into voter-outreach efforts, so that progress can be made at the legislative level. It’s stealthy, which is why I like it. :)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I was saying from the GOP’s POV. They probably believe that they don’t need any actual policy to win
Frankensteinbeck
@david:
I really don’t think anybody votes based on whether Biden prosecutes people for being misleading in how they described the proposal process that put a question on the census. Similarly, it’s probably not the kind of thing the DoJ is going to go out on a limb to do.
@Martin:
The Right’s policy has not changed since before Trump, except that trans issues became the new abuse target during that period. White supremacy, all-around bigotry, and Cleek’s Law got Trump elected. He was an effect, not a cause. Flat-out lying about economic policy was the standard Republican policy before Trump was elected.
Elizabelle
BREAKING NEWS
The S&P 500 fell 2 percent, on pace for its worst drop in months, as concerns grew about the Delta variant’s impact on growth.
Monday, July 19, 2021 1:04 PM EST. [SOURCE: NY TIMES]
The sell-off on Wall Street was broad, reflecting a range of concerns about economic growth and the potential for rising Covid-19 infections to lead to the return of restrictions on travel and tourism.
Elizabelle
Republicans (and other rightwingers) are BAD for business. Bad.
I hope some fingers get pointed at them, hard, for endangering the world’s attempted return from the pandemic. It could happen. Money talks. The needlessly dead: not so much.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
On the contrary, they operate under a very focused policy – to seize and clutch raw power for themselves alone.
germy
https://wnyt.com/news/american-academy-of-pediatrics-school-mask-recommendations/6176552/?cat=10114
American Academy of Pediatrics ‘strongly recommends’ masks in schools for all
Almost Retired
@Elizabelle: Exactly! Preach! The negative repercussions from anti-vaxxism is not just owning the Libs. If the market continues to tank, it will also affect their donors and what’s left of the Republican’s traditional business base. Fuckers. Too steep of losses, and I might have to change my nym to “not quite as close to retired as I thought.”
Frankensteinbeck
@Elizabelle:
But they’re good for rich people who want to feel like they are superior beings whose most trivial selfish or cruel whim is genius.
FelonyGovt
@H.E.Wolf: My local old lady Huddle group is going to be writing postcards to encourage voter registration in CA-25 (Katie Hill’s old district, where the awful R Mike Garcia won by 333 votes in 2020). Looking forward to seeing the ladies again and writing some postcards!
Kent
Even the trans issue isn’t really new. It’s just the newest incarnation of anti-LGBT bigotry. A decade or so ago the panic was over gay marriage. After they lost that one they just pivoted to trans kids as the new focus for anti-LGBT bigotry. But it is the same hatred wrapped in Christianity that has always been part of the GOP agenda.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@H.E.Wolf:
I….guess. It just smacks of the rich and well-connected (plus right-wing) getting off scot-free again
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
That’s true
Frankensteinbeck
@Kent:
Yep. Just the current fad in a long bigotry tradition.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
Do you think trans rights will follow the same trajectory as same-sex marriage did? I remember two years ago reading the results of annual survey of young American adults’ acceptance/tolerance of LGBT+ people. The survey found that LGBT+ tolerance and acceptance had dropped considerably, below 50%
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Frankensteinbeck:
Been meaning to ask you this, but I remember you predicting around 6 months ago that Trump would fade away and the GOP would only throw him bones from time to time. Given the thousands still attending his rallies and his continued hold over the party (I believe he won some CPAC straw poll recently), do you still think this will be the case?
sdhays
OT: This story is just stupid, but entertaining:
You can just see the joy of the reporter writing that last sentence. I also find it highly entertaining that she’s a contributor to The Federalist, which I assume (and am not going to check because I don’t deserve to be wrong) is related to the Federalist Society.
Soprano2
I care about the sentences, but what I really want is for all the people who overran the Capitol to have felony convictions that will follow them for life. That will be at least as painful, if not more so, than any prison time served. I hope they get long probationary periods, too, so they can find out first-hand how punishing being on probation actually is.
Frankensteinbeck
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yes, actually. If you look at who is holding the rallies, where they are held, and the attendance, he is definitely not A list anymore. The GOP goes out of its way to talk about the election being stolen and fraud and integrity and so on while barely mentioning Trump’s name. The RNC continues to fleece rubes with his name while not giving him a dime. CPAC loves him, but CPAC is a troll farm devoted solely to Triggering The Libs. He’d be gone already if the news weren’t so desperate to create a comeback story for him, and all they’re doing is dragging out his collapse as he struggles to find some way, any way to get back on the gravy train of fleecing his base. His websites got shit attendance. His press releases are every once in awhile repeated to the public but mostly totally ignored and lost. Yeah, he’s at the “It’s the pictures that got small!” stage.
Soprano2
@david: I read a tweet by an attorney who says the problem is that to get a perjury conviction you have to be able to prove intent, and with Ross that would probably be impossible to do because might plead something like senility, which is actually a defense. Do we want the DOJ to spend a lot of time and money pursuing a prosecution where they almost certainly can’t get a conviction just to make us feel good?
Patricia Kayden
Yes
Baud
@Patricia Kayden: Yeah, gotta just keep at it.
Everyone wants an political earthquake, but a steady erosion is our friend.
JoyceH
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m with you. I honestly expected Trump to fade as quickly as Sarah Palin did. And the fact that he hasn’t is a sign of the extreme weakness of the GOP. Because they are the ones propping him up. And they’re propping him up because he’s the best they got.
I saw news about that rally he held at a fairground, and breathless reporting it was a record breaking crowd. A record breaking crowd – for a COUNTY FAIRGROUND. Much of the crowd consisting of Trumpist Dead Heads who’ve made their lives revolve around attending these rallies because their lives are otherwise so empty. But he’s the best they’ve got.
Hoodie
@Frankensteinbeck: You’re probably right. The GOP may hope that Trump would die so they could give him the Reagan hagiography treatment, and that one of their new crop of Trumpist pols (e.g., DeSantis, Noem, etc.) will be able to carry the torch. One problem with that is they have no one who is a celebrity like Trump, and each of these Trump wannabes represent various and sometimes conflicting subsections of the Trump base that only Trump is capable of uniting in any electorally stable fashion. He’s the Universal Asshole, hard to replace.
Kent
Honestly no idea. But as a HS teacher I would say that LGBT kids of all flavors are MUCH MUCH more open and out today than they were even 10 years ago and generally more accepted/supported by their peers. I think the parents and grandparents are the bigger problem. They are the ones to tend to have the gay and trans panics
And honestly. I don’t really like the LGBT label myself. I think it is too expansive. The surveys I have read suggest that the majority of self-identified LGBT folks are bisexual women. Which honestly isn’t the same thing at all as being trans.
Barbara
@Soprano2: That was my first thought. Ross is senile and even if he doesn’t use it as an affirmative defense, the jury might figure it out just by listening to the guy talk on the stand.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2: For a lot of people, the answer is yes.
The Thin Black Duke
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s good being a white man in White America.
Baud
@JoyceH:
It took a little while for Sarah Palin to fade. Trump will take longer because he is a bigger figure to the right.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Barbara: probably doesn’t apply here, but as a non-lawyer, isn’t there also the factor that acquittals can serve as precedent, to the defendant’s advantage, in future prosecutions? Was Bob McDonnell’s reversal on appeal a factor in getting Bob Menendez off the hook? again, NAL, but it’s something that’s always on my mind when people start baying for criminal prosecutions. Not only are they not guaranteed to work, they can actually backfire
As an old fashioned romantic, I prefer public Congressional inquiries, get’ed under oath, on the record in public. And even that doesn’t always work the way we want. Alexander Butterfield moments are rare. Louis DeJoy double-talk and “I think I don’t remember” are more common.
StringOnAStick
I saw a headline that BillO is talking about bringing lawsuits against the media outlets reporting that he and TFG’s stadium tour tickets are selling poorly. That should work…
Jim, Foolish Literalist
another thing people miss about criminal prosecutions: Defendants can hire lawyers. And even with a conviction– a unanimous vote of twelve jurors– defendants can hire appellate lawyers. Immensely rich people like Wilbur Ross can hire lots of very good defense lawyers
ETA: Checking Wiki for Ross’s age– 83, I thought he was older– they estimate his net worth at $600M. And he used to be married to Betsy McCaughy, which name is a flashback to good ol’ days of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
StringOnAStick
Also, I am grinning at realizing that Biden chose “The Former Guy” as a label because he knew it would get shortened to TFG and then people would start mentally reading it as “that fucking guy”; that’s how it has read in my head since the first week.
Brachiator
@Elizabelle:
Wake me when Fox News and the GOP advocate getting vaccinated to save the economy.
Josie
@StringOnAStick: Yep. I’ll bet that’s how it reads in his head too.
Soprano2
I know, and to me that’s crazy, but in a way I understand it. We feel so abused by the Trump administration that we want every organ of the government to lash back at them as hard as they can, regardless of whether it would actually do anything or not. Just making the people who made us miserable also miserable is enough for some.
Martin
@Kent: But, it is new. Gay marriage was at least focused on a demographic with some political power. But I can’t think of a smaller and less powerful target than trans student athletes. It’s like the smallest policy fight they could think of. It is of course massively consequential to those students, their families and anyone that can be extrapolated from their dipshit bigoted arguments, but they’ve ceded the entire policy space other than literally dozens of student athletes.
To me, a policy argument needs to flow from some kind of principle, otherwise it’s a ‘yes I can, no you can’t’ squabble, devoid of substance. Small government was at least anchored in some principles, even if it was really driven by ‘let us hate on black people’. There’s none of that. What’s the GOPs expression of their view of how we should be governed? There isn’t one. They’re down to ‘let the white Christians run everything’ which isn’t something they can express because they know what the backlash will be, and they can’t even offer up the Lee Atwater collection of substitutes. There’s just … nothing.
Soprano2
Once the court ruled on the McDonnell case, IMHO the prosecution of Menendez should have been dropped, because that decision made it almost impossible to get a conviction.
WhatsMyNym
@Elizabelle:
Yes, it had nothing to with extreme over-valuing of stocks prices in the last year.
ETA: the 5 year charts for the major indexes show the real story.
ETA: Click on 5Y at the top of the chart.
Martin
@Soprano2: Funny thing when you let people lie to congress. Everyone starts lying to congress, and testifying before congress loses all meaning and utility.
Soprano2
I don’t disagree about that. I am only addressing the probability of actually getting a conviction, which seems to be almost zero in this case. Perhaps there will be cases that are easier to prosecute that they will go after, but I can’t see wasting a bunch of time and money trying to get a conviction when it most likely will never happen. Sucks, but it’s the truth.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Then you select winnable cases to prosecute.
Kent
@Martin: I don’t know. I don’t think it is really that different. Two decades ago gay marriage had a pretty small constituency too. Until everyone started to realize they had gay friends, cousins, brothers, co-workers, and sons and daughters.
Trans kids also have parents, friends, classmates, etc. etc. It is the SAME EXACT Christian fundamentalists who are weaponizing and distorting the SAME EXACT bible verses to justify their anti-trans bigotry that they did two decades ago with their anti-gay bigotry. There is honestly no difference.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Now that’s just crazy talk.
Kent
@WhatsMyNym: I love how when these sorts of big swings in the market happen we have all these expert commentators rushing out to explain WHY the market is going one way or the other. When most of it isn’t actual people making decisions based on news events. It is computer-algorithm based trading that triggers other computer-algorithm based trading and a bunch of machines are mostly leading the way, all of which are just looking at numbers and data and none of which are reading the news.
Delta variant? The Delta variant has been growing in both the US and Europe for weeks. Nothing new happened today.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kent: It’s a much smaller group and has a lot less money and power than marriage equity had.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kent: Sounds like a good justification for a small transaction tax.
The Thin Black Duke
@?BillinGlendaleCA: It also doesn’t help when you have more than a few gay men and women hating on transfolk.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): OT, obviously, how ya been?
The Pale Scot
@H.E.Wolf:
Guns go bye bye……..
Cool
WhatsMyNym
@Kent: Yes and no. It was completely expected and folks were probably lining up the big trades for the morning.
ETA: it’s summer and everybody wants to lock in their profits and go on vacation ;-)
Baud
Ladies and gentlemen, your new anti-corporate GOP.
Kent
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m not arguing that point. But look what actually happened with gay marriage. Southern states were just as retrograde about gay marriage as they currently are with trans kids. Hell, even CA passed an anti-gay marriage initiative. There weren’t any victories at all on the gay marriage front anywhere in the south until SCOTUS actually intervened. Gay marriage isn’t legal in say Texas or Alabama because Texas or Alabama gay folks had a lot of money and local political clout. Same thing is happening now with trans kids. All the anti-trans stuff is happening in the south once again. And there isn’t going to be the political power to stop it locally, it will take Federal action from Congress or SCOTUS or executive action by Biden of some sort.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@The Thin Black Duke: That’s true as well.
Madeleine
Emptywheel has been following Hodgkins’s sentencing and has an informative post today. The sentence includes the 8 months, two years of probation, and $2000 in restitution. As E. Points out, this first sentence must be seen in the context of the many sentences on similar but more serious crimes to be addressed in the coming months.
Frankensteinbeck
@Martin:
Anti-trans legislation is also targeted at any woman who is insufficiently feminine. They get harassed in bathrooms and kicked out of competitive sports. It’s already happening and every anti-trans law increases it. This is about policing gender roles, and the affected demographics are huge. Republicans are pushing the restrictions through before the public realizes that.
Steve in the ATL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: don’t know about you, but I certainly trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I hate to give Ryan Grim or The Intercept credit for anything, but…
Kent
@Frankensteinbeck: All true. But the anti-gay hysteria of a generation ago spawned by the likes of Anita Bryant and various evangelicals was also about enforcing gender roles. Gender role enforcement is EXACTLY what they were talking about when they used terms like “traditional marriage” I’m not arguing that anti-trans legislation and sentiment isn’t bad. Just that it is the same exact people making the same exact arguments that they made 2 decades ago about gays. After losing that one they just pivoted to give their followers a new target to attack. Anti-trans bigotry isn’t anything new. It’s the same old Christian hysteria repackaged for the 2020s. Just like the anti-CRT hysteria is the same old racial bigotry only slightly repackaged for the 2020s.
germy
Baud
@germy: That’s not what he was charged with.
germy
?BillinGlendaleCA
@germy: Guess I won’t be buying the F-22 anytime soon.
James E Powell
@H.E.Wolf:
Agreed. We humane liberal types should not be pushing for longer sentences, even if we are very angry.
I do wonder if this guy is confident that Trump will pardon him once he returns to office in August.
germy
Paul Hodgkins, a 38-year-old crane operator, pleaded guilty last month to one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, and acknowledged that he took a selfie and joined a group of rioters who assembled at the front of the Senate chamber, with the intention to obstruct the certification of the 2020 Presidential election.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capitol-riot-sentencing-paul-allard-hodgkins-felony/
germy
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
And I was in the market for a good tank.
The Thin Black Duke
It’s safer to be a white man storming the US Capitol than it was for Breonna Taylor who was shot to death sleeping in her bed. That’s what every black person in America is taking away from the bullshit that happened today.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kent: I agree.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: same guy discussed above? I missed the detail that he pleaded (even though it should be pled) guilty. I imagine that was a big factor in sentencing?
germy
@The Thin Black Duke:
And Crystal Mason got five years for casting her vote.
germy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Eight months.
James E Powell
@Soprano2:
I get what you are saying, but the political question is whether we want to demonstrate he lied about something important or do we want him & all right-wing propaganda to say “Democrats admit he did nothing wrong?”
I’m not sure that Ross & his lies are important enough for the effort, but letting Trump and Trump-era Republicans off the hook is one of the reasons they will be able to march back into power in 2023.
germy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You’re both right.
smith
Just as important, in many states their VOTES go bye bye. Think of it as poetic justice.
rikyrah
@Kent:
I admit that I was in the Civil Unions group, because I didn’t want to upset the religious folks.
Two things changed my mind.
Catherine D.
On a bright note, I hauled a load of glass pipettes to the common area this morning and ran into a guy fixing an autoclave. He laughed when I came in and said “I like your shirt” It was an old Mad Dog Pac GOP shirt where the O is the Soviet hammer and sickle. Made my morning!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: I was just snarking. I know from months of close trial coverage that “pleaded” is the correct form, “pled” just sounds better to my ear
?BillinGlendaleCA
@James E Powell: As OO said above, choose a better case, there’s lots of them.
Patricia Kayden
Chief Oshkosh
@trnc: Not prosecuting reinforces several bad things, not least of which it tells bad actors that they are free to act badly. It also reinforces the idea that some people are above the law.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell:
Getting back on my hobby-horse: Narrowing accountability down to criminal prosecutions, which to any AG, even someone more aggressive and creative than Garland apparently is, is going to mean violations of specific statutes that can be prosecuted, convicted and upheld not just by juries, but judges, many of them… quirky. And IANAL, but would a prosecution begun today be likely to go to trial by mid-term Election Day?
I don’t know what Biden could or would do in the way appointed some kind of special investigator, a Special Inspector General?, which I guess would be an Inspector Specific, but I think the best we’re going to get is the Thompson Committee.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Chief Oshkosh: And prosecuting and not getting a guilty verdict is worse.
germy
@Patricia Kayden:
They’ll have to pay for their own private security. Another expense.
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2:
Uh, is this a trick question? Fuck yes I want the DOJ to pursue these people. Not only does it serve justice, it’s good politics. If DOJ needs more resources to get that done, well, they should call up HR and get the wheels rolling.
Judas Priest, do I have to figure out EVERYTHING for you ingrates?! ;)
patroclus
The stock market crash is not good news for the economy, but it seems likely to last only a few days as asset prices are re-valued quickly more in line with reality, rather than their over-valued levels of the past year or so. The rapid spike in COVID Delta variants, the massive flooding in Europe and our temps and fires out west, plus the bad news out of the Olympics with all the COVID stuff is the favorite day-by-day cause, but it’s really a much needed correction which brings everyone back to reality. It doesn’t look good, though, for Biden to be making an economy speech on the day it happens.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chief Oshkosh: I’ll go along with the complaints if it becomes a pattern. A decision not to prosecute one person who appears to have a defense of dementia and/or an inability to aid in his own defense due to his dementia is not something I am going g to get too worked up over. Nor is a lenient sentence where a person has pleaded guilty, accepted responsibility, and expressed remorse. Sue me.
James E Powell
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I don’t know that there are lots of them.
And choose better cases is dismissive and ignores the point I was arguing. Republicans never said what the Clintons did that was wrong in Whitewater. Al Gore committed no crime when he made phone calls from his residence. There was no chance that Hillary Clinton would be convicted for using her email server – Comey conceded that he knew that from the beginning. Nevertheless, those prosecutions changed the course of American history.
As I said, I’m not sure Ross & his lies are that big a deal, but there is a pattern developing here that is not making people happy.
And as we go into the midterms, I would caution against using “we would only be doing this to make our people happy” as an excuse not to do something that would help win votes.
Omnes Omnibus
@James E Powell: I would caution against any kind of election related decision making with respect to prosecutions. That should never be a factor. Ever.
Kent
@James E Powell: Yes, but Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were future top of the ticket Dem Candidates. And people like Hunter Biden were connected to future top of the ticket candidates.
Wilber Ross, on the other hand, is a has-been nobody. Taking him down accomplishes nothing in terms of political strategy. Going after Trump, Cruz, Hawley, et. al. That is a different story. Dirty up those fuckers as much as we can. That is the game that they created.
As for Wilber Ross. I have no doubt he has 10 pages worth of possible wrong-doing to investigate. I expect that misleading Congress on the Census is probably not even in the top 20.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@James E Powell:
Those cases were also never prosecuted.
Major Major Major Major
@Kent: one interesting thing about the obama-era LBGT rights wins is that pushing for marriage and military service were both sorta conservative ideas, advocated by folks like Andrew Sullivan, at least by the late 80s/90s.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
If Ross was even close to innocent, I’d agree. But he is not. He is a liar and a crook and Democrats should be on the TV shows talking about how Ross is a liar & a crook just like everyone in the Trump administration.
The calculation that “we can’t be sure we can get a conviction” is not always a reason not to do it. As I said each comment, I’m not saying Ross is the hill I want to die on. Most people have no idea he exists. But somebody is going to have to start putting the wood to Republicans or they are going to skate on everything.
Kent
And honestly hasn’t really ever been, even for the GOP. They created a ginormous amount of noise about Hillary’s emails and Hunter Biden’s hard drives and all of that bullshit. But neither one of them was ever actually indicted much less prosecuted. Congressional investigations are not prosecutions.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: I don’t care if it is the game they created, political prosecutions are a road down which we don’t want to travel.
Baud
@Kent:
Yeah, of these two scenarios:
# 2 would be far worse politically IMHO.
(And, yes, those are not the only two options).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
How dirtied up was Al Gore by the whole fund-raising thing? As I recall, that was ’96. I remember Bob Dole howling “Where’s the outrage?” into the wind. I don’t remember it coming up that much in 2000.
My recollection is Gore was more damaged by the likes of Maureen Dowd’s pink-washing and Broderist political coverage and the “not a dime’s worth of difference” crowd
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: There was also earth tones and the inventing the internet lie.
Geminid
@James E Powell: Are prosecutions, or the lack thereof, of former administration officials really a factor in how people vote? Or whether they vote? It seems to me that this is more of a coffee table issue than a kitchen table issue like jobs, health care, or public safety.
Kent
@Major Major Major Major: That’s true. But I think there were also a lot of wealthy white conservative gay men, especially back then. And selling gay marriage and gays in the military as conservative and patriotic was also a superb marketing strategy. After 4 years of Trump I think there are less of them in the GOP. But honestly I don’t even know.
James E Powell
@Kent:
Look, I get it. I’m a lawyer and I follow politics closely. But the people whose votes are critical for 2022 are neither.
Baud
@Kent:
It took longer to achieve, but AA service in WWII helped pave the way for the civil rights era.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Al Gore was pilloried for the phone calls, the temple fundraiser, and a few other things. It was a major part of the War on Gore.
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2:
I think it was Cheryl or another front pager who has opined a few times about the effects of “white collar” crime essentially never being prosecuted, and so there’s no deterrent. Additionally, the lack of even appearing to pursue justice adds to loss of faith in our government and society.
Well, if you have to start somewhere, and you don’t like your chances with Wilbur, who might be worth go after? Anyone? Because is sounds a little like several people here are just resigned to let this go on and on and on.
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Can’t win if you don’t play. Choosing not to pursue charges tells the voters that Ross didn’t do anything wrong and that the IG can go get stuffed. So then we go on to the next IG finding, and make the same calculation, and so the voters get told that Trump-guy No. 2 didn’t do anything wrong and the IG can go get stuffed. Then we go to the next IG finding, and make the same calculation, and so the voters get told that Trump-guy No. 3 didn’t do anything wrong and the IG can go get stuffed. Then we …
I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree.
But I’m right
;)
Kent
Hillary’s emails was an issue that came out of the endless Benghazi investigations. Without Benghazi one could reasonably argue there would have been no EMAILZ. No Andrew Weiner laptop. And arguably a Clinton win in 2016. None of that had to do with actual prosecutions. But it did have everything to do with congressional investigations who’s sole purpose was to dirty up the opponents. And it worked.
sdhays
@rikyrah: I was for civil unions too, but I was more radical – eliminating state-sanctioned marriages. To me, the critical part was equality under the law, so if society was soooo set on having “marriage” defined according to religion, then the secular state should get out of the business of defining marriage and just establish civil unions for all.
I was young and didn’t appreciate how that wouldn’t actually make anyone happy.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell:
Democrats and liberals and even a lot of reporters I would qualify as Broderists (i.e. Jake Tapper) have spent the last five years trying to get the broad middle of Americans to get outraged about trump’s manifold corruption. We’re going to do it again with the Thompson Committee. And I hope there are cases that Garland– and more likely people under him– sees fit to prosecute.
Something has been done, and something will continue to be done. I hope something eventually works. But as Pelosi likes to say, with a quote she attributes to Lincoln but that I’ve never been able to pin down, without public sentiment on your side, it’s damn difficult to get something done in our system of government.
James E Powell
@Kent:
You are splitting hairs with ‘not actual prosecutions’ and I’m certain you know it. That means nothing to the public.
Charles Pierce says it better than me.
Kent
I think if you are the Justice Department and you are going to rank the wrong-doing by the former Trump Administration by severity of the crime, then Wilber Ross probably doesn’t even get into the top 100. Prosecutions take enormous manpower and resources. I can’t imagine a world in which Wilber Ross is going to be your top target, or even your top 99th target. Not when people like Bill Barr and Jared Kushner are out there to be investigated.
Major Major Major Major
@Kent: oh, for sure. The cons were absolutely correct that these would be legitimizing victories.
I’m sure there are fewer gays in the GOP now, but they’re probably your Bloomberg 2020 sort of crowd.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s exactly what I’m saying. And how do you get public sentiment on your side?
Martin
@Kent: Yeah, the mechanism is the same, but the target was very different. Going after gay marriage directly affected not a huge demographic, but one at least large enough to sway an election given our usual winning margins – just among the people directly affected, let alone the family and friends. There was some electoral risk in going after it – and policy differences matter only inasmuch as there is electoral risk involved.
And the bigotry is exactly the same, I agree, but the risk is trivial. They’re picking quite literally the smallest fight they can find to pick. They’re either out of policy ideas or too scared to fight around them
Kent
I don’t think so. I personally think we need to deeply investigate much of what went on during the Trump Administration and that likely means subpoenas and testimony under oath. I frankly don’t care that much if say…Bill Barr or Jared Kushner actually get prosecuted and go to jail. But their deeds should be exposed for all to see and stand as a lesson for what not do to if you are ever in a similar position of power. It is called accountability. And the only way we get there is by pulling off the cover and looking underneath.
Gravenstone
@StringOnAStick: Streisand Effect on line 1 for Mr. O’reilly…
Kent
I think it is both. Also they have discovered that they can go to school board meetings and scream at public officials about bullshit like trans bathrooms and CRT with basically zero accountability. Because public officials like school board members can’t actually scream back.
The issues are actually astonishingly trivial when you get down to it. But the rage and fury is not.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: I agree. I think it’s pretty clear that when the public sees powerful people not held accountable, they get angry and wonder why they, little guy, are held to a higher standard. If they get off due to a bad ruling, or senility, or whatever, they may still be angry, but they’ll at least recognize the effort made.
sdhays
@Martin: When was the last election that the GQP actually fought about actual policy? 2008 when McCain ran on bombing Iran? Every other election has been about nonsense or nonsense about how bad Democrats are.
In 2012, the biggest policy critique the Republicans had was against Obamacare, so they nominated…the governor who established the blueprint of Obamacare in Massachusetts. Even then, they were just gnashing their teeth.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Damned if I know. Even most Republicans thought the Grab’em tape would be the end of trump. I still think that even after the ’16 election, establishment Republicans thought all the roads leading to Russia would cripple him. I thought the revelations of the trump tower meeting would shake the lumpenmittel out of their torpor. He was impeached, twice. Mitch McConnell got him acquitted, and after the second time seemed to think trump was done. He later surveyed the political landscape, which he is very good at, and determined spiking a Senate inquiry into the insurrection was to his political advantage.
It’s not because Democrats aren’t telling people. It’s because too many people really don’t care. The great challenge of the trump era has been getting people to care.
Kent
The last actual policy proposal they had that wasn’t pure bullshit was Bush’s proposal to privatize social security. And that was back in what…2006 or so? And went down in flames.
All the repeal Obamacare bullshit wasn’t policy at all. It was performative bullshit. They are actually damn lucky they didn’t pull it off.
The rest of it is just carbon copy tax cuts for the rich and de-regulation for corporations. Which is a form of policy I suppose. Just not very popular policy, so they try to disguise it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Gravenstone
Let’s call it what it was.
sdhays
@Kent: That’s what I was actually thinking, but I figured McCain deserved credit for running on going to war with everyone.
Martin
@sdhays: But it was at least based in something, and had an impact on the electorate. If you have a position that Martians shouldn’t get drivers licenses, yes, it’s structured like a policy, but it affects nothing. It doesn’t change anything.
My point being, how objectively something looks like a policy and how much energy is behind it doesn’t matter if there’s no real impact. If nothing else it risks nothing. Changing the age of Medicare is a tiny policy. You can write it out in a paragraph. You may not even be hugely committed to it, but it’s a big meaningful issue because it has a big meaningful impact. It contributes something.
To me, policy is something that has durable, measurable impact. That changes the landscape in a meaningful way such that it affects the base assumptions for the next policy debate. The public should be able to say that the world is somehow different after that policy than it was before, which will color their support for the next policy, the folks who brought it or opposed it, etc.
The trans student athlete policy and the CRT issues don’t do that. They give us meta information about what the GOP values and the kinds of fights they’re interested in taking, but they’re otherwise pointless. They’re less about fighting over what the country should be, and more about signaling who should be in the GOP, which is like, who fucking cares?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
And it isn’t just Democrats telling people what trump is. He bragged about sexual assault and tax evasion, and a handful of butterflies flapping their wings in a handful of states last October, or Democrats making the wrong decision last spring, and we might well been looking at a second term
James E Powell
@Kent:
Bush proposed social security reform in Feb 2006. Remember he said he had political capital and he was going to spend it? Well, spend it he did. His approvals dropped and never recovered. The legend is that it was Katrina, but he was already despised before then. Later on, I think early 2007, he came out for immigration reform that wasn’t racist and didn’t include a wall or anything, so the R base hated him even more. By the end of that year, they considered him to be a Democrat.
Geminid
@Kent: 2016 was a very close election, and even most marginal factors could have been consequential. But prosecuting Wilbur Ross, or twenty Wilbur Rosses, is not going make or break Democratic electoral prospects in 2022 and 2024. If you asked voters how they felt about the Wilbur Ross case I bet 90% or more would answer, who the hell is Wilbur Ross?
Setting aside the effects of Republican election subversion, I believe 2022 and 2024 will fought and won on the economy. Among secondary issues, health care and gun safety can be winners for Democrats. Virginia Democrats used these two issues to good effect in the 2017 and 2019 state elections. But former Governor McDonnell’s corruption case was not a factor..
Soprano2
They would say that regardless. If he were prosecuted it would be “it’s a witch hunt because they hate Trump”. The DOJ says he lied, they just don’t think it’s worth it to prosecute. How good would it be for them to prosecute and lose? I’m already worn out with the “Merrick Garland sold us out, he’s as corrupt as the rest of them” takes on Twitter I’ve been seeing for weeks now because he hasn’t immediately thrown everyone in jail.
James E Powell
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They underestimated the press/media’s determination to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. In response to urgent requests from the Trump campaign, Wikileaks did an email dump and by the middle of the next week, EMAILS! was the top story.
A persistent problem for our side is that we are a coalition of disparate populations who care about different things, or the same things with different priority rankings. We have to find a way to narrow cast to the relevant, movable populations.
Republican messaging is pretty easy – racism, misogyny, fear of foreigners, made up bullshit about banning police, golf courses, or hamburgers. Nearly all Republican voters respond the same way to the same messages.
In contrast, there is almost nothing any Democrat can do that doesn’t provoke a “but some Democrats . . . ” response.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
I ran across this story from November 2020. I was a bit surprised at the implication of strong gay support for Trump.
Conservatives loved these numbers
I sometimes see comments from gay folk in social media claiming that they vote for Republicans because they favor fiscally conservative policies. I do not entirely understand this. Although Trump did not heavily slam gay marriage, etc., the GOP courts people who would push gays and others out of society. How can anyone support a political party which is iffy on your right to exist?
ETA. As background, I note that the exit poll numbers obviously miss the large number of mail ballots in 2020. Also, the estimate of pollsters is that gay people are about 4.5 percent of the total US population. For various technical reasons the proper weighting of small populations for polling purposes is often problematic.
Fair Economist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: With the pull of the very phonologically similar, vivid, and lizard brain activating bleed/bled, I think it’s inevitable the past tense of plead will become pled.
The Pale Scot
@Martin:
They ain’t Xians
sdhays
@Martin: I don’t disagree. I was just pointing out that they’ve been iteratively removing all policy beyond tax cuts for the wealthy throwing women in prison for miscarriages for a long time. It didn’t just dry up all of a sudden. Even before that, Republican “policy” has mostly been defined by pretending societal problems don’t exist, from racism, to sexism, to climate change.
They stopped engaging on policy, as you define it, because it was clear they had nothing popular to say.
Geminid
@James E Powell: The factors you mention all hurt Bush, but the Iraq war hurt him most. He talked about his political capital in early 2005, but he had barely survived his reelection, and what political capital he had was swirling around the Iraq drain. The 2006 midterms were politically a Republican bloodbath. I think that war cost Republicans voters they never got back. They welcomed the influx of tea party cranks in 2010 because they needed to fill their depleted ranks, but the radicals have just helped run the party further into the ground. If they did not have voter suppression and gerrymandering on their side, Republicans would be as marginalized nationally as they have been in Virginia.
Frankensteinbeck
@James E Powell:
God, no. I had no idea who Ross was and had no idea he’d lied to congress until reading the article about the DoJ decision, and just by being here I demonstrate I’m at the top end of political awareness. Only the tiniest percentage of Americans will ever give a shit about whether Ross is prosecuted. Trying to make a public fuss over whether he lied about putting a question on the census will make us look like ultra-partisan dumbasses. In addition, there is only so much time Democrats have available on television, and a vast list of much more important things to use it to talk about. There is no political advantage to us in this topic.
J R in WV
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Hey, did you get home from your burn and scrape dermo appointment? How did that go?
I used to drive my dad to a plastic surgeon who sliced out his melanoma outbreaks. He looked like he won a knife fight on the way home, with 4-6 pressure bandages taped all over. Didn’t scar too much, guy was pretty good.
Kent
@Brachiator: Doesn’t surprise me at all. LGBTQ is way too big of a category to be meaningful in a political sense. Are you talking about rich white male 50-something real estate developers living in the suburbs? Black trans teens living in the inner city? or 20-something white bisexual professional women who live ordinary straight lives?
I knew gay Republicans when I lived and worked in Texas. They tended to be middle aged business types doing contracting, insurance sales, stuff like that. They hated Hillary and worried primarily about taxes and regulation and thought that Dems were going to throttle the economy.
The Pale Scot
@germy:
I assume the Creature is charging the SS for the rooms they’re using at the dump de largo, prices just went up
J R in WV
@Soprano2:
If it costs Wilbur thousands of $$ an hour, sure, of course. Drive his net worth down to the maximum extent possible!!! I also think he’s guilty of facilitating money laundering via the National Bank of Cyprus he managed for many years. So prosecute that as well !!!
Geminid
@J R in WV: I am all for prosecuting money laundering cases wherever possible. I’m not so sure about the value of prosecuting this census testimony case, though. I wouldn’t neccesarily say that about other matters of perjury that will come up.
Geminid
@Brachiator: My friend Joan told me about a group of lesbians she met on the Eastern Shore who were largely pro-trump. She was not surprised, and I wasn’t when I heard it. We like to celebrate diversity, but it’s a fact that the different groups are themselves diverse.