Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

So many bastards, so little time.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

“They all knew.”

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Bibi & Bone Saw

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During the 2020 primaries, one of my major misgivings about now-President Biden was his foreign policy track record. In my opinion, it was mostly awful during his time as a powerful ranking member on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations during the W years. And worse, he seemed proud of it.

Then Biden became president and proved me wrong by having the courage to finally get us out of Afghanistan, signaling he’d learned from the Iraq debacle. His quick action to rally NATO and the persuadable world after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the value of having a person with a ton of experience and connections at the helm.

But now there’s this: (NYT gift link)

The United States is discussing terms of a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia that would resemble military pacts with Japan and South Korea, according to American officials. The move is at the center of President Biden’s high-stakes diplomacy to get the kingdom to normalize relations with Israel.

Under such an agreement, the United States and Saudi Arabia would generally pledge to provide military support if the other country is attacked in the region or on Saudi territory. The discussions to model the terms after the treaties in East Asia, considered among the strongest the United States has outside of its European pacts, have not been previously reported.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, regards a mutual defense agreement with the United States as the most important element in his talks with the Biden administration about Israel, current and former U.S. officials said. Saudi officials say a strong defense agreement would help deter potential assaults by Iran or its armed partners even as the two regional rivals re-establish diplomatic ties.

“Peace in the Middle East” has been the prestige foreign policy white whale that presidents of both parties have chased since I was a child. Even the decidedly abby-normal presidency of Donald J. Trump included a run at peace in the Middle East via the so-called “Abraham Accords,” which supposedly squared things between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. The Trump people still crow about that, having few other bits of normal presidenting to tout.

And now it appears the Biden admin is pursuing a peace in the Middle East deal too. To what end? Does anyone think for a minute Prince Mohammed bin Bone Saw won’t flip off the oil pump next year to help sleaze the Trumps back into office? Or that Netanyahu won’t continue to break his country’s previous bipartisan approach to its major ally to openly side with Repubs and undermine Democrats every chance he gets?

Josh Marshall asks the right question at TPM: What’s in it for us?

What does the U.S. get from giving a strong security guarantee to a country, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, that is now largely hostile to the U.S. on behalf of another country, Israel, that is increasingly annoying and meddlesome at best? This isn’t the 1990s or even the aughts when the Middle East was a region made up mostly of various sorts of fairly-locked-in U.S. allies, albeit ones with major disagreements amongst themselves…

The U.S. partnership with Saudi Arabia, stretching all the way back to the 1940s, was always uncomfortable and even unseemly. But for decades the Saudis were supporters of high level American interests and guarantors of price stability in global oil markets. At least that was the idea. Today they appear more in league with Russia than the United States, certainly in world oil markets and beyond that as well. They openly bid China against the United States for their favor.

We live in a different world today. The Saudis have as much right to pursue their own interests as any other sovereign country. But again, what would the U.S. be getting in return for any of this?

The only clear answer I can see is: nothing.

I don’t see the U.S. benefit either. Neither country is trending in a good direction on human rights and democratic governance — quite the opposite. Neither proposed partner is trustworthy, though it’s important to keep in mind that diplomacy almost by definition requires managing relationships with scoundrels and bloodthirsty sociopaths.

Biden has exceeded expectations in the foreign policy side of the job so far, IMO. He’s earned the benefit of the doubt, at least in my book. Maybe he’s got something up his sleeve here. But I don’t see it so far. What do you think is going on?

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Senator Menendez (D-NJ) indicted for corruption (again)

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The Department of Justice released a sealed indictment of Senator Menendez this morning.  Here is the first paragraph of the allegations:

From at least 2018 up to and including in or bout 2022, MENENDEZ and his wife, NADINE MENENDEZ, a/k/a “Nadine Arslanian,” the defendant, engaged in a corrupt relationship with three New Jersey associates and businessmen—WAEL HANA, aka “Will Hana,” JOSE URIBE, and FRED DAIBES, the defendants—in which MENENDEZ and NADINE MENENDEZ agreed to and did accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes in exchange for using MENENDEZ’s power and influence as a Senator to seek to protect and enrich HANA, URIBE, and DAIBES and to benefit the Arab Republic of Egypt. Those bribes included cash, gold, payments toward a home mortgage, compensation for a low-or-no-show job, a luxury vehicle, and other things of value,

 

Jersey Jackals, start calling Trenton and DC to pressure this jagoff to resign.

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What’s the Matter with Kansas Ohio?

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So many questions about what’s up with Ohio!

Republicans chose their own map as the starting point for the redistricting commission. Were Republicans given a majority on the redistricting commission?  Otherwise, I don’t see how the Rs could push that through.

They are required to have 3 public hearings, and they chose 3 business days in a row, starting with the first one today.  I would say that’s short notice, but it’s really no advance notice at all.

Can someone from Ohio explain how this can possibly be legal?  Is it legal in Ohio to just say fuck you to the courts?

Paging Ohio peeps!  Paging Marc Elias!

https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/09/21/ohio-redistricting-commission-selects-gop-working-map-sets-public-hearings/

The Republican members of Ohio’s redistricting commission set aside their bickering long enough to introduce a new legislative map Wednesday. Despite objections from Democrats on the panel, Republicans adopted their plan as the commission’s working document. The maps’ partisan breakdowns are 62-37 GOP-to-Democratic in the Ohio House and 23-10 in the Senate.

The commission briefly weighed a pair of legislative maps proposed Tuesday by House Minority Leader Allison Russo and Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio. Republican members declined to include the proposal as an alternative working draft.

The state constitution requires the commission hold at least three public hearings around Ohio to discuss their proposal. The commission approved the following meeting schedule:

  • Friday Sept. 22 at Deer Creek State Park in Mt. Sterling southwest of Columbus
  • Monday Sept. 25 at Punderson State Park east of Cleveland
  • Tuesday Sept. 26 in the Senate finance hearing room at the Ohio Statehouse

The commission has set each meeting to begin at 10 a.m.

Update from Democracy Docket (thanks Scott)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Wednesday, Sept. 20, during the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s (ORC) first meeting since it was reconstituted, the ORC voted 4-2 along party-lines to use legislative maps proposed by Republicans as the ORC’s working draft, which will be subject to public review.

The maps would maintain the Republican stranglehold on the Legislature, due to egregious partisan gerrymandering. The Republicans’ Senate proposal contains 23 Republican seats, compared to just 10 Democratic seats. The partisan discrepancy was no different in Republicans’ House map, which would contain 62 Republican districts and 37 Democratic districts. Currently, Democrats hold just 32 House seats and seven Senate seats, compared to 67 and 26 Republican seats, respectively.

The Ohio Supreme Court has struck down the Republican commissioners’ legislative maps five separate times for being partisan gerrymanders in favor of Republicans, but Republicans’ delay tactics forced Ohioans to vote under illegal maps in 2022.

Today’s vote took place during the ORC’s first meeting in over a year, after last week’s meeting was delayed because Republicans on the commission couldn’t agree on a co-chair. Prior to today’s meeting, Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber (R) was finally announced as the Republican co-chair. Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie J. Antonio (D) was selected as the Democratic co-chair at the start of the meeting.

The GOP-backed proposals come a day after Democrats on the commission released their own legislative maps, which the ORC voted down today, also along party lines. Introduced by Antonio and Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo (D), the maps would have drastically leveled the playing field of the currently gerrymandered Legislature as Democrats would have held 43 House seats and 14 Senate seats, while Republicans would have held 56 and 19 seats, respectively.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) previously said that the commission should have maps approved by Sept. 22, but that timeline has been thrown into doubt after last week’s delays and the COVID-19 diagnosis of Gov. Mike DeWine (R), who also serves on the ORC. DeWine virtually tuned in to today’s meeting, but did not vote. Russo and Antonio have said that they don’t expect the process to be complete until mid-October.

Also on a party-line vote, the ORC scheduled three public meetings, which will all take place in the next week. Russo and Antonio, who voted against the adopted meeting schedule and the Republican-backed maps, argued that the timeline was rushed and that the locations were not spread out in a way that was conducive to all Ohioans.

Open thread.

 

What’s the Matter with <s>Kansas</s> Ohio?Post + Comments (37)

TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Some *Good* News, Too!

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Mitt Romney Exits, Stage Right

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Mitt Romney Exits, Stage Right

(Clay Jones via GoComics.com)

 
There will not be a Republican politician like Romney again, the pundits keep saying, and as far as I’m concerned this is not much of a loss. Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney was a bog-standard GOP Business Representative born a generation too late. Apart from a few belated spasms concerning Trump’s distastefully parvenu behavior, his voting record was indistinguishable from the GOP mean (in every sense of the term). He’s certainly old enough to retire while he can enjoy bullying just his extended family, and if my closest work colleague was Mike Lee(… roy Jenkins!), I’d quit too.


But let’s hear from another and far more eloquent Masshole:

… Politics has been such a disappointment to Mitt Romney. There always are so many…people involved.

He ran against Ted Kennedy, and those…people turned him down. He became governor of Massachusetts, passed a health-care law, and then tried to muscle Republicans into the state legislature only to have…people return more Democrats than were in there before. So, having lost interest in his day job, he ran for president in 2008, only to incur the profound dislike of his fellow candidates and the resounding loathing of the…people in general. In 2012, he thought he had it won only to have those…people deny him his rightful place at the pinnacle of power. Then came Trump, and Mitt Romney lost all hope in common humanity and got elected to the Senate from Utah, where he at least voted for both impeachments of the former president*. Now, he leaves the scene secure in the wisdom that has guided his entire public career — that there are two kinds of Americans: Him, and Everybody Else.

He was as maladroit a public politician as I’ve ever seen. And it took me while to realize that it wasn’t a lack of natural skills that accounted for that, it was the fact that Romney decided never to learn them. He was rich and he was handsome and he was the son of a beloved liberal Republican, and that was always enough to insulate him from the grubbier aspects of his chosen hobby. And he could always walk away.

This time, of course, he has legitimate reasons for walking away. He’d be over 80 by the time his next term was over, and his re-election campaign was going to be tougher due to his public opposition to the former president*. It was going to require some serious retail politics, and the Romneys haven’t paid retail for generations. But he will stand in history as a great missed opportunity. He had a lot of the wherewithal needed to keep the Republican Party from itself, if he only cared enough to do it.

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Excellent / Horrifying Read: The Patriot — How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

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Whether or not you agree with General Milley, this longish read has already garnered quite a bit of attention, and it’s going to get more. Jeffrey Goldberg, in the Atlantic:

… In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.

Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.

But his views emerged in a number of books published after Trump left office, written by authors who had spoken with Milley, and many other civilian and military officials, on background. In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”…

Twenty men have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs since the position was created after World War II. Until Milley, none had been forced to confront the possibility that a president would try to foment or provoke a coup in order to illegally remain in office. A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries. Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes. Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

The difficulty of the task before Milley was captured most succinctly by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the second of Trump’s four national security advisers. “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” McMaster said to me.

For the actions he took in the last months of the Trump presidency, Milley, whose four-year term as chairman, and 43-year career as an Army officer, will conclude at the end of September, has been condemned by elements of the far right. Kash Patel, whom Trump installed in a senior Pentagon role in the final days of his administration, refers to Milley as “the Kraken of the swamp.” Trump himself has accused Milley of treason. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump White House official, has said that Milley deserves to be placed in “shackles and leg irons.” If a second Trump administration were to attempt this, however, the Trumpist faction would be opposed by the large group of ex-Trump-administration officials who believe that the former president continues to pose a unique threat to American democracy, and who believe that Milley is a hero for what he did to protect the country and the Constitution.

“Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” Kelly told me. “Mark had a very, very difficult reality to deal with in his first two years as chairman, and he served honorably and well. The president couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably.” Kelly, along with other former administration officials, has argued that Trump has a contemptuous view of the military, and that this contempt made it extraordinarily difficult to explain to Trump such concepts as honor, sacrifice, and duty…

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Excellent / Horrifying Read: <em>The Patriot — How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump</em>Post + Comments (78)

War for Ukraine Day 575: President Zelenskyy Met With Congress

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President Zelenskyy met with members of both chambers of Congress today including the leadership. There is no video as he did not make an address.

While he was meeting with him six GOP senators and twenty-three members of the House GOP caucus sent a letter to President Biden indicating they would not support the requested $24 billion supplemental until or unless their conditions are met. Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo has the details:

Six Republican senators and 23 GOP House members sent a letter to the White House Thursday saying that, for now, they oppose a request for $24 billion in additional funding from Congress to support Kyiv.

In the letter, Republican lawmakers outline a series of questions they have about the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression, including progress in the country’s counteroffensive, how the administration defines victory, and what direct assistance the U.S. military has provided.

“For these reasons—and certainly until we receive answers to the questions above and others forthcoming—we oppose the additional expenditure for war in Ukraine included in your request,” the letter reads.

Zelensky is on Capitol Hill today in an effort to maintain support for U.S. aid to his country. But the letter comes as a flank of far-right Republicans, concentrated in the House, try to tank Ukraine aid.

That group is largely missing from the letter’s list of signatories, though members of the group, including Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-PA), have called for the U.S. to reduce its support. The same group of far-right Republicans have been publicly pressuring House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA ), pushing a short term spending bill that does not include additional aid for Ukraine.

You may be wondering why President Zelenskyy didn’t address a joint session of Congress while he was in DC; Kovensky has the answer for that too:

McCarthy told reporters on Thursday that he had declined a request to have Zelensky address another joint session of Congress during his visit, and in a bizarre attempt to bring a rhetorical point into reality, he suggested that Biden should support GOP border funding requests before House Republicans agree to pass more Ukraine aid.

Punchbowl has additional details:

And when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell asked the Biden administration for a classified briefing on Ukraine prior to Zelensky’s visit, one was quickly added to the calendar. Top military and intelligence officials met with senators for over an hour on Wednesday.

However, according to multiple sources, when the Biden administration offered the same briefing to the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s office turned it down. It may happen at a future date, GOP aides said.

Zelensky also asked to deliver another joint address to Congress, as he did last December. House Republicans denied that request, we’re told.

Emboldened Opposition: But Senate GOP Ukraine skeptics emerged from the briefing even more determined to block future funding for the war effort.

“If there is a path toward something that can be called a victory here, I didn’t hear it,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said afterward. “I’m frankly tired of them actively misleading us about Ukraine.”

Hawley, among the GOP’s most vocal opponents of Ukraine aid, said the Biden administration briefers told senators that funding requests will continue even beyond the current $24 billion ask from the White House.

Two things are going to happen in the next ten days. The first is the government is going to shut down. The second is that US military support to Ukraine is going to stop. This is going to happen because Speaker McCarthy is a small minded, petty vindictive man, as well as being incompetent, weak, and craven. Exhibit A:

 

Circling back, this is going to happen because the majority of the House GOP caucus will quietly do whatever the House Freedom caucus wants them to while the fifteen to twenty “moderates” will publicly tut tut the House Freedom caucus and then do exactly what the House Freedom Caucus wants them to do. It is going to happen because at least a third of the Senate GOP caucus is all in on what the House Freedom caucus is doing and the rest will do nothing to stop them. Though Senator McConnell will give a more in sadness than in anger statement that he doesn’t think government shutdowns help Republicans.

We have video with subtitled in English audio from President Zelenskyy’s meeting with President Biden. Video below, English write up from the President of Ukraine’s website after the jump:

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