Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

This really is a full service blog.

Fight them, without becoming them!

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

Republicans in disarray!

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

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Crazification Factor

Crazification Factor

Revolutionary Warfare=Guerrilla Warfare+Political Action

by | 220 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , ,

I’m going to keep this short as I still have to do the Ukraine war update later and I’m very fried from work despite this being day 1 of my mini-staycation.

I want to make this very clear at the outset, this is not a victory lap. It is not an I told you so. I really don’t want to have to write this post at all. I am no happier than any of you.

Let’s start with where we are now.

Where we are now is a revolutionary movement that revolves around a revanchist, reactionary racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, nativist, isolationist, and (white) Christian nationalist ideology fused with a cult of personality around the President-elect will soon have control of the executive branch, the Senate, most likely the House, the Supreme Court, a number of the federal appellate courts, and 25 state trifectas.

I think the model or heuristic for understanding what the President-elect’s second term will be like is a combination of two historical examples. The first is Yeltsin and Putin. Yeltsin was old, ill, and infirm from both his alcoholism and other health issues. Putin was an ambitious, angry, revanchist backed by (owned) by powerful and ultra-high net worth individuals. I think this is an apt description for the dynamic between Trump and Vance. History rhymes, it does not repeat, so this does not mean that Vance will eventually be president for life or anything.

The second is the fascist co-president that George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush, and their co-conspirators wanted to force onto FDR in the first months of his first term of office in what is called the Business Plot. Vance is the vehicle for the current equivalents of Walker, Bush, and their co-conspirators – Thiel, Musk, the Uhliens, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc – to quietly achieve their goals in the background while the President-elect does whatever he’s going to do in the foreground.

There is also going to be a LOT of chaos. Not everyone that is going to get a senior political appointment is on the same page. They all have their own agendas. There is going to be jockeying for position, the President-elect’s family members, including in-laws, are all going to want their pieces of the action or, at least ill gotten gains. And given how we’ve been watching the President-elect very visibly decline in real time over the past two months, there will be infighting over who is his actual, real successor. I fully expect the President-elect and his team to shiv RFK Jr as they don’t need him anymore.

The fight to be his successor will begin almost immediately. The President-elect’s movement is a cult of personality. But there’s no actual heir apparent to him. None of his children have what his followers see in him and want, which is a combination of anger, spite, bigotry, and entertainment. Same with other GOP officials and MAGA movement conservative elites and notables. Vance, DeStupid, Cotton, Scott, Cruz, etc all have the anger, spite, and bigotry, but they’re not entertaining. Youngkin is just boring. He presents as normal. With the exception of his youngest son, whom we only see so we have no idea if he can do entertaining, the President-elect’s other children don’t have the entertainment value and come off as whiny and spoiled, because they are whiny and spoiled. Stephen Miller has the anger, spite, and bigotry down to a science, but the President-elect’s movement isn’t going to move their allegiance to him because he’s Jewish. Musk is not entertaining at all. He’s just a black hole of entitled, coddled, failed his way upward neediness. Thiel hits the same repellent cords as Rick Scott. Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green seem to hit all the characteristics like the President-elect, and as I’ve speculated here before I could see either of them making a play for his mantle, but I don’t know if either could or would pull it off.

After the jump I’m going to go through how we got here and why I thought it was likely we would get here.

show full post on front page

Revolutionary Warfare=Guerrilla Warfare+Political ActionPost + Comments (220)

It Wasn’t a Leak, It Was A Provocation and a Feint!

by | 194 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

By now everyone has developed their own pet theory on who leaked the draft opinion in Dobbs V Mississippi, why it was leaked, etc. And a lot of really smart and good people are trying to get the news media gatekeepers – The NY Times for the mainstream, whatever mainstream actually means in 2022, and Fox News for the conservatives, whatever conservative actually means in 2022 too – to focus on the real issue, which is that at least five Republican Federalist Society backed appointees to the Supreme Court are prepared to and will overturn Roe and Casey and do so in a way that is intended to set up pretty much everything else back the Civil War amendments to also be overturned. Obergefell, Griswold, Loving, Brown, the Civil Rights Act, whatever’s left of the Voting Rights Act, everything pertaining to the New Deal, and then gutting the Civil War amendments. That’s the substantive story. Flat stop. Don’t pass go.

show full post on front page

It Wasn’t a Leak, It Was A Provocation and a Feint!Post + Comments (194)

If Our Civil Society Were Functional, Joe Rogan Would Be Going Through Some Things

by | 169 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

As I’m sure many of you know, there’s been a major to do regarding Spotify because it has a $100 million deal with Joe Rogan to stream him basically sitting around and bullshitting with guests on his eponymous podcast talk show. Specifically because he and his guests are very public assholes who spew all sorts of misinformation. Especially about COVID. For some reason unbeknownst to me people enjoy listening to Rogan and his guest engage in banal blather. I gather that it is because Rogan is good at just working the mic, but for the love of someone’s/anyone’s/no one’s (for the atheists among us) Deity or Deities (for the polytheists), listen to music or an audiobook or a history podcast* when exercising or commuting. Have some self respect people! As a result Neil Young; Nils Lofgren; Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and I would assume Young given he started the response); India ArieIndi, and several other artists have pulled or are seeking to pull their music from Spotify. Given that Spotify doesn’t pay them bupkis when someone streams their music on the platform, their actions have also brought attention to the fact that Spotify doesn’t pay them bupkis when someone streams their music on the platform.

While all of this has been ongoing I’ve been sitting back and waiting for the other shoe factory to drop. I figured given the amount of hours that Rogan spends flapping his gums on his show, somewhere in that mess of video was him saying something really offensive. And once someone took them time to listen to all of that bullshitting they’d find it and post it. And this morning, when looking for something dealing with misinformation unrelated to 50 plus year old gym rats with $100 million podcasts who are abusing Human Growth Hormone (The ginormous heads that got bigger as adults are the give away; you think Barry Bonds or Roger Stone’s or Matt Gaetz’s or Joe Rogan’s noggins got that way from testosterone supplementation? It did not!) I found that shoe factory.

The folks who tweet as PatriotTakes went through his oeuvre, rediscovered a large amount of Rogan saying exceedingly offensive things about Black people, and then posted it in a thread. This includes repeated uses of the “N” word. There was also an all too cute response about someone teaching their dog to do the NAZI salute. And, of course, insensitive and offensive remarks regarding Africa and AIDs.

Here’s the link to the thread with the videos. The tweets include some transcription of Rogan’s racist and anti-Semitic remarks. This is your warning not to play them, watch them, and/or listen to them if this stuff bothers you to watch and listen too!

India Arie has told Spotify that the reason she wants her music pulled from the streaming service is specifically so as to not subsidize Rogan’s racism. And she’s made it clear she’s not calling for Rogan to be fired.

She also said she believes that the controversial podcaster has the right to say anything he wants to say – but she believes that goes both ways.

Arie points out that artists like her make 0.003% of the money generated from Spotify. She asks for her music to be taken off the platform specifically because she doesn’t want money she makes for them to go towards what she believes to be problematic and racist.

The singer also included a 30-second video of Rogan saying the N-word over and over again throughout the years openly on several podcasts and interviews. Arie clarifies her thoughts “[Joe Rogan] shouldn’t even be uttering the [n-]word. Don’t even say it, under any context. That’s where I stand. I have always stood there.”

I have no idea what Spotify is going to do. It’s owner isn’t a US citizen and doesn’t live in the US so he’s pretty well insulated from the fallout on this in the US as long as people keep subscribing to Rogan’s podcast and others don’t abandon the service en masse. If this was happening at a major American outlet, I’d expect Rogan would either be fired or told to issue a contrite statement, resign, and drop out of site for a bit. But given that Spotify is owned by a non-American and the owner, Daniel Ek’s response has been weak sauce so far, I don’t expect much. Especially given the fact that Rogan’s listener base is basically douchebros, so I wouldn’t expect that they’ll abandon him.

Regardless, given the resurfacing of racist remarks and statements, including an attempt at genteel racism meant as a compliment that Rogan was unable to stick the landing on (the third tweet in the thread) because he’s not educated or polished enough to pull it off, I expect that Rogan will go through some things. Or, rather, that he should be facing the consequences of his past actions and statements. But that, of course, would require a much more mature and functional civil society than the US has.

* Don’t listen to true crime podcasts. They’re exploitative of other people’s suffering or bad fortune and are often full of the same propaganda the police push into news reporting about crime and law enforcement. Be better than that.

If Our Civil Society Were Functional, Joe Rogan Would Be Going Through Some ThingsPost + Comments (169)

A Couple of Things To Keep In Mind as Mark Meadows Just Desserts Are Being Considered and, Perhaps, Prepared For Him

by | 153 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , ,

As Mark Meadows travails continue, I want to focus on a couple of related things. They both deal directly with the memo he was pushing, and which has become a focus of his contempt of Congress hearing, but in different ways.

The memo raises a number of overlapping issues that we need greater clarity on:

  1. Trump and several members of his White House senior staff like Meadows were clearly in on this.
  2. Meadows read an unknown number of GOP members of the House and the Senate on to the strategy delineated in the memo. The only one we know explicitly from the news reporting is Mike Lee. We don’t know, but can guess at some of the rest. We also don’t know if Meadows read in Trump’s lickspittle acting appointees at DOD: Miller, Patel, MacGregor, Cohen-Watnick. I’ve now seen reporting that Meadows or someone else sent the memo to Ratcliffe at ODNI, but he denies ever seeing it. And We don’t know if that Assistant AG Clark got it, but given his behavior we have to assume he did.
  3. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THEM – Republican members of the House and Senate and/or their staffers, members of the administration, outside surrogates and allies – bothered to actually alert the authorities. Or even leak it it the news media as a way to try to prevent it and cover their own asses. Not that I think the news media would have covered it. They’d have held it for a book to be published later.
  4. The referenced in the reporting as partially responsible for creating the memo, COL (ret) Waldron is a 37A MOS. For the non-military/not veterans that’s a Psychological Operations officer. Allegedly his role in all of this is he’s Mike Flynn’s PSYOPer in whatever it is Flynn is actually doing.
  5. The news media, especially the political reporters that cover the White House, Congress, and what Trump is doing don’t seem too interested in actually reporting this. They comment about it on Twitter. In the case of Costa he refers, via Twitter, to his book. But it hasn’t been on the nightly network broadcasts until tonight’s contempt hearing. It’s certainly not been on FOX. CNN has covered it a bit. MSNBC has and will continue to cover it. It hasn’t on the front page of the NY Times or WaPo and it certainly isn’t in the Wall Street Journal. We now have as close to a smoking gun as possible that senior members of the Trump administration, in coordination with his personal attorneys and people working with them, developed an actual plan to overthrow the Constitution and they read in an unknown number of Republican senators and representatives. And the news media has decided to instead focus on whatever it is they’re focusing on.

Here’s a copy of the memo as a pdf:

voter-fraud

I do want to make one point before getting to the other related item. This contempt hearing is not just intended to hold Meadows in contempt, it is intended to disturb the network around Trump and see what happens without disrupting or taking down that network. Basically, the House Select Committee on the events of 6 January is running an influence operation on Trump and Trump world. How do I know? This is how I know:

Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have now all been exposed as not being fully supportive of Trump and his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and overthrow the constitutional order. Donald Trump, Jr. has as well. And Meadows agreed with each of them. Reading those tweets during a live broadcast of the committee hearing is intended to incense Trump setting him up to lash out at Kilmeade, Ingraham, Hannity, Meadows, and Jr for insufficient fealty and commitment to him. It is also designed to see what Kilmeade, Ingraham, Hannity, Meadows, Jr, and others do as a result. Panic will be setting in right now about just what, exactly, Meadows turned over to the committee and just who else he implicated before he stopped cooperating. And the results of this will be observable. I don’t know if it will work, but it is an excellent and most unexpected strategy.

The final item I want to discuss as a result of what we’re learning not just about Meadows role in the run up to and on 6 January, but the actual plan itself as delineated in the memo he was circulating is the attempt to create or instigate enough violence to seemingly justify the declaration of a National Security Emergency to stop the electoral vote certification in Congress. I specifically want to focus on this part from Barton Gellman’s excellent long form piece in The Atlantic that was published last week (emphasis mine):

Robert a. pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6.

Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.

“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.

Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.

Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all.

Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.

Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.

The CPOST team decided to run a national opinion survey in March, based on themes it had gleaned from the social-media posts of insurgents and the statements they’d made to the FBI under questioning. The researchers first looked to identify people who said they “don’t trust the election results” and were prepared to join a protest “even if I thought the protest might turn violent.” The survey found that 4 percent of Americans agreed with both statements, a relatively small fraction that nonetheless corresponds to 10 million American adults.

In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”

Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.

Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)

Let’s take Pape’s numbers as the starting point. Based on his survey data that I’ve copied and pasted above from Gellman’s reporting last week, the results indicate 21 million Americans who are thoroughly bought into and locked into Trumpism, MAGA, what Bannon calls the America First agenda, and all the conspiracy theories that go along with them. They’re overwhelmingly white and either evangelical Christian or traditionalist Catholic. When they’re not, they’re orthodox/ultra-orthodox Jews, white hispanics, or not white hispanics who identify as white (think proud boys leader Enrique Tario, who is afro-Cuban and, as such, at the bottom of the highly racialized Cuban-American pecking order in Miami).

So that’s 21 million Americans who are radicalized. The question we need to answer is how many of these folks are really willing to use violence? 10%? 20%? I’ve spent a good chunk of the past week looking through the low intensity warfare literature to see what the estimate is for figuring that out as I didn’t recall their being one off the top of my head. Or, rather, I recall being taught it was 10%, but I’d never actually seen that figure in any of our doctrinal publications. Or anyone else’s for that matter. And I was right. Our doctrine doesn’t have one. Just a formula to estimate how many counterinsurgents you need. So I emailed a former boss who is a retired Green Beret colonel, because I was sure I’d seen or been taught that the estimate was 10% of a radicalized population. He replied that he recalls being taught in his Special Forces officers course in the late 1970s that 10% is the estimator. He cautioned, however, that it is a rough one and will depend on what type of low intensity conflict is going on or possible. So revolutions and rebellions and insurgencies and terror campaigns may not all be estimatable the same way. It also explains where I learned it as I was trained and mentored by retired Green Berets who served in Vietnam.

Regardless, let’s take the 10% estimator. What this means, using Pape’s survey data numbers, is 2,100,000. Which is still a substantial number and problem. Our active duty military, across all branches, is currently 1,489,567. If you throw in the Guard and Reserve, you’ve got about another 600,000 or so. And some of that manpower will be useless. You can’t really use submariners to fight off a domestic rebellion and insurgency.

The real question here is how many of these 2.1 million would actually fight? And that I can’t answer. And I’m not sure anyone else can either. But what we’ve got, to paraphrase Mao, is a 21 million American sea for the actual violent fish to swim in. And that threat environment is more affluent and older that what we’d normally see. And it has deep pocketed, well healed backers. And the bulk of them are not nutbags like Mike Lindell or Patrick Byrne, but very bounded rational actors like the Koch’s, the Mercers, the DeVos/Prince family, the Uhliens, the Murdochs, the Bradleys, etc. And in the case of Bannon, his well heeled benefactor Miles Guo. Guo is alleged to actually be controlled opposition of the Peoples’ Republic of China meaning he is being run by the PRC’s Ministry of State Security to do exactly what he’s doing: infiltrate the Trump movement and help Trump and Bannon further cement control over the GOP and movement conservatism pushing it farther and farther into reactionary authoritarianism.

Open thread!

A Couple of Things To Keep In Mind as Mark Meadows Just Desserts Are Being Considered and, Perhaps, Prepared For HimPost + Comments (153)

The Reality of the Rittenhouse Acquittal Is the Result of Poorly Written/Worded Self Defense & Stand Your Ground Laws

by | 86 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , , , , , ,

By now everyone has, I’m sure, done a bunch of venting about the outcome of Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial today. Whether that’s about the judge and his behavior, the prosecution, the defense, the actual events, or some combination of all of them. The reality though, and I’m sure someone put this in a comment in MisterMix’s post, is that the odds were always in favor of an acquittal. I’ll leave the discussion of whether the local prosecutors in Kenosha overcharged or incorrectly charged Rittenhouse to the our crack team of readers and commenters who are lawyers, especially those who practice in Wisconsin (hint, hint). As for whether the judge’s behavior and rulings were way out of bounds, I’m sure those readers and commenters who are lawyers will be happy to explain that judges, especially those handling criminal cases, are often unique individuals. I’m sure those that do defense work will also explain that the instructions about using terms like victim or perpetrator are actually what every defendant should be getting from judges, but, sadly, all too few ever do. Especially if the accused are people of color.

This is a good thread from a public defender in Louisiana about the judge’s instruction on the language the prosecutors and the defense counsel could and could not use during the trial and how almost all the initial reporting and subsequent commentary got it wrong. Here’s his take on the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial. Here’s Ken White’s, aka Popehat, explainer on Judge Schroeder, his behavior, and why it is all too common.

I want to just briefly focus on why today’s acquittal was always the likely outcome: because the laws on armed self defense and/or stand your ground laws are either sloppily written or are currently interpreted in a very broad manner. I’m most familiar with Florida’s stand your ground expansion of its self defense laws because I was teaching state and local politics* at UF when it was being debated. The bill, commonly referred to as the Baxley Amendment as it was submitted by a state legislator from the greater Orlando area named Dennis Baxley. Baxley didn’t write the bill, it was written by Marion Hammer, who was the then chief lobbyist for both the NRA in Florida and Associated Industries of Florida (the largest business lobby in the state). Hammer is commonly referred to as the Gun Granny. The bill has what is now the usual legislative language about a reasonable person feeling threatened as the determinant for whether standing one’s ground is justified, as well as no duty to retreat. However, it also frames this within the perception regarding whether the person who is claiming stand your ground as a defense is actually facing an imminent threat. When you combine the latter with the no duty to retreat portion of the law, it allows someone to instigate and/or escalate a confrontation, determine they’re being imminently threatened with serious harm and/or death, and therefore use lethal force to stop that perceived threat.

While my understanding of the Rittenhouse case from the reporting and the commentary is that there was no stand your ground law in place in Wisconsin for Rittenhouse’s defense team to invoke, the description of instigating and/or escalating a confrontation determining one is being imminently threatened with serious harm and/or death, and therefore employing lethal force to stop that perceived threat is a pretty good description of Kyle Rittenhouse’s actions on the night he decided to go play shooting medic in Kenosha.

That description, part of which – that Rittenhouse was under attack by three different people as the lead elements of a mob of protestors, demonstrators, and rioters – focused on the imminent threat Rittenhouse was in and his inability to safely retreat, which required him to use lethal force in self defense is what his defense was built around. It was the focus of his direct testimony and it was the focus of his attorneys’ theory of the case. And it was a powerful defense because with the exception of Gage Grosskruetz, the people he shot were not alive to tell their version of events.  And this is what I want to focus on.

The simple reality is that in these armed self defense and/or stand your ground cases, the person who survives and is able to tell their version of events usually has an advantage. For the simple reason that the person or people that they shot and killed are dead and can’t really speak for themselves. The Tampa Bay Times did an extensive investigation into Florida’s stand your ground law and had two major takeaways. The first is that if only one party survived, specifically the party invoking stand your ground, then he or she (though it is usually a he) had a very high chance of either not being charged or of an acquittal because the other party or parties to the shooting were dead. The second was that if the person who was claiming stand your ground was white, the person they shot and killed is a person of color, and/or both they have an exceedingly high chance of either not being charged or of an acquittal. Whether Baxley, or really Marion Hammer, intended Florida’s stand your ground law, which became the model for similar legislation with minor variations in many other states, to actually have a racist effect is both not known and immaterial. Like so many other of our criminal laws, the reality is it produces a serious and significant racial disparity when applied.

This brings us back to Kyle Rittenhouse. The only way today’s outcome would have been different was if Gage Grosskruetz had shot Rittenhouse rather than moving his gun off of Rittenhouse as a target to signal he wasn’t a threat. Rittenhouse ignored that, which makes the acquittal on the charges regarding Grosskruetz’s being shot so egregious, and then claimed self defense because Grosskruetz was actively targeting Rittenhouse, which created an imminent threat of serious bodily harm and/or death.

Grosskruetz’s cardinal mistake was in deciding Rittenhouse was not a threat and, as a result, taking his gun off of Rittenhouse as a target and not shooting. I know that sounds cold and callous. And before someone eventually reads this and thinks I’m calling for Rittenhouse to be shot, I AM NOT CALLING FOR RITTENHOUSE TO BE SHOT!!!! The reality is if you draw your gun for self defense purposes, especially if you have a handgun and the person who is doing the shooting has a rifle, you had better take the shot. Unless you are under secure and impenetrable cover so that no matter what the other person does, you can’t be shot. Because if you don’t, the person who has been doing the shooting will see you, see your gun, and shoot you because you are a threat to him (it is almost always a him).

As I wrote way back when the congressional Republicans’ softball practice was attacked, the first attempted claim of stand your ground was in Philadelphia in the 1790s. The judge determined it was not a valid defense under the US constitution, Pennsylvania’s constitution, or the common law. The local newspaper actually published the write up of the trial as a special pamphlet, which is attached below this post. It is important to remember that the people (okay, white men) who had just come through the Revolution, the founding of the US, and were alive for the debates around both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution did not accept stand your ground as a legitimate defense. That it has been revived over the past twenty years with claims of originalism rooted in the largely created from whole cloth revisionism of the 2nd Amendment’s legislative, constitutional, and legal history is just stupendously amazing.

Open thread!

Duane 1799 – Report of extraordinary transactions at Philadelphia (1)

* When I first got to UF, because I already had a pair of masters degrees and experiencing teaching as an adjunct and as a teaching assistant, I got assigned to septuagenarian member of the faculty who had had a mild stroke from which he’d made an almost complete recovery. The guy rode his bike about 40 miles to and from campus each day! His specialty was state and local politics and, to be frank, he should have retired many years before I got there as time, the discipline, and reality had long passed him by. He was a wonderful person, really cared about the students, and loved teaching. Unfortunately they’d assigned him a 300 student intro to state and local government section. He’d never taught any course with more than 20 or 30 students, including the intro course. My job was to help him deal with this new reality. To this day I’m convinced the department chair at the time assigned him this section in the attempt to either force him to retire or kill him from the stress. Regardless, because I basically ran the course for him – I did the syllabus, handled drafting the tests and quizzes and getting them graded, did all the administration, ran the review sections, etc – we both got through the semester without major incident and as a result it was determined that I was now qualified to teach state and local politics. So every few semesters, I’d get assigned to teach it despite it being well outside of my specialty areas.

The Reality of the Rittenhouse Acquittal Is the Result of Poorly Written/Worded Self Defense & Stand Your Ground LawsPost + Comments (86)

Worrying About Republican Retaliation Is Pointless. They Retaliate Even When They Have Nothing to Retaliate For

by | 121 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

While I slowly work up a longer post Cole asked me to do on the real point of the Durham Special Counsel investigation, which keeps getting pushed father and farther back because of actual work, I wanted to just briefly remark on the veiled and not so veiled threats made yesterday by House Republicans in regard to the censure of Congressman Gosar (R-AZ), who is an avowed anti-Semite and white supremacist, as well as his being stripped of his Oversight Committee assignment. Charlie Pierce has already done a longer piece on this, and I recommend it because he’s great to read and he’s right, but I want to focus on the threats made by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and others that if/when the Republicans retake the majority in the 2022 elections that they will do to the Democrats what the Democrats have done to them. This was, of course, met with some skepticism on the claims that Democrats don’t tweet out videos showing them killing their Republican colleagues, or threatening them, or trying to rile up their supporters to attack them, so there isn’t really anything to worry about.

This is the wrong way to look at the threat. And it is the wrong reason to look at the threat because we know what Republicans do when they get a solid House majority and believe they won’t ever have to give it up. Back during the Bush 43 administration, as Karl Rove was working his plans for a permanent Republican majority, or at least control of the Federal government even if they didn’t really make up a majority in the US through extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, and one patriotic war per term (Iraq was supposed to be term 1, Iran term 2, then 9-11 happened and we got Afghanistan and Iraq in term 1 and, fortunately, no Iran in term 2), and Grover Norquist was talking about gelding the Democrats in the congressional minorities like farm animals, Republicans actually acted out despite having nothing to retaliate for. Democrats were locked out of committee rooms. Committee meetings would be officially scheduled in one place, when the Democrats showed up, they’d find empty or locked rooms, while the Republicans ran the meetings without them somewhere else. Democrats would schedule minority committee member hearings and find the microphones cut and/or the lights turned out on them.

In 2005, the Republicans had nothing to retaliate for and they retaliated anyway. What we’re seeing now with the House and Senate Republican caucuses, let alone the legislatures and governorships they control in 23 states and the legislatures or governorships they control in several others, is not something new. It isn’t something we’ve never seen before. It is just a more extreme form of the extreme behavior they have been demonstrating since the late 1990s.

Doing what has to be done, doing the right thing, is the only thing that matters right now because worrying about what the Republicans will do if/when they win in 2022 is a trap. We already know what they will do, especially if they get a large enough majority in the House. If their majority is large enough they won’t just censure Democrats or prevent them from serving on certain committees, they’ll just expel them. All while crying crocodile tears that they were forced to do this by the overreach of Speaker Pelosi in 2021. They’ve been telegraphing who their targets are. Frankly they’re doing it not to indicate what they’ll do to them in terms of censure or preventing them from serving on certain committees, they’re doing it in the hope that one of their loosely tethered to reality supporters will get the message and rid them of those meddlesome members of the Democratic caucus. Congressman Crenshaw* set Congresswoman Omar up for assassination several years ago. Congresswoman Boebert, whose white supremacist, anti-Semitic campaign manager was raided by the FBI yesterday, and who has more arrests all by herself, let alone in conjunction with her convicted of domestic abuse and lewd exposure to a minor husband, then your average career criminal, did it again last night. She also set up several other Democrats in her one minute of hate.

This is why finding a way to get the voter rights and electoral reform bills through the Senate are so important. If they aren’t passed soon, let alone at all, then the Republicans will retake the House just as a result of the extreme gerrymandering they’re doing right now. Not to continue to be a downer, but you cannot out organize the extreme gerrymanders that are being put into place in NC, Ohio, Florida, WI, and other states with either complete GOP control of the state government or where an extreme gerrymandered Republican supermajority in the state legislature has stripped the Democratic governor of their power to veto legislative redistricting maps. The Republicans continue to preview through their House and Senate majorities, as well as in the 23 states where they have complete one party control of the state government, what they will do if they come back to power in Congress, let alone Congress and the presidency. We don’t have to speculate. We’re watching it in real time.

Open thread!

* There’s only one former Navy SEAL in the House of Representatives:

And that former Navy SEAL has already made a video of his fantasies of what he’d do to just every day Americans who disagree with him.

Worrying About Republican Retaliation Is Pointless. They Retaliate Even When They Have Nothing to Retaliate ForPost + Comments (121)

Today In Revolutionary Warfare: Senator McConnell and the Debt Ceiling

by | 123 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

Last Wednesday night one of you fine readers and commenters emailed me asking what I thought was going on with the fun times we’ve been watching take place in Congress. This was the first part of my initial response:

Shit is definitely fucked up right now. Sinema has basically decided to be Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker from the 2nd Christian Bale Batman movie. Manchin is just Manchin. Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer know their business. And Clyburn is the House whip and he’s not a fool, which is why he’s not whipping votes. I expect that Manchin, Sinema, and their catspaw in the House Gottheimer are going to get their pee pees smacked good and hard tomorrow. I expect that an abject lesson is being prepared for them. And, frankly, they deserve one. They made a deal. They are now reneging on that deal. They claim to have issues, but refuse to delineate them so they can be negotiated. They deserve what is coming to them tomorrow. If, indeed, an abject lesson is going to be taught.

And an object lesson was had by those who needed it. From all the reporting Manchin and Sinema are both now engaged and negotiating. And Gottheimer’s power move was so impotent that his statement, which BettyC brought to all of our attention, had to be issued unilaterally because none of the nine other Democratic representatives he was supposedly leading on this were willing to put their names on it!

If there’s one Democratic member of the House and Senate that comes out of this with improved political capital and stature, or who should, it is Congresswoman Jayapal. She knows her caucus, she knows the entire Democratic caucus in the House, and she knows her business.

The real, ongoing crisis in Congress is actually playing out in the Senate. And it, as every crisis that has originated in the Senate for the past twelve years, will be because of Senate Minority Leader McConnell. Part of McConnell’s strategy was counting on his pet parliamentarian, who he’s cultivated for years, continuing to make rulings adverse to the Democrats and the Democrats not having the political will to either override her rulings or do what Trent Lott did in 2002: fire the parliamentarian the GOP majority inherited from the previous Democratic majority and replace the parliamentarian with someone of their own choosing. He was specifically counting on her disallowing a debt ceiling raise through the reconciliation process. While I’ve seen one reference to her ruling that using reconciliation to deal with the debt limit would be acceptable, I can’t actually find any reporting that confirms this. Senator Schumer is left with a dilemma: an unelected official that he inherited from his predecessor who hired her, whose power exists solely because of a 100 plus year old Senate rule, and is currently out for two weeks for treatment of her stage 3 breast cancer, so he can’t fire her because it would make him look like an asshole. 

It won’t make much difference, however, because the Senate Democratic leadership recognize that Senator McConnell’s attempts to force the Democrats to use reconciliation to deal with the debt ceiling is an attempt to prevent them from using reconciliation to pass all the infrastructure programs that are not in the regular order infrastructure bill. The intent is to force the Democrats to rush the process so as to prevent a debt default and by doing so make it impossible for them to actually negotiate the infrastructure that is supposed to be the focus of the reconciliation bill. By doing so, McConnell seeks to force the Democrats to either prevent a global financial meltdown caused by the US defaulting on its debt or pass their larger infrastructure package through reconciliation and in doing so prevent them from doing either. McConnell is counting on this because he doesn’t want either of them to pass and this is his best tactic to achieve that strategic goal. Which is why he taunted President Biden and the Senate Democrats this  morning in the form of a formal statement.

The Democratic leadership also recognize that even though it would technically only take two weeks to push a debt ceiling waiver through reconciliation, that would be under ideal and optimal conditions. The reality, however, is that McConnell will use every possible procedure to drag out the process, grinding every other bit of possible business the Senate could conduct over the next two weeks to a standstill.

Given it would eat up at least two weeks of floor time to amend the reconciliation bill to include the debt ceiling, and that the current parliamentarian would be unlikely to allow anything but a direct, specific number increase – so no just tying it to the total debt or permanently suspending it – that’s not happening. Especially because the Democratic Senate leadership has stated they’re not going to go that route anyway.

Right now the Democrats have no leverage until or unless Manchin and Sinema are willing to at least reform the filibuster, because Manchin and Sinema are giving McConnell leverage, and what appears to be no actual strategy other than trying to shame Manchin, Sinema, and 10 Republicans into doing the right thing. You can’t shame the shameless.

McConnell’s strategy, as it’s been since JAN 2009, is to allow nothing of consequence be done when there’s a Democratic president because he’s learned that the Democratic president in specific and the Democrats in general will be blamed. The looming debt default is his current 3 meter target. McConnell knows that a debt default is going to cause serious significant economic disruption right now. In fact he’s counting on it. McConnell doesn’t care if it destroys the US economy or the global economy or how much real damage it will do. His donors have all protected their assets. I expect that they’ve all shorted the US and are actually betting on and planning on US default in the markets right now. I expect most of the Republican senators are also making that same bet with their own investments. And McConnell fervently believes, based on the past 12 years of actual events, that if he burns the American economy to ashes that he’ll be rewarded with being put in charge of those ashes.

If he can, he is going to kill the hostage this time. He has decided that this time, it is not in his interest to even try to ransom the debt ceiling. He’s gone from being an insurrectionist to a senatorial IED emplacer to being a senatorial suitcase nuke. McConnell has seen how the news media, especially the political reporters and the pundits have been on a feeding frenzy of misrepresentation and bad faith framing since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August. The reporting on the Democratic negotiations and the process for getting the two infrastructure bills passed has been just as bad if not worse. All of this just reinforces McConnell’s view of whether his strategy will work once again. To be perfectly honest, I do not see anything that would indicate that his assumptions are wrong; that the strategy he is continuing to pursue and the tactics that he is using to achieve his strategic objectives is going to fail. It has never brought him anything but success since he first implemented it in JAN 2009.

Open thread!

Today In Revolutionary Warfare: Senator McConnell and the Debt CeilingPost + Comments (123)