Lawrence O’Donnell appears nightly on MSNBC at 10 pm EST. I love his show because he is so smart.
As a bonus, here is Robert Reich wondering why the media doesn’t report honestly about Trump’s dementia.
Archives for the month of: August, 2024
I don’t know how any self-respecting journalist could work for FOX News. It offers a good job in a competitive industry, but why sell your soul to the devil? I have recently seen tweets by Megyn Kelly, viciously attacking Kamala Harris, and every time I do, I remember Trump saying of her in 2016, after the first GOP debate, that she had blood coming out of her orifices. Yet still she is his sycophant.
In The New Republic, Thom Hartmann writes that Tim Walz may be the perfect antidote to FOX’s vitriol. If you want to reprogram family members, introduce them to Tim Walz. He is a good man, a decent man, not a FOX liar.
Hartmann writes:
All across America families are in mourning: Their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the right-wing hate and rage machine.
Jen Senko produced a movie—The Brainwashing of My Dad—about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my radio show a few times, and her story is one replicated across America millions of times. Her father—a totally normal Midwestern guy—began watching Fox “News” when he retired, and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.
Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, is America’s intervention against the mind poison that Trump, Fox “News,” and right-wing hate radio have infected our nation with.
He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s veterans during his decade in Congress.
He used the G.I. bill to go to college, getting his master’s degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his school’s football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever.
He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.
He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start his school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.
No purchased bone-spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad, who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in World War II, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.
His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up J.D. Vance—with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals and birth rates and fealty to his billionaire patrons—for the weird guy that he is. He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multibillion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.
To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch in 1985 so Murdoch could legally purchase U.S. media properties; Reagan ordered the Federal Communications Commission to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.
In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting: Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.
Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times), former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”
Fox and Murdoch’s power in Australia came, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.
It’s the same here. When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6 coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.
Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.
Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.
Along with its relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6—while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.
Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House adviser to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:
Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.
While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.
Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the right-wing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded right-wing hate.
So let the dad jokes begin!
As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’s head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door, and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”
And God willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be vice president of the United States.
CNN reported that Michele Morrow, the GOP candidate for State Superintendent of Schools in North Carolina, filmed a video on January 6 urging Trump to “put the Coonstitution to the side” and use the military to stay in power. Morrow was in DC for the January 6 rally but she says she never entered the Capitol.
In a deleted Facebook livestream she filmed from her hotel room, Morrow called for mass arrests of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election. “And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act,” said Morrow. “In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”
Morrow was at the Capitol as the attack occurred, according to public videos reviewed by CNN that show her in a restricted area on the northwest side of the Capitol. CNN has seen no evidence that Morrow entered the Capitol building that day or that she engaged in violence, and she was not charged with any crimes.
In March’s Republican primary, Morrow defeated the incumbent North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that manages the state’s $11 billion budget for K-12 public schools and helps set education priorities and implement curriculum standards.
That same month, CNN’s KFile reported Morrow had previously called for the public execution of Barack Obama and the death of Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats in comments on a since-deleted X account.
“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a since-deleted post from May 2020 about Obama. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”
Morrow home-schooled her children. She previously lost a local school board election. She is running now to take control of the education of all the children in North Carolina.
A terrifying prospect.
I enjoyed reading this story about the frantic efforts to find four young children who survived a plane crash in the Amazon. The adults on the small plane were killed, including their mother. They were found after 40 days of wandering. How they were found and how they survived makes a good story.
Every so often, someone writes in to say that immigrants are hurting the economy, and in particular, they are taking jobs away from native-born workers. Sometimes they quote economist Paul Krugman, who writes a regular column for The New York Times, to make their point. See, they say, even Paul Krugman agrees with me.
But not so fast. Krugman recently wrote this column, where he takes the opposite view.
He wrote:
On the eve of the 2020 election Donald Trump, in a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, told voters that “This election is a choice between a TRUMP RECOVERY or a BIDEN DEPRESSION.” Not quite. Since President Biden took office, the United States has gained 15.7 million jobs.
Trump, however, has been dismissing the good news on employment, claiming that all the job gains are going to illegal immigrants. In my most recent column I addressed his further claim that immigration has had a devastating effect on Black workers. (It hasn’t.)
What is true, however, is that a lot of recent employment growth has involved immigrants. But have their job gains come at the expense of the native-born?
No. But how do we know that? And how should we think about the effect of recent immigration on jobs?
Before I present numbers, there are three qualifications to consider.
First, while we have monthly estimates for employment that distinguish between native-born and foreign-born workers (although they don’t separate out the undocumented), these numbers aren’t adjusted for seasonal variation. Rather than try to roll my own seasonal adjustment, I’ll just use 12-month averages, which are good enough for current purposes.
Second, many experts believe that the standard numbers, based on the Current Population Survey, underestimate the recent surge in immigration. I’ll note where this makes a difference, but it doesn’t change the overall picture.
Finally, when you’re looking at recent job growth, it matters what you choose as your starting point. Biden inherited an economy still depressed by the effects of Covid-19, and some of the job growth on his watch reflected a recovery from that depressed state. It arguably makes more sense to compare the current economy with the economy on the eve of Covid. I’ll do it both ways, looking at both job growth since 2020 and job growth from the prepandemic year 2019.
OK, here we go. First, let’s compare average employment in the 12 months ending in June 2024 with employment in 2019 and employment in the pandemic year 2020.
Since 2020 there have been large increases in employment of both native- and foreign-born workers, but much of that reflected recovery from the pandemic slump. Compared with the prepandemic economy, job gains have been much smaller, especially for the native-born. So immigrants have accounted for most job growth — perhaps more than the chart says, if immigration has been understated — although not all of it.
The question, however, is whether the jobs immigrants have taken would have gone to native-born workers if immigration had been lower.
Well, if immigrants were stealing our jobs, we’d expect to see a sharp rise in unemployment among the native-born. We don’t. The unemployment rate among native-born workers is near a historic low.
But some anti-immigrant crusaders argue that unemployment is only low because immigrants have driven native-born Americans entirely out of the labor force; you’re only counted as unemployed if you’re actively seeking a job.
Indeed, the share of native-born adults in the labor force — employed or unemployed — has fallen slightly since 2019.
But this was both predictable and predicted, not because of immigration but as a result of the aging of the native-born population. Congressional Budget Office projections published in January 2020 — when nobody knew that either the pandemic or the immigration surge were coming — had already forecast a decline in the labor force participation rate as baby boomers retired.
So the near stagnation of native-born employment isn’t a demand-side issue, in which people aren’t working because they can’t find jobs. It is instead a supply-side issue, in which people aren’t working because they’ve reached retirement age. We’ve been able to achieve large increases in overall employment only because working-age immigrants have been coming to America. If we didn’t have the immigrants, we wouldn’t have the jobs.
What about the impact of immigration on wages? A few decades ago many economists, myself included, believed that immigrants with low levels of formal education were in effect competing with native-born workers who also lacked degrees. But most labor economists now believe that immigrants don’t do much head-to-head competition with native-born workers; they bring different skills and take different jobs. And the past few years, with elevated immigration, have also been an era of exceptional growth in wages for the worst paid.
So none of these negative claims about the effects of immigration hold up. But are there important positive effects? (Aside from the benefits to the immigrants themselves, which can be really large — I am very glad, for multiple reasons, that my grandparents left the Russian Empire.)
There’s a good although not ironclad case that immigration has helped limit inflation in recent years. Normally, as Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, recently noted, immigration is more or less neutral in its effects on inflation: Immigrants expand supply, but they also contribute to demand. In the aftermath of the pandemic, however, the huge sums spent on aid pumped up demand; this burst of demand was easier to accommodate without sustained inflation because immigration made it possible to achieve rapid growth in employment.
In the longer run, the big story is fiscal. Adult immigrants tend to be working age, which means that they will spend years paying taxes before they become eligible for Medicare and Social Security, which constitute a large part of federal spending. And while this point is a bit brutal, undocumented immigrants are especially good for the budget, because they pay payroll taxes (which are collected by employers) without being eligible for future benefits.
So, no, immigrants aren’t taking our jobs. Everything that happens in the economy hurts someone: There are no doubt some places where immigrants have driven up housing costs, or where native-born Americans or legal immigrants have faced increased job competition. But the scare stories don’t match the facts.
To see Krugman’s nifty graphics, taken from the Buteau of Labor Statistics, please open the link.
Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.
The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.
The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.
They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.
This time, it was a “hard no.”
He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.
Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.
During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.
Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.
As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.
Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…
And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…
In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.
After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.
“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.
The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.
Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…
In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.
“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”
Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.
He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.
This is not April Fools’ Day. This is real. And it’s serious.
The Los Angeles Times reported a massive data breach that includes the Social Security numbers and other personal data about every American.
About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.
The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.
“If this in fact is pretty much the whole dossier on all of us, it certainly is much more concerning” than prior breaches, Murray said in an interview. “And if people weren’t taking precautions in the past, which they should have been doing, this should be a five-alarm wake-up call for them.”
According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X.
The lawsuit was reported by Bloomberg Law.
Last week, a purported member of USDoD identified only as Felice told the hacking forum that they were offering “the full NPD database,” according to a screenshot taken by BleepingComputer. The information consists of about 2.7 billion records, each of which includes a person’s full name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and phone number, along with alternate names and birth dates, Felice claimed….
Several news outlets that focus on cybersecurity have looked at portions of the data Felice offered and said they appear to be real people’s actual information. If the leaked material is it what it’s claimed to be, here are some of the risks posed and the steps you can take to protect yourself.
The threat of ID theft
The leak purports to provide much of the information that banks, insurance companies and service providers seek when creating accounts — and when granting a request to change the password on an existing account.
A few key pieces appeared to be missing from the hackers’ haul. One is email addresses, which many people use to log on to services. Another is driver’s license or passport photos, which some governmental agencies rely on to verify identities.
Still, Murray of PIRG said that bad actors could do “all kinds of things” with the leaked information, the most worrisome probably being to try to take over someone’s accounts — including those associated with their bank, investments, insurance policies and email. With your name, Social Security number, date of birth and mailing address, a fraudster could create fake accounts in your name or try to talk someone into resetting the password on one of your existing accounts.
How to protect yourself
Data breaches have been so common over the years, some security experts say sensitive information about you is almost certainly available in the dark corners of the internet. And there are a lot of people capable of finding it; VPNRanks, a website that rates virtual private network services, estimates that 5 million people a day will access the dark web through the anonymizing TOR browser, although only a portion of them will be up to no good.
If you suspect that your Social Security number or other important identifying information about you has been leaked, experts say you should put a freeze on your credit files at the three major credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. You can do so for free, and it will prevent criminals from taking out loans, signing up for credit cards and opening financial accounts under your name. The catch is that you’ll need to remember to lift the freeze temporarily if you are obtaining or applying for something that requires a credit check.
Placing a freeze can be done online or by phone, working with each credit bureau individually. PIRG cautions never to do so in response to an unsolicited email or text purporting to be from one of the credit agencies — such a message is probably the work of a scammer trying to dupe you into revealing sensitive personal information.
For more details, check out PIRG’s step-by-step guide to credit freezes.
You can also sign up for a service that monitors your accounts and the dark web to guard against identity theft, typically for a fee. If your data is exposed in a breach, the company whose network was breached will often provide one of these services for free for a year or more.
As important as these steps are to stop people from opening new accounts in your name, they aren’t much help protecting your existing accounts. Oddly enough, those accounts are especially vulnerable to identity thieves if you haven’t signed up for online access to them, Murray said — that’s because it’s easier for thieves to create a login and password while pretending to be you than it is for them to crack your existing login and password.
Of course, having strong passwords that are different for every service and changed periodically helps. Password manager apps offer a simple way to create and keep track of passwords by storing them in the cloud, essentially requiring you to remember one master password instead of dozens of long and unpronounceable ones. These are available both for free (such as Apple’s iCloud Keychain) and for a fee.
Beyond that, experts say it’s extremely important to sign up for two-factor authentication. That adds another layer of security on top of your login and password. The second factor is usually something sent or linked to your phone, such as a text message; a more secure approach is to use an authenticator app, which will keep you secure even if your phone number is hijacked by scammers.
Yes, scammers can hijack your phone number through techniques called SIM swaps and port-out fraud, causing more identity-theft nightmares. To protect you on that front, AT&T allows you to create a passcode restricting access to your account; T-Mobile offers optional protection against your phone number being switched to a new device, and Verizon automatically blocks SIM swaps by shutting down both the new device and the existing one until the account holder weighs in with the existing device.
Open the link to read the rest of the article.
Brave New World, indeed!
For three weeks, I was locked out of Twitter because of a snafu that’s not worth recounting. Every time I tried to log on, I received a notice saying I was underage and not allowed to engage on Twitter. I have been on Twitter since 2009. So, even though I have been an active participant on Twitter for 15 years, Twitter concluded I had not yet passed my 13th birthday!
Anyway, I didn’t watch or listen when Elon Musk held a conversation with Trump last night. I did notice, however, that the topic “slurring” was trending, and I discovered hundreds of comments about Trump slurring his language in the conversation, which led to comments about weird things Trump said: congratulating Musk for firing workers who dared to strike; brushing off climate change and rising seas, instead saying that he would get “more oceanfront property” and that our real worry should be “nuclear warming.” Many more non sequiturs.
Rex Huppke of USA Today wrote about the Musk-Trump show and summed it up well: it was a disaster. Worse, it was boring.
It started 40-45 minutes late, due to technical problems.
It was downhill from there.
For a fascism-curious billionaire who loves cuddling up to right-wing loons, Elon Musk sure is good at making right-wing politicians look stupid.
Former President Donald Trump had loudly trumpeted a planned Monday night interview with Musk that would stream on X. But much like the disastrous X-platformed launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, the Musk/Trump interview failed to launch, leaving social media users laughing at the collective incompetence.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket last month, Trump’s reelection campaign has been flailing. His childish attacks against her aren’t working. His racist comments about her mixed-race heritage have repelled all but his most loyal supporters. His vice presidential pick, JD Vance, becomes less likable every time he speaks.
So his answer, weirdly, was to sit down with Musk and talk to what would undoubtedly be a very online audience that doesn’t represent the broader electorate. Had the conversation gone off without a hitch, it still would have been odd and largely useless for Trump’s effort to halt Harris’ momentum….
Forget the glitches, Trump’s X interview got worse when he started talking
Of course, things didn’t get better for Trump once the interview was able to proceed. …
He was rambling, babbling on about crowd sizes and immigration and President Joe Biden and whatever else seemed to pass through his mind. He was also badly slurring his words, raising questions about his health, and doing nothing to knock down rising concerns about his age and well-being.
He sounded like a disoriented, racist Daffy Duck…
I’m not going to quote anything Trump said in the interview because it was either too stupid to merit transcription or a mere repetition of the nonsense he spouts at every rally he holds.
A big part of Trump’s problem right now is he has become almost unbearably boring. Build a wall. Drill, baby, drill. Marxist, socialist something-something. Harris only recently became Black. Blah, blah, blah.
So for Trump, sitting down with a rich weirdo few people like and slurring his way through an interview that failed to launch was, in the words of one Donald J. Trump, “a DISASTER!”
Musk, with his social-media ineptness and unmerited sense of self-importance, made DeSantis look like a fool. And now he’s done the same to Trump.
The Mouse That Roared was a 1955 novel made into an uproarious comedy starring the great Peter Sellers in 1959. It is the story of a tiny pre-industrial nation—Grand Fenwick—whose economy has collapsed and whose leaders decide to invade the U.S. because the U.S. always rebuilds the economy of nations it defeats.
Grand Fenwick sends a fleet of 24 soldiers armed with longbows to New York City, and due to a series of miscommunications, accidentally conquers the U.S.
Something like that appears to be unfolding in the grinding war between Ukraine and Russia. After 30 months of absorbing withering attacks on its towns, cities, infrastructure, and people, Ukraine has invaded Russia.
Russia, of course, cries “unfair!” Only Russia can invade, not Ukraine. But invade they did, and the Ukrainians met little resistance.
Thinking like the writer of “The Mouse That Roared,” what if?
What if the Ukrainians pushed their way to Moscow (as the Wagner Group did last year)?
What if they took control of the Kremlin?
What if they captured Putin?
What if Zelensky became the president of Russia and launched a democratic revolution?
I know it’s fantastical, but what if?
Trump has the same reaction to every adverse circumstance in his life: Sue. Sue. Sue. He has been involved in literally thousands of law suits in his life. That’s his style. Sometimes the threat of a lawsuit is enough to frighten away an adversary. Sometimes a lawsuit forces a settlement, which works to his advantage.
Now he is suing the Justice Department for searching Mar-a-Lago for top-secret documents which he falsely claimed were his personal property. He no doubt expects the lawsuit to go before a friendly pro-Trump judge or the U.S. Supreme Court, which usually rules in his favor. If he is lucky, it will land in Judge Aileen Cannon’s court.
The New York Daily News reported:
Former President Trump is reportedly planning to sue the federal government for $115 million over the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate, accusing the Department of Justice of unconstitutional “political persecution.”
Even though the search turned up hundreds of classified documents and led to his indictment on federal charges, Trump says prosecutors improperly targeted him in hopes of damaging his campaign to win back the White House.
“What President Trump is doing here is not just standing up for himself — he is standing up for all Americans who believe in the rule of law,” Daniel Epstein, a lawyer for Trump, told Fox Business News.
Trump is demanding $15 million in compensation for his legal costs, plus $100 million in punitive damages.
Trump accuses Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray of failing to implement normal procedures for getting back the documents in order to carry out the search and humiliate the Republican ex-president….
The filing sets the clock ticking on a 180-day period during which Trump and the government can seek to work out a settlement. If no deal is reached, a federal judge will hear the case in south Florida.
Trump admits taking the documents with him to his Florida estate after leaving the White House in January 2021, but claims he had the legal right to do so.
He returned some of the documents when hit with a subpoena to give them back.
Suspecting Trump was hiding more documents, the feds asked a judge to approve a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, which was carried out on Aug. 22, 2022.
Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to investigate the case after Trump announced he would run for president again in 2024.
Trump was indicted on a string of charges accusing him of improperly retaining the documents and obstructing justice. Two Mar-a-Lago workers were also charged with moving boxes of sensitive documents to hide them from investigators and even Trump’s own defense attorney.
Judge Aileen Cannon recently dismissed the case on the grounds that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. The prosecution is appealing that decision to a higher court but it will likely wind up being decided by the Supreme Court.
Diane Ravitch's blog 