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Michael Tomasky: How to Defeat a Convicted Felon

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2024 //
30

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic offers good advice about defeating Donald Trump. It’s about shaping a narrative, constantly reminding people that he is a convicted felon.

It might also be helpful to reiterate that he had sex with a porn star while his wife Melanie was recuperating from childbirth; that a jury decided that he sexually assaulted and defamed journalist E. Jean Carroll and owes her nearly $100 million dollars; that the State of New York successfully sued him for fraudulently reporting the value of his properties to reduce his taxes and was ordered to pay more than $400 million.

Tomasky writes:

If there is such a thing as one infamous quote that defines an era, then during the George W. Bush presidency it was an on-background remark made by a Bush aide to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2002 that appeared two years later in The New York Times Magazine. A “senior adviser” who was unhappy about an earlier article by Suskind had called him on the carpet and then went on to explain the broader world view that Suskind failed to comprehend:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The passage was instantly incendiary (everyone thinks it was Karl Rove; Rove has never confirmed this, and Suskind has never revealed his source). The arrogance of it, at a time when the Iraq War was hardly going to plan, was staggering. Some Democrats took the jibe as a badge of honor and began sporting “Reality-Based Community” buttons.

Republicans have a long track record of disastrous results. The Iraq War, which we were told in early 2003 would take a couple months, lasted years, killed hundreds of thousands, and cost trillions (and by the way, Iraq is still not close to being a free country). Bush also would go on to let a major American city drown (New Orleans) and nearly destroy the global economic order.

But we have to say this: None of that ever dims their confidence that they can create their own reality. And today, by which I mean right now, this week, Democrats can and must learn a thing or two from Republicans.

While Donald Trump was on trial, the conventional wisdom was that the outcome would have no effect on the election. The only people who disagreed were some conservatives—because they were sure it would actually help him.

But now we have a couple polls telling us something different. The conviction has the potential to hurt Trump. But emphasis on “potential.” It depends entirely on what the Democrats do with it. So this is the key question: Are the Democrats capable of creating their own reality? Do they have the imagination and courage to do it?

First, the polls. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken after Trump’s conviction, 10 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents said the conviction made them less likely to vote for Trump. To be sure, majorities of both said it would have no effect, and 35 percent of Republicans said a conviction made them more likely to back Trump.

But the important number is that 10 percent. That is a huge number. Think it through with me. In 2020, 158 million people voted. According to the CNN exit polls, 36 percent were Republicans. That’s 57 million voters. If Trump were to lose 5.7 million Republicans, he would not only lose but probably lose convincingly. Even if half of that 10 percent comes back to him, he’d lose 2.85 million. That’s still a huge number.

Let’s do a little more math. In the key swing state of Arizona, the vote total was about 3.3 million. If we follow the CNN exit polls that put the GOP vote nationwide at 36 percent, then just shy of 1.2 million Arizona voters were Republican. If Trump were to lose 5 percent of them, that would amount to about 59,000 votes. And Arizona was decided, of course, by about 12,000 votes in 2020. In Georgia, which again was decided by roughly 12,000 votes, Trump would lose around 88,000 votes. In Michigan, it would be 99,000 votes lost if just 5 percent of Republicans desert him. In Pennsylvania, it would be close to 124,000 votes. And remember, I’m lowballing Republican defections from the poll’s 10 percent to half that, and I’m not even counting independents.

I trust you see the importance here.

Second post-conviction poll: Morning Consult found that 15 percent of Republicans believe Trump should end his candidacy. Now, there are no numbers to crunch here, and Trump is obviously not going to do that. But if roughly every seventh Republican really thinks Trump should end his candidacy, that is a staggering number, and again a potentially devastating one for him.

And again—emphasis on “potentially.”

Democrats, the ball is in your court. You can make your usual “judicious study of discernible reality” and buy into the lazy—and apparently wrong—conventional wisdom that says the verdict will make no difference.

Or you can create a new reality in which the verdict makes a big difference—maybe the difference between Joe Biden being reelected and Donald Trump destroying our democracy.

How to do it? There are lots of ways. But let’s start with this. “Convicted felon Donald Trump.” Not once. Not 10 times. Not 10,000 times. More like 500,000 times.

Seriously: No federal Democratic officeholder should, for the foreseeable future, say the name “Donald Trump” without putting the words “convicted felon” before it. We might give Biden himself a partial exemption here, because for a president, that kind of blunt, partisan repetition may be a little undignified. But no one else. Chuck Schumer. Hakeem Jeffries. Cori Bush on the left. Jared Golden on the right. Every. Single. One of them.

Blunt repetition may be boring. Democrats and liberals are intellectually averse to it, because it’s intellectually dull, and we’re supposed to be the smart side, always finding clever new arguments. But it works. People need to hear things over and over and over for it to lodge in their long-term memory.

Think of how many times you heard “Crooked Hillary” in 2016. Did they sound like mentally dull robots? Yes. But did it sink in, for millions of swing voters? Well, we do know this: As many as 40 percent of voters in 2016 polls said they thought she was corrupt. And when James Comey reopened that email investigation in late October, many of those voters thought: Aha. Crooked Hillary. Just what the Republicans have been saying.

This is how people’s brains work. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Gretchen Smelzer, a psychologist whom I admit I just found on Google on Sunday morning but who appears to be legit and whose 2018 book Journey Through Traumaearned a brief but respectful write-up in The New York Times. On her website, Smelzer writes:

There are only three ways that information can move from short-term memory to long term memory: urgency, repetition, or association.…

Repetition is the most familiar learning tool—everyone has memorized facts or vocabulary words by repeating them, and some have improved basketball free-throw shooting or playing piano scales through practice. Repetition creates long term memory by eliciting or enacting strong chemical interactions at the synapse of your neuron (where neurons connect to other neurons). Repetition creates the strongest learning.…

So Democrats. Here’s your situation. You can let this drop, thus ensuring that by November 5, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts by a jury that deliberated for less than 10 hours will be totally forgotten, and no one will carry the thought of it into the voting booth. Or you can hammer away at it, never letting voters forget it—and by the way, driving Trump crazy the whole time, making it likely that he’ll say nuttier and nuttier things about it—and do all you can to swing those 59,000 votes in Arizona and all the rest.

It’s up to you. Do you want to wake up on Wednesday, November 6, with Trump having won, and with exit polls showing that his conviction made no difference? If not, well … as Malone (Sean Connery) said to Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) about stopping another mobster: “What are you prepared to do?”

Categories Accountability, Character, Elections, Ethics, Fascism, Fraud, Politics, Trump

Tim O’Brien: Biden Should Consider Stepping Aside

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2024 //
27

Tim O’Brien is executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. He was formerly a writer and editor for The New York Times. His book TrumpNation caused Trump to sue him for saying that Trump was not a billionaire. Trump’s lawsuit was dismissed by the courts.

O’Brien wrote:

Joe Biden could have started writing the final chapter of his political career a year or so ago, when he still controlled the narrative.

“I’ve capped my long journey in public service by defeating Donald Trump, revivifying our economy and moving the US past the Covid era,” he might have said. “Therefore, I’ve decided not to seek a second term so the next generation of Democrats can succeed me and secure the White House and democracy for the American people.”

Instead, a humiliating and unsettling debate performance on Thursday night is now writing Biden’s final chapter for him. He shuffled onto the debate stage like the old soul that he is, rarely answered questions with more than a whispering rasp, often looked bewildered and failed to land enough memorable blows. Biden was so abysmal that Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sexual predator, effectively mastered the debate’s momentum and left Biden appearing like little more than a punching bag.

It may be time for Biden to consider moving on — and an intervention might be necessary to speed that along before the Democratic National Convention in August…

Biden ran for president three times before finally winning in 2020, and his ego may prevent him from letting go. He has spent most of his adult life in the Senate and the White House. He also took an admirable, courageous and necessary gamble by choosing to debate Trump so early in the election cycle, which I noted in a previous column this week. Biden wagered that he could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump and prove he was more vital and acute.

Biden lost that bet.

While Trump lied broadly and shamelessly throughout the debate, he was sharp-tongued and much faster on his feet than he has been in recent campaign appearances. He overshadowed Biden and the president’s loping, nebulous presence, reinforcing doubts about his ability to steer the ship of state.

None of this means Trump is fit for higher office. Biden’s Cabinet is populated by judicious and talented people, and the president himself has been purposeful throughout his career. Trump is a dangerous and unpredictable anarchist who has rarely attracted top-flight talent into his orbit.

But this is an election, not a management report card. Voters often respond to candidates emotionally, and perceptions of leadership can be deeply subjective. In that universe, Thursday’s debate was a monumental and debilitating setback for Biden. He failed to give full-throated and linear arguments for where he stood on core issues such as abortion and immigration. Some questions that he initially handled effectively, such as one about inflation and the economy, wound up following a meandering, perplexing path.

Biden’s most loyal supporters may forgive all of this, just as Trump fans have endless patience for his predations, lawlessness and buffoonery. But moderate and independent voters in swing states have had little patience for either man, and the debate may leave them permanently wary of Biden.

The president put on such a petrifying show that Trump got away with all of his usual atrocities.

Trump was impeached twice as president, and he was recently found guilty in three different courtrooms of sexual assault and criminal and civil fraud. He faces three other criminal prosecutions. Yet he managed to try labeling Biden a “criminal” during the debate.

Trump is a pathological liar who has dissembled with gusto for most of his 78 years. During the debate he offered a list of fabrications, including claiming Biden wants to quadruple personal tax rates and has been bribed by China; that the federal deficit is the biggest it has ever been; that he passed the Veterans Choice bill; that Biden indicted him; that more than 18 million undocumented immigrants have entered the US during Biden’s presidency; that the US footed 100% of NATO’s defense spending prior to his own presidency; that no terrorist attacks occurred during his presidency, and that states led by Democrats allow babies to be executed after they’re born.

Yet Trump tried labeling Biden a “liar” during the debate.

Biden, on the other hand, was spot on when he told Trump that he has “the morals of an alley cat” for romancing a porn star during his third marriage. Trump himself also briefly indulged the truth when he said he wouldn’t accept the outcome of this year’s election should he lose.

Trump also mentioned during the debate that he was running for the presidency because he thought Biden has been a singularly bad executive. I suspect the primary factor motivating Trump’s bid is his belief that a second White House stay will allow him to escape the multiple legal prosecutions bearing down on him.

Trump’s sordid business and political history, and his statements during the debate, are all reminders of how imperative it is that voters don’t send him back to the Oval Office. He and Biden are slated to debate again in September, and perhaps Biden envisions that as an opportunity to turn around his candidacy. It may be too late, alas.

The US is in perilous waters and Biden has always recognized that. He’s also done enormous good in protecting and preserving democracy at home and abroad. But he’s had his chance and he’s now come up short. He should consider stepping aside.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Politics, Trump

Ohio: Charter Schools Ripping Off Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2024 //
2

Steve Dyer, former legislator and perennial budget hawk, tracks wasteful spending on charter schools in Ohio in this post. Ohio is throwing away billions on charters and vouchers, at the expense of its public schools, which typically outperform its privatized schools. A pro-charter analyst concluded that Ohio’s charter schools were among the worst in the nation.

Dyer writes on his blog Tenth Period:

It’s difficult to say that a $1.3 billion state program can go under the radar, but lately it seems that Ohio’s charter school industry has done just that, thanks in large part to the absolute explosion of taxpayer funded subsidies given to wealthy private school parents.

And while the state’s largest taxpayer ripoff ever — in excess of $200 million plus — happened as the result of the infamous ECOT scandal (the state is only going after about $100 million of the $200 million plus that I calculated because they just didn’t do the forensic audit of years prior to the couple prior to the school shutting down), the per pupil funding explosion in Ohio’s charter schools has been equally remarkable.

The amount of money the state sends, on average, to Ohio’s charter schools is now more than what 129 Ohio School Districts SPEND per equivalent pupil, including all locally raised property and/or income taxes. 

That’s right. 

Ohio now provides Ohio’s Charter Schools (all but 5 of which rated in the bottom 25% of all schools nationally) more money on average than 1 in 5 Ohio school districts spend per equivalent pupil, including all their local property tax money. 

I’ve included a list of all the school districts that spend less per equivalent pupil than Charter Schools receive on average in state aid.

That’s quite a list, don’t you think?

This explains how Ohio’s charter schools now get nearly $1.3 billion in state aid while having fewer students than they had in the 2013-2014 school year, I suppose. That year — the record for number of charter school students — had about $300 million less going to charters despite having about 1,000 more students than today.

This is why it’s critical to keep our eyes on all the privatization efforts, not just the shiniest one in front of us. 

It is. Inevitable.

Organize and vote accordingly.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in about 25 years of following, analyzing and writing Ohio education policy, it’s that there is nothing more certain than Ohio Republican elected officials taking tax dollars out of the hands of our 1.4 million public school students and instead stuffing the bank accounts of political contributing profiteers and wealthy private school parents. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Failure, For-Profit, Funding, Ohio, Politics, Privatization, Scandals

Thom Hartmann: Bill Barr, the Master Fixer of GOP Crimes

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2024 //
4

Thom Hartmann writes here about the nefarious role played by former Attorney General William Barr in his two different stints, first, when he worked as Attorney General for President George H.W. Bush, and later when he protected Trump from the damning findings of the Mueller Report about Russian interference in the election of 2016; Barr sat on it, summarized its conclusions inaccurately, and misled the public. Bill Barr was, Hartmann writes, “the master fixer” for “the old GOP.”

He writes:

Congressman Jim Jordan wanted revenge on behalf of Donald Trump against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for charging Trump with election interference in Manhattan. 

He threatened Bragg with “oversight”: dragging him before his committee, threatening him with contempt of Congress; putting a rightwing target on Bragg’s back by publicizing him to draw sharpshooters from as far away as Wyoming or Idaho; and facing the possibility of going to jail if he didn’t answer Jordan’s questions right. Jordan, James Comer, and Bryan Steil — three chairmen of three different committees — wrote to Bragg:

“By July 2019 … federal prosecutors determined that no additional people would be charged alongside [Michael] Cohen. … [Y]our apparent decision to pursue criminal charges where federal authorities declined to do so requires oversight….”

They were furious that Bragg would prosecute Trump for a crime that the federal Department of Justice had already decided in 2019 and announced that they weren’t going to pursue. 

But why didn’t Bill Barr’s Department of Justice proceed after they’d already put Michael Cohen in prison for a year for delivering the check to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet at least until after the election, and then lying about it? Why didn’t they go after the guy who ordered the check written, the guy who’d had sex with Daniels, the guy whose run for the presidency was hanging in the balance?

Why didn’t the Department of Justice at least investigate (they have a policy against prosecuting a sitting president) the then-president’s role in the crime they put Cohen in prison for but was directed by, paid for, and also committed by Donald Trump? 

Turns out, Geoffrey Berman — the lifelong Republican and U.S. Attorney appointed by Trump to run the prosecutor’s office at the Southern District of New York — wrote a book, Holding the Line, published in September, 2022, about his experiences during that era. 

In it, he came right out and accused his boss Bill Barr of killing the federal investigation into Trump’s role of directing and covering up that conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. Had Barr not done that, Trump could have been prosecuted in January of 2021, right after he left office. And Jim Jordan couldn’t complain that Alvin Bragg was pushing a case the feds had decided wasn’t worth it. 

As The Washington Post noted when the book came out:

“He [Berman] says Barr stifled campaign finance investigations emanating from the Cohen case and even floated seeking a reversal of Cohen’s conviction — just like Barr would later do with another Trump ally, Michael Flynn. (Barr also intervened in the case of another Trump ally, Roger Stone, to seek a lighter sentence than career prosecutors wanted.)”

Which is why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg had to pick up the case, if the crime was to be exposed and prosecuted. 

After all, this crime literally turned the 2016 election to Trump. Without it, polling shows and political scientists argue, Hillary Clinton would have been our president for at least four years and Trump would have retired into real estate obscurity.

But Bill Barr put an end to Berman’s investigation, according to Berman. The DOJ pretended to be investigating Trump for another few months, then quietly announced they weren’t going to continue the investigation. The news media responded with a shrug of the shoulders and America forgot that Trump had been at the center of Cohen’s crime. 

In 2023, the New York Times picked up Bill Barr’s cover story and ran with it, ignoring Berman’s claims, even though he was the guy in charge of the Southern District of New York. The article essentially reported that Main Justice wouldn’t prosecute because Cohen wouldn’t testify to earlier crimes, Trump might’ve been ignorant of the law, and that the decision was made by prosecutors in New York and not by Barr. 

Incomplete testimony and ignorance of the law have rarely stopped prosecutors in the past from a clear case like this one appears to be (Trump signed the check and Cohen had a recording of their conversation, after all), but the story stuck and the Times ran with it.

In contrast, Berman wrote:

“While Cohen had pleaded guilty, our office continued to pursue investigations related to other possible campaign finance violations [including by Trump]. When Barr took over in February 2019, he not only tried to kill the ongoing investigations but—incredibly—suggested that Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed. Barr summoned Rob Khuzami in late February to challenge the basis of Cohen’s plea as well as the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals [including Trump]. …

“The directive Barr gave Khuzami, which was amplified that same day by a follow-up call from O’Callaghan, was explicit: not a single investigative step could be taken, not a single document in our possession could be reviewed, until the issue was resolved. …

“About six weeks later, Khuzami returned to DC for another meeting about Cohen. He was accompanied by Audrey Strauss, Russ Capone, and Edward “Ted” Diskant, Capone’s co-chief. Barr was in the room, along with Steven Engel, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and others from Main Justice.”

Summarizing the story, Berman wondered out loud exactly why Bill Barr had sabotaged extending their investigation that could lead to an indictment of Trump when he left office:

“But Barr’s posture here raises obvious questions. Did he think dropping the campaign finance charges would bolster Trump’s defense against impeachment charges? Was he trying to ensure that no other Trump associates or employees would be charged with making hush-money payments and perhaps flip on the president? Was the goal to ensure that the president could not be charged after leaving office? Or was it part of an effort to undo the entire series of investigations and prosecutions over the past two years of those in the president’s orbit (Cohen, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn)?”

In retrospect, the answer appears to be, “All of the above.”

And that wasn’t Barr’s only time subverting justice while heading the Justice Department. Berman says he also ordered John Kerry investigated for possible prosecution for violating the Logan Act (like Trump is doing now!) by engaging in foreign policy when not in office. 

Barr even killed a federal investigation into Turkish bankers, after Turkish dictator Erdoğan complained to Trump. 

Most people know that when the Mueller investigation was completed — documenting ten prosecutable cases of Donald Trump personally engaging in criminal obstruction of justice and witness tampering to prevent the Mueller Report investigators from getting to the bottom of his 2016 connections to Russia — Barr buried the report for weeks. 

He lied about it to America and our news media for almost a full month, and then released a version so redacted it’s nearly meaningless. (Merrick Garland, Barr’s heir to the AG job, is still hiding large parts of the report from the American people, another reason President Biden should replace him.)

While shocking in its corruption, as I noted here last month, this was not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who’d committed crimes that could rise to the level of treason against America.

He’s the exemplar of the “old GOP” that helped Nixon cut a deal with South Vietnam to prolong the War so he could beat Humphrey in 1968; worked with Reagan in 1980 to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for holding the hostages to screw Jimmy Carter; and stole the 2000 election from Al Gore by purging 94,000 Black people from the voter rolls in Jeb Bush’s Florida.

Instead of today’s “new GOP,” exemplified by Nazi marches, alleged perverts like Matt Gaetz, and racist rhetoric against immigrants, Barr’s “old GOP” committed their crimes wearing $2000 tailored suits and manipulating the law to their advantage…and still are.

For example, back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in Reagan’s scheme to steal the 1980 election through what the media euphemistically called “Iron-Contra.”

On Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.” (see the bottom of this article)

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush Senior’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to one of his million-dollar mansions in Connecticut, Maine, or Texas: instead, he was worried that he may face time in a federal prison after he left office, a concern nearly identical to what Richard Nixon faced when he decided to resign to avoid prosecution.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on Bush and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.

Was the criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to an obscure hostage-taking in Lebanon?

Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, “had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable and imprisonable crime: it was every bit as much treason as when Richard Nixon blew up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with North and South Vietnam to win that November’s election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Please open the link to finish reading this fascinating article.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, History, Justice, Lies, Politics, Republicans

Contrast Biden and Trump As They Campaign

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2024 //
20

This brief news clip provides a sharp contrast between Biden and Trump.

Biden talks about substance and issues. Trump mocks Biden’s stutter. We are reminded of the event in 2016 when Trump ridiculed a journalist with a disability.

Categories Biden, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Politics, Trump

Open Secrets Reports: Trump Network Paid More Than $60 Million in Legal Fees

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
3

Open Secrets is a website that tracks and reports on political spending and donors. Its latest report says that the Trump political network paid more than $60 million for legal fees, which was unprecedented for him, possibly for any presidential candidate ever. The money comes not from his pockets but from his fundraising appeals. It’s surprising but true that small donors would send $10 or $25 to a man who claims to be worth $10 billion.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Funding, Politics, Trump

Send This Teacher to the Legislature in Tallahassee!!

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2024 //
1

I received a fundraising letter for a teacher who is running for the Legislature. It was forwarded to me by a friend who lives in the district. I read his letter and immediately sent Derek Reich a donation to his campaign.

Dear Friend,

I’m Derek Reich, a local high school government teacher here in Sarasota. I’m now the Democrat running to be your state representative in District 73 so I can fully fund our children’s public schools, lower homeowner’s insurance, and restore a woman’s freedom to control her body.

I was born and raised in Sarasota County, and never envisioned myself running for office. But when Fiona McFarLand, our current representative, voted to cut $12 million in funding from our public schools, I was outraged. What representative would go to Tallahassee to cut funding from their own community’s children? She also voted for no exceptions for rape or incest in Florida’s new abortion law. Enough is enough. I will fight for my hometown and for all of my neighbors in Sarasota County who are being ignored by Tallahassee politicians.

This is the most competitive state house race in Florida. In 2020, Biden and Trump practically tied it at 49% each. I am going to flip this seat, and I hope to earn your support to do it. If you want to learn more about my campaign and the issues I’m fighting for, you can visit my website: https://derekforflorida.com/.

We’re working to build the campaign needed to get our message out by the voters, and any support you can give would help us knock doors and let voters know what our opponent is doing in Tallahassee. If you’re able to help, you can donate securely online at this link.

Let’s send this #TeacherToTallahassee

Sincerely,
Derek Reich
Teacher, Candidate for State Representative

Categories Budget Cuts, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Florida, Politics

House Homeland Security Committee Votes to Impeach Mayorkas

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2024 //
6

The Republican-dominated Homeland Security Committee voted 18-15 to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The standard for impeachment is high, but Republicans want to humiliate the Biden administration by impeaching a Cabinet Secretary for the first time in 150 years.

Given the Republicans’ slim majority, they will need almost every Republican vote to impeach Mayorkas.

The Democratic majority in the Senate will certainly defeat anything this absurd from the House.

The G.O.P. was plowing forward without producing evidence that Mr. Mayorkas committed a crime or acts of corruption, arguing instead that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law. Legal scholars, including prominent conservatives, have argued that the effort is a perversion of the constitutional power of impeachment, and Democrats remained solidly opposed…

“Neither of the impeachment charges the committee will consider today are a high crime or misdemeanor,” said Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s most senior Democrat. He added that House Republicans “don’t want progress. They don’t want solutions. They want a political issue.”

At least one House Republican is skeptical.

“I’m a ‘lean no’ at this point,” Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he feared that impeaching Mr. Mayorkas would damage Congress institutionally and be “moving in the wrong direction.”

“To say that someone was incompetent — we wouldn’t have anybody in Congress, if the standard was competence,” Mr. Buck added.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Extremism, Politics, Republicans

Jamelle Bouie: Trump Is a Loser

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
24

I am falling in love with Jamelle Bouie. I love his mind. I love his writing. I love his insights. I read his personal blog (to which I subscribe via The New York Times), and here is a recent article in a special opinion section that cheered me up.

We frequently hear that Donald Trump represents a large and significant number of Americans, each attracted to him for several different reasons, none of which are that mysterious.

There are supporters attracted to his doctrinaire commitment to social conservatism, even if he himself is a libertine. There are supporters attracted to his belligerent hostility toward a broad variety of perceived cultural enemies. There are supporters attracted to his open cruelty toward and contempt for various racial and religious others. And there are supporters who simply think he’ll get them a good deal in foreign and domestic affairs — whatever that actually means.

Again, it’s not that complicated.

What is less frequently heard on the lips of political commentators is the fact that, while large and significant, Trump’s following is not a majority. Not even close. In fact, by any measure, Trump has been a unique electoral loser for the Republican Party.

His ceiling in national elections — having been twice on the presidential ballot — seems to be somewhere between 46 percent and 47 percent of the voting public. In 2016 that was enough, thanks to the Electoral College, to put him in the White House. In 2020 it wasn’t.

Just as significant is the fate of the most explicitly Trump-aligned candidates — the so-called MAGA Republicans whom President Biden condemned in his 2022 address on the state of American democracy. They are also electoral losers. The Republican Party, thanks to Trump’s influence, has lost or severely underperformed in three consecutive national elections, as well as a large number of special and off-year elections.

None of this means that he and his closest allies are somehow doomed in November. But it does seem as if there is a national political majority that is, if nothing else, consistently hostile to Trump or Trump-like figures and will vote to keep them out of office.

There has been an endless parade of analysis of the Trump or MAGA voter. Perhaps it’s time to focus on the views of this actual silent majority, whose members don’t attend rallies or make a show of their political commitments but whose votes have powered the Democratic Party to an unusual six-year run of electoral victories.

In Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter today, he compares Trump to George Wallace, and concludes that he is the heir apparent to Wallace. He describes two biographies of Wallace that he read recently and ends: A final thought:

Wallace was a smart, clever and intellectually agile man. We are probably lucky that our demagogue, dangerous as he is, lacks those particular attributes. Even so, if Wallace has a legacy in national politics, it is very clearly Trump.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Politics, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Do Not Tire in the Struggle to Defend Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2023 //
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Heather Cox Richardson wrote a compelling piece about the challenges we face in the year leading up to the 2024 election. The media keeps warning us about ominous polls, about the dangers of Trump, about Biden potentially losing this or that demographic. Trump seems to be driven by two goals: 1) to stay out of prison (as president, he could pardon himself for federal crimes, not state convictions); and 2) the chance to wreak vengeance on his enemies.

Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety. 

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government. 

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memoputs it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism. 

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does. 

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him. 

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” 

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Trump
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