January 17, 2023
Julia Mueller of the Hill: "President Biden on Monday called Republicans 'fiscally demented' and knocked GOP priorities during the keynote speech at the National Action Network's (NAN) annual breakfast to mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day.... Biden in his speech offered sweeping remarks on his administration's work on civil rights and called out Republicans for their economic stances in light of disparities faced by minority communities.... Biden also talked about building Black generational wealth by chipping away at economic disparities and closing the racial wealth gap -- refocusing on funding for historically Black colleges and universities and 'aggressively' combating discrimination in housing. And the president reiterated calls to ban assault weapons, protect abortion rights and pardon marijuana possession charges. He said he didn't 'want to hear a word from the other side' about his plan to forgive student loan debt."
M.J. Lee & Kevin Liptak of CNN: "The White House counsel's office says there are no visitors logs that track guests who come and go at President Joe Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware. House Republicans have been demanding that the White House turn over all information related to misplaced classified documents from Biden's time as vice president, including any visitors logs to Biden's private residence and who might have had access to his private office in Washington, DC, where the first batch of documents were discovered in early November. 'Like every President across decades of modern history, his personal residence is personal,' the counsel's office said in a statement Monday morning. 'But upon taking office, President Biden restored the norm and tradition of keeping White House visitors logs, including publishing them regularly, after the previous administration ended them.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Republicans Are Full of It. Michael Shear of the New York Times: "'The Secret Service doesn't maintain visitor logs at the private residences of protectees,' [Anthony] Guglielmi[, communications chief for the Secret Service,] said. 'The visitor logs that are kept at government buildings are part of the National Archives and Records Administration, and while we have access to those, we are not the custodian of those records and logs.'... On social media on Monday, [Donald Trump] mocked [President] Biden for keeping classified documents in his home. He also bragged: 'Mar-a-Lago is a highly secured facility, with Security Cameras all over the place, and watched over by staff & our great Secret Service. I have INFO on everyone!' But Mr. Biden's Republican critics, like [Rep. James] Comer [Ky.], are seeking transparency in ways they have not for Mr. Trump. Asked on Monday whether the Oversight Committee would be requesting from Mr. Trump the 'INFO on everyone' from Mar-a-Lago, a spokesman for Mr. Comer declined to answer....
"'Either completely uninformed or deliberately misleading,' Eric Schultz, who was a spokesman for President Barack Obama, tweeted on Monday [about Republican demands for Mr. Biden's home logs].... Mr. Schultz noted that there were no logs kept for the homes of Mr. Trump, former President George W. Bush or former President George H.W. Bush. 'No logs from Trump's homes, Crawford ranch, Kennebunkport, or any President's family home,' he wrote."
David Nakamura of the Washington Post: Attorney General Merrick Garland believes the Justice "Department's civil rights work is just as essential as its high-profile probes of ... Donald Trump..., especially as a deeply polarized country faces spiking hate crimes, heightened scrutiny of abusive policing, attempts to restrict voting access and a judicial rollback of federal abortion protections. Those challenges and others have led Garland to push for a department-wide focus on civil rights cases that is drawing praise from longtime advocates, even as they worry that the litany of injustices the agency is trying to address could overwhelm available resources and muddy its sense of mission."
Jennifer Hansler & Kylie Atwood of CNN: "An American wrongfully detained in Iran is calling on President Joe Biden to take notice of US detainees there, launching a hunger strike Monday to mark seven years since he was left behind in a prisoner swap that brought other Americans home. In a letter to Biden, Siamak Namazi called on the US president to think of him every day for the seven days he intends to carry out the hunger strike commemorating the grim milestone. 'In the past I implored you to reach for your moral compass and find the resolve to bring the US hostages in Iran home. To no avail. Not only do we remain Iran's prisoners, but you have not so much as granted our families a meeting,' wrote Namazi, who is one of three Americans who remain wrongfully detained in Iran. Emad Shargi and Morad Tahbaz have also been imprisoned there for years." (Also linked yesterday.)
Isaac Stanley-Becker & Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post: "George Santos ... has deeper ties than previously known to a businessman who cultivated close links with a onetime Trump confidant and who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.... Andrew Intrater and his wife each gave the maximum $5,800 to Santos' main campaign committee and tens of thousands more since 2020 to committees linked to him, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Intrater's cousin is Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the Russian energy industry. The relationship between Santos and Intrater goes beyond campaign contributions.... The evidence suggests Santos may have had a business relationship with Intrater as Santos was first entering politics in 2020. It also shows, according to the SEC filing, that Intrater put hundreds of thousands of dollars into Santos' onetime employer, Harbor City, which was accused by regulators of running a Ponzi scheme." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ The Volleyball Chronicles, Ctd.
Episode 1 Recap. In the pilot episode, we learned that George Santos told the Nassau County GOP chairman that he was a star player (WashPo link) on the Baruch College volleyball team. We knew, however, that this could not have been possible inasmuch as George did not attend Baruch College, much less earn a degree there, as he claimed.
Episode 2 Recap. In this episode, we heard audio of George on the phone with New York City radio personality Sid & friends and told an elaborate story about how he went to Baruch on a volleyball scholarship, starred on this top East Coast team, and put so much into the game that he required two knee replacements. It was a fairly elaborate story, but all made up. Or so we thought. (See yesterday's Reality Chex page for audio as well as commentary in the Comments section.)
Episode 3. In today's episode, we learn that George did not make up that story about starring on the volleyball team. No sirree. he stole it. Virginia Chamlee of People (Jan. 13): "... a new report suggests that some of the 'key elements' of Santos' story bear a striking resemblance to the resume of his former boss, Pablo Oliveira. Inside Edition reports that Oliveira, who was Santos' boss at financial services company LinkBridge Investors, graduated from Baruch University, where he played on the school's winning volleyball team and was a two-time All-American volleyball player." ~~~
~~~ Marie: And here I was going to give George credit for his imaginative Fake biography. Turns out he's just an identity thief. Some enterprising journalist should find Pablo & ask him about his artificial knees. BTW, the volleyball tale is scarcely the first instanced in which Santos resorted to identity theft to further his own aims. When he lived in Brazil, he kited checks with a stolen checkbook. And one of his campaign aides impersonated Kevin McCarthy's chief-of-staff when soliciting campaign donations; I'm just going to speculate (without evidence) that this ploy was George's idea.
"Six Things People Believe about Politics That Are Totally Wrong." Paul Waldman of the Washington Post: "If members of Congress read bills before voting on them, legislation would be better.... If only we stopped wasteful spending, we'd solve most of our problems.... My family balances its budget. Why shouldn't the government?... Government should be run like a business.... The parties need to stop the partisan squabbling and get things done.... We need more people in Congress who aren't politicians."
Sarah Burris of the Raw Story: "... members of Twitter's safety policy team spoke on a video conference to talk about expectations for Jan. 6, 2021.... According to information that was turned over to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, the safety policy and Twitter management team were fighting over whether to take a tougher stance on the incitement of violence by Donald Trump, Rolling Stone reported Monday.... [Ultimately,] Twitter didn't use their 'coded-incitement-to-violence policy,' Rolling Stone noted.... The video is part of a collection of evidence that still hasn't been released by the Jan. 6 committee but it's now in the hands of the Justice Department."
Beyond the Beltway
New Mexico. Republican Arrested for (Allegedly!) Shooting at Democrats' Homes & Offices. Remy Tumin of the New York Times: "The authorities in Albuquerque said on Monday that a former Republican candidate who lost his bid for a State House seat in November had been arrested in connection with a series of recent shootings at the homes and offices of a half-dozen Democratic elected officials. Chief Harold Medina of the Albuquerque Police Department said at a news conference that the former candidate, Solomon Peña, was 'the mastermind' behind a conspiracy in which four other men were paid to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators. Mr. Peña lost the election in a landslide to an incumbent Democrat, Miguel Garcia, but refused to concede after making unfounded claims of election fraud. Chief Medina said a gun that was found during the arrest of another suspect in the shootings last week was later linked to Mr. Peña.... Kyle Hartsock ... of the Police Department's homicide unit..., said there was evidence that Mr. Peña pulled the trigger at a shooting on Jan. 3." The AP's story is here. ~~~
~~~ Rachel Maddow said Monday that a young girl was at home during of one of the shootings, and that three bullets were found in the room where the girl was sleeping.
Way Beyond
China. Alexandra Stevenson & Zixu Wang of the New York Times: "... China's population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China last year, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's failed economic experiment that led to widespread famine and death in the 1960s." ~~~
Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: "The Chinese economy had one of its worst performances in decades last year as growth was dragged down by numerous Covid lockdowns followed by a deadly outbreak in December that swept across the country with remarkable speed. China grew 3 percent for the year, numbers released Tuesday show, much less than in 2021 and short of Beijing's target of 5.5 percent. Other than 2020, it was the most disappointing showing since 1976, the year Mao Zedong died, when the economy declined 1.6 percent.... Despite the blow inflicted by 'zero Covid,' China appears to have grown faster last year than major rivals like the United States, Japan and Germany, all of which are estimated by economists to have expanded less than 2 percent last year."
Italy. Jason Horowitz & Gaia Pianigiani of the New York Times: "... on Monday, after 30 years on the lam and achieving infamy as Italy's most wanted fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro, 60, the last Italian mobster linked to a savage period in which Sicily's 'black hand' declared war on the Italian state, was quietly arrested outside a clinic in Palermo after he showed up under an alias for a medical appointment.... Italian officials, including the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who flew to Sicily to congratulate local law enforcement, immediately heralded the arrest as proof that justice, even if slow, would ultimately catch up with the country's mobsters."
Ukraine, et al.
The New York Times' live updates of developments Tuesday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here. The Guardian's live updates for Tuesday are here. The Guardian's summary report is here. ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's live updates for Tuesday are here: "An adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky resigned after suggesting Ukrainian air defense systems may have been responsible for the deadly damage in Dnipro to an apartment building, which was mostly destroyed Saturday as Russian missiles rained down across Ukraine. The adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, later distanced himself from the suggestion, but it was used by the Kremlin to cast doubt on who was to blame. Arestovych apologized on Ukrainian television and said in a letter announcing his resignation that he had made a.fundamental error.'... On Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia does not strike residential buildings and suggested that Ukraine's air defenses may have been responsible, echoing Arestovych's claim.... It is 'highly likely' that a Russian bomber hit the Dnipro building with an AS-4 'Kitchen' anti-ship missile, Britain's Defense Ministry said, adding that the missile is notoriously inaccurate in urban settings.... A joint military exercise involving Russia and Belarus kicked off Monday, the Belarusian Defense Ministry said."
Andrew Kramer & Megan Specia of the New York Times: "... emergency workers [in Dnipro, Ukraine,] found one body after another on Monday, lifting them out of the cratered wreckage that had once been bedrooms and kitchens in one of Ukraine's largest cities. The crews reported a new toll on Monday, days after the desperate search began: at least 40 people killed by a Russian strike over the weekend, one of the single deadliest for civilians since Russia invaded Ukraine nearly a year ago.... In addition to the 40 dead, at least 75 people were wounded in the strike and 34 remained unaccounted for as of Monday afternoon, Ukraine's State Emergency Service said in a post on Telegram.... Dnipro, the city where the ordinary, nine-story apartment building had stood, is far from the front lines where Ukrainian and Russian troops have been fighting viciously over abandoned villages and even mere yards of land. But the strike on Saturday fit a pattern of Russia firing long-range missiles at civilian targets...." ~~~
~~~ Marie: Meanwhile, I heard on the news Monday that Putin said the war was "going according to plan."
Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post: Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, "on Monday visited two sites in Germany used by the U.S. military to enhance the fighting skills of their Ukrainian counterparts.... The general's visit marked his first trip to this facility in the muddy Bavarian countryside since Russia's invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago. The base, covering roughly 90 square miles, began hosting Ukrainian forces in 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula. It's now the site of a newly expanded regimen for the Ukrainian military..."
Loveday Morris of the Washington Post: "German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht resigned Monday after a series of missteps that cast doubt on her ability to lead her country's response to the war on Ukraine.... The embattled politician, a member of [Chancellor Olaf] Scholz's Social Democrats, had faced mounting pressure to step aside after a widely slammed New Year's Eve message and revelations she took her son by military helicopter to northern Germany for a holiday. The public relations blunders added fuel to broader criticism of her handling of the war response at the Defense Ministry and a planned revamp of the country's military." A Politico story is here.
Matt Murphy of the BBC: "A former commander with the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group has claimed asylum in Norway after deserting from the mercenary outfit. Andrey Medvedev, 26, crossed the border into Norway last Friday, where he was detained by border guards. He is currently being held in the Oslo area where he faces charges of illegal entry to Norway, his lawyer Brynjulf Risnes told the BBC. Mr Risnes said his client left Wagner after witnessing war crimes in Ukraine."
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Reader Comments (12)
The cases of Solomon Pena and George Santos--not to mention those of their mentor, the Pretender--raise the perennial question: How free should a free country be?
I wish I had the answer.
The Pretender did. Lock 'em up.
And a further thought on Pretenders...
To some degree we all imitate others. As we grow, we have our models and our mentors. We ape and we react against. The apple never falls far from the tree. He's just like his old man, etc. To the degree those truisms are true we're all as Marie says, identity thieves.
The sick and scary manifestation of those very common and very human tendencies is when they are so extreme they result in an entirely empty core. When there is no one there but the imitation, when their entire life is all an act, when there is no independent wholly-formed person behind the mask.
Shakespeare's description of a dark and bleak world applies:
For these ill-formed people, all their world really is a stage and they do signify nothing at all.
The pity is that their act too often draws the attention of the credulous and the reality averse.
Ka-Ching!
I was a complete failure, a party-mad, smirking scofflaw in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, and helped sell my country a load of sweaty old socks called Brexit, but…Ka-Ching! $1.7 million to kiss and tell.
Boris Johnson, disgraced former PM of the UK, has inked a huge book deal to write about his very favorite subject: himself.
It’s just incredible that you can be so bad at something (most of his ministers threatened to resign, his Brexit* lies plunged his country into economic free fall) but still end up filthy rich. I’m reminded of that old Boccaccio tale about the idiot who fell into a pile of dung and came up with a gold ring worth a fortune.
And don’t forget, Boris was only at No. 10 for three years. $1.7 mill for three years? How much could he have gallivanted off with had he been there for five or six? But then think of how much extra “conservative special” damage he could have done in two or three extra years.
Fatty must be thinking about how much he could scarf up by getting someone else to write his own memoir. Do they allow federal prisoners to do book signings? I’m guessing the book will have to be coffee table size to accommodate his gigantic, puerile scrawl of a signature. But that would be fitting. Mostly pictures means fewer words, since most of those words would be “me”, “me” “best” and “witch hunt”. Oh yeah, and “me”.
Who says publishing is in trouble?
*Otto Correct wanted to turn “Brexit” into “Brecht”, which I thought, for once, was a good idea on Otto’s part, considering that Bertolt Brecht specialized in scathing portrayals of corrupt leaders, racism, unbridled capitalism, and economic inequality. Too bad he wasn’t still around. We could get him to ghostwrite Fatty’s fatuous flimflam folderol.
Illogical conclusions?
So we go from the Big Lie about non-existent voter fraud on the part of Democrats to actual voter fraud (apart from vicious voter disenfranchisement and electoral road blocks for voters they hate) on the part of Republicans, to Republicans refusing to admit they lost, to Republicans who DID lose attempting to murder the Democrat who beat them.
But never mind about all that. Democrats do it too. Just read the Times.
Interesting comment in the WA Po from one LeCoqNoir responding to Hugh Hewitt’s latest nonsense about the debt limit:
The numbers he includes about the possible correlation between national debt and the net worth growth for the top one percent over the years are especially interesting —and I’d like them to be meaningful, but am not sure if they are more than coincidence….
"What Mr. Hewitt and his ilk ignore is that nearly the entire $33 trillion national debt is the work of Republicans. When Reagan took office, the national debt was less than $1 trillion. He and Bush quadrupled it to $4 trillion. During Clinton's eight years in the White House, the debt rose a modest $1.6 trillion. Then George W. Bush nearly doubled it in his eight years, leaving behind permanent tax cuts that caused it to double again during Obama's presidency. Then Trump added another $8 trillion to the debt in only four years. And the debt continues to rise because Republicans in Congress have blocked any attempt to restore responsible taxation. Incidentally, it is worth nothing that the increase in the national debt since 1981 is very close to the growth of the net worth of the top 1%. The bottom line is that the GOP has looted America on behalf of the wealthy.”
More to the national debt story:
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
So that's where my 'retirement' money is going. While I'm sleeping,
the 1% is siphoning off about a thousand $ a month.
I won't even be able to afford the poor house is things keep going
the way they are.
Ken! Please do not cloud the issue with facts and truth! You know how that upsets the traitors. They have their (fairy) tale and they’re stickin’ to it.
For the rest of us, however, a bracing reminder that almost everything wrong in the country today is the work of right-wingers, either actively (stuff they do, support, promote) and passively (stuff they prevent from happening, demonize, or make illegal), and if the results of their ignorance, irresponsibility, and ideological psychosis are especially egregious, they’ll find someone else to blame.
Screaming that Biden needs to do what they tell him about the economy is like Joe the Plumber (who wasn’t actually a plumber—another winger fraud) telling a heart surgeon how to operate.
@Ken Winkes: Thanks to you -- & to the Black Rooster for so succinctly explaining "How the GOP Gave the U.S.A. Its Humungous National Debt."
If I were a good citizen, I would send that explanation out to every MOC, because it sounds correct to me, based on what I've read over the years. But being a good citizen would require me to pretend I lived in 434 Congressional districts -- which means I'd have to find street addresses & ZIP Codes there in -- and I'm not that good a citizen.
Maybe I'll just send it to my own rep. She's a Democrat, but she's none too bright, and it would probably come as news to her. I'm pretty damned sure if you recited all of Paul Waldman's "6 Things Americans Think about Politics That Are Totally Wrong," she'd nod "yup" to every one of 'em.
I read (somewhere) last week (my memory for such things used to be impeccable, if not truly eidetic; nowadays it’s more truly idunknow…), that the most powerful thing in the world is a young mind eager to learn, to acquire knowledge.
David Hume decided that our knowledge of the world is based on experience, what we’re empirically exposed to. I’m not suggesting that the vogue on the right for eviscerating expansive education in order to fill young minds with vicious wingnut propaganda is the result of their intimate knowledge of Hume’s philosophy, but it might as well be.
The book banning, the planned and routine terrorizing of teachers and school boards, the kinds of schemes engaged in by fascists and racists like Abbott, DeSantis, Cotton, Gaetz, MTG, and of course, Trump, are not just about bowdlerizing American history and an approach to history that doesn’t rely solely on white Christian supremacy, it also requires an all out attack on any historical facts that they see as counter to their ideological vision of an America for whites only (unless minorities are willing to steppinfetchit for the white massas).
At some level, they understand that young minds exposed to truth, factual history, and critical thinking pose a death knell for their bigotry and authoritarian leanings.
And that cannot be allowed. Young minds can only be fed traitor ideology.
Hume (the agnostic) be damned.
Akhilleus,
And that's why a liberal education is anathema to the R's. For them, others' ignorance is bliss; the narrower their education, the better.
An addendum to my earlier post: Biden had it exactly right. The R's are "fiscally demented."
Ken,
As Trump once gushed, “I love the uneducated!” as if he were the avatar of an educated human being. What he meant was “I love the ignorant”. Plenty of people with no college education are very smart. But they are not guaranteed to fall for Trumpian blather and right-wing lies. Ignorant types, those without the critical thinking chops to see through his cons, are what he’s always looking for.
One detail that the Black Rooster left out: Bill Clinton handed GWBush a budget surplus. A Democrat not only balanced the budget, his program was on the road to paying down the national debt.
Which led to the W tax cuts because, to quote the TV Florida governor who lost to President Bartlett, "The American people know how to spend their money better than the federal government does." The Rs care about the deficit, except when they don't.
Nisky Guy,
To be more accurate, R’s care about the deficit and the debt limit only when they can use those numbers to attack Democrats. Otherwise, they spend like drunken sailors on shore leave at a Trump sponsored bordello. Debt? Deficit? That shit’s for Democrats to worry about,