and now it really begins ...

[drjohncarpenter]

Oldest candidate for president in U.S. history.

[drjohncarpenter]

Russia Paid Right-Wing Pundits.











DOJ alleges Russia funded US media company linked to right-wing social media stars
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/doj-alleges-russia-funded-us-media-company-linked-to-right-wing-social-media-stars/index.html





Not a surprise to those who know better.

America is better than this.

VOTE BLUE.

[drjohncarpenter]

Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski

We can’t elevate this racist scum to the highest office in the land again.

240904_racist social media post by scumbag.jpg

https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1831454700690141481

Embarrassing and pathetic.

Is it any wonder he's ranked LAST in the history of the U.S. presidency?





VOTE BLUE.

[drjohncarpenter]

"This is not a policy election."

VOTE BLUE.

[rickeap]

Ron Filipkowski
@RonFilipkowski

We can’t elevate this racist scum to the highest office in the land again.

https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1831454700690141481

Embarrassing and pathetic.

Is it any wonder he's ranked LAST in the history of the U.S. presidency?





VOTE BLUE.

This is similar to other posts by Trump in recent times; he's doubling down on his racism. He is truly despicable. Thankfully, I think the tide has turned and sanity might prevail, and he will be defeated and never heard from again.

[drjohncarpenter]

240905_Trump gibberish answer.jpg

Unfit. Ignorant. 78 years old.

VOTE BLUE.

[drjohncarpenter]

Convicted felon feels persecuted.

Let's be done already with this criminal.

VOTE BLUE.

[drjohncarpenter]

Stuart Stevens
@stuartpstevens

The degree of Russian compromise of the Republican party is one of the great stories of American political history. Those of us who worked within the party saw it happen, accompanied by a right-wing media industry that found it profitable to label Russian influence a "hoax."

There's nothing like it in American history.

5:29 AM · Sep 6, 2024
https://x.com/stuartpstevens/status/1832033429895917936

Stuart Stevens is an American author and political consultant. He was the cofounder of Washington, D.C. - based political media consultancy Stevens & Schriefer Group (with Russell Schriefer). In 2013, he became a founding partner in Strategic Partners & Media.

He served as a top strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign in addition to several other significant presidential campaigns over the course of his career.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Stevens

Democracy matters.

VOTE BLUE.

[drjohncarpenter]

Democracy matters.

VOTE BLUE.



'

[drjohncarpenter]

Sensible gun laws will protect the children of America.

VOTE BLUE.

[latebloomer]

The only reason the ban on automatic weapons was repealed was so the gun manufacturers could sell more of them -- and that ban was passed by a Republican congress.

And ban bump stocks, 3-D guns, and multi-projectile "clips".

Do away with unregistered concealed carry and with open carry. Repeal "stand your ground "laws.

When I was in my teens, NRA stood for gun safety and sponsored marksmanship competitions.

We got to this point -- where we haven't been since the days of the Wild West and the prohibition-era mobs -- because of our greed: the greed of arms and ammunition manufacturers, and of the politicians they bought.

And that greed was enabled by our failures as voters to rid ourselves of such venial politicians.

We have the government we elected: Alas, it is the one we deserve for our failure to cast more informed, more conscientious, more responsible votes.

[drjohncarpenter]

The only reason the ban on automatic weapons was repealed was go the gun manufacturers could sell more of them -- and that ban was passed by a Republican congress.

And ban bump stocks, 3-D guns, and multi-projectile "clips".

Do away with unregistered concealed carry and with open carry. Repeal "stand your ground "laws".

When I was in my teens, NRA stood for gun safety and sponsored marksmanship competitions.

We got to this point -- where we haven't been since the days of the Wild West and the prohibition-era mobs -- because of our greed: the greed of arm and ammunition manufacturers, of of the politicians they bought.

And that greed was enabled by our failures as voters to rid ourselves of such venial politicians.

We have the government we elected: Alas, it is the one we deserve for our failure to cast more informed, more conscientious, more responsible votes.

Understand your passion, but the royal "we" is doing a lot of work ignoring the millions who have always been informed, conscientious and responsible voters.

[latebloomer]

Alas, Doc, that We isn't royal at all, but solid fact. I worked precincts as an election official for almost 20 years, and watched election after election as we logged in only 25-45% of our registered voters -- and we weren't the only precincts who did that.

Many voters showed up at the polls without even having looked at a sample ballot. And many, many, only wanted to be shown how to vote a straight ticket.

Check out the polls for this election: How many people say they have never heard of Kamala Harris, or don't know anything about her even if they have?

Remember Jay Leno asking the man on the street -- including college students, school teachers, even college professors -- who couldn't name the current president and vice president. Who couldn't even say who Lincoln was?

I did canvassing, too, for three or four elections, and was astounded at the number of people who had no idea who was running for anything. One man wanted only to know my candidate's stand on homosexuals; he thought they all should be deported. One woman told me she was voting for Mitch McConnell, and I asked her to tell me why. She said things were in such a mess she thought we should have an experienced hand on the tiller.

And then there are the millions who voted for Trump, and plan to do so again.

Informed, conscientious, and responsible voters are the exception, not the rule.

I rest my case.

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, GOP bad guy Karl Rove.











Yes, Karl Rove.

What a disaster for the twice-impeached, multiply-indicted, convicted felon.






'

[drjohncarpenter]

Alas, Doc, that We isn't royal at all, but solid fact. I worked precincts as an election official for almost 20 years, and watched election after election as we logged in only 25-45% of our registered voters -- and we weren't the only precincts who did that.

Many voters showed up at the polls without even having looked at a sample ballot. And many, many, only wanted to be shown how to vote a straight ticket.

Check out the polls for this election: How many people say they have never heard of Kamala Harris, or don't know anything about her even if they have?

Remember Jay Leno asking the man on the street -- including college students, school teachers, even college professors -- who couldn't name the current president and vice president. Who couldn't even say who Lincoln was?

I did canvassing, too, for three or four elections, and was astounded at the number of people who had no idea who was running for anything. One man wanted only to know my candidate's stand on homosexuals; he thought they all would be deported. One Oman told me she was voting for Mitch McConnell, and I asked her to tell me why. she said things were in such a mess she thought we should have an experienced hand on the tiller.

And then there are the millions who voted for Trump, and plan to do so again.

Informed, conscientious, and responsible voters are the exception, not the rule.

I rest my case.

Over 81,000,000 Americans cast a ballot for Joseph R. Biden in November 2020.

He won.

Are they not Informed, conscientious, and responsible voters?

[drjohncarpenter]

America has a decision to make.

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, CURRENT president.














President Joseph R. Biden.

Leading the country, making things better for ALL of us.

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, CURRENT vice-president.

[latebloomer]

excerpted from https://apnews.com/article/civics-education-college-citizens-704d8abe56c0fc9b2c9a35187dacdc99

Do you know the 3 branches of US government? Many don’t, leading to a push for civics education

ALLEN G. BREED and TIM SULLIVAN, The Atlantic, 16 Sep 2034

BLUFFTON, South Carolina (AP) — On the first day of his American National Government class, Prof. Kevin Dopf asks how many of his students are United States citizens. Every hand shoots up.

“So, how did all you people become citizens?” he asks. “Did you pass a test?”

“No,” one young woman says tentatively. “We were born here.”

It’s a good thing. Based on his years of making his students at the University of South Carolina Beaufort take the test given to immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship, most would be rejected.

“Thirty, 35% of the students will pass it,” says Dopf, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former West Point instructor. “The rest of them are clueless. I mean, they’re just clueless.”

Most states require some sort of high school civics instruction. But with a recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center showing that about a third of American adults can’t name the three branches of the federal government, many think we should be aiming higher.

Over the past few years, a small but growing number of states have begun requiring students at publicly funded colleges to complete a civics requirement. That comes as polling indicates civics education is wildly popular across the political spectrum.

Civics — the study of citizens’ rights and responsibilities — fosters a sense of unity, advocates say, and an ability to deal with disagreement. It empowers citizens, and many people believe it could help heal America’s divides. Having it in higher education means they can look at issue in more sophisticated ways, perhaps weaving it into other classes.

“I feel we are in the business for making a case for America,” said Louise Dube, head of iCivics, which promotes civics education.

But what does it mean when those talking about civics often can’t be, well, civil?

Take North Carolina, where lawmakers and academics got into a heated battle over who should decide how civics would be taught.

Last year, North Carolina Republicans introduced the REACH Act, an acronym for “Reclaiming College Education on America’s Constitutional Heritage.” The bill required undergraduates to take at least three credit hours in American government and read a series of major U.S. history documents, from the Declaration of Independence to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” They would also have to pass a final exam worth 20% of the final grade.

If the bill seemed anodyne on the surface, it met with intense pushback. Critics pointed to the bill’s “reclaiming” title, its attempt to dictate curriculum usually set by professors and that it was drafted by Jameson Broggi, an avowedly conservative U.S. Marine Corps captain and lawyer who has said curriculum must include “devotion to American institutions and ideals.”

The North Carolina act easily passed the state House in March 2023 and a first reading in the Senate. It seemed on its way to victory.

University of North Carolina officials and faculty were not happy.

“We tried to slow this down in House but had zero success,” Bart Goodson, senior vice president of government relations for the 16-school UNC system wrote to a fellow administrator in an April 2023 email, obtained by Broggi through an open records request.

“It was a ‘wrap yourself in the flag’ type bill and anyone who spoke against was essentially viewed as non-American,” Goodson wrote.

So, as the idea moved slowly through the legislative process, UNC faculty took matters into their own hands.

Wade Maki, chair of the UNC faculty assembly, worked with professors from four other campuses, including two historically Black universities, to draft a set of learning outcomes. They studied what’s being done in other states.

The resulting proposal, called the “Foundations of American Democracy,” mirrors the REACH Act in many ways. They even added Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to the list of required documents.

It seemed like everyone wanted the same thing.

But supporters of requiring civics through legislation were troubled – why did the faculty object to their version?

“What are these people afraid of?” asked Michael B. Poliakoff, president and chief executive officer of American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which helped Broggi draft the North Carolina act and a similar one that passed in South Carolina three years ago.

“As if understanding the founding documents and the pivotal moments in our history, culminating with letter from Birmingham Jail, would be too disturbing, too retro.”

That’s not the point, the academics say.

Unlike standards in K-12 schools, college faculty typically decide the content of individual courses. It’s seen as a core of academic freedom.

“Faculty are the primary owners of the curriculum.” says Maki, who teaches philosophy at UNC-Greensboro. “We know what works in ways that sometimes someone outside of higher ed may not know what works.”

The UNC board of governors, all 24 of whom were appointed by the GOP-led legislature, unanimously approved the plan in mid-April. Details are still being ironed out, with the requirement applying to students entering the system starting July 2025. (The NC REACH Act’s sponsors, displeased with the UNC plan, have vowed to revive the legislative effort next year.)

According to the conservative, New York-based Civics Alliance, legislation in at least 10 states — Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming — require undergraduates at public universities to take at least one American history and/or government course. The requirement is being enacted, or at least discussed, in other states.

And the Alliance — which rails against “identity politics” and “radical New Civics activists” — is looking to spread the word.

The organization has created model legislation that calls for the “’study of and devotion to America’s exceptional and praiseworthy history.’” David Randall, the alliance’s executive director, said its materials had “informed” legislation in Florida, Iowa and Texas, but declined to say what other states might have reached out.

Some state college systems, like UNC, haven’t waited for a legislative mandate to act.

For example, students at Indiana’s Purdue University and its satellite campuses can choose from three paths — write reflections after attending six approved civics-related events, listen to 12 podcasts and take a series of quizzes or complete one of 13 politics or history courses — and pass an exam. University of Arizona system faculty are currently developing “American Institutions” curricula to fulfill a requirement from the board of regents.

Professors acknowledge not all students appreciate the forced civics learning.

“Some view it as the vegetable in a meal, some view it as the dessert. For some, the goal is just to finish the meal,” said David Reingold, dean of Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts, who oversaw the implementation of the system’s civics program.

The Civics Alliance says America’s colleges, which train K-12 teachers, have been “taken over by a radical establishment determined to replace proper civics education with pedagogies such as Critical Race Theory and action civics ...” Whitney Ross Manzo, an associate professor of political science at Meredith College in Raleigh, says fears about political indoctrination assume “a power that faculty simply don’t have.”

“If I could force something on my students, it would be to read their syllabus and do their homework. I don’t have the power to change their political ideology,” said Manzo, who once taught in Texas.

Back in Bluffton, Dopf has his work cut out for him.

After some introductory remarks, Dopf tells his students to take out a piece of paper and pen.

“This is your first test.”

The 14 questions are relatively simple: How many members in the U.S. Senate? What are the requirements to be president? How long is the term for members of the House of Representatives?

Would-be citizens must get six of 10 answers correct to pass. Dopf holds his students to a lower standard — just seven of 14.

As he expected, about 70% flunked.

One student thought Clarence Thomas was chief justice of the Supreme Court. Another put down that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1667.

“To miss basic facts like that,” Dopf says, exasperation in his voice. “We need to develop better skill sets for our students so that we have a better democracy.” (In fairness, he says even 30% of his West Point cadets failed the quiz.)

Audra Hillman, 18, a freshman from Wake Forest, North Carolina, took two politics classes in high school. So, how’d she do?

“I probably would have got kicked out,” she says with a nervous chuckle.

Hillman wants to eventually work with special needs kids but doesn’t resent having to squeeze in this civics class.

“Everyone should vote,” she says. “Like, it’s your duty as an American citizen. And I think that everyone should go out and be educated.”

A very truncated version of the citizenship test, but multiple choice in the actual test, applicants must provide answers themselves: https://apnews.com/projects/us-civics-quiz/

This is a practice version of the actual test, which is oral, not written: https://citizenshiptests.org/tests/us-citizenship-practice-test/

I answered all questions of the short test correctly and 122 of 133 of the questions on the second test. Take it! It's interesting; I learned how little I know about what the amendments contain!

[drjohncarpenter]

Yup.

[drjohncarpenter]

Yup.

[latebloomer]

THE JUDGES WHO SERVE AT TRUMP’S PLEASURE
The Founders abhorred a judiciary more loyal to the Crown than to the rule of law. But now the independent system they designed is under threat.

By Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 16 Sep 2024

In December, 1761, King George III dispatched an order to the American colonies. In a recent defiance of convention, some American colonial judges had been appointed for life, the same tenure that British judges enjoyed. Now the king intended to make it clear that all colonial judges were to serve only “at the pleasure of the crown.”

A wave of protest engulfed the colonies. In North Carolina, opponents of the decision spurned the order right up until the outbreak of the Revolution. In New Jersey, the governor disobeyed it and was promptly removed from office. In New York, the colonial assembly continued to argue that judges on its colony’s supreme court should have lifetime tenure. New York’s acting governor, Cadwallader Colden, who was sympathetic to the king, developed a grudge against the assembly that turned into what one historian called “almost psychopathic rage,” ending with him accusing the legislators of seeking to “obtain a most extensive power over the Minds of the rest of Mankind.” Four years later, a mob angered by unfair taxes, another symbol of arbitrary rule, hanged Governor Colden in effigy, smashed up his coaches, and threw the bits of wood into a huge bonfire on Bowling Green.

Where did these intense feelings about judicial independence come from? A few colonists knew the work of the British political philosopher John Locke or the French essayist Montesquieu, especially their writings on the theory of separation of powers, which gives different branches of government the ability to check and balance one another, preventing any from accruing too much authority. But most people, probably including the mob that burned Governor Colden’s carriages on Bowling Green, wanted independent judges for the same reason they wanted a revolution: instinctive resentment of distant, arbitrary, illegitimate royal power.

That instinct stayed with them. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence accused the king of having “made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” A decade later, delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, although bitterly divided about many things, stayed unified on the need for independent federal judges.

One South Carolina delegate to the convention thought judges’ salaries should be high, to attract “men of the first talents.” James Madison worried that if legislators could raise and lower salaries at will, then judges might be hesitant to rule against members of Congress. To solve this problem, he suggested pegging judicial salaries to the price of wheat “or some other thing of permanent value.”

Eventually, the Framers of the Constitution arrived at the system we have today. To preserve their independence, federal judges are nominated by the president but must be approved by the Senate. Members of Congress set judicial salaries, which cannot be reduced. Judges have lifetime tenure, so they don’t fear that they will be removed for any particular decision. They can be impeached by Congress for misconduct, but this is rare—only 15 federal judges have been impeached since 1789, all but five of them before 1937.

But in practice, they are also constrained by norms and conventions. Since the early 20th century, for instance, Congress has not dissolved federal courts whose judges displease it—which did happen in the more distant past. The idea of court packing has been considered out of bounds ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt tried and failed to reshape the Supreme Court in the 1930s by proposing to appoint up to six additional justices. Since 1957, when Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce Brown v. Board of Education, powerful politicians have mostly agreed to honor and enforce the decisions of the Supreme Court, a convention that had been flagrantly defied by several southern governors of that era. (It had been defied earlier, too, by President Andrew Jackson, who, when Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in 1832 that treaties made with the Cherokees must be respected, was alleged to have said, “Let him enforce it”; that quote is apocryphal, but Jackson’s sentiment was not.)

Ultimately, judicial independence has a more important protection: the character of the judges themselves. They have to avoid political influence. They have to base their arguments in the law. They have to at least try not to do the bidding of a president or governor. This might be the most important convention of all. Although fears of a politicized U.S. judiciary date back to the fights between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans in the very early days of the republic—and although they have reemerged at just about every important moment of social or political change—Americans in the modern era have generally assumed that judges appointed to the highest courts will act in good faith. The political philosophers of the early republic, the authors of the Constitution, and the law-school professors of the present day have all mostly assumed that federal judges will strive, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, to “unite the requisite integrity with the requisite knowledge.”

At least in recent times, few have imagined that federal judges who are well paid, unafraid of dismissal, and under no financial, legal, or political pressure of any kind would nevertheless seek to alter the law in egregiously partisan ways, not merely in support of conservative or progressive ideas, but in support of particular politicians, or in aid of their own careers. A recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity that appears designed to assist former (and possibly future) President Donald Trump; a Trump-appointed district-court judge who went against decades of legal precedent to shield the 45th president from the law—these must be taken seriously as signs that the independence of our courts is cracking, not because judges aren’t protected but because some judges are quite happy to serve “at the pleasure of the crown.”

Before i go further, let me make clear that I am not a legal scholar, a historian of the Constitution, or even a historian of the United States. I became interested in the origins of the independent judiciary because in 2015 I was living in Poland, where my husband is involved in national politics. (He is the foreign minister in the administration of Donald Tusk, a member of the Civic Platform party.) That year, a government with a legitimate, democratically elected parliamentary majority decided, with the cooperation of the equally legitimate president, to bring judicial independence to an end. Unexpectedly, this turned out to be extremely easy.

The political party that carried out this judicial coup is called Law and Justice (many noted the irony at the time), and its assault on the constitution had several elements. Among other things, the ruling party passed legislation in Parliament that forced older high-court judges into immediate retirement, a move that eventually gave Law and Justice the ability to appoint a large number of new judges (not unlike FDR’s plan to pack the U.S. Supreme Court). Law and Justice legislators created a new, unconstitutional body that had the power to investigate and sanction judges whose rulings displeased the government. When the Constitutional Tribunal (the Polish equivalent of the American Supreme Court) overruled one of the government’s laws, the prime minister refused to publish the ruling in an official court journal. In other words, she simply ignored it. And that was that: Nobody could force the prime minister or the governing party to obey the ruling.

The result was both confusion about the legitimacy of judges appointed under the new rules and a sharp rise in judicial partisanship. After a few years, it became common for anyone with a court case in Warsaw to assess their likelihood of winning not on legal grounds but according to which kind of judge was presiding. One of the “neo-judges,” illegitimately appointed by Law and Justice, might rule differently from one of the judges appointed according to the more neutral system that had been in place for the previous quarter century.

Some were shocked by the change. The strongest objections came from older people who had lived in Poland under Communism. Paulina Kieszkowska, one of the leaders of Free Courts—a group that organized protests, lobbied vigorously, and filed lawsuits in European Union courts against the so-called judicial reform—told me recently that the older protesters remembered “the concept of Stalinist and Communist judges, of verdicts which were totally politically driven, of heroic people being sentenced to death,” and they didn’t want that era back. Kieszkowska is the granddaughter of a Polish judge who resigned for political reasons. Like the American colonists, she and her colleagues had direct experience of living under rule by law—meaning the law is whatever the ruling party, the dictator, or the monarch says it is—as opposed to rule of law, when the law is enforced by courts loyal to the constitution, not to whoever happens to be in power.

But not everyone was attuned to the danger. I went to some of the first, spontaneous marches in favor of an independent judiciary and was struck by how few young people were there. The threat of a politicized judiciary didn’t, at first, seem to affect elections, or to move opinion polls very much either. Although the legal campaign led by groups such as Free Courts did have some success—EU courts found that Poland was in violation of European law—the truth is that the decline of the judiciary remained a distant, theoretical problem to the majority of Poles. Separation of powers was an abstraction that they just didn’t worry about.

Eventually, the politicized courts produced legal changes that affected people in real ways. In October 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal, which by then had been packed with highly partisan judges who had close ties to Law and Justice, narrowed Poland’s already strict abortion laws to a near-total ban. Following that ruling, doctors began refusing to give women abortions, even when their lives were in danger. Several women died.

Only then did younger people, especially younger women, react. They marched, they organized—and eventually they voted, in atypically high numbers, to oust the Law and Justice government. They were almost too late. The judicial system remains a tangled mess. Hundreds of neo-judges remain in place, their loyalties unclear, maybe even to themselves. Are they meant just to interpret the law, neutrally? Or are they there to express the will of the political party that appointed them? The Polish courts will be tainted by illegitimacy and treated with suspicion for years to come.

In the united states, even a dedicated, malevolent president and a venomous Congress would find it difficult to replicate the Polish experience. Life tenure for judges is written into the Constitution. No president could easily replace dozens of judges all at once, or establish an extraconstitutional body to exert control over them. Even making bipartisan compromises is no simple matter: President Joe Biden has proposed Supreme Court reforms, including possible term limits for judges, that are intended to be acceptable to everyone. But because this could require a constitutional amendment, or at least serious support from the Republican Party, the gesture will probably turn out to be symbolic.

But one element of the Polish experience might be relevant: the speed with which norms and conventions can shift, and the depth of the disorientation that can follow. Consider what we have seen or learned in just the past few months and years. Two Supreme Court justices were accepting large, undisclosed gifts from people who might have had an interest in their jurisprudence; the wife of one of those justices played a role in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election; more than one justice misled Congress during confirmation hearings about their intentions to overturn Roe v. Wade ; money and lobbyists have played an enormous role in the transformation of the Court; the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell broke convention to block one nomination and then enable another; and now that Republican-dominated Court has extended immunity to a Republican ex-president who has broken the law—all of this has had a cumulative and damaging effect. The Supreme Court and all other federal courts now appear to both halves of the polarized political spectrum to be weaker, more political, easier to manipulate, less bound to the Constitution. A Gallup poll conducted in July showed that a yawning gap has emerged between the 15 percent of Democrats who still approve of the Court and the 66 percent of Republicans who do. Overall, respect for the courts is at historic lows.

The peculiar case of Aileen Cannon might be a harbinger. The minimally qualified (per the American Bar Association) Judge Cannon, of the Southern District of Florida, has made a series of unprecedented and legally questionable decisions that seemed deliberately designed to help Trump, the president who’d appointed her, evade legal consequences for criminal acts. In mid-July, she dismissed Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s case against Trump for sequestering sensitive national-security documents at Mar-a-Lago and lying about it to the FBI—a violation of the Espionage Act. Mainstream legal scholars consider Cannon’s ruling to rest on highly dubious grounds: that Smith should never have been appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in the first place, and that Smith was exercising authority he “did not lawfully possess.”

After this decision, Joelle Anne Moreno, a legal scholar at International University, told The New York Times that Cannon had “single-handedly upended three decades of established law historically used fairly and in a bipartisan manner.” Laurence Tribe, one of America’s preeminent constitutional scholars, wrote that Cannon’s decision amounted to “dropping a sledgehammer on the rule of law.” Cannon’s previous rulings had already earned her a harsh and unusual rebuke from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and two of her more experienced colleagues—including the chief judge, a Republican appointee—on the Southern District bench had suggested that she hand off the Trump case.

Now imagine a second Trump presidency, during which dozens more Aileen Cannons are appointed to the courts—dozens more minimally qualified people who believe their role is to defend the president or avenge his enemies, not to defend the rule of law. Then imagine another president, a Democrat, elected in 2028, who feels no obligation to adhere to the decisions made by these highly partisan courts. Or imagine a contested 2028 election in which Vice President J. D. Vance backs insurrectionists attempting to prevent the lawful transfer of power, as he has said he would have done in 2020—when courts rejected dozens of claims from Trump’s legal advisers who sought to overturn the result. What if, in 2028 and 2029, courts were to rule in the opposite direction, with the intention of helping install an unelected president?

These are very small leaps of the imagination—in fact, they are hardly leaps at all. We are already living in a country very different from the one we inhabited a decade ago: An insurrectionist ex-president with multiple indictments now leads the Republican ticket, and much of the American public seems indifferent to the threat. The colonists of the revolutionary era had been ruled by a king and were determined not to be ever again, and some Poles remembered Communist justice and so fought to prevent its return. Americans today have no experience living with a federal judiciary whose rulings are based on allegiance to a particular politician or political party. Perhaps this has lulled us into a comforting it-can’t-happen-here quiescence. But as Tribe has said, we face the real possibility of “an imperial judiciary walking arm in arm with an imperial executive”: a new political order, one in which the laws and norms that have insulated America from dictatorship slowly degrade.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/10/judicial-independence-judge-aileen-cannon-trump/679561/

[latebloomer]

Donald Trump’s financial failures are stunning. ‘Lucky Loser’ has the receipts.

Review: Bethany McClain, Washington Post, 17 Sep 2024

imrs.php.jpeg

(Penguin Press)
If you tell someone who is not a fan of former president Donald Trump that he is essentially a fraud — that his claim that he’s “really rich” due to his own business acumen is simply not true — they will almost certainly say, “Of course. I already know that.” That this has been documented is in large part because of the work of New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and other colleagues, who in 2016 published a bombshell article based on Trump’s 1995 tax returns, which showed that he had lost almost a billion dollars that year.

It was just before the election. Obviously, it didn’t matter, at least not in the big picture.

Their source, Mary Trump — Donald’s niece — eventually turned over about 100,000 pages of “audited financial statements, tax returns, bank records, general ledgers, and legal papers.” The Times published pieces, for which the reporters won a Pulitzer, during Trump’s presidency revealing that contrary to his claims of getting just a $1 million loan from his father, he had received the equivalent of more than $400 million as an inheritance.

Now, Craig and Buettner have written a book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” It shows in meticulously documented detail how “even when Trump appeared to be at his best, he was failing,” with massive losses on his core business. The authors prove that without his father’s support, Trump would have been nothing. The book also raises a bigger question about the “fake it till you make it” ethos of modern America. In a world that conflates the “trappings of wealth with expertise and ability,” where “fame, detached from any other marketable talent or skill,” is “a highly compensated vocation,” does it even matter if you never actually make it?

The backbone of the book is the numbers. Because Buettner and Craig have such a trove of documents, they are able to prove the reality under the hype that is Donald Trump in incontrovertible detail. In the decade that ended in 1995, a decade in which Trump was supposedly a huge success, he recorded more than $1.1 billion in business losses on his tax returns, which the authors call a “failure of historical proportions.” He used those losses to avoid paying taxes in subsequent years. The news in their book lies not in one specific detail, but rather in the sheer accumulation of damning facts.

But the book is also much more than an excavation of tax returns. Buettner and Craig delve into all the aspects of Trump’s life to show how he was able to create the facade that he did. This is a page turner, with spectacular anecdotes. For instance: Trump was able to salvage at least the construction of his first casino project, a Harrah’s in Atlantic City, by bringing in Holiday Inns Inc. (which owned Harrah’s at the time) as a partner. But before it would get on board, the company wanted to know that construction was underway. So Trump faked it. He had his construction manager rent every piece of earth-moving equipment he could find so that on the day the casino’s team visited, “dozens of bulldozers and backhoes pointlessly pushed mounds of earth around the 2.6-acre site in an elaborate ruse with no purpose other than to fool his new business partner.”

The most important character in Donald Trump’s life was his father, Fred Trump, who seems to have regarded him as a golden child, incapable of wrongdoing or mistakes. Fred offered his son, but only this son, “almost endless collateral for loans, connections in banking and politics, and a reliable wellspring of cash to pursue dreams and fame.” He even paid for Donald’s flashy Cadillac. While Fred Trump wasn’t always a paragon of ethics — he made his money taking advantage of government programs for homeowners in ways that, at a minimum, skirted the rules — he was a man of his word, a penurious, detail-oriented businessman who built a real estate empire that was ultimately worth almost $1 billion. Everything about him stood in sharp contrast to his son, who became “a black hole for Fred Trump’s cash.” That’s a fact Donald has never acknowledged. Indeed, he diminished his father whenever possible, telling people: “My father, he could never do something like this.”

Craig and Buettner point out the incongruity of a man like Fred offering such unquestioning support of his son — but they don’t explain it. Maybe there is no way to explain it.

The book also demonstrates in convincing detail that Donald Trump has always been exactly as he is. Craig and Buettner write that even his early career was marked by the same traits he later exhibited as president. He constantly sought attention for accomplishments he hadn’t achieved and often never would. He was driven only by instinct. He complained that he was the one being persecuted and would file senseless lawsuits just to inflict pain on others. He’d fly into a rage and blame others for mistakes that were properly his and only his. And of course, he was also granted a kind of absolution from tough questions by the media, in which he was repeatedly credited as a superstar real estate developer with a billion-dollar empire, when the only way that was close to true was due to his father’s fortune. (Back in 1973, a gushing profile in the Times even compared his looks to Robert Redford’s.)

In an odd premonition, in 1980, NBC’s Rona Barrett asked the then-34-year-old Trump if he would consider running for president, given all his accomplishments. Trump said no, “because I think it’s a very mean life.” Indeed.

Though many of his highly touted deals were utter failures, from his casinos in Atlantic City to the United States Football League, Trump did have a few successes. One was his early development of the old Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt, but even that was only possible with his father’s political connections — which helped with a tax break that the Wall Street Journal called “the tax deal of the century.” Another was Trump Tower. Other deals were successes only by accident — and again, his father’s connections. Early on, Trump lost control of the redevelopment of the West Side Yards, but it landed back in his lap after Fred Trump’s primary banker at Chase foreclosed on the loan and gave it back to Donald without any bidding. Even then, Trump was forced to cede control, through his own ineptitude, to the Chinese developer Henry Cheng, whose involvement, the authors write, made Trump money despite himself.

By June 1990, Trump was heavily in debt. He owed banks and bondholders $3.4 billion, “nearly all of it high-interest debt.” His father’s money helped bail him out. Then came “The Apprentice.” Buettner and Craig detail how everyone involved knew they were creating fiction — even the conference rooms at Trump Tower were so dilapidated that they had to be faked — but to millions of Americans, the fiction became more real than the truth. And because of an accidental strategy of integrating the marketing of various products into the show, Trump actually did make a fortune.

But that was then. “The Apprentice” is no more. Major Trump projects since, like a hotel and condominium in Chicago, have been a disaster. His golf courses in Scotland and Ireland are hemorrhaging cash. Maybe, Buettner and Craig write, he’ll be bailed out yet again, this time by his investment in the social media Truth Social, which at the time this book went to press was worth $4 billion — but Trump wasn’t able to sell his shares, and as of the writing of this review, the value of his stake has shrunk dramatically.

The heartbreaking thing about reading Buettner and Craig’s work is realizing how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the media, which as the authors write, “rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said.” As it turns out, unfortunately, what the media giveth the media cannot taketh away. There might be no amount of hard reporting that will make a Trump believer into a disbeliever.

Buettner and Craig write that when Trump ran for president, he was finally “held up to real metrics and historical norms, his claims of accomplishment examined with a level of seriousness commensurate with the job he sought.” They say that that “process remains ongoing, and, we hope, has been advanced by the creation of this book.” It does. It has. But it probably doesn’t matter. Those who already doubt Trump will find corroboration in “Lucky Loser,” such that they need it. The others aren’t going to read it.

Bethany McLean is a special correspondent at Business Insider and the author of “Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It’s Changing the World.”

Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success
By Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig
Penguin Press. 519 pp. $35

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/09/17/lucky-loser-donald-trump-finances-susanne-craig-russ-buettner-review/

I'll wait for the library version!