Glenn Kirschner – Michael Cohen testifies in NY Grand jury; Trump refuses to testify in grand jury; indictment nears (Cohen is not a target of the grand jury before which he is testifying. A big difference – which Glenn taught me.)
Farron Balanced – Republican Lawmaker Has Complete Meltdown Over 4th Grader’s Rainbow Drawing
Robert Reich – What Silicon Valley Bank’s Implosion Means for You
Armageddon Update – This MOTHERTUCKER!
Pittie Thrown Away In Trash Does The Happiest Zoomies Around His New Yard
Beau – Let’s talk about an enduring math problem in Ukraine…. (for once, I knew this before he did. I’d call that a scoop!)
A few days ago, the newsletter I get every week from the Project on Government Oversight included a request for me to edit, sign, and send a letter to President Joe asking him to fire the IG of DHS. Most of the time I am not able to add much of anything to the letters that groups draft asking for change. This one was different. I never liked even the idea of a Department of Homeland Security – it seemed too nationalistic to me from the get-go. And the longer it exists, the less I like it. If we must have an agency that combines the functions which come under DHS (as opposed to having those functions split up, as we did before it was formed), then it absolutely needs to be subject to the State Department. Our national security is totally contingent upon our foreign relations, and those are not helped by DHS continually and blatantly breaking international law. I do get it that with the nation so ridiculously divided now may not be the best time to absorb DHS into State. But at the very least, it needs a tough IG of unimpeachable integrity, and Cuffari, the current holder of that post, is exactly the opposite. And I put most of that into the letter before sending it. Here’s the link, and besides the letter, there is some background on Cuffari and his – I’ll be overly generous and call it incompetence (but I absolutely believe there’s also malice there.)
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – Epstein’s Brother: Jeffrey Ran From 45 Because Trump Was A Crook
Quote – According to what Jeffrey’s brother, Mark, told Business Insider, his now-deceased brother distanced himself from Trump because the former President was “a crook.” Imagine being too slimy for a pedophile. And there is unaired footage of an interview by Jeffrey Epstein conducted by Steve Bannon after his brother forwarded it to him in the spring of 2019. Click through for story – it’s short. Just for the benefit of anyone whose first reaction is, “Mark is his brother. Of course he would try to put Jeffrey in the best light [or in this case the least awful light],” some people’s families do tell the unvarnished truth about them. Stephen Miller. Paul Gosar. That does not necessrily mean I believe Mark, but I won’t just dismiss what he says either.
Robert Reich – The real story behind the Silicon Valley Bank debacle
Quote – The surface story of the Silicon Valley Bank debacle is straightforward. During the pandemic, startups and technology companies enjoyed heady profits, some of which they deposited in the Silicon Valley Bank. Flush with their cash, the bank did what banks do: It kept a fraction on hand and invested the rest — putting a large share into long-dated Treasury bonds that promised good returns when interest rates were low. But then, starting a little more than a year ago, the Fed raised interest rates from near zero to over 4.5 percent. As a result, two things happened. The value of the Silicon Valley Bank’s holdings of Treasury bonds plummeted because newer bonds paid more interest. And, as interest rates rose, the gusher of venture capital funding to startup and tech companies slowed, because venture funds had to pay more to borrow money. As a result, these startup and tech companies had to withdraw more of their money from the bank to meet their payrolls and other expenses. Click through for details. Responsible parents teach children self – discipline, not only for the sake of society, but to help their children to succeed, because, without self-control, you won’t. Responsible governments regulate – and that’s really for the same reasons. This case may be less egregious than some others we have seen. What will it take to convince people that regulation is NOT a bad thing?
Iterestingly, HEather Cox Richardson also concentrated on the bank failur in he Letter from an American.
Food For Thought
Let’s see them do this with those other constants.
Yesterday, I overslept – slept through my alarm, I think, although I haven’t yet checked to make sure I actually set it to come on; it took me a whle to set it to the time I wanted because the clock zeroed out. It does that sometimes, which is annoying, but it keeps good time otherwise, and it really doesn’t take long to set, especially considering how many functions it has. I did manage to arrive just at the time I had said I would, but a lot of things I normally do were not done. I did greet Virgil for everyone here, as well as for my frosted sister in Florida, who dropped me an email to letmeknow that hew new hurricane windows, ordered in August, which arrived in October, were finally installed, and that her daughter had done some interior painting for her. (My response to her had included my taking offense on her behalf about the water being slandered, and she replied to that with some highly negative evaluation of her governor, along with a greeting for Virgil.) Of course he returns all greetings with appreciation. They have not yet replaced their lone deck of cards, but I found a Scrabble set, and that’s something we can play (we would both prefer UpWords, but they don’t have that.) We had to be told that visitation was over – and that’s a good thing. So it’s going to be Scrabble unless their game inventory changes.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
The Daily Beast – Kids Do Better In Schools With Teachers Unions
Quote – Research shows that teachers unions are positively associated with student achievement. Researchers Eunice Han and Jeffrey Keefe found that this effect is particularly strong for Hispanic and Black students. And economists Eric Brunner, Joshua Hyman, and Andrew Ju have found that districts with strong teachers unions increased spending on public education, which leads to larger increases in student achievement. Click through for story. Just off the top of my head, I can think of many reasons why this would be so, and very few why it might not. (Customers aldo do better when dealing with businesses whose workers have unions. CEOs may not get quite such huge bonuses, though.)
Robert Reich – Psst! An urgent message for Jerome Powell
Quote – You and your colleagues on the Fed’s Open Market Committee are considering pushing interest rates much higher in your quest to get inflation down to your target of 2 percent. You believe higher interest rates will reduce consumer spending and slow the economy. With due respect, sir, this is unnecessary, and it would be unjust. Over the past year, you’ve raised interest rates at the fastest pace since the 1980s, from near zero to more than 4.5 percent. But consumer spending isn’t slowing. It fell slightly in November and December but jumped 1.8 percent in January, even faster than inflation. Click through for full opinion – yes, opinion, but 100% fact based. After the shellacking Elizabeth Warren gave to Powell in committee (it was in a video thread here) perhaps this shouldn’t be necessary. But it probably is.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Today’s article is a bit old also, but in a week when The Conversation is featuring, among others, an article on why there are many other math constants which deserve their own day because why should pi have all the recognition, I believe this is a bit more important. Back in the day, before Democrats owned civil rights, there were more than a few Democrats who were not unwilling to weaponize government, and I don’t doubt some can be found today, because no one is perfect, and that goes exponentially for groups. But it is Republicans, who have invented a Subcommittee in the House on the “Weaponzation of Government,” who are the current masters of it – and have been for some time.
==============================================================
The weaponization of the federal government has a long history
This story is a forgotten sequel to the Watergate break-in. No one has ever proved that President Nixon ordered burglars to photograph documents and plant listening devices at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, known as the DNC.
But Nixon himself created proof that he abused his presidential authority to go after the DNC with the investigative powers of the Internal Revenue Service. He captured this high crime on tape less than two months after the Watergate burglars’ arrests.
‘Can’t we investigate people?’
“Are we looking over the financial contributors of the Democratic National Committee?” Nixon asked his chief of staff on Aug. 3, 1972. “Are we running their income tax returns? Or is the Justice Department checking to see whether or not there’s any antitrust suits? Do we have anything going on any of these things?”
“Not as far as I know,” said H.R. “Bob” Haldeman.
“We have all this power and we aren’t using it. Now, what the Christ is the matter?” Nixon asked.
President Richard Nixon walks with his assistant H.R. Haldeman from the Executive Office Building to the White House for a Cabinet meeting in December 1969. AP photo/file
“We’ve got a guy who’s a pluperfect bastard. He’s a loyalist – he’s a fanatic loyalist – in the IRS,” said John D. Ehrlichman, whose title was assistant to the president for domestic affairs and whose job was henchman.
“He’s with us, you mean?” Nixon asked.
“He’s our guy,” Ehrlichman said. “One Treasury secretary after another, starting with [David M.] Kennedy, [John B.] Connally, now [George P.] Shultz, has said, ‘Oh, Jesus, can’t you get this guy out of there? Can’t you just take him out? He’s making all kinds of trouble for us. He’s too partisan.’”
The president’s mood darkened. “Shultz is not long for this life, in my opinion, because he’s not being political enough,” Nixon said. “I don’t care how nice a guy is. I don’t care how good an economist he is. We can’t have this bullshit.” His frustration was growing. “Can’t we investigate people?” Nixon asked. “Is there anything we can do?”
“Yes,” Ehrlichman said.
“I would think that we could get some people with some guts in the second term, when we don’t care about repercussions,” Haldeman said.
Nixon wanted to do something immediately about the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Larry O’Brien. O’Brien directed John F. Kennedy’s victorious presidential campaign in 1960 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964. “If you could dirty up O’Brien now, I think it might be a lot better than to wait until later,” Nixon said.
President Nixon, right, at a meeting with aide John D. Ehrlichman in 1972. AP photo
Abuse of power
Under pressure from the White House, the IRS subjected O’Brien to an audit during the 1972 presidential campaign. The audit found a “relatively small deficiency,” which O’Brien promptly paid. Treasury Secretary Shultz and IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters told Ehrlichman there was nothing more they could do.
“I wanted them to turn up something and send him to jail before the election,” Ehrlichman later said. There are few purer expressions of authoritarianism than an attempt to jail the titular head of the opposition party during a campaign.
Shortly before Nixon resigned in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee cited his abuse of his power over the IRS in an article of impeachment.
None of that stopped President Donald Trump from requesting IRS audits, according to his own former White House chief of staff, John Kelly.
“I would say, ‘It’s inappropriate, it’s illegal, it’s against their integrity, and the IRS knows what it’s doing, and it’s not a good idea,’” Kelly told The New York Times in November 2022.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, right, says that President Donald Trump wanted the IRS to conduct audits on people Trump had publicly attacked. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Trump said the IRS should investigate two former FBI officials, Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Kelly said. Trump has publicly, and baselessly, accused Comey and McCabe of treason, a capital crime.
After Kelly left the White House, both Comey and McCabe were subjected to unusually intense IRS audits, the kind tax lawyers refer to as “an autopsy without the benefit of death,” New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt wrote. Through a spokeswoman, Trump denied any knowledge of the audits. A Trump spokeswoman also denied Kelly’s account.
If Kelly told the truth, then Donald Trump managed to weaponize the IRS more effectively than Richard Nixon. That’s a sentence that I, as the author of twobooks on Nixon’s worst abuses of power, found difficult to type.
Kelly has made exactly the kind of credible allegation that a “Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government” worthy of the name would investigate. Yet none of the Republicans who spoke before their party-line vote to establish the subcommittee expressed any interest in investigating government weaponization by politicians of their own party.
Congress has the power, even the obligation, to unearth and eliminate government weaponization. But if the subcommittee abuses its power for partisan ends, it will merely be an example of the problem it’s supposed to solve.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, while Nixon was pretty blatant about his desire and actions to weaponize the Federal Government, he also did not act alone. And he was clever – or whatever that was – enough to keep his involvelent mostly out of the public eye. Today’s Republicans are more obvious, and are enabled to be so by the brainwashing propaganda they are aware that their voters are being stuffed with – and sometimes are the creators of that propaganda. Most of us could probably cite many of the steps by which we got here – but the question is how do we get away from here? (And Echo answers, “How?”)
It’s always been a rite of passage for any politician hoping to become president to make a pilgrimage to Iowa in the dead of winter. And Ron DeSantis was no exception this weekend when he began that journey in Davenport, IA – one of the towns straddling the Mississippi River comprising the Quad-Cities (Moline & Rock Island in Illinois and Davenport & Bettendorf in Iowa). That’s where I grew up.
[SIDEBAR: Moline is the corporate headquarters of John Deere.]
DeSantis was hoping to get a warm welcome, and it seems the right-wing GQP base accommodated him. As we all are familiar with, part of that presidential campaign ritual requires candidates to mingle with the crowd and press the flesh of the attendees. And Ronnie was no exception.
On that cold February Saturday, DeSantis accompanied by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds was absolutely delighted when an attendee gifted both of them with handcrafted snowflake silhouettes. They giddily grinned from ear-to-ear for the cameras while displaying their bespoke snowflakes.
But as the saying goes: The Devil is in the details.
If you look closely at the snowflake, you’ll note the mastermind creator has craftily and cryptically embedded mirror images of the word “FASCIST” that form each of the snowflake’s six dendrites.
This incomparable trolling became an instant viral sensation in the Twitterverse when someone with the nom de plume“MidlifeMisfit” or “IowaCaptive” (not sure how Twitter handles handles) Tweeted out the first photo – which has now garnered over 1.4 MILLION views!
My friend makes snowflakes to give to politicians who come to Iowa – there are special messages for odious Republicans- please look at the snowflake carefully 🤣😉 pic.twitter.com/Iilha9Wxn1
It got even wider coverage when Washington Post reporter Steve Goffman joined in the fun of sharing this masterpiece – gaining over 2.7MILLION views!
At a Republican political rally in Davenport, Iowa today someone gave @GovRonDeSantis and @IAGovernor Kim Reynolds a handmade “snowflake” with the word "Fascist" secretly embedded in it. pic.twitter.com/as8UN3WRsp
I’ve put together a handy-dandy GIF of the pics I’ve seen of it for your viewing pleasure:
And someone at TikTok created a cute snow globe version of Ronnie enjoying his custom craft snowflake:
I haven’t found any identifying information WRT the lady in glasses who posed with DeSantis and Reynolds for the photos. She could be the creator – but I just don’t know. Then again, she might have decided to remain anonymous. (And given the type of people the GQP draws, that’s probably a wise decision.)
But I am hoping to see some T-shirts that incorporate her clever “Fascist Snowflake” theme – especially because it’s so fitting. Hell, even I threw together a mockup for a book cover that I’d likely buy:
In all honesty, Ronnie is a fascist at heart, and he truly frightens me. But in the meantime – let the fun begin!
I am not particularly religious, and have never been. I don’t have a problem with religious people, just as long as they are not a—holes about their faith.
You’ve probably heard that song “God Bless the USA.” If there is indeed a Deity out there – or maybe many Deities – then may He/She/It/They/Whatever bless the United States of America. This country sure could use a plethora of blessings.
May God/Goddess/the Gods bless the USA with at least some of the following, if not all of them:
A health care system that prioritizes patients over profits, so people don’t have to worry about medical bills bankrupting them and their families.
A sensible gun policy that makes an honest effort to keep guns out of the wrong hands, while allowing responsible adult citizens to purchase firearms for sport or personal protection.
Police officers who actually understand Protect and Serve, who reject racism and elitism, as well as the militarization of police forces; and actively and genuinely look after the communities they patrol.
A voting system that gives every citizen 18 and up, who is not currently incarcerated, access to the ballot box, including voting by mail.
A tax system that puts more of the burden on the ultra-rich and mega-corporations, while giving the Little Guy and Gal a much-needed break.
A minimum wage that is not just a living wage, but a wage that earners can thrive on, so they can stimulate the economy rather than resort to receiving public assistance or working multiple jobs.
Elected officials who actually give a rat’s bottom about this country and its citizens, and listen to the voice of hoi polloi.
An educational system that receives more than adequate funding so teachers can receive decent wages, and not have to buy their own supplies; so school buildings can be kept in good repair; so students can get new, up-to-date books that pass a strict screening process that is performed by teachers.
Higher education that is affordable, if not free, and actually prepares students for the real world.
Reliable infrastructure, as in a robust power grid that gets all of its energy from renewable sources, roads and bridges and sidewalks that are in great shape, airports and railroads that receive regular maintenance and upgrades.
And above all, a strong and adamantine sense of justice, a firm feeling of community, and an overwhelming desire to help one another, in the heart and mind of every U.S. resident, citizen or not.
