Michigan

Democrats behaving badly in Michigan Senate primary:

A week or two ago, candidate Abdul El-Sayed, until recently the director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans' Services of Wayne County (that's Detroit), was on television saying something he'd said before that I'd hoped more Democrats would be saying this year, that regardless of who won the primary that's at last coming on Tuesday he intended to be campaigning for the defeat in November of Republican Mike Rogers (starting around 21:30 on the video) and ensure a Democratic victory. He didn't actually mention the name of his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, who represents the suburbs of Oakland County north of Detroit, but it's hard to see who else he could have in mind, given that the two of them are the only candidates left in the race following the departure in early July of State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose district straddles Wayne and Oakland Counties). In fact he and Stevens and McMorrow have all said it, repeatedly and decisively, and not walked it back even as the climate has gotten so much more unpleasant, and I'd like everybody to keep that in mind as we make an effort to process what's what on the way to tomorrow's primary.

January 6 Was Not a Dream

 

Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire, Hanna Barakat + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / via Dave Karpf, Tech Policy Press, January 2025.

I guess everybody's heard about the weird little present eight Republican senator—Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska)—gave or attempted to give themselves in the continuing resolution that ended the government shutdown last week, inviting them to sue the government for half a million dollars apiece for, I guess, insulting them by suggesting their behavior was suspicious, when the FBI seized their phone records for January 4 to 7 2021, in what was briefly known as the Arctic Frost investigation in 2023.

Or as Josh Hawley said, “Yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone … tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators,” except of course that wasn't true in any way—it was just the metadata for the four days, no wiretaps. And

Biden’s Stasi who claimed to be saving ‘our sacred democracy’ in fact worked overtime to destroy it — all for power. They spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings — and tried to tap the phones of their political enemies. Including mine," Hawley wrote on X.

"This is an abuse of power beyond Watergate, beyond J. Edgar Hoover, one that directly strikes at the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment."

Obviously none of that was true either. "Biden's Stasi" is the agency that named special prosecutors to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings and the classified documents retained in Biden's home from his time as vice president, as also Mike Pence's, though it also did issue a memo, rescinded shortly afterwards, expressing concern about hypertraditionalist Latin Mass enthusiasts, after investigating a

suspect [who] expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a "Catholic clerical fascist." The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he needed to "build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry" in order to "make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it."

Call me paranoid, but I'm with the FBI on that; I don't get a good feeling off people who call themselves "Catholic clerical fascists" either.

The Emperor's New Cabinet

Artist oddly unnamed. Via Red Cheeks Factory Shop.

So I guess you've heard that Health and Human Services Secretary-Designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to devote himself to the crusade against unhealthy snacks, which sounds more like a First Lady gig than a cabinet position, but what do I know? I certainly agree that unhealthy snacks are unhealthy, choosing to go with the science on that as well as on vaccines, in contrast to whatever it is he's doing.

At first I thought it was funny that he appeared to be going with the liberal side on this issue, since we're all down on Doritos and Mountain Dew and up on water and organic granola, but I figured out that he's actually being a conservative in the Wilhoitian sense: he wants freedom for the nice suburban ladies who are the backbone of the anti-vaccine movement, to have their kids die of measles or polio if that's how they need to express themselves, and compulsion for the poor recipients of SNAP benefits, who won't be allowed to buy Doritos or Mountain Dew other than with folding money, even if they live in food deserts where kale isn't available. It's the same old ingroup/outgroup stuff.

Idly wondering, speaking of the cabinet choices, if Trump isn't actually trying to get himself impeached. It wasn't Kennedy's nomination for HHS that led me there but Gaetz's, for attorney general. At first, having a pretty clear idea how much almost everybody in both Houses of Congress hates Gaetz, Republicans even more than Democrats, I figured Trump was just saying "Fuck you" to all of them, and enjoying the opportunity to make them grovel.

Juneteenth

Recycled from a couple of old posts at the Substack:

 

Sinemascope

Jeff Darcy, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 28 October 2021.

 

Beating out the perpetually "concerned" Senator Collins in the adjective competition, Senator Sinema is actually  "alarmed", but she's not going to let that spoil her appetite:

Pre-empting a presidential visit to the Capitol to meet privately with Democrats, Ms. Sinema took to the floor to say that while she backed two new voting rights measures and was alarmed about new voting restrictions in some states, she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.

“These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,” Ms. Sinema said. “And while I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country.”

And "disappointed" too! Collins never imagined being disappointed, that's pretty original!

For the Record: Make it so, Democratic senators!

 Couldn't help diving back into the economics a bit, because Shapiro thinks he DEVASTATED my girl Senator Warren:

1. Warren is not particularly a proponent of MMT, though she's understood the point that deficit panic is stupid. She insists that "debt matters" https://t.co/cuMZRN0Xf8 pic.twitter.com/bfON5SYGyt

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 25, 2021

Nevertheless after five years in which we've added something like $10 trillion to the national debt, first because of Trump's insanely wasteful tax cuts, then the emergency response to the COVID crisis, it's time to start adding more tax back into the mix https://t.co/u5NFk4ba1c

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 25, 2021

You really need to learn something about a subject before you start popping off on it. I realize you get paid by the tweet and don't have much time to prepare.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 25, 2021

And then I got annoyed by the very distinguished historian Timothy Snyder, retailing a silly formula in place of an argument:

For the Record: Stupid Senator Tricks

 

Thomas Nast, 1872, "A Few Washington Sketches—In the Senate", via Senate Collection (where you can embiggen the image more effectively than here).

This thread has achieved something like virality, even as the issue seems to have been put aside for the next couple of months.

Actually the debt limit was exceeded in August 2019, when it was $16.6 trillion, the last time YOU VOTED TO SUSPEND IT, under McConnell's instructions. About $10 trillion has been added to the national debt WITH YOUR VOTE since then, plus $2 trillion without it last spring.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

This is 100% on Republicans, McConnell in particular, who has been insisting ten years on suspending the debt ceiling instead of raising it, your crazy tax cuts, your mishandling of pandemic and economic crisis, your phony accounting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

Another day, another stupid Republican senator:

For the Record: Debt Ceiling

This is something I started contemplating in July that's really starting to come into focus, and I'd never quite finished the story:

A thing people aren't realizing: Congress has NOT been voting to raise the debt ceiling over the past 8 years. McConnell made them vote to "suspend" it. There is actually no debt ceiling right now (until the current suspension expires at the end of the month). Which means...

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2021

It actually expired end of July, October is when Treasury runs out of short-term fixes. https://t.co/vyzPGOys0D

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 5, 2021

Which means...

Refresher Course

So Rudolph Giuliani's Upper East Side office and apartment have been raided, and cellphones and computers seized, and a grand jury subpoena served on Giuliani's executive assistant, in an FBI investigation of whether he may have violated laws against trying to influence or lobby the US government on behalf of a foreign official without disclosing it to the Justice Department. Among other things, I trust. Also a phone taken from lawyer Victoria Toensing, who has been variously involved with Giuliani's Ukraine contacts Yuriy Lutsenko and Dmytro Firtash and has employed Lev Parnas and Ihor Fruman as "translators", I believe, and is the attorney of writer John Solomon, who is in turn one of the correspondents in the communications the feds are searching for on the devices they seized.

I'm re-upping the following, from January 2020, the day after Trump's impeachment lawyers presented his "case",  as a helpful guide to who all these people were and what they were likely to have been doing, and who they were doing it for (one Donald J. Trump, in his aspiration for a second presidential term)

By Jen Sorensen.

System of Imbecility

Alexander Hamilton on the filibuster: “[I]ts real operation is to destroy the energy of the government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 21, 2021

That's perfect, I thought, but of course the filibuster hadn't been invented yet—what was Hamilton actually talking about? So I asked Dr. Google, and what I got was the single most useful comment on the Federalist Papers I've ever read, from The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, July 2013:

The Federalist Papers—so often quoted to rationalize governmental stasis and congressional gridlock—are almost always treated as secular scripture. They’re not. They’re newspaper op-ed pieces, written in haste to sell a particular set of compromises, some of which their authors had adamantly opposed and accepted only with the greatest reluctance.

Legislative Dada

 

Jean Tinguely, Ballet des Pauvres, 1961, via WikiArt.

Now that the budget reconciliation process is pretty much inevitable for the passing of the Covid relief plan, and the Senate's version of the bill has passed the Senate (at about 5:30 this morning), it's time to stop whipping up enthusiasm for this blow against Republican obstruction and start thinking about how disappointing and dispiriting it's going to be in actual practice, or, as Ezra Klein tells us from his new perch at The Times ("The Senate Has Become a Dadaist Nightmare")

The modern use of budget reconciliation is a kludge. The institution has become paralyzed by the filibuster and rather than rewriting its rules to solve that problem, senators have instead patched it through budget reconciliation. The Senate gets just enough done that no one can say it is actually impossible to pass big bills through the body. But budget reconciliation narrows the range of problems Congress can solve, the number of bills it can pass and the policy mechanisms it can use. No one would ever design a legislative body that worked this way, but this is how the Senate has come to work, one kludge on top of another. “For any particular problem we have arrived at the most Gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response,” [Steven] Teles wrote. That is both an apt description of today’s Senate and of the kind of policy budget reconciliation produces.

In fact it's the king of kludges. The only other time the word "kludge" has ever been used as something other than a joke (a 1993 Russell Baker joke) in The Times was by Paul Krugman, in 2013 columns about the greatest of all reconciliation maneuvers, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and a reference to the same Steven Teles paper:

For the Record: Biden's Proposal

You wouldn't fuss about moving the Overton window if it was a big enough window. You wouldn't even want to. Photo via.

Incredibly impressed with myself over this tribute from my favorite moderately famous economics professor.

That started with a quick Twitter version of an argument I feel like I've been making forever, attached in this case to the Biden Covid relief proposal-package, which is pretty amazing:

Whig measures & Tory men!

— Brad DeLong: 'Live long, & prosper!' (@delong) January 15, 2021

Well, sort of. Lovestoneite measures and Whiggish men and women, more like, in my case, but it's the same principle, where you might talk about widening the Overton window instead of moving it.

But I do feel tremendously justified by the radical character of this Biden package, with its demands for

For the Record: More Populism Hawley-Style

Buster Keaton in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928).

Sequel to my popular rant on the new most obnoxious member of the Senate (narrowly beating out perennial favorite Rand Paul, who's been looking a little fatigues):

1. Everyone needs to take a deep breath.

Yes, the President and far too many Republicans are *continuing* to engage in dangerous, anti-democratic behavior—despite having utterly failed to substantiate *any* of the claimed electoral improprieties. But it's just not going to work.

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) December 30, 2020

I think you left out "Hawley will raise a ton of money from reactionary fans who believe he could have done it if the Deep State hadn't cheated him out of it" and "It will encourage Trumpies to think positively about him as a 2024 successor to their God-Emperor."

— Yask4Mask (@Yastreblyansky) December 31, 2020

He should also be expelled from the Senate, since he's not a resident of the state he "serves". https://t.co/5A6eQgdaWy pic.twitter.com/Nm3YMuzh2b

— Yask4Mask (@Yastreblyansky) December 31, 2020

I missed that! So there's hope.

— Yask4Mask (@Yastreblyansky) December 31, 2020

So it's fun to realize he's too condescending and elitist to live in Missouri himself.

— Yask4Mask (@Yastreblyansky) December 31, 2020

The Lyin' in Winter

 

Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images via Business Insider.

We're at this bizarre moment when Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff winning the Georgia Senate seats—both of them—suddenly starts to seem conceivable. One thing is those exit poll numbers from 3 November:

Washington Post.

Biden won just 30% of the white vote (up from 21% for Clinton in 2016), but that was enough, combined with the overwhelming preference of Black and Latino voters, if only because there were so many of the latter, testimony to the extraordinary work of Stacey Abrams and thousands of people like her getting out the vote in historic proportions (not just minority members but also anybody under 45, who preferred Biden by 53% to 44%). 

But some Georgia Republicans are blaming Trump for depressing white turnout with his attacks on ballot security, and may now be making it worse for the GOP Senate candidates by insisting that it's still his election the voters should be worried about

Rudy Rude: The Best Defense Is Pretty Offensive

By Jen Sorensen.

So the Republicans finally did get around to mentioning Rudolph Giuliani's name after all, yesterday, for 15 minutes of their 24 hours (which seem to have reduced themselves by about half, no surprise there), in the person of counselor Jane Raskin, who explained that Rudy was simply a "colorful distraction" introduced into the story by Democrats:

“The House managers would have you believe that Mr. Giuliani is at the center of this controversy,” Raskin said. “They’ve anointed him the proxy villain of the tale, the leader of a rogue operation. Their presentations were filled with ad hominem attacks and name-calling … but I suggest to you he’s front an center in their narrative for one reason alone: to distract from the fact that the evidence does not support their claims.”

Because it wasn't the way the Democrats saw it when he and Lev and Ihor, and the hack journalist John Solomon, and the hack Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Kostiantyn Kulyk and Yuriy Lutsenko, and the very rich Ukrainian crook Dmytro Firtash, worked to concoct their stories of how the real thieves of the Democratic National Committee emails were an imaginary Ukrainian firm called CrowdStrike (overlapping in their alternative universe with the American company of that name in ours); and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was a secret member of the anti-Trump resistance; and Joe Biden's son Hunter had done something unspeakable and indeed undefinable, but very bad.

Raskin asserted that Giuliani’s pursuits were not about the 2020 presidential election, citing the fact that he undertook the effort before Mueller’s report on Russian interference was released and before Biden announced his presidential bid. She said he was driven by a motivation to defend his client against the Mueller probe. 

“He was not on a political errand,” Raskin argued. “He was doing what good defense attorneys do. … He was gathering evidence about Ukrainian election interference to defend his client against the false allegations being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.” 

Let's just take a look at that, focusing on the timing:

The Mustache Sings

I will point out for no good reason except Joanie will like it if she shows up that I knew Shashi Tharoor, now for some years the Congress Party's greatest Twitter exponent, very slightly when he was UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Singapore—he used to play cricket with some friends of mine. This is a picture of John Bolton hating on him and anxious to stop him from becoming UN Secretary General, via DNAIndia.

So fired National Security Advisor Bolton apparently confirms the bribery attempt, not calling it a "drug deal" in his literary effort (man doesn't know a catchy phrase when he sees it, even when he made it up himself); Haberman and Schmidt for NYTimes inform us:

WASHINGTON — President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton.

The president’s statement as described by Mr. Bolton could undercut a key element of his impeachment defense: that the holdup in aid was separate from Mr. Trump’s requests that Ukraine announce investigations into his perceived enemies, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, who had worked for a Ukrainian energy firm while his father was in office.

"Could undercut" LOL. Could confirm what all the evidence tends to show.

Looks like Bolton dishes on Pompeo (for knowing there was no basis to claims against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and passively allowed Trump to do what he wanted without ever backing her up) and Barr (Bolton asked Barr why Trump had included Barr in his "talk to Rudy" advice to Zelenskyy; Barr has denied having heard about that call until a month later). And Mulvaney (for lying about whether he listened to Trump-Giuliani discussions).

The White House evidently suggesting that it knew Mr. Bolton only for a very short time and maybe he was the coffee boy—and inevitably admitting what he said was true but regretting that he was naughty enough to say so and hang on to the documentation:

In recent days, some White House officials have described Mr. Bolton as a disgruntled former employee, and have said he took notes that he should have left behind when he departed the administration.

If it doesn't have a groove, you must not remove

Drawing by W.S. Gilbert, from the 1864 "Bab Ballad" on which his and Arthur Sullivan's first opera was based. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will only take up of couple of hours of your time this morning sketching out the full and completely fact-based argument on behalf of my client that we will be presenting to you as soon as we've finished drafting it sometime Monday afternoon, because we don't plan to make you wait for us to start repeating ourselves the way the Democrats did, with their hysterical and deeply improper attempts to talk you into accepting witness testimony before you'd even been given a chance to hear the witness testimony summarized.

We intend, in contrast, to start the process of repeating ourselves immediately, with a kind of "coming attractions" reel of all the fine points we expect to be making next week, all of which will refer themselves exclusively to the evidentiary record that the Democrats laid out for us this week, and no reference at all to that time Trump asked somebody to "take out" Ambassador Yovanovitch at dinner in April 2018 before Rudolph Giuliani even got involved with the case*. We will not even bore you by acknowledging that Rudolph Giuliani exists, and this is a promise.

A Yarn Ball as Big as China

Junior, unnamed friend, Parnas, and Fruman at some Trump property in May 2018, Facebook screenshot via Financial Times.

So I was having the craziest dream, all bound up, naturally, with the impeachment inquiries, and the House Intelligence Committee attempt to get witnesses and Trump and Barr trying to make then all refuse, and there were these two respectively Ukrainian- and Belarus-born Florida business guys, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who had worked in some capacity for the president's personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, in the Ukraine matter, refusing to testify or provide documents, only they did it by mail, in the form of a letter from their lawyer, John Dowd, who used to be Trump's personal lawyer, only the letter was in Comic Sans

Hi It's Stupid: Concern Trolling

Troll, via.

Hi, it's Stupid to tell Republican senators they'd be smart to join Democrats in sufficient numbers to convict Trump or even better send that delegation over to the White House in the next few weeks if that had a chance of getting him to move out.

Not that I do concern trolling, and I don't think I have any Republican senator readers anyway, but I think one could make a pretty solid Brooks-style argument that Speaker Pelosi has just offered them the best deal they're likely to get:

Yes, Trump Is Guilty, and Republicans Ignore That at Their Peril

This political brawl could permanently break the party.

I don't mean it could split your party leadership into irreconcilable factions of Trumpers and anti-Trumpers as if the latter, an insignificant minority, could pose an existential threat to the former, instead of just slinking out almost unnoticed like Kristol or finding a way of getting along like Brooks. I mean it could leave the party voted nearly out of existence in November 2020 and unable to reconstruct itself, like the Whigs in 1852. But before I get to that, senators, let me appeal to the better angels of your nature.

For the Record: Planked Salman

Once you've done a sword dance with a guy, you just can't stay mad. Screenshot from video by AP/Reuters via The Guardian.

Trumpy getting applause for tough talk aimed at the Saudi monarchy:

What Salman really said: Thanks for vetoing that nasty bill to cut off helping out with my Yemen war, Donald! You've been such a great little friend! Want to come over and touch my orb again? https://t.co/PdMlHXybTu

— The Young and the Vibrant (@Yastreblyansky) April 29, 2019

But impunity for the murderous Crown Prince (Salman, the father, is 83 and has been developing Alzheimer's dementia for a few years now and doesn't in fact rule the kingdom) who masterminded the killing of Jamal Kashoggi, and this (via news.com.au):