Tag: AOC

…meanwhile…

Good news too late for Biden? – June’s Consumer Price Index fell to 3.0%, from a 3.4% rate the month before. Month-over-month prices actually fell by 0.1% on the heels of Chairman Jerome Powell’s hints the Federal Reserve may soon ease interest rates. Overall CPI less food and energy was up 3.3%, lowest since April 2021. [CHART: Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Biden His Time – President Biden holds a news conference in Washington Thursday afternoon to wrap up the NATO summit, NPR’s Morning Edition reports. Meanwhile, the future of his re-election bid appear to be at the tipping point, as Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democratic senator to call for him to withdraw. 

Biden has held the fewest press conferences of any president since Ronald Reagan, according to NPR.

Did I say that out loud?... Actor George Clooney’s warning in his New York Times op-ed that Biden’s cognitive issues also will hand the House and Senate over to Republican control reportedly is shaking up Democratic congressmembers themselves, and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) “hasn’t tried to hide her disdain for the situation the party now finds itself in,” one anonymous lawmaker told Politico Playbook. 

Meanwhile… Adding to pressure from the Democratic side, the Trump campaign is now looking at a landslide and hope Biden will not drop out, according to Tim Alberta in The Atlantic magazine’s The Decision newsletter. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral vote win before the debate,” campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita told Alberta.

Politico Playbook quotes “about a half-dozen” Democratic lawmakers who say Pelosi told them Biden will not win in November, and aside from her much-parsed statement on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Biden should make the decision himself, has advised some Democrats in swing districts that they should “secure their own re-elections” even if it means they ask Biden to step aside. 

About time… However, Pelosi’s advice above comes with the warning that they hold off from asking Biden to withdraw from the race until after this week’s NATO summit is finished. 

It’s going to be a long weekend.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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AOC: Impeach Thomas, Alito/WEDNESDAY 7/10/24

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY, above) has filed articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito alleging a "pattern of refusal to recuse from consequential matters before the court in which they hold widely documented financial and personal entanglements" (The Hill).

"Justices Thomas and Alito's repeated failure over decades to disclose that they received millions of dollars in gifts from individuals with business before the court is explicitly against the law. And their refusal to recuse from the specific matters and cases before the court in which their benefactors and spouses are implicated represents nothing less than a constitutional crisis. These failures alone would amount to a deep transgression worthy of standard removal in any lower court, and would disqualify any nominee to the highest court from confirmation in the first place," she said in a press release.

BIDEN AND NATO'S 75TH

Zelenskyy Addresses NATO – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the meeting of NATO members gathered in Washington for the alliance’s 75th anniversary that American missiles and permission to fire them across the border into Russia helped his military hold off an attack on the city of Kharkiv, and for thus stopping a Russian offensive this spring, The New York Times reports. But he requested the lifting of other restrictions to allow Ukraine to fire at military bases hundreds of miles inside Russia to destroy aircraft and weapons being dropped on his country’s civilians and children. 

‘Trump-proof’… At Washington’s convention center, policymakers moved control of major elements of aid to Ukraine to NATO’s “umbrella” from the US in order to “Trump-proof” the military alliance (The Washington Post). Whether Joe Biden or Donald J. Trump wins the November election, “Putin will hate him,” Zelenskyy said at the conference (NYT).

Meanwhile, on MSNBC… Appearing on Morning Joe with Belarusian political activist Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, with whom she penned a Washington Post op-ed, House Speaker emeritus Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked to comment on whether Biden should remain in the presidential race. Pelosi gave the non-answer answer; “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run.” Of course, Biden has decided, and the primary delegates he won are his to give up. 

Pelosi’s WaPo op-ed with Tikhanovskaya is titled, “NATO is a bulwark against tyranny,” subtitle, “Facing down dictators such as Vladimir Putin and (Belarus’) Alexander Lukashenko is what the alliance was built for.”

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Hollywood Dissent -- Actor George Clooney, who hosted a star-studded Los Angeles fundraiser for President Biden in June is now asking him to step down from the campaign in a New York Times op-ed.

"I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as a president," Clooney writes. "I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he's won many of the battles he's faced.

"But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. ... It's devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe "big F-ing deal" Biden of 2010. He wasn't even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate."

--TL

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TUESDAY 7/9/24

Biden Bites Back – President Biden has support of his continued re-election campaign by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), The Washington Post reports Tuesday morning. Democratic senators were to discuss Biden’s debate debacle and what to do about his defiance in remaining in the presidential race at their weekly luncheon Tuesday.

Meanwhile, NATO… Tuesday evening in Washington, Biden is to give a commemorative speech at the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with leaders from its member countries (WaPo).

Meanwhile, Ukraine… “Poorly trained” Russian forces are unlikely to make “significant” territorial gains in a Ukraine that finally has been reinforced with fresh Western munitions, The New York Times reports ahead of NATO’s 75th celebration, citing US officials. 

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Neurologist’s Visits – White House visitor logs show Dr. Kevin Cannard, expert on Parkinson’s disease from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, visited the White House eight times in eight months up to this spring, The New York Timesreports. At least one of the meetings was with President Biden’s physician. 

After Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “dodged” and refused to reply to questions about the president’s health, White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor released a statement at 9:40 p.m. Monday that Biden had not seen a neurologist “outside his annual physical” and suggested most of those eight visits were to others working in the White House.

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MAGA in Milwaukee – The Republican National Committee released the 2024 Republican Party Platform Monday from Milwaukee, where the national convention that will formally nominate Donald J. Trump as its presidential candidate begins next week. The document reflecting “20 GOP Principles, Roadmap to Make America Great Again” calls for, number one, to “seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion,” and two, to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Number three; “End inflation, and make America affordable again.”

Number four is to “make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!”, answering the Democratic argument that the US already is the world’s largest oil exporter … but with OPEC still hanging on, not yet “by far.”

Five, “Stop outsourcing, and turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower.”

Six, “Large tax cuts for workers, no tax on tips!”

Seven, “Defend our Constitution, our bill of rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.”

Eight, “Prevent World War Three, restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East, and build a great iron dome missile defense shield over our entire country – all made in America.”

Number nine, almost the halfway point, is to “end the weaponization of government against the American people.”  

Read all 20 planks of the platform here.

The platform’s press release concludes with “When America is united, confident, and committed to our principles, it will never fail,” and “Today and together, with Love for our Country, Faith in People, and Trust in God’s Good Grace, we will Make America Great Again!”

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Defund Justice? – The fiscal year 2025 Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill is up for markup Tuesday in the powerful House Appropriations Committee, where Republicans hope to “handcuff” the Department of Justice with riders preventing it from suing states over laws that limit abortion, curtail court challenges to state redistricting plans and block it from bringing lawsuits against local or state governments that limit “transgender medical procedures,” CQ Roll Call reports.

None of this will get far in the Democratic-controlled Senate or the Biden White House, of course, though it would give voters a clear roadmap of what a 2025 Trump White House and GOP-controlled Senate would look like.

--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Dangerous Make-Believe

By Stephen Macaulay

It is absolutely appropriate that CPAC was held in Orlando, the city that has even surpassed Anaheim in its association with the Magical Kingdom. Walt Disney World is the most popular amusement park on earth, with some 58-million annual visitors. . .a number that collapsed as a result of COVID-19. However, given the reaction of an audible number of attendees who booed the announcement at CPAC that because they were in someone else’s facility they had to follow that host’s rules, and the rules included wearing masks to help mitigate the potential spread of the virus, they probably wouldn’t mind a ride on Splash Mountain, even if they were doused in foul water.

Mask-free or die.

It is all too easy to see the cartoonish golden statue of Donald Trump that was made — where else? — in Mexico, a statue that had CPAC attendees posing with just as they would with Mickey, in relation to a cautionary tale from Exodus 32: 1-6. The worship of an idol. Aaron had told the Israelites that the golden calf had delivered them from Egypt. It didn’t.

And Trump has delivered his people from what?

There are some 10.1-million people unemployed in the U.S. right now.

There are some 512,000 dead Americans — Americans — from COVID-19.

Did that Golden Idol cause the unemployment, cause the deaths?

Look at it this way: Both started under his watch. He claimed the former was going to “just disappear.” He made mask-wearing a political, not a medical, thing. He knew that a bad economy wasn’t going to be good for his brand, so despite advice to the contrary, he claimed COVID wasn’t a big deal, which led to more people getting sick, more people dying, and more businesses going out of business.

Chant though they might, it doesn’t change the facts. But facts are, as we’ll see, troublesome for some people.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York City. She was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, representing the 14th congressional district, which encompasses part of the Bronx, Queens and Rikers Island. She is a Democrat.

It is about 1,755 miles from the Bronx to Austin, Texas.

When the winter storm that set Texans back, way back on their collective boot heels, Ocasio-Cortez went to work and raised some $5-million for affected Texans.

Senator Ted Cruz, R-TX, went to Cancun.

So what did Ted Cruz do when he spoke at CPAC?

Among other things, made fun of Ocasio-Cortez, who had posted a powerful Instagram Live video predicated on her life experiences and what she experienced during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6.

Ocasio-Cortez raises $5-million for people far away from her district.

Cruz goes on vacation while the people in his state struggle.

Regardless of what you think of the political points of view of either of these people, ask yourself one thing: Which of the two is a serious leader, someone who would have your back?

Ted Cruz, a man who ended up carrying water for the man who described his wife as being unattractive and who accused his father of participating in one of the biggest crimes of the 20th century, is clearly not serious. Nor does he seem to care about anyone other than Rafael Edward Cruz.

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The unacronymic name of CPAC is “Conservative Political Action Conference.” It is organized by the American Conservative Union.

Edmund Burke is the father of modern conservatism. Or maybe that should be real conservatism.

Consider this in light of what happened in Orlando:

“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.” ― Edmund Burke

Conservatism is about things like morality, good conduct, a free-market economy, and limited government. And these people are all juiced up about Donald Trump.

How do you square that circle?

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According to the website for the Missouri secretary of state, Missouri is known as the “Show Me” state for the following reason:

“The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri's U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, ‘I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.’”

One way of looking at this is that the people of Missouri believe in facts. That evidence matters more than what people claim.

“I stood up and I said, I said, we ought to have a debate about election integrity, said, it is the right of the people to be heard. And my constituents in Missouri want to be heard on this issue.”

That is what Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, said in his CPAC 2020 comments.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election there has been a whole lot of rhetoric about how the “election was stolen.”

Where’s the evidence?

Show me.

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Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, who is rumored to be a potential 2024 presidential candidate attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci at CPAC. 

"As conservatives, we often forget that stories are much more powerful than facts and statistics," Noem said. "Our stories need to be told. It is the only way that we will inspire and motivate the American people to preserve this great country."

It is convenient that she’s not big on facts.

Few would argue that California has been an unfortunate hot spot for COVID-19.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California has had 8,784 cases per 100,000 people. It has had 131 deaths per 100,000 people.

Of course, that’s a Blue State.

So how is South Dakota doing?

12,693 cases per 100,000 people.

213 deaths per 100,000 people.

Yes, Noem, facts and statistics ought to be avoided in favor of stories because they sure as hell are damning.

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Read the full list of CPAC’s presidential candidate straw poll — click on Forum.

Kill the Electoral College, but Caution with Other Voting Reforms

By Andrew Boyd

The present zeitgeist would seem to insist I tie this discussion of the Electoral College (EC) to the recent and ongoing fervor surrounding the Game Stop short squeeze and subsequent misbehavior of retail stock merchants like Robinhood that we might uncover at the behest of their governmental and institutional overlords, a.k.a the Sheriff of Nottingham (yes, AOC and Cruz, you’re right, we need hearings).

Indeed, the tale of Robinhood speaks to the metanarrative of our time: The struggle between institutional elites and the little guy. The Framers of our Constitution were, in the context of a tyrannical British Empire, the little guys, trying to bind together a fragile union of merry men with competing visions for the future of a nascent republic. Their answer to this challenge involved imperfect compromises, including the establishment of the EC.

The EC and other proposed solutions, including a president chosen by Congress, were also a reflection of their deep distrust of the mob, and associated concerns that unalloyed democracy would lead to mob rule. These men, it could be argued, were elites in their own right, holders of power and property with a real distrust of the capacities of the common man to make wise and informed decisions, held in check, theoretically, by the power of “faithless” electors, which isn’t really a thing any longer.

Lots of stuff has changed, including many things the Framers couldn’t foresee, like the dissemination of information via the internet -- the democratization of knowledge as it were -- or the attempts at oligarchical control of same by an elitist cadre of tech bros whose motivations, I fear, aren’t so much political as they are avaricious.  

Just like the Framers, we, as a people, need to contend with the issues of our times with careful regard for how we reconstitute our union in order to preserve its essential and foundational constructs – individual freedom (rights) and individual accountability (responsibility to one another constituted in a law equally applied).

Down to it, then: what to make of the EC in the context of our times?  On a mathematical level, the EC would seem to confer outsized power to some individuals based on their geographic location. For example, the 2016 U.S. census estimates California has 26.65 million voting-age citizens, while Nevada had 1.41 million.  Dividing those voting age populations by the number of electoral votes in each state (35 and 6, respectively) states yields 716,000 (voting age people/EC vote) for California and 235,000 for Nevada. So, a Nevadan has more than three times the voting power of a Californian. That doesn’t strike me as particularly democratic.  

It’s often argued that the EC exists in part to preserve the rights of the minority, which would be the thing you place on the other side of the scale. But is geography, in our age, a reasonable stand-in for minority interests? At a gut level, I don’t see it. 

Am I thrilled at the possibility that abolishing the EC will lead to hegemony Democratic power, or that it will subject me to the whims of coastal elitist or worse yet, global bureaucratic, overlords? Hardly. But we stand on principal, or we stand on nothing, and principles built to achieve a desired outcome are not principles at all. On that basis, I can’t honestly mount a defense for the EC.

What I will beg and plead for my more left-leaning but still classically liberal friends to consider is whether the current trajectory of streamlining voting processes, including mass mail-in balloting and increasingly lacking security measures, might be a more pressing danger to the preservation of our republic.

I’ll state emphatically here how abhorrent I found the events in the Capitol on January 6. But the dissolution of clear, common-sense and consistently observed rules and standards for the election of a president is, I fear, the ground in which the more generalized sense of disenfranchisement now grows.  

We all have within us some essential sense of what’s fair and what’s not, which is at the heart of this as well as the Game Stop saga and all the great human stories across all human existence. If winning is all, and if the rules of the game can be shaped altogether according to the desires of the victor, the inevitable outcome is a growing resentment and, ultimately, unwillingness to play the game. Proceed with all due caution. 

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Click on “Forum” to read Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on former President Trump’s ethics policy.

The Turbulent Winds of Joe’s Presidency Have Just Begun to Blow

By Andrew Boyd

President-elect Biden (there, I said it) was speaking recently to a group of Black Lives Matter activists and mistakenly, I imagine, said the quiet part out loud, in essence imploring the group to drop the “Defund the police” sloganeering, just until after the Georgia Senate runoffs, mind you. Joe isn’t great on the nuance. He’s also the guy who keeps saying stupid crap like police should just shoot perpetrators in the legs.

Barack Obama, by contrast, is an exceptionally talented messenger, and respected as such, I believe. The party would be wise to listen, but its radical left is young, avaricious and impatient for change, and when the old guard says “shhh,” well, they're likely to do what young whippersnappers do, which is to double down. Where things go from here is anyone’s guess. 

The AOC wing (God save us all) has made it plain that when they say defund the police, that’s precisely what they mean. Credit for the honesty on at least this one point, I suppose. Indeed, the prevailing rhetorical winds of the D part blow straight from the mouths of the social justice squad, and it’s going to be an incredibly hard gale against which to tack, particularly for the likes of Joe, who is less the accomplished sailor than the well-oiled old weathervane. Also, he’s got Kamala with a strainer full of Chai Cyanide Evening Brew hanging from a chain about her neck, just waiting to strike. Poor old goat.

Oh, and for the record, while it might surprise some, I too believe that we need police reform, though my prescription runs afoul of the ‘defund’ bit. I think what we really need is more policing, a hell of a lot more, including aggressive stop and frisk, and broken windows policies of the kind a somewhat saner Rudy Giuliani used to astonishing effect during his tenure as America’s mayor. 

Moreover, I think police are overworked, underpaid and asked to do the hardest job there is this side of soldier or Biden’s food taster: to be in near-constant contact with the worst elements of our human nature, and still behave rationally and with infallible precision. Among the roughly 800,000 men and women in blue, there are undoubtedly more than a handful of really bad apples, and they should be sorted appropriately. 

More training, education, rest, and emotional and psychological support is needed; and with that, unquestionably, an absolute maximum of transparency and full accountability within the bounds of the law.

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Will Barrett Matter to the Election?

By Todd Lassa

Precisely one week before Election Day, Chief Justice John Roberts administered the judicial oath to Amy Coney Barrett allowing her to take her seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Late Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas administered the Constitutional oath to his new colleague shortly after the Senate confirmed Barrett by a vote of 52-48, Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed, One Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, who is fighting for her political life in her re-election bid, voted against Barrett. 

Justice Barrett starts work at the Supreme Court immediately, not a moment too soon for Republicans. The court, with Barrett now the sixth justice nominated by a Republican president and part of a potential five-justice majority with Chief Justice Roberts the swing vote, may soon decide challenges to the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, Trump administration executive orders on immigration policy, same-sex couples’ rights and the U.S. Census. The court is also expected to soon decide an effort by Trump’s lawyers to block the release of the president’s financial records to a Manhattan grand jury. 

There is also the likelihood the Trump re-election campaign will challenge Nov. 3’s results if Democratic candidate Joe Biden wins the electoral college. 

There is already election-related roiling in the courts, Pennsylvania Republicans wanted to block an extension to counting mail-in votes. The court rejected it without comment, so it may be refiled within the next few days. 

The court also rejected a case brought by Wisconsin Democrats who wanted to extend the deadline to count mail-in ballots.

The counterpoint to such apparent setbacks to the Democratic Party’s efforts to increase voter turnout and potentially win a majority of the Senate, as well as take back the White House, is that anti-abortion voters who are moderate or liberal on other issues may consider their goal achieved, and therefore may choose to not vote for President Trump next Tuesday. 

As if to counter that irony, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday called on Biden to expand the court beyond nine justices if he wins the presidency. Biden so far has refused to commit to “packing the court” as an obvious effort to keep the issue off the Nov. 3 ballot. The former vice president said in the Oct. 22 presidential debate that he would establish a commission to consider the option.

Please address comments to editors@thehustings.news

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