…for the record…this could have turned out worse…at least the dead dog reference at the end isn’t the one from transmetropolitan?

So it has gone. Time and again, Trump has faced allegations that would sink any other politician but has been handed counter-narratives — often bogus and tendentious, but nonetheless useful — to deflect and distract in an endless round of whataboutism. (Hunter Biden’s laptop comes to mind.)

In his oddly charmed political life, Trump has benefited mightily from what political scientist Brian Klaas calls the “banality of crazy,” as the body politic has grown increasingly numb to Trump’s fire hose of malice.

Even Trump must marvel at his good fortune to come on the scene at a time when America’s memory has collapsed into a national amnesia where politicians and voters alike simply can’t remember the last abhorrent thing he said.

It must feel almost providential to Trump that his rise to power has also coincided with the downfall of much of the traditional fact-based media, as well as the emergence of just the sort of alternative-reality information silos that he needed to shape his narrative and platform his bluster, bombast and fakery.

So now, despite (waves hand) all this, Trump is about to clinch the GOP nomination for the third time, and most national polls show him leading President Biden as he seeks to a return to the White House.

Has anyone ever been this lucky?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/05/donald-trump-luckiest-politician

…maybe we should ask aileen?

All nine justices agreed on that point. A majority went further and said when it comes to federal offices, only Congress has the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the part of the Constitution that bars insurrectionists from office. The court’s liberals, along with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, said the majority should not have tackled an issue it didn’t need to address.

The three justices nominated by Democratic presidents excoriated the conservative majority and accused it of trying to protect the court and Trump from “future controversy.” The majority’s reading of Section 3 effectively shut the door to using the provision to prevent future insurrectionists from holding federal office, the liberals argued.

But some legal scholars offered an additional critique, saying the court settled far less than it should have. By trying to address some questions, the majority created new ones, raising the possibility of a confusing and acrimonious post-election season, they said.
[…]
For instance, the decision leaves open the question of whether Congress could refuse to count electoral votes for Trump if it determines he committed insurrection during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Hasen said. It’s also unclear whether the Supreme Court can intervene in the unlikely event that that happens.
[…]
It’s highly unlikely such a circumstance would arise, Muller and Hasen noted. If voters elect Trump in November, they will likely also give one or both houses of Congress to the Republicans. Democrats would need to win both houses to control the counting of electoral votes. And even if they do oversee that process, many of them may be unwilling to attempt to block Trump from taking office, having spoken out persistently against Republican efforts to obstruct the vote counting in 2021.

But there remains a “nontrivial possibility” such a scenario could play out, said Rick Esenberg, the president of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. And if Congress were to refuse to count electoral votes, it’s unclear what would happen next, he said.

“The fact that they said it’s Congress’s responsibility, is that then the end of the line?” he said. “Or is that something that someone could appeal? The justices do not give us any clarity on that.”

…it’ll be about luck, won’t it? …if they’re lucky…they’ll be republican…that’s how the law works, right…or…on the right, any road?

If Trump wins the presidency, his opponents are likely to challenge his actions and policies in court by arguing he is an insurrectionist who can’t legitimately exercise power because of Section 3, he said. The Supreme Court would likely reject such lawsuits, but “the fact that this question has to be asked is exactly why the decision from the court is lacking,” Sherman said.

“The Supreme Court has opened a Pandora’s box with this opinion,” said Mario Nicolais, a Colorado attorney who worked on the case. “I think we will have extraordinary chaos in the months leading up to the election and on Election Day and post-election..”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/08/supreme-court-trump-fourteenth-amendment/

…some guys have all the luck…they tell me

U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ordered a hearing next week for legal arguments in the looming trial of Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents — while both sides await her decision on when the trial will be.

Cannon, who held a hearing last week in which lawyers sparred over when to start the trial, told Trump’s lawyers and special counsel Jack Smith’s team to be prepared to spend the whole day in court.
[…]
Prosecutors said the materials that he took from the White House are “indisputably presidential, not personal” and even if Trump did designate them as personal, prosecutors said, the PRA would still not apply to classified information.

“Nothing in the PRA leaves it to a President to make unilateral, unreviewable, and perpetually binding decisions to remove presidential records from the White House in a manner that thwarts the operation of the PRA — a statute designed to ensure that presidential records are the property of the United States and that they are preserved for the people,” Smith’s Thursday filing said.

That was just one of 11 different court filings Smith filed Thursday pushing back against various legal claims made by Trump and his co-defendants, Walt “Waltine” Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.

In one of those responses, Smith also rejected Trump’s claims that the prosecution was politically motivated.
[…]
Prosecutors said Trump was charged, and the others were not, because his conduct was far worse than theirs.

None of those others, the special counsel wrote, “is alleged to have willfully retained a vast trove of highly sensitive, confidential materials and repeatedly sought to thwart their lawful return and engaged in a multifaceted scheme of deception and obstruction — a scheme that included not only Trump’s own repeated efforts to stymie the investigation, but his recruitment and direction of his subordinates to join in the conspiracy.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/07/judge-cannon-sets-hearing-next-week-trump-documents-case/

…but he’s out there saying things like “personally, I don’t think joe biden is a nice guy”…as though that’s a basis upon which to be selected for supreme executive privilege…it’s…dizzying…sure, any definition of “nice guy” that lets him think of himself that way is presumably going to be warped enough that anyone likely to be recognized as nice by a regular human being wouldn’t look like qualifying…but…c’mon…this is some childish toddler-psych bullshit

…just one time I’d like to see joe give his unvarnished opinion of his opponent on a hot mic…really go to town…even the NYT would have to quote that shit

The Victory Lab and The Lie Detectives are of a piece, focused on the secret sauce of winning campaigns. More than a decade ago, Issenberg gave props to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s successful election drives, and posited that micro-targeting voters had become key to finishing first. He also observed that ideological conflicts had become marbled through American politics. On that front, there has been an acceleration. These days, January 6 and its aftermath linger but much of the country has moved on, averting its gaze or embracing alternative facts.

In 2016, Issenberg and Joshua Green of Businessweek spoke to Trump campaign digital gurus who bragged of using the internet to discourage prospective Clinton supporters.

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” Issenberg and Green quote a senior official as saying. “They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”

It was micro-targeting on steroids.

The exchange stuck with Issenberg. “I thought back often to that conversation with the Trump officials in the years that followed,” he writes now. “I observed so much else online that was manufactured and perpetuated with a similarly brazen impunity.”

…I dunno who’s supposed to keep count of this shit…but they say it’s the thousandth cut that kills you

No party holds a monopoly on disinformation. In a 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama, Democratic-aligned consultants launched Project Birmingham, a $100,000 disinformation campaign under which Republicans were urged to cast write-in ballots instead of voting for Roy Moore, the controversial GOP candidate.

The project posed as a conservative operation. Eventually, Hoffman acknowledged funding it, but disavowed knowledge of disinformation and said sorry. Doug Jones, the Democrat, won by fewer than 22,000 votes. The write-in total was 22,819.

…but…when it comes to what feels uncomfortably like punching yourself in the face…how does saying “actually lying is fundamental to our whole approach to the point that it doesn’t work otherwise” not make for a no-brainer scenario?

Free speech is on the line. Last fall, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – “the Trumpiest court in America”, as Vox put it – unanimously held that Biden, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI violated the first amendment by seeking to tamp down on Covid-related misinformation.

In the court’s view, social media platforms were impermissibly “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” to suppress speech government officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading. The matter remains on appeal, oral argument before the supreme court set for later this month.

Issenberg reminds us that Trump’s current presidential campaign has pledged that a second Trump administration will bar government agencies from assisting any effort to “label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information”. A commitment to free speech? Not exactly. More like Putinism, US-style.

According to Kash Patel, a Trump administration veteran and true believer, a second Trump administration will target journalists for prosecution.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/09/the-lie-detectives-review-sasha-issenberg

…probably not ross, though…you have to imagine ross is safe…after all…ross can’t quite figure out the mystery of why folks are down on joe…even though there doesn’t seem to be a reason anywhere he can put his finger on why the polling might say that

When things went south for other recent chief executives, there was usually a clearer theory of what was happening. Trump’s unpopularity was understood to reflect his chaos and craziness and authoritarian forays. The story of George W. Bush’s descending polls was all about Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. When Barack Obama was at his polling nadir, most observers blamed the unemployment rate and the Obamacare backlash, and when Bill Clinton struggled through his first two years, there was a clear media narrative about his lack of discipline and White House scandals.

With Biden, it has been different. Attempts to reduce his struggles to the inflation rate are usually met with vehement rebuttals, there’s a strong market for “bad vibes” explanations of his troubles, a lot of blame gets placed on partisan polarization even though Biden won a clear popular majority not so long ago, and even the age issue has taken center stage only in the past few months.

….now…I can’t say for sure that in a hypothetical world in which being that full of shit would kill a man…toxic shock or whatever…things would be better…but

But I experience some mystification myself. I think that Biden’s record has big problems and that the economy isn’t as golden as some of his defenders claim. But even I look at his numbers and think, really, that bad?

I also think, though, that this kind of media mystification is what you’d expect given the political realignment we’re experiencing, where right and left are sorting increasingly by class and education, and where anti-institutionalism has migrated more to the political right.

This transformation means that the Republican voters whose support Biden never had are often more culturally distant from liberal tastemakers than were the Republicans of the Clinton or Obama years. But it also means that many of the voters Biden is losing now, the swing voters driving his approval ratings down and down, are likewise fairly alien to the cultural and media establishment.

…I guarantee the man is less mystified than I am that he gets paid to sit in his niche & belch out these turgid exercises in…I dunno…extreme navel-gazing…is that what you call it when you employ a microscope so you can somehow never notice it’s your own sodding navel you’re contemplating…it’s not nelson putting the scope to his blind eye, is it?

In theory, the recent push for racial representation in elite America should have made the establishment more attuned to the concerns of nonwhite voters. But in practice, this push tended to treat representation and progressive politics as a package deal, making nonwhites with moderate-to-conservative views more exotic, not less — as mystifying, in a way, as any MAGA-hat-wearing white guy in a rural diner.

…mystery every place you look, apparently…definitely no possibility that there’s an alignment that exists between people who don’t fancy shit getting worse…& people who aren’t the runaway candidates for making everything as awful as possible across the board…nah…total headscratcher…no wonder poor ross is stumped

These are theories; maybe there’s a better one. But the first step to saving Biden’s re-election effort is to acknowledge the need for such an explanation — because unpopularity that you can’t fathom can still throw you out of office.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/joe-biden-approval-unpopular.html

…what’s the saying

…fuck it

Caterpillar’s attorneys met with senior federal officials, including the Justice Department’s top tax official, Richard Zuckerman, according to agency emails. The lawyers sharply criticized the conduct of one of the agents working on the Caterpillar case and questioned the legal basis for the investigation.

A week before the agents were to interview the witness in the Netherlands, President Donald J. Trump nominated Mr. Barr to return to the Justice Department as the next attorney general. Mr. Zuckerman then ordered the interview to be canceled and the inquiry halted, without getting input from the prosecutor overseeing the Caterpillar investigation, according to the emails.

The sequence of events alarmed some federal officials and set off calls for an internal investigation.

“It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain,” Jason LeBeau, one of the agents who worked on the investigation, wrote to the Justice Department’s inspector general late last year.
[…]
Investigations of corporate tax dodges are generally civil, not criminal. This was a rare exception, indicating that the federal authorities believed that Caterpillar might have engaged in deliberate wrongdoing. (The I.R.S., too, sought the Justice Department’s approval to open a criminal investigation, though it is not clear whether the agency got that clearance.)

“I suspect this is one of the bigger paper cases you (we) will ever do,” the head of the F.D.I.C. inspector general’s office emailed Mr. LeBeau in 2016. “It’s a great case.”

In early 2017, federal agents searched and seized records from several Caterpillar buildings in and around Peoria as part of the investigation.

Two weeks later, the company announced that it was hiring some Washington heavy hitters for help. Mr. Barr was one. He was joined by James Cole, who had been the No. 2 official in the Obama Justice Department.

…we don’t need artificial general intelligence

Mr. Barr and his colleagues met with Mr. Miller’s boss, the U.S. attorney for the central district of Illinois, and asked him to end the investigation.

In May 2018, Mr. Barr escalated the matter. He and Mr. Cole sent a 28-page letter to Mr. Zuckerman, the Justice Department’s top tax official, and the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.

The letter argued that the investigation violated a requirement that federal criminal tax investigations be approved by the Justice Department’s tax division. And it took particular aim at Mr. LeBeau, saying he had a “basic misunderstanding of the relevant tax rules” and was pursuing a “conspiracy theory.” The attacks were an unusual effort to undermine the credibility of an individual investigator.
[…]
Then, on Dec. 6, 2018, word leaked that Mr. Trump was poised to nominate Mr. Barr to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general. The news quickly spread through the Justice Department.

Five days later, internal emails show, Mr. Zuckerman contacted the U.S. attorney in the central district of Illinois. Mr. Zuckerman directed him not to conduct any further investigation into Caterpillar. The U.S. attorney relayed the order to Mr. Miller.

Mr. Miller was surprised. He still had not briefed Mr. Zuckerman on the investigation. Yet he was now halting the probe after recently meeting with Caterpillar’s lawyer, Mr. Cole, according to Justice Department emails.

“I wanted to confirm the direction we just received from your office,” Mr. Miller wrote to two Justice Department tax officials. Agents had already landed in the Netherlands, and two more were about to board a flight to join them. The interview with a former Caterpillar manager was due to start in 16 hours. Canceling at the last minute “may compromise our ability” to ever interview the former manager, Mr. Miller wrote.

Mr. Miller made a plea for an explanation about why the investigation was being paused. “Perhaps if we understood the underlying reasoning, we could address those concerns and still conduct the interview,” which had taken months to arrange, he wrote.
[…]
Two hours after Mr. Miller sent the email, he got a response: Senior Justice Department officials had decided “that no further action,” including the planned interview, should be taken “until further notice.” (That direction was reported by Reuters in 2020.)
[…]
In early 2019, Mr. Barr’s nomination was up for Senate confirmation. He told senators that he would abide by the Justice Department’s ethics rules regarding recusing himself from matters involving clients like Caterpillar.

Shortly after the Senate voted to confirm Mr. Barr, Mr. Miller proposed to officials in Washington that the investigation be restarted. In April, he was told to hold off, an email shows.
[…]
After the Biden administration took over in 2021, the Justice Department still didn’t pursue the investigation. At the end of 2022, the department’s tax division informed Caterpillar “that it does not have a pending criminal tax matter,” according to a securities filing. Last year, the government began returning the materials that agents had seized in the 2017 raids.

In his letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Mr. LeBeau said that investigators had not even been allowed to review most of the seized records, which he said was “completely unprecedented” in his 22-year career.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/business/caterpillar-tax-trump-barr.html

…clearly what we need is to plow all that money & ingenuity into developing the lying cat

…even the time of day’s a damn lie…but…we don’t have time for space-time at a time like this

Controversial new theory of gravity rules out need for dark matter [Guardian]

…I’m off to find some tunes…& see if they can get me shot of this nasty aftertaste…the maybe-not-dark-matter thing worked the first time…but I read that one already so I’m going to need something else