US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Morning After the Revolution review: a bad faith attack on ‘woke’

      by

      Writing on Substack in 2021, Nellie Bowles described some of the less attractive qualities that motivated her work as a reporter: “I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. One easy path toward the top of the list … is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple of years, that desire for attention … propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon.”Bowles is married to Bari Weiss, a former editor on the opinion section of the New York Times whose furious resignation letter earned her encomiums from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr.But Bowles wrote that her decision to convert to the faith of her Jewish wife had actually softened her approach to journalism: “I want to cultivate my empathy not my cruelty. I am trying to go back to being closer to the mirror than the knife.”However, her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, is dazzling proof she is completely incapable of changing her approach to her profession.Bowles is a former tech reporter for outlets including the Guardian and the New York Times. For many reporters, the decision to write a book comes from wanting to dig deeper into a particular subject, or a desire for freedom from the restrictions of one’s former employer. For Bowles, longform turns out to be the chance to jettison the standards of accuracy of her previous employers in favor of the wildest possible generalizations.Here are a few fine examples: “The best feminists of my generation were born with dicks.” This is the author’s jaunty description of trans women, who, she informs us, are “the best, boldest” and “fiercest feminists”, who unfortunately – according to her – have concluded “that to be a woman is, in general, disgusting”.On the ninth page of Bowles’s introduction, meanwhile, readers realize how much we must have underestimated the universal impact of the movement to Defund the Police. Did you know, for example, that “if you want to be part of the movement for universal healthcare … you cannot report critically on #DefundThePolice”?Bowles identifies a similar problem with marriage equality: “If you want to be part of a movement that supports gay marriage … then you can’t question whatever disinformation is spread that week.”The wilder the idea, the more likely Bowles is to include it, almost always in a way that can never be checked. To prove the vile effect of wokeness on the entire news business, she informs us that colleagues “at major news organizations” have “told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super-racist. Worrying about plastic in the water is transphobic.” And a “cohort” took it “as gospel when a nice white lady said that being on time and objectivity were white values, and this was a progressive belief”.Writing about a tent city in Echo Park, Los Angeles, Bowles explains why nobody living there was interested in a free hotel room: “Residents could not do drugs in the rooms. And the rooms were, of course, indoors. People high on meth and fentanyl prefer being outdoors, with no rules, with their friends.”Predictably, the book reaches a whole new level of viciousness when it reveals Bowles’ attitude toward trans people.Intelligent people know three essential facts about the debate over whether children under 18 should have access to hormones or surgery to make their bodies conform to the gender in which they think they belong.First, a large majority of trans people of all ages never take hormones or get surgery. Second, nearly all of those who do choose to use medicine to alter their bodies report a dramatic improvement in personal happiness. Third, a very small number of those who have undergone surgery or taken hormones to block puberty do change their minds and opt for de-transition.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNaturally, Bowles mentions none of those facts. According to her narrative, “the transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless … I don’t think this was planned or orchestrated. The movement simply pivoted.”No mention, of course, of polls conducted by Christian nationalists and their allies which determined that the best new fundraising tool would be an all-out attack on trans people, including the denial of their very existence, as well as the introduction of hundreds of bills in state legislatures across the country to make this tiny minority as miserable as possible.Instead, Bowles wants us to believe the debate is dominated by websites you might not have heard of, like Fatherly, which asserts: “All kids, regardless of their gender identity, start to understand their own gender typically by the age of 18 to 24 months.” One parent who appeared on PBS in 2023 is equally important in Bowles’s book, because she said her child started to let her parents know “she was transgender really before she could even speak”.Needless to say, Bowles is horrified that as America became more aware of the existence of trans people, the number of clinics available to treat them grew to 60 by 2023. Then she makes another remarkable claim: “If a parent resists” medical changes requested by a child, “they can and do lose custody of their child.”Is that true? I have no idea. If Bowles had written that sentence in the Times or the Guardian, her editor would most certainly have requested some sort of proof. Fortunately for her – but unfortunately for us – her publisher, a new Penguin Random House imprint, Thesis, does not appear to impose any outdated fact-checking requirements. The only visible standard here is, if it’s shocking, we’ll print it.
      Morning After the Revolution is published in the US by Thesis More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US campus protests give Trump a target for his violent rhetoric of vengeance

      by

      Donald Trump delights in railing against his enemies, and when protesters set up encampments at college campuses nationwide to decry Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the former US president gained another useful antagonist.For some observers, Trump’s language is both dangerous in the current political environment as he seeks to rile up his base and a dark hint at how he might treat dissent and demonstrations should he defeat Joe Biden and achieve his ambition of returning to the White House in 2025.His language is certainly extreme.“These are radical-left lunatics, and they’ve got to be stopped now,” Trump said earlier this month outside the Manhattan courtroom where he is being tried on business fraud charges.The day prior, police had rounded up demonstrators at Columbia University, home to one of the most contentious protest sites. Trump called the sweep “a beautiful thing to watch”.He then deployed blood-curdling and violent rhetoric to describe the protesters. “Remove the encampments immediately. Vanquish the radicals, and take back our campuses for all of the normal students who want a safe place for which to learn,” he said at a rally in swing state Wisconsin. “The radical extremists and far-left agitators are terrorizing college campuses, as you possibly noticed, and Biden’s nowhere to be found.”Joe Biden has in fact weighed in on the protests, acknowledging that the right to demonstrate is protected in the country while saying “dissent must never lead to disorder”.But the campus unrest has nonetheless vexed the Democratic president as he navigates a backlash to his support for Israel, which may cost him votes essential to winning the November election against Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee whom polls show currently has a narrow lead over Biden.When it comes to the protests, the former president’s course of action is far more clearcut. Though congressional investigators have blamed Trump for instigating the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol, that has not stopped Trump from decrying the pro-Palestinian students as dangerous rabble-rousers who would not be tolerated under his administration.“It’s an old playbook,” said Robert Cohen, a history and social studies professor at New York University. “Nothing original about it except that he’s more unrestrained, in the kind of ludicrous way he talks about it, because he’s openly fascistic about this.”“To feel like it’s a beautiful thing when you’re using, basically, military force to suppress dissenters, that’s really sick, if you think about that in the context of a democratic society,” Cohen said.While the majority of college demonstrations in the United States have been peaceful, police arrested more than 2,500 people at the protests, which have spread to campuses in Europe, the UK, Lebanon and India.A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released earlier this week indicated that Biden supporters are split in their views of the demonstrations. Among those who plan to vote for the president, 39% oppose the protesters’ tactics but agree with their demands, 30% support them overall and 20% are against them.There’s far less diversity among Trump supporters: 78% are against the protests, and the ranks of those who support them to any degree are in the single digits.David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said Trump was reacting to the encampments in concert with conservative news outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network, whose personalities echo the former president’s condemnation of the students, and incentivize him to keep up his attacks.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You’ve got almost dual filters, reinforcing each other: Trump’s comments, and the outlets that these voters watch and trust the most,” he said in an interview.Trump may also see the protests as a way to win over undecided voters, Paleologos said, since his survey found voters who backed the students were a minority overall.“He’s figured out that if he criticizes the protesters themselves and their behavior, he wedges into the issue that potentially gets to seven-in-10 voters or two-thirds of voters,” Paleologos said.It would not be the first time a presidential candidate has profited from attacking student movements, said Cohen, who has studied the years of demonstrations on college campuses against the Vietnam war.“Doesn’t matter how non-violent they are, how admirable their goals are, dissenting student movements are always unpopular,” said Cohen, blaming the decades-long trend on America’s “overarching culture of conservatism”.“With these politicians on the right, they love this stuff. They know that playing up these student movements works because people don’t like these student movements,” he said.Yet the solutions they embrace often only lead to more intense protests.“Usually when you repress it, it just gets worse in terms of dissent and protest, because people who may not have been concerned about, in this case, Israel and Palestine, they are upset when their friends get arrested for just sitting on a plaza,” Cohen said. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Kerry Kennedy on the family political split: ‘There’s so much at stake’

      by

      Every Christmas Kerry Kennedy makes a book for her numerous relatives. “It has at least one photograph of every single member of my extremely enormous family,” she says. “And yes, Bobby is in the book.”“Bobby” refers to her brother, Robert Kennedy Jr, a hopeful sign that the sibling bond will survive an oncoming storm. Robert is running as an independent candidate for US president in November’s election. Kerry is one of at least 15 members of the Kennedy clan who recently endorsed Joe Biden instead.Robert’s long history of promoting vaccine conspiracy theories, and associating with racists and antisemites, has been a source of anguish for what was once seen as America’s equivalent of a royal family. They have been at pains to distance themselves from the 70-year-old’s dangerously fringe, anti-scientific views.Last year Jack Schlossberg, the sole grandson of former president John F Kennedy, denounced Robert for “trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame” and described the candidacy as an “embarrassment”.With Robert polling at about 10% with potential to have an impact in crucial swing states, the Kennedy family has closed ranks around Biden, who keeps a bust of one-time presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Sr in the Oval Office. Last month they joined the president at a campaign stop in Philadelphia to publicly back him against Donald Trump, whom they cast as a dire threat to American democracy.Robert responded on social media that his family was “divided in our opinions but united in our love for each other”.View image in fullscreenKerry, 64, the seventh of Ethel and Robert Kennedy Sr’s 11 children, recalls in an interview that the collective decision involved “a lot of texts and emails and phone calls and ‘let’s do that’”.Several notable members of the dynasty did not endorse, including Caroline Kennedy, the US ambassador to Australia, and the non-profit leader Maria Shriver, which the Biden campaign said was due to their non-political professional roles. Kerry adds: “Then there’s my brother Bobby and one cousin but 100% of everybody else endorsed Joe Biden.”How did it feel to go against her own brother? After a pause, the human rights activist and lawyer says by phone from the family home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts: “I feel like there’s so much at stake. When Daddy ran for president, in part of his speech he said, ‘I cannot stand aside,’ and that’s how I feel. I just feel there’s so much at stake.“I’ve spent the last 40 years working on civil rights domestically and international human rights and trying to hold governments accountable for abusing people, particularly members of the press, and I can’t let this go. We cannot have Trump in for four more years. And Biden is great. He has accomplished so much more as president, which is wild considering the Congress that he’s had to work with.”She points to historic legislation that Biden signed to tackle the climate crisis and slash child poverty, and to an economy that has made a better post-pandemic recovery than China, Europe or any other major competitor.View image in fullscreen“Most Americans are doing a lot better than they were and Trump would be a disaster for us. I felt, and my siblings and my cousins all felt, that what’s at stake here is our democracy, our freedom. our fight for the middle class and all that means that Joe Biden must be re-elected.”Robert, an environmental lawyer, has pushed bogus assertions about the dangers of vaccines, linked antidepressants to school shootings and claimed last year that the coronavirus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” (he later said his remarks were misinterpreted).But Kerry, president of the organisation Robert F Kennedy Human Rights, is reluctant to comment on her brother’s public statements or policy agenda, citing the impossibility of an independent candidate breaking Democrats and Republicans’ stranglehold on the electoral college.“I don’t think that matters because he can’t win,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s irrelevant what he says about any given subject. It’s a nonentity. He can’t get 270 electoral votes. The only question is not where he stands on a particular issue but what’s his impact on the campaign, and that to me is dangerous because this election, just like every other presidential, is going to be razor thin and we can’t afford to lose one vote – not one.“We need every voter who’s thinking of voting for a third party to vote instead for Biden because otherwise it’s like you’re throwing a vote to Trump and that’s a disaster.”View image in fullscreenRobert, initially challenged Biden in the party primary election before running as an independent, could use his last name’s lingering Democratic mystique to siphon support from the president. A super political action committee supporting his campaign produced a TV advert during the Super Bowl that relied heavily on imagery from John F Kennedy’s 1960 presidential run. (Robert apologised if the commercial “caused anyone in my family pain”.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is some evidence that he might hurt Trump more. A Quinnipiac survey last month found that Robert drew support from 12% of voters who supported Trump in a two-way contest, compared with 7% from Biden voters. An NBC poll found that Robert attracted 15% of Trump supporters compared with 7% of those of who backed Biden.Kerry, formerly married to the Democrat Andrew Cuomo, an ex-governor of New York, responds: “That’s kind of irrelevant because I’m delighted for him to take every single vote he can from Trump but we want all those votes that would go to Biden to go to Biden because these margins are so close that we can’t afford to lose them to Bobby or anyone else.”Trump has been transparent about his ambitions for an imperial presidency. In a recent Time magazine interview, he said he was open to using the national guard to deport undocumented migrants and allowing states to monitor women’s pregnancies so they know if they receive an abortion.Kerry offers a nightmarish vision of what a second Trump term would look like. “He has said he’ll be dictator on day one, that he’ll suspend the constitution, that he will use the justice department to go after his enemies, that he will have a litmus test for the thousands of government workers on loyalty to Donald Trump and that loyalty test will be: was the election stolen or not? If you say the election was not stolen, you no longer have a government job.“It would be generational bias on courts, not just the supreme court but courts across the board. He’s said he will create massive labour camps and forced detention centres for immigrants and he would put not just the police but the armed forces in our streets in order to enforce that.“A Muslim ban on day one. It would be a disaster for global warming, as he’s indicated. It would be a disaster for women’s rights and women’s control over their bodies. You’d see more librarians going to prison for allowing books to be on bookshelves.”At age 43, Kerry’s uncle was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency. Her father, a former attorney general, was just 42 when he was assassinated while running for the White House in 1968. There could be no greater contrast with Biden, who at 81 is the oldest president in history. Kerry, who has spent time with him twice in the past two months, offers her assessment.View image in fullscreen“He physically does not have the grace of a 20-year-old but in terms of his mind, if you talk to him about any number of issues – and I’m not talking about what do you think about Gaza and the Middle East or Ukraine in general or poverty, I’m talking about what do you think about private prison systems that imprison Black youth in Louisiana? – he will talk to you about that.“And then he’ll tell you about three different bills by name. ‘Well, HR 2732 would address that but the Republicans don’t want it for this reason and they have a congressman in Alabama who’s against it for this reason but there’s a chance of changing it on these two paragraphs.’ I mean, it is unbelievable. That is a guy who knows what’s going on. That is my experience.”That is why, Kerry insists, voters must stay focused on the binary choice before them and not get distracted by third-party candidates: Jill Stein, Cornel West – and Robert Kennedy Jr. “I disagree with him on a range of the issues which I’ve discussed with him and been quite public about,” she says.“But the point here is not a sister and a brother or a family or anything like that. It is what’s the future of our country and what’s the future of our world and do we have a democracy in the United States and do we have a liberal world order or not? That’s what’s going on here. Who cares about two siblings? It’s absurd.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Say More review: Jen Psaki on Biden, Trump and how to make your point

      by

      Jen Psaki left the Biden White House after 16 months as press secretary. Saturday Night Live never savaged her, though Kate McKinnon played her. By that and other measures, Psaki compares favorably to Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, her predecessors from the years of Trump. A veteran of the Obama West Wing, before that a competitive collegiate swimmer, Psaki had the president’s ear and spoke with knowing authority.Her press briefings were not cauldrons of rancor. Her tussles with Peter Doocey, the Fox News White House correspondent, never neared the boiling point. They played nice.Unlike Karine Jean-Pierre, her successor, Psaki didn’t have to share the White House podium with John Kirby, spokesperson for the national security council and a retired rear admiral. Psaki was a force in her own right.Now a host at MSNBC, Psaki is out with her first book. It mixes political vignettes with tips on navigating life’s competing demands, including how to dodge – and throw – sharp elbows. As a political memoir, it does its share of score-settling. But, true to its subtitle, Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, Psaki’s book is not a tell-all, terribly newsy or an audition for a slot in a second Biden administration, if there is one.To be expected, Psaki is critical of Donald Trump and his minions, but injects subtlety too. She wields a scalpel, lacerating Spicer and his former boss. She frames criticisms as career advice, not frontal assault.“Shouldn’t [Spicer] have rejected the job offer, if he were truly credible?” she asks of the Republican official who had first go at speaking for Trump, perhaps the most thankless task yet invented in politics.Great question. We all know the answer. As the anti-Trump operative Rick Wilson put it, everything Trump touches dies. Only Ivanka is safe and even then … who knows.“While Sean may not have been acting entirely on his own behalf when he was giving his press briefings,” Psaki writes, “he was the one who suffered as a result.”True. If Melissa McCarthy plays you in an SNL cold open, as she did Spicer, lampooning your loud parroting of your boss’s absurd lies … you’re screwed.Then again, Spicer was kind of lucky. Banished from the Trumpian kingdom early on, he never suffered a January 6-related indictment. Eventually, he expressed regret for beclowning himself over the inauguration in 2017.Back on Psaki’s own side of the aisle, Say More is no hagiography of Joe Biden. Psaki is aware of the president’s capacity for empathy but also mindful of his tendency to bring the story back to his own losses, most recently including that of Beau Biden, his late son who served in Iraq.In summer 2021, amid the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomb at Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans dead. Three days later, American bodies arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended. Things did not work out as planned.Psaki conveys how Biden was stunned into silence when told that family members of dead Americans were complaining he had spent too much time talking about Beau, alleging he was insufficiently focused on the deaths of their own children.“I paused for the president to respond,” Psaki writes. “The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.”Biden finally responded, but did so “in a softer voice than usual”.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Again he paused: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPsaki also tweaks Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, and John Kerry, Barack Obama’s second secretary of state and until March a member of Biden’s administration as his climate envoy.Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, viewed by many as another welfare scheme. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, a stock market crash and the mortgage crisis, Obamacare cost the Democrats both chambers of Congress.“There were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy,” Obama later acknowledged to Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post.One of those “outsiders” was Schumer. The New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all in on healthcare amid a meltdown in jobs and housing. Political prescience, however, isn’t always welcomed, let alone rewarded. Recalling how the White House rejected Schumer’s suggestion that Obama’s final State of the Union address contain a pitch for student loan relief, Psaki seems to delight in the outcome.“I was telling [Obama] he needed to decide whether he wanted this to be his State of the Union speech, or Senator Schumer’s,” she recalls. “I delivered my thoughts calmly. My argument tapped into my knowledge of how the media would cover the speech. The president eventually agreed. Sorry, Senator Schumer.”Psaki also recalls a gaffe made by Kerry in 2014. Responding to a question, he intimated that if conflict broke out between Japan and China, the US would use military force – a stance at odds with the stated American position.“That was a huge mistake,’” chided David Wade, a longtime Kerry aide. Kerry didn’t yell back. Instead, he gave Psaki and Wade the green light to contact the White House and distance itself from his comments. In that moment, Psaki learned that being effective in her job meant delivering quick feedback, at times.“Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them,” she writes.The Biden administration has been relatively leak-free. Nothing approaching Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims, an early memoir by a Trump administration official, has appeared. Whether this matters come election day remains, of course, to be seen.
      Say More is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Rudy Giuliani suspended by New York radio station over 2020 election lies

      by

      The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s troubles deepened on Friday when he was suspended by WABC radio, for trying to use his show to discuss the lie that the 2020 presidential election was lost by Donald Trump because of electoral fraud.John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire, Republican donor and owner of WABC, told the New York Times: “We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election. We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it.“So he left me no option. I suspended him.”Giuliani later said he had been fired.A spokesperson for Giuliani issued a lengthy statement, in which the former mayor said: “I’m learning from a leak to the New York Times that I’m being fired by John Catsimatidis and WABC because I refused to comply with their overly broad directive stating, word-for-word, that I’m ‘prohibited from engaging in conversations relating to the 2020 presidential election’.”Claiming “a clear violation of free speech”, Giuliani said he would address the situation further on social media on Friday night.But he went on to say the move by WABC came “at a very suspicious time, just months before the 2024 election, and just as John and WABC continue to be pressured by Dominion Voting Systems and the Biden regime’s lawyers”.Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of elections machines, reached a $787.5m settlement with Fox News over its broadcast of election fraud lies. It also sued Giuliani and Sidney Powell, another lawyer who worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Now 79, Giuliani was mayor of New York from 1993 to 2001, emerging as a national figure after leading the city through the 9/11 terror attacks. He ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.Long close to Trump, who reportedly helped him through a personal crisis after the failed presidential run, Giuliani emerged as a steadfast supporter when Trump ran for the Republican nomination in 2016 and then won the White House.Giuliani did not win the prize of being made secretary of state, but he worked on Trump’s behalf in matters including the attempt to extract political dirt from Ukraine, which prompted Trump’s first impeachment.In 2020, Giuliani worked to try to overturn Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls, only to suffer a series of courtroom defeats and mounting public embarrassments.Giuliani denies wrongdoing, but his efforts on Trump’s behalf have produced legal disbarment proceedings; criminal charges in two swing states, Georgia and Arizona; and defeat in a defamation suit that left him owing $148m to two Georgia poll workers he claimed were involved in electoral fraud.Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in New York last December. Filings showed debts of up to $500m.Earlier this week, a legal filing on Giuliani’s behalf said no accountants “seem[ed] interested” in working with him to meet requirements in the bankruptcy case.His spokesperson, Ted Goodman, said then: “While it is true that the permanent Washington political class is leveraging all of its power and influence to bully and scare people from defending Americans who are willing to stand up and push back against the accepted narrative, Mayor Giuliani will be appropriately represented when it comes to his accounting and finances.”The filing on Tuesday said the former mayor, who made millions in consulting work after leaving office in 2001, “currently received social security benefits and broadcasts a radio show and podcast”.“These are his sole sources of income,” it said.Catsimatidis told the Times that at the close of his WABC show on Thursday, Giuliani tried to speak about the 2020 election but was cut off by station employees.“Look, I like the guy as a person, but you can’t do that,” Catsimatidis told the paper. “You can’t cross the line. My view is that nobody really knows [about the 2020 result] but we had made a company policy. It’s over, life goes on.”In his statement, Giuliani accused Catsimatidis of “telling reporters I was informed ahead of time of these restrictions, which is demonstrably untrue.“How can you possibly believe that when I’ve been regularly commenting on the 2020 election for three and a half years, and I’ve talked about the case in Georgia incessantly ever since the verdict in December. Other WABC hosts and newscasters questioned me on these topics.“Obviously I was never informed on such a policy, and even if there was one, it was violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously.” More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Court upholds Steve Bannon’s conviction for defying Jan 6 committee subpoena – as it happened

      by

      A federal appellate court ruled unanimously today to uphold Steve Bannon’s conviction of contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House special committee on the January 6 capitol attack. It’s a blow for the far-right media executive who helped usher Donald Trump into office in 2016 and was a key architect of the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Bannon was originally sentenced to four months in prison; this ruling makes his incarceration a real possibility, although he could appeal the decision again.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump’s 2024 campaign will be “lean,” according to a Washington Post report, which also revealed numerous swing state officials’ worries that they lack critical campaign resources ahead of the 2024 election.
      Paul Manafort offered his consulting services to a Chinese media venture after Trump pardoned him in 2020 – and is likely to join the Trump 2024 campaign soon.
      Unsealed court documents reveal two political consultants pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired to commit money laundering with Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas, who the Department of Justice has charged with receiving bribes from foreign entities.
      Rudy Giuliani can’t stop fanning the flames of election conspiracy theories – a habit that got his show on the conservative talk radio station WABC, in New York, cancelled.
      Rudy Giuliani’s show on the conservative talk radio station WABC in New York was cancelled after Giuliani continued to platform falsehoods about the 2020 election – a violation of the radio station’s policy.According to the New York Times, which first reported the cancellation, Giuliani had been warned repeatedly to stop discussing election lies on air.“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” John Catsimatidis, who owns the station, told the New York Times. “We warned him twice.”In a 9 May letter to Treasury secretary Janet Yellen, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren this week urged the Treasury to step up measures recommended by the Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity (TACRE).“I am concerned that the recommendations made by members of the TACRE remain in limbo at Treasury,” Warren wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. Warren requested the department provide a timeline by May 23 for implementing the remaining proposals.The Disney heiress and activist Abigail Disney blasted South Dakota governor Kristi Noem and the Republican Party in an email to voters, per an exclusive Guardian report from Martin Pengelly:Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.“My great-uncle Walt Disney knew the magic place animals have in the hearts of families everywhere,” Disney wrote in an email released by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.“When he released Old Yeller, the heart wrenching story stayed with people because no one takes the killing of a family pet lightly.“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack announced today plans to unleash funding to mitigate the spread of bird flu in cattle – a measure intended to slow the spread of the virus.The spread of the virus to dairy cows poses an immediate risk to the workers in close contact with livestock and has raised concerns about the virus mutating and spreading to humans.Officials have promised nearly $200m for tracking and testing, and to compensate farmers who have taken a loss due to the spread of the virus.Two months after the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Colorado lacked the authority to ban Donald Trump from the ballot there, a separate fight over ballot access is playing out in Ohio, over Joe Biden’s eligibility to appear on the ballot this fall.The partisan fight that has been brewing for months escalated this week when the GOP-controlled state legislature blew past a Thursday deadline to pass legislation ensuring the president will have ballot access in November.Because the Democratic National Convention falls after the state’s certification deadline for presidential candidates, the state legislature was tasked with passing a law to push that deadline ahead.But Republicans in the state say they will grant Biden ballot access only if they garner the votes to also pass legislation banning foreign nationals from donating to state referendum campaigns – a push that stems from their anger over donations from a Swiss billionaire to Democratic-backed ballot measures in the state last year.Unsealed court documents reveal two political consultants pleaded guilty to charges that they conspired to commit money laundering with Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas.Cuellar’s former campaign manager, Colin Strother, and consultant Florencio “Lencho” Rendon, are now cooperating with the Department of Justice in its case against the Texas Democrat.Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, were indicted last week for allegedly accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes from a Mexico City bank and an oil and gas company owned by the government of Azerbaijan.Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaigns are a study in contrasts.While Biden spends his Friday fundraising on the west coast, making campaign stops in California and Washington, Trump sits through another day of his New York trial over Trump’s alleged falsification of business records in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.And while the Biden campaign has launched a massive fundraising campaign, Trump’s operation appears strained amid his legal battles. According to a report today in the Washington Post, swing state GOP operatives are worried they lack critical campaign infrastructure ahead of the 2024 general election (the Trump campaign insists that’s not the case).Donald Trump’s fixer and former lawyer Michael Cohen is expected to appear in court Monday – his testimony in the hush money case will be key, given Cohen’s role in facilitating the $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. You can follow updates on the case on the Guardian’s live trial blog here:In the unanimous decision by a federal appellate court to uphold Steve Bannon’s conviction of contempt, circuit court judge Brad Garcia wrote that Bannon “deliberately refused to comply with the Select Committee’s subpoena in that he knew what the subpoena required and intentionally did not respond; his nonresponse, in other words, was no accident.”Bannon has maintained that he refused to comply with the congressional subpoena from the special House committee investigating the January 6 attacks on the advice of his former lawyer, Robert Costello – a justification the appellate court has rejected.Bannon could continue to appeal the case, including by turning to the U.S. Supreme Court.Far-right Trump ally Steve Bannon has, since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, maintained the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Even as other figures in the conservative movement shy away from the claim, Bannon has made the falsehood a rallying cry. In March, the Guardian’s David Smith wrote about Bannon’s incendiary role in right-wing politics: Wearing an olive green jacket over a black shirt, Steve Bannon blew the doors off a subject that most other speakers had tiptoed around. “Media, I want you to suck on this, I want the White House to suck on this: you lost in 2020!” he roared. “Donald Trump is the legitimate president of the United States!”A thrill of transgression swept through the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland. “Trump won!” Bannon barked, pointing a finger. “Trump won!” he repeated, shaking a fist. “Trump won!” he proclaimed again. His audience, as if hypnotised, chanted the brazen lie in unison.It was a blunt reminder that Bannon, an architect of Trumpism variously compared to Thomas Cromwell, Rasputin and Joseph Goebbels, remains a potent force in American politics as the 2024 US presidential election looms into view and the re-election of Trump looks a clear possibility.After Steve Bannon’s criminal conviction for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the special House committee investigating the January 6 capitol attack was upheld by a federal appeals court, the far-right political operative could soon be forced to begin a 4-month prison sentence initially ordered in 2022.Leaked audio showed that ahead of the 2020 general presidential election, Bannon was familiar with Trump’s plans to declare an early victory. Since 2020, he has continued to push falsehoods about the 2020 election and host prominent conspiracy theorists on his influential War Room podcast.When the House committee investigating the January 6 attacks issued a subpoena for Bannon, he refused to comply. The court’s decision to uphold his conviction delivers a blow to the Trump ally.A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has reportedly upheld Steve Bannon’s conviction on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena issued by the United States House select committee on the January 6 capitol attack.Paul Manafort returned to international consulting after Donald Trump pardoned him in 2020, The Washington Post reports.Manafort, in the years since obtaining clemency, worked on a Chinese streaming media venture. Now, the Post reports, Manafort is poised to join Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Manafort denied that his work on the Chinese media project would form a conflict of interest in the U.S.-China relationship.Before chairing Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Manafort’s former firm, called Black, Manafort, and Stone notoriously lobbied U.S. congress on behalf of foreign governments – including on behalf of human rights-abusing dictatorships, among them the regime of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.Former president Donald Trump has adopted the legal strategy of stalling and stalling to ensure his most sensitive trials will take place after the election. That strategy is working, reports Sam Levine:As had been expected for months, Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday scrapped a 20 May trial date that had been set in south Florida over the former president’s handling of classified documents. The delay was almost entirely the doing of Cannon, a Trump appointee, who allowed far-fetched legal arguments into the case and let preliminary legal matters pile up on her docket to the point where a May trial was not a possibility.On Thursday, the Georgia court of appeals announced it would hear a request from Trump to consider whether Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, should be removed from the election interference case against him because of a relationship with another prosecutor. The decision means both that Trump will continue to undermine Willis’s credibility and draw out the case. “There will be no trial until 2025,” tweeted Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has been closely following the case.The third pending case against Trump, a federal election interference case in Washington, also appears unlikely to go to trial before the election. The US supreme court heard oral arguments on whether Trump has immunity from prosecution last month and seemed unlikely to resolve it quickly enough to allow the case to move forward ahead of the election.Swing state GOP officials say they have not received key campaign resources ahead of the 2024 general presidential election, The Washington Post reports. This comes amid a funding crunch for Donald Trump’s campaign, which is looking lean as the former president faces mounting legal costs.Top campaign officials rejected the idea that their operation was suffering.But Republican Party officials in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan said they worried that their funding and operations would be insufficient – and that the campaign had not built out enough of an infrastructure in those key states.“There is no sign of life,” Kim Owens, an Arizona Republican Party operative, told the Post.Good morning! After easily surviving an attempt to oust him by the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, House speaker Mike Johnson appears to be basking in it. In an interview with Politico, Johnson – the conservative Republican who developed his career in the legal world of the Christian right and joined his colleagues in contesting the results of the 2020 election – waxed poetic about bipartisanship and consensus.He had high praise for House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, and proclaimed – of bipartisanship – that the American political system “doesn’t work unless you understand the principles that undergird it.”His praise came after the House easily quashed far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to oust Johnson on Wednesday, as members of both parties came together in a rare moment of bipartisanship to keep the chamber open for business.The vote on the motion to table Greene’s resolution was 359 to 43, as 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats supported killing the proposal.Having said this, Johnson was just as quick to defend his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Johnson, who led the effort to garner congressional Republican support for a Texas lawsuit attempting to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, said he had no regrets over the legal maneuver.Here’s what’s going on today:
      Amid the former president’s mounting legal costs, Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is taking a “lean” approach, Washington Post reports.
      Trump returns to court today, rounding out a week marked by detailed testimony from adult film star Stormy Daniels about her alleged affair with Trump.
      Joe Biden will participate in campaign events on the west coast this afternoon. More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Abigail Disney evokes Old Yeller in plea to reject Republicans after Kristi Noem kills dog

      by

      Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.“My great-uncle Walt Disney knew the magic place animals have in the hearts of families everywhere,” Disney wrote in an email released by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.“When he released Old Yeller, the heart wrenching story stayed with people because no one takes the killing of a family pet lightly.“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”Noem describes the day she killed Cricket (and an unnamed goat) in No Going Back, a campaign memoir published this week but first reported late last month by the Guardian.Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, met her fate in a gravel pit because Noem deemed her “untrainable” after she disrupted a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbour’s chickens. The goat, which had not been castrated, was deemed too aggressive and smelly and a danger to Noem’s children. By the governor’s own admission, it took two blasts with a shotgun to finish the goat off.Noem has repeatedly defended her story as indicative of her willingness to do unpleasant but necessary things in life as well as politics. Nonetheless, she has reportedly slipped way down Donald Trump’s list of possible vice-presidential picks, should the presumptive Republican nominee avoid prison on any of 88 criminal charges and should he beat Biden in November.Two weeks after the Guardian report, shock and revulsion over Noem’s story continues to ring throughout the US. This week, amid a string of uncomfortable interviews even on usually friendly rightwing networks, also questioning an untrue claim to have met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, the governor cut short a promotional tour for her book.In her email in support of the PCCC, Disney said: “Walt Disney also understood story telling. Together, we must make sure all voters see how this sad Kristi Noem episode is part of the larger story of the 2024 election: America could vote into the White House extremists that glorify cruelty and lack basic empathy and compassion.”View image in fullscreenAsking readers to post pictures of beloved pets and the hashtag #UnleashTheVote, Disney also promoted a petition against “Trump and extreme Republicans who lack the character to lead our nation”.Old Yeller, which the Guardian called “one of the best and most poignant boy-and-his dog movies”, was released in 1957. It tells the story of a family in Texas in 1869 that adopts a large yellow dog.Disney said: “In Old Yeller, the family comes to see the lovable stray dog as an indispensable member of the family. The film’s climactic moment is a heartbreaking one, when the father has no choice but to shoot Old Yeller when the dog contracts rabies because of the inevitable threat to their lives – and, out of compassion, to end the suffering the dog would have to endure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Noem shot her family’s 14-month-old puppy after a hunting trip, in her own account, because she was too hard to teach. ‘I hated that dog,’ she wrote, framing the killing of a puppy as an example of strength.“Kristi Noem is not strong. Like Trump, she is cruel and selfish.”Listing positions taken by Trump and supporters like Noem, Disney said: “If Kristi Noem was actually strong, she would stand up to the January 6 insurrectionists instead of celebrating them. Or she would make billionaires pay their fair share of taxes instead of lining up for their campaign donations.“If she had real courage, she might even criticise the supreme court for abolishing abortion rights or making it easier to flood our streets and schools with guns.“True strength is not demonstrated through harshness, brutality, or callous indifference, but through steadfast kindness and compassion. Our pets teach most of us this lesson every day through their loyalty and unconditional love.“Let’s make sure Americans demand leaders who do the same when it comes time to vote.” More

    • 275 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden is desperate for this war to end – but neither Netanyahu nor Hamas is in any hurry | Jonathan Freedland

      by

      Beware cornering a US president anxious about re-election. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly ignored that advice in his dealings with Joe Biden, and this week his country learned the price.It came in the revelation that Biden had withheld the supply of about 3,500 bombs, refusing to let US munitions play a part in an Israeli assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have sought refuge. The president was at pains to say he was not giving up his “ironclad” commitment to Israel. Instead, it was just the specific, long-threatened Rafah operation that he would not back with weapons. “We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” Biden told CNN. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”To understand why this is such a big deal, remind yourself of the people and the countries involved. The US is Israel’s most crucial ally. Israel’s former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin used to say that his country’s number one strategic asset was not this or that weapon – not even its unconfirmed, and undenied, nuclear arsenal – but its relationship with Washington. For many decades, the US has served as Israel’s chief arms supplier and diplomatic protector. And yet in the space of less than six weeks, Washington has withheld its veto at the UN security council, allowing a resolution to pass in late March that Israel wanted blocked, and now it has closed the doors to at least part of its armoury.What’s more, these actions were taken by a man who is, by some distance, the most personally devoted supporter of Israel ever to sit in the Oval Office. Biden is a Democrat from the era when the notion of a restored Jewish homeland in the Middle East – promising an end to two millennia of exile and persecution – would turn US liberals misty-eyed. It takes little prompting for Biden to boast that he has met every Israeli leader since Golda Meir. Unlike past presidents, his affinity for Israel is not solely the product of electoral calculation: as his Jewish supporters put it, it’s in his kishkes. It’s in his guts.Meanwhile, Netanyahu came to prominence in the 1980s as an Israeli diplomat who spoke fluent American. He offered himself then and since as an expert on the US political landscape, a crucial skill for a would-be Israeli leader. For decades, his message to the Israeli electorate has been that only he – who stands in “another league” above his domestic rivals – can be trusted with the all-important US-Israel relationship.But look at the state of it now. Biden has become the first US president in more than four decades to deny Israel military aid in this way. (Ronald Reagan conveyed US fury after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 by delaying a consignment of fighter planes.) And why has he done it? Because, under Netanyahu, a growing section of the US public is souring on Israel as never before.It’s true that a bedrock level of support for the country exists that may surprise those seeing daily footage of US campuses in ferment. When Gallup asked Americans in March where their sympathies lay, 51% stood with Israel, while 27% backed the Palestinians. But among Democrats and young people, it’s the Palestinians who prevail, by eight-point margins in both cases.Those are the numbers that weigh on Biden and his re-election team, as they face the unravelling of the coalition that defeated Donald Trump in 2020. A period of newly intense suffering in Gaza will alienate yet more of the voters they need to win. The White House asked Netanyahu to show them a plan that would achieve a goal they regarded as legitimate – the removal from Rafah of Hamas’s last remaining battalions – but without risking mass civilian casualties. Netanyahu could not do it. Which is why Washington has resorted to a more direct means of making him stop.It’s become a test of strength that Biden cannot afford to lose. He made an all-out attack on Rafah a red line: if Netanyahu crosses it, that makes Biden look weak. Facing an opponent, Trump, determined to make strong v weak the defining choice of the coming election, he cannot let that stand.But still Netanyahu refuses to buckle, telling his people ahead of Israeli independence day that they will fight alone, without US arms, with their fingernails, if they have to. He wants to sound Churchillian, but these are words of weakness, not strength. For he is pulled in two directions: Washington wants him to stay out of Rafah, while his far-right coalition partners, the ultra-nationalists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, insist he go in hard, to finish the job and win a “total victory” over Hamas.US support may be essential for Israel’s national interest, but in a contest of Biden v Ben-Gvir, there was only going to be one winner. Without the latter’s support, Netanyahu loses his coalition. Suddenly, he will have to face the voters itching to punish him for the failures that led to 7 October, as well as the courts, for a resumed trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Which is why he will always buckle to the bigots to his right. It may have Netanyahu’s name on it, but this is Ben-Gvir’s government now.It’s the same logic that has led Netanyahu to drag his feet in talks to broker a ceasefire and release the Israeli hostages still held in the darkness by Hamas. Biden wants him to do a deal, because Biden needs this war over. The Israeli public want him to do a deal, because they are desperate to bring the captives home. But Ben-Gvir is the man who opposed the last and only agreed hostage release deal, back in November. He prefers to keep pounding Gaza, harder and harder, in search of an illusory and impossible victory. And because that’s what Ben-Gvir wants, that’s what Netanyahu gives him – even if it means pushing Biden into an ever tighter corner.Still, Biden and Netanyahu are not the only players in this bleak drama. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, has his own calculations, his own determination to remain in charge. Those who have studied him closely believe his priority is not so much an end to the killing of innocent civilians – on the contrary, the more Gazans who die, the more damage that does to the international standing of his enemy, Israel – but rather a scenario that allows him to claim victory. Sinwar thought he had that earlier this week, with the deal Hamas loudly accepted. The stumbling block is the agreed duration of any cessation of violence. Sinwar does not want it to be temporary, even if that would save many lives and ease the misery of Gaza. He wants a declaration that the war is permanently over. And for that he can wait.And so there is no deal, because neither Netanyahu nor Sinwar believes what’s on offer serves their interests. As the former US state department official Aaron David Miller puts it: “The only party that’s really in a hurry is Biden.” Though that’s not quite right. Also in a hurry are the hostages and their families, whose agony has endured for more than 200 days, and the civilians of Rafah, huddled in tents, grieving their tens of thousands of dead, without running water or sanitation. They’re in a hurry too. But no one is listening to them.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More