Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Jan. 6 Committee Hearing wrap up

We start today with Ambassador P. Michael McKinley writing for Just Security that, at the very least, even the so-called “Team Normal” set of Donald Trump’s advisors should be held politically accountable for the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attempt to overthrow the U.S. government.

These senior officials with a public trust should not be treated as heroes or concerned citizens because they had reservations at the time about the efforts to overturn the election results and to select new state electors. They did not act – not on Jan. 6, not in the weeks before the insurrection, and not in the aftermath as the enormity of what had occurred sank in. Some, like former Attorney General William Barr, who authorized the Department of Justice to look into “vote tabulation irregularities” – over the objections of the head of the Election Crimes Branch who resigned instead – cooperated in the early stages of the attempt to discredit election results. They are being given an accountability pass.

Their actions may or may not be prosecutable, but political accountability should be about more than building court cases and establishing criminal liability. Not all situations lend themselves to such an outcome. The evidence trail in the Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandals did allow for convictions of political figures; the path forward has been less clear for the events of Jan. 6 but evidence is emerging that points in the same direction, and as the Department of Justice prosecutes hundreds of individuals involved in the assault on the Capitol.

Ambassador McKinley’s essay is especially — but fairly— harsh on former Vice President Mike Pence.

There was a very brief mention here of Andrew Weissman’s “hub and spoke conspiracy” essay in The New York Times by TheBradBlog. It deserves more eyes, so I am posting it here.

Before the hearings, federal agents and prosecutors were performing a classic “bottom up” criminal investigation of the Jan. 6 rioters, which means prosecuting the lowest-ranking members of a conspiracy, flipping people as it proceeds and following the evidence as high as it goes. It was what I did at the Justice Department for investigations of the Genovese and Colombo crime families, Enron and Volkswagen as well as for my part in the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election led by the special counsel Robert Mueller.

But that is actually the wrong approach for investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. That approach sees the attack on the Capitol as a single event — an isolated riot, separate from other efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election.

The hearings should inspire the Justice Department to rethink its approach: A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people “at any level” criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised.

Bob Bauer and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare note that the revelations of the Jan. 6 committee also show that Donald Trump and his lawyers lied their as*es off during the second impeachment trial.

These hearings show that Trump, through his lawyers, lied to Congress about the events of Jan. 6 in his second impeachment trial in denying that the then-president had meant to spark violence. In so doing, he undermined the constitutional process of impeachment—as well as the peaceful transition of power.

In determining whether to bring charges, prosecutors have to assess not merely the quality of the evidence against Trump but also the national interest in a prosecution of the former president. Trump’s lies in the impeachment process should properly figure into prosecutors’ deliberations on this point. After all, this was the constitutional proceeding by which he was supposed to be held accountable, and a conviction would have included a Senate judgment of his ineligibility to ever again seek office.  Corrupting the trial compounded the underlying conduct that prompted the impeachment by helping to sap the adjudication of its value—thus making prosecution arguably a more important mechanism for holding the president accountable.

What’s more, the hearings should prompt long overdue consideration of the processes by which Congress exercises its power to impeach and try presidents. Since 1974, it has been reluctant to conduct independent fact-finding. In the process affecting Bill Clinton, the House conducted virtually no independent factual inquiry, relying fatally on the independent counsel record compiled by Kenneth Starr. The Senate then did the minimum in the trial, conducting only three depositions. While the House conducted a substantial investigation in the first Trump impeachment trial, the Senate relied solely on House evidence and, though significant questions remained unanswered, passed on conducting any factual inquiry of its own.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post reviews the testimony of the two witness at last Tuesday’s Jan. 6 committee hearing, Stephen Michael Ayers and Jason Van Tatenhove.

Ayres described himself as a “family man” who’d worked at a cabinet company in northeastern Ohio for 20 years. He’s a guy who speaks in short, gravelly voiced sentences, sometimes mere fragments. He’s a regular guy, whatever that might mean, who enjoys camping and playing basketball. He arrived at his place at the witness table because he was also a man who spent a great deal of time on social media absorbing the lies of former president Donald Trump about a stolen election. Ayres wasn’t part of a club or an organization when he went to Washington with his friends. He was a citizen borne forward on anger, patriotism and the assurance of like-minded pals that he was doing the right thing.[...]

Ayres has pleaded guilty to illegally entering the Capitol and awaits sentencing; he was turned in by family who saw him bragging about it on social media. He lost his job, Ayres said, and sold his home. “It changed my life — and definitely not for the good.”

He was dressed as though he was trying to disappear, as if he was trying to fade back into a guy that no one notices on the street. He was wearing a gray suit and a blue shirt and a narrow red plaid tie. His hair was clipped short and his glasses were modestly stylish. And when Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) asked him if he still believed the election was stolen, he sounded not so much like an evangelist preaching the gospel of truth but like a man who was just plain exhausted.

I will go into some more detail about the testimony and the “I’m sorry” of Steven Michael Ayers Friday night.

Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune profiles Linda Coffee, one of the few remaining survivors involved in the 1973 SCOTUS case Roe v. Wade.

Nearly 50 years later, Coffee, now 79, is one of the only people involved in that legal battle who is still alive. Henry Wade, the Dallas district attorney named in the suit, died in 2001, and Norma McCorvey, the pregnant woman identified in the filings as Jane Roe, died in 2017. Weddington died just after Christmas last year.

So Coffee alone has borne the unique burden of watching the U.S. Supreme Court, and its new conservative majority, meticulously pick apart and summarily reject every argument she once used to establish the constitutional protection for abortion.

“It’s a bittersweet thing for me,” she said. “Because I’m glad I got to do what I did, but it bothers me, really, to see how it’s ending up.”

You may also want to read Linda Coffee’s May 4  essay in The New Republic.

Ms. Coffee is an inspiration in many, many ways. And remember, she’s from Texas and still lives in the Lonestar State.

Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic is skeptical that there will be a large-scale migration because of the Dobbs decision.

Since Dobbs, speculation about liberals abandoning anti-abortion states hamultiplied on social media. The neuroscientist Bryan William Jones was one of many liberals who declared his intention to leave a red state (in his case, Utah) for one that respects reproductive rights. Such vows aren’t limited to Twitter, however. In a recent Leger/Atlantic poll of 1,001 American adults, 14 percent of respondents said that the end of Roe had them reconsidering where they lived, including 25 percent of people who voted for Joe Biden. Notably, 24 percent of respondents said that the political climate had factored into a previous decision to move.

This would hardly be the first time that political upheaval led Americans to vote with their feet. Black Americans fled racist violence in the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration; intolerance led Mormons to Utah and LGBTQ Americans to havens such as San Francisco and New York City. Crossing national borders is a much larger hurdle, but in the decade after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, The Journal of Negro History notes, 15,000 to 20,000 Black Americans entered Canada. More than a century later, tens of thousands of draft dodgers also entered Canada to avoid conscription in the Vietnam War.

I’m skeptical that abortion will similarly scramble the American urban landscape, however.

Eliza Mackintosh of CNN writes about the continuing surge of Omicron subvariant BA.5 worldwide.

The newest offshoot of Omicron, along with a closely related variant, BA.4, are fueling a global surge in cases — 30% over the past fortnight, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In Europe, the Omicron subvariants are powering a spike in cases of about 25%, though Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, has said that number may actually be higher, given the “almost collapse in testing.” BA.5 is on the march in China, ratcheting anxieties that major cities there may soon re-enforce strict lockdown measures that were only recently lifted. And the same variant has become the dominant strain in the United States, where it accounted for 65% of new infections last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We have been watching this virus evolve rapidly. We’ve been planning and preparing for this moment. And the message that I want to get across to the American people is this: BA.5 is something we’re closely monitoring, and most importantly, we know how to manage it,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, in a news briefing on Tuesday.

13% jump in #monkeypox cases today in the US, with 41 states + Puerto Rico & the District of Columbia reporting 1053 #hMPXV cases. https://t.co/AIC5TTp5sH

— Helen Branswell 🇺🇦 (@HelenBranswell) July 14, 2022

 

Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review says that in light of the recent U.S. visit of Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and President Biden’s trip to the Middle East, the Biden Administration needs to step it up on “press-freedom issues.”

It’s not uncommon for US leaders to skirt press-freedom issues in choreographed encounters with foreign counterparts with questionable records in that area. But the state of threat facing Mexican journalists is hardly a faraway issue: two of the reporters killed so far this year died in Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego; in the past, Mexican journalists killed close to the US border have covered it, or lived and worked on both sides of it. And, more broadly, press freedom is uncommonly front of mind in US foreign affairs right now. Last night, Biden took off for his first presidential trip to the Middle East, where he plans to visit Israel, the occupied West Bank, and Saudi Arabia. He plans to focus on regional stability—and oil. But, as a slew of headlines in various countries have noted in recent days, the trip risks being overshadowed by the killings of two journalists, in particular—one recent, the other dating to before Biden’s time in office, both of considerable relevance to his administration and the US.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent journalist for Al Jazeera, was killed in May while reporting on an Israeli raid in the West Bank city of Jenin. She was a US citizen. After her death, eyewitness accounts and investigations by several major international news organizations and the United Nations concluded that she was shot by an Israeli soldier; CNN even suggested that she had been targeted...Over the July 4 holiday, the State Department said, in a 193-word statement, that officials had overseen an independent forensic analysis of the bullet that killed Abu Akleh, which Palestinian officials handed over after initially refusing to do so. That analysis was inconclusive because the bullet was damaged. The State Department said that it had also been granted “full access” to official Israeli and Palestinian investigations. It drew on those to conclude, in strikingly vague and passive language, that while “gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh,” US officials had “no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances” during the Jenin raid.

Yesterday, four Democratic US senators, including Dick Durbin, the majority whip, wrote to Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, criticizing the State Department’s findings, arguing that they do not constitute the “independent, credible investigation” for which Blinken himself called, accusing the Biden administration of a lack of transparency, and laying out thirteen further questions. Meanwhile, various commentators demanded that Biden raise Abu Akleh’s killing on his visit to Israel. Abu Akleh’s family, for their part, wrote Biden a furious letter in which they characterized the US response as “abject” and demanded that Biden meet with them on his trip.

Chris Mason of BBC News reports on the latest in the race to become the next British Prime Minister.

The contest to be our next prime minister is being remoulded once again.

Jeremy Hunt - the man who finished second for the Conservative leadership behind Boris Johnson in 2019 - told me he's now backing Rishi Sunak.

And he hopes plenty of his supporters will too.

Mr Sunak is well out in front and the working assumption is he will get one of the two golden tickets into the run off - the vote of Conservative Party members.

But the fizz and chatter, for now at least, is about Penny Mordaunt, the runner up in round one.

If she were to win this race, she'd be the most little-known prime minister on assuming office of modern times.

The challenge for the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss today, as she launches her campaign, is to prove later on that she is competitive and can grab a slot in the final two.

Annabelle Dickson of POLITICO Europe reports that the race to become British Prime Minister has gotten lowdown and dirty.

Dirty dossiers, claims of backroom stitch-ups, explosively timed Whitehall leaks and bitter behind-the-scenes briefing wars are all adding up to what many observers judge has been the dirtiest Tory leadership contest of recent times.

Such is the rancor that former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt issued a stark warning shot to colleagues as he was eliminated from the race Wednesday night.

“A gentle word of advice to the remaining candidates: smears and attacks may bring short term tactical gain, but always backfire long term,” he tweeted. “The nation is watching, and they’ve had enough of our drama.”

Another failed candidate, Sajid Javid, condemned the “poisonous gossip” being circulated by rival camps. A third, Nadhim Zahawi, said last week he was “clearly being smeared.”

But the key players left in the game show little sign of listening.

Thisanka Siripalan of The Diplomat says that in the aftermath of the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the ruling coalition in Japan’s upper house has expanded their majority.

The upper house election went ahead amid a record-breaking heatwave and fierce debate over national security, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a weak yen, and the rising cost of living. But it will also go down in history for its connection to Abe’s assassination in the final stages of election campaigning.

The election victory ushers in a fresh mandate for Prime Minister Kishida Fumio. It is his second consecutive victory in a national election after taking office in October last year. But his electoral success will also put his leadership to the test, as Japan faces a mountain of long-term domestic and international issues. [...]

There will be many shifts in the internal dynamics of the LDP, with Abe’s assassination leaving a gaping hole. As an elite and influential member of the LDP, Abe was a symbol of stability and experience.

Finally today, Buffalo native Ishmael Reed writes for The New York Review of Books ($$$) about the past and present of his hometown.

My mother and my stepfather arrived in Buffalo in 1941 from Chattanooga, Tennessee. By then my mother had survived tragedies that would have discouraged many others. Her father had been murdered by a white man in 1934. In his last moments at Chattanooga’s Erlanger Hospital, he told my mother, a teenager, that he heard the doctor say, “Let that nigger die.” When I received the death certificate, it noted that he had died of shock. She was left to tend to her mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. Then, in 1938, she was abandoned by my birth father. She was stabbed during a race riot on a Knoxville bus and received $3,000 in compensation only after her employer, a white woman, demanded it on her behalf.[...]

In her scathing study Power Failure: Politics, Patronage, and the Economic Future of Buffalo, New York (2006), Dillaway describes blunder after blunder wrought by the city’s white leadership, including the “Group of Eighteen” that emerged in the 1970s from the city’s new business elite. That group’s “master plan” for the city, she shows, failed to “include a plan for neighborhood development.” By the 1990s the Group of Eighteen had been replaced by more recent arrivals. Byron Brown, who came from Queens, was sworn in for the first of his four mayoral terms in 2006. In 2008 The Buffalo News reported that he was “refusing to comment on his Police Department’s decision to withhold basic crime information from the public.”

“The city’s racial divide left black professionals, entrepreneurs, and workers to fend for themselves,” Dillaway writes. “Politically, the African American community remained outside the patronage systems of the Italian, Irish, and Polish mayors. Other isolating factors included segregated schools and the inability to move into white neighborhoods.” In the 1960s, in one episode of unity, Blacks and whites joined in an effort to boost Buffalo’s economy by building the University at Buffalo’s promised second campus on the city’s downtown waterfront. In Dillaway’s account, an unnamed banker helped nix the project out of fear that the university would attract “New York radicals and people of color” to the city. The second campus was eventually built in the nearby town of Amherst. I don’t know whether this was the same banker next to whom I sat on a flight from New York to Buffalo; I was going to ask him how he had acquired one of the world’s finest modern art collections, but he downed a double vodka and went to sleep. It was 10 AM.

Have a good day, everyone.

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Previews and reviews

We begin today with Hugo Lowell of the Guardian preview of the third hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

The panel will first examine the genesis of Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence to adopt an unconstitutional and unlawful plan to reject certified electors from certain states at the congressional certification in an attempt to give Trump a second presidential term.

The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.

The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.[...}

The select committee will additionally show that Trump’s false public remarks about Pence having the power to refuse to count votes for Biden – Pence had no such power – directly put the vice-president’s life in danger as the mob chanted “hang Mike Pence”.

In this photo, taken minutes after VP Pence was evacuated from the Senate Floor, Karen Pence closes the curtains. A person in the room told me she could see the mob outside and was fearful they would see where Pence was. pic.twitter.com/RJs2nitAmE

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) June 15, 2022

Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey, and Emma Brown of The Washington Post report exclusively that Ginni Thomas also maintained email contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation.

The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Washington Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation.

Now does Liz Cheney want to investigate that?

Justin Hendrix of JustSecurity tells us about a massive database of tweets about misinformation, disinformation, and rumors” that were spread on Twitter about the 2020 election.

On the same day the Committee laid out evidence that Trump and his associates knew the election was lost even as they cynically pushed the Big Lie, a group of researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group* published a massive dataset of “misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election.” The dataset chronicles the role of key political elites, influencers and supporters of the President in advancing the Big Lie, exploring how key narratives spread on Twitter.

Published in the Journal of Quantitative Description, the paper accompanying the dataset is titled Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election. The dataset, which the researchers named ElectionMisinfo2020, “is made up of over 49 million tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories spread about the 2020 U.S. election between September 1, 2020 and December 15, 2020,” and it “focuses on false, misleading, exaggerated, or unsubstantiated claims or narratives related to voting, vote counting, and other election procedures.”

“President Trump and other pro-Trump elites in media and politics set an expectation of voter fraud and then eagerly amplified any and every claim about election issues, often with voter fraud framing,” said one of the lead researchers, Dr. Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. “But everyday people produced many of those claims.” The new report sheds light on how these claims proliferated from the margins to the nation’s Capitol.

The 5 groups of false election claims the Trump Administration utilized for the 2020 presidential election.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post writes about all the former president’s men and women.

As a candidate and as president, Trump liked to make his hires based on whether folks looked the part; he liked his statesmen and generals and personal representatives to exude “central casting” charisma and looks that are easy on the eye. And now these stars were stuck in videos with as much sheen as community access cable.

In his deposition, former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller is answering questions in muffled tones from behind a face mask while sitting in a stark, characterless room. The man once charged with speaking for the voluble Trump requires subtitles to make his words discernible. Ivanka Trump is positioned against an empty marble-patterned wall in hues of gray, from the color of lint to the color of saliva. Her heavy makeup only emphasizes that no amount of artifice can improve upon the dismal facts.

The elite circle of people who catered to a man who prided himself on his cinematic acumen has lost the power of its props, its costuming and its messaging. For an administration that loved nothing more than to surround itself with American flags by the dozens, there were few flags waving in the background as the pack of former colleagues, advisers and enablers sat through questioning by just-the-facts government lawyers. Instead of being wrapped in the accoutrements of patriotism, they were surrounded by all the trappings of grifters, cheats and con-men stuck in an interrogation room. The crafty pugilists were on the defensive.

Heather Digby Parton of Salon writes about the so-called guardrails of democracy that really weren’t guardrails at all.

The January 6 committee is now looking closely at what happened after that in the period between the election and the Capitol riot. What they have found is that the remaining protectors of the guardrails didn't do much to stop Trump from attempting to overturn the election.

Their reticence to do something other than watch from the sidelines led to Trump empowering Rudy Giuliani and the rogues gallery of misfits and weirdos who helped him spread the Big Lie that led to the insurrection. Some of the anonymous heroes even suggested in the press that Trump just needed to cry it out and then he would bow out gracefully. The Jan 6 committee hearing this week revealed that within the White House during this period they called themselves "Team Normal" apparently because they knew the Big Lie was a big lie and they didn't go out of their way to help Trump spread it. However, some helped Trump lay the groundwork for his claims that the election was being rigged and only balked after the fact when he insisted that it was. Some of them helped him raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a clear-cut scam while others are even currently working for people who are running for office on the Big Lie platform. They all stayed mum about what Trump and his crazy accomplices were up to. It's good they are telling the truth under oath to the committee but it doesn't speak well of them that they didn't step up when it really counted. Their silence led to death and mayhem and an ongoing crisis in our democracy.

The Washington Post reported some new details about the one group in "Team Normal" who did manage to hold Trump back from doing his worst in those final days: the lawyers in the Department of Justice(DOJ) and the White House Counsel's office. While Jared Kushner testified that he dismissed them as a bunch of whiners, it was their threats to quit that kept Trump from firing the Acting Attorney General and replacing him with an obscure toadie named Jeffrey Clark who was somehow persuaded that he could take over the DOJ and use it to help Trump overturn the election.

It occurs to me that Fiona Hill described a similar “two-track” way of working as it pertained to Ukraine during the first impeachment trial although, in that case, the foreign service and national security civil servants weren’t content to “watch from the sidelines.” 

Frida Ghitis of CNN writes about the Trump campaign’s election grift.

The Trump campaign’s alleged grift was well underway long before Election Day. He showed no compunction about tricking his supporters. In one of the most shameless scams, the Trump campaign extracted tens of millions of dollars by setting up the donations page on the campaign website that by default turned every donation into a recurring payment, according to reporting last year by the New York Times.

The scam snagged huge amounts of money. Among those who got caught up in it were Trump supporters – including a cancer patient – who saw their bank accounts drained. Complaints about the scheme overwhelmed fraud lines at credit card companies, according to the Times report. Despite issuing more than $122 million in refunds, campaign spokesman Jason Miller downplayed the controversy, arguing campaign records showed only a small percentage of complaints.

Not content with that shakedown, the campaign added another default setting, a so-called “money bomb” that doubled the donation of Trump supporters they took for suckers.[‘’’]

Trump’s campaign transgressions are in keeping with Trump’s own decades’ long track record of pushing the envelope on financial matters, no matter the consequences for others.

However, EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic says that the grifted, “cultists” that they are, don’t care.

Instead of election challenges, the select committee pointed out that the money solicited by Trump went to “a conservative organization employing former Trump staffers, to the Trump Hotel Collection, to the company that organized the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6” and others.

Amanda Wick, a lawyer for the Jan. 6 committee, said, “The evidence developed by the select committee highlights how the Trump campaign aggressively pushed false election claims to fundraise, telling supporters it would be used to fight voter fraud that did not exist. The emails continued through Jan. 6, even as Trump spoke on the Ellipse. Thirty minutes after the last fundraising email was sent, the Capitol was breached.”

The cultists do not care.

They refuse to believe.

They refuse even to hear the evidence, perhaps out of fear that they might believe, and they do not want to risk that. It’s a mindset that is difficult to imagine.

Charles Blow of The New York Times wonders if the U.S. will survive this period of mass hysteria.

But now, as the Jan. 6 committee is making ever clearer, his impulse to deceive and manipulate has taken on democracy-threatening dimensions.

Millions of people fell under the spell of Trump’s lies and remain convinced of them to this day. His lies have been used to incite an insurrection in which people were injured and some died, to push through a wave of voter suppression bills in counties across the country, and to help his Republican acolytes win elections.

This all raises, to me, a profound and frightening series of questions: Can a lie, in periods like this one, simply be stronger than the truth? I have faith that history will properly diagnose this moment, and that many who now occupy high places will be brought low by it. But, in the present, without the perspective that time and distance can provide, is fantasy more seductive than reality?

Is it, on a base level, more exhilarating to destroy something than to hold it together?

John Cassidy of The New Yorker talks about The Federal Reserve’s biggest interest rate hike in 28 years and wonders will it stem the tide of inflation.

In addition to raising the rate, Powell indicated that another three-quarter-point hike is possible at the Fed’s next meeting, in July. The members of its policymaking committee also raised their predictions for where the federal funds rate will be at the end of this year and next year—to 3.4 per cent and 3.8 per cent, respectively. “We anticipate that ongoing rate increases will be appropriate,” Powell said. [...]

When inflation began to rise last year, Powell resisted calls from some quarters—yes, that’s you, Larry Summers—for the Fed to hit the monetary brakes, describing the rise in prices as “transitory.” He dropped this term late last year, in time for the economy to be hit by the Omicron variant, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a fresh lockdown in China—each of which carried a further inflationary shock. In retrospect, the Fed made an error by not starting to raise rates sooner, although, given that inflation is a global problem—it’s running ​​at 8.1 per cent in the eurozone and 7.8 per cent in the United Kingdom—it’s not clear how much of a difference a quicker policy reversal in the U.S. would have made.

In any case, the big question now is whether the Fed can raise rates at a more rapid pace than it previously anticipated, and bring inflation down, without knocking the economy into an outright recession. According to a new survey conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago, which was published on Sunday, more than two-thirds of academic economists think that Powell won’t pull it off: they are predicting that a recession will start next year.

Damian Carrington of the Guardian writes about the enormous rise in temperatures in an area of the Arctic.

The heating is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where fast rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the heating in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen across the rest of the Arctic.

The new figures show annual average temperatures in the area are rising across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in the months of autumn of up to 4C a decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest warming place known on Earth.

Recent years have seen temperatures far above average recorded in the Arctic, with seasoned observers describing the situation as “crazy”, “weird”, and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown.

It was already known that the climate crisis was driving heating across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but the new research shows the situation is even more extreme in places.

Steven Erlanger of The New York Times writes about the additional arms that the U.S. and its allies are sending to Ukraine.

The package, detailed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III after a meeting with allies at NATO headquarters in Brussels, includes more long-range artillery, anti-ship missile launchers and more rounds for howitzers and for a sophisticated American rocket system on which Ukrainians are currently being trained. Overall, the United States has now committed about $5.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that he had told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine about the new weapons during a 40-minute call Wednesday morning. Mr. Zelensky and his aides have recently ramped up public pressure on the West to supply vastly more of the sophisticated armaments it has already sent, questioning their allies’ commitment to the Ukrainian cause and insisting that nothing else can stop the inexorable, brutal Russian advance in eastern Ukraine.

Western officials and arms experts caution that flooding the battlefield with advanced weapons is far slower and more difficult than it sounds, facing obstacles in manufacturing, delivery, training and compatibility — and in avoiding depletion of Western arsenals.

David M. Herszenhorn, Barbara Moens, Hans von der Burchard, Jacob Hanke Vela, and Maia de La Baume of POLITICO Europe report on the lack of unanimity by European Union members to approve Ukraine’s request for membership.

The European Commission on Friday is expected to recommend formal candidate status for Ukraine and for neighboring Moldova, but the final decision requires unanimity among the 27 EU heads of state and government who will gather for a European Council summit in Brussels next week but still don’t agree on what to do.

Rejecting Ukraine’s request — or even a fudge nodding to future “membership perspective” — would be a devastating blow for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, potentially demoralizing many of his more than 40 million citizens, and especially his military, which continues to take heavy causalities as it fights off Russian invaders who are now occupying large swathes of the south and east of the country.

Such a rejection would also further inflame Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fantasies about reclaiming a sphere of influence resembling that of the Soviet Union and its superpower status during the Cold War. Supporters of Ukraine’s membership bid say that anything less than candidate status would encourage Putin to prolong the war.

On the fifth anniversary of the tragedy at the Grenfell Tower in London, Stephen Rand of The Article writes that Grenfell and the UK’s Rwanda “extradition” policy are indicators of a Conservative Party gone wrong.

The Grenfell Tower calamity was so tragic and sobering because, when we saw the faces of the deceased, we saw people who were, in effect, in the care of the state. The people who burned alive or suffocated in that tower block were the vulnerable and voiceless, the very people whom Michael Gove had said the Conservatives needed to support. Those were the people whom the state has let down for decades. To say that the Conservative government of five years ago alone had blood on its hands is to misjudge the scale of the issue. The victims of Grenfell were let down by the whole apparatus of the state for years — by Left and Right alike.

There is an inquiry into the disaster which will report later this year, and it must be allowed to run its course before anyone jumps to conclusions. At the same time, it is wrong to use the inquiry to dodge questions and let the indignation so many felt five years ago splutter into disinterest. It’s already clear that the residents of Grenfell had foreseen and warned of the tragedy before it took place, but were ignored by a system which should have been designed to help them. It ’ s also clear that the inquiry will paint a picture of victims, not only killed in their homes, but neglected through numerous iterations and layers of the state. However, it is a stain on the memory of all those who died that nothing of any real worth has been done to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.[...]

If Grenfell happened because of disinterest and inaction, the Rwanda deportation policy represents the exploitation of the vulnerable and voiceless for political gain. Thanks to ranting from the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Liz Truss need to be seen to be doing something — anything — about people coming over the Channel on dinghies. They seem to think the answer is to be found in the crime and punishment policies of the 18th century. In 1788 the starving were punished for poaching by being transported to Australia. In 2022 asylum seekers are flown to a 21st century penal colony in Rwanda. It’s sickening.

Finally today, José Gomes Temporão, public health minister under former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva writes for AlJazeera that the U.S. should be prioritizing equitable access to COVID vaccines for Latin America.

Comprised of mostly middle-income countries, Latin America’s governments have found themselves truly caught in the middle. They do not have resources comparable to those mobilised by wealthy countries in response to the pandemic. But neither can they benefit from international support programmes often targeted only at low and lower-middle-income countries.

As pharmaceutical companies have prioritised selling doses where they can secure the highest profits and without a shared approach to advance the interests of the region as a whole, accessing COVID-19 vaccines has been an uphill struggle for the continent. As a result, more than 200 million people remain unvaccinated across the region.

A combination of large urban populations, heavy chronic disease burden, weak health systems, and a seriously unequal global vaccine rollout has led some experts to warn that Latin America could be the most vulnerable region in the world to the emergence of a new variant. This is not just a Latin American problem, but a problem for everyone.

Everyone have a good day!

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: More on the Jan. 6 hearings

We start today with Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review critiquing both the substance and the spectacle of the first of six meetings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.

Last night, at 8pm Eastern, the preemptive noise ceased and the hearing began. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s Democratic chair, immediately started to lay out Trump’s culpability for the events of January 6, calling the attack on the Capitol “the culmination of an attempted coup”; then, Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair, picked up the thread, introducing videos of pretaped testimony that showed people close to Trump—his former attorney general William Barr; his daughter Ivanka—calling his claims of a stolen election “bullshit,” to borrow Barr’s word. There followed a harrowing montage packaging never-before-seen footage of the insurrection, followed by a break, followed by live testimony from two witnesses: Nick Quested, a British documentarian who was embedded with the extremist group the Proud Boys around the time of the insurrection, and Caroline Edwards, a police officer whom the mob knocked violently to the floor and who later slipped in her colleagues’ blood. The hearing concluded with another video montage, this time showing insurrectionists testifying that they had answered Trump’s call. The whole thing was over in a crisp two hours.[...]

Ahead of the first televised hearings in Trump’s 2019 impeachment, I wrote that pundits weren’t totally wrong to focus on optics given that persuading the public to care was the point at this staging post in a much broader political process; the problem, I wrote, was that many pundits have a sensationalized and shallow definition of what makes for good TV… The committee, I would argue, couldn’t deviate too far from the way congressional hearings typically look and sound; if it had done so, the hearing would not recognizably have been a hearing, and could easily have sacrificed its own gravitas and slipped into genreless confusion.

Within these obligatory boundaries, I found the hearing short, sharp, and innovative. Most of the committee’s members were not given the opportunity to grandstand, making it easier for viewers to focus their attention on the evidence and witnesses. Edwards’s testimony was wrenching in an understated way; if a single moment of the hearing stood out to me, it was watching her calm reaction, across a split screen, as she was shown footage of the mob slamming her to the floor. The committee was smart, too, to segue straight from its montage of unseen riot footage to a break, allowing the networks to cut in with commentary. If I had to compare the hearing to a work of journalism, I’d not pick public radio but a comprehensive magazine article: there were newsy scoops in there, but its much greater value came in laying out truths that we already knew with a searing depth, emotional resonance, and fresh perspective.

John Nichols of The Nation applauds Chairman Bennie Thompson’s use of the word “coup” in describing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The message was that the deadly January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump “was not a spontaneous riot.” It was the product of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to keep Trump in office as an illegitimate pretender to power. And, the chairman of the January 6 Committee explained, “Donald Trump was at the center of that conspiracy. And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down to the Capitol and subvert American democracy,”[...]

This was not a military coup d’état in which the generals of the armed forces employ their weaponry in order to remove the duly elected president or prime minister of a country. This was a self-coup, another form of coup d’état, in which a leader overrules the other branches of government in order to assume illegitimate and illegal power.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of fascism and authoritarian leaders who teaches history at New York University, immediately recognized the significance of the committee chair’s statement. “Kudos to Chairman Thompson for calling it a coup,” she said, shortly after Thompson finished his remarks. “Some still call it a riot, which does not capture the larger political design of overturning our democracy.”

Peter Bergen of CNN interviewed British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested about his embedding with the Proud Boys.

BERGEN: So, you reached out to the Proud Boys.

QUESTED: Yeah. We called up the Proud Boys. On November 4, 2020, when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that he won the election before a winner had been declared, we were like, “Oh, here you go.” Because one of the fundamental tenets of America is having a peaceful transfer of power. I called up Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys. He liked the film “Restrepo” that war reporter Tim Hetherington, Sebastian [junger], and I made together. And he just said to come down. So we went down to DC on December 11, 2020 and started working.

BERGEN: When a revolution happens, even the revolutionaries sometimes have no idea what is going to happen. To what extent did the Proud Boys know this was going to happen on January 6?

QUESTED: I don’t know. We did definitely look at the Proud Boys and say, “Well, are Proud Boys Jacobins? Are they Brown Shirts? Or are they football hooligans?” Or is it just Trumpism? Because that was a very unifying factor throughout the Proud Boys. There are no RINOs in the Proud Boys. It is the cult of Trump, and they were the muscle.

Marcela Garcia of The Boston Globe explores how anti-blackness among Latinos can lead to them joining white supremacist organizations.

The go-to explanation is the “Hispanics are not a monolith” mantra, which, while accurate, also feels a tad superficial. Sure, my identity and political views as a Mexican American raised in Mexico but living in Boston for the past two decades are likely to be different from a second-generation Mexican American from McAllen, Texas, or a recently-arrived Venezuelan refugee in Miami. It’s how some of the Proud Boys’ appeal to Latinos in the Miami area has been explained: Cubans and Venezuelans’ fear of communism and socialism made them turn to the Republican Party and, in some cases, drove them to become right-wing activists.[...}

While it may still be shocking for people to learn who the leader of the Proud Boys is — a Latino who, as the Capitol attack unfolded, reportedly took credit for it, writing in an encrypted text, “Make no mistake. We did this” — this isn’t the first time that Latinos have been involved in a self-identified, self-professed white supremacist collective, according to Hernández. Other examples of Latinos linked to white nationalist groups: Juan Cadavid, originally from Colombia, took part in pro-Trump violent clashes in Southern California in 2017; Alex Michael Ramos, a Puerto Rican from Georgia who beat a Black man during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, also in 2017; and Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist influencer of Mexican American descent.

What drives a non-white person to take part in violence against racial minorities? “What’s the best way to distance yourself from feeling like you’re part of an oppressed group? It’s to align yourself with those who are part of the oppressors,” said Hernández. Additionally, whiteness has been very elastic throughout history, she said. “People who today we think of as white people with Italian American or Irish American ancestry were, at the turn of last century, viewed as non-white. Whiteness sort of expanded to include them.”

Manuel Roig-Fanzia of The Washington Post Magazine discloses that during Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein searched through Attorney General John Mitchell’s home office at the behest of his wife, Martha Mitchell.

On this particular Sunday, Martha was calling Woodward with an invitation. Her husband, recently indicted for a second time in the cascading Watergate scandal, had left her, moving out of their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Would Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein — she always pronounced it, incorrectly, as “bern-STINE” ― like to come up and look through her husband’s home office?

Woodward, discussing the episode at length publicly for the first time in an interview at his Georgetown home, said he did not want to miss such a rare opportunity. The sequence of events shows Mitchell at her most swaggering but also offers a glimpse at the reportorial techniques that made Woodward and Bernstein two of the most celebrated journalists of the 20th century. [...]

Satisfied that they were working with a solid source and were on firm legal ground, Woodward and Bernstein headed for the airport and caught the Eastern Air Lines shuttle to New York. When they arrived midafternoon, Martha Mitchell greeted them at the door of her Fifth Avenue apartment. She held a martini in her hand. She was “gracious” and “a little drunk,” Bernstein recalled. Mitchell gave the reporters a tour of the well-appointed space with its floral print sofas. Then, she pointed down a long hallway. John Mitchell’s office.

“Have at it, boys,” she told them. “Please nail himI hope you get the bastard.”

Now that is a dish that was served ice cold, lmbao.

Paul Waldman, also of The Washington Post, wonders about the reasons behind the rampant crime wave in rural America.

So how do we explain this? None of the things conservatives blame for crime — progressive prosecutors, lenient Democratic politicians, police feeling disrespected by racial justice protests, a lack of religious piety — are present in these places.

If — as we’ve all been told again and again — voters are fed up with “soft on crime” Democrats and are ready to “send them a message” in November’s midterm elections, to whom should a message be sent about the rural crime wave? And what should that message be?

The causes of the rural crime wave are as complex as those of urban crime, but at heart they’re about the pandemic. It isolated people from the friends, family and institutions that traditionally provide support. For many it caused sickness and grief. It elevated everyone’s stress level, brought new mental illness, left people feeling angry and powerless. Many took those experiences and tensions out on each other. [...]

My guess is that they wouldn’t say it’s a failure of political leadership. After all, in many if not most of the affected rural areas, every public official — from the sheriff to the mayor to the county council all the way up to the House member, the senators and the governor — is a conservative Republican.

Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic warns that Pizzagate-like conspiracies are now targeting all LGBTQ people and can take place in any city.

Now, a little more than five years later, 25 percent of Republicans identify as believers of the Pizzagate successor QAnon, and the far right’s capacity for street violence has grown. At the same time, where once most elected Republican officials would at least nominally distance themselves from Pizzagate-pushers out on the fringe, that wall has largely eroded. Across the country, GOP lawmakers have waged a legislative crusade targeting queer and trans kids, smearing opponents as “groomers,” language that rhymes with the “pedophile” claims that inspired the attack on Comet Ping Pong. And where once the targets of these conspiracy theories were largely confined to a select group of Democratic lawmakers and their allies, the fearmongering—amplified by Fox News and prominent conservative social media accounts—is now targeted at all LGBTQ people, from national figures to members of your local community. The stage is set for a Pizzagate in any city.

Ms. Grant was writing about the incident at a Pride event in the Oak Lawn section of Dallas last week but sure enough...

NEW: A U-Haul with masked neo-Nazi white supremacists was pulled over near a Pride event in Idaho— an officer said they were detained en masse on suspicion of conspiracy to riot and had weapons in the truck, per @thedailybeast. pic.twitter.com/ZYVOevggPG

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 11, 2022

I’m currently in Coeur d’Alene where an annual family event called Pride in the Park is projected to come under attack from fascist militias and right-wing / christo-fascist extremists.

— alissa azar (@AlissaAzar) June 11, 2022

Bible-browbeating bigots is nothing new at Pride events; I’ve encountered them. Armed neo-Nazi white supremacists, however, is something rare.

Be careful out there.

Inside Climate News reports on a study that concludes that “divisive” cultural issues and disinformation campaigns is delaying action on climate change.

A team of researchers and environmental advocates are urging governments and Big Tech companies to do far more to stop rampant online disinformation campaigns, which they say aim to delay action on the climate crisis by intentionally dragging the issue into the culture wars now dominating Western politics. Failing to stop such campaigns, the groups warned in a new report, could further splinter unity at November’s climate talks and jeopardize a global effort that has struggled to slash planet-warming emissions.[...]

The report, which analyzed hundreds of thousands of social media posts over the last 18 months, found that despite promises from tech companies in recent years to crack down on the spread of “fake news” on their platforms, posts with misleading or false information about climate change continue to flourish online. It also found that much of the disinformation is coming from a small group of actors who wield a large sphere of influence online and have found success in sowing doubt over the urgency of global warming by tapping into populist sentiments such as distrust in scientific experts and wealthy elites, as well as a nationalistic and isolationist view of global politics.

For example, the analysis found 6,262 Facebook posts and 72,356 tweets where users blamed other countries for climate change while deflecting the responsibility of their own country. Posts from Western countries tended to highlight the shortcomings of China and India, claiming they were not doing enough so there was no point in anyone acting. The study also found 115,830 tweets and 15,443 Facebook posts that called into question—often inaccurately—the viability and effectiveness of renewable energy technologies.

Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon write for Foreign Policy that Russian war crimes in Ukraine are so vast and unprecedented that efforts by various Ukrainian and international organizations to investigate and prosecute cases are becoming chaotic.

“The national legal system, even with an effective prosecutor’s office, couldn’t cope with 15,000 cases,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, a leading Ukrainian human rights lawyer and the head of the Ukraine-based Center for Civil Liberties, told Foreign Policy during a recent visit to Washington. “And remember, we are a country still at war. We have limited resources.”

There are so many alleged Russian war crimes that the investigative response is also unprecedented. The ICC, the premier intergovernmental body tasked with prosecutions of war crimes, has dispatched 42 investigators to probe possible war crimes in Ukraine, its “largest-ever” team of experts to carry out such a task. Other European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Poland, joined Ukraine in setting up a so-called Joint Investigation Team to cooperate on war crimes investigations, while the U.S. government is funding complementary efforts to document war crimes and support Ukrainian organizations dedicated to doing so. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a leading multilateral organization, has also established an expert mission to document human rights abuses. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the prosecutor general’s office has brought forward several war crimes trials against captured Russian soldiers and is investigating thousands more, while civil society groups are training volunteers on how to properly document evidence of possible war crimes, effectively crowdsourcing the early stages of investigations for future cases.

There’s a growing concern among some U.S. officials and Ukrainian activists that all these concurrent efforts could eventually trip over one another and may start doing more harm than good—that is, unless there’s a central hub set up to coordinate all the work. “It’s been a little bit chaotic,” conceded one U.S. official working on supporting efforts to document war crimes in Ukraine, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media. (Van Schaack, for her part, insisted that these efforts are “decentralized,” but not chaotic, because each group is in constant contact with one another to coordinate their work.)

Rajeev Agarwal of The Diplomat writes about the efforts of India and Iran to reset their diplomatic relationship.

India and Iran share close historical ties from the times of Persian Empire and Indian kingdoms. Iran is an important nation in India’s neighborhood and in fact, the two countries shared a border until India’s partition and independence in 1947. Iran is also important to India as it provides an alternate route of connectivity to Afghanistan and Central Asian republics, in the absence of permission for India to use the land route through Pakistan.

India-Iran relations have, however, witnessed ups and down over the decades, mostly owing to factors that go beyond strictly bilateral issues, like the stoppage of oil imports from Iran after May 2019 owing to U.S. sanctions following the revocation of the Iran nuclear deal, India’s close relations with Israel, and Iran’s ties with China, including signing a 25-year strategic partnership agreement. There are other sticky issues, too, like Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen launching drone attacks against Saudi Arabia and UAE, both close partners to India, or Iran’s statement on the Modi government’s abrogation of Article 370 of Indian Constitution, which gave special status to Kashmir. Iran on its end has not taken kindly to India succumbing to international pressure of sanctions on Iran. However, both countries have tried to keep their engagement above such occurrences and maintain a cordial trajectory of bilateral ties.

Despite the rather subdued engagement with Iran, there are a number of areas of convergence and enhanced engagement for India to consider. Afghanistan presents one such opportunity. The Taliban government has largely been isolated since it took over Kabul in August 2021. Iran was one of the few countries that did not withdraw its embassy from Kabul and has continued to keep its channels of communication open with the Taliban. India, on the other hand, was quick to wind up its embassy in Kabul but has now indicated that it is keen to reopen its embassy in some form shortly. A delegation from India met the Taliban foreign minister in Kabul on June 2. Iran and India have collaborated already in the past on Afghanistan and Iran’s role as a viable direct land route to Afghanistan is undisputable. India and Iran have the potential to forge a common and effective policy of engagement with Afghanistan in the future.

Finally today, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post celebrates the art of photographer Gordon Parks and those that are inspired by him.

Parks died in 2006 at 93, but his artistic impact is as potent as ever. He was a Black man documenting the highs and lows of his people, as well as the broader world. His legacy is expansive, arguably more than any other Black photographer’s. He moved through life wearing cowboy hats, leather bombers and ascots, breaking racial barriers, opening doors for others. His work explored issues of inequality and poverty that still haunt us, launching conversations that continue in art, politics and activism. And most important in 2022, Parks and his foundation help subsequent generations of Black artists see themselves, their communities and their possibilities more clearly. Examining their art, and looking at the ways in which it relates to the work Parks was doing more than 50 years ago, helps us to better understand the impact of history, human nature and systemic racism on our lives today. It also reminds us to pay attention to the simple joys of everyday life.

At a time when the country is spinning in circles trying to make sense of race, ward off inhumanity and define social justice, Parks’s artistic heirs are uniquely positioned to shed light, offer guidance and question the status quo. They’re doing so with heartening audacity and blessed urgency.

“It’s not that I see so much of him in one artist. I see some of him in a lot of artists. I feel Gordon is ubiquitous,” says writer Jelani Cobb, one of the executive producers of a recent documentary on Parks and incoming dean of Columbia Journalism School. “He’s one of those people who may not have the answer, but he helps you understand the right question.”

Everyone have a good day!

Abbreviated pundit roundup: January 6th hearings preview

We begin today’s roundup with a preview of this week's pivotal hearing from the January 6th Committee: 

More than 500 days removed from the violent attack on the US Capitol, the committee investigating it is ready to show its work. The House select committee will hold its first public hearing this week, on June 9 at 8 p.m. ET. Sources told CNN this hearing will be a broad overview of the panel's 10-month investigation and set the stage for subsequent hearings, which are expected to cover certain topics or themes. While the setup of the hearings has been a work in progress and evolving, sources note, the presentations will likely feature video clips from January 6, as well as some of the roughly 1,000 interviews the committee has conducted behind closed doors.

Over at The New York TimesAnnie Karni and Luke Broadwater preview the Democratic messaging strategy:

With their control of Congress hanging in the balance, Democrats plan to use made-for-television moments and a carefully choreographed rollout of revelations over the course of six hearings to remind the public of the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election, and to persuade voters that the coming midterm elections are a chance to hold Republicans accountable for it.

It is an uphill battle at a time when polls show that voters’ attention is focused elsewhere, including on inflation, rising coronavirus cases and record-high gas prices. But Democrats argue the hearings will give them a platform for making a broader case about why they deserve to stay in power.

Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post, we learn more about the scheme to appoint fake electors and undermine the election:

A staffer for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign instructed Republicans planning to cast electoral college votes for Trump in Georgia despite Joe Biden’s victory to operate in “complete secrecy,” an email obtained by The Washington Post shows.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” wrote Robert Sinners, the campaign’s election operations director for Georgia, the day before the 16 Republicans gathered at the Georgia Capitol to sign certificates declaring themselves duly elected. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

Margaret Hartmann looks at “the wildest revelations” so far:

Two days after the 2020 election Donald Trump Jr. sent Meadows a text laying out strategies to ensure his father stayed in office regardless of who actually won, according to CNN. Team Trump went on to pursue the tactics he referenced, including filing lawsuits to challenge election results, demanding recounts, promoting bogus “alternate electors,” and blocking Congress’s certification of a Biden win on January 6, 2021.

“It’s very simple,” Trump Jr. texted to Meadows, “We have multiple paths We control them all.”

Here’s an important piece by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz at The New Yorker on how the January 6th attack has galvanized the extreme right:

In the seventeen months since the insurrection, Cohen said, a unit of some nine hundred analysts had picked up on a number of disturbing patterns. “Anti-government militia, hard-core white supremacists, and even people more from the anarchist movement have come together,” he said. Their goals are explicit: “assassination of elected officials, and violent activities to resist government activities, or programs.”

The ideological hardening was predictable, and predicted, after the attack on the Capitol, according to Elizabeth Neumann, who served as the D.H.S.’s Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention during the Trump Administration. “On January 6th, we had neo-Nazis hanging out with a bunch of otherwise just maga people,” Neumann said, in an interview. “That’s an opportunity to recruit.”

On a final note, don’t miss this in-depth piece by Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic on Steve Bannon’s continuing assault on our democracy:

Bannon started War Room in October 2019, initially to fight Donald Trump’s first impeachment; in January 2020, the show morphed into War Room: Pandemic. But over time, the show became a guided tour through Bannon’s gallery of obsessions: the stolen election, the Biden-family syndicate, the invaders at the southern border, the evil Chinese Communist Party, the stolen election, draconian COVID mandates, the folly of Modern Monetary Theory, the stolen election.

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Critical race theory? Nah. The story is the great replacement scam

Bess Levin/Vanity Fair:

REPUBLICANS ARE FURIOUS PEOPLE REMEMBER THEY’VE BEEN PUSHING THE RACIST “GREAT REPLACEMENT” RHETORIC FOR YEARS

In the era of Donald Trump, a major plank of the modern Republican Party platform is outright racism. Whether it’s the leader of the free world telling four congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came,” a U.S. senator saying he wasn’t afraid of the January 6 rioters but would have been worried if they were Black Lives Matter protesters, a U.S. congresswoman speaking at event put on by a white nationalist, the complete and total hysteria over the idea of children being taught about systemic racism, or a prime-time conservative host’s regular white-power hour, this hateful little ecosystem just loves to appeal to the lowest common denominator by demonizing anyone who isn’t white. But when their actions actually have consequences? And it turns out their hate speech matters? And people have the audacity to suggest they’re part of the problem? Well, they really get their noses out of joint.

Imagine if Trump were President now and Flynn the National Security Adviser…. https://t.co/CQ32e8xSSO

— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) May 17, 2022

The New York Times:

Republicans Play on Fears of ‘Great Replacement’ in Bid for Base Voters

Republicans across the spectrum were quick to denounce the killings. But fewer party leaders appeared willing to break with the politics of nativism and fear the party has embraced to retain the loyalties of right-wing voters inspired by Donald J. Trump.

One Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, on Monday called out her colleagues for not doing enough to squash the extremist wing of her own party.

“House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism,” Ms. Cheney, the former No. 3 House Republican who was removed from that role over her criticism of Mr. Trump, wrote on Twitter. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

The victims of the terrorist attack in #Buffalo haven’t been buried yet, as Orbán refers to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory in opening speech of new term as PM. Many international media don’t even mention it!!!https://t.co/cCgvOzhCAg

— Cas Mudde 😷 (@CasMudde) May 17, 2022

Insider:

Mitch McConnell refuses to condemn racist 'great replacement theory' three separate times in one press conference

  • Some Republicans have promoted a version of the "replacement theory" that motivated the Buffalo shooter.
  • Insider and 2 other reporters repeatedly asked McConnell about the theory, but he wouldn't denounce it.
  • He said racism "ought to be stood up to by everybody, both Republicans and Democrats."

In early 2021, @elizagriswold told me she wanted to write about the rise of Christian nationalism through a little-known Pennsylvania state senator. I grumbled a bit about it. But now Doug Mastriano is the Republican GOP nominee for governor. https://t.co/Z7AbKdBlIk

— Michael Luo (@michaelluo) May 18, 2022

TPM:

How Christian Nationalism And The Big Lie Fused To Fuel Doug Mastriano’s Candidacy

That the Christian right is intertwined with a Republican candidate is hardly new. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the movement has defined GOP politics. What is new, and increasingly perilous, is that over the ensuing years the movement has become more highly radicalized, a trend that was validated and accelerated by Trump’s candidacy and presidency — and especially by his stolen election lie. A movement that elevated Trump to messianic status and shielded him from his 2019 impeachment was able to convince millions that satanic forces had robbed God’s man in the White House of his anointed perch as the restorer of America’s white Christian heritage. Their duty, as patriotic spiritual warriors, was to go to battle on his behalf.

NEW: Ukraine aid splinters GOP. With the nationalist camp growing larger and louder, most Hill Republicans — from rank & file up to McConnell — are aggressively pushing back on what they see as a disturbing trend toward isolationism.https://t.co/bGcNz5sr91

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) May 17, 2022

The Guardian:

Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting

Suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but network has barely mentioned gunman’s reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows

Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News anchor Eric Shawn.

As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and struggled to understand why it had happened, it seemed a glaring omission. But given Carlson and his colleagues’ promotion of the theory, which has been unchecked by Fox News’s top executives, experts see the network as being left in a bind.

“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”

Finnish parliament votes: 🇫🇮 Independence declaration 1917 100-88 🇪🇺 EU membership 1994: 152-45 🪖 #Nato membership 2022: 188-8 https://t.co/dN7UwOUsaH

— adam seven 🇫🇮 🇪🇺 (@a7_FIN_SWE) May 17, 2022

NBC News:

Trump waded into GOP primaries. Democrats hope he sticks around.

The former president’s presence is being increasingly felt in Democrats’ midterm message as they look to leverage his divisiveness to their advantage in yet another election.

Donald Trump has inserted himself into the Republican primaries this week in Pennsylvania, much to the chagrin of some GOP members there, who think he may have picked the wrong candidates and needlessly shuffled the race.

Democrats, however, aren't so sure they've got a problem with the former president making himself an outsize figure in the races there or nationwide, as they try to leverage his divisiveness to their advantage in yet another election.

Democrats are largely still trying to settle on exactly what role Trump should play in their campaigns as they defend razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate this fall.

But there is a growing acknowledgement that leveraging voters’ lingering distaste from the Trump years may be among their best strategies for turning out their voters in November, particularly with their policy agenda falling short in areas like lowering the cost of prescription drugs and passing voting rights legislation.

I don’t think I’ve read a better summary of what US political journalists should be doing that also makes clear what a terrible job they’re doing now. By Dan @froomkin in @thenation https://t.co/fW74bz9LHj pic.twitter.com/mH9xOdZ3XH

— Will of the Northern Loons 🇺🇸🇸🇪🌻🇺🇦 (@WMRine) May 17, 2022

David Leonhardt/The New York Times:

The Right’s Violence Problem

The Buffalo killings are part of a pattern: Most extremist violence in the U.S. comes from the political right.

As this data shows, the American political right has a violence problem that has no equivalent on the left. And the 10 victims in Buffalo this past weekend are now part of this toll. “Right-wing extremist violence is our biggest threat,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, has written. “The numbers don’t lie.”

What was Pompeo’s brain trust doing during the Jan. 6 insurrection? One of Pompeo’s State Department assistants was meeting these folks https://t.co/iMnwUtBavH

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) May 17, 2022

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Anatomy of a French presidential win

Adam Gopnik/New Yorker:

The Real Meaning of Emmanuel Macron’s Victory

The fact is that, in difficult circumstances, Macron has managed to win the Presidency twice.
[Marine] Le Pen did not get an enormous vote as a far-right extremist; she got an exceptionally large, though losing, share by pretending not to be a far-right extremist. She also benefited enormously from the presence of [Eric] Zemmour, who was so much further right and so unapologetically anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant that Le Pen seemed temperate by comparison. The whole force, and successful burden, of Macron’s remarks as the campaign ended was to remind people who Le Pen really is, and what her family legacy has been—though struggling to differentiate herself from her openly fascistic-minded father, she inherited her position mainly because of her family name—and what she really stood for. He did, and the French understood the reminder.

„The decisions we make will also kill people. With the weapons we send, people will be killed, in this case Russian soldiers.“ Quite extraordinary for German politics how clearly Habeck has been communicating in this crisis and explaining fraught and complex issues. https://t.co/5Qr5fyCKyH

— Kai Kupferschmidt (@kakape) April 28, 2022

Walter Shapiro/TNR:

The U.S. Needs an Endgame in the Russia-Ukraine War

So far, Biden and the public are fully behind sending arms to fight Russia. But will the time come for a Putin-appeasing peace treaty?

Still, the quest for total victory in Ukraine is premised on the belief that defeat is the best deterrent. Having forged NATO unity and a surprising degree of economic sacrifice by the Europeans, Putin should be under no illusions that next time will be easier. The Ukraine war is one of those rare times when the morally right course—forcing Russia to retreat from all of Ukraine—is also the approach that appears to make the most strategic sense. There are no certainties in an irrational war seemingly brought on by Putin’s passion to restore the Soviet Union. But America should do everything in its power—short of sending troops—to bring victory parades to Kyiv.

Major shake-up in Bulgaria, as the leading coalition partner - previously seen as dependent on the "pacifist" president Radev - took a clear pro-Ukraine stance today and attacked the president in "presuming that Russia will win this war, while we think Ukraine will win"

— Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) April 27, 2022

Emily Hoge/Lawfare:

The Legacy of the Soviet Afghan War and Its Role in the Ukrainian Invasion

The unifying feature of the Afghan movement was a sense of victimization. Regardless of their politics, Afghan veterans were united by the feeling that they had been betrayed: by a government that sent them to a fight in a disastrous war, by people who now said they were murderers, by the fact that they weren’t considered heroes in the way that World War II veterans were, and by the lack of recognition and benefits they had expected and that were granted to veterans of other wars. In response, they started founding political and mutual aid organizations built around the idea that veterans of Afghanistan were and should be loyal to each other above all else. They felt they didn’t owe anything to and couldn’t rely on anyone but fellow soldiers of complicated wars—members of an international “combat brotherhood” that included them, veterans of Vietnam, and eventually veterans of the conflict in Chechnya and other “local wars.” Above all, they felt that they couldn’t rely on the state, the Soviet state or later the Russian state, to take care of their needs and would take care of each other themselves.

Yet by 2014, when I sent my email for my PTSD research, Afghan veterans’ groups had become loyal advocates of the government, frequently represented at and organizers of pro-Kremlin rallies. Afghan veterans’ groups gathered and trained volunteers to send to Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. Some Russian “volunteers” wounded there were treated in a sanatorium belonging to an Afghan veterans’ group, according to a 2014 interview with fighters published by a now-defunct Russian-language website. Veterans’ groups were some of the first Russian organizations to establish branches in Crimea after its annexation. Many Afghan veterans, even though they were mostly in their 50s and 60s, went to fight in eastern Ukraine themselves.

Patrushev. "If anything today unites the peoples living in Ukraine, it is only the fear of the atrocities of the nationalist battalions...the result of the policy of the West and the Kyiv regime under its control can only be the disintegration of Ukraine into several states." https://t.co/dtG62R70ST

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) April 27, 2022

William Saletan/Bulwark:

The Most Damning Part of the Meadows Texts

He knew the president was lying. And he kept helping to spread the lies anyway.
We’ve known for a long time, based on audits, investigations, and court reviews, that Donald Trump’s allegations about massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election are false. We also know, based on firsthand accounts from Trump’s former aides, attorneys, and political allies, that Trump’s advisers repeatedly told him the allegations were false. That leaves two possibilities: Either Trump is lying, or he’s trying to overthrow the government based on an impenetrable delusion. Take your pick.

Now we’re compiling similar evidence against Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff during the election. He, too, knew Trump’s accusations were false. And instead of telling the truth, Meadows helped spread the lies.

The latest evidence comes from a batch of more than 2,000 text messages, revealed by CNN that were sent to or from Meadows between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021. Three of the exchanges are particularly instructive: one in early November of that year, another in late November, and a third in early December.

Do you know many people who publicly support Putin, who continue to praise and love him even now? Who stay loyal to Putin even after the massacres in Bucha and Irpin, after mass civilian killings and rapes? It's incomprehensible, right? pic.twitter.com/gSHjjdUH9K

— Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) April 27, 2022

Today I will tell you the story of the star Russian maestro Valery Gergiev. The celebrity conductor who headed the London Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and many others. He was once the most wanted guest at La Scala, The Met Opera, Grand Opera, everywhere. pic.twitter.com/iu3uHlpbnY

— Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) April 27, 2022

Politico:

Multiple RNC staffers have spoken to Jan. 6 panel, sources say House investigators have questions about the party’s messaging and fundraising in the weeks after the 2020 election.

Most of the officials who have spoken with investigators are former employees who worked during the 2020 election cycle, including the fraught period between Election Day and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, one of the people said.

That means the committee has more insight than previously known into the Republican Party’s activity in the lead-up to January 6. The interviews underscore the select committee’s interest in how political messaging by the national GOP apparatus — which partnered with the Trump campaign on digital fundraising efforts — may have stoked falsehoods about the 2020 election.

They also want to know just how successful one particular email campaign was at getting users to click through to donation websites. Those emails prompted people to give money based on false claims the election was stolen, the select committee has emphasized.

Committee investigators have said they’re interested in who authorized the RNC’s specific messaging about the election outcome and whether it played a role in stoking the violent mob that breached the Capitol on Jan. 6.

New: discussions involving the Trump WH RE using emergency powers have become an imp but little-known part of the J6 cmte's investigation. Our dive into all the talk abt helping Trump strong-arm his way past an electoral defeat, w @jdawsey1 & @thamburger: https://t.co/RGkcginwus

— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) April 27, 2022

Mark Liebovitch/Atlantic:

Just Call Trump a Loser

His record is clear. Some nervy Republican challenger should say so.

But if Trump does decide to inflict himself on another race, he will enter as the clear Republican favorite, enjoying a presumption of invincibility inside the GOP. This has engendered a belief that anyone who challenges Trump must tread lightly, or end up like the roadkill that his primary opponents became in 2016.

That notion is outdated.

Trump’s bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and heir apparent. In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s feelings.

NEW: Russia's war in Ukraine has turned to the cloudy Donbas, putting low-flying fighter jets in missile range. The change has forced both Russia & Ukraine to turn to drones to keep a watchful eye in the sky and hit targets on the ground.https://t.co/NO2eHhnQ6n

— Jack Detsch (@JackDetsch) April 27, 2022

Morning Consult:

Most Governors Facing Re-Election This Year Are Quite Popular Democrats in Rhode Island, Wisconsin and New Mexico have the weakest job approval ratings of governors up in 2022

Most governors facing re-election in November are beginning the year popular with voters in their states, according to Morning Consult Political Intelligence quarterly tracking. And despite declines over the past year, a handful of Republicans among them are some of the most-liked governors in the country

Ex-Georgian leader who lost war against Russia thinks Ukraine will prevail https://t.co/codzZjsv3w pic.twitter.com/QM91O3TcZF

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 28, 2022

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: War and peace

We begin this morning with Tom Hill of the War on the Rocks blog writing about the monumental difficulties of attaining a negotiated settlement in the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Negotiations to end this war, however, are not only a matter for the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators at Antalya, the Pripyat River, and elsewhere. External parties were part of the war’s structural and proximate causes. The war’s course, and how it ends, will have substantial consequences for many states other than Ukraine and Russia, including strategic interests related to national security and nuclear deterrence. The stability of any deal to end the war will also be shaped by external support, pressures, and guarantees — or lack thereof. One way or another, external states will be involved, and in significant ways, in attempts to negotiate an end to this war. [...]

This article is an attempt to chart some of the hypothetical options for securing a de-escalation, through a discussion of four of the core issues of the conflict: Russian military withdrawal, Crimea, the Donbas, and Ukraine’s independence and foreign policy identity. These options are not a prediction of what kind of war-termination deal will transpire, nor are they a proposal of what the parties should or should not accept. Instead, this is an exercise to illuminate the scale of the challenge for negotiators and to highlight the serious preparations (both in terms of policymaking and in terms of public expectations) that these negotiations will require.

As this analysis demonstrates, the incentives against Russia implementing key components of a peace agreement are significant. Tough trade-offs and external support will be needed for a sustainable peace agreement — including preparation of a clear and coordinated Western offer to Russia on sanctions relief in return for Russia’s acceptance and implementation of Ukraine’s most important demands.

Michael D. Shear of The New York Times reports that President Biden plans to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower oil prices that have skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Biden could announce the plan to tap the reserve as soon as Thursday, said the official, who requested anonymity because the plan was not ready to be announced Wednesday night. The idea would be to combat rising prices at the pump.

The president’s public schedule, which was released Wednesday night, said he would deliver remarks Thursday afternoon on the administration’s “actions to reduce the impact of Putin’s price hike on energy prices and lower gas prices at the pump for American families,” a reference to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. [...]

If fully enacted, the president’s plan would release 180 million barrels from the reserve, which is intended to help the United States weather spikes in demand or drops in supply. About 550 million barrels are in the reserve, which has a reported total capacity of about 714 million barrels.

Bashar Deeb writes for POLITICO Europe writes about European double standards when it comes to refugees.

Indeed, bad actors like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko have sought to blackmail the European Union with threats of allowing migrants to freely cross over from their countries. But what the response to Ukraine shows is that it’s not migrants who are being weaponized; it’s the EU’s own xenophobia. After all, no one can blackmail you with unarmed colored people unless you are scared of them. Only a Europe that is so fearful of its far right that it ends up adopting its racist agenda can be held hostage by people looking for a better life, a safe environment in which to raise their families.

And it’s not just those fleeing violence who suffer when the EU raises its drawbridges. It’s the EU’s own interests as well. When Europe waves in Ukrainians while leaving others floating at sea on engineless life rafts, or executes brutal pushbacks that leave people robbed and stripped naked at its land borders, it is directly supplying the Kremlin and its other enemies with propaganda.[...]

Some Western commentators have added fuel to that fire, with journalists describing Ukrainians as civilized Europeans with white skin and blue eyes, unaccustomed to the horrors of war. Commentary like that adds nothing to the story, but it does dehumanize the displacement experiences of black and brown people.

When I heard these comments, as a Syrian, I could not help but feel insulted, but because of my work, I can see where the problem lies.

Laura Bronner of FiveThirtyEight writes that, yes, Europe is more tolerant of Ukrainian refugees...for now.

In fact, that trajectory is not uncommon in humanitarian crises: Support for refugees can start relatively high in the immediate aftermath of a disaster to only crater as news cycles change, anecdotal accounts of difficulties emerge and sympathies move on. It’s one reason why support for Ukrainian refugees may ultimately prove to be short-lived, too.

There is one point in the scientific literature on public opinion toward asylum seekers that is quite clear, however: Not all refugees are welcome.legal distinctions between refugees and asylum seekers in some places, the terms are often used interchangeably. In a huge, 18,000-person, 15-country European survey, political scientists Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner found a number of characteristics ranging from refugees’ religion to their ability to speak the language that made people less — or more — willing to accept them.

In particular, Bansak, Hainmueller and Hangartner found that people were 11 percentage points less likely to say they would accept a Muslim refugee than a Christian one. They also found people were less willing to accept men seeking asylum than women. How “deserving” people thought refugees were also played a role, with refugees seeking asylum for economic opportunity being far less accepted than victims of political, religious or ethnic persecution. Victims of torture were also more likely to be accepted, as were asylum seekers without inconsistencies in their stories…

Yes, a lot of the racism and ethnic resentment that led to Brexit was directed at the migration of Eastern Europeans to the UK, for example. The idea that some European countries may get tired of Ukrainian migrants at some point in the future is not as far-fetched as it might seem now.

Heather Cox Richardson begins her latest post at her Letters From an American blog writing about the hiring of Mike Mulvaney by CBS News as introduction of the need of the political media to take Republican batsh*t seriously because of the enormous stakes.

Here’s what’s at stake: On the one hand, Biden is trying to rebuild the old liberal consensus that used to be shared by people of both parties, instituted by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protect workers from the overreach of their employers and expanded under Republican Dwight Eisenhower to protect civil rights. To this, Biden has focused on those previously marginalized and has added a focus on women and children.

Biden’s new budget, released earlier this week, calls for investment in U.S. families, communities, and infrastructure, the same principles on which the economy has boomed for the past year. The budget also promotes fiscal responsibility by rolling back Trump’s tax cuts on the very wealthy. Biden’s signature yesterday on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime in the United States, is the culmination of more than 100 years of work.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are defending democracy against authoritarianism, working to bring together allies around the globe to resist the aggression of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is working to get rid of the New Deal government. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to face the midterms without a platform, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who chairs the committee responsible for electing Republican senators, has produced an “11-point plan to rescue America.” It dramatically raises taxes on people who earn less than $100,000, and ends Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

With Maine Senator Susan Collins’ “concerns” over the nomination of Judge Ketjani Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court having subsided (at least for the time being), Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post writes that attention has turned to the ever-so thoughtful and contemplative deliberation to be made by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Her vote is being closely watched not only in D.C., where Democrats are eager to put a bipartisan stamp on Jackson’s likely confirmation, but also back home in Alaska, where Murkowski is standing for reelection this year under a newfangled election process in which traditional party primaries have been replaced with an all-comers runoff system that lets voters rank their preferred choices in the four-candidate general election.[...]

Although she backed the vast majority of President Donald Trump’s policy initiatives and nominees, she was among a small number of congressional Republicans who frustrated and ultimately foiled the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Under Biden, she has voted to confirm all of his Cabinet nominees, save for Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, as well as more than 50 of his judicial nominees — a record of cross-aisle comity matched only by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). [...}

Now all eyes are firmly on Murkowski. Collins on Wednesday announced she would back Jackson, saying the judge possessed “the experience, qualifications and integrity” necessary to serve. Graham, meanwhile, has strongly indicated he is likely to oppose Jackson’s ascension to the high court and questioned her aggressively about her sentencing record and other matters during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week.

Study: When white Americans heard about COVID hitting people of color harder, a lot of them mentally peaced out. This is ugly. https://t.co/AZnRJPQdMS pic.twitter.com/MHGDIlCWv8

— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) March 30, 2022

That much has been obvious ever since the data showing the racial disparities was announced and, in response, The Damn Fool called for the churches to be filled on Easter Sunday 2020. NIce to have the data to back it up.

Thomas Edsall of The New York Times writes about both the gender and partisan gaps over whether the United States has become “too soft and feminine.”

Deckman and Cassese found a large gender gap: “56 percent of men agreed that the United States has grown too soft and feminine, compared to only 34 percent of women.”

But the overall gender gap paled in comparison with the gap between Democratic men and Republican men. Some 41 percent of Democratic men without college degrees agreed that American society had become too soft and feminine compared with 80 percent of Republican men without degrees, a 39-point difference. Among those with college degrees, the spread grew to 64 points: Democratic men at 9 percent, Republican men at 73 percent.

The gap between Democratic and Republican women was very large but less pronounced: 28 percent of Democratic women without degrees agreed that the country had become too soft and feminine compared with 57 percent of non-college Republican women, while 4 percent of Democratic women with degrees agreed, compared with 57 percent of college-educated Republican women.

Russell K. Robinson writes for the San Francisco Chronicle that “Hollywood still has a gay problem.”

With her win for Best Supporting Actress, Afro-Latina Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer woman of color to nab one of the film industry’s most coveted awards in an acting category. But if you think her win, and other pro-LGBTQ speeches during the show, mean Hollywood has fundamentally changed, you’re wrong.

Hollywood still has a gay problem.

For decades, heterosexual and cisgender actors have built or capped their careers by playing LGBTQ characters to great acclaim. Think Tom Hanks bravely agreeing to play a gay man dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia” or Sean Penn subverting his macho reputation as a gay political trailblazer in “Milk.” This career strategy continues to pay off. Benedict Cumberbatch’s two Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, including this year for “The Power of the Dog,” were for playing a gay man. Two of Penélope Cruz’s four Academy Award nominations, for her work in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and this year’s nomination for “Parallel Mothers,” were for playing queer women.

But the career boost does not work in reverse. Openly LGBTQ actors generally do not win acclaim for playing heterosexual, cisgender characters. No one is praising DeBose for “acting straight.” Indeed, DeBose is unusual because openly LGBTQ actors are generally not cast in Oscar caliber movies as queer or straight characters.

Finally, today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer that..well, the definition of a “woman’ is a little complicated.

“Can you provide a definition for the word woman?”

Until recently, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn would never have dreamed of asking such a question in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, as she did last week of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. But in 2022, Blackburn properly deduced that she could score a few right-wing culture-warrior points by leaning into GOP anxieties over gender and shifting popular perceptions of it.

Jackson’s response — “No, I can’t. … Not in this context. I’m not a biologist” — sent many Republicans into predictable fits of apoplexy. [...]

By definition, I’m a definitions guy. Dictionaries are invaluable tools in our inexorable quest to be as precise and concise as possible. But as I’ve written previously, dictionaries are an ideal place to start your search and a terrible place to stop.

The definition of woman, which Blackburn faux-pretended was the easiest question she could ask, is a case in point.

Everyone have a great day!

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: President Zelensky addresses Congress

We start off today with Robin Wright of The New Yorker and her review of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s virtual address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress yesterday.

In a concise eighteen minutes, Zelensky outlined an ambitious wish list of actions both to help Ukraine and punish Russia. He once again called for the West to create a no-fly zone—to “close the skies” and to limit the ability of Russian warplanes to strike Ukraine’s cities. If a no-fly zone was “too much to ask,” Zelensky appealed for more advanced missile-defense systems and aircraft. “I call on you to do more!” he said. Despite growing pressure from Congress, President Joe Biden has resisted Zelensky’s request for the no-fly zone, and for the transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets that Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly. Washington fears that any direct U.S. intervention could spark a wider conflict. “That’s called World War Three,” Biden said last week. Zelensky also asked the U.S. to sanction every Russian politician and widen the economic dragnet. “I am asking that Russians do not receive a single penny they can use to destroy Ukraine,” he said. He encouraged individual lawmakers to mobilize aid and support for Ukraine from companies in their districts.

Russia’s aggression and its deadly attacks on civilians have spurred a rare moment of unity in Washington. Zelensky received two standing ovations from Republicans and Democrats alike—before he even started speaking. He received a third at the end of his remarks. The charismatic lawyer turned comic turned politician, who took office in 2019, was once a little-known figure in the U.S., whose name came up only in context of the first Trump impeachment. On Wednesday, he joined a short list of foreign leaders who have addressed a joint session of Congress: Winston Churchill, in 1943; Nelson Mandela, in 1990; and Pope Francis, in 2015.

Only one Republican member of Congress voted to impeach or remove Donald Trump from office for withholding military aid that President Zelensky needed for defensive purposes.

Just sayin’.

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post asserts that, in part, because of Zelensky’s speech, the United States cannot simply sit on the sidelines when the fate of a democracy is at stake.

There were several new aspects to Zelensky’s message. First, while he asked for a no-fly zone or, as an alternative, aircraft to “protect our sky,” he sought at least the means of shooting down Russian planes: “You know what kind of defense systems we need — S-300 and other similar systems.”

The administration and many lawmakers have opposed a no-fly zone as a dangerous escalation that would inevitably involve military conflict with Russia. Likewise, the administration has resisted pleas for military aircraft as both escalatory and unnecessary. (Ukraine has more than 50 fighter jets.) But air-defense systems might bridge the gap, meeting Ukraine’s needs without raising the risk of World War III.

Second, Zelensky’s concluding appeal for the United States to end its reluctance to provide international leadership might have more impact than any domestic politician, think tank or pundit could. “You are the leader of the nation, of your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace,” he said. With that, he demolished any notion that the United States can remain on the sidelines.

I won’t fault President Zelensky for asking for anything at this time; he needs all the help that he can get. And in principle, I agree with Rubin; when a democracy asks for help under these circumstances, the United States, the so-called greatest democracy in the world, should be willing and ready to do what it can

Brian Klass of The Atlantic writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into “the dictator trap.”

Autocrats such as Putin eventually succumb to what may be called the “dictator trap.” The strategies they use to stay in power tend to trigger their eventual downfall. Rather than being long-term planners, many make catastrophic short-term errors—the kinds of errors that would likely have been avoided in democratic systems. They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice. They misunderstand their population. They don’t see threats coming until it’s too late. And unlike elected leaders who leave office to riches, book tours, and the glitzy lifestyle of a statesman, many dictators who miscalculate leave office in a casket, a possibility that makes them even more likely to double down.

Despots sow the seeds of their own demise early on, when they first face the trade-off between allowing freedom of expression and maintaining an iron grip on power. After arriving in the palace, crushing dissent and jailing opponents is often rational, from the perspective of a dictator: It creates a culture of fear that is useful for establishing and maintaining control. But that culture of fear comes with a cost.

For those of us living in liberal democracies, criticizing the boss is risky, but we’re not going to be shipped off to a gulag or watch our family get tortured. In authoritarian regimes, those all-too-real risks have a way of focusing the mind. Is it ever worthwhile for authoritarian advisers to speak truth to power?

After playing a significant role in the installation of an American president, I honestly believe that Vladimir Putin believed that he was invulnerable.

Mikhail Viktorovich Zygar, a Russian journalist writing for Der Spiegel, points out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first time that middle-class Russians have sought to leave the country as fast as possible.

The departure of the Russian middle class from the country, which began on Sunday, Feb. 27, has become increasingly infused by panic. That was the day most European countries closed their airspace to Russian aircraft. Many Russians thought that the borders would soon be sealed and that there would be no way out.

The result was an almost tenfold increase in ticket prices from Moscow to Istanbul, Dubai, Yerevan, Baku, Bishkek and even Ulaanbaatar. Russia’s intellectuals flew out in all directions, taking the most bizarre detours. Indeed, the fear of closed borders remains one of the most persistent phobias of all former residents of the Soviet Union.

Over the past 20 years of Putin's presidency, as respect for human rights and freedom of expression has continued to deteriorate, many Russians established a red line for themselves, beyond which they would be willing to emigrate: if the borders were to be closed. Behind this is an historical trauma that Russian society still has not overcome, even though it lies more than one hundred years in the past. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup and overthrew the liberal interim government. A few months later, they closed the borders, forbidding travel abroad, much less the export of money and valuables. The Russian nobility, poets of the Silver Age, outstanding avant-garde artists, dancers of the Russian ballet, scientists, writers and journalists were forced to seek ways to escape, abandoning all their possessions.

Andrey Pertsev, writing for the Russian independent news outlet Meduza, interviews a development expert about the effects that sanctions will probably have on ordinary Russians.

According to Zubarevich, it’s city dwellers, not villagers, who will experience the effects of the coming economic downturn most acutely. That’s because they have more to lose.

“Income per capita in Moscow is twice as high as that of Russia as a whole,” Zubarevich told Meduza. “Consumer demand in Moscow will change as the food and beverage industry shrinks. Housing, utility, and transport costs aren’t going anywhere. It’s too early to talk about anything else, because consumption patterns haven’t changed yet, but I will say that Moscow is skewed towards the service sector, and the risks there are quite high.”{...]

Even outside of the cities, where people can grow their own food in a pinch, nobody will be spared completely. “We’re at the beginning of a giant experiment: how will consumption patterns shift? Grocery stores aren’t going away, but everything else is an open question,” said Zubarevich. “But people [in rural areas] have gardens: they’ll plant more potatoes, some will grow cucumbers and tomatoes, some have animals — chickens, pigs. Life in those towns is a lot more closely tied to the land, so their losses will be mainly due to inflation.”

I’ve gotten sick of articles like this and this that seem to be extolling President Zelensky as paving the way for some sort of redefinition of some sort of old school version of manhood. Laszlo Solymar writes for The Article about some important history about the “spoils of war” that Soviet soldiers felt free to take in 1945 in Budapest.

That women can be regarded as spoils of war is not a new thing. When I came across the concept in my early teens I could not understand why, after the victory at Troy, Agamemnon brought Cassandra, quite openly, to his Royal palace in Argos. According to my understanding at the time, men were supposed to keep their wives and mistresses apart. Then it was explained to me that Agamemnon got Priam’s daughter as part of the post-war settlement and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, should have accepted that. Well, she did not and that led to all kind of deceit and murder and eventually to her own demise.

The above reference to a Greek tragedy intends only to show that the idea of women as spoils of war is not a 20th-century invention. History is full of them, although very few of these women left written testimonies. I know something of the subject because I was in Budapest in January 1945 when the Soviet Army occupied the city. They were supposedly liberating the country. In fact, there was widespread plunder, looting and rape. They did not do it in an organised manner, in contrast to Berlin where rape was institutionalised. In Budapest it was a random, but not infrequent, event, left to the initiative or conscience of the individual soldier.

And there was looting, of course. The Hungarian language was enriched by new words, e.g. zabralni which came from zabirovatj, the Russian word meaning to rob with violence. The combat troops coming first concentrated on watches. The second and third waves were less discriminatory: they took everything: shoes, dresses, coats.

And not to at all diminish what happens when women are treated as “the spoils of war,” some men are treated the same way.

That’s what some people consider to be an “old school version” of manhood in a time of war.

Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review writes about how foreign policy “experts” shape American foreign policy views.

One age-old criticism has been that US networks, in particular, are overly reliant on “expert” pundits with professional and financial ties to the US national-security establishment and defense industry, and rarely give a platform to longstanding anti-war activists. That’s happening again with the Ukraine war. (Just yesterday, CBS News added H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, as a “foreign policy and national security contributor.”) These pundits are (mostly) not apologists for Putin’s invasion—far from it—and they do have expertise relevant to the current moment. Nor do they always agree. But they are not experts in the sense that media people often understand that word—an authority figure who can help put an issue or debate in its proper context—as much as actors often steeped in a particular foreign-policy worldview.

The experts to whom news consumers are exposed influence what they think about the war, and US policy “options” with regard to it. So does the language that they, and we, use. While it is part of our job to convene debates between insightful people, it is not our job to present asymmetrical policies as two equal sides of a coin or to hide the ramifications of those policies behind euphemistic language. As Putin has escalated his war, we’ve heard demands, from US foreign-policy elites but also from Ukrainian leaders, for a NATO “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, sometimes preceded by the adjectives “limited” or “humanitarian”—language that sounds de-escalatory but would actually entail direct military confrontation with a major nuclear power. Since the Biden administration and politicians and analysts from across the political spectrum oppose a no-fly zone as liable to start World War III, this view has gotten plenty of media airtime, and the policy has been characterized in similar ways by some prominent news reporters. But other journalists have too often bandied about the term without adding much context. This is highly consequential. Polls have already shown that public support for a no-fly zone can recede dramatically when it is characterized as an “act of war” or similar.

Moving into domestic politics, Julio Ricardo Varela of NBC News writes about the prevalence of white supremacist views in Latino communities.

Last week’s news that Enrique Tarrio, the former Afro-Cuban leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested on federal charges surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has sparked some interest in an apparently paradoxical reality: nonwhite Latino men worshiping at the altar of American white supremacy and providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.

As a journalist who’s been covering Latino communities for years, I know that this supposed paradox has never existed and that the country’s estimated 62.1 million Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other. American whiteness is a prize; it is where the power lies, and people like Tarrio would rather bask in that whiteness than fight against it and appear too “woke,” even it means tearing down democracy.

Non-Latino media have long been obsessed with proving the claim that more and more Latinos are longing to become white, which ignores the fact that being Latino is not just a sole racial construct but more of a messy combination with ethnicity. Voices from within the U.S. Latino community have responded by diving into the complexities of what it is to be Latino in modern-day America. While it is apparent that the country has become more multiethnic and multiracial, the quest for what Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness” will always have an appeal in our community.

Igor Derysh of Salon that most of the states with the highest per-capita murder rates are states won by Donald Trump in 2020.

In all, eight of the 10 states with the highest per-capita murder rates in the country voted for Trump in 2020. None of those eight states have been carried by a Democrat since 1996. Mississippi had by far the highest murder rate at 20.5 murders per 100,000 residents, followed by Louisiana at 15.79. Alabama, Kentucky and Missouri all had murder rates higher than 14 per 100,000 compared to a national average of 6.5. The only states that voted for Biden to appear in the top 10 are Georgia — a longtime Republican stronghold that went blue by a tiny margin in 2020 — and New Mexico.

Large blue states that have attracted criticism from Republicans had murder rates significantly below the national average. New York's rate was 4.11 murders per 100,000 residents and California's was 5.59. According to the study, Mississippi's murder rate was 400% higher than New York's and 250% higher than California's.

Republicans and the media have also focused on Democratic-led cities in coastal states, but many Republican-led cities have posted much higher murder rates. Despite intensive media coverage of increasing crime in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, the murder rate in that city was only half that of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's district in Bakersfield, a Southern California city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted Trump. Jacksonville, Florida, another Republican-led city, had 120 more murders than San Francisco did in 2020 (with only a slightly larger population) but received a tiny fraction of the national news coverage.

Mariel Padilla and Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th News write that hate crimes against the AAPI community continues to rise in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic waning (for now, anyway).

Hate crimes targeting AAPI people made headlines during the pandemic as officials, from President Donald Trump on down, used xenophobic rhetoric linking the virus with the AAPI community. Then, on March 16, 2021, a White gunman opened fire in three spas in the Atlanta area, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent. Those attacks galvanized many officials to speak out against the violence, or accelerate their work to prevent it. Congress passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Atlanta to speak with community leaders and state lawmakers.

In some states, including California, Illinois and New Jersey, policymakers are pushing new legislation, including bills to direct transit agencies to combat street harassment and require Asian-American history in schools. Now, one year later, people are worried that momentum has waned and not enough is being done even as the number of reported incidents of hate, particularly towards women, continues to rise dramatically.

In recent months, two women of Asian descent were fatally shot in spas in Albuquerque. New York City has seen a particularly gruesome stream of violence: a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent was punched 125 times, seven AAPI women were assaulted by the same man, one woman was pushed in front of an oncoming train and another was found stabbed to death in her own apartment after being followed. Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, tallied nearly 11,000 hate incidents from March 2020 to the end of 2021, according to its latest findings.

Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post write that based on the COVID surge presently in Europe, that Americans need to be prepared for another surge here, as well.

Infectious-disease experts are closely watching the subvariant of omicron known as BA.2, which appears to be more transmissible than the original strain, BA.1, and is fueling the outbreak overseas.

Germany, a nation of 83 million people, saw more than 250,000 new cases and 249 deaths Friday, when Health Minister Karl Lauterbach called the nation’s situation “critical.” The country is allowing most coronavirus restrictions to end Sunday, despite the increase. Britain had a seven-day average of 65,894 cases and 79 deaths as of Sunday, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center. The Netherlands, home to fewer than 18 million people, was averaging more than 60,000 cases the same day.

In all, about a dozen nations are seeing spikes in coronavirus infections caused by BA.2, a cousin of the BA.1 form of the virus that tore through the United States over the past three months.

In the past two years, a widespread outbreak like the one now being seen in Europe has been followed by a similar surge in the United States some weeks later. Many, but not all, experts interviewed for this story predicted that is likely to happen. China and Hong Kong, on the other hand, are experiencing rapid and severe outbreaks, but the strict “zero covid” policies they have enforced make them less similar to the United States than Western Europe.

Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the vagueness of verbs in Florida’s recently passed “Don’t Say Gay” bill and why that vagueness is dangerous.

In the run-up to last week’s passage of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation — an ignorant assault on LGBTQ Floridians and their families — the bill’s proponents accused its detractors of not having actually read the text. They argued that nowhere does the bill say “don’t say gay,” and that the woke mob was twisting its meaning.

They’re right. The bill doesn’t say “don’t say gay.” But it is a grammatical mess that will make its implementation even more abusive than it appears at first glance.

“Does it say that in the bill? Does it say that in the bill?” Gov. Ron DeSantis upbraided a reporter who asked about “Don’t Say Gay.” “I’m asking you to tell me what’s in the bill because you are pushing false narratives,” DeSantis said.

If you say so, guv. Let’s look at the bill, which reads in part: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Everyone have a great day!

Abbreviated pundit roundup: Ukraine update, Trump and Putin, and more

We begin today’s roundup with analysis of the Russian invasion and attacks in Ukraine, starting with an op-ed by Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in The Washington Post:

Of course, evil has always taken root under different circumstances. But we can’t push aside that we are witnessing a barbaric effort to redraw borders by brutal force and erase national identity and self-determination with no room for compromise. [...] 

Hitler’s rise and aggressions were enabled by the inability to confront him early on. The crocodile ate appeasers one by one. The price to put a stop to his global ambitions was devastating. We can’t afford to repeat the same mistakes that were made eight decades ago. “Never again” means acting before it’s too late. “Never again” means stopping the aggressor before it can cause more death and destruction. “Never again” means not letting fear paralyze us.

Here’s Eliot Cohen’s take on The Atlantic on the way forward: 

A broader world order is at stake; so too is a narrower European order. Putin has made no secret of his bitter opposition to NATO and to the independence of former Soviet republics, and it should be expected that after reducing Ukraine, he would attempt something of a similar nature (if with less intensity) in the Baltic states. He has brought war in its starkest form back to a continent that has thrived largely in its absence for nearly three generations. And his war is a threat, too, to the integrity and self-confidence of the world’s liberal democracies, battered as they have been by internal disputes and backsliding abroad.

Bridget Read at The Cut writes about nuclear anxiety:

“That was my awakening, in the moment where that nuclear alert became the most real for me,” [Cynthia Lazaroff, disarmament activist and documentarian] told me on the phone from Hawaii last week. When I asked her how she feels about the looming threat to which she has dedicated her life zooming back into popular conversation, she insisted we should be concerned about nuclear weapons all the time, not just because of recent international conflict the threat had always been pressing. “Nuclear weapons, just by their existence, and by statistics — if we don’t eliminate them, as long as we have them, they’re very likely to be used by accident, miscalculation, or mistake,” she said.

Masha Gessen at The New Yorker on the new Putin symbol of violence:

The new Russian politics of aggression now has a symbol: the letter “Z.” The symbol does not appear to have been conceived in the Kremlin. Rather, it seems to have come to prominence organically, to satisfy some need for an expression of national unity in a time of war—even if Russia continues to claim that there is no war.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait lays out the Putin-Trump relationship:

Trump, of course, was impeached the first time for pressuring Zelenskyy to smear Biden, and his motive was primarily to gain an advantage over his opponent. But he also had clearly absorbed Putin’s idea that Ukraine was a corrupt and undeserving of sovereignty. Trump regularly flummoxed his staff by insisting Ukraine was “horrible, corrupt people,” and “wasn’t a ‘real country,’ that it had always been a part of Russia, and that it was ‘totally corrupt,’” the Washington Post reported. (The element of Russian propaganda here is not the claim that corruption exists in Ukraine, which is true, but the premise that this somehow destroys its claim to sovereignty or justifies subjugation to its far more corrupt neighbor.)

By the end of Trump’s presidency, the distinction between his agenda in Ukraine and the Russian agenda in Ukraine was difficult to discern. In the aftermath of the first impeachment, Rudy Giuliani inherited Manafort’s role as a liaison to the pro-Russian elements in Ukraine’s polity. In his travels through the country, Giuliani linked up with Party of Regions apparatchiks, as well as known Russian intelligence agents, ginning up business proposals and allegations to fling against Biden. Trump’s agents, Russian agents, and pro-Russian Ukrainian apparatchiks were speaking in almost indistinguishable terms.

And on a final note, on International Women’s Day, here is an excellent piece by law professor Melissa Murray on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:

Much has been made in recent days of the racial and gender diversity that President Biden’s choice of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would add to the Supreme Court. But there has been surprisingly little discussion of the fact that she would join Justice Amy Coney Barrett as the court’s second working mother. [...]

Will Judge Jackson’s status as a working mother be similarly deployed as the confirmation process takes shape? While Democrats have touted her sterling qualifications and the historic nature of her nomination as the first Black woman to the court, few have leaned into her identity as a mother, as the Republicans did with Justice Barrett. [...]

Whatever the reason, discussion of Judge Jackson’s bona fides as a working mother has been notably absent among Democrats, who have been focusing on the consequential nature of her nomination. But critically, those qualities have also made her a target of the right. Already, Republican leaders have sniped about Mr. Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman, ignoring — or, in the case of Tucker Carlson, challenging — her superlative credentials and record of public service. It will surely get worse as the confirmation process begins in earnest.

Posted in APR

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The state of the Union is sound, but Europe is at war

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

Five vile things Trump did to Zelensky and Ukraine that you forgot about

The obvious rejoinder to this spin is that Trump got impeached for withholding military aid to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into manufacturing propaganda to help Trump’s reelection. This came even as Zelensky pleaded for help against Russian aggression, which the world is now witnessing unfold in all its horror.

But the focus only on that episode risks oversimplifying the story. It casts this recent history as being mainly about Trump’s personal corruption, i.e., his effort to use foreign policy to smear his campaign opponent.

Belarusians have formed at least five military units in #Ukraine right now and are fighting alongside Ukrainians. Many of them could have fled Ukraine and stayed safe but they decided to support them. Here is an appeal to the Belarusian military not to go to war in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/PMFXHiF0XG

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) March 1, 2022

Some news pieces to catch you up:

NY Times:

Senior EU officials tell me the EU is considering offering qualified Russian 🇷🇺 citizens EU 🇪🇺 passports - to accelerate Russian economic brain drain This is just one of many innovative measures being considered to complement economic sanctions now in place 🇪🇺🇺🇦

— Mujtaba (Mij) Rahman (@Mij_Europe) March 1, 2022

WaPo:

In just 72 hours, Europe overhauled its entire post-Cold War relationship with Russia

Just last week, many European countries were still so somnolent about the threat Russia posed to Ukraine that Germany’s spy chief was caught unawares in Kyiv when the Kremlin invasion started. He had to be extracted in a special operation.

But over just a handful of days, Europe has been shocked out of a post-Cold War era — and state of mind — in which it left many of the democratic world’s most burning security problems to the United States.

Switzerland no longer neutral? That’s not as shocking as Germany deciding to rearm.

The wording by French finance minister @BrunoLeMaire is important. “We are going to wage a total economic and financial war on Russia” https://t.co/t2EAuydqpb https://t.co/SWMvwNjoyH

— Andrew S. Weiss (@andrewsweiss) March 1, 2022

Mitchell A Orenstein/Bulwark:

What Changed Germany’s Mind

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision to give weapons to Ukraine overturned decades of tradition.

Until yesterday, Germany remained extremely reluctant to create even the faintest appearance that it was threatening Russia militarily—hence its refusal even to allow overflight rights to NATO allies exporting arms to Ukraine. For its own domestic and moral reasons, Germany needed to be a peacemaker to the last.

Putin’s blatant and unprovoked assault on Ukraine changed that calculus. Now, no one in their right mind could possibly blame Germany, so it is finally safe to act. Germany can play a key role as a supporter of Ukraine, both by sending arms to help the poor people in Kyiv and throughout the country and by rearming itself, as Scholz has promised to do, to meet the obvious threat from Russia.

The new era has long been coming. For years, Germany’s leaders, committed to good relations, studiously refused to treat Russia as a threat, but rather as a potential partner. Putin made it easy for them to change their minds.

In decades past, when America’s national interest was at stake, especially with a threat from abroad, members of both parties showed solidarity and support for the president. It is fundamental patriotism. Now lacking among a majority of congressional Republicans.

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) March 2, 2022

David Dayen/TAP:

Biden Wants to Take Down the Ocean Shipping Cartel

New initiatives would beef up investigations into anti-competitive conduct from the industry, which is enjoying astronomical profits.

President Biden will target the ocean shipping cartel in tomorrow night’s State of the Union address, outlining new steps to crack down on suspected anti-competitive behavior priced into the cost of every transported good, which has led to astronomical profits for the industry.

The steps include an executive action to commence investigations into ocean shipping excess profit-taking, and a legislative recommendation to bolster the Ocean Shipping Reform Act now working its way through Congress by taking away the industry’s antitrust exemption for so-called “ocean shipping alliances.”

The executive action results from a joint agreement between the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), the main regulator of ocean carriers, and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. Under the arrangement, the Antitrust Division will essentially act as the FMC’s counsel in investigating conduct in the industry, providing the lawyer-power for what would otherwise be an impossible task for an understaffed and under-resourced agency.

This is a powerful speech and everyone should listen. But I'm also interested in the framing of it. Is there any evidence this is not just a random room with a chair and a flag? Plus the shot is so low, as if hiding the absence of a desk or something else. https://t.co/6dUpHQMvAF

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 1, 2022

David Remnick/New Yorker:

The Ambassador Caught Between Ukraine and Trump

In her first major interview since testifying against Trump, Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, discusses Russia’s war on the nation and Trump’s attack on her.

How far will Putin take this? The invasion hasn’t gone the way he would’ve liked, but maybe time is on his side. The sheer volume of arms is on his side. What does he want here?

I think he wants to control Ukraine. When I was in the country, from 2016 to 2019, I always felt that he didn’t really want to own Ukraine, because then there’s at least a modicum of responsibility. He would have to provide services. But he wanted to make sure that Ukraine didn’t have the power of self-determination. He wanted to keep it in his sphere of influence. What he discovered—due, ironically, to his own actions, particularly the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbass—was that he is the single biggest driver since independence, in 1991, of bringing the Ukrainian people together.

As Zelensky fights for his country, for democracy, for his own life, it's crucial that Trump & the GOP hacks who defended his alliance with Putin & his criminal behaviors toward Ukraine be named, quoted, & relentlessly reminded of their votes on impeachment and Jan. 6.

— Joe Hagan (@joehagansays) March 1, 2022

John Cassidy/New Yorker:

How Vladimir Putin Miscalculated the Economic Cost of Invading Ukraine

The Russian leader apparently failed to anticipate the unprecedented targeting of the Central Bank of Russia, a step that has battered the ruble and shaken the country’s financial system.

In wartime, it is wise to treat statements from all sides skeptically. In this case, we don’t need to rely on the assessments of anonymous U.S. officials. When the international markets opened on Monday morning, the value of Russia’s currency plunged by a third. To stem the decline, the Russian Central Bank more than doubled its key interest rate, from 9.5 per cent to twenty per cent, and ordered Russian exporting companies to sell foreign currencies and buy rubles. These desperate moves helped trim losses, but at the close of trading in Moscow the ruble was still down by almost twenty per cent—a huge decline for any currency. In a briefing with reporters, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, conceded that “economic reality had significantly changed.”

In Washington, meanwhile, the Biden Administration intensified its economic offensive by imposing a freeze on the Central Bank of Russia’s assets held in U.S. financial institutions. The Treasury Department also prohibited any U.S. person, including American banks and businesses, from engaging in transactions with Russia’s Central Bank, finance ministry, or sovereign wealth fund. “This action effectively immobilizes any assets of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation held in the United States or by U.S. persons, wherever located,” the Treasury said, in a statement announcing the new policy. In London, the U.K government has introduced a policy along the same lines.

It wasn’t immediately clear just how much money the Central Bank of Russia still holds in New York, London, and other Western financial centers—and which it will no longer be able to access. (According to some estimates, about two-thirds of Russian reserves are now blocked off in countries that have introduced sanctions.) Even so, experts on economic sanctions described the targeting as unprecedented and highly effective. “The G-7 sanctions against the Russian Central Bank, not the swift sanctions, are the real hammer, and they’re showing effect,” Jonathan Hackenbroich, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Russia’s Central Bank might struggle to fight massive inflation and panic even after it doubled interest rates and introduced capital controls.”

First it was 3,000. Then it was 500. Now they don’t even want to talk numbers. https://t.co/oQDgM4hI5q

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 1, 2022

I don’t know whether the alleged Zelensky assassination plot was, in fact, foiled by FSB snitches, as the Ukrainians say. But saying the tip came from with the FSB itself is maximally designed to send the FSB into a counterintelligence ouroboros.https://t.co/t4TK9OoSrs

— Zach Dorfman (@zachsdorfman) March 1, 2022