'Da' for Trump, 'Nyet' for Biden in new Russian world history textbook that propagates the Big Lie

 

In 2017, a Moscow souvenir kiosk offered a drawing depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin holding a baby with the face of Donald Trump, based upon a propaganda poster showing late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin holding a baby.

By Charles Jay for Community Contributors Team

Wednesday, December 27, 2023 at 2:04:49p MST

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Former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election is now being propagated in a new world history textbook for Russian high school students. As for President Joe Biden, he’s described in the new textbook as corrupt and tied to business interests in Ukraine.

On Monday, Marc Bennetts, a foreign correspondent for The Times of London, posted images on X, formerly known as Twitter, with a translation from the new textbook written for Russian students in the 11th (graduating) grade.

The textbook says Trump lost the 2020 election “as a result of obvious electoral fraud by the Democratic Party.” As for Biden, the textbook claims, "His entire political career has been accompanied by corruption scandals. He and his family have commercial interests in Ukraine."

 Of course, there’s no mention that Trump is facing criminal charges accusing him of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election or that his claims of massive election fraud have been widely debunked in the courts as well as by former Attorney General William Barr and others who served in his administration. And despite concerted efforts by House Republicans to discredit Biden, they have yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing. 

And just look at the images used: Trump with a beaming smile on his face; Biden with his face covered by a black mask.

Newsweek reported that Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born economist who is now a professor at the University of Chicago, provided more details about the textbook.

Newsweek wrote:

When contacted for more information about the textbook, Sonin provided Newsweek with a PDF copy of the book. He also told Newsweek that he didn't doubt the authenticity of its contents and that the book's publication was announced earlier this year during a press conference by the book's authors and Sergei Kravstov, Russia's minister of education.

In a post on X, Sonin displayed the cover of the textbook alongside the Trump entry. The textbook covers the period from 1945—the end of World War II—to the beginning of the 21st century.

Sonin cited the Trump entry as an example of the “reverse cargo cult’’ that “is a staple of authoritarian propaganda.”

“Under the ’cargo cult,’ the locals believe that imitating elections will bring as much prosperity as real elections in democratic countries,” Sonin continued. “Under the ‘reverse cargo cult,’ the locals believe that the fact that their own elections are fake means that elections in democracies are fake as well.”

Maybe Trump will cite the new Russian textbook at a future campaign rally just as approvingly as he quoted Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin at a campaign rally earlier this month, in New Hampshire.

The Washington Post wrote:

In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump’s own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.

“It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: “They’re all laughing at us.”

But wait—there’s more. In another post on X, Bennetts added this about the new textbook:

Barely a word about the collapse of the Soviet Union in the new Russian school history textbook for 11th graders. Not one mention of the words perestroika or glasnost. Says Cold War ended because of "unilateral concessions" by Gorbachev to the West.

“Perestroika” (“restructuring”) was the term used to describe Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy in the mid-1980s to reform economic and political policy, and “glasnost” (“openness”) allowed for more criticism of government officials and eased censorship on the media—policies that are antithetical to what Putin is doing in Russia today. 

The textbook reflects a broader effort to indoctrinate young Russians to support Putin and the war in Ukraine.

In June, The New York Times wrote that since the war in Ukraine began, “educational programs across Russia are awash in lessons and extracurricular activities built around military themes and patriotism.”

The drumbeat of indoctrination essentially started with Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, but the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has accelerated it. The Ministry of Education and Science releases a constant stream of material, including step-by-step lesson plans and real-life examples — like a video of a student concert that used poetry, dance and theater to explain the history of Russian foreign intelligence.

“It includes all levels, from kindergarten to university,” said Daniil Ken, the head of the Alliance of Teachers, an independent Russian union, who works from voluntary exile. “They are trying to involve all these children, all students, directly in supporting the war.”

And at the start of the new school year in September, Nina Rozhanovskaya of the Kennan Institute, a leading center for advanced research on Russia and Eurasia, wrote on the institute’s blog “The Russia File” that “classrooms are turning into an ideological battleground.”

She wrote:

Starting in September 2022, schools across Russia begin every week with a flag-raising ceremony followed by a lesson entitled “Conversations about Important Things.” Vladimir Putin personally kick-started the first Important Conversations series last year by giving an “open lesson” to a select group of students and telling them that Russia’s mission in Ukraine was to “stop the war” and “protect the people” in the Donbas. During this year’s televised “open lesson” Putin told his young audience that Russians were “invincible.”

Researcher Ivan Fomin has identified a strong anti-Western slant in how the teaching guidelines for Important Conversations cover certain topics, along with the message that “the state is the most authoritative source of information” about everything. Teachers are meant to put forward the idea of national unity and patriotism, emphasize heroism and self-sacrifice, and promote “traditional values.” In 2022, one of the conversations focused on the annexation of Crimea, or, as the official narrative refers to it, “the reunification of Crimea with Russia.”

And here’s how she described the new world-history textbook:

Public debate was sparked ahead of the academic year by a new Russian history textbook for the 11th grade, the final year of high school. Co-authored by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky and MGIMO rector Anatoly Torkunov, it reframes Soviet and Russian history from 1970s onwards in accordance with today’s political agenda, and there is a separate chapter on the so-called “special military operation,” which demonizes the West and presents Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as justified. Commentators criticize the new textbook for the chaotic presentation and tendentious interpretation of recent history and current events. Historian Nikita Sokolov called it an “outrageously bloated propaganda leaflet.” Unmoved by the public outcry, Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov promised that fifth to ninth graders will get their own new history textbooks next year.

And the same attempt at indoctrinating youth is happening right here in Republican-controlled states, where authoritarian-minded governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida are attempting to alter or drop lessons about black and LGBTQ+ history.

The Texas Tribune reported that last month the Republican-controlled Texas State Board of Education “rejected seven of 12 proposed science textbooks for eighth graders that for the first time will require them to include information on climate change.”

Florida already gained notoriety when its new African American history standards included teaching that some enslaved Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful job skills.

And then, in August, Florida became the first state to approve PragerU’s ersatz K-12 curriculum, The New Republic reported.

The New Republic described PragerU, co-founded by conservative radio host Dennis Prager, as “a right-wing group that has explicitly stated it wants to indoctrinate children.”

It wrote:

PragerU is not an accredited academic institution. Rather, it’s a conservative advocacy group cloaked in the guise of scholars that are best known for spreading disinformation on climate change, questioning the role of slavery as the pretext for the Civil War, and generally dismissing any acknowledgment of racism (especially against Black Americans) throughout American history.

This photo is about as real as Russia's new high school history book, but it does make a point.

Sad, Scary Stories: John Roberts, Donald Trump and the Ghosts of Bush v. Gore

  

Donald Trump shakes hands with Chief Justice John Roberts on Feb. 4, 2020. A pair of explosive Trump cases in 2024 will test Roberts' long campaign to shore up the Supreme Court's public standing. (photo: Leah Millis/Getty) Donald Trump shakes hands with Chief Justice John Roberts on Feb. 4, 2020. A pair of explosive Trump cases in 2024 will test Roberts' long campaign to shore up the Supreme Court's public standing. (photo: Leah Millis/Getty) 

 

The Supreme Court may become the decisive player in the 2024 election.

John F. Harris and Josh Gerstein / POLITICO

24 December 23

John Roberts has spent his 18 years as chief justice on a campaign to instill public confidence that the Supreme Court of the United States is on the level — committed to interpreting and applying the law in a principled and dispassionate way.

During that time, it’s become steadily more common to believe that the institution Roberts leads is fundamentally not on the level. A polarized age of politics, purity tests for judicial nominees, mounting ethics scandals about justices gallivanting with billionaires, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade have produced a court that often seems as angry, as divided and as cynical as the rest of the country. Most politicians and even legal commentators take it as a given that the most important decisions will hinge on the ideological affinities and grievances of the justices.

Roberts’ forlorn history is essential context for the choices that await the Supreme Court in the new year, when it will be one of the principal actors — possibly the decisive one — in the 2024 presidential election.

Two recent, intertwined moves have ensured it. The first is the request from special counsel Jack Smith, who’s prosecuting former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, that the court make an expedited ruling on Trump’s claim that he’s immune from being prosecuted for actions taken as president. If the court agrees with Smith, it would clear the way for Trump to stand trial on the election charges next year, potentially disrupting his bid to return to the White House.

The second development is the Colorado Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling this week that Trump is disqualified from the ballot in that Democratic-leaning swing state because of the 14th Amendment’s Civil War-era provision banning insurrectionists from holding office. The Colorado bombshell virtually guarantees that the nation’s highest court will have to resolve Trump’s eligibility — and in doing so, it will have to revisit and relitigate the trauma of Jan. 6, 2021.

The convergence of the two cases may prove to be the decisive chapter for the doubts about legitimacy that have haunted the court for nearly a quarter-century, even before Roberts joined. It was during Bush v. Gore in 2000 that the notion that the court could be driven not just by philosophical differences — a constant in court history — but by naked partisan calculations first took hold.

At the time, the circumstances seemed bizarre in an almost hallucinatory way: a presidential election so close that the coin flip landed on its side rather than heads or tails. Little did we all know that the events of the Trump years — two presidential impeachments and a deadly riot at the Capitol — might give memories of 2000 an aura of quaint Mayberry nostalgia.

But the underlying dynamics are strikingly similar. As in 2000, when the Supreme Court had to rule on procedural questions in Florida that held national consequences, the court now must rule on state actions in Colorado that shake the foundation of the presidential contest everywhere else.

It’s a sign of the court’s polarizing politics how quickly the received wisdom on what the justices will do has congealed. Most legal scholars believe the 6-3 conservative majority will not let the Colorado ruling stand, much less say that its logic should apply to the other 49 states and throw Trump off the ballot everywhere.

How the court reaches that likely result — and whether it can do so along anything other than a partisan-line vote — will be the newest test of Roberts’ desire to safeguard the institution. It’s a quality that many — including vocal detractors on the right — saw on display when he split from his fellow conservatives in the politically explosive Obamacare case five months before the 2012 election and again in the seismic abortion case last year.

In the looming Colorado case, the high court has about a dozen different off-ramps, some of them highly technical, by which it could avoid the pandemonium of disqualifying a leading presidential candidate. Some of those off-ramps may even garner support from the court’s three liberal justices — they, too, will be sensitive to the optics here.

But however the court navigates the thicket it’s been thrust into, the Trump cases seem sure to strain Roberts’ effort to revive the court’s standing with the public. The plain political implications of whatever the court decides will further debunk his old argument (from his 2005 confirmation hearing) that justices are like umpires calling balls and strikes — not players on the field.

“I would think this would be a nightmare for John Roberts,” said Supreme Court historian Stephen Wermiel, a law professor at American University. “The last thing I could imagine he would want is for the court to find itself pretty much deciding critical issues about the 2024 election.”

One scenario, though, might appeal to Roberts, if he can manage to corral enough votes from the court’s key coalitions: the hard-right flank, the more pragmatic-minded conservatives and the increasingly isolated liberals. As described by POLITICO legal editor James Romoser, it would have the court project its supposed independence by making two moves in swift succession: Strike down the Colorado decision and ensure that Trump can continue running for president, while also endorsing Smith’s argument that Trump is not immune from prosecution and that a trial should take place before November 2024. The presumed logic: Let voters decide, with all the information they need about Trump’s alleged criminal behavior before balloting begins.

“At one level, they want to deliver a mixed bag,” said David Garrow, another historian who closely follows the Supreme Court. “So, Trump loses on immunity, but scores a narrow win on the 14th Amendment. If you’re being calculating, reputationally calculating — as we’re for the moment assuming Roberts very much is — that’s where you come down.”

In other words: Faced with two Trump curveballs, the court could call one a ball and the other a strike. That may be the outcome that best preserves whatever’s left of the court’s institutional capital. It’s also precisely the sort of middle-ground instinct that has left Roberts a lonely figure on an increasingly polarized court.

Coke Can Clarence and the Conservative Court Crew.

Kellyanne Conway: "Why can't Democrats get over Jan. 6 already?"

And now, the Time Liar of the Year...Kellyanne Conway

 

By Walter Einenkel

Wednesday, December 20, 2023 at 3:49:50p MST

Daily Kos Staff

 

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Kellyanne Conway is still around! On Wednesday, she appeared on Fox News like the Swamp Ghost of Christmas Past to run some interference for her former boss and historical embarrassment Donald Trump.

I just think the Democrats wake up every morning, Emily, and they look at the calendar, the iPhone says Jan. 6, 2021—the date never changes. And then they get in the electric vehicle and go get an abortion. I just described the Democratic Party to you in 7 seconds.

(You can insert your own cricket sounds here.)

This is what Conway is good at: summing up the Republican Party line of cynicism and misinformation in short, sophomoric statements. Yes, Kellyanne, when will this plurality of voters get over Trump’s (and his friends’) attempted coup d’état?

It wasn’t long after Jan. 6, 2021, that MAGA Republicans began whitewashing the history of that day. Before long, Republican lawmakers were attempting to characterize the violence and upheaval that was captured on hundreds of hours of video as a “normal tourist visit.” 

In recent weeks, we’ve seen Sen. Mike Lee stoking the embers of conspiracy that the “tourist visit” was also a riot but the riot part was perpetrated by secret FBI forces. As we approach the third anniversary of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election, we have people like Conway calling it no big deal and Sen. Ron Johnson lying and saying that Democratic politicians have done it “repeatedly” throughout American history.

The fact that there have been more than 1,000 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack—with people still being arrested as the Department of Justice works its way through copious video and testimony—is all white (militia) noise to the MAGA propaganda machine. But it isn’t simply craven greed and a hunger for power that makes so many Republican operatives willing to sign on to such a pathologically perverse view of history. Just consider how many prominent Republicans are suspected of being complicit in the day’s events.

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney recently reminded an audience at the University of Minnesota that Rep. Jim Jordan has yet to answer some very serious questions about his role in the attack. The same can be said for Sen. Johnson. Even more recently, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania was exposed as having texted a lot with those attempting to change the 2020 election results.

Conway's glib way of talking about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, is just self-defense for the whole MAGA ecosystem.

"Republican lawmakers were attempting to characterize the violence and upheaval that was captured on hundreds of hours of video as a “normal tourist visit.”"

The Supreme Court Did This to Itself

   Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Getty Images) 

 

 

Dahlia Lithwick / Slate 

23 December 23

The Supreme Court is on a collision course with itself, and it’s not clear that the justices even know it. We are now witnessing a five-car pileup of Trump–slash–Jan. 6 cases that will either be heard by the Supreme Court or land on their white marble steps in the coming weeks. The court has already agreed to hear the case of Joseph Fischer, the former Pennsylvania cop accused of taking part in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol and assaulting police officers, to determine the scope of prosecutions for obstructing an official proceeding. The court’s already flirting with hearing a direct appeal by special counsel Jack Smith to speedily resolve Trump’s claims to absolute immunity for his actions in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. And a game-changer of a case came out of the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday that would knock the former president off of the Republican primary ballot in that state as a consequence of his involvement in the insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, which would also critically apply to the general election ballot next November. That ruling has to be settled by the high court in order to forestall, or affirm, other states’ efforts to do the same thing. Potential appeals of gag orders in criminal suits and doofy immunity claims in the E. Jean Carroll suit are all also winging their way to Chief Justice John Roberts’ workstation, and it’s not even 2024 yet.

In the meantime, the justices cannot seem to catch a break when it comes to being caught behaving terribly. In addition to the bottomless evidence of judicial freebies and junkets that were not disclosed by justices bound by both disclosure and recusal rules, the past few weeks have brought bombshell reporting from ProPublica about the ways in which the body meant to police the court was mostly just laying around the henhouse hoping for a good scratch behind the ears.* Then this week, ProPublica produced another in-depth report of how a bunch of millionaires and conservative activists—afraid that Justice Clarence Thomas might leave the court if he didn’t get a pay raise and nice lifestyle perks—conspired to get him pay raises and lifestyle perks. This effort somehow was blessed by (surprise!) members of Congress; the judiciary’s top administrative official, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and others who understood perfectly that you needn’t hate the player, or the game, you really just need to take him on island cruises to Indonesia to keep him in the league.

Added to that, there’s the phenomenally reported New York Times story from last week about the ways in which the Supreme Court’s conservative members manipulated and distorted the outcome in the Dobbs case overturning Roe v. Wade in order to try to keep up appearances, even as they phoned in their work on the case to achieve the partisan outcomes for which they were seated. Even if you fully believed all the nonsense about nonbinding ethics codes that are enforced by mindpower, Cool Whip, and promises of good faith, it just isn’t possible to read the stories about 20 years of partisanship, pay-to-play, and the erosion of norms of judicial humility and restraint on the part of the MAGA wing of the court and still feel confident that this is the body to which one wants to entrust the major electoral outcomes of the coming year.

The two stories—political corruption and political cases—are so inextricably connected that one almost wants to weep at the rate at which they have been force-multiplied as disasters in the making in a matter of weeks, and not because the press is out to discredit the high court, but because the court has been so hellbent on discrediting itself and then refusing to cop to it. It’s the political and financial dirty work of two decades, coming to light in the span of one year, that the court has brought on itself at the moment in which it should have been beyond reproach.

In the coming months, Thomas will have to decide whether his wife’s text messages around and participation in the very same insurrection for which Trump is being removed from the Colorado primary ballot mean he should recuse himself from that case. He will allow himself to pass judgment on whether her subsequent insistence that the 2020 election was stolen might just make it improper for him to hear the Colorado case. The new code of conduct recently embraced (no, really) by the court requires that the justices disqualify themselves from an appeal if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Moreover, justices should be mindful as to whether their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding” or is “likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.” We know Thomas is capable of applying this test to himself in theory because, for reasons unknown, he removed himself from a case last October involving John Eastman, principal architect of one of the key legal plots to keep Trump in power. But will he do the same when the stakes are much, much higher? And why on God’s Earth is he being permitted to decide these high-stakes questions at all?

Also in the coming months, with public mistrust for the integrity and character of some of the justices at record lows, the justices will have to help the public understand why they should be trusted to engage in sober, principled deliberations of thorny questions when reporting shows that at least some of them take 10 minutes to read 98 pages, that decisions in major cases are ends-driven and political, and that a couple of them are more than willing to distort the record to cover up for that fact. In the coming months, the public will have to sit with the fact that Justice Samuel Alito told Wall Street Journal opinion writers that the court is untouchable by Congress and with the fact that when the Senate sought testimony from the chief justice last year he just refused to show up. And the public will have to just get really comfortable with the fact that this imperial court thinks that kind of thing is fine.

One of the most striking aspects of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling is how much of the 213-page opinion is devoted to institutional humility: Are the issues justiciable? Is this a political question better resolved by the political branches? Is it even appropriate for a court to resolve issues of such enormous national import? While the 4–3 majority of the Colorado court came down with a “yes” on each of these issues, you can’t say they didn’t take them seriously:

We do not reach these conclusions lightly. We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach. We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory, and that this case presents several issues of first impression.

Agree or disagree with the conclusions of that court, the deep seriousness of purpose and institutional humility pervading that opinion is palpable. Compare that tone to the self-certainty on display from some of the members of the highest court in the land, who, when caught out in self-dealing and dishonesty, reject any effort to rein them in and persist in declaiming their own infallibility.

For years, some of the most vocal critics of the court’s ethical lapses, its lack of transparency, and its refusals to take seriously its own brokenness and errors, have warned that the day would come when an election would be decided by a body that has refused to clean house and has blamed the press and the academy for the stench of its own illegitimacy. The worry wasn’t that the court would decide the election; that seems almost inevitable. The worry was that the public, grown weary of the stench, would not abide by their decision.

Lavish world cruises, secret deals with moneyed donors, threats to step down unless someone ponied up with a pay raise, fishing trips with parties who have business before the court, an amicus brief industrial complex wholly bought and paid for by billionaire donations, leaked drafts, and secret speeches are not the stuff of constitutional democracy, or infallibility, or finality. When the hyperpolitical supercharged Trump cases catch up with the court—and that is beginning to happen, right now, this week—all that stench will run headlong into the questions about why the husband of the woman who went to the pep rally for the insurrection and the folks who lied to us all about Dobbs are objective enough to decide the outcome of an election. The same people entrusted with the protecting the reputation of the court have blundered into being wholly responsible for protecting democracy. Not one thing suggests they will take the latter any more seriously than they took the former.

Coke Can Clarence: "I am this rich now."

Pressure grows for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from Trump cases

Supreme Court Justice Clarence "Coke Can" Thomas, right, with his obfuscating wife, Ginni Thomas

By Joan McCarter for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday, December 20, 2023 at 1:36:41p MST

 

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The Colorado Supreme Court decision to remove Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot is almost certainly headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. When it gets there, Justice Clarence Thomas should not be allowed to participate in the court’s deliberations. That’s the message from retired Judge LaDoris Cordell, discussing the issue on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes” Tuesday night.

“There should be only eight justices on the Supreme Court hearing this case when it comes up,” Cordell told Hayes.

I say that because Clarence Thomas has no business hearing this case. Why? Because his wife was a major player in the whole insurrection. And he should, he should, if he had principles, recuse himself. But I will guarantee you this: Clarence Thomas will recuse himself when Ginni flies.

That’s where Chief Justice John Roberts comes in: If Thomas won’t recuse himself, Roberts has to make it happen. That’s the message Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sent to the chief justice on Tuesday. It was sent before the Colorado court ruled, but it remains relevant. The Democratic Judiciary Committee member urged Roberts to “take appropriate steps to ensure that Justice Clarence Thomas recuses himself” from one of the other pending cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“The federal recusal statute requires that any ‘justice, judge, or magistrate judge … shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,’” Blumenthal writes. “In addition, recusal is required when a Justice ‘or his spouse … is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding; [or i]s to the judge’s knowledge likely to be a material witness in the proceeding.’”

There’s precedent, as Blumenthal points out. Back in October, Thomas recused from deliberations as to whether the court should take an appeal from John Eastman, the architect of many of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election who was also a close contact of Ginni Thomas. That might be precisely why Thomas recused: The appeal was over the release of emails to the House Jan. 6 committee, and plenty of those emails would have been between Ginni Thomas and Eastman. With the Jan. 6 committee long disbanded, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal and Thomas didn’t explain why he didn’t participate in that decision.

Blumenthal cited that recusal in his letter to Robert, saying it was “proper” and should be repeated, in this case regarding the pending case concerning Trump’s presidential immunity from prosecution. He wrote that considering “Mrs. Thomas’s involvement in challenging the 2020 election results, Justice Thomas’s impartiality in a related case ‘might reasonably be questioned,’ giving rise, at a minimum, to an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

House Democrats have also weighed in, directly asking Thomas to recuse. As Cordell says, he’ll do that “when Ginni flies.” Roberts needs to make it happen. As Blumenthal points out in his letter, Roberts and the court just made a big point of releasing a code of conduct, which they insist has been informally guiding the justices all along. As Blumenthal points out, though, it “very unfortunately does not provide any enforcement mechanism,” but “it mirrors the statutory standard for recusal.” If Thomas won’t do it himself, Blumenthal tell Roberts, “it is incumbent upon you to assure that the Code is followed to ‘dispel the misunderstanding’ that ‘Justices … regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.’”

That’s true for the immunity question. It’s true for this Colorado case and for any case coming to the court involving Trump’s—and Ginni Thomas’—efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

The joke, it appears, is on us, and it's a costly one.

Republicans plot revenge after Colorado Supreme Court kicks Trump off state ballot

By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday, December 20, 2023 at 11:29:44a MST

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that Donald Trump is ineligible to hold office because of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The ruling is certain to head to the Supreme Court, but even before it lands in the lap of Chief Justice John Roberts and crew, this legal blast is generating significant fallout.

The immediate reaction of most Republican candidates is exactly what you might expect from people who are running either in hopes of being Trump’s number two or of raising their profiles for 2028. Nikki Haley made a bland statement about judges making these decisions when the issue should be in the hands of the voters. Chris Christie may win the award for silliest mish-mash in saying, “I just think what he’s done is horribly wrong and that he has reserved the right that we would give him as voters to lead us again.” Ron DeSantis said … nothing.

But it was fading candidate Vivek Ramaswamy who jumped straight to a pearl-clutching loyalty stunt by declaring that he would remove himself from Colorado’s ballot unless they put Trump back. Then the Colorado GOP raised Ramaswamy’s bet by threatening to scratch the whole primary.

Ramaswamy starts by slamming the Colorado Supreme Court. Or the groups who filed suit. Or Democrats. Or whoever it is making up the “they” in his statement. “They have just tried to bar President Trump from the Colorado ballot using an unconstitutional maneuver that is a bastardization of the 14th Amendment to our U.S. Constitution.”

He goes on to explain this was meant to bar members of the Confederacy, which is definitely not what the 14th Amendment is about. It could have been written to only deal with the singular events of the American Civil War, but it wasn’t. The people who wrote that amendment were very aware that there might be other incidents in the future. This is why this is a constitutional amendment in the first place rather than just a law explicitly addressing former members of the Confederacy.

After a quick reference to “the unelected elite class in the back of palace halls,” Ramaswamy carries on by saying, “I will withdraw […] from the Colorado GOP primary ballot unless and until Trump’s name is restored. And I demand that Ron DeSantis, and Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley do the same thing, or else these Republicans are simply complicit in this unconstitutional attack on the way we conduct our constitutional republic.” Maybe the most impressive thing about Ramaswamy’s self-aggrandizing statement is that despite rambling on about the will of the voters and we the people, he manages to avoid saying the word “democracy” at any point. But he gets in two repeats of his “demand” that DeSantis, Haley, and Christie sign on to his pledge while peppering them with insults.

Ramaswamy’s departure from the ballot would give the other candidates a whopping 2% to divide among themselves. So far Haley, Christie, and DeSantis have not agreed to follow him out the door.

But none of that may matter since the chair of the Colorado Republican Party, Dave Williams, is threatening to pull the plug on the whole primary. According to Williams, the Colorado GOP will move to a “strict caucus process” so Republicans in that state can still pick the guy who led an insurrection. Whether that happens or not is likely to be determined by just how quickly the U.S. Supreme Court takes up the case and gives its opinion on the ruling of the Colorado court.

Colorado Republicans have already stated that they will appeal the case, and the nation’s highest court will likely snap it up quickly. Because every now and then the Supreme Court feels a need to step in to tell states how to run elections. Say … every 23 years.

The Colorado Republican Party also showed itself to be true followers of Trump in the most important way: by immediately turning this into a fundraising opportunity.

Not to be left out, the Texas Republican Party—where no such ruling has taken place—decided it had to get in on the act. And they’re doing it in an even more Trump-appropriate manner: by threatening retribution.

As The Daily Beast reports, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, threatened to remove President Joe Biden from the Texas primary ballot because … because … Hell. Do they need a reason? “Seeing what happened in Colorado makes me think—except we believe in democracy in Texas—maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing eight million people to cross the border since he’s been president disrupting our state,” Patrick said.

It will be a miracle if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton doesn’t file such a suit before the week is out. Considering that Abraham Lincoln’s name was not permitted on the ballot in 10 Southern states, this wouldn’t exactly be precedent.

Colorado is just one of 16 states where Trump’s presence on the ballot is being challenged based on a 14th Amendment provision that prevents anyone from holding office if they have "previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States" and then become involved in an insurrection.

A lower court ruling in Michigan that allowed Trump to remain on the ballot was appealed to the state supreme court earlier this week. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Trump could remain on the ballot there.

You always know which side Redneckistan aka Texas is going to come down on.

Colorado Has Handed SCOTUS a Thorny Problem

  

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former US President Donald is disqualified from holding public office. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP) 

 

Marc Ash / Reader Supported News 

20 December 23

So it would seem that the Justices of the Colorado Supreme Court (CSC) contemplated in significant measure how their Trump 14th Amendment ruling would be processed by the SCOTUS and while the current permutation of the SCOTUS has taken great pains to demonstrate the omnipotence of their powers of discretion it should be noted that the CSC has left them with a rather thorny problem.

The original state court finding that Trump engaged in insurrection doesn’t go away easily. Nor for that matter does the language of the 14th Amendment’s Section 3, it’s black letter law.

SECTION 3 DISQUALIFICATION FROM HOLDING OFFICE

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

So the SCOTUS is left with little more than procedural grounds to overrule the CSC, ie timeliness, voter confusion etc. But that’s a stretch and potentially damaging to the court’s reputation.

It also bears noting that this court has shown little enthusiasm for carrying Donald Trump’s water. While he certainly shown no shame in inviting the court’s favor the court has appeared almost invariably reluctant to oblige.

In sum, the SCOTUS can overrule the CSC and may, but the potential for harm to the court is great and might prove to be only the beginning their Trump related problems.

BREAKING NEWS: TRUMP DISQUALIFIED FROM COLORADO BALLOT!

 

First to legalize marijuana. 

First to kick Trump out.

 

The Colorado state Supreme Court agreed that Trump had engaged in insurrection, but rejected the lower court's finding that the president is not an officer of the country that elected him.

 

Section 3 of the Civil War-era 14th Amendment says: “No person shall ... hold any office, civil or military, under the United States ... who, having previously taken an oath ... as an officer of the United States, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Trump's Nazi rhetoric dominates latest rally

Donald Trump at campaign rally in New Hampshire on Dec. 16

By Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff 

Monday, December 18, 2023 at 9:21:07a MST 

 

REPUBLISHED BY: 

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

The first time Donald Trump talked about immigrants poisoning the blood of the nation, he did so in an interview with a right-wing outlet. For the next month, the straight-out-of-”Mein-Kampf” meme disappeared from Trump’s campaign rhetoric, only to be replaced by an even more obvious tip of the Hitler hat when Trump described his opponents as “vermin” in a Veterans Day speech that threatened to erase the legacy of every American veteran.

Now Trump is bringing the full-on Nazi rhetoric to his rally speeches. As CNN reports, Trump’s weekend rally featured a return of his talk about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He mixed that theme into a speech that brought even more of his regular shout-outs to authoritarian rulers and expressions of disdain for democracy.

Trump is not just humming Hitleresque themes, but bellowing full-bore Nazi slogans to his red-hat rally crowds. It shows that just as he has done so many times in the past, he has crossed the line and found that the white supremacist territory on the other side suits him just fine. Trump is making his similarity to Hitler into the core of his 2024 campaign.

As if quoting Hitler to his pale, screaming crowd wasn’t enough, Trump also trotted out a quote from Vladimir Putin about the “rottenness” of American democracy. Rotten, according to Putin, because it goes after Trump. “Even Vladimir Putin … says that Biden’s — and this is a quote – ‘politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.’”

As a side note, Putin’s most notable political opponent, Alexei Navalny, who has been held as a political prisoner since 2021 after surviving an attempt to kill him using a nerve agent, disappeared from the prison where he was being held at the beginning of December. He is still missing.

Trump once again ticked off names from his authoritarian friends list, making his now-regular round of how much he admires everyone who is ripping up democracy around the world. That included reminding the crowd that he gets on well with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and letting everyone know that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “very nice.”

But it was the centerpiece return of the Nazi theme of “poisoning the blood” that really stole the show at Trump’s New Hampshire rally. On many occasions, Trump has tossed some loathsome statement out to the public, stepped back for a moment to see how it went down, then chased it up with something even worse when it turned out his supporters either did not care or actively loved his hate speech. Could he get away with going after Gold Star families? Could he dismiss prisoners of war as losers? And could he endlessly elaborate on how Mexico is populated entirely by rapists and drug mules? Yes, yes, and oh-hell-yes.

He’s not unaware that he’s repeating Nazisms. He’s just erasing another line as he aspires to make the country a dictatorship.

Now it seems that “poisoning the blood” could be as big a part of Trump’s 2024 run as “lock her up” was in 2016. A fulsome embrace of the white supremacism that has never been all that far from the surface of Trump’s speech.

Back in a 1990 interview with Vanity Fair, Trump’s then-wife, Ivana Trump, said that her husband had a copy of Hitler's collected speeches, “My New Order,” that he kept in a bedside cabinet. Trump insisted that the book had been given to him by a Jewish friend. Only that friend wasn’t Jewish. He was just someone who thought Trump would find a book of Hiter’s speeches “interesting.” Clearly, he was right.

This is not the first time that Trump has put his nighttime reading to use in his campaigns, but now it seems he no longer feels the need to disguise his plagiarism.

That 1990 interview also featured this little tidbit.

Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, "Heil Hitler," possibly as a family joke.

It’s a whole lot less funny these days.

Give Russia's Frozen Assets to Ukraine Now

  "On both sides of the Atlantic, the crunch has arrived." (photo: Nicole Tung/NYT/Redux)

Putin should pay for the damage his invasion has caused, and the money is needed immediately.

Anne Applebaum / The Atlantic 

18 December 23

A majority of Americans and a majority of Congress want to help Ukraine win the war against Russia, and to stop the spread of autocracy into Europe. A majority of people in the European Union and a majority of EU leaders want the same. But small minorities of lawmakers—some inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin or his money, some bent on bargaining for other things—have managed to block or delay that aid.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the crunch has arrived. The far-right faction that now controls the Republican Party captured the House last year and has successfully blocked a new spending bill for many months.The prime minister of Hungary, himself a de facto autocrat, is also blocking an EU financial package for Ukraine. Eventually the European prime ministers and the Biden administration alike may well do deals and allocate the money. But in the meantime—and just in case they fail—there is something else that American and European governments can do.

At the very beginning of the conflict, the U.S., the EU, the United Kingdom, and other democratic governments jointly froze more than $300 billion in Russian sovereign assets, mostly in Europe. This is money that Russia cannot sell or borrow against. Nor can Russia make use of any of the interest this money earns. At the time, many believed that the decision to freeze these assets would shock the Russian government into pulling back. That did not happen. After nearly two years, the countries that hold these assets—all of them—should take the next step and transfer the money to Ukraine.

Lawrence Tribe, the American constitutional scholar, has been promoting this idea for some time. In September, he and a team of lawyers published a 187-page report making the “legal, practical, and moral case” for transferring Russian assets to Ukraine. The moral argument is the easiest: Russia should pay for the damage it has done to Ukraine. The fundamental legal case, Tribe told me, rests on the many treaties that Russia broke by invading Ukraine, destroying whole cities, murdering civilians, deliberately damaging power grids and grain storage. By doing so, Russia lost any standing to complain about the violation of its sovereignty or property rights, since it denies those to Ukraine.

In truth, we in the West already crossed that bridge when we froze the assets in the first place. “If you have the authority to freeze the assets,” Tribe told me, “you have taken them away from the sovereign that claimed to be their owner. Why should they now have to lie idle while a country is decimated?” The frozen assets would solve some of Ukraine’s immediate budgetary and financial problems. More important, $300 billion is a reasonable down payment on the reparations that Russia should pay to Ukraine. Russian money should rightly compensate Ukrainians for the harm that Russia has done, and help rebuild the Ukrainian infrastructure that Russia destroyed.

The strongest Western objections to transferring the frozen Russian money to Ukraine have been practical ones. Tribe cited an “inchoate concern that hegemony of the dollar will be threatened, and people’s willingness to park reserves in the U.S. and other Western countries will be jeopardized.” Some countries may fear that their own assets could be at risk if kept in Western financial institutions, and will instead place them in China or elsewhere. A handful of Europeans fear that redistributing the money would set a precedent, encouraging others to take their own national assets. A range of public officials, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former World Bank President Robert Zoellick as well as David Cameron, the new British foreign secretary and former prime minister, have nevertheless argued in favor of the seizure. There isn’t an alternative reserve currency to the dollar right now, or anywhere safe outside the Western-dominated financial system for investors to go. Besides, as Tribe’s report argues, “assisting Ukraine in its time of need is worth the speculative risk to the dollar.”

This part of the argument has more significance now than it did in September, when Tribe and his colleagues published their report, because the stakes for Ukraine are higher and the need to take risks is greater. The crisis in Western funding—a crisis caused, I repeat, by pro-Russian politicians and factions in our own societies, some of whom are coordinating their activity with Russia—is now acute. It is also visibly emboldening Putin, who last week gave a press conference restating his goal in Ukraine, which is the same as it was two years ago: the destruction of the Ukrainian state. The dysfunction in Washington and Brussels is bolstering Putin’s belief that he will win the war simply by waiting for the West to give up.

Handing $300 billion of Russian assets to Ukraine will put a dent in this confidence. It will show Putin that the West is willing to take creative, even unprecedented, measures to win the war. It will also be popular, not only in Ukraine but in the U.S. and Europe. Most people will intuitively understand the fairness of making Russia pay for its own acts of vandalism. Whatever reputational damage this transfer of assets might cause for the West, it is vanishingly small in comparison to the reputational damage that the West will suffer if Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine. The sooner we make this decision, the more quickly the impact will be felt on the ground. What are we waiting for?