<[Event "48th New Hampshire Open"] [Site "Manchester NH"]
[Date "1998.07.19"]
[Round "4"]
[White "Anderson, James D"]
[Black "Timberlake, David"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "B06"]
[WhiteElo "2109"]
[BlackElo "2200"]

1.d4 f5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.h3 d6 4.g4 fxg4 5.hxg4 Bxg4 6.Qd3 Qd7 7.Ng5 Nc6 8.f3 Bf5 9.e4 Bg6 10.Bh3 Qd8 11.Ne6 Qb8 12.Nc3 Nd8 13.Nf4 Bf7 14.e5 g5 15.exf6 gxf4 16.Bxf4 e6 17.O-O-O c6 18.Qe2 Qc7 19.Ne4 Qa5 20.Nxd6+ Bxd6 21.Bxd6 Qxa2 22.Ba3 Qd5 23.Qe3 b6 24.f4 Kd7 25.f5 Re8 26.Qd3 Kc7 27.c4 Qa5 28.Qg3+ Kc8 29.fxe6 Bxe6 30.Rhe1 Qa4 31.Rxe6 Qxc4+ 32.Qc3 Qxc3+ 33.bxc3 Rxe6 34.f7 1-0>

What's more the Ukrainians are freezing their asses off this winter and they didn't get to grow food crops -- a harvest season -- to have a winter food supply. Be glad that you're a super spoiled arrogant westerner big mouth without a brain and go back to finish middle school, you ignorant lazy dumbass flunky.>

Maybe you should be tutored so as to become a <life800player>, ignoramus--certainly there is no chance whatever you can be a decent human being.

<Among all of the other questions raised by former President Donald Trump’s felony conviction, there’s one prickly issue still facing planners of the July GOP national convention: What to do if Trump is in jail when it starts?

Trump’s sentencing date, July 11, is only a few days before the start of the party convention in Milwaukee on July 15. He could end up behind bars by the time the convention starts. The odds of that happening are slim-to-none, but that hasn’t stopped GOP officials from musing about what to do.

“We’re working on that now,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said on Newsmax in early June.

“We expect that Donald Trump is going to be in Milwaukee and he’s going to be able to accept that nomination. And if not, we will make whatever contingency planning we need to make for it,” Whatley said June 4.

Exactly what those contingency plans would include, Whatley did not say.

“We are planning on him being here. I think that that’s really where we’re going to go forward with it. Of course obviously you have to have contingency plans in place,” Whatley told Spectrum News the next day.

Citing sources familiar with the convention’s planning, NBC News on June 13 reported backup plans were being made at Trump’s home in Florida and at the convention site in Milwaukee in case Trump is not able to be physically present.

Those contingency plans are unlikely to be needed, though, given the virtual certainty that Trump will still be a free man at the time of the convention.

While New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan could certainly send Trump to jail immediately following his sentencing hearing — and indeed, the way Trump during his trial antagonized both Merchan and the criminal justice system as a whole may make that more plausible — Trump will likely be free while his appeals play out, a process that could easily stretch into 2025. Judges are often reluctant to have convicts jailed during the appeals process unless they pose either a flight risk or are considered a danger to others. Trump would not meet those conditions.

In the event Merchan did want to limit his movements, he could order Trump to “self-report” to a jail on a specific date, which would likely be after the convention.

Or he could require Trump to stay what would basically be house arrest at one of his residences in New York City, New Jersey or Florida. On a more limited basis, Trump’s travel could be curtailed, with Trump having to give notice or seek permission to travel outside of a designated area.

A request for comment from the Trump campaign was not immediately returned.

Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic consultant, said it’s unlikely Trump would start serving his sentence immediately. “I think [Merchan] would say ‘report in a week, report in 10 days,’ if there were a prison sentence,” he said.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball political newsletter, said he thought it was unlikely Trump would be thrown in jail but it was smart to plan for any outcome.

“One way or the other, Trump’s attorneys will probably be able to get him to the convention for a live appearance. Making a martyr out of Trump — even more than he already is — is not in the interests of the court,” Sabato said in an email.

But if he were in the clink, Sabato said he could attend via video link, though it’s unclear how that would work.

“If Trump is incarcerated, my guess is that provision would be made for him to broadcast from a room decorated with flags and bunting from somewhere in the prison,” he said. ”‘Live, from Riker’s Island, the Republican National Convention starring Prisoner No. 384756!’”

“Do you accept the nomination of your party from a holding room in a jail? Or maybe he would be sentenced to home confinement, so accept it from Mar-a-Lago? But I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Shrum said....>

<....Presidential candidates in the past have sometimes checked in from the road on the way to the convention to accept their party’s nomination. Similarly, the 2020 Democratic convention during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic included a virtual roll call of the 50 states, in which each state sent in a 30-second video to air during the event.

The wild card is how incarcerating Trump, who has claimed he is a “political prisoner” after his conviction, would play out politically.

Republicans have been swift to point to surging small-dollar donations to his campaign as evidence that the trial and conviction energized more support for Trump than it cost him, as voters were upset over Trump’s alleged mistreatment.

An Economist/YouGov poll taken in early June, shortly after his conviction, gave some support to that idea. It found 39% of respondents said he had been treated more harshly than other people by the judicial system. But almost as many, 34%, said he had been treated more leniently.

It also found a whopping 92% of respondents said the verdict had not caused them to reconsider who they will vote for in November, compared to 8% who said it had.

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said an imprisoned Trump would be all the more certain to win.

“If President Trump cannot attend the convention in Milwaukee physically because they’re following through with this sham trial, the Democrat Party is going to be electing Donald J. Trump as the 47th president,” he told HuffPost.

“What the Democrats didn’t seem to figure out is that they have actually peeled the scales off of Saul’s eyes on the road to Damascus and people are like, ‘Holy beans, I don’t want to live in a country where this can happen.’”

Sabato said the belief that Trump being kept from his own party’s convention benefitting him may be misplaced, though.

“I know what we all usually say — this will infuriate Trump’s base and help him — but isn’t this technique tapped out?” he asked.

“A stunt like this, with poor Donald kept away from his own convention, appeals to the usual suspects, but it also underlines for non-Trump-cult voters just how embarrassing and impractical a Trump presidency might turn out to be.”

The situation is not completely unprecedented, though. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party of America’s nominee for the White House in 1920, was behind bars in an Atlanta federal prison for speaking out against the U.S.’ participation in World War I.

For Debs — or as he called himself in the 1920 campaign, “Convict No. 9653” — it was a mixed bag, according to historians.

A film clip of Debs being told about his nomination circulated around the country, per The Associated Press, and he campaigned by giving a weekly statement to one of the wire services.

Debs received almost 1 million votes in the 1920 presidential election. While the Socialist Party’s share of the vote was down from a peak of 6% in the 1912 election to around 3%, it was second-best electoral showing in the party’s history and the best showing by a third-party candidate until John B. Anderson in 1980.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who served as head of the Democratic National Committee during the 2012 and 2016 conventions, said Trump’s physical presence would likely not be required to accept the nomination.

And she had one piece of advice for Republicans: “Don’t nominate someone who could potentially go to jail.”>

Sound policy, that. (laughs)

<Donald Trump was the luckiest man alive last Thursday. President Joe Biden's abysmal debate performance overshadowed what should have been the biggest story of the night: Trump, as he did in the 2020 presidential debate, winkingly encouraged his supporters to commit political violence. Biden correctly noted during the debate that Trump has promised to pardon the over 1,200 people charged with federal crimes for the January 6 insurrection. Trump responded by calling the rioters "innocent" and saying Biden "ought to be ashamed" because his Justice Department charged them with crimes. This echoes Trump's increasingly rabid defense of the insurrectionists on the campaign trail, where he often calls them "hostages" and "political prisoners" and holds ceremonies honoring those who are imprisoned.

Trump doesn't just glorify the insurrection because he is a narcissist who can never admit he's done anything wrong. It's part of a larger campaign to encourage more political violence from his supporters. He frequently uses "warnings" to threaten public officials. Using the pseudo-warning, Trump has threatened "bedlam" if he's prosecuted. He begged his followers to "go after" New York Attorney General Letitia James for prosecuting him for fraud. He posted a video fantasizing about kidnapping Biden. He threatened "death and destruction" if he was charged in the New York "hush money" case. He even had a rally in Waco, Texas around the anniversary of the Branch Davidian self-immolation, an unsubtle dog whistle to far-right militias that use that event to justify anti-government violence.

So far, however, Trump's open desire for more mob violence has not amounted to much. During his Manhattan criminal trial, which resulted in 34 felony convictions, Trump's desperation for another January 6 reached a fever pitch. He was all over social media and in front of cameras pleading with his followers to "rally" — barely code after the Capitol riot — but to no avail. There are many reasons for this, but at the top of the list was the widespread fear among right-wing radicals of going to prison, which feels a lot more real now that hundreds of their brethren went to lock-up for the insurrection.

Every time Trump or his surrogates calls for a "rally" to intimidate public officials, conspiracy theories fly around MAGA social media, claiming it's a "set-up" by the FBI and/or "antifa." However much anyone believes this, it's obvious what they're doing: Creating a face-saving excuse not to risk prison. No matter how much Trump may laud the January 6 insurrectionists, their fate has lingered as a warning to the rest of MAGA about what's coming if they commit more violence in Trump's name.

Or, at least that was true until Friday. In Fischer v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a January 6 defendant who argued that he was wrongly convicted under a law criminalizing the obstruction of an official proceeding. As Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog explained, the court ruled the law "applies only to evidence tampering, such as destruction of records or documents, in official proceedings."

The ruling led to headlines that made it sound like a big win for the January 6 rioters. Words like "strike down" and "improperly charged" featured heavily in headlines. Yes, headline writers did try to soften the blow with words like "some" and "limits scope." For those who live in the alternative reality constructed by MAGA media, however, these modifiers will likely mean little. They've been hearing for years from Trump, Republican politicians, and talking heads like Tucker Carlson that they were done dirty by the Biden Justice Department. Many are likely ready to round this up to a total victory — and a reassurance they won't be prosecuted for future violence....>

<....Legal eagles did swiftly explain that this decision is limited and unlikely to do much to change the fates of the 1,200+ people who have been charged with crimes from the riot. That includes Trump, whose "fake electors" scheme in his indictment appears to fall outside the ruling's narrow scope since his conspiracy was so paperwork-centric. An analysis at Just Security demonstrated that, with small tweaks to their cases, prosecutors can keep the original charges in place. Even more importantly, the legal analysts write, "only 26 of these defendants have been (or were scheduled to be) sentenced solely" under this charge. They even included a helpful pie chart.

A relief, no doubt, to both prosecutors and people nerdy enough to pay attention to these granular legal details. The message sent to MAGA is very different. It's not exactly a group of people gifted with the patience and comprehension to understand these nuanced legal analyses. Instead, MAGA world moved to declare victory and total exoneration

In a vacuum, this could be viewed as inconsequential chest-thumping. But this is happening in a context where the threatening language and normalization of political violence is spreading way beyond Trump into the larger GOP. "Extremism monitors have warned for years that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric inspires real-world attacks. Assailants have invoked his name in dozens of violent episodes," the Washington Post reported last week. Just this month, the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, Shelby Busch, was caught on video threatening to "lynch" election officials who correctly record ballot counts that don't favor Republicans. More candidates are echoing Trump's threats to "jail" anyone who opposes him. Some, like congressional candidate Anthony Sabatini, R-Fl., are even running paid ads with the threats.

Last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued another warning about the rising threat of violence against government workers, telling the Washington Post, "Threats of violence targeting any public servant are abhorrent." The Post laid out some recent chilling examples, including a man who threatened to murder FBI agents if Trump loses in November and another who threatened to murder Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mon., and his whole family.

All this was before the Supreme Court issued a ruling being read in many corners as a broad invalidation of charges against January 6 rioters. As we learned in the days after the riot, many — if not most — of the insurrectionists acted on the belief that people like them would never face legal consequences for political violence. That's why they filmed themselves during the insurrection and uploaded all the photographic evidence used to convict so many of them. A big part of Trump's appeal to his followers is the sense of impunity he breeds, where "criminal" is based on who you are, not what you do. A lot of MAGA is ready to believe their white skin and right-wing politics should immunize them from consequences. Regardless of what the Supreme Court's decision says, we should not be surprised if it's read by Trump's supporters as an invitation to commit more political violence.>

Yet another reminder to the twin axes of evil: <I> decide content here. Don't like it? Stay away.

<South Carolina has implemented one of the most restrictive book ban laws in the US, enabling mass censorship in school classrooms and libraries across the state.

Drafted by Ellen Weaver, the superintendent of education and close ally of the far-right group Moms for Liberty, the law requires all reading material to be “age or developmentally appropriate”. The vague wording of the legislation – open to interpretation and deliberately inviting challenge – could see titles as classic as Romeo and Juliet completely wiped from school shelves.

“All we’re going to have left is Lassie from here on out,” said Shanna Miles, an author and school librarian born and raised in South Carolina. “They’re not going to stop at one aspect of society they don’t like; they will keep on going. Now [that] they have a taste of power, this is never going to end.”

South Carolina’s recent regulation is part of an alarmingly broader nationwide fight against literature exploring race, sexuality, or anything seemingly contentious or divisive. The severity of this particularly draconian law, however, sets it apart from what is happening in most other states.

The broad-reaching policy took effect automatically on 25 June despite not being debated or voted upon by the state senate or house, as the process typically necessitates.

It outlines that “age-appropriate” materials must not include descriptions or visual depictions of “sexual conduct”. Any parent with a child enrolled in a public K-12 school in the state can challenge up to five titles a month if they feel they violate these terms.

When similar language was used in an Iowa bill passed in May 2023, an onslaught of book banning ensued. Classic titles, like Ulysses and Native Son, were removed from reading lists and libraries, marking a radical departure from the traditional literature taught in schools for decades.

“South Carolinians are less free today than they were yesterday,” Jace Woodrum, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the state, told the Guardian.

“Superintendent Ellen Weaver has handed a blunt instrument to her ideological allies in the pro-censorship lobby. We still believe in academic freedom and will fight tooth and nail alongside teachers, librarians, students and parents against the ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation in public schools and libraries.”

Shanna Miles, who grew up and went through the education system in South Carolina, never could have foreseen the state’s current climate. Like many school librarians nationwide, she thought that the literary censorship she heard of was just political theatre.

“It’s not just queer kids, it’s not just kids of color, it’s impacting all kids,” Miles said. “There is a great overreach with these organizations like Moms of Liberty because they want to govern not just what their children read, but what other children want to read.”

Miles has written three books as an author herself, often choosing to centralize her plot around a fictional teenage character. In The Fall of The House of Tatterly, a 12-year-old Black boy living in Charleston fights Confederate demons. Like many other writers, Miles uses her stories to draw on more extensive social and political themes.

While she isn’t so focused on her own books being banned, she is worried about the impact this censorship, and by proxy, its intimidation, will have on the future of librarians in the US.

“I’m more worried about soft censorship, like when librarians would be so afraid to purchase books with any kind of sexual content or Black kids on the cover because that makes them a target,” she said.

“That sends a cooling effect across the purchasing of queer, Black, and neurodivergent books.”

Indeed, librarians have been left with little guidance on how to proceed with future purchases in the face of these new restrictions. PEN America documented how, in other states, this climate of fear for teachers and librarians eventually led many to leave their jobs.

According to a Rand report, about a quarter of the teachers surveyed said limitations on topics related to race and gender influenced their teaching materials.

Tayler Simon, who is from South Carolina and founded Liberation is Lit, a bookselling company that aims to spark collective action and community among readers, agrees that the future under this legislation looks uncertain.

“South Carolina already has its issues with sex education in public schools, and limiting access to this material will further isolate students from exploring relationships in safe ways,” she said.

<Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney fired back at Donald Trump after the former president shared an image on his Truth Social page saying she was guilty of treason and should be tried during “televised military tribunals.”

“Donald – This is the type of thing that demonstrates yet again that you are not a stable adult,” she wrote on X, “and are not fit for office.”

The former Wyoming congresswoman was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the former president after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

She also was a co-chair and one of only two Republicans on the House select committee that investigated the events surrounding and leading up to the attack, launched by a mob of Trump’s supporters to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

A meme on Truth Social included a photograph of Cheney and the text “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason” and “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.”

Trump’s account reposted the image on Sunday.

Trump has repeatedly targeted Cheney in his attempts to undermine the select committee’s reporting, which determined that Trump and his campaign supported a “multi-part conspiracy” to reverse his election loss, while he failed to stop a mob of his supporters from launching an assault inside the halls of Congress to do it by force.

He has called for its members to face criminal prosecution, and his House Republican allies have pressed federal courts and the Supreme Court to withdraw its findings.

Trump’s latest attack arrived as his former White House adviser Steve Bannon reported to prison for defying subpoenas to provide evidence and testimony to the committee. He was found in contempt of Congress and sentenced to four months in prison.

He is the second official from Trump’s orbit to go to prison for crimes connected to the Capitol attack. Former adviser Peter Navarro similarly defied congressional subpoenas and is serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.>

<For years, conservatives have railed against what they call the “administrative state” and denounced regulations.

But let’s be clear. When they speak of the “administrative state,” they’re talking about agencies tasked with protecting the public from corporations that seek profits at the expense of the health, safety, and pocketbooks of average Americans.

Regulations are the means by which agencies translate broad legal mandates into practical guardrails.

Substitute the word “protection” for “regulation” and you get a more accurate picture of who has benefited — consumers, workers, and average people needing clean air and clean water.

Substitute “corporate legal movement” for the “conservative legal movement” and you see who’s really mobilizing, and for what purpose.

I spent four years as policy director at the Federal Trade Commission, advising the commissioners on how best to protect the public from corporate excesses. I spent four more years as secretary of labor, protecting American workers from the depredations of big American corporations.

Most large corporations I dealt with obeyed laws and regulations designed to protect the public, but they spent a great deal of money trying to prevent such laws and regulations from being created in the first place and additional efforts contesting them through the courts.

Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for the FTC, the Labor Department, and dozens of other agencies — ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Highway and Safety Administration — to protect Americans from corporate misconduct.

On Thursday, the six Republican-appointed justices eliminated the ability of these agencies to enforce their rules through in-house tribunals, rather than go through the far more costly and laborious process of suing corporations in federal courts before juries.

On Friday, the justices overturned a 40-year-old precedent requiring courts to defer to the expertise of these agencies in interpreting the law, thereby opening the agencies to countless corporate lawsuits alleging that Congress did not authorize the agencies to go after specific corporate wrongdoing.

In recent years, the court’s majority has also made it easier for corporations to sue agencies and get public protections overturned. The so-called “major questions doctrine” holds that judges should nullify regulations that have a significant impact on corporate profits if Congress was not sufficiently clear in authorizing them.

Make no mistake: Consumers, workers, and ordinary Americans will be hurt by these decisions. Big corporations — especially their top executives and major investors — will make even more money than they’re already making because of them.

These rulings are the consequence of a corporate strategy launched 53 years ago.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then a modest business group in Washington, D.C., asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, to recommend actions corporations should take in response to the rising tide of public protections (that is, regulations).

Powell’s memo — distributed widely to Chamber members — said corporations were “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II, ensuring that corporations be responsive to all their stakeholders — not just shareholders but also their workers, consumers, and the environment.

Powell saw it differently. He urged businesses to mobilize for political combat.

Business must learn the lesson … that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.

He stressed that the critical ingredients for success were organization and funding.

Strength lies in … the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.....>

<....On August 23, 1971, the Chamber distributed Powell’s memo to leading CEOs, large corporations, and trade associations. It had exactly the impact the Chamber sought — galvanizing corporate American into action and releasing a tidal wave of corporate money into American politics.

An entire corporate legal movement was born — including tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, public relations flaks, think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and corporate recruiters to the courts, such as the Federalist Society.

In 1972, President Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court.

Within a few decades, big corporations would become the largest political force in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals.

I saw Washington change. When I arrived there in 1974, it was still a rather sleepy if not seedy town.

By the time I became secretary of labor in 1993, Washington had been transformed into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor to the margins of the district and made two of Washington’s surrounding counties among the wealthiest in the nation.

The number of corporate political action committees mushroomed from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980. By the time I became secretary of labor, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them. That came to more than 100 lobbyists for each member of Congress.

The so-called “conservative legal movement” of young lawyers who came of age working for Ronald Reagan — including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — were in reality part of this corporate legal movement. And they still are.

Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court emerged from the same corporate legal movement.

The next victory of the corporate legal movement will occur if and when the Supreme Court accepts a broad interpretation of the so-called “non-delegation doctrine.”

Under this theory of the Constitution, the courts should not uphold any regulation in which Congress has delegated its lawmaking authority to agencies charged with protecting the public. If accepted by the court, this would mark the end of all regulations — that is, all public protections not expressly contained in statutes — and the final triumph of Lewis Powell’s vision.

Corporate capitalism in the United States has always coexisted uneasily with democratic capitalism. The underlying question is which is in charge — big corporations or the people?

The current Supreme Court, and the corporate legal movement that spawned it, is intent on the answer being big corporations.>

<Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has questioned the legitimacy of Jack Smith's appointment as special counsel as the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is partially immune from prosecution for actions taken while he was in the White House.

In a 6-3 ruling, the justices returned Trump's case to the trial court to determine what is left of Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Trump.

In his concurring opinion, Thomas wrote, "No former President has faced criminal prosecution for his acts while in office in the more than 200 years since the founding of our country. And, that is so despite numerous past Presidents taking actions that many would argue constitute crimes."

"If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the special counsel's appointment before proceeding," Thomas added.

Thomas explained that he was writing a separate opinion, in support of the majority, to highlight that Smith may have been illegally appointed.

"Few things would threaten our constitutional order more than criminally prosecuting a former President for his official acts. Fortunately, the Constitution does not permit us to chart such a dangerous course," he wrote, before focusing on Smith's appointment.

"I write separately to highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure. In this case, the Attorney General purported to appoint a private citizen as Special Counsel to prosecute a former President on behalf of the United States. But, I am not sure that any office for the Special Counsel has been 'established by law," as the Constitution requires," Thomas wrote.

In an opinion that mirrors Trump's legal argument in his election interference case in Washington, D.C., and his classified documents hoarding case in Florida, Thomas suggested that Smith may have been unlawfully appointed.

He wrote that the Constitution only allows for "a limited exception for the appointment of inferior officers."

"Before the President or a Department Head can appoint any officer, however, the Constitution requires that the underlying office be 'established by Law.'"

"The Constitution itself creates some offices, most obviously that of the President and Vice President. Although the Constitution contemplates that there will be 'other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for,' it clearly requires that those offices 'shall be established by Law," he wrote.

Thomas claimed that the federal statutes that the Attorney General uses to justify the appointment of a special counsel are not relevant.

"None of the statutes cited by the Attorney General appears to create an office for the Special Counsel, and especially not with the clarity typical of past statutes used for that purpose," he wrote.>

<It is well established that the road to power in the Republican Party runs past a toll booth named Donald Trump. Those seeking prominence and power have to offer the former president their fealty at a bare minimum; those seeking to travel further have to pay a higher cost.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) is happy to pony up. Burgum rose to attention a year ago when he announced his extremely long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. (He’s rich, which always helps.) He fared poorly, but that was probably more a positive than a negative: He never had to hit Trump too hard but still came to Trump’s attention. Now he’s being discussed as a contender for his party’s vice-presidential nomination.

That brought him to NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, where — with a ping of his political E-ZPass — he offered a neat articulation of the Republican response to concerns that Trump seeks authoritarian power: No, Democrats do.

Host Kristen Welker asked whether Trump’s comments during last week’s presidential debate didn’t have the effect of “undermining people’s faith in … democracy itself by raising questions about the fairness of the 2020 election.” It didn’t, Burgum replied, because “both parties have done this.” His evidence that Democrats had done so was both familiar and thin: asking for a recount in 2000 or grumbling about the outcome in 2016.

“As a country, if we want to move forward,” Burgum said, “we have to have elections that both parties agree to.”

On paper, this seems noncontroversial. In context, though, it’s anything but. The entire point of Trump’s efforts to subvert 2020 was that he established and encouraged Republicans to reject the results of the election. A compromise to which both parties agreed, then, necessarily meant one in which the reality of Trump’s loss was somehow undermined. Setting that standard moving forward means that partisanship should set the boundaries of acceptability, not math. That’s precisely the sort of thing that is alarming to those concerned about Trump’s approach to democracy.

Welker pushed back, as you might hope she would: Wasn’t Trump’s failure to concede alarming?

Burgum didn’t think so, given that, “Trump, at the end of this term on January 20th, left the White House. We had a smooth transition.”

Welker offered Jan. 6 as a counterpoint to that argument.

“Well, I think we have to say that there was a smooth transition,” Burgum replied, which we certainly don’t. A second later, he got to the central point.

“Going into 2024, I think both parties are going to be very focused on [the election],” he said. “I think the threat to democracy, as a governor in North Dakota today, I’ve been living under what I call the Biden dictatorship because of all the rules and regulations.”

Welker noted that Biden had introduced fewer executive orders than both Trump and Burgum himself, asking whether that made Burgum “dictator of North Dakota.” Burgum claimed that he was simply “trying to get rid of red tape” and changed the subject.

Again, though, this is the rhetoric: Democrats are the real threat to democracy. It’s not always articulated in the manner Burgum used, but it’s routine. Violence that followed some protests against police brutality in summer 2020 was worse than the Capitol riot. The arrest of those who participated in the riot was not a response to an effort to subvert democracy but itself such a subversion. It isn’t what Trump does that’s the problem; it’s Biden and the Democrats and being “woke” and labeling social media posts as false and changing the rules around elections and so on. The problem isn’t us, and it isn’t Donald Trump. The problem is them, and it is Dictator Biden.

That Democrats and Republicans point to the threat to democracy as a significant problem has been established in polling for some time now. Last month, a Fox News poll found that members of both major parties saw the threat to democracy as being a function of restricted freedom rather than impaired elections, for example....>

<....Over the weekend, polling from CBS News, conducted by YouGov, showed how pervasive the sentiment is. Most Democrats said democracy would only be safe if Biden wins in November. Most Republicans said it would only be safe if Trump did.

The ‘Biden dictatorship’: How the right reframes the threat to democracy The ‘Biden dictatorship’: How the right reframes the threat to democracy The net effect is that Americans overall are divided. A majority think that democracy will not be protected if Biden wins, and a (mostly different) majority thinks it will not be protected if Trump does.

As Welker noted to Burgum, the presentation of Biden as a “dictator” because he implemented executive actions is flatly ridiculous. It became only more ridiculous after the Supreme Court on Monday determined that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election had broad protections against criminal prosecution. It’s not even clear the extent to which Burgum believes it.

But it is clear that this is the sort of thing Trump wants to hear from a possible running mate. It is also clear that a lot of Republicans believe it, that they see Biden as dictatorial centrally because he uses the power he was granted by the 2020 election to enact his agenda.

If you think that election was illegitimate because Trump convinced you that it was, it’s not hard to see how this perception of Biden follows.>

<The Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for their “official” acts will reverberate far beyond Donald Trump’s criminal case for seeking to subvert the 2020 election.

The panoply of federal and state charges Trump faces in Florida and Georgia, as well as related cases facing some of his closest White House advisers, may turn on how other judges apply the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.

And although the ruling’s most immediate impact is on the federal election case in Washington, the implications for the presidency itself — including for Joe Biden and any successors — are also likely vast.

Monday’s immunity decision threw an enormous wrench in special counsel Jack Smith’s bid to put Trump on trial for what Smith has described as a criminal conspiracy to overturn Biden’s victory. And Trump is certain to try to harness the ruling to derail his other cases, as well.

In Georgia, where he is similarly charged with trying to corrupt the state’s election results in 2020, Trump has previously tried to shield himself by claiming his conduct is immune from prosecution because he was acting as president. The judge in that case, Scott McAfee, has yet to rule on that effort, and now the Supreme Court may help guide his hand.

The high court left open the question of whether Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials to reverse certified election results can be treated as “official” conduct. So it’s possible the charges against Trump for urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him to prevail in the state will survive.

In Florida, where Trump is charged with hoarding classified documents in his home after leaving office, Trump has also lodged an immunity claim, contending that his decision to transfer the classified records to Mar-a-Lago in the final days of his presidency renders it protected from prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has not ruled on that motion yet but is now likely to have to contend with at least a limited impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on her case — yet another factor that could slow her already plodding timeline.

“It certainly raises whole new avenues for litigation there,” said Cardozo Law School professor Jessica Roth, a former federal prosecutor. “It certainly adds additional avenues for delay.”....>

<....And even in Trump’s New York case — where he was found guilty in May of falsifying records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star — Trump is reportedly floating a longshot bid to reverse his conviction by citing the immunity decision. In a letter that has not been made public, his lawyers asked the judge in that case to toss out the jury verdict, the New York Times reported Monday evening.

The Supreme Court’s opinion extends way beyond Trump. Taken to its extreme conclusion, the court has embraced a constitutional framework that makes it nearly impossible for a president to be held legally accountable for any use of official power, no matter how nefarious — with Congress’ impeachment power being the only recourse.

“Although the Court doesn’t quite say it, the commander in chief power has to be a ‘core’ power by its logic, and so can never be a basis for a criminal prosecution,” noted Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago professor of constitutional law. “This licenses the misuse of … the surveillance and intrusive powers of the national security state.”

The decision to bless nearly all official presidential conduct as immune from prosecutorial scrutiny also has ramifications for Biden. Republicans have repeatedly suggested that their allies in government should consider charging Biden with crimes for actions ranging from his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal to the flow of migrants over the southern border. Those policy considerations would be clearly beyond the reach of prosecutors under the Supreme Court’s analysis.

Though the Supreme Court largely left it to trial judges to determine which of Trump’s specific acts as president were “official” — and therefore immune — the justices made one exception: Trump’s conversations with Justice Department officials about how to deploy the department in service of his bid to stay in power were squarely within his official power as president, the high court declared.

That aspect of the case against Trump has been among the most vividly documented efforts to subvert the results of the election. Trump, according to numerous witnesses — including former acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue — leaned heavily on department leaders to amplify false claims of voter fraud to lend the imprimatur of the government to those allegations. When they resisted, he threatened to appoint a more like-minded ally, then-assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, to lead the department for the final weeks of his presidency.

Clark was charged alongside Trump for his alleged role in the scheme in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought a massive racketeering case. He was also charged by Washington bar authorities with a professional ethics violation, which could lead to the suspension or loss of his law license.

But Clark is now calling for both of those cases to be dropped in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s White House chief of staff during the 2020 election efforts and is similarly facing criminal charges, could also try to invoke the immunity decision to derail his own charges.>

<Hunter Biden is suing the Fox News network, just a little over a year after the right-wing news channel was forced to reach a historic settlement and admitted its anchors had spread false claims about a voting machine company to please its pro-Trump audience.

A lawsuit filed on Monday by attorneys for the president’s adult son accused the network of “target[ing] Mr Biden in an effort to harass, annoy, alarm, and humiliate him, and tarnish his reputation” with false claims about his business ventures, drug abuse, alleged illegal activity and foreign investments.

Specifically, the lawsuit points to a six-part fictional mock trial series titled “The Trial of Hunter Biden.”

“Far from reporting on a newsworthy event, Fox sought to commercialize Mr. Biden’s personality through a form of treatment distinct from the dissemination of news or information,” the lawsuit said. “Indeed, the entire miniseries is fictionalized and based on a nonexistent criminal case.” Despite the fact Fox stated the trial was fictional, Biden’s lawsuit said that the show presented actual emails and “nonconsensual intimate images.”

“While using certain true information, the series intentionally manipulates the facts, distorts the truth, narrates happenings out of context, and invents dialogue intended to entertain,” the lawsuit states. “Thus, the viewer of the series cannot decipher what is fact and what is fiction, which is highly damaging to Mr Biden.”

The lawsuit also criticized Fox’s publishing of the sexual images.

“The unlawful publication and dissemination of the intimate images by Fox was not made for a legitimate public purpose, where the miniseries featuring a mock trial is not accurately reporting on newsworthy events but rather, is a fictionalized trial of a nonexistent case against Mr Biden, produced for entertainment purposes,” the lawsuit said.

The images of the younger Biden in intimate engagements have also been shown in congressional hearings, most notably by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Fox provided the following comment to The Independent: “This entirely politically motivated lawsuit is devoid of merit.”

“The core complaint stems from a 2022 streaming program that Mr Biden did not complain about until sending a letter in late April 2024. The program was removed within days of the letter, in an abundance of caution, but Hunter Biden is a public figure who has been the subject of multiple investigations and is now a convicted felon. Consistent with the First Amendment, FOX News has accurately covered the newsworthy events of Mr Biden’s own making, and we look forward to vindicating our rights in court.”

Hunter Biden, the last living child from President Joe Biden’s first marriage, has come under intense scrutiny by Republicans and the legal system both for his time actively addicted to drugs and his business dealings.

Earlier this year, he testified before the House Oversight Committee behind closed doors for six hours. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of using his father’s name as leverage for his business deals.

Last month, a federal jury in Delaware found Hunter Biden guilty in his federal gun trial in Wilmington, Delaware after weeks of testimony from many members of the Biden family and Hallie Biden, the widow of his late brother Beau, with whom he had a relationship as well.

Republicans and right-wing media have regularly referenced Hunter Biden and claimed that the elder Biden helped his son with business dealings. No solid evidence has emerged of wrongdoing.>

Whatsamatter, <fredwuckfad>? Don't like the content here? Stay away! We have no need of evil polluting these pages!

<Lost in the shuffle of the outrage over the conservative majority Supreme Court's 6-3 decision to hand Donald Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card with their expansive presidential immunity ruling on Monday, was presiding Justice John Roberts [sic] sneering attack on the three dissenting judges, Associate Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in his brief.

With Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett also questioning some of Robert's [sic] reasoning while joining with the majority, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance took Roberts to task for his attack on his female colleagues in the dismissive comments he included at the end of his written opinion.

On her Civil Discourse Substack platform, Vance asserted that 69-year-old Roberts was anything but civil when he waved away their concerns about the implications of a ruling that absolves Trump of just about any criminal activities and allows the conservative court to ride to the convicted felon ex-president's rescue in the future.

In particular, Vance took exception to Robert's writing that their concerns exhibited "a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today.”

According to the former prosecutor, "The majority opinion closes with a section where the Chief Justice, in a most decidedly uncollegial fashion, criticizes the Justices who dissent," before adding that Roberts was, in essence, telling them: "Sit down, little ladies."

"Roberts tries to downplay what the Court is doing, but essentially, that comes down to saying that all that the Court is doing is saying Trump is entitled to immunity for his attempt to get DOJ to legitimize his efforts to steal the election," she wrote before adding, "Perhaps worst of all is an argument the majority offers as its own that is straight out of Trump’s playbook."

Expanding on that assertion she wrote, "The dismissive language they use towards the dissents is really outrageous," and then pointed at Roberts claiming, "Unable to muster any meaningful textual or historical support, the principal dissent suggests that there is an ‘established understanding’ that ‘former Presidents are answerable to the criminal law for their official acts.’ Conspicuously absent is mention of the fact that since the founding, no President has ever faced criminal charges — let alone for his conduct in office."

To which Vance pointed out, "We all know the answer to this one—no president has been prosecuted because no president has ever done what Trump did before. We all believe, or at least have until today, as did the Founding Fathers, that no man is above the law, not even the president. Everyone seems to understand that except for six conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court."

Noting Roberts also wrote, "Our dissenting colleagues exude an impressive infallibility,” Vance shot back with a biting, "It’s a shame he cannot see himself in the mirror.">

<You will obey!

This is the mission statement for authoritarians and autocrats such as aspiring dictator Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Donald Trump and his agents’ and allies’ revolutionary plans to end American democracy are not secret: they have been publicly announced and are detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, on Trump’s own campaign website as Agenda 47, and throughout the right-wing “news” media disinformation echo chamber. And now blessed by the highest court in the land.

These enemies of American democracy would not be so bold if they were not reasonably certain of their success.

In series of recent interviews, MSNBC host and author Rachel Maddow has been trying to warn the American people about the existential danger to their freedom, lives, and safety from Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and larger neofascist project. As Maddow told CNN’s Oliver Darcey, Trump's threats are no joke:

I'm worried about the country broadly if we put someone in power who is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people, and to 'root out' what he's described in subhuman terms as his 'enemy from within. Again, history is helpful here. He's not joking when he says this stuff, and we've seen what happens when people take power proclaiming that kind of agenda. I think there's a little bit of head-in-the-sand complacency that Trump only intends to go after individual people he has already singled out. Do you really think he plans to stop at well-known liberals?

Maddow continued:

It also seems pretty clear that some people in politics might think they'll be on the safe side — that they might even benefit from it — if they side with Trump. Ask Mike Pence about how that works out in the end. When Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against civilians on his first day in office, do you think he then rescinds the order on day two? For that matter, what convinces you that these massive camps he's planning are only for migrants? So, yes, I'm worried about me — but only as much as I'm worried about all of us.

Rachel Maddow is correct. History has repeatedly shown that authoritarian and fascist movements almost always expand the groups of people they target as the enemy or some type of Other. Eventually, these movements target their own supporters in a cycle of escalating violence and suffering, as they finally, as seen in Nazi Germany, consume themselves in destruction. Ultimately, almost all Americans are imperiled by Trumpism and American neofascism.

One of the great failures of the mainstream news media in the Age of Trump (and especially its hope-peddlers, institutionalists, and professional centrists) is treating aspiring dictator Donald Trump and the right-wing’s plan(s) to end multiracial pluralistic democracy as a hypothetical or something imagined and fantastical instead of as a real and present and growing danger.

In their new essay at Slate, Norm Ornstein and Dahlia Lithwick write with uncommon clarity and force about how the news media and the country’s political class have mostly failed in their responsibilities to warn the American people about the imminent dangers and reality of Trumpism and American neofascism:

Americans have a normalcy bias. It leads them to believe anyone who tells them that everything is awesome and that a system is “holding” — even as that system is hanging together by way of dental floss…..And many journalists have a normalcy bias so acute they wouldn’t know how to cover an authoritarian takeover if it meant that one of the two presidential candidates threatened jail for his political opponents—even as he continues to refer to these journalists as “the enemy of the people.” (My emphasis added) It also means that they tend to cover “Trump convicted on 34 felony counts” in terms of “how much would this story make us deviate from covering a normal election?” It turns out that we’re normalizing the abnormal, covering the election as a horse race between democracy and illiberalism without mentioning illiberalism or considering the stakes and the consequences, and repeatedly applying a false equivalence to Trump and Biden…. The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger. “The system is holding” is not a plan for a knowable future. It never was.

What are the specifics of Project 2025, Agenda 47, and the larger right-wing plot to end American democracy? These plans include removing any checks and balances on Dictator Trump and his regime by purging any members of the bureaucracy who are deemed to be disloyal, i.e. they place the Constitution and the rule of law above personal fealty to Trump and the MAGA movement. The Department of Justice will also be politicized and used to attack the enemies of the Trump regime.....>

<....The Republican Party will basically be made into the country’s official national party. Voting for the Democrats or other political parties that are deemed to be a threat to the MAGA movement will be made prohibitively difficult through voter intimidation, nullification and purges. White Christianity will be made into America’s official state religion. The civil rights of Black and brown people, the LGBTQ community, and women will be severely curtailed. Women will have their reproductive rights and freedoms taken away. There will be mass deportations and concentration camps targeting non-white migrants and refugees. Homeless people and other “undesirables” will also be imprisoned in these camps. As promised, Trump and his forces will target the human “vermin” who are polluting the “blood” of the nation, including but not be limited to non-whites, Muslims, Jews, and disabled people.

The United States military will be ordered to occupy Democrat-led cities and other “blue” parts of the country to combat "crime." There will be a national “patriotic” education program where dissent and intellectual freedom and otherwise challenging “conservative”/neo-fascist orthodoxy and dogma will not be allowed. High-quality public education will be ended and replaced with indoctrination programs to create compliant subjects who lack the intellectual training to be critical thinkers and responsible citizens in a real democracy. Universities and colleges will be targeted with censorship, lawsuits and other efforts to defund and close them down – as well as to threaten and intimidate faculty and administrators – if they do not sufficiently support the Trump regime and the larger right-wing reactionary and revolutionary project.

Freedom of the press and freedom of speech will be severely limited. President Biden and other leading Democrats, Republicans deemed to be disloyal, and any other individuals and groups who are targeted as the enemy will face the possibility of being put in prison for “treason” and then being executed. Donald Trump and his propagandists and other agents and allies have repeatedly made such explicit threats and promises of “revenge” and “retribution”. As part of that project, Trump will pardon the January 6 terrorists (a group he describes as “soldiers” and “heroes”) and other violent right-wing extremists who will then become his personal brownshirts.

Donald Trump will personally exercise control over the United States economy by making himself the de facto head of the Federal Reserve board. Trump, like other autocrats and authoritarians, will use federal tax policy and other laws to reward his business allies. In turn, these business interests will give Trump and his family and other designated recipients vast sums of money. Trump’s first term in office was but a preview of the vast corruption that will take place when/if he takes power in 2025. To that point, at a fundraising event, the former president recently told fossil fuel industry executives to give him one billion dollars. In return, they will be permitted to pollute and ruin the world.

There are prominent voices among the news media and political class (and general public) who will push back that this is all “hysterical”, “doomsaying”, and that “the institutions” and “the rule of law” will stop aspiring dictator Donald Trump and Project 2025 and his Agenda 47 and the other plans to end the country’s democracy. Plus, Trump could not implement his desire to become a dictator during his first regime because he is “stupid” and “disorganized” and his Jan. 6 coup failed, and he is now a convicted felon which all means that the “guardrails held”. And of course, there is this talking point: the American people are basically good! Donald Trump is a bad man! The American people will get it right because they always do in the end!

Such responses and denials are so much hopium happy pill balderdash and immature thinking that are at odds with reality as it actually exists.

The following new interview in Rolling Stone with Trump MAGA operatives should sober up such voices – it will not.

“OF COURSE WE aren’t fu**ing bluffing.” That’s the message one close Trump adviser and former administration official — who requested anonymity to speak candidly — wants to get across to the press and public, when asked about Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign vows of “retribution,” unprecedented force, and militaristic action.

Indeed, this sentiment is shared widely among the upper echelon of Trumpland and the MAGAfied Republican Party, with various officials and conservatives with a direct line to the former president insisting that so-called “moderates” or alleged “establishment” types will be tamed or purged, if Trump retakes power next year.....>

<....Rolling Stone spoke with a dozen sources who are playing roles in Trump’s “government-in-waiting” or are in regular contact with the ex-president, including GOP lawmakers, Trump advisers, MAGA policy wonks, conservative attorneys, and former and current Trump aides. They universally stress that the former (and perhaps future) U.S. president and top allies are serious about following through on his extreme campaign pledges. These promises run the gamut from siccing active duty military units on not just American cities but also Mexican territory, all the way to prosecuting and potentially imprisoning Trump foes.

Rolling Stone continues, "Yes, we do really want to burn it all down,” says another Republican close to Trump, referring to the so-called GOP “establishment” remnants who may wish to shackle Trump’s hard-right impulses. When asked about potential court challenges in a Trump second term, this source simply replies: 'Who cares?”'

Are you afraid? You should be.

Where is the massive public resistance to aspiring Dictator Donald Trump and the other neofascist forces and enemies of American democracy and freedom? As compared to how Europeans are responding to ascendant neofascism in their own respective countries, the mobilization (or lack thereof) by the American people can reasonably be described as pitiful. On this William Bunch writes at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

With far-right populist movements and strongman leaders on the rise across the globe in 2024, France’s marchers aren’t unique in fighting back. Earlier this year in Germany, large crowds took to the streets to voice their opposition to their country’s up-and-coming ultraright movement, Alternative for Germany (AfD). For many critics in Germany, AfD — with 16% of the vote in recent elections for the European Parliament — carries dangerous echoes of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, which plunged their country into World War II and executed the Holocaust against Jews.

The first part of this story should sound familiar to U.S. voters. Donald Trump’s Republican Party is running in November on a mass deportation proposal that would round up a million or more immigrants in the dead of night and ship them to large, sweltering detention camps on the southern border. Trump’s anti-immigrant plan — a first cousin to the extreme nativism of France’s RN or Germany’s AfD — is just one chapter in a 900-page blueprint for an American dictatorship called Project 2025 that would guide a second Trump administration.

So ... where are the protesters?

An anti-democracy comet is heading straight for Washington, D.C., in four-and-a-half months, and in a chilling case of life imitating art, we are living large in the United States of Denial (where, as I write this, the story at the top right of the New York Times home page is about a U.S. couple’s struggle to find a Rome apartment on their $950,000 budget)....>

<....The insanity of doing the same thing over and over — begging millions of utterly tuned-out voters to like the (undeservedly, in my opinion) unpopular President Joe Biden and expecting a different result on Nov. 5 — isn’t working. With the American Experiment on the line, the political slogan of 2024 is “Don’t Look Up!”

What’s weird is that it’s not that America doesn’t have a tradition of political protest.

Bunch continues:

So, here’s a crazy idea — what about protesting and, more importantly, organizing before the wrong guy wins? That’s not the American way, I know, but I think the distinctive crisis in 2024 makes a case for changing things up, and maybe taking some inspiration from our friends in Europe. Just like over there, Trump’s MAGA movement — from the mass deportation scheme to plans to call up troops with the Insurrection Act to the candidate’s alarming echoes of Hitler — is a threat like we’ve never seen before. But also comparable is that — much like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Olaf Scholz — our traditional neoliberal leader in Biden is neither popular nor inspirational.

There is perhaps a glimmer of hope. The New York Times recently reported on plans being developed and implemented by pro-democracy activists and organizations across the country to resist Dictator Trump and his regime’s agenda.

But such plans will be limited in their success if pro-democracy Americans do not organize and mobilize by the tens of millions, instead of surrendering through tacit consent and learned helplessness and exhaustion or alternatively waiting for the elites and their other leaders and influentials to save them.

The American people would be wise to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. At this point, given the early 2024 polls, fundraising, and other measures – most notably the enduring if not growing popularity of convicted felon and aspiring dictator Donald Trump, the worst is the far more likely outcome. Given the obvious and growing danger, the American people cannot say that they were surprised or not told what awaits them and their democracy if Dictator Trump and his regime take power. They chose to sleepwalk eyes open into a disaster.>

<The organizing principle for TPM’s core coverage since Jan. 6, 2021, has been the conceit that we are a vigilant watchdog over the long, slow, unsteady process of holding Donald Trump to account under the law for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In the early days of that effort, much of the focus was on expanding the public understanding of the election subversion scheme beyond the violent attack on the Capitol to encompass all of the wrongdoing that Trump and others conspired to engage in to retain an extraconstitutional grip on power.

We traced the beginning of the conspiracy back to April 2020 when the new voting measures put in place during the COVID pandemic enraged Trump and many Republicans and began us on the road to the Big Lie. There were tendrils that extended as far back as 2016, but the core conspiracy sprouted in the spring of 2020 and didn’t just come into full bloom out of nowhere on Jan. 6, 2021.

It was clear from the outset that Trump’s unlawful conduct was somehow beyond the imagination of the people most immediately responsible for protecting and preserving our constitutional framework and the legal system it undergirds.

That was deeply alarming, but it also felt fixable, with the consistent application of a more dextrous [sic] imagination coupled with clear-headed thinking, the relentless gathering of evidence, a sober assessment of the consequences of an auto-coup attempt, and an emotional appeal to the underlying principles imperiled by Trump’s conduct and further imperiled by the failure to hold him to account under the law for that conduct.

For a time, it was thrilling to watch the needle move as the public imagination broadened and deepened and officials of good faith began to come to grips with what had happened and what now needed to happen to preserve the rule of law. The work of the House Jan. 6 committee was pivotal in this regard. While the Justice Department moved quickly against the Jan. 6 rioters, it moved more slowly on other fronts; but it eventually brought to bear the full weight of its resources and professionalism to the enormous task of prosecuting a former president.

As the needle started to move on the Jan. 6 front, an astonishing new development further reinforced the growing consensus in official Washington that Trump’s lawlessness could no longer be ignored let alone excused. The mind-boggling revelation that Trump had squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago classified documents he had pilfered upon leaving the White House and the FBI search of his home to retrieve them demonstrated the extent of his criminality, the risk he posed not just to the rule of law but to national security, and the consequences of not holding him to account under the law.

Still, even with the needle moving during this period, it was becoming obvious that there was a fundamental failure at many levels of government to grapple with the political calendar and the fact that we were in a race against the clock. There is no justice in failing to hold to account in a timely fashion the man who illegally used the powers of the presidency to try to overturn the last election, especially when he is running again for the very same office, is the standard-bearer for his party, and remains a threat to democratic order and the peaceful transfer of future power.

At this point in our national narrative, holding Trump to account shifted to the province of the courts. Speed is not their forte, and usually for good reason. Still, it felt like an important milestone. I’ve said here before, to the chagrin of many of you, that the goal wasn’t to land Trump in prison but to hold him to account in a court of law and let the chips fall where they may. Given how remote it seemed in the days immediately after Jan. 6 that such an accounting would ever happen, indictments in Washington, D.C., South Florida, Atlanta and to a lesser extent in New York City felt like a vindication of sorts for the rule of law and the ability of the justice system to rally to the historical moment.

I needn’t tell you what happened next. The wheels came off.

Sensing that we were losing the race against the clock, advocacy groups made a strategic decision to invoke the 14th Amendment’s Disqualification Clause against Trump to keep him off the ballot in key states. If it didn’t apply to Jan. 6 insurrection, when would or could it ever apply? In so doing, we got our first taste of how the Supreme Court — with its six-justice “conservative” majority, half of them appointed by Trump — viewed Jan. 6. It couldn’t bring itself to confront the reality of Jan. 6 at all. With a dyspeptic hand-wave, it rendered the clear language of the Constitution a nullity and foreshadowed where things were headed next.....>