Yes, Glenn posted, but i am still usig this Meidas Touch/Legal AF with Michael Popok (despite the commercial in the misddle) because heis actually in the Southern District, even in the Miami Division, and knows what is specifically usual in the Miami Division as well as when things are different from the usual.
The Lincoln Project – Trump’s Federal Indictment
Thom Hartmann – Alarming New U.N. Report Proves Feminists Right – Want to Know What Men REALLY Think About Women??? (Other 79 countries – don’t get smug.)
Bruce W Nelson (“Mangy Fetlocks”) – Trump’s Hiding Places — Lyrics here https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017835797
Cat Rolls Down The Stairs 5x A Day
Beau – Let’s talk about misconceptions about Trump in Florida….
Yesterday, we had thunder, lightning, and hail, and also a power outage which lasted about an hour. And, of course, it was cold – low fifties with a “feels like” in the high forties. The outage must have stressed me, thoug, because I tripped and fell – no damage to speak of – two small cuts is all – just annoying. Incidentally, if anyone is wonderng abot whether the indictment really has 37 or 38 counts, the aner is 38, but the 38th one only applies to the pool boy, so 37 relating to Trump** is correct.
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NPR – What is HAPE? How people in the mountains can still fall ill to mountain sickness
Quote – High altitude pulmonary edema — commonly referred to as HAPE — is a more serious case of altitude sickness that, if not treated quickly or properly, can lead to death…. “There are deaths usually every couple of years in adults who come to ski or have a vacation with their friends,” [Summit County’s Dr. Christine] Ebert-Santos said. “There are so many times when people are sick with a virus and you don’t really give it a second thought. Without having somebody’s eyes on you or having a pulse oximeter to see what is happening with your oxygen, you can’t really know if this is something going on in your lungs or it’s just a cold.” Click through for details. I know, I’m the only one who lives in the mountains. But people do come up ere for reasons – and this was certainly news to me. I do own a pulse oximeter and I know how to use it, so here’s that.
USA Today – I don’t want to live in a country where Trump could be held accountable
Quote – It’s like Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote in a tweet Friday: “These charges are unprecedented and it’s a sad day for our country, especially in light of what clearly appears to be a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not.”… TWO TIERS! One tier in which President Trump keeps getting indicted via both state and federal justice systems and another in which the people I don’t like keep getting not indicted via all the things Fox News tells me they did wrong. Click through for full satire – if it isn’t too close to reality for you to stand. It realy doesn’t get any more “bothsiderist” than this.
The Nib (Rosemary Mosco) – The Future Is on Thin Ice
Quote – Growing up in Canada, I used to skate home from school. I know this sounds like a stereotype…. I grew up in … Ottawa. A canal runs through the city…. [I]t holds the Guiness World Record for the largest naturally frozen ice rink. In the winter, the canal freezes over…. Only this year it didn’t. Click through for graphic essay. Back in the ineties, when the general public started to hear about climate change (which fossil fuel pushers had known about for decades), the changes resulted in some extremely heavy swnowfalls for us (because so much polar ice had thawed, there was more water in the air elsewhere.) So many ignorant people thought that was a reason to deny that glabal warming existed. What will that say to this, I wonder? Will they even see it?
Yes, this is long. But Glenn today is almost twice as long, and IMO needlessly alarmist, as well as repetitive. I get that. But despite the clickbait Meidas Touch headline, I think this is more realistic – and more accurate.
Meidas Touch – Jack Smith has PLAN to DEAL with CORRUPT Judge Aileen Cannon – long but meaty
The Lincoln Project – Pence Knows
Thom Hartmann – Unsealed! Donald Trump’s Indictment (And More)
Armageddon Update – Florida Is A DeSaster
Guy Finds Tiny Frog In His Salad
Beau – Let’s talk about McCarthy’s dream and the GOP’s future….
Last week, I got an email from Smithsonian to remind me that Juneteenth is comeing up. And also to give me a link to the NMAA site with history and other information about the day. Even if you have been celebrating it for years, there may be something you can still learn about it – or some detail you may have forgotten. Then, yesterday, I got the email that Heather Cox Richardson has just finished a book to be released mid-September. In her words, it “tries to explain how we got to this political moment.” That’s all I know about the publication details. She does comment that the writing process caused her to rethink a good deal and end up changing her thesis – probably not n uncommon experience for any writer.
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SPLC – Pride Month a Time to Honor History by Challenging Anti-LGBTQ+ Movement
Quote – Pride Month is more than a time to reflect on Stonewall and the other protests that helped solidify the LGBTQ+ movement and push the world to rethink its prejudices against the community. It’s a time to look at the current threats and challenges to the movement. Now, as then, LGBTQ+ people are under attack. Across the nation, conservative state legislators and governors have adopted draconian restrictions on speech, assembly, education, health care and other matters – all in an attempt to violently force LGBTQ+ people back into the closet. Click through for the full article. I personally don’t think the haters are trying to force people back into closets. I think they are trying to exterminate them. And, yes, I’m starting the month late. Apologies.
Children’s Defense Fund – Childhood Watch Column – “The Mindless Menace of Violence”
Quote – [The day after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated,] Robert Kennedy continued: “When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies—to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear—only a common desire to retreat from each other—only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.” Click through for the rest of the column. Not only have we not fixed this, we have allowed it to get increasingly worse. I would point out that the key word is “teach” – and that we have lost any control we ever had over education. It’s futile to say “If he had only lived.” But who can help thinking it?
Colorado Public Radio – Meet the 28 working mothers of the first graduating class from Denver Public Schools’ new community hubs
Quote – The 28 women, all mothers, took part in a special graduation ceremony Saturday. They are the first graduating class from Denver Public Schools’ community hubs. DPS opened the six family resource centers last fall to help with child care, food, language classes, and GED diplomas…. The idea behind the hubs is to empower parents to be role models for their children as lifelong learners…. “We launched this program because there was a need in our community, and it’s helping,” DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero told the graduates. “You should be standing a bit taller today, feeling more excited about what’s in store for you. That is a powerful thing.” Click through for article. This may seem petty, considering how much damage Lauren Boebert has done on larger stages, but I really, really resent her for the way she has reinforced the already unfair disrepute in which the GED is held by people who hold more conventional diplomas. I’ve worked with the GED, which means I have met and worked with those who have taken it. and I am a big fan. Even if those taking it need it bcause they dropped out of high school for some stupid and/or selfish reason, that isn’t who they are now. (And many didn’t, but faced hardships most of us can barely imagine.) They want to learn. They want to improve their ability to support their families (or even just themselves.) They want to “be all they can be.” And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with wanting – and working – to “better yourself”? Plenty who finish high school never reach that level of self-awareness. (OK, end of rant.)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Heaven knows what is happening with Donald Trump** these days is truly unprecedented in the history of the U.S., and maybe in any country’s history. There are plenty of nations which have been betrayed and/or abused by their leaders; some have faced accountbility, others not so much. Donald can be happy (if he even knows how to be happy) that he is not Charles I of England, nor Louis XVI of France, nor Nicholas II of Russia. But one thing there is a precedent for is running for President against a former colleague (I put it that was because this story includes a matchup between a former President against the prsimptive nominee his former VP rather than the other way around.)
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Mike Pence is jockeying against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination – joining the ranks of just one vice president who, in 1800, also ran against a former boss
Former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence appear together in November 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Former Vice President Mike Pence filed paperwork to declare his candidacy for president on June 5, 2023 – placing him in unusual ranks.
While 18 of the 49 former vice presidents have gone on to run for president, it’s rare for vice presidents to run against their former bosses. Six of these former vice presidents, including President Joe Biden, were ultimately elected president.
Pence and former President Donald Trump have had a complicated relationship. Pence’s devout conservative evangelical Christianity was a crucial ingredient in helping carry Trump to victory in 2016.
There are only a few other times in American history that are vaguely similar to the unfolding battle over who will become the Republican presidential nominee. Both were extraordinarily bitter, and centuries later, their strife still makes historians and experts on the presidency – including myself – raise eyebrows.
Mike Pence, left, is the second vice president to run against his former boss for election. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Name-calling in 1800
There is one other time in history when a vice president ran against the president he served with in office.
In the election of 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged incumbent President John Adams. Adams had won the presidency in 1796, and Jefferson was runner-up, making him vice president. Until 1804, the person who came in first in a presidential election became commander in chief, while the person who brought in the second-most votes became vice president.
Jefferson’s allies called Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
An Adams ally with the pseudonym of Burleigh, meanwhile, offered an omen if Jefferson won the presidency: “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes,” Burleigh wrote.
The two used proxies to level vicious personal attacks against one another in the press. But neither one gained the advantage. The election ended in an Electoral College tie. This set up what is sometimes known as the Revolution of 1800 – the very first time one group in political power peacefully ceded that power to another group, based on the results of an election.
Jefferson emerged victorious from the election.
A view of the Republican National Convention in June 1912, when William Howard Taft was nominated to serve on the ticket. PhotoQuest/Getty Images
‘Dumber than a guinea pig’ in 1912
But there is another point in history that is similar to the Trump vs. Pence race that is about to get underway.
Roosevelt endorsed William Howard Taft, his secretary of war, for president. And Taft won the race easily.
But Roosevelt grew unhappy with the Taft administration, as he felt it was not upholding his beliefs that the president should do what is necessary for the good of the country, as long as it is not explicitly forbidden by law.
In one instance, the Taft administration filed a lawsuit against U.S. Steel Corporation for violating antitrust laws that prevent unlawful mergers or other business practices.
Roosevelt went into a fury. Other factors were at play, but he had personally approved the steel company’s trust and viewed Taft’s actions as a personal attack against himself and his administration’s legacy.
Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination and ran against him in 1912. The former president dusted off his bully pulpit and used his rhetorical knives to their maximum advantage against Taft.
In the spring of 1912, Roosevelt referred to Taft as a “fathead,” “puzzlewit” and “dumber than a guinea pig.”
Taft then used the term puzzlewit in a humorous, self-deprecating way to draw attention to what he felt were failures of Roosevelt. This included Roosevelt’s opposition to treaties with Great Britain and France.
Taft also said in a 1912 campaign speech in Ohio that, “I hold that the man is a demagogue and a flatterer who comes out and tells the people that they know it all. I hate a flatterer. I like a man to tell the truth straight out, and I hate to see a man try to honeyfuggle the people by telling them something he doesn’t believe.”
The 1912 Chicago Republican Convention, where the two faced off, was one of the most raucous in history. Taft and Roosevelt supporters even got into into fistfights.
The Republican Party leadership ultimately backed Taft. And Roosevelt, in dramatic fashion, removed his supporters from the convention after a speech, in which he declared, “… we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”
Then, Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party and split Republicans, paving the way for Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s presidential win.
No other time exactly like it
Pence’s decision to run against Trump has no direct equivalent in American history.
However, if the past is a prologue, the Republican primary season will likely have more in common with the Roosevelt and Taft match-up than others, at least in terms of direct insults and attacks upon leadership style – things Trump is known for doing.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, We can all be grateful the winner-President-second-place-VP system did not last, and the Adams/Jefferson Presidency must have been a big reason why it didn’t. It would have been a lot like having Trump as President and Hillary as VP. Adams was not evil, but he was about as opposite Jefferson in his politics as two people can be (and to top it off, Jefferson had a crush on Abigail.)
I realize this is not exactly the hottest news today, and what is hot is the full indictment, which Jack Smith has suggested that literally everyone should read. It’s a speaking indictment, so it could be a lot harder to get through, and it is at the bottom of the page at this link.
Yesterday, the radio opera was “Der Fliegende Holländer” (The Flying Dutchman”). This was the earliest of his operas to feature the theme of a man’s redemption through a woman’s love by means of her death. Yes, that’s totally nuts. But he wasn’t alone – literature, music and art all had influential practitioners in 19th century Europe who were obsessed with this idea. Most of his operas after this one riffed on the theme. Exceptios would be “Lohengrin” (he doesn’t need redeeming, and Elsa doesn’t die – maybe) and the Ring Cycle (unless Brynhilde’s immolation redeems Siegfried – but he’s already dead when that happens.) But I digress. In any case, the music of the Dutchman is impressive. It was written before he fine-tuned his “leitmotif” system but is already characterized by tone painting. A lot of music has been written by a lot of people purportedly depicting storms at sea, but Wagner’s in this opera is the one that convinces me. Senta is self-destructive and as dunb as a MAGAt, but at least she doesn’t take anyone else down with her, and her music convincingly depicts her obsession. And so on.
Also yesterday I received a petition from Move On titled “Convict Trump” I was shocked. I had to go to their website to send a message, but I thought it was necessary. Here’s what I said: “Have you lost your minds? No, I’m not going to sign a “convict Trump**” petition. Only a jury can convict Trump** (or anyone else), and they are not supposed to have any outside influence. Sending a jury a petition like this is jury tampering. Unless he makes a plea deal – that would result in a conviction – but do we really want that? Come back to me when you have a petition which is Constitutional. This one isn’t.”
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Colorado Public Radio – Sen. Michael Bennet wants to strengthen the watersheds that help protect clean drinking water
Quote – The bill reauthorizes the USFS’s Water Source Protection Program (WSPP), which helps fund projects that prevent pollution at the source, usually by restoring forest health and watersheds. It would increase funding for the program to $30 million per year for the next five years for work done in partnership with local communities, water utilities or agricultural producers. WSPP also tries to prioritize projects that focus on drinking water or improve resilience to wildfire or climate change. Click through for story. I’m certainly aware of watersheds. But it never occurred to me what, besides lack of precipitation, might threaten them, nor of what could be done to keep them strong. D’oh! So i’m very glad to know that I have been voting for a Senator who does know.
The Conversation – Forts Cavazos, Barfoot and Liberty — new names for army bases honor new heroes and lasting values, instead of Confederates
Quote – The renamings so far have come off without controversy – and with no one seriously defending why the bases should continue honoring Confederates. As Trevor Noah said on “The Daily Show,” “Imagine being a Black soldier training at a base that is named after somebody who didn’t even think of you as a human being.” Celebrities popular with conservatives have praised the base redesignations, too. For example, Mel Gibson applauded renaming Fort Benning for Col. Moore, whose memoir was the basis for “We Were Soldiers,” a 2002 film starring Gibson. Click through for details. How many people know more than one or two names of Hitler’s henchment? Honoring Confederate generals is not history – it’s just disgusting. And if even Mel Gibson – not just a conservative favorite but a – not terribly nice person – doesn’t mind, then really no one should.
The 19th – Could access to child care be the key to helping parents clear arrest warrants?
Quote – Cierra was among dozens of people who came out in early June for the so-called warrant clinic, one in a series of nationwide events that aims to address active warrants, usually those tied to outstanding traffic violations and misdemeanors. The periodic one-day events can be life-changing. People with lifted warrants can get back a driver’s license. They can apply for jobs. They can seek services that help with housing and food insecurity. They can also vote. “We are adding capacity to the justice system,” said Anza Becnel, the creator of the warrant clinics and the founder and executive director of Growing Real Alternatives Everywhere (GRAE), a nonprofit that helps organize the clinics. “We are adding capacity to things that we’ve identified that the community needs.” Click through for more. If you didn’t realize this was a problem … you’re not alone … and you’re probably white.
USA Today – 
