Tag Associated Press

Just the facts, ma’am – election rigging edition

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

For a guy who promised to keep “piling up the facts” about our president to illuminate the truth about his ongoing assault on our country and our way of life, it may seem out of character to offer a prediction.  But this prediction is grounded in facts and a clear-eyed review of past actions, which all point to one incontrovertible fact: Donald Trump is trying to rig the November elections to keep MAGA world in charge in Washington.  He’s been doing it right out in the open, in front of our eyes, stacking lie upon lie about a false “crisis of election security” so he can undo enough MAGA losses in November to maintain Republican control of the House and Senate for the last two years of his term of office.  So he can get away with God knows what.

We all witnessed him try to unlawfully snatch victory from the jaws of his defeat in 2020 and fail, thanks to the dozens of lawyers and judges who argued against and struck down his nonsensical pleadings in court cases across the country, and to the members of Congress and Vice President Pence who refused his treasonous efforts on January 6, 2021.  But his basic approach – to election stealing, to everything – is to never admit defeat (even when defeat is obvious) and always fight back with greater force.  Getting his ducks lined up before this November’s election is critical: he knows that if Democrats take control of either house of Congress he won’t be able to get the Compliant Congress® to pass anything to smooth the MAGA path for 2028.

The “facts” he is abusing to make his argument concern voting by mail and voting by non-citizens.  Voting by mail is a simple, reasonable, pretty uncontroversial method of voting, which Trump himself has reportedly taken advantage of for years (apparently without any fraud, eh?).  Yet Trump has been lying about problems with voting by mail for years, despite research by conservative and GOP organizations finding no significant issues: as reported recently by the New York Times,

An election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes just under 300 cases of proven “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” over a 43-year period, from 1982 to 2025. And in 2025, the Brookings Institution found that fraud accounted for only four out of 10 million mailed ballots.

Only 300 cases of fraud in 43 years !?  Only four cases (one two three FOUR) out of 10,000,000 ballots!?!   (BTW,  Brookings headline is that there was “very low fraud and significant benefits to voters” [emphasis added])  Hardly an issue of fraud, or of election results being compromised.  Might Trump have something else in mind?

Mr. Trump has admitted that combating fraud is not the only reason to target the practice. In March, he told Republican lawmakers that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots, which Democrats now use more than Republicans, would “guarantee the midterms” for his party.

I.  Am.  Shocked.  So shocked.

I’m all for keeping non-citizens from voting in our elections.  As it so happens, it is already illegal for non-citizens of the U.S. to vote in U.S. federal elections.  Also illegal for non-citizens to vote in state elections in all 50 states; municipalities in three states and the District of Columbia do allow them to vote in some municipal elections.  The documented instances of non-citizens becoming registered to vote is exceedingly small; the number of those illegally registered to vote who then actually voted  is even smaller than that.  In summary, there is no evidence that non-citizens have ever voted in large enough numbers to have changed the outcome of any election, despite the hair-on-fire claims of TFG.

There has been a lot of activity in the past week over voting by mail, starting with a Supreme Court ruling that “allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.”

…the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order.

It’s important to remember that the Constitution gives the states — the states — the authority conduct elections for Congress (both houses), subject to Congressional approval or revision of those plans by virtue of laws passed by the Congress.  Laws passed by Congress, not executive orders from the president –- Constitutionally speaking, the president has ZERO authority over conducting elections, including through the use of executive orders.  (It is believed that the Supreme Court justices are aware of this.)  Yes, Congress has passed laws concerning federal elections: for example, to establish a uniform election date across the country, to require states with more than one representative in the House to draw districts rather than elect all representatives statewide, and to limit campaign contributions.

But this Congress has refused to pass the SAVE Act that the president wants enacted to “ensure election integrity and prevent non-citizens from voting.”  If passed into law, this proposal would “add a new layer of documentation requirements on top of a verification system that is already in place and working.”  In practice,

Every American, including people who have been registered for decades, would need to appear in person at an election office with qualifying documents. Online voter registration, which 42 states currently rely on, would be upended or eliminated. Mail registration would end entirely. Voter registration drives would become functionally ineffective, since they depend on reaching people at events and public spaces where no one carries a passport or birth certificate.

A standard driver’s license alone does not qualify in most states. A REAL ID alone does not qualify. A military ID alone does not qualify. A tribal ID alone does not qualify. Only five states currently issue enhanced driver’s licenses that meet the bill’s requirements on their own.

(snip)

For most Americans, qualifying requires one of the following: a valid U.S. passport or passport card, a certified birth certificate paired with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate, or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. If your name does not match across those documents, additional paperwork such as a marriage certificate would also be required.

(snip)

The requirement applies any time a voter updates their registration, including after moving, changing their name, or switching political parties. Millions of already-registered Americans would need to comply, not just people registering for the first time.

Meanwhile, back in court last week: opponents of Trump’s plan refiled their objections in light of the Supreme Court ruling, leading to a federal judge halting Administration efforts to restrict voting by mail, and to the Justice Department appealing that ruling.  And since the election is only two months away and the first mail-in ballots are about to be sent out, “The whipsawing legal battle could have major ramifications for the midterms. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail and election officials contend there isn’t enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new Postal Service directives.”  The Postal Service, officially, insists it has to obey the executive order, and “won’t deliver mail ballots unless states provide a list of voters who should receive them and format the envelopes in a certain way.”

But, a Postal Service official has filed a federal whistle-blower report that claims “the agency is moving forward with a ‘secretive, rushed’ effort to carry out President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.”

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

(snip)

The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised “grave concerns” that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the portal would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

(snip)

The Postal Service confirmed in a statement that it had continued work on the portal amid the legal battle, but asserted that it was in compliance with the courts because it was not currently using parts of the new system that could invalidate people’s votes.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents have been pulled off of their regular duties of “investigating such serious crimes as human trafficking and terrorism” to scour state voter rolls using the personally identifiable information of individual voters looking for non-citizens who are registered to vote.

Given the decades of evidence showing how rare noncitizen voting is, it’s unclear what the administration will discover, how verifiable any findings will be and what President Trump or Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin plans to do with those findings.

(snip)

Mr. Trump’s unrelenting focus on noncitizen voting has concerned election officials from both parties. So far, the administration has been unable to verify his claims, and has effectively admitted at times that its numbers have been overstated. Yet the public repetition of falsehoods about election fraud has continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process ahead of a charged midterm election that will determine control of Congress [emphasis added].

All of it has left voting-rights groups and Democrats increasingly concerned that the president will try to interfere with the election. And it has alarmed former officials with the Department of Homeland Security that the agency is being weaponized as part of the effort.

Jamelle Bouie summarizes that “the president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this.”

Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked.

This would leave states that rely on mail-in voting scrambling to accommodate the new rules, leading to the kind of chaos that might keep voters from casting a ballot in the first place. And in states that reject the rules, the administration can tar the results as fraudulent. None of this would stop the public from electing a Democratic majority, but it could give that majority the taint of illegitimacy — and even tee up a situation where new members are challenged in the next session.

It is important to say that there is no way to know, at this point, if any of this will actually work in the end. But it clearly is the plan.

Is it a plan to rig the election?  To rig the counting of the votes in this election?  If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, do you have any doubt it’s a duck?

No facts are a match for the denier in chief

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

On this day in history it is noted that the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia and were purchased by English colonists (1619), to begin legal slavery in North America; Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery suffered the only death of one of its members (1804) from what is now believed to be peritonitis after a burst appendix; Leon Trotsky was assassinated (1920), the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia (1968), President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president (1974) and the Menendez brothers murdered their parents (1989).  I am daydreaming that if someone casually mentioned this list of carnage to President Trump today, his likely response would be to quickly declare that none of it was his fault.  Nothing ever is, you see.

Concerns about a weak economy and still-high inflation? His predecessor, Joe Biden, saddled him with that, he says, even though the Democrat has been out of office for 18-plus months and despite Trump once promising an immediate turnaround.

The problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool? That was marred by vandalism, the Republican president insists, even though the office of a prosecutor he put in the job has said the damage was due to shoddy workmanship.

The increasingly unpopular war in Iran that has kept oil prices high, Trump’s approval rating low and sent shock waves through the global economy? Actually, this was Trump making up for timid earlier presidents who, he argues, squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Pithy slogans aside, all modern presidents shift responsibility onto others to some degree, frequently blaming the commander-in-chief who preceded them, Congress — or both. But Trump has taken it to a new level, effectively embracing a de facto political strategy of being in charge of everything but responsible for nothing when things go badly.

(snip)

Accepting the 2016 presidential nomination, Trump said, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” But as president, he has often suggested that the solution and blame rest elsewhere.

For all of his praise of his own father – whose emotionally cold parenting bears much of the blame for Trump being the way Trump is – TFG’s personality was molded critically by legendary lawyer Roy Cohn.  You know: prosecuting the Rosenbergs, assisting Joe McCarthy, defending the Trumps from charges of racial discrimination in their housing developments…that Roy Cohn.  It was Cohn who taught Donald Trump that the way to respond in any dispute is never apologize, always fight back with greater force, and never admit you were wrong.  Especially if you were wrong.  Explains a lot.

In the interest of providing more facts about “your favorite president,” I wonder if you can pick your favorite Trump Truth (a truth that is not): the lie about the stolen 2020 election has to be the biggest, but there’s also the “longest” lie, the one about issues with election security that he has been reinforcing (with more lies) for years and years to set the stage for the real election interference to come.

That [federal] interference [in state elections] could take many forms: demands for access to voter rolls, pressuring state officials, attempts to station federal monitors at voting locations or even efforts to seize ballot boxes, voting equipment or election records.

States need to stiffen their spines now. It doesn’t require much imagination to see that Trump may be setting the stage to keep his options open to subvert state elections.

Governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state should review their legal authority, secure voter data, clarify chains of custody, establish procedures for resisting unlawful federal demands and prepare emergency litigation in advance. They should not wait until federal agents arrive, ballots are threatened or the president manufactures a crisis.

Republican officials especially must understand that federalism is not a slogan to be used only against Democratic presidents. If a Democratic administration attempted to seize ballots in Texas, Republicans would be outraged. It doesn’t become just constitutional because Trump orders it in Pennsylvania.

The Constitution gives states control over their own elections. Executive branch interference in state elections is a violation of separation of powers. If Washington attempts to influence or take control of state elections, the states should resist, for the sake of the Republic.

Not counting all the documented untruths of his pre-presidential business career, CNN and the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 lies during his first term – nearly two dozen every single day!  That is, I think, partly due to the need to battle back with new lies to appear to bolster the veracity of the original lie, and his inherent nature as a salesman to need to promote every single thing as the best, the greatest, the tallest, the richest, the most beautiful.  “Like no one’s every seen before!”  Even when it is not any of those.  Maybe especially when it is not any of those.

Yesterday we marked 19 months of the second Trump Administration…just 29 more to go!

How a bad thing can lead to your being grateful

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Over the past month there have been enough examples of my state’s leaders behaving disgracefully to make me think I could write a nice satire about how I am thankful we have leaders who are willing to protect us from things we didn’t know we needed protection from.  You know, things like, Muslims in America exercising their First Amendment rights to the freedom of religion, or Texas state employees using personal social media accounts to promote a non-MAGA political rally, or university professors who are serious about exposing students to ideas their parents may not agree with, or actually anything done by anyone intent on telling truths that don’t align with the preferences of how those in power prefer their “truths” nowadays.  But before I could get there I found something that I really am grateful for: the first serious signs of a potential loosening of TFG’s grip on the Republican Party.

During the 2016 primary campaigns there were plenty of Republicans willing to be quoted disagreeing with the outrageous things Donald Trump had to say, right up until he won the nomination.  After that, as is usual, members of the party supported the party’s candidate.  But as time went on we saw an eerie, almost mystical transformation that left virtually every Republican unable to speak any criticism at all: they learned that (1) Trump was so thin-skinned that he could stand no disagreement of any kind at all on any issue, no matter how petty, (2) he had demonstrated how he would gleefully make good on his threat to support a challenger to any critic when he or she ran for re-election, and (3) MAGA nation was eager to do whatever TFG asked.  Republican senators and members of Congress – never shy and retiring types, always eager to defend their institutional prerogatives as well as their high and mighty personages – forgot how to disagree, however politely, with the Chief Executive.  They might as well have stopped meeting at all.  For a period recently, they pretty much did stop meeting.

When the president began issuing executive orders to take actions that have always been the right and/or responsibility of Congress, the Republicans who control both the House and Senate never raised a public peep about it.  When his administration took it upon itself to begin unprovoked attacks on private boats in international waters – destroying the ships and killing the crewmembers – while claiming the boats and their crews were hauling illegal drugs and therefore constituted an attack on the safety of the United States but never sharing with the world any evidence to prove the claim, there was one constant in the response from GOP members: the sound of crickets.  Until this weekend.

Last Friday the Washington Post reported (free link) on the questionable orders that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave to the Navy SEALs executing the first of these attacks.

The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.

The important thing to be emphasized here, beyond the claim that Whiskey Pete ordered the killing of “combatants” who might have been considered “non-combatants” after their boat was blown out from under them and were clinging to wreckage to keep from drowning, is that the talk of investigating potential “war crimes” is coming from Democrats AND Republicans!

The lawmakers said they did not know whether last week’s Washington Post report was true, and some Republicans were skeptical, but they said attacking survivors of an initial missile strike poses serious legal concerns.

“This rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, when asked about a follow-up strike aimed at people no longer able to fight, said Congress does not have information that happened. He noted that leaders of the Armed Services Committee in both the House and Senate have opened investigations.

“Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Turner said.

(snip)

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, said in a joint statement late Friday that the committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

That was followed Saturday with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and the ranking Democratic member, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, issuing a joint statement saying the panel was committed to “providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”

“We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” Rogers and Smith said, referring to U.S. Southern Command.

This does not mean that ALL Republicans are challenging the White House, but today some of them are willing to say the quiet part out loud: that lawmakers have the responsibility to check this out for themselves…it might be that the president’s puppet, the demonstrably unsuitable nominee to lead the nation’s military that the Senate obediently approved even if holding their collective noses, might have given orders that violate the Geneva Convention.  And, they are saying, we won’t ignore this.

For that, I am grateful.

Just a few helpful suggestions

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

The lack of enthusiastic support – or any support at all, really – for the current American president found within and among this blog’s posts might lead one to believe I am a withered, cranky, “no fun” sort with all the redeeming social characteristics of a cadaver.  The poster coot for the “get off my lawn” model of Americans.  But it’s not true: I’m actually quite friendly and eager to help out anyone any time I can.  For example, while watching TV “news” stories about recent actions being taken by the Administration, it dawned on me that perhaps no one bothered to clearly explain to TFG just what it is that a president of the United States is supposed to do and, more importantly, what such a president is not supposed to do.  I’d like to help!

For example, presidents don’t seek to “punish” other sovereign countries (especially ones that are our friends and biggest trading partners) because the leader of some political subdivision of that country (like a provincial premier or a state governor) runs a television ad critical of the American president’s economic policy.  Whether the ad was truthful or not.  An autocrat would do something like that.

Presidents don’t – unilaterally, without warning, and without prior consultation with allies – launch unprovoked, lethal military strikes against private vessels in international waters without presenting to the world the incontrovertible evidence of that vessel and its crew’s threat to American interests.  A lawless tyrant would do that.

Presidents don’t presume to dictate to the leaders of other sovereign nations how to wage war or how to end war.  Only a…well, only a would-be dictator would try that.

Presidents don’t believe they have leeway to significantly alter, or destroy, historic artifacts in order to erect gaudy monuments to their almighty selves (even when they say the costs will be paid by private donations; a scheme ripe for corruption) without even a show of a cursory consultation with appropriate government officials.  That sounds like something a megalomaniac would do.

Presidents don’t tell transparently false stories about the conditions in their country as an excuse to send their nation’s armies into their own cities against their own citizens to put down peaceful protests and intimidate political opponents.  Totalitarians do stuff like that.

Presidents don’t misuse the routine processes of self-governance to re-set the conditions of an upcoming election they fear they will lose.  Cowardly losers try to rewrite the rules of the game.

Presidents may indeed be the driving force behind the construction of patriotic symbols recognizing the greatness of their country, but they don’t reflexively presume to name those edifices after themselves or fire public officials who have the authority to alter what could easily be interpreted as self-aggrandizing plans.  But, boy oh boy, narcissists sure do.

“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the Commission on Fine Arts is terminated, effective immediately,” reads an email reviewed by The Post that was sent to one of the commissioners by a staffer in the White House presidential personnel office.

(And if you want to fire people who work for you, a president has the guts to do the dirty work themselves.  Especially if they are a president who invaded the public consciousness in a brainless television offering in which their very very macho catchphrase was “you’re fired.”)

When the do-nothing (without TFG’s approval) Congress lets appropriations authority lapse and forces the government to shut down, presidents don’t use that as an excuse to take “unprecedented, and even illegal, steps during the shutdown to inflict unnecessary damage to public services and investments, the federal workers who deliver them, and the public who depends on them.”  But a con man would…and they would really hate it when the courts step in to stop them.

See, it was easy to be friendly and offer good-natured, non-accusatory assistance.  I feel good!  If any similar instances of possible misunderstanding turn up in the future, I’ll be happy to try to help out.  It’s what I do.

This is EXACTLY what the First Amendment protects us from

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

In the dark reality of the second Trump Administration and its near-daily attacks on the legal and Constitutional protections of the American way of life, I’ve resolved not to be that guy with the kneejerk rapid response to every “outrageous” action dreamed up by the Christian nationalist lawyers who plan and execute TFG’s official agenda.  Because if I did, there wouldn’t be enough time left in the day for sleeping late or watching TV, for playing golf or doing any of the things I like to do; sounding the warning about you know who is a thing I am increasingly uninspired about.  I figure, those who know the threat already know; those who know and don’t care aren’t listening anyway; the rest can’t read, I guess.

But our government blatantly violated the First Amendment to the Constitution yesterday, and I felt the need to say something even though others have and will say this, but I want to say it too.

Since the Bill of Rights was ratified December 15, 1791, my favorite Constitutional amendment has protected our basic freedoms: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  When it comes to free speech, what it means is that we can say we want (within some limits) without censorship by the government.  It doesn’t mean that your boss or your church or your spouse can’t punish you for what you say, or that your friends can’t ostracize you from the group chat or not invite you to the neighborhood barbecue; it means you have “the right to articulate opinions and ideas without interference, retaliation or punishment from the government.”  As explained in an article by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, freedom of speech

…has long since been interpreted by the Supreme Court to mean that all American speech can not be infringed upon by any branch or section of the federal, state, or local governments. Private organizations however, such as businesses, colleges, and religious groups, are not bound by the same Constitutional obligation. The First Amendment experienced a surge in support and expansion in the 20th century, as Gitlow v. New York (1925) determined that the freedoms promised in it are applicable to local, state, and the federal governments. Further, subsequent Supreme Court decisions from the 20th century to the early-21st century have determined that the First Amendment protects more recent and advanced forms of art and communication, including radio, film, television, video games, and the Internet. Presently, the few forms of expression that have little to no First Amendment protection include commercial advertising, defamation, obscenity, and interpersonal threats to life and limb.

Yesterday we all learned that the ABC television network, a division of the Walt Disney Company, announced an indefinite suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”  That decision was announced after Nexstar Media Group announced it would preempt Kimmel on the 23 ABC-affiliated stations it owns due to comments Kimmel made “concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk”.  Nexstar owns and/or operates more than 200 local TV stations across the country, and it has every right to decide which programs it will air and which it will not.  As the possessor of a government license to operate a broadcast outlet, it actually has a responsibility to do that.  Whether or not you or I agree with Nexstar’s stated reason for deciding to pull Kimmel, that decision is entirely within the law and does not violate anyone’s First Amendment rights.  And if ABC pulled the show from the network as a means to try to placate a large business partner, that’s perfectly legal, too.  A little cowardly, maybe, but not illegal.

Now, just as background, be aware that both Nexstar and Disney are in line to get government approval for separate planned deals: Disney’s ESPN is trying to acquire the NFL Network, and Nexstar still needs final approval to buy Tegna, which owns 64 stations in 51 markets across the country.  Hmm, seems familiar: Paramount, which owns CBS, was awaiting government approval on a merger…then it settled a meritless $20 BILLION suit filed against it by Trump (for $16 million) and that led to the “big fat bribe” comment on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and then CBS cancelled Colbert (ten months in the future).  Paramount received the merger approval three weeks later.  But back to our current story.

You see, before Nexstar made its announcement yesterday and before ABC then followed up with its announcement, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission appeared on a podcast and criticized Kimmel’s comments.  That’s cool.   Brendan Carr said the FCC “has a strong case for holding Kimmel, ABC and network parent Walt Disney Co. accountable for spreading misinformation.”  Uh, I guess that’s OK if he means the agency responsible for regulating the use of public airwaves won’t permit the misuse of that shared resource.  But then Carr said “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

That doesn’t sound very much like the government threatening a business over its exercise of free speech, does it?  Take care of it…or else. ( Hey, nice network ya got there; be a shame if anything happened to it.)

The point of free speech is that you can say what you want and not face “intimidation, retaliation or punishment” from the government.  Like, say, the FCC chairman (a Trump sycophant) threatening the licenses of ABC affiliates who air Kimmel because he (and Trump) don’t like what Kimmel says.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez criticized the administration for “using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression” in a post on X.

“Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “We cannot be a country where late-night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president.”

Like, the president who said “as he flew home on Air Force One on Thursday…networks that give him bad publicity should “maybe” have their licenses taken away. (The FCC regulates local TV station licenses, not networks.)”  Proving beyond all question that he really does not understand the role of the press in America.

Bill Carter, an editor-at-large at LateNighter who has spent 40-plus years covering late-night comedy and the television industry, said “nothing even remotely like it has ever happened before.” Calling the Trump administration’s recent actions an “affront to the Constitution,” Carter stressed the role previous late-night stars like Johnny Carson played in public discourse.

Carson “spoke comedy to power,” Carter said. “And that’s what late-night shows have done ever since.”

Other expressions of shock and anger rolled through the Hollywood Hills and Capitol Hill on Thursday, as concerns mounted about a new era of government censorship.

“This is beyond McCarthyism,” Christopher Anders, director of the Democracy and Technology Division for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke. The Trump administration’s actions, paired with ABC’s capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”

“Jimmy Kimmel has been muzzled and taken off the air,” comedian Marc Maron said in an Instagram video posted early Thursday morning. “This is what authoritarianism looks like right now in this country … This is government censorship.”

“This isn’t right,” actor and director Ben Stiller wrote on X.

Damon Lindelof, the writer-producer of the hit TV show “Lost,” vowed to take action against ABC’s owner, Disney. “I can’t in good conscience work for the company that imposed [Kimmel’s suspension],” he said.

There are many more reactions in this story, including from that fun couple Barack Obama and Roseanne Barr.  Click the (gift) link above to read them all.

My point is, this action – a government official threatening government action against a company over speech he (claims he) finds offensive – is as stark an example as I can imagine of what the First Amendment does not allow.  And, it’s just the latest example of what seems to be a top goal of the thinnest-skinned man ever to be our president: to punish any and all who would dare criticize his any or every action. (Gift article, too)

Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics. If they don’t, he threatens to use the levers of government — particularly those designed to remain independent — to financially punish them. None of this is secret; the brazenness is, at least partly, the point.

(snip)

The systematic effort to censor American media isn’t exactly subtle. The president has not disguised his intentions or his reasons. He has gone to some trouble to emphasize that he wants to control who’s on television and what they say. (And in newspapers too — in the past two months, he has filed lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.) When Colbert’s “Late Night (sic) with Stephen Colbert” was canceled in July, Trump posted “It’s really good to see them go,” “and I hope I played a major part in it!”

For some valuable perspective on this big Constitutional issue, and the tiny-fisted tyrant at the center of the storm, I close with this:

David Letterman, the king of a previous generation of late-night TV hosts, spoke about Kimmel’s suspension at the Atlantic Festival in New York on Thursday. He said that as host of “Late Night With David Letterman,” he had mocked presidents across six administrations without fear of retribution.

We “attacked these men mercilessly,” Letterman told Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. “Beating up on these people, rightly or wrongly, accurately or perhaps inaccurately in the name of comedy, not once were we squeezed by anyone from any governmental agency, let alone the dreaded FCC.”

“The institution of the President of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show. You know, it just really ought to be bigger,” Letterman added. “By the way, I have heard from Jimmy. He was nice enough to text me this morning, and he’s sitting up in bed taking nourishment. He’s going to be fine.”