Tag Associated Press

I’d like to say just a few words about the happenings of this week

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Oh, Auntie Em, I had the most amazing, wonderful dream…

Things didn’t exactly turn from black and white to Technicolor while I sat up until 2:00 a.m. watching election returns, but at one point just after midnight I remember saying to my wife, “You know, this is fun!”  I hadn’t had this much fun during election returns since the last time I anchored the broadcast, almost forty years ago.

Watching the defeat of an evil empire of Christian nationalist, law-and-norm-ignoring fascists, even if it turns out to be only temporarily, the strongest emotion I’ve felt – am still feeling, almost three days later – is schadenfreude.  I know my mom (maybe yours too) would have gently scolded that’s it’s not nice to take pleasure in the suffering of others; I like to think that Elsie Joan would have allowed some grace in this case, where the “others” in question are people who have been so aggressively contemptuous of so many of our laws and of their fellow men that they deserve little sympathy.  I think they got what they deserved.

For your reading pleasure and historical backgrounding, here is a free link to the New York Times article with the inside story of how the Trump Administration went out of its way to shoot itself in the foot and make it possible for the lost-in-the-desert Democrats to complete a thorough and humiliating ass-whipping of a president and a party that felt they were bulletproof, all can’t-touch-this I dare  you to come against us.

It seems obvious to me that this election was a referendum on TFG in the sense that people have been so angry, and so offended, at what he and his black-hatted henchmen have actually done since January 2025.  At how they have failed to do things they promised that won them new political support in the last election.  At how they have actually gone about doing some of the things they did do in ways that appalled most everyday Americans (remember DOGE?).  At how they have made clear their disdain for the rule of law and even for the participation of the representatives of the American people in the House and Senate.  It turns out the post-election Associated Press polling backs that up.

People couldn’t get beyond the realities of life in Trump’s America: the Iran war and the senseless tariffs that combined to raise prices for us all while alienating our allies around the world; the barely-trained vigilantes ICE dispatched not to round up “the worst of the worst” but to terrorize immigrant society and kill a few American citizen protesters in the process; the unprecedented corruption and self-dealing; the self-aggrandizing efforts of a tawdry real estate developer to memorialize himself in our nation’s capitol – including the interminable gilding of everything that didn’t move out of his way – and the most godawful sycophants who were tiny-hands-picked by Trump himself as candidates (so bad that even staunch conservatives just couldn’t stomach them – yeah, I’m looking at you Ken Paxton).

Yesterday I read another interesting explanation behind the enormous vote “against Trump” not only all across the country, but especially from Black and Hispanic voters: they were responding to the Republicans assault on voting rights.  That is, Trump’s pressure on states to redraw their Congressional district lines ahead of schedule – because, he said, Republicans were “entitled” to more seats due to their winning margin in 2024 (that’s not ever a reason why lines are drawn the way they are) – led to the elimination of many majority-minority districts across the country.  And the litigation over that effort led to a Supreme Court decision that further gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that political  gerrymandering is perfectly legal so long as it isn’t intentionally racist.  Justice Samuel Alito further ruled that drawing districts designed to elect  racial minorities constituted “intentional race-based conduct” and that’s a no-no.

Many advocates feared the worst: Between the 2024 and 2026 elections, Republican-led states reassigned over 25 million people, or roughly 7.5 percent of all Americans, into different congressional districts. One report concluded that “the only realistic path” for Democrats to avoid decades of Republican rule—and for Black voters to have any shot at electing candidates who represent their interests—would be “a rare ‘blue wave’ election scenario” where “voters turn out at overwhelming rates.”

Tuesday was not just a wave. It was a tsunami. Preliminary data from the University of Florida Election Lab indicates that approximately 48.8 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2026 midterm election, making it the second-highest midterm turnout in over a century. Other early reports indicate that Black voter turnout in particular soared, rivaling the numbers of Barack Obama’s first presidential run.

And Black folks are mad as hell: In a poll of 700 Black women shortly before the election, for example, 87 percent said that the nullification of the Voting Rights Act and the surge of racially discriminatory attacks on the franchise made them more motivated to vote. A New York Times analysis of 2026 midterm trends shows that 91 percent of Black voters supported Democrats—a considerably higher amount than that of any other racial group.

Republican elites underestimated Black voter turnout and overestimated their own level of support. Now, instead of collapsing, Black representation is expected to remain relatively steady in Congress. Black candidates made historic inroads in statewide elections for offices like the Senate, which are not affected by redrawing individual district maps; and in the House, Black candidates won many contested seats, gerrymandering be damned.

Hey, would you look at that: actually voting makes a difference.

The results we saw in this week’s election were not just thanks to an overwhelming response from voters fed up with TFG and his sycophants in the Administration and in Congress.  Writing in Slate, Richard Hasen reminds us that thousands of people have been working, for years, to be ready to fight if Trump carried through on his threats to steal the election.

There were legitimate concerns Trump would go further [than he ultimately did], such as by seizing ballots or voting machines while states were tabulating ballots and certifying results. People also worried he would invoke the Insurrection Act or declare a national emergency as a pretext for a federal election takeover. He publicly said he wanted a federal takeover of elections in Democratic states. His administration refused to categorically rule out sending ICE officers or other agents to the polls, or to abstain from messing with state election certifications.

That none of this happened is a testament to the very hard work that has been underway for years. It was not just one individual or group that saved American democracy. Civil rights lawyers, who have been in the trenches for years fighting for voting rights, pivoted to fighting against attempts to steal elections. Nonprofit election protection organizations mobilized civic, business, and religious leaders to bolster support for threatened election officials. Foundations and voters stepped up to fund this intense work. Democratic and Republican election officials conducted war games, considering what to do if the DOJ showed up with warrants for ballots or to arrest election administrators. Citizen groups mobilized in case ICE agents showed up at the polls. Courts decided emergency election cases, often on absurdly compressed timetables, and judges across the legal and political spectrum held the line. Journalists relentlessly explored the weak spots in how elections are run, pressed the Trump administration for answers, and reported fairly about the risks. Voters turned out in droves and named democracy as one of their primary concerns, along with corruption, for their votes. They rejected election deniers who wanted to run elections in 2028.

Are you like me, have you noticed since the votes have been counted we’re seeing a few leaders of MAGA World seem to be maybe trying to find their way back out of the wilderness and into the good old Grand Old Party, the one that up until 2016 thought Trump the candidate was thoroughly unqualified to be president and an embarrassment on top of that, but who changed their tune by the time he finished his hostile takeover at the 2016 Republican Convention?  People like Ted Cruz.  Back then Cruz was strongly anti-Trump (and acted pretty provoked when Trump insulted Cruz’ wife) until after the convention; since then he has been a strong and verbal backer of the Republican in the White House.  That, in and of itself, is not unusual: for a politician, there isn’t much future in being a vocal opponent of your party’s leader.  Cruz is ambitious, and not stupid.

But if you go so far as to defend Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election (in the face of absolutely zero pieces of evidence to prove it), if you defend his decision to start an unprovoked war, if you generally want it known that you and he are asshole buddies, and then within hours of your boy suffering a generational “ass-kicking” (his words, not mine) you can’t piously blame the war for your party’s loss like you had nothing to do with it.  If Cruz disagrees with Trump on important stuff, and I believe he does, it would have been nice to see some of that political courage when it meant something.  Same thing for other Republicans.

Here in Texas, every Republican running statewide on the ballot Tuesday (Cruz wasn’t on this ballot) was beaten badly, including our three-term governor and lieutenant governor; Democrats will also take control of the state House of Representatives (but not the State Senate).  I find it telling that as Republican legislators consider how they will approach governing our state without their party having a stranglehold on all the offices, some are panicking.  Like Brian Harrison, who is so fearful of the scary Democrats having some power that he’s calling on Republicans to change the rules of the game: to use the time between now and the next governor’s swearing-in in January “to restore separation of powers and limit the emergency powers that Governor-Elect Hinojosa is set to inherit, which would allow her to destroy liberty in Texas by executive fiat.”

So, the Republican legislature was just fine with destroying the separation of powers so Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick do whatever they wanted without oversight, but we can’t trust a Democrat not to “destroy liberty” in Texas?  Who believes this crap?  What a pathetic bunch.

I am mindful that this enormous win at the polls for Democrats does not end the fight.  We still have as president the man who’s been stuffing bribe money into his own pockets while promising to end a war he started (and then not doing it), who thinks imposing tariffs on imports does not mean Americans pay higher prices for goods (it does), who doesn’t think he himself has any responsibility for his party getting its head handed to it at the polls (he does), who thinks his eye for design is high class (it is not), and who just today selected as his new White House chief of staff the one adviser who is most responsible for all the crap ICE has pulled since January of last year.  (Of all the terrible aides in this White House, why pick the one who sleeps hanging upside down to be in charge?)  Even if this Administration doesn’t try to stop Democrats from taking control of Congress in January, and I say that is not a given no matter what they’re saying now, we’ll still have two more years of this guy in charge.  Maybe we can take some pleasure in watching his minions defending their past actions when they get to testify before Congressional committees.  Now that’s entertainment!

Fact is, this tortured abuse of the legal process is likely only the beginning

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

OK then, I guess up is down, right is left, the sun sets in the north and I was People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year in 1984 (a test of concept, before rolling out Mel Gibson the next year).  That we now live in Bizarro World is the only reasonable explanation for how Donald Trump’s Justice Department today could – with a straight face – ask a federal court “to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent loses.” [emphasis added]

The Justice Department, in a court filing, argued that confusion over another candidate on the ballot with a name very similar to the incumbent, Senator Dan S. Sullivan, could taint the election result. Mr. Sullivan is in what polls suggest is a close race against Mary Peltola, a Democrat, but the ballot also features Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

A number of tight races across the country, including Alaska, could tip the balance of power in the Senate. The legal gambit also comes shortly after the administration sued the state of California over what it claims are 20,000 “likely noncitizens” on the state’s voter roll.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials, said he could not recall a similar instance in which the federal government sought to block certification of an election, “and certainly not 11 days before an election.” The issue of another candidate with a similar name has already been addressed by state officials, he said.

“D.O.J. making this claim this late smells of political interference and is against D.O.J. policy,” Mr. Becker said. “The feds have absolutely no authority to tell Alaska when and how to certify. The state officials are following Alaska state law, as the Constitution requires.” He said he expected the courts to reject the administration’s lawsuit.

Did DOJ argue that confusion might also work the other way, that voters who would have otherwise elected the other Dan Sullivan might be confused into voting for the incumbent senator?  That that might be another reason to stall certification until the confusion could be sorted out?  No, no it did not.  The new politically-supercharged Department of Justice (We Punish Trump’s Enemies; Just You Try Us!) has bravely stepped up to try to protect a poor, defenseless Republican senator from suffering at the hands of the stupid voters of his own state.  And it did so because, apparently, Trump himself told them to do it.  This would be the most pathetic example of the tortured relationship with the concept of truth by people living in Trumpworld that I found in the news today were it not for the sad claim that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire in Ukraine.  Yes, that  Melania Trump.

Remember, Donald Trump has the emotional maturity of a two year old and cannot admit to losing, or even to making a mistake.  That he is trying to corrupt the conduct of this election in the hope he can steal enough races to maintain his control of the Congress is a given.  That he is doing so while simultaneously sowing the seeds for the excuses he’ll rely on later to blame others for the loss…well, that dexterity may be his only remarkable talent.

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.