Rarely does a congressional hearing manage to avoid grandstanding, uncover new and compelling evidence and exceed expectations. The Jan. 6 select committee managed to do all three.

Indeed, the surprises kept coming on Monday. The sincere and spontaneous emotional reactions from Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and law enforcement officers stood as a rebuke to the cynicism of Republicans who continue to lie about the insurrection. It also implicitly rebuked the media, which too often dabbles in bothsidesism, even to this day.

Kinzinger could barely get through his tribute to the officers’ bravery. “You guys won," he said tearfully. “You guys held. Democracies are not defined by our bad days. We are defined by how we come back from bad days.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has pulled no punches concerning the insurrection, was even more emphatic in skewering her own party. “On Jan. 6 and in the days thereafter, almost all members of my party recognized the events of that day for what they actually were," she said. She added, “No member of Congress should now attempt to defend the indefensible, obstruct this investigation or attempt to whitewash what happened that day.” It’s no wonder she gives Republican toadies the shakes, especially when she warns that failure to hold all those involved responsible would allow the cancer on our democracy to go unchecked. As she put it: “We must know what happened here at the Capitol. We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House. Every phone call. Every conversation. Every meeting leading up to, during, and after the attack.”

The media coverage of the GOP’s ongoing attempt to undermine democracy has too often devolved into false “balance” and an inaccurate portrayal of a movement that now accepts violence and disdains elections. Journalists would do well to watch the full hearing and emulate the clear language offered by committee members and the witnesses. They must do better if they are to keep Americans informed about the ongoing threat to democracy. The days of putting Jan. 6 apologists and deniers on mainstream news programming must end. The media must stop acting as a conduit for Republican disinformation.

Finally, if the Justice Department harbored any doubt that it should investigate whether there was any involvement in the attack by lawmakers or whether the former president’s incitement of the mob rose to the level of criminality, that vanished on Monday. The officers pleaded with the committee to find anyone who “collaborated” or spurred the attack. They are not willing to let bygones be bygones. None of us should. The Justice Department should follow the facts and indict anyone found to be criminally liable for the violent insurrection.

The media must stop acting as a conduit for Republican disinformation

You’d think after 5 years of insanity and a violent insurrection the media would already get this…..

It made me want to vomit reading articles in MSM accusing PELOSI of making the committee partisan by refusing to allow a likely material witness and someone who publicly stated they don’t support the committee’s purpose… on the committee.

Politico and USA Today have been PARTICULARLY BAD!

Charles Pierce calls Politico "Tiger Beat on the Potomac". That might be too kind of a description for them.

I get so ANGRY when I see some of these AWFUL misleading headlines. The Times is bad too.
Charlie Pierce is brilliant!

Both Politico and USA today are rags.

Fran of the North says:
July 15, 2021 at 10:06 am

Apologies for the WAY O/T post.

The Guardian is reporting this morning that leaked secret Kremlin documents reveal that Putin authorized an operation in Jan 2016 to help Trump get elected in November. That probably isn’t news to regular readers.

The interesting part is the very clear assessment of Trump: “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

Of course, this could also just be more efforts to stir the pot, but according to the article, western intelligence agencies have examined the docs and they have strong indications of being genuine.

More here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers-appear-to-show-putins-plot-to-put-trump-in-white-house
Reply

earlofhuntingdon says:
July 15, 2021 at 10:29 am

For sure, the Former Guy had a historically unique and abjectly dependent relationship with the Russian president. How and why is another matter. But no one is better than Putin at stirring his opponent’s pot with his disinformation spoon.

The Guardian is far from perfect. This material should first be established as legitimate. If not, we lay ourselves open to what Marcy described a couple of days ago. That these clams are subsequently deemed to be fraudulent, which imperils other legitimate claims to the contrary. Think Dan Rather and the Bush National Guard gambit.
Reply
earlofhuntingdon says:
July 15, 2021 at 10:42 am

The story’s lead writer, Luke Harding, is regarded by his critics as a creature of the security services. The second author, Julian Borger, is right behind him. There are parallels among the WaPo’s national security columnists.
Reply
BobCon says:
July 15, 2021 at 10:31 am

From the article:

“The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.”

I wish The Guardian had dug more deeply into the implications of that sentence. What is the purpose of the leak? Damaging Trump? Smokescreen? Discrediting anti-Trump allegations by later release of contradictory information?

If the Guardian doesn’t know, they should at least spend more time noting that Kremlin leaks tend to have agendas behind them.
Reply
drouse says:
July 15, 2021 at 10:39 am

What’s not really clear is exactly who is trying to stir the pot. My first take was that it was an attempt by Putin to toss a large rock into the mud puddle that is our politics. Then again, the article says that our intelligence agencies have been aware of it for months. So at this moment I’m more inclined to believe that it was somebody from our intelligence services who gave it to the Guardian. The motivations behind the leak aren’t really clear.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, and the Loving v Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

It’s a funny thing to write about the Fourteenth Amendment in the twenty-first century. I am a scholar of Reconstruction, and for me the Fourteenth Amendment conjures up images of late-1860s Washington, D.C., a place still plagued by malaria carried on mosquitoes from the Washington City Canal, where generals and congressmen worried about how to protect the Black men who had died in extraordinary numbers to defend the government while an accidental president pardoned Confederate generals and plotted to destroy the national system Abraham Lincoln had created.

It should feel very distant. And yet, while a bipartisan group of senators rejected Bork’s nomination in 1987, in 2021 the Supreme Court is dominated by originalists, and the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment seem terribly current.

The definition of chutzpah
Published by digby on July 9, 2021

That insurrectionist thinks he should be left off the hook in order to heal the nation. The next time someone complains about liberal snowflakes, think of this:

As hundreds of his fellow MAGA rioters stormed all corners of the Capitol on Jan. 6, Paul Hodgkins headed straight for the Senate chamber.

After walking among the desks once inhabited by lawmakers certifying the presidential election—before being forced into hiding—the 38-year-old Florida man took off his protective eye goggles and snapped a selfie before joining his fellow insurrectionists.

That photograph led to Hodgkins’ February arrest after an acquaintance tipped off the FBI—and his eventual decision to strike a plea deal with prosecutors. Now, his defense lawyers are arguing their “kind” client does not deserve prison time for his one felony count.

And in an unreal turn of events, his attorneys are arguing that a lenient sentence on July 19 for the Tampa resident would actually “heal” the nation.

“This case is the story of a man who represents all that we would want in our fellow Americans,” defense attorney Patrick Leduc argued in a sentencing memo to Judge Randolph D. Moss. “It is the story of [a] man who for just one hour on one day, lost his bearings and his way.”

“A sentence that provides Paul Hodgkins ‘charity’ would go a very long way toward healing a nation in dire need of seeing what undeserved ‘grace’ looks like,” Leduc added.

The claim is among a series of head-scratching arguments made in the 32-page sentencing memo, including the declaration that “Hodgkins should not be cancelled.”

Hodgkins wanted to “cancel” an election. And he happily joined a crowd that wanted to “cancel” the Vice President and Speaker of the House.

Nobody’s calling for this insurrectionist to be “cancelled.” They are calling for him to be held accountable for what he did.

A Florida man held a press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Wednesday to announce the filing of lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and corresponding executives Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai – who runs YouTube's parent company.

The former political office holder, known among other things for a cancelled reality TV series, a discontinued steak business, a failed casino, and a shuttered business training school, accused the social networks of violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution by closing his accounts and deplatforming him.

Booted from the aforementioned internet services for statements deemed to have encouraged or incited the storming of the US Capitol by tooled-up tourists, the plaintiff is also seeking to have the courts declare Section 230 of America's Communications Decency Act unconstitutional.

First Amendment scholars were quick to ridicule the complaints.

The First Amendment does *not* apply to non-governmental actors. Full stop. https://t.co/FAmXafuOZZ
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) July 7, 2021

In an effort to overcome that legal obstacle, the man's complaint against Facebook [PDF] asserts that the internet ad giant's status "rises beyond that of a private company to that of a state actor."

The complaints against Twitter [PDF] and YouTube [PDF] make largely identical claims, arguing in essence that the defendant social media companies are part of the US government. All three cases, joined by assorted other individuals, were filed in Florida, which recently passed a social media law that has been challenged as unconstitutional.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The respective companies can be expected to ask that the cases be removed to California, per their terms of service, and that the claims be dismissed for legal deficiencies.

A real go-GETTR: Former Trump aide tries to batter Twitter by ripping off its UI
US Supreme Court rules teens cussing out schools on social media is protected speech
Prez Biden narrowly escapes cicada assassination attempt, hunkers down in Cornwall
Biden cancels Trump's bans on TikTok, WeChat, other Chinese apps

In an email to The Register, Eric Goldman, Associate Dean for Research and Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and Co-Director, High Tech Law Institute, said he can't imagine the plaintiff expects to win his cases, noting that hospitality industry magnate doesn't seem to care that his legal arguments are weak.

"In particular, most of the arguments he's making have been tried in court by others and have failed decisively," said Goldman. "His lawsuits have no realistic chance of success."

Goldman said the golfing enthusiast, often seen at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, "rarely files lawsuits because he expects to win, and he often doesn't invest much energy in lawsuits after they've been filed. He usually is seeking some other payoff from litigation. In this case, that payoff is almost certainly the media coverage he will get. He's never held accountable for bringing stupid cases and making stupid arguments in court."

The septuagenarian, whose mental state was repeatedly questioned during his four-year stint in public office, is also asking the court to award monetary compensation, something he's also seeking from political donors. Meanwhile, his organization and its chief financial officer face criminal tax charges in New York. ®

Two recent revelations about the murder of Saudi journalist and Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — including that four members of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s hit team, known as the “Tiger Squad,” received paramilitary training in the United States, and that Egypt allegedly provided them the lethal poison they used to kill Khashoggi — are just tips of an iceberg of information that still remains hidden.

Who else outside of Saudi Arabia was involved in this crime? What did U.S. officials know, and when, about plans to kill him? What else does the Biden administration know that it might not be telling us? Will they question Prince Khalid bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s former ambassador to the United States and currently its deputy defense minister, during their meetings with him when he comes to Washington this week, about his own role in the murder, including phone records of his communications with Khashoggi?

It’s very hard to believe that American officials were not closely monitoring the U.S.-trained Saudi hit men. They were certainly surveilling the top Saudi echelon: The CIA intercepted 11 WhatsApp messages from MBS to his senior henchman, Saud al-Qahtani, who orchestrated Khashoggi’s killing, in the hours before and after the murder, as well as the calls that the crown prince’s brother Khalid bin Salman made to Khashoggi soliciting him to go to Istanbul.

Biden’s speech recalled that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on June 5, 1944, upon the fall of Rome during World War II. It was Italian leader Benito Mussolini who articulated the ideals of fascism after World War I, envisioning a hierarchical world in which economic and political leaders worked together to lead the masses forward by welding them into a nationalistic, militaristic force.

In his 1944 speech, FDR was careful to explain to Americans how they were different from the Italian fascists. He talked about “Nazi overlords” and “fascist puppets.” Then, in contrast to the fascists’ racial hierarchies, FDR made a point of calling Americans’ attention to the fact that the men who defeated the Italian fascists were Americans from every walk of life.

And then he turned to how fascism treated its people. “In Italy, the people have lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of it—their economic conditions have grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education, a lower public health, all byproducts of the fascist misrule.”

To rebuild Italy, FDR said, the troops had to start from the bottom. “[W]e have had to give them bread to replace that which was stolen out of their mouths,” he said. “We have had to make it possible for the Italians to raise and use their local crops. We have had to help them cleanse their schools of fascist trappings….”

He outlined how Americans had anticipated the need to relieve the people starved by the fascists, and had made plans to ship food grown by the “magnificent ability and energy of the American people,” in ships they had constructed, over thousands of miles of water. Some of us may let our thoughts run to the financial cost of it,” he said, but “we hope that this relief will be an investment for the future, an investment that will pay dividends by eliminating fascism, by ending any Italian desires to start another war of aggression in the future….”

FDR was emphasizing the power of the people, of democracy, to combat fascism not only abroad but also at home, where it had attracted Americans frustrated by the seeming inability of democracy to counter the Depression. They longed for a single strong leader to fix everything. Other Americans, horrified by FDR’s use of the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, wanted to take the nation back to the 1920s and in so doing had begun to flirt with fascism as well.

As he celebrated the triumph over democracy in Italy, he was also urging Americans to value and protect it at home.