Thank you, President Biden, for being the extraordinary President you have been.
Now let’s get behind Kamala Harris. Let’s make history.
Country before self
Colorado has a good spring snowstorm
And I am so happy to see it. I amused myself by making snow ducks as you can see below. Then there was so much snow overnight that my Ducktans were buried and vanished. Also, the top of one of our trees broke off and fell into the streets. There’s a lot of that around town; the arborist services will be busy for some time.
News reports say Nederland, up in the foothills above Boulder, got 53″ (!) of snow, most of the foothills got three feet, and most of the suburbs got around two feet, which seems like what I’m seeing in my yard.
It’s been a few years since we got a snow this nice. I am fortunate to be retired so I can stay at home and look at the pretty snow while city services tries to dig us all out. Hooray for water in the mountain snowpack! It’s important for the entire southwestern United States.
Ducktan Sonyeondan incoming!!
This was tricky to do. I have a terrible tremor and was in snow up my calves. But they are really cute.
Using the pink duck mold in honor of #FRIENDS_BY_V @BTS_twt #BTSARMY pic.twitter.com/OAW8iXZam3
— jnfr ⁷⁼¹ 🇺🇦 🦋 (@jnfr) March 14, 2024
Advice for trans people
Thoughtful advice for trans folks on one way to help protect your true gender identity, in the face of some states trying to erase you. Provided by Anna on Mastodon.
Anna
@nami@tech.lgbtIf you are #trans and a US citizen, you should absolutely, 100% apply for a passport this year, whether you plan to travel or not. Yes, it costs $$, but you can self-select your gender without bureaucratic BS (thanks, Joe), and it lasts 10 years and is valid ID everywhere in the world. Whatever fascist laws your GOP reps are proposing in your state legislature about gender markers on IDs, you will have a federal document that reflects your actual gender. And if necessary, you can use it to leave the country.
50 years of abortion rights, rescinded
Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade that granted abortion rights to women. Last year in their Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court reversed itself and took those rights away.
In every election since, women have turned out to restore those rights, including elections in very red states. It’s very clear that this will be a primary issue for all Democrats this year. It’s also very clear that Republicans can’t hide from the fact that their abortion bans continue to harm women around the country.
In some states with abortion bans, doctors are fleeing and maternity care is no longer available nearby. In others, pro-choice activists continue to fight to expand access to reproductive care. (gift link)
This advertisement is from the Biden/Harris campaign. You can be sure we will hear from many more women in the months ahead.
The one thing I want to say to you is that if you can possibly afford it, stock up on mifepristone now. For yourself, your sisters, your kids, your friends, for other women in the world who might need your help. Because this same Supreme Court will be the one who decides this year whether mifepristone remains legal in the United States, and they absolutely are not trustworthy on this issue.
They don’t care about women’s rights or women’s health, so we must look out for ourselves.
I’ve revamped my Abortion Resources page. There are many sources listed, both inside the U.S. and in other countries. There are also links to abortion funds and other resources that try to help with costs. Ensure your safety while you can. And please spread these links around. Sooner or later, they will likely try to shut down information-sharing of this sort.
I have also been pulling together some resources on self-managed abortions, and I’ll have another post on the subject soon.
ETA: Just to note that undamaged, sealed supplies of mifepristone (PDF file) are good for at least five years. Stock up with confidence!
Speaking of NATO
As I pointed out in the previous post, Trump never liked NATO and didn’t want to be tied down by those strategic alliances. This article from Politico shows it clearly, reporting on a time Trump said exactly that to world leaders while he was President.
Trump vowed he’d ‘never’ help Europe if it’s attacked, top EU official says
‘By the way NATO is dead,’ the former (and potential future) US president added in private meeting.
BRUSSELS — One of Europe’s most senior politicians recounted how former U.S. President Donald Trump privately warned that America would not come to the EU’s aid if it was attacked militarily.
“You need to understand that if Europe is under attack we will never come to help you and to support you,” Trump told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2020…
“By the way, NATO is dead, and we will leave, we will quit NATO,” Trump also said…
Brussels is rife with fear about the possibility Trump will return to the U.S. presidency.
Trump’s reelection seems likely to upend the world order as it exists today and has existed since NATO was founded after World War II. For all the many faults of that alliance, the nations within it have generally enjoyed peace and prosperity through these years.
But autocrats and wannabe dictators like Trump crave chaos, not peace and prosperity. Chaos usually favors the dictator, because when people are stressed and endangered they look to the strongman to save them. They will be more inclined to give up their own power in search of safety. And they will likely end up with neither.
ETA: One word edit for clarity, “usually” replaced “always”.
Thinking about the Korean Peninsula
If you’re not familiar with Pod Save the World from Crooked Media, it is where Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes, both of whom worked in the Obama administration, discuss world politics and all sorts of other affairs.
It’s consistently interesting and informative, one of my favorite podcasts and I recommend it to you without reservation.
Embedded below is the episode from January 10, 2024. If I’ve done this right it’s cued up to 51:35, towards the end of a discussion of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the fact that North Korea is currently supplying Russia with a lot of heavy weapons in support of that war.
Rhodes then segues into a serious issue that hasn’t gotten much attention, but which everyone should be aware of as we move into this election year. We already know that Trump has said that he doesn’t like our alliance with NATO and there is a lot of speculation that he might well pull the US out of that crucial alliance. What else might he do?
Ben asks the next obvious, dangerous question: Do you think that the U.S. would come to the defense of South Korea in a Trump administration?
Ben has no answer to that question and neither do I, but the implications are obvious. No matter what the US public or the rest of the world thinks, you know Trump would gladly turn South Korea over to Kim Jong Un, a despot he considers a dear friend and a role model for the type of government Trump himself would like to impose. The US public and the rest of the world would fight him on it, but you know he’d try.
I’ve transcribed the segment below. Any errors are my own.
Ben: The last thing I just, you know, ruminating over the break, unfortunately not about positive things because the world doesn’t seem that great. This North Korea piece, there was some, like, North Korean escalations, provocations towards the South Koreans over the break. Who knows what they are getting from the Russians in exchange for all that artillery? They must be getting something.
And the thing I was thinking about, okay, the world’s on fire and the thing we talk about a lot, a lot of people talk about, like, Ukraine, you’ve got the Middle East on fire, and then you’ve got Taiwan… Like, “Hey, let’s not forget the Korean peninsula here!” Because if, if Trump wins, okay? Do you think that the U.S. would come to the defense of South Korea in a Trump administration?
Tommy: I hadn’t even thought about it.
Ben: This is the man that literally… I hadn’t thought about it either until for some reason over the break, but like, this is a man has ‘love letters’ from Kim Jong Un displayed on his wall.
Tommy: That’s a big accomplishment.
Ben: Who boasts about how tight he is with the guy… You’ve got Kim Jong Un feeling emboldened by the support he’s getting from Russia and China. I’d watch that one! You know, another reason for Trump not to win because… I kind of feel like suddenly the Korean Peninsula becomes a hot spot.
Tommy: Yeah, it’s a good point. It’s easy to mock North Korea’s sort of backward Potemkin cult of personality but they have a military-industrial complex that is…
Ben: Yeah. That’s all they are!
Tommy: that [crosstalk] right? They’ve got a lot of shells they can transfer over. And also the, you know, in the United States there’s still this big question about this supplemental funding bill and frankly the entire fate of the Ukrainian war effort probably rides on it, so…
Ben: A lot up in the air in 2024.
Edit 1/17/24: Today there was another Pod Save the World episode and North Korea was once again a topic of discussion. I won’t embed, but the conversation starts at time marker 48:00. This time the subject arose because of yet another hostile action by Kim Jung Un, as discussed in this New York Times article. (gift link, no paywall).
North Korea Says It Is No Longer Interested in Reunifying With the South
Abandoning the longtime goal, however unlikely, Kim Jong-un, the North’s leader, instead threatened to subjugate South Korea in war.
Three years ago today
Never forget, and don’t let the Repulicans gaslight you about the truth of what happened.
The New York Times put together a visual timeline of the assault. You’ll have to click through to see it on YouTube.
Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol
And now I do have COVID
Thought I’d mention that. After three full years of careful isolation and masking and no COVID in our home, some time with family brought COVID to me.
Mr Jnfr is fortunately still testing negative. We are quite lucky and quite privileged to have a home with plenty of space to divide the house for isolation purposes for a week or so. I also have had all the main vaccines and boosters, including the last variant booster.
Up-to-date on flu shots, shingles, and Pneumovax too.
So far symptoms are fairly mild, like a moderate head cold. I’ve had no fever, my pulse-oxygen is normal and steady, but my head, nose, and throat are itchy, sneezy, and sore.
I’ll update if things turn serious, but for now I’m mostly hanging out blowing my nose and feeling slightly bored.
And on the sixth day: still testing faintly positive. Fortunately Mr. Jnfr remains negative. Will continue my isolation for a while longer. grump grump
Read the indictments
I am so glad to see that Jack Smith has finally brought forth his charges against Donald Trump in the matter of the Jan. 6th insurrection. Now we will see whether our system can still serve justice to a powerful, wealthy, well-connected man, when that man has committed clear and monstrous crimes.
The full text of the indictments can be found here (.PDF file). It’s very much worth your time to read, as it lays out in explicit detail exactly how Trump and those around him conspired to steal the Presidential election in several different ways, invalidating the 81 million of us who voted against him. Really, it’s an easy read with a clear narrative line, and it screams “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!” much as the Watergate story did back in 1973.
At the center of the plot is Trump’s attempt to overturn an election he lost, so that he could illegally remain in power. It’s a pure authoritarian play, an autogolpe — attempted coup from inside the government of a sort that has been seen in other countries.
The indictments lay out his attempts (aided by unnamed co-conspirators) to force fake electors into the system, replacing the legally appointed electors certified by the states. It also describes how Trump constantly worked in the background to convince various state officials to delay or overturn their own citizens’ decision as determined by the legal votes in those states.
His intention was apparently to delay the certification of the outcome and then use his supporters’ violence as an excuse for military intervention to force an election1 where his preferred outcome would triumph through Republican cooperation. They believed it likely that a similar force would arise from the left and lead to a clash large enough to seem dangerous. I was watching from the left and our side clearly agreed in general to stay away from the entire Jan 6 protest, concerned that exactly this scenario might play out. As far as I could tell, no leftist group took part in the events of Jan 6.
Trump was told by almost everyone around him that he lost fair and square, that there was no fraud so great it overturned the election, and he needed to pack it up and leave at the end of his term. That action, giving over power when you lose, manifests the very heart of our democracy. It was something he simply was not willing to do. So in the end, as described in this document, Trump conspired with several others around him to ignore the truth of the election, to illicitly maintain power as head of our government.
I’ve believed this since we saw the insurrection that day, saw clearly how Trump did not want the violence to end, how he really did intend for the Congressional certification process to be stopped, no matter what it took. In the story told here, it becomes very clear that using violence to get his way was something he always intended, perhaps even relished as an option.
If you’d like your indictments with a bit more analysis, the New York Times offers the indictments with annotations by Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, two of their best. (gift link, no paywall)
You might also read this analysis by Ken White, a.k.a. Popehat, who is an actual lawyer (I am not). He has thoughts. He looks at the right-wing response and warns:
…There’s a very broad range of plausible arguments about how to read American law. Saying “my interpretation is that this violates the First Amendment” or “I think the better reading is that obstruction of an official proceeding requires violence or perjury” are not lies, even if they are bad arguments.
But some people are absolutely lying to you about the law and how it applies to the indictment of Donald Trump — or, at the most charitable, Cliff Clavening it by speaking confidently from a place of deliberate ignorance….
Just as Donald Trump was willing to call upon a host of overt lies in an attempt to steal an election, his defenders are willing to muster lies to defend him from any legal consequence. Donald Trump’s critics, too, will lie to deny that any argument made in his favor can possibly be colorable.
Don’t tolerate it. Call it out. Rebuke, and shun, the liars….
He explains in detail how and why they are trying to mislead. These are Trump’s devoted shock troops, and it’s not surprising that they would try to spin things in his favor. The underlying danger here, as with Trump generally, is that their arguments are unhinged from legal reality, and reality in general, and continue to be backed by threats of violence.
ETA: 1 Listening further to the experts, it seems most likely that disruption of the certification, even by violence or military force, would have ended up in the courts. And Trump has reason to believe that in many US courts these days, even the Supremes, he has a good chance of success.
But I wasn’t thinking his immediate aim was a military coup. I’m sure in his heart he’d love one, but I don’t think our military would go along with that.
This is expected
Be careful out there. The threat of violence continues to escalate, as we always feared it would. And Trump’s indictment (gift link) is going to ramp up their fear and anger to a ever-more-fevered pitch.
‘We Need to Start Killing’: Trump’s Far-Right Supporters Are Threatening Civil War
Within minutes of Trump’s indictment, supporters lit up social media platforms with violent threats and calls for civil war.
In what is becoming a now all-too-familiar trend, former President Donald Trump’s far-right supporters have threatened civil war after news broke Thursday that the former president was indicted for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House without permission.
“We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains,” wrote one Trump supporter on The Donald, a rabidly pro-Trump message board that played a key role in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol….
Trump supporters are making specific threats too. In one post on The Donald titled, “A little bit about Merrick Garland, his wife, his daughters,” a user shared a link to an article about the attorney general’s children.
Under the post, another user replied: “His children are fair game as far as I’m concerned.”…
ETA: In my post on violence, linked above, I talked about how many of my leftist friends had started to buy guns of their own. With that happening, I found these events also unsurprising. As progressive people secure guns of their own, they typically schedule time at gun ranges to practice. This is the responsible thing to do as a new gun owner, to learn how to handle your weapon.
Gun ranges are spaces mostly controlled and visited by right-wing, conservative people. And so this happens:
They went to a gun range for a birthday celebration. Then came the threats from right-wing extremists.
…The employee commented that Loder was a “long way from home,” the letter said, which struck several of the friends as unusual and concerning.
“Her tone and expression suggested some sort of interest in Mr. Loder and their personal information,” the letter said.
That evening, right-wing social media accounts — with a history of targeting transgender people and progressive policies — posted about Loder and their friends. One Twitter account said Loder was spotted in Mission Valley that night with “well-known members of SD Antifa.” Another Twitter user, whose videos celebrate his own violent clashes with protesters, wrote: “Heard Chad Loder is in town gonna head downtown to say hi!”
Loder’s friends are not associated with Antifa, Loder said, but were unnerved by the posts….
No harm has come of this so far, as near as I can tell. But the threats are clear.