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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 9 months

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The front page of today's New York Post. Rupert Murdoch suddenly plays it straight and suggests that the special counsel has all the evidence he needs to secure convictions on all four counts.

[Robert Scott Horton]

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Susan B Glasser:

"Then came the indictment. It had taken two and a half years—and a lot of empty airtime—to get to that stark forty-five-page document, but when it came there was nothing tedious, normal, or quotidian about it. Donald J. Trump was indicted on four counts of the most serious offense that a former President of the United States could be charged with—an offense against democracy itself. An attempted coup. An effort to overturn the will of the voters and remain in power such as we’ve never seen before and hopefully never will again. Six co-conspirators enlisted by Trump to help carry out his attempt to nullify the results of the 2020 Presidential election were cited but not charged with him. Five of the six were quickly identified as lawyers: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro. Together with the former President, the indictment alleges, they used “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat” the federal government in its job of certifying the election results. Here it was, at last, stark and sharply stated: what Trump did in the two months following the election that he lost to Joe Biden was a crime. This came too late, perhaps, given the political calendar and Trump’s current stampede toward the 2024 Republican nomination. But still the message was clear and unequivocal. There are no euphemisms for Trump’s behavior and that of his co-conspirators in the indictment. The preamble laying out their conspiracy is a piece of legal writing for the ages:

'The Defendant spread lies . . . . These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.'

The words are stunning—and also a restatement of what we’ve known all along. The case against Defendant Donald J. Trump, although unprecedented, rests on unprecedented acts that took place in full view and for all to see."

https://www.newyorker.com/.../trumps-offense-against...

#NY Post #Robert Scott Horton #election lies #TFG #fraud #The New Yorker #Susan Glasser #attempted coup

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deadpresidents · 1 year

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[January 20th] is the second anniversary of the Biden Presidency. For the most part, up until now, he has been more unlucky than stupid, with his tenure marked by interlocking crises that would sorely test any Chief Executive -- including a lingering pandemic, highest-in-decades inflation, and a radicalized Republican Party that has refused to disavow Trump and his lies about the 2020 election. Democrats, for decades, have feared that conservative Justices on the Supreme Court would strike down Roe v. Wade, and with it the guarantee of women’s reproductive freedom. It finally happened on Biden’s watch. In Europe, Vladimir Putin has long threatened Russia’s neighbor Ukraine, but it was at the start of Biden’s second year in office that Putin unleashed the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War.

Given such a dreary moment, the perennially upbeat Biden has come out of it not so badly. Even with a fifty-fifty Senate the last couple of years, he managed to pass an array of sweeping legislation boosting spending on infrastructure, health care, and climate-change mitigation. He assembled and held together a bipartisan coalition to send billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine. He’s held off, for now, the threat of a recession.

If anything, Republican overreach has offered Biden a political path out of the morass, with the 2022 midterm results far less catastrophic than expected, at least in part because of the GOP’s insistence on selecting Trump-backed extremists as nominees in battleground states. Trump himself has long been the most effective argument on Democrats’ behalf, and there is a reason this cartoonish con man became the first incumbent since Herbert Hoover to lost the House, Senate, and White House in just four years.

The past couple of weeks, though, are a reminder that Democrats cannot simply count on Republican excess in the name of Trump to carry them through. A screwup is a screwup, and this one by Biden -- whether or not it matters that much to voters, who often don’t care about the inside-the-Beltway scandals that obsess us Washingtonians -- will go down at a minimum as a self-inflicted bit of political malpractice. The big news at the midway point of his Presidency is that Biden seems determined to run again, no matter how risky it may seem to put the fate of his Party -- and the Republic -- in the hands of a gaffe-prone octogenarian. His opponents are real-life insurrectionists. What if next time his luck really does run out?”

-- Susan Glasser, The New Yorker

#President Biden #Biden Administration #Joe Biden #The New Yorker #Susan Glasser #Politics

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loveboatinsanity · 2 years

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#susan glasser

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gwydionmisha · 8 months

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#Kevin McCarthy #Susan Glasser #Budget #Government Shutdown #News

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screamscenepodcast · 6 months

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Director Bert I. Gordon finally makes an appearance on the podcast with TORMENTED (1960)! Taking a break from his "Thing Big" schtick, Gordon takes on a ghost story that stars Richard Carlson, Juli Reding and Susan Gordon.

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 21:16; Discussion 34:28; Ranking 50:42

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xtruss · 8 months

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The Twilight of Mitch McConnell and the Spectre of 2024! On the Dangerous Reign of the Octogenarians.

— By Susan B. Glasser | August 31, 2023

McConnell has gone from the G.O.P.’s powerbroker to a symbol of how quickly things can go wrong for America’s fragile gerontocracy.Source photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty

The Tape is Painful to Watch. Whatever you think of Mitch McConnell, it was simply a political car crash to see the Senate Minority Leader, during a press conference in his home state of Kentucky on Wednesday, freeze up and stare blankly from a lectern for more than thirty long seconds, even after an aide rushed to his side and asked gently, “Did you hear the question, Senator?” All the worse, the question to which he never responded was whether he would run again when his Senate term is up in three years. Ouch.

McConnell, who is eighty-one years old, has experienced a precipitous and very public decline since falling at a Washington hotel during a fund-raiser last March—and suffering a concussion. So far, the senator has refused to provide detailed information about his medical condition; indeed, his office sought to quell concerns after Wednesday’s event by claiming he was simply “momentarily lightheaded.” A letter from Congress’s attending physician, a day later, pronouncing him “medically clear” to keep up his schedule was hardly reassuring, either. The latest incident, coming after a similar moment of incapacity at a Capitol Hill press conference earlier this summer, has made clear that something serious is afflicting the top Republican in the Senate. In six months, McConnell has gone from the G.O.P.’s feared power broker to a symbol of how quickly things can go wrong for America’s fragile gerontocracy: running the world one minute, frail and unable to parry questions the next.

One obvious question is what McConnell’s problems mean for his Senate Republican conference. As the Senate’s longest-serving party leader—in January, he overtook the record held by Mike Mansfield, of Montana, who led the Democrats in the upper chamber from 1961 to 1977—McConnell has managed to keep his wing of the G.O.P. largely united and, during the Presidency of his former Senate colleague Joe Biden, even capable of occasional acts of bipartisan lawmaking. (See: the infrastructure bill.) A fierce partisan, McConnell arguably did as much as anyone to get Donald Trump elected, in 2016, then used his power during Trump’s tenure in the White House to shift the federal judiciary in a radically more conservative direction. But McConnell is also the closest thing his party has right now to a national leader of the non-Trump establishment. He has, famously, not spoken with Trump since December, 2020, when he publicly congratulated Biden for winning the election that Trump refused to concede. His abiding final mission has been to rally Republican support for Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression—a cause that Trump, an open admirer of Vladimir Putin, disdains.

All of which makes him a stark contrast to his counterpart across the Capitol, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a more or less willing hostage to the spirit of burn-it-down Trumpism that prevails among his slim majority in the House of Representatives. Last November, McConnell faced an explicit challenge to his leadership after Republicans failed to win back the Senate in the midterm elections; only ten of his party’s forty-nine members voted against him and for the insurgent, Rick Scott. But Politico is already reporting on furtive consultations among Senate Republicans about whether to call an emergency meeting on McConnell’s leadership when the Senate is back in session, next week. No surprise there. Washington is a brutally unsentimental place; the smell of weakness brings out the sharks.

I suspect this is not yet the moment for an open effort to bring down McConnell, but the signs are there for a seismic power shift in the making. The possible heirs to his post are known around the Capitol as the three Johns—Senators Barrasso of Wyoming, Cornyn of Texas, and Thune of South Dakota. Like McConnell, all three are considered members of the Senate G.O.P.’s establishment wing. But none has the power, clout, or stature of McConnell, never mind the reputation for Machiavellian maneuvering that he so relished in his prime. And, if there were any doubt about the direction in which the Party’s momentum is trending, Trump’s current stampede toward the 2024 Presidential nomination seems to offer a loud answer. It speaks clearly to the moment that it was President Biden and not ex-President Trump who called McConnell with words of consolation. “He was his old self on the telephone,” Biden said, as he called the Republican whom Democrats have loved to hate in recent years “a friend.” “I’m confident he’s going to be back to his old self.

Biden, quite simply, needs McConnell right now. At a time when many Republicans are increasingly taking their cues from Trump and questioning U.S. support for Ukraine, Biden is counting on McConnell and his Senate Republicans to push through twenty-four billion dollars in urgently needed additional funds. The fall’s marquee crisis is expected to be a showdown between the Biden Administration and McCarthy’s restive House Republicans, who have threatened to shut down the government when federal funding runs out at the end of September. What happens if McConnell is out of action to help make a deal?

Politically, McConnell’s Decline might also be something of a boon to Biden. At least, it’s awkward timing for Trump and Republicans, who have been planning to make Biden’s age and capacity a major theme of the 2024 Presidential campaign. National polls show an overwhelming majority of voters, including many in Biden’s own party, consider the President too old to seek a second term. The latest A.P./N.O.R.C. survey, released this week, put the figure at three-quarters of the over-all electorate, and sixty-nine per cent of Democrats. When the pollsters asked an open-ended question about what word first springs to mind about Biden, the largest percentage of responses—twenty-six per cent—came under the heading of “Old/Outdated/Retire/Elderly/Aging/Senile Dementia.” Another fifteen per cent responded with “Slow/Confused/Idiot/Ignorant/Sleepy/Gaffe/Bumbling.” Trump’s years of taunting the President as Sleepy Joe have clearly had an effect. Yet Biden is a year younger than McConnell and, for now at least, notably more vigorous.

No wonder the loyal Trumpist Marjorie Taylor Greene was quick to throw McConnell over. Soon after video circulated on Wednesday of his Kentucky disaster, she pronounced him, along with several Democratic politicians, including Biden and the ninety-year-old Senator Dianne Feinstein, “not fit for office.” Expect more of this to come. It is a bizarre fact of our current politics that Republicans are preparing to unite around the banner of the seventy-seven-year-old Trump in the name of averting the catastrophe of a President who is too old to serve.

But, in politics, you run with what you’ve got. It’s not so much that voters aren’t concerned about Trump’s age but that, when it comes to him, they have so much more to worry about. In the same A.P. survey, voters’ views of Trump were also highly negative, but fixated more on his chronic lying, alleged criminality, and reckless personality. Among the words volunteered to describe the ex-President: “Corrupt,” “Criminal,” “Crooked,” “Compromised,” “Traitor,” “Con Artist,” “Puppet,” “Bully,” “Mean,” “Jerk,” “Hateful,” “Loudmouth,” “Liar,” “Dishonest,” and “Untrustworthy.” Together, those made up more than a quarter of all responses.

It’s the nature of politics to seek advantage in a crisis. The sad twilight of Mitch McConnell will prove to be no exception. But what I keep coming back to is a different and likely even more consequential question: What if Biden has his own McConnell moment? Imagine it happening in the latter days of the 2024 campaign, with Trump as the Republican nominee and the fate of the free world itself on the line. This is hardly an implausible hypothetical. There are, sadly, a million possibilities—a health scare, a bad fall as McConnell experienced, just the accelerated condition of advanced old age. The reign of the octogenarians is a risky bet for a democracy. ♦

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garudabluffs · 2 years

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Jared And Ivanka Walk Out During 'Biggest Crisis Of The Trump Presidency' Sep 20, 2022

The Divider' takes a look at the Oval Office during Trump's presidency and writers Susan Glasser and Peter Baker join Morning Joe to discuss many of the key moments from the book.

9:17 VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43lRefNr-I

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Lunatic': Michael Cohen Demolishes Trump On Declassifying Docs 'By Thinking' Sep 22, 2022

Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen slams Donald Trump over a new interview appearance in which he claimed to Fox’s Sean Hannity that he could declassify documents “by thinking” it, telling MSNBC’s Ari Melber that Trump “truly doesn’t want to be the President, he wants to be the king.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNHZ9KSU598

2,485 Comments

https://youtu.be/RdlFv7sBrCs

#book review author interviews The Divider #Susan Glasser and Peter Baker

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probablyasocialecologist · 7 months

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Netanyahu himself promised “mighty vengeance” in the early hours after the Hamas strike, and according to The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser, Israeli diplomats cautioned the Biden administration that their ground operation to eradicate Hamas may take as long as a decade. Israel’s supposedly centrist President Isaac Herzog has openly defended the ongoing collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, saying, “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved.” One of Israel’s most popular singers, Eyal Golan, called for Gaza to be erased without a single person left. “A leadership that feels sorry for monsters that massacred us is not worthy of leadership,” posted the right-wing politician Revital Gottlieb. “Without crushing Hamas and flattening Gaza we will not have the right to exist.” Residents of Tel Aviv hung a banner reading “Image of victory: population zero in Gaza” from a highway overpass. And ex-minister Naftali Bennett, of Qana infamy, has demanded a biblical “pillar of fire” to pave the way for IDF soldiers into Gaza. Israelis who do not believe the consequences of this frenzy will be felt closer to home are kidding themselves. On October 19, I co-interviewed the Israeli Knesset member Ofer Cassif, a communist recently suspended from parliament for forty-five days due to his public insistence that Israeli leaders acknowledge the hand of Israeli policy in producing the October 7 attacks. When we spoke, he brushed aside concern for his own marginalization and laid out what he viewed to be an underrated threat—the capacity for things to get much, much worse: The fascist militias that are organized within Israel under the auspices of Israeli police, and the [security] minister [Itamar Ben-Gvir] are going to get a green light to attack a democratic Jews and Palestinian citizens. That’s going to be a terrible bloodshed. That’s going to lead to rivers of blood. And I’m afraid that we are on the brink of that . . . I’m afraid that everybody is going to drown in rivers of blood.

#israel #usa #palestine #gaza #zionism #west bank

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nodynasty4us · 2 years

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#donald trump #foreign affairs #featured

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deadpresidents · 4 months

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DONALD TRUMP •The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Rage by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward's Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump by Bob Woodward (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control by Steven Hassan (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

JOE BIDEN •The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by Gabriel Debenedetti (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House by Chris Whipple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO) •Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption by Jules Witcover (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

#History #Books #Book Suggestions #Book Recommendations #Presidents #Presidency #Presidential Books #POTUS Books #Books About Presidents #Barack Obama #President Obama #Donald Trump #President Trump #Joe Biden #President Biden

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canichangemyblogname · 6 months

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In case we all forgot... fuck this guy ^^^

The stopgap bill he has proposed to avoid a US government shutdown and extend government funding at current levels for certain agencies does not provide funding for Ukraine. This is not the first time a US budget has neglected sustained funding for Ukraine.

NPR interviewed New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser, who expressed a similar sentiment to what I explained yesterday in this post: the lack of ability for the US government to make and honor its international commitments as a consequence of the nature of our political system. The US can no longer be trusted to honor its long-term commitments; its "allies" know this. Glasser put it perfectly: America's inconstancy is its primary weakness.

#NPR #all things considered #ukraine

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 2 years

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🤬

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pscottm · 2 years

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“Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job, then used it as a guide in his attempts to cope with Trump’s irrational behavior,” The Guardian reports.

#books #us news #us politics #donald trump #politics books

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 6 months

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Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News

* * * *

Susan B Glasser: In the hours after Johnson’s unexpected ascension on Wednesday, the press and the political commentariat feasted on examples of the previously little-known congressman’s ideological extremism: his calling gay people “dangerous” and “deviant” threats to the American way of life; his sponsorship of a national abortion ban and warning that those who performed an abortion would, at least in Louisiana, end up doing hard labor; his insistence that, if only women would bear more “able-bodied workers,” there would be no need to cut back Medicare and Social Security. His climate-change denialism, his belief in creationism over evolution, and his promotion of “covenant marriage” were all examined. It was pointed out that Johnson, after only six years in Congress, was the least experienced Speaker in a hundred and forty years, and the most hard-right House leader anyone could remember.

But none of those were the reasons for his rise, which had less to do with his stealth brand of political extremism than with his stellar record of support for Trump’s unprecedented effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Many members of the House Republican Conference—two-thirds of them, in fact—had voted to back Trump’s lies about the election. But few had worked as actively to foist bogus conspiracy theories about 2020 on the American public as did Johnson, a constitutional lawyer who enlisted dozens of fellow-members to support a Texas court case seeking to cancel the election results in battleground states. Johnson even promoted the bizarre falsehood, also amplified by Trump, that Dominion voting machines had been rigged because they came from “Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” (One thing that always bothered me about this: Didn’t anyone ever point out to them that Chávez died in 2013, seven years before the election that he somehow stole?) Johnson’s role, little noted at the time, was such that the Times later called him “the most important architect” of the campaign to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results and thus overturn Trump’s defeat.

On Tuesday, it had looked like the Speakership might go to Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, but the Republican whip turned out to have a fatal black mark on his résumé, at least as far as House Republicans were concerned: his vote on January 6, 2021, to certify President Joe Biden’s election. After five rounds of voting in the Republican Conference on Tuesday, Emmer defeated Johnson, a hundred and nineteen votes to ninety-seven votes. But then Trump weighed in. No way he wanted an election enabler as House Speaker. In a Truth Social post, Trump warned against the “tragic mistake” of choosing a “globalist rino” like Emmer. Enough Republicans then refused to go along with Emmer in a prospective House floor vote—where the Republican majority is so slim that a Speaker candidate can lose no more than four members of his own party—that he was soon forced to give up his bid. (“It’s done. It’s over. I killed him,” Trump reportedly bragged in a phone call with members.) It says everything about today’s House G.O.P. that Johnson lost the race against Emmer but then won the job anyway.

[The New Yorker]

#Adam Zyglis #Buffalo news #MAGA #American Authoritarianism #The New Yorker

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porterdavis · 2 years

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“I love maps,” Trump elaborated, “and I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”

Facepalm. Somebody should explain mercator projection to him, or better yet -- hand him a globe.

#greenland

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clusterbuck · 1 year

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hello, emma!! some time ago you made a post saying that you've been reading a lot of non-fiction and listening to podcasts related to current events and such. i wanted to ask if you could give any recommendations?

(also, love your blog and your buddie fics are my absolute favorite)

hi! i don’t know if these will be exactly what you’re looking for but here’s a handful of suggestions haha

some non-fiction books i’ve liked recently:

empire of pain, patrick radden keefe

the divider, peter baker and susan glasser

i’m glad my mom died, jennette mccurdy

pandora’s lab, paul a. offit

a history of the world in six glasses, tom standage

cultish, amanda montell

a curious history of sex, kate lister

meme wars, joan donovan & emily dreyfuss & brian friedberg

how sex changed the internet and the internet changed sex, samantha cole

as for podcasts:

you’re wrong about

5-4

ologies

wind of change

if books could kill

wow if true

(also, very much not current events, but i still want to mention pod and prejudice!)

#shush emma

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