The Conversation -- January 2, 2024
A New Year's Wish from RAS:
Jenna Russell of the New York Times: "Lawyers for ... Donald J. Trump filed an appeal on Tuesday seeking to overturn the ruling last week by Shenna Bellows, Maine's secretary of state, to bar him from appearing on the state's Republican primary ballot. Ms. Bellows, a Democrat, 'was a biased decision maker who should have recused herself and otherwise failed to provide lawful due process,' lawyers for Mr. Trump wrote in the 11-page appeal filed in Maine Superior Court. They further argued that she had 'no legal authority to consider the federal constitutional issues presented by the challengers.'"
Tracey Tully, et al., of the New York Times: "Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey -- already accused of using his political influence to benefit Egypt -- was newly charged on Tuesday with using his power to help the government of Qatar. Mr. Menendez, 70, was charged by federal prosecutors with accepting bribes from Fred Daibes, a prominent New Jersey developer, in exchange for the senator's help securing financial backing from an investment fund with ties to the Qatari government." CNN's report is here. ~~~
~~~ Marie: Awkward! News of the new charges broke while Menendez' daughter Alicia Menendez was hosting a two-hour MSNBC show that, were she not hosting, would have announced the charges in breaking news. Update: So in the show that followed Menendez's, Ari Melber reported the new charges.
** Emma Haidar & Cam Kettles of the Harvard Crimson: "Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. University Provost Alan M. Garber '76 will serve as Harvard's interim president during a search for Gay's permanent successor, the Harvard Corporation -- the University's highest governing body -- announced in an email on Tuesday.... Gay's resignation -- just six months and two days into the presidency -- comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5. Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration's response to Hamas' Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work." ~~~
~~~ The New York Times is liveblogging developments: "Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work, Harvard's president Claudine Gay announced her resignation on Tuesday." ~~~
~~~ Jennifer Schuessler: "Claudine Gay resigned from Harvard three weeks after plagiarism accusations against her emerged, the latest development in a turbulent stretch of presidency that began with her response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.... Rumors about problems in Dr. Gay's work had circulated for months on anonymous message boards. But the first widely publicized report came on Dec. 10, the evening before Harvard's board met to decide whether she would keep her job, when the conservative education activist Christopher Rufo published an essay in his Substack newsletter highlighting what he described as 'problematic patterns of usage and citation' in her 1997 doctoral dissertation. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, followed with several articles detailing numerous allegations regarding her published scholarly articles, and reported two formal complaints submitted to the Research Integrity Office of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, of which Dr. Gay, a political scientist, is a member.... As more allegations surfaced, faculty support for Dr. Gay began to erode, particularly as questions arose about what procedures the corporation -- which normally has no involvement in scholarly matters -- had used to investigate." ~~~
~~~ Annie Karni: "House Republicans were stepping over each other to claim credit for Claudine Gay's resignation." ~~~
~~~ Anna Betts: "Christopher Rufo, a conservative education activist who was among the first to widely publicize the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, took credit for her resignation in a post on social media[.]" ~~~
~~~ A statement from Harvard's governing board. ~~~
~~~ Gay's resignation letter.
~~~ Anemona Hartocollis: "New plagiarism allegations that surfaced on Monday against Claudine Gay, leading to her resignation, threatened to mire Harvard deeper in debate over what constitutes plagiarism and whether the university would hold its president and its students to the same standard. The accusations were circulated through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon...."
Brad Reed of the Raw Story posts remarks of several GOP senators who said they acquitted Trump of impeachment charges because the criminal justice system was the venue for him to be held to account for "the violent, despicable acts of January 6th." ~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~ Adam Liptak of the New York Times: takes a look at Donald Trump's preposterous argument that he cannot be prosecuted for his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election: Article I.3.7 of the Constitution reads, "Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: But the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law." Now, I would say you and I know what that means, but in Trumpsidedown World. they disagree with us: "The clause 'presupposes that a president who is not convicted may not be subject to criminal prosecution,' Mr. Trump's brief said." Trump also argues that "A president who is acquitted by the Senate cannot be prosecuted for the acquitted conduct." (Also linked yesterday.)
Sour Country. As the New Year fast approaches, I would like to wish an early New Year's salutation to Crooked Joe Biden and his group of Radical Left Misfits & Thugs on their never ending attempt to DESTROY OUR NATION through Lawfare, Invasion, and Rigging Elections. They are now scrambling to sign up as many of those millions of people they are illegally allowing into sour [sic] Country, in order that they will be ready to VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024. -- Donald Trump, New Year's Eve ~~~
~~~ Stephen Collinson of CNN: Donald Trump "rang in the New Year Monday with a wild social media post filled with falsehoods about the 2020 election and unsubstantiated accusations that President Joe Biden had committed criminal acts.... He claimed on Truth Social that his successor had 'attacked his Political Opponent at a level never seen before in this Country, and wants desperately to PUT "TRUMP" IN PRISON. He is playing a very dangerous game, and the great people of America WILL NOT STAND FOR IT.'"
Marie: Oh, if only I were a D-list "celebrity," I could have enjoyed performances by white (natch!) rapper Vanilla Ice & an Elvis impersonator while hobnobbing with Roger Stone at a gold-encrusted mansion in Palm Beach. Life is so unfa-a-air!
Danny Hakim of the New York Times: The National Rifle Association's longtime leader Wayne "LaPierre, 74, faces his gravest challenge, as a legal showdown with New York's attorney general, Letitia James, goes to trial in a Manhattan courtroom. Ms. James, in a lawsuit filed amid an abrupt effort by the N.R.A. to clean up its practices, seeks to oust him from the group after reports of corruption and mismanagement.... The organization, long a lobbying juggernaut, is a kind of ghost ship. After closing its media arm, NRATV, in 2019, it has largely lost its voice, and Mr. LaPierre rarely makes public pronouncements. Membership has plummeted to 4.2 million from nearly six million five years ago. Revenue is down 44 percent since 2016, according to its internal audits, and legal costs have soared to tens of millions a year.... The group recently enlisted the support of the American Civil Liberties Union in a federal lawsuit that accuses former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration of misusing their authority by dissuading banks and insurers from doing business with the N.R.A." ~~~
~~~ Marie: And that's why the ACLU isn't getting contributions this year from some Reality Chex contributors and me. They have phoned, they have emailed, they have promised that none of my donation would go to the ACLU suit. I was not convinced.
~~~~~~~~~~
Israel/Palestine
The Washington Post's live updates of developments Tuesday in the Israel/Hamas war are here: "The Israeli military is planning to withdraw from Gaza five brigades -- which could include thousands of troops -- while vowing 'prolonged fighting' in the new year. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said the return of reservists is expected to 'significantly ease the burden on the economy.'... The U.S. 6th Fleet announced that the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group, one of two such groups deployed to the Middle East for deterrence after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack, is leaving the eastern Mediterranean Sea." ~~~
~~~ The New York Times' live updates are here. CNN's live updates are here.
Isabelle Kershner, et al., of the New York Times: "Israel's Supreme Court on Monday struck down a law limiting its own powers, a momentous step in the legal and political crisis that gripped the country before the war with Hamas, and pitted the court against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government. The court's 8-7 ruling has the potential to throw Israel's national emergency government, formed after the Oct. 7 attacks, into disarray and reignite the grave domestic turmoil that began a year ago over the Netanyahu government's judicial overhaul plan.... The court, sitting with a full panel of all 15 of its justices for the first time in its history, rejected the law passed by Parliament in July that barred judges from using a particular legal standard to overrule decisions made by government ministers." (Also linked yesterday.)
South Korea. Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times: "Lee Jae-myung, the leader of South Korea's main opposition party, was stabbed in the neck on Tuesday morning, according to the police and live-streamed TV footage. Mr. Lee, the leader of the liberal Democratic Party, was visiting the southern port city of Busan when an unidentified man stabbed him in the neck with a knifelike weapon, according to the footage. Mr. Lee, 59, had just finished taking questions from journalists after touring the site of a planned airport and was making his way through a crowd of reporters and supporters when he was attacked. The police in Busan said the assailant had been detained, but they did not provide any details about Mr. Lee's condition or the motives of the attacker. Mr. Lee was bleeding from the neck before being taken away in an ambulance, according to news reports and photos from the scene." A Reuters story is here.
Ukraine, et al. Constant Méheut of the New York Times: "Russian missiles and drones hammered Kyiv on Tuesday morning, officials said, in a large-scale attack on the Ukrainian capital and other cities, the day after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia promised to retaliate for a Ukrainian assault on a Russian city. The Ukrainian Air Force said the barrage involved some of Russia's most powerful weapons, including hypersonic missiles that fly at several times the speed of sound. Air-raid alerts sounded constantly in Kyiv on Tuesday morning, as wave after wave of missiles rained down."
News Ledes
ABC News: "The driver suspected of causing a fiery fatal crash outside a concert venue in upstate New York early New Year's Day was identified on Tuesday, however, officials added they have not yet found any nexus to terrorism after multiple canisters full of gasoline were found in his vehicle, officials said. Two people in a ride-sharing car were killed after a rented Ford Expedition driven by the suspect, 35-year-old Michael Avery, slammed into it and burst into flames as it sped in the direction of pedestrians in a crosswalk outside the Kodak Center at about 12:52 a.m. Monday, Rochester Police Chief David Smith said at a news conference Tuesday morning. The two passengers riding in the backseat of the ride-share, a Mitsubishi Outlander, were killed, Smith said. They were identified by police Tuesday evening as Justina Hughes, 28, of Geneva, and Joshua Orr, 29, of Webster. The ride-share driver was taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Smith said.... Smith said video of the incident reviewed by him and investigators appears to show the pedestrians in the crosswalk outside the theater were Avery's targets."
CNN: "A Japan Airlines plane carrying hundreds of passengers burst into flames at Tokyo's Haneda airport on Tuesday after it was in collision with [a Japan Coast Guard aircraft] involved in earthquake relief efforts. JAL flight 516 ignited after flying into Haneda from the northern Japanese city of Sapporo at 5:47 p.m. local time (3:47 a.m. ET) All crew members and passengers, including eight children under the age of two, were safely evacuated from the passenger plane, according to the airline.... One person on the Coast Guard plane escaped, but five are unaccounted for."
New York Times: "At least 48 people were killed in the powerful earthquake that struck western Japan on Monday, the authorities said a day after the disaster, as they continued to comb through the rubble of collapsed and burned buildings. The dead included 19 in Wajima, a city in Ishikawa Prefecture, the coastal epicenter of the earthquake, which triggered tsunami warnings, extensive evacuations and widespread power outages after it hit around 4:10 p.m. on New Year's Day. A large fire broke out in Wajima after the quake, which registered 7.6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale."
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Reader Comments (17)
The best of Lauren Boebert:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C1c_paaSAyH/
Forrest,
Isn’t that kind of like “The Best of Bubonic Plague”?
Marie,
Your clip and comment on Matt Damon prompted me to rewatch one of my all time favorites: Dogma
Memo to God:
If you really are Alanis Morrisette, I take it all back. Beam me up.
This is sort of current events, even though it comes from 2010 and the angst of progressives feeling that the Democrats don't take care of them so why should they vote for Democrats. One of the stupidest conclusions ever.
TBogg is gone but Happy Gumdrop Fairy Land is forever.
@Ak: Fortunately, the bubonic plague is a bacteria. Bacterias can
be cured. Lauren Boebert is more like a virus. No cures for those.
A virus should be avoided at all cost.
(I'm not a doctor, but I once dated one.)
I hope this year that those trying to rig our elections and trying to destroy our country get what they deserve
On those senators:
Yeah, that's Republican leadership:
Let someone else do it.
The view from 10,000 feet
I finally got around to a book I’ve been meaning to read for some time, “All the Light We Cannot See”, by Anthony Doerr. Excellent book. A bit slow at first, but it becomes increasingly propulsive towards the end and I found myself doing what I try to avoid when reading fiction, speed reading, to find out what happens to characters you come to care a great deal about.
While reading this book, I came across several articles on the late (but not late enough) war criminal, Henry Kissinger, and I found some immediate connections, through war.
The Doerr book is set in Germany and France during WWII. I’ve been a war movie fan since I was a boy when we’d play “War” with the neighborhood kids. I was great at dying after being “shot”…grab the chest and fall down with appropriate sound effects. Even better, if we were playing on a hill behind a local high school, you could topple over and roll all the way down the hill. Great death! But, of course, unlike real War, no one died, no one lost an eye or a limb, no one went hungry or had their homes bombed. We got up, went home, and had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
It strikes me that for war mongers like Kissinger, like Bush and Cheney, that’s what war was like for them. Pretense. Then have a bite to eat. War for those guys was seen from 10,000 feet.
In “All the Light”, you see war at ground level. You see what top level war mongers and planners of horrors inflict on real people. You see the soul killing damage, the hunger, the fear, the murder. Walt Whitman once decried what he saw as a general view of human beings as “dreams and dots”. How many dots did Kissinger kill, displace, destroy? A million? For what? So he could be the life of the party at Washington cocktail parties? So he could give vicious life to theories of state power he concocted in grad school?
Dreams and dots.
How about the Decider and Darth Cheney? How many dreams and dots did they destroy?
The view from 10,000 feet turns the whole thing into a game of sorts. Like in those war movies I used to watch as a kid. Some officer stands over a table with a map of Europe painted on it and pushes pieces of war machinery around the board. But down at ground level, those pieces are tearing through buildings, homes, lives.
Even well done war films suffer from this sort of tunnel vision. The combatants set to and have it, they take ground, lose ground, fire up a fat cheroot and move on to the next battle. But in their wake, what happens to the dots? The dreams become nightmares. But those people don’t get star billing, so…
You can see this reduction of human beings to dots all over the place. Trump and company didn’t see families, poor moms and dads looking for a better life, helpless infants, crying for parents they’ll never see again in this world. They saw dots. Dots. And they stepped on them, gleefully, just like they promised.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has been making the case for years that our best hope for moral tutelage can be found in literature. Books like “All the Light” of “All Quiet on the Western Front” take Whitman’s dreams and dots and give them faces, souls.
The Kissingers and Trumps and Deciders like the 10,000 foot view.
Better stories at the next cocktail party.
@Akhilleus: A film adaptation of "All the Light We Cannot See" is now a limited series on Netflix. Movies are seldom as, well, enlightening as the books on which they are founded, but you can judge for yourself.
Marie,
Thanks. My wife was waiting for me to finish the book (so she can read it) before we watch the Netflix series. Looks like a good cast, but as you say…adaptations, one never knows, do one? Although I can report that the recent German film based on “All Quiet on the Western Front” is a fine adaptation. A few changes from the book, but no huge quibbles. One can see why the Nazis banned that book.
Patrick,
Idiots abound. Those were the morons who voted for Raph Nader, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein. Now we have Cornel West and RFK, Jr. as this year’s spoilers. Even crazier, I’ve been seeing reports that younger black voters are going for Trump rather than Biden.
Seriously? It’s one thing to say “Biden’s not helping us so I’m not voting for him” but to vote instead for a racist pig? Why? To show that your vote shouldn’t be taken for granted? Okay, I get that people feel that way, but….Trump? This guy is fine with African-Americans being shot for looking cross eyed at a cop. He tried to discount millions of black votes. He’s a fucking white supremacist!
Jesus. What are people thinking?
Oh my, another ODP (Old Dead People), Les McAnn.
ThisThis was a major soundtrack of my long ago youth.
@Akhilleus -
That's the rub isn't it? Thinking? Or, hopefully, reports of such flim flammery are greatly exagerrated?
AK: and Gonzo: I will never understand those voters. Never. Nor will I become and "us" with them. There is no future in "bringing people together" as it is impossible. What the civil war stopped short of, we seem to be accomplishing. Ugh. Time to eat chili and Wilbur buds. (Those are PA "kisses" that aren't Hershey and are far better...)
Happy 2024: it is finally upon us.
Alarum! Alarum! Non-white lady who has to think twice about bending over for the Orange Monster might weasel her way into Der Fuhrer’s next administration!! MAGA alert!
So sez convicted felon, three shirt wearing, serial liar, Steve (why isn’t he in fucking jail?) Bannon.
So here are two data points to consider, following which one can assess the value of MSM reporting.
First, Newsweek picks up Bannon’s latest MAGA alert, repeating it pretty much verbatim.
But hang on, an investigation into the veracity of information spun out on political podcasts points out that right-wing podcasters are habitual liars and that Bannon is the biggest liar out there.
“A major study reviewing the top US political podcasts found that conservative-leaning shows are vastly more likely to include misinformation — with Steve Bannon's War Room coming way out ahead…Fifty-six of the podcasters reviewed shared false or unsubstantiated claims at some point, the study found. But 10 of those were responsible for a full 60 per cent of the misleading material found. And of those, all were conservative-leaning, the study said.”
Didja get that? Ten podcasters are responsible for 60% of the misinformation being spread online. ALL are right-wingers and Bannon is the worst.
So how come Newsweek just regurgitates his crap without referencing how little truth there is to almost everything this asshole says?
Gotta be nice to the MAGAts I guess. Because both sides…
Don’t look for any help from most MSM outlets in the coming war against democracy.
D,
Sad to hear about Les McCann. My brother and I wore out a live recording of a concert of his at Montreux. “Compared to what” is still a great track even after a couple hundred listens.
Okay, so the MSM mostly sucks, lazy reporting, horse race polling up the ying yang, and Both Sides to beat the band.
But Fox??
Blithering idiot Jesse Watters, who once slashed a woman’s tires (not his wife), he was hoping to boink (clever move there, Jess, although I’ve never tried that tactic, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked, but then again, I’m not a Fox asshole) is now getting his exclusives from…a psychic.
I am not even kidding.
Good news though, the psychic lady sez Trump will lose in 2024.
When Watters asked how Biden would do, she predicted “Lots of money!” Never one to forgo an opportunity to be a stupid dick, Watters quickly followed with “From China??”
Christ on a Tarot card. What’s next? Interviews with Limbaugh from beyond the grave? I don’t think they have Wi-Fi in hell.