Week of Bunkered Ballroom, Political Courtrooms, War Rooms
Billion Dollar Dance Floor, Political Prosecutions, Iran War Triple Reversals, Hormuz Strait Jacket, Epstein, Voting Rights

Quoting Jessie Opoien of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

The leaked memo names the candidate that really scares Republicans, that would give them the hardest path to squeaking out a win.

James seems skeptical:

James speculates by what stealth the reporter managed to get hold of that top secret memo:

I sense skepticism.

Political entanglement:

Practical effect:

driftglass quotes from an interview with a retired worker faced with family health insurance costs now increasing by multiples as Republican slashes take effect:

A little history:

More detailed information is presented by Juliet in an hour long (well… 53 minute) entertaining podcast.

Says tengrain:

Not at all the Trump we know from pretty much all other accounts.

News Corpse covers Trump’s angry denial the call ever occurred.

Quoting, and linking to, Trump’s denial:

Partial headline captures the strange post:

Mary Wheeler notices a problem:

Jesse uses the play as an object lesson and applies it to the political prosecution of Trump’s political enemies by the Justice Department.

She begins with James Comey’s now famous photo of a pattern of seashells encountered on a walk along the beach. They were arranged into 8647, 86 being a well known short for discarding something, and 47 being someone we all know with varying degrees of affection.

The Trumped up charge (see what I did there?) against Comey was that his photo was a threat against the life of the aforementioned beloved person. Deadly seashells with a dangerous message.

She goes on to several other baseless, but politically inspired, prosecutions of Trump critics.

Her point is that witch hunts are not about witches.
They are part of an authoritarian motif, inciting folks against those whom those the politically powerful don’t like.
Making ordinary people afraid to speak up.

My thought: Guns don’t kill people. Mollusks kill people.

How about those who plan violence? Well yeah. Conspiracy counts.

Those who advocate violence? The Trump administration has strayed into dangerous seashell patterns in which “86” is no longer held to mean to discard, as in vote against.

M. Bouffant at Web of Evil links to a dozen and a half reports as Trump officials expand their efforts into pre-emptive hinterlands. Get them before they even think of doing anything to us.

Reports show the administration targeting left‑wing extremists:
Extremists such as transgender activists, anyone whose views are anti-American, and those identifying as Antifa.

In one report, Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, is asked who else will be targeted for terrorism.

Well! There you go!

According to polls, that would seem to include the majority of American voters, now to be considered terrorists. Presumably the charge will be testicular inadequacy in regard to Trump wars.

Trump can never acknowledge failure. He can’t fail. He can only be failed.

…as opposed to what we have gained; which is to say nothing.

Infidel753 brings a message from Reza Pahlavi, an Iranian dissident living in exile in Washington, DC. It is a message of disappointment in western media and defiance on behalf of ordinary citizens resisting the hyper-religious thugs currently oppressing that country.

It all won’t be back for a long time after the war is over.

And you can thank this clown for that:

Horrible because the military costs of the attack on Iran are greater than previously known.
Horrible because Trump and everyone reporting to him had been lying, hiding that cost from the public.
Horrible because of reports about FBI director Kash Patel’s journey into deep alcohol adventures.
Horrible because Patel has ordered the FBI to investigate reporters for reporting on his dive into boozy depths.
Horrible because of Epstein, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s involvement with Epstein, the Epstein files, and Epstein.

The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

Others:

Some pretty weird stuff.

In order to grab everything he can, Trump is stealing the sense of hope and forward‑thinking that has always been the best part of the American ideal.

A lot of the violence was thought to be unnecessary by more gentile White Supremacists. The same objective could be done legally.

Even in the post-Civil War 19th Century, you couldn’t explicitly keep Black citizens from becoming Black voters. But you could do it without mentioning race within the law itself.

Senator Theodore Bilbo, Mississippi:

That section of the state constitution required new prospective voters to so completely understand provisions of the state constitution that nobody could reasonably be expected to do it. No mention of race.

But another law helped out White voters. If an applicant’s father or grandfather had been a voter, or would even have been allowed to vote in the good old days, that new registrant was exempted from any literacy requirement. It was called the Grandfather Clause.

Occasionally a voting push would coach prospective Black voters on minute details of the constitution and the law. So other measures were employed.

White Citizen’s Councils were formed to pay friendly visits to employers of Black applicants warning those employers about the economic dangers of keeping such radicals on their payrolls.

Other means were also found. Voting locations in Black areas were changed at the last minute to distant, hard‑to‑locate places. Photo IDs were made harder to get for those who used buses rather than owned cars. Creativity in setting barriers seemed endless.

For a while after the Voting Rights Act was passed, gerrymandering was creatively used. If Black voters couldn’t be kept off the rolls, at least they could be kept out of office.

Lawsuits applied the 1965 Voting Rights Act to outlaw that. If enough Black voters existed in an area to elect a member of Congress, or any other official, you had to allow a district to accommodate that.

That is, up until last week.

The newest Supreme Court decision seemed reasonable on the surface. You couldn’t take race into consideration in creating new districts or keeping old ones.

You could, however, take politics into consideration. If White legislators move to slice out Black representation, they can now simply say it’s also political, not just racial.

In fact, the court went even further. If voting rights advocates can prove conclusively that new district boundaries are set up with the clear intent to deny Black representation, they have a new obligation.

They have to come up with boundaries that will pretty much guarantee that Republican incumbents will keep their seats, thus preserving allowed political motives. Of course, they must also guarantee that Black representatives will not be elected by Black voters because of their race.

Such is the new order.

Dave quotes Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Professor of History at New York University, and foremost expert on fascism and authoritarian leaders.

Professor Ben-Ghiat on the current authoritarian mindset:

Dave is hopeful democracy will be restored in his lifetime, but not optimistic.

You may prefer a complete transcript (PDF).

We no longer have to imagine what we would have done in 1930s Germany.

Julian Sanchez considers the stated reason, detection of published threats to the US, and the real reason, suppression of opinions Trump supporters don’t like.

And he points out what any decent human would want to avoid for those seeking refuge from danger and oppression: It immediately jeopardizes their safety, often their lives and that of their families.

Although Professor PZ Myers is an arachnologist, he denies responsibility.

Kyle issues a message of courageous defiance:

PZ Myers somehow manages to bring his sympathetic grief under control:

The problem:

The solution:

Dave does include an admission of sorts:

From curious Joel:

She has a point. What does it cost a company to be polite?

Her guest blogger is Yvette Prior who is sort of a Renaissance figure of many talents: author, work psychologist, poet, and a contributing editor to an anthology on food with vignettes on how cuisine has shaped culture, classrooms, and social life.

Yvette has advice for aspiring writers on what she, and editors generally, look for in submissions.