Saturday Report 9/9/23 - Fani Willis crushes Gym Jordan and all but calls him a dumb*ss....

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

— Why wasn’t Lindsey Graham indicted? Down in Georgia, DA Fani Willis ran two separate and consecutive grand juries, the first to determine the facts around Trump’s attempt to overthrow our government and the second to actually issue the indictments. Yesterday, we learned that the first grand jury suggested indicting not only Trump and the 18 others Willis is currently going after, but another 21 people, including two former Republican US senators and current Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). They found that Graham, former Republican Georgia Senators David Purdue and Kelly Loeffler, along with former national security advisor Mike Flynn and another 16 miscreants committed felony crimes worthy of prosecution. So, what happened between the time of the recommendations and the time of the indictments? Did DA Willis conclude a 39-person indictment would be too unwieldy? Did she decide against trying to prosecute three more high-profile Republicans because she was concerned about the blowback (particularly in Georgia, where she lives and works, since Loeffler and Purdue were Georgia’s US senators)? Did the facts in the cases change? Are those 21 people now cooperating witnesses we may one day see testify against Trump and others? The answers to these questions will probably leak out over the next few days or weeks, and it’ll add significantly to the drama around this worst crime against US democracy since the Civil War.

— Did Elon Musk meddle in the war in Ukraine to help Putin? Walter Isaacson has a new biography of Musk that’ll be available this coming week and in it he says that Musk screwed Ukraine on behalf of Putin. Ukraine had put together a small fleet of slightly-submerged drones that could travel like torpedoes, guided by a connection to the internet via Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service. Musk has had conversations with Putin, and it seems that Putin told him a big attack by Ukraine would cause him to use nuclear weapons in retaliation. Musk bought that story hook, line, and sinker, if media reports are accurate, so, as the torpedoes/drones were in the water heading toward the Russian fleet stationed in Crimean ports, Musk cut the internet connection in real time. The drones/torpedoes then harmlessly washed up on shore, where the Russians could collect them. Putin has tried his “I’ll nuke you” strategy with multiple world leaders, including Biden and several European heads of state, and they’ve either laughed at him or called his bluff, but Musk is neither that smart nor that experienced, if the early reports from Isaacson’s biography are any indicator. Ukraine is seriously pissed off about this, as the deadliest terrorist attacks Russia has launched against them have been with cruise missiles fired from those very ships. Meanwhile, Musk continues to platform pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine and anti-democracy propaganda as well as blatant antisemitism on his social media site. Tech writer John Gruber argues that Musk has put out a “big, blinking ‘welcome Nazis’ sign” on Twitter X because the site tolerates users with names like J3wsAreBad, gasthejews6969, and J3wsRapeK1ds. Since the story went viral two days ago, those particular accounts have been suspended, but there’s no shortage of hate filling the site since Musk took it over and re-platformed numerous open Nazis and anti-Semites. (It probably doesn’t help that last weekend Musk claimed that Jews are responsible for the failure of the site under his management.) Now that there are numerous competitors (Threads, Spoutible, Mastodon, Post, Tribel, Substack, Linked In) for short-form social media, people appear to be deserting Musk’s site. Sad.

— Republicans are attacking Biden for what Trump did. Will their voters fall for it? (Is the sky blue?) And, Republicans think they now have a Biden impeachment narrative that could work: just make something up! Over at George Takei’s substack The Big Picture, his team is documenting how Republicans are currently attacking Joe Biden for things that happened while Donald Trump was president. One particularly egregious tweet says: “Joe Biden and his party shuttered schools, forced masks on their faces, and put vaccines in their arms, all while holding our children back in ways that will have long-lasting impacts on their educational future. Joe Biden and the Democrats put power over our kids.” The only problem is that all of those things happened in 2020 and were done by Trump. The RNC has gone so far as to use pictures and video from 2020 to attack Biden. Kevin McCarthy and Iowa Congressman Feenstra have both tweeted that, “President Biden not only paid people to stay home at the expense of American taxpayers, but under his watch $191 BILLION in unemployment benefits were also misspent and wasted.” Again, that was Trump. But their tweets are still up: clearly, they believe Republican voters are mindbogglingly stupid. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House have decided they’re going to try to impeach President Biden for “accepting bribes.” The only problem they have is that there’s absolutely no evidence — not a shred or even a hint of a shred — to back up that claim. That said, there was also no evidence that after Republicans in Congress refused the CIA’s funding request to harden Benghazi and the station was attacked that Hillary Clinton had anything to do with it. That didn’t stop them from spending two years and tens of millions of dollars trying to convince Americans she was responsible.

— Was Chuck Grassley in on January 6th? On January 5, 2021, the day before the Capitol was attacked by Trump’s murderous mob, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley told reporters that he expected to oversee the counting of the electoral votes the following day, a job that the Constitution gives to the “president of the senate.” That role is usually filled by the vice president, but if he’s absent or dead then the temporary president of the senate becomes the senator who’s been there the longest, which is Chuck Grassley. And, indeed, the Secret Service, perhaps under orders from Trump (all their phones were wiped under Trump’s appointee’s orders, so we’ll never know), tried to remove Pence from the Capitol when the riot started, which would have put Grassley in that spot. Grassley had been meeting with Trump and other co-conspirators in the days and weeks leading up to January 6, although he’s now claiming he misspoke and it’s all a big mistake to think he was planning to count the votes. Was he in on it? Inquiring minds want to know.

— Fani Willis crushes Gym Jordan and all but calls him a moron. Jordan, in his role as Trump’s chief enforcer in Congress, had demanded all sorts of information and paperwork from Willis that, presumably, he could use to discredit her prosecution. Her reply to him is one for the ages. Quoting a letter Jordan himself had sent last year to January 6th Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, Willis wrote: “This unprecedented action serves no legitimate legislative purpose and would set a dangerous precedent for future Congresses... the American people deserve better.” She then proceeded to take him apart. “[Y]our job description as a legislator does not include criminal law enforcement, nor does it include supervising a specific criminal trial because you believe that doing so will promote your partisan political objectives.” And, “Your letter makes clear that you lack a basic understanding of the law, its practice, and the ethical obligations of attorneys generally and prosecutors specifically.” And, “For a more thorough understanding of Georgia’s RICO statute, its application and similar laws in other states, I encourage you to read ‘RICO State-by-State.’ As a non-member of the bar, you can purchase a copy for two hundred forty-nine dollars [$249].” It’s going to be very interesting to see how Jordan responds: my bet is he’ll try to drag her before his committee and threaten her with a Peter Navarro type of criminal prosecution if she fails to show up. Given how Jordan himself refused to show up for the January 6th Committee’s subpoena, this could become a really interesting show…

— Is the GOP re-branding the “pro-life” term because it’s just not working? And how go their efforts to ban birth control? Wednesday night Mitch McConnell’s SuperPAC hosted a conversation with Republican senators about using different language than “pro-life” in the future. Turns out it’s not polling well any more. The problem they have is that the best suggestion anybody came up with was “pro-baby,” which doesn’t seem much better. Meanwhile, Oregon Right to Life is following in the footsteps of other radical anti-woman groups and trying to outlaw or at least de-fund multiple forms of birth control, including IUDs and birth control pills, in my state. In 2017 the Oregon legislature passed a law requiring all insurers to pay for birth control, and it’s that law the rightwing group is targeting, refusing to even reference IUDs and hormonal pills as “birth control” but instead referring to them as “abortifacient contraceptives.” Keep an eye on this and other efforts at the state level; multiple state legislators have already proclaimed they’re going after birth control next, and Clarence Thomas, in his Dobbs concurring opinion, argued that the right to birth control — decided by the Court in their 1965 Griswold decision — should be overturned, along with the right to gay marriage. These guys won’t stop until they’ve taken America back to the 19th century, before the income tax and the right of women to vote were put into law.

— The Saudis and Putin are gambling on a Trump win — and are already trying to manipulate the 2024 election. Russia and Saudi Arabia both desperately want Trump back in office, so last week they joined up to cut world oil production by 1.3 million barrels a day with the promise those cuts — which immediately boosted oil prices by around $10 a barrel — will stay in place until after the November, 2024 election. They