For Four or More Years

Adolph Hitler is smiling

A show-stopping takedown of Donald Trump

BREAKING: Democratic star Congressman Jamie Raskin delivers a show-stopping takedown of Donald Trump’s lawless mass pardon of violent January 6th insurrectionists.

This is exactly what all of us are thinking right now…

“The chairman began by saying that the point here is to restore the rule of law… restore the rule of law… Can you even pretend to do that if you stand by and support Donald Trump who on day one — as the chairman of the committee just said — day one of his presidency, pardoned fifteen hundred insurrectionists including hundreds of people who violently assaulted and attacked American police officers?” said Raskin during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

“Let’s just take one person who is free today, Julian Khater, who had been convicted after having every due process protection, the right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses, the right to introduce evidence, but they had him completely,” said Raskin.

“They knew exactly what happened. Most of this was videotaped so the whole world could see it,” he continued. “Well, Julian Khater repeatedly violently assaulted our officer protecting us in Congress, Officer Brian Sicknick, who then proceeded to have several strokes and died on January the 7th, 2021, the next day.”

“The family of Officer Sicknick is absolutely devastated and demolished by what’s just happened,” Raskin went on. “I invite any of my colleagues, including the members new to this committee who maybe weren’t here on January 6th and didn’t experience the trauma of that violent insurrection when we saw a mob marauding through here yelling ‘Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!’ and looking to assassinate Nancy Pelosi.”

“And now you have the temerity to come forward and say this is about public safety? How much safer are we now with these fifteen hundred criminals at large in Washington D.C. and going out into the country?” asked Raskin.

“Are you vouching that these people are not going to be attacking any other police officers?” he added. “Are you vouching that they’re no longer a threat to public safety? What an outrage! What a scandal!”

The truth is that there is no defending Trump’s pardons on anything other than purely partisan grounds. He released these criminals because they support him. He doesn’t care that they attacked police officers. He doesn’t care that they might do it again. All that matters is that they’re in his MAGA cult.

Jimmy Carter dies at 100

After a year in hospice care former President Jimmy Carter has died at 100.

Carter’s achievements were few. Carter was sworn in as the 39th president of the United States. On his first full day in office in January 1977, he pardoned most Vietnam-era draft evaders. He signed treaties to return the Panama Canal back to Panama in 1999. Senate narrowly ratifies them in 1978. In September 1978: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Carter signed Camp David accords, which lead to a peace deal between Egypt and Israel the following year.

Sadly he did little to rescue 52 hostages that Iranian militants took when storming the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The inflation rate hit a record high of 14.6% in March and April of 1980.

It was the high inflation and his failure to rescue the hostages held in Iran that led to Carter’s defeat in that fall’s election.

In my opinion Jimmy Carter was the worst president since Herbert Hoover.

Democracy suffers when navigated by a ship of fools

Abridged and edited article by Lloyd Axworthy

Special to The Globe and Mail a Canadian Newspaper

Directed to Canadians but applicable to the United States.

Almost 2,400 years ago, Plato wrote a mocking allegory in his dialogue The Republic, depicting how in democracies, leaders emerge who use the electoral process to amass personal power and proceed to govern autocratically. He likened such leaders to sailors who knew nothing of navigation yet claimed the right to steer the ship, leading to irrational decisions and chaos – a “ship of fools.”

Over the succeeding centuries, Plato’s allegory has been used to highlight the importance of good leadership and the risks of governing with ignorance and malfeasance. It serves as a warning about the perils of populism and demagoguery.

The potential second term of Donald Trump has given new meaning to this metaphor. The crew of miscreants that Mr. Trump is bringing on board the Washington ship of state, coupled with his pronouncements that they are chosen solely because of their loyalty to him and his mission of undermining democratic governance, has renewed questions about how democracies can be transformed into autocracies.

He is not unique. An epidemic of far-right political movements is under way globally, exploiting the civic malaise brought on by the pandemic, surging migration, growing inequality, and inflationary increases to mobilize discontent and translate it into electoral success.

American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has warned that these autocratic movements have aligned into sophisticated networks that undermine democracy. They share common interests in power and wealth, often supporting each other financially and politically to destabilize democratic societies.

In these turbulent times, we need not a ship of fools but a ship of reason – a vessel steered by leaders who understand navigation, who respect the complexity of democratic governance and who are committed to charting a course through challenging waters with wisdom, transparency and genuine public service.

Our democratic journey requires not blind loyalty or reactionary impulses but thoughtful leadership that can unite rather than divide, that can inspire rather than incite and that can restore faith in our collective ability to navigate toward a more just and hopeful horizon.

Republican Liz Cheney hits back Hard at Donald Trump

BREAKING: Republican Liz Cheney hits back hard at Donald Trump for his “assault on the rule of law” after he threatens to imprison those like her who served on the House January 6th committee.

And she wasn’t done there…

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” Cheney said in a statement provided to several outlets.

“He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes,” she went on.

“Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave,” Cheney continued.

“This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history,” she stated. “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”

Over the weekend, Trump told Meet the Press that Cheney’s actions were “inexcusable” and said “honestly, they should go to jail” of the members of the January 6th committee.

The fact that these people have done nothing wrong and were simply trying to protect our democracy matters not to Trump. He’s beginning his revenge tour.

LA Times owner plans to add AI-powered ‘bias meter’ on news stories, sparking newsroom backlash

Is it time to cancel my subscription?

As reported by ABC Los Angeles

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who blocked the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and plans to overhaul its editorial board, says he will implement an artificial intelligence-powered “bias meter” on the paper’s news articles to provide readers with “both sides” of a story.

Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who acquired the Times in 2018, told CNN political commentator Scott Jennings – who will join the Times’ editorial board – that he’s been “quietly building” an AI meter “behind the scenes.” The meter, slated to be released in January, is powered by the same augmented intelligence technology that he’s been building since 2010 for health care purposes, Soon-Shiong said.

“Somebody could understand as they read it that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he said on Jennings’ “Flyover Country,” podcast. “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias and then that story automatically, the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story and then give comments.”

Soon-Shiong said major publishers have so far failed to adequately separate news and opinion, which he suggested “could be the downfall of what now people call mainstream media.”

The comments prompted a rebuke from the union representing hundreds of the Times’ newsroom staffers, which said Soon-Shiong had “publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples.”

“Our members – and all Times staffers – abide by a strict set of ethics guidelines, which call for fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias, and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue,” the Los Angeles Times Guild said in a statement Thursday. “Those longstanding principles will continue guiding our work.”

The contentious moves from the paper’s owner also led to the resignation of Harry Litman, a senior legal affairs columnist for the Times’ Opinion page.

“My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump,” Litman wrote Thursday. “Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.”

Litman’s resignation comes days after Kerry Cavanaugh, the Times’ assistant editorial page editor, also announced her exit, Status first reported. In addition to his sweeping changes to the editorial board, a person familiar with the matter said Soon-Shiong has begun reviewing the headlines of all opinion pieces before publication. A spokesperson for the Times did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

The moves come as Soon-Shiong looks to restructure the newspaper’s editorial board, telling CNN last month that he plans to balance the paper’s opinion section with more conservative and centrist voices in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.

“If we were honest with ourselves, our current board of opinion writers veered very left, which is fine, but I think in order to have balance, you also need to have somebody who would trend right, and more importantly, somebody that would trend in the middle,” Soon-Shiong told CNN in November.

The restructuring follows Soon-Shiong’s divisive decision to block a drafted endorsement of Vice President Harris two weeks before Election Day, which resulted in the resignation of several members of the paper’s editorial board, staff protests, and thousands of readers canceling their subscriptions. Just three of the editorial board’s eight members now remain, according to the Times website. On Wednesday, Soon-Shiong told Jennings that when the editorial board shared it had “pre-packaged” a presidential endorsement “without having met with any of the candidates,” he was “outraged.”

“I did not want our paper to be part of that method of providing information or misinformation or disinformation,” he said.

“Everybody has a right to an opinion, that’s fair,” Soon-Shiong said, underscoring that the paper needs to “actually create some level of balance when it comes to opinion and columnist, and then we need to actually let the reader know this is opinion.”

In his resignation Thursday, Litman called the owner’s decision to spike the presidential endorsement a “deep insult to the paper’s readership.”

“Trump has made it clear that he will make trouble for media outlets that cross him,” Litman wrote. “Rather than reacting with indignation at this challenge to his paper’s critical function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.”

Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times

By Harry Litman

I have been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times op-ed page in some fashion for more than 15 years. For the last three years, I have been the Senior Legal Columnist, writing regular weekly columns about Trump’s legal troubles, the Supreme Court, and a wide range of other topics. The Times also permitted me to cover Trump’s trial in New York and the 2024 Democratic convention.

My editors have been skilled, quick, and fair. I have been able to write whatever I like, including blistering criticism of Donald Trump.

I’ve been proud of my work and proud to be part of the Times, the most prominent and storied newspaper west of the Mississippi. It’s got gravitas—and 45 Pulitzers to show for it—combined with a California flair that complements the constant variety and zaniness of my adopted state.

But I have written my last op-ed for the Times. Yesterday, I resigned my position. I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.

My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump. Those moves can’t be defended as the sort of policy adjustment papers undergo from time to time, and that an owner, within limits, is entitled to influence. Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.

Soon-Shiong’s most notorious action received national attention. The paper’s editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates’ policies, but that’s at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper’s professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.

Owners participate in setting overall editorial direction. But it’s a grave insult to the independence and integrity of an editorial department for an owner to force it to withdraw a considered and drafted opinion. And of course, this was no ordinary opinion. The endorsement of a presidential candidate is an editorial department’s most important decision, so the slight was deep.

It was also a deep insult to the paper’s readership. Like any major paper, the Times has a coherent and consistent line of reasoning to its editorial decisions. That can include idiosyncratic departures on particular issues. Where Trump was concerned, the paper had presented to its readers a long series of opinions that set out, with force and nuance, the great dangers of his return to office. That line of analysis culminated logically in the endorsement of Harris. For the Times to lead its readers to the finish line only to step off the track was bizarre and disrespectful.

By far the most important problem with Soon-Shiong’s scrapping of the editorial was the apparent motivation. It is untenable to suggest that Soon-Shiong woke up with sudden misgivings over Harris’s criminal justice record or with newfound affection for Trump’s immigration proposals. The plain inference, and the one that readers and national observers have adopted, is that he wanted to hedge his bets in case Trump won—not even to protect the paper’s fortunes but rather his multi-billion-dollar holdings in other fields. It seems evident that he was currying favor with Trump and capitulating to the President-elect’s well-known pettiness and vengefulness.

Trump has made it clear that he will make trouble for media outlets that cross him. Rather than reacting with indignation at this challenge to his paper’s critical function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.

And his decision had a sort of force multiplier effect with the similar conduct by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who rammed a similar non-endorsement decision down the throat of his editorial staff. There as well, there was no argument that the intervention was based on sensible policy contrast between Trump and Harris. History will record it as a self-serving protection of other holdings, which, as in the case of Soon-Shiong’s, dwarf the newspaper itself.

Before joining the Times, I was a contributing commentator for the Post. We used to say there, tongue-in-cheek, that our billionaire was better than their billionaire, meaning Bezos was more aware of his public responsibility and more hands-off in his oversight. As it turns out, both billionaires flinched when the chips were down, choosing to appease, not oppose, a criminal President with patent authoritarian ambitions.

Before he has even taken office, Trump has faced down two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, inducing them to back off longstanding, well-reasoned editorial opposition. That is terrifying.

As a commentator, especially one dedicated to constitutional norms and the rule of law, I have spent much of the last couple of years arguing that Trump is a genuine menace to our constitutional system. November 5 showed that a narrow majority of Americans who voted disagree or don’t care.

Yet here in Southern California and in Washington, D.C., we have evidence of tangible erosion of social guardrails in real time. Trump is in the process of commandeering and corrupting institutions of government and civil society that we have always counted on to nurture our democracy.

Look closely at this already deeply eroded landscape: all the electoral branches are not only Republican but firmly within Trump’s fist and dedicated to loyalty to him over any principle of governance. The Supreme Court has assisted his authoritarian initiatives in ways that the legal profession and society as a whole have condemned. His current nomination process is seeking openly to cut the Senate, even its Republican members, out of their constitutional advice-and-consent role.

For the moment, the best hopes for desperately needed pushback lie with federal law enforcement, the lower federal courts, the military, and (an economically weakened) mainstream media. All this is material for another Substack, but Trump has taken dead aim at imposing loyalty to him as the defining feature of the first three, including a proposal to permit him to discharge generals who are not, as he put it, sufficiently like “Hitler’s generals.”

So the role and responsibility of the media have never been greater. And if major outlets can be bought off and made to cower, the impact on our liberty—and freedom of thought—is in grave jeopardy.

Thus far, I have analyzed only Soon-Shiong’s most notorious and visible action of scuttling the endorsement. That put him in lock step with Bezos. But he has combined it with a general program of cozying up to Trump, especially since the election. Soon-Shiong ordered the shelving of a multi-part series, intended to run with the endorsement but broader and of a piece with the editorial page’s opinion over the last several years, which had been entitled, “The Case Against Trump.” His spiking of the series was part of the explanation given by the editorial board members who resigned.

There is more: Soon-Shiong went on Fox News after the election to talk about the paper’s editorial direction. He advocated “diverse perspectives” in the editorial pages and voices from across the political spectrum to avoid creating an “echo chamber.” Most alarmingly, and escaping the notice of no one, he pandered to Fox and Trump by saying he wanted to make the Times more “fair and balanced.”

Soon-Shiong followed up by hiring a noted pro-Trump commentator, Scott Jennings, for some as yet ill-defined role of “balancing out” the views on the editorial page. Then most recently, during an interview on CNN in which he was asked about the Jennings hire, the normally mild-mannered Soon-Shiong went full Trump, labeling the CNN correspondent a “so-called reporter” before abruptly ending the interview.

Soon-Shiong’s argument for all these moves is to create “balance” on the editorial page, which still remains unstaffed and in chaos, and a neutral, “just the facts” approach to news. It sounds banal, but in fact, it is pernicious; and it goes to the heart of my reasons for leaving.

First, the idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump. The media has struggled for years to figure out how to call out Trump’s incessant lies while still covering the contentious issues of the day. There’s good reason to think that the propagation of those lies, some of which Trump simply picks up from fringe social media sites and Fox News, influenced the results of the election. The people who voted for Trump were fed a relentless false account of issue after issue, including Trump’s signature distortions about immigrants (eating pets, committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes), which Fox News and right-wing social media parroted relentlessly.

In that context, the bromide of just being balanced is a terrible dereliction of journalists’ first defining responsibility of reporting the truth. Soon-Shiong apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no “other hand.” Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.

These are not normal times. Look around. We are in the political, cultural, and legal fight of our lifetimes. Trump’s conduct since winning the election only reinforces his determination to replace constitutional rule with some form of authoritarian rule. That needn’t be 1933 Germany, an analogy that typically draws counter-charges of excessive drama (though the existence of certain overlapping features is inescapable). There are other models of democratic demise, ones that Trump obviously wants to emulate, such as Hungary’s slide toward authoritarianism over the last 20 years.

So the neutral posture that Soon-Shiong uses to justify his violence to the paper is exactly, fundamentally wrong. This is no time for neutrality and disinterest. It’s rather a time for choosing. And a choice for true facts and American values is necessarily a vigorous choice against Donald Trump.

I don’t pretend that my resignation is any kind of serious counter-blow to the damage of Soon-Shiong’s cozying up to Trump. And I see, and I thought about, the argument that my most constructive role would be to stay on and continue to use my one voice as forcefully as I could to explain to Times readers the grave dangers on the horizon.

But the cost of alliance with an important national institution that has such an important role to play in pushing back against authoritarian rule, but declines to do so for spurious and selfish reasons, feels too great. And Soon-Shiong’s conscious pattern of détente with Trump has in fact recast the paper’s core identity to one of appeasement with an authoritarian madman. I am loath to affiliate with that identity in any way.

My growing misgivings about the Times are one of the reasons I started this Substack two weeks ago. I’ve been blown away by the response and the number of followers and subscribers in just the first two weeks: thank you to everyone. Having this outlet for my thoughts about where Trump 2.0 is taking us makes it easier to leave.

I’m not going anywhere. I will continue to do my best to identify and analyze the dangers that might be hard to see, but for now, here on Substack. I may surface elsewhere, too. Stay tuned! I hope you will follow me here and think about becoming a subscriber.

I’ll close by quoting admiringly my former colleague and the former editorial editor at the Times, Mariel Garza: “I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

Talk to you later.

A Sad United States

“To my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a time when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.” — Former Rep. Liz Cheney

http://stevenbeschloss.com/bio

Biden’s decision to pardon his son

You thought Joe Biden would uphold the law. Protecting his family was number one in his mind. Democrats left fuming over Biden’s decision to pardon his son — after he repeatedly said he wouldn’t. Obviously Hunter Biden looks like a happy man.

Multiple officials who recently worked for Joe Biden said they never believed the president or White House aides speaking on his behalf when they insisted in recent months that a pardon for Hunter Biden was off the table.

“Anyone who was even close to the top knew that he was probably going to do this. Why did we pretend otherwise?” a former senior West Wing aide said.