The report expanded on this summer’s televised hearings, describing in detail what it called former President Donald J. Trump’s “multipart plan” to overturn the 2020 election.
Declaring that the central cause of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was “one man,” the House committee investigating the assault delivered its final report on Thursday, describing in extensive detail how former President Donald J. Trump had carried out what it called “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and offering recommendations for steps to assure nothing like it could happen again.
It revealed new evidence about Mr. Trump’s conduct, and recommended that Congress consider whether to bar Mr. Trump and his allies from holding office in the future under the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists.
“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report said. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.” …
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has returned to Kyiv after receiving a hero’s welcome in Washington and briefly visiting Poland, concluding a sprint of diplomacy aimed at thanking his country’s most robust allies and cementing their support.
“I am in my office,” he said in a video posted to his channel on the Telegram social media app early Friday. “We are working toward victory.”
In a brief evening address on Thursday while en route home, he expressed satisfaction with his landmark visit to Washington, insisting that it had heeded “good results” that “will really help” with Ukraine’s ongoing war effort.
“I thank President Biden for his help, his international leadership and his determination to win,” he said. …
Let’s try to avoid the on-rushing tragedy. Zelensky is doing what he sees as his duty but I don’t think America or the other Allie’s are doing theirs. I could be wrong, but feel that US/NATO has concluded it is just too risky to seriously threaten that Russia actually lose this conflict. If that is the case, I question the judgment of people who choose to feed military resources into the fighting.
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system.
The decisions of (some voters) discernible in surveys and voiced in interviews, did not necessarily lay to rest concerns about the ability of the election system to withstand the new pressures unleashed upon it by Mr. Trump.But they did suggest a possible ceiling on the appeal of extreme partisanship — one that prevented, in this cycle, the worst fears for the health of democracy from being realized. …
In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates campaigning on Mr. Trump’s election lies for secretary of state, the office that in 40 states oversees the election system. In all three, those candidates lost. The rout eased the immediate concern that strident partisans who embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots might soon be empowered to wreak havoc on election systems.
The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states. …
For decades, worries about the exploding national debt—now a staggering $31.3 trillion — were tempered by low interest ratesthat made it relatively cheap to keep borrowing.
But with interest rates rising rapidly, a long-feared debt crisis could be arriving soon.
Like a consumer grappling with a massive credit card balance, the federal government is paying more just for the interest on the national debt. Government projections show those interest costs tripling from $399 billion this year to $1.19 trillion in 2032.Borrowing most likely will have to increase just to pay for the higher interest expenses.
And on it goes, a vicious cycle that promises bruising fights over debt and spending in Washington next year, partisan conflict which could shake financial markets and an economy already at risk of falling into recession. …
(It seems likely that billionaire Globe publisher John Henry insists that this notification be put up every so often.)
“If you’re borrowing more and more every year on autopilot to fund programs that we promised, which [you]lack the revenue to pay for, you then have a compounding problem where interest on the debt compounds and just adds to the burden,” said Michael A. Peterson, chief executive of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which promotes deficit reduction and has been sounding the alarm on the debt for years.
“Interest on the debt compounds and just adds to the burden and that puts you in this rapidly growing death spiral that we’re in,” he said. …
It took about 200 years for the nation to accumulate $1 trillion in debt, but the figure started rising more quickly with growing budget deficits in the 1980s. This century, the debt rose $4.9 trillion during President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, $9.3 trillion during Obama’s two terms and $7.9 trillion in Trump’s four years, according to Treasury data. So far, since President Biden took office in 2021, the debt has increased $3.5 trillion.
Biden and Democrats have warned that it’s irresponsible to put the federal government at risk of defaulting on its obligations by failing to raise the debt limit, which would prevent the Treasury Department from borrowing to pay some of the nation’s bills and bondholders.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing will create more chaos and do more damage to the American economy than playing around with whether we pay our national bills,” Bidensaid at a pre-midterm election campaign rally on Nov. 1.
He has said he won’t negotiate over the debt limit and won’t consider cutting Social Security or Medicare. Democrats made the Republican talk ofpotential cuts to Social Security a midterms rallying cry, a move Republicans labeled as “scare tactics” that cost them more wins in the elections. …
You can even find faint glimmers of good news — if you squint hard enough at all the bleak headlines, that is.
Indeed, we live in a world in which it’s increasingly necessary to deliberately seek out the good news, or even just a sense of perspective on the bad news — because the algorithms that dominate social media only want to keep viewers “engaged,” which too often means afraid and angry.
Joy might be a stretch. But there are, in fact, causes for hope in this troubled world this Christmas Day.
Ukraine’s underdog military has withstood a Russian invasion for 10 months, a courageous feat that’s come at an enormous cost in lives. The war has had a sobering effect on the rest of Europe, encouraging the most unity among democratic countries in decades. …
American voters sidelined some of the country’s most dangerous right-wing politicians — including election deniers like Kari Lake, the extremist Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, and Don Bolduc, the New Hampshire Senate candidate who rejected the 2020 election results.
Indeed, the worldwide tide toward antidemocratic, authoritarian politics might not have turned this year, exactly — see Italy and Hungary, where far-right candidates triumphed — but it didn’t get noticeably worse, and the GOP’s poor performance in the midterms has even caused more Republican officials to gingerly distance themselves from former president Donald Trump. …
Meanwhile, Congress overcame its all-too-common gridlock to pass its most substantial US climate investments ever, and scientists achieved major breakthroughs in fusion technology. In the race against catastrophic climate change, the world is now poised to come in a strong second.
In economic news, the inflation rate stopped rising over the summer. The unemployment rate ticked downward. An economy-wrecking rail strike was averted. Congress passed legislation — bipartisan legislation! — to aid American semiconductor manufacturing. …
Have any corners been turned? The dangers before the country and the world, from the pandemic to climate change to inflation, remain overwhelming. But no, we’re not at rock bottom anymore. The pervasive doom and gloom of 2020 and 2021 has been replaced by a sense of … intermittent doom and gloom? Qualified doom and gloom?
Obviously, the world faces enormous challenges ahead. But as bad as 2022 was in many respects, it showed that tyrants can be fought, truth can defeat lies, and big problems can be confronted. And that’s a Christmas gift worth celebrating.
When I read last week that Roger Stone, the famous political whacko and longtime Donald Trump confidant, said he knows there is a demonic portal to Hell hovering above the White House, quite visible, a swirling inferno in the general shape of a sphincter, and that it had first appeared when President Biden moved in, I was a bit skeptical. …
Stone, in an interview with Eric Metaxas, criticized the mainstream media for failing to report on the swirling doom hole, saying the media “doesn’t cover a lot of things that are true.” …
Since China abandoned its restrictive “zero Covid” policy about two weeks ago, the intensity and magnitude of the country’s first nationwide outbreak has remained largely a mystery. With the country ending mass testing, case counts are less useful. The government has a narrow definition of which deaths should count as caused by Covid. Anecdotal evidence, like social media postings of hospital morgues overcrowded with body bags, is quickly taken down by censors.
Now, a picture is emerging of the virus spreading like wildfire.
One province and three cities have reported Covid estimates far exceeding official tallies in recent days. At a news conference on Sunday, an official in Zhejiang Province, home to 65 million people, estimated that daily Covid cases there had exceeded one million. …
In the eastern city of Qingdao, population 10 million, a health minister said on Friday that there were roughly half a million new cases each day, a number he expected would rise sharply in the coming days, local news sites reported.
In Dongguan, a city of seven million in central Guangdong Province, a city health commission report on Friday estimated between 250,000 and 300,000 new cases daily.
And in northwestern Shaanxi Province, officials in Yulin, a city of roughly 3.6 million people, logged 157,000 infected on Friday, with models estimating that more than a third of the city’s population had already been infected, according to local media. …
… Mei Xinyu, an economist at a research institute affiliated with the Commerce Ministry, wrote on his social media page, commenting on a daily report of Covid figures released by the government. He later posted an announcement that the father-in-law of a prominent economist had died from pneumonia induced by Covid. …
A state judge on Saturday rejected Kari Lake’s last-ditch effort to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, dismissing for lack of evidence her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County election officials.
The ruling, after a two-day trial in Phoenix that ended Thursday, follows more than six weeks of claims by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that she was robbed of victory last month — assertions that echoed the false contention that was at the heart of her campaign: that an even larger theft had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Lake and her supporters conjured up what they called a deliberate effort by election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, to disenfranchise her voters. But they never provided evidence of such intentional malfeasance, nor even evidence that any voters had been disenfranchised.
In a 10-page ruling, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson acknowledged “the anger and frustration of voters who were subjected to inconvenience and confusion at voter centers as technical problems arose” in this year’s election.
But he said his duty was “not solely to incline an ear to public outcry,” and noted that, in seeking to overturn Katie Hobbs’s victory by a 17,117-vote margin, Ms. Lake was pursuing a remedy that appeared unprecedented.
“A court setting such a margin aside, as far as the Court is able to determine, has never been done in the history of the United States,” Judge Thompson wrote.
He went on to rule flatly that Ms. Lake and the witnesses she called had failed to provide evidence of intentional misconduct that changed the election’s outcome.
“Plaintiff has no free-standing right to challenge election results based upon what Plaintiff believes — rightly or wrongly — went awry on Election Day,” the judge wrote. “She must, as a matter of law, prove a ground that the legislature has provided as a basis for challenging an election.” …
… “On Monday, the judge had rejected eight of 10 claims by Ms. Lake, including a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and vague allegations contained in a complaint filed earlier this month. He ruled that Ms. Lake could proceed on two counts.
To prevail on one claim, Ms. Lake needed to prove that a county election official had deliberately caused ballot printers to malfunction for the purpose of swaying election results, and that the outcome flipped as a result.
To prevail on the other, she needed to prove that officials had purposely violated chain-of-custody procedures for handling ballots and, again, that this noncompliance had swayed the election’s outcome.
But Judge Thompson ruled (on Saturday) that Ms. Lake came nowhere near meeting those benchmarks. No election official was ever identified as responsible for malfeasance, and no voters were identified as having been disenfranchised — let alone the thousands it would have taken to tip the outcome. …”
Thus “her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County REPUBLICAN election officials” were dismissed.
Jan. 6 Panel Issues Final Report, Placing Blame for Capitol Riot on ‘One Man’
NY Times – Dec 22
The report expanded on this summer’s televised hearings, describing in detail what it called former President Donald J. Trump’s “multipart plan” to overturn the 2020 election.
Declaring that the central cause of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was “one man,” the House committee investigating the assault delivered its final report on Thursday, describing in extensive detail how former President Donald J. Trump had carried out what it called “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and offering recommendations for steps to assure nothing like it could happen again.
It revealed new evidence about Mr. Trump’s conduct, and recommended that Congress consider whether to bar Mr. Trump and his allies from holding office in the future under the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists.
“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report said. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.” …
Final Report From the Jan. 6 Committee
Download the original document
Jan. 6 Committee Report Executive Summary
Ukraine’s leader is back in Kyiv after a sprint of diplomacy
NY Times – just in
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has returned to Kyiv after receiving a hero’s welcome in Washington and briefly visiting Poland, concluding a sprint of diplomacy aimed at thanking his country’s most robust allies and cementing their support.
“I am in my office,” he said in a video posted to his channel on the Telegram social media app early Friday. “We are working toward victory.”
In a brief evening address on Thursday while en route home, he expressed satisfaction with his landmark visit to Washington, insisting that it had heeded “good results” that “will really help” with Ukraine’s ongoing war effort.
“I thank President Biden for his help, his international leadership and his determination to win,” he said. …
Let’s try to avoid the on-rushing tragedy. Zelensky is doing what he sees as his duty but I don’t think America or the other Allie’s are doing theirs. I could be wrong, but feel that US/NATO has concluded it is just too risky to seriously threaten that Russia actually lose this conflict. If that is the case, I question the judgment of people who choose to feed military resources into the fighting.
Merry Christmas to all and good night Charlie Brown.
Bill Withers – Ain’t No Sunshine
[OK, no wondering – but otherwise….}
How the Worst Fears for Democracy Were Averted in 2022
NY Times – Dec 24
A precariously narrow but consequential slice of the electorate broke with its own voting history to reject openly extremist Republican candidates — at least partly out of concern for the health of the political system.
The decisions of (some voters) discernible in surveys and voiced in interviews, did not necessarily lay to rest concerns about the ability of the election system to withstand the new pressures unleashed upon it by Mr. Trump. But they did suggest a possible ceiling on the appeal of extreme partisanship — one that prevented, in this cycle, the worst fears for the health of democracy from being realized. …
In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republican primary voters nominated candidates campaigning on Mr. Trump’s election lies for secretary of state, the office that in 40 states oversees the election system. In all three, those candidates lost. The rout eased the immediate concern that strident partisans who embraced conspiracy theories about hacked voting machines, foreign meddling and smuggled ballots might soon be empowered to wreak havoc on election systems.
The election results suggest that a focus on Mr. Trump’s election lies did not merely galvanize Democrats but also alienated Republicans and independents. Final turnout figures show registered Republicans cast more ballots than registered Democrats in Arizona and Nevada, but election-denying candidates nevertheless lost important races in each of those states. …
Merry Xmas from the Boston Globe.
How our $31.3 trillion national debt is getting even more expensive.
Boston Globe – Dec 24 – not a free link
A ‘rapidly growing death spiral.’
For decades, worries about the exploding national debt—now a staggering $31.3 trillion — were tempered by low interest rates that made it relatively cheap to keep borrowing.
But with interest rates rising rapidly, a long-feared debt crisis could be arriving soon.
Like a consumer grappling with a massive credit card balance, the federal government is paying more just for the interest on the national debt. Government projections show those interest costs tripling from $399 billion this year to $1.19 trillion in 2032. Borrowing most likely will have to increase just to pay for the higher interest expenses.
And on it goes, a vicious cycle that promises bruising fights over debt and spending in Washington next year, partisan conflict which could shake financial markets and an economy already at risk of falling into recession. …
(It seems likely that billionaire Globe publisher John Henry insists that this notification be put up every so often.)
“If you’re borrowing more and more every year on autopilot to fund programs that we promised, which [you] lack the revenue to pay for, you then have a compounding problem where interest on the debt compounds and just adds to the burden,” said Michael A. Peterson, chief executive of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which promotes deficit reduction and has been sounding the alarm on the debt for years.
“Interest on the debt compounds and just adds to the burden and that puts you in this rapidly growing death spiral that we’re in,” he said. …
… Republicans have said they plan to seek spending cuts and possibly changes to Social Security and Medicare when the US approaches the statutory limit on borrowing at some point next year and Congress will have to increase it. That’s led to charges of hypocrisy given their willingness to raise the limit when the debt was rising during the Trump administration.
It took about 200 years for the nation to accumulate $1 trillion in debt, but the figure started rising more quickly with growing budget deficits in the 1980s. This century, the debt rose $4.9 trillion during President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, $9.3 trillion during Obama’s two terms and $7.9 trillion in Trump’s four years, according to Treasury data. So far, since President Biden took office in 2021, the debt has increased $3.5 trillion.
Biden and Democrats have warned that it’s irresponsible to put the federal government at risk of defaulting on its obligations by failing to raise the debt limit, which would prevent the Treasury Department from borrowing to pay some of the nation’s bills and bondholders.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing will create more chaos and do more damage to the American economy than playing around with whether we pay our national bills,” Biden said at a pre-midterm election campaign rally on Nov. 1.
He has said he won’t negotiate over the debt limit and won’t consider cutting Social Security or Medicare. Democrats made the Republican talk of potential cuts to Social Security a midterms rallying cry, a move Republicans labeled as “scare tactics” that cost them more wins in the elections. …
Bah, Humbug!
(Elsewhere in the Boston Globe…)
Counting our thanks on Christmas Day
Joyous would be putting it too strongly. But this year did bring some encouraging news.
Look on the bright side: 2022 was clearly the best year of this decade.
No insurrections. No new pandemics. No murder hornets.
You can even find faint glimmers of good news — if you squint hard enough at all the bleak headlines, that is.
Indeed, we live in a world in which it’s increasingly necessary to deliberately seek out the good news, or even just a sense of perspective on the bad news — because the algorithms that dominate social media only want to keep viewers “engaged,” which too often means afraid and angry.
Joy might be a stretch. But there are, in fact, causes for hope in this troubled world this Christmas Day.
Ukraine’s underdog military has withstood a Russian invasion for 10 months, a courageous feat that’s come at an enormous cost in lives. The war has had a sobering effect on the rest of Europe, encouraging the most unity among democratic countries in decades. …
American voters sidelined some of the country’s most dangerous right-wing politicians — including election deniers like Kari Lake, the extremist Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, and Don Bolduc, the New Hampshire Senate candidate who rejected the 2020 election results.
Indeed, the worldwide tide toward antidemocratic, authoritarian politics might not have turned this year, exactly — see Italy and Hungary, where far-right candidates triumphed — but it didn’t get noticeably worse, and the GOP’s poor performance in the midterms has even caused more Republican officials to gingerly distance themselves from former president Donald Trump. …
Meanwhile, Congress overcame its all-too-common gridlock to pass its most substantial US climate investments ever, and scientists achieved major breakthroughs in fusion technology. In the race against catastrophic climate change, the world is now poised to come in a strong second.
In economic news, the inflation rate stopped rising over the summer. The unemployment rate ticked downward. An economy-wrecking rail strike was averted. Congress passed legislation — bipartisan legislation! — to aid American semiconductor manufacturing. …
Have any corners been turned? The dangers before the country and the world, from the pandemic to climate change to inflation, remain overwhelming. But no, we’re not at rock bottom anymore. The pervasive doom and gloom of 2020 and 2021 has been replaced by a sense of … intermittent doom and gloom? Qualified doom and gloom?
Obviously, the world faces enormous challenges ahead. But as bad as 2022 was in many respects, it showed that tyrants can be fought, truth can defeat lies, and big problems can be confronted. And that’s a Christmas gift worth celebrating.
In other news…
About that portal to Hell hovering over the White House
Boston Globe – Dec 23 – not a free link
When I read last week that Roger Stone, the famous political whacko and longtime Donald Trump confidant, said he knows there is a demonic portal to Hell hovering above the White House, quite visible, a swirling inferno in the general shape of a sphincter, and that it had first appeared when President Biden moved in, I was a bit skeptical. …
Stone, in an interview with Eric Metaxas, criticized the mainstream media for failing to report on the swirling doom hole, saying the media “doesn’t cover a lot of things that are true.” …
Roger Stone Says He Saw Swirling ‘Demon Portal’ Above White House
Covid Is Spreading Rapidly in China, New Signs Suggest
NY Times – earlier today
Since China abandoned its restrictive “zero Covid” policy about two weeks ago, the intensity and magnitude of the country’s first nationwide outbreak has remained largely a mystery. With the country ending mass testing, case counts are less useful. The government has a narrow definition of which deaths should count as caused by Covid. Anecdotal evidence, like social media postings of hospital morgues overcrowded with body bags, is quickly taken down by censors.
Now, a picture is emerging of the virus spreading like wildfire.
One province and three cities have reported Covid estimates far exceeding official tallies in recent days. At a news conference on Sunday, an official in Zhejiang Province, home to 65 million people, estimated that daily Covid cases there had exceeded one million. …
In the eastern city of Qingdao, population 10 million, a health minister said on Friday that there were roughly half a million new cases each day, a number he expected would rise sharply in the coming days, local news sites reported.
In Dongguan, a city of seven million in central Guangdong Province, a city health commission report on Friday estimated between 250,000 and 300,000 new cases daily.
And in northwestern Shaanxi Province, officials in Yulin, a city of roughly 3.6 million people, logged 157,000 infected on Friday, with models estimating that more than a third of the city’s population had already been infected, according to local media. …
As Cases Explode
NY Times – Dec 23
… Mei Xinyu, an economist at a research institute affiliated with the Commerce Ministry, wrote on his social media page, commenting on a daily report of Covid figures released by the government. He later posted an announcement that the father-in-law of a prominent economist had died from pneumonia induced by Covid. …
Arizona Judge Rejects Kari Lake’s Effort to Overturn Her Election Loss
NY Times – Dec 24
A state judge on Saturday rejected Kari Lake’s last-ditch effort to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race, dismissing for lack of evidence her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County election officials.
The ruling, after a two-day trial in Phoenix that ended Thursday, follows more than six weeks of claims by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that she was robbed of victory last month — assertions that echoed the false contention that was at the heart of her campaign: that an even larger theft had stolen the 2020 presidential election from Donald J. Trump.
Ms. Lake and her supporters conjured up what they called a deliberate effort by election officials in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, to disenfranchise her voters. But they never provided evidence of such intentional malfeasance, nor even evidence that any voters had been disenfranchised.
In a 10-page ruling, Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson acknowledged “the anger and frustration of voters who were subjected to inconvenience and confusion at voter centers as technical problems arose” in this year’s election.
But he said his duty was “not solely to incline an ear to public outcry,” and noted that, in seeking to overturn Katie Hobbs’s victory by a 17,117-vote margin, Ms. Lake was pursuing a remedy that appeared unprecedented.
“A court setting such a margin aside, as far as the Court is able to determine, has never been done in the history of the United States,” Judge Thompson wrote.
He went on to rule flatly that Ms. Lake and the witnesses she called had failed to provide evidence of intentional misconduct that changed the election’s outcome.
“Plaintiff has no free-standing right to challenge election results based upon what Plaintiff believes — rightly or wrongly — went awry on Election Day,” the judge wrote. “She must, as a matter of law, prove a ground that the legislature has provided as a basis for challenging an election.” …
(Clarifying…)
… “On Monday, the judge had rejected eight of 10 claims by Ms. Lake, including a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and vague allegations contained in a complaint filed earlier this month. He ruled that Ms. Lake could proceed on two counts.
To prevail on one claim, Ms. Lake needed to prove that a county election official had deliberately caused ballot printers to malfunction for the purpose of swaying election results, and that the outcome flipped as a result.
To prevail on the other, she needed to prove that officials had purposely violated chain-of-custody procedures for handling ballots and, again, that this noncompliance had swayed the election’s outcome.
But Judge Thompson ruled (on Saturday) that Ms. Lake came nowhere near meeting those benchmarks. No election official was ever identified as responsible for malfeasance, and no voters were identified as having been disenfranchised — let alone the thousands it would have taken to tip the outcome. …”
Thus “her last two claims of misconduct by Maricopa County REPUBLICAN election officials” were dismissed.
Fred
the lot of you keep forgetting this is a Republican led stronghold. Go ahead and sue your sponsors. Still chuckling.