Monday News & Notes
JULY 12, 2021 -- VICE PRESIDENT AARON BURR FATALLY SHOOTS ALEXANDER HAMILTON IN A DUEL, 1804
•Police have removed protective fencing installed around the Capitol after the January 6 riots by supporters of then-lame duck President Trump.
•Senate returns to Capitol Hill from July 4 recess today. The House of Representatives returns next week.
•Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, to set up floor votes on the bipartisan infrastructure bill – that’s $973-billion/five years or $1.2-trillion/eight years, as dollar amounts seem the easiest way to keep these straight – and on reconciliation instructions before the August 6 recess, or keep the Senate in session if needed, Punchbowl News reports.
•Scroll down past News & Notes to Forum for Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on Donald Trump’s explanation of why the Trump Organization and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, are not guilty of alleged tax fraud.
Cuban Spring? -- Cuban protestors took to the streets of several towns and cities Sunday to protest a variety of problems that the Communist government is not addressing, ranging from power blackouts to increased COVID-19 cases to food shortages. According to The Washington Post, “The demonstrations were so large that President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Raúl Castro this year as first secretary of the Communist Party, called on Cuba’s ‘revolutionary’ citizens to take to the streets.” What’s more, according to The Post, “The protests were among the largest since the Cuban revolution of 1959 and appeared broader based than the 1994 Maleconazoprotest in Havana that precipitated Fidel Castro, the father of the Cuban revolution and then-leader, to allow thousands of Cubans to flee the country by boats and rafts.”
Note: According to reporting by the Associated Press, during a protest that was occurring in central Havana on Sunday, “About 300 people close to the government then arrived with a large Cuban flag shouting slogans in favor of the late President Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. Some people from the group assaulted an AP videojournalist, disabling his camera, while an AP photojournalist was injured by the police.”
Let’s think about that: a small group of agitated people shouting out on behalf of someone who is no longer in charge. Well, slightly more problematic than those who stormed the U.S. Capitol because Fidel has been dead since 2016. Then the attacks on the journalists: Sound familiar?
Finally, back to the reporting in The Washington Post. Apparently U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL, tweeted: “The incompetent communist party of #Cuba cannot feed or protect the people from the virus. Now those in the military must defend the people not the communist party.”
Somehow he didn’t seem quite so concerned with the incompetence that was exhibited vis-à-vis the virus in his own country.
•••
Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan to Step Down – Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller will step down Monday as the top military commander in Afghanistan in a ceremony in Kabul, The Washington Post reports. Miller’s relinquishment of responsibility marks a “symbolic end” to 20 years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, as a rejuvenated Taliban threatens to topple the nation’s central government, the Post says.
Note: The White House has moved up full withdrawal from its original September 11 deadline to August, and President Biden says his administration is working out a plan to protect translators and other Afghanis who have aided U.S. troops in their effort to stabilize the nation’s government against terrorist/extremist groups. But as the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan much in the same way the Soviet Union did nearly 30 years ago, the Biden White House faces new foreign affairs challenges much closer to home, in Cuba (see news item above) and Haiti (see news item below).
•••
Florida Doctor Arrested for Assassination of Haitian President – A Florida-based doctor born in Haiti, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, has been arrested as a key suspect in the successful plot to kill the country’s president, Jovenel Moise, The New York Times reports. A hit squad fatally shot Moise in his personal house in a suburb of Port-au-Prince last week. Moise’s wife also was shot and is being treated in a Florida hospital. A U.S. team has met with Haitian officials to assist in the investigation, which has resulted in the arrest of about two-dozen suspects so far.
•••
Federal Judge Considers Penalties on Trump Attorneys – Federal Judge Linda Parker is considering whether to order financial penalties or other sanctions against attorneys for former President Trump who signed a lawsuit last year challenging Michigan election results, the AP reports from Detroit. The lawsuit had alleged widespread voter fraud, but Trump’s lawyers voluntarily dropped the suit last December after Parker found only “speculation and conjecture” that votes for the Republican candidate for re-election were destroyed or converted to votes for Joseph R. Biden, who won Michigan by 2.8 percentage points. Gov. Gretchen Witmer, D, and the City of Detroit want Trump attorneys, including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, to face consequences for what they call frivolous claims.
Meanwhile, Trump Declares Victory for His Two Impeachments – Donald J. Trump compared his two impeachments with calls for impeachment of his former attorney general, William Barr at a Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Sunday. As reported by The Hill Trump said: “He became a different man when the Democrats viciously stated that they wanted to impeach him. They went wild. They went wild. We want to impeach him. We’re going to impeach Bill Barr. We’re gonna impeach him. He became different. I understand that. I didn’t become different. I got impeached twice. I became worse. (Applause from the CPAC crowd.) I became worse.”
Reminder: Democrats criticized Barr for acting like attorney general for the Trump administration rather than as AG on behalf of American citizens, per the job description. But Barr became a different man and resigned just before last Christmas rather than support Trump’s false claims of a stolen presidential election.
But Wait, There’s More – Trump led a CPAC straw poll of candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination for president last weekend, The Hill says, citing a report by Forbes. Trump garnered 70% of the vote, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis second at 21%, same as his number from the January CPAC convention in Orlando, Florida (where Trump was at 55%). The other usual suspects in the poll, all Republican Trump loyalists, each took about 1%; Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
•••
Money vs. McConaughey -- Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that there are two elements in his favor when it would come to taking on Matthew McConaughey or any other challenger for the 2022 gubernatorial election: (1) strong polls and (2) money. If this was April 2020, one could understand a certain bullishness, as according to The Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas-Austin, Abbott was then at 56% approval, 32% disapproval. The latest numbers, as of June 2021, is 44% -- approval and disapproval.
As for the other rationale, Abbott told Wallace, “I have $55 million in the bank already and I’m an aggressive fundraiser.”
Note: The people of Texas should be encouraged to know that Abbott sees his path to victory not in some plans for improving the state (he spent a lot of time dancing around an inefficient power grid that it has yet to get in order) but in having as many people liking him as not. And having lots of money and the wherewithal to accumulate more.
--Edited by Gary S. Vasilash, Todd Lassa and Nic Woods
Forum
Trump: Yes, Honest People Know Commentary by Stephen Macaulay
During a recent presentation to a crowd of his faithful in Sarasota, Florida, Donald Trump evinced, once again, that those people in the audience are his people as long as they’re in the audience.
Among his comments were: “They go after good, hard-working people for not paying taxes on a company car. You didn’t pay tax on the car or a company apartment. You used an apartment because you need an apartment because you have to travel too far where your house is. You didn’t pay tax. Or education for your grandchildren. I don’t even know. Do you have to? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?”
Anyone who has had a company car knows that you do have to pay taxes on it and keep meticulous mileage logs so that work trips are separate from personal trips. The personal trips taken are a form of income.
If a company sets you up in a place to live and doesn’t charge you for it, then that, too, is a form of taxable income.
Good, hard-working people understand that.
The man who claimed mastery of the tax code, the stable genius, doesn’t understand the rules that the rest of us abide by. If we don’t, and we get called in for an audit, then we go to the audit. And it probably won’t work out well for us if we were riding, living and getting funding for education and not claiming it on our taxes.
(And on the subject of taxes, it is somewhat hilarious how some Republicans are expressing high dudgeon over the possibility of the IRS getting sufficient funding so as to go after those who are dodging their taxes. Odds are those who are going to be pursued were not wearing MAGA hats last Saturday night: there isn’t sufficient percentage in going after them. It is the businesses who are going to get it. Arguably, swampy businesses. Those MAGA people ought to be happy.)
Another thing that Trump evidently doesn’t understand is the Constitution.
He has filed suit saying that the likes of Facebook and Twitter have violated his First Amendment rights.
They are not the government. They are private businesses. They make the rules. And people can abide by them or not. If they don’t abide by them, odds are they’re going to be persuasively asked to leave.
Here’s a bit of a thought experiment:
Someone shows up at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster. There is a bag of clubs over his shoulder. There is a MAGA hat on the head. And the person is wearing a red, white and blue thong. That’s it.
Does the club have the right to throw that person off the property?
And a third example of how little Trump cares about good, hard-working people.
According to reporting by David A. Fahrenthold in The Washington Post, “Former president Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, charged the Secret Service nearly $10,200 for guest rooms used by his protective detail during Trump’s first month at the club this summer.”
What’s more, “Since Trump left office in January, U.S. taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $50,000 for rooms used by Secret Service agents, records show.”
Let’s get this straight. Trump owns the place. The Secret Service personnel are protecting him. He is essentially making money off of the U.S. taxpayers providing him with protection.
“Does anyone know the answer to that stuff?”
Well, we know what that stuff is. And we know the answer about Trump.