Salem Political Snark

Israeli people fight authoritarianism in their country as GOP promotes it in U.S.

At the moment Israel is being torn apart by the attempt of their right-wing Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to pass bills that would do away with the balance of power in that country by allowing the legislature to control the judiciary and stop investigations into wrongdoing by Netanyahu.

If that sounds familiar, it's akin to what Republicans in our House of Representatives want to do to protect Donald Trump from prosecution. 

A trio of House Republican committee chairs say the House of Representatives could soon take up legislation to strip state and local prosecutors of the authority to prosecute former presidents in response to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s potential indictment of former president Donald Trump.

Note: this would apply to former presidents.

So Trump could murder someone as the private citizen that he is now, and he couldn't be prosecuted at the state or local level. This seems completely unconstitutional, but a little thing like the Constitution doesn't matter to GOP politicians still determined to kiss Trump's ass any time the Orange One demands their subservience.

Fortunately, with the Senate and Presidency in Democratic control, there's zero chance a House bill prohibiting former presidents from criminal prosecution would become law any time soon. So for now there's no need for the public to protest this horrible Republican proposal.

In Israel, though, Netanyahu wants to begin to pass his Protect Benjamin Netanyahu Act next week. That's why massive protests have erupted in Israel after Netanyahu fired his defense minister for criticizing this highly controversial legislation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister on Sunday, just a day after he called on the embattled premier to halt a controversial plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary.

The proposal to remake Israel’s courts has plunged the nation into crisis, spurring protests in major cities in recent weeks. On Sunday, Netanyahu’s decision to remove Yoav Gallant, a fellow Likud Party member, prompted at least 150 demonstrations across Israel, according to police.

Crowds gathered around the Knesset building in Jerusalem after police deployed water cannons near Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem. Some demonstrators hoisted Israeli flags and shouted, “De-mo-cra-cy!” while others set fire to a major highway.

...Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister, another once-fringe settler extremist, has come out in support of the reform, saying that Gallant had “surrendered to the blackmail of the anarchists” — a word he has frequently used to describe the demonstrators.

Ben Gvir has vowed to advance legislation that would cancel Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial, in which he has been indicted in three separate cases and faces potential prison time.

Here's some Twitter tweets I came across today about the uproar in Israel.

If a Democratic president acted like Trump, how would liberals react?

Today the January 6 committee held its final meeting to lay out criminal referrals to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. 

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.

The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.

The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.

The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.

Clearly this is a historic moment. As the above excerpt from a New York Times story says, never before has Congress referred a former president for criminal prosecution. Such didn't happen even with Nixon after his Watergate scandal was revealed. So says a TIME magazine story.

No congressional committee ever issued a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Nixon. Rather, the reverse occurred, as Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating Nixon, sent Congress a “roadmap” laying out evidence of criminal violations Nixon was believed to have committed including bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice.

Because Nixon was a sitting president, Jaworski initially believed it made more sense for Congress to move forward with impeachment proceedings, than trying to prosecute Nixon in a court of law. Facing impeachment in the House, cratering support from his fellow Republicans, and looming criminal charges from a grand jury, Nixon resigned from office before facing prosecution.

So two Republican presidents have come closest to being prosecuted for crimes committed during their time in the White House. Nixon found little support from fellow Republicans, while Trump still enjoys considerable support from his base, though it is steadily slipping.

The question of how Democrats would respond to a Democratic president being credibly accused of crimes as bad as those committed by Trump interests me. 

My wife, a Democrat like me, believes that members of our political party wouldn't stand for the outrageous behavior that Trump engaged in during his four years in office (thank heavens it wasn't eight).

Laurel thinks that Democrats care more about ethics than Republicans, who are more prone to being concerned about maintaining power in the sense of "ends justify the means." In large part I agree with her. 

Republicans do appear to fall in line behind a leader more than Democrats do. This makes them vulnerable to a malevolent leader like Donald Trump who has been able to maintain much of his base in the Republican Party even as evidence of his numerous crimes accumulates.

My own view is a bit less confident in the willingness of Democrats to hold a Democratic president accountable for serious wrongdoing while in office. (Compared to Trump, I don't see what Bill Clinton did to be anywhere near as serious.)

I do believe that a Trumpian candidate wouldn't make it very far in Democratic presidential primaries. Democrats care about ethics. They also care about electability. I suspect that this would prevent a Trump-like Democrat from ever becoming president.

But if he or she did, another factor would come into play, the same one that helped Trump remain popular among Republicans during his time in office: producing results. 

I try to imagine how I'd react if a Democratic president had managed to get several liberal Supreme Court justices confirmed; passed major legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ban assault weapons, increase taxes on billionaires, make Puerto Rico and the D.C. states, and other Democratic priorities -- then was enmeshed in a major scandal.

Would I be more willing to overlook the scandal because of all the good the Democratic president had ben able to accomplish? Sure, I would. And I think lots of other Democrats would feel the same way.

Thus while I'm fine with being critical of Republicans who stand by Trump no matter what horrible things he does, I have to admit that while I'd never be OK with a Democrat who acted just as badly, I'd overlook some ethical failings if that leader was able to produce significant benefits for the nation. 

Which means I can't be totally holier-than-thou when it comes to Republicans defending Trump, though I am confident that I'd be less willing to go along with a Democrat doing everything Trump did while in office.

Hopefully I don't regret this blog post about Trump 2024

Yesterday Donald Trump announced that he's a candidate for president in 2024, a full two years before the election. 

I can't stand Trump. But I'm pleased that he's running for the Republican nomination again. It'll be easy for me to explain why.

I just hope that after the 2024 presidential election I don't take a look at this post and think, Brian, how could you have been so stupid?

Wouldn't be the first time I've had that thought, of course. I think and do stupid stuff all the time.

However, it's one thing to make a personal mistake, and a whole other thing to be mistaken about the future of our democracy -- which clearly would be threatened if Trump has another four years to complete his authoritarian agenda.

Before the midterms I was much more worried about Trump than I am now.

The big question is whether the failure of Trump's Big Lie candidates in swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada -- is a sign that his appeal to voters has stopped working like it did in 2016, or whether Trump is capable of reinventing himself.

My guess is that Trump's popularity is on a downward trend that might reverse itself a bit, yet not enough to get him elected in 2024. Or maybe even nominated by the GOP as their presidential candidate.

What gives me pause, though, is that I was thrilled in 2016 when it became clear that Trump was the Republican nominee. I was confident that this would guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton. 

After all, how could the American people elect someone as unqualified to be president as Donald Trump? Turned out, of course, that they certainly could.

Naturally I could be wrong about Trump this time also. But 2016 is way different than 2022. Now voters know all about Trump's many weaknesses and his Big Lie schtick is wearing thin even among his avid supporters.

Yet Trump still has a good chance of winning the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, especially if it's a crowded field, as in 2016. His base of GOP support is substantial. But I'm confident that the Democratic nominee would beat Trump, given Biden's victory in 2020 and how well Democrats did in the recent midterm election.

If Trump doesn't win the nomination, this will probably deeply irk most of his base, even, or especially, if Ron DeSantis is the nominee. DeSantis strikes me as too Trump-like in his hateful attitude toward immigrants, gays, teachers, and others to appeal to a broad swath of the national electorate.

I was worrying that Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor, could be DeSantis' vice-president pick, or Trump's pick, since her lengthy background as a TV news anchor makes her skilled at communicating to voters.

But now that Lake has lost to Katie Hobbs, that worry is much reduced. 

All in all, I'm feeling good about Democrats holding on to the presidency in 2024. I think Biden could win, though like most Democrats, I'd prefer that someone else be my party's nominee.

I love the photo of top secret documents found in Trump's residence

When Trump is convicted of mishandling government documents, many of which were marked top secret, as I dearly hope will happen, this FBI photo will be part of the evidence that led to his downfall.

There's so much to love about this photo. For one thing, it demolishes any argument Trump could make that he didn't know the documents were marked as classified. 

The big red and yellow borders around the secret/top secret cover pages show that it would be impossible to miss that these were highly sensitive documents. Which, of course, belong to the U.S. Government, not Donald Trump, who is now a private citizen.

As plenty of people who had high-level security clearances have pointed out, if any ordinary person had so many documents marked secret/top secret in their possession, especially if they had refused requests to return them, as Trump did, they'd be facing some serious jail time.

That's exactly what Trump deserves. 

What's shown in the photo is just a portion of the secret/top secret documents recovered from Trump's Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. These came from his office, though it isn't clear whether the photo was taken in his office. Not that it matters, since the photo was taken at Mar-a-Lago.

A Washington Post story describes how the photo came about.

The Justice Department used 35 pages of type in a court filing on Tuesday to provide new details of its investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of hundreds of classified documents that were taken from the White House at the end of his term.

But the most easily digestible element of the filing was appended at the end: a single photograph showing documents with secret and top secret markings arrayed on a patterned carpet, with a carton of framed pictures on one side. The photograph did not clearly display any details of the subject matter of the documents, which were conspicuously bordered in red when labeled secret and in yellow for top secret.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump took to his social media site to say that “the F.B.I., during the raid of Mar-a-Lago, threw documents haphazardly all over the floor (perhaps pretending that it was me that did it!), and then started taking pictures of them for the public to see.”

But the genesis of the photograph appears to be in keeping with standard protocols for how federal agents handle evidence they come across in a search.

The folders were arrayed by agents at Mar-a-Lago after being removed from what the filing indicated was Mr. Trump’s office — they were not discovered scattered on the floor, according to two federal law enforcement officials.

The Justice Department would not comment on the specifics of the photograph. But it is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for.

The marking “2A” on a folded piece of paper in the picture corresponds to a listing in the inventory of items seized in the search that was made public along with the search warrant. In that inventory, the item marked as “2A” is described as “various classified TS/SCI documents.”

Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings. The ruler seen in the image is to give a sense of their size in relation to other objects.

One noteworthy element of the photograph, as the Justice Department pointed out in its filing yesterday, is that none of the folders bear a label or stamp indicating that Mr. Trump declassified them, as he has periodically claimed when asked about his retention of government materials requested by the National Archives. Documents that have been declassified typically contain explicit markings indicating the change.

It's truly astounding that Trump would have secret/top secret documents lying around his office. Well, let's say rather that it would be astounding if any other former president had acted so irresponsibly. Trump is so egotistical and unethical, he thinks the world revolves around him.

His whole life, Trump has screwed people over and gotten away with it thanks to copious lies, legal threats, and powerful friends.

But it's looking more and more like the Justice Department is serious about holding Trump legally accountable for his mishandling of sensitive documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them to their rightful owner, the United States government.

Let's imagine President Hillary Clinton acting like Trump

I realize that almost everybody is biased toward the members of their own political "tribe."

For sure, I am. I readily admit that I'm more willing to overlook transgressions of fellow Democrat politicians than Republican politicians.

But I deeply doubt that most Democrats would put up with all the crap that Donald Trump has done as president and post-president. At least, nowhere near to the extent that Republicans still bow down at the Altar of Trump.

If you're a Republican who disagrees with that assessment, here's a thought experiment for you to consider. Imagine this alternative reality...

In November 2016 Hillary Clinton confirmed what most pollsters predicted: she defeated Donald Trump and was elected president of the United States.

Right away, though, rough spots started to appear on her presidential image. Clinton claimed that the crowd at her inauguration was much vaster than it actually was. But her supporters brushed that mistake off, saying Clinton was just being Clinton.

Things got worse, much worse. Fact checkers documented how many lies Clinton was spreading. The Washington Post reported 30,573 false or misleading claims in four years, an average of more than 20.9 per day.

No problem for most Democrats. They excused Clinton's falsehoods, being much more concerned about her appointing three justices to the Supreme Court, assuring a liberal majority for decades to come. 

Sure, there were lots of scandals in the Clinton administration. She appointed people to cabinet positions who were loyal to her, not because they had the experience and temperament needed to do their job.

But again, Clinton's Democratic base loved how she used the levers of government to increase taxes on the wealthy, combat global warming, assure equal rights for minorities, impose more regulations on corporations, and fulfill other aspects of liberal wish lists.

Nearing the end of her first term, Clinton was impeached by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives because she tried to get political dirt on a GOP presidential contender by withholding aid from a foreign country that supposedly could provide evidence of a scandal involving the contender's son.

She was easily acquitted by the Democrat-controlled Senate. Clinton viewed this vindication as a green light to do whatever she wanted in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, including using the White House as a prop for campaign events.

Sure, that was against the rules. Clinton, though, endorsed the adage, "It isn't a crime if the president does it." 

Clinton mismanaged the Covid crisis when it hit the United States. That led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, according to experts. However, neither Clinton nor her supporters cared about what experts said, nor what the mainstream media said. 

Power was what mattered to Clinton, not rules, nor ethics, nor going along with how things always had been done. 

It turned out, though, that American voters were tried of all the drama of the Clinton years. Her constant lying and grandstanding was wearing people out. So in November 2020 she lost to her Republican challenger.

Or so the headlines said.

Clinton refused to accept the outcome of the election. She filed 60 frivolous lawsuits claiming election fraud, even though there was no evidence of any widespread fraud. Even after losing all but one of the suits, Clinton kept on loudly asserting that she had won the election.

A mob of her Democratic supporters stormed the nation's capitol on January 6, beating police officers and looking for politicians they could harm, so great was their anger at the election supposedly being stolen from Clinton, and so strong was their belief that Clinton was correct in asserting massive voter fraud.

That led to Clinton being impeached a second time. And being acquitted by the Senate a second time. 

President Clinton did leave the White House for her home in New York. But in a final defiant gesture, Clinton took many boxes of government documents with her, including top secret documents. When the FBI demanded their return, it took a subpoena for that to happen.

Turns out, though, that even though Clinton's lawyer swore that all classified documents had been returned to the government, a search of her property under a warrant signed by a federal judge turned up eleven more boxes of documents, some of them highly secret.

Per usual, Clinton lied her way through this post-presidential scandal. At first she claimed that the FBI had planted incriminating documents during their search.

Then a variety of other excuses were put forward, including that Clinton was so sure she was going to stay in office, she didn't start packing until a few days before she had to leave the White House and got the classified documents mixed up with other stuff.

Again, all this was no problem for most Democratic politicians and her supporters. They're eager for her to run for president again in 2024 so she and her fellow Democrats can punish Republicans for causing her so much grief during her first term as president.

If you're not OK with this alternative reality, Republicans, how is it that most of you are absolutely fine with Trump doing the same things?

Eight cartoons about FBI raid on Trump's Florida home

I was so happy yesterday when I heard that the FBI had raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in search of classified documents that the worst president in our nation's history had carted off illegally.

Word is that the FBI agents left with about a dozen boxes, which follows on the fifteen boxes that were sent back to the National Archives earlier. 

Since a federal search warrant can't be issued without a judge affirming that there is probable cause that a crime has been committed, and that evidence of the crime could be destroyed without the warrant, it sure seems like Trump could be in serious legal trouble.

Along with all of his other well-deserved legal troubles. 

To keep the anti-Trump smile on my face fresh, today I searched for cartoons about the Mar-a-Lago raid. Here's what I found. A recurring theme is how while president, Trump would rip up documents and flush them down a toilet. There's proof!

Enjoy the cartoons...

The Guardian:


The New Yorker:

Tucson Sentinel:

Charlotte Observer:

Morten Morland:

Christian Adams:

Sacramento Bee:

WUN:

Anyone who still supports Trump is a democracy-hater

If there was any doubt that Donald Trump is the worst president in American history, the rock-solid findings of the January 6 committee have put that doubt to rest.

I haven't watched all of my recording of tonight's primetime hearing by the committee into Trump's 187 minutes of utter inaction following the insurrection at the nation's capitol. But I listened to about an hour while driving around, and looked at some of the hearing when I returned home.

It's amazing that there's anyone in the United States who still backs Trump.

If any other president had done 1/1000 of the horrible stuff Trump did in his four years in office, and continues to do at the present moment, there's no way that former president would maintain any credibility, much less be seriously considered for a second term.

This shows how true the frog-in-boiling-water analogy is, even if I doubt a frog would truly remain in a pot while the water was heated to 212 degrees.

Bit by bit, day by day, we Americans were exposed to Trump's lies, incompetence, and malevolence so often, in so many ways, it became easy to view Trump as either a buffoon or a crazy uncle who somehow made it into the Oval Office.

But the January 6 committee has revealed that Trump is even worse than that. He's a lying incompetent malevolent crazy buffoon who also is a wanna-be authoritarian. Trump knew he lost the election to Joe Biden. 

Yet Trump worked hard to stay in office illegally, January 6, 2021 being his last gasp at trying to remain president by any means within his power. This is so un-American, so against the ideals of our constitutional democracy, anyone who continues to support Trump is a democracy-hater.

If that sounds harsh because you're someone who likes that Trump appointed three anti-abortion Supreme Court justices, cut taxes on corporations, imposed tariffs on China, or whatever, think about this.

While the nation's capitol was being attacked by an angry armed mob, chanting "Hang Mike Pence!", Trump sat for over three hours in the White House watching Fox News, ignoring the pleas of his deeply conservative staff to issue a statement decrying the violence and telling the mob to go home.

Is this how you want the Commander in Chief to behave? If a foreign power attacks the United States, are you really OK with the president doing nothing because he figures he'll benefit from the attack? And do you believe Trump would have stood up to Putin after Russia invaded Ukraine when Trump wasn't even willing to act against an insurrectionist crowd invading the capitol?

Sadly, most Republicans still back Trump, or at least aren't opposing him. This shows that the Republican Party has lost not only its moral compass, but also its political instincts. There's no longer any upside to supporting Trump.

It might help a candidate win a Republican primary. However, an ever-increasing share of American voters are beyond tired of Trump's attacks on democracy. There's a good chance they'll give Democrats more election wins this November than was being predicted just a few months ago.

My shameful fantasy involving Donald Trump

Hey, I survived the shame of telling my Donald Trump fantasy to a friend today, Jim, during our usual Sunday get-together at the Urban Grange coffeehouse in West Salem.

So I might as well share that not-so-secret aspect of my political self with the much vaster audience who read this Salem Political Snark blog. (I have a liberal interpretation of much vaster.)

I was describing to Jim the current status of my long-running depression about being a progressive Democrat in a time when everything seems to be going wrong for my side of the political spectrum.

Inflation is skyrocketing. Biden's approval rating is plummeting. Joe Manchin is tanking climate change legislation, along with voting rights, women's rights, and any other right that isn't favored by West Virginia voters. Republicans are poised to take control of the House and Senate. Oregon might end up with either an independent or Republican governor. The Supreme Court is acting like an arm of the Republican Party and has more important cases to rule on that will make conservatives ecstatic.

I told Jim that I was thinking of writing a blog post today about all the things that bother me about being a progressive in a country where liberal successes are few and far between.

But then I realized that my malaise could be described in a simpler fashion: I'm not feeling any positive energy from Democrats. The energy that permeated progressive hearts and minds in 2020 when Biden defeated Trump is gone. And it was more a joy that Biden wasn't Trump than any real excitement about Biden.

The last time I was truly enthused about a Democratic national leader was when Obama ran for president in 2008. Then it really did seem that so much progress was possible.

When Clinton ran against Trump in 2016, again it was the fact that Hillary wasn't Donald which was most appealing. And, that she could make history by becoming the nation's first female president. Didn't happen, of course, thanks to her damn email server and some stupid campaign mistakes.

So what I miss is the feeling of being part of a wave of political change that Republicans are surfing on right now.

I want to imbibe the positive energy that comes with having leaders of your political tribe who are enthusiastic about a vision for the future that actually seems possible to achieve with enough work and determination. 

Which gets me to my no-longer-secret shame about my Donald Trump fantasy. Understand: it's just a fantasy. Plus, when I allow the fantasy to enter my mind, it only lingers there for a few seconds. I try it on for size to see how it feels, then I discard it, because I don't like the feeling.

Well, more accurately I enjoy the emotional tone of the fantasy, but not its content. Here it is.

I imagine myself becoming a Trump devotee. I imagine myself embracing Republican positions on abortion, gun control, immigration, taxes, global warming -- the whole agenda that is tilting in the direction of conservatives these days. I no longer drive a Subaru Crosstrek. I drive a giant loud pickup belching diesel fumes with two big American flags whipping in the breeze as I terrorize electric cars.

In short, I imagine the energy and enthusiasm I'd feel if I traded in my progressive values, which are in a bear market currently, for the rising tide of conservatism that has had way more political victories recently, with more successes on the horizon.

Like I said, I enjoy the feeling of being part of a political movement that has the wind at its back with leaders who know how to energize members of that movement. But it only takes a few moments for me to realize that I could never jump ship and become a Republican. 

So I'm stuck with the Democratic Party. Which makes me feel listless at the moment. Hopefully my mood will improve when, as I strongly suspect will happen, some new younger leaders come forward with a lot more energy and vitality than Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and Co. are able to muster.

Georgia election workers show what a hateful liar Trump is

At this point I'm rarely shocked by anything Donald Trump does or says.

But today's televised hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol moved me deeply,  because what Trump did to two Georgia election workers -- Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman -- was so horrible even by Trumpian standards.

Moss and Freeman at the January 6 committee hearing

He and his lying accomplice, Rudy Giuliani, destroyed the lives of Moss and Freeman by falsely accusing them of falsifying many thousands of ballots for Joe Biden. 

It was infuriating to listen to Moss and Freeman talk about their lives being turned inside down by Trump and Giuliani. (Moss testified in person today; the committee showed videos of Freeman's previous testimony .)

These are honest hardworking women who believed strongly in helping people vote. Trump doesn't possess even 1% of the integrity and morality of Moss and Freeman. Yet so far he hasn't been indicted for his election-related crimes.

Hopefully Trump will be held to account for his misdeeds, especially since there's every indication he and his Republican cronies plan to try to steal the next presidential election if Trump runs again. And maybe even if he doesn't run.

Because a majority of Republicans, one poll had it at 70%, believe Trump's lie that he won the 2020 presidential election because of some mysterious voter fraud that lacks any evidence but supposedly occurred because Trump says so.

It's a national embarrassment that one of our two major political parties has gone so far down the election fraud rabbit hole. How anyone can vote for Republican candidates is beyond me.

Check out a Washington Post story, "Election workers describe 'hateful' threats after Trump's false claims." Some excerpts:

Shaye Moss’s life forever changed on Dec. 10, 2020, when Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump’s top campaign lawyer, publicly claimed that she and her mother, a fellow poll worker in Fulton County, Ga., had rigged the outcome in her state.

Moss’s supervisor suggested that day that she check her social media accounts to see if she had received any threats, as others in the office had. She was stunned by what she saw when she pulled up her Facebook Messenger account.

“It was just a lot of horrible things there,” Moss said at a hearing Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Many of the messages were racist and “hateful,” said Moss, who is Black. “A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’ ”

That was only the beginning. Moss eventually stopped going to the grocery store, where she feared acquaintances might say her name and call attention from believers of Trump’s voter-fraud claims. Election deniers showed up at the home of her grandmother and tried to push their way in to search for evidence of fraud. Both she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were forced into hiding. They quit their jobs with the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections, where Moss had proudly served as a poll worker for more than a decade.

...Moss said she was speechless when her supervisors showed her a recording of Giuliani’s statement to a Georgia state Senate committee investigating the 2020 result. Giuliani claimed that Moss and Freeman had plotted to kick out observers at the State Farm Arena, where the county had set up a ballot counting operation. They had brought in suitcases filled with fraudulent ballots for Biden and scanned them through the tabulating teams multiple times, he said. He described surveillance video from the arena that he claimed showed the two exchanging USB memory sticks, presumably containing fraudulent vote counts, “as if they’re vials of cocaine.”

“I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who’s a criminal investigator or prosecutor that they are engaged in surreptitious, illegal activity,” Giuliani said. “And they’re still walking around Georgia. They should have been questioned already. Their homes should have been searched for evidence.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the questioning at Tuesday’s hearing, asked Moss: “None of that was true, was it?”

Moss’s answer: “None of it.”

Schiff then asked about the USB memory sticks.

“What was your mom actually handing you on that video?”

“A ginger mint,” Moss said.

Trump also attacked Freeman and Moss personally in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) just days before the Capitol attack, mentioning Freeman 18 times and describing her at one point as a “professional vote scammer and hustler.” The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call and published it last year.

The threats and harassment that ensued even reached Moss’s grandmother, who called one day, screaming, to say people had knocked on her door and, when she had opened it, had tried to push into the home in search of Moss and Freeman. Moss recounted how awful she felt telling her grandmother, “who likes to get her steps in walking around the neighborhood,” that she had to stop exercising outside for her own safety. At night, pranksters “continuously” sent pizzas to her home that the delivery drivers expected her to pay for, Moss testified.

The world condemns Putin for invading Ukraine. Trump praises Putin.

The depths of depravity to which Donald Trump will sink appear to be bottomless. As Putin was invading Ukraine, Trump was calling the ex-KGB authoritarian ruler of Russia a smart guy for sending his military into a sovereign nation without any good reason.

Donald Trump on Wednesday called Russian President Vladimir Putin "very smart" for launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, suggesting that he supports a military conflict that will lead to untold civilian death. 

"I mean, he's taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I'd say that's pretty smart," Trump said during a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. "He's taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in." 

We can't let the astounding nature of Trump's remarks pass by lightly, just because Trump has been spewing crap like this for so long, it's difficult to be surprised at his offensive remarks.

Trump is an ex-president of the United States. He isn't a performer in a cheap comedy club.

Trump is saying that the first invasion of a sovereign nation in Europe since World War II is just fine and dandy with him, even if the United States and all of our key allies are united in condemning Putin's action.

Soon the full extent of the horrors Putin is producing in Ukraine will come to light. Things are already bad enough, but they will get worse. 

If we're so unlucky that Trump runs for president in 2024, the clip of him saying that Putin is very smart for invading Ukraine should be front and center in political ads calling for the election of Trump's opponent. 

Sadly, it seems that most Republicans don't care about Trump's love of the havoc Putin is inflicting on the world. All of Oregon's Democratic members of Congress have condemned the invasion of Ukraine, while the sole Republican, Cliff Bentz, has been silent.

Here's some Twitter tweets I've been collecting about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There's courage of display, as the people of Ukraine battle the stronger Russian military, and brave Russian citizens demonstrate against what Putin has wrought, risking arrest for speaking truth to power.