Mediaboss Marketing

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has been saying some certifiably zany stuff these days, from promising to eliminate rape in the Lone Star State to launching an all-out assault on gender-neutral childrens toys. But the real weirdness is brewing in the primary candidate pool, where a comedian, a fail son from a car dealership family and an accused war criminal are taking turns casting Abbott as a "Demonrat" in sheeps clothing.

Following the states abortion ban, many liberals threatened to flee Texas for good. Still, nothing would send them packing sooner than if an Abbott challenger were to move into the governors mansion. (It may sound like a long shot, but a recent poll by the Texas Politics Project found that only 41% of Texans approve of the governor's performance, the lowest number throughout his time in office.) Chad PratherComedian Chad Prather told Texas Scorecard that he has the solution to the states border crisis: detect, deter, detain, deport and defend. Ah yes, the alliterative five-D method will solve it all.

Likening border-crossers to an invasion, Prather said as governor, hed gladly give the mounted border agents a hand and be the first guy down there on horseback. (The cowboy didnt say whether hed be shirtless when mounting the stallion, but the Western revenge-fantasy does conjure images of another politician.)

When discussing the state's abortion ban, which doesn't include exemptions for rape, Prather told Texas Scorecard that the guilt of murder on top of the ignominy of rape does not help a woman. Perhaps most notable, though, was his sound, science-based understanding of biology during an attempt to poke holes in the pro-choice argument.

Local

Community

Journalism

Support the independent voice of Dallas andhelp keep the future of Dallas Observer free.

Keep Dallas Observer Free.

[After conception], the DNA of a human being is immediately imprinted on that person; that DNA is there for the rest of their life, he said. If we were to discover that on Mars, we would spend tens of trillions of dollars trying to protect that life.

Don HuffinesHis family may have gotten you a deal on your Hyundai, but Don Huffines is applying his salesmanship to the governors race. Now, hes set on persuading Texans that Abbott is allied with the LGBTQ-loving left.

On Tuesday, The Texas Tribune reported that the states child welfare agency had deleted a page providing LGBTQ youth with resources. The move came after Huffines slammed the agency in a video posted to Twitter, accusing them of promoting transgender sexual policies to kids.

As governor, I will ensure this predatory grooming of Texas kids ends, he wrote. Any adult who pushes the perverted LGBTQ agenda on our children will be promptly removed from all positions within Texas government agencies. Allen WestAllen West, the former Florida congressman who also served as chair of the Republican Party of Texas, is known for making memorable copy. This year, he scorned a New York Times reporter for wearing a mask, telling her she could remove her face diaper during their interview. Hed also railed against vaccine mandates even after West, who is unvaccinated, was hospitalized for COVID-19.

On Saturday, Wests social media account tweeted that hed been taking the horse dewormer ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that public health officials have begged people to refrain from eating. Hed also taken the antimalarial medication hydroxychloroquine. Medical experts say neither should be usedto treat coronavirus.

But on Tuesday, West issued a statement saying hed been released from the hospital. He also wrote that hed gone on a 2-mile jog that morning: Neither a high-speed motorcycle crash nor COVID-19 can keep an old soldier down.

He again took the opportunity to vow that hed crush anyone who forced vaccine mandates in Texas.

Our bodies are our last sanctuary of liberty and freedom, West wrote. I will defend that for everyone, even the progressive socialist jackasses who must be saved from themselves.

Read this article:
Ahead of the 2022 Republican Primary, Texas' Gubernatorial Candidates are Saying Some Weird Stuff - Dallas Observer

Last week, the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee published their report on new revelations into Donald Trumps efforts to discard the election results and remain in power. The important takeaway, Republicans conclude, is that Trumps interest in using the Justice Department to secure an unelected second term was based on legitimate complaints and reports of crimes. And anyway, he decided not to go through with the full Saturday Night Massacre coup plan that Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark had urged upon him.

Conservative pundits have embraced this happy-ending interpretation. The story of Trump and the Justice Department, then, is not one of the presidents relentless pressure campaign on the nations top lawyers. It is, rather, a story of the president taking those lawyers advice and then, tragically, turning elsewhere, argues Byron York. Trump decided against it, insists Brit Hume. It is not to his credit that he even considered it, but his rejection should be part of any story on it.

That Trump decided against Clarks plan is certainly part of the story. But is it the important part of the story? That depends on his reasons for rejecting the plan. It would be one thing if Trump rejected the proposal on moral grounds but not even a Byron York could manage to type the words Donald Trump and moral in the same sentence. Instead, he simply judged the plan unlikely to succeed, much like a bank robber deciding not to crack a vault because its security system is too tough.

The important issue going forward is what Republicans will decide about the idea of overturning Democratic election victories. Here, the evidence is overwhelmingly negative. The Republican impulse is to rehabilitate all the participants in Trumps attempted coup.

An instructive episode is the protective cordon forming around John Eastman, the lawyer whose memo gave Trump his step-by-step playbook for using Mike Pence to discard the election results on January 6. Eastmans plan hinged on an extremely tenuous constitutional argument that the vice-president has unilateral power to discard any election result he decides is wrong, and throw the election to the House, which would decide the result on the basis of which party controlled the most state delegations. Even if Eastmans argument was valid and hardly any scholars take it seriously it would mean he had discovered a loophole that would allow the presidents party to retain power forever.

Eastmans effort to end American democracy has resulted in some professional blowback. If conservatives wanted to prove that the real takeaway from Trumps coup is that he decided against it, they would cut Eastman loose. Instead, they are rallying to his defense.

The Claremont Institute, a formerly highbrow cog in the conservative movement, defended Eastman against what it called a recent combined disinformation, de-platforming, and ostracism campaign. Claremonts defense is aggressively misleading:

Contrary to almost universally false news accounts, which have done great damage, John did not ask the Vice President, who was presiding over the Joint Session of Congress where electoral votes were to be counted on January 6, to overturn the election or to decide the validity of electoral votes. John advised the Vice President to accede to requests from state legislators to pause the proceedings of the Joint Session of Congress for 7 to 10 days, to give time to the state legislatures to assess whether the acknowledged illegal conduct by their state election officials had affected the results of the election.

Translated into English, Claremont is insisting that Eastman didnt ask Mike Pence to overturn the election he asked Mike Pence to refuse to certify the result and then throw the question over to the House, which would overturn the election. Its a bit like getting furious when people say Stalin executed millions of people, when the real story is that he ordered other people to do the executions but never fired a shot with his own hands.

Joining Eastmans pro bono defense team is J. Christian Adams. In a new column, Adams argues that Eastman did nothing wrong and is the victim of an oppressive orthodoxy.

Adams argues that Eastman merely fulfilled the highest ideals of the legal profession by representing a client in need of counsel. Calling Eastman a victim in the campaign to cancel attorneys who committed the sin of representing former president Trump, Adams reasons that Eastman was merely representing a client in need. Back in the old days of representing GITMO detainees, we called that the sacred right to legal counsel. In olden days, lawyers representing terrorists were allowed to fill their terrorist-clients heads full of reasons they werent guilty of trying to kill Americans, he pleads.

This would be a good argument if Trump were a criminal defendant. Actually, Trump is a criminal defendant. Hes facing charges in Manhattan and New York State for a lengthy list of alleged financial crimes. And, in fact, nobody is proposing to sanction the lawyers representing Trump in these cases, a fact that disproves Adamss claim that Eastman is merely being bullied for his unpopular client.

The finer points of legal ethics obviously do not interest Adams. He is closing ranks with Eastman out of a broader desire to rehabilitate the legal insurrection. And Adams is hardly some insignificant nut. He is a nut, all right, but one who possesses impeccable conservative-movement credentials. He worked in George W. Bushs Justice Department, served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, writes op-eds in the Washington Examiner, is invited by Republicans to testify in Congress as a credentialed expert, and is one of his partys leading voices on election security.

When J. Christian Adams shouts that Eastman is the victim of cancel culture, it signals what the Republican legal Establishment thinks about Trumps coup. Whatever regrets they have are dwarfed by their anger at the liberals for exposing the plot. They are going to try again.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

Read the original:
Republicans Are Rehabilitating the Participants in Trumps Attempted Coup - New York Magazine

Congress held its first hearing last week on Arizona's utterly bonkers election "audit," and House Republicans participating in the discussion put on a highly discouraging display. For example, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, the chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, insisted "we don't know" who actually won Arizona's presidential election last year, despite reality.

At the same hearing, Biggs' fellow Arizonan, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, peddled an incoherent conspiracy theory, which appeared to be based on strange claims from secret sources the congressman seemed to make up after having already peddled equally strange conspiracy theories based on equally strange claims from different secret sources whom Gosar also apparently made up.

For those inclined to be generous when assessing the state of the contemporary Republican Party, the likely argument is that folks like Biggs and Gosar are fringe figures, known for voicing extreme views. It's not as if the GOP is putting irresponsible officials in leadership positions, right?

It's against this backdrop that House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, followed in the fringe figures' footsteps yesterday. The Associated Press reported:

The House's second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say on Sunday that the 2020 election wasn't stolen, standing by Donald Trump's lie that Democrat Joe Biden won the White House because of mass voter fraud. More than 11 months after Americans picked their president and almost nine months since Biden was inaugurated, Scalise was unwilling during a national television interview to acknowledge the legitimacy of the vote, instead sticking to his belief that the election results should not have been certified by Congress.

Remember, Scalise isn't some random backbencher with a low profile and limited influence. On the contrary, if Republicans take back the House in next year's midterm elections, the far-right Louisianan will likely become the House majority leader.

And yet, there he was on Fox News yesterday, getting pressed by host Chris Wallace to acknowledge that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. Acknowledging his own country's electoral reality, however, was a step Scalise simply would not take.

This is not a situation in which the GOP congressman is a shrinking violet, lacking the temperament to denounce ideas with which he disagrees. During the same interview yesterday, Scalise said those who equate Georgia Republicans' new voter-suppression law with Jim Crow are pushing "flat-out lies."

In other words, Scalise is capable of condemning ideas he finds objectionable in no uncertain terms. When it comes to the Republican Party's Big Lie, however, Scalise repeatedly insisted that states didn't follow election laws last fall to his satisfaction, which in his mind justifies his skepticism about the results.

Three times, Wallace tried to get Scalise to acknowledge the truth. Three times, the high-ranking GOP lawmaker refused.

A tiny number of congressional Republicans were displeased. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, for example, wrote via Twitter, "Millions of Americans have been sold a fraud that the election was stolen. Republicans have a duty to tell the American people that this is not true. Perpetuating the Big Lie is an attack on the core of our constitutional republic." Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois called Scalise's rhetoric "unacceptable."

The duo, however, was part of a vanishingly small minority. For most congressional Republicans, Scalise's nonsense reflected a new normal.

The bottom line is unavoidable: The line between the GOP fringe on Capitol Hill and the GOP leadership has been blurred to the point that it hardly exists at all. When the #2 House Republican isn't lending credence to his party's Big Lie, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik is toying with a white-supremacist conspiracy theory and trying to blame House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the Jan. 6 attack.

It was just last month, meanwhile, when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threatened private companies in the hopes of obstructing a bipartisan congressional investigation, which he soon followed by falsely claiming that the FBI had cleared Donald Trump of wrongdoing on Jan. 6.

There ought to be an important gap between the Republican Party's radicals and the GOP's leadership. In 2021, they appear to be reading from awfully similar scripts.

Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics."

See more here:
Why Steve Scalise's stance on the Republicans' Big Lie matters - MSNBC

New York has received support from an unlikely source in defense of its restrictive public carry laws in the form of an amicus brief filed in NYSRPA v. Bruen, the Supreme Court case that will decide whether the Second Amendment protects a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. The brief was submitted on behalf of several signatories, but most noteworthy is its headlinerJ. Michael Luttig, the former Fourth Circuit judge who reportedly was on the shortlist for nomination to a Supreme Court seat during the George W. Bush administration. The brief does not live up to the standards one would expect from Judge Luttig.

First and foremost, while claiming to take a "textualist" approach (at 7), the brief fails to confront the Second Amendment's clear statement that the right of "the people" to "bear" arms shall not be infringed. New York absolutely criminalizes the bearing of arms openly and issues licenses to carry arms concealed only to a selected few who the state deems to have "proper cause." Instead of bearing arms being the rule while carving out exceptions (such as for courthouses and legislatures), the brief argues that the right is not infringed because narrow exceptions are made for hunting and target practice (at 6). But that ignores that "self-defense was the central component of the right itself," Heller, 554 U.S. at 599.

The brief's shortcomings are conspicuous in its engagement with history. The brief purports to apply Heller's text, history, and tradition approach, averring that "founding-era statutes" are particularly important (at 1011). Yet the brief cites a grand total of six colonial and early state laws to support its remarkable assertion that the founding era did not understand the right to carry to extend to the public. The brief's authors ignore the extensive evidence refuting their argumentsmuch of it in amicus briefs previously filed in support of the plaintiffs. Nor does the brief address the dismissal by Justice Thomas of such arguments based on the Statute of Northampton and its state analogues articulated in his dissent from the denial of certiorari in Rogers v. Grewal, 140 S. Ct. 1865 (2020), arising out of New Jersey. All of the material historical issues here are covered in my book, The Right to Bear Arms: A Constitutional Right of the People or a Privilege of the Ruling Class? Pay special attention to the Forward by Rene Lettow Lerner, which traces the modern anti-Second Amendment campaign back to 1968.

Embarrassingly, the brief relies (at 12) on a 1792 North Carolina "law" purportedly providing that no person may "go nor ride armed by night or by day, in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the King's Justices, or other ministers, nor in no parts elsewhere." It should have been obvious that something is amisswhy would a 1792 North Carolina statute refer to the King? The reason is there was no such statutethe cited law "is fake," the source being a compilation of North Carolina laws that later compilers condemned as including many statutes "which never were, and never could have been in force." See my book The Right To Bear Arms at 243 n.778.

While the other five statutes (3 colonial and 2 state) were actually enacted, they do not demonstrate that founding-era legislatures felt themselves free to ban public carry. Four of the statutes plainly are analogues of the 1328 Statute of Northamptona statute with a lengthy history of interpretation with which the brief fails entirely to engage. (See my post on Tuesday.) And by the time of the founding, the historical sources indicate that the Statute and its analogues barred only carrying dangerous and unusual weapons or in a manner otherwise calculated to induce terror. This is apparent from the words of the statutes themselves, which as quoted in the Luttig brief (at 1213) focus on carrying "offensively" (1699 N.H.) and inducing "fear" (1692 and 1795 Mass.) or "terror" (1786 Va.).

That leaves only an obscure 1686 East New Jersey law (the colony was then split into East and West) that prohibited the private carry of "pocket pistols" and provided that "no planter shall ride or go armed with sword, pistol or dagger." The latter part may have only applied to terror-inducing carry, as otherwise the former part would be redundant. We don't know if the law survived the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which declared the right to have arms, but it was long since forgotten when the Second Amendment was ratified. Indeed, the public carrying of firearms was legal in the State of New Jersey until 1966. See generally The Right to Bear Arms at 123-31. Regardless, Heller refused to "stake [its] interpretation of the Second Amendment upon a single law, in effect in a single city, that contradicts the overwhelming weight of other evidence regarding the right to keep and bear arms for defense of the home." 554 U.S. at 632.

The Luttig brief fails to discuss the wealth of evidence demonstrating that Americans at the founding understood the right to bear arms to extend to public carry. For example, as an amicus brief filed by the Second Amendment Foundation demonstrates, our first six Presidents and other leading Founders were proponents and practitioners of arms bearing. Some were citizens of Virginia or Massachusetts, two states which according to the Luttig brief barred public carry altogether. That would have been a surprise to the likes of Jefferson and Adams, who under the Luttig brief's conception of history would have been serial lawbreakers.

Once history is understood as demonstrating a right to public carry, the Luttig brief becomes self-refuting. With its historical case collapsing, it is left with the sorts of policy arguments that the brief indicates should not be used to determine constitutional rights. And some of those arguments are bizarre. For example, the brief refers to the incursion of protestors into the Capitol on January 6, seeming to argue that such events would become more frequent and deadlier were a right to public carry to be recognized. But D.C. itself already is a right-to-carry jurisdiction, with the D.C. Circuit in Wrenn v. D.C., 864 F.3d 650 (2017), having struck down a may-issue law akin to the current New York law.

The brief ignores the history laid out in the amicus brief of the Independent Institute that demonstrates that there were restrictions at the time of the founding on carrying firearms into courts and legislative bodies. The brief also fails to engage with the literature reviews concluding that based on existing empirical evidence it cannot be said that respecting the right to carry leads to increased crime and violence.

More criticisms of the brief could be made, from misciting then-Judge Barrett's opinion in Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437, 451 (7thCir. 2019), as concurring rather than dissenting (at 2 & 11) to its amateurish lack of background on the history of the Second Amendment. The Luttig brief is not to be taken seriously as a work of historical scholarship. If it weren't for the identity of its lead sponsor, it is doubtful anyone would give it a second look, and its arguments should play no role in the Supreme Court's decision.

See the article here:
A Surprise Amicus Brief in the Challenge to New York's Gun Carry Ban - Reason

STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN

October 14, 2021

Signing of Protocol of Amendment to the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement with Greece

Alongside Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, today I signed an amendment to the U.S.-Greece Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA). The MDCA is the bedrock of our defense cooperation and has helped strengthen our common defense for more than three decades. This second amendment to the MDCA in as many years demonstrates the continued ability and resolve of the United States and Greece to address the security challenges of today and tomorrow through our strategic relationship.

The amendment to the MDCA deepens and expands on our partnership to maintain strong, capable, and interoperable militaries. The MDCA has allowed for U.S. forces to train and operate within Greek territory since 1990. Todays amendment extends the MDCAs validity, making it consistent with other bilateral defense cooperation agreements between NATO Allies and durable enough to allow for Greece and the United States to advance security and stability in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond.

The United States welcomes Greeces continued investment in defense capabilities and its commitment to fulfilling the pledge it made at the NATO Wales Summit. Our defense relationship is rooted in a common history and shared values and interests going back more than two centuries. Our shared values extend to efforts beyond our defense cooperation and include a partnership in addressing climate change, increasing bilateral investment and trade opportunities, and strengthening educational and cultural connections. These efforts ensure that the U.S.-Greece relationship is stronger than ever.

I am pleased to update the MDCA and hope that the Hellenic Parliament quickly approves this Protocol of Amendment.

By U.S. Embassy in Athens | 14 October, 2021 | Topics: Featured Event, U.S. & Greece | Tags: #USGreeceStrategicDialogue2021

Read more here:
STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN: Signing of Protocol of Amendment to the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement with Greece - US Embassy in...