March 20, 2023

Monday, March 20,2023. 💐 Annette’s News Roundup.

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Kamala is always busy.

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Trump did it again.

If arrested, he’s called on “protesters” to come to his defense, by Tom Nichols.

Let us begin with the obvious thing that just happened: This morning, Donald Trump threatened to summon a mob—for the second time in two years—to his defense. The former president of the United States and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for the White House in 2024, facing a possible indictment in New York, claimed to know the exact day on which he would be arrested and then called on his supporters to “protest.” Trump and his cult know what a call for “protest” means: The last time he rallied his faithful supporters this way, they stormed the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in death and destruction and many, many prison sentences.

Spokespeople from the former president’s office have already walked backTrump’s statement, noting that they have not been told of any specific date for an indictment or an arrest. Indeed, any attempt to book Trump is unlikely to happen as soon as Tuesday, for many reasons. But that’s not the point. Trump’s message today to the American people has already come through loud and clear: I am too dangerous to arrest.

Despite my political feelings about Donald Trump, I am agnostic on whether he should be indicted and arrested for possible financial violations involved in the payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Personally, I have no doubt that he broke the law, and part of me is now growling that if you can get Al Capone for tax evasion instead of murder, file the tax case already. But as my colleague David Frum noted, juries tend to be forgiving of personal misdeeds by political leaders (shown, for example, by the 2011 acquittal of former Democratic Senator John Edwards), and the hush-money scandal is not the strongest possible case against Trump.

That said, Trump himself today upped the ante by saying, in effect, that it doesn’t matter what’s in the indictment. Instead, he is warning all of us, point-blank, that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will.

This is pure authoritarianism, the flex of a would-be American caudillo who is betting that our fear of his goons is greater than our commitment to the rule of law. Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.

(The Atlantic).

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And the #GreatGrifter grifts.

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What is the GOP made of?

The articles linked below 👇 made me really angry. We watched them defend separating children from their parents. We watched them defend the Russian invasion of another sovereign country’s rightful borders. We watched them weaken voting rights and child labor laws. Now this! 👇

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What kind of human beings let others remain endangered as hostages in order to win an election?

A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election.

WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.

It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.

His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal. (New York Times).

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What kind of human beings don’t denounce a criminal former president’s call for Violence but denounce law enforcement?

Keep in mind that no Republican in Congress has seen the evidence. Only the Grand Jury and law enforcement have seen it.

Republican lawmakers blast potential Trump indictment as ‘politically motivated,’ ‘abuse of power.’

Republican lawmakers blasted the prospect of former President Trump being indicted after he revealed he expects to be arrested next week, calling the potential move “politically motivated” and an “abuse of power.” 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he would direct relevant committees to investigate if any federal funding is being used to “subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.

“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” he tweeted, referring to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. 

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said he has been asked multiple times if Trump being indicted would cause him to take away his endorsement of Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Trump endorsed Vance while he was running in the GOP primary for an open Senate seat in Ohio. 

The answer is: hell no. A politically motivated prosecution makes the argument for Trump stronger. We simply don’t have a real country if justice depends on politics,” Vance said. 

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, said in a statement that the “Radical Left” will have Trump arrested because they know they cannot defeat him in an election. She said this is “unAmerican” and reaching a “dangerous new low of Third World countries.” 

“What these corrupt Leftist prosecutors like Alvin Bragg and their Socialist allies fail to understand is that America First Patriots have never been so energized to exercise their constitutional rights to peacefully organize and VOTE at the ballot box to save our great republic,” she said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said at Vision 24, a conservativeconference in South Carolina, on Saturday that Bragg has “done more” to help Trump get reelected than anyone else in the country.

“They’re making stuff up that they never used against anybody because they hate Trump,” Graham said.

He said the case is moving forward because “they’re afraid of Trump.” (The Hill).

(Gosar, Republican House Member from Arizona, who has been sued for his support of the rioters who attacked the Capitol, has every reason to think he “might be next.”)

Yes, Mike Pence called for “peaceful” protests but even he who could have been hanged thanks to Trump’s incitement of violence on January 6 focused his complaint more on the indictment - “The idea of indicting a former president of the United States is deeply troubling to me, as it is to tens of millions of Americans,” Pence told reporters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. “And particularly happening in what appears to be a politically charged environment in New York where the attorney general and other elected officials literally campaigned on a pledge to prosecute the former president.” (Source. The Hill).

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Keep this in mind whenever Trump is indicted. #DayOfShame

If indicted, and arrested, the process Trump would face would likely go this way: Law enforcement would most likely set a date and time for Trump to surrender and his Secret Service detail would deliver him to the office of District Attorney Alvin Bragg in New York or the office of Fani Willis, Fulton County District attorney in Georgia, or the office of Jack Smith, Special Counsel for the Department of Justice, in DC, for fingerprinting, mugshots, cheek-swabbing, and the like.

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The Unhoused is often the top issue in cities nationwide.

Should a Biden-Harris theme for 2024 be #Housing4All?

Can’t we make headway on homelessness starting now?

A Sandwich Shop, a Tent City and an American Crisis.

As homelessness overwhelms downtown Phoenix, a small business wonders how long it can hang on.

He had been coming into work at the same sandwich shop at the same exact time every weekday morning for the last four decades, but now Joe Faillace, 69, pulled up to Old Station Subs with no idea what to expect. He parked on a street lined with three dozen tents, grabbed his Mace and unlocked the door to his restaurant. The peace sign was still hanging above the entryway. Fake flowers remained undisturbed on every table. He picked up the phone and dialed his wife and business partner, Debbie Faillace, 60.

“All clear,” he said. “Everything looks good.”

“You’re sure? No issues?” she asked. “What’s going on with the neighbors?”

He looked out the window toward Madison Street, which had become the center of one of the largest homeless encampments in the country, with as many as 1,100 people sleeping outdoors. On this February morning, he could see a half-dozen men pressed around a roaring fire. A young woman was lying in the middle of the street, wrapped beneath a canvas advertising banner. A man was weaving down the sidewalk in the direction of Joe’s restaurant with a saw, muttering to himself and then stopping to urinate a dozen feet from Joe’s outdoor tables.

“It’s the usual chaos and suffering,” he told Debbie. “But the restaurant’s still standing.”

That had seemed to them like an open question each morning for the last three years, as an epidemic of unsheltered homelessness began to overwhelm Phoenix and many other major American downtowns. Cities across the West had been transformed by a housing crisis, a mental health crisis and an opioid epidemic, all of which landed at the doorsteps of small businesses already reaching a breaking point because of the pandemic. In Seattle, more than 2,300 businesses had left downtown since the beginning of 2020. A group of fed up small-business owners in Santa Monica, Calif., had hung a banner on the city’s promenade that read: “Santa Monica Is NOT safe. Crime … Depravity … Outdoor mental asylum.” And in Phoenix, where the number of people living on the street had more than tripled since 2016, businesses had begun hiring private security firms to guard their property and lawyers to file a lawsuit against the city for failing to manage “a great humanitarian crisis.”

To read more the painful story of how one small business struggles to hold on as homeless overwhelms the city of Phoenix, click here.

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The New Mayor of Los Angeles by Emily Witt.

LA Mayor, Karen Bass - Homelessness is the “No. 1 issue in our city.”

I met with the new mayor at her office in City Hall on a brilliant Thursday afternoon in early March that offered a break from a season of much needed, but totally miserable, rainy weather. Bass wore a blue suit with a pink shirt and drank hot water for her voice, which has not kept up with her speaking schedule. As she approaches her first hundred days in office, the window of time in which she has the good will of a newcomer is going to start to close.

For now, Bass’s focus is on homelessness, which is both a humanitarian crisis and a political imperative. Her declaration of a state of emergency about the issue on her first day in office was perhaps more symbolic than substantive, but what I noticed as we spoke was her candor about how bad things are. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to come back to Los Angeles to run for mayor?

In a way, I feel I’ve come full circle. Thirty-two years ago, I started an organization because our city was in crisis at that time, and there was this profound sense of hopelessness and despair and fear. Then it was crack cocaine, the Crips, the Bloods, and a thousand homicides in one year, and I was very worried, especially about the addiction issue. I come out of health care, and I felt like the only thing policymakers were doing was passing laws to incarcerate people, so I walked away from teaching at U.S.C. Medical School and started an organization at the epicenter of the problem then. This time, I decided to leave Congress because our city is in another crisis. I was very worried that, because of the sense of hopelessness, despair, and fear and anger, citizens were going to go along with the idea of criminalizing homelessness. That’s why it feels full circle. I never thought about running for mayor, and I was not planning on leaving Congress, but, when it became very clear that the city could take a more conservative direction, that was my motivation to come home.

How would you characterize this crisis versus that one thirty years ago?

We were dealing with homelessness thirty years ago, but it was really only in two parts of town. It was South Central and Skid Row. Now it’s all over the city. I don’t know what the numbers used to be, because nobody did a count during those days, but I guess it was a few thousand, and now it’s probably closer to fifty thousand. We’ll get the new count in a few months that will verify it.

And is homelessness the center of the crisis today, or does it go beyond that?

That is the No. 1 issue in our city, there’s no question about that. In the past eighteen years, and when I was in the statehouse, I focussed on foster care and I focussed on people coming out of prison.

Those are two categories of the unhoused population. What I tried to say on the campaign, and now in this position, is for the public to understand the diversity of the population. There are veterans, there are people in tents and cars who actually work full time, but they just can’t afford to rent here, or they’re excluded from housing because of bad credit or past evictions. There are people who were formerly incarcerated. There are thousands of children, some with moms who were fleeing domestic violence, some children who were in the child-welfare system. There are people with mental illness and substance abuse. And then there are people with chronic illnesses. It’s important to understand that there’s a variety of reasons that lead to homelessness.

And, when you get people off the street, you have to have multiple strategies.

You set a goal of getting seventeen thousand people housed this year. Do you think you’ll make it?

I certainly hope so.

You’ve introduced a program called Inside Safe that is focussed specifically on moving people in tents and encampments into interim housing, mostly hotel rooms and other temporary shelters. The fear among some advocates for the unhoused is that some of the solutions proposed in the past have just tried to take away the visible effects of poverty instead of offering a lasting solution.

So, first, I think the advocates are correct in being suspicious because they’ve seen this so many times before. I do believe what I’m doing is different, though, but only time will tell—I have to prove that. I’m not offended by people who question what’s going to come of this, but I do know the depth of my sincerity and the depth of my commitment, and I have to demonstrate that to people.

The most important thing to do is to get people out of tents, because that is how Angelenos experience homelessness. Whether you are in a tent or you’re impacted by the tent, the tent is the focal point. If I dedicated all of my time to building half a million units of housing but there were still tents, people would have no faith that we were getting anything done. That’s the measure, and that’s why I focussed on that, because increasing people’s faith in government is critical to people being willing to say, “Build in my neighborhood.” My fear was that people were reaching a point of giving up and just saying, “Look, just get rid of these people. After all, they’re on the street because they’re drug addicts, and they choose to be there.” A lot of people feel that way. I’m sure you’ve heard that.

And drug addiction is a real problem—I think fifteen hundred people died of fentanyl overdoses in L.A. County in 2021. You have a background in working on drug treatment and addiction issues. Is that something that’s on your mind?

I’m obsessed by it, because what I’m worried about is that I don’t think enough policymakers are connecting the dots with substance abuse. Everybody connects the dots with mental health, but I don’t think everybody connects the dots with substance abuse. Everybody says, “Well, they’re all meth addicts.” We have what remains of a drug-treatment infrastructure that has been shredded over the years. And I’m trying to raise this issue on a federal level, to say that we need to make some changes in policy so that we can rebuild our drug-treatment infrastructure.

One of the things that I wanted to do that I’m very happy to say happened almost immediately was getting everybody in alignment: federal, state, county, and city. By coincidence, President Biden comes out with a plan around homelessness where he says he wants to reduce homelessness by twenty-five per cent in the next two years. I called up and said just come to L.A. and you can meet your goal. Ambassador Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, came here, we explained what was going on, and now L.A. is in contention to be selected as one of the cities that the White House will focus on.

Governor Newsom also offered to include us in the first cohort of the care Court. The care Court would allow people who are profoundly mentally ill to be put into conservatorship and taken care of. We will not solve the problem if we do not address mental health and substance abuse.

You also recently passed an order for the city to look at where it might be able to build housing on city-owned land.

That was an executive directive, because the city owns hundreds of acres of land, so let’s build there because, you know, of course, one obstacle is neighborhood opposition.

To read more from The New Yorker about how Mayor Bass intends to overcome neighborhood opposition and other obstacles to end homelessness in LA, click here.

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Jen Psaki, former Biden Press Secretary, had her first television show yesterday. This 👇 was the centerpiece of greatness.

If you have 6+ minutes to watch this segment, this may make your day.

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It is the first day of Spring. 💐💐💐💐💐💐💐💐