January 9, 2024

Tuesday, January 9, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

Thinking about January 6th.

Here again is the President’s Valley Forge Speech, which has been widely praised as his best speech ever, in case you missed it or if you just want to watch it again and again.

Yesterday, the President delivered inspiring and important words to the congregants of Emanuel A.M.E. Church where 9 people were killed in a racist massacre in 2015.

The President compared "loser" Trump's election denialism to the Confederates who refused to accept they had lost the Civil War.

“They embraced what is known as the 'lost cause,' the self-serving lie that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states' rights. That was a lie, with terrible consequences," Biden said in remarks at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist gunned down nine Black parishioners in 2015.

"Let me be clear for those who don't seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There's no negotiation about that. Now we're living in an era of a second Lost Cause. This time the lie is about the 2020 election, the election in which you made your voices heard and your power known."

They tried to steal an election. Now they’re trying to steal history, telling us that violent mob was – and I quote – a ‘peaceful protest,’” added Biden, who needled Trump by calling him a "loser." (US News and World Report.)

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Vice President Harris is always busy.

Thinking about January 6th.

I was at the United States Capitol the morning of Wednesday, January 6,

2021. And not long after I left, the chaos began. Like Americans everywhere, my husband Doug and I watched with absolute shock, as our Capitol was under siege and the people within it were afraid for their lives. That day, we all saw what our nation could look like if the forces who seek to dismantle our democracy are successful.

January 6 reflects the dual nature of democracy—its fragility and strength.

Fragility because if we are not vigilant, democracy will not stand. Strength because of the rule of law, the principle that everyone should be

treated equally and the commitment to free and fair elections. The resolve I saw in our elected leaders when I returned to the Senate chamber that night— their resolve not to yield but to certify the election, their loyalty not to party or person but to the Constitution of the United

States—reflects the strength of democracy. What was at stake then and now, is the right to have our future decided the

way the Constitution prescribes it: By We, the People.

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Trump on January 6th.

Touch to watch a nostalgic Trump - “There was love in that crowd.”

Trump’s answer to Biden’s Valley Forge speech.

Keep in mind that the President didn’t stutter during his speech at Valley Forge.

Once a bully, always a bully. Once a liar, always a liar.

“A few hours after Biden had given a sweeping denunciation of Trump, calling him a sore loser and a threat to American democracy, the former president made fun of Biden’s childhood speaking impediment.


“Did you see him? He was stuttering through the whole thing,” Trump said to a chuckling crowd on Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa. “He’s saying I’m a threat to democracy.”
“’He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” he continued, pretending to stutter. “Couldn’t read the word.”


The remark was not true; Biden said the word “democracy” 29 times in his speech, never stuttering over it. Trump’s comment also marked a particularly crass form of politics that he has exhibited throughout his career that places politeness and human decency at the center of the 2024 presidential election.” (Washington Post).

https://x.com/ronfilipkowski/status/1743427015288717697?s=61&t=I_Od53CbnPTsbLcD0baXPg

The big plan.

The threat.

What other deranged plans are Trump and his allies conjuring?

Trump’s Bonkers Plan to Weaponize an Archaic Law for Mass Deportations.

AS HE CAMPAIGNS on a pledge to lead an unprecedented crackdown on legal and illegal immigration, former President Donald Trump has vowed to invoke an 18th-century wartime law to help fuel his massive deportation operations. According to three people familiar with the policy deliberations, Trump, his advisers, and allies have been developing legally dubious justifications and theories to give Trump what he would ostensibly need to wield the archaic law as a weapon against the undocumented if he’s elected president again.

If Trump were to try to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for this purpose, it would almost certainly provoke court challenges, since the law is meant to target the actions of foreign governments and regimes during wartime, not alleged criminals, gangs, or non-state actors. One source familiar with the plans — a lawyer who has counseled Trump over the years — tells Rolling Stone the legal justifications under consideration by the ex-president and his associates are “very convoluted and crazy to me.”

This attorney adds, “I really don’t know how you get away with this in court.”

Still, the former president and some of his closest allies are determined to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and put these legal theories to the test, should Trump retake the White House. Trump’s public remarks on the matter have presented little detail about how, exactly, he and his government-in-waiting would circumvent the glaring legal obstacles. The three sources shed light on some of the twisted legal justifications being cooked up by Trump and his inner sanctum.

Last year, right-wing lawyers and policy advocates repeatedly spoke directly to Trump, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, and others in the MAGA elite about these ideas and generally received positive feedback, the people familiar with the situation say. One of the sources read to Rolling Stone from a written memo that had been circulated in the upper ranks of Trumpland, outlining how Trump in a second term could “get this done,” the source says, stressing that this would be supposedly “all legal.”

Invoking the Alien Enemies Act is a key component of the multi-pronged immigration and southern-border clampdown that Trump is planning. The law, first passed in 1798, grants presidents the authority to remove foreign nationals over the age of 14 from countries where the United States is either engaged in a declared war or subject to “invasion or predatory incursion” by their country of origin.

The text of the law presents a number of problems for the would-be mass deportation plans, which opponents would likely attempt to leverage in federal court. Congress has not declared war on any country since World War II, much less on any of the Latin American countries whose citizens Trump would like to deport. Nor has any foreign country invaded the U.S. since the post-war period.

But the sources say a second Trump administration would, for instance, argue in court that cartels, gangs, and drug dealers in Latin America have, essentially, co-opted and corrupted their governments to such a degree that the criminals represent effective state actors. Trump and his senior officials would present documents and evidence that these foreign nations — including Mexico and El Salvador — have lengthy track records of corrupt high-level government and law-enforcement officials being on the payroll of and working with drug cartels and violent criminal groups.

The administration would further claim, according to the sources, that members of cartels and gangs in the U.S. are therefore engaged in an invasion on behalf of foreign narco-states — enabling Trump to use the authorities of the Alien Enemies Act, which in text appears to apply strictly to foreign governments attacking the U.S.

By using the Alien Enemies Act, rather than existing immigration enforcement authority, a future Trump administration could “suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding,” Miller explained during a September talk-radio appearance. Once migrants are relieved of their right to due process and appeals, Trump could more easily carry out a mass deportation operation of the scale he has outlined in campaign speeches.

“I’m pretty skeptical that courts would accept the idea that the current migration conditions would satisfy the requirements of the Alien Enemies Act,” says Adam Cox, a scholar of immigration law at NYU School of Law. “The only times it’s ever been invoked in our history are in cases of actual hostilities with other nations. There’s not really any historical basis for reading this to encompass actions by non-state actors, nor is there any textual basis for doing that.”

Cox says that while the Alien Enemies Act would provide for more expedited removals at scale, there is already “authority to do things that candidate Trump said he wants to do, like mass deportations, even under existing immigration law.” (During the Trump administration, immigration officials expanded the pool of immigrants subject to the “expedited removal” procedure, which limits immigrants’ right to a hearing during a deportation process.)

Aside from the legal hurdles, any attempt to cast Latin American countries — many of which are friendly nations that partner with the U.S. on issues like immigration, trade, and security — as rogue narco-states at war with America is sure to cause a diplomatic rift. Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has bristled at suggestions by Republican lawmakers that Mexico lacks control over its territory and should be subject to U.S. military strikes — if not invasion — against cartels.

Furthermore, two of the sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone that though Trump has been campaigning on using the Alien Enemies Act to target “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members” operating in the United States,” the ex-president envisions using it to cast a much wider dragnet. In private conversations last year, Trump talked to some fellow anti-immigration hardliners about how it wasn’t enough to deport the “bosses” and the drug dealers.

According to the two sources, Trump mentioned that it was important to also use the law to expel their family members and associates and others in their networks who were also noncitizens — even if they weren’t, strictly speaking, “cartel members.”

Though the former president has kept generally quiet in public about how he would try to legally pull off this invocation, at least one veteran of his first administration has publicly referenced this legal argument, even if the former official only sounded partially sold on its feasibility.

In October, George Fishman, a Center for Immigration Studies senior fellow who served as deputy general counsel in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, wrote that though the premise “would be an uphill climb in federal court,” there are arguments existing referencing “the rise of ‘mafia states,’ nations in which ‘criminals have penetrated governments to an unprecedented degree’ and ‘rather than stamping out powerful gangs,’ the ‘governments have instead taken over their illegal operations’ with ‘government officials enrich[ing] themselves … while exploiting the money, muscle, political influence, and global connections of criminal syndicates to cement and expand their own power.’”

Fishman added in his post: “In such situations, a powerful argument might be made that gang or cartel crimes in the U.S. (if rising to the level of an invasion or predatory incursion) have been carried out by foreign governments.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly signaled his interest in using the Alien Enemies Act to grant him the authority to conduct mass deportations. In September, he vowed to “immediately” invoke the act to deport drug dealers, cartel members, and “all known or suspected gang members.”

Trump allies have also backed the logic underlying the former president’s hopes to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, with some going so far as to advocate that the U.S. go to war in Mexico. In March, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Mexico a “narco-terrorist state” and introduced a bill to designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organization and authorize the use of unilateral military force against them.

But so far, Republican state officials have fared poorly when trying to cast immigration as a hostile foreign “invasion” when arguing in court.

Gov. Greg Abbott argued that Texas “retains sovereign authority to defend itself in the event of invasion” in a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration seeking to stop the state from using floating buoys to block immigrants seeking to cross the Rio Grande. A federal court and the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, siding with the Biden administration. Last month, Abbott promised to take his case to the Supreme Court.

But before Trump and his MAGA policy wonks began eyeing the narco-states justification, the ex-president’s government-in-waiting had researched other legal arguments that creative, right-wing attorneys could make to support Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. Some of the ideas that were under discussion last year proved too extreme or flimsy to pass the smell test, even by the often depraved standards of Trumpland.

One idea that was briefly kicked around and discussed with Trump was finding a way to translate his campaign-trial rhetoric — about foreign governments intentionally sending legions of unwanted and violent undocumented immigrants to the U.S. — into actual government documents or legal memoranda.

For years, the 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner has been fond of saying, including at his rallies, that the Mexican government (as well as governments in other unnamed nations on different continents) are deliberately sending their “bad” people to America, so that the U.S. will have to deal with them instead. These foreign leaders are, in Trump’s imagination, purposely seeding migrant caravans with people from their prisons, “mental institutions,” and “insane asylums.” Trump made similar nativist claims during his political rise in 2015 and his time in office, and he continues to do so in his campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination.

And yet, there is barely — if any — shred of evidence, intelligence report, or documentation backing up Trump’s insistence that foreign governments are now intentionally siccing their prisoners and mentally ill on the U.S. in large numbers. Such an outlandish claim, if true, could be used to legally argue that foreign powers are “invading” or attacking America, and therefore provide a pretext for invoking the Alien Enemies Act. However, the absolute dearth of evidence for Trump’s assertion quickly led his current advisers to believe that any attempt to shoehorn those claims into government or legal documents would only make it easier for the courts to strike down Trump’s invocation of the wartime law, two sources familiar with the situation say.

Trump’s apparently firm conviction is not likely to be supported by any classified documents he was shown as president or any well-sourced contemporaneous reporting on the matter. It might, however, have something to do with a movie he’s watched.

According to a former senior administration official and another person close to Trump, he has at times over the years — including in the White House’s West Wing — privately told subordinates that foreign leaders are releasing their “worst” into America “just like in the movie Scarface.”

The bloody 1983 crime epic, directed by Brian De Palma and written by Oliver Stone, stars Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a Cuban refugee who builds a cocaine empire in Miami. The film opens with a sequence stating that Cuba’s Fidel Castro loaded U.S.-bound emigrant boats with “the dregs of his jails,” and that’s how Florida got drug lord Tony Montana — who famously uttered, “SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND,” before going on an infamous gun-toting rampage in his decadent mansion.

God made Trump.

As Robert Reich said, “Trump shared a video today claiming that God has chosen him to be "a shepherd to mankind." This is not funny. This is not parody. This is terrifying.”

Touch to watch the GOP reaction following January 6, 2021. 👇

No answer from Mitch McConnell.

Pence says he believes the FBI didn’t contribute to Jan. 6 riot.

“I’ve heard the many repeated assurances from the FBI that they were not involved and I take them at their word,” Pence

In the 3 years since Jan. 6 attack, nearly 1,300 arrests made.

The Department of Justice said Friday that nearly 1,300 individuals have been arrested and charged for their alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Why it matters: Around 200 of those arrests came in the last six months, signaling that the DOJ’s prosecutorial efforts are still going strong three years after the deadly assault.

Driving the news: In an update sent out marking three years since the attack, the U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. said more than 1,265 defendants from nearly all 50 states had been charged in connection with Jan. 6.

• Nearly 452 have been charged with assaulting a police officer and 123 with using a deadly weapon to do so. Another 11 were charged with assaulting members of the media or destroying their equipment.

• Roughly 71 defendants have been charged with destruction of government property and 56 with theft of government property.

• Over 332 have been charged with “corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding, or attempting to do so,” the update said.

By the numbers: The vast majority of defendants whose cases have been resolved have pleaded guilty, “many of whom faced or will face incarceration at sentencing,” the update said.

• Out of the 718 guilty pleas, 213 involved felonies, including 89 for assaulting a police officer, 41 for obstruction and four for seditious conspiracy.

• Another 171 were found guilty in contested trials, 76 of whom were charged with assaulting an officer.

• Roughly 467 defendants have been sentenced to prison terms, some as high as 12 and a half years. (Axios)

Other than Trump and maybe Stephen Miller, is there anyone more evil than Elise Stefanik?

The woman who claimed to be champion of Israel while attacking the 3 women presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT fully embraced and repeated Trump’s call to free the “January 6 hostages.”

One more thing. This happened too.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) refused to say whether she would vote to certify the result of the 2024 presidential election. Asked if she would like to be Trump’s Running Mate, she also said she would be honored to serve in any capacity in the Trump administration.

Another GOP Presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy says he will pardon all peaceful January 6th protestors on Day 1 as President.

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Trump picks the best people.

JUST IN. An exclusive report has surfaced revealing that Roger Stone engaged in a conversation with a friend in law enforcement about the potential assassination of Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler.

According to a report on Democratic Underground, which references an article from Mediaite, Roger Stone, a political operative, had a conversation with his associate Sal Greco, who was an NYPD officer providing security for Stone, about the potential assassination of House Democrats Jerry Nadler and Eric Swalwell.

The discussion reportedly took place at a restaurant in Florida before the 2020 presidential election.

An audio recording of this conversation, where Stone is heard making threatening comments about the two lawmakers, was obtained by Mediaite.

The source who provided the information believed that Stone's remarks were serious and expressed concern over Stone's discussions about violence with an NYPD officer and other militia groups.

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Roger Stone Spoke With Cop Pal About Assassinating Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler - Democratic Underground

democraticunderground.com/100218582488).

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A message I need. How about you?

Taking a Cue From the Squirrels in My Birdhouse.

Just before 2023 gave way to 2024, my husband and I drove down a mountain, talking about how to manage election-year anxiety. Specifically, my election-year anxiety. We had just spent a few days in a cottage in the woods, and we were jazzed on silence and stillness and the obligation to do nothing but walk together among the trees. To listen to the wind in the trees.

We weren’t making New Year’s resolutions, exactly. We were feeling for ways to carry those days of calm into a troubling new year. I was proposing things like eating by candlelight every night or reading only poems after 5 p.m. My husband was proposing things like hiding my phone.

For most of 2023 I managed to avoid poll-related panic by reminding myself that the election was still more than a year away. There were plenty of other calamities to worry about in the meantime — climate, biodiversity, war, gun violence, racism, health care access and the persecution of my L.G.B.T.Q. neighbors, just for starters. But lurking beneath it all was an understanding of how very much worse such troubles would get if autocrats took control of the American presidency in 2024.

My husband is not very worried about the election. He trusts that American voters aren’t fools. He is able to check the news at night and only a moment later fall into the sleep of winter bears. I, on the other hand, will lie awake if I so much as glance at the headlines after dark

I found I didn’t worry so much while I was out on book tour last fall. There is really nothing like spending time in libraries and bookstores to give a person faith in humanity. I am profoundly direction-impaired, and solo travel can be disorienting for me, every street bewildering in the dark. But inside those little lighted spaces, people were nodding and smiling. People were reaching out for my hands.

They would go home with a book, or sometimes a whole stack of books, and I was reminded yet again of how this commonplace miracle of connection — between writers and readers, between readers and one another — persists across distances. Every time I left a bookshop or a library last fall, I was filled with love for the sweetness in people.

But it’s January now, and there is nothing to distract me from a looming election during which a shocking number of Americans hope to see an aspiring dictator reinstalled in the White House.

My husband and I saw the New Year in as we always do, with our closest friends, and the next morning I woke up smiling. But when I went to the bedroom window to look for my first bird of the year, there were no birds to be seen. A squirrel peered at me from our largest birdhouse but quickly ducked back into the shelter of the leafy nest she’d built inside the box. She raised a litter of babies there last summer, and I’m pretty sure at least one of those youngsters, now grown, was inside with her on that cold New Year’s morning.

When I stepped outside my own house, all was silence. No towhee scratching in the leaf litter. No winter-drab goldfinch picking through seedcrowns in the pollinator garden. No thirsty bluebird at the heated birdbath. No robin harvesting the last of the pokeberries. Not even any crows stalking across the churned soil where our late neighbor’s house so recently stood.

According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on New Year’s Day sets a theme for your year. A robin can be a sign of renewal. A starling suggests adaptability. A crow might mean a year of wit and problem-solving and maybe even a little mischief. What did it mean for the new year to dawn entirely bereft of birds?

I know that songbirds are quiet in cold weather, conserving their energy for warmth. I know they take shelter on gray days when hawks are on the wing, hunting while they can fly without casting a warning shadow. But my first thought on that silent New Year’s morning was not a realistic recognition of the cold or the drear. My first thought was an atavistic, apocalyptic fear: This what it will be like when all the birds are gone.

After an hour of scanning the trees, I finally heard a blue jay, and then the returning call of another, and a moment later the first bird of 2024 appeared. Its colors were muted on that gray day — in birds, the color blue is created not by pigment but by the interaction of light and feather — but the blue jay’s impossible beauty was as clear to me in that instant as it has ever been in all my life of loving blue jays.

The birds weren’t gone, of course. Like the squirrel in the nest box outside our bedroom window and the opossum tucked between the floor joists under our family room, they were only keeping still in the dense protection of pine and cedar, or roosting in the boxes they nested in last spring. In bad weather they always shelter together, sharing warmth — bluebirds in the nest box in our front yard, chickadees in the box under the climbing rose, Carolina wrens in the clothespin bag by the back door.

The natural world does not exist to teach us how to live, much less to match our purposes, and the first-bird game is only a bit of whimsy. But in that moment of whooshing relief, after a blue jay finally flew from a pine, I found my lesson for the coming year. And it had nothing to do with where I keep the phone or how often I check for news, and very little to do with silence or candlelight or even poetry.

To make it through the gathering disquiet, I will need embodied connection. As my wild neighbors did in the uncheery newness of an inhospitable morning, as I did myself in all the lovely places I visited on book tour, and in the company of dear friends on New Year’s Eve, I will need to seek comfort in the warmth of others this year. Whenever the cold creeps in, wherever the dark night pools, I will need to look for others. I will need not pixels but voices. Not distances but reaching hands.

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