Trump says he’s going to be arrested on Tuesday.

Trump writes on Truth Social that he expects an indictment on Tuesday and calls for protests. https://t.co/TGi6fwhOR8 pic.twitter.com/sOvTRqPI5c

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) March 18, 2023

This could very well be true. There have been a lot of signals that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is about to indict Trump. Manhattan prosecutors requested meeting with law enforcement to go through the details about how arresting a former president would work.

The former president has around-the-clock Secret Service protection, raising questions about how routine procedures — such as fingerprinting — would work amid a coterie of armed guards and obvious security concerns surrounding an ex-president. Fox News, citing a source, said that Manhattan prosecutors had requested a sit-down Thursday to “discuss logistics for some time next week, which would mean that they are anticipating an indictment next week.” 

I understand that if there is an indictment, Trump’s lawyers would be notified first, before the indictment is made public. S it’s possible Trump has been notified that he will need to surrender, or at least be available to be taken into custody, on Tuesday.

This would indicate that Trump intends to stay and fight rather than flee the country. He seems to believe an indictment will boost his election chances. Ed Kilgore at New York magazine:

Whether an indictment would hurt Trump’s campaign is a separate issue. Trump certainly does not think it would end his reelection bid. In fact, he told the Associated Press that criminal charges wouldn’t deter him in the slightest. “Oh, absolutely, I won’t even think about leaving,” he said this week. “Probably, it’ll enhance my numbers.”

That may sound like just another outlandish Trumpian brag, but it’s actually entirely plausible — in the short term at least. There is no reason to assume that a criminal indictment will change any minds among the MAGA faithful. Trump clearly benefited from both of his congressional impeachments among rank-and-file Republicans. And Trump’s base has been instructed for years that the “deep state,” with its tentacles extending into every branch of government, is determined to remove him from the picture in order to resume its persecution of “patriots” and its globalist destruction of the U.S.

It’s also the case that the Stormy Daniels payoff story is an old one that everybody’s heard. It’s also among the least interesting of the many legal problems Trump is facing now. There are arguments floating around that it’s to Trump’s advantage that this is the case going forward first, because he can so easily claim this is just old fake news, and Alvin Bragg is just grasping at anything to stop Trump from being elected POTUS again. We’ll see. See also Josh Marshall, Does It Matter That the Stormy Case Goes First?

In other news, yesterday a Washington DC district court judge ordered that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran has to testify to Jack Smith’s investigation. Corcoran can’t claim attorney-client privilege because of the crime-fraud exception.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I’m looking forward to corned beef and Guinness this evening. You, too, I hope.

I am reminded that we’re nearing the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Spencer Ackerman has a retrospective at The Nation, The Unlearned Lessons From the War in Iraq. “You’ll drive yourself crazy if you try to view US foreign policy through a lens of logical consistency rather than according to its signature mix of material interest and exceptionalist fantasy,” he writes.

U.S. foreign policy has been more about what sells at home and what helps win elections than about what’s really best for the U.S. and the world for a long time. Consider the Republican Party. Way back when, before Pearl Harbor, U.S. conservatives were isolationists. Some of them even admired Hitler. Then after World War II they flippy-flopped to being proactive hawks ready to send troops anywhere to fight the Commies before they attacked us.

By 1950 U.S. foreign policy was mostly about shutting down anything that looked like less than 100 percent support for capitalism. That’s why U.S. and British intelligence agencies orchestrate a coup in 1955 that ousted Iran’s democratically elected and secularist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq. This was mostly because Mossadeq wanted to nationalize his nation’s oil industry. Can’t have that. But this bit of stupidity set up a world of hurt for a lot of people, including us, in the future. U.S. “tough on commies” foreign policy tended to backfire a lot, such as its support for the dictator Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, which you might remember didn’t end well, either. 

Democrats got sucked into Red Scare hysteria too, of course. Lyndon Johnson sent troops into Vietnam because he feared being accused of “losing” Vietnam the way the U.S. had “lost” China. A “soft on Communism” label was a hard thing to overcome.

Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks with Vietnam so he could win an election against Johnson — which resulted in the Vietnam War continuing even longer and Nixon owning it.  Did Ronald Reagan negotiate with the Ayatollah Khomeini to sabotage hostage negotiations so he could win an election against Jimmy Carter? Reagan really didn’t have anything to do with the Iran hostage release, according to everyone who knows anything about it, but Reagan got the credit anyway.

I don’t have the strength to review the messes made by Ronald Reagan (Lebanon, anyone? Iran Contra? Grenada?), but it has to be said the high point of movement conservatism was probably the moment that Reagan went to Berlin in 1987 and said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  Or something like that. Republicans liked to give Reagan sole credit for ending the Soviet Union, but in truth he was a very tiny part of a much bigger picture. The USSR likely would have ended as it did had Reagan never gone to Berlin, or even been elected President. Try telling a Republican that, though.

Bill Clinton wasn’t really a foreign policy president as much as he was a globalization president, which is a whole ‘nother mess that needs its own discussion. But toward his last couple of years in office he really was focused on the rising threat of Islamic terrorism and tried to warn the incoming Bush II administration about it. The Bushies blew him off and ignored al Qaeda, until September 11, 2001.

People forget that a majority of House Democrats (126 to 81) voted against the Iraq War Resolution in October 2022. Had they all voted against it, it still would have passed with 215 Republican votes. It was the Senate Democrats who let us down on that one. The Dems had 50 seats in the Senate, plus the former Republican turned Independent James Jeffords was caucusing with the Dems. They could have stopped it. But 29 Democrats voted with 48 Republicans to pass the thing. There’s a list of who voted how at Wikipedia.

My impression is that many of those Dems voted for the damn resolution because they didn’t want to be blamed for being soft on terrorism. Hillary Clinton later tried to claim that she didn’t realize Bush was going to really invade Iraq. Yeah, right.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy decisions don’t stand much scrutiny either, frankly. Providing support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen was an indefensible thing to do, IMO. But then … Donald Trump? Who wanted to destroy NATO? Who negotiated with the Taliban? Who sent Turkish President Erdogan an engraved invitation to go ahead and wipe out our Kurdish allies in northern Syria (because “betraying the Kurds” is another recurring theme in U.S. foreign policy)? Who enabled a mass release of ISIS prisoners?

Trump’s so-called foreign policy was what you’d expect if you put a spoiled 9-year-old who had already flunked third-grade geology in charge of foreign policy. But he got one pass after another because the Republican Party, the one-time party of foreign policy toughness and anti-Communist hawks, protected him.

And now the Republican party can’t even rally behind defending Ukraine, because a big chunk of younger (as in under age 60) Republicans are isolationists who admire Vlad Putin and would possibly turn the nation over to Viktor Orban if they could. A portion of the Republican Party has come full circle to about where it was in 1940. From the Washington Post:

At a dinner named after the former president at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering earlier this month, failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake pushed a very different message to the party’s activists.

I would like to say that I flinch a bit whenever Democrats make defending Ukraine all about doing something nice for another democracy. That’s fine, but there’s also the little matter of not risking a wider war in Europe. If Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine he is likely to want to start taking nibbles out of other eastern European countries that used to be part of the USSR. He’s got to be stopped somewhere. Might as well do it in Ukraine. If Putin can be stopped without risking the lives of U.S. troops, so much the better. And if stopping Putin in Ukraine gives Xi Jinping second thoughts about invading Taiwan, better still. It’s very possible that not stopping Putin is what could lead to World War III. See, for example, World War II.

Speaking of Vladimir Putin, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for him.

Well, happy St. Paddy’s, anyway.

I keep reading that the Republicans have a DeSantis problem or that Florida has a DeSantis problem, but in Politico I read that DeSantis has a Florida problem. Get this:

In the run-up to the primary, DeSantis solidified his place as Trump’s chief rival for the nomination largely based on an electability argument. He was MAGA, like Trump, but without the former president’s baggage or toxicity to moderate Republicans and independents — the kind of voters Republicans will need to run Joe Biden from the White House next year.

But as DeSantis edges closer to announcing, he is testing the limits of how hard right he can go without undermining his rationale for running in the first place. It’s a significant risk in a primary in which Republican voters — sore from losing the White House in 2020 and a less-than-red-wave midterm two years later — are desperate to nominate a candidate who can win.

“In a way, the Republican dominance of the Florida Legislature may end up hurting DeSantis because his proposals can become reality,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona. “That may help him in a primary in Iowa or Texas or South Dakota, but in a general election in Arizona, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, it could be ruinous for him.”

To restate, DeSantis might be in trouble because the Florida legislature is likely to pass some of his hard-right policy proposals in the next few months, which would be a big screaming warning that as President he would actually do what he promises to do, which would turn off voters. Reflect on that for a bit.

His most recent thing is to call for a ban on abortions past six weeks’ gestation. That by itself should destroy him in a general election for POTUS. How many times must Republicans get beaten up over this issue before they get the memo? Or does DeSantis think he can somehow pivot to a more “moderate” position once he get the nomination? I don’t think so.

A DeSantis spokesperson declined to comment. But a top Republican consultant in Tallahassee, who was granted anonymity to talk freely about DeSantis, said there is a logic behind the governor’s moves.

“The bottom line is that if he decides to run he wants to have the most robust cultural and policy conservative list of accomplishments,” said the consultant. “This makes him impervious to hits from the right.”

Taken to logical conclusions, this seems to be saying that no presidential candidate who can win a Republican nomination has a prayer in a general election. At some point the Republican Party may need to address this.

One New York Republican, granted anonymity to speak freely about the party primary dynamics, said a six-week ban viewed as unpalatably restrictive to some will be considered too weak by some anti-abortion rights purists in the right wing of the GOP.

“This position is so scrutinized that you’ll lose a core constituency in allowing for any abortion at any time,” said the person, who is partial to Trump. “Six weeks sounds like the middle ground that a political operative would advise you to take. Six weeks is not what the Christian right voters will accept. There is a definite bifurcation between political realities and politically paid staffers.”

There is a definite bifurcation between the Republican base and the sense God gave turnips, in other words. See also S.C. Republicans propose bill that could subject women who have abortions to the death penalty. So “pro life” they are.

Speaking of bifurcations, one may be closing between Trump and justice. Dozens of Mar-a-Lago staff, from servers to aides, are subpoenaed in classified documents probe is the latest at CNN. Jack Smith is also pushing to get Evan Corcoran to testify.

And yesterday we learned the Fulton County special grand jury heard testimony we didn’t even know about.

Fulton County investigators have an audio recording of a phone call that former President Donald Trump made to the Georgia House speaker to push for a special session to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Fulton County special grand jury, which investigated Trump’s actions in the state after the 2020 election, heard the recording of Trump’s call to David Ralston, according to five of the jurors who spoke anonymously to the AJC. A source confirmed to CNN the existence of the recording, which hasn’t been made public.

Don’t take too long, folks.

I blame the tech bros. Edward Ongweso Jr. writes at Slate,

If the technological innovation coming out of Silicon Valley is as important as venture capitalists insist, the past few days suggest they haven’t been very responsible stewards of it. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank late last week may have resulted from a perfect storm of ugly events. But it was also emblematic of a startup ecosystem and venture-capital apparatus that are too unstable, too risky, and too unmoored from reality to be left in charge of something as important as the direction of our technological development.

As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto. All weekend, they screamed that there would be an economic collapse, that they were concerned about the workers, that the Federal Reserve was responsible, that-that-that … until finally, on Sunday evening, they got what they wanted: the government promising full account access to all Silicon Valley Bank depositors.

The Republicans are screaming about bank bailouts today. It’s important to stipulate that the bank is not getting a bailout. It is gone. “The banks’ equity and bond holders are being wiped out,” said the official at Treasury. “They took a risk as owners of the securities, they will take the losses,” it says here. The DEPOSITORS will get back the money they had on deposit, including deposits in excess of the $250,000 that already was insured by FDIC. But this money is not coming out of our taxes. It is being paid out of the Deposit Insurance Fund, which is funded with quarterly fees assessed on financial institutions and interest on government bonds.

But the venture capitalists helped cause the freaking problem by being willing to fund just about anything with “tech” attached to it. The Silicon Valley bros got used to snapping their fingers and getting wads of cash for it. Ongweso continues,

For over a decade, low interest rates have allowed venture capitalists to accumulate huge funds to give increasingly unprofitable firms with unrealistic business models increasingly larger valuations—one 2021 analysis found that not only were 90 percent of U.S. startups that were valued over $1 billion unprofitable, but that most would remain so. Give metens of billions of dollars and a $120 billion valuation and someday, somehow, I will replace every taxi driver with gig workers paid subminimum wages—or robot taxis paid no wages—while charging exorbitant fares for rides, increasing pollution, and adding to traffic. Or not, and I will sell off all the science-fiction projects I’ve promised, but still fail to make a profit.

Over the last year, rising interest rates to combat inflation have meant less free money for science-fiction projects, pressuring investors to change their entire approach and actually fund realistic ventures at realistic valuations with realistically sized funds and deals. Drops in valuations meant smaller checks, which meant smaller deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, and more and more withdrawals as startups ran out of cash themselves. It also meant the bonds SVB bought were now worth less than when purchased, so they’d have to be sold at a loss to generate some liquidity, so that clients could withdraw their deposits.

Martin Levine wrote last week at Bloomberg that the SVB collapse was a problem having to do with venture-capital backed tech startups, not the financial system generally. And here Ongweso is saying the same thing. Until recently the tech startups were having big wads of cash thrown at them by the venture capital people, so they didn’t need business loans. Since SVB wasn’t being called on to make a lot of business loans, it put its money into long-range fixed-rate securities, which are usually safe unless there is inflation. But there was inflation, and SVB’s securities lost market value,  and suddenly the bank was short of cash on hand to cover deposits.

Some writers at the Wall Street Journal put it more succinctly: “Bankers that grew up in the easy-money era following the 2008 crisis failed to ready themselves for rates to rise again. And when rates went up, they forgot the playbook.” Jeez, that was just 15 years ago, people.

Andy Kessler writes at the Wall Street Journal,

SVB got caught with its pants down as interest rates went up. Everyone, except SVB management it seems, knew interest rates were heading up. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has been shouting this from the mountain tops. Yet SVB froze and kept business as usual, borrowing short-term from depositors and lending long-term, without any interest-rate hedging.

The bear market started in January 2022, 14 months ago. Surely it shouldn’t have taken more than a year for management at SVB to figure out that credit would tighten and the IPO market would dry up. Or that companies would need to spend money on salaries and cloud services. Nope, and that was mistake No. 2. SVB misread its customers’ cash needs. Risk management seemed to be an afterthought. The bank didn’t even have a chief risk officer for eight months last year. CEO Greg Becker sat on the risk committee.

Mistake number 1, Kessler wrote, was what they did with the mountain of venture capital startup cash that they had on deposit. “There was no way SVB was going to initiate $131 billion in new loans. So the bank put some of this new capital into higher-yielding long-term government bonds and $80 billion into 10-year mortgage-backed securities paying 1.5% instead of short-term Treasurys paying 0.25%.”

I’m reading now that an accounting firm called KPMG gave both Silicon Valley and Signature banks  clean bills of health just days before they both failed. (Signature was big into crypto; the feds just took it over, too.) Is KPMG the new Arthur Andersen?

But at the Guardian, Joseph Stiglitz puts some of the blame on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and his interest rate hikes. This was bound to put a lot of strain on the financial sector, Stiglitz said.

Now, as a result of Powell’s callous – and totally unnecessary – advocacy of pain, we have a new set of victims, and America’s most dynamic sector and region will be put on hold. Silicon Valley’s startup entrepreneurs, often young, thought the government was doing its job, so they focused on innovation, not on checking their bank’s balance sheet daily – which in any case they couldn’t have done. (Full disclosure: my daughter, the CEO of an education startup, is one of those dynamic entrepreneurs.)

Stiglitz understands the economy a lot better than I do, and there have been many reasons to criticize the interest rate hikes. But I’m leaning more toward Edward Ongweso on this one. The venture capitalists and the tech bros generally have been operating with serious disregard for reality. And anyone managing a bank should have noticed the interest rate hikes, which started just about a year ago. Did SVB take any steps starting a year ago to be sure it had cash on hand? Not that I’ve seen.

Spreaking of Arthur Andersen, I wrote back in 2006 when the Enron boys were on trial that people who become Captains of Industry tend to be very sure of themselves and their ways of doing things. As their companies start to go south, all too often they keep doing the same old thing and figure that with enough time it will all right itself. They will always be proved to be right, if given enough time. If they fail, it’s because someone lacked faith. And this is why these people need to be regulated.

Oh, and Ron DeSantis is going around saying that SVB failed because of its diversity programs. It’s too woke. I’m serious. And here is more proof the Right has a collective IQ of minus seven and should not be trusted with anything more complicated than a squeaky toy.

The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank may be a bigger deal than I first realized. As I live far from Silicon Valley I had never heard of this bank before. Here’s a basic explanation of what happened:

On Friday, regulators took over Silicon Valley Bank, a 40-year-old institution known for lending to tech startups, seizing all deposits. Earlier in the week the company had announced emergency measures in order to preserve its liquidity, leading to a customer bank run. On Friday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took control of the insolvent bank. CNBC called it “the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever.” Thousands of tech companies are now scrambling to figure out what this means for their future. The bank liked to brag that nearly half of all venture-capital funded startups had accounts there. $250,000 is insured by the F.D.I.C. But that’s not much of a comfort to a company like Roku, the creator of a popular digital media player, which had nearly $500 million in the bank, according to an SEC filing.

On the other hand, a company called CAMP that sells toys and play spaces used it for a sales promo:

l hope CAMP gets its money back. Here’s some more background:

The regulation that was put in place for the nation’s biggest banks after the financial crisis includes stringent capital requirements, which means they must have a certain amount of reserves for moments of crisis, as well as stipulations about how diversified their businesses must be.

But Silicon Valley Bank and others its size do not have the same regulatory oversight. In 2018, President Donald J. Trump signed a bill that lessened scrutiny for many regional banks. Silicon Valley Bank’s chief executive, Greg Becker, was a strong supporter of the move. Among other things, it changed requirements for the amount of cash that these banks had to keep on their balance sheets to protect against shocks.

The financial sector guys cannot learn. They always think they’re smarter than the last financial sector guys who screwed up and caused a meltdown. But they aren’t. Anyway, I understand the fallout of this on other financial institutions has been mixed.

Word is that Peter Thiel had many millions in Silicon Valley Bank but pulled it all out last week at the first sign of trouble, and that’s what precipitated the run on the bank.

You mean the guy who was touting crypto and trashing critics while he was selling crypto? That guy? Shocker! SVB Collapse: Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Withdrew Millions – Bloomberg https://t.co/sfiPXUP8Iv

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) March 11, 2023

Matt Levine writes at Bloomberg that part of SVB’s problem was that it had a lot of its assets in fixed-rate bonds rather than in loans, which means rising interest rates really messed it up. The bank was buying fixed-rate bonds with money on deposit because the tech startup companies it catered to had lots of cash from equity investors and didn’t need loans. I’m sure that’s an oversimplification of the situation, but that’s how I understand it. Banks usually profit from higher interest rates, because they raise the interest rates on loans. But SVB was stuck with long-term fixed-rate bonds, and the market rate of the bonds was going down. At the same time, the startup clients were withdrawing deposits to keep their companies afloat during a slow time for IPOs.

Anyway, on Wednesday the bank sold almost all of its securities, some $21 billion worth, at a $1.8 billion loss. Then the bank tried to sell $2.25 billion in new shares, but failed. Then Theil pulled his money out and told all his clients to pull their money out. SVB was done for.

There’s been much snickering about all the Silicon Valley libertarians who hate government regulation but now want the feds to bail out Silicon Valley Bank. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, perhaps there are no libertarians in a bank failure.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Jack Smith is about to ask a judge to reject Trump’s privilege claims.

A federal judge is set to hear arguments Thursday over special counsel Jack Smith’s push to extract more grand-jury testimony from a lawyer for Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the escalating investigation into the handling of classified documents at the former president’s South Florida estate.

In a closed-door court proceeding, Mr. Smith’s team is expected to urge Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the District Court for the District of Columbia to reject attorney-client privilege claims that Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, raised on behalf of the former president during a January grand-jury appearance. Following that appearance, prosecutors asked Judge Howell to invoke the so-called crime-fraud exception to bypass the privilege claims and compel Mr. Corcoran to provide more testimony, the people said.

That exception applies in instances where there is reason to believe that legal advice has been used in furtherance of a crime. The move to invoke it suggests that Mr. Smith’s team suspects Mr. Trump or his allies used Mr. Corcoran’s services in such a way.

Another baby step toward a Trump indictment. Also too, former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis has been censured by a Colorado Supreme Court judge for making false statements about the 2020 election.

Speaking of false statements, this has turned into Laughing at Tucker Carlson Week. And everywhere I see the question — Why didn’t Fox settle with Dominion? For example, yesterday Erik Wemple wrote, “Perhaps Fox News now wishes it had settled?“

The several truckloads of exhibits filed by Dominion are not just being gleefully made public by most news media. Television news people not at Fox are also connecting specific emails and texts to what was being said on Fox the same day. There is absolutely no question that the Fox program hosts knew good and well that Sidney Powell et al. had no evidence for the stolen election claims. Some of them — Lou Dobbs, for example — may have desperately wanted to believe the claims, but he was told otherwise by multiple people at Fox.

So why didn’t Fox settle? David Kurtz at TPM may have the answer.

Fox News viewers don’t care whether the network was “in the wrong.” If anything, they celebrate and reward Fox News’ transgressive behavior. If Fox News takes the case to trial and loses, it and its viewers can easily dismiss it as another rigged, liberal, stabbed-in-the-back setup by their foes. They will all be victims together of Dominion’s jihad against them.

But that doesn’t work if Fox News settles. It’s not the admission of wrongdoing that’s the issue: It’s the capitulation. That is harder to spin up into a made-up narrative of victimization and fighting the good fight.

Along those lines, there is some grumbling on the Right that Tucker must’ve gotten reined in by “the regime.” Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit (don’t go there if you have high blood pressure or heart disease) complained that Tucker’s shows since the release of his propaganda video have been subdued. This was because of threats (?) issued by Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, Hoft said, plus “Now there are suggestions that Rupert Murdoch and the FOX News brass got to Tucker and changed his show plan.” So, in Hoft’s tiny mind, “Rupert Murdoch and the FOX News brass” are just part of the “regime.” And Tucker capitulated. It’s like Tucker Carlson works for Fox News, or something. Wow.

Today, Paul Waldman is thanking Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson. Calling Carlson’s efforts amateurish, Waldman writes that, “Displaying snippets of video in which the Jan. 6 rioters were momentarily calm is the equivalent of a murder suspect saying, ‘Why aren’t we talking about all the people I didn’t kill?’”

I wrote a few days ago that it seems the Right is having a harder time sticking to one set of talking points any more. Boy howdy, are we seeing that now. Tucker Carlson’s attempt to establish January 6 Trutherism is getting little support even from within Fox News.

In a remarkable segment Tuesday night, Fox News host Bret Baier and congressional reporter Chad Pergram effectively counter-programmed Tucker Carlson’s Jan. 6 whitewash from the night before.

The segment starts off as you might expect, touting Carlson’s “new” surveillance video containing images that “were hidden from the public for more than two years.” But then you can almost hear the tires screeching and the gears grinding as Baier hits the breaks and reverses course, kicking it to a pre-recorded report from Pergram on the Hill, where pushback was fierce all day.

The segment ends with an amazing and hilarious “to be sure” closing from Baier: “And to be clear, no one here at Fox News condones any of the violences that happened on Jan. 6.

Before Baier’s show, Fox News didn’t run a single segment yesterday about Tucker’s video, it says here. You’d think Rupert would rather you didn’t notice it.

Republicans in Congress nearly all pushed back against Tucker’s attempt at a Whitewash. One of the exceptions was Josh Hawley, who supported Carlson’s propaganda.

Let’s review:

Carlson also said yesterday that the video of Hawley running was “propaganda” because other senators ran from the mob also. Um, Tucker, a mob? Weren’t they just tourists? Peaceful protesters? Get your story straight, dude.

See also House GOP faces a new Jan. 6 headache, courtesy of Tucker Carlson at Politico. In brief, the Republican Congress Critters have mostly wanted January 6 to go away. They aren’t happy about having to address it again.

And then last night Dominion dumped a whole lot more court filings, which stomped all over Tucker’s stunt. Last night this was the top headline on the WaPo site:

Tucker also got blasted by all the late night comics.

Last night Aaron Blake at WaPo wrote 4 takeaways from the new Dominion-Fox lawsuit documents that’s worth reading (no paywall). And Greg Sargent writes Fox News texts point to the right’s long war on the truth (no paywall). The Fox News hosts “saw the truth as a threat to their hold on their viewers,” Sargent wrote.

The Georgia legislature is about to give itself the power to override voters and remove county prosecutors from office for, um, reasons. The New York Times:

Two of the measures under consideration would create a new state oversight board that could punish or remove prosecutors for loosely defined reasons, including “willful misconduct.” A third would sharply reduce the number of signatures required to seek a recall of a district attorney.  …

…In the Republican-controlled legislature, as of Friday afternoon, the prospects seemed favorable for the bills creating an oversight committee. They were dimmer for the recall election bill, which would lower the number of registered voters required to sign a petition to prompt a recall of prosecutors from the current 30 percent, which is standard for local elected offices, to just 2 percent. The measure was introduced after some high-profile Trump supporters in Georgia promoted the idea of a recall campaign against Ms. Willis, even though such an effort would be unlikely to succeed in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold.

Of course this is all about shutting down Fani Willis. We don’t know how close she is to indictments. If this measure is signed into law, which is expected to happen in a week or two, I wonder if she’ll speed things up.

One of the guests on MSNBC last night mentioned that Georgia law already allows for the removal of corrupt prosecutors, although I couldn’t find anything more about that on the Web. But all over the country there are Republican legislatures moving to take over county and city departments and offices currently run by Democrats, often elected Democrats.

But this isn’t new. Back in 2011 I wrote about “Martial Law in Michigan.” Then Gov. Rick Snyder and the Republican-controlled legislature were passing laws that allowed them to cancel city governments and appoint “emergency” city managers with dictatorial powers. The cities so canceled tended to be places that had lost their industrial base, usually some auto manufacturing plants, and were struggling with much reduced tax revenue. And they also tended to have large Black populations that voted for Democrats. But the emergency managers often had no experience with running cities; they were cost-cutters. They swooped in and cut services, sold public parks to private companies, and famously destroyed the Flint water supply.

Here in Missouri the legislature just voted to put the St. Louis police department under the control of a state board rather than the mayor of St. Louis. The mayor of St. Louis, you might remember, is a Democratic Black woman, Tishaura Jones.

St. Louis has a big problem with violent crime. But a big reason for that is the state’s asinine gun laws. St. Louis desperately needs tougher gun control laws to get the gun violence under control, but the state won’t let the city toughen its own laws. Instead their solution is to put the city police department under control of a panel appointed by the state’s wingnut governor. The St. Louis police union is fine with this, of course. You might remember the St. Louis police department has some issues. Like this.

The state is also making another attempt to remove St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, also a Black woman. The first time they were trying to protect Mark and Patricia McCloskey. That didn’t go anywhere. But recently there was a terrible incident in which a young woman lost her legs in an auto accident. The driver who caused the accident was under felony indictment for a 2020 robbery but was out on bond. And the driver’s case does reveal some sloppy work by the prosecutor’s office; he had violated bond multiple times yet somehow was still out, fallen through the cracks. So it’s going to be harder to protect Gardner this time. The governor plans to appoint someone to replace Gardner and won’t say if he will allow a special election to allow the people to choose their own prosecutor. I’m guessing not.

Back to the New York Times:

The proposals are part of a broader push by conservative lawmakers around the country to rein in prosecutors whom they consider too liberal, and who in some cases are refusing to prosecute low-level drug crimes or enforce strict new anti-abortion laws.

Republicans these days hate democracy. They hate voters. They want fascism.

While the recent CPAC convention was going on, never-Trump Republicans were having a smaller meeting nearby. The mood was bleak.

The former Bush speechwriter turned columnist David Frum compared their effort to reform the party to blazing a landing strip in the middle of the jungle and simply waiting for planes to land. Former congressional candidate Clint Smith, who switched his party affiliation from Republican to Independent to challenge Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), described his state’s GOP as a forest of trees killed by an invasive species of beetle that crawls under bark to poison from the inside. Panels for the event included “Looking to 2024: Hope and Despair — but Mostly Despair” and “Can the GOP survive?”

If it all felt a bit dark at times, it was a reflection of the mood of some headliners.

“Trump is a cancer that’s now metastasized,” said former Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), shortly after wrapping the latter panel. “So it’s going to kill the party more.”

Just to illustrate what we’re up against, Tucker Carlson (predictably) just released cherry-picked surveillance footage of the January 6 violence to argue that this was a peaceful protest. And just as predictably, the Right has bought it. The right-wing web sites today have all declared that Tucker has “debunked” the “myth” that the January 6 insurrection was violent. Just like good Nazis, they believe what they’re told to believe.

So, yes, we’re in big trouble here.

MSNBC has been running a four-part series on Rudy Giuliani, “When Truth Isn’t Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story.”  There is one more episode to go. It’s been pretty good, although it hasn’t shown me anything new. However, I had forgotten that Rudy Giuliani was, briefly, the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. This was in 2007, before the primaries had started. By December 2007, he was fading.

There were a number of reasons for the fade. News stories had come out about misappropriations of funds while he was mayor, for example. There were a lot of criticisms of his primary calendar stragtegy. He seemed disinteresed in rural areas far from NYC, for example. But a larger reason, the series said, may have been that he didn’t have anything to run on other than September 11. His past positions on the culture issues, especially abortion and gay rights, was way to the left of the party, so he couldn’t go that route. Instead he went to one campaign event after another talking about Islamic terrorism and how he had handled the September 11 attacks. He was like a one-hit wonder whose hit was now an oldie. He was stuck in the past.

Trump seems to me to be falling into a similar hole. His current campaign seems largely to be based on his 2016 campaign, as the outsider who is promising to go to Washington and bust up the old, corrupt regime. It’s as if he wants us to forget he was POTUS for four years already. But at the same time, he also is running on getting revenge for 2020.

The big polling companies don’t seem to be polling on the alleged fraud in the 2020 election any more. The most recent poll I could find was from last July. But that poll and those that went before pretty consistently showed that just under a third of respondents believed the Big Lie, and close to two thirds did not. Add to that the fact that election deniers overall flamed out in the 2022 midterms, I’d say this is not a viable issue for the 2024 presidential race.

As in 2020, Trump is making promises he doesn’t know how to keep (“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated”). Now he’s promising to end the war in Ukraine. Anyone who cares what happens in Ukraine surely would not trust Trump with any part of it. Those who trust Trump probably don’t give a hoo-haw about Ukraine, one way or another.

I admit I didn’t believe Trump could win in 2016 until election night. But subsequent analysis of voters showed us he got the “what the hell” vote, people who really weren’t supporters of either candidate and made up their minds at the last minute. That’s much less likely to happen in 2024. People know him now.

And then there’s Ron DeSantis. DeSantis was in California this weekend running against covid restrictions. I don’t know how Californians overall feel about covid restrictions, but now that they’re all lifted, exactly what point is Ron making here, other than he’s willing to sacrifice lives for the sake of the economy? Florida has a much higher death rate (402 per 100,000 people) from covid than California (255 per 100,000 people). Someone who could do math could probably calculate the number of Floridians who died who wouldn’t have died had they lived in California.

DeSantis seems to be running on gender issues more than Trump, although Trump is running against drag queens and trans women in sports too. I’m not seeing much in the way of recent polling on gender issues. What percentage of Americans are likely to cast votes based on candidates’ positions on drag queens, I wonder? I have no idea. But I doubt the drag queen issue will have the same traction next year as, say abortion.

I’ve already said DeSantis has peaked already. I could be wrong about that. But I’m not seeing anything about his campaign that would appeal to normal people. He and Trump are both competing for the same voting block, seems to me, but that voting block isn’t big enough to carry a national election, I don’t believe, barring some real meltdown by the Democrats.

Where is the Right going now? I liked this description of the recent CPAC convention by Ben Jacobs at New York:

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was once a marquee event on the political calendar where Republicans seeking the favor of the party’s conservative base would attempt to woo a crowd of right-wing activists and diehards. In 2015, the last time there was a competitive Republican presidential primary, a dozen candidates showed up, representing all wings of the party from Chris Christie to Ted Cruz. And they weren’t the only ones there, it was a marquee event for the entire right-wing ecosystem with seemingly every group represented. Eight years later, the vibe was entirely different. The 2023 CPAC felt like a mall after all but one of its big department stores has shut down — an emptier, jankier, lower-rent version of conferences past. The rooms were more deserted, the vendors more downmarket, and speakers a little less important.

On the other hand, Molly Jong-Fast writes at Vanity Fair that Trump and his tribe are still dangerous. She says the vibe at CPAC was more authoritarian than in the past. “Rather than ‘Make America Great Again,’ the vibe, at times, was more like ‘Let’s Make America Hungary.'” And Trump is now explicitly running against the Republican party. “We had a Republican Party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open-border zealots and fools,” he said. “But we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush.”

I don’t think this “movement” has anywhere else to go but into terrorism and violence.

That said, this is just for fun.

This is the last day of CPAC. They go by so fast. And so often. CPAC is supposed to be annual but it feels as if they have one every other month.

CPAC’s chairman, Matt Schalpp, has been accused of grabbing the crotch of a male Herschel Walker staffer, which may be why there are empty seats at the current event. It’s being held just outside Washington, DC, I understand, so filling the seats shouldn’t be that hard. See The Sad, Desolate Scenes of CPAC 2023 at The New Republic.

On Friday, Donald Trump Jr. attempted a “Willy Wonka” moment by telling people there were candy bars with golden tickets under some seats. They were VIP tickets to his father’s reception today. After people checked under their own seats they checked under the empty seats around them. Apparently the stunt didn’t elevate the prevailing sour mood.

Nick Fuentes was removed from the convention yesterday.

“We removed Nick Fuentes from his attempt to attend our conference. His hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with the mission of CPAC,” Matt Schlapp said in a statement posted on Instagram.

I don’t know why they bothered. They aren’t fooling anybody but themselves. After Fuentes was kicked out his supporters hung out outside the convention center and heckled the attendees.

Outside the event, based on videos he posted on Telegram, Fuentes’ supporters walked the streets around the venue and hurled bigoted vitriol at prominent CPAC attendees.

“You work for Jews! What’s wrong with you,” they shouted at one man.

“You’re on a gay date!” they yelled at another.

Oh, and Nikki Haley was heckled by Trump supporters.

Usually anyone thinking of running for POTUS as a Republican would be at CPAC. ABC reports,

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who are seen as possible 2024 hopefuls, are among those staying away — with some opting instead to attend a donor retreat hosted by the anti-tax Club for Growth.

“Ten years ago, [CPAC] was an opportunity to test your messages to conservative leaders and influencers all over the country and to have a big audience get to know you from the podium. And I don’t think that’s where it is today,” said one aide to a possible 2024 candidate. “Last time I was there, it almost felt more like a college crowd than it did a serious thinker crowd.”

Possibly the biggest headlines of the convention were made by Steve Bannon, who declared war on Fox News.

Nobody likes Fox News right now. Unfortunately, Fox’s ratings are doing just fine. At the same time, there are reports Trump is now “shadowbanned” at Fox News. Matt Stieb writes at New York,

According to four Trump aides who spoke with Semafor, the former president is now facing an unofficial ban at Fox News, with the network refusing to book him or even talk much about him in the context of the Republican presidential primary. “It’s certainly — however you want to say, quiet ban, soft ban, whatever it is — indicative of how the Murdochs feel about Trump in this particular moment,” said one aide. Another said they’ve heard directly from people at Fox News that the policy exists.

While the network did not respond to a request for comment, the approach is playing out on television: Trump hasn’t been on Fox News since September, when its hosts rallied around him in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid and he told Sean Hannity that he could declassify documents by “thinking about it.” They even skipped his trip last week to East Palestine, Ohio — a major talking point in the debate over the environmental disaster. Meanwhile, future 2024 also-ran Vivek Ramaswamy has been on the network four times in the ten days since he announced his run. By the metric of showing up on TV, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appears to be the favorite, appearing on Fox shows four times in three days this week.

There was a time it seemed everyone on the Right spoke with one voice, as if they all received the same talking points of the day and stuck to it. In 2001 they were all saying the outgoing Bill Clinton staff vandalized the White House, for example. Saddam Hussein ordered the 9/11 attacks. Democrats politicized Paul Wellstone’s funeral. John Kerry lied about his war experiences. It doesn’t matter that none of those things were true; the righties got the memo, and they all sang the same tune for days on end. But they can’t pull off that kind of unity any more. And I don’t see them pulling together anytime soon.