We’ve got a potentially big news day tomorrow – mostly focusing on congressional testimony. At 9:30 AM and 10 AM Attorney General Bill Barr and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin will appear before the the respective subcommittees of the House Appropriations subcommittee. They both have a lot we’d like answered on the Mueller Report and President Trump’s taxes. But it’s possible they’ll punt, arguing that that’s not what these hearings are about. These are appropriations hearing, budgeting and management of their departments.
Meanwhile the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing about White Nationalism. That’s also at 10 AM.
The witness list for the White Nationalism hearing is as follows. Read More
In recent years we’ve witnessed the increasing ideological marriage of the Israeli Likud and the American GOP. Nor is it just ideological and cultural. There is increasingly transnational cooperation, with longtime Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently intervening in US politics on Republicans’ behalf. But Likud took a big step today adopting more or less wholesale GOP ‘voter fraud’ tactics to suppress minority voters.
Today is election day in Israel, an election the right again seems likely to win by a narrow but decisive margin. But the big story of the day in the Israeli press is Likud sending party activists to Arab majority precincts with hidden cameras to monitor “voter fraud.” The party reportedly distributed 1200 hidden cameras to activists. Read More
We’ll have the video shortly. But in his brief comments this morning, President Trump said this: Ending child separation is “why you see many more people coming. They’re coming like it’s a picnic. Because let’s go to Disneyland.”
We’re getting the first exit polls out of today’s election in Israel. And they are showing unexpected strength for Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party over Netanyahu’s Likud. It seems clear Gantz’s is doing better than expected. But it’s less clear whether he’s ahead. And if he is ahead the coalition of the right still seems larger, even though a number of parties on the right appear to have come under the electoral threshold. If this seems hyper-cautious, I’ve learned over time, Netanyahu always ends up winning. It’s a law of nature. But things look to be turning out at least a bit differently. Read More
Just a quick update for those following the Israeli election results. Read More
As I wrote last night, with dark humor but very seriously, the iron law of 21st century Israeli politics is that in the final analysis Netanyahu always wins and becomes the next Prime Minister. As indeed, he has. Another fairly fixed rule is that Israeli election nights end better for the right than they begin. This goes all the way back to 1996, with Netanyahu himself.
The simple fact is that there is a not terribly large but hard and durable rightwing majority in Israel. The Israeli Knesset has 120 members. So you need 61 seats to form a government. Recent elections have all gotten just a bit over 60. Yesterday’s election appears to have netted Likud and its ‘natural partners’ 65 seats. Read More
The President appeared a few moments ago before leaving the White House. The gist: he “won” the Mueller investigation. He doesn’t care about the report. And the investigators are guilty of “treason.” Video after the jump. Read More
Bill Barr basically openly embraced the President’s discredited claim that the Obama administration “spied” on his campaign. He later seemed to partly backtracked and then tried to suggest that by “spying” he might just mean court approved surveillance as part of a counter-intelligence investigation. But that’s really just caviling. He’s embracing the President’s conspiracy theories and pushing ahead with what can only be called a retributive new investigation of the origins of the Russia probe. Read More
I want to show you a couple clips from Bill Barr’s testimony today. You’ve heard the headlines but the full language is pretty key.
When Barr said he believed there was “spying” against the Trump campaign he explicitly compared that to spying on civil rights and anti-war activists during the 1960s. In other words, while saying he simply needs to ‘look into it’, he is quite consciously validating Trump’s claims of ‘Deep State’ spying going back two years. This is conscious, intentional and the grossest form of bad faith, pretending concerns about illegal surveillance of domestic dissidents while actually seeking punitive expeditions against people the President has targeted as enemies. Read More