Morning Views

 

 Just placed an order with Granddaughter #3 for Girl Scout cookies.

When I was a Girl Scout I went door to door.  No such thing as soliciting online.

The cookies will arrive in less than 2 weeks.

Support your local Girl Scouts.

In the Good News Category

 ... is this written by Jennifer Rubin in the Contrarian

“This is not the healing that the country needed in this moment” 

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on how to build bridges and what compels him to do so 

JENNIFER RUBIN JAN 27

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Maryland Governor Wes Moore (D) has been in office for just over two years, yet he has already made a big impression well beyond his state. That is due, in part, to his leadership in the aftermath of the Frances Scott Key Bridge collapse in March 2024. (By June, he was able to announce the Fort McHenry Channel had been cleared, far faster than many expected.) Moore, forty-six, is a Rhodes scholar, decorated combat veteran, financial entrepreneur, charitable foundation leader, and author of five best-selling books, embodies the “muscular progressivism” that I have written about (tough on public safety, focused on private sector growth, and determined to increase opportunity for all through smart investments in education, childcare, and health care.) His ebullient, sunny personality comes through, whether in a one-on-one conversation or a large gathering.

In an interview on Wednesday, Moore reflected back on the bridge collapse. “I will never forget that first morning—how cold it was and every camera in the world felt like it was there descending upon you. And you needed to give answers.” He rose to the occasion, laying down four markers: bringing closure to victims’ families; clearing the channel as fast as possible; protecting Marylanders from the economic fallout; and rebuilding the bridge. “Every bit of our work kind of went back to those four global goals,” he said. “And we're now on pace to accomplish all four” (with 100 percent of costs covered by the federal government). Soon, he will announce the “Progressive Design Build” and set a timeline to complete construction.

As somebody admired for his leadership, Moore describes two critical management principles: a “unified command” (i.e. appear with all partners at briefings, make certain everyone is on the same page) and “a regular communications cycle.” People get frustrated when the “only time they hear about things is when it's bad news.” A robust website, frequently updated, continues to provide reams of data on repair operations.

Moore acknowledges that his approach stems directly from his military training. “I'm a combat veteran. This is how we were trained to kind of operate… [where] the only certainty is uncertainty.” He adds: “There has to be a measure of predictability for the people who you're working with, especially in times of crisis when nothing feels predictable. They need to be able to rely on you to give you a predictable cadence.”

Given his military background (and success in bringing down crime dramatically in the state), his reaction to the pardons of Jan. 6 felons is unsurprising. “The violence that we saw on January 6 has no place in our society…the peaceful transfer of power is a cornerstone of our democracy.” (He notes that downstairs in the building in which he now works, George Washington gave up his commission after the Revolution.) “It is the foundation of our democracy.” 

Exasperated, Moore states he cannot understand the rationale for the pardons and commutations. “On that day we saw police officers who were attacked, people were violently assaulted, and the Capitol building was desecrated. Now, we're in this process of seemingly rewriting history.” He adds that with the temperature so high, what the country needs “more than anything else is a sense of healing.” However, he emphasizes, “This is not the healing that the country needed in this moment.” He vows to protect Maryland residents from any released felons who might return to the state. “It's unfortunate that we are not going to have accountability for what happened that day and what happened to our law enforcement officers,” he tells me.

Trump’s gusher of executive edicts has spawned several lawsuits (with more certain to follow). Maryland joined one to block Trump’s unconstitutional, unilateral repeal of birthright citizenship. Regarding the “deluge” of decrees, he points out: “Some are frankly performative, and some, as you've seen from our lawsuit, are just unconstitutional.” He isn’t surprised at Trump’s attack on immigrants, given the tenor of the campaign. “This is actually a promise being honored, but is very personal to me.” He explains, “I come from an immigrant family. I was raised by an immigrant single mother. When these derogatory statements are being made about immigrants and their contributions to our society, it's deeply troubling because you know they're talking about people like my mom… my grandmother and my grandfather.” Moore recalls, “When [my grandfather] passed away at eighty-seven, he had a deep Jamaican accent. And he was maybe the most patriotic American I've ever met in my life.” He adds, “I just want us to have policies that reflect our values and reflect our highest aspirations.”

Democratic governors around the country are in a difficult spot. On one hand, they feel an obligation to call out Trump’s cruel, counterproductive, and illegal policies; however, they also must get the necessary support from the federal government. Moore’s answer is straightforward: “I think about the oath that I took, and not just the oath that I took when I was wearing the uniform of this country but when I stood in front of six and a half million Marylanders.” He continues, “I took an oath to protect the Constitution. I took the oath to protect the constitution of the state of Maryland and the laws thereof, and I took an oath to make sure that I was protecting the people of my state.” He remarks that his oath was not conditioned on having a Democrat in the White House. All of that requires, as best as he is able, to keep doing the people’s business. On the day Trump began dumping executive decrees on the public, he recalls, “I was in Frederick, Maryland, announcing school construction. [Then] I went to go announce the rebuilding of Interstate 15.”

Upgrade to paid

During his short time in office, Moore’s state went from 43^rd in the country in employment to one of the lowest rates. He raised the minimum wage, made historic investments in childcare, oversaw a precipitous drop in homicides, and quadrupled apprenticeships. He wants to focus on delivering for working and middle-class people, a critical message for all Democratic governors.

Yet some policies, such as national energy policy, depend in large part on federal policy. He says the country got “spoiled” by a president who not only understood climate change but was determined to invest in green energy. “The IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] was a landmark piece of legislation,” he says. Leading a state that has seen huge investments in renewable energy, including off-shore wind generation., he remarks, “[A]n energy future that that should include solar and wind—I don't think that's a radical concept.” Likewise, he says there is nothing radical about giving car consumers options like electric and hybrid vehicles.

Moore is blunt that what most surprised him coming into office was how “messy” state government was. The economy had stalled, with budget growth outpacing economic growth. “We inherited a massive structural government,” he explains. “You saw this level of atrophy that came from all elements of state government, the vacancies that were here, the lack of accountability.” He was taken aback by “the brokenness that we saw within state government … and the lack of attention to detail that we walked.” He jokes, “As they say in real estate, we inherited this house ‘as is.’” (On his first day in office, he discovered a horrific scandal involving allegations of abuse at the Charlotte Hall Veterans Home.)

To address the budget crisis, Moore set out to “grow our economy and get more people engaged and involved in our economy.” At the same time, he had to show state residents that they “could have a government that could be modernized and efficient.” There is work to be done but in January he was able to announce a budget that “reduces the structural deficit by $2.25 billion for FY 2026, maintains a Rainy Day Fund balance of 8.0%, and flips the projected cash shortfall of $2.95 billion to a positive cash ending balance.”

Moore would be up for reelection in 2026. He has tried to damp down chatter about a presidential run. For now, his enthusiasm and military sense of organization will be essential as we navigate through the Trump years. If he does that successfully, few doubt he will one day be a contender for president.

The Contrarian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work and independent media, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Grand Artwork

 Granddaughters #1 & #2 came over on Sunday afternoon. I put them to work drawing figures to use with FaceTime story time with granddaughter #4 who is turning three very soon. 

They did a fine job. 

#1 first drew Red Riding Hood, the Wolf and the basket for grandma. Then she drew the three bears. I was pleasantly surprised by how well proportioned her figures were. She drew the bears from her head. For Red and Wolf she had pictures to draw from. She had me do all the coloring. 

#2 drew the three pigs with coaching from me. Her first attempt had bodies smaller than heads.   She did the coloring too. 

I showed them both how adding a line grounds the figures  instead of floating in air. 

Here’s my Goldilocks. 

Storytime will start on Wednesday. I did this for granddaughter #3 during Covid. 

Now I need to make these cards stand up. 

Applause for Our Judiciary

Trump's Pardons: How Judges Effectuate the Expressive Function of the Law

By Judge Nancy Gertner (Retired) and Joel Cohen

THE CONTRARIAN JAN 24

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Judges—especially in cases involving the Trump administration—should do more than just decide cases and resolve disputes. He or she should say more than “you win,” “you lose,” “allowed,” or “denied” without explanation. That might be efficient, much like a robot, but it is wrong.

The explanation, if the judge chooses to employ it, is key. It communicates a message to the public, enables that message to be understood by society, and contributes to the decision’s legitimacy and that of the Court. Professor Cass Sunstein referred to this as the “expressive function” of the law.

 

When federal prosecutors asked the judges in the District of Columbia to dismiss the cases against the January 6 defendants because President Trump had pardoned them, all they had to say was “allowed,” then rubber stamp the executive who had plenary power to pardon. Even though the courts had no discretion to deny dismissal in the face of the presidential pardons—as presidential clemency power is effectively unreviewable—an independent judiciary can still speak, if it chooses to.

To say nothing is to ratify the lie of President Trump’s pardon message. Trump, in his executive order late Monday, said he was ending “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years,” in order to begin a “process of national reconciliation.”

But Judges Howell, Chutkan, Lamberth, Nichols, and Kollar-Kotelly refused to do so. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, appointed by President Obama, wrote in court filings that she would not dismiss the cases of Proud Boys Nicholas Ochs and Nicholas DeCarlo “with prejudice” — which would prevent charges to be filed against the men in the future. Agreeing to do, she said, would “let stand the revisionist myth” relayed in Trump’s proclamation that nearly all of the Jan. 6 defendants had been unfairly treated by the courts. She chose to explain that:

“The prosecutions in this case and others charging defendants for their criminal conduct at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, present no injustice, but instead reflect the diligent work of conscientious public servants, including prosecutors and law enforcement officials, and dedicated defense attorneys, to defend our democracy and rights and preserve our long tradition of peaceful transfers of power — which, until January 6, 2021, served as a model to the world — all while affording those charged every protection guaranteed by our Constitution and the criminal justice system.”

She added, with a pointed message of special poignancy: “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.” There was, in fact, “[n]o ‘national injustice’ that occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election.”

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, appointed by Ronald Reagan and former Presiding Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, made it clear that she was writing “for posterity,” to record the truth of what really happened.

“Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote, noting the events have been preserved through “thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens.” These records, she noted, “are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.” In a particularly moving passage, she added, “Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect.”

Likewise, Judge Tanya Chutkan, appointed by President Obama, in her order that formally ended the case against John Banuelos, who was charged with firing a pistol into the air on the grounds of the Capitol, made the harm affected by this defendant even more explicit: “The dismissal of this case cannot undo the ‘rampage that left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage.” Nor could dismissal “diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers who ‘struggled, facing serious injury and even death, to control the mob that overwhelmed them.’” Finally, the pardon, no matter what the president said, cannot “whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”

Even before Trump was inaugurated, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, appointed by President Reagan and also a former presiding judge of the FISA court, sounded the same themes. Any wide-ranging mercy for the January 6 rioters would be a mistake. He wrote that it was critical to “remind ourselves what really happened” on January 6: how an angry mob of Trump supporters invaded the Capitol, ignored directives to turn back, engaged in a “pitched battle” with the police, “stampeding through and over the officers.” Even Judge Carl J. Nichols, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas appointed by President Trump in his first term, made it clear that “blanket pardons for all January 6 defendants or anything close would be beyond frustrating and disappointing.”

It didn’t matter who the appointing president was, how long the judge had served, or how junior or senior they were. These judges would not silently rubber stamp this outrageous—even if lawful—decision of the new president. And they took pains to say so, loud and clear. An independent judiciary and impartial juries created a record that cannot be erased by the stroke of this president’s Sharpie pen. It is a lesson for us all.

---

Nancy Gertner is a former U.S. District Court Judge of the District of Massachusetts, now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, author, TV commentator and opinion writer.

Joel Cohen, a former prosecutor, practices white-collar criminal defense law at Petrillo Klein and Boxer in New York, and teaches at both Fordham and Cardozo Law Schools.

Doing the Right Thing

 Have you heard this story?

from  the NY Times

Many of those convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have celebrated the pardons or commutations that they received this week from President Trump.

Not Pamela Hemphill. A retired drug and alcohol counselor who lives in Boise, Idaho, she pleaded guilty in January 2022 to a misdemeanor offense for entering the Capitol during the riot and was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation.

She said she did not want a pardon.

“Absolutely not,” Ms. Hemphill said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation. If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.”

Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”

I'm Back to Posting Wake Up Calls.

 I've subscribed to The Contrarian (thanks Barbara for putting me on to it).  It's where Jennifer Rubin went when she resigned from The Washington Post.  It comes directly into my email and it's enlightening in the age of tRump.

I will be sharing it periodically.  The next four years can't be a snooze time.  We must stay vigilant and educated voters.  It's our one and only way to combat him.

Making Censorship Real Again

The Trump administration is capitalizing on a false conspiracy of censorship to usher in the real kind

NINA JANKOWICZ JAN 23 ∙ GUEST POST

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On Inauguration Day, amidst a flurry of executive orders adorned with loopy Sharpie signatures, Donald Trump restored free speech in America. Or so he claimed.

If you hadn’t noticed free speech had been abolished, don’t beat yourself up. Like several other executive actions, the order that aspires to “end federal censorship” is based on a conspiracy theory. Despite its flimsy pretext, it could usher in an era of real censorship the likes of which the United States has never seen.

Fox News mainstreamed the narrative that conservatives were being unfairly censored by social media companies in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss. The lies gained steam across right-wing media and on the same social media sites apparently doing all this censoring—and by 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the conspiracy-minded inmates were running the asylum. Musk granted a few handpicked bloggers and journalists access to select documents about the platform’s relationship with the federal government. With the publication of the so-called “Twitter Files,” they alleged that Twitter executives were complicit in acts of censorship against politically disfavored content, allowing the federal government to take it down at-will. They also claimed that private-citizen researchers funneled the content in question to federal agencies for review and removal.

Though some of their reporting had numerous factual inconsistencies and errors, that didn’t stop right-wing media from breathlessly covering it for years, or stop Jim Jordan from using it as a basis for his 21st century McCarthyist inquisition known as the “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”

I experienced the censorship mob firsthand. In March 2022 I was appointed to lead the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, an advisory body to help coordinate and recommend guardrails on the Department’s existing responses to disinformation. The fringes of the political spectrum immediately demonized the board as a Ministry of Truth, with me was America’s chief censor. They falsely alleged that I was appointed to pick and choose what could stay on the Internet and what would come down. My family was doxxed and threatened, and the Biden Administration seemed neither willing nor able to stand up to industrial strength lies about our work. I resigned and the Board was axed a few months later.

The many threads of the right’s “censorship” allegations came together in Murthy v. Missouri, a case the Supreme Court heard last year. In it, two state Attorneys General claimed that the Biden Administration, colluding with citizen-researchers, had coerced social media platforms to remove content it found politically inconvenient. The Court dismissed the case for lack of standing; Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion. The plaintiff, she held, “fail[ed]... to link their past social-media restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms.” She added, “The plaintiff cannot rest on ‘mere allegations,’ but must instead point to factual evidence.” Ouch.

That brings us to Inauguration Day, when Trump and his team claimed that “government employees [would no longer] pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech,” a promise built on a false assertion. Government employees never had or used that power, but Trump signed the order anyway, canonizing the “censorship” conspiracy theory.

On its face, the order may look benign. Despite Trump’s delusions, free speech is the law of the land in America, so what does it change? One provision “ensure[s] that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate” anything that looks like censorship if you squint hard enough—including the kind of work that helps the public understand how true curtailing and distortion of information looks. It could be used as grounds to defund any government-funded research looking at the effects of disinformation or foreign influence, media literacy work, or any university where faculty study or teach about disinformation. All of these, of course, constitute protected speech in and of themselves.

Another of the order’s provisions, Sec. 2(b) threatens Feds who engage in such work, and yet another instructs the Attorney General to investigate the Biden Administration for activities the conservative Supreme Court found did not happen. As someone who has been the target of such frivolous investigations, I know how time- and resource-intensive they are. They are meant to keep the truth tellers occupied, and meant to scare everyone else into subservience.

The irony of all this is that the original bogeymen of the censorship conspiracy, the broligarchs of Big Tech, have shown more partisanship than ever—in the other direction. Despite conservatives losing their minds for four years that Biden officials did so much as email social media platforms, Trump sat not only Musk, but also Zuckerberg, Bezos and more in places of honor at his inauguration. He gave Musk a position within the White House, got cozywith the Chinese-owned app he sought to ban, and, through direct pressure, Meta successfully rolled back eight years of policies that maintained a modicum of truth and safety on their platform. Even before he was inaugurated, Trump has coerced social media more than Biden did in his whole term, and he has made inroads threatening mainstream media, too.

As we buckle in for four years of Trump 2.0, it’s fitting that Washington is experiencing sub-freezing temperatures. Along with a pliant and obsequious tech class, cowering news organizations, and an executive order that looms over anyone who stands for truth, a chill is in the air.

Nina Jankowicz is the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a non-profit that works to increase the cost of lies that undermine democracy. She is the author of two books and the former Executive Director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board.

It’s Cold!!!

 It was minus 14 this morning. When this happens the water line to the dishwasher freezes up as it’s up against an outside wall in a small space. 

Discovered that the dishwasher hadn’t washed when I opened it this morning and all the lights were still on the panel. 

Time for the hair dryer. 

Heading Home from Buffalo

 

Leaving before the lake effect snow that hit southern suburbs moves north. Sunrise is in the south. 

4 degrees as we drive east but minus temps at home.