Pence increases his distance from Trump

Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, has condemned the attacks on the FBI for their execution of a search warrant on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, further signaling that at least some members of the Republican party want to distance themselves from Trump’s hysterical reaction that triggered anger among his supporters who threatened violence against the fbi and the department of justice.

“I … want to remind my fellow Republicans we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI,” Pence said on Wednesday at New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College.

“The Republican party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state and local level. And these attacks on the FBI must stop,” he said.

But what was even more interesting was that he seemed to be inviting the January 6th committee to ask him to testify before the panel.

“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it…I would have to reflect on the unique role that I was serving as vice-president… “It would be unprecedented in history for the vice-president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill. But, as I said, I don’t want to prejudge ever any formal invitation rendered to us.”

Trump has been lashing out furiously at the committee and all those who have testified, since those hearings have really damaged him. He must be apoplectic that even his once-loyal lapdog seems to offering to cooperate with it.

IRS starts process to provide free online tax filing software

The current tax filing system in the US is absurdly complex. Part of the reason is that the tax code is used to achieve various economic and social goals by making them have economic consequences. Another reason is that special interest groups lobby hard to get favorable items put into the code to benefit their own interests.

One of the less-publicized items in the big bill that was passed recently known as the Inflation Reduction Act is a provision to allow the IRS to study the creation software that people can use to file their taxes online.

The sweeping domestic policy bill passed by the House and Senate last week mandates that the IRS study options to provide a free tax filing option for Americans. That study represents a threat to the for-profit tax prep industry dominated by TurboTax, a product of the Silicon Valley company Intuit.
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Unlike many developed countries, the U.S. does not offer free tax filing services for taxpayers, who instead pay billions of dollars every year to highly profitable private tax prep companies.

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Einstein on nationalism

In the wide-ranging interview that he gave to George Sylvester Viereck that was published in 1929 in the Saturday Evening Post, Albert Einstein was asked his views about nationalism. In response to the question, “Do you look upon yourself as a German or as a Jew”, he replied, “It is quite possible to be both. I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

He thought that Americans were less nationalistic than the nations of Europe, saying:

“Americans undoubtedly owe much to the the melting pot it is possible that this mixture of races makes their nationalism less objectionable than the nationalism of Europe nationalism in the United States does not assume such disagreeable forms as in Europe this may be due partly to the fact that your country is so immense that you do not think in terms of metal borders it may be due to the fact that you do not suffer from the heritage of hatred.”

If he were alive today, I think that he would be saddened by what America has become, a nation in which Christian nationalism seems to be gaining ground and in which xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment are promoted and at least tacitly supported by a significant segment of one of the main political parties.

Desperate times call for desperate excuses

I think it is beginning to dawn on Trump and his supporters that the execution of a search warrant by the FBI on his Mar-a-Lago home is more serious than they initially thought and that the legal net is closing around him. They initially reacted as if the department of justice had handed him a gift by providing evidence that he was being harassed by the Deep State and used that claim to fundraise from his supporters. Republican congresspeople also echoed those statements and inflamed feelings against the FBI and the department of justice. In fact, it was Trump himself who first broadcast the search in sensational terms, as if the FBI had stormed into his property and ransacked the place, they way they sometimes do with ordinary people. In fact, it was done quite discreetly. The FBI had executed a properly authorized search with the cooperation of people on the premises. The news of the search would have come out eventually but Trump was the one who sensationalized it.

Now that it has been revealed that the FBI had recovered documents that had some of the highest levels of secrecy classification, some of the early and vociferous people who had condemned the search are trying to walk things back. Whether the documents recovered deserve such a high degree of classification or not (the government is notorious for over-classifying things) is not really relevant since it is a crime to have them if they were not supposed to be there.
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Why people in MAGAland still talk to Klepper

I mentioned recently my puzzlement that Trump’s MAGA followers still talk to Jordan Klepper even though his clips make them look ridiculous. In an interview, he answers that question, saying it it is not hard at all to find people willing to talk, even if they know of him and his work.

But at a Donald Trump rally in June, he looked genuinely flabbergasted when a couple of young women seemingly had no knowledge of what happened on January 6, 2021 (see clip below).

“There’s definitely a surprise to be found at every Trump event,” Klepper tells Deadline. “I wish I could say that we went to these places, and we were fishing for people, but that’s not the case, we only talk to anybody who would like to talk to us. More often than not, people want to come in and talk to us. But the fact that they had never heard of January 6, even the terminology around insurrection was new to them was frankly shocking to me. I knew there was a rock a lot of people lived underneath, I just had no idea it was so encompassing.”
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One of the more curious elements of Klepper’s segments is why so many right-wing folk are willing to talk with him, given that he is essentially making fun of them. But he likens it to being a heel in wrestling, that Trump supporters see this as entertainment.

“I probably took 50 or 60 selfies with people who were excited to just see somebody involved in the narrative surrounding this Trump World,” he says. “There are even politicians at CPAC who would come up and ask if they could set up a time [to talk]. You become like a villain in the Trump universe. It’s always that the rallies are like a sporting event. There’s ideology, there’s pomp and circumstance, it is fun, it’s entertainment and that also speaks to why people talk to me.”

Still seems a bit strange to me. Maybe it is because I at least try not to look like an idiot, even if I do not always succeed.

Things are looking increasingly bad for Trump

Thanks to the revelations about the material found at Mar-a-Lago, I have learned more about the arcane bureaucratic processes involving the various levels of classification and the processes by which they can be declassified than I ever wanted to know. This is because since classified documents were found on the premises, the initial defenses by Trump’s supporters, that the search was done as a form of harassment of a totally innocent person who had done nothing wrong, have collapsed and have kept shifting to more technical arguments.

This article explains what is going on, starting with the three kinds of classified documents found by the FBI.

FBI agents seized 11 sets of documents from Trump’s Palm Beach club on Monday, including documents  identified as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” according to the inventory unsealed Friday. The list of items taken also notes that agents carted away four sets of documents marked “top-secret,” three sets of documents marked “secret” and three sets documents marked “confidential.”

These sets of documents range in classification levels, depending on the degree of their significance to U.S. national security. According to the federal regulations governing classification, “confidential” denotes the lowest rung. Information at this level could, if wrongly disclosed, cause “identifiable damage” to national security.  “The next level, “secret” information, could cause serious damage to national security if wrongly disclosed. The “top secret” designation is reserved for material whose unauthorized disclosure could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security.

The “SCI” designation is an abbreviation for “Sensitive Compartmented Information” and refers to classified information involving sensitive intelligence sources, methods or analytical processes, and which can only be discussed within a “SCIF” — a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” — a secure room or building limited to government officials with a corresponding security clearance. 

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Is Trump even stupider than I thought?

Some details of the search of Trump’s Florida residence have been released. It appears that FBI agents did find documents marked ‘Top Secret’ after all at Mar-A-Lago.

The most sensitive set of documents removed from Trump’s post-presidency home in Florida were listed generically as “Various Classified/TS/SCI” – the abbreviation for top secret/sensitive compartmented information – the warrant shows.

FBI agents retrieved a total of 11 sets of classified documents, some of which were marked top secret, the Wall Street Journal first reported. Federal agents also took away four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents, the receipt showed.

The search warrant receipt did not provide any further detail about the substance of the classified documents. Other materials removed from Mar-a-Lago included binders of photos, information on the “President of France”, and a grant of clemency for the Trump political operative Roger Stone.

Caught at the center of a rapidly escalating controversy, Trump lashed out at the justice department on Friday, saying in a statement that he had declassified all of the records in question. “It was all declassified,” Trump asserted.

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Jordan Klepper visits MAGAland again

This time he goes to Waukesha, Wisconsin that held its primary elections on Tuesday. He seems to never run out of total nutters who are willing to go on TV and say the most outlandish things. Of course, they themselves clearly think they are being perfectly logical and factual.

By now, any reasonably politically conscious person would be aware of Klepper and that they would look foolish when the clip is broadcast. My guess is that they only read and watch right-wing media and hence still have no idea who he is or what he does. But you would think that word would have at least spread through the MAGA grapevine to avoid talking to the very tall comedian who is not Conan O’Brien and who is followed by a camera crew

This time he spoke at some length to a woman who seemed enamored of something called Gematria in order to interpret political events. I had not heard of this before and so looked it up. It seems to be a species of numerology.

Gematria is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher which is used.

Hebrew alphanumeric ciphers were probably used in biblical times, and were later adopted by other cultures. Gematria is still widely used in Jewish culture. Similar systems have been used in other languages and cultures: the Greeks isopsephy, and later, derived from or inspired by Hebrew gematria, Arabic abjad numerals, and English gematria.

Here is Klepper.

Attorney General tries to counter Mar-a-Lago search paranoia

We are living at a time when conspiracy theories abound and where over-the-top reactions to the most routine of events have become the norm. A perfect example of this has been the reaction among Trump supporters to the execution by the FBI of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, the current home of Donald Trump. While searching of the home of a former president is undoubtedly unprecedented, everything else about the process was perfectly ordinary. In fact, the department of justice seemed to have gone out of its way to do this by the book because of the its unprecedented nature.

The FBI first went all the way to the top and got approval from the Attorney General to ask for the warrant and then went, as required, to a federal judge claiming that they had probable cause for the search. You ca be sure that since a former president was involved, there was a high bar that had to be cleared in order to get the warrant. They then carried out the search with little fuss and with the cooperation of the Secret Service agents guarding the premises and with the president’s representatives apparently also present. There was no raid, no pre-dawn breaking down of the doors by armed agents, and the other kinds of things that ordinary people might be subjected to at the hands of law enforcement. In fact, no one knew about the search until Trump blasted out the news in his usual hyperbolic fashion that he was being persecuted. And as usual in their knee-jerk reaction, his loyal cult members in Congress and the nation at large responded hysterically, comparing this action to Nazi Germany and the Gestapo. They have even gone to the extent of suggesting that the FBI planted evidence at the site, a charge that they will repeat if any damning evidence is revealed. Planting of evidence by law enforcement undoubtedly happens but it seems unlikely in this case.
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Puzzles over the FBI search of Trump’s home

As is almost always the case with Trump, he exaggerates things. On Monday evening, he announced that his Mar-a-Lago home “is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents”. It is not clear if this was, in actual fact, an FBI ‘raid’ in the usual sense. Those usually occur in the pre-dawn hours where armed agents break into a house, the surprise supposedly necessary to prevent the destruction of evidence. According to this report, what happened was far less dramatic.
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