Former Attorney General William Barr has made it clear that Donald Trump should, in his view, never again be allowed access to power — but that was before Trump secured the nomination. Now, he’s on an apology tour, making excuses not only for everything Trump has done to America but for the decision to support him for the presidency again.

The general theme of Barr’s arguments is that sure, he admits Trump called for executing people and attempted a coup, but he wasn’t successful at either, so it’s all okay.

Barr was confronted by a story shared by former Trump insider Alyssa Farrah-Griffin, who alleges that the then-president called for an execution when he realized someone had leaked to the press that he retreated to a safe room under the White House during protests in the area.

He said he couldn’t remember that specific incident, but he also wouldn’t deny it, and in fact, admitted that this was a typical sort of thing for Trump to suggest. He said:

“I don’t dispute it. The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would have actually carried it out…He would say things like, similar to that…but I wouldn’t take him literally every time he did it.”

Why not?

Barr says, “Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out.”

BREAKING: According to former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr , Donald Trump on multiple occasions floated the idea of executing individuals who disagreed with him. Every American needs to see this so they know how dangerous Trump is. pic.twitter.com/UW5pQbxCxv

— Biden’s Wins (@BidensWins) April 27, 2024

That’s not all Barr defended. Pressed on whether he can really justify supporting a candidate who is facing 88 felony charges and disrupted the peaceful transfer of power, the former Attorney General was all-in.

Barr claims to genuinely believe that Biden’s administration is somehow more dangerous than Trump’s actions.

CNN Anchor Kaitlyn Collins pressed him, asking, “Worse than subverting the peaceful transfer of power?”

Barr didn’t deny Trump attempted exactly that. His defense was, “Well, did he succeed?”

Kaitlan Collins: “So you’re voting for someone…tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, who can't even achieve his policies, that lied about the election…Someone who’s facing 88 criminal counts?”

Bill Barr: “The answer to your question is YES”pic.twitter.com/KxCYomILe7

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 27, 2024

In fact, the former Attorney General made a valiant effort to list the actions that he believes are more of a threat to democracy than Donald Trump.

They include an imaginary open border (he doesn’t seem to have any comment on Trump leaning on House Republicansto stop border legislation though), regulations on what appliances one can have (regulations that also don’t aRepublicans to), and regulations on the kind of vehicle one can own (by which he seems to mean updated emissions standards and support for electric vehicles, not actual prohibitions).

Watch him work really hard to come up with that short list of made-up problems below.

Barr: We have regulations coming fast and furious. telling people were kind of stoves they can use and what kind of cars they have to drive and eliminating cars and so forth yeah, those are those are the threats to democracy pic.twitter.com/cIZRyVcVyo

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 27, 2024

It’s difficult to take Barr’s apology tour seriously when he struggles to pretend that his invented grievances outweigh the danger of an incipient fascist like Donald Trump to our democracy. He should have been content to simply beg forgiveness for all that he did as Attorney General to enable the former president while he was in office, and kept his voting preferences to himself.

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post MURDEROUS: Former A.G. Barr says Trump wanted to EXECUTE his enemies appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

One of the nasty truths about our two nastiest presidents is that getting close to them would likely end you up in jail.  Both presidents were Republicans.  Both were preternaturally corrupt.  And both demanded the kind of loyalty from their subordinates that required you, when asked, to commit crimes in furtherance of the ambitions of the boss.

If you worked in the West Wing for Richard Nixon, you got Watergate on you like grease from French fries.  Forty officials who served in the Nixon administration were either indicted or jailed.  Sixty-nine people in all were charged with crimes, when you included the Watergate burglars and ancillary campaign workers like Donald Segretti.  Of those, 48 were found guilty, including former Attorney General John Mitchell, and top presidential aides H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, Charles Colson, and White House lawyer John Dean.  Nixon lawyer Herbert Kalmbach also went to jail for his boss, as did one of Nixon’s former cabinet secretaries, Maurice Stans, who served as Commerce Secretary before he resigned to help Kalmbach move funny money around in the Nixon reelection campaign.

Now history, specifically Republican history, is repeating itself with Donald Trump.  The Republican party is up to 58 indictments associated with Trump’s attempted coup following his loss of the 2020 election.  Eighteen people were indicted this week in Arizona for their roles in attempting to overturn the election results in that state.  Those charged include four of Trump’s attorneys: Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, and Jenna Ellis; Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows; and Trump campaign aides Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman.  Also indicted were the 11 Republican party members who signed the fake elector forms that were engineered from the Oval Office by Kenneth Chesebro and Donald Trump.  Chesebro, who was also indicted in Georgia on similar charges and pleaded guilty, is suspected of cooperating in the Arizona indictments.

In Michigan, 16 Republicans were indicted last July for their roles in the fake elector scheme.  One has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against the others.  The 16 were charged with forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, election law forgery and conspiracy to commit election law forgery.  They face as many as 14 years in prison for the charge of “meeting covertly in the basement of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters on December 14th, and signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the ‘duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America for the State of Michigan.’”  None were certified or duly elected electors in the state of Michigan.  On Wednesday, it was revealed that Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Michigan fake elector scheme, as are Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, and Jenna Ellis.

Last August, 19 people were charged in Georgia in a RICO indictment alleging they conspired in an elaborate scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state.  Those charged include Trump, Giuliani, Meadows, Ellis, Chesebro, Sidney “The Kraken” Powell, former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, the aforementioned Michael Roman, and David Shafer, Chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.  Several have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors, including Powell, Chesebro, and Ellis.

Six Republican fake electors were charged last December with felony forgery and “uttering a forged instrument” in Nevada.  The felonies could result in prison terms from one to five years. 

Ten top Republicans in Wisconsin may face indictment in the fake elector scheme in that state. Attorney General Josh Kaul will not “confirm or deny” there is an investigation of the fake electors in Wisconsin, but rumors are running rampant that Wisconsin may join the four other battleground states that have charged people in the wide-ranging scheme that was engineered out of the Oval Office by Donald Trump.

So that’s 58 members of the Republican Party who are facing felony indictments for their loyalty to Donald Trump.  Experts in election law say it is unlikely that fake Republican electors from Pennsylvania and New Mexico will be indicted because the elector documents they signed were crafted to be used only if they ended up being recognized as “duly elected and qualified as electors” in their states.  Because their loyalty to Trump was technically conditional, they will probably avoid being charged and facing prison like their Republican brethren in other states.

Poison.  Nixon was poison to the people who worked for him and were loyal to him, and so was Trump, and so is Trump today.  The chief financial officer of his company, the Trump Organization, is currently serving time on Rikers Island in New York for falsifying documents and lying for Trump. 

We haven’t even counted the more than one thousand Trump loyalists who have been arrested and charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol that Trump fomented on Jan. 6.  Several hundred of the insurrectionists have been convicted and are serving time in jail. 

Trump has promised to pardon the Jan. 6 “hostages,” as he calls them, but that can only happen if he is elected in November.  It’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Kristi Noem, y’all.

I saw a headline where Kristi Noem is a dog-killer and I thought, “Huh! Someone must think she’s about to become a VP candidate, to leak this dirt on her now.”  Then I read the story and saw I was almost right.

That someone is Kristi, and she ratted on her own damn self.

Kristi has come out with a campaign autobiography, as one does, every so often. In it, she talks about how she had a 14-month-old female wire-haired pointer that she “hated.” It was “untrainable,” “worthless”and “dangerous.”

So, she decided to kill her.

And, once she decided to do that, she realized she also had an un-neutered goat she “hated.” He was “mean,” “nasty,” “disgusting” and “musky.”

She decided to off him, too.

So she dragged the dog into a gravel pit and killed it with a shotgun.  Then she dragged the goat into the gravel pit, botched the hit, had to run back and get another shell, before delivering the head shot to the not-quite-mortally wounded goat.

She noticed some workers had seen her do it. But one what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it glare later, and they prudently turned away. So the body count stayed at two, none human.

In any other America, this would be political suicide.

But in this America, when you’re angling to become Vice Dictator, one flabby, demented, over-amped aderall snort away from the Big Chair…

She speaks of being willing to “do the unpleasant job that needed to be done” – to dispatch the worthless, the dangerous, the nasty and disgusting that she hated. The kind of labels authoritarians like to fling around about “The Other.”

That’s just the kind of someone the MAGA mob is looking for.

How do you decide whom to vote for?

I spent 25 years in politics chasing the answer to that question. And the answer is this:

You’ve already decided whom to vote for.

You’d like to pretend you haven’t. You’d like to say I’ve examined all the candidates, all the issues, the domestic needs, our foreign policy aims, the direction of science & technology, and consulted with my doctor, my lawyer, my preacher and my psychic. My mind is clear, my heart is pure and my diligence is due.

It says “Get Clean For Gene?”

The truth is, for politicos, we already know how you’re voting. We just check for your name on a number of different lists, check your voting record, and decide if you’re worth our time.

The “you” I’m speaking to is a member of a class of people that fit the “you” profile, and we can predict with pretty good accuracy whom you’re going to vote for – better than your psychic can, anyway – because we have large and growing amounts of data on everybody, and we can use data science to correlate what we know about groups of “you” with voting patterns.

This is not to say “demographics is destiny,” but rather to illustrate that the old models of elections no longer obtain: there is no vast pool of undecided patriotic Americans who can be persuaded to vote for your candidate by an objective comparison of positions, policies and personal probity.

Luke, Vote Palpatine      …It is your Destiny

Rather, since the 70s, identity politics and mass media began to widen the gulf between the two parties. This was turbo-charged when Bill Clinton’s election drove home the fact that Reaganism was a brief blip. The sheer numbers were in the Democrats’ favor (we’ve won every popular vote after 1988 but one) so Newt Gingrich et al began a scorched earth policy to convince everyone that Democrats were evil.

But they weren’t trying to coerce people to switch parties or candidates. They were trying instead to anger and frighten their voters, so that they would come out in greater numbers against the less than white, less than honest, less than moral evil Dems.

That approach has a flip side, a key flip side I didn’t understand until after 2016.  Getting out the vote (GOTV), i.e. trying to gin your voters up to touch that screen, darken that oval or punch that chad, is important, but at the same time you are also trying to ruin your opponent’s GOTV by depressing their voters to just do nothing.

This phenomenon is called Negative Partisanship. Your vote is no longer a positive step towards seeing your policy initiatives thrive (really, was it ever?) but rather a veto of the other side because of who they are and what they represent. Elections now turn on who stays home because their candidate is unpalatable, yet they’d never ever vote for the dark side.

Nooo, I’m Ridin’ with Mothma!

Negative partisanship is how we lost 2016. And why we won 2020 and why 2024 will be a Blue Tsunami.

Pay little attention to the few GOP folks who say they will vote for Biden. In 2024, the job is no longer to convince people he’s better than Trump: there’s no one convincible left. The job is to convince anti-Biden people to just stay home.

Demographics is just a road map. GOTV is destiny.

Catch Congressman James Comer (R-KY) speaking on any news program or in a Congressional hearing, and you’ll get the message he’s absolutely devoted to pursuing an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden to the limit.

Ask those around him, though, and they say he’s already at and beyond the limit on that goal — and is desperate for a way out.

Republicans have not yet been able to produce a single piece of evidence of any wrongdoing, much less criminal act, by President Biden. Instead, they’ve been relying on innuendo, misrepresentation, and debunked conspiracy theories.

In the process, Comer has embarrassed himself, and been dunked on by colleagues — such as when Representative Jared Moskowitz made a motion to impeach and dared Comer or any of his Republican buddies to second it, knowing they wouldn’t do it because there’s literally no evidence.

Just how worn down is Comer, at this point? CNN reported:

“Comer is hoping Jesus comes so he can get out,” one of the GOP lawmakers who spoke to Comer told CNN.“He is fed up.”

Others have put it more mildly, saying Comer is looking for a way to “tactfully” wiggle out of the impeachment process, and save face for his future political ambitions, which include running for Governor.

Again, none of this matches what Comer has been saying publicly. A week ago, he was telling the public that the inquiry would be moving toward criminal referrals, according to The Hill.

In fact, you can see Comer in a hearing last week, when pressed by Rep. Jamie Raskin to explain what crime he’s alleging against the president, insisting, “You’re about to find out, very soon” — but he can’t name a single one.

Raskin: What is the crime that you want to impeach Joe Biden for? Tell America right now

Comer: You’re about to find out very soon pic.twitter.com/MFXsRVwulA

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 17, 2024

He also said impeachment was still “on the table,” as he complained about both Bidens, Joe and his son Hunter, declining an invitation to “set the record straight” in a public hearing.

Meanwhile, Comer’s Democratic colleagues are holding his feet to the proverbial fire. It’s not just Rep. Moskowitz humiliating him on the House floor by proving that he knows he has nothing to move forward with, they’re calling him out publicly, too.

As seen below, the Oversight Committee Democrats are even tweeting out memes that mock him for not being able to name a crime.

pic.twitter.com/UEGbe0h7Q8

— Oversight Committee Democrats (@OversightDems) April 24, 2024

No wonder Comer is tired of this act. The only question is, how long will it take him to admit it publicly? We now know he can bearly tolerate it.

For clarifications, comments, & typos, email: editor@occupydemocrats.com.

The post “FED UP”: Biden impeachment efforts turn into a personal NIGHTMARE for Comer appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

The United States has had an industrial policy aimed at boosting its domestic shipbuilding industry since the passage of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly known as the Jones Act. Whatever the arguments for the passage of the bill a century ago, it has over time been a disaster for the US maritime industry, and continues to impose significant costs on other parts of the US economy. Colin Grabow goes through the arguments in “Protectionism on Steroids: The Scandal of the Jones Act” (Milken Institute Review, Second Quarter 2024, pp. 44-53).

The Jones Act “requires that vessels engaged in domestic transportation be registered and built in the United States as well as crewed and at least 75 percent owned by U.S. citizens.” However, the underlying rule goes back to an 1817 law “prohibiting foreign vessels from transporting goods within the U.S.”

The political problem back in 1920 was that as US shipbuilding and shipping costs were protected from foreign competition, they were no longer cost-competitive. in terms of production costs, and shipping by US-owned firms was not cost-competitive, either. Grabow gives an example of one 19th-century firm that shipped from New York to Belgium to California–because it was cheaper to pay for two “foreign” trips with non-US firms than to pay a US shipping firm to go direct from New York to California.

The gap in US ship-building costs has only widened. Current estimates are that “large cargo ships constructed in U.S. shipyards today cost at least 300 percent more than the competitive world price.” For operating costs, Grabow cites a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office which finds: “According to U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) officials, the additional cost of operating a U.S. flag vessel compared to a foreign-flag vessel has increased—from about $4.8 million annually in 2009 and 2010 to about $6.2 to $6.5 million currently—making it harder for such vessels to remain financially viable.”

The consequences of this US attempt at a pro-shipbuilding and pro-US-shipping industrial policy have been awful. Here are some of them.

1) The US shipbuilding industry, with no need to respond to international competition, has become irrelevant in global markets. Here’s a table on large ocean-going ships under construction from the Congressional Research Service (“U.S. Commercial Shipbuilding in a Global Context,” November 15, 2023).

The CRS reports:

During World Wars I and II, the United States built thousands of cargo ships. These were sold to merchant carriers after the wars, including foreign buyers, but were soon replaced by more efficient ships built in foreign yards. In the 1970s, U.S. shipyards were building about 5% of the world’s tonnage, equating to 15-25 new ships per year. In the 1980s, this fell to around five ships per year, which is the current rate of U.S. shipbuilding. … The Jones Act’s domestic construction requirement likely underpins the entirety of U.S. commercial ship construction. None of the U.S.-flag international trading fleet is domestically built, though shipbuilders could take advantage of both the loan guarantee and tax shelter programs discussed above. No overseas purchase of large U.S.-built ships has occurred in decades because U.S.-built ships can be four or more times the world price.

Indeed, the US military relies on Chinese-built ships to support its military vessels: “Three of the ten commercial oil tankers selected to ship fuel for DOD as part of the newly enacted Tanker Security Fleet are Chinese-built. As for dry cargo supplies for DOD, 7 of the 12 most recently built ships in the Maritime Security Fleet are Chinese-built.

2) The higher costs of Jones-Act-compliant US shipping naturally impose heavy costs on places like Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico. Weird consequences result, and Grabow provides a number of examples. Puerto Rico gets its liquified natural gas from Nigeria, because there are no Jones-Act-compliant US ships to transport natural gas within the United States. US lumber producers complain that they have a disadvantage vs. Canadian firms, because the US lumber producers must use higher-cost Jones Act ships to send their products to US destinations, while Canadian lumber producers can use cheaper international shipping companies.

3) One might think that a natural transportation advantage for the United States would be to take advantage of maritime shipping via oceans on both sides. But the high cost of Jones-Act-compliant US shipping means more trucks and freight trains, with costs including traffic congestion, highway repair, and greater pollution.

4) Various specialized uses of ships become more costly. For example, if you want offshore wind-power to be an important part of future US electricity generation, you should know that it is considerably more costly to build with Jones-Act-compliant ships. Even basic tasks like dredging US ports and rivers are slower and more costly because the Jones Act (along with some other legislation of that time) shuts off the supplier of higher-quality and lower-cost dredging ships made elsewhere.

Supporters of industrial policy have a tendency to brush aside examples like the Jones Act: “Sure, that’s a foolish way to implement industrial policy, but my plan is a smart way to do so.” “Yes, the Jones Act is a problem, but the way to fix it is with much bigger government subsidies to expand US shipbuilding.” But the Jones Act is a classic example of a special interest law that benefits a small and very vocal group, while imposing large but diffuse costs. The problems of the Jones Act have been well-known for decades, and nothing has changed. Every proposal for industrial policy faces similar political economy dynamics.

Thus, it seems to me that the challenge for supporters of industry policy is not just to pick some alluring industries and then to hand out government favors like Halloween candy, but to specify in advance how they intend to measure success or failure of these subsidies–perhaps with a series of goals that must be met over time or else the subsidies get turned off. In South Korea, for example, which is often cited as an example of successful industry policy, the government subsidies for certain industries were often made contingent on the industries expanding their export sales at prevailing prices in international markets. When industrial policy goes poorly, as in the Jones Act, the costs are broadly felt across an array of related industries.

The post The Jones Act: Consequences of a Destructive Industrial Policy first appeared on Conversable Economist.