Donald Trump and maga Republicans wrecking America's reputation in Europe anti-American sentiment rising

I just got back from Europe. Anti-American sentiment is on the rise
Opinion essay echo published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian.

It was midday just before Easter in Paris. 

My niece and I walked past the city’s famous opera house, where tourists were relaxing on the wide steps. French soldiers armed with assault rifles strolled around, a comforting sight given the warnings about Iran-backed sleeper cells and potential retaliatory attacks. 

A busker with a guitar and a microphone entertained the crowd with a Coldplay cover.

Between songs, he asked, “Anyone here speak English?” Unbelievably, not a single hand went up.

The busker shrugged, turned both thumbs down in the universal gesture of disapproval, and said, “America, eh?” I felt him.

A couple of days after I got home, I saw a social media post that reminded me of that moment. “Honestly,” wrote @_thatambitiousgirl, “I don’t know how anyone could even feel comfortable traveling as an American outside of the U.S. right now.”

Anti-American sentiment is on the rise, and it sucks being from a country whose presidents do things like threaten to end a “whole civilization,” invade Middle Eastern countries based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, or insert themselves into pointless conflicts in faraway lands. 

In college, I had friends who sewed Canadian flags onto their backpacks because they didn’t want to be associated with America’s misadventures in Southeast Asia.

Polls show that half of Europeans view Donald Trump, who has threatened to withdraw from NATO, as an enemy rather than an ally. He has managed the neat trick of telling our allies they are useless while castigating them for not rushing to help with his poorly planned and illegal war on Iran. “This is not our war,” the German defense minister said pointedly last month. “We have not started it.”


Quite simply, with the assent of the Republican Party, Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the world order as we’ve known it in our lifetimes, while also managing to make life harder for Americans at home.

“We’re worse off in every way, and officially a global pariah,” said the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Facebook this week. “Awesome. Love that.”

Anyway, I was glad to see that someone I know, the novelist Erin Zhurkin, responded thoughtfully to @_that ambitiousgirl’s Instagram post.

Donald Trump is a Republican wrecking ball

Been an American abroad for 20 years now,” wrote Zhurkin, whose Russian-born American husband is an executive with Renault. “Six countries so far. People are in general curious and grateful that I can see my country from all sides….I try to represent the heart of the US, which I believe is about being open to all people and finding commonalities rather than differences.”

This, truly, is the heart of the matter.

 In the fall of 1967, my family moved from Northridge to France, where my father had a year-long Fulbright teaching scholarship at the University of Pau. Before we got on the airplane, my mother sat the four of her rambunctious kids down.

“It’s very important that you not be ‘Ugly Americans,’ ” she told us. We were too young to have read the classic 1958 novel she was referring to, but we understood that we were to be curious and respectful and maybe not yell, as we unfortunately did, “Yuck, this is NOT a hot dog,” during our first meal in Paris.

One winter evening in Pau, my parents took us to an anti-war demonstration, as they had done many times in Los Angeles. The locals we marched with were chanting something we couldn’t quite make out. It sounded to our American ears like “Yohn-kee go ohm.” We figured it out pretty quickly, and frankly, it was unsettling.

Zhurkin had a similar experience in Moscow, in the early 1990s, at a kiosk near Red Square. “An older Russian lady looked at me, and in a thick Russian accent said, ‘Yankee, go home,’ ” Zhurkin told me by phone from Ljubljana, Slovenia, where she and her family had moved in September from Seoul. “It opened up this whole feeling inside of me that there is something about my country that may not be as wonderful as it seems. It was a huge, perspective-breaking moment for me.”

Years later, Zhurkin was living in Paris. Trump had just been elected to his first term.

“I could not get into a taxi without someone asking me why I would let this happen, as if it was all me,” Zhurkin said. “They’d say, ‘I can’t believe you Americans are so stupide.’ I was like, ‘Look, I didn’t vote for him.’” Still, she said, “I feel like I am apologizing all the time.”

By the time President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, Zhurkin said, her family had moved to Ireland, where the vibe was much more “Thank God you guys got your act together.”

Maybe in the not-too-distant future, we will again. And then we can start to put this long national hideous nightmare behind us.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian

Republicans must hold MAGA supporter Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan accountable for ignoring Ohio State sexual abuse

A new film about the Ohio State wrestling team sex abuse scandal indicts those who looked away. Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian. 

Robin Abcarian
A new film about the Ohio State wrestling team sex abuse scandal indicts those who looked away

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), House Judiciary chairman and staunch ally of Donald Trump, has denied knowing anything about the sexual abuse of male wrestlers when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

For more than 30 years, Fred Feeney refereed matches for the Ohio State University’s powerhouse wrestling team.

Unlike the dozens of young men whose athletic scholarships depended on staying in the good graces of the team doctor, Richard Strauss, who could withhold permission for them to compete, Feeney didn’t have to persuade himself that what Strauss did was OK.

He didn’t have to pretend it was OK that Strauss was constantly taking showers with athletes. Or that it was OK when, after a match, Strauss masturbated next to Feeney in the shower, then grabbed the ref’s ass.

A visibly shaken Feeney recounts in the new documentary, “Surviving Ohio State,” that he left the locker room that day in distress and immediately told wrestling coach Russ Hellickson and assistant wrestling coach Jim Jordan what had happened.

Both coaches shrugged, said Feeney, who added that Jordan told him, “It’s Strauss. You know what he does.”

Dan Ritchie, who quit the wrestling team in his third year because he could no longer tolerate Strauss’ sexual abuse — which included forcing athletes to drop their pants and endure genital and rectal exams when they saw him, for even the most minor complaint — said that Jordan once told him, “If he ever did that to me, I’d snap his neck like a stick of dry balsa wood.”

But Jordan, now the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and an unwavering ally of President Trump, has assiduously denied ever seeing or knowing about assaults committed by Strauss during Jordan’s eight years with the team.

He emerges as one of the bad guys in the new film, which is based on the Sports Illustrated 2020 investigation, “Why Aren’t More People Talking About the Ohio State Sex Abuse Scandal?” Produced by the Oscar-winning documentarian Eva Orner and George Clooney’s production company, it debuted on HBO Max in June.

“To say that [Jordan] knew nothing, that nothing ever happened, it’s a flat out lie,” Ritchie says in the documentary.

A callous response to reports of sexual assault was the norm at Ohio State. While administrators deflected reports about Strauss for years, claiming they were just rumors, the university’s 2019 investigation, performed by an outside law firm, found that during his 1978-1996 tenure in the athletics department and at the student health center, Strauss assaulted at least 177 students thousands of times.

The school’s fencing coach, Charlotte Remenyik, complained about Strauss for 10 years until he was finally removed as her teams’ doctor. (In response to her efforts to protect her athletes, Strauss accused her of waging a vendetta against him.)

A complaint finally caused the university to remove him as a treating physician at OSU in 1996, but he was still a tenured faculty member when he retired, with “emeritus” status, in 1998. He died by suicide in 2005.

It was not until the Larry Nassar gymnastics abuse scandal exploded between 2016 and 2018 that the former Ohio State wrestlers understood that they, too, had been victimized by their team doctor, and that there were probably a lot more of them than anyone realized.

“I said, ‘Wow, that’s us,’” said former OSU wrestler Michael DiSabato, one of the first to go public. “It unlocked something in me.”

A group of former teammates met in 2018, then later sat down with their old coach, Hellickson, in an emotional encounter. 

Hellickson promised to write letters supporting them, the wrestlers said, then ghosted them. He did not respond to filmmakers’ requests to be interviewed.

Likewise, Jordan shunned requests for interviews, and he has appeared exasperated in news clips when questioned about what he knew. He’s not a defendant in any of the abuse lawsuits filed against OSU.

In 2020, Michael DiSabato’s brother, Adam, a former wrestler and team captain, testified under oath during a hearing on an Ohio bill that would have allowed Strauss’ victims to sue OSU for damages, that Jordan called him “crying, groveling … begging me to go against my brother.” Jordan has denied that conversation took place.

It seems to me that a normal human being, operating from a place of empathy, might express feelings of sorrow that the young male athletes in his charge were abused to the point that some considered suicide and others quit sports altogether, instead of accusing them of lying. Ritchie, for example, said his father was so disappointed about his decision to quit wrestling — he could not bring himself to tell his father why — that it permanently overshadowed their relationship.

I find no evidence that Jordan ever expressed feelings of regret for his wrestlers, though he did insist to Politico in 2018, “I never knew about any type of abuse. If I did, I would have done something about it. And look, if there are people who are abused, then that’s terrible and we want justice to happen.” If?

Although the explosive new documentary has been overshadowed by the implosion taking place in MAGA world over the “Jeffrey Epstein files” and questions about Trump’s relationship with the serial sexual predator, the OSU scandal is far from being yesterday’s news.

So far, OSU has settled with nearly 300 abuse survivors, each receiving an average of $252,000. But many are not willing to settle for what they consider peanuts and note that the average payout to Nassar’s victim is more than $1 million.

On Friday, as part of a federal civil lawsuit filed by some of them, Jordan was reportedly due to be deposed under oath for the first time about the allegations that he knew about the abuse and failed to protect his wrestlers.

Steve Snyder-Hill, one of the first OSU non-athletes to report that he’d been assaulted by Strauss in 1995, told NBC that he planned to be present for Jordan’s deposition.

“I expect him to lie under oath,” said Snyder-Hill. “I don’t know a nicer way to put it.”

Bluesky: @rabcarian

Democrats must create visible non violent ways to effectively struggle against Donald Trump and Republican cultism

Bravo❗ 👏😘 Opinion by Robin Abcarian, published in the Los Angeles Times:

To all those engaged in the struggle against Trump’s anti-democratic bullying❗

The all-out war being waged by Donald Trump against so many American institutions and bedrock principles is sickening🤢 to watch.

In February, after Elon Musk took his chain saw to America’s most consequential foreign aid agency, I predicted that children would die as a result.

This month, PBS reported that a Nigerian mother of twins lost one of her babies to starvation, thanks to the dismantling of USAID. A former USAID chief nutritionist estimated that the cuts to food assistance could result in about a million children not receiving treatment for severe food nutrition and potentially 163,500 deaths. So much for rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Bill Gates told the Financial Times.

Every day brings a new horror as Donald Trump takes a blow torch to the Constitution.

He blackmails universities and corporations to force them to end efforts to diversify their student bodies and work forces. He makes life as hellish as possible for immigrants, legal and otherwise. He wants to kill off birthright citizenship. Suspend habeas corpus. Ditch due process. Accept “gifts” from foreign governments. Erase the line that separates church and state.

On Thursday, he ratcheted up his battle against Harvard University, announcing that it would no longer be permitted to enroll foreign students in what the New York Times described as “a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.”

The estimated 7,000 foreign students currently enrolled at Harvard, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem declared, would immediately have to transfer to other universities or lose their legal status.

While some Americans are positively reveling in the cruelty and chaos spewing from the White House, and many companies are knuckling under to Trump, those of us who oppose the descent into lawless bullying search for heroes and signs of hope anywhere we can find it.

Thankfully, Harvard is fighting back. With its $53-billion endowment, the school is uniquely suited to the task. Thursday, it filed a lawsuit challenging the termination of the school’s participation in the government’s student visa program. In April, it sued the administration over its revocation of $2.2 billion in research grants.

In January, Costco’s board of directors unanimously reaffirmed the company’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In February, 97% of Apple’s shareholders voted against a proposal to abolish the company’s DEI initiatives. Executives at Delta Airlines have declared that diversity initiatives are a critical part of the company’s business strategy. Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker known for its progressive politics, said it would not be “intimidated or bullied” into abandoning its commitment to racial and social justice.

Recently, I found a ray of hope in an unlikely place: Madison, Wisconsin, where I was attending the law school graduation of my step-granddaughter, Kenna.

I happened to drive past a Penzeys Spices store and pulled over to take a look. In an effort to counter some of the despair the second Trump term has caused, I have taken refuge in cooking, which yanks me out of my head and distracts me from all the bad news.

When I can no longer stomach the headlines, I zone out with my favorite online chefs: Notorious Foodie, a home cook who ends each of his videos by throwing a towel at the camera (I highly recommend his lasagne), and Chef Reactions, who offers a split-screen snarky commentary of trashy cooking videos (think Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake).

At the checkout counter with my herbes de Provence, pumpkin pie spice and ground Turkish sumac berries, the cashier gave me a little blue spice packet with a bleeding red heart labeled “Resist! Keep America Alive.” On the back: “Season Liberally.”

I did not realize that I had stumbled into what is probably Ground Zero of the business world’s Trump resistance. Based in Wisconsin — the state that can take credit for bringing Musk to his knees, the company’s founder and owner, Bill Penzey, has always been vocally liberal, and the outrages of the Trump era have given him an abundance of material.

On his website, in newsletters and Facebook posts, Penzey combines his politics with specials on various spices. In 2017, on the second anniversary of Trump’s infamous slander of Mexican immigrants, Penzey offered his customers free bottles of Mexican vanilla. “It seems a good day to apologize to the people of Mexico and Latin America,” he wrote on Facebook.

On the Penzeys Spices website, next to the typical “About Us” tab, he has added another, “About Republicans.”

“We’ve arrived at the point where there’s no way to respect the nonsense the Republican Party is promoting and have any hope of overcoming the problems we as a nation and we as a planet face,” Penzey writes. “Given the choice between saving America and planet Earth or saving the feelings of Republican voters, we are choosing to side with saving our country and our world.”

I reached out to Penzey, but he declined to chat with me.

“I‘m content with just doing what we do,” he wrote. “Somehow talking to people about it all and having them try to sum it up never quite clicks. Sorry.”

Oh don’t be. Just keep doing what you do, Mr. Penzey, and let’s hope that democracy prevails.

@rabcarian.bsky.social @rabcarian

Dangerous Trump wants to take revenge on the Constitution freedom of the press. He must be defeated!

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian:  Was it just a little joke when Orange Jesus declared to Sean Hannity that, in the event of his political resurrection, he would be a dictator on “Day One”? I didn’t take it that way. You shouldn’t either. 

Believe Trump when he vows revenge on the media. MAGA shock troops are already on the attack.

Former guy President Trump’s MAGA shock troops have been announcing all over the place that a second Trump term would be dedicated to punishing enemies real and imagined, especially journalists who have dared speculate about how he would set about torching the Constitution.

Trump intends to torch the U.S. Constitution!

In the dictator’s playbook, demonizing the press is Job No. 1, and it’s something Trump is long familiar with: He not only calls news he doesn’t like “fake,” he claims he invented the term “fake news.” (No hat tip to the Nazis, I guess.) Mainstream news outlets, he’s often said, are “truly the enemy of the people.” Reporters are “scum,” “the absolute worst.”

For years, Trump has said he wants to weaken our country’s libel laws, making it easier for him to sue outlets for negative coverage. (Nothing to do with principle, of course. It’s all about him.)

Some of our Supreme Court justices have intimated that they agree and would like nothing more than to overturn the court’s unanimous 1964, ruling that made it difficult for public figures to win libel cases.

This country’s political system is flawed, no doubt about it. A presidential candidate can win the popular vote in a landslide and still lose the White House. 

Broken democracy!  Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has? (Robert Kagan)

Scheming partisans can draw maps designed to keep them in power endlessly and pass laws designed to depress voter turnout to their benefit. But haven’t we always believed, deep in our bones, that the American free press could never be silenced, that the 1st Amendment protects us from government censorship, and that a well-functioning Fourth Estate really is what keeps democracy safe?

You might think the motto of the Washington Post is kind of silly — “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” I find it profound.

It’s true that American reporters have been jailed many times over the years — most often for refusing to comply with court orders to identify their sources. We don’t put reporters in jail for telling the truth or for giving their opinions. But Trump would.

He and his allies have already laid the groundwork for a war on the free press in the event that he wins a second term.

Kash Patel, for example, was a onetime aide to former California Rep. Devin Nunes, who rose through the ranks of the Trump administration. He eventually landed a job as chief of staff to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, one of the Trump loyalists who was installed after the then-president purged Defense officials who refused to deploy military troops to quell George Floyd protests. 

Then, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Patel, whom Trump is reportedly considering for CIA director in a second administration, vowed revenge on Trump critics, including reporters.

“We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government but in the media,” he told Bannon. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections…. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

The name of the relatively obscure MAGA Republican attorney Mike Davis, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and worked for Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, has reportedly been bandied about for the position of attorney general in a second Trump administration. Davis is a walking, talking testosterone-poisoned MAGA caricature, promising to “rain hell” on Washington if he gets a Cabinet appointment. “We’re gonna put kids in cages,” he told a MAGA Republican YouTube host in September. “It’s gonna be glorious.”

He threatened to put in jail and deport the left-wing MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. “I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag,” Davis tweeted last month.

The latest Trumpian attack on the press comes from Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a Yale Law graduate and member of the elite university MAGA Republican faux populist cartel that includes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard Law), Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law).

J. D. Vance once decried Trump as “cultural heroin.” Now he’s won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Ohio by peddling Trumpism. "He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it,” he wrote in The Atlantic in July 2016. (Report by David A. Graham)

Vance, once derided Trump as “cultural heroin,” was offended by a widely read Washington Post essay by the neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan, that warned against a second Trump term. “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality,” the essay began. “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

Kagan, who left the Republican Party over its embrace of Trump, laid out a dark vision of what would happen if Trump clinches the GOP’s 2024, presidential nomination and his fellow Republicans and big-dollar donors fall into line. “Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction,” Kagan wrote. “Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?”

Could blue states provide a meaningful bulwark against a Trump dictatorship, Kagan wondered. “States with Democratic governors and statehouses could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government,” he mused. “But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny.”

Vance, getting the jump on Trump 2.0 media revenge, asked Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken to investigate Kagan.

“I suspect,” wrote Vance, “that one or both of you might characterize this article as an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.”

I suspect that Vance is either off his rocker, or more likely, simply making a disingenuous attempt to minimize Trump’s orchestrated effort to overthrow President Biden, a crime against democracy that culminated in the violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

I mean, come on people, what’s the difference between inciting a violent riot that left at least five people dead, pressuring a vice president to violate the Constitution, trying to strong-arm Georgia’s secretary of state into finding more Trump votes, orchestrating slates of fake electors and writing a thought experiment op-ed for a newspaper?

If your answer is “nothing,” then you just might have a promising future in a second Trump administration.

Weird and weirder - Speaker Mike Johnson has a strangeness problem

Echo opinion letter the editor: Robin Abcarian points out only a few very weird traits of House Speaker Mike Johnson*, a grossly unqualified, inexperienced, intellectually rigid representative who I wouldn’t trust to watch my cat, if I had one, let alone lead the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth. 

It’s not just absurd, it’s grossly negligent to put him second in line to the presidency, which is what so-called Republicans seem to be after to transition the U.S. to a quasi-dictatorial state.

The immediate threat is the possibility that Johnson’s son, and the (weird and weirder😒😟) monitoring program, will have access to Johnson’s data. By now we know even the highest elected officials fail to confine their communications to their government server. 

Mike Johnson is weird!

Really, do we need yet another dysfunctional, inexperienced nutcase in high office?

Pamela Horner, San Clemente, California

* Mike Johnson and his son have a "pornography" surveillance pact.  Is this weird, or weirder or what? 😒😕❓

• He is an election denier and religious extremist who has promoted teaching the Bible as history in public schools and has said, “God invented civil government.” 
• He has blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on “rampant homosexuality” and has supported criminalizing gay sex.

Congressman Jim Jordan has his butt kicked- Finally!

Echo opinion essay published in the Los Angeles Times by Robin Abcarian.

Trump prosecutor Fani Willis responds to meddling MAGA Republican Jim Jordan: Butt out, sir!

Congressman "Gym-Jim-Jordan"

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, a die-hard MAGA Republican who does not let the U.S. Constitution stand in the way of defending his leader, sent Fulton County, Georgia District Atty. Fani Willis a list of demands for documents and information related to her racketeering investigation and indictment of former President Trump and his many, many co-conspirators.

He accused her of timing the indictments to impair Trump’s presidential campaign. He implied that her office had inappropriately used federal funds for the investigation. And he alleged that she had improperly coordinated with Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, who has charged the former president with conspiring to subvert American democracy and with illegal handling of classified documents.  “Please provide this information as soon as possible but not later than 10:00 a.m. on September 7, 2023,” Jordan wrote.

Did Willis reply by Jordan’s deadline?

Did she ever❗😀

“Chairman Jordan,” she wrote on September. 7, “I tell people often ‘deal with reality or reality will deal with you.’ It is time that you deal with some basic realities.”

First, and most important, she told the pugnacious former Ohio State assistant wrestling coach to butt out 💥😣❗

“Your attempt to invoke congressional authority to intrude upon and interfere with an active criminal case in Georgia is flagrantly at odds with the Constitution,” Willis wrote. “That violation of Georgia’s sovereignty is offensive and will not stand.”

Jordan’s attempted interference is hardly unexpected. His behavior, as the New York Times noted during the House Democrats’ first successful Trump impeachment, was “part pit bull, part rat-a-tat auctioneer.” He is nothing if not performative, appearing in Congress with his sleeves rolled up, ever ready to pin his political enemies to the mat. (a.ka. "Gym-Jim-Jordan!*)

On Thursday, turning to the federal case against Trump, Jordan tried to ratchet up pressure on special counsel Smith. He announced he was launching an investigation into whether Smith’s office tried to extort from a lawyer by implying his application for a judgeship would be looked upon favorably by the Biden administration if his client, Trump Mar-a-Lago employee Walt Nauta, became a cooperating witness.

“Please provide this material as soon as possible, but no later than 5 p.m. on September 21, 2023,” wrote Jordan.

I will have my popcorn ready. 

In responses, she gives Jordan the “Explain like I’m 5” treatment (a popular request on Reddit). Noting that Jordan is not a lawyer, she asks him to allow her “the opportunity to provide a brief tutorial on criminal conspiracy law.”

The timing of the Georgia RICO indictments, she wrote, is the result of uncooperative witnesses who required subpoenas to compel their cooperation. Nor should Trump’s status as a political candidate make him immune from criminal prosecution. After all, he was “fully aware” of her investigation at the time he announced his candidacy.

“Here is another reality you must face,” she said. “Those who wish to avoid felony charges in Fulton County, Georgia, should not commit felonies in Fulton County, Georgia.”

My favorite portion of her letter comes at the end, where she suggests that instead of wasting everyone’s time (my words), he might use his status as chairman of the Judiciary Committee to engage in “productive activity.”
But back to Fani Willis.

Her response to Jordan was notable not just for the way she shut him down but for her volubility. “While settled constitutional law clearly permits me to ignore your unjustified and illegal intrusion into an open state criminal prosecution,” she wrote, “I will take a moment to voluntarily respond to parts of your letter.”

My favorite portion of her letter comes at the end, where she suggests that instead of wasting everyone’s time (my words), he might use his status as chairman of the Judiciary Committee to engage in “productive activity.”

He could, she offered, lead an effort for increased federal funding to states and cities for victim-witness advocates, the “grossly underpaid” professionals who take care of victims and witnesses in prosecutors offices. He could push for greater federal grant funding so that the country’s backlog of untested rape kits could be cleared. (DNA from 40 serial rapists, she said, was discovered in 1,500 untested Fulton County kits dating back to the 1990s, thanks to limited federal funds.) 

Also, Jordan could find money for overwhelmed state crime labs that are unable to complete timely tests on seized drugs, including fentanyl, or on firearms used in violent crime? 

How about expanding the Credible Messengers program, which matches kids in legal trouble with adult mentors who have turned their lives around?

Or maybe, just maybe, she wrote, Jordan might want to urge the Department of Justice to investigate “the racist threats” that she and her staff have received because of her investigation.

Willis, who is Black, has been deluged with verbal assaults and death threats — not just from random Trump-loving racists, but from the former president himself, who has described her as a “rabid partisan” and “racist.”

She has weathered the storm with grace.

“It’s not what they call you, it’s what you answer to,” she recently told Maria Boynton, host on a popular Atlanta radio station. Although her name has been bandied about as a potential Democratic gubernatorial candidate in purpling Georgia, Willis said she’s dreaming of a future away from politics.

Now halfway through her first four-year term, she’d like to serve two more, then kiss the law goodbye.

“After that,” said Willis, 52, who has brought dozens of homicide cases, “I want to be a person who throws parties. I figure I’ve seen the worst of life, now I want to go do something where everybody is happy.”

I’d hire her in a heartbeat. 

@robinkabcarian

*Because #GymJimJordan was associated with a coach who molested male adolescent children in a wrestling gym and he didn’t do anything to help them. One story told was that he was complained to about the coach pleasuring himself in the gym shower and he reportedly said “yeah he does that”, like it was not a problem.

How did Governor DeSantis ever get elected in Florida? He is a terrible politician.

Echo opinion by Robin Abcarian published in the Los Angeles Times: 

The most depressing thing we learned about the 2024, Republican presidential candidates last week when they met for their first onstage encounter in Milwaukee is that most of them would vote for former guy President Trump, even if he is a convicted criminal by election day.

Most would probably follow him to hell, too.😈

This was supposed to be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ breakout night. After all, he is the front-runner among candidates not named Trump. But he didn’t make much of an impression on most commentators. To use one of his favorite insults, he was more a listless vessel than a breakout star.

It turns out that DeSantis is not very good at debate, at least not the kind that prefaces a presidential election. He managed to repeat and contradict himself, promising twice to “send Joe Biden back to his basement” and once to not let Biden “hang out in his basement this time. We’re going to run him ragged around this country.” Make up your mind, Governor!

Florida's Ron DeSantis has "absolutely zero" charisma. In other words, "a charisma deficit disorder".

DeSantis burst onto the national stage during the pandemic, demonizing public health officials like Anthony Fauci; picking pointless fights with Disney, his state’s most important economic driver; and striking out at anything he deemed “woke,” which his own general counsel defined as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” 

How radical!

Repeatedly touting his state on the campaign trail as “the place where ‘woke’ goes to die,” DeSantis did not utter that word once Wednesday night, which tells us that he finally grasps that it’s a dumb rationale for a presidential campaign.

Nor did he mention Disney, which has become such a thorn in his side that the man whose campaign bus proclaims “Never Back Down” has gone wobbly. 

Now, DeSantis professes to have “moved on” when the feud with Disney comes up.  In fact, DeSantis urged Disney to withdraw its federal lawsuit, which claims DeSantis violated the company’s 1st Amendment rights by retaliating for the company’s objections to Florida’s notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law.

DeSantis has been falling in polls, with 38-year-old tech bro Vivek Ramaswamy ascending. I think DeSantis’ debate performance helps explain why he’s flailing.

First, as has been noted extensively, the man has exactly zero charisma. As we have seen in the past couple of months, he walks among voters wearing a grin-and-bear-it grimace. He wipes his nose, then shakes hands. He scolds and hectors children.

“Before the debate,” said a report in the New York Times, “Mr. DeSantis’s aides had predicted that he would be the center of attacks. So much for that. Rivals mostly ignored him.” In politics, that’s a fate worse than forgetting which federal departments you want to abolish.

Instead of creating labels about the "woke left", Josh Hawley should instead exit stage left: Run Josh run!

An echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times, by columnist Robin Abcarian:

Let’s dispense with the obvious.  When most people think of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) — if they think of him at all — they probably conjure images of two moments, both of which occurred on one of the worst days in American history.

"Manhood?" Josh Hawley is laughable (and the laughter was audible)🤣❗

That was, of course, January 6, 2021, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of election deniers seeking to halt the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. 

Many of those insurrectionists are now facing prison terms for sedition and other crimes.

In the first memorable image, a fist-pumping Hawley walks past the insurrectionists on his way to vote against certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election. You guys are awesome, his body language says. I am with you all the way.

The second image is a clip of Hawley fleeing that very same mob after it breached the Capitol. In that one, he is also pumping his arms, but that’s because he’s running away at a fast clip. When it was shown during one of the House January 6, Committee’s hearings, spectators burst out laughing.

Now, I’m not suggesting Hawley was wrong to run, but in doing so, he revealed himself as a coward, a hypocrite and a phony. Not to mention shameless.

On Tuesday, Hawley’s book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” (Oh Paaaaleeeze!...

.....was released by the conservative publishing house Regnery, coinciding with his 2024 reelection campaign. 

On Wednesday, Hawley tweeted that his book had “triggered” the left, so “get your copy now.”

Hawley posing as an expert on courage is as credible as Donald Trump posing as an expert on marital fidelity.

Among the many regrettable things in Hawley’s book is his un-ironic use of the metaphor of running when describing how to behave like a man: “Running towards the monsters of your life requires courage.”

“Run toward the darkness that threatens your family.”

“If your life is relentlessly about you, you will never run towards danger.”

“Manhood,” which reads like a Sunday sermon, is an extended rant about how American men need to rediscover their manliness ❓ by modeling themselves on biblical figures such as Adam and Abraham. Since we are, in Hawley’s view, witnessing “the collapse of American manhood,” blame must be assigned. A culprit must be found.

Aaaaand, no surprise here, it’s the “woke left!” that’s turning men to mush. Not to mention “the liberal elite,” “the educated elite,” “the cultural elite” and all of the other godless folks who control American business, academia, the media and Hollywood.

“To a remarkable, historically unusual extent,” Hawley writes, “America’s cultural institutions are now dominated by a small, homogenous class of individuals who graduated from the same coterie of elite schools and share the same Epicurean, mostly atheistic world view they learned there.” (Not many of the blue collar Trumpanizitas know what "Epicurean" means and are challenged to spell it.)

I guess intellectual dishonesty is to be expected from a man who poses as a blue-collar hero but doesn’t bother to mention in biographical passages that his father was a banker, or that he attended a private prep school, Stanford University and Yale Law; clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.; taught constitutional law; worked as a state attorney general; and has basically been cushioned in privilege his entire life. (“In college,” he writes, “I took up rowing.” Quelle surprise!)

Mirror mirror on the wall. Who is the biggest hypocrite of all?

I can’t really account for Hawley’s bizarre and frequent use of the word “Epicurean” as a synonym for liberals or progressives, except that he may think it makes him sound like an intellectual. (Epicurus, by the way, was a Greek philosopher who taught that the point of life was to attain pleasure. He is associated with hedonism, the opposite of stoicism, which emphasizes virtue as its own reward.)

In any case, writes Hawley, who was raised Methodist and now attends an evangelical Presbyterian church, America is a Christian nation, founded on biblical principles that have somehow gotten lost as American men, told their masculinity is toxic, have turned into simpering mama’s boys who exercise no agency and have no ambition.

Well, he doesn’t use those exact words, but that’s pretty much what he means when he writes, “Much of today’s left seems to welcome men who are passive and tame, who will do as they are told and sit in their cubicles, eyes affixed to their screen.” (Where, he presumes, they are watching pornography instead of getting married, working and raising their children.)

This is a shockingly weak analysis of America’s long-standing social problems.

In Hawley’s America, there is no systemic racism or sexism, no mass incarceration, no educational inequity and no income inequality that might account for some of the seemingly intractable problems that beset us.

In Hawley’s America, every social problem is due to the dearth of manly men. Having been brainwashed by liberals — excuse me, Epicureans — men instead seek pleasure and avoid responsibility.

I’m sorry, but there is not a man in America who needs a lecture from Josh Hawley.

Especially not about courage.