“There is considerable ambiguity about what various participants in the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 were doing. There is no ambiguity about what Ginni Thomas was doing. She was trying to overthrow the government.
[..]
“Here she had been obsessing this whole time, and here now, three decades after the hearings, ten years after the voice-mail, the very old man who presided over the hearings had come back to thwart her. Of course it was connected.
“Thomas quotes W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, he echoes arguments one might encounter in Black Power, he draws frequently on his own painful childhood, and yet he comes, almost all of the time, to conclusions amenable to Harlan Crow.
[..]
He did not in fact share Crow’s worldview, but he had melded a mix of Black nationalism and originalism sufficient to build a decoy.
“Virginia Thomas speaks the language of QAnon, but her texts to Meadows lack the coherence of even a sophisticated QAnon adherent; they are, according to the hosts of the podcast QAnonymous, redolent of “the classic QAnon boomer” whom younger, more-with-it followers of Q would kick off boards for theories “too stupid and melted.”
“[She] was a self-proclaimed bridge burner disgusted with both Mike Pence and “elites,” a category that evidently did not include the wife of the longest-serving Supreme Court justice or the president’s chief of staff to whom she happened to be talking. [..] She was picking up “vibes,” she told the January 6 committee, vibes being sufficient basis on which to overturn an election.
“The Supreme Court is a political body composed of political actors. In five years’ time, Clarence Thomas will be the longest-serving justice in American history. Harlan will continue to print up custom polos. Ginni will still be waiting for Anita Hill’s apology. And far fewer of us will pretend the Court is constrained by anything but the wild, emotive whims of imperfect people. It’s a gift, at long last, from them to you.”
Watching the Durham hearing, it's clear the reason @RepAdamSchiff was censured is because he is effective. Schiff knows his topic inside and out. His questions are pointed and acerbic. #durham
Rep Steve Cohen TN - D stammered, stumbled through his questioning of Durham. Cohen wasn't prepared.. The questions were incoherent. It was a missed opportunity. #durham
Glad @renato_mariotti called out @JoyAnnReid on the inappropriate laughter in the death penalty segment. This is so serious. The rhetoric around instituting the death penalty --across the board for drug dealers is dangerous. And it could come true.
Do not minimize this.
ProPublica asked about Alito’s travel. He replied in the Wall Street Journal.
Questioned about an undisclosed fishing trip hosted by a GOP billionaire, the Supreme Court justice instead shared his rebuttal in a rival media outlet — before the investigative journalists could publish their scoop
By Paul Farhi @washingtonpost
@forpeterssake@volkris From the reading, I think, Propublica sent Alito questions a week ago, with a Tuesday deadline. Alito runs to the WSJ.
Alito needs to resign.
'In 2018, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers, submersible company executives and deep-sea explorers, warned that they had “unanimous concern” about the craft’s design, and worried that the Titan had not followed standard certification procedures. In a 2019 blog post, the company said that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/06/20/us/titanic-missing-submarine/heres-the-latest-on-the-missing-submersible?smid=url-share
Alfred S. McLaren, a retired Navy submariner and president emeritus of the Explorers Club of New York City, agreed. “I’ve had three people ask me about making a dive on it,” he said in reference to the lost submersible. “And I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I wouldn’t do it in a million years.”
Some experts fear an innovative submersible maker was ‘cutting corners.’
‘In July 2016, I described Trump as temperamentally unfit to be president—erratic, unprincipled, unstable, obsessive, a serial liar, and a misogynist who made racist appeals and who suffered from what, at the time, I called a “personality disorder.” On the day after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” It hasn’t.’
