14 August 2022 — 2209 mdt
Sunday thoughts about Friday’s dark news
By James Conner
Dark news dominated Friday.
- An award winning author was gravely injured by a knife weilding assailant who may have been trying to execute a decades old fatwa and collect a seven figure bounty.
- FBI agents investigating possible violations of the Espionage Act seized from erstwhile President Trump 11 boxes of documents, including documents marked Top Secret and documents related to nuclear matters.
- Ten legislators filed with Montana’s secretary of state a document requiring a poll of the legislature to determine whether there should be a special session that would consider using a revenue surplus not for the common good but to put a thousands dollars or so in the accounts of taxpayers just before the election in November.
The attempted murder in Chautauqua, NY. Nothing Friday disturbed me as much as of The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, 75, who lies in gravely serious q in a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania. Born in India, Rushdie became an American citizen in 2016. If he lives, he may do so minus an eye, minus functioning nerves in an arm, and with a damaged liver.
The motives of his alleged assailant, Hadi Matar, 24, in a New York jail charged with attempted second degree murder, apparently are unknown. But I suspect we will learn that Matar sought the $3 million bounty that Islamic extremists, including Iranian ayatollahs, and Iranian state entities, offered for his death. The fatwa behind the bounty never has been withdrawn — and news that Rushdie had been assaulted was met with joy in Tehran.…in Iran, Mr. Rushdie’s enemies rejoiced. The front page of Keyhan, a newspaper published in Tehran, on Sunday said that Mr. Rushdie had gotten “divine vengeance” and that former President Donald J. Trump and Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, “are next.” [Washington Post]
I think the investigation of this attack will reveal that in practical terms, Rushdie — a man always in mortal danger from religious crazies — was without sufficient preventive security (and apparently was not wearing a bulletproof vest that would have prevented the chest wounds he suffered). Young, strong, highly trained guards should have been posted double at all access points to the stage, armed, alert, and able to instantly interpose themselves between a man storming the stage and the person he seeks to kill. Protecting a man in his situation is not duty fit for middle aged deputy sheriffs nearing retirement or private rent-a-cops.
If the people responsible for reaching thousands of miles to incite someone to try to kill an American citizen can be identified, then our long range cruise missiles should take them out to administer justice and remind their associates, who should have learned from Osama Bin Laden’s demise, that America hunts down and captures or snuffs out those who spill American blood. This a time for righteous retaliation, and not a time for turning the other cheek
Trump and the Espionage Act. Monday, FBI agents executing a search warrant seized documents and other items from their hiding places in former President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate. He was hundreds of miles to the north, but his attorney was there. She signed the receipt for the seized items, which apparently included documents pertaining to nuclear energy or weapons that were marked Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (see the GSA’s handbook on security classifications). The FBI kept the raid low key. But Trump, summering at his golf course in New Jersey, went into his standard high dudgeon and at maximum volume expressed his outrage that he was being treated like a regular person suspected of wrongdoing.
Thursday, we learned that a search warrant was obtained because Trump was thought to not properly complying with a subpoena for the items seized. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he had personally approved the search warrant. After explaining that the warrant was sealed to protect the subject’s presumption of innocence, he said the Department of Justice was asking the judge to unseal the warrant — provided that Trump did not object. Trump did not object. Friday the warrant was unsealed, but not the affidavit supporting the warrant.
Trump's sycophants in the U.S. House of Representatives immediately echoed his accusations that jackbooted thugs from the Deep State Police had violated his rights, but most senators were more circumspect — and were glad they did after Garland called his bluff and it was revealed that classified documents possibly containing nuclear secrets had been saved.Don Moynihan, McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, observed:
The FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-A-Largo left many unanswered questions but revealed one basic fact about contemporary American politics: the conservative movement has abandoned a healthy skepticism of government to embrace a peculiar brand of anti-statism. As soon as the news of the search broke, Republican leaders and right-wing media fell over themselves to attack public officials rather than accept the possibility that a man with decades of dishonesty behind him might have done anything wrong.
The political philosophy underpinning this support for Trump holds that state power is corrupt, and this corruption in turn justifies abuses of state power that Trump and supporters are promising in the future. Our victimhood necessitates our extremes. As an approach to governing, it is deeply destructive to a pluralistic democracy where parties exchange power on a routine basis.
Trump brought this on himself, both by flipping his bird at the subpoena and through his habit of destroying paper documents. By long established law, classified and almost all other documents produced during his presidency belong to the nation, not to him, and as part of the transition of power must be placed in the custody of the National Archives. That’s not a matter of dispute.
What might be a matter of dispute is whether he should be prosecuted for trying to retain possession of the documents after being told to give them to the National Archives. If the DOJ determines that classified nuclear information was at risk but did not fall into hostile hands, Garland might conclude that prosecuting Trump would not be in the interest of national security, but that for the rest of his life he should lose all access to all classified information.
All of this depresses me, but none of it surprises me. Trump’s destruction of documents is a common tactic of people who want no paper or electronic trail of activities that at best whiff of fresh road apples steaming under a summer sun. A missing written record reduces an issue an inconclusive he said she said standoff, which is what Trump seeks to do and in my view has spent his whole life seeking to do.
On Wednesday, when Trump sat for a deposition in New York, the liar told no lies. He responded to all questions — approximately 400 questions — by exercising his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. That might keep him from being found guilty in a court of law, but it will convict him in the court of public opinion. He doesn’t care that it will because he’s convinced that his followers will stand with him no matter what he does.
Who’s afraid of larger than expected tax revenues in Montana? Ten Republican legislator, that’s who. In a fine story in the Helena Independent Record, Holly Michels explains why they’re asking Montana Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen to poll our legislators on whether there should be a special session to kick a large portion of what they consider excess revenue back to the voters just before an election.
The letter sent this week was signed by House Majority Leader Sue Vinton, Reps. Bill Mercer, Matt Regier, Jane Gillette and Terry Moore, Senate Majority Leader Cary Smith, and Sens. Greg Hertz, Dan Bartel, Ken Bogner and Tom McGillvray.
Received by the Secretary of State on Wednesday, the letter from legislators said the “unforeseen, unappropriated and surplus tax collections belong to the people of Montana. The people of Montana have overpaid their liability tax to operate our state.”
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In the letter, the 10 legislators wrote that “when an overpayment of this magnitude occurs, it is logically expected by the people of Montana and fiscally responsible for state government to return the overpayment in an efficient manner and on a timely schedule.”
They propose up to $1,000 rebates for homeowners who paid property taxes on primary residence in Montana in 2021 and 2020 and up to $1,250 for taxpayers and $2,500 for couples filing jointly who paid individual income taxes in those years. They also call for putting $100 million toward paying down bonded debt held by the state.
Not all Republicans agree with that.
Rep. Llew Jones, a Republican who is a major crafter of the state budget each session, has argued the surplus comes from artificially high tax collections because of pandemic-tied economic stimulus programs and that the money should instead be reinvested into programs and projects he believes will lessen the burden on taxpayers down the road.
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Late last month, Jones wrote an opinion piece saying that tax collections were artificially spiked from the $14.5 billion the federal government put into Montana’s economy during the pandemic. For comparison, the two-year budget lawmakers passed for Montana in 2021 included $12 billion in total spending, with more than half of that from federal sources.
“The surplus should be returned to taxpayers, but not through an inflationary direct rebate, but rather by reducing our current liabilities and emphasizing investments that reduce future spending,” Jones wrote.
In July, according to this story by Tom Kuglin, Democrats in the legislature proposed allocating the surplus differently.
The Montana Legislature will begin the next session with a projected $1.7 billion budget surplus driven by higher than predicted tax revenues, Democratic legislators said from the Capitol Wednesday. Under their proposal, $750 million would be allocated for programs and services with $250 million refunded as targeted property tax relief.
“We want to put money back in the pockets of the people of our community, we want to address rising costs, we want to make sure that our economy is thriving, and to do that we need to address all of these things, and we need to address them here,” House Minority Leader Kim Abbott of Helena said.
The 2023 legislative session convenes in early January, less than five months from now, but two months after the election. Fiscally responsible legislators will want to wait until the session commences before committing any of the reported surplus to specific programs. They will not want to appear to be calling a pre-election special session to bribe voters to vote for Republicans.
That kind of special session would generate spending so unrestrained that a drunken sailor on shore leave after six months at sea would seem frugal and sober as an underpaid parson whose spouse begs him to buy enough groceries that their baby won’t cry from hunger.
Tell your blessing in the legislature not to return their “Should we have a special session to spend, spend, and bribe voters?” ballot. Here’s your link to the legislature: https://leg.mt.gov/session/.