Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, September 30, 2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, September 30, 2023

It appears Prigozhin got the punishment Putin vowed. What will the Russian leader do next?

When Russian authorities announced on Wednesday that Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on board a private jet that crashed, the question wasn't so much why he might have been killed, but why a man President Vladimir Putin had branded a traitor wasn't taken out earlier.

Political and security experts say what appears to have happened to Prigozhin sends a strong signal — that if any of the Russian elite publicly challenges Putin, they will be taken out in a public way.

Johannesburg, South Africa – Saudi Arabia and Iran are among six countries invited to join BRICS as new members next year, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced on the final day of a summit of the group that considers itself a counterweight to Western powers.

The group encompassing five major emerging economies – China, Brazil, South Africa, Russia and India – which makes decisions by consensus, agreed on “the guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedures of the BRICS expansion process”, during the three-day annual summit held in Johannesburg this week, Ramaphosa said on Thursday.

While the news of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death stunned the world, the response within official Washington was a collective shrug.

Officials demurred from commenting on the circumstances of the downing of a flight with Prigozhin aboard, stressing instead that everyone knew this was the likely outcome of his failed mutiny against Moscow in June and that it doesn’t change the U.S. calculation on Russia or its war in Ukraine.

Former President Donald Trump crowned tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy the winner of the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night — for singing his praises.

“President Trump, I believe, was the best president of the 21st century,” Ramaswamy said in a clip from the debate Trump posted on Truth Social.

Amia Edwards lives here because she wants to make a difference. But in this majority-Black city, long starved for funding by the state’s mostly white Legislature, that’s proved a steep challenge.

The city’s recent water crisis came after years of chronic underfunding of Jackson’s aging water infrastructure. The stench lingers in Edwards’ front yard after raw sewage flooded her home twice — neither the city nor the state agreeing to help. Abandoned homes blemish her south Jackson neighborhood as residents fled for better-funded communities. And at her nonprofit that prepares Jackson youth for performing-arts careers, she sees the results of cash-strapped schools when her kids struggle to read scripts and rap lyrics.

For Marcelino Zapoteco, the final straw came on a quiet night in 2018 at the restaurant Brioso on Staten Island. He was working alongside one of the managers who had been pulled in by the restaurant’s co-owner Pietro “Peter” DiMaggio to help as a waiter. At one point during the shift, Zapoteco watched the manager slip tip money into his pocket, when he was supposed to pool it to be shared with others.

Zapoteco, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, said he knew that the restaurant was grossly underpaying him during the more than seven years he worked there. When he served as a runner, bringing food to customers’ tables, he received as little as $10 for lunch and dinner shifts — far below the required minimum wage even when tips were included, he said.

An unlikely coalition of progressive and hard-right conservative lawmakers came together this year to push for overhauling a powerful government spying authority. But as the time approaches to take action, cracks are starting to show.

Republicans and Democrats who have backed each other’s ideas in hearings and collaborated on working groups are starting to stake out different positions about what reforms are really needed for the program, which allows government spies to snoop on the emails and other electronic communications of foreigners abroad.

A federal judge quickly shot down bids Wednesday by two former Trump administration officials — Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark — to derail the criminal proceedings against them in Fulton County, where they’re charged alongside Donald Trump with a sprawling racketeering conspiracy to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

In two six-page rulings by Atlanta-based U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones effectively ensures that Meadows and Clark will face arrest this week, a result both men attempted to prevent in a series of emergency filings.

KYIV — Ukraine on Thursday conducted a daring operation in Russian-occupied Crimea, its military intelligence said, as Kyiv marked the anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Ukrainian outlet Krym Realii reported blasts and a firefight in Crimea early in the day, citing their sources in the occupied territory. Ukrainian forces which arrived via sea engaged with Russian occupiers, inflicting casualties and damage to equipment, military intelligence said.

Who’d shed a tear for Yevgeny Prigozhin?

Well, the apparent death of the belligerent leader of the notorious mercenary Wagner Group in a plane crash Wednesday night has created an unexpected outpouring of grief inside Russia.

In the 62-year-old oligarch’s home city of St. Petersburg, a candlelit vigil was set up outside one of the group’s now-shuttered recruiting centers. Well-wishers lay red roses, while others placed badges featuring Wagner’s macabre skull and crosshairs logo.

Ukraine has claimed its troops briefly landed overnight in the occupied Crimea peninsula, as the country marks 32 years of its independence.

All objectives of the "special operation" were achieved without any casualties, the defence ministry said.

It added that during a firefight in Olenivka and Mayak, western Crimea, "the enemy suffered losses".

Ron DeSantis expected to take the brunt of his opponents’ fire.

Instead, he faded into the crowd.

Largely ignored for two hours by his lower-polling rivals on Wednesday, the Florida governor watched as the first debate of the GOP primary turned into a pile on Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur rising in polls.

Mike Pence tangled with Ramaswamy. So did Nikki Haley and Chris Christie. DeSantis, still polling second to former President Donald Trump — but with his campaign floundering — was all but reduced to an afterthought, while Pence, Haley and Christie dominated the stage.

LOS ANGELES — The California woman killed for apparently refusing to remove an LGBTQ+ rainbow Pride flag from outside her store was adamant that she would never take it down, a longtime friend said Wednesday.

Laura Ann Carleton was fatally shot Friday outside Mag.Pi, the clothing and home decor shop she owned in Cedar Glen, a mountain community east of Los Angeles.

The shooter, Travis Ikeguchi, was killed by deputies after he opened fire on them a short time later, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said Monday. Ikeguchi had frequently posted anti-LGBTQ content on social media, sheriff’s officials said.

Former President Donald Trump disputed that he asked his vice president to put Trump “above the Constitution,” in his first post after the first Republican primary debate.

“I never asked Mike Pence to put me above the Constitution. Who would say such a thing? A FAKE STORY!” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

Newt Gingrich has described traits that he apparently cannot comprehend from an American president, and critics think he might be projecting just a tad.

“How can you have a commander in chief who’s totally out of touch with reality?” the former GOP House speaker said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Jeanine Pirro was very angry on Tuesday that an American president lacked empathy, told lies and made everything about himself.

But no, she wasn’t talking about Donald Trump.

“This guy has been lying from the moment he came on the political scene,” the Fox News host said in a fervent rant about President Joe Biden on “The Five.” “He has a lack of empathy. He is egocentric. He’s got a condescending smirk whenever anybody asks him a question from the press. He’s lying and he’s narcissistic.”

A federal judge has denied last-minute attempts by Mark Meadows and Jeffrey Clark to avoid being arrested in the Fulton County, Georgia, election interference case if they fail to appear on time for their arraignments on the charges.

Both the former White House chief of staff and the former top Justice Department official wanted to block any attempts to arrest them for ignoring the deadline set two weeks ago for the 19 defendants in the state indictment to turn themselves in, according to The Hill.

In the aftermath of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “march on Moscow” two months ago, CIA chief William Burns predicted that Russian president Vladimir Putin would take his time exacting his revenge.

“What we are seeing is a very complicated dance,” Burns suggested at the Aspen Security Forum in July. “Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback.”

And while details of exactly what occurred remain murky in the immediate aftermath of the mercenary boss’s reported death in a plane crash, what is clear is that Wagner – the mercenary organisation that Prigozhin built – has essentially been first quartered and then dramatically decapitated.

House Republicans have been criticizing President Joe Biden’s response to the wildfires in Maui, saying that he’s not providing enough federal resources and is instead too focused on supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“FEMA is underfunded by $4 BILLION, Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) is only funded $1 per Georgian, Hawaii’s Lahaina is in desperate need of help from devastating fire killing 50+ people, and America is broke,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted earlier this month, just after the Maui wildfires took hold.

As students across the country grapple with mass shootings and the looming threat of a decimated planet, Republican lawmakers have trained their energy instead on education.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, state lawmakers introduced 392 so-called educational intimidation bills, according to a report from PEN America published on Wednesday. As of earlier this summer, only four state legislatures had not seen this type of bill, according to the report, which spans legislative activity from January 2021 to June 2023. All but 15 of the bills were sponsored solely by Republicans.

Vladimir Putin has defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sought to rally leaders of the Brics nations meeting in South Africa to the Kremlin’s side.

In a prerecorded video message aired on Tuesday to the leaders of Brazil, India, China and South Africa, Putin repeated his earlier unfounded claims that the west was responsible for the war in Ukraine.

“Our actions in Ukraine are dictated by only one thing – to end the war that was unleashed by the west and its satellites against the people who live in the Donbas,” Putin said, referring to the eastern part of Ukraine where Russian proxies have been fighting the Ukrainian army since 2014.

The race to win the Republican nomination for the White House is set to kick off in earnest, as the party holds its first presidential debate this Wednesday.

And while the debate will feature some of the biggest names in conservative politics, one figure will be conspicuously absent: former United States President Donald Trump.

Far and away the frontrunner in the Republican race, Trump announced on his platform Truth Social over the weekend that he would not participate in the debate, citing his already high poll numbers.

So what’s next for Rachel Notley?

The buzz grows louder by the day that Notley is going to move on from her role as Alberta’s Opposition leader.

Gossips are hinting at sometime early in the new year, possibly January. As for Notley herself and her inner circle, they’re playing it close to their vests. For now.

Unusually for a party leader who has just lost an election on which many supporters had pinned their hopes, there is no clamour within the NDP caucus or most of the party for Notley to go.

Rudy Giuliani, who was Donald Trump's personal lawyer, has surrendered at a jail in Atlanta, Georgia on charges of helping Mr Trump try to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

Mr Giuliani, who was released on a $150,000 (£118,000) bond, faces 13 charges including racketeering.

The former New York mayor is one of 19 people, including Mr Trump, indicted in the election interference case.

Mr Trump has said he will attend jail to be booked on Thursday afternoon.

A man believed to be a Chinese rights activist has been arrested in South Korea after an apparent attempt to flee there on a jet ski.

The country's coast guard said the man had travelled about 300km (186 miles) across the Yellow Sea using binoculars and a compass, but then got stuck.

Local reports named him as Kwon Pyong, a critic of President Xi Jinping, but his identity has not been verified.

Former US President Donald Trump has been implicated by one of his employees in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, according to a court filing.

Yuscil Taveras, an IT director identified as Trump Employee 4 in legal documents, changed his testimony after switching lawyers, say prosecutors.

He now accuses Mr Trump and two aides of "efforts to delete security camera footage", says the filing.

The 77-year-old ex-president faces 40 charges in the case.

Russian General Sergei Surovikin, who at one time was commander of Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine, has been dismissed as head of the country’s aerospace forces, a prominent journalist in Russia and media outlets have reported.

Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) radio station, said on his Telegram channel on Tuesday that Surovikin had been removed, citing an official decree. Surovikin will remain in the defence ministry after his deposition, Venediktov said.

Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy secretary of the Kremlin’s powerful Security Council, has warned that Moscow could annex Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Reuters news agency reported.

Medvedev, who has cast himself as one of Moscow’s most hawkish political voices since Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, accused the West in a newspaper article published on Wednesday of creating tension over Georgia by discussing its possible membership in the NATO military alliance.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for an expansion of the BRICS grouping of emerging economies to build a more just and equitable international order, insisting “hegemonism is not in China’s DNA”.

In a speech delivered on his behalf at the start of BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa on Tuesday, Xi said China had no wish to engage in great power competition or create “bloc confrontation”.

“China stands firmly on the right side of history and believes a just cause should be pursued for the common good,” Xi said at a business forum, according to remarks delivered by Commerce Minister Wang Wentao.

Xi said BRICS would continue to grow “whatever resistance there may be.”

Donald Trump caused a stir online with a tongue-in-cheek comment about leaving the U.S. to live in “a gold domed suite” with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

The former president posted the remark Monday on his Truth Social platform, after his bond was set at $200,000 following his indictment for allegedly scheming to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

A key witness in the government’s investigation into Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents retracted his previous testimony and gave new statements that implicate the former president after switching attorneys, federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday.

Trump was charged with dozens of federal crimes in June for mishandling sensitive material after he left the White House. But special counsel Jack Smith’s office leveled even more felonies against him last month, accusing the former president and two aides of ordering the deletion of a computer server that held incriminating footage.

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that Republicans would open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden next month if he doesn’t hand over personal records.

McCarthy said Republicans need “the bank statements, the credit card statements” that would show whether Biden had taken a bribe.

“Show us where the money went. Show us: Were you taking money from outside sources? That would clear most of this up,” McCarthy said on Fox Business. “The whole determination here is how the Bidens handle this. If they provide us the documents, there wouldn’t be a need for an impeachment inquiry.”

Vladimir Putin has told a summit of the Brics group of countries in South Africa that it should become a trading bloc representing the “global majority”.

However, differences among the group – comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – have become apparent at the summit over accepting new members, and whether to turn Brics into a geopolitical counterweight to the west.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, insisted on Tuesday that it was not the group’s aim to compete with western institutions.

Former President Donald Trump said Monday that he is planning to surrender himself to arrest in Fulton County, Georgia, on Thursday, as part of his indictment regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 election in the state.

“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis,” Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social. The prosecutor in the case, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, has given Trump and his codefendants until Friday to turn themselves in.

Two groups of suspected Russian hackers tried to derail the NATO defense alliance’s recent Vilnius summit by spreading disinformation and apparent intelligence documents online, social media research firm Graphika said.

In a new report shared with POLITICO, Graphika detailed how it found one campaign spreading fake NATO press releases through web pages mimicking the alliance’s website and through fake social media accounts. Another group posted documents online about the summit’s internal security measures, claiming that they were documents obtained from the Lithuanian government.

On August 4, 2023, one day after pleading not guilty to four federal criminal charges arising from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to thwart the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald J. Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that “the Supreme Court must intercede.” What he presumably means is that the Supreme Court, on appeal from motions that his trial team will undoubtedly file in all four criminal cases, should rule that his conduct is untouchable because it involved actions taken while he was still president of the United States.

“Everything that President Trump did was while he was in office as president,” one of Trump’s attorneys, John Lauro, argued on NBC’s Meet the Press. “He is now immune from prosecution for acts that he takes in connection with those policy decisions.”

Donald Trump is an “idiot” for not paying legal expenses incurred by his attorney the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in the Georgia election subversion case, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said.

“Donald’s an idiot,” Cohen told CNN of the former president. “Let me just be very clear when it comes to paying money, he is truly an idiot.

“He has not learned yet that [there are] three people you don’t want to throw under the bus like that: your lawyer, your doctor and your mechanic. Because one way or the other, you’re going to go down the hill and there’ll be no brakes.”

Could there be such a thing as Trump indictment fatigue? Every week seems to bring a new set of charges; one might be forgiven for losing any sense of what’s what in the four major cases the former president now faces. (Of course, Trump himself has long perfected the art of sowing confusion through falsehoods in response to any criticisms, impeachments and now indictments – or, in the words of Steve Bannon, “flooding the zone with shit”.) What mitigates this risk, though, is that the different indictments illuminate very different aspects of Trumpism – and the way Trump operated as president, and now continues to operate in his campaign to regain the White House.

A drone appears to have destroyed a supersonic Russian bomber on an airfield hundreds of kilometres from Ukraine, British military intelligence has said, the latest in a string of successful assaults on prestige infrastructure and military hardware.

These attacks, far beyond the frontlines, are powerful propaganda for Ukraine, though Kyiv rarely claims them directly. Hits on key assets, which are meant to be heavily guarded by the latest technology, is highly damaging to morale in Russia, even if they do not change the balance of forces on the battlefield.

The Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has posted his first video address since leading a short-lived rebellion in Russia, appearing in a clip – possibly shot in Africa – on Telegram channels affiliated with the Wagner group.

A person who appears to be the 62-year-old mercenary leader is seen in the video standing in a desert area in camouflage and with a rifle in his hands. In the distance, there are more armed men and a pickup truck.

The warlord suggests in the clip, posted on Monday, that he is on the African continent, adding that “the temperature is plus 50 [degrees Celsius]”. He says Wagner is conducting reconnaissance and search operations and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free”.

The Guardian was not able to geolocate or verify the date of the video. All Eyes on Wagner, an open-source research group, reported on Saturday that a plane linked to Prighozin had landed in Bamako, the capital of Mali.

Russian social media channels close to the mercenary leader said Prigozhin was recruiting fighters to work in Africa and also inviting investors from Russia to put money into CAR through Russian House, a cultural centre linked to Prigozhin operating in Bamako.

In the video, Prigozhin says Wagner is recruiting people and the group “will fulfil the tasks that were set”.

Prigozhin moved into the global spotlight in June with a dramatic, short-lived mutiny that posed the most serious threat to Vladimir Putin in the president’s 23-year rule. He was last heard from at the end of July, when a social media account linked to him posted a recording in which he said that Wagner would pause recruiting new fighters and would focus on activities in Africa and in Russia’s neighbour, Belarus.

Over the past few years, Wagner has deployed several thousand troops in at least five African countries, propping up local autocratic regimes, often at a grave cost to the local population. Wagner has been accused of involvement in massacres in Mali as well as elsewhere in the Sahel and central Africa.

The group is believed to have the largest presence in Central African Republic (CAR), where it intervened in 2018 on the side of the government to quell a civil war that has raged since 2012. Wagner also deployed about 1,000 personnel to Mali in December 2021 after a military coup.

Shortly after Prigozhin’s revolt, Moscow reassured its allies in Africa that thousands of Wagner group fighters deployed to the continent would not be withdrawn.

The future of Wagner has, however, been unclear since Prigozhin led his short mutiny against the Russian defence establishment.

Under a deal brokered by the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin agreed to end his rebellion in exchange for amnesty for him and his fighters and permission to relocate to Belarus. Before moving to Belarus, Wagner handed over its weapons to the Russian military, part of efforts by Russian authorities to defuse the threat posed by the mercenaries.

Putin called Prigozhin a traitor as the revolt unfolded and vowed harsh punishment, but the criminal case against the mercenary chief on rebellion charges was later dropped. Unusually, the Kremlin said Putin had a three-hour meeting with Prigozhin and Wagner group commanders days after the rebellion. Putin said he sought and failed during the meeting to have Prigozhin replaced as the leader of Wagner’s fighters in Ukraine.

A video in July apparently showed Prigozhin in Belarus but he was photographed after that on the sidelines of a Russia-Africa summit in the Russian city of St Petersburg.

The Wagner founder long benefited from Putin’s powerful patronage, including while he built a private army that fought for Russian interests abroad and participated in some of the deadliest battles of the war in Ukraine.

Original Article
Source: theguardian
Author: Pjotr Sauer

House Freedom Caucus rolls out demands to avoid shutdown

The conservative House Freedom Caucus on Monday formally drew its red line on the looming government shutdown deadline.

The group of roughly three dozen Republican lawmakers said it would oppose any short-term stopgap unless leadership meets a slew of their demands. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, earlier this month, publicly said a temporary fix will be necessary to avoid a shutdown at the end of September as Congress takes more time to hash out new spending bills.

KYIV — Russia’s missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv at the weekend not only killed seven people and injured 120, it also scored a second hit for the Kremlin by stoking internal anger against drone-makers, who are accused of turning the city into a target with a security blunder.

On a bright holiday morning, as Ukrainians were returning from church on Saturday after celebrating the Apple Feast of the Savior — a harvest festival of the Orthodox church — a Russian Iskander-type ballistic missile exploded over the theater in the center of Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv, only some 70 kilometers from the border with Russia.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) says Donald Trump should quit the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Obviously that’s up to him,” he added during an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “But he will lose to Joe Biden if you look at the current polls.”

Trump has been indicted in four separate cases, with Cassidy saying the charges in the classified documents case are “almost a slam dunk” and likely to lead to a conviction.

Former Vice President Mike Pence dodged when asked if he would apply the “same standard” to Donald Trump that he used when he voted to expel a Democrat from Congress two decades ago. (See the video below.)

Pence, who is now running for the Republican presidential nomination against his former boss, was responding to a question from co-host Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan spotted an alarming number in a new CBS News poll of Republican voters.

And it wasn’t just that 62% plan to back Donald Trump in the presidential primary despite his fourth criminal indictment.

It’s that many trust Trump more than they do family, friends, the media and religious figures.

The poll finds 71% of Trump’s supporters believe what he says it true, despite the fact that he told more than 30,000 lies during his four years in office, according to The Washington Post.

MSNBC’s Jen Psaki said Donald Trump is showing an “unusual” sign of fear.

The former president has been indicted on state charges in New York, in two federal cases, and most recently in Georgia ― or 91 felony counts in total, Psaki pointed out.

“Right now, Trump seems worried in a way that’s sorta unusual for him, at least publicly,” Psaki said.

North Carolina GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has said it himself: He’s a conspiracy theorist.

He didn’t specify in that March interview what that means in terms of what he believes. It turns out it means he has spread virtually every conspiracy theory you can think of.

Robinson, who is the state’s lieutenant governor, has said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the 1969 moon landing was fake and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job.” He’s “SERIOUSLY skeptical” of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. He falsely accused David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, of being a paid actor. He’s claimed that climate change is based on “junk science.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) invited social media scorn on Sunday by making light of tropical storm Hilary to insult frequent GOP target Hillary Clinton.

Greene retweeted a meme of the former Democratic presidential candidate’s head tracking Hilary, the first tropical storm to hit California in 84 years. The downgraded hurricane flooded parts of Southern California, generating mudslides and forcing first responders to rescue people from swollen rivers.

‘We’re Loving It’ — Atlanta Reacts to Donald Trump’s Indictment

ATLANTA — Here, at the Fulton County Courthouse, smack dab in downtown Atlanta, the vibe is decidedly hushed. In the coming months, this 112-year-old courthouse will be aswarm with activity — ground zero in the battle over democracy — when 19 defendants, including a former president, will stand trial for allegedly trying to overturn an election. But that legal reckoning is many months away. Right now, the only evidence of what’s to come are the barricades stretching up and down the block and a battalion of TV trucks camped out across the street, waiting. There is the sense of life put on pause, an anxious sort of calm before the judicial storm.

Sen. Bill Cassidy said Sunday he thinks that former President Donald Trump should exit the 2024 GOP presidential race.

“I think so,” Cassidy (R-La.) told host Kasie Hunt when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether Trump should withdraw from the presidential race. “But obviously, that’s up to him. I mean, you’re just asking my opinion but he will lose to Joe Biden if you look at the current polls.”