Ian Welsh

Use to discuss topics not covered in recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 13, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

How the EU is using anti-Russia sanctions to criminalise journalism

Hüseyin Dogru,  September 6, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

The EU sanctioned me and my media outlet for covering Palestine protests in Germany.

War on voting

The Final Battle for America’s Democracy

Michael Luttig, September 10, 2026 [The New Republic]
[Summarized in link below, plus more.]

Letters from an American, September 12, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, September 12, 2026

On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party…and to all Americans. In the piece, Luttig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. “The coming crisis,” the piece says, would be “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.”

Luttig spelled out that Trump is fighting a war against America’s democracy. While the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to assist his power grab made it fail in January 2021, Luttig notes, today Trump and his Republican congressional allies are more determined than ever to take over the country.

Luttig focuses on the ability of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to prevent the recognition of duly-elected Democratic representatives on January 3. Johnson has the power, Luttig says, to remove the current House clerk, Kevin McCumber, and replace him temporarily with a MAGA loyalist who will refuse to list Democrats on the roll of those elected to the 120th Congress.

In this scenario, once Democrats are eliminated, they will have to get a federal court to order the temporary clerk to list their names. If a court does so, another crisis point will arrive if the clerk simply refuses to obey the order. Then it’s possible the courts will stay out of the fight until the 120th Congress formally convenes and the Republicans vote not to seat the Democrats. That vote would be reviewable by the courts, including the Supreme Court.

But that review would take weeks, if not months, paralyzing the United States and leaving the country “helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” And at that point, how would the current Supreme Court answer the question: “Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?”

As if to illustrate Luttig’s warning, House speaker Johnson told attendees at Trump’s convention in Dallas on Thursday: “We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”

Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voting has recently had a test run. Yesterday, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket picked up a story from Jeff Berlew of the Tallahassee Democrat to report that the USPS rejected mailed ballots from Leon County, in Florida, because the words “return service requested” were only 0.236 inches from the election office’s return address. They were supposed to be a full quarter-inch apart. So, the delivery of those mail in ballots came down to a federal complaint about a spacing issue of 0.014 of an inch.

“It’s ridiculous,” Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told Berlew. But, as Saksa notes, the rejection of ballots for such a petty flaw shows what will likely happen if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction blocking the postal service from implementing the new rules it has put in place since Trump ordered such interference in a March executive order.

On Thursday, September 10, Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has sent threatening letters to at least thirty top election officials in the states, warning that those officials “are currently under investigation” and are subject to “ongoing litigation,” and so must not destroy any records relating to the 2024 election. As Corasaniti notes, the administration has sued 30 states for their voter lists and has lost 23 of the cases and won none. Trump has claimed to be the victim of voter fraud since the 2016 primaries but has never produced any proof of his claims.

In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division in the DOJ, threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if any noncitizens cast a ballot in their state (although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote), and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with criminal prosecution if they did not put Trump’s election changes into effect….

Voting Rights Groups Are Preparing to Confront ICE at the Polls

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2026]

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This is the first of two parts of the second part of a longer three part series. Part one covered COVID.

POTUS Joe Biden wasn’t just a senile fool who insisted on running for re-election when obviously senile, costing the Democrats the 2024 Presidential election and giving us Trump 2.0, he was also the nominal architect of three mass-death events that rank with this awful Century’s worst.

So yea, I’m back to hammering nails in the dying ghoul’s coffin so people don’t forget what he was and what he (or the administration with his name on it) did.

Last time I pounded home the Biden administration’s horrific, criminally negligent responsibility for ~1M deaths of American citizens and residents.

This time I’m going to be pounding home the extent to which Biden & co. knowingly provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in February 2022, put the kibosh on a peace deal Russia and Ukraine had allegedly worked out on in April 2022, and squandered massive fortunes pouring money and weapons into the yawning black maw that is Kyiv under Zelensky, and in so doing signed the death warrant of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, mostly the former.

And because the trap that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into was loaded not only with billions worth of military preparations and massive economic sanctions, but also with the biggest and most brutally effective propaganda campaign of my lifetime (and I lived through the post-9/11 Karl Rove Great War on Terror nightmare as a full-grown ass adult), trying to speak up for a modicum of reason and objectivity got anyone even mildly opposed to the dominant narrative labeled a “Putin puppet” and cast out of polite liberal American society.

That wasn’t new in 2022, of course. By that point we’d enjoyed six years’ worth of RussiaGate panic and the neo-McCarthyism from the establishment shitlibs in charge of the Democratic Party and their “vote blue no matter who” idiot supporters.

Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign kicked off RussiaGate the day after she lost the election to Trump as a great way to distract from how shitty her campaign was and the fact that the Democratic party put its thumb on the scale in her favor against Bernie Sanders, went full-on commie hunter like the ’64 Goldwater girl she once was against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. Clinton said on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe (that’s former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe) that the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and calls her “the favorite of the Russians.”

Gabbard filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit but then dropped it to “defeating Donald Trump in 2020 (ie the future worthless Trump Director of National Intelligence dropped the suit so she could focus on helping Biden beat her future boss. Oh the places you’ll go, indeed.).”

So I should have been hardened to that kind of crap by 2022, but despite Mueller coming up completely empty (“the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”) and RussiaGate adding up to a giant distraction that helped Trump get away with tons of bribe-taking and other real crimes (emoluments clause anyone?) because the Dems only seemed to care about his antics if it interfered with their Ukraine plans or could somehow be linked to Russia and Putin.

I mean if they tried to impeach Trump for taking bribes from foreign countries, that might hit Dem legislative playas like Nancy Pelosi and Bob Menendez right in the wallets.

Finding out later that that bullshit was a psyop from the get-go fills me with rage and I’d love to go all Borger, Texas on any of the fuckers involved should I ever get the chance.

Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story — you know the bombshell pre-election NY Post article that no one could post on Facebook (Zuckerberg later apologized) or share on Twitter (even via DM) which revealed a great deal of lucrative scumbaggery on the part of Hunter Biden, some of it maybe even involving “the old man”, some of which took place in Ukraine where Hunter enjoyed a $50,000/month gig at a natural gas company despite knowing fuck all about natural gas or Ukraine?

Remember how fifty-one former intelligence officials — including James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta — signed a one-paragraph statement saying the laptop story (later confirmed to be true) has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They concede in the letter itself that they have no evidence.

Politico ran it as “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”

In 2023, former acting CIA director Michael Morell told the House Judiciary Committee he organized the letter after a call from Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, and that a purpose was to give Biden a “talking point” for the debate. FWIW Blinken denies it was his idea. Since I don’t believe a word that double-genociding mofo says, rest assured I’m just including it for the record.

Blinken, of course, became Biden’s Secretary of State and ran Ukraine policy for four years because of course Sleepy Joe was too senile to run a fucking lemonade stand by 2022.

Did anyone happen to catch the study covered by FAIR showing that American corporate media were seven times more likely to quote think tanks with military-industrial funding than those without? Good times were had gaslighting everyone’s liberal family and friends.

I lost friends, relationships with work colleagues and online friendly acquaintances, and my family, and marital relations were deeply strained by this most epic fucking gaslighting campaign (which was presaged by the Atlantic Council’s John Deni in his Dec, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine” oh yea, Deni is also a research prof at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute).

And who could forget Ivan Krastev’s Feb. 3, 2022 New York Times op-ed which warned, “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War” — and the horror Putin planned?

Why nothing less than a negotiated European security architecture that acknowledges Russian interests. Krastev passionately argued that “an invasion “could, in a perverse way, save the current European order.” And God knows, perversity is what the current European order (and its ruling Epstein class) is all about.

The WSJ and NYT truly know their audiences and the goldfish memories they have because both papers beat the war drums while Putin was begging for negotiations (the Russians even drafted a full signature ready document) and then spent the next three years calling the invasion of Ukraine “unprovoked” and insisting that the rest of the Western MSM media do the same.

But before I can get to hammering on the coffin I’m preparing for Genocide Joe Biden’s reputation and historical standing, I have to cover some historical background.

That ought to chase off all the fucking Americans reading this. Goddamn, it’s crazy-making to be a student of history in the USA in the short-attention-span 2020s. Well, so be it.

This is going to be quick and link heavy because I’m writing a blog post for a topic that merits multiple books.

NATO Stopped Being a Defensive Alliance in the 1990s Under Bill Clinton

Despite assurances to then Soviet Premier Gorbachev from President GHW “Poppy” Bush’s Sec of State James Baker that NATO will not move “one inch eastward” when Gorby allowed German re-unification, NATO moved east even more relentlessly than the Wehrmacht did in 1939-1942.

Just look at this fucking map.

And Bill Clinton (who was busy with other things and barely cared about foreign policy) and his administration (some of whom very much cared about foreign policy and will recur in administration after administration to the present day) were warned by fifty foreign policy veterans (including Robert McNamara, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, Paul Nitze, Jack Matlock, Richard Pipes, and Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Sam Nunn) that NATO’s eastern expansion was “a policy error of historic proportions.”

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.