Odds and Ends — 22 November 2024

The Brazilian authorities announced on Thursday that they were recommending criminal charges against former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro over his role in a broad plot to cling to power after he lost the 2022 presidential election.
The accusations sharply escalate Mr. Bolsonaro’s legal troubles and highlight the extent of what the authorities have called an organized attempt to subvert Brazil’s democracy. Mr. Bolsonaro narrowly lost to the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, but claimed the election had been fraudulent.

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1859668716096532794

The press obeys in advance

Donald Trump brings out the worst — and it’s going to get a lot worse

https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1859613894869746007

Trump’s Most Dangerous Cabinet Pick

Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years.
I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.

https://twitter.com/hawillisdc/status/1859325886509744472

Texas governor orders state agencies to sell China assets

Georgia Election Workers Go After Giuliani Again

Two Georgia election workers who won $148 million in damages from former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani last year asked a judge Wednesday to find him in contempt for repeating debunked claims about them.

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1859519312924471448

What Mandate?