(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . L.L. #9, a Tuesday, April 28 [1] ['The Geogre', 'View Profile', 'Chitown Kev', 'Belinda Ridgewood'] Date: 2026-04-28 Preface: This is “Laudable links” — a collection of curated articles worthy of reading. They are presented with selected summary, context, and wordplay. Comments required for this to be sustainable. Members welcome. Authors to the group welcome, as I believe in socializing wealth and information as wealth. The Trump OLC’s decision that the Presidential Records Act is optional has to go to court, because his OLC has Trumplaw attorneys in it. “Tod” Blanche is being sued for his defiance of the Epstein law. The lumpenproletariat may not be MAGA, but they’re not Democrats. Central Park Zoo, NYC The OLC is not a controlling court. It’s just a group of lawyers who are supposed to be scholarly and thinking about potential legal issues that could one day confront the President. Their rulings control the Department of Justice’s actions, but that’s it. You know the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from its ruling that serving presidents may not be prosecuted. Well, on April Fool’s Day, Donald’s OLC did some hard thinking and announced that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. Thing is, OLC doesn’t determine constitutionality. The Supreme Court does. However, the reason for the ruling was clear: the Trump administration, from April 1 on (and. . . come on. . . before then, too) was going to ignore all records retention laws. That has spurred Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to sue, as Matt Naham tells us at Law and Crime. [|Quote] The Trump administration’s attempt to upend a long-standing legal requirement to preserve presidential records must be “permanently” blocked because there’s “a real and immediate threat” President Donald Trump will “destroy or sell” documents, a new lawsuit alleges. . . . The complaint, naming Trump, Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the National Archives (NARA) and acting Archivist Edward Forst as defendants, asked a federal judge in Washington, D.C., to declare “unlawful, vacate, and set aside” the administration’s stated policy of “non-compliance” with the post-Watergate era “dictates” of the Presidential Records Act (PRA).[End Quote|] The OLC had said that Donald was the most unfairly treated person in history, basically, because his enemies tried to prosecute him for doing things with documents that “for the majority of the country’s history” would have been considered his property. That majority of the history is, in fact, until Watergate and Richard Nixon’s attempt to destroy evidence of presidential crimes. It would be before the passage of the Presidential Records Act. In essence, “going down the road drunk was perfectly legal for most of this country’s history!” Indeed, until automobiles and traffic, there were no DWI/DUI laws, I’m sure. [Incidentally, drunk horse riding was outlawed in towns. Otherwise, it was a self-correcting problem, as people who fell off horses had a habit of dying.] [|Quote] For the plaintiffs, the Trump administration’s “nonsensical” green light for itself to defy the PRA and Supreme Court precedent attempts to “return the country to a pre-Watergate status quo,” opening the door for the president to “destroy or sell” presidential records “at will.”[End Quote|] One thing CREW keeps track of, incidentally, is all the stuff that Donald sells. It’s a big job. The case will be argued before Senior U.S. District Judge John D. Bates. If it matters these days, he was nominated by George W. Bush. Who knew that a DAG could be sued for failing to obey the law? Then again, he would have to be sued, since he would NEVER be prosecuted by the DOJ whose prosecutions he decides upon. This fact has become clear to me by Joe Patrice, at Above the Law, explaining that “Todd Blanche Sued Over Epstein Files Cover Up.” I love the way he starts his article, so I’m going to kidnap it and stick it in here: [|Quote]Todd Blanche wants to talk about the White House ballroom. Or the Southern Poverty Law Center. Or how to transfer taxpayer dollars into Donald Trump’s personal account. But he definitely does NOT want to talk about the Epstein files, a subject of inquiry that he’s bent over backward to obfuscate, frustrate, and affirmatively conceal from production. Faced with an explicit statutory command to turn over the Epstein files without any redactions or withholdings designed to protect the men involved, Blanche worked tirelessly to keep the men engaged in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation from the public eye. [End Quote|] Remember one thing most of all. Todd Blanche is the PERFECT employee for Donald, in that he does not have the job he wants, but he has a job he can’t lose. This means he is going to be capering, dancing, somersaulting, and rope dancing FOREVER. . . or until an attorney general is mandated. I’m not sure one actually is. Remember Katie Phang? She had a show on MSNBC, which was a “liberal” cable television station that did not have nothing-but-panel-shows in the evenings. She was, and is, an attorney as well as a journalist, and she is the one who has filed suit against the Tod: [|Quote] Katie Phang filed a lawsuit laying out Blanche’s violations of the Epstein Transparency Act, styling her complaint as Administrative Procedures Act and ultra vires claims that Blanche directed the Department of Justice to arbitrarily and improperly act in direct opposition to statute.[End Quote|] It seems that Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna had tried to get a judge to impose an independent monitor. The judge in question said that the request fell outside of the suit he was considering, but they were free to sue. Well, they didn’t, but Ms. Phang has. In other words, the evidence had been sitting on the table (or hanging on the wall like Chekov’s gun), and now it’s going to be marshaled. Under the act, DOJ had only five permitted categories of redaction. It did not redact according to those. It redacting along some other criterion — a criterion that precludes an innocent interpretation. [|Quote] The complaint catalogs the kind of redactions that DOJ apparently believes are statutorily authorized. The identities of people in a draft indictment who allegedly conspired with Epstein “to persuade, induce, and entice individuals who had not attained the age of 18 years to engage in prostitution.” The identity of whoever wrote Epstein in 2014 to thank him for “a fun night” and praise his “littlest girl” for being “a little naughty.” The identity of the person who in 2017 told Epstein, “I met [REDACTED] today. She is like Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature.” The person who told Epstein in 2018 about three “very good young poor” girls. And — because apparently the limiting principle here is “anything Trump’s friends might find awkward” — the identity of whoever Epstein wrote to in 2009 saying, “where are you? are you ok I loved the torture video.”[End Quote|] The Tod is doing all of this rope dancing in order to keep the light off of “his client.” I believe that we’re all paying higher gasoline, and much higher diesel, costs for the same reason. We may even be looking at “the top companies that have worked for me. . . all they do is swimming pools” with the Reflecting Pool for that reason. Now, look, this is not something to get your hopes too high over. There are sure-fire case killers lurking out there. [|Quote] The two big questions going forward are standing and remedy. On standing, Phang’s contention is that she’s a journalist who has covered the Epstein matter for years across MSNBC, her YouTube channel, and Substack, and the complaint maps the harm with the kind of specificity that survives a 12(b)(1) motion: she can’t report on documents that don’t exist, can’t analyze redactions that aren’t explained, can’t assess scope when DOJ keeps unringing the bell. Whether that’s enough informational injury will be the first real fight. [End Quote|] All that effort primping in front of the glass to look the part for the job, all that daring lying, all of that ‘never retreat’ing, and guess what, Tod? Donald is probably going to want to give the job to Cleta Mitchell. Finale, Democratic Party Questions from the Socialists Jared Abbott raises a point that quite a few Democratic pollsters and political consultants have, albeit in a framework that is nearly two hundred years old: “Class Dealignment Hasn’t Gone Away.” “Class dealignment” is a clever phrase. If you accept the idea that there are classes in the United States and that ideology in the United States is a motor for class — that there is any class consciousness on an individual or collective level — then individuals should be politically active in the interests of their class or in their individual interests as determined by class. They aren’t. They haven’t been. Further, “identity politics” has not proven any better. Do you wake up and say, “I am a woman, and I write as a woman, drive as a woman, work as a woman, speak as a woman, and therefore have voting interests in line with this identity?” Substitute “Black” or “South of the U.S. border heritage.” To the degree that power writes the identity on you — the way that it writes class on you just as deeply — do you have this identity your political being? So far, appeals on these identity questions have not paid consistent dividends. As a sometimes Marxist, I think class is very real, but it may not be determining political action. I am absolutely sure that identity is written onto people and that they can write their own identity in return. That’s not the question. The nugget of Mr. Abbott’s article could have come from any “mainstream” newspaper: [|Quote] Working-class voters may be having second thoughts about MAGA, but they’re still abandoning the Democratic Party. Democrats’ reliance on college-educated suburbanites is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable.[End Quote|] Now I want to be clear that I quarrel with this article. I’m recommending it as something to kick start conversation and thought, not as truth. [|Quote]Whatever short-term movement we see in the polls, the structural trend that has defined American politics for decades remains firmly in place: working-class voters continue to abandon the Democratic Party. The 2024 election confirmed and accelerated this pattern among non-white working-class voters, and the fact that the Democrats aren’t reaping the rewards we’d expect from Donald Trump’s disastrous poll numbers (at least not yet) is a clear sign of the party’s continued working-class woes. [End Quote|] The primary problem is untangling perception from reality. We know that Democrats have a “messaging problem,” but do they, really? Do they, instead, have a media problem? Did they fritter away as Air America dissolved in a puddle of tears and Fox News purchased the low numbers on cable dials? Did they swear to integrity as Donald held get aways and meetings with online influencers, where Bongino and others flattered them with access and talking points? Did they catch despair and witter as they said, “It’s hopeless! Besides, they’re all stupid?” Did they spend all their time looking for how they had a “messaging problem” and quarrel between Third Way’s millions and Justice Democrats’ throw-the-plutocrats-out? I don’t know. No one seems to. That said, Mr. Abbott has hard evidence about party label. That’s not something I would fight with. [|Quote] Data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), stretching back to the early 1970s, show that working-class Americans, defined as those without a college degree and in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution, identified as Democrats at rates as high as 65%. That share stayed well above 50% until 2016. By 2024, however, that figure had fallen to 42%, dropping an alarming 9 percentage points between 2020 and 2024. Over the same period, college-educated, upper-income voters moved in the opposite direction, with their Democratic identification rising to a whopping 68% by 2024.[End Quote|] You can see his assumption — education = class. It is not a sustainable assumption. Anyone who has read Walter Benjamin knows this. (How’s that for your Marxist Top 10?) Academics, artists, authors, and intellectuals are upper class in culture and lower class economically. They are rejected by the working class and the ruling class alike. (Exceptions made for the servant subgenres.) What’s more, as, since 1970 precisely, the Dept. Labor began pushing a study showing that “college graduates make twice as much as non-college graduates over their lifetimes,” college has become a vocational matter. It is no longer a class measurement. It is a marker of the middle class, not the upper class. All of those Business degrees, management degrees, and general studies degrees are oriented toward “getting the paper.” Thus, just as the party divergence occurs, college graduation is no longer a marker of class. He’s on surer footing when he looks at the General survey: [|Quote] The General Social Survey (GSS), using an entirely different measure of class based on occupation, confirms the same pattern. Whether you define the working class as manual, service, and clerical workers (the “traditional” definition) or expand it to include more highly credentialed workers like teachers and nurses, the downward trend is the same. No matter how you define the term, working-class identification with the Democratic Party has fallen to historic lows.[End Quote|] Nurses and teachers as working class? They enjoy that amphibious class designation, like academics. A classic argument by naive Marxists is that race is class. Karl Marx himself said that that was the greatest mistake he ever made. “Race” is complex, but it definitely grows out of a class creation. Having it called caste is fitting, but it is a manufacture of the early industrial age and colonialism. Mr. Abbott points out that the dealignment is occurring across race as well as among white voters. In fact, it doesn’t seem to matter where one looks. The poor are voting for people who harm the poor and who are hostile to the prospects of social wealth. He offers no answers. Nor can I, but I agree that this is a challenge that demands more than glib deprecations of “them,” or praise of us. Conclusion: Ended with a bummer, I know. Sorry, but I couldn’t find much to bring in that wasn’t behind a major pay wall or concerned with technology. I’ll be bester soonish. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/28/800029072/community/l-l-9-a-tuesday-april-28/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/