Getting Out Of A Space Jam

NASA's unmanned, proof-of-concept Orion mission to the moon was an unqualified success as the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific on Sunday afternoon.

 

NASA completed a significant step Sunday toward returning astronauts to the lunar surface with the successful completion of a test mission that sent a capsule designed for human spaceflight to orbit the moon and return safely to Earth.

The Orion spacecraft, which had no astronauts on board, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:40 p.m. Eastern off the Baja California peninsula of Mexico under a trio of billowing parachutes.

Orion’s homecoming came 50 years to the day after the Apollo 17 spacecraft landing on the lunar surface in 1972 at the Taurus-Littrow valley, the last human mission to the moon. And it heralded, the space agency said, a series of upcoming missions that are to be piloted by a new generation of NASA astronauts as part of the Artemis program.

The flight was delayed repeatedly by technical problems with the massive Space Launch System rocket and the spacecraft. But the 26-day, 1.4 million-mile mission went “exceedingly well,” NASA officials said, from the launch on Nov. 16 to flybys that brought Orion within about 80 miles of the lunar surface and directly over the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base.

“From Tranquility Base to Taurus-Littrow to the tranquil waters of the Pacific, the latest chapter of NASA’s journey to the moon comes to a close. Orion, back on Earth,” NASA’s Rob Navias said during the agency’s live broadcast of the event.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said it was “historic because we are now going back to space, to deep space, with a new generation.” The successful mission augurs a new era, he added, “one that marks new technology, a whole new breed of astronauts, and a vision of the future.”

Now that the spacecraft is safely home, NASA will immediately begin to assess the data gathered on the flight and prepare for the Artemis II mission — which would put a crew of astronauts on the spacecraft for another trip in orbit around the moon. NASA hopes that mission would come as early as 2024, with a lunar landing to come as early as 2025 or 2026. That would be the first time people walk on the moon since the last of the Apollo missions.

 

Any manned mission to another planet in our Solar System was going to require us going back to Luna as a testing ground, and Orion proved we can test the testing ground in the next few years.  It's exciting to see us getting back to exploring space in my lifetime, and yeah, the next big step is that Mars landing I hope I get to see.

Great job, NASA.

Oh, and I'm damn glad to see Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Like John Glenn and Mark Kelly, Nelson was an astronaut himself before joining the US Senate, and now he's been running the rocket show for 18 months. Orion is a great feather for his cap.

Here's to more success.

Last Call For The New McCarthyism, Con't

Putative incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he will subpoena dozens of FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence officials under oath before the House Intelligence Committee for the "possibly criminal act" of signing a letter in 2020 calling the NY Post Hunter Biden laptop story disinformation. The NY Post's Mark Moore can barely contain his glee at the prospect that they will get revenge.

House Minority Leader ​Kevin McCarthy has ​vowed to subpoena 51 former intelligence officials who called The Post’s Hunter Biden expose Russian disinformation in the wake of the “Twitter Files” revelations about how the social media colossus censored the reporting. ​

The California Republican — who is expected to become speaker when the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives in January — said what Twitter did with The Post’s bombshell October 2020 report was “egregious.”

“Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong, was Russia collusion, many of them have a security clearance,” McCarthy said on Fox News’ “One Nation” on Saturday.

“We’re going to bring them before a committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing​,​ bring them and subpoena them before a committee. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public?” he said.

Former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-National Security Council Director James Clapper were among a group of former intelligence officials who signed a statement days after the expose, claiming it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” 

McCarthy questioned the move. “Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you … but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?” he said on Fox.  

McCarthy and his nutjob House GOP caucus don't actually care about any of the real problems facing the American public right now, they just want to promise their audience buckets of blood and the fantasy that "Democrat" officials will be marched off to jail.

Now, you can definitely argue that plenty of folks on the left sold that "fantasy" to us about Trump and his inner circle in orange jumpsuits, but the difference is the latter actually should happen because they actually broke laws, and God willing, it'll come to pass.

Warren Terrah: Old School Edition

It took most of my lifetime, but the US finally has the Libyan bombmaker responsible for building the explosive device that downed Pam Am Flight 103.

A Libyan intelligence official accused of making the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 in an international act of terrorism has been taken into U.S. custody and will face federal charges in Washington, the Justice Department said Sunday.

The arrest of Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi is a significant milestone in the decades-old investigation into the attack that killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground. American authorities in December 2020 announced charges against Masud, who was in Libyan custody at the time. Though he is the third Libyan intelligence official charged in the U.S. in connection with the attack, he would be the first to appear in an American courtroom for prosecution.

The New York-bound Pan Am flight exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on Dec. 21, 1988. Citizens from 21 different countries were killed. Among the 190 Americans on board were 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.

The bombing laid bare the threat of international terrorism more than a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks. It produced global investigations and punishing sanctions while spurring demands for accountability from victims of those killed.

The announcement of charges against Masud on Dec. 21, 2020, came on the 32nd anniversary of the bombing and in the final days of the tenure of then-Attorney General William Barr, who in his first stint as attorney general in the early 1990s had announced criminal charges against two other Libyans intelligence officials.

The Libyan government initially balked at turning over the two men, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, before ultimately surrendering them for prosecution before a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands as part of a special arrangement.

The Justice Department said Masud would appear soon in a federal court in Washington, where he faces two criminal counts related to the explosion.

U.S. officials did not say how Masud came to be taken into U.S. custody, but in late November, local Libyan media reported that Masud had been kidnapped by armed men on Nov. 16 from his residence in Tripoli, the capital. That reporting cited a family statement that accused Tripoli authorities of being silent on the abduction.

In November 2021, Najla Mangoush, the foreign minister for the country’s Tripoli-based government, told the BBC in an interview that “we, as a government, are very open in terms of collaboration in this matter,” when asked whether an extradition was possible.

 

Biden administration played hardball and got their man. Let's hope Al-Marimi isn't the last. 

As a personal aside, I was in middle school when the Lockerbie bombing happened. Poppy Bush had easily won the 1988 contest and Reagan was too annoyed because it was interrupting his last Christmas as President, ironically asking reporters if shutting down all air traffic would have been the right thing to do.

They didn't get the bastards.  Joe Biden did, almost 35 years later.

Remember that.

Sunday Long Read: Spies Like Her

In this week's Sunday Long Read, Helen Warrell at the Financial Times gets the Brits to discuss the biggest unkept secret in espionage: Women make the best spies, because men have all the important information and are dumbasses.

 

My journey to the school for spies starts in the half-light of a waking city. I do not know where I am going and have only been instructed to meet my contact at a central London landmark. 

 

We travel by car, boat and train to a place where officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the overseas espionage agency known as SIS, learn their craft. I am not allowed to describe it to you, but I can tell you this: it is giant and austere and the slicing wind makes my eyes water. 

 

At the door, I am met by a small, cheerful woman with short, wavy blonde hair whose beaming welcome is at odds with the sterile eeriness of this place. Kathy, who is in charge of all intelligence operations by SIS officers and their agents around the world, ushers me over to a bank of armchairs next to a large window overlooking a paved landscape. 

 

She jokes that when she was first offered a job at the agency, also known as MI6, her mother questioned whether she wanted to commit herself to something so “wacky and unfamiliar”. “My dad just said, ‘Go for it.’” This self-effacing northerner says she is “not particularly brave”. But she is one of the most powerful spies in Britain. 

 

Kathy is one of four directors-general at SIS, each of whom reports to the chief, known as “C”. For the first time, three of them are women. They work in the most important and rapidly evolving areas of spycraft. Kathy is director of operations. Rebecca is the chief’s deputy, who oversees strategy. The most storied MI6 job of all belongs to Ada, who is the head of technology, known as “Q” after James Bond’s mastermind gadgeteer. I have spent six months interviewing them about how they reached the top in a traditionally male career and trying to understand what the life of a female spy is really like. 

 

Since the chief of MI6 is the only member of the agency who is named or permitted to speak in public, and because all of them have been men, this is the first time that female SIS officers have ever spoken on the record. I have agreed to change their names and omit certain details to protect them and the sources they work with. They agreed to speak to encourage women applicants and correct the perception of espionage as a man’s game.

The low profile of these three senior officers is in keeping with the history of women in British intelligence. In the past, women have been overlooked, relegated to secretarial roles or, before the SIS era, deployed as “honeytraps” to ensnare or blackmail enemies. When Vernon Kell co-founded MI6’s precursor in 1909, he identified as his ideal recruits men “who could make notes on their shirt cuff while riding on horseback”. His views on women were less well-known, but it is said that he once commented: “I like my girls to have good legs.” Despite having proved themselves with significant skill and bravery during the second world war, women in MI6 and its sister agency MI5 struggled to progress and were not regularly recruited as intelligence officers until the late 1970s.

 

This misogyny was repeated and exaggerated in popular novels written by former spies such as Ian Fleming and John le Carré. The fictional MI6 officer James Bond gropes his secretary, spices his operations with extravagant liaisons and encounters few female spies, the most famous being the dowdy Russian counter-intelligence officer Rosa Klebb. Film versions of Fleming’s books made famous an entire genre of “Bond girls”, conquests rather than fully drawn human beings. Le Carré, best known for the cold war spy chronicles starring a gnomic intelligence officer, George Smiley, expresses a similarly two-dimensional view. His women are sirens who exert a potent sexual hold over male protagonists but have little to say for themselves. The one exception, “Moscow-gazer” Connie Sachs, is a caricature in the opposite direction — an eccentric with an encyclopedic memory who succumbs to alcoholism after being sidelined from the job at which she excels. 

 

Sexist depictions are hardly confined to spy films, but they matter more in a profession in which mystery is encouraged and reality is classified. The perceptions built up through cultural references are, like so many aspects of the Bond legacy, double-edged. The films have built SIS a legendary brand, but their portrayal of ad-hoc killings and solo operations is far from accurate. For MI6, the historical absence of women is both a serious omission and a secret weapon. The UK’s main adversaries today — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are repressive societies with few women in positions of power. For the female spy, this weakness in the enemy is exploitable. Precisely because they are so likely to be overlooked, women have the potential to be the best spies of all.

 

The countries of the world are more than happy to help spread the notion that spycraft is done by men, because the real work has been done by women for decades now, and will only continue to increase as more dumb, horny men get into positions of authoritarian power in strongman regimes all over the planet.

I'm good with that.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

As I've been telling you for years now, Republicans consider any election they lose to be "fraud", and Arizona GOP loser Kari Lake is no different.

 

Kari Lake, the losing Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, filed a lawsuit Friday contesting the results of an election that was certified by the state this week.

Ms. Lake’s lawsuit came after she had spent weeks making a series of public statements and social media posts aimed at sowing doubt in the outcome of a contest she lost by more than 17,000 votes to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. That loss was certified in documents signed on Monday by Ms. Hobbs, who currently serves as secretary of state.

A former news anchor, Ms. Lake centered her candidacy on false conspiratorial claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald J. Trump, who had endorsed her. For the past month, Ms. Lake, her campaign and other allies have been soliciting Election Day accounts from voters on social media and at rallies.

“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” Ms. Lake said on Twitter on Friday evening after announcing her lawsuit. “Stay tuned, folks.”

Ms. Hobbs called Ms. Lake’s suit “baseless” in a post of her own on Twitter, describing it as the “latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.”

Ms. Lake sued Ms. Hobbs as well as officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county.

The suit claims that the election was corrupted in Maricopa County and that she should be declared the winner. The 70-page filing relies on a hodgepodge of allegations, ranging from voter and poll worker accounts to poll numbers claiming that voters agreed with Ms. Lake on the election’s mismanagement. Some of what is cited comes not from last month’s election but from the 2020 contest. Other allegations accuse officials of wrongdoing for taking part in efforts to try to tamp down election misinformation.

Fields Moseley, a spokesman for Maricopa County, said the court system was the proper place for campaigns to make their case to challenge results.

“Maricopa County respects the election contest process and looks forward to sharing facts about the administration of the 2022 general election and our work to ensure every legal voter had an opportunity to cast their ballot,” Mr. Moseley said.

A number of those cited as experts in the lawsuit and one of the lawyers who filed the case — Kurt Olsen — are part of a loose election-denial network led by Mike Lindell, the pillow company entrepreneur who has been pushing conspiracy theories about election machines since early 2021. Another Lake lawyer, Bryan Blehm, represented the contractor Cyber Ninjas during the partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results last year and also represented supervisors in Cochise County this year in a lawsuit over an attempt to carry out a hand-counted audit plan.

Ms. Lake’s legal action came as lawsuits were also filed Friday by two other Arizona Republicans who lost their midterm elections: Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, and Abe Hamadeh, the attorney general candidate. Mr. Hamadeh, who is trailing his opponent by 511 votes in a race that is undergoing a recount, was joined in his lawsuit by the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Hamadeh previously filed suit late last month seeking to overturn the election, but the suit was dismissed by a Maricopa County judge for being filed prematurely. His new suit — filed in Mohave County, a Republican stronghold where he won 75 percent of the vote — is more narrow than Ms. Lake’s, claiming that it is not questioning the election’s validity. But, as with Ms. Lake, Mr. Hamadeh is seeking an order overturning the election results and declaring him the winner, claiming he is not alleging widespread fraud but rather “certain errors and inaccuracies.” On Twitter late Friday, Mr. Hamadeh wrote that “Maricopa County faced unprecedented and unacceptable issues on Election Day.”

Dan Barr, a lawyer for Mr. Hamadeh’s opponent, Kris Mayes, said the lawsuit was “based on speculation” and contained “no real facts.” He said he planned to file motions to dismiss it and move it to Maricopa County early next week.

Mr. Finchem, one of several secretary of state candidates around the country who denied the results of the 2020 presidential race, lost by more than 120,000 votes. In his suit, filed in Maricopa County, Mr. Finchem alleged that Arizona had “failed miserably” to administer a “full, fair, and secure election” and asked that the court declare the election “annulled” and name him the winner.

That suit was filed by Daniel McCauley, who also represented Cochise County in its recent failed attempt to deny certification of the election results.

 

You can't have a circus without clowns, and there are plenty involved in this "legal" process. The whole point of course is to justify the violence coming against Arizona Democrats who won. If you somehow still thought that Mike Lindell and his army of election liars were just going to go away, well, you have your answers.

Only crushing sanctions, disbarment, and punitive contempt charges are going to begin to slow these guys down.

We'll see.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Special Counsel Jack Smith is already tired of Team Trump's lies when it comes to boxes of stolen classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago and is asking for a federal judge to hold the Trump legal eagles in contempt of court.

 

Prosecutors have urged a federal judge to hold Donald Trump’s office in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a May subpoena to return all classified documents in his possession, according to people familiar with the matter — a sign of how contentious the private talks have become over whether the former president still holds any secret papers.

In recent days, Justice Department lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell to hold Trump’s office in contempt, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sealed court proceedings. The hearing is scheduled for Friday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The request came after months of mounting frustration from the Justice Department with Trump’s team — frustration that spiked in June after the former president’s lawyers provided assurances that a diligent search had been conducted for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club and residence. But the FBI amassed evidence suggesting — and later confirmed through a court-authorized search — that many more remained.

One of the key areas of disagreement centers on the Trump legal team’s repeated refusal to designate a custodian of records to sign a document attesting that all classified materials have been returned to the federal government, according to two of these people. The Justice Department has repeatedly sought an unequivocal sworn written assurance from Trump’s team that all such documents have been returned, and Trump’s team has been unwilling to designate a custodian of records to sign such a statement while also giving assurances that they have handed documents back.

The precise wording of the filing could not be determined because it remains under seal. Trump is under investigation for three potential crimes: mishandling classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government records.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president’s lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent.” He added: “This is a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen.”

 

Except of course both of those statements by Cheung are lies as well.

 

Trump has given up on his special master nonsense too, Judge Aileen Cannon served her purpose and essentially destroyed her career by allowing Trump to dodge any consequences until after the midterm elections, and with Cannon no longer being of any use to him, he's letting his request die without calling in the conservatives on the Roberts Court to bail him out.

Former President Donald Trump does not plan to appeal to the Supreme Court a lower court order that put an end to the special master review of documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN.

Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that a lower court judge had erred when she ordered the appointment of a third party, or special master, to review about 100 classified documents that investigators found when they searched his Florida home in August.

The former president’s legal team previously argued that they needed an outside expert to decide whether any of documents found at Mar-a-Lago could be privileged. They had until Thursday to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

On Thursday afternoon, the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued the mandate that puts its ruling into effect, meaning the time period Trump had been given to seek an order pausing the ruling has expired.

The Trump team’s decision not to appeal would mark the end of a monthslong legal battle over whether the review should take place and will allow the Justice Department to push forward in their investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents.

 

Judge Cannon was savaged by the three judges on the 11th Circuit panel, all Republican appointments, two of them appointed by Trump himself for the decision. Nobody on SCOTUS was going to touch it, and Trump no longer needed the delays anyway now that he's pitched his Big Mac-stained MAGA hat in the ring.

The terrible legal week from hell continues for Trump.

Sinema Verite', Con't

While she will still caucus with the Democrats, for now at least, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema says she's leaving the Democratic party to register as an independent.

 

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is changing her party affiliation to independent, delivering a jolt to Democrats’ narrow majority and Washington along with it.

In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans and suggested that she intends to vote the same way she has for four years in the Senate. “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she said.

Provided that Sinema sticks to that vow, Democrats will still have a workable Senate majority in the next Congress, though it will not exactly be the neat and tidy 51 seats they assumed. They’re expected to also have the votes to control Senate committees. And Sinema’s move means Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — a pivotal swing vote in the 50-50 chamber the past two years — will hold onto some but not all of his outsized influence in the Democratic caucus.

Sinema would not address whether she will run for reelection in 2024, and informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of her decision on Thursday.

“I don’t anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure,” Sinema said, adding that some of the exact mechanics of how her switch affects the chamber is “a question for Chuck Schumer … I intend to show up to work, do the same work that I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent.”

 

What it means is if the last two years in the Senate was all about Chuck Schumer about keeping Joe Manchin happy, the next two now mean keeping Sinema from caucusing with the GOP, she might do in order to force another two years of 50-50 Senate power sharing, and even if the Dems can somehow magically defend all their other 2024 seats, we're stuck with Co-President Sinema for a long time.

But the big thing is that it now means any sort of primary challenge to her in 2024 is doomed and would assure someone like Blake Masters would win easily. She knew she was facing political oblivion if she stayed a Democrat as Rep. Ruben Gallego was waiting for his opportunity to knock her out of the running.

Now she can safely say that it's her way or the GOP. A three way race would go to the GOP, every time. Kyrsten Sinema did this to save Kyrsten Sinema's narrow ass, full stop. The caucusing with the GOP threat is secondary if she can't stay in her seat.

On the gripping hand, maybe she's just doing this for the lobbyist cred and she won't run in 2024 at all.

The Independent thing worked for Bernie, and worked for Angus King in Maine. It'll work for her if she wants it to.

We'll see.

Last Call For Bugging Out The Troops

The Biden White House is pissed tonight that House Democrats and Nancy Pelosi folded and gave in to Kevin McCarthy's extortion on the Pentagon funding bill, as McCarthy had threatened to kill the bill entirely unless Pelosi removed the military's Covid vaccine mandate.

The Biden administration fumed Wednesday at the near-certainty that Congress will strip away the Defense Department’s requirement that all military personnel be vaccinated against the coronavirus, upending a politically divisive policy that has led to the dismissal of nearly 8,500 service members and numerous lawsuits disputing its fairness.

The agreement, brokered as part of the Pentagon’s next spending bill, was celebrated by Republicans as a victory for individual choice. It comes despite opposition from President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who characterized the vaccine mandate as a way of protecting troops from covid-19 and preventing sprawling outbreaks that sideline entire units, undermine the military’s readiness and endanger national security.

The looming reversal — spurred by Republicans who had threatened to block passage of the $858 billion spending bill if the mandate wasn’t struck down — creates a rat’s nest for the Pentagon. Commanders whose job it was to enforce the mandate will face the onerous task of assessing whether — and how — to allow back into uniform those already separated from the military for refusing to follow orders. Managing overseas deployments, especially in countries that require visitors to be vaccinated, will create burdensome logistical headaches as well, officials said.

John Kirby, a White House spokesman, would not say whether Biden would entertain vetoing the bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), if as expected the legislation passes both chambers of Congress with the repeal intact. But Kirby emphasized that the administration believes scrubbing the vaccine mandate is a “mistake” and castigated those in the GOP who pushed to end it.

Republicans, he said, “have obviously decided that they’d rather fight against the health and well-being of those troops rather than protecting them.”

Privately, some Defense Department personnel were even more pointed.

One senior defense official said that when service members “inevitability get sick, and if they should die, it will be on the Republicans who insisted upon this.” The official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the polarizing issue, cited the sprawling coronavirus outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in spring 2020. The vessel — a major power-projection weapon — was sidelined for weeks through a cumbersome quarantine process with more than 1,200 cases in a crew of about 4,800, and one sailor died.

“How does this impact deployments? How does this impact overseas training assignments? How does this impact overseas assignments generally?” this official asked. “What are the downstream consequences of this shortsighted insistence in the new law?”

 

In fact, Republicans got several victories in the House version of the Pentagon funding bill.

 

“Make no mistake: this is a win for our military,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement late Tuesday night, warning that when the GOP takes over the House next year, Republicans will “work to finally hold the Biden administration accountable and assist the men and women in uniform who were unfairly targeted.”

While the decision to roll back the vaccine mandate was politically divisive, freezing negotiations between Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate armed services committees for several days, it is far from the only Pentagon policy challenged in the compromise defense bill. The measure, which the full House and Senate still must vote to approve, pushes the Defense Department and related agencies to adopt several ventures, including new programs to arm Taiwan and scrutinize military assistance to Ukraine, and retain aging weapons systems the Biden administration has slated for decommissioning.

The bill creates several new accountability measures for the billions of dollars in military assistance being sent to Ukraine. Those include ordering reports from the Defense Department and a consortium of inspectors general about the methods being employed to track weapons, with the aim of identifying potential shortfalls.

While enhanced oversight of Ukraine aid has become a rallying cry for Republicans skeptical of the continued provision of advanced systems and munitions, the measures included in the defense bill had earlier secured bipartisan support in the House. The Senate never voted on its version of the bill before the compromise legislation’s unveiling.

 

And the reason this happened of course is that neither Pelosi nor Chuck Schumer had the votes to pass the bill without GOP support.

The sausage got made again, $850 billion worth of it.

 

It's A Harding Knock Life

Florida Republican state Rep. Joe Harding, the asshole behind the state's "Don't Say Gay" law, is facing numerous federal charges for pandemic business loan fraud.

 

The Florida legislator who sponsored legislation critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay" bill was accused of illegally obtaining tens of thousands of dollars in Covid-relief funds, authorities said Wednesday.

Joseph Harding, 35, was indicted on six counts of wire fraud, money laundering, making false statements and other crimes, the U.S. attorney’s office for Northern Florida said in a release.

Harding, a Republican whose district is south of Gainesville, is accused of seeking Covid-relief loans from the Small Business Administration in 2020 for two companies, Vak Shack Inc. and Harding Farms, according to the indictment.

The indictment alleges that in applications to the agency, Harding said the companies had half a dozen employees and gross revenues from the previous year totaling more than $800,000.

The companies had no employees, and state records showed they had been dormant in the months before the applications were filed, the indictment says.

Harding sought more than $150,000 in loans and received roughly $45,000 in January and February 2021, according to the indictment.

Harding pleaded not guilty to the charges in court Wednesday, court records show. Neither he nor his lawyer immediately responded to requests for comment.

 

Which is really funny, because after he embezzled tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars, he had the balls to go after Broward County businesses that got pandemic relief funds in March.

The news about Broward County’s new coronavirus aid-funded hotel had one Representative Thursday calling for Broward County to be shut out of future member funding projects — and had some of his Republican colleagues nodding in agreement.

“Maybe the FL Legislature should ban all member projects for Broward since they have so much money they can make ridiculous expenditures such as this,” Republican Rep. Blaise Ingoglia wrote. He quote tweeted a national Associated Press story that highlighted Broward County’s hotel and the $140 million in federal coronavirus aid it received in the first paragraph.

But at least one Broward County Senator called the Spring Hill lawmaker’s framing of the aid “complete misinformation.”

“His treatment is so emblematic of how we are treated in this Legislature,” said Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky, explaining the “we” as lawmakers from Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties. Those counties send more tax money to Tallahassee than they receive, she said.

“The hostility … it’s so palpable and it’s frustrating,” Polsky added.

Besides the “high-end,” 29-story, 800-room hotel that will go with the county’s expanded Convention Center, the story also detailed other projects around the U.S. that the American Rescue Plan helped fund. Those include a minor-league baseball stadium renovation, a ski area and an effort to woo the 2026 World Cup to New Jersey.

Reached later, Ingoglia said, “I’m sick and tired of local governments spending lavishly and egregiously and yet still crying poor and asking the Florida Legislature for money and continuing to raise taxes on people locally,” he said.

Republican Rep. Joe Harding responded with a meme, “I’m in.”

 

You'll have plenty of time to think up funny memes in prison, Joe.

 

Next time, keep your damn mouth shut, and keep your hands out of the cookie jar.

Britney Griner Coming Home

President Biden spoke this morning on a prisoner swap to free WNBA player Britney Griner from Russia.

 

Brittney Griner’s freedom ultimately hinged on the release of a convicted Russian arms dealer whose life story inspired a Hollywood film.

On Thursday, a source told CNN that the US basketball star had been released from Russian detention in a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” by his accuser.

Bout, a former Soviet military officer, was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States on charges of conspiring to kill Americans, acquire and export anti-aircraft missiles, and provide material support to a terrorist organization. Bout has maintained he is innocent.

The Kremlin has long called for his release, slamming his sentencing in 2012 as “baseless and biased.”

Griner – who had for years played in the off-season for a Russian women’s basketball team – was arrested on drug smuggling charges at an airport in the Moscow region in February. Despite her testimony that she had inadvertently packed the cannabis oil found in her luggage, she was sentenced to nine years in prison in early August and was moved to a penal colony in Mordovia in mid-November after losing her appeal.

Griner’s family had urged the White House to secure her release, including via prisoner exchange if necessary. At the center of their bid was Bout, a man who eluded international arrest warrants and asset freezes for years.

The Russian businessman, who speaks six languages, was arrested in a sting operation in 2008 led by US drug enforcement agents in Thailand posing as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the acronym FARC. He was eventually extradited to the US in 2010 after a protracted court proceeding.

“Viktor Bout has been international arms trafficking enemy number one for many years, arming some of the most violent conflicts around the globe,” said Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan when Bout was sentenced in New York in 2012.

“He was finally brought to justice in an American court for agreeing to provide a staggering number of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist organization committed to killing Americans.”

The trial honed in on Bout’s role in supplying weapons to FARC, a guerrilla group that waged an insurgency in Colombia until 2016. The US said the weapons were intended to kill US citizens.

 

Griner's wife, Cherelle, says they will continue to work with the Biden Administration to free the other high-profile American detained by Russia, Paul Whelan.

A source familiar with the matter tells CNN that the swap involves convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. The swap did not include another American that the State Department has declared wrongfully detained, Paul Whelan.

“She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home,” Biden said at the White House Thursday morning alongside Griner’s wife, Cherelle. “After months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held under untolerable circumstances, Brittney will soon be back in the arms of her loved ones, and she should have been there all along.”

Biden acknowledged that Griner’s release was occurring while Whelan remained imprisoned, saying that Whelan’s family “have to have such mixed emotions today.”

“This was not a choice of which American to bring home,” Biden said. “Sadly, for totally illegitimate reasons, Russia is treating Paul’s case differently than Brittney’s. And while we have not yet succeeded in securing Paul’s release, we are not giving up. We will never give up.”

 

Viktor Bout is a terrible man, and releasing him is going to make a lot of people ask if it was worth it, to which I say "Screw you." A lot of things got us to this point, bad decisions, structural racism, the gender pay gap, but unlike Bout, Griner never deserved to be a in a goddamn Russian gulag.

If it was your loved one, you'd want them out too. Pasul Whelen will be coming home soon as well, I suspect.

Joe Biden gets that.

Trump would have let her rot.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

So here's the kind of trenchant political analysis and pithy observation you've come to expect from ZVTS:

1. It has already been a horrific week for Donald Trump.
2. He cost the GOP another Senate seat last night with his personal pick of Herschel Walker.
3. It's only Wednesday.
4. Things have already gotten considerably worse for him tonight.

 

Former President Donald J. Trump hired people to search four properties after being directed by a federal judge to look harder for any classified material still in his possession, and they found at least two documents with classified markings inside a sealed box in one of the locations, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump’s search team discovered the documents at a federally run storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla., the person said, prompting his lawyers to notify the Justice Department about them.

The New York Times reported in October that Justice Department officials had told the former president’s lawyers that they believed he might have more classified materials that were not returned in response to a subpoena issued in May. The F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, in August for additional classified documents and other presidential records.

People close to Mr. Trump had said earlier on Wednesday that no classified material had been found during the searches, a claim that was later proved incorrect. The Washington Post first reported on the locating of the two additional documents, as well as the searches of the properties.

After the warning from the Justice Department, a debate ensued among Mr. Trump’s lawyers about whether to bring in an independent firm to conduct a search.

The discovery of the documents at the storage unit, maintained by the federal General Services Administration, came during a series of wider searches that were completed around Thanksgiving and conducted at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; at Trump Tower in New York; and in a storage closet at Mar-a-Lago, according to two people familiar with the events.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement that the former president and “his counsel continue to be cooperative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponized Department of Justice.”

The department is investigating the former president’s handling of thousands of government documents, including more than 300 classified ones, that were taken from the White House at the end of his term and were found at Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors are also seeking to determine whether Mr. Trump obstructed the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve the materials.

When the Justice Department warned that it believed Mr. Trump still had documents in his possession, a lawyer whom he had hired a short time earlier, Christopher M. Kise, suggested along with other lawyers working for Mr. Trump that they engage an outside firm, according to people familiar with the events.

A cadre of other Trump lawyers were resistant to the idea; among them was Boris Epshteyn, a communications adviser who has positioned himself as an in-house counsel on some of Mr. Trump’s legal entanglements. The dispute led to Mr. Kise’s standing in Mr. Trump’s circle diminishing for weeks, according to several people close to the former president.

More recently, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington, who oversees grand jury investigations, directed Mr. Trump’s lawyers essentially to search more carefully for any remaining documents. Other lawyers in Mr. Trump’s circle took on the issue and hired a firm, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

 

So, like everything else in this case, Trump lied, his lawyers said one thing, and the truth was entirely something else.  He can't stop lying. He knows he's going to get caught, and he does.

And this time it's going to cost him.

I hope, anyway.

Antifa, With German Efficiency

Thousands of German police conducted early-morning raids and arrested more than two dozen right-wing domestic terrorists allegedly plotting a fascist coup to overthrow the country's government.

 

Authorities in Germany arrested 25 people on Wednesday who are suspected of planning to violently overthrow the government in a far-right extremist plot.

More than 3,000 police officers, including special forces, made 130 early morning searches across 11 of Germany's 16 federal states in one of the biggest counterterrorism operations in the country's history.

Suspects from the so-far unnamed group include a nobleman with a historic royal title and various armed forces veterans. It is centered on the so-called Reichsbürger, or Reich Citizens, movement which is motivated by conspiracy theories about the role and legitimacy of the modern German state.

Those arrested will appear in court Wednesday and Thursday. The homes of a further 27 people suspected of being members or supporters of the group have been searched.

“We defend ourselves with all strength against the enemies of democracy," German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wrote on Twitter.

She said the group was "driven by fantasies of violent overturn and conspiracy ideologies" and hated democracy and the state. "Further investigations will give a clear picture of how far the coup plans had progressed," she said.

The German prosecutor's office said the suspects belong to a terrorist group founded in November 2021 at the latest, which aims to overthrow the government in Berlin and install its own leaders through the "forcible elimination of the democratic constitutional state."

"The members of the association are aware that this project can only be realized through the use of military means and violence against state representatives," the prosecutor's office said in a statement early Wednesday. It said there was "the suspicion that individual members of the association have made concrete preparations to forcibly invade" the German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, "with a small armed group."

 

This would have been a competent version of America's January 6th attack, and they supposedly had some serious hardware on them. I don't know if our good friends in Moscow were involved, but I wouldn't be surprised.

 

Or, you know, our good friends in the GOP.

The group had planned to overthrow the German government, in part by assassinating government officials and installing “Heinrich XIII P.R.,” identified by German officials as 71-year-old Prince Heinrich XIII, a German noble of the House of Reuss. Heinrich was among those arrested.

According to a press release from the German attorney general’s office, the group was founded around November 2021. Prosecutors allege the organization adheres to the ideology of the “Reichsbürger,” or Citizens of the Reich, and is heavily influenced by QAnon. According to the statement, the group is “firmly convinced that Germany is currently governed by members of a so-called ‘deep state.’” The group also believes an “Alliance” of “technically superior secret society of governments, intelligence services and the military of various states, including the Russian Federation and the United States of America” had assets present in Germany prepared to assist in securing liberation from “deep state” forces.

The organization had reportedly engaged in paramilitary training for its members, and began acquiring arms and equipment in preparation for its coup. Several of the accused individuals were preparing to occupy government positions and head agencies following the overthrow. According to prosecutors, the group targeted members of the Bundeswehr, the German military, and the German police. 

More on this as we get information, but yeah, this was a serious threat, enough so that police acted first, rather than, you know, allow the attack to happen. The Germans actually deal with their neo-Nazi politicians. Here in America they run for office as Republicans.

Maybe we should consider doing the same?

Warnock, Win Notched

Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has faced voters five times in the last two years and change, a Democratic primary in 2020, two general elections, and two runoff wins with last night's victory over Republican Herschel Walker, and being the 51st Democrat in the US Senate means the current power-sharing agreement with Mitch McConnell goes into the trash.

 

Democrats had already clinched control of the Senate, with 50 seats secured last month, which would allow Vice President Kamala Harris to cast the tie-breaking vote as she does now. But winning a 51st seat, thanks to Warnock’s victory Tuesday, comes with important benefits for the Democrats running the Senate and for President Joe Biden’s administration.

The party will now enter 2023 with a true Senate majority – one that won’t require the power-sharing agreement that has been in place over the last two years in an evenly divided chamber. That outright majority means that Democrats will have the majority on committees, allowing them to advance Biden’s nominees more easily.

For example: The Senate Judiciary Committee, with its 22 members, will shift from a split of 11 Democrats and 11 Republicans to 12 Democrats and 10 Republicans. That removes a GOP procedural mechanism to slow down the confirmation of Biden’s judicial nominees.

Democratic leaders, meanwhile, face a reduced risk that a single senator can hold its priorities hostage, since the party can now afford to lose a vote. Harris, who has already cast the third-most tie-breaking votes of any vice president, and the most since John Calhoun nearly 200 years ago, would be less tied to Capitol Hill.

It’s also an early boost to Democrats ahead of a 2024 election in which the party will have to defend several seats in deep-red states, including West Virginia and Montana, to maintain its majority. 

 

The good news is that the Dems did astonishing well for 2022. The bad news is 2024 is going to be a far tougher road, and whether you like them or not, both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin will be up for re-election, along with Jon Tester, Jacky Rosen, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey, Tim Kaine and Tammy Baldwin. Dems will have to defend all these seats and depending on the presidential outcome, we might have to defend all eight seats and run the table to keep the Senate.

Now, we did that this year and even gained a seat with John Fetterman. But Florida (Rick Scott) and Indiana (Mike Braun, leaving the seat for a Governor's run in Indiana) are going to be tough to pick up. let alone beating Ted Cruz in Texas or Josh Hawley in Missouri.

We'll see how all this turns out.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

A Manhattan jury has found the Trump Organization guilty on all nine tax fraud charges.

The Trump Organization’s two affiliate companies on trial in New York City were found guilty of all nine counts of tax fraud and related crimes on Monday, as jurors ended a long trial with a swift verdict against the former American president’s corporate empire.

The Manhattan jury concluded that former President Donald Trump’s eponymous companies dodged taxes by playing accounting games: showering their executives with benefits, reducing their official salary, and paying them at times as if they were “independent contractors.”

As the court clerk read the list of nine criminal counts—tax fraud, falsifying business records, engaging in a conspiracy—the jury foreperson kept repeating the same word, "Guilty." At times, she even got ahead of herself, saying the word before the clerk finished describing the charge. Afterward, each juror nodded and asserted out loud that they agreed.

The company now faces what prosecutors expect to be more than $1 million in fines—a paltry sum for a multi-billion dollar global marketing operation but a mark of shame nonetheless, just as Trump launches a re-election campaign. This is also the first successful legal action against the Trumps in years.

The tax accounting hacks were all a ruse—one that even the company acknowledged but placed all the blame on a rogue employee.

Defense lawyer Michael van der Veen tried to win over jurors with a mantra straight out of the O.J. Simpson trial: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” The Trump Organization motto was, “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg.

But the jurors weren’t convinced. After all, those swindling staffers were Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and company controller Jeffrey McConney, as well as half a dozen other executives who were never charged.

Weisselberg eventually confessed to reducing his on-the-books salary—allowing him to avoid city, state, and federal taxes—and instead got an ton of perks: a fake $6,000 no-show job for his wife, corporate Mercedes sedans for them both, a luxury Manhattan apartment, and more than $360,000 in private school tuition for their grandkids paid by Donald Trump himself.

Weisselberg and several other executives, including Chief Operating Officer Matthew Calamari Sr., also diverted some of their salary to make it seem as if they were outside contractors, claiming a status that allowed them to pay even fewer taxes.

The ploy let the company to reduce the overall size of its payroll, allowing it to pay less in payroll taxes, Medicare, and related expenses.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office spent roughly six weeks at trial against the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation—sister companies within the real estate mogul’s corporate umbrella. The time was stretched out by holidays, the incessant police sirens that echoed in the streets below, and a COVID outbreak that sickened a witness and even the judge.

Prosecutors made the case that top decision makers were all in on the plot to routinely reduce executives’ official salaries in various ways to avoid paying taxes. For prosecutors, the primary challenge came from proving that these executives did it to enrich themselves—and helped the business in the process.

Joshua Steinglass, an assistant district attorney, put it simply to jurors in his closing arguments last week Friday. He described how an employee seeking to buy a $25,000 car would have to ask for a raise worth double that to account for taxes. But the employee and company both make out like bandits—avoiding a heap of taxes—if the company just gives the employee a $25,000 car and reduces their pay by the same amount.

“By far the most significant benefit… is that it allowed these companies to pay these executives less than they otherwise would have,” Steinglass told jurors.

And while Manhattan DA Allen Bragg got his victory today, remember that Bragg is still looking into Trump's hush money check to Stormy Daniels.

Again, politically, this should be the end of Donald Trump, his corporation nailed with massive tax fraud convictions.

We all know however that it won't be.

Republicans In Disarray, Con't

Kevin McCarthy still doesn't have the votes for House Speaker, and he's not going to.

House Republicans are plotting tactics for their new majority and weighing how to use their leverage to enact a laundry list of demands, with many zeroing in on an issue with enormous economic implications: Raising the nation’s borrowing limit.

It’s an issue confronting House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is rounding up the votes to win the House speaker race and facing pressure from some of his colleagues to more forcefully detail how he plans to handle the sensitive topic before they decide whether to support him on January 3 for the most powerful position in Congress.

In interviews with CNN, more than two dozen House GOP lawmakers laid out their demands to avoid the nation’s first-ever debt default, ranging from new immigration policies to imposing deep domestic spending cuts. And several Republicans flatly said they would oppose raising the borrowing limit even if all their demands were met, making McCarthy’s narrow path even narrower.

“I’m a no, no matter what,” Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, said of raising the debt ceiling.

Despite Congress suspending the nation’s borrowing limit three times when Donald Trump was president, even under all-GOP control of Washington, lawmakers say it is highly uncertain how the matter will be dealt with in a divided Congress next year – reminiscent of the furious battles between House Republicans and Barack Obama’s White House that put the country on the brink of economic disaster.

For McCarthy, the debt ceiling debate will represent one of his most difficult balancing acts if he’s elected speaker: He would need to work with Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden to cut a deal and avoid economic catastrophe without angering his emboldened right flank for caving into the left. And unlike other bills in the GOP House that will die in the Democratic-led Senate, a debt ceiling increase is one of the few must-pass items awaiting the new Congress – something many Republicans see as critical leverage.

Some Republicans say it is incumbent upon McCarthy to spell out his strategy on the issue before they decide if they will support him in the speakership race – when the California Republican can only afford to lose four GOP votes. In one private meeting with a member of the House Freedom Caucus, McCarthy was urged to take a harder public stance on the coming policy issues for next year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Several (House Freedom Caucus) members have made spending a main issue,” one GOP lawmaker who has been critical of McCarthy told CNN.

Rep. Scott Perry, the leader of the hardline Freedom Caucus, confirmed it’s an issue that has been broached with McCarthy as he has been wooing members ahead of next month’s vote.

“Debt ceiling has been a conversation that has been perennial in every single conversation or meeting around here since I’ve been here,” the Pennsylvania Republican said in an interview.

But some moderate Republicans – whom McCarthy needs to protect in order to keep their fragile majority in 2024 – have expressed uneasiness over using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip, risking both a catastrophic default and the political blame, especially if Republicans push for cuts to popular entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Republicans remember 2011 all too well when a proposal from then-Rep. Paul Ryan to overhaul Medicare became fodder for attacks that depicted him rolling an elderly lady in a wheelchair off a cliff.

“We shouldn’t put the United States in a position to default on our debt, clearly,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican. “But I also think every member of Congress needs to acknowledge that the $32 trillion debt is not in our national interest.”

 

To recap, House Republicans want to destroy America's credit and immediately push us into a deep recession with a debt default, or force massive spending cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  Several of them want to replace the "or" with "and". 

And that's if McCarthy becomes Speaker, which again...seems incredibly unlikely.