Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The NY Attorney General's investigation into the Trump Organization has officially become a criminal investigation, and things just got real interesting as this means both the federal and state probes are now criminal.

 

New York Attorney General Letitia James is joining the Manhattan district attorney's office in a criminal investigation of the Trump Organization, James' office said Tuesday. 

The attorney general office's investigation into the Trump Organization, which has been underway since 2019, will also continue as an ongoing civil probe, but the office recently informed Trump Organization officials of the criminal component. 

"We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA," James' spokesman Fabien Levy told CNN. "We have no additional comment." 

A lawyer for the Trump Organization declined to comment when reached by CNN. 

James' office is working with Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's Office, whose wide-sweeping probe into the Trump Organization has looked into whether the company misled lenders and insurance companies about the value of properties and whether it paid the appropriate taxes. 

Vance's office is examining millions of pages of documents that include Trump's tax returns. 

A person familiar with the investigation said a couple of investigators with the New York attorney general's office, who are steeped in knowledge about the Trump Organization, have joined the district attorney's team. A different person familiar with the matter said the New York attorney general is still conducting a civil investigation.

 

I still don't think the probe will result in criminal charges however, or any charges against Trump. Doing so would almost certainly lead to a massive terrorist attack or series of attacks in New York City that would make January 6 and even 9/11 look like a picnic. 

Yes, the Biden administration would quickly restore order, but that would result in lots of other pop-up attacks all over the place, and governors in some states aren't going to cooperate even if charges are filed.

Still, it is one step closer to Trump getting what he deserves, and what America needs to happen.

A Supreme Ruling On Gunmerica

In a unanimous 9-0 opinion from Justice Thomas, the Supreme Court made it very clear that "community caretaking" exception to warrantless Fourth Amendment search and seizure procedures by police in a person's home has limits, and those limits include guns.

 

On Monday, the Supreme Court released its opinion in Caniglia v. Strom, which unanimously held that a lower court’s extension of Cady v. Dombrowski’s “community caretaking” exception into the home defied the logic and holding of Cady, as well as violated the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. With the court’s unanimity in Caniglia, the home remains the most sacred space under the Fourth Amendment; its sanctity literally houses its privilege. Sans warrant, exigency or consent, governmental search and seizure within it is unconstitutional.

During an August 2015 argument with his wife, Edward Caniglia offered her one of his unloaded guns and requested that she put him out of his misery. Instead, she threatened to call 911. After the couple’s argument continued, she left the marital home to overnight at a hotel. When she returned the next day, she enlisted Cranston, Rhode Island’s police department to perform a wellness check on her husband. They did. They also arranged transportation for Edward to obtain a psychiatric evaluation at a local hospital. He agreed to go, but only after officers purportedly agreed not to confiscate his weapons. However, as soon as he left, officers — apparently by deceiving his wife — entered the Caniglia home and seized Caniglia’s handguns and ammunition. Caniglia sued, alleging that the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit sided with the officers by relying on Cady, a 1973 decision that upheld the warrantless “caretaking” search of a car that had been in an accident.

The court’s opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, was devoid of the fearsome, compelling specter raised in the briefing and during argument regarding the potential for troubling eventualities — for instance, that Caniglia may have harmed himself or his wife (or, perhaps, other innocent/intervening victims). A pithy four pages “long,” the opinion was unanimous and unambiguous: If police do not have the homeowner’s consent, an “exigent” circumstance, or a judicial warrant authorizing a search, then no version of Cady’s car exception applies to police entry into the home under the Fourth Amendment. “What is reasonable for vehicles is different from what is reasonable for homes,” Thomas wrote.

As always with realty – and, per Caniglia, the court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence — location matters. Specifically, the location of Cady’s warrantless search and seizure – a post-accident, routine search of an intoxicated, off-duty officer’s damaged and impounded car — simply cannot compare to a search of and seizure within a home. Governmental searches of vehicles regularly occur via exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement; a myriad of decisions have constitutionalized warrantless searches of vehicles, their compartments, their containers and even their occupants. Not one of these warrantless exceptions is available for the home.

Accordingly, caretaking under Cady is not carte blanche for police to search or seize within the home, nor do their “caretaking” duties create a “standalone doctrine that justifies warrantless searches and seizures in the home,” Thomas wrote. Cady, itself, he noted, drew an “unmistakable distinction between vehicles and homes,” constitutionally embedding the exception outside the home.

That police may engage in a myriad of “civic” community caretaking functions did not move the court off its jurisprudential bright line. Certainly, such functions give texture to the modern, sometimes complex, role of policing. They do not, however, supplant the constitutional sanctity of the home. Accordingly, the Caniglia court declined the opportunity to expand Cady’s “community caretaking” exception and permit warrantless entry into the home.

 

The overarching theme here is that short of an exigent emergency, cops can't search your home and take your things. None of those things applied in this case, and the court reaffirmed unanimously that this is the case.

It was a simple call, even for Clarence Thomas to make.

The House Republican Performative Caucus, Or Welcome To The Clown Show

Breaking news, the clown show that is the House Republican caucus is in fact full of clowns, and they're too busy being clowns to vote on legislation.

The top five freshman members of Congress who've missed the most votes this year are all House Republicans, according to data collected by Quorum.

By the numbers: Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) led the pack, missing 16.2% of votes. Cawthorn ranks sixth overall among all members — both House and Senate — in terms of missed votes. 

The House Democratic freshman who missed the most votes is Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), No. 14 on the list, at 2.82%. 

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), No. 12, missed the most votes in the Senate as a freshman, at 3.14%.

What they're saying: “Rep. Cawthorn married the love of his life on April 3rd of 2021. Due to his honeymoon, he missed House votes occurring between April 13th and April 16th," his spokesman Micah Bock told Axios. 

Four of the votes that Sen. Lummis missed were due to a record-level blizzard that hit Wyoming this year, Lummis's office said.

 

Sure, that's an excuse, because all the House votes took place in four days in April, right? And it's weird, because Wyoming's other senator, John Barasso, made those votes.

Even more so than the House GOP entering freshmen of the last decade, this class seems to think that they'll get reelected by not doing anything in the House except being assholes.

And they will get reelected, because their Republican voters in red districts think the federal government is illegitimate and broken anyway, so why not have a Congressperson dedicated to making sure it stays that way?

They don't want representation. They want entertainment. They want to own the libs. Period.

Welcome to the clown show, rookies.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The GOP local government of Maricopa County, Arizona is denouncing the state GOP's "audit" of the 2020 election results as a "grift" and the only question is how quickly the county's local Board of Supervisors is removed, replaced, and charged with election fraud by The Big Liars.

The Republican leaders of Arizona’s most populous county issued a blistering rebuke on Monday to a review of the November election that had been ordered by Republicans in the State Senate, calling it “a grift disguised as an audit” that had spun out of the legislators’ control.

The senior Republican in Maricopa County, Jack Sellers, the chairman of the board of supervisors, said flatly that the county would stop cooperating with the review and suggested that it would challenge in court any of its conclusions that pointed toward improprieties.

“This board is done explaining anything,” Mr. Sellers said at a special meeting of the five-member board, four of whose members are Republicans. “People’s ballots and money are not make-believe. It’s time to be done with this craziness, and get on with this county’s critical business.”

It was an extraordinary pushback to an election review that was supposed to placate voters who insisted that Donald J. Trump’s narrow loss in the state was a result of fraud, but which has mushroomed into a political spectacle with what experts call serious procedural lapses.

The Maricopa supervisors had resisted the audit since its inception in December, asking a court to decide whether the State Senate could legally take control of election records and equipment governed by strict security safeguards. They had insisted throughout that the county’s election — in which Joseph R. Biden Jr. earned a slim majority of 2.1 million total votes — had been among the most secure and smooth in the state’s history.

But they were pushed past the breaking point by a letter last week from State Senator Karen Fann, the Senate president, that implied that someone in the county had illegally removed critical election files from equipment and software that the Senate had subpoenaed for examination.

The supervisors learned of the claim when it was posted on a Twitter feed controlled by the review team. Ms. Fann’s letter asked the supervisors to address that and other concerns in a meeting with state senators and a liaison to the firms conducting the review — a meeting that was to be livestreamed by the far-right cable channel One America News.

“This board was going to be part of a political theater,” one Republican supervisor and former chairman of the board, Bill Gates, said. “The Arizona Senate is better than that. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is better than that. And I am not going to be a part of that.”

Mr. Trump had seized on the deleted-file claim over the weekend, calling it “devastating” evidence of irregularities in the vote. That led the county’s top election official, Stephen Richer, to call Mr. Trump’s online comment “unhinged.”

 

Of course the Maricopa County GOP government was going to be sacrificed on the altar of the Big Lie, and everyone knows it. It's just a matter of time before state lawmakers move against the county.  Arizona allows for both impeachment and recall ballots against any elected or appointed government official, and I fully expect one or both to happen to the County Board of Directors, County Recorder Steve Richter, and the state's only Democratic statewide officeholder, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

 

I will be shocked if that doesn't get underway by July 4th.  Republicans after all have to now justify the Big Lie between now and November 2022, and that means covering their asses.

Top House Republican Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday he opposes a bill to form a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, raising doubts about its passage in Congress.

The chamber plans to vote this week on legislation to set up a 10-member panel — appointed by Democratic and Republican leaders — which would study the events that led to a pro-Trump mob overrunning the Capitol while lawmakers confirmed President Joe Biden’s electoral win. Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and John Katko, R-N.Y., the chair and ranking members of the House Homeland Security Committee, brokered the agreement.

McCarthy, who voted to object to counting Arizona and Pennsylvania’s certified election results after rioters stormed the Capitol, criticized the process of setting up the commission as political. He contended the panel would duplicate efforts by congressional committees and federal authorities to investigate the insurrection, and argued its scope should extend beyond the events of Jan. 6.

“Given the political misdirections that have marred this process, given the now duplicative and potentially counterproductive nature of this effort, and given the Speaker’s shortsighted scope that does not examine interrelated forms of political violence in America, I cannot support this legislation,” he said in a statement.

 

By "interrelated forms of political violence" McCarthy means rounding up Black Lives Matter as "insurrectionists" too.

 

Understand that the GOP will not allow any investigation of January 6th and the Big Lie move forward unless it does as much or more damage to the Democratic party. Meanwhile, they'll spend the whole time complaining that the "corrupt media and corrupt Democrats" won't let the Big Lie go.

Watch.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The Roberts Court will hear next fall the case that could effectively end legal abortion in most red states, Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban law, on its Constitutionality.

 

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider a major rollback of abortion rights, saying it will decide whether states can ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

The court’s order sets up a showdown over abortion, probably in the fall, with a more conservative court seemingly ready to dramatically alter nearly 50 years of rulings on abortion rights.

The court first announced a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and reaffirmed it 19 years later.

The case involves a Mississippi law that would prohibit abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The state’s ban had been blocked by lower courts as inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent that protects a woman’s right to obtain an abortion before the fetus can survive outside her womb.

The justices had put off action on the case for several months. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an abortion-rights proponent, died just before the court’s new term began in October. Her replacement, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is the most open opponent of abortion rights to join the court in decades.

Barrett is one of three appointees of former President Donald Trump on the Supreme Court. The other two, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, voted in dissent last year to allow Louisiana to enforce restrictions on doctors that could have closed two of the state’s three abortion clinics.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Ginsburg and the other three liberal justices, said the restrictions were virtually identical to a Texas law the court struck down in 2016.

But that majority no longer exists, even if Roberts, hardly an abortion-rights supporter in his more than 15 years on the court, sides with the more liberal justices.

The Mississippi law was enacted in 2018, but was blocked after a federal court challenge. The state’s only abortion clinic remains open. The owner has said the clinic does abortions up to 16 weeks.

 

If the Gilead bloc on the court (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and now Barrett) bands together, they could completely end safe and legal abortion in not just a state-by-state basis, but in all states in a broad enough ruling. I'm not sure how far they'd be willing to go, but the question they are considering, whether the Roe 24-week ban is constitutional or not, is a direct challenge to more than four decades of precedent allowing abortions.

That is now in peril.

At the very least I expect a ruling that allows states to ban abortion on an individual basis, and to allow laws criminalizing crossing state lines to get an abortion procedure, effectively setting up women for a two-tiered reproductive rights citizenship depending on which state they get impregnated in.

I also expect the ruling to be used against trans folks too, because everything eventually is used against trans folks.

This is why Barrett was put on the court by Trump, this is what we've been warning about for years, and the bill comes due most likely in about 12-13 months.

Retribution Execution, Con't

I'm not sure what Republican party Washington Post contributor Katherine Clayton is observing, but the fact she's a Ph.D. Poly Sci student at Stanford shows in this depressingly naive analysis of the Liz Cheney ousting.

 

In new research, I find that this internal battle may push away Republicans who aren’t particularly committed to their party — those who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents who lean toward the GOP.

From March 14 to 25, I administered a survey experiment to a nationally representative sample of 1,876 Americans, using the Lucid platform. I randomly divided participants into three groups. Before answering questions, I had the first group read a news article excerpt that described prominent Republican and Democratic lawmakers clashing over whether Joe Biden legitimately won in the 2020 presidential election. The second group read about internal conflict among Republican lawmakers over the issue. The third group read no information at all, and simply took the survey.

All three groups then answered questions about their attitudes toward each party; whether they believed the opposing party posed a threat to democracy, and if so, how much; and whether they believed that the U.S. political system needs a major third party.

Does conflict within the party push Republicans away? It depends on their convictions.

When Democrats or strongly committed Republicans read about clashing GOP lawmakers, it had little or no effect on their attitudes. They were no more or less committed to the party, and they felt no more or less strongly about the opposing party’s threat to democracy, than those in a control group.

But Republicans with weaker commitments to the party did lose faith in the party after reading about GOP conflict. I used a measure of overall party opinion that takes into account favorable or unfavorable attitudes toward the party as well as trust in the party to handle U.S. problems. After reading about the GOP’s internal clashes, weak Republicans’ overall opinion of the party dropped by about six percentage points, compared with the control group or the group who read about clashes between the parties.

However, less committed Republicans did not become more interested in a potential third party. That’s bad news for any possible Republican Party offshoot, which probably wouldn’t gain traction among elected officials or voters.

Instead, weaker Republicans who read about GOP conflict over the election started thinking more highly of the Democratic Party, and became less likely to view it as a threat. Their opinion toward the Democratic Party grew six percentage points more favorable, and belief that the Democratic Party threatens democracy dropped by eight percentage points.

In other words, the Republican Party’s internal civil war could push some less committed Republican voters to the Democrats.

 

How do I put this gently?

Bullshit.

What she's describing is the ghostly uncommitted voter, the political independent, the voter that we proved didn't exist in the era of Trump. People like that just don't bother to vote at all. They're turned off by "both sides" and skip the hassle.

 

We know that 80% of Republicans approved of the purge of Liz Cheney, and the majority of Republicans still think the election was stolen by the Democrats.  They're not going to view the Democratic party "more favorably".  This is wrong just like the 2020 polling was wrong in several aspects: Republicans lie to pollsters.

I can tell you now though that anyone who still identifies as a Republican is never, never going to actually vote for the Democrats. That instinct will be brutally purged from them just as easily as Liz Cheney was purged from the GOP by 2022.

The rest will stay home.

That's the best we can hope for.

The remaining Republicans are Authoritarians for Trump. Keep that in mind.

 

Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

I honestly have come to the conclusion that the gun-humpers on the right want to refight and win the Civil War and reconstitute slavery, and they keep telling us that this is what they want to do.

Conservative activist Rogan O'Handley argued over the weekend that the government should provide firearm subsidies so that people can protect themselves from "looting, violence and murder" that he blamed on Black Lives Matter.

O'Handley made the remarks while appearing on OAN, a conservative news channel.

"America owns more guns than 50% of the planet," O'Handley said. "There are more guns than people in this country. God bless the Second Amendment and our Founding Fathers. I am absolutely loving seeing these huge, huge gun numbers."

The conservative activist went on to praise first-time gun buyers who fear Black Lives Matter protests..

"People that have never owned a gun in their life are looking around and seeing BLM and antifa burning down courthouses, police stations... looting, violence, murder," he said. "And they're saying, you know what? Maybe I have to look at protecting myself and my family. Maybe I should start exercising my constitutional right to keep and bear arms."

O'Handley added: "And I will say I'm in the camp where I think we should actually have subsidies for gun ownership in this country. You know, we subsidize schools, housing, everything. Why are we not subsidizing guns? That's a constitutional right and one of the most important. Very happy to see these huge numbers."

 

To reiterate, we're at the point now where the white supremacists are openly saying the government should give people guns to stop Black Lives Matter and Antifa. 

 

This is their idea of utopia.

 

Millions of people agree with this lunatic. My "The Second Civil War" tag is not an exaggeration, folks.

 

This will only end in catastrophe.

The Kids Are Alright (And Voting)

The Silent generation and Boomer generation are now well into AARP territory while Millennials, now firmly in their 20's and 30's are becoming the new electoral majority. That's helping to push the country to the left finally, but there are some major caveats, mainly that white Millennials still favor Republicans across the board, and that Boomers are living longer and voting more conservative as they age.

More members of the millennial generation and Generation Z voted in the 2020 presidential election than in any prior election, according to several studies of the electorate that have taken place in recent months.

And for the first time in American history, a majority of eligible voters under the age of 30 cast a ballot in an election.

As the oldest millennials creep toward their 40th birthdays and more members of Generation Z age into the electorate, the data show those two groups became substantially more powerful within the electorate, as occasional voters cast ballots more regularly and first-time voters began their voting careers in greater proportions.

“Basically 40 percent of the electorate are essentially Gen Z and millennials and some young Xers in there,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics who helped the Biden campaign survey younger voters. “They are replacing the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. For every one of those who are exiting the electorate, they are being replaced by someone more progressive.”

About 21 million voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast a ballot in 2020, up from 18 million in 2016, according to data from the Democratic firm TargetSmart. And 23 million voters between the ages of 30 and 39 cast ballots, an increase of almost 3 million from the last presidential contest.

In both cases, those voters made up a slightly larger share of the overall electorate — up 0.5 percent among 18 to 29-year-olds and up 0.2 percent among 30 to 39-year-olds.

Their gains came as voters between the ages of 40 and 65 declined as an overall share of the electorate. Turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds jumped 9 percent, and by 7 percent among 30- to 39-year-olds. Turnout among those between the ages of 40 and 65 rose 6 percentage points.

“In a pandemic election, where many young Americans found their lives uprooted by college campus closures, the youth vote still expanded over the 2016 benchmark,” said Tom Bonier, TargetSmart’s chief executive.

For the first time, the millennial generation and Generation Z combined to make up a greater share of the electorate than Generation X.

And more of those younger voters are getting more comfortable casting their ballots: Among those between the ages of 30 and 39, almost half are frequent voters, up from just over a third four years ago, a sign that a generation long dismissed for its apathy is engaging in politics more habitually.

There are signs that the emerging younger electorate is likely to provide a windfall for Democratic candidates. In states where voters are allowed to register by party, 52 percent of voters 18 to 29 are registered Democrats, compared with just 35 percent who are registered Republicans. Among 30- to 39-year-olds, the gap is even wider: 53 percent are registered Democrats, while just 34 percent are registered Republicans.

“Young voters were a critical component of the Democratic coalition that formed the Blue Wave in 2018, and will be perhaps even more central to Democratic hopes in the 2022 midterm elections,” Bonier said. “Meanwhile, as the electorate grows increasingly younger and more diverse, Republicans are left clinging to hopes of higher turnout among older and less educated white voters.”

Some Republicans acknowledge the growing generational challenge their party faces.

“The big problem that we have is that we’re not putting forward policy proposals that people are willing to listen to, particularly in those generations,” said Evan Siegfried, the author of "GOP GPS: How to Find the Millennials and Urban Voters the Republican Party Needs to Survive." “Instead of reacting to proposals and statements by Democrats with mockery and memes, which only appeal to the base and voters you already have, it would benefit Republicans to respond with alternatives and thoughtful debate.”

 

But that goes to show you how fragile our country is right now: without record-shattering numbers of voters age 18-45 going to the polls, Biden would have been crushed and we'd be locked in the hell of a Trump second term with Republican dominance of Congress. If those voters don't show up in 2022, we're going to lose the House and Senate.  If they don't show up in 2024, well...

A lot is riding on motivating people to care about voting, and as a whole, we barely give a damn.

Especially younger voters.

We need all of us, folks.

The Village Gets Used Again

One of the main reasons the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has gone on so long, longer than my entire life and nearly as long as the Zandarparents have been alive is that both sides fully understand that the war is being fought in the global public opinion battlefield as well as in Gaza and the West Bank, and always has been. The international press ends up getting drafted in this fight, and it never turns out well for them.

Israel shared intelligence with the US showing how Hamas operated inside the same building with the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera in Gaza, officials in Jerusalem said on Sunday. 

Officials in more than one government office confirmed that US President Joe Biden’s phone call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday was, in part, about the bombing of the building, and that Israel showed Biden and American officials the intelligence behind the action. 

“We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building,” a source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said. “I understand they found the explanation satisfactory.” 

Another senior Israeli official admitted that the fact that the bombing took place two days after a tweet by the IDF misled some foreign media into reporting that ground troops had entered Gaza made the situation more difficult from a public diplomacy perspective.
But in government-to-government diplomacy, Israeli officials felt that the situation was still good. 

The US was the only country to inquire about the IDF strike on the building, which the military said housed Hamas military intelligence offices, as well as AP and Al Jazeera, other news outlets, and other offices and apartments. 

“From an analysis the Foreign Ministry did [on Sunday], 80% of the 90 countries we spoke to in recent days released official statements supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. They aren’t calling to stop the operation,” the ministry source said. 

Ashkenazi also spoke to over 30 foreign ministers around the world. 

“We’re still in a positive place when it comes to our legitimacy to act,” the Foreign Ministry source added. “There is very clear support for the Israeli stance that the terrorism crossed a line.” 

The IAF struck the 12-story tower in Gaza on Saturday, giving a warning an hour in advance. 

“The building housed the offices of civilian media, which the terrorist organization Hamas hides behind and uses as human shields,” the IDF said in a statement. "The terror organization Hamas deliberately places its military assets in the heart of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip. Prior to the attack, the IDF warned the civilians who were in the building and gave them sufficient time to evacuate.”

 

Even if the intelligence is BS, and using the Associated Press as pawns is the IDF's master stroke to evacuate all the international press out of Gaza "for their own safety", or whether Hamas really was running intel operations from the building, betting that Israel wouldn't touch the place, the point is that the Associate Press, Al Jazeera, and other media outfits in Gaza not only allowed themselves to become the story, but to become part of the conflict itself.

That alone necessitates AP CEO and President Gary Pruitt's resignation, and that of the AP's Gaza staff. Maybe that's not fair, but AP's been in that building for 15 years. Perhaps they should have known, being a news-gathering organization in a war zone. Things aren't fair in war, especially this war.

Either the IDF is terrible or Hamas is terrible (and both being terrible is the most likely outcome) but again, the AP allowed themselves to get pulled into this.

We need better media run by better people.

StupidiNews!

• At least one person is dead and four injured after a mass shooting in Toronto on Sunday, the shooting took place near the Pearson International Airport in the Ebitocoke neighborhood.
• Embattled Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is ruling out a Gaza cease fire, saying the IDF will pursue Hamas terrorists "for as long as necessary" as fighting there enters a second week.
• A new WHO study finds that stroke and heart disease deaths caused by overwork in 2020 rose 30% from 2000, claiming nearly three-quarters of a million people worldwide.
• Ireland's government is confirming a second cyber attack on the country's health system in three days as hackers continue to shut down hospital and heath care computers.
• Archaeologists in Italy believe a naval officer's body found near Mount Vesuvius may have been part of a failed rescue mission 2100 years ago.
  

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Trump continues to lie to America and the world as his cultists continue to try to manufacture a scandal in Arizona's 2020 vote count, declaring that the entire Maricopa County voter database was deleted ahead of Monday's election board meeting, a lie so laughably false that the county's Republican top election official publicly tweeted that Donald Trump is "unhinged".

"Wow. This is unhinged."

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer's tweet Saturday castigated former President Donald Trump for alleging "election crime" in an email he sent Saturday.

Trump's premature leap to unsubstantiated conclusionsdrew Richer's attention before a scheduled meeting Monday in which Maricopa County officials say they will respond to questions raised by Arizona Senate-hired private contractors auditing the county's general election.

Richer took office in January, after the election, the election count and county accuracy tests and a county-directed audit were conducted.

He and other Republican county officials are sounding alarms as claims about a deleted database such as the one made by Trump — and the audit's own Twitter account — burn across social media like wildfire.

"Wow. This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now," Richer posted on Twitter in response to Trump's claims.

He added: "We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country."

Trump wrote in one of his Saturday emails, "The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!" He called it "illegal" and an "election crime," despite the audit spokesperson walking back such claims two days earlier. Trump also alleged that "seals were broken on the boxes that hold the votes, ballots are missing, and worse."

On Wednesday, the auditors' Twitter account alleged Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases before the election equipment was delivered to the audit, claiming spoliation of evidence.

But Ken Bennett, the audit spokesperson, walked back a claim of wrongdoing.

"We didn’t say there was anything malicious," Bennett said Friday of the database in question. "Maybe it was deleted because it was a duplicate of something that was elsewhere."

Bennett said auditors seek an explanation from the county.

 

The explanation is simple: "You're all a bunch of liars, and you most likely will be hearing from our lawyers if not country prosecutors." 

And I don't feel sorry for Stephen Richter at all. The proper thing to do is to resign very publicly, very loudly, and to encourage every other Republican remaining in the party to leave as well, stating very clearly that Donald Trump's Big Lie cannot be allowed to stand. Back up those words with actions.

Leave. The. Party.

Because those who remain will be part and parcel of the violence that will inevitably come.

 

There's no middle ground anymore, because those who are disloyal to Trump are being purged anyway.

When House Republicans ousted Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post, it spoke to the direction of the Republican Party in at least one specific way: what should happen to those who publicly break with former President Donald Trump? So, we surveyed the nation's self-identified Republicans to learn what they thought of the week's events. They still very much want their party to show loyalty to Mr. Trump and adhere to the idea that President Biden didn't legitimately win.

Their views on Cheney, in turn, now reflect those wishes.

Eighty percent of Republicans who'd heard about the vote agree with Cheney's removal — they feel she was off-message, unsupportive of Mr. Trump, and that she's wrong about the 2020 presidential election. To a third of them, and most particularly for those who place the highest importance on loyalty, Cheney's removal also shows "disloyalty will be punished."

Those Republicans opposed to her removal — just a fifth of the party right now — say it's mainly because there's room for different views in the party, not all need support Mr. Trump and this was a distraction. But when we look down the line to any potential electoral impact, theirs might be even more limited: this group is also less likely to report voting in Republican primaries. 

Republicans say that Mr. Trump himself represents their views just as well as they think the party does; it's a personal connection to him we've seen for years. Today, loyalty also means they specifically want the party to follow more of the former president's examples across a range of items, including economics, issues of race and immigration, how to treat the media, using power and leadership, generally.

 

There is no GOP anymore. There is only the Trump party now. And it will very soon go to war with America itself.

God help me, we're not prepared to win that war, either.

Retrubution Execution, Con't

The Liz Cheney fight is over, and Donald Trump has claimed 100% victory with Elise Stefanik taking Cheney's role as House GOP conference chair. As CNN's Harry Enten notes, Republicans are now moving on to winning back Congress in 2022.

The House GOP's move to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position is widely seen as the latest move to placate the base at the risk of alienating the center of the electorate. Cheney had voted to impeach former President Donald Trump and has continued her critiques of him while most other Republicans seem to have a hard time distancing themselves from him. 

But a look at the statistics reveals that Republicans may be playing it right when it comes to Trump. 

The belief that Republicans should not try to placate Trump or his supporters comes down to the fact that he is unpopular and just lost a presidential election. 

That said, there's little sign that Trump is even on the minds' of most voters these days. He's not on Twitter, and Google searches for him are way down. Indeed, there's not much of a sign that the GOP's association with Trump is hurting them at this point. 

Take a look at the generic congressional ballot. Democrats hold a slight lead of about 3 to 4 points in an average of polls. Trump lost the 2020 election by 4.5 points, and House Republicans lost nationally by 3.1 points. 

In other words, Republicans are in no worse position than they were in the 2020 election. In fact, they're actually polling better now on the generic ballot than they were heading into the last election by about 3 to 4 points because polling across the board underestimated Republicans.

 

In other words, without Trump reminding people daily why the GOP is corrupt and terrible, they're actually doing better in the polls, better enough to win back Congress by a healthy margin. Biden's big legislative wins and the COVID vaccine progress aren't enough. People actually like Republicans more now, because they're the "outsider" party and everything is now the Democrats' fault because they're in control.

Unless Democrats find a way to make the GOP pay a price for their continued support of Trump, the Biden admin will be over and done in 2023 when Republicans take over Congress and impeach him three, maybe four times just to make sure Trump is no longer the "most impeached" Oval Office occupant.

You think I'm kidding. I'm being deadly serious.

Sunday Long Read: The Coldest Of Cases

This week's Sunday Long Read mystery doesn't get much more "cold case" than the disappearance of a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains during the Soviet era more than 60 years ago, but as author Douglas Preston tells us in the New Yorker, the mystery may finally be solved.

Igor Dyatlov was a tinkerer, an inventor, and a devotee of the wilderness. Born in 1936, near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), he built radios as a kid and loved camping. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, in 1957, he constructed a telescope so that he and his friends could watch the satellite travel across the night sky. By then, he was an engineering student at the city’s Ural Polytechnic Institute. One of the leading technical universities in the country, U.P.I. turned out topflight engineers to work in the nuclear-power and weapons industries, communications, and military engineering. During his years there, Dyatlov led a number of arduous wilderness trips, often using outdoor equipment that he had invented or improved on. It was a time of optimism in the U.S.S.R. Khrushchev’s Thaw had freed many political prisoners from Stalin’s Gulag, economic growth was robust, and the standard of living was rising. The shock that the success of Sputnik delivered to the West further bolstered national confidence. In late 1958, Dyatlov began planning a winter expedition that would exemplify the boldness and vigor of a new Soviet generation: an ambitious sixteen-day cross-country ski trip in the Urals, the north-south mountain range that divides western Russia from Siberia, and thus Europe from Asia.

He submitted his proposal to the U.P.I. sports club, which readily approved it. Dyatlov’s itinerary lay three hundred and fifty miles north of Sverdlovsk, in the traditional territory of the Mansi, an indigenous people. The Mansi came into contact with Russians around the sixteenth century, when Russia was extending its control over Siberia. Though largely Russified by this time, the Mansi continued to pursue a semi-traditional way of life—hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. Dyatlov’s group would ski two hundred miles, on a route that no Russian, as far as anyone knew, had taken before. The mountains were gentle and rounded, their barren slopes rising from a vast boreal forest of birch and fir. The challenge wouldn’t be rugged terrain but brutally cold temperatures, deep snow, and high winds.

Dyatlov recruited his classmate Zina Kolmogorova, and seven other fellow-students and recent graduates. They were among the élite of Soviet youth and all highly experienced winter campers and cross-country skiers. One was Dyatlov’s close friend Georgy Krivonishchenko, who had graduated from U.P.I. two years before and worked as an engineer at the Mayak nuclear complex, in the then secret town of Chelyabinsk-40. Jug-eared, small, and wiry, he told jokes, sang, and played the mandolin. Two other recent graduates were Rustem Slobodin and Nikolay Thibault-Brignoles, of French descent, whose father had been worked nearly to death in one of Stalin’s camps. The other students included Yuri Yudin, Yuri Doroshenko, and Aleksandr Kolevatov. The youngest of the group, at twenty, was Lyuda Dubinina, an economics major, a track athlete, and an ardent Communist, who wore her long blond hair in braids tied with silk ribbons. On a previous wilderness outing, Dubinina had been accidentally shot by a hunter, and survived—quite cheerfully, it was said—a fifty-mile journey back to civilization. A couple of days before the group was due to set off, the U.P.I. administration unexpectedly added a new member, much older than the others and largely unknown to them: Semyon Zolotaryov, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Second World War with an old-fashioned mustache, stainless-steel crowns on his teeth, and tattoos.

The party left Sverdlovsk by train on January 23rd. Several of them hid under seats to avoid buying tickets. They were in high spirits—so high that on a layover between trains Krivonishchenko was briefly detained by police for playing his mandolin and pretending to panhandle in the train station. We know these details because there was a communal journal, and many of the skiers also kept personal journals. At least five had cameras, and the pictures they took show a lively and strikingly handsome group of young people having the adventure of their lives—skiing, laughing, playing in the snow, and mugging for the camera.

After two days on trains, the party reached Ivdel, a remote town with a Stalin-era prison camp that, by then, held mostly criminals. From there the group travelled another day by bus, then in the back of a woodcutter’s truck, and finally by ski, guided by a horse-drawn sleigh. They slept in an abandoned logging camp called Second Northern. There Yuri Yudin had a flareup of sciatica that forced him to pull out of the trip. The next day, January 28th, he turned back, while the remaining nine set off toward the mountains. The plan was to end up at the tiny village of Vizhai around February 12th, and telegram the U.P.I. sports club that they had arrived safely. The expected telegram never came.

At first, the U.P.I. sports club assumed that the group had just been held up; there had been reports of a heavy snowstorm in the mountains. But, after several days passed, families of the group began placing frantic phone calls to the university and to the local bureau of the Communist Party, and, on February 20th, a search was launched. There were several search parties: student volunteers from U.P.I., prison guards from the Ivdel camp, Mansi hunters, local police; the military deployed planes and helicopters. On February 25th, the students found ski tracks, and the next day they discovered the skiers’ tent—above the tree line on a remote mountain that Soviet officials referred to as Height 1079 and that the Mansi called Kholat Syakhl, or Dead Mountain. There was no one inside.

The theories are quite entertaining as to what happened to the Dyatlov party, as good as some of Preston's novels featuring seminal New Orleans FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast. The reality may actually be a bit more frightening, however.

I avoid skiing anyway. Mountains will kill you, you know.

Israeli A Problem Here, Con't

We've now reached the inevitable "Israeli airstrikes destroy international press offices" stage of the 2021 iteration of Middle-East Peace™ and I'm wondering how President Biden will choose to respond.

An Israeli airstrike targeted and destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets hours after another Israeli air raid on a densely populated refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians from an extended family, mostly children, on Saturday.

The strike on the high-rise came nearly an hour after the military ordered people to evacuate the 12-story building, which also housed Al-Jazeera, other offices and residential apartments. The strike brought down the entire structure, which collapsed in a gigantic cloud of dust. There was no immediate explanation for why it was attacked.

The earlier Israeli airstrike on the Gaza City refugee camp was the deadliest single strike of the current conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. Both sides are pressing for an advantage as cease-fire efforts gather strength.

The latest outburst of violence started in Jerusalem and spread across the region over the past week, with Jewish-Arab clashes and rioting in mixed cities of Israel. There were also widespread Palestinian protests Friday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot and killed 11 people.

The spiraling violence has raised fears of a new Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising, when peace talks have not taken place in years. Palestinians on Saturday were marking Nakba (Catastrophe) Day, when they commemorate the estimated 700,000 people who were expelled from or fled their homes in what was now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation. That raised the possibility of even more unrest.

U.S. diplomat Hady Amr arrived Friday as part of Washington’s efforts to de-escalate the conflict, and the U.N. Security Council was set to meet Sunday. But Israel turned down an Egyptian proposal for a one-year truce that Hamas rulers had accepted, an Egyptian official said Friday on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

Since Monday night, Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which has pounded the Gaza Strip with strikes. In Gaza, at least 139 people have been killed, including 39 children and 22 women; in Israel, eight people have been killed, including the death Saturday of a man killed by a rocket that hit in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv.

The strike on the building housing media offices came in the afternoon, after the owner received a call from the Israeli military warning that the building would be hit. AP’s staff and others in the building evacuated immediately, and were reported safe.

 

It was nice of the IDF to warn the AP to evacuate before their Gaza office was deliberately targeted and bombed to hell so that they can no longer report on what the IDF will be bombing next.  

 

See, the IDF is friendly and full of the good guys!

The Big Lie, Con't

Well what do you know, we actually found voter fraud in the 2020 election, well this changes everything! I mean it's all over for Biden and the Democrats now, nobody...

...wait, I'm being told that this was Republican voter fraud to illegally help Donald Trump in Colorado, by a man accused of not just voting his estranged wife's ballot, but killing her as well.

Barry Morphew, who is charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of his wife who remains missing, is now accused of submitting a ballot for her in the November presidential election.

Suzanne Morphew was last seen in May 2020, and while she has not been found, the Chaffee County Sheriff's Office (CCSO) announced earlier this month the arrest of her husband Barry and said they believe Suzanne is no longer alive.

He was previously facing charges of:

• First-degree murder after deliberation
• Tampering with physical evidence
• Attempting to influence a public servant

New charges were announced this week and include:

• Forgery of public record
• Election mail ballot offense

Back in October 2020, the Chaffee County Clerk reported to the sheriff's office that she had received a mail-in ballot for Suzanne Morphew, a person she knew was missing since May 2020, an arrest affidavit from CCSO for Barry Morphew's arrest says.

The ballot was provided to the sheriff's office and seized as evidence.

It did not have the signature of the voter as required and instead, the affidavit says, the name Barry Lee Morphew was handwritten on the line for the witness's legal name.

In April, Barry Morphew was interviewed about the ballot and asked why he submitted it.

He replied, "Just because I wanted Trump to win," the affidavit says. He further stated, according to the affidavit that "I just thought give him [Trump] another vote."

He went on to say, according to the affidavit, "all these other guys are cheating," and I know she [referring to his wife] was going to vote for Trump anyway."

When asked if knew submitting the ballot was illegal, he responded, "I didn't know you couldn't do that for your spouse," the affidavit says.

 

I have to say, if this guy killed his wife and then stole her identity to cast two ballots for Joe Biden, this would have been the leading news story on FOX for six goddamn months. It would have taken on BENGHAZI status. The trial would be covered daily, with Democrats constantly asked to disavow Biden's "obvious cheating" and for him to do everything up to and including resign.

But this asshole voted for Trump, so nobody cares.