Last Call For Corporation Obliteration

The party of "freedom of speech" and "Money is speech" sure is doing everything they can to silence corporations when they take positions that Republicans don't like. In Florida, Ron DeSantis is set to take over Disney's special Reedy Creek tax district in order to force the company to cough up $1 billion in debt.

 

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis may soon get to pick the people who govern Disney’s Orlando-area theme parks, a move that would give the Republican leader new authority over the state’s largest employer and a recent political foe.

Republican lawmakers on Monday unveiled a bill to turn over control of Disney’s special taxing district, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, to a five-member board chosen by DeSantis. The proposal also comes with a rebrand; Reedy Creek would become the “Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.”

The move to take over Reedy Creek is the latest step in a yearlong spat between DeSantis and Disney over a bill to restrict certain classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity. DeSantis signed the bill into law over the objections of Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek.

In an act opponents decried as political retribution, DeSantis then pushed lawmakers to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which for 55 years effectively gave Disney control of the land around its Florida properties. Republicans, who control the seats of legislative power, complied, and the district was scheduled to be sunset on June 1.

But the bill proposed Monday breathed new life into the taxing district and kept many of its special powers. Indeed, the final page of the 189-page bill states clearly: “The Reedy Creek Improvement District is not dissolved as of June 1, 2023, but continues in full force and effect under its new name.”

 

Why dissolve Disney's special tax status when you can take it over and use it to extort billions out of the company and parkgoers?

 

Not to be outdone, House GOP Circus of the Damned Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy and his sidekick Steve Scalise are set to banish the US Chamber of Commerce from Capitol Hill entirely for the crime of endorsing Democrats in some House races.    

 

The two highest-ranking Republican leaders in the House of Representatives are going to war with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the new Congress takes shape.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise are both refusing to meet with the the Chamber after the lobbying group endorsed a handful of Democrats in the past two elections, clearly making an enemy of the powerful congressional leaders.

"The priorities of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have not aligned with the priorities of House Republicans or the interests of their own members, and they should not expect a meeting with Speaker McCarthy as long as that's the case," Mark Bednar, a chief spokesman for McCarthy, told CNBC in a statement.

Scalise also won't meet with the Chamber, according to spokeswoman Lauren Fine.

"Washington has radically shifted away from the pro-business philosophy of most local Chambers across America," she said. Fine also took aim at the Chamber's move to endorse Democrats running for House seats and said that "unless the Chamber gets back to their traditional pro-business roots, they should not expect to have any engagement with Majority Leader Scalise's office."

Denying the Chamber access could also prompt other House Republicans to block the nation's largest business organization.

The Chamber has continued to actively lobby Capitol Hill despite the ongoing battle with top Republicans. The group spent just under $21 million on lobbying in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to its latest disclosure report. The form shows they lobbied lawmakers in the House and Senate, as well as Biden White House officials, on a wide variety of bills, including new tax proposals as well as U.S. aid to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. 

 

Look, American corporations are pretty terrile, ut forcing them to give their money to Republicans or else in order to hurt Democratic candidates is a new low, even for these jackasses.

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Hopefully this asshole spends the next two decades in jail, but neo-Nazi hate group Atomwaffen founder Brandon Russell and his girlfriend are facing federal charges after being picked up in a plot to destroy power substations around Baltimore in order to "completely destroy the whole city." 

A neo-Nazi leader recently released from prison has been arrested again and accused of plotting an attack on the Maryland power grid with a woman he met while incarcerated.

Brandon Russell, 27, and Sarah Clendaniel, 34, are expected to make their first appearance Monday in Baltimore federal court on a charge of conspiring to destroy an energy facility, which carries up to 20 years in prison.

“If we can pull off what I’m hoping … this would be legendary,” Clendaniel said on Jan. 29, according to the court record. She was speaking to a federal informant, who was having similar discussions with Russell.

According to prosecutors, their plan was to attack with gunfire five substations that serve the Baltimore area. The charges come after similar attacks on the power grid in North Carolina and Oregon that remain unsolved; the Department of Homeland Security recently warned that the United States is in a “heightened threat environment” and that critical infrastructure is among the “targets of potential violence.”

In conversations about the plot, according to court documents, one defendant “described how there was a ‘ring’ around Baltimore and if they hit a number of them all in the same day, they ‘would completely destroy this whole city.’”

Clendaniel and Russell met while incarcerated at separate prisons, according to the court documents — Russell in federal custody for possessing bombmaking materials and Clendaniel in a Maryland facility for robbing convenience stores with a machete.

“Going to prison was worth it because I might not have met you otherwise,” Russell said in one text.

Both are on probation. It was not immediately clear whether they had attorneys representing them in this matter. Attempts to reach family for Clendaniel and Russell was not immediately successful.

Russell, a former Florida National Guard member, is the founder of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen, which attempted to use violent attacks to spark a race war in the United States. Experts say the group, while small, is dangerous because of its influence on the broader far-right movement to eschew politics and spill blood.

Proud Boys and Oath Keeper terrorists are one thing, but these Atomwaffen assholes put the Nazi in neo-Nazi and they specifically targeted Baltimore in order to make Black folk suffer and die. It's 2023 and America is still dealing with shit like this.

And we have an entire major political party playing footsie with these guys, and the people who support them.

Jesus wept.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Will Bunch makes it plain that House GOP Circus of the Damned's latest cackling performance piece kitting out members with AR-15 lapel pins is both making it clear whom the GOP really serves, and acting as an open threat against Democrats and their voters, starting with "George Santos".

In winning election on a completely made-up resume, Santos is the final downward spiral for a Republican Party that has become 100% about the performance and 0% about the policy. So when his new GOP colleague from Georgia handed Santos a lapel pin in the shape of an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the New Yorker did what any outrageous showman would do. He pinned it on.

The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.

It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.

And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.

Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?

Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.

A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.

But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.

For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.

 

There's really no coming back for the GOP. Either they gain de facto permanent rule, or they'll make however many millions suffer until they get the votes to do so.

Last Call For Fantasma Santos, Con't

"George Santos" claims to be many things he's not: a volleyball champ, an investment guru, a human being, but he's never claimed that he wan't a Republican, and we know that's the one thing that's true here, because six weeks in and he's already facing sexual harassment charges while in office.

A prospective congressional aide has accused Representative George Santos of ethics violations and sexual harassment, according to a letter the man sent to the House Committee on Ethics and posted to Twitter on Friday.

The man, Derek Myers, briefly worked in Mr. Santos’s office before his job offer was rescinded earlier this week, according to the letter.

Mr. Myers said in the letter that he was alone with Mr. Santos in his office on Jan. 25 when the congressman asked him whether he had a profile on Grindr, a popular gay dating app. Then, he said, Mr. Santos invited him to karaoke and touched his groin, assuring him that his husband was out of town.

Mr. Myers’s account could not be corroborated, but a spokeswoman for Representative Susan Wild, ranking member of the House Ethics Committee, acknowledged that his letter had been received by her office.

Mr. Myers said in an interview that he also filed a report with the Capitol Police, speaking to an officer over the phone. On Twitter, he said that he was making his complaint public for the sake of transparency.

“They are serious offenses and the evidence and facts will speak for themselves if the committee takes up the matter,” he wrote.

A day before making his complaint public, Mr. Myers received attention following the release of recordings he had secretly made of Mr. Santos and his chief of staff, Charley Lovett.

Mr. Myers was charged last year with wiretapping in Ohio, after a small newspaper he ran published audio of courtroom testimony that someone else recorded and sent to him. Journalism organizations rallied around him, calling for the charges to be dropped in the name of press freedom.

Mr. Santos told the news start-up Semafor on Thursday that his office had been in the process of hiring Mr. Myers, but had decided against it because of concerns over the wiretapping charges. Mr. Lovett confirmed the same to Talking Points Memo.

 

The ace part of this is that the House Ethics Committee has all but been dismantled under Kevin McCarthy's Circus of the Damned, so there's literally nobody there to hear Myers's complaint. 

Santos isn't going anywhere, even if he's indicted. McCarthy can't afford to lose his vote. The only way Santos goes out is by election loss, and even then I'd expect he'd accuse whoever beats him of fraud. He'll run again, just like I expect Madison Cawthorn will. Well, once he gets out of jail.

Have A Koch And A Vile

Billionaire right-wing corporate magnate Charles Koch is willing to buy the remaining souls of any Republican who isn't Donald Trump in order to get his agenda into power in 2024, which I find deeply weird because Trump gave Koch and his ilk the largest corporate tax cut in history four years ago, but there you are.

The deep-pocketed network associated with billionaire Charles Koch is preparing to throw its money and weight behind a single Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential primary – in a move that could significantly reshape the GOP field.

Americans for Prosperity Action, the main political arm of the Koch network, “is prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win,” Emily Seidel, the CEO of Americans for Prosperity and a top adviser at AFP Action, wrote in a memo released Sunday.

The memo does not mention Donald Trump, but an official with AFP Action confirmed to CNN that the network is not planning to support the former president’s White House bid.

“To write a new chapter for our county, we need to turn the page on the past,” Seidel wrote to AFP’s staff and activists. “So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter.”

The Koch decision to engage in the GOP primary – after sitting on the sidelines for the two most recent White House nomination fights – is likely to set off a scramble among Republican presidential contenders to win over the Kansas-based industrialist and the hundreds of wealthy donors who help finance his influential, free-market network.

During his White House tenure, Trump, often sparred with Koch officials, who sharply criticized his administration’s trade and hard-line immigration policies.

AFP Action has not announced a budget for its 2024 political activity, but the network has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in previous election cycles, rivaling the financial reach of the Republican National Committee. Americans for Prosperity has permanent staff in 36 states and touts millions of grassroots activists across the country.

Its political wing also plans to engage earlier and more aggressively in congressional and state-level primaries, both to influence more contests and to find new voters to participate in primaries, AFP Action officials said.

Seidel said the network is stepping up its activity to help address “the broken politics” that she said has created a “toxic situation” in the nation’s capital and blocked policy progress.

 

I certainly expect Koch's AFP network to back Ron DeSantis, meaning that while it will take billions to buy the kind of campaign advertising that Trump will get in kind (again) from the "liberal" media that absolutely wants him back in the White House to rule over the airwaves, DeSantis will have the money he needs to compete.

We'll see how the battle plays out. All the money in the world couldn't stop Trump in 2016, and didn't. Counting Trump out of 2024 is a mistake I won't make again.

Sunday Long Read: The Telegram Files

If you're still wondering why Elon Musk and Team Kremlin are breathlessly weaving fiction about how the CIA is reading every tweet looking for "enemies of the Biden regime", it's because they are distracting the world from the fact Putin is actually using "secure" social media app Telegram to hunt down and destroy dissidents.

ON THE CHILLY, clear afternoon of February 24, 2022—the day Vladimir Putin’s forces launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a handful of Russian opposition politicians gathered in front of Saint Petersburg’s palatial Law, Order, and Security building. They had come to officially request permission to hold a rally opposing the war, which they knew would be denied. Among the group was Marina Matsapulina, the 30-year-old vice chair of Russia’s Libertarian Party. Matsapulina understood that the gathering was a symbolic gesture—and that it posed serious risks.

Nine days later, Matsapulina was awoken around 7 am by someone banging at her apartment door. She crept up to the entrance but was too frightened to look through the peephole, and she retreated back to her bedroom. The pounding continued for two hours, as Matsapulina kept seven friends from her party apprised in a private Telegram group chat. “They’re unlikely to bust it down,” she wrote, wishfully.

But at 9:22 am, she heard a much louder noise. She had just enough time to lock her phone before the door caved in. Eight people surrounded Matsapulina’s bed. They included, she recalls, two city police officers, a two-person SWAT team wielding guns and shining flashlights in her face, and two agents from either the Center for Combating Extremism or the Federal Security Service or the FSB—the successor to the KGB. The officers told her to lie on the floor facedown.

They told Matsapulina she was suspected of emailing a police station with a false bomb threat. But when she was taken into the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ investigation department, she says, a police officer asked whether she knew the real reason she’d been arrested. She guessed that it was for her “political activities.” He nodded and asked, “Do you know how we knew you were home?”

“How?”

She says the officer told her that investigators had been following along with her private Telegram chats as she wrote them. “There you were, sitting there, writing to your friends in the chat room,” she recalls him saying. He proceeded to dispassionately quote word for word several Telegram messages she had written from her bed. “‘They’re unlikely to bust it down,’” he recited.

“And so,” he said, “we knew that you were there.”

Matsapulina was speechless. She tried to hide her shock, hoping to learn more about how they’d accessed her messages. But the officer didn’t elaborate.

When she was released two days later, Matsapulina learned from her lawyer that on the morning she was arrested, police had searched the houses of some 80 other people with opposition ties and had arrested 20, charging each with terrorism related to the alleged bomb threat. A few days later, Matsapulina gathered her belongings and boarded a flight to Istanbul.

In April, after having made it safely to Armenia, Matsapulina recounted the episode in a Twitter thread. She ruled out the chance that anyone in her close-knit group had been cooperating with security forces (they’d all also left Russia by then), which left two conceivable explanations for how the officers had read her private Telegram messages. One was that they had installed some kind of malware, like the NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus tool, on her phone. Based on what she’d gathered, the expensive software was reserved for high-level targets and was not likely to have been turned on a mid-level figure in an unregistered party with about 1,000 members nationwide.

The other “unpleasant” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.

As we come upon the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with all evidence pointing towards a major escalation and new offensive from Moscow happening within the next few weeks or even days, it's important to remember that another war is being fought in the streets of Russian cities, one where Putin has all the advantages, and a people live in fear of their government.

Putin had everything ready to go in order to win that war. We're entering a very dangerous timeframe in world history now. The next few weeks, months, years may determine the path of the planet for decades to come.

The path Putin went down was obvious. The only question now is whether he takes Russia -- and the world -- down that dark channel.

Supremely Bad Security

Turns out not only is The Great Supreme Court Dodds Decision Leak™ still without a chief suspect because it's almost certainly one of the conservative justices (or a spouse like Ginni Thomas) who is being ignored because of the political fallout, trying to even track the method of the leak is also extremely difficult because document security at SCOTUS is "middle school teacher's lounge" level.

 

Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month.

New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered security, led to the leak and hindered an investigation into the culprit.

Supreme Court employees also used printers that didn’t produce logs – or were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking – and “burn bags” meant to ensure the safe destruction of materials were left open and unattended in hallways.

“This has been going on for years,” one former employee said.

The problem with the justices’ use of emails persisted in part because some justices were slow to adopt to the technology and some court employees were nervous about confronting them to urge them to take precautions, one person said. Such behavior meant that justices weren’t setting an example to take security seriously.

The justices were “not masters of information security protocol,” one former court employee told CNN.

In a statement attached to the final report, the court called the leak a “grave assault” on the court’s legitimacy and the marshal of the court issued a road map to improve security.

The report and the new revelations of weak protocols come as the court is trying to protect its own legitimacy after an embarrassing leak and allegations (prompted by the recent rash of high profile cases breaking along familiar ideological lines) that it has simply become another political branch. The 20-page report and its still secret “Annex A” raised some questions as to whether the entire investigation should have been outsourced to someone without close ties to the court.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff reviewed and endorsed the Supreme Court’s internal investigation into the leak. However, the court did not disclose Chertoff had been paid at least $1 million in recent years to perform security assessments for the court.

The court declined to comment.

 

Printer logs not tracking print jobs and open document disposal "burn bags" left in public areas are the kind of things that your company's Security IAM (Identity & Access Management) folks fired on the spot, but I suspect that "Security so bad that anyone could be a suspect" is a feature of SCOTUS, not a bug.

Also, it's entrirely possible that Michael Chertoff has been ripping off SCOTUS for years, or simply taking the equivalent of an "outside contractor job" as a working bribe to keep security that lax.

Lot to investigate here, but who's going to do it? Biden can't, and Republicans in Congress won't because they know what the truth is.

Democrats Dance With Destiny

DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is set to meet with party officials from across the country in Philly today to vote on the new primary schedule replacing South Carolina with Iowa as first in the nation to decide 2024...if there even is a primary.

 

Democrats are poised to reorder their presidential primary schedule beginning next year, replacing Iowa with South Carolina in the leadoff spot as part of a major overhaul meant to empower Black and other minority voters critical to the party’s base of support.

The Democratic National Committee has worked for months to revamp the start of its voting calendar, and the full membership is set to vote on the plan on Saturday.

Although changes are still possible throughout the summer and beyond, the formal endorsement during the party’s meeting in Philadelphia is acknowledgement that the start of 2024′s primary will look very different from the one in 2020.

The proposal has been championed by President Joe Biden and would have South Carolina hold its primary on Feb. 3. That would be followed three days later by New Hampshire and Nevada, the latter of which is swapping the caucus it used to hold in favor of a primary. Georgia would vote fourth on Feb. 13, followed by Michigan on Feb. 27, with much of the rest of the nation set to vote on Super Tuesday in early March.

“This isn’t just about us,” Trav Robertson, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told a gathering of the DNC Southern caucus earlier this week. “This is a regional thing, and it’s making us all look good.”

States voting early in the primary have major influence since White House hopefuls struggling to raise money or gain political traction often drop out before visiting areas outside the first five. The move marks a major shift from the current calendar, which had started with Iowa’s caucuses for the last five decades, followed by New Hampshire’s primary and subsequent contests in Nevada and South Carolina.

DNC chair Jaime Harrison, a former Senate candidate from South Carolina, said the new schedule “allows the South to stand up, for our voices to be heard.”

Four of the five states that will start Democrats’ new primary schedule are presidential battlegrounds, meaning the eventual party winner can lay groundwork in important general election locales. Michigan and Georgia both voted for Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020.

The exception is South Carolina, which hasn’t backed a Democrat in a presidential race since 1976, leading some to argue that the party shouldn’t be concentrating so many early primary resources there. But the state’s population is nearly 27% Black, and African American voters represent Democrats’ most consistent base of support. The change means many will have an earlier impact on the Democratic primary than ever before.

The revamped Democratic calendar could be largely meaningless for 2024 since Biden is expected to seek reelection with no major primary challenge — and the DNC has already pledged to revisit the voting calendar before the 2028 presidential election.

 

Everyone seems to think Biden is going to drop out or something, and that this is all for show for 2028, but it's still an important precedent. It was South Carolina that put Biden back in the race, with Black voters leading the way over Bernie Sanders. Biden knows in, Harrison knows it, the DNC knows it.

 

I expect this to go off relatively smoothly today. We'll see.

Last Call For Balloon Fight

Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful...Chinese spy balloon?

The spotting of a high-altitude balloon over the U.S. mainland has quickly spiraled into a diplomatic incident. U.S. officials say the object is a Chinese spy balloon, while Chinese officials called it a “civilian airship” mainly used to track weather.

The airborne vehicle was seen over Montana, home to some of the United States’ nuclear missile silos.

The balloon has since moved southeast from Montana, U.S. officials said Friday. The Pentagon has a “constant fix” on the aircraft and its direction and is collecting signals and data on it, the aide said. Reports of a second device in Canada and Alaska are inaccurate, a senior defense official told lawmakers Friday morning.

Spy balloons have previously passed over the United States, but this object is unusual for loitering overhead “for an extended period of time,” defense officials say.

The first known usage of reconnaissance balloons was by the French during the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, when they were used to spy on Austrian and Dutch troops in what is now Belgium.

Here’s what you need to know about spy balloons, and about the Chinese balloon spotted over Montana.

 

Indeed, the singular luftballoon has deflated US Secretary of State Tony Blinken's trip to China this weekend.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed his upcoming trip to China in response to the flying of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the United States, in what marks a significant new phase in the tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Blinken, who was due to depart Friday night for Beijing, said at a press conference Friday that the high-altitude surveillance balloon flying over the continental United States “created the conditions that undermine the purpose of the trip.” He informed China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in a call Friday morning that he was postponing.

“In my call today with Director Wang Yi, I made clear that the presence of this surveillance balloon in US airspace is a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law, that it’s an irresponsible act, and that the (People’s Republic of China) decision to take this action on the eve of my planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have,” Blinken told reporters Friday.

Blinken said Friday that the US was confident the balloon over the US is a Chinese surveillance balloon.

The Chinese foreign ministry claimed Friday that the balloon was a “civilian airship” used mainly for weather research that deviated from its planned course. The statement from a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry was the first admission that the airship originated in China.

“It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.

“The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure,” the statement added, using a legalistic term to mean circumstances beyond China’s control.

 

If Beijing is indeed trolling us here, it's because they know perfectly well that Republicans aren't hesitating to use it to push their own garbage conspiracies. 

Several top Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, on Friday, called on the Biden administration to shoot down the balloon, which some military leaders had discussed. Ryder said at his briefing Friday that the military was still "reviewing options" but had not taken the balloon down because "right now we assess that there is no physical threat or military threat to people on the ground."

Trump posted on his platform Truth Social, “SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON!”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., one of the most vocal critics in Congress of the Chinese government and U.S. policy toward China, also called on the U.S. government to bring down the balloon.

“President Biden should stop coddling and appeasing the Chinese communists. Bring the balloon down now and exploit its tech package, which could be an intelligence bonanza,” said Cotton. “And President Biden and Secretary Austin need to answer if this [balloon] was detected over Alaskan airspace. If so, why didn’t we bring it down there? If not, why not? As usual, the Chinese Communists’ provocations have been met with weakness and hand-wringing.”

 

Not to mention violent Sinophobia fron Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer.

 

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, blasted President Biden for a high-altitude balloon from China that is traveling over the continental United States not being shot down before it reached U.S. territory, speculating that it could have “bioweapons.”

Comer told Fox News’s Harris Faulkner in an interview on Friday that he is concerned that the federal government “obviously” does not know what is in the balloon.

“Is it bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?” Comer said, referring to the Chinese city where the COVID-19 virus was first discovered. “We don’t know anything about that balloon.”

He said China is “clearly playing games” with the U.S., and the balloon should not have been allowed to cross into the airspace of the continental U.S.

 

Next thing you know, the House GOP will be demanding that we shut down your local Chinese take out place.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Cincy Edition, Con't

Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval and the City Council are taking on Ohio Republicans with new gun safety ordnances for the city and a lawsuit to restore home rule for firearms regulations.

 

In an effort to curb gun violence, Cincinnati has two proposed ordinances for City Council to consider and has filed a lawsuit against the state.

The first ordinance addresses the safe storage of firearms to keep them away from children. The second ordinance would bar those convicted of domestic violence or subject to a protection order from processing firearms.

The ordinances are extensions or additions to existing laws. They give law enforcement and prosecutors a few more options when it comes to addressing gun violence in situations that might not rise to the level of a felony. As city ordinances, both of the new charges would be misdemeanors punishable by up to one year in prison.

However, cities in Ohio have largely been unsuccessful in passing gun legislation due to a 2006 law that has survived a challenge in the Ohio Supreme Court. Cincinnati's lawyers want to change that.

Often called the "preemption law," it bars political subdivisions (like cities and counties) from regulating firearms, their components, ammunition, and knives. Ohio's gun lobby has successfully sued Cincinnati and other cities in the past to block gun restrictions. In 2018, Cincinnati's ban on bump stocks was stopped in this way.

“Keeping residents safe is the top priority of our City government," Mayor Aftab Pureval said. "Gun safety measures save lives, and we will continue to do everything in our power to put an end to gun violence in Cincinnati.”

Last week, the city filed a lawsuit seeking that the "preemption law" be declared unconstitutional.

 

We'll see. Ohio's Supreme Court may choose to take this up and make a ruling, but I'm sure Ohio Republicans will find a way to block the law anyway by sending whatever legislation is needed to Gov. Mike DeWine's desk.

 

But at least Pureval is having this fight. Good on him.

Jobapalooza, Con't

A gigantic jobs report for January coupled with recent lowered inflation numbers means the Biden Boom is rolling on.

The number of new jobs created in January rose by 517,000 to mark the biggest increase in six months, suggesting little erosion in a dynamic U.S. labor market even though the economy has show lots of signs of weakening.

One caveat: The government’s formula to adjust for seasonal swings in hiring sometimes exaggerates employment levels in January. It’s unclear whether that was the case last month.

Yet employment grew even faster in the waning months of 2022 than previously reported, indicating the labor market is still quite robust.

The unemployment rate, meanwhile, slid to a 54-year low of 3.4% from 3.5%, the government said Friday. That’s the lowest level since 1969.

Hourly pay rose a modest 0.3% for the second month in a row, reflecting the smallest back-to-back gains in almost two years.

The increase in pay over the past year also slowed again to 4.4% from 4.8%, indicating some relaxation in wage pressures. The Federal Reserve has been worried that rapidly rising wages could make it harder to bring down high inflation.

U.S. stocks DJIA, -0.11% SPX, +1.47% fell in premarket trades and bond yields rose after the report.

Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast an 187,000 increase in new jobs last month.

Big picture: The economy is slowing and the threat of recession is rising as higher interest rates depress growth. Many large companies such as Amazon AMZN, +7.38%, IBM IBM, +0.96% and Fedex FDX, +6.13% have announced layoffs and more job cuts are expected.

Yet the economy has also proven quite resilient and lots of businesses are reluctant to fire workers given how hard it was to hire them in the first place. The U.S. might even be able to avoid a recession if job losses remain on the low side.

 

With revisions, the jobs numbers were three times the expectation.  Even if adjustments were off by 100k or even 200k, it's still a rocket-powered jobs report.

 

And record-low 3.4% unemployment?  Yeah, Biden did that.  I don't know where this "recession" is going but people need to stop calling it that, because we're not in one.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Arizona Republicans are proposing to gerrymander the state's most populous county, Maricopa, into four smaller counties and to put nearly all of the state's Latino and Black residents in one of them, starving them out for resources and letting Republicans run the other three. Michael Greenberger at WaPo's Monkey Cage blog:

Counties oversee the administration of presidential elections, and elect their own important officials such as sheriffs, school superintendents and election administrators. That makes them critical units of political organization. As The Washington Post reported, critics of the push to divide Maricopa County see this as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of elections, which are administered at the county level. The new counties, Republicans must calculate, will either vote for Republicans legitimately, or be more likely to be run by election officials who will support attempts to paint future elections as fraudulent.

In my research, I’ve analyzed the history of county division during the Jim Crow era. There I’ve found that newly created counties, like those proposed in Arizona, were more likely to administer fraudulent elections. I also find that these new counties hurt Black voters and Black officeholders the most.

From 1865 to 1920, the period from the Civil War through the early 20th century, state legislatures created more than 300 counties and significantly adjusted the borders of 1,000 existing ones. This geographic manipulation happened during the same period that the federal government ceased enforcing Reconstruction, enabling the former Confederate states to abandon democratic elections and voting rights for African Americans. During this time, new counties were created to target Black voters and officeholders, helping the then-white-supremacist-aligned Democratic Party solidify control over the South and institute Jim Crow rule.

I used the Newberry Library’s online atlas of historical county boundaries, which has data on the historical boundaries of every county in the United States, to detect changes to county boundaries and track the emergence of new counties from 1865 through 1920. Of the roughly 1,500 total counties that existed as this period ends, about 300 were established in the South during the Jim Crow era. Then, using historical election and demographic data, I compared new counties created in the South and counties targeted for manipulation with other counties in the South to see whether they had been targeted for political or racial reasons. By comparing the demographics, turnout, and partisanship of newly created counties and the counties from which their land was taken, I can determine whether the geographic changes were made with racial and political factors in mind. I also looked at whether these changes benefited the party that controlled that state’s legislature.

Over the years leading up to and during Jim Crow in the South, I find that Democratic state legislatures disproportionately ``packed’’ Black voters into new counties, thus reducing their voting power statewide by concentrating their electoral influence in fewer political units.

New counties had a much higher proportion of Black residents than the counties that were divided or adjusted to allow the new county to be created. While most counties in the South had only small concentrations of Black residents, making up from zero to roughly 20 percent, most new counties had between 20 and 75 percent Black residents — leaving the old counties disproportionately White.

Putting all of a minority group into a single county or district, which scholars of congressional gerrymandering call “packing,” served several purposes — just as it would in Arizona today. First, the new counties that are more likely to vote in line with the political goals of the state legislature — Democrats in the Jim Crow South, Republicans in contemporary Arizona — would elect more like-minded political officers and would certify election results favorable to the state legislature. Second, the new counties packed with non-White residents can be policed in ways that discourage voting or have the results manipulated for fraudulent outcomes.

 

What Arizona wants with three new blood red GOP counties are three new county boards of voting officials that will stack the deck to steal the 2024 election for the GOP.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Black Lives Still Matter. Even Republican ones, as a Black New Jersey Borough Councilwoman, Eunice Dwumfour, was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds last night.

 

Eunice K. Dwumfour, a 30-year-old councilwoman serving her first term in Sayreville, N.J., was fatally shot on Wednesday night, officials said.

The authorities said they received reports of a shooting at 7:22 p.m. in Parlin, an unincorporated area of Sayreville, according to a statement by the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office. Officers with the Sayreville Police Department found Ms. Dwumfour in her car with multiple gunshot wounds. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

The authorities did not say whether there is a suspect in the crime and have not offered any information about a possible motive. An investigation is ongoing.

Victoria Kilpatrick, the mayor of Sayreville, said in a statement that “the fact that she was taken from us by a despicable criminal act makes this incident all the more horrifying.”

Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey said he was “stunned” by the “act of gun violence,” adding that Ms. Dwumfour “had already built a reputation as a committed member of the Borough Council who took her responsibility with the utmost diligence and seriousness.”

Sayreville, with a population of about 45,000 people, is in Middlesex County, about 30 miles south of New York City.

Ms. Dwumfour was elected to the Sayreville Borough Council in 2021 after she and another Republican candidate, Christian Onuoha, unseated two Democratic incumbents on the six-person council. She was serving a three-year term.

 

She was murdered and found in her crashed SUV outside her own home. Really no doubt as to what happened, but who killed her?

 

Now, the Right-Wing Noise Machine is already calling this an "Antifa assassination" and all, but the suspect needs to be brought to justice. Her life mattered.

Black Lives Still Matter.

 

The Turtle Snaps Back

 GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had his own petty vengeance moment this week as he went after his fellow Republicans who came for his job last month and failed.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has pulled Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who tried to oust him as the Senate’s top Republican in a bruising leadership race, off the powerful Commerce Committee.

McConnell also removed Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who supported Scott’s bid to replace McConnell as leader, from the Commerce panel, which has broad jurisdiction over a swath of federal agencies.

The GOP leader insisted last year that he didn’t take the attempt to end his leadership reign personally, but the latest move sends a clear message to conservatives that challenging McConnell’s leadership carries a cost.

“McConnell got to pick. He kicked me off; he kicked Lee off,” Scott confirmed in an interview.

Scott acknowledged that running against McConnell was the likely reason he was booted from the panel despite his relative seniority on the committee and experience running a major company.

“I probably ran the biggest company almost any senator in the history of the country has ever run. I was governor of the third-biggest economy in the United States, Florida. I’ve got a business background,” Scott said, ticking off his credentials.

But Scott and Lee have teamed up to challenge McConnell’s leadership of the GOP conference on fiscal and spending decisions, and Lee gave one of the nominating speeches for Scott’s bid to take over as GOP leader.

Scott said he learned of the decision in a text message.

One personal familiar with the episode described the Florida senator as “furious.”

Other conservatives agree the leadership fight was a major factor in the decision to remove Scott and Lee from Commerce.

 

While I'm always glad to see Batboy end up in the "and find out" stage of the proceedings, this little tiff doesn't address the problems with Scott's mismanagement of the NRSC, and how he's almost certainly guilty of campaign finance shenanigans that would make "George Santos" blush.

Mitch won't address that, of course. But cutting Scott off from his main source of corporate lobbyist grifting is a calculated move, and both men know it.

We'll see if Scott responds in the future.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Once again, the voter fraud in America is revealed to be Republicans in red states voting extra times for the fascists.

 

To the extent that the United States has a retirement community known to national audiences, it’s probably The Villages in central Florida. As regular readers probably recall, it has also earned a reputation as a far-right Republican stronghold.

A few years ago, for example, when Donald Trump promoted a video showing a parade of supporters in golf carts — one of whom shouted, “White power!” — it was recorded at The Villages.

It was against this backdrop that we learned in 2021 that three residents of The Villages were charged with voter fraud. A fourth soon followed. As we discussed at the time, according to local police reports, the accused tried to game the system by voting in Florida, while also trying to cast absentee ballots in other states. Not surprisingly, they got caught.

Whatever happened to these charges? I’m glad you asked.

Circling back to our earlier coverage, two of the accused — Charles Barnes and Jay Ketcik — pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony. Though the charges could’ve resulted in prison sentences, both received probation. They were joined by Joan Halstead, who pleaded guilty last summer and also received probation.

This week, the final member of the quartet followed suit. WKMG in Orlando reported:

All four residents of The Villages charged with voting twice in the 2020 election have now admitted to the crime, court records show. John Rider, 62, recently entered into a pre-trial intervention program that will allow him to avoid potential prison time if he successfully completes court-ordered requirements and refrains from violating the law.

It’s worth noting for context that Rider originally pleaded not guilty. Evidently, he changed his mind ahead of a plea agreement in which he received probation.

 

Old white GOP voters in red states who knowingly vote twice get probation.

 

Black women in red states who accidentally vote at all without being eligible? Five years in prison. 

Thus endeth the lesson.