Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Trump cultists continue to call for mass armed violence against the US government, and the loudest voices of the insurrectionists are members of the Trump family themselves.

 

Despite violent rhetoric from her family inciting the January 6th insurrection, Lara Trump suggested vigilante violence against people perceived to be from south of the southern border during a Saturday night appearance with Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro.

The former president's daughter-in-law suggested residents of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California should arm themselves and prepare for violence.

"And I don't know what you tell the people that live at the southern border," she said. "I guess they better arm up and get guns and be ready — and maybe they're going to have to start taking matters into their own hands."

She went on to say people shouldn't not make the "dangerous" journey to America despite the right of asylum being guaranteed by U.S. and international law.

 

Calls for bloody, lethal armed violence against immigrants are the central tenet of the right-wing "replacement theory" that Democrats are allowing "illegals" into the country in order to take jobs, cast votes, and to "outbreed" white Trump voters.  FOX News tumor Tucker Carlson spouts his hateful rhetoric about this five days a week, while plenty of Republicans casually parrot this notion that immigrants, particularly coming over the US Southern border, need to be gunned down.

It's all related. The GOP tantrums over "Critical Race Theory", the replacement nonsense, the open carry firearms provisions in states, the election law changes to allow Republicans to nullify Democratic victories, states now suing the Biden administration for hundreds of billions in order to build a border wall, all of it is in service of a Republican party now wholly dedicated to the last gasps of preserving white supremacy in America.

When you realize that everything the GOP does is in service to maintaining white supremacy in America, it all makes sense. That includes setting up Joe Biden as a race traitor and increasingly calling for violence against the government he leads, and against the people who voted for that government.

Your Primary Consideration, Con't

The "first in the nation" primary war for 2024 has now been declared in earnest as Nevada enters the fray to take on Iowa and New Hampshire.

Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak on Friday signed a law that would make Nevada the first state to vote in the 2024 presidential primary contests, bumping Iowa and New Hampshire from their leadoff spots.

Signing the law is a gamble.

It’s likely to set off maneuvering by other states, especially Iowa and New Hampshire, to move up their contests. The national political parties would need to agree to changes in the calendar, or state parties could risk losing their delegates at presidential nominating conventions.

The Democratic National Committee has not yet signaled whether it would support the calendar shakeup and isn’t expected to start writing rules for its nominating process until next year. Republicans in four early presidential nominating states this week all jointly opposed the move, saying they’re committed to preserving the historic schedule.

Democrats in Nevada, including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, launched the push this year to boost their state after the 2020 primary contest left members of the party questioning the process. They noted Iowa’s problem-plagued caucuses and the fact that the two traditional early states are overwhelmingly white, unlike Nevada.

Before he went on to win his party’s nomination, President Joe Biden performed poorly in Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary. In Nevada, with a much more racially diverse population that mirrors the U.S. as a whole, he finished second.

That gave Biden momentum heading into South Carolina’s primary, which then catapulted him to a string of Super Tuesday victories.

The new law changes Nevada’s contest from a party-run, in-person caucus meeting to a government-run primary election. Democrats nationally started shifting away from caucuses to primaries before 2020, citing the difficulty of attending an in-person meeting and the fiddly math involved to determine who wins the most delegates.

The law will require the presidential primary to be held on the first Tuesday in February in a presidential election year.

 

So now begins the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, where both the Dems and the GOP come to an agreement with the other early states: NH, IA, SC, and increasingly, Texas, Florida, and California, who all want to decide primary winners well before Valentine's Day. 

Of course, if the horse race for the conventions is decided six months before the actual convention, that doesn't leave much of a race to cover for the media. An agreement on a national primary day for all 50 states and all territories and ex-pats would be the actual solution people are looking for, but of course that will never happen.

Well, at least until the fighting gets so bad it does. Or, you know, we lose our democracy to fascism. Hey, at least we're finally getting rid of caucuses. That's actually progress.

Sunday Long Read: It Taxes The Imagination

Our Sunday Long Read this week is ProPublica's massive new report on just how much in income tax America's richest billionaires pay, and the answer is "nowhere near enough", while middle-class Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck because they pay as much or more in taxes than their net worth increased in the last 15 years.

 

And thanks to Congress, among them some of the richest people in the country, it's all 100% legal.

In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.

Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, amassing little wealth and paying the federal government a percentage of their income that rises if they earn more. In recent years, the median American household earned about $70,000 annually and paid 14% in federal taxes. The highest income tax rate, 37%, kicked in this year, for couples, on earnings above $628,300.

The confidential tax records obtained by ProPublica show that the ultrarich effectively sidestep this system.

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.

We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth for people their age. From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value of their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.

 

You want to know who the biggest tax scammer in the nation is? Not Bezos, not Zuck, not Elon, not Bloomberg, but Warren Buffett. He made close to $25 billion from 2014 to 2018, and paid only $24 million in taxes.

 

His tax rate was 0.10%.  One one-thousandth of what he made.

 

Bezos at least paid a billion in taxes over five years on his $99 billion. But Buffett? There's a guy who deserves to see the inside of a tumbrel. 

Well, they all do.

Warren goes first, however.

 

Last Call For Israeli A Problem, Con't

As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu progresses through the stages of grief for his lost career and upcoming trial, we find he's reached the bargaining stage ahead of Sunday's vote removing him from office.

In a desperate last-minute bid to thwart the swearing-in of the new government, associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu early Friday conveyed to Defense Minister Benny Gantz a plan by which Netanyahu would immediately step down and the Blue and White chief could serve as premier for three years, Channel 12 reported Friday night.

The proposal, rejected by Gantz’s camp, would reportedly have seen Netanyahu serve as alternate prime minister during that time.

The report said the offer, one of several that came to Gantz through a number of channels and associates close to Netanyahu in recent days, was conveyed in the early hours of Friday morning.

According to Channel 12, Netanyahu offered to formally resign on Friday morning so as to give Gantz confidence that he could still return to the so-called “change bloc” if the prime minister were to withdraw his resignation in the two days ahead of Sunday evening’s vote on the new coalition.

Gantz’s associates absolutely rejected Netanyahu’s offer, Channel 12 said.

Netanyahu’s Likud and Gantz’s Blue and White agreed to form a coalition in April 2020, after three consecutive inconclusive elections. But just over six months after it was formed, the government was dissolved when the sides could not agree on passing a 2020 budget, and a new election was called for March 2021. The move was widely seen as being engineered by Netanyahu so as to avoid handing over the premiership to Gantz in November 2021, as stipulated in the coalition agreement between them.

Likud MK David Bitan on Friday leveled some criticism at Netanyahu over the dissolution of the short-lived unity government that Likud formed with Blue and White.

“In retrospect, it’s clear today that it was a mistake by Netanyahu not to implement the rotation with Gantz. Relative to what happened, he made a mistake,” Bitan said.

The Channel 12 report on the offer to Gantz said the proposal showed that Netanyahu has reconciled himself to the fact that his political rivals are on the cusp of forming a government that will see him removed as premier and head to parliamentary opposition.

Members of Netanyahu’s “circle” told Channel 13 news that he understands that his 12-year consecutive term will come to an end on Sunday and he is determined to fight the “change government” from the opposition benches.

The outlet said that Netanyahu told associates that he will “continue to lead the national camp as head of the opposition.”

The Likud party for the first time said Thursday that Netanyahu is committed to a peaceful transition of power, while reiterating and clarifying the premier’s claims of “election fraud.” The statement was issued only in English.

Meanwhile, Likud MK Shlomo Karhi told Channel 13 Friday that the party is united and “we’re going together to the opposition.”

Karhi’s comment came a day after Likud MK Nir Barkat called for party members to delay holding new leadership primaries. Barkat’s call, at a gathering of some 4,000 Likud activists in Tel Aviv, was seen as a show of strength in the party and an indication he will join a growing list of top Likud officials lining up to challenge Netanyahu for the party leadership.

 

Now let's make no mistake here, Israel's policy of Apartheid against the Palestinians will continue, the violence will continue, America's unwavering support of both will continue...but it will continue without Netanyahu as PM.  All three will continue as his legacy.

But he will no longer be in charge, and very soon I suspect, he will be in prison.

 

It's About Suppression, Con't

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday announced a major new Justice Department initiative to take on GOP voter suppression efforts across the country as the Biden administration gears up to fight the Big Lie.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Justice Department will aggressively fight efforts to restrict voting rights nationwide following a blitz of new voting restrictions in Republican-led states that stem from former President Donald Trump's lies that widespread fraud helped Joe Biden win the presidential election. 

In a speech Friday, Garland outlined a number of steps the Justice Department will take to protect every citizen's right to vote, and within the next 30 days said the department will double the number of employees in the Civil Rights Division's "enforcement staff for protecting the right to vote." 

"There are many things that are open to debate in America. But the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow," Garland said to a room of prosecutors inside the Justice Department's Great Hall. 

The Justice Department, he said, will examine new restrictive voting laws across the country and take action against any "violations." 

As Arizona's problem-ridden audit has inspired Republicans elsewhere to push for reviews in their own states, Garland said DOJ will analyze post-election audits, "to ensure they abide by federal statutory requirements to protect election records and avoid the intimidation of voters." 

Garland said that since 2013 when the Supreme Court decided that portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were no longer valid, "there has been a dramatic rise in legislative efforts that will make it harder for millions of citizens to cast a ballot that counts." 

This year alone, 14 states have passed controversial voting right laws "and some jurisdictions, based on disinformation, have utilized abnormal post-election audit methodologies that may put the integrity of the voting process at risk and undermine public confidence in our democracy," Garland said. 

By increasing the Civil Rights Division's staff, Garland said "we will use all existing provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act to ensure that we protect every qualified American seeking to participate in our democracy." 

Garland emphasized a commitment to protecting Black voters and other voters of color, and said the department will "scrutinize current laws and practices" to discern whether Black voters and other voters of color have been discriminated against, including when it comes to the amount of time Black voters and other voters of color wait in polling lines compared to white voters. 

The department will put out "guidance with respect to early voting and voting by mail," Garland said, and, "the voting protections that apply to all jurisdictions as they redraw their legislative maps," as states begin the redistricting process ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Garland said. 

While he said the Justice Department is not waiting on legislation, Garland reaffirmed the Biden administration's vision for the passage of S1, called the For the People Act, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. 

According to Garland, the "For the People Act," the Democratic-backed voting rights bill "would provide the Department with the tools it needs," to preserve voting rights.

 

Good. It's time to go on the offensive, staff up the Civil Rights Division, and start suing the hell out of Republican states for voter suppression.  We need to tie them up for months, if not years.

And yes, I know this means heading for a certain defeat in the Roberts court before 2024, which is the trap being laid. But it won't matter if the GOP wins back Congress in 2022, because the game will be up.

I like this fight. Let's have it.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Trump cultists are threatening to kill election officials nationwide over the Big Lie, and because their Orange God-Emperor will never be declared Maximum Leader, we are going to see a mass casualty terrorist event slash political assassination, and soon.

Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”

A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”

That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”

Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.

Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.

In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.

The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.

“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”

In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.

“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.

Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement that “vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”

Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for U.S. election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Some have faced protests at their homes or been followed in their cars. Many have received death threats.

Some, like Raffensperger, are senior officials who publicly refused to bow to Trump’s demands to alter the election outcome. In Georgia, people went into hiding in at least three cases, including the Raffenspergers. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson – a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December – is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

 

There's really no doubt that an attempt will be made (or several attempts) will be made on the lives of US election officials nationwide, but rather, when, and how successful they will be. I would hope that state and federal law enforcement are investigating right now to prevent a tragedy from happening. I expect that like the plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer last year, we'll get wind of these plots being stopped soon.

It's better of course than the alternative, that the plots were carried out.

The bigger problem is that Trump's Big lie is going to get people hurt or even killed soon, and when it happens, Trump needs to be held responsible.

Climate Of Devastation, Con't

With more than a quarter of the US West now suffering from exceptional drought (and it's only June) and nearly 75% under some level of water shortage, farmers, ranchers, Native tribes, small businesses and residents are all facing rough choices this summer.

Tricia Hill tears up when she talks about the emotional toll the water shut-off in southern Oregon has had on her family. 

Amid historic, climate change-driven drought, the federal government in May shut down the water supply from the Upper Klamath Basin on the California-Oregon border to protect native fish species on the verge of extinction. As a result, Hill and other farmers like her in the region have been cut off from water they have used for decades. 

The drought has "definitely made it a lot harder for us to get by year after year, and it's making an already tight margin a lot tighter," Hill, a fourth-generation farmer, told CNN. "For all of us, we've got families, employees, customers -- people we have to figure out how to take care of." 

As the Klamath Basin dried up, an environmental crisis exploded into a water war this year that has pitted local farmers against Native American tribes, government agencies and conservationists, with one group threatening to take the water back by force. 

More than a century ago, the federal Klamath Project redrew the basin's landscape, draining lakes and redirecting rivers to build a farming community that today supplies horseradish, wheat, beets and even potatoes for Frito-Lay chips. 

But the project has since been a source of environmental controversy, and two native fish species were listed as endangered in the 1980s. Since then, federal water officials have sought to strike what some say is an impossible balance between providing water to local farmers and leaving enough to protect the fish that are central to the cultural practices of native Klamath Tribes. 

When the lake level plummeted earlier this year, federal officials decided to shutter a headgate that has delivered water to communities around the basin since 1907.

The shutdown has upended agricultural practices, taxed the community and added financial burden to farming families. Some are threatening to take matters into their own hands. 

In April, Dan Nielsen and Grant Knoll bought property next to the irrigation canal headgate in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Soon after, they erected a large red and white tent and plastered it with American flags and signs that read things such as, "Stop Rural Cleansing" and "Help Amend the Endangered Species Act." 

"We're here because we're trying to stand up for our private property," Nielsen said. "We've been trying to be nice, but we're getting to the end of the rope. You just go in there and pull the bulkheads and open the headgates." 

"We're going to do it peacefully," he added, "unless the federal government turns on us like they usually do."

 

Let's remember that the most recent attacks on the federal government by the white supremacist militia goons began in earnest out in the West, with the Bundy clan of domestic terrorists. This drought is the perfect excuse for more violence against federal park officials and Native tribes.

 

In 2001, during a previous water standoff with the federal government, enraged farmers -- including Nielsen and Knoll -- breached a chain-link fence and forced open the headgates of the main canal with saws, crowbars and blowtorches until the US Marshals were called in to put an end to it. 

The same farmers are threatening to blow the gates open again with the support of anti-government activist Ammon Bundy, known for leading an armed group to occupy Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Bundy later faced federal charges for his role in the 41-day standoff with federal agents but was acquitted by a jury. 

One of Bundy's men, Robert LaVoy Finicum, was killed by law enforcement during that takeover. Now, among the posters hanging in Nielsen's Klamath Basin tent is Finicum's rallying cry: "There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them. I am prepared to defend freedom." 

"He's a nice guy, he's just like me," Neilsen said of Bundy. "He's just willing to stand up on what's right and wrong." 

 

I fully expect another round of devastation from these clowns, and this time, the death toll could be brutal. Keep an eye on Washington DC, yes...but keep an eye on Washington State, too.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump Justice Department under Jeff Sessions didn't just illegally investigate journalists from CNN, the NY Times, and the Washington Post in 2017, they illegally seized phone records and metadata from House Intelligence Committee Democrats, including ranking member and now chairman Rep. Adam Schiff and his family., and Bill Barr continued the investigation when he took over.

As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.

All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had been subpoenaed.

Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.

But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.

The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.

Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.

Prosecutors also eventually secured subpoenas for reporters’ records to try to identify their confidential sources, a move that department policy allows only after all other avenues of inquiry are exhausted.

The subpoenas remained secret until the Justice Department disclosed them in recent weeks to the news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN — revelations that set off criticism that the government was intruding on press freedoms.

The gag orders and records seizures show how aggressively the Trump administration pursued the inquiries while Mr. Trump declared war on the news media and perceived enemies whom he routinely accused of disclosing damaging information about him, including Mr. Schiff and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom prosecutors focused on in the leak inquiry involving Times records.

 

Straight up Watergate abuses, covered up by Sessions and Barr for years, and it's barely in the top ten of reasons why Trump should be in prison right now. He wanted to lock up reporters and Democrats and directed the Justice Department to make it happen. Trump didn't just have an enemies' list, he used it.

Hearings, of course, but we'll see what else happens.

Last Call For Droning On About Food

Here in the Cincy area, Kroger is testing grocery delivery by drone starting this week and I can't wait for the wacky stories that come out of this.

Drone-flown deliveries of groceries will start Wednesday in an area within a mile of Kroger’s Centerville store, signaling a new era in flight and grocery shopping.

The Kroger Co. has been working with a Monroe company, Drone Express, to deliver groceries via drones, and actual flights responding to customer orders will start happening this week.

Erin Rolfes, a spokeswoman for Kroger, on Monday said drone flights have been tested for several days, and deliveries will be ready to go on Wednesday.

For the first pilot program, no charge will be levied for these flights, Rolfes said. But that’s temporary. At some point, there will be charges, but Rolfes did not have a date for that.

Drone orders can be made through a web site, Kroger.com/dronedelivery. Deliveries will be scheduled first come, first served.

“While of course we’re all very excited about the drone piece, I think it’s one part of a larger narrative of how Kroger is really reacting to what customers are asking for and giving them that product anytime that they want, anywhere that they are,” Rolfes said. 

The drone can carry only about five pounds worth of items. Pilots will oversee the drones as they fly to customer’s homes in the prescribed area around the Marketplace store at 1095 S. Main St.

“Right now, per FAA guidance, we’re only flying the drone to deliver within one mile of the store,” Rolfes said.

Kroger and Drone Express, part of New Jersey-based TELEGRID Technologies Inc., last month first announced the pilot program to offer grocery delivery via autonomous drones.

“Everything’s going well,” said Beth Flippo, principal engineer for the Drone Express delivery service. “Wednesday we are good to go.”

The company has about 10 pilots working in Monroe and Centerville at the moment, Flippo said. The pilots work in shifts at the Centerville store, covering nights and weekends, she said.

The problem of course is economies of scale here. Not every Kroger is going to be able to afford 10 drone pilots and the requisite support staff required for a one-mile delivery radius. I would only expect this to be in the nicest neighborhoods with the kind of area that can support the delivery fees, which are going to be significant when rolled out, and even then, you're going to see NIMBY folks go berserk trying to keep drones out of their neighborhood the first time a pilot drops 4 pounds of groceries on someone's car, or a drone gets vandalized, smashed, or stolen while on the ground.

No, this technology is going to get shelved until they can replace the pilots with computers at best, and at worst it'll go like the way driverless vehicles are going now: nowhere because of lawsuits, regulatory rage at Big Tech, and because the technology itself is still decades away, and the regulatory framework even further.

If we have any readers in Centerville, let me know how this is going.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The Louisiana State Police are under an internal investigation into the treatment of Black suspects after Ronald Greene was stunned and beaten to death by four white cops two years ago, but as we all know, internal affairs investigations never ever find cops guilty of hurting Black folk, because that's the job description.

The same Louisiana State Police unit whose troopers stunned, punched and dragged Ronald Greene on video during a deadly 2019 arrest is now under internal investigation by a secret panel over whether its officers are systematically targeting Black motorists for abuse.

The panel, whose existence was confirmed to The Associated Press by four people familiar with it, was set up in response to Greene’s death as well as three other violent stops of Black men: one who was punched, stunned and hoisted to his feet by his hair braids in a body-camera video obtained by the AP, another who was beaten after he was handcuffed, and yet another who was slammed 18 times with a flashlight.

“Every time I told him to stop he’d hit me again,” said Aaron Bowman, whose flashlight pummeling left him with three broken ribs, a broken jaw, a broken wrist and a gash to his head that required six staples to close. “I don’t want to see this happen to nobody — not to my worst enemy.”

The panel began working a few weeks ago to review thousands of body-camera videos over the past two years involving as many as a dozen white troopers, at least four of whom were involved in Greene’s arrest.

The review is focused on Louisiana State Police Troop F, a 66-officer unit that patrols a sprawling territory in the northeastern part of the state and has become notorious in recent years for alleged acts of brutality that have resulted in felony charges against some of its troopers.

“You’d be naïve to think it’s limited to two or three instances. That’s why you’re seeing this audit, which is a substantial undertaking by any agency,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group. “They’ve got to identify these people and remove them from the organization.”

Other than the federal civil rights investigation into Greene’s death, the state police panel is the only known inquiry into possible systemic abuse and racism by its troopers.

Its seven members, drawn from officials from across the State Police, are not only scouring the videos for signs of excessive force, the people told the AP, but also examining whether troopers showed racist tendencies in their traffic stops and pursuits, and whether they mislabeled body-camera videos, turned off their cameras or used other means to hide evidence from internal investigators.

It’s not clear if the panel has a deadline or if it plans to expand the inquiry to the eight other troops in the 1,200-officer state police.

The State Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

The problem with the logic that there have to be incidents of racial injustice and police brutality that Troop F is hiding is that it means all other troops are doing it too, as well as all other police departments, state and local, across the US. The only issue is the degree of guilt and the severity of the abuse.

It is systemic. This is what we mean when we say systemic racism is an unavoidable, everyday fact of being Black in America. You only live because a cop hasn't killed you yet.

But Black Lives Still Matter.

The Law Of The Lone Star

Texas Attorney General Dan Patrick is facing possible disbarment as the state's Bar Association is investigating whether Paxton's Supreme Court lawsuit to block Joe Biden's presidency was unethical.

The Texas bar association is investigating whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election based on bogus claims of fraud amounted to professional misconduct.

The State Bar of Texas initially declined to take up a Democratic Party activist’s complaint that Paxton’s petitioning of the U.S. Supreme Court to block Joe Biden’s victory was frivolous and unethical. But a tribunal that oversees grievances against lawyers overturned that decision late last month and ordered the bar to look into the accusations against the Republican official.

The investigation is yet another liability for the embattled attorney general, who is facing a years-old criminal case, a separate, newer FBI investigation, and a Republican primary opponent who is seeking to make electoral hay of the various controversies. It also makes Paxton one of the highest profile lawyers to face professional blowback over their roles in Donald Trump’s effort to delegitimize his defeat.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Paxton’s defense lawyer, Philip Hilder, declined to comment.

Kevin Moran, the 71-year-old president of the Galveston Island Democrats, shared his complaint with The Associated Press along with letters from the State Bar of Texas and the Board of Disciplinary Appeals that confirm the investigation. He said Paxton’s efforts to dismiss other states’ election results was a wasteful embarrassment for which the attorney general should lose his law license.

“He wanted to disenfranchise the voters in four other states,” said Moran. “It’s just crazy.”

Texas’ top appeals lawyer, who would usually argue the state’s cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, notably did not join Paxton in bringing the election suit. The high court threw it out.

Paxton has less than a month to reply to Moran’s claim that the lawsuit to overturn the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was misleading and brought in bad faith, according to a June 3 letter from the bar. All four of the battleground states voted for Biden in November.

From there, bar staff will take up the case in a proceeding that resembles the grand jury stage of a criminal investigation. Bar investigators are empowered to question witnesses, hold hearings and issue subpoenas to determine whether a lawyer likely committed misconduct. That finding then launches a disciplinary process that could ultimately result in disbarment, suspension or a lesser punishments. A lawyer also could be found to have done nothing wrong.

The bar dismisses thousands of grievances each year and the Board of Disciplinary Appeals, 12 independent lawyers appointed by the Texas Supreme Court, overwhelmingly uphold those decisions. Reversals like that of Moran’s complaint happened less than 7% of the time last year, according to the bar’s annual report.

Claire Reynolds, a spokeswoman and lawyer for the bar, said state law prohibits the agency from commenting on complaints unless they result is public sanctions or a court action.

The bar’s investigation is confidential and likely to take months. But it draws renewed attention to Paxton’s divisive defense of Trump as he and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush vie for the former president’s endorsement in the Republican primary to run for attorney general in 2022.

 

While Jeb!'s son is definitely gunning for the job his uncle had in Texas and in Washington and needs Paxton out of the way, I don't see how he's going to be able to take advantage of this bar investigation in any way. Anything short of complete agreement with whatever Paxton's position is, being martyred in Trump's "noble" defense, is the end of Potted Plant's career and he knows it. 

Granted, an AG being disbarred from practicing law in the state where he resides kind of makes it impossible to do the job, but there's nothing he can do other than stay out of the way of this hurtling trainwreck.

Last Call For Removing The Keystone

The Keystone XL pipeline project is officially dead and buried, sufficiently killed by a combination of COVID-19 crushing crude oil demand, green energy activism, and the Biden administration yanking the construction permits back in January.

 

The company behind the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline said Wednesday it's officially terminating the project. TC Energy already had suspended construction in January when President Biden revoked a key cross-border presidential permit. The announcement ends a more than decade-long battle that came to signify the debate over whether fossil fuels should be left in the ground to address climate change.

Environmentalists opposed the pipeline in part because of the oil it would carry— oil sands crude from Alberta. It requires more processing than most oil, so producing it emits more greenhouse gases.

TC Energy had begun construction on the pipeline last year and said about 300 miles of the $8 billion project had been built. It would have carried oil from landlocked Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL supporters, including most of the oil industry, said the pipeline construction would have created much-needed construction jobs.

"It's unfortunate that political obstructionism led to the termination of the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a blow to U.S. energy security and a blow to the thousands of good-paying union jobs this project would have supported," said Robin Rorick, American Petroleum Institute vice president of midstream and industry operations.

The oil industry and its allies have claimed that Keystone XL would have created hundreds or even thousands of jobs. Most of those positions would have been temporary construction jobs. The State Department estimated full-time permanent jobs to be closer to 50.

Climate activists cheered the decision.

"For 13 years, an international movement of frontline communities in the U.S. and Canada, Indigenous leaders, and environmentalists fought back against this terrible proposed project at every turn," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. "Today, we can say yet again, that our efforts were a resounding success."

Keystone XL would have passed through Nebraska, and for years, a coalition of Indigenous tribes, ranchers and local environmentalists demonstrated, lobbied and sued to halt the pipeline's construction. Its proposed route in Nebraska cut through the Ogallala Aquifer, the groundwater source for millions of Plains states residents.

The pipeline's opponents in Nebraska feared that any leak from Keystone XL would damage the critical aquifer, and they welcomed the end of the project. "On behalf of our Ponca Nation we welcome this long overdue news and thank all who worked so tirelessly to educate and fight to prevent this from coming to fruition. It's a great day for Mother Earth," Larry Wright Jr., chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, said in a statement.

 

 

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Nearly a third of Republicans think Trump and his regime will be "reinstated" before the end of the year, and I remind you, that's tens of millions of Americans who are going to get very angry, if not violent, when that doesn't happen.

Those close to Donald Trump have sought to publicly downplay a report that the former president thinks he will be reinstated in the Oval Office later this year, but a sizable minority of Republican voters believe it will happen anyway.

According to a new Morning Consult/Politico survey, 29 percent of Republican voters said it is at least somewhat likely that Trump will be restored as president in 2021 – including 17 percent who said it is “very likely.”

The June 4-7 poll was conducted among 1,990 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points. For the first time in a Morning Consult/Politico poll, the responses were weighted on 2020 presidential vote in addition to the typical weighting variables of age, gender, race and ethnicity, educational attainment and region.

The survey was conducted after New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman reported that the former president had told a number of people in his orbit that he expects to be reinstated by August. The paper’s chief Trump chronicler alluded to Trump’s regular statements on such developments as Arizona’s ongoing election review as evidence of the former president’s preoccupation with the notion that President Joe Biden’s certified victory in the 2020 presidential election could be overturned.

There is no existing constitutional mechanism to accomplish such a goal, as Corey Lewandowsi, a top Trump adviser, acknowledged on Fox News over the weekend, a fact that was not lost on the nearly 3 in 4 voters – including 84 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans – who said it is unlikely that Trump will return to the White House this year.

While the idea of Trump’s reinstatement is far-fetched at best, the electoral and political impact of Trump’s repeated attacks on the 2020 outcome is very real, polling data suggests.

Recent Morning Consult polling has shown Democrats and Biden voters with an early enthusiasm advantage over Republicans and voters who backed Trump in 2020 ahead of the midterm elections. Republican leaders have also pressed Trump to drop his public denial of Biden’s victory and instead focus on attacking Biden and his agenda, but he instead doubled down on his false claims during remarks at the North Carolina Republican Party convention over the weekend.

Trump’s loss – and his behavior following it – did a number on Republican confidence in American elections, and it’s already been blamed by GOP strategists for a number of electoral problems, including the GOP’s loss in two Georgia special elections for Senate in January and the poor showing in a special election for House in New Mexico earlier this month, as both parties look toward a midterm cycle where there is no room for error.

From October to November, the share of Republican adults who said they had “a lot” or “some” confidence in the electoral system fell 22 percentage points, to 45 percent. In the latest May 28-May 30 survey, just 2 in 5 Republicans said they have confidence in American elections, compared with 62 percent of Democrats.

Amid Republicans’ Trump-fueled erosion of faith in the integrity of U.S. elections and Democrats’ fear and anger following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and a spate of state-level voting legislation, the vast majority of Americans said that they felt the world’s oldest continuous democracy is at risk.

With another 10% of Republicans saying they don't know whether or not Trump will be "reinstated" we're talking about the number of  Republicans who believe it can happen is about the same as the number of Republicans who no longer believe in the electoral system.

The next putsch/coup/junta attempt will be a lot bloodier, folks.

Closing Out The Mistakes Of The Past

When President Obama tried to close Guantanamo, Republicans (and several Democrats) rose up in Congress to make it impossible to do. President Biden says he won't make the same mistakes as we come up on the 20th anniversary of the Forever War.

President Joe Biden has quietly begun efforts to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, using an under-the-radar approach to minimize political blowback and to try to make at least some progress in resolving a long-standing legal and human rights morass before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

After initial plans for a more aggressive push to close the facility — including rebuffed attempts to recruit a special envoy to oversee the strategy — the White House changed course, sources said. The administration has opted to wait before it reaches out to Congress, which has thwarted previous efforts to close the camp, because of fears that political outcry might interfere with the rest of Biden's agenda.

"They don't want it to become a dominant issue that blows up," a former senior administration official involved in the discussions said of Biden officials. "They don't want it to become a lightning rod. They want it to be methodical, orderly."

The administration hopes to transfer a handful of the remaining terrorism suspects to foreign countries, the people familiar with the discussions said, and then persuade Congress to permit the transfer of the rest — including 9/11 suspects — to detention on the U.S. mainland. Biden hopes to close the facility by the end of his first term, the people familiar with the discussions said.

But even though just 40 people are left at Gitmo, the Biden administration faces many of the same obstacles that doomed President Barack Obama's much more public effort to close it a dozen years ago.

President George W. Bush opened the detention facility in 2002. At its peak, it held nearly 800 detainees, including 9/11 suspects and combatants from the battlefield in Afghanistan. By the time Obama took office in 2009, fewer than 300 detainees were in the camp.

During his campaign for president, Obama had pledged to shutter the prison within a year of taking office. Two days after he was inaugurated, he issued an executive order to close Gitmo by the end of the year, and he restated the goal in media interviews.

Congress, however, resisted the transfer of detainees to the U.S. The House and the Senate rejected funding for the move and also blocked the transfers, with many Democrats voting against the Obama administration's plans.

By the end of his second term, Obama had reduced Guantánamo's population from 245 to 41 detainees, transferring many to foreign countries, but the prison remained in use.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order keeping it open. One detainee was transferred to a foreign country during his tenure.

 

I personally think Trump will do everything he can to sabotage this and rally his cult against the closing, because if Trump couldn't get credit for it, nobody will. 

Give it a week, and the GOP will be rallied. Give it a month, and the plan will be dead.

 

StupidiNews!

• Former Virginia Dem Gov. Terry McAuliffe has won the state's gubernatorial primary, Virginia governors are allowed two terms but not consecutively.
• The US Senate has confirmed the first federal judge under President Biden, Julien Neals, on a 66 - 33 vote.
• Peruvian socialist Pedro Castillo is holding a narrow lead over Keiko Fujimori in the country's presidential elections, but Fujimori is challenging the margin in the nation's election court.
• President Biden's talks with Senate Republicans over a major infrastructure bill ha reportedly broken down, leaving Democrats turning to budget reconciliation to pass the legislation.
• Ohio GOP Attorney General Dave Yost is suing Google to force the company to be treated as a common carrier public utility and to have all of its goods and services regulated by the state.