Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Democratic strategist Max Burns notes that The Former Guy™ trying to turn January 6th terrorist Ashli Babbitt into a martyr for his cause is no accident.

When Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, 35, was shot dead by police while trying to force her way through a barricaded door protecting members of the House of Representatives from a mob of rioters inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, she was energized in part by then-President Donald Trump's big lie that Democrats were hard at work stealing the White House from its rightful Republican owners.

Far from dampening support for the big lie, Babbitt's death is being amplified by Trump loyalists into a powerful rallying symbol for far-right anti-government extremists the FBI calls terrorists, who now find aid and comfort within a Trumpified GOP.

Babbitt's canonization as a right-wing martyr is a dangerous development for a Republican Party with members increasingly comfortable pressing for and defending political violence. Trump himself seems to want to use outrage over Babbitt's death as a blast furnace to heat up his 2024 political comeback — but cheerleading extremism is more likely to send the country up in smoke.

"Who was the person who shot an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman?" Trump asked Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, before interrupting himself to offer an answer: "I will tell you, they know who shot Ashley Babbitt. They're protecting that person. I've heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official — a Democrat."

Trump's rumors have been firmly rejected by law enforcement, according to reporting by NBC News. A senior law enforcement official briefed on the matter said the officer involved was not a member of a security detail provided to a specific member of Congress.

Trump's speculation is also refuted by the video evidence freely available to the public, which clearly shows that Babbitt was not "innocent." She was shot while trying to force entry into a restricted area and disregarding multiple police orders to stop. We also know Babbitt arrived at the Capitol fired up by Trump's conspiracy theories, which she spelled out on her social media profiles alongside threats to Democratic elected officials, such as the vice president-elect, Kamala Harris, and Rep. Maxine Waters of California.

In any case, it is doubtful that anyone in the GOP is actually interested in uncovering the truth about what happened on Jan. 6. Back in May, Republicans loudly and proudly refused to support a bipartisan investigation into the riot. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona went so far as to accuse the FBI of secretly having organized the attack itself — a conspiracy theory amplified by his GOP colleagues Louie Gohmert of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Matt Gaetz of Florida.

But the danger is greater than the now-typical muddying of the waters about what really happened during a day that threatened U.S. democracy. It represents a new tactic to further the spread of propaganda and distortion that courts — rather than denounces — the most dangerous elements of American society. The open embrace of the Jan. 6 rioters as "peaceful patriots" by parts of the GOP signals a grim reality: Republicans simply cannot afford to lose the votes of far-right domestic terrorists.

Trump creating a martyr is Autocracy 101 a symbol to kill for, and a symbol to die for, and that's where we are headed with these white supremacist terrorists. They will use her as justification for whatever deadly violence comes next. 

I can't stress how awful this is going to be.

Texas Two-Steppin' Out

Texas state Democrats are heading for the hills to prevent a quorum in the state legislature for Texas Republicans to ram through the worst, most draconian voter suppression bills yet, but it's only delaying the inevitable.

With Republican-backed voting bills moving rapidly through a special session of the state Legislature, Texas Democrats bolted — again.

At least 51 Democratic members of the state House of Representatives fled the state Monday afternoon in two charter jets bound for Washington, D.C., in an effort to block the measures from advancing, a source familiar with the plans told NBC News. At least seven others are en route, as well.

The unusual move, akin to what Democrats did in 2003, will paralyze the chamber, stopping business until the lawmakers return to town or the session ends.

The lawmakers plan to spend more than three weeks in Washington, running out the clock on the session, which began Thursday, and advocating for federal voting legislation. The Democrats say the For the People Act, an amended version of which Republicans filibustered in the U.S. Senate last month, is the only way they can permanently fend off election limits Republicans are advancing at the state level.

"Our democracy is on the line," state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer told NBC News. "It became very clear to us that this weekend that any attempts to negotiate some Democratic concessions were cut off, making it very clear that Republicans were hellbent on having it their way."

ON BOARD: Texas Democrats on their way to D.C., where they plan to stay for more than three weeks to deny the state House a quorum pic.twitter.com/hTE0mfxveZ— Jane C. Timm (@janestreet) July 12, 2021

The legislators risk arrest by taking flight. Under the Texas Constitution, the Legislature requires a quorum of two-thirds of lawmakers to be present to conduct state business in either chamber. Absent lawmakers can be legally compelled to return to the Capitol; the source said Democrats expect state Republicans to ask the Department of Public Safety to track them down.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who has made tightening election rules a priority, slammed the move as a dereliction of duty.

"Texas Democrats’ decision to break a quorum of the Texas Legislature and abandon the Texas State Capitol inflicts harm on the very Texans who elected them to serve," Abbott said in statement. "As they fly across the country on cushy private planes, they leave undone issues that can help their districts and our state."

Republican House Speaker Dade Phelan vowed in a statement on Monday afternoon to "use every available resource under the Texas Constitution and the unanimously-passed House Rules to secure a quorum."

"The special session clock is ticking," Phelan said.

 

This didn't work for Oregon Republicans when they tried the same to stop climate change legislation in 2019 and again in 2020.

The difference of course is that Oregon Republicans aligned themselves with armed terrorists and dared Oregon Democrats to send cops after them. And in the end, Oregon Dems dropped the bill and gave in to the GOP terrorists.

 

In 2021, Oregon Republicans repeated the same nonsense several times over Gov. Kate Brown's COVID regulations.

Meanwhile, I fully expect Texas Republicans will do what Oregon Democrats didn't do: send armed law enforcement after the legislators and bring them back in cuffs.

Watch.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Next week, the Maricopa County, Arizona "audit" of the 2020 ballots will enter its fourth month, and there's no sign that the audit will ever end. As Amanda Carpenter reveals, that's the point. Audit uber alles!

If you’re waiting to read the Cyber Ninjas’ report about Maricopa County’s election counts to find out what happens next in Donald Trump’s rigged election narrative, don’t bother.

The sham audit itself is the endgame. The audit, which began on April 23, was supposed to end by May 14. Now, nearly two months after blowing past that deadline, a spokesman says people shouldn’t expect anything until August. But, really, who knows when, or if, it all will ever end.

It’s not like anyone in MAGA land is in any hurry to call curtains on the big show. That’s because the performance, as incompetent as it is, is the point. It’s what’s keeping Trump’s election delusions alive and well; not what will prove or disprove whether the fantasy has merit. The play’s the thing.

Besides, haven’t they already won, on some level? It’s not every day a couple of partisans are able to seize millions of ballots and a bunch of expensive election equipment to put on a big, months-long show at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Everybody came, too. Politicos, reporters, elected officials. MAGA propagandists are still capitalizing on all the free content. And donations keep pouring into the coffers of Trump-adjacent grifters all around. Why end it now?

The auditors haven’t even drafted a report and already, there’s lots of breathless talk from MAGA land about taking the show on the road to Pennsylvania. The dominos are falling, just as the prophecy foretold!

Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli “Stop the Counting” Ward couldn’t be happier. “It is good to know that the Arizona audit is already inspiring others to take important steps to ensure election integrity,” she said in a video on Friday. “Even before its completion, the Arizona audit, America’s audit, is bearing good fruit.”

Joy! The sequel is being planned before the first release even wraps its maiden run! Election Integrity Forever!

There are plenty of financial, legal, and political costs associated with the spectacle, none of which seem to worry the audit’s proponents much. They’re having too much fun.

They’re not concerned about sticking Arizona taxpayers with the bill for voting equipment that will need to be replaced at a yet-to-be-determined cost. They’re not thinking about the implications of using private funds to finance what was billed as a public, government-run enterprise before spiraling into bamboo-sniffing, Cheeto-dust-hunting ridiculousness. The Department of Justice has warned about possible legal exposure that Arizona Republicans have for violating federal laws requiring the preservation of election records. But that hasn’t slowed them down, either.

More than likely, the audit will damage the Republican brand even further in the critical swing state of Arizona, where it lost both its marquee races—the presidency and U.S. Senate—in 2020. A recent Bendixen & Amandi International poll found roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort and that the “intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support, with those strongly opposed to it outnumbering those strongly in favor by 5 percentage points.”

Considering that Maricopa County delivers about two-thirds of Arizona’s votes, someone ought to start writing a political thriller for 2022. Title it: “Backlash.”

 

Boy I'd like to think that this is how it plays out, but something tells me that it's not going to happen this way. "Remember Arizona!" is going to be a permanent battle cry through 2022 I suspect. In fact, the best thing for the GOP would be for Democrats to try to force an end to the report, and they'll hold out until someone makes them issue...some kind of statement.

 

Then they'll bitch about needing another audit.

 

It'll never end. That's the point.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

America's journey into the darkness continues while Trump is out of political power, for there are plenty of folks who expect him to return triumphantly and usher in a new epoch of rule. The problem is they're not waiting until 2024, hell they're expecting in next month. And of course, we can't have a Christian fundamentalist theocracy without an official state religion, right?  

The pastor was already pacing when he gave the first signal. Then he gave another, and another, until a giant video screen behind him was lit up with an enormous colored map of Fort Worth divided into four quadrants.

Greed, the map read over the west side. Competition, it said over the east side. Rebellion, it said over the north part of the city. Lust, it said over the south.

It was an hour and a half into the 11 a.m. service of a church that represents a rapidly growing kind of Christianity in the United States, one whose goal includes bringing under the authority of a biblical God every facet of life, from schools to city halls to Washington, where the pastor had traveled a month after the Jan. 6 insurrection and filmed himself in front of the U.S. Capitol saying quietly, “Father, we declare America is yours.”

Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing. It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown — a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.

“Say, ‘Cleanse me,’ ” the pastor continued as drums began pounding and the people repeated his words. “Say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servants are listening.’ ”

The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party. It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.

This is the world of Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White and many more lesser-known but influential religious leaders who prophesied that Trump would win the election and helped organize nationwide prayer rallies in the days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, speaking of an imminent “heavenly strike” and “a Christian populist uprising,” leading many who stormed the Capitol to believe they were taking back the country for God.

Even as mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations continue an overall decline in numbers in a changing America, nondenominational congregations have surged from being virtually nonexistent in the 1980s to accounting for roughly 1 in 10 Americans in 2020, according to long-term academic surveys of religious affiliation. Church leaders tend to attribute the growth to the power of an uncompromised Christianity. Experts seeking a more historical understanding point to a relatively recent development called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR.

A California-based theologian coined the phrase in the 1990s to describe what he said he had seen as a missionary in Latin America — vast church growth, miracles, and modern-day prophets and apostles endowed with special powers to fight demonic forces. He and others promoted new church models using sociological principles to attract members. They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.

None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.

What is new is the degree to which Trump elevated a fresh network of NAR-style leaders who in turn elevated him as God’s chosen president, a fusion that has secured the movement as a grass-roots force within the GOP just as the old Christian right is waning. Increasingly, this is the world that the term “evangelical voter” refers to — not white-haired Southern Baptists in wooden pews but the comparatively younger, more diverse, more extreme world of millions drawn to leaders who believe they are igniting a new Great Awakening in America, one whose epicenter is Texas.

 

It's had many names and many forms over the years, last decade it was Quiverfull (as in "breeding an army of God's soldiers, arrows to fill the quiver") and two decades ago it was Prosperity Gospel (God will make you rich!)

 

People keep asking the wrong question, which is "How can evangelical Christians support Donald Trump?" The assumption is that Democrats must be doing something critically wrong to lose 80% of the white evangelical vote to someone like him. The reality though is that modern American Christianity has changed into something malignant, and it sees Trump as its prophet. Dems never had a chance to win over these folks, because Democrats are literally the anti-Christ to these folks.

It's a holy war, guys.

Those never end well.

Taking On Gunmerica

Former NYPD captain Eric Adams won NYC's ranked choice Democratic primary, and as such there's a 99.9% chance he ends up Mayor (something that has Trumpy Republican Curtis Sliwa very upset, folks) and everyone knows it. Adams isn't resting on his laurels either, not flinching from calling out national progressive Dems for focusing gun safety efforts on rifles like the AR-15 and mass shootings and for not more heavily regulating the weapons that compose most of street crime in cities like NYC: handguns.

New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams said Sunday that national Democrats are focusing on the wrong issue in terms of gun violence.

Adams told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that Democrats’ priorities on gun laws at the federal level are misguided, saying they’ve focused too much on banning assault rifles in the aftermath of mass shootings, while they should be focusing more on gun crimes committed with handguns, which are more common.

“I believe those priorities, they really were misplaced,” Adams said. “And it's almost insulting what we have witnessed over the last few years. Many of our presidents, they saw these numbers. They knew that the inner cities, particularly where Black brown and poor people lived, they know — they knew they were dealing with this real crisis.”

Adams officially won the Democratic mayoral nomination last week as the results from the city's first ranked-choice election were released. He ran as a moderate with a centrist message focused on public safety, police reform and reversing a surge in crime in New York City.

He stressed Sunday that Democrats need to increase focus on the trafficking of handguns, “just as we became energetic after we saw mass shootings with assault rifles in the suburban parts of our country.”

“The numbers of those who are killed by handguns are astronomical. And if we don't start having real federal legislation, matched with states and cities, we're never going to get this crisis under control,” he said.

Adams commended President Joe Biden’s increased focus on the rise in gun crimes in recent weeks, with the president announcing on June 23 that the Justice Department was launching five firearms trafficking strike forces in cities across the country. Last week, during a trip to Illinois, Biden addressed “the fight against gun violence” following a deadly July Fourth weekend in Chicago, where 104 people were shot and 19 were killed.

The Biden administration is grappling with an uptick in violent crimes in big cities this year, with guns driving much of that spike in violence.

“I believe, for the first time, we are going to see a coordinated effort between the president, the governor, the mayor to go after the flow of guns in our city, which is extremely important. But then, right on the ground, how do we deal with the intervention aspects of it?” Adams said on what New Yorkers can expect if he’s elected mayor.

 

Adams stresses he doesn't want to ban handguns, something that would never survive the Roberts Court anyway. He wants to go after gun dealers, their suppliers, and enforcing laws already on the books to save real people in neighborhoods rather than performative social media bleating.

What a concept.

Sorry, I missed having a pragmatic Democratic party that doesn't give in to the screeching hordes, and man is it ever good to see it again. New tag, as I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot from him in the years ahead: Eric Adams.

Last Call For The Only Way To Win Is Not To Play

Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker argues that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by not playing Trump's game as Hillary Clinton did and lost, but by showing people the alternative that the game didn't need to be played.

 

The Brooklyn-reared boxing trainer Charley Goldman, who crafted Rocky Marciano, the undefeated heavyweight champ of the nineteen-fifties, once made a wise statement: “Never play a guy at his own game; nobody makes up a game in order to get beat at it.” He meant that there was no point getting into a slugging match with a slugger or a bob-and-weave match with a bob-and-weaver. Instead, do what you do well. Damon Runyon, another New York character of that same wise vintage, said something similar about a different activity: if someone wants to bet you that, if you open a sealed deck of cards, the jack of spades will come out and squirt cider in your ear, don’t take the bet, however tempting the odds. The deck, you can be sure, is gaffed on the other gambler’s behalf. Never play the other guy’s game: it’s the simple wisdom of the corner gym and the gambling den. The other guy’s game is designed for the other guy to win.

An instinctive understanding of this principle was part of the brilliance of Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign—and that we do not think of it as brilliant, despite his decisive victory against an incumbent, is part of its brilliance. Donald Trump invented a game: of bullying, lying, sociopathic selfishness, treachery, and outright gangsterism, doing and saying things that no democratic politician had ever done or even thought of doing, and he did it all in broad daylight. (A notorious line attributed to Nixon—“We can do that, but it would be wrong”—was about paying hush money. Even Nixon wouldn’t pardon his henchmen. Trump did.) It was a game designed for Trump alone to win, but all too many got drawn into it. It was a game that some credit to a Russian model of disinformation but actually seems rooted in old-fashioned American Barnumism, weaponized with John Gotti-style ethics. It was designed, in plain English, to throw out so much crap that no one could ever deal with it all. Trying to bat the crap away, you just got more of it all over you, and meanwhile you were implicitly endorsing its relevance.

Biden, by contrast, insisted that the way to win was not to play. In the face of the new politics of spectacle, he kept true to old-school coalition politics. He understood that the Black Church mattered more in Democratic primaries than any amount of Twitter snark, and, by keeping a low profile on social media, showed that social-media politics was a mirage. Throughout the dark, dystopian post-election months of Trump’s tantrum—which led to the insurrection on January 6th—many Democrats deplored Biden’s seeming passivity, his reluctance to call a coup a coup and a would-be dictator a would-be dictator. Instead, he and his team were remarkably (to many, it seemed, exasperatingly) focussed on counting the votes, trusting the process, and staffing the government.

It looked at the time dangerously passive; it turned out to be patiently wise, for Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory and progress can be found. (As a recent Populace survey stated, Biden and Trump voters hold “collective illusions” about each other, and “what is often mistaken for breadth of political disagreement is actually narrow — if extremely intense — disagreement on a limited number of partisan issues.”) Biden’s ideology is, in fact, the old ideology of pragmatic progressive pluralism—the ideology of F.D.R. and L.B.J. Beneath the strut and show and hysteria of politics, there is often a remarkably resilient consensus in the country. Outside the white Deep South, there was a broad consensus against segregation in 1964; outside the most paranoid registers of Wall Street, there was a similar consensus for social guarantees in 1934. Right now, post-pandemic, polls show a robust consensus for a public option to the Affordable Care Act, modernized infrastructure, even for tax hikes on the very rich and big corporations. The more you devote yourself to theatrical gestures and public spectacle, the less likely you are to succeed at making these improvements—and turning Trumpism around. Successful pluralist politicians reach out to the other side, not in a meek show of bipartisanship, but in order to steal their voters.

 

I happen to think Gopnik has a solid point, because it is how Biden won.

 

It is absolutely not how Biden and the Democrats can stay in power, however. Obama was reelected, but House and Senate Dems were wiped out at the local and state level, and frankly, we've not made very much improvement on preventing another catastrophe in 2022.

 

Therein lies the lesson.

 

Going Against The Grain

One thing I've noticed over the years and that history has taught me, is that symbols of progress like highways, factories, and stadiums always seem to get build on land owned by Black folk, particularly if the result of living near these symbols of industry come with an environmental cost. People want these things built, but there are always losers in the NIMBY competition. Nobody's going to build a polluting, noisy factory next to a neighborhood of million-dollar homes, after all. But people sure don't seem to have a problem building them next to Black neighborhoods.

Joy Banner, 42, stands at the edge of her hometown of Wallace, La., looking over a field of sugar cane, the crop that her enslaved ancestors cut from dawn to dusk, that is now the planned site of a major industrial complex. Across the grassy river levee, the swift waters of the Mississippi bear cargo toward distant ports, as the river has done for generations.

"This property is where the proposed grain elevator site would be set up right next to us," she says. "As you can see, we would be living in the middle of this facility."

A bitter fight has broken out between the powerful backers of this major new grain terminal on the Mississippi River in south Louisiana and the historic Black community that has been here on the fence line for 150 years. Charges of environmental racism are coming from her and fellow descendants of enslaved people, who believe the silo complex is an existential threat to the community of Wallace.

On this sunny Juneteenth, a couple dozen folks — mostly Banner's extended family — sit under a 300-year-old oak tree on the grounds of the Fee-Fo-Lay Cafe in Wallace. They eat roast beef sandwiches and peach cobbler, drink whisky and daiquiris, and enjoy the laid-back, rural life on this lazy bend of the mighty river.

But they fear change is coming.

"I have grown up here my whole life," says Banner, the community activist leading the fight against the grain terminal. "We don't want this way of life to be ruined." She and her twin sister, Jo Banner, are co-owners of the cafe.

Banner and the rest of this predominantly African American, unincorporated town of 1,200 are alarmed at the plans of Greenfield Louisiana. The company plans to put in 54 grain silos to store 4.6 million bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans. The grain would float down the Mississippi River from the Midwest on barges, get loaded onto cargo ships at a new Wallace terminal and then be delivered around the globe.

Supporters — from the governor's office to the local parish council — say the grain terminal will create jobs and expand international trade. But neighbors see a massive industrial installation with one structure standing as tall as the Statue of Liberty, operating 24/7 with constant truck and train traffic, machinery noise, and dust escaping when grain is loaded and unloaded.

Some 200 industrial and petrochemical plants are located along the twisting river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

This industrial corridor has been nicknamed Cancer Alley. Study after study has shown that poor Black communities near toxic air pollution suffer greater rates of cancer in south Louisiana.

People at the Juneteenth picnic say that their air is already foul and that a giant grain elevator next door is bound to make things worse.

"You got red dust, black dust, white dust. All these plants, they all got dust," says Lawrence Alexis, 93, in a thick Creole accent. He's a lifelong Wallace resident and former sugar-refinery worker. "That thing they wanna put right there, I don't think it should be there, not close like that."

The proposed Greenfield Louisiana terminal will help, not harm, the community by diversifying the tax base and creating 100 jobs, says CEO Adam Johnson.

In a statement emailed to NPR, Johnson said the "new, state-of-the-art grain elevator will enable the efficient transport of agricultural goods from local farmers to consumers while significantly reducing environmental impacts."

A company fact sheet says Greenfield Louisiana will fully enclose conveyor systems, install dust-collection devices and minimize fugitive emissions during loading and unloading.

While acknowledging that "any kind of change is an adjustment," Johnson said Greenfield has "taken great care to engage the community on this project."

On this point, Wallace residents emphatically disagree. They tell NPR that they were kept entirely in the dark. Banner heard a rumor about a big grain terminal last summer, but she only learned concrete details of the project from a scientist who received a routine public notice from a federal agency four months ago.

Moreover, the St. John the Baptist Parish Council — the elected body that represents citizens of the parish, or county — pledged its support to the grain terminal 14 months ago, yet it never held a public meeting in Wallace to listen to residents' concerns or even put the issue on the council agenda, as residents requested.

In May 2020, seven members of the parish council sent letters to then-Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao urging her to approve a $25 million grant to help the Port of South Louisiana build a new dock in Wallace for the Greenfield terminal. None of the elected representatives would agree to repeated requests by NPR for interviews to discuss their support for the project.

 

It'll take a miracle to stop this grain terminal from being built, and miracles are in short supply these days. I hope the people of Wallace can stop the inevitable, but history tells us a few years from now that most of the residents will be gone. The 100 jobs will almost certainly be automated out of existence as soon as possible, too.

There's always a cost, you see.

Sunday Long Read: The Non-Outsiders

Vice's Talia Levin writes today's Sunday Long Read, about how the COVID-19 pandemic and the new normal actually ended up reversing the progress she had made on her near-crippling fear of open spaces.

I’m sitting on the curb, as I often do, contemplating how far I can go on my walk today. The sun is shining, and New York City hasn’t yet descended into its suffocative, piss-redolent summer heat. All around newly-unmasked people are out with their dogs and boyfriends and children, breathing in the good wind.

For me, this is a more complex equation than just my feet, or time, or stamina allows: I have severe agoraphobia, and the equation involves how to navigate my fear in the world—a fear that offers me the shortest of leashes. With each step, I calculate how far I am from my apartment building’s door, and sometimes, without warning, I turn back, drawn by an inner calculus of fear that is sometimes baffling even to myself. Over the past year, during the pandemic, my range of motion has been pared down beyond recognition; once it spanned boroughs, whole cities, and now it spans a few blocks. I’ve memorized the mica and the placement of fire hydrants, and I see the same faces every day, when I take my air squatting curbside; I know precisely what’s growing in the planters, I examine the weeds, my life shrunk to a pointillist’s level of detail.

A panic attack is a deeply unpleasant experience. The comedian and author Sara Benincasa described it as the precise opposite of an orgasm, a full-body sensation one cannot ignore, and I call it being struck by bad lightning, electric terror that buzzes under every millimeter of your skin. Once you have had one—or ten, or 20, or 100—trying to avoid another is a fully rational pursuit, but the list of things you avoid gets longer and longer, until suddenly you are an agoraphobic, cut off by your fear from the world. I have a lot of stories from my disorder, raw and a little bit funny, dispatches from the outer edges of sanity. I once vomited copiously while watching a musical about Joan of Arc in the Public Theater, dripping with bile for the remnant of the musical Siege of Orleans. On a flight from Georgia to Ukraine, I stood half-crouched in my plane seat, ready to flee, for a full half-hour before takeoff, until a gold-toothed man with whiskey on his breath in the next seat over held my hand and prayed to Christ with me, a Jew. I’ve lived with panic disorder for 11 years, and agoraphobia, that metastatic outgrowth, for at least seven.

The first time I had a panic attack, I was 21. I was in Russia during the summer of 2010, and I thought I was dying. I called Russian 911 from my host family’s couch, unable to calm myself, my heart beating the primal tattoo of dread for hours on end. They gave me an EKG there on that couch, and a tonic of “herbs” to drink, and told me I was fine. My host mother, a heavily-made-up woman in her mid-twenties weighing 90 pounds at most, told me she regularly experienced such episodes, her heart hammering at her in the hot Kazan night. I wondered if this was a language-barrier issue because I didn’t know, yet, what had happened to me. How could she have nearly died so many times? Was the woman who’d made her husband carry her down four flights of stairs in glittery roller skates somehow an immortal—Highlander in pink stiletto heels?

In time, I learned that what I’d experienced wasn’t an incipient heart attack, but rather anxiety at its most savage; I got on Lexapro, saw a therapist briefly, poured myself into my studies and experienced a year of night terrors, waking up with a scream in my mouth and a weight on my chest to rival Giles Corey’s. I cultivated a support network of a few friends and relatives I could trust to soothe me back down from the edge, learned a few breathing techniques, downloaded a one-dollar panic meditation app, and lived as best I could for as long as I could. I went on different meds, and then other meds, and more meds after that, seeking out a formula that would allow me life; I tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, psychoanalysis, and raw bleak stretches of silence.

Throughout, everything was colored by anxiety, as if it were an impermissive chaperone: I can do this, I can’t do that; that’s too much and that isn’t. It was a constantly shifting set of parameters to live my life through, but one that permitted me some measure of mediated freedom. Until the pandemic. For a year and a half, my anxiety’s natural instincts—to stay at home, surrounded by trusted people—became the way of things. I no longer had to force myself to run a daily gauntlet of low-level fear. Unchallenged, the fears became stronger, and multiplied. I have seen an erosion, and then a disappearance, of my abilities, gradually and then faster and faster, into the big black maw of a fear that’s swallowed my life and left me little.

As New York City has opened up on the strength of a flood of vaccines, the city feels like a body whose veins, once pinched and restricted, are coursing with new blood. My friends—the ones that haven’t moved away, or faded from my life because I cannot, cannot come to the picnic or the birthday party or the brunch—are flowing back into the center of the city, laughing a little about how weird it feels to be together again. A few have commented in passing about the hitches they’ve faced in their reentry: a new unease in crowds, awkwardness around small talk with strangers, a certain reluctance to dance back into the swing of things as if the past year and a half of isolation had never occurred. I empathize, but distantly, as, for me, the permissive, pulsing life of the city in which I live is so far from my own eroded capacities.

From my enforced distance, the heady period being heralded as “Hot Vax Summer” doesn’t feel all that different from the ways in which we were expected to contend with, or ignore, the disease at the height of its deadly ferocity in this country. The president told us to go out and spend while tens of thousands were dying; expectations of productivity never waned, no matter how much stress we were under. Now, what meager aid has been offered is being yanked away, and the vast constellation of loss we have endured must be left hushed. Go out and spend: time in the sun and money in the bar, and subsume yourself in breathless companionable laughter and don’t think for a moment about what you lost, or you’re weak and strange. It is so very unnatural, and so very American, and I want my piece of this sweet and terrible lie and can’t have it.  

Not all of us want to go outside, folks. The new world of remote work and deliveries and never going any further than the mailbox makes that possible for some of us, but for others we have no choice but to do what we had to do before, and not knowing which of our co-workers, friends, or acquaintances are a ticking time bomb ready to put us in the hospital with Delta variant breaking through a vaccine.

Some of us never had a choice to begin with.

Shattering The Crystal Ball

Larry Sabato, University of Virginia professor and the force behind the respected Sabato's Crystal Ball election prediction site and the UVA Center for Politics, has come under assault from Virginia Repubicans saying that Sabato needs to be investigated, fired and his group shut down for "violating the university's code of ethics" by saying Republicans in 2021 are basically terrible people on Twitter.

 

The Republican Party of Virginia has publicly criticized the social media posts of University of Virginia politics professor Larry Sabato as partisan lambasting of former President Donald Trump and requested the university investigate them.

Sabato called the criticism “silly but predictable,” and a university spokesman said the professor’s opinions are protected free speech.

Rich Anderson, chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, wrote a letter to UVA on Thursday, saying eight of Sabato’s tweets from the past year appear to violate the university’s mission statement and faculty code of ethics. Anderson called them examples of “bitter partisanship.”

The dispute comes amid a growing national debate over academics’ right to express their opinions and the consequences that follow. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for her work on The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, recently turned down a belated tenure offer from the University of North Carolina and accepted a position at Howard University.

On June 3, Sabato tweeted that he agreed with a New York Times reporter who wrote that Trump believed he would be reinstated to office. “Of course it’s true,” Sabato wrote. “Trump, who governed on the edge of insanity for four long years, has gone over the edge. Yet millions of people and 90%+ of GOP members of Congress, still genuflect before this false god.”

 

Josh Marshall notes that the story is definitely another example of Republican hypocrisy on free speech and cancel culture, but that it's also about Sabato himself finally coming around to the conclusion that both sides aren't the same.

 

Years ago – and in some case until quite recently – there was a group of commentators who the prestige news shows relied on for non-partisan, “both sides” commentary on the politics of the day. Two of the most visible – especially on shows like The NewsHour were Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two think tank political scientists from AEI and Brookings respectively. Another was presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Another was Larry Sabato. Ornstein and Mann tended to focus on the function of Congress; Beschloss, the presidency; Sabato, federal elections. But they each covered the full terrain of contemporary politics. If you go back through 20-plus years of my writing the Editors’ Blog you’ll probably find some criticism of each of them, almost certainly precisely because of this studious effort to see the country’s two political parties in equal terms and treat them as such, even as the evidence for that perspective steadily dwindled.

In many ways TPM was begun, right on the heels of 1998/99 Impeachment and the 2000 election, with a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit argument that the two parties are simply not equal. They don’t function in the same way. Despite its history and current branding the modern GOP is not just another center-right party of government, such as exists under different labels in every functioning modern democracy. It’s something different. It now functions like one of the revanchist, rightist sectarian parties which also exist in most multi-party European democracies. Under the most generous read they play different roles. The fact that the GOP is substantively the latter (rightist sectarian party) while structurally occupying the space of the former (center-right party of government) is the essence of the United States’ current crisis of democracy.

Then in the spring of 2012 Mann and Ornstein published an OpEd in The Washington Post: “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem“. The title speaks for itself but if you wanted more you could read the book that it was adapted from It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Ornstein’s twitter feed is now so blistering in its criticism of contemporary conservatism and the GOP that it makes me blush. Beschloss now has a priceless Twitter feed made up largely of historical artifacts, photos, commemorations almost all of which function as subtweets of Trump, Trumpism or some related manifestation of the contemporary GOP.

Sabato was in many ways the final holdout. In an interview with The Richmond Times-Dispatch for an article about the state GOP investigation demand, Sabato chalked the shift up to Trump and the January 6th insurrection. “People had better pay attention because if they don’t, it’s going to happen again.”

Reading over this post I can see that some might read it as a claim of vindication. Far from it. It is a more a testament to the Republican party. It is a good and proper thing to have a mode of commentary that is as free as possible not only of partisan commitments but the ideological commitments and opinions which are closely situated to the political contests of the moment. It is useful. But especially in the early 21st century the Republican party has simply given people who want to occupy this ground no place to stand. The culture of lying is simply too deep in the fabric. The rejection of democracy itself, let alone the culture of norms in which it best thrives, is too total.

And thus here we are.

 

Those of us who have been shouting into the whirlwind for years now that the GOP is truly dangerous don't feel vindicated, we're scared because we were right beyond our wildest warnings.

The Art Of The Steal

OK, yeah, this is an actual Hunter Biden scandal, and the Biden White House absolutely looks corrupt as hell here.

 

A New York gallery owner will facilitate sales of Hunter Biden's original artwork, an arrangement meant to diffuse concerns over buyers paying top dollar to win influence with the president's son, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The gallerist, Georges Berges, will independently set prices on the artwork of President Joe Biden's son and keep the identities of buyers confidential, including from the president and administration officials. Berges will be the sole person authorized to collect, reject and agree on offers. Berges has agreed to reject any offer that seems unusual, including offers above asking price.

White House officials were involved in creating the arrangement, according to the source, as a way to avoid any suggestion of preferential treatment or conflict of interest.

According to the Washington Post, which first reported the story, Berges has said Hunter Biden's artwork could be priced anywhere from $75,000 to $500,000.

But ethics experts are raising concerns about the agreement.

"This arrangement is problematic. The best disinfectant, in this case, would have been to have a publicly open process. The public could see who the purchasers are, and then it would be incumbent upon the Bidens to bear the burden of saying why it isn’t a conflict," said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the influence of money in politics.

 

It's beyond "problematic".

 

If Ivanka had created several pieces of artwork during her father's corrupt regime and had a gallery sell the art to private, undisclosed donors, we absolutely would know it was a scam, and that it was a legalized payoff to the Trump family in exchange for political favors. Democrats would have demanded transparency and they would have been absolutely correct in doing so.

For Hunter Biden to do this and for Joe to go along?

Malarkey, Mr. President.

You goddamn well know it, too.

Do better.

Last Call For Biden, His Time

President Joe Biden today unveiled a huge new executive order package that targets greedy corporations in general and Big Tech and Big Pharma in particular with a raft of new federal antitrust and pro-consumer regulations.

The White House announced a sweeping executive order Friday to promote competition throughout the U.S. economy, in the most ambitious effort in generations to reduce the stranglehold of monopolies and concentrated markets in major industries.

The order — whose details POLITICO first reported last week — also includes elements designed to lower the price of prescription drugs, protect consumers' privacy and increase scrutiny of abusive business tactics in the tech industry.

The effort marks a major push by President Joe Biden’s administration to focus on competition as part of the economic recovery from the pandemic. It also offers a response to progressives’ criticisms that the federal government has focused too much on supporting banks and other corporations without concern about the effect on consumers, who have watched their choices dwindle over the years.

Biden plans to sign the order at 1:30 p.m., the White House said.

The order’s impacts could be felt in industries including agriculture, airlines, health, broadband and banking. Previously unreported elements include a provision urging the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate its Obama-era net neutrality rules, as well as a call for financial regulators to allow data sharing among financial companies.

It dives into the specifics on some policy issues — for instance, by calling for over-the-counter sales of hearing aids, urging the Food and Drug Administration to allow imports of prescription drugs from Canada, and ending "exclusivity arrangements" in which landlords "stick tenants with only a single internet option," according to a nearly 4,000-word White House fact sheet issued Friday morning.

The White House said order will include initiatives to require airlines to refund fees to passengers who receive shoddy Wi-Fi service or baggage handling; restricting businesses’ ability to foist noncompete agreements on employees; challenge occupational licensing requirements that limit competition in industries like health care; and guarantee farmers and motorists the right to repair their own vehicles without voiding warranty protections. The last provision would also have implications for consumer products like Apple’s iPhones.

Top White House officials said the order seeks to ensure small businesses and consumers have access to fair markets.

“The overarching objective with the executive order is to make sure the president is encouraging competition in industries around the country,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday.

Taking aim at just one industry the order will cover, Psaki added: “It doesn’t sound right to most people that there are three shipping companies that are dominating the market and upping and increasing costs for suppliers, small businesses, people across the country. That doesn’t sound right or fair, because it isn’t.”

 

The bad news is that the regulations are toothless without Congressional law backing these up. There's a lot of "suggestions" and "proposals" and directives to "encourage" things, but nothing that will really take a bite out of monopolies by the trillion-dollar corporations.

 

The worse news of course is that I expect every major industry group to sue the pants off the Biden administration over anything that actually will have an effect, and for the orders to receive near-instant national injunctions from Trump-appointed federal judges that will tie up the regulations in federal courts for years.

They'll never take effect unless Biden's followed by a second term or another Democrat. Better make that happen, folks.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Texas's new statewide anti-abortion law is a legal nightmare, not just because of the screamingly unconstitutional "fetal heartbeat" provision that effectively blocks abortions after six weeks, but the even worse nonsense that deputizes Texas anti-choice activists as the state's Abortion Police.

People across the country may soon be able to sue abortion clinics, doctors and anyone helping a woman get an abortion in Texas, under a new state law that contains a legal innovation with broad implications for the American court system.

The provision passed the Texas State Legislature this spring as part of a bill that bans abortion after a doctor detects a fetal heartbeat, usually at about six weeks of pregnancy. Many states have passed such bans, but the law in Texas is different.

Ordinarily, enforcement would be up to government officials, and if clinics wanted to challenge the law’s constitutionality, they would sue those officials in making their case. But the law in Texas prohibits officials from enforcing it. Instead, it takes the opposite approach, effectively deputizing ordinary citizens — including from outside Texas — to sue clinics and others who violate the law. It awards them at least $10,000 per illegal abortion if they are successful.

“It’s completely inverting the legal system,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It says the state is not going to be the one to enforce this law. Your neighbors are.”

The result is a law that is extremely difficult to challenge before it takes effect on Sept. 1, because it is hard to know whom to sue to block it, and lawyers for clinics are now wrestling with what to do about it. Six-week bans in other states have all been blocked as they make their way through the court system.

Texas’ Legislature began a special session on Thursday, with a conservative agenda taking aim at voting rights and other issues.

The law comes as the right to an abortion and the laws governing it are in flux. Abortion opponents have scored major victories in state legislatures over the past decade, with restrictions whittling down access through much of the Midwest and South. The 2021 legislative season has set the record for the most abortion restrictions signed in a single year in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion statistics and supports abortion rights.

The Supreme Court has shifted too, with conservatives now making up a solid majority, and an abortion case before the court next term.

Critics say the Texas law amounts to a kind of hack of the legal system. In an open letter this spring, more than 370 Texas lawyers, including Professor Vladeck, said a central flaw was its attempt to confer legal standing on abortion opponents who were not themselves injured. They called the law an “unprecedented abuse of civil litigation,” and said it could “have a destabilizing impact on the state’s legal infrastructure.”

“If the barista at Starbucks overhears you talking about your abortion, and it was performed after six weeks, that barista is authorized to sue the clinic where you obtained the abortion and to sue any other person who helped you, like the Uber driver who took you there,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University.

Some statutes do authorize private citizens to sue to enforce a law even if they themselves are not harmed, for example California’s consumer protection law, which gives anyone in the state the right to sue a company for disseminating false information or engaging in other unfair business practices, said Howard M. Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University in Miami. What’s different about Texas’s law, he said, is that private enforcement is not in support of state enforcement; it’s in lieu of it, a switch he said was not good for democracy.

What is more, a Supreme Court ruling last month involving a credit reporting company rejected the concept of people suing when they were not concretely harmed. That case involved lawsuits in federal court, but Professor Wasserman said lawyers for the clinics would probably use it in their arguments in Texas.

The most common place for clinics to challenge abortion restrictions in Texas has been federal court, where they have won more often than at the state level. Supporters of the new law say it is an attempt to argue abortion cases in the courts of the state where they originated — Texas — without anti-abortion measures immediately being suspended by a federal judge, as often happens.

John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, the largest anti-abortion organization in the state, said that some people in the anti-abortion movement thought “this was not working in federal court, so let’s try a different route.”

Lawyers for the clinics argue that a six-week abortion ban is clearly unconstitutional, and the Texas law is designed to insulate the state from a challenge. Federal protection currently extends to pregnancies up to the point at which a fetus can sustain life outside the womb, about 23 or 24 weeks, and six weeks is often before a woman even knows she is pregnant. Given that federal courts are experienced at deciding constitutional rights issues, lawyers for clinics say, it is logical to go there for relief. The new law, if it takes effect, will make that much harder.

The clinics and their staff “are stuck in state court in a defensive posture, and there’s a lot at stake,” Professor Wasserman said. “If they lose, they are on the hook for significant sums of money.”

 

This law is horrific. It effectively gives all the power to rabid anti-choice lunatics who would serve as the Uterus Stasi, going after women looking for medical services, clinic employees, drivers, everyone with hundreds, maybe thousands of civil lawsuits that would bankrupt and destroy everyone in the women's medical services field, not to mention obliterate the women at the core of the "debate" over abortion.

The goal here is make getting an abortion so impossible that nobody ever tries, because of the consequences.  Most of all, it's to put women in Texas in a constant state of fear, and to set a precedent for deputizing GOP cultists and religious zealots as the new agents of the state. They are trying to criminalize anything that might threaten the power structure of white Christian Dominionism: history, medical services, education, voting.

I was never kidding about the "Road to Gilead" part, folks. It was never a catchy metaphor based on a popular Hulu and book series. It was always a deadly serious warning about a theocratic fascist government that reduced women to chattel forming before our eyes, and we're closer than ever to that point.

Glenn's Scary Glenn Loss

The mask slips, and once again Republicans tell the truth by accident.

Virginia's Republican nominee for governor reportedly told supporters at a fundraising event in June that he couldn't reveal his true position on abortion rights until after he's elected.

His reasoning: He needs the independent vote to ensure his victory in November.

Glenn Youngkin, the venture capitalist running as a Republican in Virginia's gubernatorial race against former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, made the comments to Lauren Windsor, who runs The Undercurrent, a self-described "grassroots political web-show" funded by the liberal advocacy group American Family Voices.

The American Independent obtained the video footage from Windsor, who also shared it with MSNBC.

In the video, Windsor begins speaking with Youngkin about her feigned support for things like "getting a fetal heartbeat bill here like they did in Texas, or defunding Planned Parenthood."

A man who identifies himself only as "Pete" also appears in the video, though his full identity is not immediately clear.

Youngkin responds by telling Windsor that she's "on the right path," adding that he initially wants to work on abortion issues he says a "majority of Virginians" support, including to "stop using taxpayer money for abortions" and banning "abortions all the way up until the last week before birth." (Taxpayer money is not used to fund abortions.)

When Windsor pushes him more, Youngkin says that he's unable to speak much on the issue for fear of losing the independent voters he says he needs to win Virginia's gubernatorial contest in November.

"I'm gonna be really honest with you, the short answer is, in this campaign, I can't," Youngkin says after "Pete" asks him whether he plans to "take it to the abortionists."

"When I'm governor, and I have a majority in the House, we can start going on offense," he continues. "But as a campaign topic, sadly, that in fact won’t win my independent votes that I have to get. So you'll never hear me support Planned Parenthood, what you'll hear me talk about is actually taking back the radical abortion policies that Virginians don't want."

 

A couple of observations: 

 

One, Democrat Terry McAuliffe is going to win by double digits over this clod. There's no bigger sin in Republican politics than admitting the culture war con is just that. Not only does Youngkin admit he needs to deceive moderate voters, but he's tacitly admitting that he needs to deceive Republican cultist base voters too, because politics is all about getting into power. Actually showing the people how the sausage gets made makes you a ham-fisted loser in the era of Trumpian showmanship.

Two, there are no moderate Republicans in 2021. They're all cultists if they're in the party, and half the ones that "left" are just independents who want to self-delude into thinking they're cool hipsters or something. Youngkin I think really falls into this latter category, and that's the second-biggest sin in GOP politics.

He's done, folks.

Last Call For Gov. Mike, De Slime

Never forget for a moment that red state Republicans want anyone who isn't a white, straight Christian removed from "their" state by legalized attrition through denial of basic services.

In the latest state-level swing at LGBTQ health care access, Ohio will now allow medical providers to refuse to administer any medical treatment that violates their moral, ethical, or religious beliefs.

The language was buried in a 700-page document of last-minute amendments to the state’s two-year budget bill, which Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine approved last Thursday. The provision allows anyone providing medical care — from doctors and nurses to researchers and lab techs – and anyone paying for that care (namely, insurance providers), “the freedom to decline to perform, participate in, or pay for any health care service which violates the practitioner’s, institution’s, or payer’s conscience as informed by the moral, ethical, or religious beliefs.”

The bill does not allow medical professionals to deny LGBTQ people care, carte blanche; the exemption “is limited to conscience-based objections to a particular health care service.” It goes on to say that the provider is “responsible for providing all appropriate health care services, other than the particular health care service that conflicts with the medical practitioner’s beliefs or convictions, until another medical practitioner or facility is available.”

But the bill was overwhelmingly opposed by the state’s medical community. “The implications of this policy are immense and could lead to situations where patient care is unacceptably compromised,” read a letter to budget negotiators, signed by the Ohio Hospital Association, the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association, the Ohio State Medical Association, and the Ohio Association of Health Plans.

Gov. DeWine could have struck the language while signing the rest of the budget into law, but declined to do so, despite issuing 14 other line-item vetoes.

State and national LGBTQ advocates started sounding the alarm in June, when the language was introduced, saying that it will prevent LGBTQ people from accessing the health care they need. With this newly enacted language in place, a medical provider could refuse to prescribe PrEP to an LGBTQ patient looking to reduce their risk of contracting HIV, or refuse to provide gender-affirming care to trans and nonbinary patients, or puberty blockers to transgender minors. Equality Ohio called it a “license to discriminate,” and Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David said that it jeopardizes “the medical well being of more than 380,000 LGBTQ people in Ohio.”

Gov. DeWine has insisted that this provision won’t change the standard of care in Ohio. “This is not a problem,” he told a local news station. “If there’s other things that maybe a doctor has a problem with, it’s worked out. Somebody else does those things” — referring to a loosely written clause that requires that the medical professional, when possible, “attempt to transfer the patient to a colleague who will provide the requested procedure,” as long as making that referral doesn’t violate their conscience as well.

But even if the medical professional does attempt to make that referral, a quarter of Ohio’s population lives in rural counties, where LGBTQ-friendly medical care is sparse. And for queer elders living in long-term care facilities, options are even slimmer.

Local advocates have also called foul on lawmakers’ move to insert the clause last-minute into the state’s massive two-year, 2,400-page budget bill. “They know that they couldn’t pass this on its merits as a standalone bill, because literally no one is asking for this to be passed,” Dominic Detwiler, a public policy strategist for Equality Ohio told the Columbus Dispatch.

 

Right-wing assholes like DeWine have used tactics like these for generations: if you want to get rid of "undesirables" just legalize discrimination that codifies them as second-class citizens. Nothing's more American.

And of course, the Roberts Court will see that this legalized discrimination remains "constitutional".

The Big Lie, Con't

Pennsylvania Republicans, having learned nothing from the hubris of Arizona Republicans, now plan to conduct their own "forensic audit" of the 2020 election. To make things even worse (and to waste even more taxpayer dollars) the PA "audit" will include multiple counties, not just Arizona's one.

 

A Republican state senator close to former President Donald Trump has announced he will pursue a legislative audit of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin, said Wednesday that he had sent letters to “several counties” asking for “information and materials” needed to conduct a “forensic investigation” of the 2020 general election and the 2021 primary.

“This investigation is not about overturning the results of either election,” he wrote in an opinion piece sent to Pennsylvania news outlets. “The goals are to restore faith in the integrity of our system, confirm the effectiveness of existing legislation on the governance of elections, and identify areas for legislative reform.”

Mastriano, who has promoted false claims of a stolen election, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the op-Ed, the central Pennsylvania lawmaker did not specify which counties he had requested information from. The counties also represent “different geographical regions” and “differing political makeups,” Mastriano said in the opinion piece. He added that it will be a “balanced investigation.”

*At least two counties have confirmed they received a letter from Mastriano: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city and a Democratic stronghold, as well as York County, a large, reliably Republican county in south-central Pennsylvania.

The letter states that legislative changes to the election code, the COVID-19 pandemic, state Supreme Court rulings and actions by former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar “presented unprecedented challenges” and “combined to cause a great burden on counties and county officials during the general election cycle.”

“The damage to the integrity and confidence in our election process will not be undone with the passing of time,” the letter continues. “I believe the only way to restore confidence in our Commonwealth‘s election process is to undertake a forensic investigation of the election results. By doing this, faith in our election system will be restored.”

The letter requests that York County turnover potentially hundreds of thousands of items, including all ballots cast in the 2020 election, voter rolls, ballot paper samples, cybersecurity protocols, software used through the election process, and the machines used to tabulate results, among others.

Mastriano set a July 31 deadline for the counties to respond with a plan to comply. A subpoena may be issued if a plan to comply with the documents request is not returned by the deadline, the letter says.

A spokesperson for York County declined further comment besides confirming they had received the letter.

 

No doubt that just like Arizona, Pennsylvania's "audit" will subcontract the job out to Trump-friendly Republicans, followed by comically bad faith efforts, a complete travesty of any chain of custody efforts of the ballots and the voting machines, and for a Democratic Secretary of State, in this case Kathy Boockvar, to find that the entire disaster will end up costing multiple counties millions to purchase new voting equipment.

This will go even worse than in the Grand Canyon State, I expect.

Watch.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The right-wing noise machine wants the deadly January 6th insurrection of six months ago to disappear completely from the national stage, and it's working better than even I expected it to.

 

Six months after their leader tried to overturn the election he had lost by more than 7 million votes, Republicans have settled on a message about the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol: Insurrection? What insurrection?

From calls to let bygones be bygones, to punishing dissidents who dare criticize former President Donald Trump for instigating that day’s attack, to literally describing the mob as no different from everyday “tourists,” the Republican Party ― with notable exceptions ― has pushed the idea that the unprecedented attempt to overthrow American democracy was really no big deal.

And, if recent polling is correct, they appear to be succeeding. According to a recent Morning Consult survey, fully 41% of Americans believe that the riot of Jan. 6 has received “too much attention,” compared with 50% who do not. That figure is driven by 68% of Republicans who say that but includes more than a third of independents and even a quarter of Democrats.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who believes the country barely dodged a constitutional crisis on Jan. 6, said many Americans simply would rather not think about that day.

“It’s human nature to suppress terrible forebodings that don’t quite materialize,” he said, adding that the barrage of Trump-inspired crises during his term likely laid the groundwork. “The cascade of terrible events and near-misses over the past four years has desensitized people if not entirely anesthetized them.”

Hans Noel, a political science professor at Georgetown University, said that Republicans also have an active interest in wishing Jan. 6 away.

“Generally, conservatives, particularly those who get their news from other conservatives, will come to downplay the attack,” Noel said. “Some of that is just believing it’s not a big deal. Some of it is not wanting to talk about uncomfortable facts as they come out. But this is the main thing: The partisan messaging on this has been to downplay it for Republicans, Trump supporters and others on the right.”

Whatever its causes, the process of memory-holing that day reflects Trump’s continued success at fashioning an outrageous lie and then browbeating Republican leaders into going along with him.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, for example, said on Jan. 13 on the House floor that Trump “bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” Within weeks, he had gone to visit Trump at his Palm Beach resort and posed for a photo with him. And, at the six-month mark of the mob assault, he is attacking those few GOP House members, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney, who refuse to bend to Trump’s will.

McCarthy’s office did not respond to HuffPost queries. On Thursday, he said of Cheney’s acceptance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to serve on a select committee to investigate Jan. 6: “Maybe she’s closer to her than us.” He had warned Republicans who would serve on that panel that they would be stripped of their committee assignments.

“If most Americans have indeed forgotten about Jan. 6, that is in part due to the tenacious efforts of the GOP to downplay it,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University. “For a party whose brand is law enforcement, Jan. 6′s murderous rage against Capitol Police could turn voters off. So they deny the violence ― Trump turned it into ‘hugs and kisses’ ― and block any investigation that would place the facts of it in the public realm.”

 

So yeah, "Why don't you liberals shut up about January 6th already" is a thing, and nearly half the country agrees, even a quarter of Democrats.

 

It's okay though.

 

We'll have a brand-new horrible domestic terrorism event or six to talk about very soon, I imagine.

StupidiNews!

• Florida officials say the search and rescue mission at a collapsed condo building in Surfside has now changed to a recovery mission as the death toll has risen to 46.
• Former US President Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn are celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary this week as the Carters will host a reception in their hometown on Saturday.
• A Texas federal judge has found the US Air Force responsible for a 2017 mass church shooting by failing to prevent the gunman from purchasing weapons a background check would have stopped.
• President Biden faces the decision to keep or replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and could replace three other central bank governors this year.
• Chinese mobile phone games are now requiring facial recognition scans to play at night as Beijing cracks down on kids playing games during the country's official nightly gaming curfew for minors.
  

Last Call For Mitch Better Have My Money, Con't

Delusional Republican voters lie to themselves as much as their GOP politicians lie to them, so it all makes sense in the end that reality is meaningless as long as their side "wins".

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for touting the benefits of the stimulus law for his home state of Kentucky. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief law cleared Congress in March without any Republican support.

"Vote no and take the dough," Pelosi wrote on Twitter.

At a press conference on Tuesday, McConnell swung between noting his opposition to the federal rescue package and crediting it with providing substantial financial relief for Kentucky.

"Not a single member of my party voted for it. So you're going to get a lot more money," McConnell said. "I didn't vote for it, but you're going to get a lot more money. Cities and counties in Kentucky will get close to $700-$800 million."

The Kentucky Republican said the state was projected to get $4 billion as a result of the stimulus law. "So my advice to members of the legislature and other local officials: Spend it wisely because hopefully this windfall doesn't come along again," McConnell said.

Republicans were staunchly opposed to Biden's stimulus law, which contained $1,400 direct payments, a renewal of federal unemployment benefits, and aid to state and local governments. They argued it was too large and costly after lawmakers had approved a $900 billion federal rescue package late in 2020. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for it.

However, at least a dozen congressional Republicans have since touted parts of the law, such as small business aid, even though they didn't support the law's passage. Biden rebuked the GOP earlier this year for "bragging" about the law, saying, "some people have no shame."

Also on Tuesday, McConnell pledged a bruising political brawl over Democratic efforts to bypass Republicans to implement their infrastructure spending plans. "This is not going to be done on a bipartisan basis," he said. "This is going to be a hell of a fight over what this country ought to look like in the future and it's going to unfold here in the next few weeks."

 

So Mitch to Kentucky:

1. We didn't vote to give you anything.
2. You're getting money because of Biden and the Democrats.
   
3. We're taking credit for it anyway. 
4. Vote Republican!

 Yes, it's delusional. Yes, Republican voters believe every word of it.

Dennis Beckett wasn't even sure he wanted to cash his stimulus check, especially after he received a letter from President Biden announcing its arrival. Beckett, a retired pipe fitter, owns 25 firearms and staunchly opposes the president's call for restrictions on high-capacity magazines.

After thinking about it for a few days, Beckett finally decided to use the money to fix up his century-old home, recently purchased for $30,000.

But even as the stimulus makes his renovation possible, Beckett also blames it for the rising cost of the construction materials he needs. “Ever since January 20th, everything has shot up,” Beckett said, referring to the day Biden was inaugurated. “Just look at gas — it’s $3 a gallon, when it had been $1.79.”

Beckett’s ambivalence is echoed across Monroe County, made up of small towns and family farms tucked in the Appalachian region of southeastern Ohio.

In this impoverished pocket of the United States, the most recent round of stimulus payments — $1,400 for Americans who earn up to $75,000 — was the difference between getting a medical treatment and not, enrolling a child in college and not. But political divisions are deep here, and Trump voters, who make up the great majority of residents, are blaming the payments for a range of ills.

Some here say the Biden stimulus checks are keeping people from work, fueling a sense that the undeserving are exploiting the system. As the price of basic goods climbs, others worry that the stimulus will lead to runaway inflation on wood, cars, even milk.

“My God-honest opinion was at first that it was nice that the government was helping people,” said Brad Jeffries, 50, a truck driver who was laid off for most of last year and used the stimulus to pay off bills. “But since we got that, everything has went up, so how is that helping people out?”

This former Democratic stronghold has shifted right recently, and many residents now refer to the area as “Trump country.” In 2020, President Donald Trump received an average of 72 percent of the vote in the 420 counties covered by the Appalachian Regional Commission, a joint federal-state agency that steers resources to the 13-state region.

Biden has promised to win some of those voters back with economic incentives like the stimulus and the expanded child tax credit program, which will begin monthly payments to parents in mid-July of $350 per-child under the age 6, and $250 per child for children between 6 and 17.

A Washington Post analysis estimates that more than 90 percent of Trump voters in Monroe County received stimulus checks, one of the highest rates in the region.

“The president understands when we raise the quality of life and achievement of rural America, we improve the quality of life for all Americans,” said Gayle Manchin, whom Biden appointed co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission this spring.

But many of Monroe County’s Trump supporters don’t see it that way. Danny Long, a 41-year-old truck driver, was unemployed for much of last year and was behind on rent and utility bills.

The stimulus helped him catch up. But he credits Republicans for the checks, noting that Americans also received two stimulus payments during the last year of Trump’s presidency. “Biden didn’t do this,” Long said. “Trump did.”

 

So either the Biden stimulus "caused inflation", rather than the basic economics of demand reasserting itself after a depression-strength crash, or it's the Trump stimulus and he gets the credit for it. Also, apparently only Trump voters matter. You'd never, ever, ever see a single story where the people who voted for Biden are happy that they got the money they needed.

You can't win over a self-delusional cultist.

Dems need to stop trying to save people who would literally rather die than be helped and save who want to be helped. You will never appease them, and they will never stop trying to destroy Democrats and their voters.

They will never, ever stop.