Last Call For Trump's Taxing Explanation, Con't

As I keep saying, they got Al Capone on tax fraud, too.

 

A witness in the New York investigation against the Trump Organization has told prosecutors that Donald Trump personally guaranteed he would cover school costs for the family members of two employees in lieu of a raise—directly implicating the former president in an ongoing criminal tax fraud case.

The explosive claims come from Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of a longtime company employee, during a teleconference call with investigators on Friday, June 25, according to two sources who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity.

On that afternoon's Zoom call, those sources said, investigators with the Manhattan district attorney and New York state attorney general asked Jennifer Weisselberg whether Trump himself was involved in the company’s alleged tax-dodging scheme of making corporate gifts instead of increasing salary that would be taxed.

He was, she answered.

Weisselberg then provided key details for investigators. In January 2012, inside Trump’s office at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Jennifer Weisselberg watched as Trump discussed compensation with her husband and her father-in-law, both company employees. Her husband wouldn’t be getting a raise, but their children would get their tuition paid for at a top-rated private academy instead.

Weisselberg allegedly relayed to prosecutors that Trump turned to her and said: "Don’t worry, I’ve got it covered.”

Prosecutors were astonished, according to one source.

The Daily Beast received descriptions of the call from two people familiar with the details of the call.

According to two sources, among the prosecutors on the call were Carey Dunne, the Manhattan DA’s general counsel; Mark F. Pomerantz, a white collar crime specialist brought on for this investigation; and Gary Fishman, an assistant attorney general deputized to work on this joint investigation.

If true, Jennifer Weisselberg’s claims would directly tie Trump to what a New York criminal indictment described as a corporate scheme to pay executives “in a matter that was ‘off the books.’”

“The scheme allowed the Trump Organization to evade the payment of payroll taxes that [it] was required to pay,” an indictment for the Trump Organization claims. On the flip side, it also alleges that executives avoided having to pay income taxes on a huge chunk of their pay.

Neither the Manhattan DA nor the state AG would comment on this story. Jennifer Weisselberg declined as well.

 

The question remains if Trump himself will be indicted.

My fear remains that the moment he is, the country burns.

The Big Lie, Con't

Trump cultists are running on The Big Lie openly now in Georgia, and they will in contests across the country in 2021 and beyond. Every journalist needs to ask every Republican candidate or elected if they acknowledge Biden's win. Increasingly, the answer is "no."

The organizers at the door handed out soft-pink “Trump Won” signs to each attendee. An out-of-state radio host spouted far-right conspiracies. Speaker after speaker insisted that Joe Biden couldn’t have won the November election and that Georgia couldn’t be a blue state.

The gathering this week in Rome might seem like a pro-Donald Trump fantasy convention. But this was no fringe group. Some of the biggest stars in the Georgia GOP were in attendance.

State Sen. Burt Jones, a wealthy executive who is expected to run for lieutenant governor, was given a hero’s welcome. A fellow Republican, state Sen. Brandon Beach, regaled the group with stories about standing up to the party establishment. Two other congressional candidates worked the room.

And U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene opened by telling the crowd, “I do not think Joe Biden won the election.”

Across the state, candidates for public office are repeating Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and the contest was stolen from him. Many are running for local office and state legislative seats, while some are seeking the most powerful posts in the state.

The conspiracy theories are already complicating GOP primaries in Georgia, as Republicans try to fend off ascendant Democrats fresh off a string of victories in November’s presidential election and January’s U.S. Senate runoffs.

The leading candidates competing to challenge Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock have raised questions about the election results and echoed the phony narrative of widespread voting fraud in Georgia.

And the early maneuvering in races for statewide posts, including governor and secretary of state, have focused on debunked claims that voter fraud was rampant in Georgia last year.

The evidence is clear. Three separate tallies of the roughly 5 million ballots upheld Biden’s narrow victory, court challenges by Trump allies were squashed, and state and federal election officials have vouched for the results.

An audit of absentee ballot signatures in Cobb County found no cases of fraud. While investigators are still probing more than 100 complaints from November, they would not change the election result even if every allegation is substantiated. Neither would a lawsuit pushing for a deeper review of Fulton County ballots.

But Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of a “rigged” election have seeped deeply into the Georgia GOP and left his critics marginalized.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed a broad majority of conservatives support a Republican-backed election overhaul that includes new restrictions on voting. A spate of national polls, including from CNN, indicate most Republicans don’t believe Biden won.

The few Georgia Republicans who have spoken in defense of the results have faced ridicule from their own.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who oversaw the election and rejected Trump’s demand that he overturn its results, is the underdog in his race against a formidable GOP challenger endorsed by Trump. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan opted against a reelection bid to focus on his vision for a post-Trump era.

In an interview, Duncan said every time Republicans falsely assert the election was stolen it “makes the pathway for Democrats even easier.”

“Our job, as Republicans, is to walk into every GOP meeting whether it’s comfortable or uncomfortable and convince them there’s no fraud,” he said.

 

The apostates like Raffensperger and Duncan will be purged from the ranks entirely in a few years. Understand that the purpose of The Big Lie is for it to be used as justification for everything the cult does for the rest of the decade, and longer.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

To be clear, it's not moronic cowards like this clown like this who I'm afraid of.

 

A Kentucky man charged with threatening Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio over the district’s mask mandate told WAVE-TV his comments were taken out of context.

Bradley Linzy went inside the district’s central office in Louisville on Monday and began arguing with staff about the mask requirement for unvaccinated students and staff, according to court documents. After leaving the building, school security officers found Linzy outside in his car, where he admitted to having a gun.

Linzy is accused of confronting Pollio as the superintendent was leaving the building, telling him, “Your life is f(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) over and career as you know it," and, “You don’t know what I’m capable of doing.”

He told the television station that he was not threatening Pollio's life.

"I said, ‘Your life is over as it pertains to your career, sir.’ I said, ‘I have enough of a following that I could make this very difficult for you,’ etc. etc. kinda thing. I didn’t, I wasn’t threatening the man’s life or anything like that.”

Linzy has a YouTube channel with videos about guitars and other instruments, with more than 120,000 followers.

As for his other comment, “You don’t know what I am capable of," Linzy said he made it to the security officer when he was asked if he had any weapons.

“I was agreeing with him,” Linzy said. “He was like, ‘I have to ask. I’m just doing my job.’ And I was like, ‘I understand that.’ I said, ‘You don’t know what I’m capable of. I get it.’ That’s what that was about.”

Linzy said he went to the district office after calling multiple times to try to speak to someone about the schools' mask mandate. He said he is concerned for his 10-year-old daughter who is on the autism spectrum.

“With these mask mandates, and her being in a mask, and all of her peers being in a mask, it makes it doubly hard for her to understand people’s emotions,” he said.

 

Using his own child's autism as an excuse for this behavior and hiding behind it makes Brad Linzy a coward and a fool. He's not the person I'm worried about.

 

I'm worried about one of his 120,000 YouTube followers who decides that the next Jefferson County school board meeting or Louisville City Council meeting needs to be "disrupted" by an AR-15. Odds a really good the security at those meetings will deal with anything like that.

 

But if it's, say, a dozen "like-minded" individuals?  Well, that gets dicey, fast.

 

Maybe nothing even approaching that happens here in Kentucky.

 

But maybe it does. And frankly, it wouldn't be difficult at all to start.

 

Where, when, and how it ends, well...

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

It was only a matter of time before the Russian leaks about Trump's assistance from Vlad and the boys in 2016 started coming out in the wake of Trump's loss, and The Guardian apparently has a big ol' pile of documents to prove it.

Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.

The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present.

They agreed a Trump White House would help secure Moscow’s strategic objectives, among them “social turmoil” in the US and a weakening of the American president’s negotiating position.

Russia’s three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature.

By this point Trump was the frontrunner in the Republican party’s nomination race. A report prepared by Putin’s expert department recommended Moscow use “all possible force” to ensure a Trump victory.

Western intelligence agencies are understood to have been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.

The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.

The Kremlin responded dismissively. Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said the idea that Russian leaders had met and agreed to support Trump in at the meeting in early 2016 was “a great pulp fiction” when contacted by the Guardian on Thursday morning.

The report – “No 32-04 \ vd” – is classified as secret. It says Trump is the “most promising candidate” from the Kremlin’s point of view. The word in Russian is perspektivny.

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.

“It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.

 

Yes, we've heard this all before.  Yes, the Trump regime, the GOP, and press on both the left and the right treated it as everything from planted Chinese intel to help Hillary to CIA "Deep State" disinformation (also to help Hillary) and everything in between. 

Here's the thing though, if we keep getting multiple credible stories about it from multiple credible sources over several years, and not believe the deranged missives of delusional Trump cultists and their fellow travelers instead, the stories just might be true in this case. 

 

Just saying. With all this naugahyde, there's got to be a live nauga here.

Of course, the most likely possibility is that Kremlin leaked these docs on purpose, because it's the destabilizing chaos that keeps on giving. Keep that in mind too.

These Disunited States, Con't

 No, I don't think the United States as we know it is going to survive my lifetime. Call me a pessimist, but number like these and the trend upwards into succession.

A new YouGov survey conducted on behalf of a democracy watchdog group finds that 66 percent of Republicans living in the South say they’d support seceding from the United States to join a union with other Southern states.

Secession is actually gaining support among Southern Republicans: back in January and February, 50 percent said they’d support such a proposal.

It sure is a good thing there aren’t any troubling historic precedents for what happens when large numbers of Southern conservatives, motivated in large part by a sense of grievance and victimhood, want to break away from the Union.

Oh, wait.

Those findings come from Bright Line Watch, a group that conducts regular polls of political scientists and the American public to monitor attitudes toward democracy. They’ve started polling this question because “it taps into respondents’ commitments to the American political system at the highest level and with reference to a concrete alternative (regional unions).”

While Southern Republicans are the group most in favor of succession, they’re not the only ones. Across the country, Bright Line Watch finds, people have more favorable views toward secession when their political party is dominant in their region.

 

 

 

I don't think we can stay together much longer without a fight. 

Yeah, maybe I'm screaming into the abyss, but then again, we goddamn elected Trump.

 

In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes may attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

A spokesman for Milley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Portions of the book related to Milley — first reported Wednesday night by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release — offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history.

The episodes in the book are based on interviews with more than 140 people, including senior Trump administration officials, friends and advisers, Leonnig and Rucker write in an author’s note. Most agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity and the scenes reported were reconstructed based on firsthand accounts and multiple other sources whenever possible.

Milley — who was widely criticized last year for appearing alongside Trump in Lafayette Square after protesters were forcibly cleared from the area — had pledged to use his office to ensure a free and fair election with no military involvement. But he became increasingly concerned in the days following the November contest, making multiple references to the onset of 20th century fascism.

After attending a Nov. 10 security briefing about the “Million MAGA March,” a pro-Trump rally protesting the election, Milley said he feared an American equivalent of “brownshirts in the streets,” alluding to the paramilitary forces that protected Nazi rallies and enabled Hitler’s ascent.

Late that same evening, according to the book, an old friend called Milley to express concerns that those close to Trump were attempting to “overturn the government.”

“You are one of the few guys who are standing between us and some really bad stuff,” the friend told Milley, according to an account relayed to his aides. Milley was shaken, Leonnig and Rucker write, and he called former national security adviser H.R. McMaster to ask whether a coup was actually imminent.

“What the f--- am I dealing with?” Milley asked him.

The conversations put Milley on edge, and he began informally planning with other military leaders, strategizing how they would block Trump’s order to use the military in a way they deemed dangerous or illegal.

 

This is stuff we needed to know 12 months ago, but Milley was covering his ass.  So yeah, don't tell me it can't happen here, because we were one election away from it happening right now.

The Good Package, Con't

 Democrats are getting together the Good Package.

It looks like final negotiations on the reconciliation-powered massive Biden bill are now underway.

Senate Democratic leaders announced an agreement Tuesday evening to advance a $3.5 trillion spending plan to finance a major expansion of the economic safety net.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the $3.5 trillion would be in addition to the $579 billion in new spending in the bipartisan infrastructure agreement.

He said the deal would include a "robust expansion of Medicare" that would include new benefits like dental, vision and hearing coverage, along with major funding for clean energy. "If we pass this, this is the most profound change to help American families in generations," he said.

"Joe Biden is coming to our lunch tomorrow to lead us on to getting this wonderful plan that affects American families in a so profound way, more than anything that's happened to generations," Schumer told reporters. "We are very proud of this plan. We know we have a long road to go. We're going to get this done for the sake of making average Americans' lives a whole lot better."

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., a member of the Budget and Finance committees, said the plan would be "fully paid for."

The agreement would prohibit tax increases on small businesses and people making under $400,000, a Democratic aide familiar with the deal said.

The announcement points to a challenge for Democrats, who will have to agree on a massive bill that is financed with new tax revenue to pass it through razor-thin congressional majorities, with no realistic hope of winning Republican support.

Democrats have no margin for error in the 50-50 Senate, and they can lose just four votes in the House before the legislation would be in danger of failing.

"This is, in our view, a pivotal moment in American history," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the Budget Committee chairman, told reporters.

"What this legislation says among many, many other things is that those days are gone. The wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families in this country," he said.

The agreement, a significant decrease from Sanders' $6 trillion proposal, is an attempt to achieve consensus in an ideologically diverse Democratic Party with a host of competing interests. The legislation has yet to be written.

Senate Democratic leaders hope to advance both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the party-line budget reconciliation bill this month, before Congress leaves for the August recess.

 

A lot of things can still go wrong here, and even if the bill passes and signed into law, I expect Republicans to tie up in court for years, and for the legislation to be all but dismantled by the Roberts Court. But that's a battle for 2025 or so.

We still have to get through 2021. And Mitch McConnell could still derail everything by pushing for a bipartisan deal that stalls the $3.5 Good Package, and one that he ultimately kills in the end.

Something strange is happening in Washington: Mitch McConnell might go along with a central piece of Joe Biden’s agenda.

The self-appointed “Grim Reaper” of the Senate, a minority leader who said just two months ago that “100% of my focus is on standing up to this administration,” has been remarkably circumspect about the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal. He’s privately telling his members to separate that effort from Democrats’ party-line $3.5 trillion spending plan and publicly observed there’s a “decent” chance for its success.

Other than questioning its financing, McConnell has aired little criticism of the bipartisan agreement to fund roads, bridges and other physical infrastructure, even as he panned Democrats’ separate spending plans on Wednesday as “wildly out of proportion” given the nation's inflation rate.

His cautious approach to a top Biden priority reflects the divide among Senate Republicans over whether to collaborate with Democrats on part of the president’s spending plans while fighting tooth and nail on the rest. Many Democrats predict McConnell will kill the agreement after stringing talks out for weeks, but the current infrastructure talks are particularly sensitive for the GOP leader because one of his close allies, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, is the senior Republican negotiator.

McConnell is aware of the conventional wisdom that he will ultimately knife the deal and is taking pains not to become the face of its opposition.

“He usually is the brunt of the demonization of the other side,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another McConnell confidant. “I don’t think he is Dr. No when it comes to all legislation.”

For the moment at least, McConnell’s approach marks a shift from his past strategy of blocking Democratic priorities to portray the governing party as chaotic and inefficient. Advisers say he understands the bipartisan appeal of infrastructure and views it as less ideological than other Democratic priorities.

No guarantees on anything. But McConnell really wants the bipartisan deal now because he realizes that "President Biden and the Democrats passed legislation to fix roads, bridges, and water pipes and Senator/Representative X voted against it, and now they want credit for it" is wildly effective.

Democrats should move on without him, or the GOP.

Give us the Good Package.

Last Call For Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

Finally coming to his senses, President Biden won't be leaving thousands of Afghan translators and interpreters and their families to be butchered by Taliban forces as the US finally slinks away from the mother of all Unfinished Bush Business.

The Biden administration is set to begin evacuations of Afghan interpreters and translators who aided the U.S. military effort in the nearly 20-year war, an administration official said.

The Operation Allies Refuge flights out of Afghanistan during the last week of July will be available first for special immigrant visa applicants already in the process of applying for U.S. residency, according to the senior administration official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

President Joe Biden has faced pressure from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to come up with a plan to help evacuate Afghan military helpers ahead of next month’s U.S. military withdrawal. The White House began briefing lawmakers on the outlines of their plans last month.

The evacuation planning could potentially affect tens of thousands of Afghans. Several thousand Afghans who worked for the U.S. — plus their family members — are already in the application pipeline for special immigrant visas. 

The Biden administration has also been working on identifying a third country or U.S. territory that could host Afghans while their visa applications are processed.

The administration is weighing using State Department-chartered commercial aircraft, not military aircraft, according to a second administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. But if the State Department requests military aircraft, the U.S. military would be ready to assist, the official said.

Tracey Jacobson, a three-time chief of mission in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kosovo, is leading the State Department coordination unit that will deliver on the president’s commitment under Operation Allies Refuge. That unit also includes representatives from the defense and homeland security departments.

Russ Travers, deputy homeland security adviser and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, is coordinating the interagency policy process on Operation Allies Refuge, officials said.

Separately, the White House announced that Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, the White House homeland security adviser, would lead a U.S. delegation to a security conference in Uzbekistan this week to discuss Afghanistan’s security issues with leaders from the Central 5 — Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia — and other regional players.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. special envoy on Afghanistan reconciliation, are also expected to take part in the conference.

U.S. officials have said that one possibility under discussion is to relocate the Afghan visa applicants to neighboring countries in Central Asia, where they could be protected from possible retaliation by the Taliban or other groups.

 

Frankly, we should be giving these folks a tickertape parade and full US citizenship for their lives, not to mention 20 years of military back pay for risking their lives along with our troops in the Sandbox for two decades, but getting them out of Dodge is literally the least we could do for them and their families.

I'm glad Biden is doing this, but it's not like he had any choice.

Here's hoping they all get out safely.

Tennessee Goes Viral

As the number of new COVID-19 cases have doubled this month from last month due to the dangerous Delta Variant spreading among the unvaccinated in red states like Missouri and Louisiana, and 4th of July holiday celebrations turning into super-spreader events, the problem remains that red states are doing everything they can to downplay the pandemic's rise. In Tennessee, the state's top vaccine official was fired this week over outreach efforts to vaccinate kids against COVID.

Tennessee’s former top vaccinations official said Tuesday that she couldn’t stay silent after she was fired this week amid scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to vaccinate teenagers against COVID-19.

Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who was the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, said the state’s elected leaders put politics over the health of children by firing her for her efforts to get more Tennesseans vaccinated.

She said the agency presented her with a letter of resignation and a letter of termination Monday, but no reason for why she was being let go.

After choosing the termination letter, Fiscus penned a blistering 1,200-word response in which she said she is ashamed of Tennessee’s leaders, afraid for her state, and “angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind.”

She also revealed that the Tennessee Department of Health has halted all outreach efforts around any kind of vaccines for children, not just COVID-19 ones, which The Tennessean confirmed through department documents. All of it, she warned, comes as only 38% of Tennesseans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, lagging behind much of the nation.

“I don’t think they realized how much of an advocate I am for public health and how intolerant of injustice I am,” Fiscus told The Associated Press on Tuesday in one of several interviews with numerous news outlets.

So far, Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s administration has been silent on the firing. His office and the Health Department declined to comment, citing personnel matters. After an event Tuesday, Lee did not answer questions from reporters.

Democrats blasted the firing, with Sen. Raumesh Akbari saying Fiscus was “sacrificed in favor of anti-vaccine ideology.” House Speaker Cameron Sexton was one of few Republicans to weigh in, saying through a spokesperson that health officials made the decision internally.

“While members have expressed concerns about the department’s recent vaccine marketing strategy, Speaker Sexton will not speculate on the factors that went into this decision,” said Sexton’s spokesperson, Doug Kufner. “However, Speaker Sexton does believe that those who have voiced their dissent agree with yesterday’s outcome.”

Republican Sen. Richard Briggs, a physician, said he’s also unsure why Fiscus got fired, but said “it would be wrong if the reason for her firing was because she had a campaign to try to get our children vaccinated.” He said he doesn’t want to second-guess the department, but “because of the way it at least looks superficially without the details being known, there probably needs to be some clarification.”

During a June committee meeting, angry Republican lawmakers invoked Fiscus’ name over a letter she sent to medical providers who administer vaccines explaining the state’s legal mechanism letting them vaccinate minors as young as 14 without parental consent, called the “Mature Minor Doctrine.” The letter was in response to providers’ questions and didn’t contain new information.

Fiscus said the health department’s attorney provided the letter. The attorney, she said, had said the letter had been “blessed by the governor’s office.” She said the doctrine was based on a 1987 Tennessee Supreme Court ruling and her job was to explain what is allowable.

Republican lawmakers also admonished the agency for its communications about the vaccine, including online posts. One graphic, featuring a photo of a smiling child with a Band-Aid on his arm, said, “Tennesseans 12+ are eligible for vaccines. Give COVID-19 vaccines a shot.”

During the hearing, Republican Rep. Scott Cepicky held a printout of a Facebook ad saying teens were eligible, calling the agency’s advocacy “reprehensible” and likening it to peer pressure.

Asked about the hearing, the governor last month said generally that the state will “continue to encourage folks to seek access – adults for their children, and adults for themselves to make the personal choice for vaccine.”

 

Again, many of us live in states where a majority of our neighbors are not vaccinated and never will be. The disinformation campaign against the vaccine might be the single greatest evil act perpetrated against the US in my lifetime, one that will end up killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions in the months and years ahead.

We're going to have to deal with the fallout of unvaccinated states, and it's going to be clear by Labor Day I think that the pandemic is far from over. The real test is how states respond to the coming Delta surge in cases, and in most of the states where this will happen, the answer will be, by law, absolutely nothing.

This fall and winter will be a nightmare.

Texas Two-Steppin' Out, Con't

My prediction yesterday that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the state GOP would move to arrest Texas Democratic lawmakers for leaving town was one of the easiest calls I think I've ever made, as Republicans in the state legislature voted swiftly to issue arrest warrants.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said that Democratic lawmakers who have left the state can and "will be arrested" upon their return as he pushes ahead with changes in voting laws.

Abbott, a Republican, gave an interview to KVUE on Monday about the Democrats' decision to leave the state and whether the special session of the Texas legislature the governor called can go ahead.

The Democratic legislators flew out of Texas to Washington, D.C. on Monday in order to deny the legislature the two-thirds quorum needed in order to conduct business and to pass legislation.

KVUE asked Abbott if the Democratic walkout meant the voting bills - Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3 - could not be passed and if he could do anything as governor to compel the lawmakers to return to the state.

Abbott said there "still remains plenty of time to pass not just the bills you mentioned but there's a lot of other bills on there."

He highlighted some of the measures other than voting reforms. He then addressed the issue of the quorum.

"Answering your second question, yes, there is something the governor can do," Abbott said.

"First of all, I'll tell you what the House of Representatives can do. What the speaker can do is issue a call to have these members arrested.

"In addition to that, however, I can and I will continue to call a special session after special session after special session all the way up until election next year. And so if these people want to be hanging out wherever they're hanging out on this taxpayer-paid junket, they're going to have to be prepared to do it for well over a year," the governor said.

 

I fully expect this situation to get far worse. Don't be surprised if nutjobs decide to make citizens' arrests of these lawmakers, too. Abbott wants blood, he wants to see Democrats in chains, and thrown in jail. So do his voters, and my guess is they're going to get it.

It will be a bloody spectacle, and it won't be the last we see involving the arrest of Democratic party politicians, I think.

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.