Last Call For Finally Joining The Fray

President Biden is finally realizing that without the end of the filibuster, that his entire legacy is in danger, and we will never have free and fair elections in GOP states. He's finally realized that he's the last card in the deck to be played to convince Manchin and Sinema to go along, or it's all over.

With a make-or-break vote looming in the Senate on a sweeping voting-rights and anti-corruption bill, President Joe Biden and his advisers have said in recent weeks that Biden will pressure wavering Democrats to support reforming the filibuster if necessary to pass the voting bill.

According to three people briefed on the White House’s position and its recent communications with outside groups, Biden assured Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he was ready to push for filibuster reform. Biden’s pressure would aim to help Schumer convince moderate Democrats to support a carveout to the filibuster, a must for the party if it’s going to pass new voting protections without Republican votes. According to a source briefed on the White House’s position, Biden told Schumer: “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls.”

The Senate returns to work this upcoming week, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intends to call a vote on the For the People Act, the most ambitious reform bill in decades and the Democrats’ best shot at countering the wave of state-level GOP voter suppression laws this year. But to get the bill out of Congress, Senate Democrats will almost certainly need to change the filibuster, the procedural tactic used by the minority party to block many types of legislation.

Publicly, there are two centrist Democrats who have stated their opposition to changing or abolishing the filibuster, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Activist groups and fellow Democratic senators say Manchin and Sinema are the likely 49th and 50th votes both on any voting-rights legislation and especially any filibuster reforms. Sources say both senators are likely targets for when Biden launches his final push to pass a compromise version of the For the People Act.

“I think there’s a clear recognition the president will have a role to play in bringing this over the finish line, and if in order to do that, we need [filibuster] rules reform, then so be it,” says Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), who helped write the original version of the For the People Act. “I think Joe Biden with his long history and experience in the Senate can see that.”

A White House spokesman declined to comment on any private conversations between Biden and congressional leaders. The official said that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been “deeply involved” with the push to pass new voting protections. “The president and vice president have been very clear that this is a crucial priority and senior White House staff across many departments are constantly working on it,” the official said.

Even with a lobbying blitz from Biden, the path to passing the For the People Act is a tricky one. A group of senators will soon release a compromise version of the For the People Act intended to satisfy Manchin’s concerns about earlier versions of the bill. Sources familiar with the compromise bill say it will focus on shoring up voting rights against GOP suppression laws, crack down on dark money and partisan gerrymandering, and create new policies to stop attempts at election subversion like what happened after the 2020 presidential election.

But even if the revised bill earns the support of all Democrats, it won’t be enough to overcome the filibuster. Schumer will not only need to prevent a single defection on the bill itself but also convince — with Biden’s help — all 50 Democrats to create a carveout in the filibuster for voting-rights-related legislation.

 

Carveout rules already exist for nominations and budget reconciliation thanks to the GOP, but of course this will be sold as the end of the Republic, and most likely it will fail.

We'll see if this moves Manchin and Sinema at all. My fear is that it won't and the entire $3.5 trillion Good Package will fall along with it, and doom the Democrats and our country for decades.

As E.J. Dionne notes, failing to enact these measures in the weeks ahead could very well doom the American experiment.

Yes, the stakes are that high. The horror of what so many Republican-dominated state governments have done — most recently in Texas — to restrict access to the ballot and undercut the honest and nonpartisan counting of ballots presents Democrats with only two options: Act uncompromisingly at the national level to ensure democracy everywhere, or accept that many states in our union will, in important ways, cease to be democratic.

Killing a strong voting rights bill means accepting, to evoke Abraham Lincoln’s declaration on slavery, a nation half-democratic and half undemocratic.

Here again, the clarity of the hazard is pushing even reluctant Democrats to action. Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have said repeatedly that they would not overturn current filibuster rules to enact a voting rights bill.

So Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued Manchin a friendly challenge: Offer a proposal that you could vote for and find 10 Republicans to support it.

Manchin accepted the challenge, and as soon as this week, a group of Democrats including Manchin and Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) could introduce a bill rooted in his ideas.

If Manchin can find 10 Republicans to support it, he will deserve canonization for having performed a miracle. If he can’t, will he and Sinema stick with their refusal to alter the filibuster and thus make themselves complicit in the death of a bill as important to democracy in our times as the original Voting Rights Act was in 1965?

Call me naive, but I do not believe that Manchin, Sinema and Biden want to be associated in history with those who failed to stand up for democracy at the hour of maximum danger. In a little over a month, we’ll know where they stand.

 

Unfortunately, I believe the opposite. I believe that by 2024 my vote will not only be meaningless, but punishable.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Local Edition

As the rest of the country was observing the 20th anniversary of 9/11, here in Northern Kentucky, right-wing radio host Eric Deters organized a Trump rally on his farm which attracted hundreds of delusional nutjobs screaming about how 2020 was stolen in a state that Trump won by 26 points.

On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, thousands of former President Donald Trump's supporters flocked to a farm a half-hour south of Cincinnati.

Among the pastures and bales of hay, banners directing expletives at President Joe Biden adorned trucks and fences.

This was a celebration organized by former lawyer Eric Deters, a conservative firebrand, podcaster and self-described "legal outlaw." He's no stranger to controversy. A judge in 2020 banned him from the Hamilton County courthouse for comments Deters made on his podcast, "The Bulldog."

Deters didn't see anything wrong with organizing a Trump pep rally on 9/11. It was the first Freedom Fest, something he told the crowd he wants to hold annually on his 138-acre farm in the rural outpost of Morning View, Ky., just south of Independence.

Speaking Saturday night were former Trump advisor and Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is currently dating Donald Trump Jr., and Fox News personality Tomi Lahren.

People came from all over the region, as far away as Batavia and Fairfield, united in their fealty to Trump, distrust of the COVID-19 vaccines and belief in the debunked myths surrounding the 2020 election and Trump's discredited claims of a stolen election. No evidence exists of widespread voter fraud.

"We're the outcasts of the country these days," said Bill Albright.

The 57-year-old traveled from his home in Batavia with his girlfriend Kathi Brinegar. They gripped flag poles on the hillside where Deters had built a stage and amphitheater, the wind whipping their large flags that said "2020 was rigged", "Unmasked, unmuzzled, unvaccinated, unafraid," and "Joe Biden sucks."

In the crowd were several members of the Proud Boys, wearing their yellow and black colors and polo shirts. The Proud Boys group is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Both the SPLC and Anti-Defamation League describe the Proud Boys' all-male membership as known for anti-Muslim and misogynistic rhetoric.

During the speeches, one man in the Proud Boy colors flashed the 'OK' symbol, which the Anti-Defamation League and other civil rights groups say has been co-opted into a white supremacist symbol.

Hundreds of motorcycles thundered over the rolling hillsides and parked in front of the stage, forming a barricade between the stage and audience.

One of the bikers, Dwayne Turner, 51, of Goshen, told The Enquirer he was on the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6. He said he didn't enter the Capitol, though.

He traveled to D.C. that day for Boots on the Ground Bikers for Trump organization to provide security for different groups.

"I was right on the steps," Turner said. "They made it out more than what it really was. The mainstream media has made it out to be an insurrection, to me it was a few people who were pissed off."

But many of the people who were at Freedom Fest said they weren't part of any group. About 100 cars and motorcycles, most decked out in pro-Trump, anti-vaccine regalia traveled up Ky. 17 for about 10 miles to Deters farm in a caravan.

Shari Reynolds, dressed head-to-toe in stars and stripes, walked among the cars pulled over at Pioneer Park in southern Covington. She was getting the caravan to Deters' farm into order, telling cars to put their blinkers on.

She said the caravan just kind of came together.

"It takes one person to organize somebody and you tell one person, and then you tell one person," Reynolds said. "The worst thing you can do is be silent."

Reynolds, 51, and her husband Patrick, 38, of Deer Park, like many of the thousands at Freedom Fest believe Trump won the 2020 election and distrust the media.

So then where do they get their information?

"I don't have any news sources," Patrick Reynolds said.

"Just research," Shari Reynolds said.

They do see news stories, Patrick Reynolds said, but "you have to research the information."

The keynote speakers, Lahren and Guilfoyle, in their speeches hit on the usual talking points, railing against vaccine mandates, praising Trump, slamming Biden and blaming "cancel culture" for silencing conservatives.

The media wasn't popular at Freedom Fest.

"The media has become so consumed by their own agenda that they've lost sight of their responsibility to report, to inform and to serve, but they sure do love their little fact checks," Guilfoyle said. "I could say Kentucky is a beautiful state, magnificent, and they would fact check me."

 

So you've got all the enduring, classic hits: Trump really won, we're the outcasts here even though Trump got 62% of the vote, the media is lying to us, along with white supremacist assholes like the Proud Boys in the crowd.

 

Believe me when I say that this is a nationwide cult now, and deprogramming them will take decades. It took decades to program them, you see.

Even right here in Northern Kentucky.

This is why I'm taking the calls to violence by Republican governors over Biden's mask mandate seriously. That's why I'm treating the potential threat of violence at the "Justice For J6" rally next weekend seriously.

These people are cultists. And cultists can do dangerous, deadly things.

Sunday Long Read: Hit And Run...For Office

Vanity Fair's Tom Kludt gives us our Sunday Long Read this week as the trial of South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg begins for the death of Joseph Paul Boever. Ravnsborg hit and killed Boever with his car on a dark night along a country highway last year with such force that Boever's head went through the windshield and his glasses were found in the vehicle. But Ravnsborg refuses to step down despite the growing calls for his resignation, and through it all a family grieves.

The diamond-shaped signs are hallmarks of the South Dakota highway, doubling as memorials and warnings. For more than 40 years, the state has placed them at the sites of motorized fatalities, making them disquieting roadside counterparts to the billboards summoning travelers to Wall Drug and other tourist enclaves. There is a bright red X near the uppermost tip and a pair of all-caps messages that force drivers to reckon with their own mortality: “THINK!” commands one side of the sign; “WHY DIE?” asks the other.

The “THINK signs,” as they are known locally, are installed by county highway departments, typically within days of the crash. It isn’t clear how many dot the flat terrain. The South Dakota Department of Transportation says it doesn’t keep records of where the signs are located or for whom they were erected, but that often isn’t required for anyone who has ever lived here. Everyone has a THINK sign story, and everyone knows the story behind the one situated on Highway 14 just outside of Highmore, South Dakota. Adorned with flowers and a wooden cross at its base, the sign there stands in memory of Joseph Paul Boever.

On September 12, 2020, Boever’s truck went into the ditch at around 7:30 p.m. and smashed into a bale of hay. He summoned his cousin Victor Nemec to the scene, and after surveying the damage incurred by the pickup’s front bumper, the two decided to retrieve it in the morning. Nemec recalled dropping off Boever, 55, at his home in Highmore and hearing him say he was going to bed. But shortly before 10:30 p.m., Boever was back in the area, armed with a flashlight and walking along the north shoulder of the road. Family members don’t know exactly why he was there.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was heading toward Pierre that night, capping off what had been a demanding week of travel. Earlier in the evening, Ravnsborg (pronounced “ROUNDS-berg”) was in the town of Redfield to speak at a Lincoln Day dinner. It was the second Republican event Ravnsborg attended in as many days, having appeared at a Lincoln Day dinner in Rapid City held on September 11. Ravnsborg’s two-hour journey from Redfield to Pierre started out routine enough. He called his father, a nightly ritual ever since his mother passed away three years earlier. The call dropped, a common occurrence in a state blanketed by dead zones. And he listened to a broadcast of the Minnesota Twins game, a classic soundtrack for laconic summer drives through the upper Midwest.

As he passed through Highmore, Ravnsborg considered stopping for gas before opting to press on for the final 46 miles to Pierre. It was around there, he said later, that he turned the radio off after hearing the Twins collect the final out in their win over division rival Cleveland several minutes earlier. At 10:20, according to cell phone data obtained by the investigators, he unlocked his phone and signed into his Yahoo email account. From there, Ravnsborg scanned headlines before landing on an article published by a right-wing website about “Riding the Dragon,” a documentary billed as an exposé into the “secret world of Joe Biden and his family’s relationship to China and the sinister business deals that enriched them at America’s expense.” At 10:22, prosecutors determined he locked his phone. A minute later, Ravnsborg veered into the right shoulder, where Boever was walking, sending his head through the windshield.

What happened in the moments before the crash and in the subsequent 12 hours has consumed South Dakota’s political class, and even caused a rift between two Donald Trump allies. Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican star and potential 2024 contender, urged Ravnsborg, a self-described “pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, pro-business” conservative, to resign. And yet Ravnsborg continues exerting his power in deep red South Dakota and beyond, from joining a 17-state legal effort in December to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat to teaming up last month with Republican attorneys general hoping to declare a New York state concealed carry gun law unconstitutional. Meanwhile, his predecessor has announced plans to run for attorney general again next year, despite Ravnsborg still being eligible to seek another term.

The case has stirred up questions about how investigations are handled in South Dakota, where virtually everyone is linked by fewer than six degrees of separation. Ravnsborg’s freedom may not be on the line, as prosecutors opted for less severe misdemeanor charges rather than, say, manslaughter. He is expected to plead no contest to two of the three charges, according to a source familiar with the matter, which could allow him to avoid a two-day trial that is scheduled to kick off Thursday. But although he has dodged the most dire of legal consequences, Ravnsborg’s future as a public figure may forever be clouded by a tragedy that has confounded residents, rocked the political establishment, and left a grieving family divided in its pursuit of clarity and justice.

 

A man is dead, killed by a power GOP politician, and we all know that the politician is not only going to get away with it, but most likely win a second term as the most powerful officer of the court in the state. A man whose job is enforcing the laws and keeping the order of the state is himself going to skate on taking another man's life and suffer no consequences whatsoever.

 

It comes at the expense of the people who put them in power.  Always.

 

This is the one-party corruption that Republicans seem to think Democrats have, but don't. Democrats get rid of their monsters, like Cuomo.

 

Republicans re-elect them.

 

That's the difference.

No Room At The ICU

Understand there are far more stories out there like this, where an Alabama man died from a heart attack after he was turned away from dozens of hospitals with no ICU beds to save him. We're only now hearing about them. There will be many, many more.

 

The family of a man who died of heart issues in Mississippi is asking people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 after 43 hospitals across three states were unable to accept him because of full cardiac ICUs.

Ray Martin DeMonia died last week in Meridian, Mississippi. He was three days shy of his 74th birthday and a well-known native in Cullman, Alabama, his family said.

DeMonia suffered from a cardiac event, and emergency staff at Cullman Regional Medical Center had to bring him to the nearest available bed, which was nearly 200 miles away at a Mississippi hospital.

In his obituary, DeMonia’s family urged people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non-COVID related emergencies,” the obituary read. “He would not want any other family to go through what his did.”

“Ray DeMonia was like no other,” his obituary read.

 

This wasn't a man who died of COVID. He died of cardiac arrest because there were no cardiac ICU beds available, because they were full of morons who yelled MUH FREEDOMS and refused to wear masks and refused to get vaccinated.

Expect a lot more triage death scenarios in the weeks ahead, especially in red states where the health care system is overloaded and has collapsed due to COVID delta cases.

We're already back to seeing three or four thousand dead per day and that's only going to get worse as COVID burns through the states this fall and winter. But unlike last year, we have a President who is telling people to be safe, mask up, and get the vaccine.  Tens of millions refuse.

So some of them will die drowning in their own liquefied lung tissue.

And a broken health care system will let thousands more die because there are no resources available to care for patients. None.

Never forget, this is what the GOP wants.

Some Twenty Years Gone

We've been told for two decades to Never Forget, but it seems we haven't learned a damn thing from 20 years ago, either.

When President Biden told an exhausted nation on Aug. 31 that the last C-17 cargo plane had left Taliban-controlled Kabul, ending two decades of American military misadventure in Afghanistan, he defended the frantic, bloodstained exit with a simple statement: “I was not going to extend this forever war.”

And yet the war grinds on.

As Mr. Biden drew the curtain on Afghanistan, the C.I.A. was quietly expanding a secret base deep in the Sahara, from which it runs drone flights to monitor Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants in Libya, as well as extremists in Niger, Chad and Mali. The military’s Africa Command resumed drone strikes against the Shabab, a Qaeda-linked group in Somalia. The Pentagon is weighing whether to send dozens of Special Forces trainers back into Somalia to help local troops fight the militants.

Even in Kabul itself, a fiery drone strike on men believed to be Islamic State plotters targeting the airport portended a future of military operations there. The attack, which the Pentagon called a “righteous strike” to avert another deadly suicide bombing, showcased America’s “over the horizon” abilities, to use a phrase favored by Mr. Biden. Family members denied that the men being targeted were militants and said the strike killed 10 people, seven of them children.

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the so-called war on terror shows no sign of winding down. It waxes and wanes, largely in the shadows and out of the headlines — less an epochal clash than a low-grade condition, one that flares up occasionally, as in 2017, when Islamic State militants ambushed American and local soldiers outside a village in Niger, killing four Americans.

Taking stock of this war is difficult because it is inseparable from the twin calamities of Afghanistan and Iraq. In those countries, the United States reached beyond the tactics of counterterrorism for a more ambitious, ill-fated project to remake fractured, tribal societies into American-style democracies.

Those failures are etched in the shameful images of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq or of desperate Afghans falling from the belly of an American plane. They are documented in the deaths of more than 7,000 American service members, hundreds of thousands of civilians and trillions of squandered American dollars.

The counterterrorism war, much of it waged covertly, defies such metrics. More and more of it involves partners. Large parts of it occur in distant places like the Sahel or the Horn of Africa. American casualties, for the most part, are limited. And success is measured not by capturing a capital or destroying an enemy’s army, but by breaking up groups before they have a chance to strike the American homeland or overseas assets like embassies and military bases.

By that yardstick, say counterterrorism experts, the war on terror has been an undisputed success.

“If you had said on 9/12 that we’d have only 100 people killed by jihadi terrorism and only one foreign terrorist attack in the United States over the next 20 years, you’d have been laughed out of the room,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism in the Obama administration.

 

Well, nobody's flown another plane into a skyscraper, but we have plenty of terrorism, and plenty of people dying weekly, if not daily, to it.

Police in West Texas this week arrested Joseph Angel Alvarez, 38, who allegedly targeted a couple - killing the wife in the process - because they voted for Biden, and had a Biden flag and “a doll of Trump hanging” outside their home.

Alvarez, arrested September 8 nearly a year after the murder, is being held at the El Paso County Detention Center. He was jailed on a $2 million bond for the murder of Georgette Kaufmann, 50, and on a $500,000 bond for the aggravated assault of the woman’s husband, Daniel Kaufmann.

The couple was targeted on November 14, 2020, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, at their home in the 3000 block of Copper Avenue in Central El Paso.

 

The lesson we exported to the world was "deadly political violence works."

Last Call For Black And White

Marriage between Black and white people is...perfectly normal in 2021, despite all the screaming racism that still accompanies being a mixed-race kid, and I know several couples in fact. The latest Gallup poll finds 94% of Americans are okay with it, about as close to universal approval as anything race-related in this country will ever possibly get.

Ninety-four percent of U.S. adults now approve of marriages between Black people and White people, up from 87% in the prior reading from 2013. The current figure marks a new high in Gallup's trend, which spans more than six decades. Just 4% approved when Gallup first asked the question in 1958.

The latest figure is from a Gallup poll conducted July 6-21. Shifts in the 63-year-old trend represent one of the largest transformations in public opinion in Gallup's history -- beginning at a time when interracial marriage was nearly universally opposed and continuing to its nearly universal approval today.

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage nationwide in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. A year after that decision, Gallup found support for the practice increasing, but still only a small minority of 20% approved.

Approval of interracial marriage continued to grow in the U.S. in periodic readings Gallup took over the following decades, finally reaching majority level in 1997, when support jumped from 48% to 64%. Support has increased in subsequent measures, surpassing 70% in 2003, 80% in 2011 and 90% in the current reading.

Non-White Americans have been consistently more approving of interracial marriages than White Americans -- but that gap has narrowed over time and, in the latest reading, has nearly closed.

Previous measures from 1968 to 2013 found double-digit gaps in approval between White and Non-White adults. Today, the three percentage points that separate approval among White (93%) and Non-White adults (96%) is within the poll's margin of error.

Recent growth at the national level has been driven by increasing approval among White Americans, as approval among Non-White Americans has been unchanged over the past decade.

Majorities of non-White adults since 1968 have approved of interracial marriage. It was not until 1997 that a majority of White adults held that opinion.

 

The reason it's now broadly acceptable, much like same-sex marriage, is that we all know people who are an interracial couple and have great kids and are good people and they are very much a part of our friends and families and this has become true all over the country.

So yeah, 94%? I'm actually kind of shocked it's that high, but there you are.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Attorney General Merrick Garland is suing Texas over its ridiculous abortion law that looks to get around Roe v. Wade by deputizing citizens to flood abortion providers and women with civil lawsuits, and despite the Supreme Court pretending to be too shocked to actually block the law last week, the Justice Department isn't letting this one go unchallenged.

The Justice Department has filed suit against the state of Texas to block its law banning most abortions, Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Thursday, setting up a high-stakes legal battle after the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect earlier this month.

"That act is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent," Garland said at a news conference. "Those precedents hold, in the words of Planned Parenthood versus Casey, that 'regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.'"

He accused Texas Republicans of crafting a "statutory scheme" through the law "to nullify the Constitution of the United States."

"It does not rely on the state's executive branch to enforce the law, as is the norm in Texas and everywhere else. Rather, the snatcher deputizes all private citizens without any showing a personal connection or injury to serve as bounty hunters authorized to recover at least $10,000 per claim from individuals who facilitate a woman's exercise of our constitutional rights," he said.

As part of its lawsuit, Garland said the DOJ is seeking an immediate court order preventing the enforcement of SB8 in Texas.

Garland also made clear that the Justice Department won't hesitate to take similar legal action against other states that might pursue a similar route to restrict abortions.

"The additional risk here is that other states will follow similar models," Garland said, and he denied that the decision to file the suit now was in any way based on political pressure from Democrats or the White House.

The lawsuit accuses Texas lawmakers of enacting the law "in open defiance of the Constitution."

"The United States has the authority and responsibility to ensure that Texas cannot evade its obligations under the Constitution and deprive individuals of their constitutional rights by adopting a statutory scheme designed specifically to evade traditional mechanisms of federal judicial review," the lawsuit says. "The federal government therefore brings this suit directly against the State of Texas to obtain a declaration that S.B. 8 is invalid, to enjoin its enforcement, and to protect the rights that Texas has violated."

 

We'll see how quickly the courts act upon this, but yes, this is going to get ugly fast would be my guess. After all, the Roberts Court has already signaled the end of Roe and the end of abortion for about half of American women. States will be able to legislate it out of existence, and I'm expecting for states like Florida and Texas to make crossing state lines to get an abortion illegal as well, although that goes directly to the Commerce Clause having a hole blasted in it too by the Roberts Court.

It won't be long, either way.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

President Biden has finally stepped up with a major, national, federal vaccine mandate for American employers that will affect the vast majority of US workers: get vaccinated or else.

 

President Biden is announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will affect tens of millions of Americans, ordering all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be inoculated or face weekly testing.

Biden also will require all health facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid funding to vaccinate their workforces, which the White House believes will impact 50,000 locations.

And the president plans to sign an executive order that would require all federal employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus — without an option for those who prefer to be regularly tested instead — in an effort to create a model he hopes state governments and private companies will adopt.

The cluster of new policies comes as the country grapples with the highly contagious delta variant, which has sent cases surging to more than 150,000 a day and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths. The White House has struggled to convince hesitant Americans to get vaccinated and has been increasingly shifting toward requirements.

The changes also come as Biden’s approval rating has fallen in recent weeks, with Americans less supportive of his handling of the pandemic. Defeating the pandemic was among his central promises, and White House aides believe that his ability to deliver on it will be critical to the success of his presidency.

The White House released an 11-page memo Thursday entitled “Path Out of the Pandemic” that outlined six key areas where Biden is either shifting or hardening his strategy on the virus.

The most far-reaching is a new regulation to be written by the Labor Department that will requires all businesses with more than 100 employees either to mandate vaccinations for all their workers, or require them to take weekly coronavirus tests. The White House estimates that the policy will impact about 80 million workers, or two-thirds of the country’s workforce.

Businesses that ignore the policy, once it’s in place, could trigger penalties of up to $14,000 per violation, according to a senior Biden administration official, who briefed reporters on the plan ahead of the president’s speech under the condition that his name would not be used.

Businesses also will be required to give workers paid time off to get vaccinated, according to the new rules.

“This plan will ensure that we are using every available tool to combat COVID-19 and save even more lives in the months ahead, while also keeping schools open and safe, and protecting our economy from lockdowns and damage,” according to a copy of the memo.

 

It's a great plan.

 

It will be blocked by a federal judge before it ever goes into effect, however.

I guarantee that.

Best case scenario, businesses decide to err on the side of caution and mandate anyway, but they will run afoul of red state anti-mandate laws (which also may or may not be blocked).  The point it, the legal morass will not appreciably increase the number of vaccinated Americans by any significant amount.

This plan too will be made to fail by the GOP. And Biden will be blamed.

StupidiNews!

• Los Angeles County Schools will mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for all eligible students 12 and over by December 31, or students will not be able to attend school after winter break.
• Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio went into lockdown Thursday night after reports of an armed gunman and a shooting.
• President Biden spoke directly with Chinese President XI Jinping on Thursday, the two discussed economic and security concerns for about 90 minutes.
• Democrats are moving ahead with 12 weeks of paid parental leave in the House among other safety net provisions as part of the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package.
• The LAPD is getting social media information from those detained by police, the data is being fed into analysis systems powered by controversial data surveillance company Palantir.

The Vax Of Life, Cincy Edition

A new Cincinnati Enquirer poll finds only 56% of Cincinnati-area residents are vaccinated, with 50% fully vaccinated, but nearly 20% saying they will never get the jab.

 

Almost 1 in 5 Cincinnati-area residents who aren't vaccinated against COVID-19 say they will not get inoculated, and about 1 in 4 say they either want it or haven't decided yet.

The responses come from a newly released Interact for Health poll, called the COVID-19 Health Issues Survey. The Kenwood-based nonprofit, which advocates for health initiatives in 20 counties in the region, held a webinar about the survey Thursday with the community and its health partners.

"The survey is a snapshot in time," Interact for Health spokeswoman Emily Gresham-Wherle said.

The Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati conducted the online poll, to which 502 people in the region responded, from July 7-16.

"There's a good number of people who want to get vaccinated or are haven't decided yet," said Colleen Desmond, an Interact for Health research associate who provided the survey results online with her team. The reason for stalling, according to this survey, seem to be largely access and trust.

Those who took part in the survey were asked whether they were vaccinated, and if not, why not? Is it easy to find a convenient location to get the vaccine? (Yes, most said.) And more questions.

Interact's data show 56% said they had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine – with 89% of these respondents fully vaccinated – and 44% had not. Among those who hadn't, 18% said they had not decided whether they'll get vaccinated, 19% said they "definitely will not" and 7% said they "definitely will."

The survey results also explored why there is vaccine hesitancy here.

Most who didn't plan to get vaccinated – 72% – shared this reason: "I want to confirm it is safe," the survey shows.

And when asked whom they'd trust for such information, respondents said they most trusted their physician or a health care provider; next, a pharmacist; and after that, their local public health department.

 

So again, the disinformation by the GOP is working extremely well. More than a third of Cincy-area residents are going to remain unvaccinated. We will never reach herd immunity at that level, and we'll be fighting the disease for years at this rate. 

Meanwhile across the river in Kentucky, the health care system is now completely collapsing. Kentucky has few ICU beds, and Beshear has no power to issue mandates as the legislature is currently in special session making them illegal.

Governor Andy Beshear held another Team Kentucky Update Thursday.

This week’s update came amid a special session of the General Assembly the governor called for over the weekened to address COVID-related issues. Thursday is the special session’s third day.

Gov. Beshear began his Team Kentucky update Thursday on a grim note. He said 60 of the state’s 96 hospitals are operating under critical staffing shortages.

“Our hospital situation has never been more dire in my lifetime than it is right now,” Beshear said. “We cannot handle more sick individuals.”

The governor also said Thursday the state currently has fewer ICU beds available than it has at any other point during the pandemic, now 18 months in.

Beshear said he has called the Kentucky National Guard in to 21 more hospitals around the state to offer logistical and administrative support. The Kentucky National Guard already has been assisting at hospitals in Morehead, Hazard, Bowling Green and Pikeville, but will now help at a total of 24 hospitals across Kentucky.

 

Soon, people will be dying in triage in hospital corridors, but you sure showed those libs how fucking smart you are, Kentucky.

 

Biden Burned By BATF Bid

Senate Democrats have all but killed the Biden administration's nomination of gun safety advocate David Chipman to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, with all 50 Republicans against him, and at least three Democrats looking to vote him down.

The White House is planning to withdraw David Chipman's nomination to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, according to three sources close to the process.

Chipman is currently a senior policy advisor to Giffords, a gun control group, and faced an uphill battle to Senate confirmation as President Joe Biden's point person on firearms regulation. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) had previously told the Biden administration and Senate Democrats that he was not supportive of the nominee. Other moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, have also remained noncommittal on the pick.

Chipman, meanwhile, faced universal opposition from Senate Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell described the nominee as an "anti-gun extremist" and asked for the White House to withdraw his nomination.

The White House declined to comment on the imminent yanking of the nomination. It's unclear when the formal withdrawal of Chipman's nomination will take place, though it could happen as soon as this week.

During his confirmation hearing, Senate Republicans pressed Chipman over a recent interview in which he said new gun owners who have no training should only bring their guns out "if the zombies start to appear." The nominee responded that the comments were “self-deprecating.”

The committee deadlocked on the nomination along party lines, which would have forced the Senate to vote to discharge him.

Chipman isn’t the only high profile White House nominee to be withdrawn amid opposition from members of the Democratic caucus. Neera Tanden, Biden’s initial pick to lead the White House Office of Management and Budget, withdrew in March amid opposition from Manchin and all 50 Senate Republicans.

Tanden ultimately joined the White House in a non-Senate-confirmed capacity as a senior adviser, however, and Chipman may also find a path into the Biden administration. The White House has offered Chipman a role at the Justice Department, per a source familiar.

 

Republicans have been able to block almost every ATF Director since the NRA lobbied the Senate to require Senate confirmation for the post after Ruby Ridge in 2006, the exception was Todd Jones in 2013, and he quit two years later.  Acting ATF heads are in fact normal, even Trump couldn't get his acting director nominee a hearing and didn't bother as Regina Lombardo is still in charge.

Still, multiple Democratic senators saying no to Chipman is a reminder that rural red states with blue senators still pull way above their weight class when it comes to determining our nation's laws, and that I expect that to continue for a long, long time.

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Mindy made landfall late Wednesday on the Florida coast near St. Vincent Island with winds around 50 MPH, the mostly rain event is expected to continue to weaken rapidly.
• Marie Antoinette's famous diamond jewelry will be up for action in Geneva, the pieces are expected to fetch as much as $4 million.
• A new study by San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly finds racial inequality has cost the US more than $50 trillion over the last 30 years.
• The Biden administration is taking aim at meat-packing corporations for "grocery profiteering" and is warning of federal antitrust action in court.
• New global warming data finds to limit the rise in global temperatures to just 1.5C would require leaving more than half of oil and 90% of coal in the ground.
  

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

The Former Guy™ is making good on his threat to destroy Liz Cheney's political career by supporting Harriet Hageman's primary challenge to Cheney's Wyoming at-large House seat.

 

Donald Trump is set to back Wyoming attorney Harriet Hageman as she prepares a primary challenge against GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, according to three people with knowledge of his plans, marking the most important political endorsement yet in Trump’s post-presidency.

Trump’s looming involvement in the primary will test his political power in the GOP like never before, as he seeks to punish the most high-profile House Republican to vote for his impeachment in January. His allies and team not only encouraged Hageman to run against Cheney — they now are under pressure to clear the crowded primary field of other candidates who could split anti-Cheney sentiment, which would give the incumbent the chance to win her primary with only a plurality.

Cheney became Trump’s top Republican target after she spoke out against his role inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. House Republicans soon stripped her of her leadership post, and one of Trump’s sons and a top Trump ally have already campaigned against her in Wyoming.

At the same time, Trump threw himself into the process of vetting and interviewing multiple candidates running or exploring campaigns against Cheney with the goal of anointing a single challenger. Ultimately, he chose Hageman because she impressed him the most, according to the people with knowledge of his plans.

In a final step before officially announcing her campaign later this week, Hageman resigned Tuesday as one of Wyoming’s members of the Republican National Committee.

“By censuring Rep. Liz Cheney we sent the strong message that we expect our elected officials to respect the views and values of the people who elected them. Accountability is key and I am proud of our party for demanding it,” Hageman wrote in her resignation letter.

Hageman isn’t just banking on Trump’s endorsement in the coming primary against Cheney: Top Trump staffers and allies are in her corner, including some who are in talks to occupy key roles on her campaign or with a super PAC prepared to back her. Some former Trump campaign hands and advisers met with Hageman in March at the urging of local conservatives.

Trump’s endorsement announcement could come any day, but he has already told Hageman that she has his support, sources said.

“He interviewed a lot of people, and when it was done, it was clear she’s in a class of her own,” said one Republican familiar with Trump’s selection process who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about his decision.

Aside from her Trump connection, Hageman’s campaign credentials include her status as a fourth-generation Wyomingite who grew up on a ranch, later becoming a conservative activist and top land-use attorney in a state where land is a political issue. In 2018, her tough-talking campaign for governor made her a conservative favorite, though she finished in third place in a crowded primary. Still, that campaign made Hageman one of Cheney’s only likely challengers who had previously run statewide in Wyoming.

It's pretty obvious that the entire GOP now works for Donald Trump, and Trump's slate of 2022 revenge endorsements against those he feels weren't loyal enough to him, replacing them for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan clones is really the only thing that might save the House for the Democrats as his hand-picked, double-dipped lunatics lose general election after general election.

We'll see what happens, but Liz Cheney's political career is close to being permanently over, I think. She'll get a nice corporate lawyer job and then a think tank sinecure in a few years, but like most Dubya-era Republicans, she'll be excluded from any real decisions in the party.

Not that she doesn't deserve the ignominy, but the country may actually pay a worse price for getting rid of her.

That Tax Shelter Is The Great Hall Of Thrain

Why yes, the nation's richest Americans are also the nation's biggest tax scofflaws, like Smaug sitting on his hoard, and if they actually paid what the law says they owe, we'd more than be able to afford the Biden infrastructure package twice over.

 

The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are the nation’s most egregious tax evaders, failing to pay as much as $163 billion in owed taxes per year, according to a new Treasury Department report released on Wednesday.

The analysis comes as the Biden administration is pushing lawmakers to embrace its ambitious proposal to invest in beefing up the Internal Revenue Service to narrow the “tax gap,” which it estimates amounts to $7 trillion in unpaid taxes over a decade. The White House has proposed investing $80 billion in the tax collection agency over the next 10 years to hire more enforcement staff, overhaul its technology and usher in new information-reporting requirements that would give the government greater insight into tax evasion schemes.

The proposals have been met with deep skepticism from Republicans and business lobbyists who argue that the I.R.S. cannot be trusted with more power and that the proposals are an invasion of privacy. Democrats are counting on raising money by collecting more unpaid taxes to help pay for the $3.5 trillion spending package they are in the process of drafting. The Treasury Department estimates that its tax gap proposals could raise $700 billion over a decade.

The Treasury Department report, which was written by Natasha Sarin, deputy assistant secretary for microeconomics, makes the case that narrowing the tax gap is part of the Biden administration’s ambition to create a more equitable economy, as audits and enforcement actions will be aimed at the rich.

“For the I.R.S. to appropriately enforce the tax laws against high earners and large corporations, it needs funding to hire and train revenue agents who can decipher their thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings,” Ms. Sarin wrote. “It also needs access to information about opaque income streams — like proprietorship and partnership income — that accrue disproportionately to high-earners.”

 

Let's not forget that the GOP did everything it could to cut taxes on the top 1% when Trump took office and then they turned around and raised taxes on the rest of us so that taxes on the 1% could be lowered even more.

 

The GOP knows who their constituency is, and it's the wealthiest Americans and the corporations they own to profit and give money to the GOP in turn.

Biden's trying to fix that. Remember that too.

Extra-Solar Activity

The Biden Administration wants to set a major new solar power plan for the US, increasing the amount of power the country gets from the sun from 5% to a whopping 45% by 2050.

The Biden administration on Wednesday released a plan to produce almost half of the nation’s electricity from the sun by 2050 as part of its effort to combat climate change.

Solar energy provided less than 4 percent of the country’s electricity last year, and the administration’s target of 45 percent would represent a huge leap and will most likely take a fundamental reshaping of the energy industry. In a new report, the Energy Department said the country needed to double the amount of solar energy installed every year over the next four years compared with last year. And then it will need to double annual installations again by 2030.

Adding that many solar panels, on rooftops and on open ground, will not be easy. In February, a division of the Energy Department projected that the share of electricity produced by all renewable sources, including solar, wind and hydroelectric dams, would reach 42 percent by 2050 based on current trends and policies.

The new department blueprint is in line with what most climate scientists say is needed. Those experts say that reducing net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero by 2050 is essential to limiting the worst effects of global warming — and much greater use of renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines will be needed to achieve that goal.

But administration officials have provided only a broad outline for how they hope to get there. Many of the details will ultimately be decided by lawmakers in Congress, which is working on a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a much larger Democratic measure that could authorize $3.5 trillion in federal spending.

One thing going for the administration is that the cost of solar panels has fallen substantially over the last decade, making them the cheapest source of energy in many parts of the country. The use of solar and wind energy has also grown much faster in recent years than most government and independent analysts had predicted.

“One of the things we’re hoping that people see and take from this report is that it is affordable to decarbonize the grid,” said Becca Jones-Albertus, director of the Solar Energy Technology Office in the Energy Department. “The grid will remain reliable. We just need to build.”

The administration is making the case that the United States needs to act quickly because not doing anything to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels also has significant costs, particularly from extreme weather linked to climate change. In a Tuesday visit to inspect damage from the intense rainfall caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida in New Jersey and New York, President Biden said, “The nation and the world are in peril.”

Some recent natural disasters have been compounded by weaknesses in the energy system. Ida, for example, dealt a huge blow to the electric grid in Louisiana, where hundreds of thousands of people have been without power for days. Last winter, a storm left much of Texas without electricity for days, too. And in California, utility equipment has ignited several large wildfires, killing scores and destroying thousands of homes and businesses.

Even so, many analysts and even some in the solar industry are skeptical that the administration can achieve its green targets. In addition to the 45 percent solar target, Mr. Biden has said he wants to bring net planet-warming emissions from the power sector to zero by 2035. He also wants to add hundreds of offshore wind turbines to the seven currently in the waters off the nation’s coasts and have as many as half of all new cars sold be electric by 2030.

While renewable energy has grown fast, it contributes about 20 percent of the country’s electricity. Natural gas and coal contribute about 60 percent.

“That kind of quick acceleration of deployment is only going to happen through smart policy decisions,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “That’s the part where having a goal is important, but having clear steps on how to get there is the issue.”

 

What I don't see mentioned in the article is the largest single blockade to any green energy plan right now: West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who is working to kill all climate measures in the Good Package bill because of his state's coal and gas interests. Manchin failing to stop a green bill would mean the end of his career overnight, as he's going to be replaced by Republican Gov. Jim Justice at some point.

Of course, Republicans will just eliminate funding for any of this when they get Congress and the White House back later this decade, so it's all 100% meaningless anyway.

Right?