Last Call For The McCabe Coda

Andrew McCabe, the FBI deputy director that testified against Trump after being fired days before his pension would have been fully vested, has won back the money Trump took from him out of spite.

Hours before he was scheduled to retire in 2018, Andrew G. McCabe, then the F.B.I.’s deputy director, was fired by the Justice Department, depriving him of his pension and prompting cheers from President Donald J. Trump, who had been hounding him over his role in the Russia investigation.

On Thursday, the department reversed Mr. McCabe’s firing, settling a lawsuit he filed asserting that he was dismissed for political reasons. Under the settlement, Mr. McCabe, 53, will be able to officially retire, receive his pension and other benefits, and get about $200,000 in missed pension payments.

In addition, the department agreed to expunge any mention of his firing from F.B.I. personnel records. The agreement even made clear that he would receive the cuff links given to senior executives and a plaque with his mounted F.B.I. credentials and badge.

The Justice Department did not admit any wrongdoing. But the settlement amounted to a rejection by the Biden administration of how Mr. McCabe’s case had been handled under Mr. Trump, who perceived Mr. McCabe as one of his so-called deep-state enemies and repeatedly attacked him. A notice of the lawsuit’s dismissal was also filed in federal court.

“Politics should never play a role in the fair administration of justice and Civil Service personnel decisions,” Mr. McCabe said in a statement. “I hope that this result encourages the men and women of the F.B.I. to continue to protect the American people by standing up for the truth and doing their jobs without fear of political retaliation.”

Mr. McCabe thanked his lawyers at the firm of Arnold & Porter, who will receive more than $500,000 in legal fees paid by the government. The firm intends to donate the money to its foundation, which provides scholarships to minority law students, among other things.

“What happened to Andrew was a travesty, not just for him and his family, but the rule of law,” said Murad Hussain, one of Mr. McCabe’s lawyers. “We filed this suit to restore his retirement benefits, restore his reputation and take a stand for the rights of all civil servants, and that’s exactly what this settlement does.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

I fully expect Trump's cultists to find a way to go after McCabe, whether it's Hannity and his flying monkeys demanding blood, the nutjobs in the congressional GOP holding up legislation until his settlement is reversed, or individual "concerned citizens" paying him a visit.

Maybe this will have a happy ending, and out of gratitude, McCabe will come clean on the Trump-era FBI and the rotten apples still in the agency.

I don't honestly know.  And that scares me.

Tech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, Con't

House Democrats are making their strongest pitch yet to reform Section 230 protections for social media giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Whether or not the bill will get any Republican support, despite Donald Trump screaming about Section 230 for years, remains to be seen.

Top Democratic lawmakers unveiled a major proposal Thursday that could hold digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter legally responsible for making personalized recommendations to users that lead to their physical or emotional harm.

The bill comes amid a groundswell of scrutiny of how algorithms can amplify harmful content in the wake of revelations by whistleblower Frances Haugen about Facebook’s risks. Her disclosures to the media and policymakers have shined a spotlight on the way Silicon Valley’s often-opaque systems can surface dangerous material.

The legislation marks one of the most significant threats in years to the tech industry’s liability protections under Section 230, a decades-old law that shields a broad range of digital services — from giants like YouTube and Instagram to smaller sites like Etsy and Nextdoor — from lawsuits for hosting and moderating user content.

The bill is set to be introduced Friday by four leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) — which holds broad jurisdiction over tech issues including Section 230.

“Designing personalized algorithms that promote extremism, disinformation and harmful content is a conscious choice, and platforms should have to answer for it,” Pallone said.

The legislation would carve out Section 230 so that a digital service could face liability if they knowingly or recklessly make a personalized recommendation that “materially contributed to a physical or severe emotional injury to any person.” The bill would apply to recommendations that use algorithms to boost certain content over others based on users’ personal information.

Lawmakers have introduced dozens of proposals to revamp or roll back tech companies’ liability protections in recent years, but almost all of them haven’t gone anywhere.

Only one measure has been signed into law, FOSTA-SESTA — a proposal to open tech platforms up to liability for knowingly facilitating sex trafficking, which cleared former president Donald Trump’s desk in 2018. And just one other, a bill to make it easier to sue companies that host child exploitative material known as the EARN IT Act, has advanced out of committee since.

Attempts to weaken Section 230 have faced heavy opposition from the tech industry and some civil society groups, who consider it a foundational law that helped create the modern Internet.

But the latest proposal — the Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act — boasts some of the most powerful lawmakers in the space, instantly making it one of the top contenders of all the Section 230 bills to potentially become law.

It’s the first bill targeting Section 230 led by Pallone, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee and is a close ally to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). He ultimately controls what Section 230 bills get marked up and voted on by the panel and will surely look to advance his own proposal.

It seeks to sidestep thorny and politically divisive debates about what content should be left up or taken down by focusing instead on how platforms recommend content to users, and how those choices can lead to real-world harm.

Democrats and Republicans have sparred for years over whether companies like Facebook over- or under-enforce many of their policies. Democrats say major platforms haven’t done enough to crack down on misinformation, hate speech and other online harms, while Republicans accuse the platforms of stifling conservative viewpoints.

 

Again, the problem is there's no way this will pass the Senate filibuster unless there's specific language that does prevent digital media from stopping Republican bigotry and hate speech.  Trump will torpedo it anyway, because he wants to be the one to sign the bill into law, not Biden.

Besides, it may not even get out of the House.

The techbros have too much money.

School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Cincy Edition

Ohio perennial losing Senate candidate Josh Mandel got himself tossed from a Boehner Country school board meeting in Butler County after attacking school board members and refusing to wear a mask.

U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel was escorted out of a Butler County school board meeting Monday evening after school officials said he staged an event to "disrupt a public meeting."

A video of the meeting is available on the Lakota Local Schools' YouTube channel. At nearly an hour and a half into the recording, school board candidate Darbi Boddy said she would like to have Mandel speak on her behalf.

Mandel walked up to the microphone and began by criticizing the district for not publicizing its finances on the Ohio Checkbook, a website created during his tenure as state treasurer that details spending by public institutions. Board president Kelley Casper interrupted Mandel and asked him to stop speaking.

As Mandel continued, Casper announced that the board would take a recess and the video cuts out.

"I'm just trying to stand up for kids," Mandel said in a video he posted on Twitter.

Public hearing participants must be residents of the Lakota Local School District, according to the board's bylaws, or "be the resident's designee and be introduced as such, and have a legitimate interest in the action of the Board."

Mandel, a Republican from the Cleveland area, is running in a crowded primary to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Rob Portman. He paints himself as a fighter who isn't afraid to disrupt the status quo and often uses social media as a platform for misinformation and controversial statements that attract attention.

"Forcing kids to wear masks in schools is a total trampling of the freedom and liberty of the kids and the parents," he said in an interview on Tuesday. "It is not the role of a school official or politician to tell moms and dads how to raise their kids."

In another video of the incident, provided by Mandel's campaign, Mandel spoke about the district's mask requirement and gender politics. Casper told the crowd that the board's bylaws allow Boddy to designate someone to speak on her behalf, but instead she had stated she "wanted to yield her time."

Mandel is then escorted out of the meeting by two Butler County Sheriff's officers. According to the board's bylaws, the board's presiding officer may request the assistance of law enforcement officers to remove "a disorderly person when that person's conduct interferes with the orderly progress of the meeting."

Mandel did this knowing he'd get thrown out, and knowing he'd be able to get it on video. He's in a race to see which white male asshole can be the biggest, most hateful, most Trumpy moron in the race so that red Ohio will elect him in 2022. He's up against equally awful bigot and antisemite JD Vance, author of "Hillbilly Elegy" and the soon to be upcoming tale, "How I sold my soul to Donald Trump and lost an election."

It's free publicity when Mandel pulls stunts like this. Expect a lot more of this as the race heats up over the next six months and change as we get closer to the primary in early May. Using a school board meeting as a prop is going to be the least of their sins.

StupidiNews!

• The CDC says that COVID-19 cases will most likely continue to decline in the US, but infections among schoolchildren remain extremely high.
• Some 60,000+ Hollywood film and TV crew members will go on a massive strike on Monday unless film studios like Amazon, Netflix, and Disney return to the table.
• The US Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday from the Biden administration over the reinstatement of the death sentence of convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
• US Interior Secretary Deb Halaand says the Biden administration is ready to majorly expand offshore wind farms off of all US coastal states by 2030.
• IBM joins Southwest and American Airlines in ignoring Texas's vaccine mandate ban, saying the federal government's vaccine mandate order supersedes it.
  

Last Call For The Good Package, Con't

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent argues that Democrats need to get in gear when it comes to telling people what's actually in the Biden Build Back Better plan rather than harping on the cost.

 

A big problem Democrats face right now is that congressional sausage making is so repellent and ugly that it risks alienating voters precisely when Democrats need them to be open to the details of their proposals.

In this regard, new polling released this week should light a fire under them — and prompt them to pass President Biden’s agenda as quickly as possible.

A new CNN poll released Wednesday, for instance, finds that only 25 percent of Americans believe they and their family will be better off if the two bills making up Biden’s agenda pass. Meanwhile, 32 percent say they’ll be worse off, and 43 percent say they’ll be about the same.

Among independents, who may be souring on Biden, only 20 percent say the bills will make them better off. While those numbers are grim, the poll does find some good news for Biden: 50 percent of Americans approve of his performance.

Yet the poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans want the bills to pass in their current iteration, which would include the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion social policy reconciliation bill. Another 30 percent want them in scaled down form, with less spending.

In one way, that’s not necessarily bad news. That such a large majority wants something to pass — and that large percentages are agnostic on whether it will help or hurt them — both suggest that only a small minority are dug in against it.

So many Americans might be open to approving of it once it passes and they learn more about it. But that means Democrats should hurry up and make that happen.

Their basic dilemma is also underscored in a new CBS News poll. It finds soaring support for individual provisions in Biden’s agenda, with 88 percent of Americans supporting the government negotiating down prescription drug prices, 84 percent supporting expanding Medicare to cover dental, eye and hearing treatment, and 73 percent supporting paid family and medical leave.

The CBS poll also finds general support for the two big Biden bills is in the low-to-mid 50s — good, but not nearly as good as the individual provisions. And only 36 percent say the Build Back Better social policy bill will help them or their families.

Sean McElwee, who polls regularly for the progressive group Data for Progress, thinks the message for Democrats is clear.

“The longer they sit these bills out there, and let them get attacked not just from Republicans but from the center of their party, the more difficult it is to claim these as unifying bills,” McElwee told me, adding that this clouds the case that “Biden is doing stuff for you.”

 

The problem remains that President Manchin and Vice President Sinema continue to call the shots, and they will continue to make sure nothing is passed, especially Sinema.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the moderate Arizona Democrat who has objected to the size and scope of President Biden’s sweeping legislative agenda, has been trailed all over the country by progressive activists seeking to pressure her. They have followed her into a bathroom in Arizona, on an airplane and even to the Boston Marathon.

But this week, with the Senate out of session, those activists would have had to travel even farther to press their case with Ms. Sinema in person — she’s in Europe on a fund-raising trip.

A spokesman for Ms. Sinema said she had participated in fund-raising for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee but declined to say where or provide any additional details. One person briefed on the matter said an event had occurred in Paris. It was not clear whether her trip to Europe was at the urging of the party committee.

The chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, is also in Europe this week and headlined a dinner on Wednesday in London, with contribution levels as much as $36,500, according to a copy of an invitation. Ms. Sinema’s name does not appear on that invitation.

A spokesman for the Senate committee declined to comment on the events in Europe or on Ms. Sinema’s role.

Although political campaigns and parties cannot raise money from foreign nationals, American citizens living abroad can and do regularly contribute.

Ms. Sinema’s office declined to say how long she would be abroad, what countries she was visiting, how the trip was being paid for and whether she was doing any additional fund-raising for her own campaign. Her political team had reached out to set up meetings in London and Paris, according to two people familiar with the matter.

John LaBombard, a spokesman for Ms. Sinema, said she remained engaged in the negotiations in Washington.

“So far this week, Senator Sinema has held several calls — including with President Biden, the White House team, Senator Schumer’s team, and other Senate and House colleagues — to continue discussions on the proposed budget reconciliation package,” Mr. LaBombard said. “Those conversations are ongoing.”

Sinema knows what her priorities are. Passing any Infrastructure bill isn't one of them.

At all.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

House January 6th Commission members are getting closer to pursuing criminal charges against the former Trump regime members who are refusing congressional subpoenas.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is planning to ramp up its efforts to force Trump administration officials to comply with its subpoenas as the former president attempts to stymie the inquiry.

Lawmakers who sit on the panel said they are prepared to pursue criminal charges against witnesses like Stephen K. Bannon who have balked at cooperating. And the committee may issue a subpoena as early as Wednesday to Jeffrey Clark, a Trump Justice Department official who sought to deploy department resources to support former president Donald Trump’s false claims of massive voting fraud in the 2020 election.

“We are completely of one mind that if people refuse to respond to questions without justification that we will hold them in criminal contempt and refer them to the Justice Department,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the panel, said in an interview Tuesday.

Tensions over compliance with subpoenas are increasing as the committee’s plan to hold depositions this week with Bannon and three other Trump administration officials — former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and Kash Patel, who was serving as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary on Jan. 6 — is already facing head winds.

Although lawmakers maintain that the deposition dates still stand for this week, it remains unclear whether they will happen. But talks between the committee and the former officials’ lawyers continue.

Negotiations between Clark’s legal team and the committee did not proceed as rapidly as the committee hoped, according to a person familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. As a result, the committee is contemplating issuing a subpoena, this person said.

A committee spokesman declined to comment on any possible future subpoenas.

Clark is considered a key witness for the panel, which is looking into Trump administration efforts to overturn election results and interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.

Clark, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil division, emerged as a key player in Trump’s push to amplify his voter-fraud claims after it was reported that the two men were in close touch in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, which was the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.

Clark authored and circulated a draft letter dated Dec. 28, addressed to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) that urged officials in the state to investigate unfounded claims of fraud. The Washington Post has previously reported that in early January, Trump entertained a plan to oust acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Clark, who was open to pursuing Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results.

Trump has urged his former aides not to cooperate with the committee and is asserting a claim of executive privilege to prevent the release of records from the National Archives after the Biden administration last week said it will not stand in the way of the information’s release.

 

So, negotiations continue. Because that's what you do with traitors, insurrectionists, and criminals who swore to destroy the country before and who have all but issued standing threats that the moment they get back into power, they will act upon those threats against this very Commission.

 

You "negotiate" with them.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The Biden administration will finally lift border restrictions for fully vaccinated travelers from Canada and Mexico starting next month.

The U.S. government next month will lift pandemic-era travel limits along the Canadian and Mexican borders for travelers who are vaccinated against the coronavirus, allowing them to enter the U.S. for non-essential activities, like tourism and family visits, for the first time since March 2020.

Starting in early November, the Department of Homeland Security will exempt travelers who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 from the non-essential travel restrictions in place along both U.S. land borders, senior Biden administration officials told reporters during a call Tuesday.

Those who can't provide proof of vaccination will continue to be banned from crossing the land borders if their travel is deemed to be "non-essential." U.S. citizens, green card holders and individuals traveling for medical care have been exempted from the non-essential restrictions since they were instituted.

Starting in January 2022, the U.S. will require all travelers — including those engaging in essential travel, like truck drivers — to show proof of vaccination before entering a land border crossing, the officials said.

"This phased approach will provide ample time for essential travelers such as truckers and others to get vaccinated, enabling a smooth transition to this new system," one administration official said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection will accept paper or digital proof of vaccination, an official said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet determined which vaccines the U.S. will recognize, the officials added.

Tuesday's announcement is likely to be welcomed by Mexican and Canadian travelers, as well as U.S. border community leaders, who have been urging the Biden administration for months to lift the travel limits, which have hurt local economies that rely on tourism and commerce.

"There's been a lot of struggle in the community because of the closure, not just financial struggle but a lot of families who have been separated and a lot of literal emotional hardship," Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who represents the Texas border city of El Paso, told CBS News. "This is very welcomed news."

You notice Mexican and Canadian citizens aren't screeching about "mah freedumbs" over this, they'll be vaccinated and come in to the States to do what they want to do. I don't know why though, Canada's a hell of a lot safer than the US as far as the virus.

StupidiNews!

• House Democrats have passed the Senate's stopgap debt limit bill that will head for President Biden's desk this week, setting up a major government shutdown fight at the end of 2021.
• Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court over destruction of the Amazon basin.
• Both American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, based in Texas, say they will ignore the state's ban on vaccine mandates and follow the Biden administration's executive order instead.
• Kentucky Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth, the current House Budget chair, says he will not run for reelection in 2022, setting up a major primary fight in the Bluegrass State.
• California spaceflight company Astra will make its fourth attempt to get a rocket successfully in orbit after several failures, and as competitors test their own rockets this year.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Kentucky Edition

Abortion went before the Supreme Court again today, this time with Kentucky GOP AG Daniel Cameron saying he has the exclusive right to defend the state's abortion ban in court if Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear will not do so, and as far as the Supremes go, they seemed to heavily side with Cameron.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in an abortion case on Tuesday, but the issue for the justices was a procedural one: Could Kentucky’s attorney general, a Republican, defend a state abortion law when the governor, a Democrat, refused to pursue further appeals after a federal appeals court struck down the law?

As the argument progressed through a thicket of technical issues, a majority of the justices seemed inclined to say yes.

“Kentucky maybe ought to be there in some form, and the attorney general is the one that wants to intervene,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said.

More important abortion cases are on the horizon. In December, the court will hear arguments on whether to overrule Roe v. Wade in a case concerning a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks. And the justices have been asked to take another look at a Texas law that prohibits most abortions after six weeks, which the court allowed to go into effect last month by a 5-to-4 vote.

Tuesday’s case, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, No. 20-601, concerned a Kentucky law that challengers said effectively banned the most common method of abortion in the second trimester of pregnancy, dilation and evacuation. The justices barely discussed the law during Tuesday’s argument.

Rather, they focused on the tangled history of the case and the complicated jurisdictional and procedural questions that arose from it.

The case started in 2018, when the state’s only abortion clinic and two doctors sued various state officials to challenge the law. The state’s attorney general at the time, Andy Beshear, a Democrat, said his office was not responsible for enforcing the law and entered into a stipulation dismissing the case against him, agreeing to abide by the final judgment and reserving the right to appeal.

The state’s health secretary, who had been appointed by a Republican governor, defended the law in court. A federal trial court struck the law down, saying it was at odds with Supreme Court precedent. The health secretary appealed, but the attorney general did not.

While the case was moving forward, Kentucky’s political landscape shifted. Mr. Beshear, who had been attorney general, was elected governor. Daniel Cameron, a Republican, was elected attorney general.

Mr. Beshear appointed a new health secretary, Eric Friedlander, who continued to defend the law on appeal. But after a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, affirmed the trial judge’s ruling, Mr. Friedlander declined to seek review from the full appeals court or the Supreme Court.

Mr. Cameron, the new attorney general, sought to intervene in the appeals court, saying he was entitled to defend the law. The appeals court denied his request, ruling that it had come too late.

On Tuesday, the justices probed the significance of the stipulation and the standards for when appeals courts should allow parties to intervene in the late stages of a case.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who has taken to asking the first questions during arguments, said “there isn’t much law” on the appropriate standards.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Sixth Circuit was entitled to take account of the fact that the attorney general had failed to file an appeal after losing in the trial court, notwithstanding the later election of a new attorney general.

“Why would we call it an abuse of discretion for a court of appeals, after it’s rendered its judgment, to say we don’t really care what has happened in the political arena?” she asked.

Matthew F. Kuhn, a lawyer for Mr. Cameron, said his client was acting in a different capacity when he sought to intervene. He was now, Mr. Kuhn said, representing the interests of the state.

About 45 minutes into the argument, Justice Stephen G. Breyer described what he said was really going on the case. “First the Republicans are in, then the Democrats are in,” he said, “and they have different views on an abortion statute.”

He described the history of the case, ending with the ruling from the three-judge panel of the appeals court.

“At that point, for the first time, we have an attorney general who thinks it’s a pretty good statute,” Justice Breyer said. “He wants to defend it.”

“Why can’t he just come in and defend the law?” Justice Breyer asked.

 

At this point it's looking like a 7-2 or even 8-1 decision in favor of Cameron. I know, predicting Supreme Court decisions is a mug's game, but I don't see how he loses if Breyer is asking questions like this.

 

Besides, it's not going to be Kentucky that gets in the history books for ending abortion next summer, it's Mississippi. Cameron wants it so, so badly though. It would be a guaranteed trip to the Governor's mansion and possibly higher office. 

 

Either way, it's another mile closer to Gilead.

 

The Big Lie, Con't

 Georgia Republicans have found their pretext for using new state laws to take over and replace the county election board in Atlanta's Fulton County, leaving elections in the largest county in the state under permanent Republican election rule heading into 2022 midterms.

The elections office in Georgia’s heavily Democratic Fulton County said on Monday that two workers had been fired for shredding voter registration forms, most likely adding fuel to a Republican-led investigation of the office that critics call politically motivated.

The workers, at the Fulton County Board of Elections, were dismissed on Friday after other employees saw them destroying registration forms awaiting processing before local elections in November, the county elections director, Richard Barron, said.

Both the county district attorney and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s chief elections official, were asked to conduct inquiries into the matter, the chairman of the Fulton County Commission, Robb Pitts, said in a statement.

But it was Mr. Raffensperger who first revealed the allegations of shredded registration forms, issuing a blistering news release demanding that the Justice Department investigate “incompetence and malfeasance” in the agency. “After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be,” he said.

His declaration only underscored the political implications of the document-shredding charges, which would almost certainly have been less freighted in any other election office. Fulton County officials did not say how many forms were shredded, but Mr. Raffensperger put the total at about 300 in a county with 800,000 voters on the rolls.

While the charges of wrongdoing surfaced on Friday, it was unclear when the actual destruction of registration forms might have occurred.

Mr. Raffensperger, who won national attention for rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s request to “find” enough ballots to overturn President Biden’s narrow win in the state, faces a difficult primary race next spring against a rival endorsed by Mr. Trump. The Fulton County elections office, meanwhile, has become the object of fury by Trump supporters who baselessly claim that Mr. Biden’s win in the state was illegitimate.

Some supporters are suing to conduct yet another review of the presidential vote in Fulton County, which includes a broad swath of metropolitan Atlanta and where 73 percent of voters favored Mr. Biden. The statewide Georgia vote has been counted three times with zero evidence of fraud.

The Republican-dominated State Legislature approved legislation this spring that gives it effective control of the State Election Board, and empowers the board to investigate legislators’ complaints about local election bodies. Fulton County was quickly selected for an inquiry that eventually could replace the elections board with a temporary superintendent who would have sweeping powers to oversee the vote.

Voting rights advocates and Democrats statewide have cast the inquiry as a first step toward a pro-Trump takeover of election machinery in the county most crucial to Democratic hopes in future elections.

“I don’t think there’s another state in the union that has a State Election Board with the power to turn a nonpartisan elections office into a partisan arm of the secretary of state’s office,” Mr. Barron, the Fulton County elections director, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

 

Replacing elected officials with a Republican-appointed superintendent in Fulton County was always the goal of the Georgia GOP "election reform laws", much like Michigan's vile "emergency manager" law used in Flint. That turned into a major federal corruption case when that happened.

Nobody will be prosecuted here when the Republican superintendent mysteriously calls Fulton County for the GOP in 2022 and for Trump in 2024. Trump will need this foul infrastructure in place to steal the election and he's increasingly going to get it.

To do that, he's going to purge every non-loyalist from the party, especially election officials. Even in Red state counties where Trump won, the insufficiently loyal, those who refuse to fix elections so that Democrats can never win even in blood red counties, they are being removed by the dozens, if not hundreds.

An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.

Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month.

Her critics sought to abolish her position and give her duties to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

Carew, who was hired to run elections in Hood County two-and-a-half months before the contested presidential race, said in an interview that she worried that the forces that tried to drive her out will spread to other counties in the state.

“When I started out, election administrators were appreciated and highly respected,” she said. “Now we are made out to be the bad guys.”

Critics accused Carew of harboring a secret liberal agenda and of violating a decades-old elections law, despite assurances from the Texas secretary of state that she was complying with Texas election rules.

Carew said she is joining an Austin-based private company and will work to help local elections administrator offices across the country run more efficiently. She will oversee her final election in early November before leaving Nov. 12.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration, said Carew’s departure is the latest example of an ominous trend toward independent election administrators being forced out in favor of partisan officials.

“She is not the first and won’t be the last professional election official to have to leave this profession because of the toll it is taking, the bullies and liars who are slandering these professionals,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We are losing a generation of professional expertise. We are only beginning to feel the effects.”

 

No expertise is needed to administer elections in Trumpland. Just loyalty to Dear Leader.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

 President Biden's vaccine mandate rules for companies with more than 100 employees was always headed for the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are going to try to kill as many constituents as possible.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Monday prohibiting any entity, including private businesses, from imposing Covid-19 vaccination requirements on employees or customers.

"The COVID-19 vaccine is safe, effective, and our best defense against the virus, but should remain voluntary and never forced," Abbott said in a statement.

Abbott, a Republican, said in his order that it was prompted by the Biden administration's vaccination mandate, which he said was federal overreach.

President Joe Biden announced a mandate last month requiring companies with 100 or more employees to ensure that their workforces are vaccinated or regularly tested. The Labor Department has yet to release details of the emergency rule, but Biden last week called on companies to act now and not to wait for the requirement to go into effect.

Abbott, who tested positive for Covid in August, has also resisted mask mandates and requiring proof of vaccination. Texas has continued to experience a rise in cases and crowded hospitals, prompting Abbott to invest in monoclonal antibody infusion centers.

 

Abbott says he'll rescind the order once Republicans in the state legislature put a bill on his desk putting the order into law, raising the specter that Abbott may call yet another special session of the legislature into order.

We'll see where this goes, but I suspect a swift Supreme intervention once the Biden administration lays down those new labor laws.

StupidiNews!

• The Florida Education Association says the state is short some 5,000 teachers and 4,000 other school personnel as the pandemic and low teacher pay continue to destroy morale.
• Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden has been forced to resign after multiple sexist, racist, and homophobic emails surfaced Monday showing a years-long pattern in the NFL of open bigotry.
• North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced the country's nuclear missile program is necessary to defend against South Korea, the US and EU.
• The Biden administration says it will not seek to oust World Bank head Kristalina Georgieva after the IMF investigated claims she manipulated data to help China.
• Best Buy is locking hot holiday electronics like the PlayStation 5 behind its new $200 a year VIP program, betting that consumers will pay big bucks to skip lines in stores and online.
  

Last Call For Cruz Control, Con't

Part of the "Biden's incompetence!11!!" argument is the fact that the Biden administration has yet to fill hundreds of executive agency nominations that require Senate approval. But Republican senators like Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, and especially Ted Cruz have been blocking nominations for months over petty stupidity.

The U.S. Treasury is being held hostage by Republican Senator Ted Cruz's efforts to halt a Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline, blocking critical appointments when the federal debt limit remains a pressing issue, White House officials and Democrats in Congress say.

Only four confirmed nominees are in place in the top ranks of the Treasury, of about 20 slots for presidential picks, officials say. More than eight months after Democratic President Joe Biden took office, his nominees across the government are being approved at a slower rate than the past three presidents, federal data shows.

In addition to the toll that Cruz's actions are taking on the Treasury's ability to tackle the federal debt limit, they are hurting the Biden administration's ability to address other big problems, senior officials say, including a global minimum tax, terrorism and financial intelligence.

Cruz has wielded power by being a lone holdout on a fast-track confirmation process that requires consent by all 100 senators for non-controversial nominees - a description the White House says fits many of the Treasury picks as well as others awaiting Senate confirmation, including numerous ambassadors.

Cruz wants Biden to impose sanctions that would halt Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

Biden, despite his opposition to the pipeline, has said he waived sanctions because the project was nearly complete and he wanted to rebuild strained ties with Germany, a key U.S. ally.

As far as Cruz is concerned, a spokesman for the senator said, the solution is simple: he will remove the holds if the Biden administration sanctions the company behind the pipeline project, something he insists is required under U.S. law.

Failure to do so "hands Vladimir Putin a geostrategic victory" and "entrenches corrupt Russian influence in Europe" Cruz said in a letter on Sept. 13, referring to the Russian president.

 

Suddenly, Ted Cruz cares about punishing Russia over a gas pipeline, but that's strictly because he thinks it would hurt US energy companies in Texas. Otherwise, Cruz is happy to give Putin a pass. 

 

But it also gives Cruz the excuse he needs to block Biden nominations in the Senate, and he's been blocking them for more than six months. 

In fact, multiple Republican senators are currently blocking Biden nominations.

But somehow, this is Joe Biden's fault.

Nobody Should Be Supplies By This

It's becoming increasingly clear that COVID-19 broke the global "just in time" supply chain, and that things aren't going to be fixed anytime soon without, say, major infrastructure investments, and major pay hikes by logistics companies always looking to cut costs.

Like toy blocks hurled from the heavens, nearly 80,000 shipping containers are stacked in various configurations at the Port of Savannah — 50 percent more than usual.

The steel boxes are waiting for ships to carry them to their final destination, or for trucks to haul them to warehouses that are themselves stuffed to the rafters. Some 700 containers have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for a month or more.

“They’re not coming to get their freight,” complained Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority. “We’ve never had the yard as full as this.”

As he speaks, another vessel glides silently toward an open berth — the 1,207-foot-long Yang Ming Witness, its decks jammed with containers full of clothing, shoes, electronics and other stuff made in factories in Asia. Towering cranes soon pluck the thousands of boxes off the ship — more cargo that must be stashed somewhere.

“Certainly,” Mr. Lynch said, “the stress level has never been higher.”

It has come to this in the Great Supply Chain Disruption: They are running out of places to put things at one of the largest ports in the United States. As major ports contend with a staggering pileup of cargo, what once seemed like a temporary phenomenon — a traffic jam that would eventually dissipate — is increasingly viewed as a new reality that could require a substantial refashioning of the world’s shipping infrastructure.

As the Savannah port works through the backlog, Mr. Lynch has reluctantly forced ships to wait at sea for more than nine days. On a recent afternoon, more than 20 ships were stuck in the queue, anchored up to 17 miles off the coast in the Atlantic.

Such lines have become common around the globe, from the more than 50 ships marooned last week in the Pacific near Los Angeles to smaller numbers bobbing off terminals in the New York area, to hundreds waylaid off ports in China.

The turmoil in the shipping industry and the broader crisis in supply chains is showing no signs of relenting. It stands as a gnawing source of worry throughout the global economy, challenging once-hopeful assumptions of a vigorous return to growth as vaccines limit the spread of the pandemic.

The disruption helps explain why Germany’s industrial fortunes are sagging, why inflation has become a cause for concern among central bankers, and why American manufacturers are now waiting a record 92 days on average to assemble the parts and raw materials they need to make their goods, according to the Institute of Supply Management.

On the surface, the upheaval appears to be a series of intertwined product shortages. Because shipping containers are in short supply in China, factories that depend on Chinese-made parts and chemicals in the rest of the world have had to limit production.

But the situation at the port of Savannah attests to a more complicated and insidious series of overlapping problems. It is not merely that goods are scarce. It is that products are stuck in the wrong places, and separated from where they are supposed to be by stubborn and constantly shifting barriers.

The shortage of finished goods at retailers represents the flip side of the containers stacked on ships marooned at sea and massed on the riverbanks. The pileup in warehouses is itself a reflection of shortages of truck drivers needed to carry goods to their next destinations.

 

Basically everything that could have gone wrong with supply chain management in the last 20 months has gone wrong: retirements of experienced ship captains and truckers, necessary pandemic regulations, all the slack ruthlessly burned out of the supply chains, overworked everybody, very real and very pressing climate change concerns, and rapidly increasing demand as global economies come out of hibernation.

All that is too much for the current system to handle, and it's broken, very possibly beyond repair.

The question now is what replaces it, and how much it's going to cost the globe.

Orange You Glad He's Back

After the weekend's rally in Des Moines, it's painfully clear that The Former Guy™ is now the Only Guy for the GOP, whether they want it or not.

Nine months ago, Republicans were questioning Donald Trump’s place as the lead fixture of their party. Saturday night provided the clearest evidence yet that they want him right there.

Not one year removed from surviving a second impeachment, the former president rallied before thousands of his most loyal supporters across the Iowa State Fairgrounds on a balmy Midwestern evening. He regaled them with his stories from the White House, his falsehoods and complaints about the 2020 election results, and his criticisms of the Biden administration on everything from immigration to the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The bulk of Trump’s speech was devoted to his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen — a false belief that was supported by the crowd, who broke out into chants of “Trump won! Trump won! Trump won!”

But the notable elements were not what was said by Trump, but who was there with him. Appearing alongside the former president was a who’s who of influential Republicans in the Hawkeye state, including Sen. Chuck Grassley and Gov. Kim Reynolds, Iowa Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson, former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker and Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann.

Trump has held rallies since leaving the White House. But never have elected Republicans of such tenure and stature appeared with him. And the presence of Grassley in particular signified that whatever qualms the GOP may have had with Trump are now faded memories; whatever questions they had about the direction of the party have been resolved.

Trump himself seemed to recognize as much, as he focused intently on relitigating the results of the 2020 elections even while admitting his own party members wished he would just move on.

“Sir, think to the future, don’t go back to the past,” Trump said some Republican members of Congress have advised him.

“I’m telling you the single biggest issue, as bad as the border is and it’s horrible, horrible what they’re doing they’re destroying our country, but as bad as that is the single biggest issue the issue that gets the most pull, the most respect, the biggest cheers is talking about the election fraud of the 2020 presidential election,” Trump said.

It was not that long ago when there was more uncertainty about Trump’s future within the party. Back in January, Grassley offered a stinging condemnation of Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election — the type of statement that, at its heart, suggested a desire to rid himself of the messiness.

“The reality is, he lost. He brought over 60 lawsuits and lost all but one of them. He was not able to challenge enough votes to overcome President Biden’s significant margins in key states,” Grassley said in a statement offered after voting against Trump’s second impeachment. “He belittled and harassed elected officials across the country to get his way. He encouraged his own, loyal vice president, Mike Pence, to take extraordinary and unconstitutional actions during the Electoral College count.”

But Grassley is in a different place now. He recently announced, at age 88, that he is running for an eighth term. And with it, Trump has gone from nuisance to needed.

This week, Grassley and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report that claimed Trump’s reported pressure on the Department of Justice to change election results was not just overblown but consistent with the commitments of the office of the president to uphold the Constitution. And on Saturday night, Trump brought Grassley on stage to offer his “complete and total endorsement for reelection.”

“If I didn’t accept the endorsement of a person that’s got 91 percent of the Republican voters in Iowa, I wouldn’t be too smart,” Grassley said.

Going forward, Republicans have to run with, towards, and cheering Donald Trump. Nothing has changed for the GOP heading into 2022. Trump's ego was always going to eventually mean he was going to take the spotlight and pick just about every eventual primary winner. They're all going to be loyal to Trump, they're all going to try to get away from "The election was stolen" but Trump won't let them, and neither will the majority of Republican primary voters.

And they may actually find a way to lose in 2022 because of it.

Everyone they run in the next 13 months is going to be Trump. Some of them will win House and Senate races.

But not all of them. The one thing that could sink their midterm hopes is happening as we speak. And Trump's going to remind everyone why he lost in 2020, along with a whole lot of GOP candidates. He won't be able to help himself. The networks and cable shows will cover every word of his racist rallies and people will suddenly have a very clear comparison to Biden.

That's good, because "Joe Biden is in real trouble!" is a meme that's not going away.

W. Mondale Robinson spent a large chunk of last fall in clubs and bars and concert venues in Georgia, trying to convince disenchanted Black men that casting a ballot — in the 2020 general election, then the Georgia runoffs for the U.S. Senate — could finally mean real change in their communities.

But Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, thinks the case would be a lot harder to make now. He remembers the exact moment his optimism that President Biden would be different began to fade: when Democrats in May said they were willing to significantly weaken a policing reform bill to get Republican support.

More disappointments followed. Robinson was dismayed that Biden did not push for filibuster reform to enact a $15 minimum wage. He was upset that the president did not try to halt a raft of voting restrictions passed by Georgia’s GOP-led legislature.

“I think the frustration is at an all-time high, and Biden can’t go to Georgia or any other Black state in the South and say, ‘This is what we delivered in 2021,’ ” said Robinson, whose group believes it reached 1.2 million Black men in Georgia. “Black men are pissed off about the nothingness that has happened . . . Does it make the work harder? It makes the work damn near impossible.”

After an initial burst of support, Biden has seen his approval ratings fall significantly in recent months. A Washington Post average of polls since the start of September shows 44 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s job approval, while 49 percent disapprove.

And polls suggest support for Biden has sunk notably among key Democratic constituencies — Blacks, Latinos, women and young people. Pew Research Center polls found Biden’s approval rating among Black Americans fell from 85 percent in July to 67 percent in September, while also falling 16 points among Hispanics and 14 points among Asians.

Interviews with nearly 20 advocates, activists and politicians in the crucial state of Georgia — which Biden won narrowly, in large part due to support from Black voters, after decades of Republican dominance — give a sense of the sentiments behind those numbers. At the center are Black and other minority voters who helped fuel Biden’s victory, but who now see what they consider unfulfilled promises and dwindling hope for meaningful change.

In some sense, the “benefit of the doubt” portion of Biden’s presidency is over. While the president gained initial goodwill among many from simply not being Trump, especially when it came to the coronavirus, now those who supported him are demanding results, and his lack of a devoted base is starting to show.

“If midterms are about enthusiasm and turnout, who do you think is excited to vote on November 2 at this moment?” said Nsé Ufot, chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, which has registered more than a half-million voters. “Because it ain’t Democrats. It ain’t Black folks. It ain’t young people.”

 

It's not 100% Biden's fault. He's getting stabbed in the back (and the front) daily by President Joe Manchin and Vice President Sinema. Biden's not the one blocking filibuster reform or removal. But the Republican plan for an overwhelming midterm win requires Donald Trump to not be in the news daily, either.

 

Don't get me wrong, the headwinds against Biden and the Dems are still overwhelming. It'll take a miracle to keep Congress.

 

Perversely, that miracle may just have shown up, is what I'm saying.