Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

Senate Republicans are trying really, really hard to pretend that Donald Trump doesn't exist and that he's not the leader of the GOP so that they can get reelected in November, but Trump keeps making that hard with his continuing campaign to crucify those left in the party who aren't loyal.

 

In interviews on Monday evening, GOP senators lashed out at their own national party's overwhelming vote to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for working on the House's investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. They warned that alienating a portion of the party for being overly anti-Trump is not a political winner heading into the midterms, a sharp message from sitting members that goes far beyond criticism already aired by a handful of GOP pundits.

Several Republican senators took more direct action: Both Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) were in communication with RNC chair Ronna McDaniel about the censure, with Graham calling her and Romney texting his niece.

“A very unfortunate decision by the RNC and a very unfortunate statement put out as well. Nothing could be further from the truth than to consider the attack on the seat of democracy as legitimate political discourse,” Romney said in an interview. Graham said the party is going in the “wrong direction” when it’s not talking about taking back control of Congress.

The RNC is supposed to be a unifying organization within the party. But its passage of a resolution censuring Cheney and Kinzinger for the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” is having the opposite effect — reopening divisions between the large pro-Trump wing of the party, the smaller anti-Trump wing and the rest of a GOP still trying to find its way amid a favorable midterm cycle.

The intrigue will continue to play out later this week, with internal discussions in the House over the censure and future of Cheney and Kinzinger in the party.

The RNC “did say in their resolution that the job was to win elections. I agree with that. But then they go on to engage in actions that make that more challenging,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is close to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. “I don’t think you can kick out of the party everybody you disagree with. Or it’s going to be a minority party.”

McConnell, who has defended Cheney in the past, said he would address the matter on Tuesday at his usual press conference. Several members of his leadership team expressed their concern about GOP infighting. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, the No. 5 GOP leader, said it shouldn’t be the job of the RNC to censure individual members of Congress: “I wish they wouldn’t. I would leave it up to the states.”

“We’ve got a lot of issues that we should be focusing on besides censuring two members of Congress because they have a different opinion,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who serves on McConnell’s leadership team. “I thought: Free speech for everybody.”

 

This is Mitch and the Senate GOP yelling "Don't make me pull this car over" while in the front passenger seat. Trump's been driving this clown car for nearly seven years now and nobody cares to listen to them anymore.

 

It's Trump's party and it will be for the foreseeable future. 

What Senate Republicans are afraid of is Trump turning on them next.

Vermont Does The Rights Thing By Women

As the clock ticks down to SCOTUS gutting Roe and states being allowed to end safe abortion services for tens of millions, Vermont is expected to put the question of a right to abortion to voters and to enshrine that right in the state's constitution.

Vermont legislators will vote Tuesday on a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to abortion and contraception, the first amendment of its kind anywhere in the United States.

If passed, the proposed amendment, known as Proposition 5, will head to Gov. Phil Scott (R), who is required to give public notice of the measure before it appears on the ballot in November. Scott has signaled his support for Proposition 5. And voters in Vermont, where 70 percent of people say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, are expected to approve it.

The proposal is part of a wave of abortion rights legislation to emerge in Democratic states this year, ahead of a key Supreme Court ruling on abortion expected this summer. The Supreme Court case, which involves a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks, could overturn or significantly weaken Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that has guaranteed the right to abortion for almost 50 years.

Fifteen states have passed laws protecting the right to abortion, including, most recently, New Jersey, where Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed the Freedom of Reproductive Choice Act in January. Other states, such as Florida, have privacy laws in their state constitutions, which courts have interpreted to protect the right to abortion. But no other state has enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution.

At a moment when antiabortion legislators across the Southeast and Midwest are proposing dramatic rollbacks of abortion rights, abortion rights advocates are thrilled to see a state moving in the opposite direction.

“We are hoping to be a model for other states to follow,” said Lucy Leriche, vice president of Vermont Public Policy at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. “In states all over the country, politicians are moving to take away reproductive rights, specifically abortion rights, and we could be an example of another way.”

 

State Republicans in the legislature are unhappy to say the least.

Republican lawmakers and lobbyists in Vermont have called the amendment “extreme.” By adding this amendment to the state constitution, said Republican state Rep. Anne Donahue, legislators are making the assumption that public opinion on abortion won’t change.

“We as human beings have made a lot of mistakes at times when we thought we were doing the right thing,” said Donahue, who cited the Supreme Court’s prior rulings on segregation and eugenics. “When we start putting a current belief in the constitution, I think we’re playing with fire.”

Donahue and other Republicans have cited concerns with certain language in the proposed amendment. Proposition 5 guarantees the right to “reproductive autonomy,” a term Donahue said is too vague, opening the door for future courts to interpret the amendment more broadly than legislators intended.

 

Yes, it might be interpreted to mean that women have control over their own reproductive organs. 

Perish the thought.

Another Supreme Disappointment, Con't

I mentioned last week that a federal court declaring Alabama's congressional redistricting by the GOP to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act for basically removing one of the two of the state's majority Black districts at least meant the VRA still existed. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court noticed and promptly killed it again, with the five Federalist Society assholes putting the redraw on hold.

The Supreme Court on Monday reinstated an Alabama congressional map that a lower court had said diluted the power of Black voters, suggesting that the court was poised to become more skeptical of challenges to voting maps based on claims of race discrimination.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s three liberal members in dissent.

The Supreme Court’s brief order, which included no reasoning, was provisional, staying a lower court’s decision while the case moves forward. The justices said they would hear Alabama’s appeal of the lower court’s ruling, but they did not say when.

Both the stay and the decision to hear the case indicated that the court is open to weakening the role race may play in drawing voting districts for federal elections, setting up a major new test of the Voting Rights Act in a court that has gradually limited the reach of the law in other contexts.

The dispute in Alabama is part of a pitched redistricting battle playing out across the country, with Democrats and Republicans alike challenging electoral districts as unlawful gerrymanders. Those challenges have mostly been filed in state courts, meaning the Supreme Court is unlikely to intervene.

Civil rights leaders and some Democrats say the redistricting process often disadvantages growing minority communities. Republican state officials say the Constitution allows only a limited role for the consideration of race in drawing voting districts.

If the court follows its usual practices, it will schedule arguments in the Alabama case for the fall and issue a decision months later, meaning that the 2022 election would be conducted using the challenged map.

Alabama has seven congressional districts and its voting-age population is about 27 percent Black. In the challenged map, Black voters are in the majority in one district. The lower court, relying on the Voting Rights Act, had ordered the State Legislature to create a second district in which Black voters could elect a representative of their choice.

In a concurring opinion on Monday, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said that “the stay order does not make or signal any change to voting rights law.” It was necessary, he wrote, because the lower court had acted too soon before a coming election.

“When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties and voters, among others.”

 

'Obvious racism is bad unless it happens in an election year, in which case disenfranchisement is 100% acceptable" is a shit argument even for Justice Kegstand the Beer-Lover, but this is how SCOTUS works now.  So yes, Republicans can just do whatever they want in redistricting. SCOTUS will cover them. 

Good to know!

Last Call For Hillbilly Epitaph

Over the river in Ohio, "Democrats don't know how to talk to rural America" mascot and now Republican Trump cultist and author JD Vance is running into his own ugly past, and it's leaving him stranded in the middle of the road where his fate is seemingly to get wrecked by oncoming traffic in the Ohio GOP primary in a few months.

 

Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance “needs a course correction ASAP” — and that’s according to the well-funded super PAC supporting him.

A 98-page PowerPoint presentation produced by Tony Fabrizio, who has been polling for the pro-Vance Protect Ohio Values super PAC since last year, paints a dire picture of the candidate’s prospects. According to the slide deck, Vance has seen a “precipitous decline” in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary since last fall, when a pair of outside groups backing a rival began a multimillion-dollar TV advertising blitz using five-year-old footage of Vance attacking former President Donald Trump.

“Driving his negatives is the perception that he is anti-Trump. This has only grown since” November, said the presentation, which is based on polling data of 800 likely primary voters conducted Jan. 18-20.

The Senate race in Ohio is a high-profile example of how Trump is dominating Republican down-ballot primaries, and how his support is seen as make-or-break for those seeking the party’s nomination. Vance refashioned himself as a Trump supporter long ago, but his past comments are sticking to him. Meanwhile, Republican candidates are welding themselves to the former president and aggressively seeking out his endorsement; last spring, a handful of the Ohio Republican candidates met with Trump for an “Apprentice”-style boardroom audition for his support.

Vance, a venture capitalist and the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” has been working to make inroads with both Trump supporters and Trump himself: Last year, Vance and his main financial benefactor, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, quietly met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida.

Fabrizio, who is also a longtime Trump pollster, wrote that Vance is “now underwater with strong Trump” supporters “and very conservative voters, groups needed to win a GOP primary.” He added that Vance’s “association as a Never Trumper has only grown since November” and that “being anti-Trump is the #1 reason voters do not like Vance.”

Several months out from the May 3 primary, the presentation says that “consideration of Vance has fallen most dramatically with those on the right: conservatives and strong approvers of Trump,” and that the “perception” of Vance “as a moderate or even as a liberal continues to steadily grow.”

“The groups where Vance has improved are those we don’t want him doing better with: Trump disapprovers and moderate/liberals,” Fabrizio wrote.

Vance’s decline follows a $2 million-plus TV ad campaign from the Club for Growth and USA Freedom Fund, outside groups that are backing Vance rival Josh Mandel, which have portrayed Vance as an anti-Trump figure. The commercials, which use footage from 2016, show Vance describing himself as a “Never Trump guy” and calling Trump an “idiot,” “noxious” and “offensive,” appear to have made a dent. According to the slide deck, “anti-Trump is by far the top thing the 50% of voters who have seen an ad about Vance remember.”

Still, the polling paints the picture of a close, crowded race. The survey shows Mandel, a former state treasurer who unsuccessfully ran for Senate in 2012, out ahead with 15 percent. He is followed closely in the results by self-funding investment banker Mike Gibbons, with 14 percent, former state GOP Chair Jane Timken with 13 percent, business owner Bernie Moreno with 11 percent, and Vance at 9 percent. (Moreno dropped out of the primary last week, several weeks after the poll was taken.)

 

It's not a question of if a nutjob racist, bigoted, white supremacist terrorist sympathizer tries to replace Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman, it's "which one".  Increasingly, that person is looking like it may actually not be Vance, but that leaves plenty of assholes like Josh Mandel to run for the seat. 

Having said that, Donald Trump hates Josh Mandel. It's still possible that Trump saves Vance by giving him the endorsement, put at this point, Trump hasn't made his choice yet.

We'll see.

The Great Canadian Trucker War, Con't

After a third weekend of protests by Canadian Trumpists blocking highways and roads in Canada's capital of Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson has had enough and has declared a state of emergency, setting the stage for  local, provincial and federal police to step in.

The mayor of Canada’s capital declared a state of emergency Sunday and a former U.S. ambassador to Canada said groups in the U.S. must stop interfering in the domestic affairs of America’s neighbor as protesters opposed to COVID-19 restrictions continued to paralyze Ottawa’s downtown.

Mayor Jim Watson said the declaration highlights the need for support from other jurisdictions and levels of government. It gives the city some additional powers around procurement and how it delivers services, which could help purchase equipment required by frontline workers and first responders.

Thousands of protesters descended in Ottawa again on the weekend, joining a hundred who remained since last weekend. Residents of Ottawa are furious at the nonstop blaring of horns, traffic disruption and harassment and fear no end is in sight after the police chief called it a “siege” that he could not manage.

The “freedom truck convoy” has attracted support from many U.S. Republicans including former President Donald Trump, who called Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “far left lunatic” who has “destroyed Canada with insane Covid mandates.”

“Canada US relations used to be mainly about solving technical issues. Today Canada is unfortunately experiencing radical US politicians involving themselves in Canadian domestic issues. Trump and his followers are a threat not just to the US but to all democracies,” Bruce Heyman, a former U.S. ambassador under President Barack Obama, tweeted.

Heyman said “under no circumstances should any group in the USA fund disruptive activities in Canada. Period. Full stop.”

After crowdfunding site GoFundMe said it would refund or redirect to charities the vast majority of the millions raised by demonstrators protesting in the Canadian capital, prominent U.S. Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis complained.

But GoFundMe had already changed its mind and said it would be issuing refunds to all. The site said it cut off funding for the organizers because it had determined the effort violated the site’s terms of service due to unlawful activity.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has called it an occupation.

 

Hopefully order will be restored in the city, I suspect that the last holdouts however may turn to violence. We'll see how this story ends, but I'm honestly surprised it took this long for Watson and the city to respond.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Another governor is ending school mask mandates across the state having arbitrarily decided that the pandemic is "over", only this time it's a Democratic governor in New Jersey's Phil Murphy.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who has imposed some of the nation’s most stringent pandemic-related mandates, will no longer require students and school employees to wear masks, signaling a deliberate shift toward treating the coronavirus as a part of daily life.

Mr. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said on Sunday that he would officially announce the elimination of the mandate on Monday afternoon. The new policy will take effect the second week of March, two years after New York and New Jersey became early epicenters of a virus that has since mutated and resurged, killing more than 900,000 people nationwide.

The debate over mask wearing in schools has proved one of the most divisive issues in the pandemic, embroiling parents, school boards, teachers and elected officials in caustic clashes over academic loss, protecting public health and individual choice.

Mr. Murphy’s move follows a decision last month by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to rescind his state’s school mask mandate. The Democratic governors of New York and Connecticut also said last week that they were re-evaluating school mask mandates that are soon set to expire.

An average of 78 New Jersey residents died each day from Covid-19 in the last week, contributing to a daily nationwide death toll of 2,600, a per capita rate that far exceeds those of other wealthy nations.

But new cases of the highly contagious Omicron variant are plummeting in New Jersey and across the country.

Last week, after meeting with President Biden at the White House during an annual governors conference, Mr. Murphy suggested it was time to reconsider how to manage the virus. “The overwhelming sentiment on both sides of the aisle,” he said on Wednesday, “is we want to get to a place where we can live with this thing in as normal a fashion as possible.”

Deaths are still above 2,500 per day from the virus and we're above 900,000 total deaths and counting, with tens of millions suffering from Long COVID symptoms of fatigue, memory loss, chronic pain, heart and lung problems and more, but both Republicans and Democrats have decided that this is the new normal.

 

Most of all the behavior of White House staffers on the pandemic hasn't changed at all from the Trump era.

President Joe Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, bullied and demeaned his subordinates and violated the White House’s workplace policy, an internal White House investigation recently concluded, according to interviews and an audio recording obtained by POLITICO.

The two-month investigation found “credible evidence” that Lander — a Cabinet member and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy who the White House touts as a key player in the pandemic response — was “bullying” toward his then-general counsel, Rachel Wallace, according to a recorded January briefing on the investigation’s findings.

Christian Peele, the White House’s deputy director of management and administration for personnel, said that the investigation also concluded that there was “credible evidence of disrespectful interactions with staff by Dr. Lander and OSTP leadership,” according to the roughly 20-minute briefing, which included a representative of the White House Counsel’s office.

There was also “credible evidence” that Lander had spoken “harshly and disrespectfully to colleagues in front of other colleagues,” Peele said, according to the recording. “The investigation found credible evidence of instances of multiple women having complained to other staff about negative interactions with Dr. Lander, where he spoke to them in a demeaning or abrasive way in front of other staff,” Peele said in the recording.


In an office of roughly 140 people, 14 current and former OSTP staffers who worked under Lander this past year shared similar descriptions of a toxic work environment where they say Lander frequently bullied, cut off and dismissed subordinates. Nine of those current and former OSTP staffers said Lander yelled and sometimes made people feel humiliated in front of their peers. Most were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation from Lander.

The behavior is at odds with Biden's Day-1 warning to his political appointees that anyone who disrespected their colleagues would be fired “On the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”

This is the sort of idiotic nonsense that we used to hear about Trtump's pandemic response team. To see the exact sort of foolishness play out under Biden is just damning.

 

Live with the lethal virus, folks.

 

That's the Democratic platform in 2022.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

The National Butterfly Sanctuary in Texas is closed until further notice because the park and its staff have been targeted for deadly violence, as Trump cultist conspiracy nuts have deemed the center to be a secret child kidnapping and smuggling base.

In a country where many believe that Satan-worshiping pedophiles run the government and the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. will restore a Trump presidency, the butterfly center has become the latest unlikely victim of wild misinformation and outright lies spreading rapidly online. It has become a borderland version of Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizzeria that became the center of the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed that Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring in the restaurant. That lie spread so far that it prompted a North Carolina man to drive to the pizzeria and fire an assault rifle inside .

Becoming the focus of this type of attention has terrified and infuriated the staff at the butterfly center, some of whom have taken steps to protect themselves online and at work.

“The kind of activity, the kind of chatter going on — these are the kinds of things that happen before other horrible events where people ended up dying,” said Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg, the president of the nonprofit North American Butterfly Association, which runs the butterfly center in Mission.

He feared that someone who believed the lies could resort to violence, and cited the mass killer who targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, amid a similarly heated debate over border security.


“We know it’s a dangerous lie,” said Dr. Glassberg, 74, a lifelong lover of butterflies who also developed the process of DNA fingerprinting. “People say you’re raping babies, then unhinged people come out of the woodwork.”

When people began showing up at the butterfly center, the nonprofit decided it needed to do more to provide security for staff members and visitors. It would remain closed, he said, until a plan could be developed for how to do so.

 

And why is the enter being targeted? You can blame Donald Trump and his horrible minions for that.

 

Created nearly two decades ago by Dr. Glassberg, the butterfly center in Mission,was built on the site of a former onion field. The recent trouble began in 2017 as President Donald J. Trump pushed to build new sections of border wall. The center did not support construction of the wall through its 100-acre property.

The center and its staff have endured attacks by conservative figures and from Mr. Bannon’s “We Build the Wall,” a crowdfunding campaign that raised millions to construct a border barrier on private land near the butterfly center. Mr. Bannon and Brian Kolfage, an Iraq War veteran involved in leading the effort, were indicted by federal prosecutors in 2020 on fraud charges. (Mr. Bannon was pardoned by Mr. Trump.)

During the wall-funding campaign, Mr. Kolfage repeatedly attacked the butterfly center on social media. “Instead of enabling women and children to be sex trafficked like @NatButterflies, we are taking action! This is a war for control of the most powerful country,” read one post from his Twitter account in 2019.

“When I took this job, I thought I would be able to spend a good amount of time outdoors: butterflies, birds, educating children, writing grants,” said Marianna Trevino Wright, the center’s executive director since 2012. “Now every day my children literally worry whether I’m going to survive a day at work.” 

 

So yes, because the center refused to sell its land to Bannon for Trump's goddamn wall, it's now being targeted by his violent, arme3d, lethal cultists and the staff is in mortal peril of being assassinated.

 

The staff of a butterfly sanctuary.

 

I hate Trump. I really do.

Sunday Long Read: Zeroed Out

Our Sunday Long Read this week is Ernest Owens's New York Magazine interview with Black Lives Matter icon and Campaign Zero co-founder Johnetta Elzie on her start as an activist in Ferguson, Missouri and the near decade of peaks and valleys since the fateful days of the Michael Brown shooting.

Johnetta Elzie wants to remind you that she — and not DeRay Mckesson — was there first.

Ever since Elzie left Campaign Zero, the police-reform organization she and Mckesson founded along with Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Samuel Sinyangwe, she has refused to give on-the-record interviews about what went wrong. But now, she says, she’s ready to be blunt and honest — qualities Elzie argues have been “missing from the movement for a very long time.”

On August 9, 2014, Elzie was on the scene in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, shortly after Michael Brown was shot; she was there when his body was still on the ground.

“I saw a tweet from someone who said there was a Black man who got shot by the cops and was left dead in broad daylight,” Elzie, a native of St. Louis, says. “I went down with a few of my friends to see what was up, and my life was never the same.”

Brown was only 18 years old when he was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. Witnesses to the incident claim that during the altercation between Brown and Wilson, the former put his hands up to surrender before getting shot six times — inspiring the chant “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Protests would prompt a militarized response from the police. The public outcry got international attention.

During those intense weeks, Elzie met with Packnett Cunningham, who was the executive director of the St. Louis branch of Teach for America. According to Elzie, Packnett Cunningham wanted to introduce her to a man named DeRay Mckesson, also an affiliate of Teach for America. Mckesson had been working in Minneapolis as a schools administrator but came to Ferguson to protest. The plan was for the three of them to connect to find better ways to support efforts on the ground.

Shortly after their meeting, Mckesson launched the Ferguson Protester Newsletter as a digital hub to send information to activists across the country on what was happening in the area. Elzie and Packnett Cunningham soon joined him. Mckesson, who earned a massive following on social media for his notable presence at protests (he stood out in photographs in his signature blue bubble vest from Patagonia), found Sinyangwe, a Stanford grad and tech whiz, on Twitter. This connection would lead to the formation of Campaign Zero, which would become one of the most visible policy-driven organizations calling for police reform in America.

For many years, it was just that — an endeavor led by four unique personalities, each with his or her own superpowers: Mckesson was the outward-facing big-ideas guy, Elzie was the community-outreach voice, Packnett Cunningham was the communications-and-policy wonk, and Sinyangwe was the tech-and-data guru. Their efforts took them from the streets of Ferguson to the White House — a feat that earned them admiration and some skepticism.

In 2016, Wired named Campaign Zero one of the 20 most influential tech-driven political organizations in the country: “Campaign Zero’s founders are taking ideas long embraced by on-the-ground protesters and using the power of social media to persuade politicians to embrace those ideas, too.” According to Sinyangwe, who previously served as the board treasurer, the organization would eventually come to be worth more than $40 million.

Today, Mckesson is the sole co-founder still attached to Campaign Zero — the other three have either resigned or been fired. In addition to Elzie, Mckesson and Sinyangwe are speaking openly for the first time about how Campaign Zero got to this breaking point. (Packnett Cunningham declined to comment for this article.)

Like similar stories of movement organizations that have been thrust into the spotlight, this is a tale of how something so promising collapsed because of ego and misguidance. But it’s also one that measures the evolution of progressive views — and how the ideas behind Campaign Zero got left behind.

 

Elzie's oral history of the rise and fall of Campaign Zero is definitely worth experiencing, and it remains as a cautionary tale that we don't always get to control the movements that happen and the people who join them.

Remember that not everyone has your exact agenda, a valuable piece of advice no matter what organization you find yourself a part of.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

North Carolina's state Supreme Court has tossed the state GOP legislature's gerrymandered maps, saying they violate the state constitution.

The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday upended Republican efforts to lock in political dominance in the state, saying that congressional and state legislative maps were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution.

The ruling requires the Republican-controlled legislature not only to submit new maps to the court, but to offer a range of statistical analyses to show “a significant likelihood that the districting plan will give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity to translate votes into seats” in elections.

The requirement rebuffed the argument against redrawing the maps that the legislature offered in oral arguments before the court this week: that the court had no right to say whether and when political maps cross the line from acceptable partisanship into unfairness.

The justices’ 4-3 decision, split along party lines, not only sets a precedent for judging the legality of future maps in the state, but could play an important role in the struggle for control of the House of Representatives in elections this November. The Republican-drawn maps had effectively allotted the party control of at least 10 of the 14 House seats the state will have in the next Congress, even though voters statewide are roughly equally divided between the two parties.

It was a challenge to earlier partisan maps in North Carolina and Maryland that led the U.S. Supreme Court to end decades of federal debate over the constitutionality of partisan gerrymanders, ruling in 2019 that they were political issues beyond its jurisdiction. The justices said then that Congress and state courts should rule on the question, and lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case said on Friday that the new ruling carried out that mandate to the letter.

“The U.S. Supreme Court said it’s up to state courts to rein in partisan gerrymandering, and that’s exactly what the North Carolina Supreme Court has done,” said Elisabeth Theodore of the law firm Arnold & Porter. “The court’s direction is clear: The General Assembly must stop cheating and draw fair new maps so that North Carolinians can have a fair say in who governs them.”

But one longtime scholar of the state’s politics, Michael Bitzer of Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., said the Republican legislature could take the case yet again to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Citing their brief in the state case, he said the legislators might argue that the state court’s decision violates the provision in the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the ultimate right to decide the “times, places and manner” of elections.

The decision comes as both federal and state courts have lately proved a bulwark against some excessive gerrymanders. A state court in Ohio rejected maps drawn by Republicans in the state legislature last month as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, and a federal court in Alabama ruled last month that Republicans had to redraw their congressional map to create a second district that gave minorities a fair shot at electing their preferred candidate.

The legal decisions have been a boon for Democrats, who started the latest redistricting cycle at a significant disadvantage. Republicans controlled the map-drawing process in 187 congressional districts, while Democrats were able to draw 75 districts.

The court decisions in North Carolina, Ohio and Alabama all forced Republicans back to the drawing table and are likely to result in either more competitive seats or opportunities for Democrats in the midterm elections.

 

And that part's actually happened. Democrats in big blue states have taken a page from the GOP manual and have taken a flamethrower to red districts in states like California, New York, and Illinois, all but erasing Republican seats, so many that Democrats are now in the redistricting lead.

NEW: for the first time, Dems have taken the lead on @CookPolitical's 2022 redistricting scorecard. After favorable developments in NY, AL, PA et. al., they're on track to net 2-3 seats from new maps vs. old ones.* pic.twitter.com/7DsP5LEDD0

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) February 3, 2022

 

I didn't think it would happen, I didn't think Dems has the guts to do it. But the GOP run courts of the last decade made it possible, in particular the SCOTUS decision to remove federal oversight from state redistricting.

 

Works both ways, gang.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

Having already been censured by the Wyoming state GOP for her role in the January 6th Committee, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney now faces censure from the national GOP in the party's annual meeting in Salt Lake City this weekend.

 

Republican leaders forged an agreement this week to potentially fund a challenger to Rep. Liz Cheney in Wyoming, and party members are expected to formally condemn her for her work on the Jan. 6 committee Friday, an unprecedented rebuke of an incumbent member of Congress.

As the party met in Salt Lake City this week, the leaders of the Wyoming GOP privately signed a special letter that would allow the national party to financially support Harriet Hageman, Cheney’s primary challenger. The letter officially recognizes Hageman as the presumptive nominee for the seat.

In response to the party passing the “Rule 11” resolution that could fund Cheney’s challenger, a spokesman for Cheney said: “Wyoming Party Chairman Frank Eathorne and the Republican National Committee are trying to assert their will and take away the voice of the people of Wyoming before a single vote has even been cast.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also worked behind the scenes with David Bossie, a top Trump ally, to author and push a resolution that attacked Cheney’s work on the committee, called her a “destructive” force in the GOP and vowed the party would no longer support her.

“We’ve had two members engage in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse. This has gone beyond their original intent. They are not sticking up for hard-working Republicans,” McDaniel said in a joint interview with Bossie at a Salt Lake City hotel where the party is holding its winter meeting.

Bossie called it a “one-two punch” against Cheney that signaled a message from the GOP at the state and national levels.

The draft resolution passed unanimously in the GOP’s resolutions committee meeting on Thursday afternoon, and McDaniel and Bossie spoke privately in favor of it. “Once it passed, there was applause in the room,” McDaniel said of the resolutions committee. The RNC chairwoman said she expected the resolution to pass “overwhelmingly” on Friday morning when the 168 members of the committee consider it. “This isn’t a top-down situation. The members have shown tremendous support for this,” McDaniel said.

A representative for Cheney decried the party’s position, reiterating a statement she made last week that said Republicans were “hostage” to Donald Trump. She faces a difficult primary in Wyoming, where Trump endorsed against her and former aides of his are working for her opponent. Cheney, daughter of former vice president Richard B. Cheney, has largely voted with Republicans and has long held conservative views but has been vociferous and relentless in her attacks on Trump since Jan. 6.

“The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what,” Cheney said.

 

Cheney is going out doing the right thing, but her career is effectively over. Wyoming Republicans get to pretend that she doesn't exist and the party is already supporting her replacement in Harriet Hagerman. And yes, if David Bossie is involved, this is Trump personally taking a hand in her crucifixion.

Cheney is still awful of course. She's fine with 99.9% of Trump's racism, misogyny, and bigotry, she just wants a less-terrible figurehead for the party for her foul policies. She's being sacrificed along with GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, also facing excommunication from the party.

That's not the problem. This is.

The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” formally rebuking two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.

The Republican National Committee’s overwhelming voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.

On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

It was an extraordinary statement about the deadliest attack on the Capitol in 200 years, in which a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the complex, brutalizing police officers and sending lawmakers into hiding. Nine people died in connection with the attack and more than 150 officers were injured. The party passed the resolution without discussion and almost without dissent.

The Republican party just officially recognized the January 6th terrorist attack as "legitimate political discourse", folks.

 

Republicans will kill to maintain power from here on out.

 

Don't mourn Cheney and Kinzinger's destruction.

Elect more Democrats instead.

Jobapalooza, Con't

Huge, huge numbers in the January jobs report today, including massive upward revisions in the "disappointing" November and December numbers.

Payrolls rose far more than expected in January despite surging omicron cases that seemingly sent millions of workers to the sidelines, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Nonfarm payrolls surged by 467,000 for the month, while the unemployment rate edged higher to 4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Dow Jones estimate was for payroll growth of 150,000 and a 3.9% unemployment rate.

The stunning gain came a week after the White House warned that the numbers could be low due to the pandemic.

Covid cases, however, have plunged nationally in recent weeks, with the seven-day moving average down more than 50% since peaking in mid-January, according to the CDC. Most economists, while expecting January’s number to be weak, see a further rebound coming in the months ahead.

Along with the big upside surprise for January, massive revisions sent previous months considerably higher.

December, which initially was reported as a gain of 199,000, went up to 510,000. November surged to 647,000 from the previous reported 249,000. For the two months alone, the initial counts were revised up by 709,000. The revisions came as part of the annual adjustments from the BLS that saw sizeable changes for many of the months in 2021.

“The benchmark revisions helped the numbers a bit just because it moved out some of the seasonal factors that have been at work. But overall the job market is strong, particularly in the face of omicron,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at Charles Schwab. “It’s hard to find a weak spot in this report.”

For January, the biggest employment gains came in leisure and hospitality, which saw 151,000 hires, 108,000 of which came from bars and restaurants. Professional and business services contributed 86,000, while retail was up 61,000.

There was more good jobs news: The labor force participation rate rose to 62.2%, a 0.3 percentage point gain. That took the rate, which is closely watched by Fed officials, to its highest level since March 2020 and within 1.2 percentage points of where it was pre-pandemic.

A more encompassing level of unemployment that counts discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons dropped to 7.1%, 0.2 percentage point decline and to just above its pre-pandemic level.

The job gains brought employment back to about 1.7 million below where it was in February 2020, a month before the pandemic declaration.

 

So to recap: 

• Nearly 500k new jobs this month alone.
• Upwards revisions of more than 700k for November and December.
• Leisure/Restaurant numbers up by more than 100k.
• An entire percentage point of the American labor force came back to work.
• Under 2 million jobs to go to erase the Trump Depression's losses.

 

These are some of the best job numbers in decades, folks. Biden is doing it right. All the nonsense about "people staying home" isn't happening. 

 

The economy is roaring back. 

Joe Biden did that.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

Yet another Republican governor has decided that if the COVID dead each week simply aren't counted anymore, that the pandemic will simply vanish and everything will be fine.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Thursday that she will soon end public health disaster proclamations that Iowa has operated under since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic nearly two years ago.

The shift will include pulling the plug on a state website focusing on COVID data, such as the number of Iowans testing positive for the disease, being hospitalized with it or dying from it. However, many of those statistics will continue to be available on other state and federal websites, Kelly Garcia, interim director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, said Thursday.

Reynolds, a Republican, first invoked a disaster proclamation on March 17, 2020. In the early days of the pandemic, she used such proclamations to close businesses, limit large gatherings and encourage other pandemic responses, such as limiting nonessential surgeries and — briefly — requiring masks to be worn in certain indoor settings.

Reynolds said in her statement Thursday that she will allow the current proclamation to expire on Feb. 15 at 11:59 p.m. She said it's time to reallocate state resources.

"We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat COVID-19 as a public health emergency indefinitely," Reynolds said in a statement. "After two years, it’s no longer feasible or necessary. The flu and other infectious illnesses are part of our everyday lives, and coronavirus can be managed similarly."

Her move comes as Iowa's spike in cases and hospitalizations from the omicron variant has begun to ease. Still, 794 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Iowa as of Wednesday, while 109 patients required intensive care and 51 required ventilators.

Iowa recorded more than 150 additional COVID-19 deaths in its weekly update Wednesday, representing people who had died with the disease in previous weeks and months. The health department recorded just three additional flu deaths in its weekly flu report Jan. 28, bringing the total since last fall to 13.

 

If you get COVID and die, oh well.

 

Manage it.

 

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The Biden administration policy of announcing Russia's false flag efforts ahead of time has got to be really annoying to Putin, as it seems Washington has caught his disinformation squad red-handed once again trying to start a pretext for military invasion.

The United States has acquired intelligence about a Russian plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine using a faked video that would build on recent disinformation campaigns, according to senior administration officials and others briefed on the material.

The plan — which the United States hopes to spoil by making public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine.

Russia, the officials said, intended to use the video to accuse Ukraine of genocide against Russian-speaking people. It would then use the outrage over the video to justify an attack or have separatist leaders in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine invite a Russian intervention.

Officials would not release any direct evidence of the Russian plan or how they learned of it, saying to do so would compromise their sources and methods. But both a recent Russian disinformation campaign focused on false accusations of genocide and the recent political actions being taken in the Russian parliament to recognize breakaway governments in Ukraine lent credence to the intelligence.

If carried out, the Russian operation would be an expansion of a propaganda theme that American intelligence officials and outside experts have said Moscow has been pushing on social media, conspiracy sites and with state-controlled media since November.

The video was intended to be elaborate, officials said, with plans for graphic images of the staged, corpse-strewn aftermath of an explosion and footage of destroyed locations. They said the video was also set to include faked Ukrainian military equipment, Turkish-made drones and actors playing Russian-speaking mourners.

American officials would not say who in Russia precisely was planning the operation, but a senior administration official said that “Russian intelligence is intimately involved in this effort.”

A British government official said that they had done their own analysis on the intelligence and had high confidence that Russia was planning to engineer a pretext to blame Ukraine for an attack. The details of the intelligence, the official said, are “credible and extremely concerning.”

While it is not clear that senior Russian officials approved the operation, it was far along in the planning and the United States had high confidence that it was under serious consideration, officials said. Russian officials had found corpses to use in the video, discussed actors to play mourners and plotted how to make military equipment in the video appear Ukrainian or NATO-supplied.

While the plan sounded far-fetched, American officials said they believed it could have worked to provide a spark for a Russian military operation — an outcome they said they hoped would be made less likely by exposing the effort publicly.

The highlights of the intelligence have been declassified, in hopes of both derailing the plan and convincing allies of the seriousness of the Russian planning. The officials interviewed for this article requested anonymity to discuss declassified but sensitive intelligence before it was released publicly.

 

It's an exceedingly simple, yet effective plan, but that also means like disarming a tripwire, it can be taken down easily once you're aware of its presence. Contrary to popular belief, the Biden administration doesn't want a shooting war in Ukraine. 

Let's hope it stays that way.

The Night The Lights Went Out In Texas, Again

With a brutal winter storm on the way towards the Lone Star State today, and state leaders having done precisely nothing since last February's lethal power outage debacle, Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is once again advising Texans that they are on their own when it comes to power, heat, water, and light this week.

With freezing weather expected to hit a large portion of Texas this week, Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday tried to assure Texans that the state is better prepared this year than last, but said there could be local power outages throughout the state.

“Either ice on power lines ... could cause a power line to go down, or it could be ice on trees that causes a tree to fall on power lines,” Abbott said.

This week’s cold front could be the first significant test of the state’s main power grid since last February’s freeze left millions of Texans without power for days in subfreezing temperatures. Hundreds of people died because of that storm.

“No one can guarantee there won’t be [power outages],” Abbott said Tuesday, just over two months after he promised the lights would stay on this winter.

Abbott and other officials at the press conference warned that the winter storm could cause “treacherous” driving conditions due to snow and ice.

Two hours before Abbott’s Tuesday news conference, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s main power grid, held a conference call with dozens of entities in the Texas power system and told them that gas suppliers have already begun notifying electricity generation companies that some of their expected gas supply will not arrive this week during the freezing weather, according to people on the call who requested anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss the call publicly.

The Texas natural gas system’s ability to perform in the cold has been in question since last February, when the winter storm caused power outages and equipment failures that choked off much of the fuel supply to many electricity generators when they needed it most to produce electricity.

After last year’s storm, state lawmakers did not require natural gas companies — which fuel a majority of electricity generation in Texas — to prepare their equipment for the extreme cold before this winter. Meanwhile, lawmakers required most power generation companies to be prepared by this winter.

During the year’s first cold snap over New Year’s weekend, natural gas production in the state’s top energy-producing region dropped by about 20% as parts of Texas briefly experienced freezing weather. A couple weeks later as another cold front approached Texas, subsidiaries for a major pipeline company threatened to cut off natural gas supply to the state’s largest power generator over an ongoing financial dispute stemming from the February 2021 winter storm.

When asked about the natural gas supply Tuesday, Abbott said “there might be some reduction in the generation of natural gas. We can still maintain power grid integrity even if there is a loss of some level of production of natural gas.”

Abbott said gas producers have “taken steps to ensure that we’re going to have the natural gas that we need.

An ERCOT spokesperson said the grid operator has “planned and prepared” for a drop in natural gas this week.

The natural gas industry has not made significant upgrades since last winter, Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, said in December. But Staples said the industry has been preparing for winter weather for years.

 

Sure, Jan. And tens of thousands are already without power ac the ice storm falls.

 

Texas is a third world, failed state.

Go Ahead And Mark Zucker, Burned

Turns out that not only did CNN's investigation into Chris Cuomo turn up evidence of his sexual misconduct, the same investigation also turned up sexual misconduct on the part of CNN head Jeff Zucker, who has now immediately resigned from the cable news network in disgrace as a result.

Jeff Zucker resigned on Wednesday as the president of CNN and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division, writing in a memo that he had failed to disclose to the company a romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN.

Mr. Zucker, 56, is among the most powerful leaders in the American media and television industries. The abrupt end of his nine-year tenure immediately throws into flux the direction of CNN and its parent company, WarnerMedia, which is expected to be acquired later this year by Discovery Inc. in one of the nation’s largest media mergers.

In a memo to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zucker wrote that his relationship came up during a network investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who was fired in December over his involvement in the political affairs of his brother, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

“As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Mr. Zucker wrote. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

“As a result, I am resigning today,” he wrote.

Mr. Zucker was referring to Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer and one of the highest-ranking leaders of the network, who is closely involved in major business and communications decisions.

Ms. Gollust said in a statement on Wednesday that she was remaining in her role at CNN.

“Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years,” she wrote. “Recently, our relationship changed during Covid. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time. I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN and look forward to continuing the great work we do everyday.”

Both Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust are divorced.

In a memo to WarnerMedia employees, Jason Kilar, the company’s chief executive, acknowledged that he had accepted Mr. Zucker’s resignation, adding, “We will be announcing an interim leadership plan shortly.”

 

The fact that it took two months after Cuomo's ouster for the hammer to fall on Zucker, well.

 

Make of that what you will.