Last Call For Irish Suprisish

After decades of being an also-ran, Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein has scored the largest bloc in Northern Ireland's parliamentary elections on Saturday, a huge step forward for reunification with Ireland.

The Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, which seeks unification with Ireland, hailed a “new era” Saturday for Northern Ireland as it captured the largest number of seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in a historic win.

With almost all votes counted from Thursday’s local U.K. election, Sinn Fein secured 27 of the Assembly’s 90 seats. The Democratic Unionist Party, which has dominated Northern Ireland’s legislature for two decades, captured 24 seats. The victory means Sinn Fein is entitled to the post of first minister in Belfast — a first for an Irish nationalist party since Northern Ireland was founded as a Protestant-majority state in 1921.

The centrist Alliance Party, which doesn’t identify as either nationalist or unionist, also saw a huge surge in support and was set to become the other big winner in the vote, claiming 17 seats.

The victory is a major milestone for Sinn Fein, which has long been linked to the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary group that used bombs and bullets to try to take Northern Ireland out of U.K. rule during decades of violence involving Irish republican militants, Protestant Loyalist paramilitaries and the U.K. army and police.

“Today ushers in a new era,” Sinn Fein vice-president Michelle O’Neill said shortly before the final results were announced. “Irrespective of religious, political or social backgrounds, my commitment is to make politics work.”

O’Neill stressed that it was imperative for Northern Ireland’s divided politicians to come together next week to form an Executive — the devolved government of Northern Ireland. If none can be formed within six months, the administration will collapse, triggering a new election and more uncertainty.

There is “space in this state for everyone, all of us together,” O’Neill said. “There is an urgency to restore an Executive and start putting money back in people’s pockets, to start to fix the health service. The people can’t wait.”

While the Sinn Fein win signals a historic shift that shows diminishing support for unionist parties, it’s far from clear what happens next because of Northern Ireland’s complicated power-sharing politics and ongoing tussles over post-Brexit arrangements.

Under a mandatory power-sharing system created by the 1998 peace agreement that ended decades of Catholic-Protestant conflict, the jobs of first minister and deputy first minister are split between the biggest unionist party and the largest nationalist one. Both posts must be filled for a government to function, but the Democratic Unionist Party has suggested it might not serve under a Sinn Fein first minister.

The DUP has also said it will refuse to join a new government unless there are major changes to post-Brexit border arrangements known as the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Those post-Brexit rules, which took effect after Britain left the European Union, have imposed customs and border checks on some goods entering Northern Ireland from the rest of the U.K. The arrangement was designed to keep an open border between Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland, a key pillar of the peace process.

But the rules angered many unionists, who maintain that the new checks have created a barrier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. that undermines their British identity. In February, the DUP’s Paul Givan resigned as first minister in protest against the arrangements, triggering a a fresh political crisis in Northern Ireland.

DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said he will announce next week whether he will return to the government.

“We will consider what we need to do now to get the action that is required from the government. I will be making my decision clear on all of that early next week,” he told the BBC.

 

So, we'll see how this all plays out, but "Sinn Fein controlling Norther Ireland politics as the largest bloc" is definitely not something I had on my bingo card.  Granted, I've been busy covering America's own period of terrorist attacks and seperationist militants, but Irish unification seems pretty inevitable at this point.

I mean I'm old enough to remember both the Time of Troubles and German reunification, so. The number one thing to remember about history is that the future is never guaranteed.

The Big Liedaho

The Big Lie that Trump "really" won the 2020 election is ripping up primary slates in several states, and that apparently includes the Gem State.

Idaho’s dominant Republican Party is at war with itself up and down the ballot ahead of its May 17 primaries.

It’s not just Gov. Brad Little, whose reelection campaign became national news when Donald Trump endorsed a primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. The state attorney general is staring down a challenge from a former rabble-rousing member of Congress. The senior of Idaho’s two GOP House members is facing a primary that has drawn millions in spending. And contentious open races for lieutenant governor and the secretary of state — Idaho’s chief election official — echo some of the national divisions within the party.

There is bound to be some infighting in a state where ambitious pols only have a few routes up the ladder. But there’s more to it in Idaho, where the party’s longtime control over the booming state has bred sharp differences and fierce enmity between two wings of the GOP.

“Some people would describe it as conservative, and then far-right conservative,” said Tom Luna, the chair of the state Republican Party. That “far-right” camp, Luna continued, “would call themselves conservatives and everybody else moderates.”

“We’re probably a microcosm, in some ways, of a lot of places around the country,” said Tommy Ahlquist, a developer who finished third in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary.

The normally invisible secretary of state race illustrates the situation. Two of the three candidates running in the GOP primary — state Sen. Mary Souza and state Rep. Dorothy Moon — said they did not believe that President Joe Biden fairly won the 2020 election. Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, who oversees elections in the state’s most populous county, said that Biden did win the election.

“It’s just this national rhetoric, and running to a narrative created by Trump that he started when he knew he was going to lose, and started telling the lie,” said Ahlquist, who is critical of the far-right slate of candidates. “And that filters down to Republicans in our state. And in a state as red as ours, that’s still the narrative because that’s what they do to get elected.”

In the state attorney general’s race, former Rep. Raúl Labrador — a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus — and his allies have cast five-term Attorney General Lawrence Wasden as a weak link in the national fight against Democrats.

The Club for Growth, a longtime backer of Labrador’s in Congress, has spent nearly $300,000 on TV ads in the race, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Though the group hasn’t formally endorsed Labrador, who finished second in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, they have gone after Wasden.

“Lawrence Wasden is no general,” the narrator of the Club ad says, knocking him for not joining multi-state actions that other GOP attorneys general backed — including the 2020 lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that tried to toss out the results of the last presidential election.

But it’s the governor’s race that will headline the GOP primaries in Idaho, with Little facing down a challenge from McGeachin after years of public feuding between the two, especially over coronavirus policies. Their horn-locking reached farcical levels: More than once, McGeachin used her power as acting governor while Little was out of the state to issue an executive order on the pandemic, which Little would angrily rescind shortly after returning.

Little is one of two sitting Republican governors whom Trump is opposing, joining Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whose primary against former Sen. David Perdue is later this month. But unlike Kemp — who had a well-documented public breakup with Trump in 2020, over his unwillingness to help Trump overturn the election results — Little never publicly drew the former president’s ire.

McGeachin, however, was one of Trump’s earliest supporters. She also has ties to the far right, having appeared at the same conference hosted by a white nationalist that drew condemnation and criticism for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). (McGeachin accused a Boise TV reporter of trying to play guilt “by association” by raising the conference, saying she didn’t know the organizer before she spoke.)

Little contonues to have a pretty big lead over McGeachin, but you can't count her out, not with Trump, Michelle Malkin, and white supremacist domestic terrorist outfits like the Three Percenters behind her.

Understand that the only thing that matters in the Republican party anymore is loyalty to Trump.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

With the fall of Roe virtually assured, Republicans are lining up to destroy the next big barrier to Gilead, Griswold v Connecticut, and they're making it very clear they are coming after birth control, contraception, and bodily autonomy by "returning" these issues "to voters" next.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturns women’s constitutional right to abortion this summer, one Arizona Republican candidate for U.S. Senate thinks judges should also take aim at the right to buy and use contraception.

Blake Masters, a Tucson-based venture capitalist, boasts on his website that he will only vote to confirm federal judges “who understand that Roe and Griswold and Casey were wrongly decided, and that there is no constitutional right to abortion.” Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, decided in 1973 and 1992, respectively, both upheld a constitutional right to abortion access.

But the ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 protected a married couple’s right to buy and use contraceptives without government restrictions. The case centered on a Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives, which the court determined violated a married couple’s constitutional right to privacy, establishing the basis for the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices.

Masters’ stance puts him on the opposite side of the issue from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of GOP senators, which has advised candidates on talking points following the leak of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

In a section instructing candidates on how to “forcefully refute Democrat lies” about Republicans’ positions on abortion and health care, the NRSC declares that “Republicans DO NOT want to take away contraception.”

Elsewhere in the talking points memo to GOP Senate candidates, the NRSC advises them to say, “I’m not in favor of putting women or doctors in jail. I would never take away anyone’s contraception or health care. That’s just the typical BS you get from politicians.”

Yes, the typical BS from Republican politicians, who absolutely want to have American women as kept breeding slaves like Bene Tlielax axolotl tanks from Dune.

And if you don't think the decreasing share of white folk in America has everything to do with overturning Roe, Casey, and Griswold, I have bad news for you. America's been a white ethnostate for, you know, centuries, and forcing births of white babies for Millennials and especially Zoomers has been the plan for some time now.

Republicans are coming for everything that has allowed diversity in America and they continue to lie to you about it until it will be far too late.

Count on that.

 

Jobapalooza, Con't

America has now recovered nearly all of the 21 million jobs lost to Trump's COVID collapse two years ago.

The U.S. economy added slightly more jobs than expected in April amid an increasingly tight labor market and despite surging inflation and fears of a growth slowdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 428,000 for the month, a bit above the Dow Jones estimate of 400,000. The unemployment rate was 3.6%, slightly higher than the estimate for 3.5%. The April total was identical to the downwardly revised count for March.

There also was some better news on the inflation front: Average hourly earnings continued to grow, but at a 0.3% level for the month that was a bit below the 0.4% estimate. On a year-over-year basis, earnings were up 5.5%, about the same as in March but still below the pace of inflation.

An alternative measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons, sometimes referred to as the “real” unemployment rate, edged higher to 7%. Unemployment for Blacks has showed a steady decline and fell again, to 5.9%, while Hispanic unemployment dropped to 4.1%.

“The job market continues to plow forward, buoyed by strong employer demand. After just over two years of the pandemic, the job market is remaining resilient and on track for a return to pre-pandemic levels this summer,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at jobs review site Glassdoor. “However, the job market is showing some signs of cooling as it turns the corner and the recovery enters a new phase.”

The labor force participation rate, a key measure of worker engagement, fell 0.2 percentage points for the month to 62.2%, the first monthly decline since March 2021 as the labor force contracted by 363,000. The level is of particularly importance with a gap of about 5.6 million between job postings and available workers.

“Demand for labor remains very strong; the problem is a shortage of available workers, and the decline in the labor force participation rate in April could add to wage pressures,” wrote PNC chief economist Gus Faucher.

Leisure and hospitality again led job growth, adding 78,000. The unemployment rate for the sector, which was hit hardest by the Covid pandemic, plunged to 4.8%, its lowest since September 2019 after peaking at 39.3% in April 2020. Average hourly earnings for the sector increased 0.6% on the month and are up 11% from a year ago.

Other big gainers included manufacturing (55,000), transportation and warehousing (52,000), Professional and business services (41,000), financial activities (35,000) and health care (34,000). Retail also showed solid growth, adding 29,000 primarily from gains in food and beverage stores.

Some of the details in the report, though, were not as strong.

The survey of households actually showed a decline of 353,000, leaving the level 761,000 short of where it was in February 2020, just prior to the start of the pandemic. April marked the first monthly decrease in the household survey since April 2020.

 

The household survey number is something to watch, but for now, we've climbed out of the hole that Trump put us in.  Well, climbed out of one of the many deep chasms Trump put America in, at any rate.  

Black unemployment is still very low, too.  The problem is another round of global supply chain issues from COVID wreaking havoc in China and rising interest rates to corral inflation are battering markets worldwide, and it's only a matter of time before things start turning south again here.

We'll see where we are in the future, but for now, Biden did it.  The cost was heavy, but he did it.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Six weeks ago I told you about Mason, Tennessee, a tiny majority black town with a part-time local government trying to fix the embezzlement issues from a white Republican local government that trashed the town's finances.  They got no help from the state at all, and managed to get their heads above water anyway.

 

But once Ford announced a huge new battery plant on the land next to Mason, suddenly the Tennessee GOP declared war on the town and threatened to revoke the town charter if they didn't hand over control.

The NAACP stepped in to help Mason with its legal issues, and the good news is now we have a preliminary settlement in the works.

After alleging that Tennessee’s top leaders were placing unfair scrutiny over a predominantly Black town’s finances, the small town of Mason announced Wednesday it had reached a deal halting the threat of a state takeover of its finances.

The settlement marks a victory for town officials who had argued the state was treating Mason’s majority-Black leaders differently than they have white administrators who also struggled with finances.

“This settlement agreement is a good thing for the citizens of the town and it’s a good thing for African Americans across the country,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson.

The issue began when Comptroller Jason Mumpower asked Mason’s town leaders to surrender their charter, pointing to ongoing years of financial mismanagement. After Mason voters refused to do so, Mumpower later said the state would take over its financial supervision.

The news of the pending takeover quickly sparked national attention as many pointed out that Mason is located near the site of a future $5.6 billion Ford electric pickup truck factory, which is expected to employ about 5,600 workers at the plant, and construction of the factory will create thousands more jobs.

The 2020 Census shows Mason’s population at about 1,330. But that fell to less than 800 after a private prison closed recently.

“For far too long, we’ve seen highways going through our cities in our community, or hostile takeover by states,” Johnson said. ”Here’s an opportunity for the citizens to retain their charter, implement best practices and participate in the opportunities that the economic development we’re bringing for this community.”

Town leaders quickly filed a lawsuit — with the help of the NAACP — hoping to stop the takeover, alleging the pending Ford plant has sparked extra scrutiny. In particular, the suit sought to challenge the state’s edict that Mason get approval to spend more than $100 — a strict requirement that town leaders said would make it impossible to do business.

“They set up Mason to fail,” said attorney Van Turner Jr., president of the NAACP Memphis branch who represented Mason’s town leaders.

 

But they couldn't sweep this under the rug after the outrage six weeks ago. While Mason will continue to work in good faith reporting open books and town expenses to the state, the state will leave the town alone.

I fully expect the state to cut the town out of any revenue from the impending Interstate 40 construction or Ford's Blue Oval City project in the months ahead, but that's not going to stop Mason from getting visitors and customers to local businesses.

Keep an eye on Mason.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Last Call For Courting Disaster, Con't

A post-leak poll conducted by Team WIN THE MORNING finds overwhelming majorities for keeping Roe in place and a near-majority for keeping it legal nationally.

By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, voters oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted immediately after POLITICO published a draft opinion from the Supreme Court that would eviscerate the 1973 precedent guaranteeing federal abortion rights.

Half of voters (50 percent) say Roe v. Wade should not be overturned — more than the 28 percent who say it should be overturned. More than 2-in-10 voters, 22 percent, are undecided, according to the poll.

Majorities of Democrats (68 percent) and Independents (52 percent) say Roe should not be overturned, while a narrow majority of Republicans (51 percent) say it should.

The poll was conducted Tuesday, the day after POLITICO published Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion, which would strike down Roe v. Wade and allow states to restrict abortion.

Asked whether abortion should be legal or illegal nationwide, or whether it should be up to the states, 47 percent say it should be legal, 21 percent say it should be illegal, and 19 percent say it should be up to the states to decide.

While there is little support for striking down Roe v. Wade, polls do suggest some limits on abortion are popular. Only 25 percent of voters surveyed in the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll say abortion should be “legal in all cases,” though an additional 31 percent say it should be “legal in most cases.” Roughly a quarter, 24 percent, say abortion should be “illegal in most cases,” and only 11 percent say it should be “illegal in all cases.”

 

That's the good news. The bad news is, at least initially, Republicans are the ones who will turn up to vote and not Democrats in November.

Republicans and those who want Roe gone want to vote, 56% of Republicans and 65% of those who want Roe overturned say they are Extremely or Very enthusiastic about voting, compared to 52% of Democrats and 52% of those who want to keep Roe.

That's a problem, folks.

Vote like your country depends on it.