Last Call For It's A Gas, Gas, Gas, Con't

Former NFL running back Herschel Walker is the GOP's US Senate in Georgia, going up against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and it seems Walker will do anything to win, including outright voter bribes at the pump in Atlanta's Black community.

A long line of cars formed at a Chevron gas station south of downtown Atlanta on Saturday as word spread that a political action committee was handing out $25 vouchers. Now the pro-Herschel Walker group’s giveaway is fueling a different sort of backlash.

The initiative by 34N22 was designed to highlight rising gas prices, a top issue for Republicans hoping to capitalize on inflation and economic uncertainty to unseat U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Motorists in the heavily Democratic area were handed vouchers totaling $4,000 along with flyers promoting Walker, a former football player who is now the Republican nominee. Outside the gas station, volunteers held signs declaring “Warnock isn’t working.”

Democrats and voting rights groups quickly criticized the stunt, questioning how offering fuel vouchers to support a political candidate could be allowed in a state that bans groups from distributing refreshments to waiting voters in line to cast ballots.

“This is illegal,” declared LaTosha Brown, a cofounder of Black Voters Matter.

“Meanwhile, also in Georgia, giving out water to those waiting to cast a ballot is considered illegal voter influence,” said state Sen. Michelle Au, a Johns Creek Democrat.

The PAC referred to a memo from attorney Kory Langhofer that asserted the program was “entirely lawful and permissible” because the vouchers were given without any condition, such as a requirement to vote for Walker or appear in an advertisement.

“Warnock’s campaign is upset about 34N22′s community outreach program, not because of any earnest legal concerns, but because they don’t want the public to know Warnock has contributed to record gas prices and the pain Georgians are feeling at the pump,” wrote Langhofer, whose experience includes serving as a lawyer for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Aides to Warnock, who backed a federal gas tax suspension earlier this year to lower prices, didn’t comment on the initiative.

But several influential Democrats argued that the PAC’s move could have violated Georgia law that states: “Any person who gives or receives, offers to give or receive, or participates in the giving or receiving of money or gifts for the purpose of registering as a voter, voting, or voting for a particular candidate in any primary or election shall be guilty of a felony.”

Among them was state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democratic candidate for secretary of state who recalled how the office of Georgia’s top election official sent an investigator to a metro Atlanta precinct in 2020 “with firearm on hip and demanded all food and water to be removed.”

“Giving away gas vouchers and Herschel Walker flyers at the same time isn’t legal. Are they gonna do something about it?”

 

Of course they aren't. Laws like this only get enforced against Democrats in a state like Georgia. There's enough gray area here to say it's legal, so it will be legal when Walker does it, and it will be legal when other Republicans repeat the tactic in other states.

And keep in mind, Walker's camp wouldn't be stooping to this level, this early, if Warnock wasn't already whooping Walker's ass in the race.

Now that Herschel Walker is officially the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has started to mine the treasure trove of opposition research out there on the former NFL star. 

A new ad from Warnock's campaign features Walker talking to right-wing pundit Glenn Beck about Covid-19. Here's the text of what Walker tells Beck: 

"Right now, you know what, I'm gonna say something I probably shouldn't. Do you know right now, I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from Covid as you walk through this dry mist. As you walk through the door, it will kill any Covid on your body. When you leave, it will kill the virus as you leave. This here product -- they don't want to talk about that. They don't want to hear about that." 

Near the end of the commercial, this text appears onscreen: "Is Herschel Walker really ready to represent Georgia?" 

The clip comes from an August 2020 appearance Walker made on Beck's podcast. It's not clear what product Walker is referring to, as it could be dangerous for a person to walk through a disinfecting spray or mist that kills the coronavirus. 

Walker's comments evoke the pitch made by then-President Donald Trump in April 2020, when he suggested that ingesting disinfectants or sunlight might help patients battling Covid-19. 

The new Warnock ad serves as a stark reminder of how incredibly untested Walker is -- and what a massive gamble the former football star represents for Republicans in what is widely expected to be one of the closest and most expensive Senate races in the country this fall. 

Walker has never before run for elected office. He hadn't lived in Georgia for years before launching his bid for Senate last year.

 

Walker is a time bomb, frankly.  Even CNN's Chris Cillizza has figured it out.

CNN reported last year that several women have accused Walker of making threats against them. In 2002, one Texas woman told police that Walker had threatened and stalked her. Over the years, two other women -- Walker's ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend -- have also accused him of making threats, telling authorities Walker claimed he would shoot them in the head. 

(At the time of CNN's report, a spokeswoman for Walker declined to respond to the allegations or police report, citing his past struggles with mental health and saying that he was unfairly being targeted as a Republican Senate candidate. Walker's spokeswoman also denied the claims made by the candidate's ex-girlfriend.) 

More recently, Walker has run into trouble when asked for his views on issues, most notably guns. Here's what Walker told Fox when asked about the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and what, if anything, he believed should be done about it on the legislative front: 

"Cain killed Abel and that's a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation -- what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women, that's looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they want to just continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights. And I think there's more things we need to look into. This has been happening for years and the way we stop it is putting money into the mental health field, by putting money into other departments rather than departments that want to take away your rights." 

Uh ... 

Walker wasn't any clearer on the issue when speaking recently with CNN's Manu Raju. Asked whether he supported new gun laws in the wake of Uvalde, Walker said: "What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff." 

Is it possible that Walker's celebrity status -- and the likely Republican lean of the national playing field -- means that voters in Georgia won't much care about his Covid claims or his inability to offer any thoughts on guns in American society? Sure. But as Warnock's latest ad makes clear, nominating Walker was a major risk for Republicans in a critical state to their majority math.

 

Walker needs some help, and is absolutely unfit for office, but it's not like that stopped voters before in the case of Trump himself... 

We'll see.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

At least one Democrat wants to tax sales of new AR-15 rifles by a whopping 1,000%, and because it's a taxation issue, it could get through the Senate in budget reconciliation.

The recent violence is prompting one House Democrat to draft a measure aimed at severely restricting access to the AR-15-style weapons used by different gunmen in the carnage. Rep. Donald Beyer of Virginia, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means panel, wants to impose a 1,000% excise tax on assault weapons.

"What it's intended to do is provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen," Beyer told Insider. "We think that a 1,000% fee on assault weapons is just the kind of restrictive measure that creates enough fiscal impact to qualify for reconciliation."

New AR-15-style guns range from $500 to over $2,000 depending on location, NBC News reported. That means a 1,000% tax on the weapon would add $5,000 to $20,000 to their final sales price — and would probably keep it out of reach from many younger Americans.

Some details of the bill still aren't finalized, such as when the tax would kick in and what to do with any revenue raised. It's also unclear how much money it would generate. One out of every five weapons purchased in the US in AR-15 style rifle, per the National Shooting Sports Foundation in a 2014 court brief. Gun sales have surged since then and reached their second-highest level recorded last year.

Law enforcement agencies and the US military wouldn't be subject to the tax, Beyer said. The legislation would also apply only to future assault weapon sales — and not to the 20 million AR-15-style rifles already estimated to be in circulation across the US. Other guns used for hunting and other recreational purposes would also be exempt.

Bullets wouldn't be subject to the new tax. But high-capacity magazines that can carry more than 10 rounds of ammunition would be aggressively taxed at that level.

Beyer's definition of an assault weapon closely mirrors a measure that Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island is pushing. That bill would ban weapons with at least one military characteristic like a pistol grip or a forward grip.

House Democrats are rallying around their own expansive gun-control package separate from ongoing Senate negotiations on a narrower bill centered on mental health, red flag laws, and a modest expansion of background checks. The House bill is expected to fall flat in the upper chamber due to stiff GOP resistance.

That outcome prompted Beyer to eye reconciliation, the legislative tactic allowing proposed laws to bypass the Senate's 60-vote threshold known as the filibuster and pass with a simple majority. Democrats employed the maneuver in 2021 to approve both the stimulus law and the House-approved Build Back Better bill over united GOP resistance.

One expert says his measure likely qualifies for inclusion in a smaller spending bill containing pieces of President Joe Biden's climate and tax agenda. Democrats hope to revive it by summer's end.

"Taxes get more deference in budget reconciliation than other policies from a parliamentarian point of view," Zach Moller, director of the economic program at the center-left Third Way think tank, told Insider.

"So a pure excise tax that isn't set so high as to end all sales should pass the Byrd rule," Moller said, referring the rule governing what meets the requirements to be included in a filibuster-proof bill.

The federal government already imposes a 10% tax on the importation and sale of handguns, per the Tax Policy Center. The tax rate is 11% for other guns and ammunition.

Beyer said he was open to negotiating the 1,000% tax rate. "There's nothing magical about that thousand percent number. It's severe enough to actually inhibit and restrict sales. But also successful enough that it's not seen as an absolute ban."

There are instances stretching back decades of Democrats seeking massive tax increases on guns and ammo to make them unaffordable. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said in 1993 that he wanted to tax handgun ammunition "out of existence" to curb crime, The New York Times reported.

Then in 2020, a pair of Democrats introduced similar measures to raise taxes on weapons to prevent gun violence, though not at the scale Beyer is seeking. Both Rep. Hank Johnson and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts put forward plans to triple the tax on handguns to 30%, as well as nearly quintuple the tax rate on shells and cartridges to 50%.

Those went nowhere in Congress — and the Beyer plan faces steep hurdles as well. Democrats will likely be wary of Republicans further casting them as tax-and-spend liberals in an election year where the party faces major headwinds to keep control of Congress. It may also violate Biden's pledge to not increase taxes on people earning under $400,000.

 

I guarantee you that the bill will never pass the Senate anyway, it won't have 50 votes as long as Joe Manchin is needed to get that total, and it being a midterm year, I doubt the measure would even have 40 votes.

 

Besides, Republicans will simply "DEMOCRATS WANT TO TAX GUNS BY A THOUSAND PERCENT" in every ad that goes out, and those ads will work in swing states. This wouldn't stop private gun sales, and while yes, it would slow down "I'm going to buy an assault rifle today" sales, the Roberts Court would kill it anyway.

I appreciate the "do something!" aspect, and it does make sense, but it'll never happen.

We live in Gunmerica.

No, this is a horrible idea, and someone in the Democrat

Sunday Long Read: All The President's Crooks

As the January 6th Committee's live hearings get under way later this week, our Sunday Long Read comes from none other than the legendary Watergate-breaking, Nixon-destroying pair of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, writing in the Washington Post with their take on the man they call far worse than Nixon: Donald Trump.

President George Washington, in his celebrated 1796 Farewell Address, cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned.

Two of his successors — Richard Nixon and Donald Trump — demonstrate the shocking genius of our first president’s foresight.

As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.

And then along came Trump.

The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.

With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.

Nixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.

Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.

These instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history.

Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.

Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.

This singular moment in American democracy is the only official declaration and certification of who won the presidential election.

In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.

We watched in utter dismay as Trump persistently claimed that he was really the winner. “We won,” he said in a speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.” He publicly and relentlessly pressured Pence to make him the victor on Jan. 6.

On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.

By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history.

 

This is the article that we should have gotten sixteen months ago from these two, making it very, very clear that Trump should have been expelled from the White House, and that Washington's Republicans were too cowardly, too enmeshed, and too ambitious to stop him, mainly because dozens of them wanted Trump's power for themselves, to remake the country in their image, to complete the dark work that Trump narrowly failed. 

It's good to finally see it, and yes, when the news will be filled with these hearings, this article gives a much-needed perspective on what needs to happen in the weeks ahead.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

A former Wisconsin county judge was assassinated yesterday in his home, with the gunman trying to take his own life afterwards. On the gunman allegedly: a list of other political targets, including Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Former Juneau County Judge John Roemer was shot and killed in his home in the Township of New Lisbon Friday morning.

Officials say when SWAT entered the home, they found Roemer zip-tied to a chair and fatally shot.

The Department of Justice says Douglas Uhde was found in the basement with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A law enforcement official says a "hit list" was found in Uhde's vehicle which included Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It all started at 6:30 a.m. on Friday when the Juneau County Sheriff’s Office received a call notifying law enforcement of an armed person and two shots fired in a residence.

The caller had left the home and contacted law enforcement from a nearby home.

Following failed attempts to negotiate with the person in the home, at approximately 10:17 a.m. the Juneau County Special Tactics and Response Team entered the residence and located Roemer dead.

Dispatch recordings have also revealed that Roemer's son may have been a witness to the deadly scene.

Uhde, 56, was found in the basement with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He is in critical condition.

Law enforcement began life-saving measures, and Uhde was taken to a medical facility.

A firearm was recovered at the scene.

Kaul said the judicial targets have been notified.

Kaul said investigators are looking into whether this was related to court cases.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler released a statement on Roemer's death:

"The state's judicial family is shocked and saddened by this tragedy. Judge Roemer dedicated much of his career to public service in the law. Before taking the bench in 2004, he had served as an assistant district attorney and as an assistant state public defender. He was known by colleagues for his sharp legal mind and his willingness to share his time and knowledge with others. His work made a tremendous difference in the lives of many people in Juneau County and elsewhere in the state. Our deepest sympathy goes to Judge Roemer's family at this time."

The investigation is being handled as both a homicide and possible case of domestic terrorism.

 

So, we've gone beyond the "attempted plot phase" in Wisconsin and now we're at the "targeted political assassinations phase" of the ongoing terrorist insurrection, with all the targets having something to do with what the gunman considered a corrupt legal and political system in the US.

I guarantee you this guy thought all four people were enemies of Donald Trump.

I guarantee you more local and state politicians, judges, and civil servants are going to be killed in the months ahead, too.

We're in a ludicrously dangerous time right now.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

GOP Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine says he will sign legislation passed this week in order to arm teachers in schools.

 

Ohio school districts could begin arming employees as soon as this fall under legislation approved by Republican lawmakers and set to be signed by GOP Gov. Mike DeWine.

Democrats said the proposal, which is optional for schools, sends the wrong message a week after the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Republicans say the measure could prevent such shootings. Lawmakers fast-tracked the legislation to counter the impact of a court ruling that said, under current law, armed school workers would need hundreds of hours of training.

The bill will protect children by ensuring instruction is specific to schools and including significant scenario-based training, DeWine said late Wednesday in announcing his support.

The measure is opposed by major law enforcement groups, gun control advocates, and the state's teachers' unions, which asked DeWine to veto the measure. It's supported by a handful of police departments and school districts.

Under the latest version of the bill, school employees who carry guns would need up to 24 hours of initial training, then up to eight hours of requalification training annually.

DeWine, who is expected to sign the bill later this month, also announced that the state's construction budget will provide $100 million for school security upgrades in schools and $5 million for upgrades at colleges.

 

So the response to school shootings in Ohio is:

 

• Put more guns readily available in classrooms
• Give teachers a day's training to keep packing
• Turn schools into prison complex fortresses
• Continue to terrorize kids with shooting drills 
• Waste $100 million that should go anywhere else
  

 

In any other country this would considered insanity, Ohio would serve as a dark cautionary tale, and DeWine's career would be over. Instead, because this is Gunmerica, Louisiana is going to allow teachers to start packing heat too and I expect several other states will follow.

 

By the way, police officers in Ohio need hundreds of hours of training before going on the job, over 600 in fact.  Teachers, well, we'll give them 3 days.  Still, that's more than security guards get, they only have to have 20 hours and 4 each year for recertification, so that's good right?

Kids are actually going to die in Ohio classrooms where they will be shot and killed by Ohio teachers in entirely preventable deaths, but do go on about school safety.

There's also some good and bad news out of Buffalo this week too.

Rep. Chris Jacobs, an Orchard Park Republican, said Friday that he was withdrawing as the GOP and Conservative candidate for Congress in the newly redrawn 23rd District, acknowledging that his newfound views on gun control place him at odds with the parties that endorsed him.

"This obviously arises out of last Friday, my remarks, statements on being receptive to gun controls," Jacobs said in an interview. "And since that time, every Republican elected (official) that had endorsed me withdrew their endorsement. Party officials that supported me withdrew, most of them, and those that were going to said they would not. And so obviously, this was not well received by the Republican base."

What's more, both the Republican and Conservative parties were circulating petitions for candidates to run against Jacobs in the Aug. 23 congressional primaries.

"I truly believe that I could win this, but it would be an incredibly divisive race for our party, for the district," Jacobs said. "There's a high likelihood that there would be a lot of outside money coming in, so it would make this gun issue the issue. And that divisiveness not good in any effort to move this discussion forward in a productive way."

It's good news because there are no good Republicans who are staying in the party and Congress, so Rep. Jacobs leaving because he knows he can't win in Buffalo as a gun safety Republican, and he still voted against Biden 75% of the time anyway. We're all better of with him being replaced.

 

The bad news is that remaining Republicans are even more nuts than Jacobs.

 

Just another day in Gunmerica.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Team Trump knows they have to get this month's January 6th Committee hearings off the news, and they have plans to go wall-to-wall on FOX, Newsmax, OANN, and other online right-wing noise machine outlets to make their own news and drown out coverage.

 

Former President Trump and his allies, in conjunction with top House GOP leadership and conservative groups, have begun pulling documents and coordinating a behind-the-scenes effort to counterprogram the Jan. 6 committee's televised hearings this month, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: Republicans face a daunting challenge in the coming messaging war. The committee has been building toward this moment for months, hoping to use the blockbuster summer hearings to paint a vivid picture of how close Trump and his supporters came to subverting democracy. 

Republicans are plotting to compete with wall-to-wall cable coverage by using their own platforms to argue the committee is a partisan fishing expedition that lacks legal legitimacy. That framing will be central to their hopes of defanging whatever negative revelations come to light during the hearings.

What we're hearing: Trump and his inner circle will rely heavily on members of Congress — from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) — to drive counterprogramming, sources familiar with their planning tell Axios.Trump himself has not ruled out making some sort of an appearance, one of the sources says. 

People close to Trump have been working closely with members of Congress, the RNC and outside groups like the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to collaborate on their offensive narrative. Matt Schlapp, former Trump White House political director and chairman of CPAC, has been a leader in the effort, sources say.

A crucial component is ensuring these surrogates have the tools they need to fight back, according to Republicans.That includes digging up old documents and logs from the White House to help provide Trump surrogates with a full picture of what happened both in the lead-up to and on Jan. 6, 2021.

What to watch: These surrogates will be fanning the airwaves — especially on networks and social media platforms they feel are more favorable to their cause.That includes Fox News, Steve Bannon's "War Room," "Real America’s Voice," Facebook and Trump's own Truth Social and Save America PAC. 

Members of Congress and other conservative "influencers" are also planning to write op-eds and push their own rapid responses through their personal social media. Which witnesses the committee calls to testify publicly will dictate the coordinated response, the sources say.

Details: Members of House Republican leadership and would-be GOP members of the Jan. 6 committee are planning to meet early next week to go over potential strategy, two senior congressional aides tell Axios.

Jordan and Banks, whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) barred from the Jan. 6 panel last year, will seek to hammer the message that the committee "lacks merit and legitimacy" and is hyperpartisan, one of the aides emphasized. 

Another leading point Republicans plan to make is that the priorities of Democrats are "out of touch" with what Americans are most concerned about: inflation, spiking gas prices, the baby formula shortage and recent mass shootings. 

They're betting voters have Jan. 6 "fatigue," a House GOP leadership aide said. "We’ve got to be rigid and responsible, but a lot of Republicans think if Dems want to just talk about Jan. 6 between now and the midterm election — good luck," the aide added.

 

Of course, all this leads to the following observations:

 

1) Trumplandia is scared stiff.  They know what's coming, because they're the ones that committed insurrection against the United States. They wouldn't risk a major Streisand Effect incident by bringing more attention to January 6th among their own voters unless they knew that anything has to be better than America finding out the truth in these hearings.

2) They're setting the stage to punish the January 6th Committee Members in 2023. The screaming about the Committee itself being illegitimate is the biggest part of this. Documenting the hearings as "evidence to be used later" and as justification for, say, removing all the committee members from their other committee assignments in January (or worse) is the goal should Republican retake control of the House.

3) The pressure for media to cover the "Republican response" in order to "both sides" the hearings will be massive.  Expect cable news coverage teams on the networks like CBS, NBC, and ABC to feature at least some Republicans, as they will demand "equal time" for hours of hearings. News divisions will give it to them too, because of the access game they feel will be necessary next year. This will be a deliberate choice by the media when it happens.

So yes, the Trump plan is to flood the zone with bullshit and more, and we'll see if the Committee can rise above it later this month.

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida continues its descent into authoritarian control as GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis says he will now veto a $35 million training facility of MLB's Tampa Bay Rays after the Rays dared to speak out about gun violence and pledged a $50k donation to gun safety organization Everytown. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to veto a $35 million legislation for a Pasco County facility that’s earmarked for the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring training, OutKick has learned.

DeSantis’s decision is in response to the Rays politicizing recent shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde ahead of a matchup with the Yankees in May.

Here’s what the Rays posted before the start of the game:

 

pic.twitter.com/9DpyuwEzJo

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) May 26, 2022

 

The decision follows DeSantis’ response to Disney earlier this year. In April, DeSantis revoked Disney’s special tax and self-governing privileges after the company injected itself into the debate over a Florida parental rights law, inaccurately dubbed as “Don’t Say Gay.”

DeSantis is giving a voice to the people who do not want their sports and children’s companies on the front lines of the cultural divide.

Florida residents had called for DeSantis to veto the spending anyway, saying that Floridians’ tax dollars should not help fund a facility for a professional sports team.

The Florida Senate has argued against this case, by listing the proposal as a “Sports Training and Youth Tournament Complex” and not mentioning the Rays. However, the Tampa Bay Times first reported the money would mostly help cover a new facility for the Rays.

 

In other words, this was the Florida GOP trying to sneak a fastball over the plate, but DeSantis instead now has his reason to take his ball and go home and make it all about punishing a company for daring to disagree with him.  There's probably nothing the Rays can do here, but DeSantis is more than happy to be a tyrant here.

Plenty of voters want a tyrant these days.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

President Biden gave a White House speech to the nation last night about gun safety legislation, but it almost certainly fell upon deaf ears.

In remarks from a candle-lined Cross Hall at the White House, Biden recalled his visits to the memorials of recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. Fifty-six candles burned behind him to represent victims of gun violence in all US states and territories. 

"Standing there in that small town like so many other communities across America, I couldn't help but think there are too many other schools, too many other everyday places, that have become killing fields -- battlefields -- here in America," Biden said of his visit to Uvalde. 

He added, "For God's sake, how much more carnage are we willing to accept?" 

The remarks amount to Biden's most fulsome speech about guns since a massacre at a Texas elementary school last week. 

He said the recent spate of horrific mass shootings must impel the nation to take action to prevent further massacres by passing gun restrictions. 

After meeting families mourning their slain loved ones in Buffalo and Uvalde, Biden said the message from them was clear: "Do something." 

"Nothing has been done," Biden said. "This time that can't be true. This time we must actually do something." 

He issued a call to reinstate a ban on assault weapons that he said had helped prevent horrific murders but expired in 2004. 

'We should reinstate the assault weapons ban," Biden said, seeking a new prohibition on the types of high-capacity weapons used in the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings. 

Biden said that in the 10 years the law was in place, mass shootings decreased. 

"After Republicans let the law expire in 2004, those weapons were allowed to be sold again. Mass shootings tripled," the President said. 

He said the weapons inflicted gruesome damage on their victims, particularly children, and he used very vivid language to describe the shootings and their aftermath. 

"The damage is so devastating, and in Uvalde, parents had to do DNA swabs to identify the remains of their children, 9 and 10 years old," he said. 

In the little more than a week since the Uvalde shooting, a string of additional mass shootings have unfolded in states across the country, including in Tulsa on Wednesday. That shooting left five dead, including the gunman. 

It's the second time that Biden has delivered an emotional evening speech at the White House on mass shootings, also speaking in the wake of the Robb Elementary School assault. Since then, however, Biden has only selectively waded into the debate over gun control, stopping short of endorsing any specific legislative action to prevent further carnage. 

However, he broke with that trend on Thursday. Biden said the age to purchase assault weapons must be raised from 18 to 21 if lawmakers cannot agree on an outright ban on those firearms. 

"We must at least raise the age to be able to purchase one to 21," the President said.

 

It was a good speech, with Biden laying out specific legislation that he wants. Nancy Pelosi will be in the House taking up all of these measures in the days ahead.

The problem of course is that the legislation will never get past Mitch McConnell and the GOP, and there isn't one Republican voter who will suddenly have a change of heart and want to punish the GOP for blocking every single bit of this.

Not only will voters not punish the GOP for this in November, they will most likely reward them with control of the House and Senate assuring no gun safety legislation is even considered.

And so "never again!" will be "until the next time it happens and Republicans are rewarded for it."

Just another day in Gunmerica.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Proud Boys white supremacist domestic terrorists are increasingly taking over Republican party positions at the local and county level, and their biggest success so far is Miami/Dade County in Florida.

The concerted effort by the Proud Boys to join the leadership of the party — and, in some cases, run for local office — has destabilized and dramatically reshaped the Miami-Dade Republican Party that former Gov. Jeb Bush and others built into a powerhouse nearly four decades ago, transforming it from an archetype of the strait-laced establishment to an organization roiled by internal conflict as it wrestles with forces pulling it to the hard right. The conflict comes at a pivotal moment for Republicans nationally, as primary voters weigh whether to wrench the party from its extremist elements — or more fully embrace them.

“Yes, we have fringe elements,” said René García, the chairman of the approximately 125-member Republican committee in Miami-Dade County, who is also a county commissioner and former state senator. “Yes, we have different points of view in our party. That’s how we are. And my job as Republican chairman is to protect everyone’s First Amendment right, however wrong they may be.”

The Proud Boys spent nearly half a decade engaged in often violent protests across the country over issues such as the removal of Confederate statues and the unsubstantiated spread of Shariah law. After the Capitol attack, however, as Proud Boys were being investigated by law enforcement and charged with federal crimes, they lowered their profile. The group dissolved its national leadership and encouraged chapters to get involved in local issues, with the goal of amassing support in advance of this year’s midterm elections.

“The plan of attack if you want to make change is to get involved at the local level,” Jeremy Bertino, a prominent member of the North Carolina Proud Boys, told The New York Times last year in the midst of the shift.

What they intend to do with their power is unclear. Still, following a trend pushed by far-right figures like Stephen K. Bannon, Proud Boys started showing up at school board meetings to protest coronavirus mask mandates and the teaching of antiracist curriculum.

In California’s Central Valley, members of the group have intimidated protesters who did not want a church to buy an L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly theater in Fresno. A Proud Boy declared his candidacy for the Oregon Legislature. A former Proud Boy in Kansas lost a race for a Topeka City Council seat.

The Proud Boys’ encroachments into the Miami-Dade Republican Party are, by far, the group’s largest political success. The Fontainebleau incident was the latest to cause unrest within the party as a small but growing number of Proud Boys have deepened existing divisions and injected an unusual degree of aggression into routine dealings.

Such a rightward shift mirrors the evolution of state and national Republicans but is remarkable for Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county, which Democratic presidential candidates have won since 1992. Republicans vastly improved their showing in 2020, a swing that has soured Democrats’ prospects.

Chris Barcenas, a Republican committeeman and Proud Boy, said he started thinking about running for a committeeman seat about a year ago.

“Instead of sitting on the sidelines complaining about RINOs or whatever,” he said, referring to “Republicans in name only,” “I realized that in order to make changes, I had to be involved and be part of the process.”

Mr. Barcenas, 34, voluntarily testified a few months ago to the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 about his understanding of the Proud Boys’ role in the Capitol attack. He protested at the Capitol that day but did not go into the building and has not been charged with any crimes.

Gabriel Garcia, 37, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges from the Capitol attack, said the party was once the province of country-club Republicans.

“I know a lot of people on the committee way before me were supporting people like Jeb,” said Mr. Garcia, who lost a State House bid in 2020. “But when Trump won, pretty much everyone started falling in line.”

 

Again, these are January 6th domestic insurrectionist terrorists now taking over local GOP offices and purging the "RINOs" from the party. They are telling Cuban Americans that Democrats have abandoned them, all the way up to "Well if you don't want to end up like the Blacks, you'd better vote Republican."

It's working. Miami/Dade is going to be lost for a generation to the GOP if Democrats don't get their shit together and go after the actual January 6th terrorists running the GOP in the county.

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

More Americans define themselves as "pro-choice" in Gallup's latest poll, approaching the 1995 record of 56%.

A Gallup poll conducted mostly after the draft of a Supreme Court decision addressing abortion rights was leaked finds a marked shift in public attitudes over the past year. After a decade in which Americans' identification as "pro-choice" varied narrowly between 45% and 50%, the percentage has jumped six points to 55% in the latest poll, compared with the prior measure a year ago.

Pro-choice sentiment is now the highest Gallup has measured since 1995 when it was 56% -- the only other time it has been at the current level or higher -- while the 39% identifying as "pro-life" is the lowest since 1996.

Similarly, for the first time in Gallup's trend on the moral acceptability of abortion, originating in 2001, a majority of Americans (52%) consider abortion morally acceptable, while a record-low 38% call it morally wrong.

The latest survey was conducted by telephone May 2-22 with a nationally representative sample of 1,007 U.S. adults. A leaked draft of the Supreme Court's opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was reported by Politico on the evening of May 2, shortly after the start of interviewing for the new poll.

The opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito provides the court's reasoning behind its preliminary decision to uphold a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In this first draft, Alito argues that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that affirmed a constitutional right to seek abortion was wrongly decided and must be overturned.

The increase in pro-choice identification over the past year is mainly driven by Democrats; 88%, up from 70% last year, consider themselves pro-choice.

The poll also shows significant increases in pro-choice identification among Democratic-leaning groups, including younger adults and women. Pro-choice identification increased by nine percentage points to 61% among women, 12 points to 67% among adults aged 18 to 34 and nine points to 58% among adults aged 35 to 54. The percentage "pro-choice" did not change significantly among Republicans, independents, men or older Americans.

 

The question is whether or not this is going to move the needle on the 2022 midterms when half of American women no longer have access to abortion as health care by July 4th. I think it will, but it may not be as much as inflation/price gouging (which is a real problem right now) and the general consensus that we're heading into a recession (which isn't actually true...yet).

Still, when this really slams home and abortion become criminalized in half the US, I think the backlash will be very swift and powerful.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

The instant availability of rifles in Gunmerica means people can just buy deadly weapons and then use them to kill.

An assault-style weapon found at the scene of Wednesday's deadly shooting in an Oklahoma medical building had been bought that day, according to three federal sources briefed on the investigation.

A gunman -- who was later found dead -- opened fire on the second floor of a medical building on the campus of Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa on Wednesday afternoon, killing four people. Fewer than 10 others were injured, authorities said.

The assault-style weapon was an AR-15 style firearm, a source said. A different weapon -- a handgun -- was purchased on May 29, a source told CNN.

The two firearms -- a semiautomatic rifle and a semiautomatic pistol -- were both found at the scene, Tulsa police Capt. Richard Meulenberg told CNN earlier.

"It was just madness inside, with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of people trying to get out of the building," Meulenberg told CNN.

The mass shooting is among the latest instances nationwide of first responders and civilians coming face-to-face with the threat of gun violence in public places. It comes more than two weeks after a racist assault at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a bloody attack at a church in California; and eight days after a heartbreaking massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

The Tulsa shooting was one of the 233 mass shootings that have happened in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. CNN and the archive define a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

Law enforcement received a call just before 5 p.m. Wednesday about a person with a firearm at the Natalie Medical Building, a physicians' office facility on the Saint Francis Hospital campus, Tulsa police Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish said at a news conference.
Responding officers who arrived within minutes "were hearing shots in the building, and that's what directed them to the second floor," Dalgleish said.

The gunman was found dead by police as they worked their way inside the building, Meulenberg said, and has not been publicly identified.

Police suspect the gunman's fatal wounds were self-inflicted. Two of the deceased were found in the same room as the gunman, the police captain said.

It was unclear whether the four people killed were medical staffers, patients or visitors, said Dalgleish, who said the shooting took place at an orthopedic center in the building.
In addition, fewer than 10 people suffered non-life-threatening injuries, Meulenberg said. Authorities are trying to determine if they were wounded by gunfire or during the chaos of escaping the scene, he said. No officers were injured.

Investigators are working to determine the gunman's motive, although the shooting was not believed to be indiscriminate, Meulenberg told CNN's Don Lemon.

"He very purposefully went to this location, went to a very specific floor, and shot with very specific purpose," he said. "This was not a random shooting by this individual."

 

The initial analysis is that the gunman was a patient who was suffering from chronic pain, who then bought a rifle to kill the physician who was treating him. That physician was not at the medical facility yesterday, so the gunman shot up the place and then turned the gun on themselves.

The key variable in this tragedy was the instant availability of firearms for sale in Oklahoma. And even with the waiting period for the handgun, the gunman bought the pistol on May 29 and picked it up June 1 along with the rifle.

Nothing will be done, of course. "He bought the firearms legally, there was nothing that could have stopped him".

Just another day in Gunmerica.

The Concerned Citizen's Brigade, Con't

More on the GOP plan for massive voter harassment and intimidation at polling places this November in a concerted effort to both suppress and disenfranchise Democratic voters, but also to generate justification for GOP Secretaries of State to throw out millions of legitimate Democratic votes as "fraudulent".

 

Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys.

The plan, as outlined by a Republican National Committee staffer in Michigan, includes utilizing rules designed to provide political balance among poll workers to install party-trained volunteers prepared to challenge voters at Democratic-majority polling places, developing a website to connect those workers to local lawyers and establishing a network of party-friendly district attorneys who could intervene to block vote counts at certain precincts.

“Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” said Matthew Seifried, the RNC’s election integrity director for Michigan, stressing the importance of obtaining official designations as poll workers in a meeting with GOP activists in Wayne County last Nov. 6. It is one of a series of recordings of GOP meetings between summer of 2021 and May of this year obtained by POLITICO.

Backing up those front-line workers, “it’s going to be an army,” Seifried promised at an Oct. 5 training session. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

Seifried also said the RNC will hold “workshops” and equip poll workers with a hotline and website developed by Zendesk, a software support company used by online retailers, which will allow them to live-chat with party attorneys on Election Day. In a May, 2022 training session, he said he’d achieved a goal set last winter: More than 5,600 individuals had signed up to be poll workers and, several days ago, he submitted an initial list of more than 850 names to the Detroit clerk.

Democrat Janice Winfrey, who serves as the clerk, would be bound to pick names from the list submitted by the party under a local law intended to ensure bipartisan representation and an unbiased team of precinct workers.

Separately, POLITICO obtained Zoom tapings of Tim Griffin, legal counsel to The Amistad Project, an self-described election-integrity group that Donald Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once portrayed as a “partner” in the Trump campaign’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, meeting with activists from multiple states and discussing plans for identifying friendly district attorneys who could stage real-time interventions in local election disputes.

On the recording, Griffin speaks of building a nationwide network of district attorney allies and how to create a legal “trap” for Winfrey.

“Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” Griffin said during a Sept. 21 meeting. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.,” he said.

 

The goal is simple: drown elections in "fraud" lawsuits and declare Republicans the winner time and time again. Republicans have been setting thr groundwork for this for over a year now, and multiple sitting Republicans in Congress are already questioning the 2022 elections as illegitimate five months before they've even happened, as Greg Sargent points out.

Usefully enough, Rep. Mo Brooks has now stepped forward to confirm this. And the Alabama Republican’s corroboration is noteworthy in light of emerging details about a complex new GOP plan to make this principle actionable in future elections.

Brooks’s latest comes in a New York Times piece that reports on the selective approach that Republicans take with charges of voter fraud. As the Times notes, this exposes a “fundamental contradiction,” in which those charges are used to challenge GOP losses but not GOP wins.

Brooks deserves particular scrutiny on this point. He was central to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, widely claiming election fraud. Yet when he made the runoff in the GOP Senate primary in Alabama last week, he didn’t discern any such problems.

When the Times questioned Brooks about this, he essentially gave away the game:

Mr. Brooks offered a simple answer to why he’s not worried about his race: There’s no fraud in Republican primaries, he said. 

“I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Mr. Brooks said. “In a Republican primary or a Democrat primary, the motivation to steal elections is less because the candidates’ philosophy-of-government differences are minor.”

Pressed further by the Times, Brooks blithely suggested that in Alabama, the fraud took place “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.”

You see, in primaries decided by Republican voters in red areas, the voting is pure and unsullied. By contrast, in general elections that Democrats are trying to steal from Republicans, the voting in blue areas is marred by widespread fraud.

That form of fraud alleged by Brooks happens to be virtually nonexistent. But the point is that the mere assertion that something illicit happened is the coin of the realm here. It’s meant to give some kind of patina of a public rationale for naked efforts to subvert election losses.

 

We're going to hear this time and again in November: "massive voter fraud" in the "predominantly Democrat parts" of the country.  Lawsuit after lawsuit flooding the airwaves and social media with Republican bullshit, leading to outright nullification of Democratic wins by Republican Secretaries of State.

"Democrat voter fraud" then becomes the default heading into 2024, and the declaration of the Republican candidate as the winner months before the polls open.

Understand that if this isn't fought and defeated, that's it for the country. We'll be under permanent Republican rule.

Vote in numbers they can't possibly steal.

Last Call For The Booker Of History

Kentucky state Sen. Charles Booker is the Democratic candidate running against GOP Sen. Rand Paul here in Kentucky this November, and Booker's new campaign ad is a hard strike against Paul.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker stands with a noose around his neck in a new campaign ad criticizing his opponent, Republican incumbent Rand Paul, for holding up legislation in 2020 that would have made lynching a federal hate crime in America.

The certain-to-be-controversial ad, which Booker's campaign released Wednesday morning, includes a content warning for "strong imagery."

It does not mention that Paul went on to co-sponsor a new (and bipartisan) version of that legislation. The Senate unanimously voted this March to pass the updated Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which is now law.

"The pain of our past persists to this day," Booker says in a voiceover as his ad begins, showing a historic lynching photo and a noose hanging from the limb of a tree. "In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool of terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom.

"It was used to kill my ancestors," Booker says as he appears onscreen, standing next to a tree with a noose looped around his neck.

"Now, in a historic victory for our commonwealth, I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate."

"My opponent?" he says as an image of Paul appears. "The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who singlehandedly blocked an antilynching act from being federal law."

"The choice couldn't be clearer," Booker continues over the resounding creak of a rope, shown in close-up, before he appears onscreen with his hands gripping the noose. "Do we move forward together? Or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?

 

Now, having lived in this state for 16 years, I can tell you two things: One, that Booker is right about Rand Paul's history as Senator, and two, that doesn't change the fact that Kentucky is 88% white. The backlash on this ad is going to be incredible and nationalized. FOX is going to have a field day with this here for weeks, if not months.

This is going to be framed as the Worst Thing Black Democrats Have Ever Done™. Expect Black Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott and Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears dragged out to denounce Booker and demand he drop out of the race.

Oh, and part of me feels like Booker just put a target on the backs of every Black person here in the Commonwealth.  He's still right about the state's history of lynching. He just threw it in the face of Rand Paul and white Kentucky. Booker needed to get national attention to change the trajectory of an assured double-digit loss.

But I don't know if this is going to help here. I really don't.

We'll see.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

President Biden takes to the NY Times in an op-ed to explain his endgame for Ukraine.

The invasion Vladimir Putin thought would last days is now in its fourth month. The Ukrainian people surprised Russia and inspired the world with their sacrifice, grit and battlefield success. The free world and many other nations, led by the United States, rallied to Ukraine’s side with unprecedented military, humanitarian and financial support.

As the war goes on, I want to be clear about the aims of the United States in these efforts.

America’s goal is straightforward: We want to see a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.

As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said, ultimately this war “will only definitively end through diplomacy.” Every negotiation reflects the facts on the ground. We have moved quickly to send Ukraine a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition so it can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.

That’s why I’ve decided that we will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine.

We will continue cooperating with our allies and partners on Russian sanctions, the toughest ever imposed on a major economy. We will continue providing Ukraine with advanced weaponry, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, powerful artillery and precision rocket systems, radars, unmanned aerial vehicles, Mi-17 helicopters and ammunition. We will also send billions more in financial assistance, as authorized by Congress. We will work with our allies and partners to address the global food crisis that Russia’s aggression is worsening. And we will help our European allies and others reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and speed our transition to a clean energy future.

We will also continue reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank with forces and capabilities from the United States and other allies. And just recently, I welcomed Finland’s and Sweden’s applications to join NATO, a move that will strengthen overall U.S. and trans-Atlantic security by adding two democratic and highly capable military partners.

We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia. As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow. So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces. We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia.

My principle throughout this crisis has been “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” I will not pressure the Ukrainian government — in private or public — to make any territorial concessions. It would be wrong and contrary to well-settled principles to do so.

Ukraine’s talks with Russia are not stalled because Ukraine has turned its back on diplomacy. They are stalled because Russia continues to wage a war to take control of as much of Ukraine as it can. The United States will continue to work to strengthen Ukraine and support its efforts to achieve a negotiated end to the conflict.

 

The goal at least is to get Moscow to the table to negotiate an armistice. How many people in Ukraine have to die before that happens, well, that's up to Putin.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Republicans are the party of mass firearms deaths, and they proudly run on it, because the people who vote for them are bloodthirsty lunatics who want to water the Tree of Liberty with the blood of tyrants, and "tyrants" is anyone who votes Democrat.

 

Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick first shoots the hunting rifle he says he used as a teenager. Pow. Next, he cocks the rifle he says he used at the U.S. Military Academy and fires. Pow. Then he points a semiautomatic assault rifle like one he says he used in Iraq at a faraway target. Pow. Pow. Pow. Pow.

Former television personality and surgeon Mehmet Oz loads a shotgun and shoots. “When people say I don’t support guns? They’re dead wrong,” Oz says. The camera then zooms in on Oz locking a magazine onto an AR-15 style rifle.

McCormick and Oz, the finalists in a high-stakes Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania that has gone to a recount, have spent months trying to showcase their conservative bona fides to GOP base voters and head off skepticism of their elite backgrounds on Wall Street and in Hollywood, respectively. Part of that strategy involved commercials showing them shooting guns.

Although candidates in both parties have long used guns as a campaign prop, the images have in recent years become more prevalent, and intentionally provocative, in Republican advertising, holidays greetings and other forms of communication with the public. Such placements convey a cultural and political solidarity with conservatives more powerfully than most anything else, according to Republican strategists and aides.

“It is a very visual example. It’s an illustration of where both sides are in that the more the right feels they are going to lose their Second Amendment rights, the further they’re going to go to defend them,” said Terry Sullivan, a veteran Republican strategist.

But as the nation reckons with a pair of deadly mass shootings at a Buffalo grocery store and a Texas elementary school, some are warning that these photos and videos are harmful and glorify the use and ownership of firearms designed to kill.

“These ads create a dangerous impression that firearms, and assault-style firearms specifically, are casual tools rather than dangerous weapons,” said Kris Brown, the president of Brady, a gun violence prevention organization. “To use them to grandstand and to provocate is dangerous.”

Some Republicans rejected that position, arguing they are promoting safe and legal gun use.

Last Christmas season, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted a holiday photo on social media showing him and his family posed in front of a Christmas tree, all clutching military-style firearms.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who has built her political brand in large measure around her devotion to guns, responded to Massie’s tweet with a photo of her and her sons holding similar assault rifles with a message to her colleague: “The Boeberts have your six” — military jargon for having someone’s back.

While most representatives of the elected officials and candidates cited in this report did not immediately respond to a request for comment, John Kennedy, communications director for Massie, defended his boss’s decision to promote his photograph and said it did not send a dangerous message.

“Rep. Massie’s photo was so popular with his Kentucky constituents that the most commonly heard complaint we received was that this photo was not released as the actual Christmas card,” Kennedy said.

 

I have to assume from his actions that Massie would love nothing more than to be given carte blanche to shoot constituents like me, and if that's true, you'll no longer wonder why I don't go out much around here in Gunmerica.

Last Call For The Concerned Citizen's Brigade, Con't

The abortion "bounty" laws in Texas and Oklahoma are the future of America, using ordinary citizens to bring civil litigation and enforcement of unconstitutional ordnances rather than having the government do it. It's recruiting your neighbor as police informants, and we've now returned to the point where groups of these "concerned citizens" are tracking down potential miscreants door-to-door.

 

Clipboards in hand, Jenifer Short and Emily Tadlock strolled a swanky suburban neighborhood on a recent afternoon, checking homes against a list of voter registrations.

Knocking on the front door of a house with an Alfa Romeo in the driveway, they chatted with a woman, a renter who verified she was registered to vote at the address, but who said another person registered there was the homeowner, who did not live there.

After the brief chat, Short and Tadlock moved on, marking down the information on an “incident report” for the group they’re volunteering for, the Washington Voter Research Project.

“We’re detectives, OK?” said Tadlock, somewhat jokingly describing the work of checking out thousands of voter registrations flagged by the group as potentially suspicious.

Across Washington, hundreds of volunteers like Tadlock and Short have been knocking on doors, questioning residents and searching for evidence of voter fraud — or at least outdated voter rolls.

It’s an effort led by Glen Morgan, a conservative activist from Thurston County known for filing frequent campaign finance complaints against Democratic politicians, unions and other allied groups.

While Morgan seeks to distance the canvassing from outlandish and false conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election, he acknowledged his group has attracted 350 volunteers across the state in part due to the distrust in the election system stoked by former President Donald Trump.

What’s happening here is loosely connected to a national campaign by Trump supporters hunting door-to-door for proof that the 2020 election was fraudulent. The activity in some states has drawn fierce blowback and accusations of voter intimidation. Civil rights groups in Colorado filed a federal lawsuit in March, alleging canvassing by Trump supporters there has targeted neighborhoods with a high number of people of color.

In Washington, the Morgan-led doorbelling campaign has generated complaints from people put off by the inquiries, leading several county auditors and Secretary of State Steve Hobbs to issue public statements warning that the group is not authorized by any election office.

In interviews, some county auditors said they have received reports of canvassers trying to pose as government officials.

“People called very concerned, because they were portraying themselves as county employees,” said Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall. “They had like the Thurston County logo on their clipboard.”

Hall said her office “would never go door-to-door asking voters if they voted or how long they’ve lived there, anything like that.”

 

As I said yesterday, this open voter intimidation is nothing more than a 2022 field test for a massive operation in 2024. It's going to be an army harassing every polling place where a Democrat mnight win, and it's going to be a phone book's worth of "irregularities" that will only be reported in places where Democrats pull ahead.

And then these wins will be nullified by GOP secretaries of state.

Watch.

The Durham Disaster, Con't

The jury in the Michael Sussman trial of the Clinton lawyer accused by US Attorney John Durham of lying to the FBI about the Trump/Russia collusion connection took less than six hours to come back wit a not guilty verdict, if you're still wondering how badly the Durham probe is going for Trump and the right.

 

A federal jury delivered a major setback to special counsel John Durham on Tuesday, acquitting well-connected lawyer Michael Sussmann on a charge that he lied to the FBI in 2016 while acting on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign — a trial that sought to revive old controversies about the FBI’s role in that election.

The verdict, coming after less than a full day of deliberations spread over parts of Friday and Tuesday, was not a close call or a hard decision, two jurors told The Washington Post.

“Politics were not a factor,” the jury forewoman said. “We felt really comfortable being able to share what we thought. We had concise notes, and we were able to address the questions together,” she said, declining to give her name as she left the courthouse.

“Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she added, saying the government “could have spent our time more wisely.” A second juror told The Post that in the jury room, “everyone pretty much saw it the same way.”

Sussmann was accused of lying to a senior FBI official in September 2016 when he brought the FBI allegations of a secret computer communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. FBI agents investigated the data but concluded that there was nothing suspicious about it. 

Durham, appointed three years ago during the Trump administration to find possible wrongdoing among federal agents who probed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, alleged that Sussmann had lied to the FBI when he claimed that he was not bringing them the information on behalf of any client, when, the prosecutors alleged, he did so on behalf of the Clinton campaign and technology executive Rodney Joffe.

Sussmann, the first person charged by Durham to go to trial, said outside court that “justice ultimately prevailed in my case. … I’m looking forward to getting back to the work I love.”

Durham did not speak outside court, issuing a statement that said, “While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service.” Durham plans another trial in the fall, of a researcher accused of lying to the FBI about his research into Trump.

Gregory Brower, a former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official, said the acquittal was “not a surprising result given the lack of evidence” and the way false statement laws have historically been applied.

“The special counsel was only appointed because the former president wanted an investigation that he could point to for political reasons during the campaign, and [former attorney general William P.] Barr gave him one,” said Brower, noting that much of what Durham was tapped to investigate had already been exhaustively examined by the Justice Department’s inspector general. “This quick acquittal,” he said, “should mark the end of this chapter.”

 

It should mark the end of the Durham probe as a whole.  Both President Biden and Merrick Garland should hold a joint press conference explaining why Durham is being cashiered after this, but in the long run Durham will get a chance to write his report, and it will be just as disappointing to the right as the Mueller Report was to the rest of us.

Keep in mind if Trump is elected again in 2024 though, he will order his AG to arrest Democrats all over the place.

 

A Supreme Search

Again, the odds that Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, GOP activist Ginni Thomas, is the person who leaked the draft Roe decision is about 99%. The Supreme Court on the other hand continues to pretend that a massive investigation into clerks and staff is needed.

Supreme Court officials are escalating their search for the source of the leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, taking steps to require law clerks to provide cell phone records and sign affidavits, three sources with knowledge of the efforts have told CNN.

Some clerks are apparently so alarmed over the moves, particularly the sudden requests for private cell data, that they have begun exploring whether to hire outside counsel.

The court's moves are unprecedented and the most striking development to date in the investigation into who might have provided Politico with the draft opinion it published on May 2. The probe has intensified the already high tensions at the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority is poised to roll back a half-century of abortion rights and privacy protections.

Chief Justice John Roberts met with law clerks as a group after the breach, CNN has learned, but it is not known whether any systematic individual interviews have occurred.

Lawyers outside the court who have become aware of the new inquiries related to cell phone details warn of potential intrusiveness on clerks' personal activities, irrespective of any disclosure to the news media, and say they may feel the need to obtain independent counsel.

"That's what similarly situated individuals would do in virtually any other government investigation," said one appellate lawyer with experience in investigations and knowledge of the new demands on law clerks. "It would be hypocritical for the Supreme Court to prevent its own employees from taking advantage of that fundamental legal protection.". 

Sources familiar with efforts underway say the exact language of the affidavits or the intended scope of that cell phone search -- content or time period covered -- is not yet clear.

The Supreme Court did not respond to a CNN request on Monday for comment related to the phone searches and affidavits.

 

SCOTUS is going to continue to pretend the credibility crisis of the court is because of the leak, and not because Alito and at least four other justices are going to start rolling back rights after decades and pitch the country into a patchwork of abortion bans and other "it's up to the state" rulings where your rights are determined solely by which state you live in.

We'll see who is offered up as the leaker eventually, but my guess is that we won't see that until after the term ends.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It

The Trumpian effort to steal the 2022 election is not just recruiting secretaries of states who will manipulate laws and votes, it's giving those criminals and traitors cover with an army of "election observers" at polling stations who will challenge, harass, and intimidate anyone they believe is voting Democratic, legally or "illegally".

 

In a hotel conference center outside Harrisburg, Pa., Cleta Mitchell, one of the key figures in a failed scheme to overturn Donald J. Trump’s defeat, was leading a seminar on “election integrity.”

“We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again,” Ms. Mitchell told the crowd of about 150 activists-in-training.

She would be “putting you to work,” she told them.

In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Republican lawyers who frantically compiled unsubstantiated accusations, debunked claims and an array of confusing and inconclusive eyewitness reports to build the case that the election was marred by fraud. Courts rejected the cases and election officials were unconvinced, thwarting a stunning assault on the transfer of power.

Now Ms. Mitchell is prepping for the next election. Working with a well-funded network of organizations on the right, including the Republican National Committee, she is recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.

In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.

One concern is the group’s intent to research the backgrounds of local and state officials to determine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the movement. Many officials already feel under attack by those who falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen.

An extensive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, including documents and social media posts, interviews and attendance at the Harrisburg seminar, reveals a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures. They include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation.

Ms. Mitchell says she is creating “a volunteer army of citizens” who can counter what she describes as Democratic bias in election offices.

“We’re going to be watching. We’re going to take back our elections,” she said in an April interview with John Fredericks, a conservative radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.

The claim that Mr. Trump lost the election because of improper conduct in election offices or rampant voter fraud is false. Mr. Trump’s defeat was undisputed among election officials and certified by Democrats and Republicans, with many recounts and audits verifying the outcome. Mr. Trump’s Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud. Mr. Trump lost more than 50 of his postelection challenges in court.

Campaigns, parties and outside groups from both sides of the political spectrum regularly form poll-monitoring operations and recruit poll workers. And Republicans have in the past boasted of plans to build an “army” of observers, raising fears about widespread voter intimidation and conflict at the polls that largely have not materialized.

Some former election officials say they are hopeful that when election skeptics observe the process they may finally be convinced that the system is sound. But several who examined Ms. Mitchell’s training materials and statements at the request of The New York Times sounded alarms about her tactics.

Ms. Mitchell’s trainings promote particularly aggressive methods — with a focus on surveillance — that appear intended to feed on activists’ distrust and create pressure on local officials, rather than ensure voters’ access to the ballot, they say. A test drive of the strategy in the Virginia governor’s race last year highlighted how quickly the work — when conducted by people convinced of falsehoods about fraud — can disrupt the process and spiral into bogus claims, even in a race Republicans won.

“I think it’s going to come down to whether they are truly interested in knowing the truth about elections or they’re interested in propagating propaganda,” said Al Schmidt, a Republican and former city commissioner of Philadelphia who served on the elections board.

Asked about her project at the Pennsylvania training, Ms. Mitchell declined an interview request and asked a reporter to leave.

In a statement emailed later, she said: “The American election system envisions citizen engagement and we are training people to assume the roles outlined in the statutes.”

 

The goal here is to flood the zone with bullshit "voter fraud" claims, then scream whenever the fraud claims aren't proven. There's a reason why Republicans want to get rid of all non-Election Day, in-person voting, so that all voters can be "screened" by this army of voter intimidation drones.

2022 is the test run for a much larger effort in 2024.

Count on that.