Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

A certain Florida resident is about to have a bad, bad weekend with his staff, so you should at least kee them in your thoughts.

 

At least eight of the 16 Georgia Republicans who convened in December 2020 to declare Donald Trump the winner of the presidential contest despite his loss in the state have accepted immunity deals from Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating alleged election interference, according to a lawyer for the electors.

Prosecutors with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) told the eight that they will not be charged with crimes if they testify truthfully in her sprawling investigation into efforts by Trump, his campaign and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, according to a brief filed Friday in Fulton County Superior Court by defense attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow.

Willis has said that the meeting of Trump’s electors on Dec. 14, 2020, despite Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s certification of Biden’s win, is a key target of her investigation, along with Trump’s phone calls to multiple state officials and his campaign’s potential involvement in an unauthorized breach of election equipment in rural Coffee County, Ga.

Georgia was among seven states where the Trump campaign and local GOP officials arranged for alternate electors to convene with the stated purpose of preserving legal recourse while election challenges made their way through the courts. Among the questions both Willis and federal investigators have explored is whether the appointment of alternate electors and the creation of elector certificates broke the law. Another question is whether Trump campaign officials and allies initiated the strategy as part of a larger effort to overturn Biden’s overall victory during the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

The news that some — but likely not all — of the electors will not be charged raises new questions about the scope of Willis’s examination of the meeting of electors, all of whom she had previously identified as criminal targets in her investigation. The electors who accepted immunity did so without any promise that they would offer incriminating evidence in return, and they all have stated that they remain unified in their innocence and are not aware of any criminal activity among any of the electors, Debrow said.

“In telling the truth they continue to say they have done nothing wrong and they are not aware of anyone else doing anything wrong, much less criminal,” said an individual familiar with the investigation who requested anonymity to discuss the case.

Among the electors who appear to remain targets are David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party who presided over the gathering, and Shawn Still, a state senator who at the time was state finance chair for the party and who told congressional investigators he played a role confirming electors’ identities and admitting them into the room at the Georgia Capitol where they convened.

None of the electors responded to efforts by The Washington Post to reach them. Shafer has denied that convening to cast electoral votes for Trump was a crime, saying repeatedly — including during the gathering itself — that the electors were meeting on a contingency basis to preserve Trump’s legal remedy in the event that he prevailed in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the Georgia result.

 

As we saw earlier this week with the January 6th seditious conspiracy convictions, once you can prove there was a conspiracy, you can roll up everyone involved in the plot. If Fani Willis is being hand delivered testimony that proves the Georgia slate of fraudulent electors were conspiring against Georgia and the United States, well, a lot of heads can roll.

 

Maybe even a certain orange Floridian, too.

Supremely Corrupt Cads, Crooks, And Creeps, Con't

More corruption was revealed today involving Justice Clarence Thomas being bought like the puppet he is. First up, Right-wing billionaire and Nazi memorabilia enthusiast Harlan Crow paid for years of tuition for Thomas's grandnephew to attend a private boarding schools.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

 

Crow's lawyer confirmed yesterday that this happened.

It was bad enough for Thomas yesterday morning, and then yesterday evening's corruption story dropped.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group called the Judicial Education Project and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the Judicial Education Project filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, an adviser to the Judicial Education Project and a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012. The documents reviewed by The Post do not indicate the precise nature of any work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or the Polling Company.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

In response to questions from The Post, Leo issued a statement defending the Thomases. “It is no secret that Ginni Thomas has a long history of working on issues within the conservative movement, and part of that work has involved gauging public attitudes and sentiment. The work she did here did not involve anything connected with either the Court’s business or with other legal issues,” he wrote. “As an advisor to JEP I have long been supportive of its opinion research relating to limited government, and The Polling Company, along with Ginni Thomas’s help, has been an invaluable resource for gauging public attitudes.”

Of the effort to keep Thomas’s name off paperwork, Leo said: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

 

Again, if any other federal employee did a fraction of what Justice Clarence Thomas has copped to in the last few weeks, the Justice Department would have already opened the investigation, if not issued charges. 

At some point, the theory is, it'll be too much for Thomas to keep his job.

How much exactly "too much" is, well. We'll see.

Jobapalooa, Con't

The Biden Boom in the jobs market continues to thunder ahead with another great month. Steve Benen:

 

Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 180,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in April. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those projections turned out to understate what appears to be an extension of the hot job market. CNBC reported this morning:

Job growth fared better than expected in April despite bank turmoil and a decelerating economy, the Labor Department reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls increased 253,000 for the month, beating Wall Street estimates for growth of 180,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate was 3.4% against an estimate for 3.6% and tied for the lowest level since 1969.

While the unemployment rate isn’t my favorite metric, it’s worth noting for context that in January 2021, when President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 6.3%. Now, it’s 3.4% — a level the United States did not reach at any point throughout the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Before this year, the last time the jobless rate reached a figure this low was May 1969. (We hadn’t yet landed on the moon and Woodstock was still a few months away.)

I’m mindful of the chatter about whether the economy is in a recession, but by any reasonable measure, these are not recession-like conditions.

As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.

According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created nearly 13.2 million jobs since January 2021 — roughly double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.

 

Again, Biden has created double the number of jobs in 27 months than Trump did in 36, but the economy is "in a recession" and Biden's marks for the economy continue to be dismal because that's what the Villagers are telling them. 

Oh, and at a record-low 4.7%, Joe Biden has given us the lowest Black unemployment rate so far.  Biden cut that in half since he took over, and it's the first time that Black unemployment has been under 5%. The gap between Black and white unemployment is also the lowest it's been, 1.8% (White unemployment is 3.1% right now).

Let me say this again, white unemployment is three point one percent and white voters say this is the worst economy of their lifetimes and shit like that.

It's ludicrous how this is being portrayed in the hostile right wing noise machine.

But hey, the numbers speak for themselves.

Last Call For Lake Of Fire, Con't

The "election fraud" fraud is coming apart in Arizona, and Kari Lake's legal team is now facing the first of many sanctions and punishments in the months ahead as the hammers drop.

 

Republican Kari Lake’s lawyers were sanctioned $2,000 Thursday by the Arizona Supreme Court in their unsuccessful challenge of her defeat in the governor’s race last year to Democrat Katie Hobbs.

In an order, the state’s highest court said Lake’s attorney made “false factual statements” that more than 35,000 ballots had been improperly added to the total ballot count. The court, however, refused to order Lake to pay attorney fees to cover the costs of defending Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in Lake’s appeal.

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel cited Lake’s challenge over signature verification remains unresolved.

Hobbs and Fontes said Lake and her attorneys should face sanctions for baselessly claiming that over 35,000 ballots were inserted into the race at a facility where a contractor scanned mail-in ballots to prepare them for county election workers to process and count.

When the high court first confronted Lake’s challenge in late March, justices said the evidence doesn’t show that over 35,000 ballots were added to the vote count in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of the state’s voters.

Lawyers for Hobbs and Fontes told the court that Lake and her lawyers misrepresented evidence and are hurting the elections process by continuing to push baseless claims of election fraud. Attorneys for Fontes asked for the court to order Lake’s lawyers to forfeit any money they might have earned in making the appeal, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to benefit from their own misconduct.

Lake’s lawyers said sanctions weren’t appropriate because no one can doubt that Lake honestly believes her race was determined by electoral misconduct.

Lake, who lost to Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes, was among the most vocal 2022 Republican candidates promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races in November, Lake did not.

 

The good news for Kari Lake is that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review. 

The bad news for Kari Lake is also that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review.

 

When that ruling goes against her, that's going to open her up to yet more sanctions and worse.

 

Stay tuned as this Lake of Fire is going to get torched.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Proud Boys terrorists arrested and charged in the January 6th insurrection are now official seditious conspirators, guilty of conspiring against the United States of America.

 

AFTER A TRIAL that stretched nearly four months, four Proud Boys have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy in connection to the insurrection of Jan. 6.

The jury delivered guilty verdicts for Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of Proud Boys; Ethan Nordean, who was the leader on the ground in Washington; Zachary Rehl, a top Proud Boy from Philadelphia, and Joseph Biggs, one of the best known militants, with a big social media following.

A fifth Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola — who smashed out a window — at the Capitol was found guilty, along with the other four, on a secondary charge of obstructing Congress.

In one of the last, major high-profile cases stemming from the insurrection, prosecutors succeeded in proving the Proud Boys defendants engaged in sedition. The verdict builds on the previous convictions of numerous Oath Keepers on the same seditious conspiracy charge.

The verdict was a partial one, and before it was entered, the judge urged the jurors to continue working for unanimity on the remaining counts.

The Proud Boys are a far-right drinking and fighting club that promotes “Western Chauvinism” — which they define as a refusal “to apologize for creating the modern world.” The Associated Press dubs them “a neofacist group” and they are deemed a terrorist entity by the government of Canada.

The Proud Boys are infamous for brawling with antifa activists during street protests. At the bitter end of the Trump era, the group had become increasingly militia-like in its M.O., and staunchly backed the MAGA president. Trump even said during a debate ahead of the 2020 election that the group should “stand back and stand by.” Tarrio’s lawyer said during closing arguments on Tuesday that the directive led the Proud Boys to “grow so large that vetting became difficult.”

 

This should be the end of a number of Republican careers, starting with MTG, Lauren Boebert, and Donald Trump.  It won't be, all three will run on overturning the convictions and Trump in particular will promise to pardon them.

Republicans supporting convicted seditious conspirators should be grounds for expulsion from Congress and the end of Trump's campaign, but sadly, it will only benefit them as they rally around these new MAGA martyrs and ensure that yet more domestic terrorist attacks will continue.

Walker, Georgia Arranger

Former Georgia GOP Senate loser Herschel Walker is in real trouble this week as the Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger has broken what looks like a huge campaign finance fraud scandal, if not outright embezzlement.

 

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.

And the emails reveal that not only did Washington complete Walker’s wire requests, he was under the impression that these were, in fact, political contributions.

In the best possible circumstances, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the emails suggest violations of federal fundraising rules; in the worst case, they could be an indication of more serious crimes, such as wire fraud.

But Walker—who had been schooled on campaign finance rules since his campaign launched in August 2021, according to a person involved in those conversations—appears to have dismissed the Washington team’s concerns that the money may have gone to the wrong place. When a third party informed a Washington Companies executive that the money couldn’t be used for political purposes, they raised the issue with Walker, asking at one point whether the funds should be redirected to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Walker never contributed any of his own money to his campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and it’s unclear what happened to these particular funds. Walker may have ultimately returned the money to Washington, but he did not reroute the money to the super PAC, according to FEC filings and a person with direct knowledge of the events.

“It was good talking with you today,” Tim McHugh, executive vice president for the Washington Corporations, wrote to Walker last November. “After our call, [redacted] reached out to me and said [a person] clarified with you that any funds sent to the HR Talent account cannot legally be used for political purposes. Political contributions must go to either the Team Herschel or 34N22 accounts.”

34N22 was a super PAC supporting Walker. Walker was not allowed to solicit donations for the super PAC in excess of federal limits, which this amount of money explicitly was. But that was not McHugh’s concern; he was worried about the hundreds of thousands of dollars his boss had wired to HR Talent in March.

“We will need your assistance to get the prior contributions made to the HR Talent account in March corrected,” McHugh concluded in the email.

While Walker’s campaign was battered from the jump by a hurricane of controversies, this situation stands out.

According to the legal experts who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, this scheme appears to not just be illegal—it appears to be unparalleled in its audacity and scope. The transactions raise questions about a slew of possible violations. In fact, these experts all said, the scheme was so brazen that it appears to defy explanation, ranking it among the most egregious campaign finance violations in modern history.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, called the arrangement “jaw-dropping.” Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said if Walker “used the campaign to funnel money into his own business, that’s one of the biggest campaign finance crimes I’ve ever heard of.” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of Documented, remarked that the exchanges were “stunning and, to my knowledge, without parallel in recent history.”

“Campaign finance laws are designed to prevent massive under-the-table payments like those described here,” Fischer said. “While we don’t have all the facts, these emails point to highly illegal, potentially even criminal activity.”

 

I'm hoping this means the feds come knocking and Merrick Garland has a few surprises for him, as this looks like the most slam dunk campaign fraud scam in recent history.

We'll see how this going, but my question is would we ever have known about this if Walker had won five months ago?

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Another pair of numbing, soul-rending mass shootings in Gunmerica, and they will keep happening until we stop them, which is to say, never. First in Oklahoma, an apparent murder-suicide by a convicted rapist claimed six lives after which the gunman shot himself.

 

A convicted rapist on trial for child pornography charges is believed to have fatally shot six people, five of them teenagers, before taking his own life at the rural Oklahoma property where the kids were having a sleepover last weekend, authorities said Wednesday.

All of the victims were shot in the head, said Joe Prentice, chief of the Okmulgee Police Department and spokesman of a violent crime task force overseeing the investigation into the killings outside the small town of Henryetta.

The suspected shooter, Jesse McFadden, 39, also died of a gunshot wound to the head, Prentice said.

Prentice identified the victims as Ivy Webster, 14; Brittany Brewer, 15; Michael Mayo, 15; Tiffany Guess, 13; Rylee Allen, 17; and Holly McFadden, 35.

Holly McFadden’s mother, Janette Mayo, identified her daughter on Tuesday as Holly Guess. She married Jesse McFadden last year, Okmulgee County records show.

Their bodies were found in two groups on the large property where the McFaddens rented a home, Prentice said.

 

No motive as of yet, and no motive in another mass shooting in an Atlanta hospital waiting room that killed one and injured four as the suspect was caught after a citywide manhunt.

A man accused of opening fire in an Atlanta medical facility waiting room Wednesday, killing one woman and wounding four others, is in custody, police said.

Atlanta police announced the apprehension of 24-year-old Deion Patterson at around 8 p.m., almost eight hours after the deadly shooting.


The shooting occurred shortly after noon, police said. Patterson fled in a vehicle he carjacked and later abandoned, Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum told reporters.

The suspect and that stolen vehicle were seen by Department of Transportation cameras in Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta, around 12:30 p.m., county police Sgt. Wayne Delk said.

The shooting happened around 12:08 p.m. in an 11th floor waiting room of a Northside Hospital medical facility in Midtown Atlanta, Schierbaum said.

The suspect, later identified as Patterson, was able to flee the area as law enforcement descended on the shooting scene in Midtown, he said.

The victims, all of whom are women, have not been publicly identified.

The victim who was killed was 39. The four people who were wounded were ages 71, 56, 39 and 25, Schierbaum said. It wasn't immediately clear if the victims were patients or hospital employees.

"It's still too soon to know why these individuals were chosen," Schierbaum said of the victims.

 

Dead teenagers, a dead woman in a hospital waiting room.

 

The price Republicans remind us we should be willing to pay for "freedom". 

Welcome to Gunmerica.

 

 

Last Call For The Road To Gilead Goes Through North Carolina, Con't

NC Republicans aren't wasting any time now that traitorous ex-Democrat Tricia Cotham's decision to join their ranks, giving them the two-thirds majority needed to override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's promised veto on a newly-proposed 12-week abortion ban.

 

The bill is called the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act,” and it will likely be placed into Senate Bill 20 using a procedural move where both House and Senate Rules committees will meet to discuss the bill. The bill would then move to the floor to be discussed and voted on again. This is not a common procedure, but the move quickly sends the bill to Governor Cooper, who will likely veto it.

“This proposal erodes even further the freedom of women and their doctors to make deeply personal health care decisions,” Cooper tweeted after the press conference. “I, along with most North Carolinians are alarmed by the overreach of Republican politicians into people’s personal lives, and I strongly oppose it.”

However, in a recent poll, 57% of North Carolinians support legislation to prohibit abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is in danger.

According to Rep. Sarah Stevens, R-Surry, every Republican in the House and Senate has agreed on this bill, meaning there is enough support to override Cooper’s veto.

Stevens also mentioned there may be some Democrats willing to vote for the bill. Still reeling from Rep. Tricia Cotham’s decision to switch to Republican affiliation last month, Democrats have struggled to keep its members on the same policy page on issues like abortion that divide the Democrat caucus along moderate versus liberal progressive lines.

A member of the House informed Carolina Journal on the condition of anonymity that as many as four House Democrats are expected to back the bill.

Two Democrats, both of whom are pastors, who are most likely to vote in favor of restricting abortion, are Reps. Garland Pierce, D-Scotland, and Amos Quick, D-Guilford.

Three more Democrats who have shown they are willing to work with Republicans on other issues, and could potentially agree with them on this bill, are Reps. Shelly Willingham, D-Edgecombe, Michael Wray, D-Northampton, and Cecil Brockman, D-Guilford.

According to a press release from Senate Republicans, the bill will make the following changes to North Carolina’s abortion laws:

• Limit elective abortions in the second and third trimesters
• Establish an exception for rape and incest through 20 weeks
• Establish an exception for fetal life-limiting anomalies through 24 weeks

The bill maintains an exception to save the life of the mother through the duration of her pregnancy.

“The ‘Care for Women, Children, and Families Act’ is reasonable, commonsense legislation that will protect more lives than at any point in the last 50 years,” said Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth. “We are beginning the process of creating a culture that values life, and that’s something we can all be incredibly proud of.”

"Incredibly proud" that at least we're not banning abortion completely, so you bitches should be goddamn grateful to the Republican party, right?

We're enlightened troglodytes, you see, ladies.

That 12-week ban will become a six-week ban as soon as the election is over, but I guess it's a victory, yay!

Empire State Of Energy

New York is banning fossil fuels in new construction, a major step towards future decarbonization, but the MAGA trolls and the courts are going to have a field day with this, and  I give it less than 50% odds that it survives the inevitable SCOTUS challenge.

New York has become the first state in the nation to pass a law banning natural gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings, a move that could help reshape how Americans heat and cook in their homes in the coming decades.

Late Tuesday, the New York legislature approved a $229 billion state budget that will prohibit natural gas hookups and other fossil fuels in most new homes and other construction, a major victory for climate activists. The move, which will likely face a court challenge from the fossil fuel industry, will serve as a test of states’ power to ban fossil fuels outright, rather than simply encouraging developers to build low-carbon buildings.

The law effectively requires all-electric heating and cooking in new buildings shorter than seven stories by 2026, and in 2029 for taller buildings. And although it allows exemptions for manufacturing facilities, restaurants, hospitals and even carwashes, the measure does not do what some climate activists had feared: give cities and counties license to override the ban.

Dozens of cities and counties have adopted bans on gas hookups in new buildings, part of a national movement to cut emissions from homes and businesses that account for about 11 percent of the nation’s carbon pollution and 30 percent of New York state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

As the restrictions spread across the country, they become a new front in the culture wars. Earlier this year, when a federal official suggested, and then quickly retracted, the idea that the national government might ban gas stoves, debate over the future of gas flared.

But Democrats, who control the New York Senate and Assembly, decided to press ahead, despite the partisan warfare. And, in the end, it was not negotiations over gas stoves that stirred controversy but a drawn-out fight over bail reform and housing policy that delayed approval of the budget by a month.

The law’s passage, and the approval of a measure that would require the state to build renewable energy when the private sector falls short, have fueled supporters’ hopes for New York to become a national model.

“I hear from local government and state folks frequently that they’re thinking of this sort of policy, and so I’m certain, as other policymakers look to a state that’s found a politically and technically feasible way to go about electrification, that others will be paying attention,” said Amy Turner, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

In Massachusetts, a law adopted last year has allowed 10 cities and towns to participate in a pilot program banning gas-burning stoves and furnaces from new construction. Environmentalists are eager to see the state go further, using a new building code written to discourage the use of fossil fuels. Advocates are also eyeing Chicago, where the heavily blue city recently elected a liberal mayor.

New York’s new law “is an indication that this policy is definitely building momentum and becoming more mainstream, in particular within the Democratic Party,” said Abe Scarr, director of the Illinois Public Interest Research Group, a consumer group that’s part of a coalition trying to build support for a similar ban in Chicago.

 

So, we'll see if this works or not. I mean, eventually we're going to stop using fossil fuels because we'll either ban them, or none of us will be left to argue about it.

Lots Of Strike Through Text

The Writer's Guild of America authorized a strike Tuesday after months of fruitless negotiations with Hollywood Studios, and the immediate effect is that late night TV will be on reruns until further notice.

 

Nightly talk shows including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, are set to go dark starting on Tuesday after writers agreed to strike.

Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show, which had correspondent Dulcé Sloan host this week, also will be hit. The Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Tonight Show and Late Night will officially be in re-runs now, waiting on what Comedy Central will do with The Daily Show.

Weekly shows as Saturday Night Live, Real Time with Bill Maher and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver will be similarly impacted. The two HBO shows will shut down, although a final decision on SNL is expected to come later in the week. UPDATE Monday 1:30 PM. SNL has officially canceled this week’s show, which was supposed to be hosted by Pete Davidson. Repeats of the late-night program will air until further notice.

Colbert was set to have Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Chita Rivera on Tuesday’s show, with Chris Hayes, Zach Cherry, Michael J. Fox and Shonda Rhimes lined up for later in the week. Fallon was set with Ken Jeong and Emma Chamberlain on Tuesday, with the likes of Jennifer Lopez, JJ Watt, Elle Fanning and Bowen Yang among guests for later in the week. Kimmel was welcoming Dr. Phil, Gina Rodriguez and The Pixies on Tuesday, with Melissa McCarthy, Will Poulter, Ricky Gervais, Anthony Carrigan and Smashing Pumpkins set for later in the week. The Daily Show was set to welcome authors Vashti Harrison and Jason Reynolds and former NFL All-Pro Brandon Marshall.

Seth Meyers, speaking on Late Night this afternoon, said: “I love writing. I love writing for TV. I love writing this show. I love that we get to come in with an idea for what we want to do every day and we get to work on it all afternoon and then I have the pleasure of coming out here. No one is entitled to a job in show business. But for those people who have a job, they are entitled to fair compensation. They are entitled to make a living. I think it’s a very reasonable demand that’s being set out by the guild. And I support those demands.”

Pete Davidson, whose Peacock comedy series Bupkis starts this week, was set for his SNL return on May 6. We hear that there are a number of possibilities for the Lorne Michaels-created show if there is a strike and that a decision is set to be made closer to showtime.

Speaking on The Tonight Show, Davidson joked that he was taking it personally. “It sucks because it just feeds my weird story I have in my head, like, of course that would happen to me.”

Two of the nightly hosts, Kimmel and Colbert, went through this situation in 2007-08, the latter as the host of The Colbert Report. Meyers was at Saturday Night Live during the last strike, and Oliver was on The Daily Show. Maher’s Real Time was also hit, with its season finale replaced by a rerun.

One of the issues in this year’s negotiation between the writers guild and the studios is also, in fact, surrounding late-night shows on streaming. As it stands, writers who work on “comedy variety programs made for new media,” such as Peacock’s The Amber Ruffin Show, do not qualify for MBA minimums, something the WGA has been fighting for.

Late-night showrunners have told Deadline that they will stay in touch with each other as the strike progresses to give a unified approach to the situation, something that didn’t happen in ’07-’08.

“I have been and will continue to talk to the other shows to see what they’re up to,” one showrunner said. “We’ve got to support the writers — our writers are amazing. That said, the rest of the staff is amazing, and I don’t want to see anybody lose their jobs or lose a paycheck. What’s the happy medium there? Figuring that out, it’s not been easy.”

 

We haven't really had a writers' strike in the era of pervasive social media, and this is where I think this will be a shorter strike, because the studios are getting torched on Twitter, Instagram, and yes, even Facebook. 

Oh, and you know which late night show is breaking the strike?  Gutfeld! on Fox News.

They couldn't afford WGA writers anyway, I guess. It's not like the guy is funny.

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen says that the government will run out of debt ceiling tricks and could be forced to default on loans as soon as June 1, and as far as the Biden administration is concerned, the time to put this mess to bed is now here.

 

A standoff between House Republicans and President Biden over raising the nation’s borrowing limit has administration officials debating what to do if the government runs out of cash to pay its bills, including one option that previous administrations had deemed unthinkable.

That option is effectively a constitutional challenge to the debt limit. Under the theory, the government would be required by the 14th Amendment to continue issuing new debt to pay bondholders, Social Security recipients, government employees and others, even if Congress fails to lift the limit before the so-called X-date.

That theory rests on the 14th Amendment clause stating that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

Some legal scholars contend that language overrides the statutory borrowing limit, which currently caps federal debt at $31.4 trillion and requires congressional approval to raise or lift.

Top economic and legal officials at the White House, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department have made that theory a subject of intense and unresolved debate in recent months, according to several people familiar with the discussions.

It is unclear whether President Biden would support such a move, which would have serious ramifications for the economy and almost undoubtedly elicit legal challenges from Republicans. Continuing to issue debt in that situation would avoid an immediate disruption in consumer demand by maintaining government payments, but borrowing costs are likely to soar, at least temporarily.

Still, the debate is taking on new urgency as the United States inches closer to default. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen warned on Monday that the government could run out of cash as soon as June 1 if the borrowing cap is not lifted.

Mr. Biden is set to meet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California at the White House on May 9 to discuss fiscal policy, along with other top congressional leaders from both parties. The president’s invitation was spurred by the accelerated warning of the arrival of the X-date.

But it remains unclear what type of compromise may be reached in time to avoid a default. House Republicans have refused to raise or suspend the debt ceiling unless Mr. Biden accepts spending cuts, fossil fuel supports and a repeal of Democratic climate policies, contained in a bill that narrowly cleared the chamber last week.

Mr. Biden has said Congress must raise the limit without conditions, though he has also said he is open to separate discussions about the nation’s fiscal path.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday.

 

America has 30 days or the economy implodes thanks to GOP terrorists.

 

Luckily, House Democrats are also trying to stop the clock.

 

The only clue to the gambit was in the title of the otherwise obscure hodgepodge of a bill: “The Breaking the Gridlock Act.”

But the 45-page legislation, introduced without fanfare in January by a little-known Democrat, Representative Mark DeSaulnier of California, is part of a confidential, previously unreported, strategy Democrats have been plotting for months to quietly smooth the way for action by Congress to avert a devastating federal default if debt ceiling talks remain deadlocked.

With the possibility of a default now projected as soon as June 1, Democrats on Tuesday began taking steps to deploy the secret weapon they have been holding in reserve. They started the process of trying to force a debt-limit increase bill to the floor through a so-called discharge petition that could bypass Republican leaders who have refused to raise the ceiling unless President Biden agrees to spending cuts and policy changes.

“House Democrats are working to make sure we have all options at our disposal to avoid a default,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wrote in a letter he sent to colleagues on Tuesday. “The filing of a debt ceiling measure to be brought up on the discharge calendar preserves an important option. It is now time for MAGA Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner to pay America’s bills without extreme conditions.”

An emergency rule Democrats introduced on Tuesday, during a pro forma session held while the House is in recess, would start the clock on a process that would allow them to begin collecting signatures as soon as May 16 on such a petition, which can force action on a bill if a majority of members sign on. The open-ended rule would provide a vehicle to bring Mr. DeSaulnier’s bill to the floor and amend it with a Democratic proposal — which has yet to be written — to resolve the debt limit crisis.

The strategy is no silver bullet, and Democrats concede it is a long shot. Gathering enough signatures to force a bill to the floor would take at least five Republicans willing to cross party lines if all Democrats signed on, a threshold that Democrats concede will be difficult to reach. They have yet to settle on the debt ceiling proposal itself, and for the strategy to succeed, Democrats would likely need to negotiate with a handful of mainstream Republicans to settle on a measure they could accept.

Still, Democrats argue that the prospect of a successful effort could force House Republicans into a more acceptable deal. And Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s announcement on Monday that a potential default was only weeks away spurred Democratic leaders to act.

 

It's time to send in the bomb squad and disarm the debt doomsday device for good.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump continues to attack the journalists clamoring to cover his every move, and they've apparently learned nothing from the last eight years.

 

It was March and former president Donald Trump was aboard his plane with a gaggle of reporters following a campaign rally in Waco, Texas. He started off in good spirits. But then a line of questioning from NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard, who suggested that Trump had in recent days seemed “frustrated” by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s investigation, began irritating the former president. “Don’t ask me any more questions,” Trump said. About 10 minutes later, as Hillyard continued to ask about the investigation, Trump snapped, grabbing the reporter’s two phones and chucking them to the side, according to a source familiar with the matter. “Get him out of here,” Trump told his aides, according to a recording obtained by Vanity Fair.

The incident occurred a few days before Trump would be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his role in hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels. Some of Trump’s comments on the plane have been previously reported, such as when he responded to reporters’ questions about Bragg’s probe by attacking it as a “fake case” that “they’ve already dropped.” The Guardian noted how Trump lashed out at Hillyard when the NBC News reporter asked whether he was frustrated by the investigation. Trump denied the notion, insisting, “We did nothing wrong,” and saying, “This is fake news, and NBC is one of the worst. Don’t ask me any more questions.” Hillyard himself said Trump avoided specifics and called the press “fake news.” But the full scope of Trump’s tirade, including his throwing the reporter’s phones, has not been previously reported. Hillyard declined to comment.

Axios reported that Trump’s 2024 team is running a more professional operation than that of his previous runs, with seasoned political operatives intending on running a “disciplined campaign.” Yet the incident demonstrates Trump's hostile relationship with the press remains unchanged. Trump was notorious for lashing out at reporters while in the White House. On the campaign trail, he regularly turned the ire of the crowd toward the press, famously coining “fake news” as a rallying cry.

Hillyard’s questions revolved around Trump’s posts on Truth Social at the time; the former president had warned that there could be “potential death and destruction” if he was indicted. When Hillyard again tried to clarify Trump’s “version of events” around the DA’s investigation, the ex-president said, “I don’t want to talk to you.” Hillyard tried to ask another question. “Do you hear me? You’re not a nice guy,” Trump said, turning to take a question from another reporter. When Hillyard tried a third time to get a response, Trump lost it. “Alright, let’s go, get him out of here,” Trump said. “Outta here. Outta here,” Trump said, as Hillyard kept trying: “The special counsel, sir.” A deeper voice, apparently belonging to a Trump campaign aide, can be heard saying, “Vaughn, we’re done.”

Trump then picked up one of the phones recording the gaggle and asked, “Whose is this?” Hillyard replied that it was his. Trump picked up another phone and asked the same question. “That one’s mine too,” Hillyard said. The former president tossed both phones out of his sight, onto the seat next to him; the thud of one of the phones hitting a surface can be heard in the recording. Someone then asked to talk about congressional support, but an aide said that the gaggle was over. Other members of the gaggle included Axios’s Sophia Cai, the Daily Mail’s Rob Crilly, RSBN’s Brian Glenn, and Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci. (At one point in the recording, Trump praised Vucci as “handsome,” telling the plane, “look at the arms on him.”) The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell had been expected to travel with the president for the Waco trip, but was bumped off the trip a day before due to a story he’d written about Truth Social being under a money-laundering investigation.

The Trump campaign appears to have reduced mainstream press access as a result of what happened on the plane back from Waco. The only reporters on Trump’s plane for last week’s trip to New Hampshire were from friendly conservative outlets: Henry Rodgers of The Daily Caller and Daniel Baldwin of OANN. Baldwin, in his write-up of the trip, wrote of the “warm” and “welcoming” former president, “It’s clear Trump values the opinions of everyone he surrounds himself with, whether he agrees or disagrees. He even turned to me and said, ‘You really know your sports.’” In a surprising turn, Trump is slated to participate in a town hall on CNN next week.

 

Nope, they haven't learned a single damn thing, and when Trump starts putting reporters in prison, they'll still be trying to get "access" to him to prove they are "one of the good ones".

Trump assaults a reporter and throws their phones around his plane like he's a kid mad at his video game and he's tossing a controller, and Trump is now getting rewarded with his own CNN town hall event later this month where he can be a racist and as awful as possible.

Who needs Tucker Carlson or FOX? Chris Licht at CNN seems more than happy to have his cable news channel fill the role. Look for more of this as the Village scrambles to fill Carlson's power vacuum...

Wild Cardin In Play

After nearly 60 years in Maryland politics and 17 years in the Senate, Maryland Democrat Sen. Ben Cardin is bowing out.

 

U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin says he won’t seek reelection next year, ending a nearly 60-year run in Maryland politics and creating a scramble to fill a rare vacancy in the closely-divided Senate.

“It’s time,” the 79-year-old Democrat told The Baltimore Sun in an interview at his Pikesville home in advance of his anticipated announcement Monday. “I always knew this election cycle would be the one I would be thinking about not running again, so it’s not something that hit me by surprise. I enjoy life. There are other things I can do.”

In his career, Cardin, whose third six-year Senate term ends in January 2025, has emphasized international human rights and assisting Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay.

He began his political career as a member of the House of Delegates in 1967 while still a law student. Democratic U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer, 83, who represents Southern Maryland, started in the state Senate the same year, making them the state’s longest-serving elected officials.

U.S. Senate vacancies are rare, and the possibility of Cardin’s retirement has already drawn interest from a number of potential successors. Possible contenders include Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks; U.S. Rep. David Trone, who represents Frederick County and Western Maryland; Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.; and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County.

Each of those four Democrats declined to comment last week in deference to Cardin, as he had not announced his 2024 plans. But none would rule out running when they or their aides were questioned by The Sun.

Democrats, who hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate, will try to hang on to control of the chamber in the 2024 elections.

Maryland, which has twice as many Democratic voters as Republicans, has not elected a Republican U.S. senator since Charles Mathias of Frederick in 1980.

 

Cardin has been serving as a Maryland elected official for almost a decade longer than I've been alive, and he's finally retiring.  There's no chance the Dems lose this seat, but Jaime Raskin would be the most notable name in the group attempting to succeed Cardin.

We'll see who runs. Whoever wins would probably have the seat for decades, so.

Last Call For A Supreme Government Takeover

The Roberts Court has agreed to take up a case that could spell the end of regulatory federal agencies. TPM's Kate Riga:

The Supreme Court opened a new front in its war against the administrative state Monday when it took up a case that asks it to consider overruling a doctrine that has long helped form the basis of executive branch agencies’ authority.

The Chevron doctrine, stemming from a 1984 Supreme Court decision, gives government agencies deference in how they choose to interpret congressional statutes they administer. Congress traditionally delegates authority to agencies in broad strokes — say, for example, telling the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution in accordance with the Clean Air Act. Under Chevron, the EPA would be given leeway in using its expertise to determine how best to achieve that.

The right-wing legal world is passionately committed to weakening the administrative state, the parts of the government that are charged with regulating corporate polluters, protecting workers’ rights, dictating public health policy and more. That attitude has become evident in its members that sit on the bench, who have largely welcomed cases that challenge agency authority.

A group of familiar far-right groups, including the Cato Institute, National Right to Work Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former Trump attorney John Eastman all filed amicus briefs asking the Court to take up the case.

The case tacked on the broad Chevron challenge as an additional question to the heart of the dispute, which centers on the National Marine Fisheries Service. The Court only agreed to take up that second part of the question, “whether the court should overrule Chevron, or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself.

The overturning of Chevron would be somewhat less of a legal earthquake than it would have been before the right-wing judges amassed such power on the Supreme Court, as they largely have ignored the doctrine when presented with agency actions they don’t like. But still, and enduringly at lower courts, the Chevron doctrine is a bedrock in agency authority — one that the Court seems primed to take a whack at.

 

 In other words, the end of Chevron would mean the end of nearly all the regulatory power of the executive branch and all of its executive agencies, and courts filled with Trump appointees would be able to wreck those agencies and tie up even basic regulatory power in courts for decades.

It would mean the end of enforcement of things like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the FDIC, the CFPB, and who knows, probably everything else the Executive cabinet agencies do. It would be awful. Red states could sue to stop just about everything, and they will.

Trump getting three appointees is the end of a lot of America as you know it.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestc Terrorism Problem, Con't

As goes Ohio, the political bellwether of the Midwest, so goes the nation. That's true of a lot of political topics, none more so than the state becoming ground zero for white supremacist MAGA terrorists who bomb churches over drag events.

Aimenn Penny sat watching online videos of drag-queen story hour events in France, half a world away from his Alliance home, when he decided to attack, authorities say.

Penny, a member of White Lives Matter Ohio, made Molotov cocktails, drove some 50 miles to a small Geauga County town and hurled them at a church planning to host drag events the following week. His only regret: that the church didn’t burn to the ground, according to court records.

Penny’s arrest and indictment on federal hate crime charges, as well as a recent report from the Anti-Defamation League that showed a spike in white supremacist activity in Ohio, is emblematic of the growing problem of domestic hate groups, said Jonathan Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“It paints a really disturbing picture of the state of domestic terrorism and domestic violent extremism in this country,” Lewis said. “I think that the case that was recently brought in in Ohio is, unfortunately, a really good indicator of the types of violent extremism bubbling to the surface today.”

Penny’s case in many ways mirrors the broader white supremacist movement and how some become radicalized via social media and ultimately carry out real-world attacks, Lewis said.

Most white supremacists are no longer affiliated with organized groups, like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, he said. The new trend is groups that are very loosely affiliated. There’s no set hierarchy in the groups or membership dues. Meetings aren’t in person, but on apps like Discord, 4Chan and Telegram, among others, he said.

The rhetoric is hate-filled, but there’s no single person who issues orders or makes plans, Lewis said. Those who carry out violence often do so alone or in small groups, making it more difficult to detect or predict.

“The chatrooms stop just short of saying, ‘Hey go commit a hate crime tomorrow,’ ” Lewis said. “It’s basically do-it-yourself terrorism.”

Members are typically younger, like the 20-year-old Penny. They get radicalized online and through public officials and politicians at the local, state and federal levels who use similar rhetoric, Lewis said.

The result is people with different causes often blending. People with anti-LGBTQ+ ideologies team up with anti-Semites, racists with anti-LGBTQ and so on, Lewis said.

“It creates a really complex environment, particularly for law enforcement,” Lewis said. “It’s tougher to infiltrate a group because it’s all decentralized.”

White Lives Matter of Ohio fits that mold, Lewis said. The group launched in April 2021. It is loosely affiliated with a nationwide group and uses Telegram to spread propaganda and disrupt drag shows like the one the Chesterland Church of Christ organized.

 

These terrorists continue to radicalize others. The Trump stochastic terrorism model is now being repeated by dozens of Republicans at local, state, and federal levels.

We will be dealing with the damage from these monsters for decades to come.

 

It's 2008 All Over Again, Con't

The 2023 version of the 2008 Big Bank Casino Bonanza is nowhere near over, as California regional bank First Republic has finally failed over the weekend, with the FDIC seizing the bank's remaining assets to sell to Jaime Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

 

Federal regulators have seized First Republic Bank and sold it to JPMorgan Chase Bank in a deal aimed at quelling renewed weakness in the nation’s banking industry.

In a statement issued early Monday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said that all depositors of First Republic Bank will become depositors of JPMorgan and will have full access to their deposits.

The deal involved a “highly competitive bidding process,” the FDIC said in its statement, but it did not say what JPMorgan is paying to purchase First Republic.

Under the deal, JPMorgan acquires “substantially all” First Republic assets and agrees to assume responsibility for all of its deposits, including those above the federal insurance limit of $250,000 per account. First Republic had about $229.1 billion in assets and $103.9 billion in deposits.

JPMorgan personnel are now reaching out to First Republic customers, CEO Jamie Dimon said.

Federal regulators approached JPMorgan about bidding on First Republic’s assets, said Jeremy Barnum, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer. The bank “did not seek out this deal,” Barnum told reporters Monday.

Dimon reiterated that the broader banking system was sound and said the deal would stabilize the system after the country’s third bank failure in two months. Still, Dimon acknowledged that as interest rates continue to rise, the economy is not immune to consequences or stress.

“Hopefully people will be properly prepared for it,” Dimon said.

In March, JP Morgan was one of the banks that put billions of dollars into beleaguered First Republic, as regulators and the industry scrambled to contain a crisis that had led to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Barnum said the ultimate demise of First Republic wasn’t a sign that that effort failed. Rather, it helped buy time “when time was needed.”

JP Morgan is not assuming First Republic’s corporate debt or preferred stock, it said in a statement.

First Republic’s failure is expected to cost the FDIC about $13 billion, the agency said. The money will come from the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund, which insured banks pay into every quarter.

First Republic’s 84 offices in eight states will reopen as branches of JPMorgan, and depositors will be able to access all of their money when they open Monday.

The closure and sale of First Republic comes seven weeks after the abrupt failure of Silicon Valley Bank in California prompted an extraordinary federal rescue effort aimed at averting a wider financial crisis.

Unlike SVB, which failed in a matter of days, First Republic has been wobbling for weeks. The delay gave regulators and industry executives time to evaluate the bank and prepare for its demise.

 

The difference between SVB's failure in March and First Republic this morning is that the big investors were given time to make an orderly exit and even profit from First Republic.

 

Everyone's acting like this is the end of the performance rather than the coda to the first movement of the symphony where the second biggest bank failure in US history just happened. 

If the Fed raises interest rates even more to slow down the inflation train, more of this will happen. And if the GOP causes a debt default on America's credit, all bets are off even in the Big Casino.

It's going to be a wild summer.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

If Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's terrible little swamp kingdom antics are really meant as red meat for GOP presidential primary consumption, then he doesn't have many takers at his feast table. CNN's Harry Enten:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the past few months running to the right ahead of his expected entry into the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign. From signing into law a six-week abortion ban to fighting with Disney, the governor has focused on satisfying his party’s conservative base.

So far at least, those efforts have not paid off in Republican primary polling, with DeSantis falling further behind the current front-runner, former President Donald Trump.

Things have gotten so bad for DeSantis that a recent Fox News poll shows him at 21% – comparable with the 19% that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, is receiving on the Democratic side. 

DeSantis was at 28% in Fox’s February poll, 15 points behind Trump. The Florida governor’s support has dropped in the two Fox polls published since, and he now trails the former president by 32 points.

The Fox poll is not alone in showing DeSantis floundering. The latest average of national polls has him dropping from the low 30s into the low 20s.

This may not seem like a big deal, but early polling has long been an indicator of how well presidential candidates do in the primary the following year. Of all primary elections since 1972 without incumbents running, candidates at around 30% in early primary polls (like DeSantis was in February) have gone on to become their parties’ nominees about 40% of the time. Candidates polling the way DeSantis is now have gone on to win about 20% of the time. 

I will, of course, point out that 20% is not nothing. DeSantis most certainly still has a chance of winning. The comparison with Kennedy is not a remark on Kennedy’s strength but on DeSantis’ weakness.

There is no historical example of an incumbent in President Joe Biden’s current position (over 60% in the latest Fox poll) losing a primary. At this point in 1995, Bill Clinton was polling roughly where Biden is now, and he had no problem winning the Democratic nomination the following year.

In that same campaign, Jesse Jackson was polling near 20% in a number of early surveys against Clinton. So what we’re seeing from Kennedy now is not, as of yet, a historical anomaly.

 

So no, the notion that the "moderate" Republicans are going to abandon Trump for DeSantis is foolishness.  Yes, something may still happen to Trump, and DeSantis may benefit, but there's way too much baggage working against him.

No, he'll go back to making Florida an authoritarian state like Viktor Orban's Hungary.

Sunday Long Read: Crimes Of Collier County

In 2004, two men vanished in Collier County, Florida. One, Terrance Williams, was Black. Three months apart, Felipe Santos, was Latino. The last time either man had been seen was in the back of a patrol car with a white Sheriff's Deputy named Steven Calkins. Fifteen years later, CNN took a four-year investigation into these disappearances resulting in this week's Sunday Long Read.

“It is my belief that they were killed because of their color,” said Doug Molloy, who was an assistant US attorney in 2004 and led a multi-agency task force that investigated the disappearances as potential hate crimes.

Sheriff’s investigators surveyed the evidence and determined that Calkins was not telling the truth about his encounter with Terrance Williams. One investigator made a list of nearly two dozen untruthful or inconsistent statements that Calkins made about the day he met Williams. In August 2004, about seven months after Williams disappeared, then-Sheriff Don Hunter fired Calkins. As he later wrote, “I have lost trust in Calkins and his ability to describe incidents in detail and to recall them.”

Meanwhile, investigators got to work. They searched the woods and the waters near where the missing men were last seen. They put a tracking device on Calkins’ car. They did a complete forensic inspection of the car, paying special attention to the trunk. No trace of Santos or Williams turned up.

The FBI delivered a target letter to Calkins and asked him to answer questions from a federal grand jury about the disappearances. Calkins declined. And the investigators’ suspicions did not lead to probable cause. No one could prove these were hate crimes, or even crimes at all. Years passed, and the cases remained open, and both men’s children grew up without their fathers. Calkins repeatedly denied harming the men. He was never criminally charged.

Now 68 years old, Calkins was last known to be living in Iowa. Through his attorney, he declined multiple interview requests from CNN.

Marcia Williams kept a lock of her son’s hair, and a picture of him, wearing a navy blue T-shirt, looking at the camera, which made it seem as if Terrance were looking at her when she walked past. And across the Gulf of Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca, friends and relatives remembered Felipe Santos.

“He didn’t deserve to be disappeared in this way,” his friend Francisca Cortés told CNN. “It isn’t right that he hasn’t been found after so many years and we don’t know what happened to him. As his parents say, ‘If we find his remains, we can give him a Christian burial so we have somewhere to cry and pray for him.’ But in this case there isn’t anywhere. And there isn’t any way to do that. Everything is in limbo and we are never going to know what happened.”

In 2019, a CNN reporter began a new inquiry into the disappearances of Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams. Eventually, two more reporters joined the project. Nearly 70 people were interviewed. The reporters filed dozens of open-records requests with government agencies, yielding more than 10,000 pages of documents and many hours of audio recordings.

Using phone records, dispatch logs and interview transcripts, CNN built minute-by-minute timelines of the days each man disappeared. CNN also obtained every available incident and arrest report from Calkins’s career with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, more than 2,000 reports from 1987 to 2004. This story is the result of CNN’s efforts to untangle one of the most disturbing unsolved mysteries in the recent history of American law enforcement.

This is a shocking story, even for a crooked cop true crime tale, and a reminder that American law enforcement has been corrupt, insular, and villainous for decades.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

Folks like Alex Shephard at TNR continue to believe that Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP are trying to run a hostage negotiation and that they are doing it badly, and while that would be true if McCarthy was actually trying to play the standard Washington kabuki script, that's not what is actually going on.

What McCarthy and the Circus of the Damned are actually doing is trying to crash the economy so that America blames Biden and elects the GOP to power in 2024. If you accept they will not negotiate and will kill as many hostages as possible until their terms are 100% met, everything they are doing makes complete sense.

 

McCarthy has been more or less open about the fact that this is not a real bill. “This bill is to get us to the negotiations,” he said on Tuesday. “It is not the final provisions, and there’s a number of members who will vote for it going forward to say there are some concerns they have with it. But they want to make sure the negotiation goes forward because we are sitting at $31 trillion of debt.”

This bill may get the Republican Party to those negotiations over raising the debt limit, which must be done by early June or the United States will face potentially calamitous economic consequences. It’s hard to assess what the outcome of potential negotiations will be, especially since the White House’s position is “Send a clean debt limit bill, or pound sand.” What is clear, however, is that this bill is a disaster for Republicans.

It is not being treated that way everywhere. The New York Times’ Carl Hulse, who should know better, described it as “a narrow win but a win for Speaker Kevin McCarthy nonetheless.” Politico’s Playbook, meanwhile, declared that this was a coronation of sorts, an occasion in which McCarthy “proved his naysayers wrong.” I suppose if you squint a certain way, you can see it, but these laurels should actually be seen as participation trophies.

Sure, if McCarthy had failed to get anything across the line he would have looked completely incompetent, even by the standards of recent Republican House leaders. Nevertheless, a bill filled with devastating cuts and manifestly unpopular positions is arguably worse than getting anything done at all. The GOP passed a messaging bill that provides Democrats with the better message, something that they can use to hurt the GOP in swing districts for the next two years; a bill that shows that Republicans’ ultimate goal is to gut health care and food stamps and education—and even veterans benefits. There is no universe in which a clean bill, raising the debt ceiling and moving on, isn’t more politically advantageous for the GOP.

The whole sorry episode has only shown that Kevin McCarthy just isn’t good at this. It’s never been entirely clear why he wanted to be speaker of the House in the first place. It’s always been clear, however, that he is not up to the task. To gain the gavel, McCarthy had to make a series of humiliating, enfeebling concessions to his far-right flank that more or less disempowered him. Now, put in a position where he needed to get something done, he once again had to cave to the same right flank—indeed, it was Matt Gaetz, who had previously relished holding back McCarthy’s ascendence to the speakership, who forced him to add more draconian Medicaid work requirements to the bill.

McCarthy essentially wakes up every morning conscripted into a race to the bottom by those in his party with the worst political instincts and ideas. This should not be particularly surprising to McCarthy, but his abject supplication is nevertheless notable. This bill does not matter. It will not pass. It is not intended to pass. Republicans had an opportunity to aim a productive salvo at swing voters, the better to convince them that GOP majorities can deliver prosperity, and giving them some sign that the party was tacking back from the heights of extremism that alienated voters in the last midterm elections. Instead, the message being sent is that the party is all about owning the libs and slashing aid for veterans and the poor. The GOP can’t even fake being a party interested in governing anymore. That’s bad news for the man stuck presiding over this clown show.

 

Again, the problem is the assumption that the goal is to get to a negotiation without crashing the economy, and that's completely wrong, and the more quickly people realize this, the fewer people suffer.

 

This isn't a hostage negotiation, it's a hostage execution with manufactured post-facto justification. Republicans are admitting as such as Paul Davies at WaPo explains:

“However you want to frame it, we’ve got to sit down and talk. And so I think it’s critically important that all the parties sit down, at the White House with the president, and start having these conversations. And they should meet every single day until they get there, together,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told reporters Friday.

But those House Democrats, having lost the majority in last November’s elections, lack the leverage to actually start such talks. Instead, from the relatively moderate Coons to a fiery liberal like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Senate Democrats view even a modest concession, such as a relatively powerless debt commission, as a reward for taking this hostage.

“The problem with that approach is that it signals to the rest of the world that America’s commitment to paying its debts is contingent on some underlying political negotiation over spending that is otherwise too damn contentious to get through on its own,” Warren told reporters Thursday.

But this Democratic approach seems to assure that little will happen until the deadline draws perilously close and then, at that momentous hour, assumes House Republicans will cave out of fear for getting blamed for tanking the economy.

That strategy, so far, is nowhere close to working. House Republicans in swing districts are digging in for a protracted fight and expressing little interest in passing a so-called clean debt hike. They are demanding spending cuts that will begin to rein in the debt.

“It’s certain that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling our economy will crash, but if we don’t do things to limit spending, our economy will also crash,” said Rep. Nick LaLota, one of six New York Republicans on the Democratic target list for next year’s elections. “Reasonable people should adopt that dual-pronged understanding.”

“We have to negotiate. Passing a clean debt ceiling [hike] is not going to happen. He’s going to have to meet us partway,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), whose district favored Biden by 6 percentage points in 2020, recently told reporters.

Democrats also seem to be betting that Senate Republicans will step in as more mature political actors and defuse this situation, but even one of the most productive dealmakers is supporting McCarthy’s approach.

“This bill is not the final deal, but it opens the door for a negotiated deal,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said Thursday.

Cassidy noted that in past fiscal showdowns, the perceived victor tended to be the one that made the other party look most reckless.

“Partly the public perception of this is going to be really important,” he said.

 

To recap, Republicans are looking to see how many hostages they can kill and still come out looking like the good guys. The second Democrats give in, that number goes up to "everyone".

Republicans believe they can win the political standoff by making Biden and Democrats look petty by refusing a basic negotiation. Fresh off his narrow win on his debt bill, McCarthy held a valedictory news conference Wednesday evening in Statuary Hall.

“The Democrats need to do their job. The president can no longer ignore [us] by not negotiating,” McCarthy said.