Last Call For Biden Smokes Them Out

The Biden administration is having the FDA ban menthol and flavored cigarettes, cigarillos and flavored cigars, where mentholds in particular have been sold as "safer" than regular cigarettes and have been killing generations of Black folk in America for decades. The bad news is the policy that may not take effect for years, depending on court battles and more.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday proposed banning menthol cigarettes, a significant step praised by leading health and civil rights groups that say the tobacco industry has a history of aggressively marketing to Black communities and causing severe harm, including higher rates of smoking-related illness and death.

The FDA also proposed prohibiting flavors in cigars, including small ones called cigarillos that are popular with teenagers. 

FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, in remarks to reporters, said a ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars would save lives and reduce health disparities. Expressing a sense of urgency to finalize the rule, he stressed that 480,000 people a year in the United States die of tobacco-related illnesses, making smoking the leading cause of preventable death. 

Still, the effective date for the ban could easily be two years away. The FDA will accept public comments for the next few months and then write a final regulation that will include lead time for manufacturers to shutter production. Court challenges by the industry are expected and could set off a protracted legal battle. 

Assuming a federal ban is finalized, it would be the most aggressive action taken by the FDA against the industry since Congress gave the agency the authority to regulate tobacco products in 2009, said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. 

“This is a giant step forward” in decreasing health disparities, said Carol McGruder, co-chair of the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council, an advocacy group that has pushed hard for the change. Because of potential litigation-related delays, she urged states and cities to adopt their own bans. 

Manufacturers sold 203.7 billion cigarettes in the United States in 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s annual Cigarette Report. That marked the first increase in two decades but was sharply lower than the peak in the 1980s, when annual sales exceeded 600 billion cigarettes. Menthol cigarettes make up about 36 percent of the market — and 50 percent of sales for Reynolds American, which manufactures Newport, the top-selling menthol brand. 

Tobacco companies, which have long expressed opposition to a menthol ban, said a prohibition is unlikely to work and that menthol cigarettes should not be singled out. 

“The scientific evidence shows no difference in the health risks associated with menthol cigarettes compared to non-menthol cigarettes, nor does it support that menthol cigarettes adversely affect initiation, dependence or cessation,” Kingsley Wheaton, chief marketing officer of British American Tobacco, which owns Reynolds, said in a statement. 

Altria, which makes menthol versions of Marlboro and its other brands, warned that “taking these products out of the legal marketplace will push them into unregulated, criminal markets that don’t follow any regulations and ignore minimum age laws.”
Guy Bentley, director of consumer freedom at the Reason Foundation, said on Twitter: “Serious Volstead Act vibes here,” referring to the 1920 law designed to implement Prohibition, which failed to end sales of alcohol. The Reason Foundation is a think tank that advocates on behalf of libertarian principles. 

Thursday’s move was foreshadowed almost exactly a year ago, when the FDA promised to propose a ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars within 12 months. 

Menthol has deep roots in Black communities. In the 1950s, about 10 percent of Black smokers used menthol cigarettes. Today, more than 85 percent of Black smokers choose menthol cigarettes — almost three times the proportion for White smokers. Researchers and regulators have found the sharp rise was a result of aggressive marketing in Black communities — especially of menthol cigarettes — by the tobacco industry. The cigarette companies deny targeting Black communities. African Americans die of tobacco-related illnesses, including cancer and heart disease, at higher rates than other groups.

 

This battle will take years, and I expect major interference by Republicans along the way. But there's no doubt that tobacco kills nearly a half-million Americans a year, and it's the right thing to do.

The Big Lie, Con't

Trump's cultists would do anything in order to "prove" their case of "massive election fraud" and that apparently included breaching swing state election systems in order to find...or plant...evidence of such.

Eighteen months after Donald Trump lost the White House, loyal supporters continue to falsely assert that compromised balloting machines across America robbed him of the 2020 election.

To stand up that bogus claim, some Trump die-hards are taking the law into their own hands – by attempting, with some success, to compromise the voting systems themselves.

Previously unreported surveillance video captured one such effort in August in the rural Colorado town of Kiowa. Footage obtained by Reuters through a public-records request shows Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder, the county’s top election official, fiddling with cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer drives containing sensitive voting information.

Schroeder, a Republican, later testified that he was receiving instructions on how to copy the system’s data from a retired Air Force colonel and political activist bent on proving Trump lost because of fraud.

That day, Aug. 26, Schroeder made a “forensic image of everything on the election server,” according to his testimony, and later gave the cloned hard drives to two lawyers.

Schroeder is now under investigation for possible violation of election laws by the Colorado secretary of state, which has also sued him seeking the return of the data. Schroeder is defying that state demand and has refused to identify one of the lawyers who took possession of the hard drives. The other is a private attorney who works with an activist backed by Mike Lindell, the pillow mogul and election conspiracy theorist.

Schroeder said in a legal filing that he believed he had a “statutory duty” to preserve voting records. He declined to comment for this report.

The episode is among eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to voting systems in five U.S. states since the 2020 election. All involved local Republican officeholders or party activists who have advanced Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods or conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, according to a Reuters examination of the incidents. Some of the breaches, including the one in Elbert County, were inspired in part by the false belief that state-ordered voting-system upgrades or maintenance would erase evidence of alleged fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, state election officials say, those processes have no impact on the voting systems’ ability to save data from past elections.

The incidents include a North Carolina case, first reported last week by Reuters, in which a local Republican Party leader threatened to get a top county election official fired or have her pay cut if she didn’t give him unauthorized access to voting equipment. In southern Michigan, a pro-Trump clerk who has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media defied state orders to perform maintenance on a voting machine on the unfounded belief that doing so could erase proof of alleged fraud. In another Michigan case, a Republican activist impersonated an official from a made-up government agency in a plot to seize voting equipment.

Some of the people and groups involved in the vigilante election-investigator movement are drawing financial support from Lindell, the My Pillow Inc chief executive and one of the most visible backers of Trump’s false fraud claims. Lindell said he hired four top members of one group, the U.S. Election Integrity Plan, or USEIP. The group got Lindell’s backing about three months after its co-founder advised Elbert County Clerk Schroeder in his effort to copy and leak voting data. In all, Lindell told Reuters he has spent about $30 million and hired up to 70 people, including lawyers and “cyber people,” partly in support of Cause of America, a right-wing network of election activists.

Lindell, who said he hasn’t been involved in any data breaches, said his quest aims to prove fraud in the 2020 vote and to reshape American elections by getting rid of electronic voting machines and returning to paper ballots. The Trump ally said his fraud claims will eventually be vindicated in spite of what he described as ridicule from the media.

“We’ve got to get rid of the machines!” Lindell said. “We need to melt them down and use them for prison bars and put everyone in prison that was involved with them.”

A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

 

A lot of people should be in jail, chiefly Trump himself.  But the larger problem is that these crooks are setting up their game plan to steal the election from the Democrats in 2024, they're doing it in broad daylight, and little is being done to stop them.  If we don't, well....

 

From long before Election Day 2020, Trump and Republicans planned to overturn the presidential election by exploiting the Electors and Elections Clauses of the Constitution, the Electoral College, the Electoral Count Act of 1877, and the 12th Amendment, if Trump lost the popular and Electoral College vote.

The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known "independent state legislature" doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the election using Pence's ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to Donald Trump. 

The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.

The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election. 

Trump and the Republicans began executing this first stage of their plan months before November 3, by challenging as violative of the independent state legislature doctrine election rules relating to early- and late-voting, extensions of voting days and times, mail-in ballots, and other election law changes that Republicans contended had been unlawfully altered by state officials and state courts in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.

These cases eventually wound their way to the Supreme Court in the fall of 2020, and by December, the Supreme Court had decided all of these cases, but only by orders, either disallowing federal court intervention to change an election rule that had been promulgated by a state legislature, allowing legislatively promulgated rules to be changed by state officials and state courts, or deadlocking 4-4, because Justice Barrett was not sworn in until after those cases were briefed and ready for decision by the Court. In none of these cases did the Supreme Court decide the all-important independent state legislature doctrine.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court's indecision on that doctrine, Trump and the Republicans turned their efforts to the second stage of their plan, exploitation of the Electoral College and the Electoral Count Act.

The Electoral College is the process by which Americans choose their presidents, a process that can lead to the election as president of a candidate who does not receive a majority of votes cast by the American voters. Republicans have grown increasingly wary of the Electoral College with the new census and political demographics of the nation's shifting population. 

The Electoral Count Act empowers Congress to decide the presidency in a host of circumstances where Congress determines that state electoral votes were not "regularly given" by electors who were "lawfully certified," terms that are undefined and ambiguous. In this second stage of the plan, the Republicans needed to generate state-certified alternative slates of electors from swing states where Biden won the popular vote who would cast their electoral votes for Trump instead. Congress would then count the votes of these alternative electoral slates on January 6, rather than the votes of the certified electoral slates for Biden, and Trump would be declared the reelected president.

The Republicans' plan failed at this stage when they were unable to secure a single legitimate, alternative slate of electors from any state because the various state officials refused to officially certify these Trump-urged slates.

Thwarted by the Supreme Court in the first stage, foiled by their inability to come up with alternative state electoral slates in the second stage, and with time running out, Trump and the Republicans began executing the final option in their plan, which was to scare up illegitimate alternative electoral slates in various swing states to be transmitted to Congress. Whereupon, on January 6, Vice President Pence would count only the votes of the illegitimate electors from the swing states, and not the votes of the legitimate, certified electors that were cast for Biden, and declare Donald Trump's reelection as President of the United States.

 

All three of those tactics failed in 2020. In 2024, they  may very well succeed.

 

Unless we stop them.

Bragging Wrongs, Con't

As I've said now for weeks, the Manhattan DA's case against Donald Trump for possible criminal fraud is dead and buried, and Trump will walk.

A special grand jury that had been hearing evidence in the criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump expires at the end of the week and will not be extended, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News.

The special grand jury was empaneled last fall, but had stopped hearing evidence once Alvin Bragg became district attorney in Manhattan in January, raising questions about the strength of the case and whether prosecutors had amassed all the elements required to prove it.
MORE: Manhattan DA insists Trump criminal probe remains active

The two senior prosecutors who had been leading the investigation, Mark Pomerantz and Cary Dunne, resigned in February. Pomerantz said in his resignation letter he believed Trump "is guilty of numerous felony violations."

Trump has denied wrongdoing.

The district attorney's office declined to confirm or deny the decision not to extend the special grand jury, which was first reported by CNN. Grand juries can always be called upon to hear evidence and weigh the return of an indictment and a new special grand jury could always be empaneled.

A spokeswoman for Bragg declined to comment and instead pointed to a statement the district attorney issued earlier this month that insisted the criminal investigation remained active.

"The team working on this investigation is comprised of dedicated, experienced career prosecutors. They are going through documents, interviewing witnesses, and exploring evidence not previously explored," Bragg said in a statement said earlier this month. "In the long and proud tradition of white-collar prosecutions at the Manhattan D.A.'s Office, we are investigating thoroughly and following the facts without fear or favor."

 

No grand jury, no charges, no case. It's over on this front. Alvin Bragg killed this case, and eventually we'll find out why. 

But not until it's too late. It's now up to the state cases against Trump and AG Tish James.