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

Republicans running for office in 2022 continue to shout the quiet part out loud now when it comes to white supremacists boilerplate bigotry, and they're absolutely counting on it getting them votes and campaign millions from angry white racists.

 

Billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel’s favored candidate for an Arizona Senate seat went on a recent screed against “anti-white racism,” accusing liberal teachers of turning America’s students into self-hating automatons.

Blake Masters, a 34-year-old venture capitalist and protege of the PayPal founder, recently jumped into the race to face Democratic Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. Weeks before he officially launched his campaign, he delivered a speech that was harshly critical of Critical Race Theory, which he claimed has permeated America’s classrooms.

“Too much of schooling in America has become a machine to uproot common sense and to replace it with something much more sinister. You’ve heard about Critical Race Theory,” he said. “All it does is teach kids to identify in racial terms. Right? You are good or bad, depending on what you look like. At this point it is straight up anti-white racism. I don’t think we’re allowed to say that. But let’s call it what it is. It is toxic, and it does not belong in our schools.”

“We’ve got to take back the schools and stop the indoctrination,” Masters continued.

The remarks, first reported by The Informant, were made just weeks before Masters officially announced his Senate bid at a May 25 rally in Phoenix. That event, billed as “America’s Comeback Tour,” was hosted by the right-wing group Freedomworks and headlined by right-wing British politician Nigel Farage.

The comments fall in a larger pattern of Republican candidates and operatives seeking to make the fight they’ve invented over Critical Race Theory, a once-obscure legal theory that America’s institutions are indelibly influenced by racism, into a cause célèbre arguing that America’s children are being brainwashed. This has cropped up in races big and small across the country.

And they’re not surprising for a candidate backed by Thiel, who as Buzzfeed News reported has extensive ties with the racist fringe of the GOP.

Masters is running to face Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, and is currently in a crowded primary that includes Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. And his anti-CRT attack isn’t just a one-off—he warned of “schools that teach our kids to hate our country” in his campaign launch video.

Nearly all of Masters’ career has come under the tutelage of Thiel, the founder of PayPal who was one of the tech tech billionaires to loudly back President Trump. Masters took a Stanford Law class Thiel taught in 2012, and began posting detailed notes of Thiel’s anti-globalization lectures online. Thiel asked him to turn them into a book, and later hired Masters as president of the Thiel Foundation, and later, as COO of Thiel Capital.

These chowderheads want a war, a bloody, deadly, shooting war where they get to live out their dreams of killing those people with righteous impunity, a war they believe will render anyone who isn't white in America a powerless non-citizen.

 

But they'll settle for getting that outcome without having to fire a shot if they can get it.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

The last person in the entire state of New York to realize that Andrew Cuomo had to go just figured it out in real time on national television.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday he would be resigning, effective in 14 days. His resignation comes one week after an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James that found that he sexually harassed 11 women, including staffers and women who did not work for his administration.

"The best way I can help now is to step aside," Cuomo said at a new briefing.

Shortly before his resignation, his attorney, Rita Glavin, appeared to be outlining his defense. "This is about the veracity and credibility of a report that is being used to impeach and take down an elected official," Glavin said.

The New York Assembly Judiciary Committee said Monday that it is wrapping up its impeachment inquiry into Cuomo. He has until Friday to submit any evidence.

Brittany Commisso, one of the women who is referenced in Attorney General Letitia James' investigation, told "CBS This Morning" and the Albany Times Union that she believes Cuomo knows he broke the law and he needs to be "held accountable."

"There's a difference between being an affectionate and warm person. Sexual harassment is completely different," she said. "The governor knows that what he did to me and what he did to these 10 other women, whether it be a comment or an actual physical contact, was sexual harassment. He broke the laws that he himself created."

One of Cuomo's top advisers, Melissa DeRosa, resigned Sunday night.

 

There were rumors earlier this week that Cuomo wanted to finish out his term and would strike a deal to not run for a fourth term next year. The response, what changed, is the fact the NY General Assembly obviously came back and said that they had to votes to impeach and remove him from office.

 

Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul will be New York's first woman governor on the 24th. 

I still hope Cuomo gets the book thrown at him by Tish James. There's still a lot that needs to happen here, and it ends with Cuomo in prison.

[UPDATE]: The reason behind the paradigm shift from Cuomo's deal-seeking 24 hours ago to resignation today is almost certainly the revelations in this Ronan Farrow New Yorker piece.

In April, 2014, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo placed a call to the White House and reached Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. Cuomo was, as one official put it, “ranting and raving.” He had announced that he was shuttering the Moreland Commission, a group that he had convened less than a year earlier to root out corruption in New York politics. After Cuomo ended the group’s inquiries, Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued letters instructing commissioners to preserve documents and had investigators from his office interview key witnesses. On the phone with Jarrett, Cuomo railed against Bharara. “This guy’s out of control,” a member of the White House legal team briefed on the call that day recalled Cuomo telling Jarrett. “He’s your guy.”

Jarrett ended the conversation after only a few minutes. Any effort by the White House to influence investigations by a federal prosecutor could constitute criminal obstruction of justice. “He did, in fact, call me and raise concerns about the commission,” Jarrett told me. “As soon as he started talking, and I figured out what he was talking about, I shut down the conversation.” Although Cuomo fumed about Bharara’s efforts, he did not make any specific request before Jarrett ended the call. Nevertheless, Jarrett was alarmed and immediately walked to the office of the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to report the conversation. Ruemmler agreed that the call was improper, and told Jarrett that she had acted correctly in ending the conversation without responding to Cuomo’s complaints. “I thought it was highly inappropriate,” the member of the White House’s legal team told me. “It was a stupid call for him to make.” Ruemmler reported the incident to the Deputy Attorney General, James M. Cole, who also criticized the call. “He shouldn’t have been doing that. He’s trying to exert political pressure on basically a prosecution or an investigation,” Cole told me. “So Cuomo trying to use whatever muscle he had with the White House to do it was a nonstarter and probably improper.”

Cuomo’s outreach to the White House may have opened him up to sanction for violating state ethics rules and could be relevant in an ongoing impeachment inquiry by the New York State Assembly. “It’s highly inappropriate and potentially illegal,” Jennifer Rodgers, a former prosecutor in Bharara’s office and an adjunct clinical professor at N.Y.U. Law School, told me. Jessica Levinson, the director of Loyola Law School’s Public Service Institute, added, “If he, in fact, called a U.S. Attorney’s bosses and implied, ‘Stop this guy from looking into me,’ that could easily amount to an impeachable offense.” (Shortly after publication time, Cuomo announced that he would resign as governor of New York.)

White House officials at the time believed that prosecutors might want to interview Jarrett and assess whether the call had risen to the level of illegality. Instead, the Department of Justice notified Bharara. “Everybody basically just said we’re not going to do anything—we’re not going to stop Preet,” Cole said. “The investigation is the investigation, and I don’t care if Andrew Cuomo calls us or not.” Bharara’s office chose not to pursue charges, but he recalled being alarmed. “Andrew Cuomo has no qualms, while he’s under investigation by the sitting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, trying to call the White House to call me off,” Bharara told me. “Trump did that. That’s an extraordinary thing, from my perspective.”

Elkan Abramowitz, an attorney for Cuomo, said that Bharara’s office had asked Cuomo whether he’d had contact with the White House about Bharara and that Cuomo acknowledged that he had, without providing specifics. Abramowitz added, “If Bharara thought this was obstruction of justice, he would have said so at the time.” A spokesperson for Cuomo declined to answer follow-up questions, saying only, of the allegations that Cuomo interfered with the Moreland Commission, “This threadbare narrative has been litigated and re-litigated to death and no wrongdoing was found.”

Cuomo’s vindictiveness, his attacks on officials who defy him, and his attempts to undermine inquiries about him are recurring themes in a report released last week by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. The report documents both allegations from women who say that Cuomo harassed them and claims that Cuomo and his inner circle threatened and smeared employees and political enemies. It is replete with accounts of state employees who say that they feared they would lose their jobs if they attempted to report misconduct by the Governor or his allies. It concludes that Cuomo and his team’s disclosure of confidential files related to one of his accusers, Lindsey Boylan, constituted illegal retaliation. It notes that Cuomo’s staff pressed former employees to call and secretly record women who had made allegations, apparently to collect information to use against them. When the recordings did not serve that end, Cuomo’s staff destroyed them—an act that legal experts said could also figure in ongoing inquiries. As the attorney general’s investigators worked on the report, Cuomo and his allies worked to discredit its authors; his aide Rich Azzopardi, who was instrumental in the disclosure of Boylan’s files, publicly suggested that James, the attorney general, had designs on Cuomo’s job. “There were attempts to undermine and to politicize this investigation, and there were attacks on me as well as members of the team, which I find offensive,” James said last week, as she announced the results of the probe.

 

So he wasn't going to be impeached just on sexual harassment charges, but ethics charges as well, and that was ballgame in the end.

The Buckeye Battle Royale

Everybody's after Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine's job in 2022 as he faces tough challengers from both parties, the latest of which is Cincy Mayor John Cranley.

 

Two-term Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley joined the race for Ohio governor on Tuesday, pledging to modernize Ohio’s infrastructure and economy with proceeds from legalizing marijuana and to extract money from energy companies for homeowner rebates that will help lift family budgets.

With the launch of his campaign Tuesday, Cranley joins his friend, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, in the Democratic field. She announced her bid April 19. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is expected to run for a second term, a campaign that will begin with a contested primary.

Cranley, 47, had been exploring a bid for the Democratic nomination for months and had raised more than $1.3 million for the effort as of July. Whaley reported raising more than $1.6 million.

First elected mayor in 2013, Cranley is term-limited from running again this year. He points to his record as chief executive of a major city that’s growing while others languish to show his capability to lead the state.

“Ohio needs a comeback and deserves a governor who has led a comeback,” Cranley told The Associated Press in an interview. “It’s not going to be easy to take a state like Ohio, which like so many in the Midwest has been in decline, and to have it come back again, but that’s what we’re going to do.”

He said the GOP-controlled state Legislature has been tainted by corruption and puts the interests of big corporations over workers. He said he will make “jobs, jobs, and more jobs” his priority.

Cranley’s economic plan calls for creating 30,000 new $60,000-a-year jobs annually in such areas as advanced manufacturing and renewable energy, and to improve Ohio roads, water systems and broadband networks.

He proposes using tax revenue from legalizing recreational marijuana, now legal in neighboring Michigan and 17 other states, to pay for his programs. He also would reconfigure Ohio’s privatized job creation office, JobsOhio. He also proposes offering Ohio homeowners $500 dividends paid for from energy company profits.

As mayor, Cranley, who twice lost congressional races against Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot of Cincinnati, aggressively pursued a new soccer stadium project that helped the city land a Major League Soccer franchise and helped Cincinnati police acquire a cutting-edge ShotSpotter gunshot detection system.

His 2018 feud with a city manager who accused Cranley of overstepping his authority to undermine the city manager’s role drew criticism from some fellow Democrats. The city manager eventually resigned with a severance agreement.

Although Cranley, a Roman Catholic, personally opposes abortion, he doesn’t think government should pass restrictions on the procedure that spark expensive, often unsuccessful, legal battles because “it’s just not a good use of scarce resources.”

“I’m pro-choice. I’ve struggled as a matter of faith,” said Cranley, who supports same-sex marriage. As governor, Cranley said he would veto any incursions on the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

While both Cranley and Whaley have managed to keep their noses clean in their respective city's federal bribery scandals on City Council, I just don't see how either one gets more than 40% of the vote in Ohio in 2022.

Of course, I'm expecting DeWine to be replaced by somebody far worse. Former GOP Rep. Jim Renacci has already stepped in on the Republican side and I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that more are coming over the next 12 months.

Stay tuned.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

Republican governors are finally realizing that their constituents are dying from COVID and are working with the Biden administration on new measures to help people. Wait, did I say help people? I meant punish them some more.

The Office of Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the Florida Board of Education could withhold the salaries of superintendents and school board members who defy the governor’s executive order prohibiting mask mandates.

Here is the statement released to CBS4:

“With respect to enforcing any financial consequences for noncompliance of state law regarding these rules and ultimately the rights of parents to make decisions about their children’s education and health care decisions, it would be the goal of the State Board of Education to narrowly tailor any financial consequences to the offense committed. For example, the State Board of Education could move to withhold the salary of the district superintendent or school board members, as a narrowly tailored means to address the decision-makers who led to the violation of law.

“Education funding is intended to benefit students first and foremost, not systems. The Governor’s priorities are protecting parents’ rights and ensuring that every student has access to a high-quality education that meets their unique needs.”

Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who runs the fourth largest school district in the nation, released a statement in response. It reads, in full:

“We have established a process that requires consultation with experts in the areas of public health and medicine. We will follow this process, which has served us well, and then make a final decision. At no point shall I allow my decision to be influenced by a threat to my paycheck; a small price to pay considering the gravity of this issue and the potential impact to the health and well-being of our students and dedicated employees.

“I want to thank the Governor for recognizing that students should not be penalized.”

 

That goes for Gov. Abbott, who apparently is trying to shut down rural and small regional hospitals. 

Gov. Greg Abbott announced new moves Monday to fight the coronavirus pandemic as it rages again in Texas, including asking hospitals to again put off certain elective procedures to free up space for COVID-19 patients.

Still, the governor did not back down on his refusal to institute any new statewide restrictions on businesses or to let local governments and schools mandate masks or vaccines.

Instead, Abbott announced he had written to the Texas Hospital Association asking hospitals to "voluntarily postpone medical procedures for which delay will not result in loss of life or a deterioration in the patient’s condition." As coronavirus was consuming the state last summer, Abbott took a more restrictive approach and banned elective surgeries in over 100 counties before ending the prohibition in September.

 

And without funding to shore up those hospitals who are admittedly making money to stay in business because hospitals are for-profit enterprises in America, these hospitals will shut down. 

Republicans governors want a death toll as high as possible so that they can blame Biden.

That's the plan, and it has been since November 2020.

Climate Of Disaster, Con't

The latest UN report on climate change is out this week and the results are about as grim as it gets. We're no longer in any doubt of man-made global catastrophe, only how many trillions of dollars in fire, storm, flood, and drought damage and how many millions of lives will be lost over the next few decades.

More than three decades ago, a collection of scientists sanctioned by the United Nations first warned that humans were fueling a dangerous greenhouse effect and that if the world didn’t act collectively and deliberately to slow Earth’s warming, there could be “profound consequences” for people and nature alike.

The scientists were right.

On Monday, that same body — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — issued its latest and most dire assessment about the state of the planet, detailing how humans have altered the environment at an “unprecedented” pace and cautioning that the world risks increasingly catastrophic impacts in the absence of rapid greenhouse gas reductions.

The landmark report, compiled by 234 authors relying on more than 14,000 studies from around the globe, bluntly lays out for policymakers and the public the most up-to-date understanding of the physical science on climate change. Released amid a summer of deadly fires, floods and heat waves, it arrives less than three months before a critical summit this November in Scotland, where world leaders face mounting pressure to move more urgently to slow the Earth’s warming.

Monday’s sprawling assessment states that there is no remaining scientific doubt that humans are fueling climate change. That much is “unequivocal.” The only real uncertainty that remains, its authors say, is whether the world can muster the will to stave off a darker future than the one it already has carved in stone.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called the findings “a code red for humanity” and said societies must find ways to embrace the transformational changes necessary to limit warming as much as possible. “We owe this to the entire human family,” he said in a statement. “There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.”

But so far, the collective effort to slow climate change has proved gravely insufficient. Instead of the sort of emission cuts that scientists say must happen, global greenhouse gas pollution is still growing. Countries have failed to meet the targets they set under the 2015 Paris climate accord, and even the bolder pledges some nations recently have embraced still leave the world on a perilous path.

“What the world requires now is real action,” John F. Kerry, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate, said in a statement about Monday’s findings. “We can get to the low carbon economy we urgently need, but time is not on our side.”

It certainly is not, according to Monday’s report.

Humans can unleash less than 500 additional gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of about 10 years of current global emissions — to have an even chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

But hopes for remaining below that threshold — the most ambitious goal outlined in the Paris agreement — are undeniably slipping away. The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), with few signs of slowing, and could pass the 1.5-degree mark early in the 2030s.

“Unless we make immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to 1.5C will be beyond reach,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Each bit of warming will intensify the impacts we are likely to see.”

Already, we are living on a changed and changing planet.

Each of the past four decades has been successively warmer than any that preceded it, dating to 1850. Humans have warmed the climate at a rate unparalleled since before the fall of the Roman Empire. To find a time when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changed this much this fast, you’d need to rewind 66 million years to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

 

But of course no real climate change amelioration will happen, because either people will say "I don't believe it because all of science is corrupt!" and the people who do believe it will say "We can't accomplish this without collapsing the global economy and killing most of us anyway, so why bother?" 

As I said, our grandkids will never forgive us, and they shouldn't. The Zoomers born between 2001 and 2020, I'm sorry to say that we failed you, and as for those born after 2020, catastrophe is all they will ever know.

 

 

We're going to have to try to get out of this, and it'll be up to all of us to do so.