Last Call For Certified Jackasses

Oklahoma's state Health Commissioner has abruptly resigned a day after it was revealed that the state issued a non-binary birth certificate for an Oregon resident.

 

Oklahoma Health Commissioner Dr. Lance Frye unexpectedly resigned from the post on Friday, effective immediately, the state health department said.

Department spokesperson Rachel Klein said Frye “felt it was time to move on” from leading the agency.

His departure came a day after state Republican leaders, including Gov. Kevin Stitt, expressed outrage upon learning the health department in May issued a birth certificate with a nonbinary gender designation.

The birth certificate was issued as part of a settlement with an Oklahoma-born Oregon resident. The settlement was reached under the administration of former state Attorney General Mike Hunter, Frye said.

Frye lauded “the dedication, resilience and tenacity of the OSDH team,” in a statement released Friday by the department. “They have worked tirelessly over the last two years to ensure Oklahomans had access to not only COVID-19 testing, vaccinations and critical information, but to other life-saving services.”

Stitt, who appointed Frye, praised his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in the state.

“Dr. Frye provided steady leadership during Oklahoma’s COVID response from his role in surge planning on the Governor’s Solution Task Force to guiding our vaccine rollout that was Top Ten in the nation as Commissioner of Health,” Stitt said in a statement.

Although Frye encouraged mask wearing to slow the spread of COVID in Oklahoma and was commonly seen wearing one, he refused to publicly disagree with Stitt’s stance to not issue a statewide mask mandate.

Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed has been named interim commissioner of health, according to Kevin Corbett, state Secretary of Health and Mental Health.

 

You'd better believe Frye was told to resign or to be fired.

Never forget that Republicans want to stop LGBTQ+ folks from ever existing.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

In "We're doing this to protect the people!" news, Florida Republicans would rather ban enforcement of all federal worker safety rules in the state than submit to President Biden's vaccine mandate rules under OSHA.

 

Hours after Thursday’s unexpected request by Gov. Ron DeSantis for lawmakers to return to Tallahassee and pass laws against vaccine mandates, Florida’s top GOP legislators had a surprise of their own.

Florida should remove itself from the direct federal oversight of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, they said. The proposal was a reaction to President Joe Biden’s administration announcing a rule, to be enforced by that agency, that says private businesses with 100 or more employees must require their workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or undergo weekly testing.

Instead of submitting directly to federal regulations, Florida would create its own workforce safety program — an idea that could cost millions and make the state the first to withdraw from direct Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversight in nearly 40 years.

House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, and Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, wrote in a joint statement that the federal agency’s regulations are “onerous” and that a state program could “alleviate” state employers and employees.

Simpson has a history with those regulations. The environmental cleanup company he owned was fined $18,000 by the agency after a worker fell and died in 2014.

The roofing company owned by another top GOP senator, Keith Perry of Gainesville, was fined nearly $50,000 for six incidents between 2011 and 2017, including two in which employees fell and were hospitalized with serious injuries. The fines were later reduced to just over $21,000.

State lawmakers hadn’t proposed leaving the federal agency until Thursday in the hours following DeSantis’ call for a special legislative session.

Florida’s conservative leaders have bristled at the new Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule. Attorney General Ashley Moody and DeSantis said they plan to fight it in court.

But Simpson and Sprowls took DeSantis’ ideas a step further, proposing to exempt Florida from Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversight and instead create a state workforce agency.

“Unfortunately, (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is now being weaponized by the Biden Administration not to protect workers, but to institute an illegal and unconstitutional nationwide vaccine mandate that robs the American people of the dignity of work,” Simpson said in a statement Friday. “If Florida withdraws from (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), our state plan would certainly maintain, or exceed the effective safety standards that currently protect employees and employers in our state.”

Former Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials say Florida forming its own program would hardly lessen any burden supposedly brought about by federal regulations — for two reasons.

First, any state program would still have to be approved by the federal government. Second, as Simpson noted, agency rules say the program would have to “be at least as effective” as federal workplace standards.

“You’re not going to get very far if you tell the feds you’re going to adopt a state OSHA plan so that you don’t have to adopt federal OSHA standards,” said Jordan Barab, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from 2009 to 2017. “It makes no sense.”

 

"We'll just simply refuse to follow federal law" never works out in the end, but I expect we're going to see a lot more of this, and that this Supreme Court is going to allow more and more of it until a defacto breakup of the union occurs. The only opinions that actually matter in this country are what five of nine justices think, and even then I'd expect Texas and Florida and Georgia Republicans are only going to do what they want anyway.

California did the same thing years ago, but it took a while, and their standards are much higher than federal OSHA ones, not less. The point isn't to form a new state worker regulation authority, the point is tying up Biden's vaccine mandate in court for years so that it can never be enforced.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Why yes, the January 6th terrorist attack was 100% planned by the Trump regime and now we know that includes multiple House Republicans who were in on the planning as well, because the terrorists are freely admitting it.

As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.

Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses. While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope. The two sources also claim they interacted with members of Trump’s team, including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence.

The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified.

“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” the organizer says. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.”

For the sake of clarity, we will refer to one of the sources as a rally organizer and the other as a planner. Rolling Stone has confirmed that both sources were involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6. Trump spoke at that rally and encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol. Some members of the audience at the Ellipse began walking the mile and a half to the Capitol as Trump gave his speech. The barricades were stormed minutes before the former president concluded his remarks.

These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.

Along with Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” says the organizer.

And Gosar, who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters, allegedly took things a step further. Both sources say he dangled the possibility of a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.

“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” the organizer says, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”

 

Sure is going to be fun to watch the GOP turn on the January 6th terrorists, huh?

The House GOP Fascist Caucus was in on January 6th from the beginning, guys.

Time for subpoenas. Resignations and expulsions are wishful thinking, as a two-thirds vote to expel anyone wouldn't be happening even if we proved Marjorie Taylor Greene or Madison Cawthorne were more than happy to sacrifice members of their own party.

And prison.

As Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz pointed out Sunday:

They tried to overthrow the government, they had a plan, they executed it, and they broke many laws along the way. And the leader of the Party is going to run again. This problem won’t naturally fade away - it must be confronted. https://t.co/b9GtTplDlJ

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) October 25, 2021

 

The Rolling Stone story effective shatters the GOP gaslighting that the January 6th attack was a "tourist event" and now we know why the gaslighting was so ridiculously obscene: because House Republicans were in on it from the start. They helped coordinate a terrorist attack against their Democratic colleagues in order to steal the election.

 

At some point, we have to start making Republicans pay the price for their failed coup, or the next coup will not fail.

StupidiNews!

• The FDA could approve COVID-19 vaccinations for kids 5-11 as early as this week, the White House is planning for some 20 million kids to be vaccinated by the end of the year.
• Greenhouse gases hit another yearly record in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic reducing carbon output into the atmosphere, the UN says the world is "way off track".
• Facebook's problems with failing to stop abusive speech and disinformation in countries where it could affect the political climate has been known to the company for years.
• President Biden says he's open to modifying the Senate filibuster for voting rights and debt limit legislation, but the plan still does not have all 50 Democratic senators on board and may never.
• New data finds that carbon emissions from plastic production will eclipse coal plant emissions by the end of the decade, even with an increase in coal in developing countries.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Big Texas Edition

If there was somehow any doubt left over the validity of Republican state "election audits" consisting of anything more than flimsy excuses to assuage loser Donald Trump's ego and to provide a pretense for the wholesale theft of federal elections in 2022 and 2024, Texas GOP Gov. Gregg Abbott is making sure that the Arizona audit farce is coming to the Lone Star State, led by one of Trump's Big Lie lawyers.

Amid pressure from former President Donald J. Trump to support a broad review of the 2020 election in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday appointed as secretary of state a lawyer who briefly joined Mr. Trump’s challenge to the 2020 results in Pennsylvania.

The new secretary of state, John Scott, will oversee Texas elections at a time when a new law imposing further restrictions on voting and a Republican redistricting plan have raised alarm among voting rights advocates that the state’s growing nonwhite population would not be fairly represented.

More immediately, Mr. Scott, a Fort Worth lawyer who worked for Mr. Abbott when he was the state’s attorney general, will take charge of a limited review of the 2020 election results that Mr. Abbott, a Republican, ordered last month for four of the most populous counties in Texas.

“I am confident that John’s experience and expertise will enhance his oversight and leadership over the biggest and most thorough election audit in the country,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement announcing the appointment.

Though he must eventually be confirmed by the State Senate, Mr. Scott can serve in the role in the interim. The Senate is not in regular session again until 2023.

The appointment brought immediate criticism from Democrats and voting groups. “The timing of this announcement is clearly intended to subvert our democratic process in a way that allows Greg Abbott’s completely unsuitable nominee to oversee our 2022 elections without having to face confirmation hearings,” said Stephanie Gómez, the Texas associate director for Common Cause.

Mr. Scott was among the lawyers representing Mr. Trump’s campaign as it filed suit to challenge the results of the November 2020 election in Pennsylvania, a state that President Biden won by 80,555 votes.

But Mr. Scott withdrew from the case, as did another member of his law firm, Bryan Hughes, on the eve of a hearing, after a circuit court ruling that effectively gutted their arguments. The case was ultimately dismissed.

“The lesson from the Pennsylvania case is that John Scott is a guy you can trust to follow the law,” said Mr. Hughes, a Republican state senator from Tyler, Texas. He added that, while in the attorney general’s office, Mr. Scott represented Texas in litigation over the state’s voter identification law, “so this area of the law is not unfamiliar to him.”

Mr. Hughes was the lead sponsor of Texas’ restrictive new election rules, which passed this year over concerted opposition from Democrats. The new rules broaden the authority of the secretary of state in elections.

No credible evidence has emerged of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election in Texas or in any other state. Mr. Trump carried the state by more than 5 percentage points and Republicans maintained a lock on the statehouse despite a well-funded effort by Democrats to try to flip control.

 

So the question then becomes "why the audit"?  Trump won the state, and Texas has already passed a raft of new voter suppression laws that will help keep Republicans in power for the foreseeable future. A thorough audit like Abbott is promtsing would show that...Trump won the state. The bill advancing the audit in the state legislature quietly died earlier this week because even Texas Republicans don't feel the need to do it.

But Abbott is going to do it anyway. What's the deal?

The "deal" is to go after election officials in Texas's largest urban (and blue) counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin and replace them with Republicans. They need the pretense to do that. This will be it.

They'll never stop trying to rig elections, folks.

A Come To Joes' Meeting

President Joe Biden and President Joe Manchin will hold a summit with Senate Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer over the Build Back Better bill in Delaware today to try to iron out Manchin's final raft of hostage demand cuts.

 

President Joe Biden was hosting two pivotal senators for meetings in Delaware on Sunday in hopes of resolving lingering disputes over Democrats’ long-stalled effort to craft an expansive social and environment measure.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., were scheduled to attend the session, the White House said.

Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., two of their party’s most moderate members, have insisted on reducing the size of the package and have pressed for other changes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said she was waiting for the Senate to wrap up talks on the framework and was expecting a plan to be introduced as early as Monday. Top Democrats are scrambling to act on legislation by week’s end so they can pass a separate, roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill by Oct. 31, when a series of transportation programs will lapse.

“I think we’re pretty much there,” Pelosi, D-Calif., told CNN’s “State of the Union,” stressing that a few “last decisions” to be made. “It is less than what was projected to begin with, but it’s still bigger than anything we have ever done in terms of addressing the needs of America’s working families.”

Democrats initially planned that the measure would contain $3.5 trillion worth of spending and tax initiatives over 10 years. But demands by moderates led by Manchin and Sinema to contain costs mean its final price tag could well be less than $2 trillion.

Disputes remain over whether some priorities must be cut or excluded. These include plans to expand Medicare coverage, child care assistance and helping lower-income college students. Manchin, whose state has a major coal industry, has opposed proposals to penalize utilities that do not switch quickly to clean energy.

Pelosi said Democrats were still working to keep in provisions for four weeks of paid family leave but acknowledged that other proposals such as expanding Medicare to include dental coverage could prove harder to save because of cost. “Dental will take a little longer to implement,” she said.

The White House and congressional leaders have tried to push monthslong negotiations toward a conclusion by the end of October. Democrats’ aim is to produce an outline by then that would spell out the overall size of the measure and describe policy goals that leaders as well as progressives and moderates would endorse.

The wide-ranging measure carries many of Biden’s top domestic priorities. Party leaders want to end internal battles, avert the risk that the effort could fail and focus voters’ attention on the plan’s popular programs for helping families with child care, health costs and other issues.

Democrats also want Biden to be able to cite accomplishments when he attends a global summit in Scotland on climate change in early November. They also have wanted to make progress that could help Democrat Terry McAuliffe win a neck-and-neck Nov. 2 gubernatorial election in Virginia.

 

Pelosi and Biden have a deadline for next week. Manchin does not. Pretending Manchin isn't holding 99.99% of the leverage here is wishful thinking, and that's been true for months now. Manchin will get the cuts he decides on. The alternative is nothing, which is what chance Dems will have in the future if this bill self-destructs.

The question remains if he will move the goalposts again, or if Sinema will do so.

The long-term solution remains 52+ Democratic senators.

We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: Lamb Of A Cruel God

Our Sunday Long Read is Politico Magazine's Jessica Pishko profile of a white supremacist domestic terrorist, Pinal County, Arizona Sheriff Mark Lamb. Know your enemy, folks.

The first thing to know about Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, is that he just plain looks like a sheriff. It could be the Justin cowboy hat he wears pulled low over his eyes and his penchant for Western shirts and a tactical vest in lieu of a uniform. It could be his demeanor, at once confident and aw-shucks. It could be his size — he’s 6’3”, 240 pounds, or so he writes in his self-published book, American Sheriff: Traditional Values in a Modern World.

In public, Lamb commands attention. During a July interview at a local café here decked out in Old West paraphernalia, passersby interrupted to clasp hands heartily with him and chat. There was an older Latino man named Randy wearing a snap-pocket shirt who had recently retired from a wild horse-and-burro program at the nearby prison and asked Lamb if he knew any cowboys. There were middle-aged women with salon-styled hair hoping to take their picture with him. There was the waitress who told Lamb he needed to gain weight. They seemed unsurprised to see their sheriff talking to a reporter and flashing his TV-ready smile.

Lamb, 49, has jurisdiction over only Arizona’s third most populous county, a stretch of desert wedged between Phoenix and Tucson that’s home to about 500,000 people. Yet he styles himself as the “American Sheriff” — a moniker around which he has spent the past several years trying to build a national brand as a fervent defender of law enforcement.

Since taking office in 2017, Lamb has become the face of a new online streaming service called the American Sheriff Network and of a nonprofit coalition of sheriffs called Protect America Now; he also founded a charity, the American Sheriff Foundation. Lamb is a frequent talking head on Fox News and Newsmax, where he derides President Joe Biden’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’ handling of immigration, and he has spoken at political events like a Turning Point Action summit a few months ago in Phoenix, where he quoted Shakespeare and Thomas Paine (“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered”) and promised, “The sheriffs are going to hold the line.”

With an action figure-style charisma and a growing media platform, Lamb sees it as his mission to educate the American public about the role of the sheriff, which he described to me as to protect people from “the bad guys, and I always say the sheriff is also there to protect the people from government overreach.” As much as he glorifies law enforcement, though, Lamb is selective about which laws he chooses to enforce. He takes a hardline approach on immigration, for example, but when it comes to the government telling people to get vaccinated — or declaring the 2020 election legitimate — he fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric.

Lamb supported the “stop the steal” campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates “garbage” and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, “We’re going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We’re going to find out who is willing to die for freedom.” He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6. For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — “well within the Constitution,” he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to “suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff.” Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a local civilian “posse” to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

Through Protect America Now, which was founded by a Republican strategist and two businesspeople working with Lamb and counterparts nationwide, he is marshalling dozens of other elected sheriffs and citizen supporters around these ideas — “building an army” as the group puts it. The message: Sheriffs are here to protect your freedom — including freedom from your own democratically elected government.

 

What the law in Pinal County means is whatever Mark Lamb says it means. What he wants is a national network of like-minded county sheriffs, complete with surplus military gear thanks to Dubya and Trump and an army of deputies to use it against whomever they choose.

 

That's not law or justice.  That's an authoritarian regime. And there's dozens like Lamb out there, waiting to join his organized insurrectionists. What do you do when the local county sheriff *is* the terrorist in your neighborhood?

America as a united nation of 50 states doesn't have too much longer at this rate.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The evidence of the Trump regime's "soft coup" attempt to seize control of the United States after losing to Joe Biden in November continues to pile up, this time with the story of Trump's advisers in a "war room" at the Willard Hotel in DC trying to engineer a way Trump could stay in power past January 20th.

They called it the “command center,” a set of rooms and suites in the posh Willard hotel a block from the White House where some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lieutenants were working day and night with one goal in mind: overturning the results of the 2020 election.

The Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse and the ensuing attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob would draw the world’s attention to the quest to physically block Congress from affirming Joe Biden’s victory. But the activities at the Willard that week add to an emerging picture of a less visible effort, mapped out in memos by a conservative pro-Trump legal scholar and pursued by a team of presidential advisers and lawyers seeking to pull off what they claim was a legal strategy to reinstate Trump for a second term.

They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

They sought to make the case to Pence and ramp up pressure on him to take actions on Jan. 6 that Eastman suggested were within his powers, three people familiar with the operation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Their activities included finding and publicizing alleged evidence of fraud, urging members of state legislatures to challenge Biden’s victory and calling on the Trump-supporting public to press Republican officials in key states.

The effort underscores the extent to which Trump and a handful of true believers were working until the last possible moment to subvert the will of the voters, seeking to pressure Pence to delay or even block certification of the election, leveraging any possible constitutional loophole to test the boundaries of American democracy.

“I firmly believed then, as I believe now, that the vice president — as president of the Senate — had the constitutional power to send the issue back to the states for 10 days to investigate the widespread fraud and report back well in advance of Inauguration Day, January 20th,” one of those present, senior campaign aide and former White House special assistant Boris Epshteyn, told The Washington Post. “Our efforts were focused on conveying that message.”

In seeking to compel testimony from Bannon, the congressional panel investigating Jan. 6 this week cited his reported presence at the “ ‘war room’ organized at the Willard.” The House voted Thursday to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with the committee’s subpoena.

The committee has also requested documents and communications related to Eastman’s legal advice and analysis.

Eastman told The Post on Wednesday that he has not yet been contacted by the House select committee investigating the insurrection. Asked about his involvement in the Trump team’s operation at the Willard, Eastman said: “To the extent I was there, those were attorney discussions. You don’t get any comment from me on those.”

 

And at the heart of these machinations were Trump's gallery of evil minions: Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, along with Trump's legal architect, John Eastman. This represents an organized insurrection, to grab the reins of power while the January 6th terrorist attack was happening, and never give them back.

It only failed because VP Mike Pence got cold feet.

The plan was there. The execution of it failed. If people don't end up in prison for this, the next time the execution won't matter.

As Neera As I Can Tell, She Won

 Neera "But Her Mean Tweets!" Tanden gets the last laugh after all.

 

Neera Tanden, the former president of the Center for American Progress whose nomination as White House budget director was pulled earlier this year, has been named President Joe Biden’s staff secretary, a White House official confirmed Friday.

Tanden has been working in the White House since May as a senior adviser to the president. Her added responsibility as the staff secretary is to control the flow of documents to Biden and other senior staff.

"The Staff Secretary role is the central nervous system of the White House and moves the decision-making process and manages a wide variety of issues for the President," a White House official said in a statement. The role, a senior position, was once held by now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and John Podesta, who later served as then-President Bill Clinton's chief of staff.

Tanden will replace White House staff secretary, Jessica Hertz, who recently planned to leave the position, Politico reported.

As a senior adviser to Biden, Tanden had been tasked with preparing for different contingencies that could result from the Supreme Court’s consideration of Republican lawsuits seeking to strike down the Affordable Care Act, NBC News reported in May. She was also assigned to launch a review of the United States Digital Service whose mission is to make government accessible through technology.

A White House official said Friday that Tanden has also been working on the president's Build Back Better agenda. The official said that she will keep her senior adviser title "and will continue to provide leadership on particular projects and initiatives, and will report to the chief of staff."

The White House withdrew her nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget in early March after Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., voiced opposition to confirming her. Manchin and many pointed to what they described as inflammatory statements she had previously made publicly.

 

It was Joe Manchin who killed Tanden's nomination to OMB. She's now arguably the number 2 person on the WH staff behind Chief of Staff Ron Klain, especially with her keeping the senior advisor portfolio.

Manchin may wish Tanden was relegated to OMB instead, just sayin'.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Rudy Giuliani associate and Russian fixer Lev Parnas has been found guilty of campaign finance violations for funneling Putin mobster cash to Republicans.

Lev Parnas and his business partner, Igor Fruman, were at Dulles International Airport near Washington two years ago, holding one-way tickets for a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, when the F.B.I. caught up with them.

The two Soviet-born businessmen, who had climbed to prominent places in the orbit of President Donald J. Trump, were arrested before boarding the flight and charged with several campaign finance violations, including conspiring to funnel a Russian tycoon’s money into American politics.

In the years that followed, Mr. Parnas began to open up about his role in events connected to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. He provided material to House investigators and acknowledged participating in an effort by Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate at the time who subsequently beat Mr. Trump.

Still, the campaign finance charges loomed. Even as Mr. Fruman and a second man charged in the case, David Correia, pleaded guilty, Mr. Parnas and a fourth defendant, Andrey Kukushkin, maintained their innocence. Last week, the two men went to trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

On Friday, Mr. Parnas’s activity as a political donor caught up with him, as a jury convicted him on all six counts he was facing. Mr. Kukushkin was also found guilty.

In a statement, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said that Mr. Parnas and Mr. Kukushkin had conspired to manipulate the American political system to enrich themselves.

”Campaign finance laws are designed to protect the integrity of our free and fair elections — unencumbered by foreign interests or influence,” Mr. Williams said. “Safeguarding those laws is essential to preserving the freedoms that Americans hold sacred.”

Speaking outside court after the verdict was read, Mr. Parnas’s lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, said his client planned to appeal and seek to have the conviction vacated.

Mr. Parnas, who is not in custody, was defiant.

“I’ve never hid from nobody,” he said, while thanking his supporters. “I’ve always stood up and told the truth.”

The verdict came after about six hours of deliberations, following testimony from, among others, a onetime finance director of a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump; an ex-chief of staff to a former Republican congressman from Texas; and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor of Nevada.

Prosecutors outlined a two-part scheme, saying Mr. Parnas had lied to the Federal Election Commission about certain campaign donations he had made and that he and Mr. Kukushkin had tried to gain favor among candidates with contributions tied to the Russian tycoon, Andrey Muraviev, with whom they were involved in a cannabis business.

“The purpose behind this conspiracy was influence buying,” a prosecutor, Hagan Cordell Scotten, said during closing arguments on Thursday, adding: “The voters would never know whose money was pouring into our elections.”

 

Arguably the biggest recipient of Parnas's generosity is former Nevada Republican gubernatorial candidate and current US senate candidate Adam Laxalt, who testified in the Parnas trial last month.

Keep in mind that Parnas's targets weren't federal officeholders, but state Republicans like Laxalt (running for Governor) and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. What Parnas wanted was in on the ground floor of state-level legalized marijuana in Republican states, and Giuliani was his ticket in.

 

Don't get it twisted though. Parnas gave nearly a third of a million to a Trump PAC illegally.

When Parnas used his influence in Ukraine to help Giuliani and Trump go after Hunter Biden, he thought he was on Easy Street. Of course, you trust DOnald Trump, this is what happens.

You face prison.

Stacking The Deck

It's redistricting time ahead of the 2022 elections, and no state is more obscenly broken in this respect than Wisconsin, where Democrats actually won 200,000 more state legislature votes last year, and Republicans run the state assembly with a 60-38 margin anyway. The 2022 GOP redistricting plan will actually make that even worse.

Republicans who control the Legislature would maintain a large advantage in Assembly races under a redistricting plan they made public late Wednesday.

The release of their proposed congressional and legislative maps propelled the state's redistricting fight into the next stage.

States must draw new maps every 10 years using census data to ensure districts have equal populations. Where the lines go can give one political party a big advantage over the other for a decade.

Republican lawmakers plan to approve their plans as soon as next month, but Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is likely to veto them. That would leave it to the courts to decide how to draw the districts.

Under the plans Republicans released Wednesday, 61 of the Assembly's 99 districts would lean Republican, according to recent voting patterns analyzed by Dave's Redistricting, an online platform that allows the public to review maps.

A small number would have only a slight GOP lean, meaning Democrats would have a shot at winning a few of those 61. But the vast majority of GOP seats would be quite safe for their party. (Republicans would also have a shot at winning a handful of the 38 Democratic-leaning seats.)

Because of the number of GOP-advantaged seats, Republicans would likely continue to hold sizable majorities in the Assembly for years.

 

That 61-38 margin would be the new baseline in a 50-50 election year, and fewer than ten state House districts would be competitive at all, meaning that Democrats would have no chance of regaining control for another decade, and then Republicans would just redraw another 55+ safe districts again in 2031.

It gets even worse when it comes to the state's eight Congressional delegation seats in the US House.

Six of the state's eight congressional districts would have a Republican advantage — four by double digits and two by single digits, according to Dave's Redistricting. The state's remaining two districts — one centered around Milwaukee, the other around Madison — would be overwhelmingly Democratic.

 

Republicans would actually gain a US House seat. In fact, redistricting in the nation as a whole would give Republicans about 15-20 more US House seats across the country, net. 

Which is the point. After this year, with this GOP, state control of most of the country's state legislatures will be impossible to flip for Democrats.

 

Permanent one-party state control.

 

Coming to a state near you...

Ohio Republicans New Trans-Ender Policy

Ohio Republicans have decided that of all the problems facing the Buckeye State right now, the one that needs immediate attention is quite literally making trans kids illegal under state law.

 

A new bill would prohibit children under age 18 from obtaining hormones treatments, puberty blockers and surgery to transition genders, even with parental consent.

House Bill 454, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, is sponsored by a quarter of the Ohio House. All are Republicans. There are two sponsors — Reps. Gary Click of Sandusky County and Diane Grendell of Geauga County. Twenty-three Republicans are cosponsoring the bill.

The bill seeks to prevent gender-affirming health of youth under 18 through a handful of actions: Through restrictions on private insurance plans and Ohio Medicaid, potential sanctions on the licenses of medical professionals, potential cuts to public funding of hospitals and clinics, limits to what a school official can keep from parents when a child shares their gender identity in private.

The bill is similar to Arkansas’ SAFE Act, which Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed on April 5. A day later, the legislature overrode the veto. By July 21, a federal judge stopped the bill from going into effect as a lawsuit over its constitutionality wends its way through the courts.

Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a Christian conservative policy organization formerly known as Citizens for Community Values, said that his group is championing the bill in Ohio and helped draft HB 454. It contains the same provisions as the Arkansas bill, which the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom helped author.

“We’ve been talking about this issue for a very long time,” he said.

Maria Bruno, Equality Ohio’s public policy director, said it’s appalling to see Ohio children being used as political pawns by lawmakers seeking re-election.

“This bill attempts to ban evidence-based medical treatment that is supported by medical professionals, including but not limited to the American Academy of Pediatricians, the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the American Psychiatric Association,” she said.

 

The party of "you'll never take OUR FREEDOMS" and "GOVERNMENT STAY OUT" again has no problem turning the entirety of society into a mechanism of state-enforced monitoring of kids to prevent them being trans, requiring the punishing adults for helping them, and destroying their support networks with no recourse or remorse.

Even the bill's name, Save Adolescents From Experimentation, relegates being trans to "a dangerous phase we have to save kids from" rather than "We should help these kids navigate some really tough choices here and let them know they are loved."

No, it's YOU ARE ILLEGAL and IF YOU DO THIS ADULTS WHO CARE WILL BE PUNISHED, to kids.

To kids.

 

Republicans are horrific monsters. And it doesn't matter what DeWine thinks because his veto will be overridden if this many Republicans are co-sponsors.

StupidiNews!

• President Joe Biden said at a televised CNN town hall meeting on Thursday in Baltimore that he is considering using the National Guard's logistics capability to ease America's supply chain issues.
• US Attorney General Merrick Garland faced grilling from both Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary committee Thursday over federal prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists.
• Thailand announced vaccinated visitors from 46 countries skip mandatory COVID quarantine starting in November, including vaccinated visitors from Canada, China, Britain, and the US.
• Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren continues to call for the replacement of Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell over ethics issues with Fed officials engaging in stock trades.
• University of Maryland researchers can cheaply make wood materials more than 20 times the hardness of existing wood, meaning the material could replace some disposable plastic items.
  

Last Call For Matt's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Apparently GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz isn't just facing major sexual misconduct charges, his "wingman" Joel Greenberg, a former county tax collector from Gaetz's home of Florida, has spilled so much information on Gaetz that federal prosecutors are still cataloguing it all.

 

Joel Greenberg, the former Florida official whose crimes in the state ensnared Rep. Matt Gaetz in a federal sex trafficking investigation, has been providing the Justice Department with new information as he continues to cooperate with authorities following a guilty plea earlier this year. 

At a brief hearing in Orlando federal court Monday, Roger Handberg, an assistant US attorney, said that Greenberg has made allegations to investigators that "take us to some places we did not anticipate." 

"What investigators do is they follow up on that to try to corroborate the information that's been provided," Handberg said. 

Greenberg, a former county tax commissioner and close friend of Gaetz's, pleaded guilty to six charges in May, admitting that he had knowingly solicited and paid a minor for sex. 

As part of his plea agreement, he was required to give "substantial assistance" to investigators as they build out related cases. His lawyer has said that Greenberg has held a series of proffers, or meetings, with the Justice Department. 

Handberg did not say what investigations Greenberg was providing new information to authorities about, although CNN has reported that Greenberg has told the Justice Department about encounters he and Gaetz had with women who were given cash or gifts in exchange for sex. 

Greenberg faced dozens of criminal charges before his guilty plea, and the ongoing investigations related to him have also roped in a circle of local politicians and businessmen who authorities are scrutinizing for possible fraud. 

In court Monday, Handberg called Greenberg a "prolific criminal." 

"Mr. Greenberg was not alone," Handberg said. 

Gaetz, who is also under investigation for obstruction of justice related to the investigation into him, has not been charged with a crime. He has repeatedly denied having sex with an underage woman. 

The hearing was held following a request by Greenberg's attorney to delay Greenberg's sentencing for a second time so that he could continue to provide information. The Justice Department had not opposed the request. 

Handberg called the need for a second delay "unusual" but added the department was in an "unusual situation given the number of different investigations and lines of investigation we are pursuing."

 

When federal prosecutors ask that they need to delay a trial because their chief states' evidence witness against you has so much additional credible information to give that they are pursuing additional lines of investigation, you are screwed beyond belief.

Greenberg has been feeding the feds stuff for almost a year now. There's so much of it, they're asking for more time to build their case because it's that big.

If this is a tactic to get Gaetz to turn over on a bigger fish, say, Trump...well, this is how you do it. This has now gone far beyond a #MeToo moment, not to minimize it, but Gaetz could be facing decades in prison if the feds are still racking up the charges.

 

And the feds? Well, they are working overtime for this one. 

The Justice Department has added two top prosecutors from Washington to the child sex trafficking investigation of Representative Matt Gaetz, according to two people briefed on the matter, a sign of the complex and high-stakes nature of the inquiry into Mr. Gaetz, a Florida Republican who is one of former President Donald J. Trump’s closest congressional allies.

The prosecutors — one a public corruption investigator with an expertise in child exploitation crimes, and the other a top leader of the public corruption unit — have been working on the Florida-based investigation for at least three months, the people said.

It is not unusual for prosecutors from the Justice Department in Washington to be added to local teams of federal investigators in high-profile cases that require a deep and specific expertise like sex crimes.

For his part, Gaetz is now publicly claiming that he's the target of a mysterious assassin.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) made an unexpected announcement during a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday.

"I think someone may be trying to kill me," Gaetz said shortly after he was recognized on the House floor. "If they are successful, I would like my constituents and my family to know who stopped their arrest."

Gaetz then claimed that he received a death threat from someone who claimed to be a professional hit man on Twitter and who supposedly traveled to Washington D.C.

According to Gaetz, the Capitol Police recommended that the individual be arrested, but the Department of Justice supposedly refused to take action.

 

Yes, Gaetz made this claim on the House floor on Wednesday. No evidence, no anything, and he claims if he "suddenly dies" that we all know what happened to him.

The real victim in the end is Matt Gaetz, right?

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

 In the end, the Republican platform is about allowing white supremacy to reign supreme, and for Black folk, especially Black Democrats, to be eliminated.

Iowa Democratic Party Chair Ross Wilburn received multiple threats, including one of lynching, after he penned an opinion piece critical of former President Donald Trump, he told the Des Moines Register.

Wilburn, a state representative from Ames, is the first Black chair of the Iowa Democratic Party.

Although he’s become accustomed to hateful comments as an elected official and party leader, “it's important for people to know that this is not normal and it’s not OK,” Wilburn said in an interview.

Ames Police Cmdr. Jason Tuttle confirmed his department is investigating the threats, and Story County Attorney Tim Meals said his office has also been made aware of the incidents.

Wilburn authored an opinion piece titled “Iowa Republicans put loyalty to Trump over helping Iowans,” which the Des Moines Register published on its website Oct. 8 and on its print opinion page Oct. 9. The piece was timed ahead of Trump’s rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines Oct. 9. It was the former president's first trip back to the state since he lost the election and a mob of his supporters swarmed the U.S. Capitol in January.

After the essay's publication, Wilburn said he received two threatening phone messages and one threatening email to his legislative email address, which all made reference to what he wrote in the article.

“The voicemails include very explicit language. Every other word was the ‘n-word,’” he said.

Wilburn said he could not share more details about the contents of the calls because the investigation is pending. But he said he was compelled to report these instances of harassment, though he has received others, because of the “intensity” of the language.

“What stood out this time was the language that was used — specifically, the very direct statement about lynching,” he said. “And I get angry about that — that people feel that they can come in and make you feel less than human, subhuman, with that type of reference to lynching. There's the history behind that and trying to intimidate Blacks, intimidate African Americans.”

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Jeff Kaufmann expressed support for Wilburn in a statement Tuesday.

"I strongly condemn the racist threats made toward Chairman Wilburn," he said. "We can have a spirited debate on issues and candidates without threats of violence. I am pleased the authorities are looking into this and hope those responsible are held accountable for their actions."

 

The Iowa GOP party chair strangly condemns this, he says.

 

But he'll do everything he can to support Trump.

 

And that means getting the votes of the people who want to see  Ross Wilburn swinging from an oak tree.

Let's not forget that part.