Last Call For Sour Virginia, Con't

Yes, white rural voters in Virginia turned out and voted for Republicans out of white grievance identity politics, and they freely admit doing it and say they will do it again in 2022.

The rural share of the vote in America has been steadily shrinking, but remains sizable enough to be politically potent. National exit polling in 2020 estimated that one in five voters lived in rural or small-town America. The Democratic data firm TargetSmart, which categorized voters based on population density, labeled 30 percent of the electorate as rural.

But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics. And the voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink by a litany of social movements that had gone too far.

A monument to Confederate soldiers stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs, a visual representation of the cultural gap between its residents and the Democratic base. The town is accessible only by a two-lane highway that winds through mountains near the West Virginia border. It’s best known for The Homestead, a luxury resort founded in the late 1800s that has hosted golf tournaments, conferences for the United Nations and presidents, including William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for keeping schools shut down during the pandemic, embracing progressive policies focused on race and removing Confederate statues and monuments. She called this an example of critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become shorthand for a contentious debate on how to teach race and racism in schools.

White children “are no longer allowed to be kids, we’re treating them like little monsters,” Ms. Williams said.

Mr. Hamilton, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said his vote for Mr. Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Mr. Trump. Of President Biden, he said, “the best thing that can happen is to get him and that woman out of there.”

John Wright, a 68-year-old retiree, said he listened only to pro-Trump programming.

“I don’t care if the media said the moon was full of cheese, and there was an astronaut who brought back some cheese,” Mr. Wright said. “If the media said it, I won’t believe it.”

Some of these voters are simply out of reach for Democrats, incompatible with the party’s embrace of Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and #MeToo.

But the politically urgent problem for Democrats is that rural America has moved faster and further from them in the last 20 years than urban America has moved away from Republicans. From 1999 to 2019, cities swung 14 percentage points toward the Democrats, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report. At the same time, rural areas shifted by 19 percentage points toward the Republicans. The suburbs remained essentially tied.

Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks for Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said it could be challenging to recruit candidates in deep red small towns — and to lure money into what are most likely losing causes.

“We just have to try and lose by less,” she said. “And ‘investing to lose by less’ is not a fun sell to Democratic donors. But it is what it is.”

Those Democrats who do run in conservative territory often distance themselves from the national party brand. When Monica Tranel, a Democrat, kicked off her bid for Montana’s new congressional seat over the summer, she lamented how few of the people she grew up with still vote Democratic. “They feel like Democrats look down on rural America,” she said in her campaign launch video.

Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist in Virginia, has watched his party’s vote share in rural areas wither for three decades.

“I don’t know what our message is there,” Mr. Tribbett said. “Which is a problem, because I’m supposed to be creating content for political campaigns.”

 

The good news is that the Biden era is showing quite clearly that Democrats have finally realized that the best they can do in America's rural counties is triage. White voters in rural areas have been inundated with right-wing disinformation for decades, and fixing the problem will also take decades, decades that the country doesn't have judging by the near-coup by Trump in 2020. You can't sell your policies to people who think you are literally trying to round them up in camps to kill them. The time to get serious about fighting right-wing propaganda and disinformation was a quarter-century ago.

That ship has sailed, folks. All we can do now is to try to stop the hemorrhaging.

Fixing bridges and roads and schools and providing good jobs in the cities and suburbs doesn't matter in the quarter of the country's population that is rural. The hard reality is in states with 75% or more white votes, losing white voters by 2 to 1 means there's no way you can win. Some triage is necessary, but the GOP knows that if they can keep the electorate white and win white voters, it doesn't matter what Black folk like me in a red state want. We literally do not matter politically anymore, and they know it.

If Democrats are going to lose these areas by 50 points, the best they can do is try to only lose them by 40 and accept that. They're not going to listen. We're dealing with people lost to the Years of Trump and Rage, parading around their vaccine refusal, ripping people's masks off and spitting in people's faces to try to infect them, screaming bloody murder at restaurant servers and checkout cashiers, disrupting school board and city council meetings, and running over protesters with their vehicles.

 

We still need to provide folks out here with better infrastructure. Better roads, schools, bridges, broadband internet access, water, clean air. They're Americans too and we took a big step towards that over the weekend.

But we have to try to save the rest of us too. There are people who will never vote for the Democratic party, and at this point, it's time to try to turn out the people you have some chance with instead of chasing the zero percent rage junkies. We have to because if we don't, the alternative is near-permanent GOP authoritarian rule.

Democrats needs to continue to make policies to help everyone, but don't expect some of them to vote for you. There's nothing you can do at this point other than turning out people who will listen and to give them a reason to show up.

And those folks don't live in places like Bath County, Virginia.

Finally, the real lesson here is that Trumpism without Trump is now far more dangerous in 2021 than Trumpism with Trump in 2020. Dems need to counter with actions, with turnout, and with going after the right-wing noise machine that made all this possible.

Or it will be too late for us in only a few short years.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Republican Attorneys General have found the judges they need in the Fifth Circuit for a stay of the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employers, and the honest truth was that the OSHA rules were always headed for the US Supreme Court.

 

A U.S. federal appeals court issued a stay Saturday freezing the Biden administration's efforts to require workers at U.S. companies with at least 100 employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly, citing "grave statutory and constitutional" issues with the rule.

The ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit comes after numerous Republican-led states filed legal challenges against the new rule, which is set to take effect on Jan 4.

In a statement, Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda said the Labor Department was "confident in its legal authority" to issue the rule, which will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," she said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court.”

An average of about 1,100 Americans are dying daily from COVID-19, most of them unvaccinated. COVID-19 has killed roughly 750,000 people in the United States.

The stay comes two days after the Biden administration unveiled the rule, which was immediately met with vows of legal action from Republican governors and others, who argued it overstepped the administration's legal authority. read more

The action on the private-sector vaccinations was taken under OSHA's emergency authority over workplace safety, officials said. The rule applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers, according to OSHA.

The administration's various vaccine rules cover 100 million employees, about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce, according to the White House.

Saturday's court order came in response to a joint petition from several businesses, advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah. The rule is also facing separate legal challenges before other courts. read more

 

So yes, the stay was guaranteed, and now the legal battle begin over whether or not OSHA has the authority to even exist, let alone issue vaccine mandates.

 

As I've mentioned before, there may very well be five or six Supreme Court votes to dismantle most executive agencies as unconstitutional. 

Stay tuned.

Sunday Long Read: The Butcher Of Havana

This week's Sunday Long Read is The Atavist's profile of Herman Marks, Castro's number one "troubleshooter" who usually solved Castro's problems with, well, shooting it. Tony Perrottet gives us Marks's history as both a revolutionary from Milwaukee and his role as a Supreme Court test case with his prosecution by the US over his stripped citizenship in 1961.

On the balmy night of April 9, 1959, a little over three months after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara seized power in Cuba, a group of famous international writers gathered in El Floridita, a popular restaurant in Old Havana. They were an urbane set—Tennessee Williams, George Plimpton, Elaine Dundy, and her husband, Kenneth Tynan—and they were expecting to carouse with Cuba’s most beloved yanqui, Ernest Hemingway. Instead, they encountered another Midwestern expatriate, wearing a wide military belt and a hulking .45 service revolver.

Burly and tattooed, the man had rough-hewn good looks. He was in his late thirties—more than two decades younger than Hemingway—and stood five-foot-ten, with thick brown hair and, in the words of his draft card, a “ruddy” complexion. An English journalist later described him as “tall, straight and meanly friendly,” with striking blue eyes that, “yellowing after only a few beers, suggested company dangerous to keep when drunk.” The American’s words tumbled out in the distinctively nasal accent of someone from blue-collar Milwaukee. He pronounced “that” as “dat” and dropped his g’s. He was the uneducated son of Polish immigrants, the type of man one of Williams’s own fictional snobs might have called a redneck.

But if his origins were humble, at El Floridita the man needed no introduction. His image had appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. In fact, after Hemingway, he was probably the most notorious American in the Caribbean. His name was Herman Marks, and he had risen through the ranks of Castro’s rebel army to command the revolution’s firing squads. Around Havana, there were rumors that he had a sadistic streak; his version of a coup de grâce, it was said, was to empty his pistol into a condemned man’s face, so relatives could not recognize the corpse. Marks’s brutal work had earned him a nickname: He was El Carnicero—the Butcher.

The literati peppered him with questions, and Marks responded with pride. He boasted of being second-in-command to Che himself at La Cabaña prison, and declared that he was so busy, he conducted nightly executions until 2 a.m., and sometimes until dawn. He called the proceedings “festivities” and showed off his cuff links made from spent bullet shells.

Marks knew what the gathered writers were really after. It was an open secret in Havana that he invited select visitors to the executions, which were conducted in the empty stone moat around La Cabaña, beneath a giant floodlit statue of Christ with outstretched arms. American politicians, journalists, starlets, and socialites had all made discreet inquiries about watching a firing squad do its work. Williams, whose grandfather had been a minister, forlornly felt that he might comfort a condemned man by offering “a small encouraging smile” before he was shot.

On this particular night, Marks told the group at El Floridita, he had a busy schedule. The prisoners awaiting execution included a German mercenary. “He made the invitation as easily as he might have offered a round of cocktails at his home,” Plimpton later recalled. Marks counted the visitors out: “Let’s see… five of you… quite easy… we’ll drive over by car… tight squeeze…”

Unnoticed by the others, Tynan had been listening to Marks with growing horror, and now the Englishman leapt to his feet and began shouting. According to Plimpton, the red-faced theater critic squinted his eyes and flapped his arms like an enormous bird while denouncing Marks. He didn’t want to be in the same room as an executioner, Tynan gasped, let alone witness his handiwork. He would attend the execution only to run in front of the firing squad to protect the condemned. Tynan then stormed out of the bar, followed by Dundy.

“What the hell was that?” asked Marks. He told the remaining writers to meet him in the lobby of a nearby hotel at 8 p.m.

 

 Marks' story is not one I had read before, and it's an amazing journey that's worth your time. The legal questions of American citizenship that his case brought up exist to this day.

So do the problems in Cuba.

Last Call For Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Last month's revelations about the Trump "brain trust" using a suite in DC's Willard Hotel as a coup command center seems to have motivated another round of subpoenas from the January 6th commission, according to The Guardian's Hugo Lowell.

The House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January is poised to issue subpoenas to top Trump lieutenants involved in attempting to subvert the 2020 election results from a “command center” at the Willard hotel in Washington, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The subpoenas, which could be issued as soon as next week, reflect the select committee’s interest in events at the hotel just across from the White House, where Donald Trump’s most loyal aides plotted to keep him in office.

The select committee is targeting about 20 individuals connected to the Trump command center at the Willard, among them the legal scholar John Eastman, who outlined ways to deny Joe Biden the presidency, the source said.

The subpoenas seeking documents and testimony are aimed at obtaining the legal advice offered to Trump on how he could manipulate events on 6 January to stop certification of Biden’s election win, the source said.

House investigators are moving to pursue Trump lieutenants who gathered at the Willard to uncover the “centers of gravity” from which Trump and his advisers conspired, the source said – and whether the former president had advance knowledge of the Capitol attack.

The select committee appears to be seeking a full account of what transpired in several suites at the Willard in the days leading up to 6 January and during a final “war room” meeting the night before the Capitol attack.

The select committee is targeting Eastman after it emerged that he outlined scenarios for overturning the election in a memorandum presented at a White House meeting on 4 January with Trump, former vice-president Mike Pence and Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

At that meeting, according to a source close to Trump, Eastman ran through the memo that detailed how at the joint session of Congress on 6 January Pence might refuse to certify electoral slates for Biden and thereby hand Trump a second term. 

 

Which is all fine and good, but what I'm not seeing is any indication that AG Merrick Garland is going to do anything at all to Steve Bannon on the congressional contempt referral for refusing his subpoena from last month.

To many in Washington, the criminal contempt case against Steve Bannon appears cut and dried: The podcaster and former Trump adviser has openly spurned a congressional subpoena to testify in an investigation into the January 6 US Capitol attack, claiming to be covered by executive privilege even though he wasn't a government employee at the time. 

But the longer it takes for the Justice Department to make a decision on whether to prosecute Bannon, the more questions swirl around whether this was the right strategy for congressional investigators. Democratic critics, already frustrated with Attorney General Merrick Garland over other moves, have focused their impatience over the Bannon referral on Garland because he has ultimate say on whether Bannon is prosecuted. 

It's been more than two weeks since the House voted to refer Bannon's case to the Justice Department. Since then, Garland has said little publicly about the status of Bannon's referral, but some people close to the attorney general say his experience of being blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans for partisan reasons means he's not unaware of the political forces he has to navigate. 

While Justice officials say they expected criticism over the delay in making a decision on the Bannon criminal referral, Garland has established a methodical approach to making decisions, aware that the department will be criticized no matter which way it goes.
Justice Department officials tell CNN that prosecutors don't feel pressure to act more quickly. Given that criminal referrals are rare and even more rarely enforced by the department, the Bannon decision will be dissected for years to come so the lawyers have to be sure they get it right, officials say.

 

That's...actually a fair point, *if* Garland is going to prosecute. We simply don't know if he will. But keep in mind Garland not prosecuting will "be dissected for years to come" too.

 

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump continues to have the only Republican primary vote that matters, and now he's picking Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly's GOP opponent in Arizona in 2022.

Former President Trump is set to attend a fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort next week with Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters, his first public involvement in the state’s marquee Senate race.

An invitation to the fundraiser obtained by The Hill shows the event will be held on Wednesday and costs $2,900 per person to attend. Donors or couples giving $25,000 ahead of the event will also be granted a picture with Trump.

The invitation also shows that the host committee for the event includes an array of prominent tech titans and conservative mega donors, including Peter Thiel, who has already dumped $10 million into a super PAC backing Masters, and Rebekah Mercer.

Masters is the chief operating officer at Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation. News of the fundraiser was first reported by Politico.

Trump’s involvement in the fundraiser is notable given that he has not issued an endorsement in the GOP Senate primary. He has officially backed candidates running in Arizona’s gubernatorial and secretary of state races.

It was not immediately clear if the fundraiser was an indication that Trump was leaning toward endorsing Masters, who has a mutual ally with the former president in Thiel, or if Trump is still considering throwing his weight behind another contender.

Among the other Republicans running for the chance to take on Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) next year are Arizona Secretary of State Mark Brnovich and businessman Jim Lamon.

 

Maters is perfectly cast from the Trump mold: a stupidly rich, completely amoral executive who will say or do anything to win. Mark Brnovich will never be the candidate, he failed to steal Arizona for Trump and Trump won't lift a finger for him.

Both Masters and Brnovich have competed to display their loyalty to Trump, who remains wildly popular with the GOP grassroots in Arizona, though Trump has knocked Brnovich for what he suggested was insufficient support of a Republican-led audit of the November presidential race in the state.

That audit ultimately showed that President Biden won Arizona by a slightly wider margin than initially believed.

Brnovich has tried to bolster his conservative bona fides by using his office to sue the Biden administration on its vaccine mandates for businesses, though Masters has released ads knocking the attorney general as weak on illegal immigration.

An internal poll commissioned by the pro-Masters Saving Arizona super PAC this month and obtained by The Hill showed Brnovich's unfavorable rating jumped from 9 percent to 20 percent since the launch of the ad and that Masters’s support in the primary among likely voters rose from 5 percent to 14 percent.

The poll showed Brnovich leading Masters by a 29-5 margin in August compared to a 26-14 margin in October.

 

Current Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey has no chance for the same reason Brnovich is a dead man walking: he failed to deliver Trump his "election fraud!" victory over Biden.

 

No, Kelly should be preparing to take on Masters now, and he should be ready. 

The Gavel Crashes Down Once More

Late last night, the five members of The Squad, plus Brooklyn Rep. Jamaal Bowman, called Nancy Pelosi's bluff on passing the Senate infrastructure bill in the House. With their five no votes, the Senate bill could not pass on Democratic votes alone. They thought they had finally beaten her.

And then a baker's dozen House Republicans voted for the bill.

The House on Friday passed the biggest U.S. infrastructure package in decades, marking a victory for President Joe Biden and unleashing $550 billion of fresh spending on roads, bridges, public transit and other projects in coming years.

The vote was 228-206 and sends the legislation to Biden for his signature. It capped a day in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to deal with a last-minute standoff between party progressives and moderates that took hours of intense negotiations and the president’s intervention to resolve.

Pelosi and Biden, however, were unable to land a House vote at the same time on a more than $1.75 trillion tax and spending package that makes up much of the rest of Biden’s domestic agenda. The House instead is set to approve a procedural measure teeing up a vote after lawmakers return from next week’s break and the Congressional Budget Office delivers a cost analysis.

That was a last-minute concession to a small group of moderates who refused to vote for the spending package without the CBO score. Progressives also made a concession by supporting the infrastructure legislation before a vote on the larger spending package.

“I’ve spoken to the president a number of times today and the president appreciates that we are working in good faith with our colleagues agreement,” Representative Pramila Jayapal, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement. “We’re going to trust each other because the Democratic Party is together on this, we are united that it is important for us to get both bills done.”

Sure, it was all kabuki, Pelosi allowed the Squad to have their purity tantrum and demonstrated to everyone by getting thirteen Republican votes that the bill's passage was preordained. Despite the drama the bipartisan bill passed and Pelosi had a dozen plus Republicans help her, just as more than a dozen Republican senators helped Chuck Schumer 3 months ago.

In the end, never bet against Pelosi when her chips are in and the vote is on. That's the good news. the bipartisan bill is headed for Biden's desk this weekend.

Now the bad news.

The thing is that there's a higher stakes game the next table over in two weeks, the Build Back Better plan. President Manchin has all the chips in that pot. He can trash the game and the Biden plan now...

...but if he does, he's the villain. Is he really okay with that? Is Sinema?

We'll see.

Last Call For Do You Know Who My Dad Is?

Glenn Youngkin may have won the Virginia gubernatorial race (and you notice that Terry McAuliffe isn't screeching about "election fraud" or anything) and the Beltway Pundits will tell you that Youngkin won because of angry parents.

The problem is we know exactly how Republicans handle parenting because Youngkin's 17-year-old son tried to commit voting fraud in order to vote for his dad and was turned away.

Twice.

The 17-year-old son of Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) tried to cast a ballot in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election twice despite being too young to vote, Fairfax County officials said in a statement released Friday.

The statement, which identified the teen as Youngkin’s 17-year-old son, emphasized that he did not end up voting and stated that he did not violate any state election laws. The Washington Post is not including the teen’s first name because he is a juvenile and has not been charged with a crime.

The teen walked into the voting precinct inside the Great Falls Library on Tuesday afternoon, presenting his driver’s license to election officials when asked for a proof of identity, according to Jennifer Chanty, the precinct captain there.

Chanty said in an interview with The Post that she realized who the teen was when she looked at his ID. Upon seeing his age, she said she informed him that he must be at least 18 to be eligible to vote in Virginia.

She said she offered to register him to vote for the next election, but the teen declined and walked out.

About 20 minutes later, the teen returned, insisting that he be allowed to vote, saying that a friend who was also 17 had been allowed to cast a ballot, Chanty said.

“I told him, ‘I don’t know what occurred with your friend, but you are not registered to vote today. You’re welcome to register, but you will not be voting today,’ ” Chanty, a Democrat, recalled saying.

Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Youngkin, issued a statement Friday.

““It’s unfortunate that while Glenn attempts to unite the Commonwealth around his positive message of better schools, safer streets, a lower cost of living, and more jobs, his political opponents — mad that they suffered historic losses this year — are pitching opposition research on a 17-year old kid who honestly misunderstood Virginia election law and simply asked polling officials if he was eligible to vote; when informed he was not, he went to school,” O’Malley wrote. 

 

You don't get to play the "innocent mistake" card when you were told no the first time and tried to come back and insist that you could vote the second time because "somebody else did it!" That's entitled "But I'm rich and my dad's important!" bullshit.

 

Especially when Republicans have been screaming about ZERO TOLERANCE for WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD and whaddya know, it's nearly always Republicans actually committing fraud. 

Jerk.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Another home run month for the labor economy as the Biden administration continues to rapidly dig out of the Trump Depression hole that cost us 22 million jobs.

The American economy added 531,000 jobs in October, the Labor Department said Friday, a sharp rebound from the previous month and a sign that employers are feeling more optimistic as the latest coronavirus surge eases.

Economists polled by Bloomberg had been looking for a gain of 450,000 jobs. The unemployment rate declined to 4.6 percent, from 4.8 percent.

The October gain was an improvement from the 312,000 positions added in September — a number that was revised upward on Friday, along with the August figure, providing a more upbeat picture of the last few months.

The increase in employment was broad, with sizable gains at restaurants and bars, as well as in factories and offices. And in another sign that conditions are gradually returning to normal, the proportion of employed people who worked remotely at some point last month fell to 11.6 percent from 13.2 percent.

“This was a strong employment report that shows the resilience of the labor market recovery from the pandemic,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. “I think we will see a pretty strong bounce back in economic growth in the fourth quarter.”

Hiring has seesawed this year along with the pandemic, especially in vulnerable sectors like hospitality and retail, where workers must deal face to face with customers. White-collar employees have fared better, because many can work remotely.

Some employers are complaining of a shortage of workers, as many people remain on the sidelines of the job market. The labor force participation rate — the share of the working-age population employed or looking for a job — was flat in October, at 61.6 percent, and up slightly among those 25 to 54.

The stubbornly low participation rate underscores the damage the pandemic has done to the economy, and why it will take time to recover, despite strong months like October.

 

Still, even with the lower workforce participation numbers, we'll climb out of the hole next summer. Rememeber, the Trump regime's "recovery" stalled out last winter when we were still ten million jobs in the hole. It's Biden's policies that got us more than halfway out from there in just 9 months.

Give it another nine months and we'll be back in business, hopefully after today's infrastructure plan vote in the House.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Meanwhile, the time bomb that the Trump regime left in the Justice Department in the form of the Durham "investigation" just exploded.

 

Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.

The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.

Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.

The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.

Some claims from the Steele dosser made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.

But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.

The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.

A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.

The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.

“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”

Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion G.P.S., which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.

Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.

The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.

 

The NY Times at least makes it clear what Durham's goal is: to pin Trump's actual ties to the Russian mob and the actual crimes they committed on Hillary Clinton's campaign as a Russian disinfo operation.  The best part is that it's entirely possible that ol' KGB Vlad played both sides of the record at the same time, helping Trump and leaving the "too good to be true" Steele Dossier where the Clinton team would eventually find it.

We'll see where this all goes.

Last Call For Sour Virginia, Con't

The simple reason as to why Democrats lost in Virginia on Tuesday, very nearly lost New Jersey, and almost lost the House and Senate in 2020, is that white non-college women are anti-Trump Republicans, and without Trump on the ballot, they voted for the white supremacy party.

White women voters may have made the difference for Republicans in Virginia’s high-profile gubernatorial race Tuesday, swinging by double digits towards the GOP and giving the party a potentially winning playbook in future elections.

For some Democrats surveying the wreckage from a bad night, the 13 percentage point swing towards the GOP among white women — fueled by a 37 point shift among white women who didn’t go to college — was the number in NBC News exit polls that stood out among a sea of bad ones.

“That white non-college woman is very sobering,” said Scott Kozar, a Democratic consultant who worked on the Virginia lieutenant governor and House of Delegate races.

Democrats had attributed much of their victories in 2018 and 2020 to driving up their margins with women, helping propel the party to control of Congress by tilting key districts away from their previous Republican slant.

But that tide appears to have receded.

The startling shifts enabled Republican Glenn Youngkin to cut into Democrats’ margins in the booming Virginia suburbs and run up the score in conservative rural counties, providing the formula for GOP success in a state that has steadily trended blue since former President Barack Obama snapped a decades-long Republican winning streak in the commonwealth in 2008.

Youngkin made schools and “parents rights” the centerpiece of his campaign. And his party is already picking up the baton, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announcing Wednesday that Republicans plan to introduce a “parents bill of rights” in Congress soon.

“He put together a coalition where he did even better than Trump did with base voters and rural voters, and he improved a lot in the suburbs, where Trump was toxic,” former Virginia Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock, a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, said on MSNBC. “Which is why he closed that gender gap to single digits, instead of Trump’s yawning gender gap.”

 

White voters overwhelmingly want Republicans in charge. Last night proved that. Trump served his purpose even with a Democratic president and Congress, because the best we can do is whatever table scraps President Manchin allows us to have. Republicans have two-thirds of white voters, the courts, the corporations, and the billionaires.

The hard lesson is only overwhelming voter turnout of non-white voters will move the needle, and there's not enough of us to stem the tide of angry white Virginia folk who want us removed from the country, like the Charlottesville and Richmond terrorists.

For a month, FBI agents listened in as two members of a white supremacist group discussed their sinister plans: a plot to use a pro-gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, to engage in mass murder and attacks on critical infrastructure, which they believed would mark the start of a racial civil war.

Patrik Mathews, a former Canadian Army reservist illegally in the U.S., and Brian Lemley, a Maryland resident and self-described white nationalist, fantasized about the brutal murders they'd soon carry out against law enforcement and Black people, all with the goal of bringing about the "Boogaloo," or the collapse of the U.S. government in order to prop up a white ethno-state, according to recordings of the pair's discussions.

"We need to go back to the days of ... decimating Blacks and getting rid of them where they stand," Mathews said in one recording. "If you see a bunch of Blacks sitting on some corner you f***ing shoot them."

"I need to claim my first victim," Lemley said in another recording. "It's just that we can't live with ourselves if we don't get somebody's blood on our hands."
MORE: Inside the neo-Nazi hate group 'The Base,' which is the center of an FBI investigation

The two men were each sentenced in late October to nine years in prison, and ABC News has now obtained newly released audio from the FBI's secret recording of Mathews and Lemley at their Delaware residence in late 2019.

The tapes offer a chilling look into the private plotting of the two members of "The Base," a white supremacist extremist group that the FBI says has, since 2018, recruited members both in the U.S. and abroad through a combination of online chat rooms, private meetings, and military-style training camps. In their plea agreements and at sentencing, Mathews and Lemley both acknowledged their membership in the group.

After the two men were arrested in January 2020, just days before the Richmond rally was set to take place, law enforcement found tactical gear, 1,500 rounds of ammunition, and packed cases of food and supplies in their residence.

In the course of their investigation they also found that Lemley and Mathews had both attended military-style training camps with other members of The Base, and had built a functioning assault rifle that they tested out at a gun range in Maryland.

The recordings captured by the FBI included Mathews and Lemley discussing potential acts of terror they could carry out around the Richmond rally that would lead authorities and, eventually, the U.S. government, to capitulate to the chaos and bloodshed taking place.

"You wanna create f***ing some instability while the Virginia situation is happening, make other things happen," Mathews said. "Derail some rail lines ... shut down the highways ... shut down the rest of the roads ... kick off the economic collapse of the U.S. within a week after the [Boogaloo] starts."

"I mean, even if we don't win, I would still be satisfied with a defeat of the system ... and whatever was to come in its place would be preferable than what there is now," Lemley said. "And if it's not us, then you know what, we still did what we had to do."

 

Plenty of your friends, neighbors, co-workers and church congregants think Mathews and Lanley are American heroes. 

They showed up in Virginia to vote this week, too.

The people siding with these assholes are exactly who we're up against. For some of us, it's a matter of survival, and less of "Well I didn't get X from Biden so I'm sitting this one out."

Remember that.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis wants a brand new state election police force as part of a new raft of voter suppression measures, and this should be setting off klaxons all around the state.

Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed on Wednesday to create a fully-staffed statewide law enforcement office whose sole job would be to crack down on election crimes, despite previously praising Florida’s smooth 2020 elections and rebuffing calls by members of his own party for an audit.

DeSantis, who is running for reelection and is considered a potential 2024 presidential contender, is also pressing state lawmakers to increase the criminal penalty for violating new restrictions on collecting mail-in ballots. He also wants to enact a tight new 100-day deadline on when local election officials must scrub their voter rolls for those who died, moved or been convicted of a felony.

The new law enforcement office will cost nearly $6 million, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

“I guarantee you this: The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that,” said DeSantis at a West Palm Beach event billed as a “press conference” but featured dozens of DeSantis supporters who loudly applauded the governor. At one point, the crowd cheered “Let’s go Brandon” — a conservative rallying cry against President Joe Biden.

The governor also said he wants the GOP-controlled Legislature to put additional restrictions on the use of drop boxes.

“I don’t even think we should have drop boxes,” said DeSantis even though he signed the bill two years ago that first authorized their use in the state.

The Republican governor’s push comes just months after he successfully got state legislators to enact a controversial new voting law that adds new restrictions on the collection of mail-in ballots including a clampdown on when and where drop boxes could be located. It also comes as some Republicans in the state, echoing former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, are pushing for an audit of the 2020 election over DeSantis’ objections.

That new election law has drawn multiple federal lawsuits from civil rights and voting rights groups who contend those restrictions unfairly discriminate against elderly voters, voters with disabilities and minority voters. These additional proposals could throw another hot-button issue into an upcoming regular session where Florida legislators will be working on redistricting, abortion restrictions and another battle with tech companies over data privacy. The session starts in January.

Democrats — who have little power to stop the changes — quickly condemned the governor’s plans.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat, said on Twitter, “More attacks on voting coming to Florida. Just like in 2020 we had elections last night in our state w/no issues. Why does our Governor keep creating partisan chaos. Why can’t we just focus on problems like housing, hunger, taxes, our environment & public transportation?”

One of the biggest changes contained in the new law was a two-ballot limit on how many mail-in ballots someone could gather and turn in on behalf of the elderly or sick and disabled voters, though there is an exception for immediate family members. This ban on “ballot harvesting” is a misdemeanor that DeSantis wants increased to a felony.

DeSantis also said that many local election offices and local prosecutors either do not want to — or lack the expertise — to investigate election crimes. In late September, the governor asked Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee to investigate whether Facebook interfered with the 2020 election even though her office does not have any investigators.

Under the governor’s proposal, Florida would create an “Office of Election Crimes and Security” that would have sworn law enforcement agents as well as other investigators to probe voter fraud and other election law violations. A three-page outline obtained by POLITICO says the governor’s election police force would cost $5.7 million in the first year and have 52 employees, including 20 sworn law enforcement agents who would be based in Tallahassee and in five field offices.

The breakdown of the governor’s proposal also calls for uniform reporting of felony convictions to election supervisors, banning cities from using ranked voting — which is already banned for the state — and a new deadline for determining voter eligibility. Local supervisors are already required to report to the state twice a year on how many voters they have removed in the previous six months.

 

So yeah, armed election police that would go after election officials with guns drawn, I guess. The second these clowns suspect "election fraud" they go in and what, arrest voters? Remove election machines in the middle of an election? How much power would these assholes have?

If you thought terrorism against state and county-level election officals was bad enough coming from Trump cultists, imagine what it will be like coming from gung-ho election cops.

This is literally DeSantis's special police, guys.

This road goes straight to fascism.

Flipping The Flipper

Real estate giant Zillow played with fire (and hundreds of billions in house flipping properties) and got absolutely burned when the computer algorithm designed to push housing prices up broke as the housing market cooled off last month, and they're out of the game.

 

Zillow Group Inc. is pulling the plug on its tech-powered home-flipping operation, after an ambitious effort to transform the company collapsed when its vaunted pricing algorithms proved unequal to the task.

The company plans to take writedowns of as much as $569 million and reduce its workforce by 25% as it winds down the business in coming months, according to a statement Tuesday. Zillow shares plunged as much as 11% to $76.22 in late trading.

The decision to abandon home flipping comes as the company’s third-quarter results showed it lost more than $380 million in the operation, called Zillow Offers. The business hit a major snag in recent months as Zillow tweaked its algorithms to make more aggressive offers, causing it to overpay for houses just as the heated U.S. market began to cool slightly.

With the company’s losses mounting, Chief Executive Officer Rich Barton said it had become too risky to scale the business in a U.S. housing market that has been running hot for well over a year during the pandemic.

“Fundamentally, we have been unable to predict future pricing of homes to a level of accuracy that makes this a safe business to be in,” Barton said on an earnings call.

Seattle-based Zillow is the best-known real estate company in America. And for millions of owners who watched their home values surge during the pandemic, the company’s quick exit raises an uneasy question: Is the boom over? Barton emphasized instead that buying and selling thousands of homes every month required the company to put too much capital at risk.

Zillow has had a turbulent few weeks. On Oct. 18, it issued a statement confirming a Bloomberg News report that it wouldn’t make any new offers on houses for the rest of the year as it struggled to find workers to fix the homes it had under contract. In the weeks after, it became clear that the company had overpaid for properties and was taking bigger losses on sales.

On Monday there was another sign that something had gone wrong: Bloomberg reported that the company was marketing about 7,000 homes for roughly $2.8 billion to institutional investors.

For most of Zillow’s 15-year history, the company has been known for publishing online real estate listings and home-price estimates -- called Zestimates -- and seeking to profit by connecting agents with potential clients. In 2018, Barton, one of the company’s founders, reclaimed the role of CEO and pivoted into the high-tech home-flipping business, called iBuying.

Zillow used pricing algorithms to buy homes from their owners, make light repairs, and put them back on the market. Barton set an ambitious goal, seeking to buy 5,000 homes a month by 2024.

Only one problem: Zillow didn't have buyers for the houses they fixed up anymore, and they forgot to stop the computers from buying more.

The real question is if the damage Zillow and other private equity firm backed real estate giants blew out the pandemic housing bubble entirely, in which case, we're all going to have a lot of problems in the months ahead.

StupidiNews!

• New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy has narrowly won re-election, becoming the state's first reelected Democratic governor in more than four decades.
• Far-right wing cable news outlets OANN and Newsmax are facing billions in defamation damages from election technology company Smartmatic over false reports voting machines were rigged.
• UN agencies have announced a major investment in weather forecasting technology for developing countries as part of a large effort to enable smaller nations to fight climate change.
• Senate Republicans blocked a federal voting rights bill a third time this year as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the John Lewis Voting Rights Act a "Trojan Horse" for Democrats.
• Alaska GOP Governor Mike Dunleavy joins Texas, Florida, and several other Republican governors in ordering the state to ignore any federal vaccine mandates and to sue the Biden administration.
  

Last Call For The New Mayor In The Queen City

Across the river in Cincy, Aftab Pureval has become the city's first Asian mayor, succeeding John Cranley in a relatively easy win over Republican David Mann.

 

Aftab Pureval is Cincinnati's next mayor, nabbing a whopping 66% of the vote.

He defeated longtime Cincinnati politician David Mann, who conceded the race at 10 p.m.

"We made history in Cincinnati," Pureval said to supporters who gathered to celebrate his win.

He'll be the first Asian-American mayor in the city's history and the only one in the Midwest.

Pureval's mother and brother were with him during his victory speech at Lucius Q in Pendleton.

Pureval told the crowd of their journey "to a place called Ohio" from New Delhi for a better life.

"What on earth were they thinking?" He said to laughter. "They came to this country to provide a better life for their sons. Because of that incredible decision, our family went from being refugees to mayor of Cincinnati."

Mann was gracious, tweeting: "Congratulations to Aftab on his well-deserved victory. I have spoken with him and wish him nothing but the best, and it has been the honor of my lifetime to serve this community as a councilman, mayor, and member of congress throughout my career. Thank you, Cincinnati!"

 

In City Council elections, after an ugly bribery scandal left no fewer than four council members facing criminal charges over bribery and misconduct over the past two years, voters cleaned house and elected 8 Democrats and one Republican, Liz Keating, who squeaked in at 9th place. Only Democrat Greg Landsman remains from 2019.

We'll see what Pureval and the new City Council can do. They have a lot of problems ahead.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Donald Trump and Republican politicians in the House spent nearly a million bucks with digital advertising firm Event Strategies to advertise the January 6th terrorist attack, and used right-wing social media propaganda platforms like Gab and Parler to do it.

 

When then-President Donald Trump held his “Stop the Steal” protest on Jan. 6, he turned to a firm called Event Strategies to set up the rally. And while the violent results of that protest may give other politicians pause about using that firm again, Event Strategies has instead become Trump’s preferred staging group—as well as a new go-to for other GOP committees in the months after the riot.

A review of public financial disclosures shows that multiple entities involved in the Jan. 6 rallies have continued to rake it in after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, with various Republicans and GOP groups continuing to give these entities business even as investigators look into their roles with the insurrection.

Public records also show a number of curious payments on and around Jan. 6—including more than $25,000 in advertising that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) paid to right-wing social media platform Parler, with one transaction on the day of the riot.

In total, Trump’s fundraising apparatus has paid Event Strategies roughly $800,000 since Jan. 6, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, with the latest payment coming on Aug. 13. That $31,358 expense was for “event staging,” and footed by Make America Great Again Action—the Trump-endorsed super PAC run by former top aide Corey Lewandowski which was shuttered earlier this month amid allegations that Lewandowski had sexually assaulted a donor.

None of the other top event management firms on Trump’s payroll between October 2020 and the riot have worked for him since Jan. 6.

But Trump is hardly the only Republican to pay Event Strategies this year.

In April, the National Republican Congressional Committee—the official national committee for House Republicans—reported spending about $3,675 with the firm for “facility rental,” and dropped another $6,000 for “audio visual/staging” expenses on June 29. And in late August, the Alabama Republican Party and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), a key player in efforts to overturn the election, shelled out $200,000 and $7,038 to the company, respectively, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

In the 2020 cycle, Trump’s groups paid more than $4.3 million to people and companies involved in organizing the Jan. 6 rally, OpenSecrets reported this week. Of that amount, about $2.8 million went to Event Strategies, records show. But the only 2020 payments other committees made to the firm came after the election, in connection to the Georgia Senate runoffs.

FEC data shows that the NRCC had not paid Event Strategies since 2009, and neither Brooks nor the Alabama GOP previously contracted the company.

Bluebonnet Fundraising, the firm run by rally organizer and former Trump campaign adviser Caroline Wren—who last month was subpoenaed by House investigators—raked in tens of thousands of dollars after the riot.

Some of that cash came from the leadership PAC belonging to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who paid Bluebonnet $1,280 in fundraising fees six days after the attack, per FEC records. Lynda Blanchard, a Republican challenging Brooks in the 2022 Alabama Senate race, also forked over $22,000 in consulting fees to Bluebonnet in May. And in late January, Bluebonnet also got an $86,800 boost from Save the US Senate PAC, a group founded last year by associates of Donald Trump Jr.

 

Trump's propagandists of choice are more than glad to take GOP dollars to drum up hatred and division, and they're making millions doing it. Maybe they should actually pay a price.