Last Call For insurrection Investigation, Con't

As widely expected, Donald Trump is taking his silly legal argument on blocking the release of his national archives records from the January 6th Committee all the way to the Supreme Court.

Former President Donald Trump turned to the Supreme Court Thursday in a last-ditch effort to keep documents away from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol led by his supporters.

Trump’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court to reverse lower court rulings against the former president, who has fought to block the records even after President Joe Biden waived executive privilege over them. The federal appeals court in Washington previously ruled the committee had a “uniquely vital interest” in the documents and Trump had “provided no basis” for it to override Biden and Congress.

The records include presidential diaries, visitor logs, speech drafts, handwritten notes “concerning the events of January 6” from the files of former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and “a draft Executive Order on the topic of election integrity,” according to a previous court filing from the National Archives.

Repeating arguments they made before lower courts, Trump’s attorneys wrote Thursday that the case concerned all future occupants of the White House. Their filing came on the day that an administrative injunction issued by the appeals court was set to expire.

Former presidents had “a clear right to protect their confidential records from premature dissemination,” Trump’s lawyers said.

“Congress cannot engage in meandering fishing expeditions in the hopes of embarrassing President Trump or exposing the President’s and his staff’s sensitive and privileged communications ‘for the sake of exposure,’ ” they added.

The House committee has said the records are vital to its investigation into the run-up to the deadly insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election. Before and after the riot, Trump promoted false theories about election fraud and suggested that the “real insurrection” was on Election Day, when he lost to Biden in an election certified by officials from both parties as fair.

 

Nice stinger at the end there from the AP's Mark Sherman and Nomaan Merchant.

In all seriousness however, the lower court decisions have ranged from "It's the current Chief Executive who makes these decisions" to "Trump is basically full of it and has no argument here." 

What Trump has as an expectation is for the Roberts Court to construct him a new as yet seen right of refusal and protection over national archives documents, provided under law. I don't think they'll do it, because it'll expand to Biden when he's out of office too.

On the other hand, I expect if Trump does get control back, he'll dispense with the need for documents and just start putting people in boxes or in the ground.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem

I've talked about white supremacist domestic terrorist organizations like Three Percent and Proud Boys and Oath Keepers time and time again on ZVTS, but the biggest concentration of armed, trained, lethal white supremacist domestic terrorists remains your local police departments, county sheriffs offices, state police and other law enforcement agencies.

For nearly 10 years, Joseph Moore lived a secret double life.

At times the U.S. Army veteran donned a white robe and hood as a hit man for the Ku Klux Klan in North Florida. He attended clandestine meetings and participated in cross burnings. He even helped plan the murder of a Black man.

However, Moore wore something else during his years in the klan – a wire for the FBI. He recorded his conversations with his fellow klansmen, sometimes even captured video, and shared what he learned with federal agents trying to crack down on white supremacists in Florida law enforcement.

One minor mistake, one tell, he believed, meant a certain, violent death.

“I had to realize that this man would shoot me in the face in a heartbeat,” Moore said in a deep, slow drawl. He sat in his living room recently amid twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, remembering a particularly scary meeting in 2015. But it was true of many of his days.

Before such meetings, he would sit alone in his truck, his diaphragm heaving with the deep breathing techniques he learned as an Army-trained sniper.

The married father of four would help the federal government foil at least two murder plots, according to court records from the criminal trial for two of the klansmen. He was also an active informant when the FBI exposed klan members working as law enforcement officers in Florida at the city, county and state levels.

Today, he and his family live under new names in a Florida subdivision of manicured lawns where his kids play in the street. Geese wander slowly between man-made lakes. Apart from testifying in court, the 50-year-old has never discussed his undercover work in the KKK publicly. But he reached out to a reporter after The Associated Press published a series of stories about white supremacists working in Florida’s prisons that were based, in part, on records and recordings detailing his work with the FBI.

“The FBI wanted me to gather as much information about these individuals and confirm their identities,” Moore said of law enforcement officers who were active members of or working with the klan.

“From where I sat, with the intelligence laid out, I can tell you that none of these agencies have any control over any of it. It is more prevalent and consequential than any of them are willing to admit.”

 

Police organizations are hotbeds of white supremacists, they are armed and dangerous and they can freely persecute and kill Black and brown folk at will.  The second another Republican government gets in charge at the federal level, these local police will be given absolute free reign like they were under Trump. Biden at least is trying to contain them.

When activists say "defund the police" we mean "stop giving avowed white supremacist killers unlimited money to buy military surplus gear to use against Black folks."

And yes, Moore is right, this is beyond pervasive, it's structural. This is what we mean, precisely, by structural racism: institutions that effectively exist to maintain white supremacy. In the case of police, it's through deadly force.

Remember that.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump is a simple creature. He's a raging malignant narcissist and he wants credit for the vaccine. Of course, he's also convinced his cultists that the vaccine will kill them, but Trump's narcissism is now exceeding his need for his cult.

Former President Donald Trump pushed back on Candace Owens during a recent interview when the conservative commentator appeared to be undermining the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines to hurt President Joe Biden politically.

Trump joined the Daily Wire host for a wide-ranging interview, which was released on Wednesday, in which the two pushed various conspiracy theories surrounding the riot in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. But the issue of vaccines came up and the former president continued to tout the efficacy of the vaccines in a manner that will likely encourage some of the vaccine-hesitant and eventually save lives.

Trump took credit for the incredible speed at which the vaccinations were developed during his administration and in partnership with private pharmaceuticals, reiterating a point he made over the weekend during Bill O’Reilly.

“I came up with a vaccine with three vaccines,” Trump said. “All are very, very good. Came up with three of them in less than nine months. It was supposed to take five to 12 years.”

Owens interjected, “yet more people have died under COVID this year.” She then pivoted to hit the current administration, saying “By the way, under Joe Biden, then under you and more people took the vaccine this year. So people are questioning how …”

Trump interrupted “oh no, the vaccine work, but some people aren’t the ones. The ones who get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected.”

“Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get it, it’s a very minor form,” he continued. “People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”

 

You catch that?

 

Trump says he came up with the vaccine, three of them. 

This is why Biden thanked him earlier this week. Biden pushed Trump's buttons like a pro.

And now we have Trump pushing the vaccine to his own cultists willing to not take it and die for him.

It's so easy, folks. How did America ever elect this idiot in 2016?

Last Call For These Disunited States, Con't

The Guardian's Jason Stanley warns that America is well on its way towards autocratic fascism, with Trump's attempted coup just the beginnings of the ground being prepared for its dark harvest, and soon the soil will be red and black.

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

So began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to last.

Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.

Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.

Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.

The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.

My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. And my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life to discuss it. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her.

Philosophers have always been at the forefront in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. In keeping with a tradition that includes the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, I have been writing for a decade on the way politicians and movement leaders employ propaganda, centrally including fascist propaganda, to win elections and gain power.

Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.

Fascist propaganda takes place in the US in already fertile ground – decades of racial strife has led to the United States having by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. A police militarized to address the wounds of racial inequities by violence, and a recent history of unsuccessful imperial wars have made us susceptible to a narrative of national humiliation by enemies both internal and external. As WEB Du Bois showed in his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction, there is a long history of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.

The novel development is that a ruthless would-be autocrat has marshalled these fascist forces and shaped them into a cult, with him as its leader. We are now well into the repercussions of this latter process – where fascist lies, for example, the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, have begun to restructure institutions, notably electoral infrastructure and law. As this process unfolds, slowly and deliberately, the media’s normalization of these processes evokes Morrison’s tenth and final step: “Maintain, at all costs, silence.”

 

We're in pretty bad shape, folks. It won't take much at this point to put America in a shooting war against itself, but the far more likely outcome is autocratic rule by a strongman like Trump or worse. Unless we're able to overcome the ruthless odds of history, we're headed for a very dark time in our history, even for a country as messed up as America.

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

If Republicans can't assure permanent election control by state legislature fiat, they can always fall back on good ol' voter suppression in counties with large percentages of Black and brown voters, like Georgia's Lincoln County, population 7,600 with more than a quarter being Black folk.

Lincoln County is trying to close all but one polling place for next year’s elections, a move opposed by voting and civil rights groups.

Relocating voters from the county’s seven precincts to a single location will make voting “easier and more accessible” and eliminate the need to transport voting equipment and staff the remaining sites, according to a news release. Community members disagreed.

“Lincoln County is a very rural county. Some people live as far as 23 miles from the city of Lincolnton,” said Denise Freeman, an activist and former Lincoln County school board member. “This is not about convenience for the citizens. This is about control. This is about the good old boys wanting to do what they’ve always done, which is power and control.”

The move was made possible after the Georgia General Assembly passed legislation earlier this year disbanding the Lincoln County Board of Elections. The chief sponsor of Senate bills 282 and 283 was Sen. Lee Anderson, R-Grovetown, whose district includes Lincoln County. The newly-appointed board agreed to move forward with the “consolidation” plan and was expected to vote on it last week, but appeared to lack a quorum, several said.

Multiple public interest groups including the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, Common Cause Georgia, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Augusta’s Interfaith Coalition are taking a stand against the effort.

Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, said the move is an extension of Senate Bill 202, which tightened restrictions on voting and gave the state the authority to take over elections boards.

“They’re trying to do this undercover precinct consolidation, so we’re going to go ahead with the canvassing drive,” Dennis said. Obtaining signatures from roughly 20% of the population of a single precinct would appear to have the effect of blocking the move, at least temporarily.

Dennis attributed the Lincoln County effort to a larger push across rural Georgia.

“I think there are bad actors who are wanting to pilot precinct consolidations and takeovers of elections boards in smaller counties,” she said.

With multiple voting changes from Senate Bill 202 already underway, adding the precinct closures in a county that lacks a public transportation budget – and attempting to pass them over the holiday season – is too much, Dennis said.

“There’s no real justification for something this drastic,” she said. “This is something that is trying to be steamrolled outside the public eye.”

 

This is exactly what I said would happen after Georgia's "election integrity" bills became law: entire county election boards purged of Black election workers, replaced with white Republican appointees, and voting precincts removed from Black neighborhoods entirely. 

This is also exactly the kind of racist voter suppression nonsense that the Voting Rights Act preclearance measures were supposed to stop, but that was gutted by the Roberts Court years ago and will never be fixed.

So now, Black voters will have to drive 20+ miles to vote, and it will be their fault if they don't "want to take responsibility to vote" when it will take them hours to do so.

It's the same tune across the country. Republicans gain and keep power with intensive gerrymandering, voter suppression, and spreading the Big Lie, and outright stealing elections.

The Big Lie, Con't

Yet more evidence of Trump regime officials directly pressuring state elections officials to commit election fraud and give the 2020 election to Trump that he didn't win, with all indications that Trump will be much more successful in these efforts in 2022 and 2024 unless he's stopped.

A member of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign arranged and participated in a meeting at which a Georgia election worker says she was pressed by a Chicago publicist to falsely admit voting fraud.

The revelation directly ties a senior figure in the former president’s political operation to an extraordinary late-night Jan. 4 meeting in which a $16-an-hour election worker faced pressure to implicate herself in a baseless conspiracy theory, stoked by Trump himself, as he sought to overturn his Georgia election loss.

Harrison Floyd - who was executive director of a national campaign coalition called Black Voices for Trump in 2020 - told Reuters on Monday that he asked Chicago publicist Trevian Kutti to visit the Atlanta area to speak with 62-year-old temporary election worker Ruby Freeman. Floyd said he then participated by phone in a meeting Kutti held with Freeman at a police station in Georgia’s Cobb County.

Kutti was accompanied at the meeting by another Trump campaign figure: Garrison Douglas, who was a Georgia leader in Black Voices for Trump during the campaign and now works as a Republican Party spokesperson in the state. Douglas confirmed to Reuters that he was present at the meeting. Floyd said he recruited Douglas and Kutti because he was unable to attend himself.

In a statement to Reuters on Monday, Douglas said: "On January 4th, I was unemployed and received a call to serve as a volunteer driver, as I had many times in the past. I had no involvement in the meeting beyond the task of driving."

In a phone interview Monday, Floyd said he was asked if he’d be willing to set up the meeting by a man he described as a chaplain with “connections” in federal law enforcement. He declined to name the clergyman or to detail what those connections involved. Floyd said the chaplain, who is white, wanted him to approach Freeman, who is Black, to discuss an immunity deal for her, out of a belief that she would not trust a white stranger. Floyd, Douglas and Kutti are Black.

Floyd said that he had left his role in the Trump campaign before the Jan. 4 meeting. Trump himself “never asked me to go” to Georgia, he said, and board members of the Black Voices for Trump group “had no involvement in this.”

Floyd said he arranged the meeting in an effort to help Freeman. He said he himself believed she was seeking assistance, including immunity from prosecution over claims from the Trump camp that she had committed voting fraud.

Freeman, through a spokesperson, said she never reached out to anyone to seek immunity. Her lawyer, Von DuBose, declined to comment further.

 

So once again we have a Black female election worker in Georgia who was facing direct pressure to lie  that election fraud existed, with threats of legal punishment if they didn't do so.  The timing once again was less than 48 hours before the Trump coup, and the plan was clearly to use these "accusations of election fraud" to justify Mike Pence blocking electors from enough states to send the election to the House delegations for a Trump theft of the presidency.

All this was planned from the top down, folks. It was 100% a coup, and in 20222 and 2024 the coup succeeds unless Trump's people and a lot of state GOP officials start going to prison and soon.

StupidiNews!

• New CDC figures confirm that COVID was the third-leading cause of US deaths in 2020, behind only heart disease and cancer for last year.
  
• News networks will commemorate coverage of the January 6th insurrection with several days of specials, Donald Trump says he plans his own news conference that day with "new evidence".
• San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank is the latest major US employer to delay employees returning to the office amid America's COVID Omicron surge.
• President Biden says he's considering lifting the travel ban from Southern African nations where COVID Omicron was first identified last month based on CDC advisors.
• Jury deliberations in the criminal fraud trial of Theranos co-founder Elizabeth Holmes continue as both sides made their closing arguments on Monday.
  

Last Call For Thune Out, Turn On, Drop Out

Although the story of congressional retirements heading into 2022 remains the nearly two dozen Democrats in the House heading out, Republican Senate number two John Thune of South Dakota is reportedly also looking for the exit off Capitol Hill.

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Senate Republican and a potential future leader, is seriously considering retiring after next year, a prospect that has set off an intensifying private campaign from other Republicans urging him to seek re-election.

Mr. Thune is only 60, but a combination of family concerns and former President Donald J. Trump’s enduring grip on the Republican Party have prompted the senator, who is in his third term, to tell associates and reporters in his home state that 2022 could be his last year in Congress.

His departure would be a blow to South Dakota, which has enjoyed outsize influence in Washington, and could upend Senate Republicans’ line of succession. Mr. Thune has been open about his ambition to lead his party’s caucus after Senator Mitch McConnell makes way, and quiet but unmistakable jockeying is already underway between him and Senators John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming.

“John is the logical successor should Mitch decide to not run again for leader,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine said of Mr. Thune, while noting that Mr. McConnell’s hold on their caucus remained “very secure.”

That Mr. Thune would even entertain retirement with the chance to ascend to Senate Republican leader illustrates both the strain of today’s Congress and the shadow Mr. Trump casts over the party. The senator’s departure would represent yet another exit, perhaps the most revealing one yet, by a mainstream Senate Republican who has grown frustrated with the capital’s political environment and the former president’s loyalty demands. The exodus began in 2018 with Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker retiring rather than facing primaries, and has accelerated this year.

Part of Mr. Thune’s hesitation owes to Mr. Trump and the potential for the former president — who lashed out at Mr. Thune early this year when the senator rejected his attempts to overturn the election — to intervene in South Dakota’s Senate primary race. But the larger factor may be the longer-range prospect of taking over the Senate Republican caucus with Mr. Trump still in the wings or as the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.

Mr. Thune has said he will decide his intentions over the holidays. Yet a number of his friends and colleagues have become convinced that he is serious about leaving public life.

Among those alarmed is Mr. McConnell himself, who one adviser said had “leaned in” on pushing Mr. Thune to run again.

“I certainly hope that he will run for re-election, and that’s certainly what I and others have been encouraging him to do all year long,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview.

 

Jon Martin at the Times makes it clear that doing Trump's personal bidding for another decade after Mitch settles back down here in KY is absolutely not in his cards, and he basically has that seat for life. To give that up makes me think there's a lot more to the story.

It's certainly not that Thune is a moral man, he's a Republican after all.

Sadly, it just means he'll be replaced by a Republican 100% loyal to Trump instead of say, 95%.

The Vax Of Life

The Biden Administration is planning to do what the Trump regime could never be bothered to do: distribute hundreds of millions of COVID test kits free of charge to all Americans in January.

President Joe Biden will announce Tuesday a purchase of a half-billion at-home rapid Covid-19 tests and a plan to distribute them free to Americans who request them through a website, one of a series of new steps he'll unveil as the country faces a potentially crippling wintertime surge of infections. 

The 500 million new tests will be made available next month and will reach Americans through the mail, the official said. The administration is still working to determine how many tests each household may request. 

The new test shipment scheme will come during remarks meant to underscore the White House's plan to confront what is expected to be a large spike in cases driven by the now-dominant Omicron variant in the coming weeks. Already, cases are rising rapidly in areas around the country and hospitals are nearing capacity. 

Among the President's new initiatives is a plan to prepare 1,000 military service members to deploy to overburdened hospitals across the country in January and February, administration officials said. Those service members will include doctors, nurses, medics and other military medical personnel. 

An official said, "God willing" the full 1,000 wouldn't be needed, "but if we do, they are ready and they're mobilized." 

Biden hopes to reassure Americans that if they are vaccinated, they can still proceed with their holiday plans without fear of becoming seriously ill. Conversely, he wants to tell those who have not yet received shots of the potential for severe illness or death in the coming months.

 

This should have happened six months ago with Delta, but at least it's happening now. Getting half a billion tests into the hands of American families is the right thing to do. 

Still, it's more than the previous guy ever even bothered with, and we can't go back to him, period.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The January 6th Committee may be considering referring the insurrectionists for federal criminal charges, and yes, apparently that may include not just Trump's lackeys, but even Trump himself.

When the House formed a special committee this summer to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, its stated goal was to compile the most authoritative account of what occurred and make recommendations to ensure it never happens again.

But as investigators sifted through troves of documents, metadata and interview transcripts, they started considering whether the inquiry could yield something potentially more consequential: evidence of criminal conduct by President Donald J. Trump or others that they could send to the Justice Department urging an investigation.

That move — known as sending a criminal referral — has no legal weight, as Congress has little ability to tell the Justice Department what investigations it should undertake. But it could have a substantial political impact by increasing public pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who in his first year in office has largely sidestepped questions about what prosecutors are doing to examine the conduct of Mr. Trump and his aides as they promoted baseless allegations of voter fraud.

The questions of criminality go far beyond the contempt of Congress referrals that the House has sent to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation. (Federal law requires prosecutors to bring contempt of Congress charges before a grand jury upon receiving such a referral.)

According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.

It is not clear what, if any, new evidence the committee has that might support a criminal referral, when and how it will determine whether to pursue that option and whether the committee could produce a case strong enough to hold up against inevitable accusations that it acted in a partisan manner.

Behind the scenes, the committee’s day-to-day work is being carried out by a team of 40 investigators and staff members, including former federal prosecutors. The panel has obtained more than 30,000 records and interviewed more than 300 witnesses, including about a dozen last week whom committee members say provided “key” testimony.

In recent weeks, the committee has publicly signaled its interest in the question of criminality. Shortly after obtaining from Mr. Meadows 9,000 pages of documents — including text messages and a PowerPoint presentation — the panel’s top Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read from the criminal code at a televised hearing.

She suggested that Mr. Trump, by failing to stop the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, might have violated the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.

“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”

 

Let's get a couple things out of the way first.

 

One, as the article says, the committee referring anyone, even Trump, for criminal charges means that a referral from the January 6th Committee and a $10 bill will get you a roll of quarters.  Unless Merrick Garland decides there's a case there, nothing's going to happen. No US Attorney, not Cy Vance in Manhattan, not newly minted DC US attorney Matt Graves, is going to do a damn thing at this level without Garland's express permission, and unless the evidence that the Committee turns over to Garland is damning as hell (it might be, frankly) precisely nothing's going to happen here.

Two, it was always going to come down to Garland and the Justice Department's decision. Congress doesn't do prosecuting, folks. and the evidence is Garland won't issue any charges because of rocking the political boat. It's unfortunate, because the next GOP-appointed Attorney General absolutely will bring charges against Democrats up to and including Joe Biden. But Garland isn't going to be pressured into doing jack shit, not by Biden or by anyone.

 

Three, the usual caveats about the guaranteed violence by Trump cultists if Trump himself is charged. That's the most likely outcome should Garland go forward (or Tish James in New York, which is actually far more likely). America isn't prepared for that. Hell, police and military personnel may support, if not actually be the ones conducting said violence. If Garland has the goods, he needs to act, but understand that there will be a cost in blood, the only question is how much these assholes will extract. Congressional and state Republicans will absolutely vow to take action as well. it will get ugly, folks. I'm not sure if Garland has the fortitude to see this through if he has a case. People are going to be made to suffer, and that has to be part of the calculus.

Having said that, that brings us to point Four: the people who aren't Trump are absolutely fair game for Garland. Rudy, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, all the dickheads that Trump pardoned and then helped him with the damn coup? Let's put those guys back in jail, shall we?

We'll see where all this goes.

StupidiNews!

• A magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck Northern California on Monday with the epicenter near Cape Mendocino, no casualties or major damage was reported.
• Oklahoma state House Republican Terry O' Donnell is facing multiple felony fraud charges, including a ten-year prison sentence if convicted of conspiracy against the state.
• The case against Jeffrey Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell went to jury deliberations Monday, Maxwell is facing decades in prison if convicted on child sexual abuse charges.
• Quebec officials are closing bars and schools across the province as COVID Omicron cases are ripping across Montreal and Quebec City, hospital cases are up more than 75% in three weeks.
• The EPA has released tough new fuel economy standards, replacing far more lenient Trump-era standards requiring passenger vehicles to average 40 mpg across fleets by 2026 up from 25.
  

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

The objective economic data proves pretty convincing when it comes to the Biden Boom in 2021. Joe Biden's comparisons to America's recent presidents finds him on top or at number 2 on all the big economic indicators, according to Bloomberg's Matt Winkler.

U.S. financial markets are outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century, and with good reason: America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden's first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion.

Exceptional returns from dollar-denominated assets, especially the S&P 500 Index in both absolute terms and relative to its global counterparts, can be attributed to record-low debt ratios enabling companies to reap the biggest profit margins since 1950. Corporate America is booming because the Biden administration's Covid-19 vaccination programs and $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan reduced the jobless rate to 4.2% in November from 6.2% in February, continuing an unprecedented rate of decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Consider that real, or inflation adjusted, gross domestic product surged at an average annual rate of 5.03% in each of the first three quarters of 2021, and is poised to expand 5.6% for the year based on the average estimate of more than 80 economists surveyed Bloomberg. If that forecast proves accurate, it would be more than 2.8 times the average between 2000 and 2019 and double the average since 1976.

All of which makes Biden's first year in the White House the standout among the seven previous presidents, based on 10 market and economic indicators given equal weight. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, no one comes close to matching Biden's combination of No. 1 and No. 2 rankings for each of the measures:

• Gross domestic product (1)
• Profit growth (1)
• S&P 500 performance (2)
• Consumer credit (1)
• Non-farm payrolls (2)
• Manufacturing jobs (2)
• Business productivity (2)
• Dollar appreciation (2)
• S&P 500 relative performance (2)

Per capita disposable income, which rose 1.08% this year, is the only comparable weakness for Biden, trailing Donald Trump’s 2.17%, George W. Bush’s 2.01%, Jimmy Carter’s 1.80% and Ronald Reagan’s 1.42%.

GDP growth in every incoming administration during the past four decades never exceeded 2.74% until 2021. Biden is now positioned to surpass Carter (5.01%) as the GDP champion of presidents since 1976. Much of the credit goes to The American Rescue Plan, which poured $66 billion into 36 million households and reduced the child poverty rate by 50%, helping the U.S. recover faster from the pandemic than most other nations.

 

The downside to that is record corporate profits that absolutely are not being shared with workers, and in 2021 economic inequality got considerably worse, even with Biden's recovery act putting billions in the pockets of American families, and oh yeah, significant inflation, even more so than under Carter.

Biden, like Carter, now faces the political fallout of the accelerating inflation from global supply chain breakdowns associated with the pandemic even though maintaining stable inflation and interest rates are the primary responsibility of the Federal Reserve, and the Fed said it's prepared to tighten monetary policy in 2022.

Biden, unlike Carter, benefits from the $29 trillion U.S. debt market. In contrast to the 1970s and early 1980s, confidence in the Fed’s ability to get inflation back under control is unimpaired, reflected in the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fluctuating below 1.7% as inflation hovers at 4.1%. When Carter was in the White House, investors lost confidence in the Fed, evidenced by the 10-year yield rising to 12.6% with inflation reaching 9.65%.

The clear message from the market that tells all other markets what to do is that the people with the most at stake are betting on the Biden economy.

 

The problem is the GOP continues to put on a master class of blaming Biden for Trump's disastrous economy. For those of you keeping score on Tang The Conqueror's marks among the last 8 presidents:

• Gross domestic product (T-3)
• Profit growth (5)
• S&P 500 performance (4)
• Consumer credit (2)
• Non-farm payrolls (5)
• Manufacturing jobs (3)
• Business productivity (5)
• Dollar appreciation (8)
• S&P 500 relative performance (5) 

 

And remember, this is comparing their first year in office. Trump trashed the dollar in his first year in office and coasted on Obama's economic performance, before cratering the economy entirely in his last year in office.

Biden is kicking ass and bringing the dollar back around. The downside again is the hefty inflation, but Biden can still raise rates and almost certainly needs to.

 

Keep that in mind. Biden's doing very well.

 

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki scorched Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday over Manchin's complete reversal on backing Biden's Build Back Better bill, and now we're getting details that indicate Manchin was never going to be on board with the bill's provisions.

After months of haggling with President Joe Biden and other Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) dashed his party’s hopes on Sunday by announcing he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better legislation.

Publicly, his biggest gripes are about the cost of the bill. But privately, Manchin has told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.

In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.

Continuing the child tax credit for another year is a core part of the Build Back Better legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass by the end of the year. The policy has already cut child poverty by nearly 30%.

Manchin’s private comments shocked several senators, who saw it as an unfair assault on his own constituents and those struggling to raise children in poverty.

Manchin has also told colleagues he believes that Americans would fraudulently use the proposed paid sick leave policy, specifically saying people would feign being sick and go on hunting trips, a source familiar with his comments told HuffPost.

Manchin’s office declined to comment for this story.

In a statement on Sunday, he said he opposed the Build Back Better agenda largely because of its cost.

 

West Virginia is in nearly every category the poorest state in the nation, and Manchin apparently thinks that the massive number of impoverished in the state are all drug addicts for not being as rich as he is in a country of "endless opportunity" like America. 

Manchin's pretty terrible, but the Republican who will eventually replace him will be far worse. There are several bad Democrats, but there are no good Republicans. Keep that in mind.

So where do Dems go from here? For his part, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Dems will be taking several "early 2022" votes on the Biden agenda.

The U.S. Senate will vote early next year on President Joe Biden's sweeping $1.75 trillion policy bill as well as on voting rights, the chamber's top Democrat said on Monday, despite conservative Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's opposition.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled plans for both votes on Monday, the day after Manchin -- who has stood as a roadblock to many Biden policies in the evenly divided chamber -- said in a television interview that he would not vote for the "Build Back Better" bill, dealing it a potentially fatal blow.

"The Senate will, in fact, consider the Build Back Better Act, very early in the new year so that every Member of this body has the opportunity to make their position known on the Senate floor, not just on television," Schumer wrote in a letter to colleagues.

Democrats need all of their members on board to pass legislation in the Senate. Biden and party leaders negotiated with Manchin for months to satisfy his concerns, but the West Virginia senator said on Monday that those talks were doomed to fail.

 

Schumer isn't playing here. That Dear Colleague letter named Manchin specifically.  But the fact remains as long as Manchin is a no, and that there remains unified resistance from the Senate GOP, nothing gets passed at all.

Something has to change or the vote fails. The question is what, if anything, will change at all.

The Airing Of The Grievances

House Republicans aren't just counting their 2022 midterm chickens before they hatch, they're loudly and openly telling anyone in earshot exactly how they will spend 100% of their time in 2023 and 2024 with constant petty vengeance investigations, televised circus hearings, government shutdown hostage taking, and putting as many Biden administration officials in jail with House contempt votes as they can get away with should they win the House back.

 

House Republicans have begun mapping aggressive probes of the Biden administration if they win back the majority — including inquiries into the origins of COVID, a leak of IRS data about billionaires, and accusations the NSA spied on Tucker Carlson.

Why it matters: The plans, obtained exclusively by Axios, show House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy would make muscular use of majority powers for the last two years of President Biden's term if, as expected, the GOP wins the majority in next year's midterms.
McCarthy plans to send a spate of "preservation notices" to departments throughout Biden's Cabinet, ordering them to retain documents that might be needed for future GOP oversight hearings.

Between the lines: Republicans want to deflect attention from the 1/6 commission, a real-time probe of real violence, death and looting in the Capitol. 

As a prelude, House Republicans in August sent Biden a request to "preserve all records related to your Administration’s withdrawal ... from Afghanistan."

Investigations planned by House Republicans — in parallel with their legislative agenda — show they hope to use congressional power to stoke culture wars for 2024.

 

They are vowing to investigate Biden over everything Democrats hit Trump on: COVID, foreign policy, immigration, the IRS, and everything from Tucker Carlson's email to Critical Race Theory.

 

And we're not even counting the inevitable impeachment investigations. 

If you're considering stayng home and not voting in November because Biden or Manchin or whoever disappointed you, wait until Republicans get power back and take vengeance upon all of us.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Republicans say they will block any Biden Supreme Court pick for two years if they regain control of the Senate in the 2022 elections.
• The Catholic Church is facing a major investigation into sexual misconduct of priests in Spain, with possible abuse cases dating as far back as 80 years ago.
• Chilean leftist Gabriel Boric is claiming victory in Sunday's presidential elections less than two years after nationwide protests against the Pinochet-defending party of rival Juan Antonio Kast.
• Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker both say they have tested positive for COVID Omicron and will be taking measures to control its spread among staffers and Senate personnel.
• ESPN and other Disney-owned channels are returning to YouTubeTV after Google and Disney reached a deal over the weekend for carriage of Disney channels on Google's service.