Last Call For The Buckeye Purge

Ohio Republicans took a constitutional amendment on redistricting to the voters in 2018, and it passed overwhelmingly. Of course, with the GOP having a two-thirds supermajority in the state House and Senate, when the "bi-partisan" vote for redistricting went south, the "independent" redistricting commission formed to rectify the situation was made entirely of Republicans, along with GOP Governor Mike DeWine. It should have been a slam dunk for permanent Republican rule in the state, except for one thing...

The state's Supreme Court got the final say on the redistricting maps. And despite a 4-3 Republican majority on the bench, Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor is siding with the court's three Democrats to declare the maps unconstitutional.  In fact, the state GOP is now 0-3 as of this week, putting the state's scheduled May 3 primaries in jeopardy.

But now, the state GOP has decided to make its counterattack, and House and Senate Republicans in the state realize they have the numbers to impeach and remove Justice O'Connor from the court completely.

 

House Republicans are discussing whether to impeach Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor after the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a third set of legislative maps and effectively ended all hope of a full May 3rd primary.

The court struck down the maps on Wednesday with O'Connor as the deciding vote, sending the Ohio Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board for the fourth time. A ruling on the latest congressional maps is expected any day.

O'Connor, a Republican, is seen as an independent voice on the court and sided with Democrat justices to throw out multiple sets of maps, arguing they did not comply with constitutional rules for redistricting. That's increasingly made her a target of fellow party members who contend she's shirking her responsibilities.

"It's time to impeach Maureen O'Connor now," Rep. Scott Wiggam, R-Wayne County, tweeted Thursday.

An email from a Republican state central committee member, obtained by USA TODAY Network Ohio, said an unnamed lawmaker disclosed that they would be filing an impeachment charge against O'Connor. Multiple House Republicans said there have been discussions about the matter, but it's unclear if any decisions have been made.

"I don’t understand what the woman wants," said state Rep. Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton.

A statehouse insider, who requested anonymity to discuss the situation candidly, also confirmed Republican lawmakers are mulling impeachment and may move forward in the coming days.

"I don't know if it moves or not," the source said. "Judging by conversations I'm aware of, there is growing support for this move. I don't know if there's enough."

 

We're at a point where Ohio Republicans are going to try to impeach a state Supreme COurt Chief Justice because she ruled against their maps giving them permanent control of the legislature.

 

This is an extremely dangerous point in history, folks.

 

Stay tuned.

The Greatest Generation Gave Virginia To The GOP

As Ed Kilgore points out in new voting analysis from last year, Virginia's deep red turn in 2021 wasn't angry suburban moms complaining about COVID precautions at all, but a massive spike in turnout in those 75 and older, the Greatest Generation.

The prevailing conventional wisdom has been that Republican Glenn Youngkin won and Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost because suburban swing voters upset about education and, to a lesser extent, economic issues switched from voting Democrat to Republican between 2020 and 2021. Indeed, a lot of influential focus-group work on the election began with the assumption that these voters made the difference and tried to interpret why they swung rather than how far they swung and how much it mattered. And the more that analysts dwelled on education issues as crucial, the more they agreed that school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic may have damaged Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey (where Democratic governor Phil Murphy had a surprisingly narrow winning margin) even more than Republican attacks on the alleged teaching of “critical race theory” or other culture-war topics related to schools.

Now comes a new study from the data-analysis firm TargetSmart that calls this narrative into question even more than past dissents. As TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier notes, comparing the Virginia results to data on school closures calls into question the idea that the latter affected the former:

Of the top 10 counties in Virginia ranked by days with in-person education during the 2020-2021 school year, 6 of the 10 saw a larger swing towards Republicans than the state average swing of 5.3%, while the remaining 4 counties saw a slightly below average GOP swing. In fact, the biggest swings towards Republicans occurred in southwestern Virginia, where schools were open for in person instruction for most of the year.

Conversely, those counties that conducted virtual learning for most of the 2020-2021 school year saw a smaller shift towards Republicans than the state average — the top 10 counties for days spent in virtual learning in 2020-2021 saw a 3.8% average swing towards Republicans, well below the statewide average of 5.3%.

More generally, TargetSmart took a look at the voter-file information recently made available by Virginia and drew attention to some rather dramatic turnout numbers that seemed to suggest parents of school-age children in the Washington and Richmond suburbs weren’t the keys to this election:

Turnout among voters age 75 or older increased by 59%, relative to 2017 while turnout among voters under age 30 only increased by just 18%. Notably, turnout of all other age groups combined (18-74), which would likely include parents of school-aged children, only increased by 9% compared to 2017.

These are massive changes in the electorate in an election that was far from a blowout: Youngkin won by just 2%.

It’s common for seniors to turn out to vote significantly more than younger cohorts in non-presidential elections. But the figures for Virginia in 2021 were unusually large: 

Voters age 65 and older are an estimated 15.9% of Virginia’s population according to the census, yet accounted for 31.9% of all ballots cast in 2021.

348,314 more seniors (ages 65+) voted in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election than in the 2016 presidential election.

TargetSmart calls it a “silver surge.” Whatever you call it, it seems to suggest that variable turnout patterns rather than swing voting was the biggest deal in Youngkin’s win. It’s also what a December analysis in FiveThirtyEight of precinct-level data showed, indicating that the big net gains by Youngkin were in Democratic- and Republican-base areas, not in highly competitive swing areas. And for that matter, that’s what the much-discounted exit polls suggested, as Ron Brownstein pointed out right after the election:

Compared with the 2017 governor’s race, or the 2020 presidential contest in the state, the electorate Tuesday was older, whiter, less college-educated, and more Republican, the exit polls found. Census figures show that voters of color have increased as a share of the state’s eligible voter population since 2017, but in the exit polls nonwhite voters plummeted from about one-third of the electorate in both 2020 and 2017 to only a little over one-fourth this year. Voters under 30 fell from 20 percent of the vote in 2020 and 14 percent in 2017 to just 10 percent Tuesday. College graduates shrank from nearly three-in-five voters in 2017 to just under half. And although Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 11 percentage points in the 2017 electorate, the exit polls found that GOP voters almost exactly equaled them this year.

None of this is to say that Youngkin’s victory over McAuliffe was some sort of aberration or that it shouldn’t alarm Democrats. But what it takes to boost turnout by Democrats without further boosting turnout by Republicans is not the same as what it takes to persuade a narrowly defined suburban swing vote upset principally about schools. Narratives matter, and Democrats should take care to ensure they aren’t telling themselves the wrong story.

 

The story in Virginia was that angry 75+ seniors turned out in massive numbers.  The GOP turned out the base across the state, while the Democrats did turn out, the GOP turned out much more.

Call it the FOX News effect. Rage gets people to vote on the GOP side. If Dems don't find a way to counter, we're all screwed in November.

The Night The Bits Went Out In Texas

Regulation-free Texas wants to become the home of many a cryptocurrency mining operation, but the state's third-world "independent" power grid with dozens of providers in a wild west style fight over customers and infrastructure will need millions, if not billions of dollars of upgrading to handle the kind of power needs a major crypto mine needs, and absolutely nobody wants to pay for it.

David Naylor’s knowledge of cryptocurrency was limited, to say the least, when Bitcoin miners started approaching him last year about buying power from the utility he runs across a 16-county stretch of rural Texas.

“I was writing it down, B-i-t-c-o-i-n,” said Naylor, chief executive officer of Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative Inc., which provides power to about 229,000 customers — mostly small towns and homes — north and east of Dallas.

Naylor has had to get up to speed quickly. He’s received multiple proposals to build Bitcoin mines, with rows of electricity-guzzling computers that solve mathematical problems to create digital coins, on what’s now ranch land. Two of the mines would each require as much as $20 million to fortify power lines and avert blackouts. Each would consume enough electricity to power as many as 60,000 Texas homes. Utilities like Rayburn have to provide service to miners if it’s technically feasible to do so, but upgrades to the grid threaten to drive up bills for consumers already shouldering price shocks for almost everything.

Rayburn’s talks with Bitcoin miners illustrate the conundrum utilities face as crypto companies like Riot Blockchain Inc. and Argo Blockchain Plc flock to Texas, spurred by almost nonexistent regulation, relatively cheap electricity and Governor Greg Abbott’s quest to make the state the global center for crypto mining. Besides threatening to boost power bills, the dozens of Bitcoin mines proposed are also a risk to the state’s shaky power grid after a deep freeze last year left hundreds dead and pushed up prices so much that utilities were left with massive debts or bankrupted.

“These are just challenges we’ve never faced before,” Naylor said in an interview.

Texas utilities may have to figure it out largely on their own, weighing the cost of upgrades against long-term benefits like revenue that can be invested in protecting against outages. It falls to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, to evaluate how Bitcoin mining will affect the power system. So far, Ercot hasn’t publicly disclosed what it's done, but its members will vote this month on creating a task force to understand how many mines will connect to the grid and how fast. New types of demand come with a number of risks and challenges, and “Ercot will continue to coordinate and collaborate with its regulators and stakeholders to successfully integrate crypto loads,” the grid operator said in an emailed statement.

It’s too early to estimate how much Texans’ power bills could rise as a result of Bitcoin mining. But the city of Plattsburgh, New York, may provide clues. After power prices surged, Plattsburgh temporarily banned crypto mining in 2018 until it could pass measures to regulate the industry. Two counties in Washington state took similar steps.

Overall, Bitcoin mining cost residents and businesses in upstate New York about $250 million a year in higher annual electricity bills, a 2021 University of California Berkeley study concluded. Mining pushes up monthly electric bills about $8 for individuals, and $12 for small businesses, the researchers estimated.

Industry advocates argue that as Bitcoin mining booms in the state, someone will come along to build more power plants. One year after the deadly winter storm, a record amount of solar capacity is planned for Texas. Plus, miners say their ability to quickly throttle back operations when the grid needs power will actually make the system more stable. Bitcoin mines shouldn't cost consumers much because they seek out more sparsely populated areas with electricity to spare, said Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council, a lobbying group.

But Rayburn's experience shows that's not always the case. Miners are looking at remote sites, which in some cases will require millions of dollars in grid upgrades, Naylor said.

Utilities across Texas are fielding proposals. American Electric Power Co. is weighing requests from 75 to 100 Bitcoin miners to connect primarily across West Texas and is evaluating the need for upgrades to handle the mines. Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, which serves the Texas Panhandle and Central Plains, is studying inquiries from two dozen miners.

Austin Energy, which powers the state capital, says investors want to build five mines just outside Austin that would need a total of 1,000 megawatts of electricity, equal to about two-thirds of the city's current demand. That may require the utility to build more transmission lines, said Erika Bierschbach, vice president of energy market operations.

“The risk is that we don’t manage the opportunity very well,” Bierschbach said. Austin Energy, Rayburn and Golden are considering whether to require miners to pay higher power rates.

Upgrades to the power system will be needed because the grid “can’t handle all of this new load,” said Evan Caron, a former power trader in Austin who invests in energy technology. New investments in the transmission system are typically shared among Ercot’s consumers and show up in their utility bills. This year, Ercot expects more than $4.5 billion in transmission charges to be distributed among users from factories to utilities.

 

With Texas's power grid being nothing more than a collection of dozens of independent power providers, nobody wants to be the sucker holding the bag for the tens of millions in improvements needed to power this new "industry", itself a giant scam.  Frankly, the state and the crypto con artists deserve each other, but it's the people of Texas who are going to end up getting screwed the most when the miners eventually take the money and run.

When the crypto con gets shut down finally as the global money laundering operation/multi-level marketing scam that it is, a whole lot of people are going to discover that their entire life savings are gone for good, and then Texas will want its money back, taking it from the people.

This is going to be a massive disaster in a short time if things go how I predict they will.

The Biden Administration Goes Viral, Con't

The Biden Administration is shifting from COVID-19 as crisis to COVID-19 as manageable health care issue, and that means current Biden COVID czar Jeff Zients is leaving next month, to be replaced by Brown University med school dean Dr. Ashish Jha.

Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur and management consultant who steered President Biden’s coronavirus response through successive pandemic waves and the largest vaccination campaign in American history, plans to leave the White House in April to return to private life, President Biden said in a statement.

Mr. Biden called Mr. Zients “a man of service” and praised his work to “build the infrastructure we needed to deliver vaccines, tests, treatment and masks to hundreds of millions of Americans.”

Mr. Zients will be replaced as the White House Covid coordinator by Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a practicing internist who has urged an aggressive approach to the pandemic in frequent television appearances.

Dr. Jha, who is also a health policy researcher with expertise in pandemic preparedness and response, will coordinate the government’s Covid response from inside the White House, officials said. But the selection of a veteran public health expert signaled that Mr. Biden believes the country has moved into a new phase of the fight against the virus.

With much of the country vaccinated, officials said the federal response would become more of a long-term public health effort and less of a moment-by-moment crisis requiring rapid government action. If new variants of the virus spread, they said, Dr. Jha will be able to draw upon the tools his predecessor put in place during the past 14 months.

In his statement, Mr. Biden said that “Americans are safely moving back to more normal routines, using the effective new tools we have to enable us to reduce severe Covid cases and make workplaces and schools safer.”

But he added that “our work in combating Covid is far from done” and called Dr. Jha the “perfect person” to fight the virus “as we enter a new moment in the pandemic.”

Officials said his background as a medical doctor makes him the right choice as the virus becomes more an endemic part of the country’s health challenges. In 2014, Dr. Jha was a co-chair of an international commission on the global response to the Ebola outbreak. And he has argued that agencies like the World Health Organization are critical in dealing with diseases like Ebola and Zika.

Mr. Zients, 55, became one of the unlikely faces of the Biden administration’s response to the deadly virus, a somber-sounding businessman presiding over weekly updates with public health officials that were streamed live on the White House website. He had committed to working in the West Wing for a limited time as Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, and extended his stay several times at the president’s request, officials said.

Mr. Zients’s deputy, Natalie Quillian, will also depart in April.

Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, called Mr. Zients a “once-in-a-generation managerial talent” and a “warmhearted friend.” He praised Mr. Zients for his work on getting Americans access to vaccines and tests.

“Today, over 215 million Americans are fully vaccinated, Americans have received over one billion at-home tests, 98 percent of schools are open and our economy is recovering,” Mr. Klain said in a statement. “Through the ups and downs of this past year, Jeff met every challenge with a level head and laser-focused execution. Because of that, lives have been saved here at home and in countless other countries.”

 

The good news is that Dr. Jha is a well-respected medical expert, and that the general consensus is that Biden hit it out of the park by getting him on board. 

The bad news is that leaves a good one-third of American adults unvaccinated, who will never take the vaccine, and we're still seeing 10k deaths from COVID per week, so I guess we're just moving on into the "this is acceptable" stage of hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths a year.

Oh, and Omicron BA2 variant is on the loose and is even more contagious than regular Omicron.

While some would like to think the coronavirus pandemic is behind us, a new form of the Omicron variant is rapidly spreading.

What's known as BA.2 -- a sub-lineage of Omicron -- now makes up nearly a quarter of new COVID infections nationwide.

The CDC says it's particularly a problem in New York and New Jersey, where 39% of the virus in circulation is BA.2.

It's also dominating new case worldwide, and some countries are facing a renewed surge of infects, just as they move to lift pandemic restrictions.

While COVID cases have been declining recently, positivity rates in our area have been slowly on the rise.

On Sunday in the New York City region, the positivity rate was at 0.96. It moved up to 1.23 on Monday and 1.28 on Tuesday.

In Manhattan, the positivity rate was at 1.33 percent on Sunday, 1.67 on Monday and 1.73 on Tuesday.

 

By Easter we're going to be smack in the middle of another major COVID surge and with mask mandates and social distancing gone in 90% of the country, it's going to spread like a wildfire in a popsicle stick factory.

 

Expect millions more COVID cases -- and deaths -- in the months ahead. With SCOTUS having killed national mandates and state and local elected on both sides of the aisle pretending this is all over, I expect this Spring will be another nightmare leading to a 9/11's worth of deaths a day again for weeks, if not months later this spring, but hey...

...crisis is over!

Right?

Sold My Soul To The Company Store

The only question I have about Amazon building "affordable housing" is how much profit they intend to make off the sale.

Amazon said Tuesday it will spend more than $120 million to build affordable-housing units close to transit stations near Seattle and Washington, D.C, the latest example of a tech company trying to address the affordable housing crisis critics say the industry has exacerbated.

Amazon said it is working with Sound Transit and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to construct a total of 1,060 homes near four public transit sites. The Washington state sites are in SeaTac and Bellevue. The other sites are Maryland in the cities of New Carrollton and College Park.

Amazon is building out another corporate hub in Arlington, Virginia, and is expanding operations in Bellevue, near its Seattle headquarters.

“We know that our investment in these areas brings many economic opportunities for residents in the region, but we also acknowledge that this growth needs to benefit everyone in the community,” Catherine Buell, director of the Amazon Housing Equity Fund, said in a statement.

That funding comes from a commitment Amazon made in January 2021 to launch its Housing Equity Fund, a $2 billion initiative to preserve and create 20,000 affordable homes.

 

Now, back of the napkin math means Amazon would have to sell the homes for about $115,000 each in order to make their money back, because Amazon is sure as hell not going to build a company town and lose money on it.  If that's how things really work out, that's great. If the housing is under the transit authorities and subject to HUD grants and loans and they are the landlords, that's great too.

But I don't think that's going to happen.

Specifically, I think nearby residents are going to go the full Karen on zoning boards, and the project is going to get scrapped. Nobody is going to vote to lower their own property values by hundreds of thousands of dollars on purpose.

We'll see, but the devil here is definitely in the details. I don't trust the company or Bezos, even when they are actually doing the right thing, and there's no way we should, either.

 

 

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

There's little doubt that Trump is building an army of state and national Republicans to push his Big Lie after the November elections, and that the cost of his endorsement is for Republican loyalty to Trump himself and the Big Lie, not to America or even the party. Trump is therefore doing everything he can to purge the party of the insufficiently toadying, his latest target is an open threat against GOP Alabama Sen. Mo Brooks.

Former President Trump is reportedly considering revoking his endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) for Senate and backing one his primary rivals instead as the incumbent GOP congressman struggles in the polls.

Lackluster polling is one thing — but Trump also said he was not thrilled with Brooks for telling voters it’s time to move on from the 2020 presidential election, a hill Trump will likely die on.

“Mo Brooks is disappointing,” Trump told the Washington Examiner in a phone interview from Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday evening. “I’m determining right now, has Mo Brooks — has he changed?”

Trump endorsed Brooks last year to replace retiring Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL). Brooks thus far has failed to demonstrate strong support in recent polls, signaling he could fall to one of his Republican rivals: Katie Britt, Shelby’s former chief of staff, or Mike Durant, a businessman and military veteran.

Regardless, the former president seems to have gone cold on Brooks, telling the Examiner he has a particular bone to pick with the congressman.

Trump reportedly has doubts about his initial endorsement of Brooks, a flip-flop that follows the GOP congressman urging voters at a Trump rally last year to stop feeling “despondent” about 2020 and “look forward” to 2022 and 2024. Trump apparently took offense, as Brooks has remained an ardent pusher of the Big Lie of a “stolen” 2020 election for some time. Trump suggested his support for the congressman may be at risk if Brooks’ position on 2020 has truly changed.

“I’m disappointed that he gave an inarticulate answer, and I’ll have to find out what he means,” Trump said, referring to Brooks’ remarks at his rally in Alabama last year. “If it meant what he sounded like, I would have no problem changing [my endorsement] because when you endorse somebody, you endorse somebody based on principle. If he changed that principle, I would have no problem doing that.”

The mercurial former president did, however, indicate the relationship has not completely soured, saying he still thinks Brooks is a believer.

“I endorsed him because he felt strongly about election fraud. And he still does. But he was inarticulate in the way he said it,” Trump told the Examiner.

Trump added that he is “not particularly happy” with the “very tight race” between Brooks and his two primary rivals.

 

Brooks folded like a lawn chair in a hurricane back in August.

Let me be clear, the 2020 election was fraught with voter fraud & election theft on a massive scale. If only legal votes cast by eligible American citizens were counted, Trump won the election. I support audits of state 2020 election results, & I eagerly await their findings.

— Mo Brooks - Endorsed By President Trump 🇺🇸 (@MoBrooks) August 22, 2021

 

Apparently Brooks is going to have come crawling to his master like the dog he is once again.

Hiking The Rate Range

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter-point today, and expects several more rate hikes in the months ahead as part of combating inflation.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved its first interest rate increase in more than three years, an incremental salvo to address spiraling inflation without torpedoing economic growth.

After keeping its benchmark interest rate anchored near zero since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee said it will raise rates by a quarter percentage point, or 25 basis points.


That will bring the rate now into a range of 0.25%-0.5%. The move will correspond with a hike in the prime rate and immediately send financing costs higher for many forms of consumer borrowing and credit. Fed officials indicated the rate increases will come with slower economic growth this year.

Along with the rate hikes, the committee also penciled in increases at each of the six remaining meetings this year, pointing to a consensus funds rate of 1.9% by year’s end. That is a full percentage point higher than indicated in December. The committee sees three more hikes in 2023 then none the following year.

The rate rise was approved with only one dissent. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard wanted a 50 basis point increase.

The committee last raised rates in December 2018, then had to backtrack the following July and begin cutting.

 

It's the right thing to do, mainly because former Clinton and Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers thinks it's a horrible idea that will push us into stagflation.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy gave a virtual address to Congress this morning, citing Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as to why the US needs to enter the airspace over the country and enforce a no-fly zone.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to Congress for help directly Wednesday, telling US lawmakers "we need you right now" as he invoked tragedies in American history like the attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11 terrorist attack. 

The historic speech given as a virtual address on comes as the United States is under pressure from Ukraine to supply more military assistance to the embattled country as it fights back against Russia's deadly attack. 

"Friends, Americans, in your great history, you have pages that would allow you to understand Ukrainians, understand us now, when we need you right now," he said through a translator at the start of his speech, though at the end of his remarks he spoke in English. 

"Remember Pearl Harbor, terrible morning of December 7, 1941, when your sky was black from the planes attacking you," Zelensky said. "Just remember it, remember, September the 11th, a terrible day in 2001 when evil tried to turn US cities into battlefields, when innocent people were attacked from air, just like nobody else expected it and you could not stop it. Our country experiences the same, every day, right now at this moment." 

While there is widespread bipartisan support for aid to Ukraine, many US lawmakers also believe the US should be careful not to be drawn into any kind of direct, armed conflict with Russia. 

Zelensky also cited his call for the US to help enforce a no-fly zone in Ukraine -- to protect civilians -- and provide fighter aircraft that the Ukrainians can use to defend themselves. 

These two controversial options divide lawmakers, with Republicans more hawkish about giving Ukraine jets, but some Democrats -- and the White House -- concerned Russia could consider such a move an escalation and potentially draw America into war. 

Lawmakers of both parties say they are wary of a no-fly zone at this time because they think it could pit the US directly against Russia in the skies over Ukraine. 

President Joe Biden plans to detail US assistance to Ukraine in a speech of his own later in the day Wednesday.

 

President Biden is expected to announce $800 million worth of direct military aid going to Ukraine this week, on top of last week's $13.6 billion humanitarian aid package, but as I've said before, a no-fly zone means a shooting war with Russia, a nuclear power.

That's what Putin has wanted since day one of this invasion.

Last Call For Time, Out, In The Senate

Today the US Senate passed by unanimous consent a measure to make Daylight Savings Time permanent starting next March. If the measure passes the House and President Biden signs it, no more clock changes. The problem is as the Washingtonian's Andrew Beaujon points out, we've tried this before and everyone in the country hated it. 

The sun rose at 8:27 AM on January 7, 1974. Children in the Washington area had left for school in the dark that morning, thanks to a new national experiment during a wrenching energy crisis: most of the US went to year-round daylight saving time beginning on January 6. “It was jet black” outside when her daughter was supposed to leave for school, Florence Bauer of Springfield told the Washington Post. “Some of the children took flashlights with them.”

The change would benefit Americans in the long run, predicted Steve Grossman of the Department of Transportation. Yes, accidents in the morning darkness may become more common, he said, but longer daylight hours could mean eliminating the hazards of evening commutes: “stress, anxiety, and many drivers have had a couple of drinks,” as he told the Post. Outside the capital, others vowed defiance: Robert Yost, the mayor of St. Francis, Kansas said his town’s council “felt it was time to put our foot down and stop this monkey business.”

Now as the idea of permanent daylight saving time has gained some political momentum, it’s probably worth a look back to another period when the US tinkered with time.

Congress had voted on December 14, 1973, to put the US on daylight saving time for two years. President Nixon signed the bill the next day. The US had gone to permanent daylight saving time before, during World War II. Then, too, the measure was enacted to save fuel. Permanent DST wasn’t close to the wackiest idea about time floating around—Paul Mullinax, a geographer who worked at the Pentagon, came up with the idea of putting the continental US on a single time zone. “USA Time” would apply from Bangor to Barstow, eliminate jet lag, and standardize TV schedules. His idea even got traction in Congress, via a bill from US Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii. “The human being is a very adaptive animal,” he said. “There is no reason we have to be a slave to the sun.”

And yet the early-morning darkness quickly proved dangerous for children: A 6-year-old Alexandria girl was struck by a car on her way to Polk Elementary School on January 7; the accident broke her leg. Two Prince George’s County students were hurt in February. In the weeks after the change, eight Florida kids were killed in traffic accidents. Florida’s governor, Reubin Askew, asked for Congress to repeal the measure. “It’s time to recognize that we may well have made a mistake,” US Senator Dick Clark of Iowa said during a speech in Congress on January 28, 1974. In the Washington area, some schools delayed their start times until the sun caught up with the clock.

The factual picture was a bit more complicated. The National Safety Council reported in February that pre-sunrise fatalities had risen to 20 from 18 the year before. In July, Roger Sant, then an assistant administrator-designate for the Federal Energy Administration, wrote a letter to the Post that noted a 1 percent energy saving achieved by going to DST equated to 20,000-30,000 tons of coal not being burned each day. Further, he wrote, accidents had fallen in the afternoons.

By August, though, as the Watergate scandal caused the Nixon administration to crumble, the country was ready to move on from its clock experiments. While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later, the New York Times reported. Seven days after President Nixon resigned, US Senator Bob Dole of Kansas introduced an amendment in August that would end the DST experiment. It passed. A similar bill passed the House. In late September, the full Congress passed a bill that would restore standard time on October 27. President Ford signed it on October 5. Energy savings, a House panel noted, “must be balanced against a majority of the public’s distaste for the observance of Daylight Saving Time.”

 

In other words, Watergate made sure clock changes would continue to happen for nearly the next 50 years.

I expect the measure ill pass the House again and become law, but I'm also betting we're going to have a near permanent fight on our hands to change things back by November 2024 or so.

Watch.

America Goes Viral, Con't

 Republicans in Congress (and more than a few Democrats) have decided that COVID-19 is over despite dire White House warnings.

The White House is preparing to "stop critical COVID response efforts" as additional funding for COVID-19 relief sits stalled in Congress, a person familiar with the plan told ABC News.

Biden and his administration have warned for weeks that there was not enough money left to support critical COVID-19 response efforts, including testing at the current pace, purchasing more COVID-19 treatments and acquiring more booster shots.

But pleas for Congress to allot billions more in its latest funding bill fell short last week, leaving government relief efforts in a "dire" place, the White House said.

While it’s not yet clear which response efforts will get cut back, the White House is expected to lay that out in a letter to congressional leadership later Tuesday, according to the person familiar with the White House’s plans.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki previewed the cuts on Monday, warning reporters that "some programs, if we don't get funding, could abruptly end or need to be pared back."

She also stressed that the U.S. needs to be ready to respond to a potential increase in cases like the upticks currently happening in the U.K. and China due to the BA.2 variant, which is a more transmissible strain of omicron, and said that any reduction in the United States' COVID-19 response could hamper the country's ability to fight back to this variant or future ones.

 

Nobody cares. War! Inflation! March Madness is here!

 

Ahh, but we've now reached the fourth time in two years that we've beaten COVID down, then let it come back again because "COVID is now over!"

A wastewater network that monitors for Covid-19 trends is warning that cases are once again rising in many parts of the U.S., according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by Bloomberg.

More than a third of the CDC’s wastewater sample sites across the U.S. showed rising Covid-19 trends in the period ending March 1 to March 10, though reported cases have stayed near a recent low. The number of sites with rising signals of Covid-19 cases is nearly twice what it was during the Feb. 1 to Feb. 10 period, when the wave of omicron-variant cases was fading rapidly.

It’s not clear how many new infections the signs in the sewage represent and if they will turn into a new wave, or will be just a brief bump on the way down from the last one. In many parts of the country, people are returning back to offices and mask rules have been loosened — factors that can raise transmission. At the same time, warmer weather is allowing people to spend more time outside, and many people have recently been infected, which may offer at least temporary protection against getting sick again – factors which would keep cases down.

“While wastewater levels are generally very low across the board, we are seeing an uptick of sites reporting an increase,” Amy Kirby, the head of the CDC’s wastewater monitoring program, said in an email to Bloomberg. “These bumps may simply reflect minor increases from very low levels to still low levels. Some communities though may be starting to see an increase in Covid-19 infections, as prevention strategies in many states have changed in recent weeks.”

Bloomberg reviewed data for more than 530 sewage monitoring sites, looking at the most recent data reported during the 10-day window from March 1 to March 10. Out of those sites, 59% showed falling Covid-19 trends, 5% were roughly stable, and 36% were increasing. Rises or declines are measured over a 15-day period.

 

In fact the Omicron BA.2 variant is now very much in play in Europe and spreading globally.

Covid cases are rising in Europe, with an increasing number being attributed to the prevalence of a "stealth" subvariant of the omicron strain.

Covid cases have increased dramatically in the U.K. in recent weeks, while Germany continues to mark record high daily infections with more than 250,000 new cases a day. Elsewhere, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands are also seeing Covid infections start to rise again, aided and abetted by the relaxation of coronavirus measures and the spread of a new subvariant of omicron, known as BA.2.

Public health officials and scientists are closely monitoring BA.2, which has been described as a "stealth" variant because it has genetic mutations that could make it harder to distinguish from the delta variant using PCR tests, compared with the original omicron variant, BA.1.

The new subvariant would be the latest in a long line to emerge since the pandemic began in China in late 2019. The omicron variant — the most transmissible strain so far — overtook the delta variant, which itself supplanted the alpha variant — and even this was not the original strain of the virus.

Now, Danish scientists believe that the BA.2 subvariant is 1½ times more transmissible than the original omicron strain, and is already overtaking it. The BA.2 variant is now responsible for over half of the new cases in Germany and makes up around 11% of cases in the U.S.  

That number is expected to rise further, as it has in Europe.

 

Going to be a bad spring again. We still have 1,500 or so people dying from COVID a day. We're coming up on one million US COVID deaths.  That's only going to get worse, and possibly much worse as even basic prevention is now history. Omicron BA.2 is most likely going to be another wildfire in the weeks and months ahead.

So of course Republicans are going to block COVID funding and watch America get sick again so they can blame Biden.

You were warned.  We all were.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The January 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol was really supposed to be the January 6th terrorist attack on multiple DC buildings, according to a document in evidence against indicted Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

A document found by federal prosecutors in the possession of a far-right leader contained a detailed plan to surveil and storm government buildings around the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year, people familiar with the document said on Monday.

The document, titled “1776 Returns,” was cited by prosecutors last week in charging the far-right leader, Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the Proud Boys extremist group, with conspiracy. The indictment of Mr. Tarrio described the document in general terms, but the people familiar with it added substantial new details about the scope and complexity of the plan it set out for directing an effort to occupy six House and Senate office buildings and the Supreme Court last Jan. 6.

The document does not specifically mention an attack on the Capitol building itself. But in targeting high-profile government buildings in the immediate area and in the detailed timeline it set out, the plan closely resembles what actually unfolded when the Capitol was stormed by a pro-Trump mob intent on disrupting congressional certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Many questions remain about the document, including who wrote it and how it made its way to Mr. Tarrio, according to prosecutors, on Dec. 30, 2020, as President Donald J. Trump was engaged in a series of overlapping schemes to keep himself in power. The people familiar with the document said other evidence the government has gathered suggests that it may have been provided to Mr. Tarrio by one of his girlfriends at the time.

Prosecutors have not accused Mr. Tarrio of using the document to guide the actions of the Proud Boys who played a central role in the Capitol attack. Nor do the charges against him offer any evidence that he shared the document with his five co-defendants: Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Charles Donohoe and Dominic Pezzola.

But the document could help explain why prosecutors chose to charge Mr. Tarrio with conspiracy, even though he was not at the Capitol during the attack. And it appears to be the first time that prosecutors have sought to use evidence of a specific written plan to storm and occupy government buildings in their wide-ranging investigation into the attack and what led up to it.

Mr. Tarrio’s lawyer, Nayib Hassan, declined to comment.

Broken into five parts — Infiltrate, Execution, Distract, Occupy and Sit-In — the nine-page document recommends recruiting at least 50 people to enter each of the seven government buildings and advises protesters to appear “unsuspecting” and to “not look tactical,” the people familiar with it said.

After ensuring that crowds at the buildings are “full and ready to go,” the document suggests that “leads and seconds” should enter and open doors for others to go in, “causing trouble” to distract security guards, if necessary.

Should the crowds fail to gain entrance to the buildings quickly, the document suggests pulling fire alarms at nearby stores, hotels and museums to further distract guards or the police, the people said. It then says protesters should occupy the buildings and conduct sit-ins, even recommending slogans for people to chant, like “We the people” and “No Trump, No America.”

The document also makes suggestions for the days leading up to Jan. 6, the people said, advising protesters to “scope out” road closures near the seven target buildings. On the morning of the protest, they added, the document suggests having “scouts” drive around the buildings to look for “roadblocks.”

While much of the document is marked for “internal” use, the people said, it contains a section, known as the “Patriot Plan,” that appears to have been meant for public distribution. This part of the document suggests that crowds begin to gather at the seven buildings at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, the people familiar with it said. Thirty minutes later, the public part of the plan calls for the crowds to await a “signal from lead” and then to “storm” the buildings.

 

Things could have been far, far worse on that day 14 months ago.  We need to make sure it doesn't happen again, because if a crapload of people don't end up in prison for seditious conspiracy including multiple Republican members of Congress, the next time it'll be successful.

Last Call For The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

President Joe Manchin has all but killed another Fed nominee, and it's back to the drawing board for Biden and company.

 

Sen. Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, said Monday that he opposes one of President Joe Biden's nominees to the Federal Reserve, leaving her candidacy to join the central bank with the slimmest of hopes.

"I have carefully reviewed Sarah Bloom Raskin's qualifications and previous public statements. Her previous public statements have failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation's critical energy needs," Manchin said in a statement.

"I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to support her nomination to serve as a member of the Federal Reserve Board," he added.

Manchin's formal opposition all but dooms Raskin's bid to be the Fed's next vice chair for supervision, one of the most powerful banking regulators in the world. While it's possible Raskin could garner support from a moderate Republican, a Senate split 50-50 means anything but a unified Democratic party makes the odds of success for any presidential nominee perilous at best.

"Sarah Bloom Raskin is one of the most qualified people to have ever been nominated for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors," a White House spokesperson told CNBC. "She has earned widespread support in the face of an unprecedented, baseless campaign led by oil and gas companies that sought to tarnish her distinguished career. We are working to line up the bipartisan support that she deserves, so that she can be confirmed by the Senate for this important position. "

Manchin, who last week said that his own party should advance Biden's four other Fed nominees without Raskin, has for weeks worked to support the U.S. energy industry as the prices of oil and gasoline climb thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Biden has also nominated Jerome Powell to a second term as Fed chair, Lael Brainard as vice chair, and Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson as Fed governors.

 

Manchin is killing Raskin's nomination over her remarks that the US and the world will continue to have unstable economies as oil gets more expensive and climate change continues to wreck the planet. This is "too political" for her to be on the Fed, according to Manchin, and basically ever other Republican will go along with this.

It's possible that Romney or Collins might save this nomination, but not likely. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska certainly won't.

Joe Manchin continues to know when and how to hurt Biden, and he's done so expertly for the last 13 months.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

A week after I told you GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar would get away with being featured speakers at last month's white supremacist domestic terrorism conference put together by known domestic terrorist Nick Fuentes, it seems that Ukraine has given the both of them cover to completely ditch what should be a career-ending scandal. Steve Benen:

For a brief moment, it appeared Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar had pushed their luck. The pair were already recognized as two of Congress’ most radical members, but when they appeared at a white nationalist event nine days ago, it created a challenge for GOP leaders: Was the party prepared to do something?

A week ago this morning, the possibility of action seemed almost plausible. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told CNN and Punchbowl News that it was “appalling and wrong” for Gosar and Greene to attend the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC).

“There’s no place in our party for any of this,” the House GOP leader said. “The party should not be associated any time, any place with somebody who is anti-Semitic.... This is unacceptable.” McCarthy added that he planned to discuss the “appalling“ matter with the right-wing duo.

 

Of course, your readers knew this was laughably wishful thinking.

A week later, there’s reason to believe Republican leaders are prepared to accept that which they saw as unacceptable. Politico reported this morning:

It’s not yet clear when Kevin McCarthy will have his promised conversation with two divisive House conservatives who spoke at a white nationalist event — and whenever he does, the talk likely won’t amount to much.... McCarthy’s office confirmed to POLITICO that he hasn’t yet spoken to the two but still plans to.

As we discussed last week, the party has some options. McCarthy & Co. could, for example, kick Gosar and Greene out of the GOP conference. The party could also announce that it will not support the members’ re-election campaigns — akin to what the party has already done to Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, because of their efforts to help lead the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack. Republicans could also agree to censure the duo.

The minority leader, who vowed in November to reward Greene and Gosar with new committee assignments in the next Congress, could even announce that he’s changed his mind about what he said four months ago, and he will no longer support giving Greene and Gosar committee assignments in the next Congress.

None of this has happened, and by all appearances, it seems unlikely that GOP leaders will do much of anything.

 

With Ukraine, inflation, and a new COVID variant loose in Europe, nobody cares about white supremacist Republicans being white supremacists.

It's been normalized with a big hand from both Trump and Putin.

In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions

Axios's Alexi McCammond asks:

A big-time Maryland donor recently raised a lingering question in some corners of the Democratic Party: Can Black candidates run for and win statewide races?

 

The funny thing is that she answered her own question a few paragraphs down:

The questions come despite unprecedented representation by officeholders and candidates, from the vice president to members of Congress and mayors. 

A snapshot: There are 57 Black U.S. House members, the most ever; Black women are mayors of seven of the 100 most-populous cities; three Black candidates were among the primary contestants for the Virginia governor's race last year, and three are currently competing in Maryland Democratic gubernatorial primary.

 

So while Black gubernatorial candidates in Maryland, a pretty narrow subset of total Black candidates mind you, have lost races, it's not a national problem.

 

The question becomes why is Axios making it one?

 

Of course we have an answer to that too, published the same day: 

Top Democratic operatives see expanding defections by Hispanic voters to the GOP, worsening Democrats' outlook for November's midterms.

Why it matters: Democrats had hoped this might be a phenomenon specific to the Trump era. But new polling shows it accelerating, worrying party strategists about the top of the ticket in 2024.

A Wall Street Journal poll last week found that by 9 points, Hispanic voters said they'd back a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat. In November, the parties were tied.

What's happening: Democrats saw evidence of this shift in 2020 in House races in south Florida, Texas and southern New Mexico. 

Key factors, operatives say, include skepticism among Hispanic voters about programs they view as handouts. And many Hispanics are social conservatives, with what L.A. Times columnist Gustavo Arellano has called a "rancho libertarianism streak." The national party also needs to do better with messages that distinguish among Americans whose families hailed from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico or Central America, several Democrats tell me.

Our thought bubble: Latinos, especially Mexican Americans, still lean Democratic. But Democrats have been losing ground among these voters in recent elections because the party hasn't been paying enough attention to them.

 

That's weird, that's the same exact reason why Democrats have "lost" white voters.  Not enough "attention" and Black candidates can't win even though they've won.

It's almost like Axios wants the Dems to lose.

Badly.

Now there's your burning question: why?

And we know why.

Last Call For The Convoy's Long Haul

 The conventional wisdom on "The People's Convoy" is that the event earlier this month was an unmitigated disaster, a rolling tire fire of a failure, and a cosmic joke that shows that the only people the far-right rabid Trumpies can ever really own are themselves.

But the vehicle convoy part was never the actual goal, it was the street fair aura of "come check us out" for Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem™ and on that lone premise, it was one of the most successful recruiting events in the post-Capitol attack era, as UMBC history professor Terry Bouton reports.

It’s hard to take the "People’s Convoy" trucker caravan seriously. Starting as a protest against Covid mask and vaccine restrictions, it launched after most mandates had been lifted. Many of the convoy’s big rigs, pickups and SUVs are covered with QAnon conspiracy references. Convoy organizers promised to shut down Washington D.C. Instead, they parked their trucks at a stock-car racetrack in western Maryland and then did a few gaffe-filled laps around the D.C. Beltway. The convoy has been lampooned in late-night talk show monologues and newspaper op-eds, and parodied in countless memes. The consensus is that it has been a complete failure.

That’s the wrong conclusion. I spent four hours walking around the convoy’s Hagerstown, Maryland, encampment last Saturday. Make no mistake: the "People’s Convoy" has been a great success as a movement-building event for the far-right. And it should be taken seriously, despite its absurdities.

The far-right was well represented at the convoy. Members of white supremacist and anti-government groups that were at the center of the Capitol insurrection have been heavily involved in its planning. Erik Rohde, a national leader of Three Percenters, was a “consultant” to the "People’s Convoy." (In return the "People’s Convoy" official Telegram account urged supporters to donate to a protest march on the Washington state capitol that Rohde was organizing). Three Percenter and Proud Boy Telegram channels have organized support and raised money for the "People’s Convoy." In Wisconsin, convoy organizers called on the Oath Keepers to provide security.

When I visited the Hagerstown encampment, numerous people wore Proud Boys sweatshirts or had Three Percenter patches on their jackets. I was told that other members of both groups were there in street clothes. One guy I spoke to claimed to have entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Hagerstown encampment soft-pedaled the hate and the convoy’s far-right ties, camouflaging them in a carnival-like atmosphere that drew thousands of people from the surrounding region. Entire families turned out to see the trucks and walk around the giant Speedway parking lot. There was free food and drinks, DJs, a band, quality fireworks, a ceremony with headlights and giant flags. Drivers let kids pull their horns, rev their engines and sign trucks with Sharpies. There was even funnel cake.

The convoy’s entire journey has had a similar festive feel, drawing large crowds across the heartland. People flocked to overpasses to hold signs and wave as the convoys passed. Homeschooling mothers brought their kids as part of civics lessons. Convoy stops were often mobbed with visitors and were inundated with food and drink donations.

Meanwhile, membership in dozens of public and private Convoy Facebook groups and Telegram channels has exploded. Convoy drivers upload reports, sometimes with videos shot as their trucks pass cheering crowds. Supporters post pictures and video taken from overpasses and roadsides along the route. Most people just write messages of support and thanks.

This is how social movements are built. The glue that binds people together is events just like the convoy, where strangers unite through a shared sense of belonging and purpose. They reinforce commitments and forge new bonds as people talk, share contact information, network and recruit. The man I spoke to who claimed to have entered the Capitol became emotional just talking about the convoy’s arrival in Hagerstown, comparing it to a joyous July Fourth parade.

Politicians on the right have also been moved — at least enough to get their pictures taken with the truckers. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita spoke at a large convoy rally. The main convoy organizers met with members of Congress and Sens. Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson. Cruz later went to the Hagerstown Speedway, flanked by national media, and rode in the passenger seat of the lead truck, giving convoy organizers exactly the media win they wanted.

 

And I know the first thing I'll see in the comments is "stop giving these assholes credit by pushing their propaganda, they didn't recruit anyone" to which I reply "You're not the Black guy in Kentucky who removed his Biden magnet from his car the day he won, either."

 

They're not going to be a danger to most folks right off the bat. It's always folks like me who have to deal with the first wave of movements like this, and having seen this coming in 2015 when Matt Bevin won here in KY and it only getting worse from there, I can tell you this feels like 2015 all over again.

 

Liberals weren't the target audience. Never Trump Republicans and independents were, and on that point, it brought some into the extremist fold.

 

That's not a good thing.