Last Call For The (Red) State Of (Blue) Cities

Texas Republicans have passed legislation that all but eliminates home rule for Texas cities, making nearly all municipal laws void in Democratic controlled cities and subject to GOP state legislative control instead.

A sweeping Texas bill stripping authority from cities passed the state Senate on Tuesday and is now headed to the governor’s desk.

House Bill 2127 takes large domains of municipal governing — from payday lending laws to regulations on rest breaks for construction workers to laws determining whether women can be discriminated against based on their hair — out of the hands of the state’s largely Democratic-run cities and shifts them to its Republican-controlled legislature.

According to the Austin American Statesman, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has been a vocal supporter of the bill.

Progressive critics argue the legislation — which one lawyer for Texas cities called “the Death Star” for local control — represents a new phase in the campaign by conservative state legislatures to curtail the power of blue-leaning cities.

Opponents of the bill include civil society groups like the AFL-CIO — and representatives of every major urban area in Texas, along with several minor ones.

They argue the shift in power it would enable would hamstring cities’ abilities to make policies to fit their unique circumstances.

“Where the state is silent, and it is silent on a lot — local governments step into that breach, to act on behalf of our shared constituents,” state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt (D) told the Senate on Tuesday.

“We should be doing our job rather than micromanaging theirs.”

But the bill’s Senate sponsor, state Sen. Brandon Creighton (R), said it was necessary to protect “job creators” from “cities and counties acting as lawmakers outside of their jurisdiction.”

Both the legislation’s sponsors and the principal trade group that backed it — the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) — have argued local regulation poses an existential threat to Texas businesses.

“As prices escalate, property taxes increase, and workers remain in short supply, small business owners are continuing to struggle in this economic environment,” said Annie Spilman, state director of the NFIB, in a statement earlier this month. “Arduous local ordinances, no matter how well-intended, exacerbate these challenges.”

 

And once again it's that businesses don't want to be forced to pay higher wages or to supply better benefits in larger cities.  They want to buy labor at well below the going rate and force workers to be miserable because there's no competitors willing to pay more and forcing even anything close to a living wage or standard benefits found in every other western country is an "arduous challenge" for the corporate class. 

In Texas, the second-biggest border state, the supply of cheap labor cannot be curtailed for any reason, either. Stripping protections provided by cities for workers has to go, you see.

We all float down here, Billy.

Trump Cards, Con't

CNN's Kaitlan Collins is being rewarded with her own 9 PM show on the network after her performance in last week's Trump town hall production, where she played her role as frustrated moderator to a T against Trump's lunatic ride. 

 

CNN has selected Kaitlan Collins to host a new weeknight show at 9 p.m., elevating her to one of the most coveted time slots in cable news a week after she moderated a contentious town hall with former President Donald J. Trump.

The new role for Ms. Collins was announced by CNN’s chairman, Chris Licht, on Wednesday, just ahead of a presentation to advertisers in Midtown Manhattan hosted by Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company.

Her show, which does not yet have a title, is set to begin in June. “She is a smart and gifted journalist who we’ve all seen hold lawmakers and newsmakers accountable,” Mr. Licht wrote in a newsroom memo. “Kaitlan will expose uncovered angles and challenge conventional wisdom to make sure viewers are seeing a story from every side.”

The promotion of Ms. Collins, 31, a co-host of the network’s morning show, amounts to a major bet by CNN leadership on a rising star who has impressed colleagues with her interviewing and reporting chops, but remains relatively untested as a solo anchor.

It is also Mr. Licht’s latest attempt to revive his network’s sagging ratings.

The 9 p.m. hour at CNN — once its highest-rated time slot — has effectively been vacant since Chris Cuomo was fired in December 2021. Mr. Licht’s recent attempt to fill the hour with a variety of interviews and news specials fizzled with viewers. On weeknights, CNN lags behind Fox News and MSNBC, and on Friday, two days after the Trump town hall, it even lost to Newsmax, a fledgling conservative network that is available in fewer homes.

Ms. Collins, who joined CNN in 2017 as a reporter covering the Trump White House, brings a youthful jolt to a programming block that for years has been hosted by middle-aged male anchors.

An Alabama native who cut her teeth at the conservative news site The Daily Caller, Ms. Collins is prized by Mr. Licht for her perceived ability to connect with viewers outside of coastal liberal enclaves. She became the network’s chief White House correspondent in 2021 at age 28, the youngest person to hold the role, and covered President Biden before moving to New York last year as a co-host of “CNN This Morning.”

She is also well respected in the political media and had been slated to serve as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association beginning in 2024. (She had to forgo the role after relocating from Washington.)

In April, Ms. Collins did a weeklong stint as temporary host of CNN’s 9 p.m. hour. She drew favorable ratings, with executives taking notice that she was able to retain much of Anderson Cooper’s lead-in audience from 8 p.m.

Last week, she was in the national spotlight as the moderator of the New Hampshire town hall with Mr. Trump. Ms. Collins remained composed in the face of Mr. Trump’s barrage of falsehoods, repeatedly interrupting to correct baseless claims. Mr. Trump mostly talked over her and was applauded by some audience members when he derided Ms. Collins as a “nasty person.”

 

There's no better proof that the supposedly "disastrous" town hall wasn't planned meticulously from the start, and than CNN boss Chris Licht wasn't counting on this from the beginning. He now has a reliable right-wing face for the network's shift towards the Republicans they want to both cover and watch, and returning them to power is not the network's number one goal.

Expect more normalization of authoritarian fascism through political kayfabe for years to come.

The Battle Of Jacksonville

Last night we had several primaries and municipal elections across the country, and the biggest was Jacksonville, Florida's mayoral race, pitting Republican Daniel Davis against Democratic candidate Donna Deegan. Jacksonville has long been the harbinger of Florida's red shift, it was the largest Republican-led city in the nation going into last night with two-term GOP Mayor Lenny Curry at the helm.

And Donna Deegan won, becoming the first female mayor in the city's history.

 

Democrat Donna Deegan will serve as the first female mayor of Jacksonville.

After months of hard campaigning and millions of dollars spent between both sides, Deegan won the highly contested election against Republican Daniel Davis with nearly 52% of the vote.

“We made history tonight,” Deegan told supporters at what became her election night celebration in Downtown Jacksonville. “It’s a brand new day in Jacksonville.”

Turnout ended at 33%, which was higher than primary turnout of just over 25%. Democrats finished early voting with over a 4-point lead – leaving the race open for either candidate on Tuesday.

Republicans closed the gap quickly at 12:10 Tuesday afternoon, but Deegan said she knew there would be a large amount of crossover voting from Republicans and Independent voters.

“When we were out the last several weeks, I mean, I can’t tell you how many people from across the political spectrum reached out to me and said ‘We want you to know, I’ve never voted for a Democrat before. I’m going to vote for you,’” Deegan said.

The win is the first for Democrats after Republican Lenny Curry’s win against Democratic Mayor Alvin Brown in 2015. Brown had a high approval rating among voters but lost to Curry by less than a 3-point margin.

Curry won re-election in 2019 and could not run again because of term limits. He became one of Davis’ Florida republican endorsements, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senator Rick Scott and Rep. John Rutherford.

Davis’ high-profile campaign, fueled with more money than any campaign for local office in Jacksonville history, brought criticism and praise from Republicans.

Deegan received support from Florida Democratic Chair Nikki Fried but relied primarily on local bipartisan endorsements, including current Republican council members Matt Carlucci and Randy DeFoor and local activists and pastors.

Davis told his supporters the result wasn’t what he had been expecting 24 hours ago, but he pledged to help Deegan and urged his supporters to also come together to back her. He also turned during the concession speech to thank his wife Rebekah for her support during the grueling campaign.

 

All politics are local, as they say.  But you have to admit Ron DeSantis and the GOP had this state locked up just six months ago. Now, Jacksonville is the largest crack in that lock. And just as we've seen before, Democrats have outperformed in special elections in response to GOP extremism as they have since the Dobbs decision.

That's some good news, at least.

Last Call For Justice Served, Con't

US Attorney Rachael Rollins is out, resigning before a Justice Department watchdog report on an ethics investigation into her political fundraising appearances drops the hammer on her.

 

Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins will resign following a monthslong investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general into her appearance at a political fundraiser and other potential ethics issues, her attorney said Tuesday.

The Justice Department’s watchdog has yet to release its report detailing the findings of its investigation, but an attorney for Rollins told The Associated Press that she will be submitting a letter of resignation to President Joe Biden by close of business Friday.

The resignation of a U.S. attorney amid ethics concerns is an exceedingly rare phenomenon and is especially notable for a Justice Department that under Attorney General Merrick Garland has sought to restore a sense of normalcy and good governance following the turbulent four years of the Trump administration.

Rollins’ attorney said she has been “profoundly honored” to have serve as U.S. attorney and proud of her office’s work but “understands that her presence has become a distraction.” Attorney Michael Bromwich — a former Justice Department inspector general — said Rollins will make herself available to answer questions “after the dust settles and she resigns.”

“The work of the office and the Department of Justice is far too important to be overshadowed by anything else,” Bromwich said.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately comment Tuesday. The inspector general’s office declined to comment.

Rollins was a controversial pick to be Massachusetts’ top federal law enforcer and twice needed Vice President Kamala Harris to break a tie for her nomination to move forward in the Senate amid fierce opposition from Republicans, who painted her as a radical.

Before taking the high-profile U.S. attorney job, she was the top prosecutor for Suffolk County, which includes Boston. In her role there, sparred with Boston’s largest police union and pushed ambitious criminal justice changes, most notably a policy not to prosecute certain low-level crimes such as shoplifting.

She was the first woman of color to serve as a district attorney in Massachusetts and the first Black woman to become U.S. attorney for the state.

The Associated Press was the first to report in November that the inspector general’s office had opened an investigation into Rollins over her appearance last year at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser featuring first lady Jill Biden. The inspector general’s office generally investigates allegations of fraud, abuse or violation of other Justice Department policies.

People familiar with the investigation told the AP at the time that the probe had expanded into other areas, including Rollins’ use of her personal cellphone to conduct Justice Department business and a trip she took to California that was paid for by an outside group.

 

Calling Rollins's confirmation "controversial" is being generous. Senate Republicans wanted her gone from moment one, and now Rollins gave them the opening needed to take herself out of the game.

 

Not everyone is cut out to be a US attorney, it seems.

 

What really bothers me is that GOP Sen. Tom Cotton was right. Rollins was "uniquely unfit" for the position, not because of her criminal justice reform positions, but because she wasn't able to follow the goddamn rules.

Good riddance.

A Case Of Information Insecurity

Heads are set to roll after a suspect entered Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan's home, having gotten past his Secret Service detail undetected.

 

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how a man entered the home of President Biden’s national security adviser in the middle of the night roughly two weeks ago without being detected by agents guarding his house, according to three government officials.

The unknown man walked into Jake Sullivan’s home at about 3 a.m. one day in late April and Sullivan confronted the individual, instructing him to leave, two of the people briefed on the incident said. There were no signs of forced entry at the home, according to one of the people.

Sullivan has a round-the-clock Secret Service detail. But agents stationed outside the house were unaware that an intruder had gotten inside the home, located in the West End neighborhood of Washington, until the man had already left and Sullivan came outside to alert the agents, the two people said.

The intruder appeared to be intoxicated and confused about where he was, according to people briefed on the incident. There is no evidence the person knew Sullivan or sought to harm him, they said.

In a statement, the Secret Service said it has launched an investigation into the incident and how the intruder accessed Sullivan’s home undetected.

The agency said that it considered the security breach a matter of significant concern.

“While the protectee was unharmed, we are taking this matter seriously and have opened a comprehensive mission assurance investigation to review all facets of what occurred,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in the statement, in response to an inquiry from The Washington Post. “Any deviation from our protective protocols is unacceptable and if discovered, personnel will be held accountable.”

Guglielmi said the Secret Service has deployed additional security precautions for Sullivan and around his home, pending the completion of the investigation.

The White House declined to comment.

 

Pretty scary moment there and I'm glad nobody was hurt, but yes, the results of the investigation need to include the agents who allowed this to be put somewhere else. This is not a job you say "Well, oops" on especially when National Security Advisers have been targeted in the past.

Hopefully the investigation will offer improvements and better operational guideline for the next team.

Durham's Disastrous Dead End Dud

After more than four years, Justice Department Special Counsel John Durham has finally release the findings of his extensive investigation into the FBI's pursuit of Donald Trump and found...absolutely nothing actionable.

 

Special counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, according to a report compiled over three years by the Trump-administration appointee and released on Monday.

Durham’s 300-plus page report also states that the FBI used “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” to launch the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia but used a different standard when weighing concerns about alleged election interference regarding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The special counsel, however, did not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the (Justice) Department and FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham wrote.

The report also concludes that “at least on the part of certain personnel intimately involved in the matter” there was “a predisposition to open an investigation into Trump.”

Durham’s findings that the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign should not have happened are at odds with a previous Justice Department inspector general investigation into the FBI’s Russia probe, which identified problems with the investigation but concluded in December 2019 there was sufficient justification to open the inquiry.

Attorney General Merrick Garland sent Durham’s report to congressional lawmakers and released the report on Monday.

In a letter to Congress accompanying the report, Garland said, “Special Counsel Durham’s unclassified report is attached in full as submitted to me, without any additions, redactions, or other modifications.”

Durham’s conclusions condemning the FBI’s investigation into Trump is sure to fuel the debate about Russia, Trump, the FBI and the 2016 presidential election that is still swirling more than six years after and as Trump is campaigning once again for the White House.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan announced that he has reached out to the Department of Justice to have Durham testify next week.

 

Unlike Robert Mueller, John Durham came up completely empty on the cases he brought to trial, getting laughed out of court by juries, If the absolute best he can do is to say "Maybe the FBI shouldn't have looked into Trump-Russia because the feds played it fast and loose" and then not to bring up recommended individuals for charges and without any operational improvement suggestions at all, then it's Durham who was wasting everyone's time, not the FBI. 

Yes, Crossfire Hurricane had problems. No, the fashion in which it was carried out did not rise to criminal violations.

The Clown Circus will try to have hearings next week about it, but they'll be about a successful as the current Clown Circus hearing have been, which is "not at all."

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

A man showed up at the Fairfax, Virginia office of Democratic Rep. Jerry Connolly and when the office staff told him Connolly wasn't there, the man proceeded to beat the tar out of two staffers with a baseball bat, putting both of them in the hospital.

 

A person armed with a baseball bat attacked two congressional staff members at a district office in Representative Gerald E. Connolly, the congressman said in a statement.

Mr. Connolly, a Democrat, said the individual committed “an act of violence” at his Fairfax, Va., office against two members of his staff, who were taken to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Sgt. Lisa Gardner, a spokeswoman for the Fairfax City Police, said at a news conference on Monday afternoon that the assailant, a man who is believed to be a constituent of Mr. Connolly’s, walked into the office around 10:30 a.m. with what appeared to be a metal baseball bat and struck two staff members in the upper body.

Sergeant Gardner said that a motive was not immediately known, and that charges against the suspect, whose name was not immediately released, would be forthcoming.

Both staff members were conscious when the police arrived about five minutes after a 911 call, she said.

“You could absolutely tell that the people inside were scared, they were hiding,” she said.

“It’s quite frankly scary that someone can walk up to an office with a baseball bat and just start swinging at innocent victims,” she added.

Mr. Connolly represents a swath of the Northern Virginia suburbs west of Washington, D.C. He was first elected to Congress in 2008. In a statement after the attack, he said he has “the best team in Congress.”

“My district office staff make themselves available to constituents and members of the public every day,” Mr. Connolly said in the statement. “The thought that someone would take advantage of my staff’s accessibility to commit an act of violence is unconscionable and devastating.”

The attack comes amid a rise in threats and violent political speech against members of Congress in recent years. In October, an intruder bludgeoned Representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, inside their San Francisco home after he shouted “Where is Nancy?”

The most-watched network in America regularly calls Democrats frauds, crooks, and much worse on a regular basis, and the last guy in the Oval Office continues to do much the same and has for years. Somebody once again took up the right-wing stochastic terrorism noise machine on their call to cause violence to Democrats.

The violence will continue and only get worse, and the main thought I have is "If the suspect had brought an AR-15 instead of a baseball bat, we'd be having a far different conversation right now."

Back To The Water Cooler

It's 2023 now, and as predicted, after millions of us got remote jobs and work from home shifts over the last three years, the great Return To Office isn't much of a return.

The so-called “return to the office” has been underway for a while now, and it’s a bit of a mess. Sure, more people are going to the office more often than they were a year ago, but we’re still eons away from where we were before the pandemic. And despite the gains in office attendance, many office buildings themselves are in big trouble — some of which goes beyond remote work and started long before the pandemic.

So despite what you’re hearing from some bosses, things will likely never go back to the way they were.

First off, the push to return to the office is not that robust. For every high-profile company forcing workers to return to the office, another lets them work where they wish. Companies that have instituted return-to-office policies have backpedaled or failed to enforce them. Even New York City’s mayor, who’s been bullish on the return to the office and who mandated a five-day-a-week return-to-office policy last June, is reconsidering as the city struggles to fill empty jobs.

The pain this is causing in the commercial real estate world is already visible. As office owners struggle to lease space or fail to secure more financing, delinquency rates for office loans are at their highest rate — 2.8 percent — since the pandemic began, according to data from finance analytics firm Trepp. That’s partly due to rising interest rates and trouble at regional banks, which account for most commercial real estate lending. Some fear that the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic could spread to other regional banks and further hurt the office market. Converting offices to other uses is expensive, and the credit to do so is hard to come by. So as more office leases come up for renewal or more loans need refinancing, the number of delinquencies will continue to jump.

And that pain will not be isolated to office building owners. Big cities like New York are heavily reliant on property taxes, which fund a huge chunk of the city’s budget, so losses there affect everyone in the city. Then there are the many businesses and people who were reliant on daily traffic to and from offices for their own livelihoods. Some have predicted an “urban doom loop” in which fewer people and less money coming in means fewer amenities and poorer quality of life, which leads to even fewer people and less money and so on and so forth.

Some people will certainly still go into offices in the future. It just won’t be as many people or as often, which means the amount of office space needed will go down. And the office space they go to will generally need to be nicer. The continued availability of open office space as office owners struggle to rent it out makes it a tenants’ market, where companies in a “flight to quality” are able to be choosier about the offices they pick.

As of now, the data shows that a majority of workers who were able to work from home still do some (46 percent) or all (19 percent) of the time, according to the latest data from WFH Research. Before the pandemic, these numbers were in the single digits. Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom, who helps run the project, thinks the number of workers in hybrid situations might actually climb to around 60 percent, with most of the gains coming at the expense of people currently in the office full time. That outcome is already showing up in survey data, as companies who said their workers would be fully on-site last year are now switching to hybrid work.

The weak return-to-office movement means that a lot of office space is being left empty. In North America, office utilization — the number of spaces that are used as a percentage of all spaces available — is currently at about 21 percent, less than half what it was pre-pandemic, according to XY Sense, a company that uses sensors to track office occupancy. That’s consistent with data from key card swipe company Kastle, which shows US office occupancy levels to be at 50 percent of its pre-pandemic levels.

 

Now, that's not stopping business media from publishing scare stories about how if you don't return to the office now, you'll lose that promotion, or lose your job to AI or get fired for using at home and sure, some of that may happen, but at this point there's a permanent shift to a much larger percentage of workers working in remote work than before the pandemic.

More and more Americans want remote positions, and they are getting them.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

Turns out part of those Discord leaks from last month where an Air Force reservist allegedly blabbed US military documents on Ukraine to his right-wing gaming buddies included information on PMC outfit Wagner Group offering to help Ukrainian forces because the Russians left the Wagner mercs they bought  high and dry to die in Bakhmut.

 

In late January, with his mercenary forces dying by the thousands in a fight for the ruined city of Bakhmut, Wagner Group owner Yevgeniy Prigozhin made Ukraine an extraordinary offer.

Prigozhin said that if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, he would give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions, which Ukraine could use to attack them. Prigozhin conveyed the proposal to his contacts in Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, with whom he has maintained secret communications during the course of the war, according to previously unreported U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the group-chat platform Discord.

Prigozhin has publicly feuded with Russian military commanders, who he furiously claims have failed to equip and resupply his forces, which have provided vital support to Moscow’s war effort. But he is also an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who might well regard Prigozhin’s offer to trade the lives of Wagner fighters for Russian soldiers as a treasonous betrayal.

The leaked document does not make clear which Russian troop positions Prigozhin offered to disclose.

Two Ukrainian officials confirmed that Prigozhin has spoken several times to the Ukrainian intelligence directorate, known as HUR. One official said that Prigozhin extended the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once, but that Kyiv rejected it because officials don’t trust Prigozhin and thought his proposals could have been disingenuous.

A U.S. official also cautioned that there are similar doubts in Washington about Prigozhin’s intentions. The Ukrainian and U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

In an interview with The Washington Post this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would not confirm the contacts with Prigozhin. “This is a matter of [military] intelligence,” he said. The Ukrainian leader also objected to airing classified information publicly and said he believed that the leaks had benefited Russia.

But there is no debating Prigozhin’s bitter frustration with the grinding fight in Bakhmut. He has complained, publicly and privately, that the Russian Defense Ministry has not given his fighters the ammunition and other resources they need to succeed. Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, has seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Over the past few months, in a grinding back and forth measured by city blocks, Ukrainian and Russian forces have taken steep casualties.

Prigozhin, who promised to take control of the city by May 9, in time for Russia’s Victory Day celebrations, has recently threatened publicly to pull his forces out of the fight.

Other leaked documents reveal Russian Defense Ministry officials privately wondering how to respond to Prigozhin’s criticism of the military’s performance and his demands for more resources, which they apparently conceded were not illegitimate grievances. The documents also speak to a power struggle between Prigozhin and top officials, including Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Against that tense backdrop, Prigohzin has carried on a secret relationship with Ukrainian intelligence that, in addition to phone calls, includes in-person meetings with HUR officers in an unspecified country in Africa, one document states. Wagner forces provide security to several governments on the continent.

The leaked U.S. intelligence shows Prigozhin bemoaning the heavy toll that fighting has taken on his own forces and urging Ukraine to strike harder against Russian troops.

 

Now, don't get me wrong, using mercenary groups composed of veterans in wars to bolster troops is a military strategy as old as human warfare itself. But so is turning on your employer when you leave the mercs in a hole to sacrifice themselves to save your own men.

War, war never changes, as the man once said.

Last Call For Comer Chameleon, Con't

Republican Rep. James Comer is rapidly advancing in the "dimmest bulb in the House GOP leadership" contest, and it's not even close.

 

Rep. James Comer (R-KY) revealed on Sunday that Republicans had lost track of a top witness in the investigation of President Joe Biden and his family.

During an interview on Fox News, host Maria Bartiromo asked Comer about evidence he had of Biden's alleged corruption.

"You have spoken with whistleblowers," she noted. "You also spoke with an informant who gave you all of this information. Where is that informant today? Where are these whistleblowers?"

"Well, unfortunately, we can't track down the informant," Comer replied. "We're hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible."

"Hold on a second, Congressman," Bartiromo said. "Did you just say that the whistleblower or the informant is now missing?"

"Well, we we're hopeful that we can find the informant," Comer said, explaining the informant was in the "spy business" and "they don't make a habit of being seen a lot."

"The nine of the ten people that we've identified that have very good knowledge with respect to the Bidens," he added, "they're one of three things, Maria, they're either currently in court, they're currently in jail, or they're currently missing.

 

Oopsie. We misplaced the whistleblower that doesn't actually exist for the Biden "crime" that also doesn't exist because this was all investigated by these same Republican three years ago!

 

Comer wasn't chosen as House Oversight chair because of his brains, he was chosen because he's good on TV and better at fundraising and McCarthy owed him a favor.

 

He has nothing on Biden. None of them do. But they are going to bluff it again like they did three years ago and somehow they are guessing it will work now when it failed last time because...people forgot?

I don't know. Seems like a crap-ass plan to me.

Sunday Long Read: The Mother Of All Card Games

Author Ian Frisch tells the story of his mother in today's Sunday Long Read, who took up new, old vocation after Ian's father died in order to support her family: competitive poker.

My mother learned how to play as a teen, from a group of guy friends at her Massachusetts high school, and it wasn’t long before she began playing competitively. She moved to Houston in her early twenties and played there, too, primarily sticking to underground games. But she stopped after marrying my father, moving near her hometown, and giving birth to me and my sister, all in quick succession. My mother abandoned that aspect of her identity in the face of new responsibilities and for the rewards of family life. But she always stowed a deck of cards in our junk drawer. She taught me how to play at our dining-room table, a flash of her former life trickling into motherhood.

By 2000, when I turned thirteen, my father’s tile business was flourishing. That year, he and my mother finished building a wide-set, two-story colonial with a sunny kitchen and a deck that overlooked the broad backyard: their American dream home. Then, eight months later, my father suddenly died—a stroke on the small yellow couch in the living room. He and my mother had worked for so long to save up for that house, had managed to secure a mortgage they weren’t quite qualified for even while he was alive. And now our family had no income.

My mother realized that the best way she could pay the bills on time was to start playing poker again. She ran the numbers: She could make more money at the card table than at the minimum-wage jobs that were the alternative. She reunited with cards like long-lost best friends—passionately, longingly, both nostalgic and hopeful. She began chasing games wherever she could find them: inside basements with underground tables in our area, in regulated card rooms in New Hampshire, at high-stakes tournaments in Connecticut casinos. She played on weekdays and weekends, logging enough hours most weeks to count it as a full-time job.

My sister and I supported her eccentric vocation. Our mother was home every day when we returned from school—a small token of stability in a household that needed it. Most evenings, she left us at home, but we didn’t mind; dinner was always waiting for us in the refrigerator, our clothes were always washed and folded, the house was always clean. Most mornings, on my way out the door for school, I’d spot the previous night’s earnings spilling out of her purse. The routine became normal for me. She never spoke to us in such terms, not then, but family survival was what motivated her—to save the home that stood as a physical manifestation of her and my father’s upward mobility, to not give up on all she’d accomplished so far. And she always seemed to come out ahead, each year taking home roughly $25,000 in winnings.

My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.

To some people, poker is just a card game, a way to pass the time. For me and my mother, it’s a window into our identity, our way of understanding a world that at times can seem unforgiving. I began joining my mother in basement games around town in 2003, when I was sixteen. Ever since, poker has formed a bond between us, a mutual love, a prism through which I can see her not just as my mother but as a three-dimensional person who carries deep heartache and immense responsibility. Though it took me years to realize it, I now understand exactly how high the stakes were each time she sat down at a card table: It was the only way she knew how to keep living. 

 

I will say that Zandarmom is the better poker player in my family, she's always been good at reading people. Zandardad is pretty decent, and my brother can't bluff to save his life because he always laughs when he tries to tell a lie.

Here's to the moms out there doing what they have to do every day to get by.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is covering his tracks when it comes to travel outside the state, because apparently running for president on the campaign trail means the last thing you want people to know is where you are.

With a stroke of a pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis concealed his travel records – past, present and future – from public scrutiny at the same time he’s made frequent trips outside the state as a prelude to a possible presidential campaign kick-off.

It was difficult to trace the governor’s travel before he signed the bill into law Thursday night, which went into effect immediately. Hundreds of requests for the records going back more than a year are still in the pipeline.

Now it will be even harder, First Amendment advocates said.

“The retroactivity makes it such that we’re not going to get anything related to his travel,” said Michael Barfield, director of public access for the Florida Center for Government Accountability.

The bill, approved along party lines in both chambers, exempts travel records maintained by law enforcement agencies for the governor, his immediate family, the lieutenant governor, Cabinet members, legislative leaders and other dignitaries.

It also shields the names of guests to the governor’s mansion on non-government business.

While the bill applies to pending requests, a spokeswoman with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which maintains those records, said they will not be expunged.

“We’re still going to process requests like we always have,” Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said, denying that any pending requests are going to automatically be denied. “If there’s an exemption, we’ll apply it.”

When a record comes up, the FDLE’s public records officers pull it and review it to see if anything needs redaction. Each report is reviewed in the order received, Plessinger said.

“Once a request is received it can take a few months to review because of the volume of requests,” she said.

FDLE has over 700 requests on the backlog, some asking for investigations, member emails, as well as travel records, she said.

Reporters and the public will still be able to get the cost of security and travel, but not details such as which hotels they stay in because they frequently return to the same hotels, she said.

The annual reports summarizing the cost of travel and security for the governor, his family and other state officials and dignitaries will continue to be published, she said.

Republicans, who hold a supermajority in both chambers, said the law was needed to ensure the safety and security of the governor and other officials, as well as the officers who protect them when they travel. The exemption would prevent people from mapping out their future movements as well.

 

The trouble to have his party craft legislation to specifically hide who state officers meet with means apparently it's none of Florida's business who DeSantis does business with, and protecting DeSantis from having to tell voters is crucial enough to make a law prohibiting it.

Voters should respond by throwing the lot of them out of office.

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

House Republicans passed a DOA immigration bill Thursday that would add thousands of Border patrol agents and force the government to finish Trump's idiotic wall, and now the Clown Car is demanding that the bill become law as part of debt ceiling hostage nonsense or they'll crater the economy and send us into a recession.

 

Key GOP lawmakers are signaling they want border policies in the mix as congressional leadership and the White House try to negotiate a debt ceiling deal, the day after Republicans passed a sweeping border and immigration bill. It was a GOP wishlist that included restarting construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall and placing new restrictions on asylum seekers.

“We passed the bill that I think does the job. … And by the way, I think this is now a central part of any debt ceiling or spending debate for the remainder of the year,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said in an interview on Friday.

“Every day that the President continues to dilly dally, in my mind, the price goes up, not down. … You want a debt ceiling increase? You want to go fund the operations of government? Then fix the damn border, Mr. President,” Roy added.

And it’s not just Roy. One of McCarthy’s top deputies, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), pointed to the border bill and said Republicans are “bringing more ideas to the table.”

“The House has now added more to the mix,” Graves said in a separate interview Friday. “With yesterday passing the immigration bill — which doesn't just secure America, doesn't just save lives from fentanyl overdose, but also saves tens of billions of dollars in wasted money as a result of this administration's careless border policy.”

Republicans aren’t yet demanding specifics on which border provisions they want to see in a potential debt ceiling deal, instead pointing to their recently passed bill more broadly. That, of course, has no chance at passing the Senate.

But Roy, who said he wasn’t going to negotiate publicly, said that he was “not alone” in viewing it as a key issue in the negotiations now. He said they’d also want to bring it up during talks about government spending, with a shutdown deadline at the end of September.

 

Understand that if Biden and the Dems give in now, House Republicans will only keep increasing their demands until the country's economy shatters and tens of millions are made to suffer.

 

 

Do Federal Public Corruption Charges Matter Anymore?

I ask the above question for two reasons this week, first as the public corruption investigation into NJ Dem Sen. Bob Menendez is expanding with more subpoenas...

Another round of federal grand jury subpoenas went out this week in connection with the corruption investigation into Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

Two sources familiar with the matter said at least one powerful New Jersey politician — North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco — was among those who received subpoenas.

A North Bergen spokesman said, “As they always have, Mayor Sacco and the Township of North Bergen will comply with any inquiry they receive from law enforcement and will cooperate fully.”

For months, Menendez has been under criminal investigation into whether he and his wife improperly took cash and gifts from the owners of IS EG Halal, an Edgewater halal meat business.

Menendez and the company’s owners have denied any wrongdoing.

“I know of an investigation. Don’t know the scope or the subjects and of course stand ready to help authorities when and if they ask any questions,” Menendez said in October.

A Menendez spokesman declined to comment.

The newly issued subpoenas — including the one delivered to Sacco — are unrelated to any allegations involving the meat company and Menendez, the two sources said.

The sources added that the subpoenas in part seek information about certain legislative changes in New Jersey, but they did not offer details.

The subpoena for Sacco, a Democrat, was issued Wednesday, a day after he was re-elected mayor.

Sacco’s spokesman said, “We do not feel that it would be appropriate to offer any additional comment at this time.”

An FBI spokesman and a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of Southern New York, whose office is leading the federal investigation, declined to comment.

I mention the Menendez public corruption investigation for the reason that the Roberts Court this week overturned not one but two public corruption convictions in New York.

The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out two fraud convictions during Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration in New York, dealing prosecutors the latest in a series of setbacks in their efforts to pursue federal charges of public corruption in state government.

The cases were among the blockbuster public corruption prosecutions brought by Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, that fed into Albany’s reputation as a cesspool of corruption.

One case concerned Joseph Percoco, a former aide to Mr. Cuomo convicted of taking illicit payments to benefit a Syracuse-area developer.

The other involved Louis Ciminelli, the owner of a Buffalo construction firm convicted of fraud in a bid-rigging scandal in connection with Buffalo Billion, a development project championed by Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat.

The question in the first, Percoco v. United States, No. 21-1158, was whether Mr. Percoco could be prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime to deprive the government of “honest services” for conduct that took place after he resigned his official position to run the governor’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Alito threw that conviction out because Percoco wasn't in the government at the time, but the second case applies broadly to the Menendez investigation.

The prosecutors’ legal theory was that Mr. Ciminelli had committed fraud by depriving the government of its “right to control” the use of its assets by failing to disclose potentially valuable information.

By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, though, the government had disavowed the theory. That made for an awkward argument when the justices heard the case in November, one focused on how and how badly the government was going to lose.

Justice Thomas, writing for the court, said flatly that “the right-to-control theory is invalid,” returning the case to the appeals court for further proceedings.

“Because the theory treats mere information as the protected interest, almost any deceptive act could be criminal,” he wrote.

In other words, the government's use of public corruption laws just got torched. Even if somehow the investigation involves charges against Menendez, this court will overturn the conviction down the road. At this point, bribery and fraud in government service is now perfectly legal because the Supreme Court has declared the theory that misuse of taxpayer resources is fraud is invalid. 

So yeah, if I'm Menendez's lawyers, I tell the Justice Department that this conviction would be overturned, so there's no point in the investigation.

Whether or not that's true, well..

The Uncivil Right's Act

When I keep telling readers that the GOP wants the end of the Civil Rights Era and to eliminate six decades of protections and advancements for Black, Latino, and Asian folks, LBGTQ+ folks, and women, it is not hyperbole or metaphor or theoretical, I literally mean the Black Republican who is North Carolina's current Lt. Governor is running for Governor and wants to reverse the entire Civil Rights era and wants to remove these protections in my home state.

 

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the state’s first Black lieutenant governor and the GOP front-runner for the 2024 gubernatorial race, repeatedly lambasted the “so-called” 1960s Civil Rights Movement, lamenting that “so many freedoms were lost during the civil rights movement.”

In a CNN KFile review of his media appearances over the last five years, Robinson baselessly claimed that the Civil Rights Movement was a communist plot to “subvert capitalism” and used “to subvert free choice and where you go to school and things like that.”

“So many things were lost during the Civil Rights Movement. So many freedoms were lost during the Civil Rights Movement. They shouldn’t have been lost,” Robinson said in a March 2018 podcast episode.

Robinson made many of the comments on the podcast “Politics and Prophecy” with host Chris Levels on Freedomizer Radio, a station whose slogan says “Freedomists Freedomizing Freedom.” Levels is a conspiracy theorist who has shared 9/11 truther posts on Facebook, called the Olympics an illuminati event from Satan and shared posts saying Jews control nearly everything in society.

Robinson’s previously unreported comments criticizing the Civil Rights Movement starkly contrast the rhetoric he recently espoused highlighting his hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, as “an epicenter of the Civil Rights’ Movement.” Greensboro was home to the Woolworth lunch counter sit-in-protests in 1960 started by four Black students, one of whom – Clarence Henderson – Robinson later befriended after launching his political career.

Robinson is currently seen as the GOP favorite for North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, where he will likely face Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general. The current Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, is term-limited.

After publication, Robinson published a video with Clarence Henderson, a civil rights icon, saying that he “couldn’t be more proud” of Henderson’s work in the Civil Rights Movement and now. Robinson ended the video by saying, “I’ll tell you what. You made history in this state once before. I’m gonna make history again.”

Prior to his political career, Robinson frequently referred to the civil rights’ era as the “so-called Civil Rights Movement” and criticized the Greensboro lunch counter protests as a “ridiculous premise” designed to pull “the rug out from underneath capitalism and free choice and the free market.”

“You talk about the sit-in movement. We’re in a free market system. So we’ve got a place called Woolworth in Greensboro that won’t serve Blacks at the lunch counter. What do you do? You go down there and you sit at the lunch counter and you demand for these people to take your money. How crazy is that?” said Robinson in March 2018. “That’s not what you do in a free market system. What you do in a free market system is you just say, ‘Hey guys, these guys don’t treat people fair. Do not eat here.’”

 

Mark Robinson is absolutely a very real threat to anyone who isn't white, straight, or Christian, and living proof that white supremacy can absolutely be served by someone who isn't white. And yes, He's most likely going to be the GOP candidate to succeed Roy Cooper and he'll get 45% of the vote guaranteed because this won't be a dealbreaker for Republican voters in the state.

Millions will believe him and vote for him.