StupidiNews!

• The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments today on an Arizona case that could end up being the impetus for the 6-3 conservative Roberts Court to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
• New York Democratic Rep. Kathleen Rice is calling on NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign in the wake of a third allegation of sexual harassment and news that he is now under state investigation.
• The Biden administration is expected to announce new sanctions against Russia this week for the poisoning of Moscow opposition leader and Putin critic Alexey Navalny.
• Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been found guilty of corruption, facing a year in prison, Sarkozy plans to appeal the ruling.
• The results of the Biden administration's new carbon policy is a dramatically higher "social cost" of carbon than under the Trump regime, meaning stronger federal regulations on emissions.
  

Last Call For Eating The Rich

Sen. Liz Warren is taking aim at the pandemic billionaires with a new tax proposal that would levy taxes on people with more than $50 million in wealth.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced legislation on Monday that would tax the net worth of the wealthiest people in America, a proposal aimed at persuading President Biden and other Democrats to fund sweeping new federal spending programs by taxing the richest Americans.

Ms. Warren’s wealth tax would apply a 2 percent tax to individual net worth — including the value of stocks, houses, boats and anything else a person owns, after subtracting out any debts — above $50 million. It would add an additional 1 percent surcharge for net worth above $1 billion. It is co-sponsored in the House by two Democratic representatives, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Brendan F. Boyle of Pennsylvania, a moderate.

The proposal, which mirrors the plan Ms. Warren unveiled while seeking the 2020 presidential nomination, is not among the top revenue-raisers that Democratic leaders are considering to help offset Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure, education, child care, clean energy deployment, health care and other domestic initiatives. Unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Biden pointedly did not endorse a wealth tax in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

But Ms. Warren is pushing colleagues to pursue such a plan, which has gained popularity with the public as the richest Americans reap huge gains while 10 million Americans remain out of work as a result of the pandemic.

Polls have consistently shown Ms. Warren’s proposal winning the support of more than three in five Americans, including a majority of Republican voters.

“A wealth tax is popular among voters on both sides for good reason: because they understand the system is rigged to benefit the wealthy and large corporations,” Ms. Warren said. “As Congress develops additional plans to help our economy, the wealth tax should be at the top of the list to help pay for these plans because of the huge amounts of revenue it would generate.”

 

It's a popular plan.

 

It also has no chance whatsoever of even passing the House, let alone the Senate, and even if it did, it would never survive the Roberts Court. 

So, like universal firearms background checks, raising the means testing limit on Social Security checks, and Election day as a holiday, this too will never pass until Republicans actually start losing elections because of these things.

And right now, the GOP is all Trump, all day.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

As Trump spent what seemed like hours at his CPAC speech on Sunday spewing more of the Big Lie -- how the election was "stolen" -- it's important to remember than Republicans who remain in power are echoing him and white supremacist terrorist groups by openly talking of secession and formation of a white ethnostate, and introducing legislation calling for leaving the country.

 

Trump made it very clear the fate that awaits the Republicans left who have not sworn fealty.

After days of insisting they could paper over their intraparty divisions, Republican lawmakers were met with a grim reminder of the challenge ahead on Sunday when former President Donald J. Trump stood before a conservative conference and ominously listed the names of Republicans he is targeting for defeat.

As Democrats pursue a liberal agenda in Washington, the former president’s grievances over the 2020 election continue to animate much of his party, more than a month after he left office and nearly four months since he lost the election. Many G.O.P. leaders and activists are more focused on litigating false claims about voting fraud in last year’s campaign, assailing the technology companies that deplatformed Mr. Trump and punishing lawmakers who broke with him over his desperate bid to retain power.

In an address on Sunday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, his first public appearance since he left the White House, Mr. Trump read a sort of hit list of every congressional Republican who voted to impeach him, all but vowing revenge.

“The RINOs that we’re surrounded with will destroy the Republican Party and the American worker and will destroy our country itself,” he said, a reference to the phrase “Republicans In Name Only,” adding that he would be “actively working to elect strong, tough and smart Republican leaders.”

Mr. Trump took special care to single out Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader. He called Ms. Cheney “a warmonger” and said her “poll numbers have dropped faster than any human being I’ve ever seen.” Then he falsely claimed he had helped revive Mr. McConnell’s campaign last year in Kentucky. 

 It gets far worse when you realize Trump has spent months telling Republicans that elections can't be trusted, and he did so again on Sunday.

Yet even as he dutifully read his scripted attacks on his successor, the former president drew louder applause for pledging to purge his Republican antagonists from the party.

“Get rid of them all,” he said. 

 

"Get rid of them all" is not an idle threat.

 

As author Casey Michel tells us, this is all part of justifying more brutal violence like the US Capitol terrorist attack, and Texas is ground zero. Not only do they want Republican "traitors" dealt with, they want to deal with the rest of us, too.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Texas is leading this charge. As The Daily Beast reported, a Texas state lawmaker — one who attended the Capitol rally on Jan. 6 and claimed it was “the most amazing day” — recently filed the first serious secession bill the country has seen since the Civil War. The Texas Republican Party promptly endorsed the bill, which would give Texans the right to vote in a secession referendum later this year, with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refusing to denounce the legislation.

Of course, state-level secession remains illegal in the U.S.; as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2006, “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.” But that hasn’t stopped conservatives from defending the bill, claiming that it’s simply giving Texans a “voice.” (It’s unclear if these figures think Texans should be able to vote on other illegal acts in the interest of expressing their voice.)

While much of the secessionist rhetoric remains couched in claims about things like fiscal responsibility and burdensome federal regulations, it doesn’t take much to discern the ethno-nationalism driving the push. Just like so much of Trumpian America, secession in places like Texas is rooted in a combination of nativism, xenophobia and white racial grievance. Texas secession Facebook pages are saturated with fantasies of forcing Democrats to leave the state, seizing their property and forcing them to “convert” (to what is unclear). Just like the Confederates before them, this modern secessionist ethos is rooted at least in large part in maintaining white supremacy and authoritarian governance, regardless of the costs.

On their own, the increasing marriage of secessionist chatter and GOP ideology would be cause enough for concern. But this month’s disastrous winter storm in Texas also points to how idiotic such secessionist dreams truly are. Thanks to an electric grid carved out separately from the rest of the country, Texas remained effectively stranded while storms wrought rolling blackouts, boil-water advisories and dozens of deaths thus far. Scenes reminiscent of catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina illustrated what state-level collapse looks like in modern America.

Thanks to the devastating storms, Texas secessionists have gone quiet for now. Meanwhile, regular Texans have begun looking to the federal government for help, with Washington already announcing plans for federal disaster assistance. As it should.

But imagine, for instance, if Texas somehow managed to declare independence in the near future. Rather than simply carrying on with the status quo ante, as many secessionists and increasing numbers of Republicans appear to assume, any independence push would presumably shut off the federal tap, which currently sends Texas tens of billions of dollars more than it receives from the state. A successful secession push would likewise (and presumably) send industry, spooked by political instability, scattering, gutting Texas’s vibrant economy.

Along the way, millions of patriotic Americans would promptly uproot, taking their skills elsewhere, exacerbating knock-on economic struggles. Washington would probably try to dissuade other states from joining Texas by placing punitive economic measures — blocking Social Security checks, imposing new tariffs and removing federal installations, perhaps even launching a naval blockade — on the breakaway region. Texas would be, in effect, stranded.

And this isn’t even touching on the political violence that could ensue. Given that Texas’s economic powerhouses remain the primarily Democratic cities of Houston, Austin, and Dallas — and that America’s primary political divides remain on an urban-rural axis — who knows how messy that could get. (In other words, blinkered liberals should stop trying to thoughtlessly encourage GOP secessionism.)

All of which is to say: The devastation in Texas highlights but a small sample of how awful an actual secession push would likely be. As University of Houston Professor Robert Zaretsky wrote this month, the “spirit of secessionism… carries terrible human costs.” And he’s exactly right. It’s a terrible proposal, with terrible consequences, of which Texas is getting but a taste right now. 

 

Again, we live in an era where one party is "radical" for wanting civil rights, and the other party is radical for wanting white rights. The parties are not the same, and anyone saying it after the last four years is part of the problem.

March Begins With April Haines

President Biden's Director of National Intelligence, April Haines, has four years worth of Trump regime disasters to deal with, and it's a Herculean task for any one person. Luckily, she'll be joined by a top team at CIA, FBI, and NSA...once those nominations are done in the weeks ahead.

 

As the top U.S. intelligence official for just over a month, Avril Haines has an overflowing inbox.

A massive computer hack blamed on Russia is still under investigation. President Biden has raised the possibility of rejoining a nuclear agreement with Iran. And right before Haines sat down Friday with a team from NPR, for her first interview in office, aides handed out a report she'd just declassified: it said Saudi Arabia's crown prince was responsible for the brutal 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Haines has taken over after a turbulent time. Former President Donald Trump was frequently at odds with his handpicked national security team when its assessments did not fit his preferred narrative. During his one-term presidency, he had five directors of national intelligence.

"I think it has been a challenging time, particularly for the office of the director of national intelligence," Haines told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, co-host of All Things Considered. "There was a lot of turnover during the last administration and I think, more generally, that intelligence analysis wasn't necessarily being appreciated in the same way that it normally had been in the past."

"It looked to me from the outside as if there were political pressures being put on the intelligence community," she added.

Asked if that was something that could be easily fixed, she said, "Clearly not. I think this is one of those things where it's so much about the culture of the institution that gets damaged in those moments. And it's one of the hardest things to course correct."

Haines did not criticize members of the Trump administration by name, and described her immediate predecessor, John Ratcliffe, as "very good to me, very civil" during the transition in January.

Haines wore a navy blue mask throughout the interview at the Office for the Director of National Intelligence, part of a compound that's hidden away ever-so-slightly from the highways and shopping malls of suburban Washington.

She's had a longstanding working relationship with Biden. Haines became a lawyer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2007, when Biden was a Delaware senator and committee chairman. She followed Biden to the White House, working on the National Security Council when he was vice president. She also served in the No. 2 position at the CIA from 2013-15.

Now she's going to the White House on weekday mornings to oversee the president's daily intelligence briefing. She says she'll be joined by William Burns, the nominee to head the CIA, when he's confirmed by the Senate, which appears likely within days.

"You have now a president who very much wants to hear what you have to say, regardless of whether or not it's consistent with his particular policy views or any of those things," said Haines. 

 

And that's the main thing: Biden actually listens to people. Still, the intelligence community has an active burning toxic waste fire to clean up, and the Russians and Chinese have compromised us so badly, we may not be able to do it for decades.

Remember, it all started with one man who decided that America's intelligence agencies needed to be destroyed...

StupidiNews!

• Two Florida suspects have been arrested in southern Georgia after a manhunt left one deputy in critical condition after the suspects fled a traffic stop near Orlando.
• The Biden Administration will appeal a Texas federal judge's ruling blocking a CDC moratorium on evictions due to COVID-19 health reasons.
• Johnson & Johnson's single-shot vaccine has CDC approval and the vaccine is "close" to shipping to several states nationally in March.
• Australia's government is under siege as a rape allegation against one cabinet minister comes after the victim took her own life last June, and calls are growing for PM Scott Morrison to step in.
• Cyber-security experts are warning that the Russian-backed hacker group Sandworm, which triggered blackouts in Ukraine five years ago, has had access to the US power grid for years.
  

Last Call For Un-Vaccination Nation

As The Atlantic's Derek Thompson notes, the roughly one-quarter to one-third of Americans that are actively refusing a COVID-19 vaccine have multiple different reasons for not trusting or wanting it for them or their families, and finding the alchemical formula for convincing them otherwise is the major public health issue of our time.

Why wouldn’t someone want a COVID-19 vaccine?

Staring at the raw numbers, it doesn’t seem like a hard choice. Thousands of people are dying of COVID-19 every day. Meanwhile, out of the 75,000 people who received a shot in the vaccine trials from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax, zero died and none were hospitalized after four weeks. As the United States screams past 500,000 fatalities, the choice between a deadly disease and a shot in the arm might seem like the easiest decision in the world.

Or not. One-third of American adults said this month that they don’t want the vaccine or are undecided about whether they’ll get one. That figure has declined in some polls. But it remains disconcertingly high among Republicans, young people, and certain minority populations. In pockets of vaccine hesitancy, the coronavirus could continue to spread, kill, mutate, and escape. That puts all of us at risk.

Last week, I called several doctors and researchers to ask how we could reverse vaccine hesitancy among the groups in which it was highest. They all told me that my initial question was too simplistic. “Vaccine hesitancy” isn’t one thing, they said. It is a constellation of motivations, insecurities, reasonable fears, and less reasonable conspiracy theories.

“I call it vaccine dissent,” Kolina Koltai, who studies online conspiracy theories at the University of Washington, told me. “And it’s way more complicated than being anti-vaccine. It goes from highly educated parents who are interested in holistic, naturalistic child-rearing to conspiracy theorists who want to abolish vaccines entirely.”

“I call it vaccine deliberation,” said Giselle Corbie-Smith, a professor at the University of North Carolina and the director of the UNC Center for Health Equity Research. “For Black and Brown people, this is a time of watchful waiting. It’s a skepticism of a system that has consistently demonstrated that their health is not a priority.”

“It’s not vaccine hesitancy among American Indians, but rather hesitancy and distrust regarding the entire government,” said Margaret Moss, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia School of Nursing and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota. “After decades of distrust, on top of centuries of genocide, now they appear and say, ‘Here, you have to take this!’”

Let’s not forget vaccine indifference. Two-thirds of Republicans under 30 without a college degree say that they are “not concerned at all” about COVID-19 in their area, according to polling from Civiqs. The same percentage of this group says that they won’t take the vaccine, making them the most vaccine-resistant cohort among all of those surveyed.

Dissent. Deliberation. Distrust. Indifference. Vaccine hesitancy is not one thing. It’s a portfolio. And we’re going to need a portfolio of strategies to solve it.

Kolina Koltai has been studying online disinformation since 2015, with a special focus on anti-vaccine groups on Facebook. “People come into the space for a variety of reasons,” she said. “At first, it was mostly parents, more women than men, and overwhelmingly white, ranging from stay-at-home moms to people with high levels of education who wanted a naturalistic upbringing for their child.” The group didn’t initially have a political lean. But in the past few years, Republican politicians have played more directly to anti-vaccine fears, pulling these groups to the right.

Today, resistance among the GOP seems to be the most significant problem for vaccinating the country. Just half of Republicans say that they plan to get the shot, while the share of pro-vaccine Democrats has increased to more than 80 percent.

Online denialism and conspiracy theorizing about the COVID-19 vaccine is more complex than previous anti-vaccine skepticism, Koltai said. “Crisis often breeds conspiracies, and the extended nature of this public-health crisis has given conspiratorial people lots of time to build elaborate theories,” she told me. Beyond the more outlandish theories—for example, that Bill Gates is using the shots to inject Americans with his microchips—she said that most online skepticism is more prosaic. People claim that the vaccine trials were rushed and shoddy. They worry about the long-term side effects of a newfangled chemical that monkeys around with our cells. They read news reports of people getting sick after having taken the shots, and become afraid.

“You shouldn’t say that people are idiots for believing false or misleading information, because they’re not idiots,” she said. “That’s part of what makes this such a hard problem to solve.”

 

This is the country that gave us Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. This is also the country that gave us the Tuskeegee Experiment and gave smallpox-laden blankets to Native Americans, and to this day uneven health outcomes for people of color continue to exist.

 

There are reasons for distrust. But there's also a lot of disinformation out there, and there are also more than 500,000 Americans dead.

That last part is the most important and why we need to solve this problem, and it's going to take a multi-directional, multi-disciplinary solution.

Another #MeToo Moment, Con't

A second former aide has accused New York Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, as state Republicans (and not a small number of Democrats) call for his resignation and/or impeachment over COVID-19 spread in nursing homes.

 

A second former aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is accusing him of sexual harassment, saying that he asked her questions about her sex life, whether she was monogamous in her relationships and if she had ever had sex with older men.

The aide, Charlotte Bennett, who was an executive assistant and health policy adviser in the Cuomo administration until she left in November, told The New York Times that the governor had harassed her late last spring, during the height of the state’s fight against the coronavirus.

Ms. Bennett, 25, said the most unsettling episode occurred on June 5, when she was alone with Mr. Cuomo in his State Capitol office. In a series of interviews this week, she said the governor had asked her numerous questions about her personal life, including whether she thought age made a difference in romantic relationships, and had said that he was open to relationships with women in their 20s — comments she interpreted as clear overtures to a sexual relationship.

Mr. Cuomo said in a statement to The Times on Saturday that he believed he had been acting as a mentor and had “never made advances toward Ms. Bennett, nor did I ever intend to act in any way that was inappropriate.” He said he had requested an independent review of the matter and asked that New Yorkers await the findings “before making any judgments.”

Ms. Bennett said that during the June encounter, the governor, 63, also complained to her about being lonely during the pandemic, mentioning that he “can’t even hug anyone,” before turning the focus to Ms. Bennett. She said that Mr. Cuomo asked her, “Who did I last hug?”

Ms. Bennett said she had tried to dodge the question by responding that she missed hugging her parents. “And he was, like, ‘No, I mean like really hugged somebody?’” she said.

Mr. Cuomo never tried to touch her, Ms. Bennett said, but the message of the entire episode was unmistakable to her.

“I understood that the governor wanted to sleep with me, and felt horribly uncomfortable and scared,” Ms. Bennett said. “And was wondering how I was going to get out of it and assumed it was the end of my job.”

 

Cuomo said he wants a full, fair, and independent investigation into the matter and has asked state AG Tisha James and Janet DiFiore, the state's Chief Judge of the state's Court of Appeals, to do just that.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has asked the state's attorney general and chief appeals court judge to jointly appoint an independent lawyer to investigate claims that he sexually harassed at least two women who worked for him. 

The move came after legislative leaders assailed Cuomo's plan to appoint a retired federal judge to conduct the probe.

“The Governor’s Office wants a review of the sexual harassment claims made against the Governor to be done in a manner beyond reproach,” Beth Garvey, special counsel to the governor, said. “We had selected former Federal Judge Barbara Jones, with a stellar record for qualifications and integrity, but we want to avoid even the perception of a lack of independence or inference of politics."

Garvey said the Democratic governor's administration has asked Attorney General Letitia James and Janet DiFiore, chief judge of the Court of Appeals, “to jointly select an independent and qualified lawyer in private practice without political affiliation to conduct a thorough review of the matter and issue a public report.”

Garvey said the report “will be solely controlled by that independent lawyer personally selected by the Attorney General and Chief Judge.”

 

Tish James is calling BS on this, as state law makes it clear that it's her call. Cuomo has to face the music sooner rather than later, resignation, impeachment, or election.

Or indictment. 

It's ironic that Cuomo would be prosecuted successfully by Tisha James before Donald Trump would be, but we Democrats have to take a close look at the failures of our own leaders before we can truly fix everyone's problems.

Regardless, Cuomo's days look to be numbered.

Sunday Long Read: Dinner With Old Friends

This week's Sunday Long Read is Tananarive Due's Vanity Fair interview with Jodie Foster and Sir Anthony Hopkins on the 30th anniversary of Silence of the Lambs, one of the scariest movies nerdy teenage me could have seen as the 90's were just getting underway.

When Jodie Foster and Sir Anthony Hopkins joined me on a video call to talk about The Silence of the Lambs for the movie’s 30th anniversary, they hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade, so there was more giddy laughter than you would expect from a conversation about murder and mayhem.

The late Jonathan Demme’s movie was, of course, based on the best-selling novel by Thomas Harris. It’s the story of FBI trainee Clarice Starling, who’s sent to the figurative depths of hell to probe the mind of the refined, if cannibalistic, serial killer Hannibal Lecter and secure his advice about capturing another depraved murderer named Buffalo Bill (played by Ted Levine). There has always been criticism of the way Silence represents transgender issues, which Foster speaks to here. But despite that asterisk, the movie swept all five of the top Oscar categories1, a feat not equaled in the decades since. It has spawned sequels, parodies, and the TV shows Hannibal and Clarice, not to mention the oft-repeated lines about a particular kind of wine and the perils of not properly moisturizing one’s skin.

Foster’s and Hopkins’s careers have yielded many marvels in the intervening years, including, most recently, the former’s turn as a dogged lawyer fighting for the freedom of a Muslim prisoner at Guantánamo Bay in The Mauritanian and the latter’s in a tour de force as a man battling dementia in The Father.

Our conversation? You guessed it. It was like having old friends for dinner.

When was the last time you watched Silence?

ANTHONY HOPKINS: I saw it about five years ago.

JODIE FOSTER: I saw it just a couple years ago. They were doing something at, like, the oldest movie theater in Los Angeles, and they had a 35-millimeter print, and the boys had never seen The Silence of the Lambs, so I took them all to see the movie. And I kind of thought like, Oh, you know, it’s an older movie, and it’s not going to be scary to them.

Was it still pretty intense?

FOSTER: I think it was. And what’s surprising about that is that there’s really no blood and gore. There’s only really one scene that is at all gory. The movie is so scary because it seeps into people’s consciousness through fears. It really works on fear more than anything else.

What was seeing it again like for you, Tony?

HOPKINS: I’m thrilled that the movie worked. I’m proud to be in it. I was in the theater, in London, and my agent phoned me—Jeremy Conway, his name was—and he said, “I’m sending a script over to the theater called The Silence of the Lambs.” I said, “Is it a children’s story?” I didn’t know. “No,” he said. “It’s with Jodie Foster.” I said, “Oh.”

I think Jodie just won the Oscar for The Accused, actually. So I came to the dressing room and I started reading it, and I got through about 10 pages. When [the FBI agent] Crawford2 said, “You don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head,” I thought, Ooh, that’s it. I phoned my agent, and I said, “Is this an offer? This is the best part I could ever…” He said, “Well, it’s not a big part.” I said, “I don’t care.”

The way Ted Tally had written it—it was so indelible in my mind. [Laughs.] I don’t know what it is that’s in my brain—I’m fairly normal most of the time—but I know what scares people, and I believe that stillness is the key. You know, we don’t look at anyone too long. We look away, or we laugh to disarm ourselves. But if you stare at someone for more than 10 seconds, it scares them. And you can do it, you can test people. I knew instinctively that I should be absolutely still. All the talk about “He’s a monster…” I thought, Well, go to the opposite. Play him nice.

FOSTER: We met at a reading. I didn’t really get a proper meet with Tony. So we’re sitting across from each other, and he launches in, and we start the reading. And I was just petrified. [Laughs.] I was kind of too scared to talk to him after that.

He did another movie, and I started the film without him. I still kept that kind of hold-your-breath feeling about the character just from that first reading. Jonathan wanted to use this technique that Hitchcock talked about, where you have the actors use the camera as the other person. And I think there was something really interesting about that for the film, but that also meant that Tony and I couldn’t see each other. For a lot of the close-ups, we were looking into a camera lens and the other person was just a voice in the background. And—remember?—they had to lock you into the glass prison cell. So he would do a whole day inside the prison cell, and they wouldn’t let him out. We’d just do his side. And then the next day, we’d do my side.

HOPKINS: Also, they discovered before we started filming that there would be a problem if there were bars on the prison cell for left and right eyelines. So the designer—it was Kristi Zea—came up with a Perspex thing, which makes it even more frightening, because he’s like a tarantula in a bottle. No visual borderline between the two. It was more terrifying, because it’s a dangerous creature in a bottle who can do anything. He could break the glass.

This one is fascinating, folks. This is one of my all-time Top 10 movies, and I'm glad to see both Hopkins and Foster still talk about this film.

Still not eating dinner at his house though. 

And Why Should We Believe You, America?

Joe Biden tells the world America is back. The world is no longer giving Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt, and unless Biden delivers very quickly on the diplomatic scene, we'll be done as a major diplomatic player for a generation or longer.

For President Biden and his circle, a low point in America’s global standing under President Donald Trump came when he blew up a meeting of U.S. allies in 2018, accusing close partners of “robbing” the United States and hurling insults at his Canadian host.

So it was no accident that Biden’s push to reclaim American leadership in recent days has pointedly included a starring role for Canada, as the new administration seeks to woo an array of allies with a message that “America is back.”

But it’s increasingly clear that Biden cannot simply sweep up the broken diplomatic china and restore the world order that reigned when he was vice president. There is one simple reason: Allies know Trumpism could always come back, either in a 2024 bid by Trump himself or from another presidential hopeful offering a similar pitch.

That has left friends and foes alike with doubts about the value of any new American commitments, given the country’s deep political divide and the possibility that the pendulum could swing back in four years. Allies have begun hedging their bets, musing about a Europe-only security force and exploring wider trade with China.

That’s even true for America’s closest allies, like Great Britain. “The Bidenites say with good reason that they recognize that ‘not politics as usual’ was the theme of the election in the past few years,” Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the United States, said. “It is a theme that they know they’re going to have to contend with.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said “there’s no doubt” that foreign leaders now wonder about America’s reliability, given the country’s divisions and the persistence of support for Trump.

Biden directly addresses those doubts in his conversations with his foreign counterparts, Sullivan said in an interview, reminding allies of a history of bipartisan support for institutions such as NATO.

“The president has laid out a strong case about why that is not isolated to one party or one president, that the last four years were an aberration and not some kind of new normal,” Sullivan said.

Biden has spoken to roughly a dozen heads of state since taking office. In addition to recommitting to NATO, the United Nations and global climate efforts, Sullivan said, Biden starts nearly all the calls by recognizing any global agenda for the United States is tied to addressing not only the pandemic at home, but the country’s internal divisions.

“That work at home is vital to our credibility internationally,” Sullivan said, summarizing Biden’s message.

 

Good thing, because America's global credibility is zero. The fact that Dems are holding on to power by dangling from a cliff is a worst-kept secret in the world right now, and any single mistake plunges the world into chaos and flame as America burns.  

It will take decades for anyone to even remotely trust us again.

Last Call For Cashing In On Khashoggi

Our fragile diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia would apparently be jeopardized if the Biden administration actually leveled travel sanctions against Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan for ordering of the death of US journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

President Biden has decided that the price of directly penalizing Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is too high, according to senior administration officials, despite a detailed American intelligence finding that he directly approved the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident and Washington Post columnist who was drugged and dismembered in October 2018.

The decision by Mr. Biden, who during the 2020 campaign called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with “no redeeming social value,” came after weeks of debate in which his newly formed national security team advised him that there was no way to formally bar the heir to the Saudi crown from entering the United States, or to weigh criminal charges against him, without breaching the relationship with one of America’s key Arab allies.

Officials said a consensus developed inside the White House that the price of that breach, in Saudi cooperation on counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high.

For Mr. Biden, the decision was a telling indication of how his more cautious instincts kicked in, and it will deeply disappoint the human rights community and members of his own party who complained during the Trump administration that the United States was failing to hold the crown prince, known by his initials M.B.S., accountable for his role.

Many organizations were pressing Mr. Biden to, at a minimum, impose the same travel sanctions against the crown prince as the Trump administration imposed on others involved in the plot.

Mr. Biden’s aides said that as a practical matter, Prince Mohammed would not be invited to the United States anytime soon, and they denied that they were giving Saudi Arabia a pass, describing series of new actions on lower-level officials intended to penalize elite elements of the Saudi military and impose new deterrents to human rights abuses.

Those actions, approved by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, include a travel ban on Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, who was deeply involved in the Khashoggi operation, and on the Rapid Intervention Force, a unit of the Saudi Royal Guard.

The declassified intelligence report concluded that the intervention force, which operates under the crown prince, directed the operation against Mr. Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Mr. Khashoggi entered the consulate on Oct. 2, 2018, to get papers he needed for his forthcoming marriage, and, with his fiancée waiting outside the gates, was instead met by an assassination team.

An effort by the Saudi government to issue a cover story, contending that Mr. Khashoggi had left the consulate unharmed, collapsed in days.

 

So what will Joe Biden actually do about it?

President Joe Biden on Saturday said his administration would make an announcement on Saudi Arabia on Monday, following a U.S. intelligence report that found Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Biden administration has faced some criticism, notably an editorial in the Washington Post, that the president should have been tougher on the crown prince, who was not sanctioned despite being blamed for approving Khashoggi’s murder.

Asked about punishing the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, who is also known as MbS, Biden said: “There will be an announcement on Monday as to what we are going to be doing with Saudi Arabia generally.”

 

So we'll find out soon.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

 Richard Holzer, who plead guilty to an attempt to firebomb a Colorado synagogue in 2019, has been sentenced to 20 years.

Although the plot was thwarted, U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore said Holzer had sought “to terrorize the Jewish community” of Pueblo, a city of 112,000 residents about 100 miles south of Denver.

“It is one of the most vulgar ... evil crimes that can be committed against an entire group of people,” Moore said while imposing the sentence sought by prosecutors.

Holzer declined to speak at the hearing.

The defendant pleaded guilty in October to one count of trying to obstruct religious services by force, and one count of attempting to destroy a building used in interstate commerce, according to his plea agreement.

Holzer, who lived in Pueblo, was arrested in November 2019 following an undercover sting by federal agents tracking his social media postings, in which he professed a hatred of Jews, according to an FBI arrest warrant affidavit.

Posing as fellow racists, undercover agents reached out to Holzer and later met with him as he broached the idea of blowing up the synagogue, the affidavit said. Ultimately, the agents provided him with inert pipe bombs and sticks of dynamite before arresting him, court documents showed.

The judge rejected arguments by defense lawyers that Holzer has renounced his racist views, noting that since his arrest he has reached out to other white supremacists and continued to invoke Nazi imagery.

“The notion that he’s turned some corner is fantasy,” Moore said.

 

Radicalized here in the States and unleashed upon the populace. This was somebody so awful even the Trump-era FBI brought him in.

And yes, he's a terrorist and he's going to jail. It's the slightly less stupid ones at large we have to worry about.

A sitting member of Congress appeared at a white nationalist convention Friday night, marking new GOP support for the racist movement. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke in Orlando, Florida, at the America First Political Action conference, a far-right event meant to mimic the establishment Republican Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

After Gosar’s speech, AFPAC organizer Nick Fuentes, who marched in the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and was outside the Capitol with his supporters during the Jan. 6 riot, took the podium that warned that “white people are done being bullied.” Fuentes praised the fatal riot as “awesome,” describing it as “light-hearted mischief.” He also mocked Gosar’s colleague, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), for needing a wheelchair, saying Cawthorn couldn’t “stand up” for his constituents.

“‘I’m gonna take a stand?’” Fuentes said. “How? How are you gonna do that?”

Gosar was joined at the event by former Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who lost his congressional committee seats after defending white nationalism.

Gosar attempted to distance himself from the white nationalist event Saturday morning at a panel on CPAC. Without mentioning what he was specifically referring to, Gosar said, “I want to tell you—I denounce when we talk about white racism. That’s not appropriate.”

The FBI is reportedly investigating a large bitcoin payment Fuentes and other far-right figures received ahead of the riot. A former Fuentes associate has claimed the white nationalist leader, who has also attempted to downplay the number of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust by comparing them to cookies made by Cookie Monster, has had his bank accounts frozen by federal authorities in the aftermath of the riot.

Even now, even after January 6, Republican members of Congress still show up at events with avowed white supremacist domestic terrorists. They have learned nothing, and still don't care.

Don't Care Where You Go But You Can't Stay Here

A federal judge has struck down the CDC moratorium on evictions, siding with Texas landlords in a dangerous decision that could mean the end of the Fair Housing Act and the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development. Vox's Ian Milihiser explains:

For nearly a year, millions of Americans who are unable to pay their rent due to the economic crisis triggered by Covid-19 have had some protections against eviction. Both the CARES Act, which became law last March, and the second Covid-19 relief bill, which was signed in December, included temporary moratoriums on many evictions.

In the interim periods when these statutory safeguards against eviction are not in effect — the CARES Act’s moratorium expired after 120 days, and the second relief bill’s moratorium expired on January 31 — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed a similar moratorium using its own authority, citing a federal law that permits the CDC director to “make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.”

On Thursday evening, a Trump-appointed judge on a federal court in Texas handed down a decision that calls into question the legality of these moratoriums. Currently, there is no congressional moratorium on evictions in place, only the CDC moratorium, although it is likely that the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill currently being negotiated in Congress will implement a new statutory moratorium.

Though Judge J. Campbell Barker’s order in Terkel v. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only explicitly strikes down the CDC’s moratorium, Barker’s opinion is fairly broad and suggests that congressional regulation of evictions may also be unconstitutional. His opinion, if embraced by higher courts, could endanger any federal regulation of the housing market, including bans on discrimination in housing.

The opinion is a mélange of libertarian tropes, long-discarded constitutional theory, and statements that are entirely at odds with binding Supreme Court decisions.

The thrust of Barker’s Terkel opinion is that the Constitution’s commerce clause, which provides that Congress may “regulate commerce ... among the several states,” is not broad enough to permit federal regulation of evictions.

But, as the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Lopez (1995), the commerce clause gives Congress broad authority to regulate the national economy — including any activity that “‘substantially affects’ interstate commerce.” Though Lopez struck down a federal law prohibiting individuals from bringing guns near school zones, the Lopez opinion emphasizes the breadth of Congress’s power to regulate the economy. “Where economic activity substantially affects interstate commerce,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the Court, “legislation regulating that activity will be sustained.”

To get around decisions like Lopez, Barker argues that evicting someone from a home that they pay thousands of dollars a year to rent is not an “economic activity.”

“The law at issue in Lopez criminalized the possession of one’s handgun when in a covered area,” Barker wrote. “The order at issue here criminalizes the possession of one’s property when inhabited by a covered person. Neither regulated activity is economic in material respect.”

Merely quoting this argument is enough to refute it. Again, Barker claims that removing someone from a home that they rent, for money, because that individual failed to pay the agreed-upon sum of money, is not an economic activity.

But just in case it isn’t obvious that Barker is wrong, the Supreme Court’s decision in Russell v. United States (1985) directly contradicts him. Russell held that “the congressional power to regulate the class of activities that constitute the rental market for real estate includes the power to regulate individual activity within that class.”

Barker’s opinion is still wrong even if you accept his claim that evicting someone from a rental home is not an economic activity.

 

It is wrong, but if five of the Supreme Court decide it's not wrong, that housing is solely the domain of the states and that it cannot be federally regulated, well that's basically the end of the Civil Rights era. We go right back to Jim Crow if that's true. If Lopez and Russell are thrown out, then the vast majority of federal oversight vanishes.

And that brings back the worst of the bad old days.

Last Call For Trumpy The Golden Calf

The Republican Mammon Machine is beyond self-parody now, literally with a graven golden image of Trump to worship at CPAC this weekend.

 

The Golden Calf is one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament. The Israelites, newly freed from Egyptian slavery, have a crisis of faith while God is speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai. They melt down the golden jewelry to construct a physical god — a statue in the shape of a calf — to worship in place of their abstract, invisible deity. It’s a story about the allure of idolatry, how easy it is to abandon one’s commitments to principle in favor of shiny, easy falsehoods.

This biblical tale trended on Twitter in the US Friday morning because of the following video, filmed on the first day of the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Someone involved in the conference constructed a golden statue — not of a calf, but of Trump — and wheeled it out to cheers from conference attendees. “That is so cool,” one of the onlookers says.

There are so many reasons why this is a perfect metaphor for the state of the GOP after the Trump presidency.

The party sacrificed its commitment to political principles, including previously cherished ideals like free trade, on the altar of Trumpism. White evangelicals abandoned their alleged commitments to godliness in public servants and embraced a man accused of serial sexual assault who had an affair with a porn star and paid her hush money to cover it up. Conservatism, once seen as a high-minded intellectual tradition, became undeniably base and degraded in the Trump years.

But above all else, the statue points to the way in which the GOP remains the party of Trump even after his presidency — gaudy golden aesthetic and all. The party’s base is so committed to the former president that they construct idols of him, literally, to stand up at their premier political conference.

The party leadership understands that, of course. It’s why the vast bulk of the GOP Senate caucus embraced flimsy constitutional rationales for acquitting Trump in the most recent impeachment trial, despite clear evidence that he incited the January 6 riot at the US Capitol that threatened their lives. They are too afraid of their own voters to turn on Trump, and so have no choice but to embrace him — despite knowing how much of a threat he poses to their party and American democracy.

Trump’s hold is so powerful, in fact, that even his children are now considered leading possibilities for the 2024 GOP nomination — despite the complete lack of relevant qualifications.

 

And no, we're not kidding about the statue. 

#CPAC #AmericaUncancelled pic.twitter.com/mVqBuF2blY

— William Turton (@WilliamTurton) February 26, 2021

 

This is the GOP, the cultist worship of Trump party.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Hundreds, if not thousands of GOP elected officials at the local and state level continue to confess the public delusion that Democrats "stole" the election from Trump, and that this "theft" justifies any and every possible future activity that Trump cultists want to take against Democrats and the people who voted for them.

A faction of local, county and state Republican officials is pushing lies, misinformation and conspiracy theories that echo those that helped inspire the violent U.S. Capitol siege, online messaging that is spreading quickly through GOP ranks fueled by algorithms that boost extreme content.

The Associated Press reviewed public and private social media accounts of nearly 1,000 federal, state, and local elected and appointed Republican officials nationwide, many of whom have voiced support for the Jan. 6 insurrection or demanded that the 2020 presidential election be overturned, sometimes in deleted posts or now-removed online forums.

“Sham-peachment,” they say, and warn that “corporate America helped rig the election.” They call former president Donald Trump a “savior” who was robbed of a second term — despite no evidence — and President Joe Biden, a “thief.” “Patriots want answers,” they declare.

The bitter, combative rhetoric is helping the officials grow their constituencies on social media and gain outsized influence in their communities, city councils, county boards and state assemblies. And it exposes the GOP’s internal struggle over whether the party can include traditional conservative politicians, conspiracy theorists and militias as it builds its base for 2022.

Earlier this month, the FBI knocked on the door of the Republican Women’s Federation of Michigan vice president Londa Gatt to ask where she was on the day of the Capitol attack.

Gatt, a Bikers for Trump coordinator who roars, leather-vested, alongside political rallies on her Harley-Davidson, had helped organize busloads of Trump supporters to join her in Washington on Jan. 6. She says she climbed the scaffolding outside the Capitol building that day “to take a picture of the whole view.” And she said she gladly told FBI agents that she did nothing wrong, and left the scene right away as things turned violent.

Since then, Gatt has shared hashtags tied to QAnon conspiracy theories online and posted that she has Trump’s personal email. She recently asked her Facebook friends who participated in Capitol intrusions to send messages directly to Trump explaining that he didn’t incite them, but instead they acted of their own volition. “The lawyers need our help,” she posted.

Gatt is among many conservatives organizing on Twitter, Facebook, Parler, Gab and Telegram, and is working on a digital strategy going forward under different monikers.

“We were cheated out of our legit president and we have no voice because our vote didn’t count,” she told The Associated Press. “I’m getting ready to start opening up some new pages, focus on getting out people who voted against Trump and replace those with conservative Republicans.”

 

We have already seen this rhetoric lead to an armed terrorist insurrection attack on the US Capitol.

 

Republicans simply do not care. The party of weaponized white grievance is gearing up for wave after wave of assaults on Democrats and their voters, armed violence, and worse, and the party is openly fomenting the lies that lead to January 6th.

It's not just Trump spewing these lies, it's all of them.

How do you find unity with that?

Minimum Waging War, Con't

The Democrats are headed for stupid, prideful, self-inflicted disaster again, and it could destroy the entire American Relief Plan bill. WaPo's Jacqueline Almany:

 

The Democratic Party's liberal wing is mounting a pressure campaign to overrule a decision from the Senate parliamentarian after their hopes to include a $15-an-hour minimum-wage increase in the coronavirus relief bill were dealt a major blow.

Liberals are furious with the late-breaking — but not entirely unexpected — ruling from the nonpartisan Senate umpire last night that the provision cannot remain in President Biden's $1.9 trillion relief package as written. Elizabeth MacDonough sided against Democrats, determining that the push to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour does not meet the criteria to be considered under fast-track budget rules they're using to pass the bill with a simple majority.

The progressive base understands that Vice President Harris can disregard the parliamentarian,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told Power Up. “[Vice President Nelson] Rockefeller did it in 1975 and according to parliamentarian Robert Dove, Vice President [Hubert] Humphrey did routinely. There is no way any senator would sink the final [coronavirus] bill, despite what they may say now. This simply comes down to whether the VP will choose to include the $15 or not.”

A long shot: The White House has publicly ruled out overruling the parliamentarian — and it's unlikely that all 50 Senate Democrats would stand united on this even if it got on board. It's hard to imagine Harris would be the tiebreaking vote “since at least one Senate Democrat — Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) — has said he would not vote to overrule the parliamentarian,” per our colleague Erica Werner.

But that's not stopping the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus from reaching out to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain seeking support to overturn the decision, according to a Democratic lawmaker.

“We cannot allow the advisory opinion of an unelected parliamentarian and Republican obstructionism stop us from delivering on our promise to voters,” the CPC tweeted last night. 

The package that will be voted on by the House today will include the minimum wage hike. “House Democrats believe that the minimum-wage hike is necessary,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Therefore this provision will remain in the American Rescue Plan on the floor [Friday]. Democrats in the House are determined to pursue every possible path in the Fight for 15.”  

This sets up Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) for a tricky decision, per Erica. “He could take out the minimum-wage language before putting the bill on the Senate floor, or try to keep it in the bill — whether by challenging the parliamentarian’s ruling or trying to rewrite the provision in such a way that it could pass muster under the Senate’s complicated rules.” Democrats are pressing the bill forward without GOP support by using the budget reconciliation process that bypasses the 60 votes normally required for significant legislation — but has strict rules limiting what can be included.  

Schumer vowed to fight but didn't specify how: “We are deeply disappointed in this decision. We are not going to give up the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 to help millions of struggling American workers and their families,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, without specifying how they could fight. “The American people deserve it, and we are committed to making it a reality.”

Remember: The minimum wage increase was always a long shot, parliamentarian ruling aside. “Manchin and a second Senate Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), had indicated opposition to including the minimum-wage increase in Biden’s covid relief bill anyway, so even if the parliamentarian had allowed it, it’s not clear the provision would have been able to advance,” Erica notes. “Nevertheless, liberals had been holding out hope of being able to keep all Democrats onboard to approve the overall bill with the minimum wage included.”

 

The House and Nancy Pelosi say "Raise the minimum wage".  There's not 50 Senate votes for it. Manchin and Sinema are against it, and they effectively have veto power. The worst-case scenario, which in my opinion is somewhat likely, is that Schumer miscalculates and the bill vote fails in the Senate for lack of votes from the Dems, and the whole package comes crashing down.

Republicans are licking their chops at the prospect, and they will assuredly run commercials about how Biden ran on the stimulus checks that Trump was able to deliver, and Biden wasn't, even though Republicans will have voted against it.

If Harry Reid was still in charge, I'd know he'd get Manchin and Sinema in line. But we have Chuck Schumer, and well, let's just say his track record has been untested for a long, long time.

We'll see what happens in the senate next week, but Pelosi and the House are going to lay down their marker big time later today. The most likely option is that the minimum wage hike is removed in the senate, and then the Dems have to fight it out back behind the Capitol building next to the flagpole after school.

Like the children they apparently are.