Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

As more and more Americans live in states that no longer allow the death penalty, the remaining states are going for MAXIMUM OVERDEATH.

The South Carolina House voted Wednesday to add a firing squad to the state’s execution methods amid a lack of lethal-injection drugs — a measure meant to jump-start executions in a state that once had one of the busiest death chambers in the nation.

The bill, approved by a 66-43 vote, will require condemned inmates to choose either being shot or electrocuted if lethal injection drugs aren’t available. The state is one of only nine to still use the electric chair and will become only the fourth to allow a firing squad.

South Carolina last executed a death row inmate 10 years ago Thursday.

The Senate already had approved the bill in March, by a vote of 32-11. The House only made minor technical changes to that version, meaning that after a routine final vote in the House and a signoff by the Senate, it will go to Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who has said he will sign it.

There are several prisoners in line to be executed. Corrections officials said three of South Carolina’s 37 death row inmates are out of appeals. But lawsuits against the new death penalty rules are also likely.

“Three living, breathing human beings with a heartbeat that this bill is aimed at killing,” said Democratic Rep. Justin Bamberg, rhythmically thumping the microphone in front of him. “If you push the green button at the end of the day and vote to pass this bill out of this body, you may as well be throwing the switch yourself.”

South Carolina first began using the electric chair in 1912 after taking over the death penalty from individual counties, which usually hanged prisoners. The other three states that allow a firing squad are Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Three inmates, all in Utah, have been killed by firing squad since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Nineteen inmates have died in the electric chair this century.

South Carolina can’t put anyone to death now because its supply of lethal-injection drugs expired and it has not been able to buy any more. Currently, inmates can choose between the electric chair and lethal injection. Since the drugs are not available, they choose injection.

The bill retains lethal injection as the primary method of execution if the state has the drugs, but requires prison officials to use the electric chair or firing squad if it doesn’t.

“Those families of victims to these capital crimes are unable to get any closure because we are caught in this limbo stage where every potential appeal has been exhausted and the legally imposed sentences cannot be carried out,” said Republican Rep. Weston Newton.

The lack of drugs, and decisions by prosecutors to seek guilty pleas with guaranteed life sentences over death penalty trials, have cut the state’s death row population nearly in half — from 60 to 37 inmates — since the last execution was carried out in 2011. From 2000 to 2010, the state averaged just under two executions a year.

The reduction also has come from natural deaths, and prisoners winning appeals and being resentenced to life without parole. Prosecutors have sent just three new inmates to death row in the past decade.

Democrats in the House offered several amendments, including not applying the new execution rules to current death row inmates; livestreaming executions on the internet; outlawing the death penalty outright; and requiring lawmakers to watch executions. All failed.

Seven Republicans voted against the bill, while one Democrat voted for it.

Opponents of the bill brought up George Stinney, the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. He was 14 when he was sent to South Carolina’s electric chair after a one-day trial in 1944 for killing two white girls. A judge threw out the Black teen’s conviction in 2014. Newspaper stories reported that witnesses said the straps to keep him in the electric chair didn’t fit around his small frame.

“So not only did South Carolina give the electric chair to the youngest person ever in America, but the boy was innocent,” Bamberg said.

 

To sum up, the party that considers the possibility of fraudulent voting enough to overturn a presidential election and resort to armed insurrection has no problem murdering people who may be wrongfully convicted, and wants to murder them more quickly. 

With guns!

Because guns are always the answer here in Gunmerica.

The Next Housing Crisis, Con't

Republicans got their federal judge to overturn the CDC's moratorium on evictions as a public health measure, this time in the DC Circuit, which almost certainly means this will be fast tracked to the Supreme Court.

Federal Judge Dabney Friedrich struck down on Wednesday the national eviction moratorium, potentially leaving millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes two months earlier than expected.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has banned most evictions across the country since September. The protection was slated to expire at the end of January, but President Joe Biden has extended it, first until April, and later through June.

Some 1 in 5 renters across the U.S. are struggling to keep up with their payments amid the coronavirus pandemic, and states are scrambling to disburse more than $45 billion in rental assistance allocated by Congress.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said it planned to appeal the ruling. It also seeks a stay of the decision, meaning the ban would remain in effect throughout the court battle.

Speaking at her daily briefing, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said the Biden administration recognized the importance of the eviction moratorium for Americans who’ve fallen behind on rent during the pandemic.

“A recent study estimates that there were 1.55 million fewer evictions filed during 2020 than would be expected due to the eviction moratorium, so it clearly has had a huge benefit,” Psaki said.

Housing advocates have said that the national ban is necessary to stave off an unprecedented displacement of Americans, which could worsen the pandemic just as the country is turning a corner.

Researchers have found that allowing evictions to continue in certain states caused as many as 433,700 excess cases of Covid-19 and 10,700 additional deaths in the U.S. between March and September, before the CDC ban went into effect nationwide.

At least two other federal judges have questioned the CDC’s power to ban evictions. And landlords have criticized the policy, saying they can’t afford to continue housing people for free.

 

Here in Cincinnati, the vote for more affordable housing failed spectacularly this week.

The city of Cincinnati will not have to find $50 million to fund a new affordable housing trust fund.

Voters on Tuesday rejected Issue 3, a charter amendment designed to force city leaders to provide additional housing for Cincinnati’s low-income residents, according to unofficial results from the Hamilton County Board of Elections.

With all precincts reporting, 73% of voters had said no, while only 27% approved of the measure.

“We knew that the voters would come through for us,” said Matt Alter, president of the Cincinnati Firefighters Union Local 48. “We knew that they would see through this.”

The union leaders and politicians who fought against Issue 3 agree the city needs more affordable housing, he said, and now must work to find other, better ways to create that.

“I know the Cincinnati Labor Council and some of the other stakeholders, including some of the political parties, are interested in also sitting down and being a part of that,” Alter said. “The voters voted ‘no’ on this. But how do we make sure that this doesn’t just fall to the back burner, and we continue on this pace to ensure that we can bring affordable housing to Cincinnati in a responsible manner that doesn’t damage and doesn’t hurt current services?”

 

City police and firefighter unions made sure the vote died screaming, warning that they would all but go on strike if Issue 3 passed, and they got what they wanted. Aftab Pureval, the Hamilton County Clerk running for Mayor, also opposed the bill. Issue 3 essentially had no chance.

Pureval is the favorite for replacing outgoing Mayor John Cranley, which is all you need to know about where Cincy's affordable housing situation is going.

It's worse here on the Kentucky side of the river, believe me.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner's family real estate firm just got rung up by a Maryland judge as being a slumlord, forcing thousands of tenants in their substandard apartment buildings to overpay for rent without the company providing basic repairs and utilities under state law.

It’s been six years since Dionne Mont first saw her apartment at Fontana Village, a rental housing complex just east of Baltimore. She was aghast that day to find the front door coming off its hinges, the kitchen cabinet doors stuck to their frames, mouse droppings under the kitchen sink, mold in the refrigerator, the toilet barely functioning and water stains on every upstairs ceiling, among other problems. But she had already signed the lease and paid the deposit.

Mont insisted that management make repairs, but that took several months, during which time she paid her $865 monthly rent and lived elsewhere. She was hit with constant late fees and so-called “court” fees, because the management company required tenants to pay rent at a Walmart or a check-cashing outlet, and she often couldn’t get there from her job as a bus driver before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff. She moved out in 2017.

Four years later, Mont has received belated vindication: On April 29, a Maryland judge ruled that the management company, which is owned by Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm, violated state consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to prior to signing a lease, and by assessing them all manner of dubious fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 of the company’s current and former tenants, including Mont, testified.

“I feel elated,” said Mont. “People were living in inhumane conditions — deplorable conditions.”

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh brought the consumer-protection case against Westminster Management, the property-management arm of Kushner Companies, in 2019 following a 2017 article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine on the company’s treatment of its tenants at the 15 housing complexes it owned in the Baltimore area, which have served as profitable ballast for a company better known for its gleaming properties in New York. The article revealed the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants in court over unpaid rent and broken leases, even in cases where tenants were in the right, as well as the shoddy conditions of many units.

To build its case, the attorney general’s office subpoenaed records from the company and solicited testimony from current and former tenants, who provided it via remote video link to Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker late last year.

In her 252-page ruling last week, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Daneker determined that the company had issued a relentless barrage of questionable fees on tenants over the course of many years, including both the fees identified in the 2017 article and others as well. In more than 15,000 instances, Westminster charged in excess of the state-maximum $25 fee to process a rental application. In more than 28,000 instances, the company also assessed a $12 “agent fee” on court filings against tenants even though it had incurred no such cost with the courts — a tactic that Daneker called “spurious” and which brought the company more than $332,000 in fees. And in more than 2,600 instances, the Kushner operation assessed $80 court fees to tenants at its two complexes within the city of Baltimore, even though the charge from the courts was only $50. “The practice of passing court costs on to tenants, in the absence of a court order,” Daneker wrote, “was deceptive.”

The manifold fees suggested a deliberate strategy to run up tenants’ tabs, Daneker wrote, repeatedly calling the practices “widespread and numerous.” She concluded that “these circumstances do not support a finding that this was the result of isolated or inadvertent mistakes.”

Daneker also found that the company violated consumer law by failing to have the proper debt-collection licenses for some of its properties and by misrepresenting the condition of units being leased to tenants. However, she found that the attorney general’s office did not establish that the company violated the law in several other areas, such as by misrepresenting its ability to provide maintenance on units or in some of its calculations of late fees.

Kushner Companies, which has since sold some of the complexes and put others of them on the market, declined to be interviewed for this article. A statement from Kushner general counsel Christopher Smith suggested that the ruling amounted to a victory for the company, despite the judge’s many findings against it. “Kushner respects the thoughtful depth of the Judge’s decision, which vindicates Westminster with respect to many of the Attorney General’s overreaching allegations,” Smith said.

In previous statements, the company had alleged that Frosh, a Democrat, had brought the suit for political reasons, and was singling out the company owned by the then-president’s son-in-law for a host of practices that the company said were common in the multi-housing rental industry. In her ruling, Daneker stated that she found no evidence of an “improper selective prosecution” in the suit.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment, noting that the case is not yet final. Each side will next have the chance to file exceptions, as objections are known, that will be considered by the final arbiter in the consumer protection division of the attorney general’s office. The state’s lawyers will also propose restitution sums for tenants and a civil penalty. Once the consumer protection arbiter issues a ruling, both sides will have the right to challenge it in the state’s appeals courts.

Also awaiting resolution is a separate class-action lawsuit brought by tenants that alleges, among other things, that the company’s late fees exceeded state limits. A Court of Special Appeals judge has yet to issue a ruling following a January oral argument on the plaintiffs’ appeal of previous rulings against both their attempt to certify themselves as a class and against the substance of their claim regarding late fees.

 

So there's still a huge legal fight ahead, but it's one Kushner Companies is bound to lose, and it's going to be costly for them. Frankly, by then I hope Jared Kushner is in prison along with his wife and orange father-in-law.

 

Retribution Execution, Con't

As I told you yesterday, not only is GOP Rep. Liz Cheney's goose cooked, but the smart money was on Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace her as the Number 3 House Republican. Today, that looks to be all but assured.

Former President Trump and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise are openly supporting Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to replace Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as House Republican conference chair.

The latest: "Liz Cheney is a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party Leadership," Trump said in a statement. "Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair. Elise is a tough and smart communicator!"

Why it matters: The public endorsements of Stefanik mark a new escalation in Republicans' internal feud over Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and has continued to criticize the former president. The rift has threatened to derail Republicans' chances of taking back control of the House in the 2022 elections. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) — the leader of the largest conservative caucus in the House — suggested to Axios last week that Cheney could be ousted within a month. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was caught on a hot mic on Tuesday saying he's "lost confidence" in Cheney and "has had it with" her behavior.

What they're saying: “House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda, and Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for Conference Chair,” Scalise’s spokesperson Lauren Fine said in a statement. Scalise told Axios late last month that the "idea that you just disregard President Trump is not where we are, and, frankly, he has a lot to offer still."

The other side: "Liz will have more to say in the coming days. This moment is about much more than a House leadership fight," Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler said in a statement.

Between the lines: While Stefanik rose to prominence in part due to her defense of Trump during his first impeachment, she only voted in line with the former president's positions 77.7% of the time — compared to Cheney's 92.9%, according to FiveThirtyEight.

What to watch: The House GOP conference will meet next Wednesday, May 12, at which point most members expect the process to oust Cheney will begin.

 

Now House Republicans under Kevin McCarthy are capable of messing up a two-car parade, so who knows how the actual vote next week will go once we come down to it. But Cheney, for her part, seems to want to make the House GOP pay a public price for doing this, and she's not expected to resign. 

Still, Cheney is willing to lie about everything but Trump's election being stolen, so don't feel bad for her. She'll be back.

Trump Cards, Con't

Facebook, to my great surprise, is upholding Trump's account perma-ban.

Facebook Inc (FB.O)'s oversight board on Wednesday upheld the company's suspension of former U.S. President Donald Trump in a much-awaited verdict that may signal how the company will treat rule-breaking world leaders in the future.

Facebook indefinitely blocked Trump's access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts over concerns of further violent unrest following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of the former president.

At the time of the suspension, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that "the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great." The company later referred the case to its recently established board, which includes academics, lawyers and rights activists, to decide whether to uphold the ban or restore Trump.

"Both of those decisions are no-win decisions for Facebook," said Kate Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John's University who embedded at Facebook to follow the board's creation. "So, offloading those to a third party, the Oversight Board, is a win for them no matter what."

The binding verdict marks a major decision for the board, which rules on a small slice of challenging content decisions and which Facebook created as an independent body as a response to criticism over how it handles problematic material. Facebook has also asked the board to provide recommendations on how it should handle political leaders' accounts.

 

Meanwhile, Trump is getting his own social media platform. A blog! Wow, what loser still uses blogs in 2021?

Former President Trump has rolled out a new tool to communicate with his supporters in lieu of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which banned his accounts.

Trump's platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” features videos from the former president and statements from his leadership PAC, which have been sent out over email for several weeks.

Supporters can sign up to get notified when Trump sends out a message from his site, similar to functions on other social media platforms.

While users do not have the ability to reply to Trump’s posts, they can like them and share them on their own Twitter or Facebook accounts.

"This is just a one-way communication," one source familiar with the space told Fox News, which was the first to report on the platform. "This system allows Trump to communicate with his followers."

The website’s “About” page also includes a statement touting Trump’s administration and a slew of mission statements, including “We are committed to defending innocent life and to upholding the Judeo-Christian values of our founding” and “We believe in FREE SPEECH and Fair Elections. We must ensure fair, honest, transparent, and secure elections going forward – where every LEGAL VOTE counts.”

“Over the past four years, my administration delivered for Americans of all backgrounds like never before. Save America is about building on those accomplishments, supporting the brave conservatives who will define the future of the America First Movement, the future of our party, and the future of our beloved country. Save America is also about ensuring that we always keep America First, in our foreign and domestic policy,” the website says.

The website says it is run by Campaign Nucleus, a digital firm founded by Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager.

The platform could provide a way for Trump to reach out to his supporters online while he is kicked off of Twitter and Facebook, two vehicles he used to get his message out during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

 

I mean I at least have a comment section so you guys can yell back at me. 

Seriously though, this is Trump rolling out marching orders to his army, tens of millions strong. expect daily (if not hourly) attacks on biden and the Democrats, and on everyone else who doesn't toe the Trumpist line, and his posts will end up on millions of Facebook accounts anyway, so the ban is useless.

Now, if Facebook polices this and if news outlets ignore Trump's awful two-minute hate missives, we'll be okay. What I fear though is a rush to cover his posts on a regular basis, repeated verbatim not just on FOX (of course) but on every other news, cable, and web political outlet as well so that Trump dominates all coverage again. Our news ecosystem can't handle Trump.

It's what he wants.

It's what he'll most likely get.

Last Call For Israeli A Mess, Con't

The Netanyahu debacle continues in Israel, as the PM is on trial for corruption and in the fifth round of trying to form a government, meaning tat Israel has now gone two years without an actual elected leadership.

In less than a week, Netanyahu has twice attempted to subvert the rule of law to his advantage and pivoted, at the speed of light, to deflect responsibility for the nation’s worst civilian disaster — the fatal stampede at a Galilean religious pilgrimage in which 100,000 worshipers gathered, with no permit but with the permission of Netanyahu’s government, in a spot the size of a small park.

Israel has been without a functional government for more than two years. During this time, the country was dragged through four general election campaigns in which Netanyahu failed to win enough votes to form a stable governing coalition — but succeeded in preventing anyone else from doing so each time.

Stuck in political purgatory, Israel has no budget, and it’s at risk of losing its international credit ratings. The Knesset is not operational, with the prime minister’s allies scrambling to reshape every rule and motion into a parachute that will save his political life. And the cabinet is incapacitated.

The crux of the problem for Netanyahu is that he is on trial, accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. On April 5, the first day of witness testimony, Netanyahu slammed Israel’s judiciary, calling the proceedings “an abuse of the destructive power held by the prosecution.”

“This is what the illegitimate use of power looks like,” the prime minister thundered. “This is how you try to topple a strong right-wing prime minister! This is what an attempted coup looks like!”

But it is Netanyahu who seeks to perpetrate a coup — even as he has effectively given up on governing.

By coincidence, his trial started on the same day President Reuven Rivlin invited Netanyahu, whose Likud party won 30 of 120 Knesset seats in the most recent election, to establish a government. The math meant Rivlin had no choice, but he didn’t hide his disgust.

Netanyahu has until Tuesday to come up with a coalition. If he fails, Rivlin may call on the opposition leader to try, but Netanyahu is attempting to stymie that possibility and lead Israel to a fifth round of elections, entrenching Israel’s leadership crisis — and, crucially, preserving his position as caretaker prime minister for a few months more.

With that goal still out of reach, he is instead floating an outlandish proposal — to partially cancel the results of the March 23 election, detaching the party vote for Knesset from the vote for prime minister. This would allow him, personally, to run again for reelection with no parliamentary majority, in an alternative Israel in which he can change election laws on a whim. Mid-game, he’s asking for a mulligan.

Meanwhile, spooked by his trial and by the looming deadline, Netanyahu last week forced an illegal vote through his cabinet, “appointing” a political lackey justice minister. The point of this maneuver was to enable Ofir Akunis, currently the minister for regional cooperation, to control the appointment of a new state prosecutor, one of many essential jobs left empty by Israel’s political limbo. Netanyahu’s interest in imposing his will on the state prosecution needs no explanation. The full slate of Likud ministers, who like their leader no longer pretend to govern, ignored the attorney general’s exclamations about the illegality of the stunt and voted like automatons to confirm Akunis.

Among the state affairs that fell through the cracks was an urgently needed overhaul of services provided to wounded military veterans. The issue gained prominence after Itzik Saidian, a 26-year-old disabled veteran who fought in the 2014 war in Gaza, set himself on fire outside Israeli army headquarters April 13, the day before Israel’s Memorial Day.

No resolution is on the horizon. The cabinet was due to discuss the proposal last week, when the cabinet meeting was hijacked by Netanyahu’s unlawful attempt to install a vassal justice minister. It was rescheduled for a vote at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but instead of leading his cabinet in mourning, Netanyahu canceled the meeting, saying he did it out of respect for those killed in the stampede.

 

Netanyahu is essentially pulling Trump's staying in power coup in a parliamentarian-style democracy, and it's working. As long as Netanyahu has enough allies to keep the opposition from ever forming a government, then he can stay in power semi-permanently.

The major wrench in the works is the trial. That's the one thing that he hasn't been able to stop so far and if he's convicted, all hell will break loose.

We'll see where this goes.

Retribution Execution, Con't

At this point House Republicans are now openly plotting the ouster of Liz Cheney, the one Republican willing to risk her party leadership to say that Trump's Big Lie is full of crap.

House Republicans are moving closer to ousting Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from leadership, and are already considering replacements — including Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), congressional aides tell Axios.

What we're hearing: Most members recognize Cheney can't be succeeded by a white man, given their top two leaders — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) — fill that demographic. Selling such a team in a midterm year would compound the GOP's challenges with suburban women. 

The conference meets next Wednesday, May 12. Most members expect the process to oust Cheney to begin then, whether formally or informally, after some of McCarthy's top lieutenants broadened their complaints against her. It would take up to a two-thirds vote of the 212 caucus members to replace her — a relatively high bar if a secret ballot is held.

Behind the scenes: When Cheney faced an uprising within the party in February over her vote to impeach former President Trump, McCarthy supported her and told his colleagues he wanted her to remain as GOP conference chair. But leadership and many in the rank and file were angry last week when Cheney's criticism of Trump dominated coverage of the House Republican conference in Orlando, Florida.

 

Both Walorski and Stefanik voted to throw out the Presidential election results to validate the Big Lie, while Wagner and former House #3 Cathy McMorris Rodgers did not, so my money is on Stefanik. And when people are openly talking about who will be replacing you and why rather than could, the writing's on the wall for both Cheney and the GOP.

We'll see next week just how long Cheney may have left.

And reminder: Cheney is still an awful, repugnant human being who would support 99% of what Trump did, especially if she was doing it herself.

Florida Definitely Goes VIral, Con't

GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has lifted all COVID-19 restrictions and has declared the pandemic "over" in the state of Florida, saying "We are no longer in a state of emergency".

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order Monday that immediately suspends all outstanding local Covid-19 emergency orders and related public health restrictions.

“The fact is, we are no longer in a state of emergency,” DeSantis said during a news conference. He acknowledged that Florida was still not done with its fight against the coronavirus but reiterated the nation’s decline in Covid-19 cases and deaths.

“I think that’s the evidence-based thing to do,” DeSantis said, adding that asking vaccinated individuals to continue to wear masks would undermine confidence in the coronavirus vaccines.

Private businesses can still require masks and enforce social distancing and other protective measures.

DeSantis signed a bill Monday that codifies the executive order into law, effective July 1. The executive order, he said, was designed to “bridge the gap” until then. The measure, which effectively ends all local pandemic-related restrictions, also bans vaccine passports.

 

So no more COVID health measures, local, state or otherwise.  We're back to "suggestions" that everyone is free to ignore and that the vast majority will do so. And this is an absolute recipe for disaster:

 

Florida has reported the third-most Covid-19 cases in the U.S. at more than 2.2 million since the beginning of the pandemic and the fourth-highest death toll at more than 35,000 fatalities, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Average new cases there, however, have fallen by more than 13% over the last week, dropping to 4,885 as of Sunday, according to the data.

 

And by July 4th, expect to see an "unexpected" spike in new cases. Biden will be blamed of course. We'll be right back to where we were this time last year, with red states refusing new restrictions and a big summer swell in cases and deaths.

As I said earlier, get used to the new normal.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The backlash against the idea that America is structurally racist is now in full force, with white Republicans going to the mats to destroy any hint of critical race theory being taught to anyone.

 

Nine months after officials in the affluent Carroll Independent School District introduced a proposal to combat racial and cultural intolerance in schools, voters delivered a resounding victory Saturday to a slate of school board and City Council candidates who opposed the plan.

In an unusually bitter campaign that echoed a growing national divide over how to address issues of race, gender and sexuality in schools, candidates in the city of Southlake were split between two camps: those who supported new diversity and inclusion training requirements for Carroll students and teachers and those backed by a political action committee that was formed last year to defeat the plan.

On one side, progressives argued that curriculum and disciplinary changes were needed to make all children feel safe and welcome in Carroll, a mostly white but quickly diversifying school district. On the other, conservatives in Southlake rejected the school diversity plan as an effort to indoctrinate students with a far-left ideology that, according to some, would institutionalize discrimination against white children and those with conservative Christian values.

Candidates and voters on both sides described the election as a "fork in the road" for Southlake, a wealthy suburb 30 miles northwest of Dallas. "So goes Southlake," a local conservative commentator warned in the weeks leading up to the election, "so goes the rest of America."

In the end, the contest was not close. Candidates backed by the conservative Southlake Families PAC, which has raised more than $200,000 since last summer, won every race by about 70 percent to 30 percent, including those for two school board positions, two City Council seats and mayor. More than 9,000 voters cast ballots, three times as many as in similar contests in the past.

Hannah Smith, a prominent Southlake lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, defeated Ed Hernandez, a business consultant, to win a seat on the Carroll school board. In a statement to NBC News on Sunday, Smith, who is white, said the election "was a referendum on those who put personal politics and divisive philosophies ahead of Carroll ISD students and families, and their common American heritage and Texas values."

"The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity," Smith said. "By a landslide vote, they don't want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future."

Hernandez and other candidates running in support of new diversity and inclusion programs said they were not particularly surprised by the outcome in a historically conservative city where about two-thirds of voters backed President Donald Trump last year, but they were dismayed by the margin of their defeat.

Hernandez, an immigrant from Mexico, said he worries about the signal the outcome sends to dozens of Carroll high school students and recent graduates who came forward with stories about racist and anti-gay bullying over the past two years. To demonstrate the need for change, members of the student-led Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition collected more than 300 accounts from current and former Carroll students last year who said they had been mistreated because of their race, religion or sexual orientation.

"I don't want to think about all these kids that shared their stories, their testimonies," Hernandez said, growing emotional Saturday moments after having learned the election results. "I don't want to think about that right now, because it's really, really hard for me. I feel really bad for all those kids, every single one of them that shared a story. I don't have any words for them."

The fight in Southlake dates to the fall of 2018, when a video of white Carroll high school students chanting the N-word went viral, making national headlines. In the aftermath, school leaders hosted listening sessions with students and parents and appointed a committee of 63 community volunteers to come up with a plan to make Carroll more welcoming for students from diverse backgrounds.

 

Declaring war on "Critical Race Theory" is the new in thing for the GOP, and it will be attacked, denigrated, and criminalized until us Blacks back down and shut up, I guess. Black Lives Matter, but only if it's convenient for white folks to say so. 

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he doesn’t think 1619 is one of the most important points in U.S. history.

That's the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to and sold in the Virginia colony, a point often considered as the beginning of American slavery.

“I think this is about American history and the most important dates in American history. And my view — and I think most Americans think — dates like 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861-1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” McConnell said during an appearance at the University of Louisville.

“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that the year 1619 was one of those years.

“I think that issue that we all are concerned about — racial discrimination — it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it,” he continued. “We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.”

 

Black lives matter only if white folk give us permission to matter. Same goes for Black history, Black culture, Black labor, Black pain, Black everything. Otherwise, we should just "get past it" and "Lose the victim mentality" and "Be grateful we're in America".

 

You know, while they kill us.

 

We should be grateful for that, because it could be worse.

 

Worse than killing us.

 

Think about that.

 

 

A Herd Of Toddlers With Immunity To Reason

The CDC no longer believes COVID-19 herd immunity is possible here in the US, given the fact that 40% of American adults refuse to take the vaccine and never will. What it means is we'll be living with yearly variants of the virus for years to come, and infection spikes that will kill tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands annually.

 

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.” 

 

The shift now is to triage, and to your annual COVID vaccinations for this year's variants in the years ahead, because Americans are petulant, selfish kids. Meanwhile, people will end up in hospitals and die from the disease, and tens of millions of us will still refuse the yearly variant as well. Some of them will get sick. Some will end up in the hospital on a respirator. And some will end up on a morgue slab.

The new normal, indeed.

The Mess In Texas

Democrats better figure out what's wrong in Texas and fast, because they are basically at the point of not even being able to field a primary runoff candidate in Texas's 6th District special election.

Republicans Susan Wright and Jake Ellzey will advance to a runoff in the special election for Texas' 6th Congressional District.

CNN projected Wright would take the first spot in the runoff, but Ellzey and Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez had been locked in a tight race for second.

Sanchez conceded the race on Sunday, thanking volunteers, staff and supporters in a statement posted on social media.

"Democrats have come a long way toward competing in Texas but we still have a long way to go. Unfortunately, tonight we came up short, and two Republicans will be competing to represent this Congressional district," Sanchez wrote. "We'll keep fighting for a healthier, equitable and prosperous Texas and to elect leaders who care about meeting the needs of Texans, although it won't happen in this district immediately."

It won't happen in 2022 either. Another round of GOP-controlled Census redistricting in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio will put dozens of House seats out of play for the Democrats come 18 months from now, and it will take a miracle for the Dems to hold on to the House in a second half of a Biden term.

And at this point, before that's all even happened, we can't even bother to bring enough voters to the table to get a candidate on the ballot. Trump waltzed right into the race and locked it down.

I know Democrats are busy governing, but they can't govern if they don't win, and they can't win if they can't even get on the goddamn ballot.

I expect to see that level of Democratic party incompetence here in the OH/IN/KY Tri-State, but in Texas it's a threat to the entire country.

Do better, guys.

StupidiNews!

• San Diego rescue officials say at least three people are dead and another 20 have been hospitalized after a tour boat capsized off the Pacific Coast Sunday.
• UK PM Boris Johnson is facing more questions from Parliament about personal spending on the Queen's shilling, including refurbishing his personal apartment and paying for child care.
• The Biden Administration is denying Iran state media reports of a prisoner swap deal as part of a revamped nuclear treaty, saying no such arrangement has been reached.
• Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins is joining a growing number of Republicans who are saying DC should join Maryland if its citizens want House and Senate representation, rather than statehood.
• The Biden Administration will keep the current Trump-revived National Space Council, with VP Kamala Harris set to join as the group's chair.

The Big Lie, Con't

Kansas GOP Sen. Roger Marshall is one of the Republican Party's chief insurrectionists, and told CNN's Pamela Brown on Saturday that the country is "so ready to move on" from January 6th. Of course, that's a complete lie, as the Kansas City Star takes Marshall to task for.

All Roger Marshall wants is for Americans to put his role in that little insurrection thing in the rearview mirror.

On Saturday, CNN’s Pamela Brown pressed the freshman U.S. senator from Kansas about his vote to toss out millions of Americans’ ballots in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and about his joining Texas’ lawsuit to invalidate President Joe Biden’s decisive victory. Marshall was one of only six GOP senators who voted against certifying the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, just hours after a berserk mob invaded the U.S. Capitol, killing at least five people, including one police officer. (Marshall had company in the vote with his Missouri neighbor, Sen. Josh Hawley, natch.)

So does he have any regrets, or concerns that his actions contributed to the fact that fully 70% of Republican voters think the election was illegitimate, Brown asked?

Of course not. “Look, Pamela, it’s, we’re just so ready to move on,” he said, beaming his TV smile. “I made a decision based upon the facts that I knew at that point in time. … But it’s time to move on. It’s time for this country to heal. It’s time for a spirit of forgiveness to be happening.”

Normally, saying “I’m sorry” precedes the expectation of forgiveness.

And he isn’t sorry, since he still didn’t back down from his vague claims about nonexistent voter fraud. “I was concerned then,” he told Brown, “and still am today,” that the election wasn’t aboveboard. (Just the presidential part of it, of course — he’s raised no objection to Republicans’ strong down-ballot showing around the country.)

This isn’t the first time Marshall has urged America to “move on.” In late January, he insisted that a second impeachment trial for Donald Trump would divide us too much, and that “this country has to heal.”

That’s an odd prescription from a doctor-turned-politician who makes it a regular practice to pick at the country’s culture war wounds. His Twitter feed and official press releases often read like a MAGA “Mad Libs.”

Biden’s address last week was “the lowest energy speech I have ever personally heard on the House floor,” he said. “Dem Senators” want to “enact their radical agenda & tip the scales of power in their favor,” he tweeted. He joined fellow firebrand Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa introducing the eye-rollingly named TASTEE Act, or Telling Agencies to Stop Tweaking What Employees Eat Act of 2021, “pushing back against the Left’s ‘War on Meat’ and ‘Meatless Mondays.’”

Marshall certainly has meat on his mind — red meat for his Breitbart sound bite base. But if he really thinks it’s “time for this country to work together and focus on the goals that we can solve together,” as he said to Brown, he could start by apologizing for being one of the leading proponents of the Big Lie about the election.

 

Of course no Republican is going to do this, because there are no good Republicans. Arizona's "election audit" farce continues with actual January 6th terrorists participating in the vote recounting and CNN found 70% of Republicans still believing that the election was stolen.

To believe Marshall's additional lie about the GOP wanting to move on is even more harmful than believing the Big Lie he helped to spread 100 days ago, because it clearly shows that Marshall doesn't want to be linked to the inevitable violence he knows is coming.

Also, someone should ask Sen. Marshall about the murder of Aviva Okeson-Haberman, a 24-year-old KC radio journalist who was killed last week in her apartment. She covered social justice for NPR station KCUR.

Someone needs to hold Marshall and his fellow insurrectionists accountable, because otherwise the Big Lie is here to stay.

Debra Ell, a Republican organizer in Michigan and fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, said she has good reason to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said, referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November.

In fact, there is no evidence to support Trump’s false assertions, which culminated in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But Ell, a Republican precinct delegate in her state, said the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.”

“He said the election was not rigged, as Donald Trump had said, so we didn’t agree with that, and then he didn’t blame the Democrats for any election fraud,” said Ell, explaining her frustration with Roe. “He said there was no fraud — again, that’s something that doesn’t line up with what we think really happened — and then he said it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”

Nearly six months after Trump lost to Biden, rejection of the 2020 election results — dubbed the “Big Lie” by many Democrats — has increasingly become an unofficial litmus test for acceptance in the Republican Party. In January, 147 GOP lawmakers — eight senators and 139 House members — voted in support of objections to the election results, and since then, Republicans from Congress to statehouses to local party organizations have fervently embraced the falsehood.

In Washington, normally chatty senators scramble to skirt the question, and internal feuding over who is to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection has riven the House Republican leadership, with tensions between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, spilling into public view. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is facing a Trump-aligned primary challenger in her 2022 race, inspired by her call for Trump to resign after the Jan. 6 attack and her later vote to convict him over his role in inciting the insurrection.

Local officials, too, are facing censure and threats — in states from Iowa to Michigan to Missouri — for publicly accepting the election results. And in Arizona’s largest county, a hand recount of 2.1 million votes cast in November is underway by Republicans who dispute the results, in yet another effort to overturn the results of the November contest.

The issue also could reverberate through the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election, with Trump already slamming Republicans who did not resist the election results. For Republicans, fealty to the falsehood could pull the party further to the right during the primaries, providing challenges during the general election when wooing more moderate voters is crucial. And for Democrats, the continued existence of the claim threatens to undermine Biden’s agenda.

 

The longer this goes on, the more another deadly insurrectionist terrorist attack -- or worse -- becomes likely, if not inevitable.

Sunday Long Read: A Plain Story About Being Black

The CBC's Omarya Issa and Ify Chiwetelu explore not just being Black in Canada, but being Black in the Prairie provinces and the history, culture, and future of being Black in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba in this week's Sunday Long Read.

 

What does it mean to be Black in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba? It is impossible to limit more than 200 years of recorded Black presence on the Prairies to a single definition.

The CBC project Black on the Prairies began with a conversation among colleagues in the spring of 2020. The Prairies, like the rest of the country, were gripped by the rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter.”

That conversation revealed a mutual desire to share the fullness of Black life on the Prairies. These stories are vital and urgent, especially during what the United Nations has labelled the International Decade for People of African Descent.

This project does not position the Prairies as Black ancestral territory or homelands. To be Black on the Prairies is to be part of a colonial legacy that begins on the ancestral lands of the First Nations and Métis people of this region. We aim to recognize Black and Indigenous peoples’ shared histories and affirm our ongoing relationships.

Through five themes — Migration, Putting in Work, Black and Indigenous Relations, Politics and Resistance, and Black to the Future — this project places Black people's experiences at the centre of the Prairie narrative.

These stories explore the richness, complexity, depth and multiplicity of Black Prairie life — past, present and future. They highlight achievements and histories that affirm the influence of Black life on the Prairies and challenge assumptions about its newness.

Bringing this project to life involved contributions from a 10-person community advisory board. They shared insights, curiosities and perspectives, ensuring that Black on the Prairies authentically represents a diversity of experiences and histories. To them, we are incredibly grateful.

In this project, you will find personal essays, articles, audio stories, images and more. We invite you to enter through any door.

Welcome to Black on the Prairies.

Having been born in a Great Plains state myself, I discovered a lot of similarities and some important differences in this journey, but it's definitely a history lesson worth taking in here.

Pull up a chair, as this is a good one.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Trump wants an army of "poll watchers" to discredit elections, and GOP state legislatures are delivering in nearly 20 states.

 

Voting rights activists are sounding alarms about Republican efforts in key states to empower partisan poll watchers and expand voter challenges – arguing it could lead to voter intimidation that recalls dark chapters in US history.

Bills in several states would grant new authority to poll watchers – who work on behalf of candidates and political parties – to observe voters and election workers. Critics say it could lead to conflict and chaos at polling places and an improper targeting of voters of color.

In Texas, a measure under consideration by the Republican-controlled legislature would grant partisan poll watchers the right to videotape voters as they receive assistance casting their ballots.

And in Florida, a sweeping election bill passed Thursday by Republicans in the state legislature specifies that partisan observers must be able see the ballots as canvassing boards work to authenticate voters’ signatures on absentee ballots. There are no limits on how many ballots poll watchers can challenge. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has indicated he will sign the law.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, the state’s controversial new voting law makes it explicit that any Georgian can challenge the qualifications of an unlimited number of their fellow voters. The new law comes after a Texas group, True the Vote, teamed up with Georgia activists last year to question the qualifications of more than 360,000 voters ahead of two Senate runoff elections.

Most counties dismissed True the Vote’s challenges, but Georgia’s new statute requires local election administrators to consider these challenges, threatening them with state sanctions if they don’t.

“If you believe that these challenges aren’t going to be racially targeted, then you are crazy,” said Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election lawyer who has sued on behalf of voting rights groups to stop the Georgia law from taking effect. “This is going to become a tool of voter suppression by Republicans in the state of Georgia.”

The moves to empower partisan actors come after record numbers of voters turned out in 2020. States relaxed election rules to allow more voting by mail and the use of drop boxes to avoid spreading Covid-19. That turnout surge in states such as Georgia helped Democrats seize the White House and the majority in the US Senate.

As part of their failed efforts to overturn the election results, former President Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly argued fraud could have occurred because Trump-aligned poll watchers lacked sufficient access to the voting and counting process in several states. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Around the country, Republican legislators have responded with measures that grant more authority to poll watchers. A new analysis by the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice found that, as of April 15, lawmakers in 20 states had introduced at least 40 bills to expand poll watchers’ powers.

 

There is a long, brutally racist history of "poll watchers" challenging Black voters in this nation, and we're headed back to an era where every vote cast by a Black person is challenged and disenfranchised. It won't be pretty.

And that's the point.