Retribution Execution, Con't

The 13 House Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill last week have to be crucified and left by Trump for others to see, or Trump risks losing his power heading into 2022.

 

Republican Rep. Fred Upton on Monday shared a threatening voicemail he had received after voting for the bipartisan infrastructure bill last week. 

In the voicemail, which Upton played during an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on "AC360," a caller told the Michigan Republican: "I hope you die. I hope everybody in your f**king family dies," while labeling him a "f**king piece of sh*t traitor." 

Upton was one of just 13 House Republicans who voted with Democrats on Friday to pass the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill after hours of delays and debating among Democrats. The legislation, which passed the Senate in August, will deliver $550 billion in new federal investments in America's infrastructure over five years, including roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, ports and waterways. 

Following the Friday vote, Upton tweeted in part, "I regret that this good, bipartisan bill became a political football in recent weeks. Our country can't afford this partisan dysfunction any longer." 

On Monday evening, he told Cooper, "I'll tell you it's a terrible way -- we have seen civility really downslide here. I'm concerned about my staff. They are taking these calls."
"These are very disturbing, adult language," he added. "To say the least, that truly is frightening." 

Upton's office said the voicemail was not an isolated incident. The calls came after GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia tweeted the phone numbers of those who had voted for the bill and later called them traitors.

 

Trump's already claimed the careers of GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Anthony Gonzalez, who have already announced their respective retirements. Both of them would be facing redistricting eliminations anyway, as Ohio and New York are each losing a House seat in 2022. There will be more.

Note Greene wants to be Trump's director of political assassination. She wants Trump to see her help put these "traitors" down. That's the problem with being a tyrant, however. You can't have any enemies in your own camp, because they are a direct threat to your power.

 

Greene and her goons are almost certainly going to mount a campaign to strip the 13 Republicans of their committee assignments, which Democrats should happily accept.

Expect Upton to announce his retirement soon, or to be trounced in a primary in the spring.

Meanwhile, Trump's cultists continue to terrorize election officials around the country and they're proud of it.

In Arizona, a stay-at-home dad and part-time Lyft driver told the state’s chief election officer she would hang for treason. In Utah, a youth treatment center staffer warned Colorado’s election chief that he knew where she lived and watched her as she slept.

In Vermont, a man who says he works in construction told workers at the state election office and at Dominion Voting Systems that they were about to die.

“This might be a good time to put a f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pistol in your f‑‑‑‑‑‑ mouth and pull the trigger,” the man shouted at Vermont officials in a thick New England accent last December. “Your days are f‑‑‑‑‑‑ numbered.”

The three had much in common. All described themselves as patriots fighting a conspiracy that robbed Donald Trump of the 2020 election. They are regular consumers of far-right websites that embrace Trump’s stolen-election falsehoods. And none have been charged with a crime by the law enforcement agencies alerted to their threats.

They were among nine people who told Reuters in interviews that they made threats or left other hostile messages to election workers. In all, they are responsible for nearly two dozen harassing communications to six election officials in four states. Seven made threats explicit enough to put a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death, the U.S. federal standard for criminal prosecution, according to four legal experts who reviewed their messages at Reuters’ request.

These cases provide a unique perspective into how people with everyday jobs and lives have become radicalized to the point of terrorizing public officials. They are part of a broader campaign of fear waged against frontline workers of American democracy chronicled by Reuters this year. The news organization has documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts.

The examination of the threats also highlights the paralysis of law enforcement in responding to this extraordinary assault on the nation’s electoral machinery. After Reuters reported the widespread intimidation in June, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a task force to investigate threats against election staff and said it would aggressively pursue such cases. But law enforcement agencies have made almost no arrests and won no convictions.

 

Expect terrorism and violence against election officials to increase dramatically the closer we get to November 2022 and especially November 2024.

 

Who's going to want to administer a free and fair election in America when the Republican losing that contest means you and your family are stalked, threatened, or even hurt?

StupidiNews!

• The Biden Administration has announced new measures to alleviate national supply chain issues as meat and food prices for Thanksgiving dinner are expected to hit record highs this year.
• International travelers are headed for American airports again after the Biden administration resumed overseas flights into the US this week for COVID-vaccinated passengers.
• The largest federal government employees' union is asking the Biden administration to delay vaccine mandates until after the new year.
• A bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers arrived in Taiwan this week in a move that is always drawing heavy criticism from Beijing ahead of a virtual US/China summit this month.
• NASA says ongoing litigation with commercial spaceflight companies Blue Origin and SpaceX has now pushed planned lunar missions to at least 2025.
  

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Team Trump is in absolute panic mode over the National Archives turning over Trump regime documents to the January 6th Committee this week and are now in the "throw things at the wall to see what falls into the gears to gum them up" phase of legal battling.

If you blinked you missed it.

Former President Donald Trump filed an emergency request to a federal judge late Monday night to prevent the National Archives from sending sensitive records to Jan. 6 committee investigators by Friday. And just after midnight, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected it, contending the request itself was legally defective and “premature.”

The unusual exchange, which happened in a span of two hours, comes as Chutkan is already considering an earlier request by Trump to prevent Congress from peering into his White House’s records about his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Trump sued to block the National Archives from turning the records over last month, after President Joe Biden declined to assert executive privilege on his behalf. The Archives indicated it would turn the papers over to lawmakers by Friday, unless a court intervened.

Chutkan heard arguments in the suit last week and promised to rule quickly on Trump’s initial emergency request. But she seemed inclined to reject it, questioning the legal basis for a former president to claim executive privilege over records when the sitting president and Congress disagree.

The National Archives has indicated that Trump is seeking to block at least 750 pages out of an initial 1,500 unearthed in response to the Jan. 6 committee’s request for records about the former president’s effort to overturn the election. Many of those papers are culled from the files of senior Trump aides like Mark Meadows, Stephen Miller and Patrick Philbin. They also include call and visitor logs.

Trump’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, issued his second request Monday night, asking Chutkan to approve an “administrative stay” of her own ruling even before she issued it. That way, Binnall argued, Trump would have a chance to appeal her decision before the Archives began delivering hundreds of pages to congressional investigators.

Binnall also warned Chutkan that if she didn’t rule on Trump’s first request by Wednesday, he would go immediately to the appeals court and ask it to step in. He noted that Thursday is Veterans Day and that the National Archives plans to send Trump’s papers to Congress at 6 p.m. Friday.

“This case should be decided after thorough but expeditious consideration pursuant to America’s judicial review process, both before this Court and on appeal, not by a race against the clock,” Binnall wrote.

But the request baffled legal experts, who said judges have no power to preemptively block rulings they haven’t issued yet. They noted Chutkan is already moving on an urgent timeline to consider Trump’s initial request and that it was odd for the former president to threaten to go to the appeals court before seeing Chutkan’s decision.

 

Me, I fully expect the National Archives to be blocked by an appeals court injunction this week and for the case to go before SCOTUS.  There's no way the National Archives gets the documents to the January 6th Committee without a court fight.

We'll see how it shakes out, but I expect Trump's appointed judges will eventually save Trump from himself again.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

Tons of local ordinances were voted on last week, including a rent control vote that passed overwhelmingly in St. Paul. Within a day of the vote passing, limiting rent increases in the city to 3% a year, developers called city hall to tell the city that planned new apartment units would be placed on hold indefinitely and that they would look to the outer Twin Cities suburbs to build.

 

Less than 24 hours after St. Paul voters approved one of the country's most stringent rent control policies, Nicolle Goodman's phone started to ring. Developers were calling to tell the city's director of planning and economic development they were placing projects on hold, putting hundreds of new housing units at risk.

"We don't want our equity goals to be at odds with our growth goals," Goodman said in a presentation to the City Council Wednesday. "The ordinance as written may actually put those goals at odds."

Voters' decision Tuesday to cap annual rent increases at 3% sent developers into a frenzy, prompting some with stakes in Minnesota's capital city to pause projects or reconsider sites for future housing.

Unlike most cities with rent control, St. Paul will not exempt new construction, which opponents argue will force lenders and developers to look outside the city for spots where they feel more confident that they will recoup investments and earn profits.

"We, like everybody else, are re-evaluating what — if any — future business activity we'll be doing in St. Paul," said Jim Stolpestad, who has worked on developments in St. Paul for 30 years as founder of Exeter, the company behind major projects like Grand Avenue's revamped retail corridor and new luxury apartments in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood.

It's a sobering prospect as major redevelopments, including the Hillcrest Golf Club and Boys Totem Town sites, enter critical planning stages. At the Highland Bridge site, where construction is well underway, Ryan Companies was scheduled to submit three building plans to the city this week — but Tony Barranco, Ryan's north region president, said Wednesday those reviews have been postponed indefinitely in light of the referendum's outcome.

Ryan Companies warned before Election Day that the rent control ordinance could prevent them from finding investors for the 760 affordable housing units the city pledged to bring to the former Ford site.

"If our banking partners won't loan us dollars to build the buildings that are planned as market rate because they can more safely lend their dollars elsewhere, we will not be able to build the market rate projects" that help subsidize affordable housing, Barranco said.

Supporters of rent control, led by a grassroots coalition that petitioned to put the ordinance on the ballot, say developers are making empty threats.

"This happens in every city where new regulations are passed … because they want to scare the city into changing the ordinance," said Tram Hoang, campaign manager for Housing Equity Now St. Paul, which led the ballot measure push

Ramsey County Commissioner Trista MatasCastillo, who voted for rent control, said she believes St. Paul's population and need for development will ultimately win out.

"I don't think development will stall," she said. "But there will be some kinks that need to get worked out."

 

I think this is the most likely outcome, but understand that the problem with affordable housing is that when you add to the supply of it, it lowers the value of existing housing.

There are people who will fight that with every fiber of their being. Not all of them are housing developers, either.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

As expected, the House January 6th Committee has issued another round of Trump regime subpoenas, including ones for former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Trump coup memo author/lawyer John Eastman.

The House select committee investigating the deadly January 6 riot on Capitol Hill announced Monday it is issuing six additional subpoenas to top Trump campaign associates as it continues to seek testimony and documents from key witnesses in the sweeping probe. 

With this round of subpoenas, the committee is targeting top individuals from former President Trump's reelection campaign who the panel says were involved in promoting the lie that the presidential election was stolen. 

The six subpoenas are going to:

• Trump 2020 campaign manager William Stepien
• Former senior adviser to the campaign Jason Miller
• John Eastman, an attorney who helped craft Trump's argument that the election was stolen
• Michael Flynn, who was involved in meeting about how the Trump campaign wanted to promote the lie that the election was stolen
• Angela McCallum, national executive assistant to former President Trump's 2020 reelection campaign
• Bernard Kerik, who participated in a meeting at the Willard Hotel centered around overturing election results.

All six individuals are being asked to supply the committee with documents on November 23, with depositions scheduled spanning the last week of November into mid December. 

"In the days before the January 6th attack, the former President's closest allies and advisors drove a campaign of misinformation about the election and planned ways to stop the count of Electoral College votes," Select Committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson said in a statement. "The Select Committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot, and who paid for it all."

Thompson added: "The Select Committee expects all witnesses to cooperate with our investigation as we work to get answers for the American people, recommend changes to our laws that will strengthen our democracy, and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again." 

I absolutely want to see Flynn and Kerik refuse to cooperate and end up back in the clink.

The real villain here though is John Eastman, the legal eagle behind the coup itself. Everyone else was executing Eastman's plan, which is why he's so eager to deny it.

Still, the elephant in the room remains Steve Bannon, referred for criminal prosecution for refusing to cooperate with the January 6th Committee and still a free man, with AG Merrick Garland simply saying that it's a "criminal matter".

It's criminal that Bannon isn't in a steel box right now.

StupidiNews!

• The US State Department has added the Netherlands and Luxembourg to its list of destinations considered to be "very high" COVID-19 delta risks, bringing the list to 80 countries worldwide.
• Former Transportation Secretary and wife of GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell, Elaine Chao, says that it's the "patriotic duty" of American workers to take low-paying jobs to "help supply chain issues."
• Bitcoin has his a new record high valuation as the crypto market now is worth more than $3 trillion total worldwide.
• Opposition lawmakers in Chile's lower house are scheduling a marathon speech session to keep the motion to impeach President Sebastian Pinera alive.
• Disney will release IMAX digital format aspects for 13 Marvel films on Disney+  this week, coinciding with the streaming release of Shang-Chi and The Legend Of The Ten Rings.
  

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

The GOP's anti-vaccine disinformation campaign over the last year has worked better than anyone could have imagined, and it's killing tens of thousands of red state Americans a month.

 

Whatever one’s views on the appropriateness of vaccine or mask mandates or other coronavirus-related policies, one fact about those debates is incontrovertible: Misinformation is very disproportionately a problem on one side — the right

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation lays that bare better than anything before it. But even the overall numbers might undersell the fundamental problems involved.

Kaiser runs great monthly tracking polls on the virus and related issues, and its most recent asked about false and unproven claims that have permeated the past year or so.

Of the eight statements the poll tested, just 6 percent of Republicans believed each of them to be untrue, compared with 38 percent of Democrats. And 46 percent of Republicans either believed or were unsure about at least half of the claims, compared with just 14 percent of Democrats.

Importantly, that’s not the same as saying 46 percent of Republicans actually believed four or more false claims; the pollster included those who are unsure about the claims in the above numbers.

But even those overall numbers obscure just how ripe the right is for this kind of misinformation. The reason: In most cases, if you exclude Republicans who haven’t heard the claims and focus on just who is familiar with them, a majority of them actually believe the claims.

Kaiser shared additional details of its findings with The Fix. Among them:

• 65 percent of Republicans say the government is exaggerating the death rate from the coronavirus, compared to just 4 percent of Republicans who have heard that claim and say it’s false. (In fact, the number of excess deaths compared with a normal year suggest the death rates are largely undersold.)
• 28 percent of Republicans believe ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment for the coronavirus, compared with 6 percent familiar with the claim who say it’s false. (Ivermectin remains unproven as a coronavirus treatment, with plenty of evidence that it’s not effective.)
• 28 percent also believe the government is hiding vaccine-related deaths, compared with 8 percent who say it’s false. (There is no proof for this claim, which is generally based on open-source and unverified reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.)
• 18 percent say you can get the coronavirus from the vaccine, compared with 12 percent who say that’s false. (It is false.)

Indeed, of the eight claims tested, only two feature fewer Republicans who are familiar with the claim saying it was true than saying it was false. Those are: the idea that there are microchips in the vaccines and the idea that the vaccines change your DNA.

In the former case, just 7 percent of Republicans believe it’s true — the same percentage as among Democrats — compared with 40 percent who say it’s false. (About 21 percent of Republicans have heard the claim but are unsure about it.)

The idea that the vaccines change your DNA, which was recently stated by a speaker at one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s news conferences (the Republican governor didn’t correct the speaker) is believed by 13 percent of Republicans and disbelieved by a similar number, 16 percent.

That more Republicans don’t believe these things seems to owe to the fact that many of them are simply unfamiliar with the claims in the first place — not necessarily that they have sought out reputable information.

 

The disinformation lock on Republican cultists who have been programmed to commit suicide is horrifying. We're seeing thousands die daily because they refused a safe vaccine, because they were told the vaccine would kill them.

 

It really is that simple.

 

 

These Disunited States, Con't

Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz is openly talking about the need for Texas t secede from the United States, once again proving that it's not just known House insurrectionist bomb throwing lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who want another Civil War, but Senators like Cruz as well.

 

In a startling address to constituents, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently talked about controversial COVID-19 conspiracist Joe Rogan becoming the “president” of Texas if the state secedes from the union.

“I’m not there yet,” Cruz told an audience last month at Texas A&M University about Texas seceding from the United States — popularly known as “Texit.”

But “if there comes a point where it’s hopeless, then I think we take NASA, we take the military, we take the oil,” he said to loud applause.

Asked if he would also take Rogan, a Texan, Cruz responded: “Joe Rogan, he might be president of Texas!”

When Cruz was asked by a member of the audience about the possibility of seceding, he said he “understood the sentiment.” But he added that he wasn’t ready for it — yet.

“I’m not ready to give up on America. I love this country,” he said, again to applause.

For one thing, Cruz insisted, Texas has a “responsibility” to the nation because “right now it’s an amazing force keeping America from going off the cliff, keeping America grounded in the values that built this country.”

But he’s prepared to change his mind.

“Look, if the Democrats end the filibuster ... if they pack the Supreme Court, if they make D.C. a state, if they federalize elections and massively expand voter fraud,” which doesn’t exist, “it may become hopeless,” Cruz said. “We’re not there yet.”

But if it does become “hopeless,” that’s when the state should grab NASA, the military and the oil, he added.

 

The Rogan idiocy aside, this is Cruz openly and publicly saying that if Democrats do constitutional things like get rid of the filibuster and make DC a state, he would want Texas to do a wildly unconstitutional thing like secede from the union. He is openly saying that Texas should illegally seize federal assets inside the state like NASA's Johnson Space Center...and the US military assets based in Texas.

 

The reality is that Republican voters in Red America no longer consider the rest of us to be Americans, and even to be human. They want no part of a union where they cannot be in permanent control. They would rather leave. They do not consider Democrats who live in these states to be Americans. They would rather eject them, or leave them behind.

 

Red America wants Blue America gone. Coexistence is rapidly becoming an untenable option. If Trump's cultists cannot be in charge, they'd rather burn the country down in violence and drown the streets in blood, folks.

 

We have Republican electeds at the federal level openly embracing secession rather than submit to election cycles of American politics. Not getting that permanent GOP control they were promised under Dubya and under Trump has turned increasingly to "other" solutions. Ten years ago that would have been a political outrage and a career-ender for Cruz. Now? 

 

It's par for the course, and he has millions of Texas Republicans in agreement. 

 

The rest of us in red states? I guess we're walking hostages, victims, collateral damage.

The coming violence is really inevitable.

Iraq Back In The News

Iraqi PM Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an attempted drone strike assassination attempt as the post-US future of the Middle East continues to reshape itself in violence.

A drone targeted the residence of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Baghdad early Sunday, the army said, signaling a major escalation as Iran-linked groups contest the results of last month’s elections.

“I am fine,” Kadhimi posted in a message to Twitter, thanking God and calling for restraint. The military described the attack as a “failed assassination attempt” and said that security forces were taking the “necessary measures” to follow up.

The explosion, as well as follow-up gunfire, was heard throughout central Baghdad. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

A source close to Kadhimi said that several members of his security detail had suffered light injuries in Sunday’s attack, but they did not provide a full accounting of the damage.

The drone attack came hours after Iraqi supporters of Iran-linked militia groups held a funeral march for a man killed by security forces Friday when crowds tried to storm the Green Zone — which houses Iraqi government offices and Western embassies — from two sides.

More than 125 people were wounded in those clashes, most of them members of the security forces, as militia supporters decried Iraq’s Oct. 10 parliamentary elections as fraudulent.

Although broadly accepted as legitimate by international observers, the results have sparked growing tensions in the country. As populist cleric Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr emerged with the biggest share of the country’s parliamentary seats, the Iran-linked Fatah alliance saw its share cut by around two-thirds, despite winning the largest numbers of votes.

Iran-linked armed groups have been blamed for dozens of rocket and drone strikes on the Green Zone and other U.S.-linked military targets in recent years, with the pace often increasing during sensitive political moments.

Iraqi and U.S. officials have grown increasingly alarmed over the recent use of small fixed-wing drones that have evaded detection systems around military bases and diplomatic facilities. Military officials and diplomats say that the drones sometimes fly too low to be picked up by defensive systems.

The U.S. State Department condemned the attack as “an apparent act of terrorism” and said it was in contact with the Iraqi security forces and had offered assistance in the investigation.

The spike in tensions here over the weekend followed indications that Sadr may be pushing ahead with the formation of a government that marginalizes Fatah. The Iran-backed alliance has lost popularity in Iraq in recent years, after its militias participated in the slaying of hundreds of young men and women who joined an anti-government uprising in 2019. The demonstrations began as a cry against corruption but swiftly morphed into a revolt against the entire political system.

Kadhimi came to power in May of last year, after those demonstrations toppled his predecessor Adel Abdul Mahdi. The Oct. 10 elections were held early as a concession to the demonstrators, but most Iraqis chose not to vote in the end, citing deep disillusionment in the possibility for elections to change what they see as a largely unaccountable political system forged in the wake of America’s 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

 

Ironically, the attempt on al-Kadhimi might be more of a warning than an assassination.

Most analysts saw the attack as a warning to Mr. al-Kadhimi and his allies rather than as an assassination attempt. The prime minister has remained in power by balancing Iraqi relations between Iran and the United States, and he is seeking another term.

“What we’ve seen in the past is the use of violence, not necessarily to assassinate, but to warn that, ‘We’re here,’” said Renad Mansour, head of the Iraq Initiative at the think tank Chatham House. “I think this would also be a warning perhaps gone wrong because you can gain a bit more popularity and sympathy as the prime minister who survived an assassination attempt.”

The attack, though, significantly complicates efforts to form a government. Such efforts rely on forging alliances among parties, some of them with armed wings, to form the biggest bloc in Parliament.

 

So in other words, the use of violence to greatly impede the formation of a duly elected new government.

 

Now, in which country have we seen that performed in this year?

StupidiNews!

• A US cybersecurity firm is reporting that at least nine major defense related organizations have been breached by foreign hackers looking for defense secrets with more expected.
• The US Embassy in Ethiopia has ordered all non-emergency US government employees to leave the country as Tigrayan rebels advance towards the capital, Addas Ababa.
• Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has won reelection Sunday as the Biden administration calls the election "pantomime" over the fact that Ortega main election opponent has been jailed.
• Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to announce his third term as leader of the Chinese Communist Party with a doctrine that would effectively leave him in control of Beijing for life.
• New research finds human-caused climate change responsible for 68% of the increase in Western US wildfires since 1978.
  

Last Call For Sour Virginia, Con't

Yes, white rural voters in Virginia turned out and voted for Republicans out of white grievance identity politics, and they freely admit doing it and say they will do it again in 2022.

The rural share of the vote in America has been steadily shrinking, but remains sizable enough to be politically potent. National exit polling in 2020 estimated that one in five voters lived in rural or small-town America. The Democratic data firm TargetSmart, which categorized voters based on population density, labeled 30 percent of the electorate as rural.

But while some Democratic politicians now recognize the scope of their rural problem, the words of voters in Bath County expose the difficulty in finding solutions. In interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics. And the voters, fueled by a conservative media bubble that speaks in apocalyptic terms, were convinced that America had been brought to the brink by a litany of social movements that had gone too far.

A monument to Confederate soldiers stands next to the sheriff’s office in Hot Springs, a visual representation of the cultural gap between its residents and the Democratic base. The town is accessible only by a two-lane highway that winds through mountains near the West Virginia border. It’s best known for The Homestead, a luxury resort founded in the late 1800s that has hosted golf tournaments, conferences for the United Nations and presidents, including William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

Ms. Neff, who owns a hardware store adorned with images of Mr. Trump as Rambo and the Terminator, was in Washington on Jan. 6 to support the former president — but refused to go into further detail. Citing false evidence, she called the coronavirus vaccine a “poison” and said she worried that Democrats were planning extermination camps of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Karen Williams, a Bath County resident who manages vacation rentals, said she resented the current Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for keeping schools shut down during the pandemic, embracing progressive policies focused on race and removing Confederate statues and monuments. She called this an example of critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become shorthand for a contentious debate on how to teach race and racism in schools.

White children “are no longer allowed to be kids, we’re treating them like little monsters,” Ms. Williams said.

Mr. Hamilton, a veteran of the Vietnam War, said his vote for Mr. Youngkin was really a proxy vote for Mr. Trump. Of President Biden, he said, “the best thing that can happen is to get him and that woman out of there.”

John Wright, a 68-year-old retiree, said he listened only to pro-Trump programming.

“I don’t care if the media said the moon was full of cheese, and there was an astronaut who brought back some cheese,” Mr. Wright said. “If the media said it, I won’t believe it.”

Some of these voters are simply out of reach for Democrats, incompatible with the party’s embrace of Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and #MeToo.

But the politically urgent problem for Democrats is that rural America has moved faster and further from them in the last 20 years than urban America has moved away from Republicans. From 1999 to 2019, cities swung 14 percentage points toward the Democrats, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center report. At the same time, rural areas shifted by 19 percentage points toward the Republicans. The suburbs remained essentially tied.

Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, which looks for Democrats to run for local offices nationwide, said it could be challenging to recruit candidates in deep red small towns — and to lure money into what are most likely losing causes.

“We just have to try and lose by less,” she said. “And ‘investing to lose by less’ is not a fun sell to Democratic donors. But it is what it is.”

Those Democrats who do run in conservative territory often distance themselves from the national party brand. When Monica Tranel, a Democrat, kicked off her bid for Montana’s new congressional seat over the summer, she lamented how few of the people she grew up with still vote Democratic. “They feel like Democrats look down on rural America,” she said in her campaign launch video.

Ben Tribbett, a Democratic strategist in Virginia, has watched his party’s vote share in rural areas wither for three decades.

“I don’t know what our message is there,” Mr. Tribbett said. “Which is a problem, because I’m supposed to be creating content for political campaigns.”

 

The good news is that the Biden era is showing quite clearly that Democrats have finally realized that the best they can do in America's rural counties is triage. White voters in rural areas have been inundated with right-wing disinformation for decades, and fixing the problem will also take decades, decades that the country doesn't have judging by the near-coup by Trump in 2020. You can't sell your policies to people who think you are literally trying to round them up in camps to kill them. The time to get serious about fighting right-wing propaganda and disinformation was a quarter-century ago.

That ship has sailed, folks. All we can do now is to try to stop the hemorrhaging.

Fixing bridges and roads and schools and providing good jobs in the cities and suburbs doesn't matter in the quarter of the country's population that is rural. The hard reality is in states with 75% or more white votes, losing white voters by 2 to 1 means there's no way you can win. Some triage is necessary, but the GOP knows that if they can keep the electorate white and win white voters, it doesn't matter what Black folk like me in a red state want. We literally do not matter politically anymore, and they know it.

If Democrats are going to lose these areas by 50 points, the best they can do is try to only lose them by 40 and accept that. They're not going to listen. We're dealing with people lost to the Years of Trump and Rage, parading around their vaccine refusal, ripping people's masks off and spitting in people's faces to try to infect them, screaming bloody murder at restaurant servers and checkout cashiers, disrupting school board and city council meetings, and running over protesters with their vehicles.

 

We still need to provide folks out here with better infrastructure. Better roads, schools, bridges, broadband internet access, water, clean air. They're Americans too and we took a big step towards that over the weekend.

But we have to try to save the rest of us too. There are people who will never vote for the Democratic party, and at this point, it's time to try to turn out the people you have some chance with instead of chasing the zero percent rage junkies. We have to because if we don't, the alternative is near-permanent GOP authoritarian rule.

Democrats needs to continue to make policies to help everyone, but don't expect some of them to vote for you. There's nothing you can do at this point other than turning out people who will listen and to give them a reason to show up.

And those folks don't live in places like Bath County, Virginia.

Finally, the real lesson here is that Trumpism without Trump is now far more dangerous in 2021 than Trumpism with Trump in 2020. Dems need to counter with actions, with turnout, and with going after the right-wing noise machine that made all this possible.

Or it will be too late for us in only a few short years.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Republican Attorneys General have found the judges they need in the Fifth Circuit for a stay of the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for employers, and the honest truth was that the OSHA rules were always headed for the US Supreme Court.

 

A U.S. federal appeals court issued a stay Saturday freezing the Biden administration's efforts to require workers at U.S. companies with at least 100 employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly, citing "grave statutory and constitutional" issues with the rule.

The ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit comes after numerous Republican-led states filed legal challenges against the new rule, which is set to take effect on Jan 4.

In a statement, Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda said the Labor Department was "confident in its legal authority" to issue the rule, which will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

"The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them," she said. "We are fully prepared to defend this standard in court.”

An average of about 1,100 Americans are dying daily from COVID-19, most of them unvaccinated. COVID-19 has killed roughly 750,000 people in the United States.

The stay comes two days after the Biden administration unveiled the rule, which was immediately met with vows of legal action from Republican governors and others, who argued it overstepped the administration's legal authority. read more

The action on the private-sector vaccinations was taken under OSHA's emergency authority over workplace safety, officials said. The rule applies to 84.2 million workers at 1.9 million private-sector employers, according to OSHA.

The administration's various vaccine rules cover 100 million employees, about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce, according to the White House.

Saturday's court order came in response to a joint petition from several businesses, advocacy groups, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah. The rule is also facing separate legal challenges before other courts. read more

 

So yes, the stay was guaranteed, and now the legal battle begin over whether or not OSHA has the authority to even exist, let alone issue vaccine mandates.

 

As I've mentioned before, there may very well be five or six Supreme Court votes to dismantle most executive agencies as unconstitutional. 

Stay tuned.

Sunday Long Read: The Butcher Of Havana

This week's Sunday Long Read is The Atavist's profile of Herman Marks, Castro's number one "troubleshooter" who usually solved Castro's problems with, well, shooting it. Tony Perrottet gives us Marks's history as both a revolutionary from Milwaukee and his role as a Supreme Court test case with his prosecution by the US over his stripped citizenship in 1961.

On the balmy night of April 9, 1959, a little over three months after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara seized power in Cuba, a group of famous international writers gathered in El Floridita, a popular restaurant in Old Havana. They were an urbane set—Tennessee Williams, George Plimpton, Elaine Dundy, and her husband, Kenneth Tynan—and they were expecting to carouse with Cuba’s most beloved yanqui, Ernest Hemingway. Instead, they encountered another Midwestern expatriate, wearing a wide military belt and a hulking .45 service revolver.

Burly and tattooed, the man had rough-hewn good looks. He was in his late thirties—more than two decades younger than Hemingway—and stood five-foot-ten, with thick brown hair and, in the words of his draft card, a “ruddy” complexion. An English journalist later described him as “tall, straight and meanly friendly,” with striking blue eyes that, “yellowing after only a few beers, suggested company dangerous to keep when drunk.” The American’s words tumbled out in the distinctively nasal accent of someone from blue-collar Milwaukee. He pronounced “that” as “dat” and dropped his g’s. He was the uneducated son of Polish immigrants, the type of man one of Williams’s own fictional snobs might have called a redneck.

But if his origins were humble, at El Floridita the man needed no introduction. His image had appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States. In fact, after Hemingway, he was probably the most notorious American in the Caribbean. His name was Herman Marks, and he had risen through the ranks of Castro’s rebel army to command the revolution’s firing squads. Around Havana, there were rumors that he had a sadistic streak; his version of a coup de grâce, it was said, was to empty his pistol into a condemned man’s face, so relatives could not recognize the corpse. Marks’s brutal work had earned him a nickname: He was El Carnicero—the Butcher.

The literati peppered him with questions, and Marks responded with pride. He boasted of being second-in-command to Che himself at La Cabaña prison, and declared that he was so busy, he conducted nightly executions until 2 a.m., and sometimes until dawn. He called the proceedings “festivities” and showed off his cuff links made from spent bullet shells.

Marks knew what the gathered writers were really after. It was an open secret in Havana that he invited select visitors to the executions, which were conducted in the empty stone moat around La Cabaña, beneath a giant floodlit statue of Christ with outstretched arms. American politicians, journalists, starlets, and socialites had all made discreet inquiries about watching a firing squad do its work. Williams, whose grandfather had been a minister, forlornly felt that he might comfort a condemned man by offering “a small encouraging smile” before he was shot.

On this particular night, Marks told the group at El Floridita, he had a busy schedule. The prisoners awaiting execution included a German mercenary. “He made the invitation as easily as he might have offered a round of cocktails at his home,” Plimpton later recalled. Marks counted the visitors out: “Let’s see… five of you… quite easy… we’ll drive over by car… tight squeeze…”

Unnoticed by the others, Tynan had been listening to Marks with growing horror, and now the Englishman leapt to his feet and began shouting. According to Plimpton, the red-faced theater critic squinted his eyes and flapped his arms like an enormous bird while denouncing Marks. He didn’t want to be in the same room as an executioner, Tynan gasped, let alone witness his handiwork. He would attend the execution only to run in front of the firing squad to protect the condemned. Tynan then stormed out of the bar, followed by Dundy.

“What the hell was that?” asked Marks. He told the remaining writers to meet him in the lobby of a nearby hotel at 8 p.m.

 

 Marks' story is not one I had read before, and it's an amazing journey that's worth your time. The legal questions of American citizenship that his case brought up exist to this day.

So do the problems in Cuba.

Last Call For Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Last month's revelations about the Trump "brain trust" using a suite in DC's Willard Hotel as a coup command center seems to have motivated another round of subpoenas from the January 6th commission, according to The Guardian's Hugo Lowell.

The House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January is poised to issue subpoenas to top Trump lieutenants involved in attempting to subvert the 2020 election results from a “command center” at the Willard hotel in Washington, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The subpoenas, which could be issued as soon as next week, reflect the select committee’s interest in events at the hotel just across from the White House, where Donald Trump’s most loyal aides plotted to keep him in office.

The select committee is targeting about 20 individuals connected to the Trump command center at the Willard, among them the legal scholar John Eastman, who outlined ways to deny Joe Biden the presidency, the source said.

The subpoenas seeking documents and testimony are aimed at obtaining the legal advice offered to Trump on how he could manipulate events on 6 January to stop certification of Biden’s election win, the source said.

House investigators are moving to pursue Trump lieutenants who gathered at the Willard to uncover the “centers of gravity” from which Trump and his advisers conspired, the source said – and whether the former president had advance knowledge of the Capitol attack.

The select committee appears to be seeking a full account of what transpired in several suites at the Willard in the days leading up to 6 January and during a final “war room” meeting the night before the Capitol attack.

The select committee is targeting Eastman after it emerged that he outlined scenarios for overturning the election in a memorandum presented at a White House meeting on 4 January with Trump, former vice-president Mike Pence and Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

At that meeting, according to a source close to Trump, Eastman ran through the memo that detailed how at the joint session of Congress on 6 January Pence might refuse to certify electoral slates for Biden and thereby hand Trump a second term. 

 

Which is all fine and good, but what I'm not seeing is any indication that AG Merrick Garland is going to do anything at all to Steve Bannon on the congressional contempt referral for refusing his subpoena from last month.

To many in Washington, the criminal contempt case against Steve Bannon appears cut and dried: The podcaster and former Trump adviser has openly spurned a congressional subpoena to testify in an investigation into the January 6 US Capitol attack, claiming to be covered by executive privilege even though he wasn't a government employee at the time. 

But the longer it takes for the Justice Department to make a decision on whether to prosecute Bannon, the more questions swirl around whether this was the right strategy for congressional investigators. Democratic critics, already frustrated with Attorney General Merrick Garland over other moves, have focused their impatience over the Bannon referral on Garland because he has ultimate say on whether Bannon is prosecuted. 

It's been more than two weeks since the House voted to refer Bannon's case to the Justice Department. Since then, Garland has said little publicly about the status of Bannon's referral, but some people close to the attorney general say his experience of being blocked from the Supreme Court by Republicans for partisan reasons means he's not unaware of the political forces he has to navigate. 

While Justice officials say they expected criticism over the delay in making a decision on the Bannon criminal referral, Garland has established a methodical approach to making decisions, aware that the department will be criticized no matter which way it goes.
Justice Department officials tell CNN that prosecutors don't feel pressure to act more quickly. Given that criminal referrals are rare and even more rarely enforced by the department, the Bannon decision will be dissected for years to come so the lawyers have to be sure they get it right, officials say.

 

That's...actually a fair point, *if* Garland is going to prosecute. We simply don't know if he will. But keep in mind Garland not prosecuting will "be dissected for years to come" too.

 

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump continues to have the only Republican primary vote that matters, and now he's picking Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly's GOP opponent in Arizona in 2022.

Former President Trump is set to attend a fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort next week with Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters, his first public involvement in the state’s marquee Senate race.

An invitation to the fundraiser obtained by The Hill shows the event will be held on Wednesday and costs $2,900 per person to attend. Donors or couples giving $25,000 ahead of the event will also be granted a picture with Trump.

The invitation also shows that the host committee for the event includes an array of prominent tech titans and conservative mega donors, including Peter Thiel, who has already dumped $10 million into a super PAC backing Masters, and Rebekah Mercer.

Masters is the chief operating officer at Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation. News of the fundraiser was first reported by Politico.

Trump’s involvement in the fundraiser is notable given that he has not issued an endorsement in the GOP Senate primary. He has officially backed candidates running in Arizona’s gubernatorial and secretary of state races.

It was not immediately clear if the fundraiser was an indication that Trump was leaning toward endorsing Masters, who has a mutual ally with the former president in Thiel, or if Trump is still considering throwing his weight behind another contender.

Among the other Republicans running for the chance to take on Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) next year are Arizona Secretary of State Mark Brnovich and businessman Jim Lamon.

 

Maters is perfectly cast from the Trump mold: a stupidly rich, completely amoral executive who will say or do anything to win. Mark Brnovich will never be the candidate, he failed to steal Arizona for Trump and Trump won't lift a finger for him.

Both Masters and Brnovich have competed to display their loyalty to Trump, who remains wildly popular with the GOP grassroots in Arizona, though Trump has knocked Brnovich for what he suggested was insufficient support of a Republican-led audit of the November presidential race in the state.

That audit ultimately showed that President Biden won Arizona by a slightly wider margin than initially believed.

Brnovich has tried to bolster his conservative bona fides by using his office to sue the Biden administration on its vaccine mandates for businesses, though Masters has released ads knocking the attorney general as weak on illegal immigration.

An internal poll commissioned by the pro-Masters Saving Arizona super PAC this month and obtained by The Hill showed Brnovich's unfavorable rating jumped from 9 percent to 20 percent since the launch of the ad and that Masters’s support in the primary among likely voters rose from 5 percent to 14 percent.

The poll showed Brnovich leading Masters by a 29-5 margin in August compared to a 26-14 margin in October.

 

Current Arizona GOP Gov. Doug Ducey has no chance for the same reason Brnovich is a dead man walking: he failed to deliver Trump his "election fraud!" victory over Biden.

 

No, Kelly should be preparing to take on Masters now, and he should be ready.