America Goes Viral, Con't

As the Biden administration has been warning for weeks now, the funds for COVID-19 response are being exhausted because Republicans have blocked appropriations in budget fights, and now the White House says there's not enough money to buy a second booster dose of vaccine for everyone who needs it.

 

The Biden administration lacks the funds to purchase a potential fourth coronavirus vaccine dose for everyone, even as other countries place their own orders and potentially move ahead of the United States in line, administration officials said Monday.

Federal officials have secured enough doses to cover a fourth shot for Americans age 65 and older as well as the initial regimen for children under age 5, should regulators determine those shots are necessary, said three officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail funding decisions. But the officials say they cannot place advance orders for additional vaccine doses for those in other age groups, unless lawmakers pass a stalled $15 billion funding package.

“Right now, we don’t have enough money for fourth doses, if they’re called for,” White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients said on a forthcoming episode of “In The Bubble with Andy Slavitt,” which was recorded Monday and shared with The Washington Post. “We don’t have the funding, if we were to need a variant-specific vaccine in the future.”

Federal regulators and health officials have not yet determined whether a fourth shot is needed, and some experts question whether the extra dose will be necessary to boost protection for the general population.

But administration officials said placing orders for additional doses ahead of time — rather than waiting for the United States to be swamped with another wave of the virus — was imperative and a key lesson from the pandemic’s past two years. They also noted that the fast-moving omicron variant evaded some immune protection conferred by existing vaccines, demonstrating the need to invest in more targeted shots that could better fend off omicron and potential future variants.

“Vaccines don’t just appear when you snap your fingers and say, ‘Okay, I want the vaccine.’ We’ve got to make it,” said a senior administration official. “And this year, it’s going to be more complicated, because there’s a very significant chance — although we’re still waiting for data — that the vaccines are going to need to be tweaked to cover omicron.”

Analysts at Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research organization, independently confirmed that the United States would need to purchase hundreds of millions of additional doses to ensure that every American could receive four shots, if necessary, said Jen Kates, who leads global health policy for the organization and previewed the forthcoming analysis.

“If their policy goal is to have enough doses available to provide a fourth dose to everyone, there are not enough doses purchased. They will run out of supply,” said Kates, estimating that the White House needed to purchase about 750 million additional doses to reach that goal.

Kates said her team reviewed several alternate scenarios, such as lowering its projection to 70 percent of Americans who would be vaccinated with four doses, rather than 100 percent. Even with that lower target, “there’s not enough” doses already purchased, Kates said, adding that the full analysis would be published later this week.

 

So even with the 30% of Americans who refuse to get the vaccine, we still won't have enough doses unless Republican stop blocking the $15 billion COVID package for 2022.

 

And believe me, Mitch McConnell and friends know precisely what they are doing as elections draw closer. It's only a question of what McConnell and the GOP get as concessions from the Democrats in order for the money to be released.

You didn't think Republicans were going to let the White House have the money it needs for COVID prevention in an election year, did you?

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine stalls out in its fourth week, the damage to world food markets and supplies from Putin's attack on the "breadbasket of Europe" are becoming readily apparent.

The war in Ukraine has delivered a shock to global energy markets. Now the planet is facing a deeper crisis: a shortage of food.

A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even larger portion of the world’s fertilizers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertilizer prices are soaring. Since the invasion last month, wheat prices have increased by 21 percent, barley by 33 percent and some fertilizers by 40 percent.

The upheaval is compounded by major challenges that were already increasing prices and squeezing supplies, including the pandemic, shipping constraints, high energy costs and recent droughts, floods and fires.

Now economists, aid organizations and government officials are warning of the repercussions: an increase in world hunger.

The looming disaster is laying bare the consequences of a major war in the modern era of globalization. Prices for food, fertilizer, oil, gas and even metals like aluminum, nickel and palladium are all rising fast — and experts expect worse as the effects cascade.

“Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds 125 million people a day. “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”

Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertilizer plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertilizer, threatening the size of the next harvests.

China, facing its worst wheat crop in decades after severe flooding, is planning to buy much more of the world’s dwindling supply. And India, which ordinarily exports a small amount of wheat, has already seen foreign demand more than triple compared with last year.

Around the world, the result will be even higher grocery bills. In February, U.S. grocery prices were already up 8.6 percent over a year prior, the largest increase in 40 years, according to government data. Economists expect the war to further inflate those prices.

For those living on the brink of food insecurity, the latest surge in prices could push many over the edge. After remaining mostly flat for five years, hunger rose by about 18 percent during the pandemic to between 720 million and 811 million people. Earlier this month, the United Nations said that the war’s impact on the global food market alone could cause an additional 7.6 million to 13.1 million people to go hungry.

The World Food Program’s costs have already increased by $71 million a month, enough to cut daily rations for 3.8 million people. “We’ll be taking food from the hungry to give to the starving,” Mr. Beasley said.

Significant long-term food shortages are all we need as the world reels from climate change, an ongoing pandemic and potential for World War III.

It's going to be another very bad summer, folks. There's little chance that things are going to get better soon, either, and we could be in for even worse times ahead.

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

The January 6th investigation, and subsequent arrests and prosecutions, have one real purpose: to gather enough information and evidence to put the masterminds of this terrorist sedition behind bars. The people involved with the planning are turning state's evidence on the bigger fish, and the biggest fish is orange.

Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff and a national campaign spokesperson were involved in efforts to encourage the president’s supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That’s according to a person who says he overheard a key planning conversation between top Trump officials and the organizers of the Jan. 6 rally on the White House Ellipse — and has since testified to House investigators about the phone call.

Trump and his allies have tried to minimize his role in calling his supporters to the Capitol and argue he was simply participating in a lawful, peaceful demonstration.

Scott Johnston — who worked on the team that helped plan the Ellipse rally — says that’s just not so. He claims that leading figures in the Trump administration and campaign deliberately planned to have crowds converge on the Capitol, where the 2020 election was being certified — and “make it look like they went down there on their own.”

Johnston, who says he described the phone call to House select committee investigators, detailed his allegations in a series of conversations with Rolling Stone. Johnston says he overheard Mark Meadows, then-former President Trump’s chief of staff, and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokesperson, talking with Kylie Kremer, the executive director of Women For America First, about plans for a march to the Capitol. Johnston said the conversation was clearly audible to him since it took place on a speakerphone as he drove Kremer between the group’s rallies in the final three days of 2020.

“They were very open about how there was going to be a march. Everyone knew there was going to be a march,” Johnston says.

According to Johnston, Meadows, Pierson, and Kremer discussed the possibility of setting up a permit to make the march from the White House to the Capitol official. He says the trio decided against officially permitting the march, citing concerns about security costs and about the optics of a sitting president organizing a push towards Congress as lawmakers certified his loss in the 2020 election. Ultimately, Johnston tells Rolling Stone, they planned to “direct the people down there and make it look like they went down there on their own.”

Kremer’s group, Women For America First, helped lead the Jan. 6 rally at the White House Ellipse, where Trump delivered a speech and told supporters to “fight like hell” and said he expected them to march on the Capitol. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said. As Trump spoke, people began leaving the rally to walk towards the Capitol.

The president’s camp insists this wasn’t part of any pre-planned push. In the book where he recounted his time in the White House, Meadows called the Jan. 6 violence “the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”

Johnston’s account suggests there was a deliberate strategy by Trump’s allies to have supporters descend on the Capitol. Such a connection would implicate top White House and campaign officials in drawing crowds to the Congress without a permit — a step that could have required added security and may have allowed law enforcement to better prepare for the day’s events. Those crowds overwhelmed the Capitol Police and engaged in an hours-long battle with law enforcement. Four people died during the attack.

According to Johnston, rally organizers were “constantly” using “burner phones” — cheap, pre-paid cells that can be harder to trace because they’re not personally identified with a user or a user’s account — “to talk about” potential permits and plans for a march with Trump aides.

Johnston says that, in the key phone conversation he overheard, the group settled on ordering a march without an official permit. “Nobody wanted to do it because they didn’t want to pay for it,” Johnston says of obtaining a permit. “They didn’t want to have to provide security and all the other expenses.”

On Dec. 20, 2021, Johnston testified to the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack and he provided Rolling Stone multiple pieces of documentation showing his interactions with the committee. Johnston also says he told investigators that he knew the call took place on a “burner phone” in the final days of 2020 because the discussion came right after Kylie Kremer directed him to purchase three phones for her group.

“I’m the one that bought the burner phones,” Johnston says.

The term "seditious conspiracy" is going to be in the news a lot through 2022. 

Meadows is certainly the biggest fish so far in this fish fry, but that of course means Trump knew what was going on, and that he was a major part of -- everyone all together now -- the seditious conspiracy. What other evidence turns up, we'll see. But the January 6th committee is running out of time, and indictments or not, getting convictions on the big fish may never happen even as the committee is expected to start making criminal charge recommendations in the weeks and months ahead.

We'll see.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

 In Arkansas at a car show over the weekend in the town of Dumas near the Mississippi River, 28 people were shot, one fatally, as a gunman opened fire on the show crowd. Dozens were hospitalized, including several children. Republicans in Arkansas had nothing to offer but thoughts and prayers.

Leaders across Arkansas are sending their thoughts and prayers to the residents of Dumas following a shooting at a car show Saturday night that left one person dead and more than 20 others, including many children, injured.

In a tweet, U.S. Senator John Boozman asked for prayers for the victims of the gunfire and for the first responders who assisted them.

He also said that the people responsible for the violence “will be held accountable.”
Troopers: At least 24 injured, one dead in shooting at Dumas car show

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton tweeted that “the hearts of Arkansans from across the state are with the people of Dumas” and said that God would provide “comfort to the victims and their families.”

Cotton also praised the Arkansas State Police for their work on the case.

Representative French Hill posted that his “thoughts are with everyone impacted by the shooting last night in Dumas.”

Arkansas Lt. Governor Tim Griffin sent prayers to the “entire Dumas community” and thanked law enforcement officers who responded to help.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson issued a tweet decrying the careless display of violence, stating “The shooting spree in Dumas last night at a community family event represents a total disregard of the value of life. We have at least 20 shooting victims and at least 18 who have been hospitalized. Several children have been sent to the hospital as well.”

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge tweeted that she is praying for the families who have faced “senseless violence in Dumas.” She also expressed support for law enforcement, stating “May God continue to help our law enforcement ensure that justice is swiftly served.”

Saturday's attack in Dumas was the worst mass shooting in the state's history, and this is a state where one of the first major school shootings happened some 24 years ago in Jonesboro.

In a quarter-century or so, nothing's changed. An entire generation grew up living with school shootings as news, and now a generation is growing up with school shootings as regular occurrences. Mass shootings like Dumas barely made the news outside of the state, where in literally just about any other country on earth, something like this would have been a national scandal.

But we have more firearms than people in this country now. Little wonder then that firearms have more rights than Americans do in 2022, and there's no reason to think it will ever change in my lifetime.

None.

It was just another Saturday night in Gunmerica.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Republicans in both the House and the Senate keep promising retaliation for Democrats should they get control in 2023, and the targets are clearly already being marked.

 

Hunter Biden. Anthony Fauci. Afghanistan. The border.

As Senate Republicans feel increasingly bullish about November, when they are fighting to regain control of Congress, they are floating using a new majority to dig into President Biden and his administration starting in 2023.

The potential probes underscore both the headaches awaiting Democrats if the House or Senate flips heading into 2024 but also the shifting power dynamics within the Senate GOP conference, where a stream of retirements of more pragmatic-minded senators is elevating newer, more combative Republicans.

“I’m sure there will be plenty of ingenious individuals thinking about what to do on those committees,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.).

Braun, while noting he didn’t have a pet investigation, pointed to Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) as two examples of GOP senators who could have “some real interest in looking into stuff that has not been attended to.”

Johnson, if he wins his reelection bid in November, is poised to chair the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Johnson is prevented because of term limits from chairing the full committee again, but the subcommittee gavel comes with a crucial element: subpoena authority.

Asked if there were overlooked issues that he would want to probe, Johnson appeared eager to dig in.

“Like everything?” he told The Hill. “It’s like a mosquito in a nudist colony. It’s a target-rich environment.”

Johnson pointed to the administration’s handling of the coronavirus as one area ripe for investigation. Johnson himself has caught flak, and fed Democratic campaign attacks, as one of the most vocal skeptics within the Senate GOP conference of public health measures amid the pandemic, which has killed more than 970,000 people, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

“There’s so much more in terms of what happened with our federal health agencies that we need to explore,” Johnson said

Johnson views himself as having broad jurisdictional boundaries, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s boundary lines are more amorphous than those of other panels because it combines homeland security with a much broader category of government oversight.

Johnson isn’t alone in wanting to dig into the coronavirus response.

Paul, a libertarian-leaning GOP senator who at times is a gnat for Senate GOP leadership, is in line to become the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee if Republicans win the majority.

Paul atop the committee would be a significant shift. Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.), currently the top Republican on the panel, is retiring after this year and has broken with Paul on a number of key issues. Former Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), who preceded Burr as the top Republican on the committee but retired after 2020, was a close ally of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and was known for his ability to cut bipartisan deals.

Paul has had high-profile tangles with Fauci during committee hearings and promised to investigate and subpoena Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, if he finds himself with a gavel next year.

“If we win in November, if I'm chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we'll go after every one of [Fauci's] records,” Paul said earlier this year.

 

Republicans are promising another 1996, 2010 and 2014 era of gridlock, endless investigations, and impeachment attempts.  Imagine BENGHAZI!!!1!! only times ten, and you get the picture. Surely nothing will be done to help Americans in 2023 and 2024, only daily updates on the half-dozen GOP probes into Democrats.

 

And they'll need it, with abortion illegal in half or more of states, civil rights and LGBTQ+ equality all but gutted, they'll need the TV circus on hearings, not white "christian" nationalism cementing permanent control over America as Gilead.

Half of America is happy to do that, too.

Better vote or else.

Last Call For America Goes Viral, Con't

We're still seeing 1,500 dead from COVID a day, 150,000 in 2022 alone, but nobody seems to care since the fatalities are overwhelming rural and overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic in states like Virginia, Maryland, and DC.

And at every turn, the deaths are caused by disinformation in Black and Hispanic communities.

When a radio show host asked Leonder “Rico” Jerome for his thoughts on the vaccines during a roundtable with Black barbers and health experts in June, Jerome answered honestly: He was conflicted.

Although he was there to discuss an initiative to encourage Black people to take the shot, Jerome, 48, was torn between the news he consumed on vaccine efficacy and his distrust of the pharmaceutical companies that developed the shots.

“Being a man of ebony hue … you’ve seen the Tuskegee experiments, you’ve seen so many different things — to tell me you’re not going to be paranoid is a lie,” Jerome said on the program, adding that he was not vaccinated. “My percentages have been getting higher to get [a vaccine dose] very soon. But I’m still deep in prayer.”

Three months later, his symptoms emerged. As slight discomfort devolved into a fever, Jerome’s loved ones urged him to seek medical help. Within weeks, he was placed on life support for covid pneumonia.

As District lawmakers and residents tangled over the merits of masking and vaccination mandates, Jerome spent the next three months in different hospitals, healing from surgeries on his lungs and kidneys. Even though he had no underlying health conditions, doctors told his sister, Ebony Ellison, that she should start making end-of-life plans. Jerome had a 3 percent chance of survival.

“They said if he was vaccinated, he would not be on life support,” Ellison said, remembering the conversations she had with her brother about vaccination. “He would talk about syphilis [and Tuskegee], but I didn’t go into it with him. Trying to convince someone, especially when you’re the youngest sibling — you give up the fight.”

Health experts and advocates in the District say Jerome’s case is emblematic of the vaccine-related hesitancy and distrust they’ve frequently encountered in majority-Black neighborhoods, which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic at every stage.

Black residents accounted for an overwhelming majority of the city’s 102 coronavirus deaths over the last three months, said Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor for health and human services. Of those, more than 3 in 4 were unvaccinated; 1 in 5 had some doses but lacked a booster shot; and 9 in 10 suffered from an underlying condition, such as chronic kidney disease, diabetes or high blood pressure.

“When omicron came, and we found you needed a booster, you had to almost start over,” said Tuckson, of the Black Coalition Against Covid. “There was not only hardening of misinformation in too much of Black America and the anti-vaccine community, but we also had people that were tired.”

For some Black residents, he said, vaccine distrust is intertwined with frustration over other issues such as police brutality, racism and voter disenfranchisement. For Jerome and some of his friends, that hesitation stems from America’s racist history, including leaders who once considered him and his relatives to be three-fifths of a person and the Tuskegee study. That trepidation has only been intensified by posts on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook that raise doubts over the safety of the vaccines.

The District has used a mix of financial incentives and interventions to reduce gaps in vaccination rates. But Turnage warned of a “tremendous level of misinformation” across social media that continues to influence Black residents.

“There are great reasons to be angry and bitter about Tuskegee, but the issue was people denied access to drugs that could have saved them. In this case, for some odd reason, we deny access to ourselves to the drug that would save us, as some type of protest,” Tuckson said.

In mid-December, as the omicron variant sent more unvaccinated residents into city hospitals, Jerome was released. Doctors described his recovery as a miracle.

He feels more pressure now to get vaccinated, he said. But he’s still undecided.

 

The horrible, horrible secret is white America considers COVID a Black problem that doesn't exist in white neighborhoods.  And if you wanted to kill as many Black people as possible, you'd make sure that decreasing health care funding, spreading disinformation, and sowing distrust among communities was going exactly the way it's going now: telling white folk that "lazy, fat, sickly Black people" are the ones that need the vaccine, not you, and then telling Black folks "Hey, have you ever been able to trust the US government on health care for Black America?"

And here we are, with a third unvaccinated, probably another 15-20% vaccinated but not boosted, and only a small minority of Black Americans caught up with shots.

We always suffer the most, first and last.

The Burned Bridges Of Madison Cawthorn, Con't

Republicans are finally getting clued in that GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn hates them just as much as he hates everyone else in Washington DC and maybe that he hates Republicans even more, and the fact he's only 26 years old and believes he's the smartest person in the room all the time means he hasn't picked up experience or wisdom enough to actually keep his government job.

When House Republicans gathered on the baseball field Friday morning for their weekly practice, members were abuzz about one topic: Rep. Madison Cawthorn. 

The North Carolina Republican infuriated members of his own party this week for calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a "thug" and the Ukrainian government "incredibly evil" -- comments that surfaced just days before Zelensky made a passionate plea to Congress on Wednesday for more help in defending Ukraine against Russia's bloody assault on the country. 

"It was the talk of baseball practice today," Rep. Roger Williams, a Texas Republican who coaches the GOP baseball team, told CNN. "It's not the time to toss accusations around like that ... What I would just say is, I wish he hadn't said it. That was the general sentiment (at practice.)" 

Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, who has not been shy about calling out his colleagues after voting to impeach former President Donald Trump last year, was even more pointed in his criticism. 

"Madison Cawthorn has said he is here for PR and not legislating. I don't think he's a serious legislator," Rice told CNN. "I think he's more interested in throwing bombs than he is in actually trying to help the country." 

"I don't think he has very much respect for the Republican conference or anywhere else," he added. "He's living in a dream land." 

Cawthorn's latest comments have put GOP leaders in an awkward spot -- just as they're trying to show a unified front against Russia and paint President Joe Biden as weak against Russian President Vladimir Putin. The remarks from a freshman firebrand with the ear of former President Donald Trump risks undermining their anti-Russia position, and critics have seized on Cawthorn's most recent behavior to accuse the GOP of echoing Kremlin talking points and acting sympathetic toward Putin. 

Now, lawmakers from across the conference -- including members of Republican leadership -- are dumping criticism on Cawthorn and racing to distance themselves from his remarks. 

"Madison is wrong, if there's any thug in this world it's Putin," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said at his weekly news conference on Friday, though he said he's still supporting Cawthorn's reelection bid. "You just watched Putin directing Russia bomb a maternity ward. We watched yesterday in a theater that's identified in the front and the back from the air that you're housing children -- bombed. This is atrocious, this is wrong, this is the aggressor, this is the one that needs to end this war. This is the one that everybody should unite against." 

Meanwhile, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the House GOP's campaign committee, called Cawthorn's remarks "unfortunate." 

Asked if Cawthorn is a productive member of the conference, Emmer didn't answer directly. 

"I'm not gonna comment on this," Emmer added. "I'm focused on one thing and that is winning back the majority and making sure that we stay focused on the issues that matter."

 

Now the reality is that other Republicans are just as awful, if not even worse, than Cawthorn. The difference is Republican bomb-tossers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert also come with millions of dollars of national fundraising, something Cawthorn isn't quite as good at. He's in fact broke at this point, having spent his $2 million fundraising haul already on ads.

But the real problem is that he's an unlikable asshole.

Most politicians stop digging when they are in a hole. Not Cawthorn. He arrived late to Zelensky’s speech to Congress on Wednesday, missing half of the moving appeal. He went on to oppose the multibillion-dollar package of humanitarian and military aid for Ukraine that Congress overwhelmingly passed. He has signaled his opposition to supporting Ukraine, tweeting that the future of the Republican Party is “Anti-Warmonger” and against “endless wars” and “RINOs.” He can disparage Putin all he wants, but Cawthorn has shown that he thinks supporting a democratically elected government invaded by a brutal dictator is “warmongering.” I wonder what he would have thought of the Cold War.

Most Republicans disagree with Cawthorn. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans think it’s a good idea to send Ukraine weapons, and 80 percent say Ukraine is either an ally or a friend of the United States. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans say Russia is either an enemy or unfriendly, and 83 percent sympathize more with Ukraine in its war than with Russia. Sixty-eight percent also have a favorable view of Zelensky. It’s political malpractice to be on the wrong side of your constituents on such a high-profile issue, yet that’s exactly what Cawthorn has done.

Cawthorn will surely say he has nothing to worry about. Indeed, his campaign has already put out a poll showing him with 62 percent support in his primary bid. But Cawthorn’s recent comments will likely make that old news. He has yet to face the negative ads his well-funded opponents will run castigating him for his actions and his views. Who knows what his constituents will think after that barrage?

 

Cawthorn, even if he loses this year, will only end up running for statewide office eventually. He's only 26. He has years to craft a Senate or Governor campaign. Even 20 years from now he'll be...my age now. Older, wiser, and far more dangerous. The reality is however that all of his House GOP "friends" support his re-election.

 

He's burning bridges now, but he figures the rest of the GOP will be long gone and that he'll outlast them anyway.

 

He's nearly assuredly correct.

Sunday Long Read: Black Lives Still Matter, Tulsa Massacre Edition

Our Sunday Long Read comes to us from Jesse Washington of Andscape. A century after the Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre of Black residents along Black Wall Street, then the most concentrated array of Black wealth in America, where the state and the country stepped in to literally bomb it to ashes from the air in order to destroy Black America over a lynching, the quest for justice continues. The last three survivors are over a hundred years old, descendants of the victims crave closure and reparations, and Republicans have decided to put an end to all of it in the era of "critical race theory".

As the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre approached last year, conditions seemed perfect for this haunted city to finally, meaningfully, move on.

Millions of people around the world were marching for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Corporations and organizations were holding themselves accountable for systemic racism. The 100th anniversary of the 1921 massacre in the Greenwood neighborhood was drawing worldwide attention from news reports, documentaries and the HBO TV series Watchmen. Survivors testified before Congress, and a bill was introduced to help them secure reparations. Singer John Legend, voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and President Joe Biden were coming to Tulsa for an event billed as “Remember and Rise.”

A year later, the city and state are fighting a lawsuit seeking reparations. Only three survivors remain, and two of them are 107 years old. Scholarship money intended for descendants sits unused. Black people own little of the new development in Greenwood. Tulsa built a history center to commemorate the centennial, but a significant portion of the community says the center does little to compensate victims of the massacre and their descendants.

The Greenwood district and its Black Wall Street was perhaps the most prosperous African American neighborhood ever seen. It was turned into a graveyard May 31-June 1, 1921, when an orgy of racist violence killed at least 300 people and destroyed 1,256 homes, plus several hundred businesses, churches, a library and a hospital. Tulsa police and the National Guard refused to protect Greenwood, and some people deputized by the city and National Guard participated in the violence.

More than 4,000 Black survivors were detained afterward in internment camps. The Tulsa City Commission blamed the massacre on “armed negros who started this trouble and instigated it.” Tulsa passed zoning laws making it harder for Greenwood to rebuild, and the City Commission helped prevent insurance claims by Black property owners from being paid. For more than 70 years, the crime was deliberately covered up.

In recent years, the concept of reparations has moved from an academic discussion to serious consideration in at least 11 cities across the country. But Tulsa’s limited response to one of the worst mass murders in American history raises the question: What constitutes reparations for the city’s crimes against its Black citizens?

And if cash reparations can’t be paid in Tulsa, where can they be?

at we’re up against here, we’re talking about the most powerful, the most wealthy, the most well-connected folks in the city and the state,” said Damario Solomon-Simmons, who filed the reparations lawsuit on behalf of survivors and descendants.

“Now that they have taken over the 40 blocks of Greenwood that was Black-owned land, Black-owned businesses, Black-owned homes, Black-owned organizations, Greenwood is now half a block,” he said. “The rest is white-owned businesses, white- and city-owned land and state-owned land and county-owned land.

“They’re building Greenwood for themselves,” Solomon-Simmons said. “They own Greenwood.”

In 1997, the state legislature created the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Even in the ’90s, the massacre was still called a riot, the remnant of a strategy to avoid paying insurance claims and blame Black people for what happened.

In 2001, the commission released its report. It said the massacre began after a mob of white men gathered outside the city jail intending to lynch a Black teenager, and a group of armed Black citizens arrived to defend the teen. The report recommended that “reparations to the historic Greenwood community in real and tangible form would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident.” It identified 118 survivors and at least 176 descendants of victims, and advised Oklahoma to provide direct payments, award 300 college scholarships per year, and create a Greenwood economic development zone and a memorial. “Reparations are the right thing to do,” the report said.

Hardly any of that happened. The inaction led to a 2003 federal lawsuit against Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma, filed on behalf of 200 survivors and descendants by a team of lawyers led by Johnnie Cochran and Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree. The lawsuit failed when judges ruled the statute of limitations had expired. In 2005, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

Solomon-Simmons filed the current lawsuit on behalf of several survivors and descendants in state court in 2020. It argues that Oklahoma law permits claims past the statute of limitations if there is an “ongoing public nuisance.” This law is what led to a $465 million judgment against pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson for its role in the opioid crisis. Solomon-Simmons’ case says the massacre is responsible for current racial and economic disparities — the kind documented in a Human Rights Watch report — and therefore is an ongoing nuisance.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned the Johnson & Johnson ruling in November 2021, saying the public nuisance law was wrongly interpreted. Solomon-Simmons told me the decision does not undermine his case, and he has filed those arguments with the judge.

Meanwhile, almost all the survivors have died.

The only ones still alive are Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle, both 107, and Fletcher’s brother Hughes Van Ellis, who is 101. In a 2021 interview with The Undefeated, Randle described what she saw that night: “They ran us from one place to the other, chased us like hounds chasing a rabbit. I saw people shoot people down on the street,” she said. “I saw people running, I saw bodies, I saw them kill the people and shoot people down.”

 

Now realize that in Republican state after Republican state that in 2022 teaching the history of the Tulsa Massacre and the discussion of reparations in a classroom is illegal, criminal, and grounds for firing, revocation of license, and other penalties.

Having teachers assign high school seniors to read this article would be illegal in more than a dozen states.

Black Lives, and Black History, Still Matter.

The Huntering For The No-Prize

With Hunter Biden's laptop back in the news thanks to the NY Times, which turned "yes, some emails on the laptop were legit copies of emails" into "BIDEN'S UKRAINE SCANDAL!11!!", Washington Post reporter Philip Bump reminds us all why the laptop was at best a fantasy nothingburger, and at worst a deliberate Russian plant designed to sink Joe Biden.

When the New York Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, that it was in possession of emails between a Ukrainian businessman and Hunter Biden, son of the then-Democratic presidential nominee, it would have been hard to predict what followed. This was less than three weeks before the election itself, and the content of the report was soon subsumed to the odd way in which the paper obtained the information. Mainstream outlets and social media companies balked at elevating the story’s claims, triggering frustrations on the right that remain to this day.

New reporting has re-elevated questions about how the story emerged and was handled. In light of that resurrection, it seems useful to articulate exactly why there was suspicion about the story’s origins — suspicion that itself has not entirely been resolved.

There are at least four questions that arose from the initial report. Those are:

• How did the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper?
• Was that information legitimate?
• Was the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information warranted?
• Was the social media blackout of the Post’s story warranted?

In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the first and third questions: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.

You’ll remember the story. Hunter Biden allegedly showed up at a computer repair shop with three water-damaged laptop computers. According to John Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of that shop, one of the three computers was beyond repair, one simply needed an external keyboard and one required data recovery. Mac Isaac recovered the data, but no one ever came to pick the machine up. Eventually the data from the computer made its way to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney. It was Giuliani that gave it to the Post.

That summary excludes a lot of detail, some known at the time the Post story broke, some that only emerged afterward. Here, in the form of a timeline, is detail that seems salient to our current consideration of how the Post got the material from the laptop as well as what was known at the time.

The 2016 election. It’s critical to remember what happened in the 2016 election cycle. Then WikiLeaks published two large clusters of documents stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee’s network and from John Podesta, a top aide to the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. The Podesta material in particular was released in tranches for days beginning Oct. 7, 2016. It was real information, understood even then to have been a product of Russian efforts, that became fodder for criticism of Clinton.

After the election, we learned the full scope of Russia’s involvement in the election. Suddenly, the coverage of the WikiLeaks material took on a new light: It was stolen by a foreign government to try to influence U.S. politics. Media companies reconsidered their coverage; should there have been more caution about playing into the hands of a foreign influence campaign?

This question was very much on people’s minds in the months before the 2020 election — particularly given indications that Russia was again hoping to aid Trump’s election.

 

Bump's timeline does make it clear that the source of the story has a massive credibility problem: a laptop that was never picked up from the shop made its way to Rudy Giuliani, the only taker. 

And Rudy Giuliani is not exactly the most reliable source for anything other than laughs.

We still don't know anything about the laptop's journey some 18 months later. Nothing at all. It was complete bullshit then, and it's complete bullshit now. I could put copies of emails on my 8 year old laptop and then drop it off somewhere and never pick it up, yeah. Scandal!

Idiocy is what it is.

Last Call For The Horse Dewormer Goes Viral

The largest study yet on the efficacy of horse dewormer and quack-right favorite ivermectin on COVID-19 finds zero benefit as either prevention or as a cure for the virus.

The antiparasitic drug ivermectin doesn't prevent severe disease from Covid-19 any more effectively than symptom management and close observation by medical professionals, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. 

The study enrolled nearly 500 people 50 and older who were at risk of severe Covid-19 because of their age and underlying health. These patients were treated at 20 public hospitals and a quarantine center in Malaysia in 2021. 

Half of the patients took a relatively high dose of oral ivermectin for five days, and the other half -- the comparison group -- received treatment for their symptoms, such as fever-reducing medications. All were monitored for progression of disease. 

There was no difference in outcomes between the groups. In fact, slightly more patients in the ivermectin group went on to need extra oxygen compared with those who took a placebo, though the difference was not statistically significant. 

This was the main outcome researchers studied, but they also looked at whether patients needed to be hospitalized, had to go on a ventilator, needed intensive care or died from their infections. There was no meaningful difference in outcomes between the group that took ivermectin and those who got the placebo treatment. 

The study had several important strengths:

• It was a randomized-controlled trial, the gold standard of medical research, in which researchers test an intervention against a placebo.
• The study enrolled patients most likely to be at risk from severe Covid-19 disease: those over 50 with at least one additional risk factor and mild to moderate symptoms. People who had no symptoms or who had advanced disease were excluded.
• Participants were enrolled only after a PCR test confirmed Covid-19 infection.
• It was a multicenter trial conducted at 20 public hospitals and a Covid-19 quarantine center in Malaysia between May 31 and October 25, 2021.

In addition to the fact that ivermectin didn't work, people who took it had more side effects than those who didn't, and sometimes those side effects were severe, including heart attacks, anemia and diarrhea that led to shock. 

"The higher incidence of side effects with ivermectin in our study raises concerns about the widespread use of this drug outside clinical trial setting," lead researcher Dr. Steven Lim told CNN in an email. 

"The public should understand that the highly touted safety profile of ivermectin is related to its use as an anti-parasitic drug. The use of ivermectin as an antiviral in COVID-19 is a totally different ball game, with notable differences in dosing, duration and mechanism of actions," wrote Lim, an infectious-disease specialist at Raja Permaisuri Bainun Hospital in Perak, Malaysia. 

 

No benefit, statistically significant increase in the rate of side effects.

 

The horse dewormer doesn't work as a treatment, it was always quackery and a grift, but it was wildly effective as anti-vaccine propaganda.

A third of Americans remain vaccinated against COVID. One million have died from it. We're still seeing 1,500 deaths a day and the numbers will only keep going up as the next surge from the next variant continues. Tens of millions remain as a breeding and mutation ground for the virus, and it will continue to mutate as long as people refuse to get the damn vaccine.

Shut up and get the damn vaccine already.  Then get booster shots.

Climate Of Disaster, Con't

Temperatures in Antarctica are a staggering 70 degrees above normal this week for March, and climate scientists have no idea what to do or to expect as records are literally melting before our eyes.

The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal. The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.
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“This event is completely unprecedented and upended our expectations about the Antarctic climate system,” said Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Université Grenoble Alpes in France, in an email.

“Antarctic climatology has been rewritten,” tweeted Stefano Di Battista, a researcher who has published studies on Antarctic temperatures. He added that such temperature anomalies would have been considered “impossible” and “unthinkable” before they actually occurred.

Parts of eastern Antarctica have seen temperatures hover 70 degrees (40 Celsius) above normal for three days and counting, Wille said. He likened the event to the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, which scientists concluded would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

What is considered “warm” over the frozen, barren confines of eastern Antarctica is, of course, relative. Instead of temperatures being minus-50 or minus-60 degrees (minus-45 or minus-51 Celsius), they’ve been closer to zero or 10 degrees (minus-18 Celsius or minus-12 Celsius) — but that’s a massive heat wave by Antarctic standards.

The average high temperature in Vostok — at the center of the eastern ice sheet — is around minus-63 (minus-53 Celsius) in March. But on Friday, the temperature leaped to zero (minus-17.7 Celsius), the warmest it’s been there during March since record keeping began 65 years ago. It broke the previous monthly record by a staggering 27 degrees (15 Celsius).

“In about 65 record years in Vostok, between March and October, values ​​above -30°C were never observed,” wrote Di Battista in an email.

 

Needless to say, the positive feedback loop on rising temps is now a runaway freight train. We were warned a generation ago that this was coming, and corporate greed took precedent. Now, all we can do is triage the planet.

 

The next decade or so is going to be bad, and it's only going to get worse.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The tiny town of Mason, Tennessee was not on the map for the state, much less the country. With a population of roughly 1,200 near Memphis, the town was small, quiet, and majority Black. And then Ford decided to build a battery plant nearby, and now everyone wants the land Mason is on, especially the state GOP, who is now threatening to take over and dissolve the town's charter in order to get at the now very valuable land in the area.

The Tennessee Comptroller issued an unusual appeal last week to residents of this small, majority Black town, which occupies fewer than two square miles in rural west Tennessee.

“In my opinion, it’s time for Mason to relinquish its charter,” Comptroller Jason Mumpower wrote in a letter mailed to each one of Mason’s 1,337 property owners.

Mumpower urged local residents to “encourage your local officials to do what’s necessary to allow Mason to thrive. There is no time to waste.”

State comptrollers, responsible for financial oversight of local government, typically communicate directly with elected local leaders and not their constituents. “We have not issued a letter to citizens like this before,” Comptroller spokesman John Dunn said, noting it is “unprecedented for us to publicly call for a town charter to be relinquished.”

But the Comptroller’s unprecedented public callout comes at an unprecedented time not only for Mason, but for the state. Mason, located in the southeastern corner of Tipton County, now finds itself with some of the most coveted real estate in Tennessee.

It’s one of the nearest towns to the massive new site to be built for Blue Oval City, a key component in Ford Motor Co’s multibillion-dollar pivot to electric vehicle manufacturing.

Mumpower’s letter has infuriated Mason’s part-time elected officials, who insist they have no intention of ceding their town’s 153-year-old charter – which would subsume the largely African-American, majority Democratic community under the governance of Tipton County, which is predominantly white and Republican.

“This is our home. We were born and raised here. The majority of the town is homegrown people that live here,” Vice Mayor Virginia Rivers said. “He is trying to conquer and divide us. It’s akin to a hostile take-over and it’s not hard to figure out why here, why now.”

Town leaders are accusing Mumpower and other state officials of big-footing a long-ignored, largely Black community now that major investment is heading its way.

Mason is 60% Black and includes descendants of men, women and children enslaved in the area before Emancipation. For more than a century the town was led by White elected officials.

That changed in 2016, when fraud and mismanagement allegations led to the resignations of nearly all City Hall officials, all of whom were White. Mason’s current mayor, vice mayor and five of its six alderman are Black.

“It’s because of the Black people that are in office,” said Rivers, who first became Vice Mayor in 2021.

“And it’s because of all the places in the world, Blue Oval could have selected, they selected here. There’s no way Mason won’t prosper and grow. And now they want to take it away from us.”

 

John Grisham couldn't have written a better script.  Evil, corrupt white politicians that embezzled millions and left the town's finances in ruins for years, a town struggling to right itself with a part-time Black government and no help for the Republicans in the state legislature who ignored the town and its people completely...

...Right up until the town became the home of Ford's new plant, with tens of thousands of jobs. 

 

Suddenly, Republicans came down on the town like a hammer.

 

Republicans don't care about anyone, folks. They care about being rich. They especially don't care about Black, rural America, and will use every opportunity to destroy us whenever they can get away with it. It's almost assured that they will, and that the town will be destroyed and the residents bought out or driven off to make way for new prime developments for Ford's workers and plant executives. Republicans want permanent fiefdoms run by state legislatures with GOP supermajorities, who can pass whatever laws they like. The rest of us are subjects and serfs.

The right people will get rich, as always. As they have for 400 years.

 

Those people will get crumbs, or worse, bullets.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Last Call For The Buckeye Purge

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

This is an extremely dangerous point in history, folks.

 

Stay tuned.

The Greatest Generation Gave Virginia To The GOP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

The Night The Bits Went Out In Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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