Hearing Aides For America, Con't

As I said Friday, the purpose of the hearings is the make the case to America why Donald Trump must be arrested, tried, and convicted of sedition. 

The New York Times has come to a similar conclusion.

The first prime-time hearing into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol this past week confronted the fundamental question that has haunted Mr. Trump, the 45th president, ever since he left office: Should he be prosecuted in a criminal court for his relentless efforts to defy the will of the voters and hang on to power?

For two hours on Thursday night, the House committee investigating the Capitol attack detailed what it called Mr. Trump’s “illegal” and “unconstitutional” seven-part plan to prevent the transfer of power. The panel invoked the Justice Department, citing charges of seditious conspiracy filed against some of the attackers, and seemed to be laying out a road map for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to their central target.

Several former prosecutors and veteran lawyers said afterward that the hearing offered the makings of a credible criminal case for conspiracy to commit fraud or obstruction of the work of Congress.

In presenting her summary of the evidence, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, demonstrated that Mr. Trump was told repeatedly by his own advisers that he had lost the election yet repeatedly lied to the country by claiming it had been stolen. He pressured state and federal officials, members of Congress and even his own vice president to disregard vote tallies in key states. And he encouraged the mob led by extremist groups like the Proud Boys while making no serious effort to stop the attack once it began.

“I think the committee, especially Liz Cheney, outlined a powerful criminal case against the former president,” said Neal K. Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama.

“A crime requires two things — a bad act and criminal intent,” Mr. Katyal said. By citing testimony by Mr. Trump’s own attorney general, a lawyer for his campaign and others who told him that he had lost and then documenting his failure to act once supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Katyal said, the panel addressed both of those requirements.

 

The whole point is to make to case to people why the Justice Department must charge Trump. Whether or not that happens, well. 

 

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is now entering into its fifth month, and while Ukrainian forces have put up a good fight, the reality of Moscow's attrition strategy is coming into view as Kyiv is literally running out of ammo because the curent flow of weapons isn't working quickly enough. 

Unless something changes and very soon, Biden and the other NATO nations are going to have to decide whether they are going to put troops and materiel in-country and fight for Ukraine, or leave it to the tender mercies of Putin.

 

The euphoria that accompanied Ukraine’s unforeseen early victories against bumbling Russian troops is fading as Moscow adapts its tactics, recovers its stride and asserts its overwhelming firepower against heavily outgunned Ukrainian forces.

Newly promised Western weapons systems are arriving, but too slowly and in insufficient quantities to prevent incremental but inexorable Russian gains in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which is now the focus of the fight.

The Ukrainians are still fighting back, but they are running out of ammunition and suffering casualties at a far higher rate than in the initial stages of the war. Around 200 Ukrainian soldiers are now being killed every day, up from 100 late last month, an aide to President Volodymyr Zelensky told the BBC on Friday — meaning that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians are being taken out of the fight every day, including those who are injured.

The Russians are still making mistakes and are also losing men and equipment, albeit at a lesser rate than in the first months of the conflict. In one sign that they are suffering equipment shortages, they have been seen on videos posted on social media hauling hundreds of mothballed, Soviet-era T-62 tanks out of storage to be sent to Ukraine.

But the overall trajectory of the war has unmistakably shifted away from one of unexpectedly dismal Russian failures and tilted in favor of Russia as the demonstrably stronger force.

Ukrainian and U.S. hopes that the new supplies of Western weaponry would enable Ukraine to regain the initiative and eventually retake the estimated 20 percent of Ukrainian territory captured by Russia since its Feb. 24 invasion are starting to look premature, said Oleksandr V. Danylyuk, an adviser to the Ukrainian government on defense and intelligence issues.

“The strategies and tactics of the Russians are completely different right now. They are being much more successful,” he said. “They have more resources than us and they are not in a rush.”

“There’s much less space for optimism right now,” he added.

Ukrainian forces remain resolute. In a cafe in the front line town of Slovyansk, two Ukrainian soldiers on a break from the trenches nearby recounted how they were forced to retreat from the town of Dovhenke, northwest of Slovyansk, under withering Russian artillery fire. Thirty-five of their 100-strong unit were killed in the assault, typical of the tactics Russia is using. “They destroy everything and walk in,” said one of the soldiers, Vitaliy Martsyv, 41.

“There is nothing there,” Andriy Tihonenko, 52, said of Dovhenke. “It’s all burned down.”

As troop fatalities mounted, the surviving soldiers felt “more motivated to hold our position,” Tihonenko said. To retreat after their comrades were killed defending the town, he said, would have felt like treating their deaths as insignificant.

But eventually, the defensive line was no longer effective, the two men said. With more than one-third of their force killed, the remaining soldiers had no choice but to pull back.

“Sometimes you feel down,” Tihonenko said. “But then you realize war is war — and you have to finish it.”

But the odds against the Ukrainians are starting to look overwhelming, said Danylyuk, the government adviser.

“The Russians are using long-range artillery against us, often without any response, because we don’t have the means,” he said. “They can attack from dozens of kilometers away and we can’t fire back. We know all the coordinates for all their important targets, but we don’t have the means to attack.”

Ukraine has now almost completely run out of ammunition for the Soviet-era weapons systems that were the mainstay of its arsenal, and the Eastern European countries that maintained the same systems have run out of surplus supplies to donate, Danylyuk said. Ukraine urgently needs to shift to longer-range and more sophisticated Western systems, but those have only recently been committed, and in insufficient quantities to match Russia’s immense firepower, he said.

Russia is firing as many as 50,000 artillery rounds a day into Ukrainian positions, and the Ukrainians can only hit back with around 5,000 to 6,000 rounds a day, he said. The United States has committed to deliver 220,000 rounds of ammunition — enough to match Russian firepower for around four days.

The majority of the American M777 howitzer artillery guns that U.S. officials said would enable Ukraine to match Russian firepower are now in use on the battlefield, according to the Pentagon. Yet the Russians continue to advance.

 

We're at the most critical juncture here. The Ukrainians have put up an amazing fight, but the Russians just have the numbers.

 

Putin's plan from the beginning was to force NATO into a shooting war in order to save Ukraine.  If Putin wins here, he can take the rest of the old Soviet Bloc and more, and everyone will know that NATO won't risk fighting back.

 

That plan is working pretty well right now.  Something on the NATO side has to change this month, or Donbass is lost, and the rest of Ukraine may follow.

Hearing Aides For America

The January 6th Committee hearings got underway last evening, and the criminality recounted in the primetime show included that yes, the Committee absolutely believes that Donald Trump organized a conspiracy to commit sedition, that everyone in Trump's inner circle, including his family, were in on it, that former VP Mike Pence got cold feet at the end and Trump wanted active harm to come to him as a result, and that multiple sitting Republicans in Congress wanted full pardons after the coup succeeded and Trump remained in power.

 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) was one of “multiple” GOP lawmakers who asked President Trump for pardons given their roles in seeking to unwind the 2020 election results, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said in its first hearing Thursday night.

Perry’s office forcefully denied the allegation.

Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Perry, who helped introduce former President Trump to a mid-level Justice Department attorney willing to forward his election fraud claims, was among several seeking pardons due to their roles.

“As you will see, Representative Perry contacted the White House in the weeks after January 6th to seek a presidential pardon. Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election,” Cheney said.

Perry spokesman Jay Ostrich denied that Perry sought a pardon from Trump.

“Laughable, ludicrous, and a thoroughly soulless lie,” Ostrich told The Hill.

 

But we know for a fact that GOP lawmakers wanted pardons. They knew what they were doing was seditious conspiracy.

CNN reported in January 2021 that “several” GOP lawmakers who were involved with the rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House that Trump spoke before the Capitol riot sought pardons from Trump. GOP lawmakers who spoke at the rally include Arizona GOP Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, as well as Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.).

And according to an October 2021 Rolling Stone report, Gosar floated the idea of “blanket pardons” for some of those organizing the Ellipse rally of Jan. 6.

The Jan. 6 committee issued subpoenas to Perry, Biggs, and Brooks. In a May letter requesting information from Biggs, the committee said that Biggs was identified by former White House personnel as being part of “an effort by certain House Republicans after January 6th to seek a presidential pardon for activities taken in connection with President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

 

And that's because Trump wanted to become dictator, as the NY Times's Peter Baker tells us.

In the entire 246-year history of the United States, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.

Other presidents have been accused of wrongdoing, even high crimes and misdemeanors, but the case against Donald J. Trump mounted by the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol described not just a rogue president but a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power at all costs.

As the committee portrayed it during its prime-time televised hearing, Mr. Trump executed a seven-part conspiracy to overturn a free and fair democratic election. According to the panel, he lied to the American people, ignored all evidence refuting his false fraud claims, pressured state and federal officials to throw out election results favoring his challenger, encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol and even signaled support for the execution of his own vice president.

“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the select committee. “The violence was no accident. It represents Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”

 

The purpose of the hearings is the make the case to America why Donald Trump must be arrested, tried, and convicted of sedition. 

They made that case last night alone.

Most incriminating were the words of Mr. Trump’s own advisers and appointees, played over video on a giant screen above the committee dais and beamed out to a national television audience. There was his own attorney general who told him that his false election claims were “bullshit.” There was his own campaign lawyer who testified that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. And there was his own daughter, Ivanka Trump, who acknowledged that she accepted the conclusion that the election was not, in fact, stolen as her father kept claiming.

Much of the evidence was outlined by the lead Republican on the committee, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has been ostracized by Mr. Trump and much of her own party for consistently denouncing his actions after the election. Unwavering, she sketched out the case and then addressed her fellow Republicans who have chosen to stand by their defeated former president and excuse his actions.

“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone but your dishonor will remain,” she said.

 

These bastards have to fry. I know in the past I've said that Trump will never be convicted, and that any federal court proceedings will almost certainly lead to nationwide attacks on Democrats, but it has to happen. After what I saw last night, we have to do it.

 

More than ever, I am convinced that the alternative to perp-walking Trump is far worse.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Yet Again

As the January 6th hearings get underway this evening, Michigan GOP gubernatorial hopeful Ryan Kelly, running on a platform of being a January 6th white supremacist domestic terrorist and openly bragging about it, has been arrested for being a January 6th white supremacist domestic terrorist.  Who knew, etc.

FBI agents arrested Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley on misdemeanor charges related to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The arrest and search that unfolded at Kelley's home in Allendale outside of Grand Rapids add more uncertainty to a chaotic race for governor that has seen five Republican candidates blocked from the ballot for submitting fraudulent nominating petition signatures.

Prosecutors filed four charges against Kelley, 40. They are knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building; disorderly and disruptive conduct; knowingly engaging in any act of physical violence against person or property in a restricted building or grounds; willfully injuring or committing depredation against property of the U.S.

If convicted, Kelley faces maximum punishment of up to one year in federal prison. He was freed on a personal recognizance bond following a brief hearing in federal court in Grand Rapids.

Kenzi Niewiadomski, one of Kelley’s neighbors in his Allendale subdivision whose sister lives across the street from him, said she witnessed FBI agents leading Kelley away from his home in handcuffs Thursday morning. Kelley's wife and children left the home with backpacks in hand and got into a family van moments after Kelley was taken into custody, Niewiadomski said.

“He was just cooperating,” she said. “What are you going to do at that point?”

Niewiadomski said she can’t personally stand Kelley as a politician. He has a campaign flag flying below an American flag on the flagpole in his front yard.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” Niewiadomski said. 

 

Kelley will certainly make bond, and if he's smart, he'll hold a press conference to say specifically that being a white supremacist domestic terrorist is exactly why Republicans should vote for him in the primary in August. 

Keep an eye on this asshole.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Homeland Security is warning that online extremist and white supremacist forums are pushing for more Uvalde-style school shootings as part of Republican "Great Replacement" theory rhetoric.

The U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security warned on Tuesday that people in online forums known for hosting violent extremist content are lauding the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas—and are pushing others to commit further attacks.

“Individuals in online forums that routinely promulgate domestic violent extremist and conspiracy theory-related content have praised the May 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and encouraged copycat attacks,” DHS officials wrote in a bulletin released Tuesday morning.

DHS officials explained that others have capitalized on the shooting—during which a lone gunman shot and killed 19 children and two teachers—to push conspiracy theories, including the false claim that the federal government faked the shooting to boost support for gun control measures.

DHS officials also noted that the alleged perpetrator of a mass shooting that killed 10 in a majority-Black neighborhood of Buffalo, NY 10 days before the Uvalde shooting, was motivated by racist conspiracies he found online; the shooter that killed 23 in a majority Latinx neighborhood in El Paso in 2019 was animated by many of the same theories.

Officials advised readers to “maintain digital and media literacy” and practice recognizing “false or misleading narratives” to protect themselves against proliferating misinformation.

Mass shootings have fomented similar conspiracies in the past: after a gunman killed 20 kids at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, Austin-based far-right provocateur Alex Jones pushed the lie that the federal government had staged the shooting to drum up support for gun control measures.

After Buffalo, claims that the shooting was an orchestrated ‘false flag’ operation bubbled up again. Jones’ website ‘Infowars’ trumpeted that he’d predicted a false flag operation at a grocery store in the days after; an Arizona state lawmaker is now under investigation for endorsing the conspiracy on Telegram following the shooting.

 

Nobody should be surprised that a shooting at a predominately Hispanic school and a shooting at a predominately Black neighborhood grocery store are both being praised by those encouraging more shootings.

I expect things to get worse, as they have steadily since 2016.

Birthday Blast

It's my birthday, so I'm taking the day off.  I need it. (I think we all need a day off.)

If any really important  news breaks, I'll get it in Last Call or so.

Thanks for being with me all these years, folks.  America has changed dramatically in some ways over these nearly 14 years that I've been doing this, and documenting those changes has been a vital part of dealing with them.

It's something I can control, you know?

Have a good one.  I'll be around tomorrow.

Last Call For Housing, Afire

The housing market is absolutely going to fold soon, it's just unsustainable with rent gouging like what's going on in New York City, where you now need well into three times the median national wage to even be considered for an apartment at four times the median rent.

 

New York City’s housing market has always been competitive, but renters are facing a particularly tough flat hunt now. The median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan reached $3,995 in April, a record 38% year-over-year increase and well above pre-pandemic levels, data from the real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman showed.

In New York City, it’s standard for landlords to apply what is known as the 40x rule to judge someone’s ability to pay their rent. In order to qualify as a tenant, a person’s annual gross income should be at least 40 times the monthly rent. To rent a one-bedroom at Manhattan’s current median price, that means an income of $159,800 or more. In Brooklyn, where the median one-bedroom apartment goes for $2,900 a month, anyone with an income of less than $116,000 annually will also struggle to qualify.

Meanwhile, the median household income in New York City was $67,046 from 2016 to 2020, according to the latest data available.

New York City rents point to a deepening affordable housing crisis in the city as it struggles to bounce back from the pandemic. It also calls into question the feasibility of mayor Eric Adams’ repeated pleas to have employees return to work in person.

Rising rents impact New Yorkers particularly hard because two-thirds of the population rent, twice the national rate, according to a report by The New York Times. The pain extends to aspiring home owners too—a recent Zillow survey found that half of US home buyers are crying during the process.

Prices are forecasted to rise even higher in the summer. The warmer months have always been primetime for moving as it catches new students who relocate to the city, and families with kids tend to use the school holidays to move.

In April, bidding wars accounted for more than one in five new lease signings in Manhattan, according to Douglas Elliman. In those instances, landlords received an average premium of nearly 11% above asking price. It’s a sharp contrast to just a year ago when landlords were regularly handing out one month’s free rent and other concessions like waived utilities and amenities fees to attract tenants.

Several theories exist for surging rent prices. The one-bedroom flat is reportedly the most in demand as couples forced to spend more time with their other halves during the pandemic split up, sending more single flat hunters into the market.

It also coincides with large corporates, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Google, recalling workers back to the office. With the future of work likely some kind of hybrid, people are willing to spend more money on their apartments to have space for a home office.

Another factor is Airbnb, which is distorting the market. There are more entire-apartment Airbnb rentals available in New York City than standard rental apartments by several thousand units, Curbed reported recently, squeezing supply even further.

So how do people get around these expensive prices? Many shack up with someone—a roommate, a partner, or they find a guarantor with at least 40x the rent who agrees to pay if the tenant defaults.

Another option is to downsize. The median studio rent was $2,994 in Manhattan and $2,674 in Brooklyn for the month of April. However, even at those lower rates, anyone not earning six-figures will be put out.

 

It won't be long either.  Be careful, because once the housing market augurs into the tarmac, the economy goes with it.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Greg Sargent looks at the growing Proud Boys seditious conspiracy being charged by the federal government over January 6th and what it means for the white supremacist domestic terror networks in 2022.

 

It’s tempting to dismiss all the 1776 talk as something akin to adolescent revolutionary cosplay. But the way 1776 comes up in the indictment — combined with some surprising new details it reveals — should prompt a serious look at how far-right extremist groups genuinely think about the long struggle that they envision themselves waging.

In short, groups such as these generally are driven by a dangerous vision of popular sovereignty. It essentially holds that the will of the truly authentic “people,” a flexible category they get to define, is being suppressed, requiring periodic “resets” of the system, including via violent, extralegal means.

Such groups aren’t going away anytime soon. We should understand what drives them.

 

I mean it's white supremacist dogma, but there is somewhat more to it than that.

In this context, while all the 1776-oriented talk might seem like posturing, it points to something real and enduring on the far right.

It isn’t easy to pin down the Proud Boys, who tend to define themselves as defenders of Western civilization. But Kathleen Belew, an expert in right-wing extremism, has discerned hints of white power ideology in some of the group’s symbolism and messaging.

As Belew notes, the white power movement includes opponents of non-white immigration, militia groups, and white supremacists, loosely bound by an ideology centered on the violent defense of whiteness. On Jan. 6, numerous such groups and adherents attacked the Capitol.

Tarrio’s views appear pretty convoluted. In a 2021 interview, he admitted that the 2020 election had not been stolen from former president Donald Trump, and went through the motions of disavowing the Jan. 6 violence. Yet he openly celebrated the “fear” that members of Congress felt of “the people,” and helped mobilize Proud Boys to mass around the Capitol that day.

So how to make sense of that, as well as the broader tangle of ideologies on the far right?

A helpful framework comes from Joseph Lowndes, a scholar of the right wing at the University of Oregon. As Lowndes notes, a longtime strain in American political culture treats procedural democracy as itself deeply suspect, as subverting a more authentic subterranean popular will.

For such ideologues, what constitutes “the people” is itself redefined by spasmodic revolutionary acts, including violence. The people’s sovereignty, and with it the defining lines of the republic, are also effectively redrawn, or even rebirthed, by such outbursts of energy and militant action.

In this vision, Lowndes told me, the “people” and the “essence of the republic” are “made new again through acts of violent cleansing.” He noted that in this imagining, the “people” are something of a “fiction,” one that is essentially created out of the violent “act.”

“This regeneration through violence is going to be with us for a long time," Lowndes said, "because it is fundamental to the right-wing political imagination.”

Lurking behind all the 1776 cosplay, then, is a tangle of very real radical and extreme ideologies. Importantly, they’re sincerely believed in, and they aren’t going away.

 

Straight white Christian men are "we the people" and everyone else is suspect. Rights, citizenship, and lives can be taken at a whim.

 

In the end, they're bullies.

 

Bullies need to get punched in the mouth.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

As mass shooting numbers continue to mount this year, and Americans are dying daily from gun violence, a new CBS News poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that Congress and President Biden can do something about Gunmerica, but nearly half of Republicans say that mass shootings are the price we pay for being free.

Most Americans continue to favor stricter gun laws, but feel that getting them passed is stymied by big money and inaction by politicians. And Americans say the nation's gun debate — no matter where they stand on it — is influenced more by partisanship than public safety. Polling shows they're partly right.

There is bipartisan support for measures that are applied to people — such as background checks and a federal "red flag" law, which most Americans think could do a lot to help prevent mass shootings. But there are more partisan differences over what to do about the guns themselves.

Democrats look for more gun restrictions — including banning AR-15s — and fewer people having guns in general, and also support background checks and more mental health services. But Republicans tend to oppose AR-15 bans and feel that allowing more people to carry guns and more armed security would stop mass shootings. They think that these measures, along with better mental health screening, would be most effective in preventing mass shootings.

Americans overall overwhelmingly believe mass shootings can be prevented, if we try. But Republicans, in particular, are less likely to think so — four in 10 Republicans say mass shootings are, unfortunately, something we have to accept in a free society.

In all, most don't expect Congress to pass any significant changes to gun policy in the coming months.

 

Americans overwhelmingly want Republicans in Congress to stop blocking measures.

 

 

 

But the only issue that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Manchin will allow to be considered is a red flag law. Everything else is already off the table in Senate negotiations, as the bill being considered will almost certainly be a copy of Florida's red flag laws under then GOP Gov. Rick Scott.

The senators at the helm of negotiating gun legislation are looking to the Florida law passed in 2018 after the school shooting in Parkland as a potential blueprint for the nation, Sen. Chris Murphy said Sunday.

Murphy (D-Conn.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the bill passed by a Republican legislature and signed into law by then-Republican Gov. Rick Scott has elements that senators are considering as they look to pass gun legislation following a school shooting that took place in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers.

“Well, Sen. Scott, then-Gov. Scott, passed that law in Florida because it was the right thing to do, but also because Republicans saw it as good politics. We have to make the case for Republicans that right now this is good politics,” Murphy said.

The Florida law, known as the red flag law, raised the age to buy long guns, including AR-15s, from 18 to 21, added a three-day waiting period, created a program to allow trained school staff to carry guns and invested $400 million in mental health and school security.

“The template for Florida is the right one. Which is do some significant mental health investment, some school safety money and some modest, but impactful, changes in gun laws,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of package we’re putting together right now. That’s the kind of package I think can pass the Senate.”

 

It won't pass the Senate, despite McConnell singing on to his own bill. It won't get more than five or six Republican votes for a filibuster, meaning it will come up well short of sixty votes, and everyone will go "oh well". 

Nothing's going to happen.  Nothing ever will happen, not with Senate Republicans and with Joe Manchin. The 70%+ people who expect nothing from Republicans are right.

It's just another day in Gunmerica.

Boris, Bad Enough

With all the truly nasty stuff happening here in America it's important to know that Trump's fall in 2020 is looking like it could be the end of multiple clones of himself in other countries. I noted that Trumpy Australian PM Scott Morrison lost elections last month to Labor leader Anthony Albanese, and now in the UK, Boris Johnson faced a no-confidence vote today that could very well end his career.

It was, the prime minister believed, a return to business as usual. On Monday Boris Johnson and his most senior aides gathered in No 10 for their 8am meeting, tucking into bacon rolls as they discussed how to move on from the Downing Street parties scandal.

Johnson, allies said, felt liberated with Sue Gray’s report on the scandal finally behind him and believed that a £21 billion package to tackle the cost of living would answer the concerns of many backbenchers.

The prime minister’s hopes of a respite, however, were short-lived. Over the next three days a further seven Tory MPs went public with criticism of Johnson, bringing the total number to 48.

The Bishop of Buckingham joined calls for Johnson to resign, saying he “obviously” lied over lockdown parties.

The Rt Rev Dr Alan Wilson told Times Radio: “It’s not the parties actually. It’s the lying. I think that’s the problem... I think it’s very difficult to trust a liar.”

When parliament returns from recess and the Platinum Jubilee celebrations on Monday, Johnson will be stepping into the unknown, with whips privately admitting they have no idea how close the prime minister is to the 54-letter threshold needed to trigger a vote in his leadership.

As Guto Harri, the prime minister’s director of communications put it after attending an open-air production of Julius Caesar last week. “Wonderful change from politics,” he said on Facebook. “Or was it?!” Some cabinet ministers have been alarmed by what they view as complacency in Downing Street. In the wake of the Gray report on Wednesday and Rishi Sunak’s spending package on Thursday last week the Downing Street grid appeared to be almost empty. The main offering after a week in which the prime minister had faced down yet another existential crisis was a consultation on a return of imperial measurements.

Senior figures in the campaign to save Johnson — described as Operation Save Big Dog — were also on holiday for much of last week.

“The vote is going to happen,” a government aide said. “There is an awful sense of inevitability about it all. It’s like a pack of Pringles: once you pop, you can’t stop. The lack of an Operation Save Big Dog has been a problem.” There was particular concern in No 10 after Dame Andrea Leadsom — until this week considered a loyalist — accused the prime minister of “unacceptable failings of leadership”.

Several public interventions later by Johnson’s critics and his praetorian guard finally sprang into action. Priti Patel, the home secretary, Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Brexit opportunities minister, were all despatched to defend the prime minister.

Johnson’s allies are withering — privately and publicly — about attempts to remove the prime minister. “I’m getting quite f***ing angry with colleagues who are frothing at the mouth . . . in the way that the public is not,” one cabinet minister said.

 

In other words, Boris Johnson thought he had survived "Partygate" and that everything was fine last week, if not over the weekend. They were wrong.

The Tory rebels got their 54 needed to trigger a no-confidence vote over the weekend, and he needed at least 180 votes from Tory MPs to survive and got 211. Odds were he was going to get that number, the issue was presumed that if the vote wounded him badly enough that like his predecessor Theresa May, Johnson will have to resign soon anyway.

We'll see.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

At this point Republicans no longer fear being wildly racist assholes, because they figure blaming Biden for $5 gas will win them 280 House seats and 54 in the Senate and they can say the quiet part out loud with an entire stadium PA system.

Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.”

Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”

“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”

It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”

Republicans frequently cite urban gang violence, most often in Chicago, in attempts to tap out of the gun control debate. While their redirections are often as misleading as they are cliche, those officials aren’t always as forthright as Masters about the racial undertones.

But Masters, whom the white nationalist website VDARE fêted last year as an “immigration patriot,” was quite clear about his vision of two Americas.

After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”

“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”

 

So at this point we're at straight up "We need the Second Amendment so we can shoot us some ni-CLANG!" 

Once again I implore you, your Republican voting relatives, I know the entire point of the GOP is to hurt anyone who isn't a straight white male and put everyone else as second-class citizens with malleable, disposable rights, but the rest of us outnumber them. We can beat this, and it's the rest of these folks who are siding with the GOP who are hoping they'll get secondary power that need to be convinced otherwise.

We all know people like that. Some of them are relatives or even significant others or spouses.

Please, help us. I know a lot of them don't care who they hurt as long as it's marginalized groups, but talk to them anyway. Real people are going to be destroyed here. Real lives are at stake.

Make a difference.

Help us escape Gunmerica.

Last Call For It's A Gas, Gas, Gas, Con't

Former NFL running back Herschel Walker is the GOP's US Senate in Georgia, going up against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and it seems Walker will do anything to win, including outright voter bribes at the pump in Atlanta's Black community.

A long line of cars formed at a Chevron gas station south of downtown Atlanta on Saturday as word spread that a political action committee was handing out $25 vouchers. Now the pro-Herschel Walker group’s giveaway is fueling a different sort of backlash.

The initiative by 34N22 was designed to highlight rising gas prices, a top issue for Republicans hoping to capitalize on inflation and economic uncertainty to unseat U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Motorists in the heavily Democratic area were handed vouchers totaling $4,000 along with flyers promoting Walker, a former football player who is now the Republican nominee. Outside the gas station, volunteers held signs declaring “Warnock isn’t working.”

Democrats and voting rights groups quickly criticized the stunt, questioning how offering fuel vouchers to support a political candidate could be allowed in a state that bans groups from distributing refreshments to waiting voters in line to cast ballots.

“This is illegal,” declared LaTosha Brown, a cofounder of Black Voters Matter.

“Meanwhile, also in Georgia, giving out water to those waiting to cast a ballot is considered illegal voter influence,” said state Sen. Michelle Au, a Johns Creek Democrat.

The PAC referred to a memo from attorney Kory Langhofer that asserted the program was “entirely lawful and permissible” because the vouchers were given without any condition, such as a requirement to vote for Walker or appear in an advertisement.

“Warnock’s campaign is upset about 34N22′s community outreach program, not because of any earnest legal concerns, but because they don’t want the public to know Warnock has contributed to record gas prices and the pain Georgians are feeling at the pump,” wrote Langhofer, whose experience includes serving as a lawyer for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign.

Aides to Warnock, who backed a federal gas tax suspension earlier this year to lower prices, didn’t comment on the initiative.

But several influential Democrats argued that the PAC’s move could have violated Georgia law that states: “Any person who gives or receives, offers to give or receive, or participates in the giving or receiving of money or gifts for the purpose of registering as a voter, voting, or voting for a particular candidate in any primary or election shall be guilty of a felony.”

Among them was state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democratic candidate for secretary of state who recalled how the office of Georgia’s top election official sent an investigator to a metro Atlanta precinct in 2020 “with firearm on hip and demanded all food and water to be removed.”

“Giving away gas vouchers and Herschel Walker flyers at the same time isn’t legal. Are they gonna do something about it?”

 

Of course they aren't. Laws like this only get enforced against Democrats in a state like Georgia. There's enough gray area here to say it's legal, so it will be legal when Walker does it, and it will be legal when other Republicans repeat the tactic in other states.

And keep in mind, Walker's camp wouldn't be stooping to this level, this early, if Warnock wasn't already whooping Walker's ass in the race.

Now that Herschel Walker is officially the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has started to mine the treasure trove of opposition research out there on the former NFL star. 

A new ad from Warnock's campaign features Walker talking to right-wing pundit Glenn Beck about Covid-19. Here's the text of what Walker tells Beck: 

"Right now, you know what, I'm gonna say something I probably shouldn't. Do you know right now, I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from Covid as you walk through this dry mist. As you walk through the door, it will kill any Covid on your body. When you leave, it will kill the virus as you leave. This here product -- they don't want to talk about that. They don't want to hear about that." 

Near the end of the commercial, this text appears onscreen: "Is Herschel Walker really ready to represent Georgia?" 

The clip comes from an August 2020 appearance Walker made on Beck's podcast. It's not clear what product Walker is referring to, as it could be dangerous for a person to walk through a disinfecting spray or mist that kills the coronavirus. 

Walker's comments evoke the pitch made by then-President Donald Trump in April 2020, when he suggested that ingesting disinfectants or sunlight might help patients battling Covid-19. 

The new Warnock ad serves as a stark reminder of how incredibly untested Walker is -- and what a massive gamble the former football star represents for Republicans in what is widely expected to be one of the closest and most expensive Senate races in the country this fall. 

Walker has never before run for elected office. He hadn't lived in Georgia for years before launching his bid for Senate last year.

 

Walker is a time bomb, frankly.  Even CNN's Chris Cillizza has figured it out.

CNN reported last year that several women have accused Walker of making threats against them. In 2002, one Texas woman told police that Walker had threatened and stalked her. Over the years, two other women -- Walker's ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend -- have also accused him of making threats, telling authorities Walker claimed he would shoot them in the head. 

(At the time of CNN's report, a spokeswoman for Walker declined to respond to the allegations or police report, citing his past struggles with mental health and saying that he was unfairly being targeted as a Republican Senate candidate. Walker's spokeswoman also denied the claims made by the candidate's ex-girlfriend.) 

More recently, Walker has run into trouble when asked for his views on issues, most notably guns. Here's what Walker told Fox when asked about the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and what, if anything, he believed should be done about it on the legislative front: 

"Cain killed Abel and that's a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation -- what about getting a department that can look at young men that's looking at women, that's looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that and we can stop that that way. But yet they want to just continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights. And I think there's more things we need to look into. This has been happening for years and the way we stop it is putting money into the mental health field, by putting money into other departments rather than departments that want to take away your rights." 

Uh ... 

Walker wasn't any clearer on the issue when speaking recently with CNN's Manu Raju. Asked whether he supported new gun laws in the wake of Uvalde, Walker said: "What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff." 

Is it possible that Walker's celebrity status -- and the likely Republican lean of the national playing field -- means that voters in Georgia won't much care about his Covid claims or his inability to offer any thoughts on guns in American society? Sure. But as Warnock's latest ad makes clear, nominating Walker was a major risk for Republicans in a critical state to their majority math.

 

Walker needs some help, and is absolutely unfit for office, but it's not like that stopped voters before in the case of Trump himself... 

We'll see.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

At least one Democrat wants to tax sales of new AR-15 rifles by a whopping 1,000%, and because it's a taxation issue, it could get through the Senate in budget reconciliation.

The recent violence is prompting one House Democrat to draft a measure aimed at severely restricting access to the AR-15-style weapons used by different gunmen in the carnage. Rep. Donald Beyer of Virginia, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means panel, wants to impose a 1,000% excise tax on assault weapons.

"What it's intended to do is provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen," Beyer told Insider. "We think that a 1,000% fee on assault weapons is just the kind of restrictive measure that creates enough fiscal impact to qualify for reconciliation."

New AR-15-style guns range from $500 to over $2,000 depending on location, NBC News reported. That means a 1,000% tax on the weapon would add $5,000 to $20,000 to their final sales price — and would probably keep it out of reach from many younger Americans.

Some details of the bill still aren't finalized, such as when the tax would kick in and what to do with any revenue raised. It's also unclear how much money it would generate. One out of every five weapons purchased in the US in AR-15 style rifle, per the National Shooting Sports Foundation in a 2014 court brief. Gun sales have surged since then and reached their second-highest level recorded last year.

Law enforcement agencies and the US military wouldn't be subject to the tax, Beyer said. The legislation would also apply only to future assault weapon sales — and not to the 20 million AR-15-style rifles already estimated to be in circulation across the US. Other guns used for hunting and other recreational purposes would also be exempt.

Bullets wouldn't be subject to the new tax. But high-capacity magazines that can carry more than 10 rounds of ammunition would be aggressively taxed at that level.

Beyer's definition of an assault weapon closely mirrors a measure that Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island is pushing. That bill would ban weapons with at least one military characteristic like a pistol grip or a forward grip.

House Democrats are rallying around their own expansive gun-control package separate from ongoing Senate negotiations on a narrower bill centered on mental health, red flag laws, and a modest expansion of background checks. The House bill is expected to fall flat in the upper chamber due to stiff GOP resistance.

That outcome prompted Beyer to eye reconciliation, the legislative tactic allowing proposed laws to bypass the Senate's 60-vote threshold known as the filibuster and pass with a simple majority. Democrats employed the maneuver in 2021 to approve both the stimulus law and the House-approved Build Back Better bill over united GOP resistance.

One expert says his measure likely qualifies for inclusion in a smaller spending bill containing pieces of President Joe Biden's climate and tax agenda. Democrats hope to revive it by summer's end.

"Taxes get more deference in budget reconciliation than other policies from a parliamentarian point of view," Zach Moller, director of the economic program at the center-left Third Way think tank, told Insider.

"So a pure excise tax that isn't set so high as to end all sales should pass the Byrd rule," Moller said, referring the rule governing what meets the requirements to be included in a filibuster-proof bill.

The federal government already imposes a 10% tax on the importation and sale of handguns, per the Tax Policy Center. The tax rate is 11% for other guns and ammunition.

Beyer said he was open to negotiating the 1,000% tax rate. "There's nothing magical about that thousand percent number. It's severe enough to actually inhibit and restrict sales. But also successful enough that it's not seen as an absolute ban."

There are instances stretching back decades of Democrats seeking massive tax increases on guns and ammo to make them unaffordable. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said in 1993 that he wanted to tax handgun ammunition "out of existence" to curb crime, The New York Times reported.

Then in 2020, a pair of Democrats introduced similar measures to raise taxes on weapons to prevent gun violence, though not at the scale Beyer is seeking. Both Rep. Hank Johnson and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts put forward plans to triple the tax on handguns to 30%, as well as nearly quintuple the tax rate on shells and cartridges to 50%.

Those went nowhere in Congress — and the Beyer plan faces steep hurdles as well. Democrats will likely be wary of Republicans further casting them as tax-and-spend liberals in an election year where the party faces major headwinds to keep control of Congress. It may also violate Biden's pledge to not increase taxes on people earning under $400,000.

 

I guarantee you that the bill will never pass the Senate anyway, it won't have 50 votes as long as Joe Manchin is needed to get that total, and it being a midterm year, I doubt the measure would even have 40 votes.

 

Besides, Republicans will simply "DEMOCRATS WANT TO TAX GUNS BY A THOUSAND PERCENT" in every ad that goes out, and those ads will work in swing states. This wouldn't stop private gun sales, and while yes, it would slow down "I'm going to buy an assault rifle today" sales, the Roberts Court would kill it anyway.

I appreciate the "do something!" aspect, and it does make sense, but it'll never happen.

We live in Gunmerica.

No, this is a horrible idea, and someone in the Democrat

Sunday Long Read: All The President's Crooks

As the January 6th Committee's live hearings get under way later this week, our Sunday Long Read comes from none other than the legendary Watergate-breaking, Nixon-destroying pair of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, writing in the Washington Post with their take on the man they call far worse than Nixon: Donald Trump.

President George Washington, in his celebrated 1796 Farewell Address, cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned.

Two of his successors — Richard Nixon and Donald Trump — demonstrate the shocking genius of our first president’s foresight.

As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.

And then along came Trump.

The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.

With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.

Nixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.

Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.

These instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history.

Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.

Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.

This singular moment in American democracy is the only official declaration and certification of who won the presidential election.

In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.

We watched in utter dismay as Trump persistently claimed that he was really the winner. “We won,” he said in a speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.” He publicly and relentlessly pressured Pence to make him the victor on Jan. 6.

On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.

By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history.

 

This is the article that we should have gotten sixteen months ago from these two, making it very, very clear that Trump should have been expelled from the White House, and that Washington's Republicans were too cowardly, too enmeshed, and too ambitious to stop him, mainly because dozens of them wanted Trump's power for themselves, to remake the country in their image, to complete the dark work that Trump narrowly failed. 

It's good to finally see it, and yes, when the news will be filled with these hearings, this article gives a much-needed perspective on what needs to happen in the weeks ahead.

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

A former Wisconsin county judge was assassinated yesterday in his home, with the gunman trying to take his own life afterwards. On the gunman allegedly: a list of other political targets, including Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Former Juneau County Judge John Roemer was shot and killed in his home in the Township of New Lisbon Friday morning.

Officials say when SWAT entered the home, they found Roemer zip-tied to a chair and fatally shot.

The Department of Justice says Douglas Uhde was found in the basement with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A law enforcement official says a "hit list" was found in Uhde's vehicle which included Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It all started at 6:30 a.m. on Friday when the Juneau County Sheriff’s Office received a call notifying law enforcement of an armed person and two shots fired in a residence.

The caller had left the home and contacted law enforcement from a nearby home.

Following failed attempts to negotiate with the person in the home, at approximately 10:17 a.m. the Juneau County Special Tactics and Response Team entered the residence and located Roemer dead.

Dispatch recordings have also revealed that Roemer's son may have been a witness to the deadly scene.

Uhde, 56, was found in the basement with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He is in critical condition.

Law enforcement began life-saving measures, and Uhde was taken to a medical facility.

A firearm was recovered at the scene.

Kaul said the judicial targets have been notified.

Kaul said investigators are looking into whether this was related to court cases.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Annette Kingsland Ziegler released a statement on Roemer's death:

"The state's judicial family is shocked and saddened by this tragedy. Judge Roemer dedicated much of his career to public service in the law. Before taking the bench in 2004, he had served as an assistant district attorney and as an assistant state public defender. He was known by colleagues for his sharp legal mind and his willingness to share his time and knowledge with others. His work made a tremendous difference in the lives of many people in Juneau County and elsewhere in the state. Our deepest sympathy goes to Judge Roemer's family at this time."

The investigation is being handled as both a homicide and possible case of domestic terrorism.

 

So, we've gone beyond the "attempted plot phase" in Wisconsin and now we're at the "targeted political assassinations phase" of the ongoing terrorist insurrection, with all the targets having something to do with what the gunman considered a corrupt legal and political system in the US.

I guarantee you this guy thought all four people were enemies of Donald Trump.

I guarantee you more local and state politicians, judges, and civil servants are going to be killed in the months ahead, too.

We're in a ludicrously dangerous time right now.