Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

More that 70% of all voters in this week's NY Times/Siena College poll agree that American democracy is under threat, but in 2022 that simply means "The other political party".

 

Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.

In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.

The doubts about elections that have infected American politics since the 2020 contest show every sign of persisting well into the future, the poll suggested: Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections.

Political disagreements appear to be seeping into the fabric of everyday life. Fourteen percent of voters said political views revealed a lot about whether someone is a good person, while 34 percent said it revealed a little. Nearly one in five said political disagreements had hurt relationships with friends or family.

“I do agree that the biggest threat is survival of our democracy, but it’s the divisiveness that is creating this threat,” said Ben Johnson, 33, a filmmaker from New Orleans and a Democrat. “It feels like on both sides, people aren’t agreeing on facts anymore. We can’t meet in the middle if we can’t agree on simple facts. You’re not going to be able to move forward and continue as a country if you can’t agree on facts.”

The poll showed that voters filtered their faith in democracy through a deeply partisan lens. A majority of voters in both parties identified the opposing party as a “major threat to democracy.”

Most Republicans said the dangers included President Biden, the mainstream media, the federal government and voting by mail. Most Democrats named Donald J. Trump, while large shares of the party’s voters also said the Supreme Court and the Electoral College were threats to democracy.

Seventy-one percent of all voters said democracy was at risk — but just 7 percent identified that as the most important problem facing the country.

These ostensibly conflicting views — that voters could be so deeply suspicious of one another and of the bedrock institutions of American democracy, while also expressing little urgency to address those concerns — may in part reflect longstanding frustrations and cynicism toward government.

 

We've spent two generations calling the federal government a threat, and when we get to the point where we're on the knife's edge looking into the abyss, most Americans want to jump. 

I take that back. Most Americans want permission to push the most marginalized among us off the edge in order to "improve" their own lives. A third of a billion bastards, we've become.

I have to hope we can overcome this, but it'll take a miracle.

Image

 

Made In Taiwan, Con't

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken is warning that Chinese plans for invading Taiwan have now become a much higher military priority for Beijing.

China has made a decision to seize Taiwan on a “much faster timeline” than previously thought, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, shortly after China’s leader reiterated his intent to take the island by force if necessary.

“There has been a change in the approach from Beijing toward Taiwan in recent years,” Blinken said in an event at Stanford University in California.

The remarks from America’s top diplomat on Monday come as China holds its twice-a-decade Communist party congress, and shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping used a widely-watched speech on Sunday to say the “wheels of history are rolling on towards China’s reunification” with Taiwan. While peaceful means were preferable, Xi added, “we reserve the option of taking all measures necessary.”

Blinken said China had made a “fundamental decision that the status quo was no longer acceptable, and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” He didn’t elaborate on the timing or provide other details.

Although Biden administration officials have regularly accused China of eroding the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, comments about Beijing’s intentions with regard to an invasion are less common.

Observers are highly sensitive to any remarks that might provide insights into how senior officials in Beijing or Washington view the potential for war over Taiwan -- an event that would have enormous geopolitical and economic consequences, particularly given President Joe Biden’s repeated pledges that the US would help defend the island.

The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a question on Monday about whether Blinken’s comments reflected any formal assessment that China has moved up its agenda for taking Taiwan. In March of last year, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that China wanted to take Taiwan “during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”

 

Pretty sure you can change "years" there to "months". 

 

Seems to me that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have made a deal, and both are betting that there's no appetite here, especially among the GOP, for US troops in Taiwan at all. Besides, we're busy with Ukraine, is the thinking.

 

We can't handle both.

 

The world may about to be changed dramatically by that assumption, and not in a good way.

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

Why yes, Oath Keepers are white supremacist domestic terrorists, and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to stockpile weapons in order to use them to kill politicians on January 6th.

 

Oath Keepers members spent tens of thousands of dollars in January 2021 on firearms, bullets and other equipment, according to prosecutors in Washington, DC, trying to prove members of the far-right extremist group were building an arsenal as it prepared to try to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

In all, prosecutors said Monday in federal court that nearly $200,000 in withdrawals were made from bank accounts connected to the Oath Keepers that month used for a wide variety of purchases, including guns. Prosecutors used evidence of the withdrawals, coupled with shopping receipts and text messages, to show how some members allegedly stockpiled the weapons.

Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes, according to text messages showed to the jury, bought several firearms from online sellers in what prosecutors called “parking lot purchases.”

Prosecutors then showed the jury evidence that Rhodes withdrew money from ATMs by a Bass Pro Shop, a Lowe’s and a gas station near where he made the purchases. They also displayed receipts showing purchases of firearm accessories, including 14 magazines, eight sights and one scope leveling kit, at retail shops around the same time.

Prosecutors have not said what they believe Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed on his way to Washington, DC, or whether they were taken to a Virginia hotel where the group’s so-called quick reaction force amassed.

An FBI agent testified Monday that Rhodes does not appear on the hotel’s security footage and that the weapons were ultimately found in a storage unit belonging to Oath Keeper Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

The extensive withdrawals are part of prosecutors’ efforts to convince a jury that Rhodes and his organization were preparing for more than just a peaceful rally on January 6, 2021, and that they believed a violent conflict was imminent.

According to prosecutors, Rhodes made the purchases both in his home state of Texas the week before the Capitol attack and on his road trip to the DC region. Rhodes embarked on the trip around January 3, 2021, according to cell phone data, traveling with lawyer Kellye SoRelle. SoRelle faces several charges in connection to January 6 and has pleaded not guilty in a separate case.

Attorneys for the defendants have repeatedly argued that SoRelle was the general counsel for the Oath Keepers organization. But, prosecutors suggested Monday, she was not acting in that capacity around the time of January 6 and was even exchanging sexually explicit messages with Rhodes.

“Speaking of f—ing…If you need some come on over,” Rhodes texted SoRelle on January 2. SoRelle declined, according to another text message. She allegedly later texted Rhodes that “You’re too good at what you do. Whole bad boy thing. I am a damn moth to a [fire emoji]. I really am replaying my teenage years.”

Prosecutors have relied heavily on messages and audio recordings so far to make their case against the five defendants and began to show the jury how those recordings captured the defendants actions on January 6 by calling a journalist to the stand Monday afternoon.

 

Besides the fact that Rhodes was schtupping his legal counsel, the guy bought thousands of dollars worth of firearms himself and the feds literally have the receipts for it. A lot of time in a little box awaits our friend Stewart.

Extreme RINO Hunting, Con't

Alex Henderson at AlterNet notes that even the pretend "Good Republicans" are being driven out of the party, like retiring Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, and the remainder are all soul-selling simps like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, or open fascists like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Although Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska isn’t a full-fledged Never Trumper like the Washington Post’s Max Boot, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, attorney George Conway or former GOP strategist Rick Wilson, the conservative senator has been highly critical of former President Donald Trump at times and voted “guilty” during Trump’s second impeachment trial — a move that has resulted in Sasse being labeled a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by Trump and other far-right MAGA Republicans. Sasse has decided he would rather be in academia than politics, applying for a position as president of the University of Florida.

Sasse is the sole finalist for the position, and his departure from the U.S. Senate is almost certain. GOP strategist and Never Trump conservative Sarah Longwell is sorry to see Sasse leaving politics, although not surprised. In an article published by The Bulwark on October 17, the founder of the Republican Accountability Project (formerly Republican Voters Against Trump) laments that in the GOP of 2022, there is little or no room for those who are not far-right MAGA extremists and total devotees of Trumpism.

“Ben Sasse is retiring from the Senate at the youthful age of 50,” Longwell writes. “We know why. Politicians who thought they could wait out Trump now see the writing on the wall. The party’s over. For years, we watched the GOP defenestrations: Will Hurd, Jeff Flake, George W. Bush, the memory of John McCain, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and any other Republican who stood up to Donald Trump — or even just opposed Trump’s attempted coup. Some fell on their swords. Some were tossed aside involuntarily. The result was the same.”

Trump continues, “Simultaneously, we watched the progress on the other side of the spectrum as normie Republican moderates such as Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Ronna Romney McDaniel, and J.D. Vance became unquestioning Trump maximalists. What these two dynamics proved was a simple fact: In the Republican Party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump…. The end result of this truth is that it has driven the Good Republican — that rare animal who was supposed to be the post-Trump future of the GOP — to near extinction.”

 

I'd argue that the last Good Republican was Eisenhower. The rest of them have been playing various levels of race and fear cards to get a Christian white supremacist nation all my life, and I'm only a few years younger than Ben Sasse, who will now go on to do Ron DeSantis's bidding in ridding the University of Florida system of anyone who is "woke", student and instructor alike. 

 

Not such a good guy, Ben Sasse.

 

Like I've said for years now, anyone who's still a Republican past this point is a fascist white supremacist asshole, or is at the very least OK with the country being run by them.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Weeks of relentlessly horrible, racist, brutal attack ads from GOP dark money groups have been flooding the airwaves in sewage. Will Bunch:

 

If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.

Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.

You won’t be shocked to learn that the ads are deliberately dishonest, conflating Democratic immigration policies, for example, with the horrific case of one undocumented immigrant named Christopher Puente accused of raping a toddler at a fast-food restaurant in Chicago (”She was 3 ... years ... old,” the narrator intones, milking the pathos). What’s not said is that the alleged assault occurred in February 2020, more than three years into the presidency of Republican Donald Trump, well before Biden took office.

That’s appalling, but that’s not what’s most upsetting about these ads, which, according to social media, have been broadcast nationally during the baseball telecasts on Fox Sports 1. There is absolutely no filter of jarring and often violent imagery, the racist overtones and the xenophobic innuendo, and the unrelenting darkness of the “American carnage” vibe. No one cares that this is afternoon baseball and little girls and boys are watching. This is America now.

In fact, the comparison to that infamous “Willie” (really William) Horton ad isn’t even fair. That spot — which attempted to stir up racial panic by (misleadingly, of course) linking Democrat Michael Dukakis to a Black inmate who committed a rape and murder after a weekend pass — only aired on TV one time, because just 34 years ago even most Republicans found it too crude, and over the edge. Listen to that 1980s spot and the tone that offended many folks back then seems calm and measured compared to the Natural-Born-Killers-on-acid vibe of the 2022 attack ads. Today, any and all guardrails have been taken down.

One other thing that won’t surprise you about the new attack ads is that the people behind them aren’t eager for you to know exactly who they are.

The required tagline lists the sponsor as a new group calling itself Citizens for Sanity. On one level, thanks to some excellent research by the campaign-finance watchdog Open Secrets, we know a lot about who these Citizens for Sanity are: the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump, offering America not just a new low for the 2022 midterms but a sneak preview of the nightmare that the 45th president’s 2024 comeback crusade is likely to be.

 

The polls are all showing that these ads are working spectacularly well, as in this latest NY Times/Siena College Upshot poll.

Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinctive advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.

The poll shows that 49 percent of likely voters said they planned to vote for a Republican to represent them in Congress on Nov. 8, compared with 45 percent who planned to vote for a Democrat. The result represents an improvement for Republicans since September, when Democrats held a one-point edge among likely voters in the last Times/Siena poll. (The October poll’s unrounded margin is closer to three points, not the four points that the rounded figures imply.)

With inflation unrelenting and the stock market steadily on the decline, the share of likely voters who said economic concerns were the most important issues facing America has leaped since July, to 44 percent from 36 percent — far higher than any other issue. And voters most concerned with the economy favored Republicans overwhelmingly, by more than a two-to-one margin.

 

Needless to say, going from D+1 to R+4 now is the difference between Dems barely holding on to the House and the GOP picking up 30-40 seats. The crosstabs of tht NYT/Siena College poll are not promising, either. Republicans have a 2-1 advantage: 63-31, among non-college white voters. In a state like Wisconsin, that's a death knell for Team Blue. Republicans are up by 10% points among Independents, 51-41%. The Democratic lead in the suburbs is down to 1 point, where it was double digits in 2018 and 2020.

Overall, Republicans have a 21-point lead among voters 45-64.

If this holds up, Dems will lose the House AND the Senate.

Folks if there's early voting in your state, do it now. We have 3 weeks.

We're going to give the country to the fascists because gas is $4 again.

Sunday Long Read: The Border Of Gilead

Our Sunday Long Read this week is from Stephania Taladrid at the New Yorker, who gives us the story of how abortion activists young and old are forming networks to get mifepristone and misoprostol from Mexico to women in red states in need of abortions.

 

The handoff was planned for late afternoon on a weekday, at an underused trailhead in a Texas park. The young woman carrying the pills, whom I’ll call Anna, arrived in advance of the designated time, as was her habit, to throw off anyone who might try to use her license plates to trace her identity. She felt slightly absurd in her disguise—sun hat, oversized sunglasses, plain black mask. But the pills in her pocket were used to induce abortions, and in Texas, her home state, their distribution now required such subterfuge, along with burner phones and the encrypted messaging app Signal. Since late June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas and thirteen other states had effectively banned abortion, and more were sure to follow. In some of the states, laws that originated as far back as the nineteenth century had been restored. Providing the tools for an abortion in Texas had become a felony that could lead to years in prison, and a fellow-citizen could sue Anna and collect upward of ten thousand dollars for every abortion she was found to abet.

Anna wasn’t a fainthearted woman—someone who had recently approached her for pills noted her “cottage-core vibes” and steely calm—but she wasn’t reckless, either. She and other women defying abortion bans had turned to a model developed by Verónica Cruz, a prominent Mexican activist. Until last year, abortion was considered a crime in most of Mexico, the second-biggest Catholic country in the world, and women there had become adept at providing safe abortions in secrecy. (Given the legal exposure, pseudonyms have been used for Anna and other American women who let me into their underground networks.)

By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.

he town of San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, is known as the birthplace of legendary independence leaders. It is just as famous for its charm: cobblestone streets, Baroque churches, bright houses, and lively cantinas once frequented by Mexican muralists and Beat poets. Some Americans visit for a week and decide to stay. Among those expats is Liz, a retired Southern woman in her seventies. On the morning of June 24th, as she was making coffee in a kitchen where photographs of her great-grandchildren covered the fridge, she heard on the radio that the constitutional right to abortion in the United States had ended. She maneuvered her walker to a nearby chair and sank down. She felt as she had as a child, in a house by the sea where she’d once lived, when a hurricane she’d been dreading made landfall. It was awful, yes, but knowing what was coming had given her a chance to gather her courage and make a plan.

Five years earlier, Liz had met Verónica Cruz, who runs a nonprofit called Las Libres—the Free Ones—out of the city of Guanajuato, some fifty miles west of San Miguel. At the time, Cruz was defying Mexican law by helping women—mostly poor women—abort at home. In part because activists like Cruz successfully reduced the stigma of abortion, the Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalized it in September, 2021. That same month, Texas moved in the opposite direction: a state law known as S.B. 8 banned nearly all abortions past the sixth week. Since then, Cruz had widened her remit, supplying free abortion pills to undocumented women in Texas.

Liz figured that, with Roe overturned and states from Arkansas to South Dakota implementing abortion restrictions, the demand for Mexican abortion pills would soar. If she lacked Cruz’s decades of experience working on the cusp between the lawful and the criminal, she was neither too old nor too diminished to take a risk. She picked up the phone to call Cruz and then some friends, to find out which of them would be game to join an underground network.

Locals called expats like Liz “the Old Hippies,” in English. In early July, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision negated Roe, six of them joined Liz on her terrace for hibiscus tea and a talk with Cruz. Most of the Americans were over sixty and recalled what life was like before the 1973 Roe ruling. One tactic Liz remembered for ending an unwanted pregnancy was to alternate between a tub of ice-cold water and a tub as scalding as you could bear it. Those who tried this method suffered, then usually had a baby anyway. Liz had a baby, too, as a teen-ager. Although she had cheered when the Roe decision was announced, knowing how many lives it would change, it had come too late to change hers.

Cruz, the fifty-one-year-old daughter of farmers, has appraising dark eyes and a booming voice, and is direct by nature. She asked the Old Hippies if they would raise money and buy pills in Mexico that would be distributed across the border. Cruz paused to let an Old Hippie translate for those whose Spanish was weak.

Medication abortion in the United States is typically a two-day process that involves taking mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, and misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions. The Food and Drug Administration approves the use of this two-pill regimen under a doctor’s supervision up until the tenth week of pregnancy. A prescription, which can be obtained in states where abortion is legal, is required. In Mexico, Cruz explained, misoprostol is sold over the counter. Mifepristone still requires a prescription, but Cruz had found suppliers, and when she ran short she relied solely on misoprostol, which can cause an abortion on its own.

Immediately after Dobbs, Cruz said, her existing crew of volunteers had slipped enough medication across the border to help two thousand American women have abortions. If the Old Hippies agreed to aid distributors in abortion-ban states, Cruz told them, Las Libres could help many more women. Each cell in the supply chain would know little about the other cells—safer for everyone that way.

Several Old Hippies wondered aloud about consequences, as the legal terrain was decidedly unsettled. In Louisiana, anyone who “knowingly performs” a medication abortion is subject to a five-year prison sentence and a fifty-­thousand-dollar fine. In Oklahoma, it’s a ten-year sentence and a hundred thousand dollar fine. More such laws were likely to come, although no criminal convictions had yet been reported. If charged, an Old Hippie told Cruz, they might end up at the mercy of a district attorney in, say, Mississippi, facing years of jail time. But Liz was an optimist—“You have to be,” she always said—and by meeting’s end everyone in the room had signed on to her plan.

 

It's a fascinating story, but the real problem is that Republicans made this necessary. And networks like the Old Hippies will become more and more of a necessity in the years ahead unless Republicans are stopped.

Last Call For All Trussed Up, Con't

The most disastrous government in British history may be about to come to a crashing halt.

Senior Conservatives will this week hold talks on a “rescue mission” that would see the swift removal of Liz Truss as leader, after the new chancellor Jeremy Hunt dramatically tore up her economic package and signalled a new era of austerity.

A group of senior MPs will meet on Monday to discuss the prime minister’s future, with some wanting her to resign within days and others saying she is now “in office but not in control”. Some are threatening to publicly call on Truss to stand down after the implosion of her tax-cutting programme.

In a rearguard action to prop up the prime minister, her cabinet allies tonight warned MPs they would precipitate an election and ensure the Tories were “finished as a party” if they toppled a second leader in just a few months.

However, support for Truss is also evaporating inside the cabinet, with members keeping in close touch with her critics. “She is in the departure lounge now and she knows that,” said a former minister. “It is a case now of whether she takes part in the process and goes to some extent on her own terms, or whether she tries to resist and is forced out.”

Another MP said it “would be grotesque” to allow Truss to endure another appearance at prime minister’s questions in the Commons on Wednesday after a series of humiliating U-turns, the sacking of ally Kwasi Kwarteng and the abandonment of her economic prospectus.

Between 15 and 20 former ministers and other senior MPs have been invited to a “dinner of grown-ups”, convened by leading supporters of Rishi Sunak, to plan how and when to remove Truss and install Sunak and fellow leadership contender Penny Mordaunt as a unity pairing.

A source familiar with the conversations said: “They are just going to have to sit down and work things out. It now becomes a rescue mission for the Conservative party and the economy. That’s where we are.”

 

Tories should be used to openly talking about their ridiculously bad governments and their incompetent buffoon MPs by now, and this is still a new low.

 

For their part, Labour is keeping their traps shut and letting Truss torch herself. If elections were held now, I'm pretty sure Dave Lister could get the nod. 

Truss screwed up so badly that Jeremy Hunt is back in play as UK Chancellor. He's now in charge, whether Truss is PM or not.

Stay turned, Truss may not last the month.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

 I've discussed at length the number of white supremacist domestic terrorist groups involved in January 6th, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and more. But given the latest batch of January 6th Committee evidence presented on Thursday, we now have to consider that agents of the US Secret Service may be involved as well.

The House Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection has asked the Secret Service for records of all communications between the far-right Oath Keepers group and Secret Service agents prior to and on the day of the attack, after a preliminary accounting by the agency indicated multiple contacts in 2020, according to a Secret Service spokesman.

The spokesman said the Congressional request follows a short telephonic briefing from the Secret Service to committee staff, in which the agency said an agent from its protective intelligence division had “numerous” contacts with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and other group members prior to Trump rallies in fall 2020, but that they were all part of common practice to inform the group of security protocols to follow.

That initial briefing was prompted by federal trial testimony in which the ex-leader of the North Carolina Oath Keepers said Rhodes was in contact with a member of the Secret Service around the time of a September 2020 rally.

“Following the (Oath Keepers) trial, the committee reached out to the Secret Service and a verbal briefing as provided to staff, which was specific to the comments made at trial,” said Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. “Today, the committee has followed up with a formal inquiry for records regarding that and January 6, which we will provide.”

The Jan. 6 committee made the request for all records of communications between the Secret Service and the Oath Keepers, including the days surrounding Jan. 6 2021, after an NBC News inquiry about the level of information provided by the Secret Service.

The Washington Post first reported an agent from the protective intelligence division was in communication with the Oath Keepers prior to Jan. 6, 2021.

The Secret Service found that multiple members of the organization, not just Rhodes, spoke to an agent in the protective intelligence division ahead of Trump rallies, the most recent conversation coming before a Dec. 12, 2020, rally, Guglielmi said.

Again, we're looking at a scenario here were Trump detail USSS agents were part of Trump's conspiracy with these January 6th terrorist groups. 

And yet nobody seems to care. We're all mad over french fries prices and really, we should just say screw it and let the GOP win, right?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

At this point we have to consider that the Durham counter-probe into the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump-Russia collusion is actually an op run by the Good Guys and not by Trump's merry band of dipshits, simply because the staggering incompetence of Durham's actual legal maneuvers over the last four years has now resulted in Durham yelling at his own trial witness in public for making his own case far, far worse in the trial of Steele Dossier source Igor Danchenko.

The special counsel opened his case with testimony from Brian Auten, a senior FBI intelligence analyst who oversaw part of the FBI’s early investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion.

Over two days, Auten helped prosecutors by saying there was information that Danchenko didn’t share with the FBI about his dossier sourcing that would’ve aided the bureau’s investigation. This is a key element of Durham’s case: to secure a conviction, Durham must persuade the jury that Danchenko intentionally lied and that those false statements may have impacted the FBI’s work.

The witness also put a spotlight on some of Danchenko’s inconsistencies in his many FBI interviews, where he was peppered with questions about his ties to Christopher Steele, the dossier, and his own sub-sources.

But the situation shifted when the defense got to cross-examine Auten. Danchenko’s lawyers highlighted Auten’s previous testimony, given years ago to the Justice Department inspector general and to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which contradicted some of Durham’s claims.

Auten previously said Danchenko was “truthful” and “assisted” the Russia probe. He also said securing Danchenko as an FBI source was “one of the best things that came out of” the Russia probe. This undercuts the core of Durham’s indictment, which alleged that Danchenko serially lied to the FBI and impeded the investigators who were scrambling to verify the Steele dossier.

Danchenko’s defense attorney, Danny Onorato, asked Auten in court on Wednesday if that was still his belief today, and Auten answered in the affirmative, adding, “I stand by my testimony.”

The defense also elicited testimony indicating that Durham cherry-picked material from an FBI memo that Auten wrote, when there was exculpatory information on the very next page.

“And Mr. Durham didn’t take any steps to correct your wrong answer, did he?” Onorato asked.

After Onorato finished, Durham returned for a final round of questioning, but the tone completely changed. Durham and Auten sparred for over an hour. Durham sounded angry at times, and many of Auten’s responses were adversarial, clearly not giving Durham the answers that fit his narrative.

Durham brought up the previously unknown fact that Auten was “recommended for suspension” by the FBI’s internal auditors. Auten acknowledged the recommendation, which he said is under appeal. Lawyers often bring up a witness’ past misconduct or punishments as a way to attack their credibility – but in this case, it was the prosecutor seemingly impeaching his own witness.

“You’re going to be suspended,” Durham said in one of his questions, “because you won’t admit your involvement” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, process.

The special counsel then rebuked Auten for saying earlier that George Papadopoulos was a “high-level adviser” to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Durham accurately noted that Papadopoulos was a low-level aide, just 28 years old at the time, and still included his Model UN experience from college on his resume.

Later, Durham tried to get Auten to agree that the FBI was more alarmed about Papadopoulos’ ties to the Middle East than his ties to Russia. Auten wouldn’t go there and called it a “both/and” situation. The spat had little to do with Danchenko’s alleged false statements about the dossier.

 

Auten punched Durham's case in the nuts and then fought with Durham for an hour. This can't be real, it's too TV drama to be a real federal case. This has to be an op of some sort, or maybe Occam's Razor and Durham is just that much of a dumbass. 

Either way as Marcy Wheeler points out, Durham has sabotaged his own prosecution.

Steele (and therefore Danchenko) was first paid to dig up dirt on Paul Manafort by Oleg Deripaska, someone working to get Trump elected, and in fact one of the most important new details of this exchange is that Danchenko prefaced it by referencing asking someone much earlier, in May — possibly during the time when Deripaska was still paying the tab — for dirt on Manafort. With regards to Manafort, it’s not clear Danchenko would have reason to distinguish between the two projects paying to develop dirt (and he didn’t know precisely who was paying either time). He wanted dirt and the record shows that even someone closely tied to Manafort, Deripaska, was willing to pay for that dirt.

In any case, Durham makes a materiality claim that it was really important for the FBI to know Dolan’s partisan leanings.

Q. But for the FBI’s purposes in evaluating 105, Government’s Exhibit 112, was of significance this reportedly was coming from, quote, an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign, closed quote?

A. Yes, that was important.

Q. So with respect, then, to that information, that person that was providing the information, was Donald — was Charles Dolan, would that be import to you?

A. Yes, that would be of import.

 

Later, to play up the import of Dolan’s politics, Durham again misreads the dossier and in the process, misstates his entire case. He implies that the FBI, in assessing Report 105 — which was entirely unimportant to any investigative developments but is Durham’s single piece of evidence that the Steele dossier was sourced to Democrats — should have known that a source described as “an American political figure associated with Donald TRUMP and his campaign” was actually a Democrat.

Q. And would it be of import to you that Mr. Dolan was not somebody who was an American political figure associated with Donald Trump and his campaign but, in fact, was a Democratic operative for a long period of time? Would that have been significant to you?

A. Yes, we were interested in all of the —

Q. Right.

A. — sources.

Q. So if you knew that that was the case, it wasn’t some Republican insider or some associate of Donald Trump’s, what, if any, impact did that have on your evaluation of the validity and credibility of the information that’s being conveyed in these dossier reports?

A. Well, it helps — it would have helped to understand kind of accuracy and things of that sort for the dossier reports.

Except that, once again, that’s not what the sourcing indicates. If Durham’s allegations are correct and this came from Dolan, it amounts to Danchenko sourcing something Dolan attributed to a Republican friend of his. If this claim is inaccurate, it’s not because Danchenko lied, it’s because Dolan did.

That is, Durham’s problem isn’t that Dolan is a Democrat. It’s that Dolan — his own witness — is an admitted fabricator.

And John Durham is trying so hard to invent partisanship rather than Russian rat-fuckery, that he doesn’t understand he’s impugning his source, not Danchenko.

 

If I'm right Durham understands completely that he's impugning his source. The question is why.

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Last Call For Under The Weather

Had something of a minor medical issue this week, so sorry for the light posting this close to the midterms and all. I should be back at 100% by the weekend.

I'm still having a better week than Alex Jones however.

Alex Jones was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in a defamation case for promoting the lie that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre was a hoax. The Connecticut jury found Jones liable for $965 million, with amounts reaching as high as $120 million for a single person.

Jones and his company were found liable for damages last year. The six-person jury was tasked with determining how much the Infowars show host should pay to 15 plaintiffs — including the families and an FBI agent — for calling the 2012 massacre a hoax.

The jury was instructed to arrive at two compensatory damages amounts per plaintiff: one sum for defamation damages and another for emotional distress damages.

 

The And Find Out stage of the Fucking Around is alway my favorite part. 

Last Call For Shutdown Countdown, Con't

One thing Jon Chait can tell us about the effects of the House GOP winning in November is that they will almost certainly threaten a debt default crisis in order to force President Biden and the Democrats to make hundreds of billions of cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Bloomberg’s Jack Fitzpatrick interviewed several Republican contenders to lead the House Budget Committee. They all said, with varying levels of specificity, that they plan to instigate a debt-ceiling standoff to force Biden to accept cuts to retirement and health-care programs. “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements,” said Representative Buddy Carter. Representative Jodey Arrington said he wants “eligibility reforms,” which means raising the eligibility age and imposing a means test for Social Security and Medicare benefits. “We should ensure that we keep the promises that were made to the people who really need it, the people who are relying on it,” said Representative Lloyd Smucker. “So some sort of means-testing potentially would help to ensure that we can do that.”

It might seem strange that Republicans would be pivoting to a more aggressive agenda without holding the White House. But this is actually consistent with the strategy they have followed over the past three decades. Republicans are committed to scaling back the safety net. But they realize this agenda is toxically unpopular — even less popular than defunding the police, a policy Democrats have repudiated en masse.

They could try to accomplish this through compromise — the previous two Democratic presidents showed some willingness to trade social-spending cuts for higher taxes on the rich. But higher taxes on the rich are completely verboten in the GOP. And so their strategy is to force Democratic presidents to sign spending cuts into law against their will.

The 1995–96 Republican Congress instigated a series of government shutdowns in the belief they could force Bill Clinton to accept cuts to taxes and social programs. This crusade blew up in their faces and helped Clinton win reelection. But rather than abandon it, they tried it again under Barack Obama, this time using the debt ceiling as the hostage of choice. That, too, failed.

But the Republican plan is to try it again with Biden. They are already floating their message: The Republicans will insist they won’t raise the debt ceiling unless Biden agrees to Republican-designed spending cuts, and they will blame him for the global meltdown if he refuses their demands. “If Republicans are trying to cut spending, surely he wouldn’t try to default,” said Representative Jason Smith, the prospective chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.

And while this tactic has never worked before, it has the theoretical attraction of evading the public’s deep aversion to the GOP policy agenda by extorting the Democrats into endorsing it.

Last June, the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that includes more than three-quarters of the House Republicans, released a sweeping domestic-budget plan. It received little attention in the mainstream media. The plan, notes Fitzpatrick, would

gradually raise the Medicare age of eligibility to 67 and the Social Security eligibility to 70 before indexing both to life expectancy. It backed withholding payments to those who retired early and had earnings over a certain limit. And it endorsed the consideration of options to reduce payroll taxes that fund Social Security and redirect them to private alternatives. It also urged lawmakers to “phase-in an increase in means testing” for Medicare.

On top of partially cutting Medicare and Social Security and partially privatizing the latter, the RSC plan would implement various regressive tax cuts favored by the GOP.

This House GOP, if they win in November, absolutely will burn the economy down and blame Biden for it, and the right-wing noise machine is already gearing up for the assault.

A House and/pr Senate controlled by Republicans would be an horrific nightmare, but that depends on us voting.

Saud Songs They Sing

With the US average of gas prices headed back for $4 per gallon after OPEC's production cut, both the Biden administration and high-ranking Democratic members of Congress suddenly, finally has a real appetite for cutting the Kingdom loose with potential significant effect.

President Biden is re-evaluating the relationship with Saudi Arabia after it teamed up with Russia to cut oil production in a move that bolstered President Vladimir V. Putin’s government and could raise American gasoline prices just before midterm elections, a White House official said on Tuesday.

“I think the president’s been very clear that this is a relationship that we need to continue to re-evaluate, that we need to be willing to revisit,” the official, John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council at the White House, said on CNN. “And certainly in light of the OPEC decision, I think that’s where he is.”

Mr. Kirby signaled openness to retaliatory measures proposed by Democratic congressional leaders outraged by the oil production cut announced last week by the international cartel known as OPEC Plus. Among other things, leading Democrats have proposed curbing American security cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including arms sales, and stripping OPEC members of their legal immunity so they can be sued for violations of American antitrust laws.

“The president’s obviously disappointed by the OPEC decision and is going to be willing to work with Congress as we think about what the right relationship with Saudi Arabia needs to be going forward,” Mr. Kirby said. He sounded a note of urgency. “The timeline’s now and I think he’s going to be willing to start to have those conversations right away,” he said. “I don’t think this is anything that’s going to have to wait or should wait quite frankly for much longer.”

The comments came just a day after Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assailed Saudi Arabia for effectively backing Russia in its brutal invasion of Ukraine and called for an immediate freeze on “all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” vowing to use his power to block any future arms sales.

“There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict — either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping off an entire country off of the map, or you support him,” Mr. Menendez said. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said on Tuesday morning that Saudi Arabia clearly wanted Russia to win the war in Ukraine. “Let’s be very candid about this,” he said on CNN. “It’s Putin and Saudi Arabia against the United States.

If long-time Democratic foreign policy hands like Menendez and Durbin, and eve Biden himself, are tossing Prince Bonesaw McGraw and his merry band of sheiks  out of the tent, this is real. The question is how much damage Riyadh has done. It might be the first time I can remember where US foreign policy is about to take major steps back on Saudi Arabia.

Biden can't push them too far though. If Riyadh decides to start pricing oil in rubles instead of greenback, the dollar craters and everyone now it. They've subtly mentioned this earlier this year, not exactly correcting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when he said that the Saudis were invited to join the BRICS compact. Such a move really would be siding with Putin against the US.

We'll see, but the OPEC production cut is going to have consequences, and so will the US and European actions that follow.

Big Buckeye Battleground Blitz

Republicans know that with Herschel Walker's campaign in Georgia capsizing and Sen. Raphael Warnock increasing his lead in what was a tight race that f Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan knocks out Hillbilly Racist J.D. Vance next month, they lose any shot at the Senate. The GOP is going all out, dropping tens of millions in Ohio to defend Rob Portman's seat in the final weeks, and that means Ryan is pretty much on his own as he heads into this week's debate with Vance.

Democrats are increasingly fearful that they are squandering a chance to flip a Senate seat in Ohio — a state that once seemed off the map but, according to polls, remains close four weeks from Election Day.

Although the Republican, “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, has struggled to raise money, national groups have propped up his campaign by pouring in more than $30 million worth of advertising.

Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, has been a more prolific fundraiser. But because national Democratic groups have provided comparatively little help on the airwaves, Ryan has had to spend cash as fast as it comes in just to keep up with the GOP onslaught.

The lopsided funding has unnerved Democrats in Ohio and across the country, according to interviews with a dozen party leaders and operatives. Many worry that Democrats will regret not doing more to try to pull Ryan ahead of Vance, a right-wing ally of former President Donald Trump.

“Tim Ryan is running the best Senate race in the country and having to do it all by his lonesome,” said Irene Lin, an Ohio-based Democratic strategist who managed Tom Nelson’s Senate primary campaign in Wisconsin this year. “If we lose this race by a few points, and the Senate majority, blame should squarely fall on the D.C. forces who unfairly wrote off Ohio.”

In an interview with NBC News after a campaign appearance Saturday in Cleveland, Ryan sounded resigned to going it alone.

“The national Democrats … trying to talk them into a working-class candidate, it’s like pulling teeth sometimes,” Ryan said as he tossed a football with his 8-year-old son in a parking lot behind an Irish pub. “We’re in Ohio and we got a candidate running around with a tinfoil hat on. We’re out here fighting on our own. I mean, it’s David against Goliath.”

Ryan and Vance are running to succeed Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican who is not seeking re-election. Independent polls suggest the race is a toss-up, with slim leads by either candidate falling within the margin of error. The candidates will meet Monday night in Cleveland for the first of two televised debates.

After losing two presidential campaigns and a race for governor in the state since 2016, national Democrats are wary about spending in Ohio, once a quintessential battleground. Republicans are treating it as a state they can't afford to lose.

Trump’s super PAC was the latest group to jump into the race, reserving more than $1 million in ads last week. The barrage includes a spot attacking Ryan, who has portrayed himself as a moderate, as a party-line voter beholden to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. But even the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, a major presence in other states key to determining partisan control of the chamber, has been largely absent from Ohio.

Through Monday, Republicans had spent or reserved at least $37.9 million worth of advertising on the general election, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Only $3.7 million of that had come directly from Vance’s campaign, with another $1.6 million split between the campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee through coordinated advertising.

I'm a bit baffled that anyone is surprised that Ryan is being cut off at the knees here in the eleventh hour. How quickly people forget that Ryan declared war on Nancy Pelosi after the 2018 midterms.

 

Ryan, who hails from post-industrial Youngstown, was blunt in his assessment of the Democratic Party this week: “We need a brand change.” He tells Rolling Stone that he wants a less coastal Democratic Party, pointing out the lack of House leaders from the middle of the country. “It’s a pretty large swath of the country to completely ignore,” he says. “How in God’s name do we expect to win the House, have a significant majority, hold it, have a party brand that’s connecting to people, and have nobody in the Midwest at all?”

In past interviews, Ryan has lamented his party’s turn toward political correctness. “We can’t have these purity tests,” he said, before listing a few key characteristics all Democrats should have. “You can’t be racist. You can’t be sexist. You can’t be homophobic — you’ve got to check those boxes — and then be economically progressive,” he said. “Other than that, we’ve got to be a big-tent party.” Ryan said he wants Democrats to come up with an umbrella economic agenda that can unify the party’s diverse coalition: “A robust economic message that all of those different groups could hear and go, ‘Yeah, you know, That’s me. I’m in on that.’”

 

So here you go, Tim. Here's your change to prove that "all working-class voters matter" can win you the race as a Dem, and you have a uniquely terrible faux working-class populist power to win against.

Off you go, chmap, and good luck. We're pulling for you. I want to see J.D. Vance crash into the ground like a meteor and blow up as much as anyone, but I also remember what Ryan has said nationally about the "coastal elites".

I know I've said in the past that you have to match the candidate to the electorate and Blue no matter who. Both remain true here.

But it's also true that when you come for the queen, you best not miss, and Ryan wasn't even in the same time zone. He's held on with no national support as it is, and even won a primary. He's a smart guy. Maybe he's got what it takes to win this seat.

Vote for Ryan if you're in Ohio, surely.

Just don't expect a national flood of cash at the end.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

I know that the Senate GOP is terrified of losing control of the upper chamber for another two years and that they believe they are going to fail to get to 51 seats, because nobody stopped Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville from screeching racist garbage at a Trump rally just 3 1/2 weeks from the midterms.  Will Bunch:

“They want to take over what you’ve got,” Tuberville warmed up the pro-Trump crowd — “they” his amorphous term that could have meant Democrats, or Black people, or the Washoe People, or some other “Other” — in what the journalist Matthew Chapman noted is a literal echo of language used by the KKK to rile up Southerners in the 1960s.

The Alabama senator made his pitch for Nevadans to elect Republican Adam Laxalt, the challenger with 2022′s best shot at unseating a Democratic incumbent in Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, by echoing the new party line that Democrats are “pro-crime,” in a year when voters are more alarmed than usual about that issue. But then he took it next-level by leaving no doubt who he wants his audience to see as the criminals.

“They want to control what you have!” Tuberville told the assembled Trumpists. “They want crime because they want to take over what you’ve got! They want to have reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit!” The crowd roared. “They’re not owed that.”

Suddenly, the ambiguity surrounding “they” was all cleared up, since the main (although not only) group that’s made a case for reparations are African Americans, once enslaved and then subject to racial apartheid, especially in Tuberville’s Alabama and the rest of the Deep South. A U.S. senator was openly equating Blackness with criminality, layering on the outrageous claim that “they” have the nerve to demand reparations while taking your stuff.

‘I mean, I’ve watched and listened to A LOT of old George Wallace speeches,” Tom Moon, a columnist for Alabama Political Reporter, wrote on Twitter. “You’d be hard pressed to find many that were worse than this. In 2022. Just disgusting.”

Tuberville’s Minden speech was so blatantly racist that — just a few short years ago — it’s easy to imagine at least a few Republican Party elders condemning it. But on this Sunday morning in October 2022, the silence so far has been as loud as that Minden fire siren. A political party that weeks ago was in full panic mode after its overreaches on the Supreme Court and abortion rights had energized young and women Democrats has now found its footing with the same appeal to white supremacy as the “nostalgia” for an era of “sundown” laws. 

 

If anything, Republicans are defending Tuberville's racism, because the entire party agrees with his racism. It's not a dealbreaker.

It's a requirement.

Sunday Long Read: Crazy Train

 Our Sunday Long Read is the NY Times profile by Ralph Vartabedian on how greed, techbro ego, and good old-fashioned political corruption killed high speed rail for a generation in California and the United States.

 

Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.

A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.

Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.

The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.

When California voters first approved a bond issue for the project in 2008, the rail line was to be completed by 2020, and its cost seemed astronomical at the time — $33 billion — but it was still considered worthwhile as an alternative to the state’s endless web of freeways and the carbon emissions generated in one of the nation’s busiest air corridors..

Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal.

Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the “final plan” raised the estimate to $113 billion.

The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.

“We would make some different decisions today,” said Tom Richards, a developer from the Central Valley city of Fresno who now chairs the authority. He said project executives have managed to work through the challenges and have a plan that will, for the first time, connect 85 percent of California’s residents with a fast, efficient rail system. “I think it will be successful,” he said.

 

It won't.

 

It will never, ever be finished.

 

There are too many industries dedicated to destroying mass transportation in America: automakers, energy companies, homebuilders,  fast food chains, you name it, it's because most Americans drive there on the way to and from work daily. You make a mass transportation system like high speed rail in a huge state like California, other states will want to do the same.

So turning it into a boondoggle that costs hundreds of billions will be proof positive that the American way of cars and trucks forever is the only path forward.

Remember Hyperloop?

Yeah.