Sunday Long Read: You've Got To Be Kid-ding Her

This week's Sunday Long Read from Business Insider's Julia Black is even more evidence that Elon Musk is a wealthy multi-billionaire James Bond supervillain, engaging in white supremacist eugenics with a thin veneer of techno-futurist bullshit.

Court documents obtained by Insider show that the tech mogul Elon Musk quietly had twins last November with one of his top executives, Shivon Zilis. Musk, who has been an outspoken advocate of bringing more babies into the world, now has nine known children.

In April, Musk, 51, and Zilis, 36, filed a petition to change the twins' names in order to "have their father's last name and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name." The order was approved by a judge in Austin, Texas, this May. (Insider is withholding the children's names to protect their privacy.) The twins were born weeks before Musk and Claire Boucher, the musician who performs as Grimes, had their second child via surrogate in December.

Musk and Zilis did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of about $220 billion. He's at the helm of four companies: the electric-vehicle maker Tesla, the spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, the tunnel-construction startup The Boring Company, and the brain-machine-interface implant company Neuralink, where Zilis works. This year he announced plans to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, though the deal has been held up over what the Tesla CEO has described as several unresolved matters. In May, Insider reported that SpaceX had paid a company flight attendant $250,000 to stay quiet after she alleged that Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex.

Zilis is a rising star in Musk's empire. Born in Markham, Ontario, Zilis received her bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy in 2008 from Yale, where she also played goalie on the women's ice-hockey team. A lifelong athlete, she has been pictured on social media surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing. After beginning her career at IBM, she joined the early-stage venture-capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led investment efforts in data and machine learning. She was on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category in 2015.

Zilis met Musk through her work with OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research-and-deployment nonprofit Musk cofounded in 2015. She serves as the youngest member of OpenAI's board of directors. In 2017, Zilis moved to Tesla, where she was a project director, deploying her AI expertise on the Autopilot and chip-design teams. Today she holds the title of director of operations and special projects for Neuralink, where Musk is a co-CEO. She previously worked as a project director in the CEO's office. She's recently been floated as one of the people Musk could tap to run Twitter after his acquisition.

During Zilis' tenure at Neuralink, the company has conducted surgical trials of its Bluetooth-enabled brain chips on monkeys and pigs and enabled a nine-year-old macaque to play the video game Pong using its brain. Musk has suggested human trials could start by the end of 2022.

Zilis lived in San Francisco before buying a home in a gated community in Austin in August, about three months before the twins were born. The real-estate website Zillow estimates the home is worth more than $4 million. Musk has said his primary residence is a $50,000 modular house in Boca Chica, near SpaceX's launch facility in South Texas, but in the court documents Musk and Zilis listed the same address — the multimillion-dollar home — in Austin. Musk has been spending more time in Austin after opening Tesla's new Gigafactory Texas on the outskirts of the city.

Zilis shares many of Musk's intellectual passions, including space travel, transportation, and, most of all, artificial intelligence. They appear to have a similar sense of humor — they've both tweeted AI puns and tongue-in-cheek references to Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin.

She has been an ardent defender of Musk in the face of criticism. In 2020, when a California State Assembly member, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, tweeted "F*ck Elon Musk" after Musk tweeted about moving Tesla out of California over COVID-19 restrictions, Zilis responded: "This makes me sad. No one's perfect but I've never met anyone who goes through more personal pain to fight for an inspiring future for humanity - and has done so tirelessly for decades. Everyone's entitled to their opinion but mine is that there's no one I respect and admire more."

 

If this all sounds like Musk is selectively breeding babies with the "right" white women in order to "save humanity", it's because he is absolutely doing that, and he thinks other "right" people should be doing the same in order to "advance" the human race.

The guy is basically terrible.

A Supreme Clue To A Supreme Mystery

Reporters Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker at the NY Times drop this account from a major player in right-wing religious conservative circles that the Supreme Court leaked the Hobby Lobby decision several years ago and strongly suggests that the decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito as with the leaked Dobbs decision, may have been leaked by Alito himself.

 

As the Supreme Court investigates the extraordinary leak this spring of a draft opinion of the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a former anti-abortion leader has come forward claiming that another breach occurred in a 2014 landmark case involving contraception and religious rights.

In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.

Both court decisions were triumphs for conservatives and the religious right. Both majority opinions were written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. But the leak of the draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion was disclosed in the news media by Politico, setting off a national uproar. With Hobby Lobby, according to Mr. Schenck, the outcome was shared with only a handful of advocates.

Mr. Schenck’s allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistle-blower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Mr. Schenck’s allegation.

The evidence for Mr. Schenck’s account of the breach has gaps. But in months of examining Mr. Schenck’s claims, The Times found a trail of contemporaneous emails and conversations that strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public.

Mr. Schenck, who used to lead an evangelical nonprofit in Washington, said he learned about the Hobby Lobby opinion because he had worked for years to exploit the court’s permeability. He gained access through faith, through favors traded with gatekeepers and through wealthy donors to his organization, abortion opponents whom he called “stealth missionaries.”

The minister’s account comes at a time of rising concerns about the court’s legitimacy. A majority of Americans are losing confidence in the institution, polls show, and its approval ratings are at a historic low. Critics charge that the court has become increasingly politicized, especially as a new conservative supermajority holds sway.

In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Justice Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Mr. Schenck sent his letter to Chief Justice Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.

In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck’s star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by The Times. “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails,” she wrote.

Mr. Schenck said Mrs. Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby, and that Justice Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. The court ruled, in a 5-4 vote, that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception violated their religious freedoms. The decision would have major implications for birth control access, President Barack Obama’s new health care law and corporations’ ability to claim religious rights.

Justice Alito, in a statement issued through the court’s spokeswoman, denied disclosing the decision. He said that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights, and did not dispute that the two couples ate together on June 3, 2014. But the justice said that the “allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false.”

 

Now, someone's obviously lying here, either Justice Alito or Rev. Schenck. The Times piece has a fair amount of evidence saying Alito is the one lying. Schenck has turned over a lot of documents to the Times showing his efforts to influence Justices Alito, Thomas, and at the time Scalia.

In other words, the Roberts Court is just as corrupt as I've been saying for years. What's very clear is that conservative justices on the court have been manipulated for a long time, and the campaign to do so has been successful beyond their wildest dreams, successful enough to begin the rollback of the entire last 60 years in civil rights.

THis is the real battle in America, and by and large it's already been lost.

The Propaganda Arm Of The GOP

As WaPo's Phillip Bump notes, now that the House GOP will be taking over, it's time for FOX News to settle back in as the party's official media outlet as it did 10 years ago.

There’s a pattern to the investigatory process here. Back in 2013 and 2014, with Republicans in control of the House, there were a slew of investigations into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. That story drew a lot of attention on Fox News itself; there was an often-explicit feedback loop between the network and the focus of the investigations.

Those investigations got lucky: They discovered that Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time of the attacks, had been using a private email server while serving in the Cabinet. That spawned its own obsessive coverage, up until the day that Clinton lost her 2016 presidential bid to Trump.

This wasn’t a coincidence.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — probably the next speaker — said in 2015. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”

Republicans were out of power in the House from 2019 to the present. But Fox News continued hammering themes that were picked up by GOP representatives.

One was that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was contrived or dishonest, something that prompted Fox News to spend a great deal of time talking about special counsel John Durham, tasked with investigating the investigation and proving rot in the Justice Department. He was unable to do so, but gave Fox News plenty to talk about.

The other theme was Hunter Biden and his laptop. (There was also a blip of Hunter Biden coverage back in 2019. This is when Fox News and Republicans — including Jordan — were trying to deflect the impeachment investigation into Trump by suggesting that his demand for Ukraine to investigate the Bidens was valid.) If you are a politician looking to make an appearance on Fox News or get the attention of a Fox News-watching audience, these are subjects that will probably do the trick.

It should go without saying that it is good for Congress to conduct investigations into presidents and other officials. That’s true even if the investigations are nakedly partisan; sometimes the sort of assumption of guilt that accompanies such probes unearths real wrongdoing that might otherwise have been overlooked. And there are legitimate questions about Hunter Biden’s business activities — though the Justice Department is currently looking at his actions, too.

The House Republican effort, though, can’t be separated from the eagerness with which members of the party’s caucus are explicitly appealing to the Fox News/right-wing-media echo chamber. After Thursday’s news conference, numerous observers scratched their heads about the timing: The party had just had that electoral underperformance thanks in part to a universe of rhetoric that mirrored what was being amplified at the news conference. In response, the party was pledging to use its power to double down on the claims from that universe?

Yes. In part because it fits with the pre-2016 and pre-2020 pattern of targeting a presidential opponent. And in part because doing so guarantees that Republican officials will get retweets and Fox News hits and coverage on the network that keeps them at the center of attention.

If they discover something nefarious along the way? Even better.

 

The real issue is how much the rest of the "liberal media" goes along to reinforce the narrative. If you remember the coverage of Hillay Clinton's email server for two years, you understand why she lost, and why Bump's own Washington Post assisted in that loss.

 

Trump was and is good for business for the media. Never forget that.

 

 

Last Call For The Ol' Special Treatment Again

With Donald Trump announcing his 2024 candidacy, US Attorney General Merrick Garland is declining to fall into Trump's "You can't lay a finger on me, I'm a presidential candidate!" trap and is naming a Special Counsel to handle the federal investigations into Trump.

 

Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel on Friday to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into the presence of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate as well as key aspects of a separate probe involving the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to undo the 2020 election.

The move, being announced just three days after Trump formally launched his 2024 candidacy, is a recognition of the unmistakable political implications of two investigations that involve not only a former president but also a current White House hopeful.

Though the appointment installs a new supervisor atop the probes — both of which are expected to accelerate now that the midterm elections are over — the special counsel will still report to Garland, who has ultimate say of whether to bring charges.

The role will be filled by Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s public integrity section in Washington and who later served as the acting chief federal prosecutor in Nashville, Tennessee, during the Obama administration. More recently, he has been the chief prosecutor for the special court in the Hague that is tasked with investigating international war crimes.

The Justice Department described Smith as a registered independent, an effort to blunt any attack of perceived political bias.

Representatives for Trump, a Republican, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

There was no immediate reason provided for the decision or for its timing. Garland has spoken repeatedly of his singular focus on the facts, the evidence and the law in the Justice Department’s decision-making and of his determination to restore political independence to the agency following the tumultuous years of the Trump administration.

And there does not seem to be an obvious conflict like the one that prompted the last appointment of a special counsel to handle Trump-related investigations. The Trump Justice Department named former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.

 

So, Merick Garland is crossing his t's and dotting his i's while the House GOP will almost certainly be summoning him to Capitol Hill next year to "answer" for why the investigation into Trump is ongoing anyway. He can refer to the special counsel.

 

Worked for Bill Barr.

 

We'll see if indictments happen, that decision will be Garland's and Garland's alone to make.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The federal seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes and his Oath Keepers January 6th domestic terrorists wraps up today with closing arguments.

 

Stewart Rhodes and the leaders of the Oath Keepers repeatedly called on then-President Donald Trump to deploy the military to prevent ceding the Oval Office to Joe Biden. When he didn’t, prosecutors said Friday, they decided to do it themselves.

After a grinding eight-week trial, the most significant to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, prosecutors pleaded with jurors to consider the weight of Rhodes’ words in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021.

“These defendants repeatedly called for the violent overthrow of the United States government and they followed those words with action,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy said in her closing statements. “Please do not become numb to these statements. Think about what is actually being called for in these statements.”

To prosecutors, the case is clear: Rhodes was the “architect” of a plan to overthrow the government by force unless Trump took direct action to seize a second term he didn’t win. As Jan. 6 approached, Rhodes grew increasingly frustrated at Trump’s inaction and assembled a team — including co-defendants Kelly Meggs and Kenneth Harrelson of Florida, Jessica Watkins of Ohio and Thomas Caldwell of Virginia. They coordinated to amass an arsenal of heavy weapons at a Comfort Inn in nearby Arlington, Va., and developed land and water routes to ferry them to Oath Keepers if violence erupted.

Two dozen Oath Keepers entered the Capitol after other rioters breached it and migrated toward the House and Senate chambers before they were repelled by police. Later, they met Rhodes outside the Capitol. Prosecutors say the group celebrated their actions and prepared to continue their efforts to oppose the government even after authorities regained control of the Capitol.

After closing arguments Friday, jurors will begin deliberating on the most significant charge — seditious conspiracy — as well as a slew of other charges lodged against the Oath Keeper leaders, including obstruction of an official proceeding and destruction of property at the Capitol.

Oath Keepers have contended that their conversation leading up to Jan. 6 was merely a lot of overheated talk and their actions amid the insurrection were relatively harmless. They came to Washington, they argued, to help perform security details for VIPs attending Trump’s Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally. Their weapons cache, which they described as a “quick reaction force,” was meant to guard against an outbreak of street violence, not to target the Capitol, they contended.

In his closing argument, Rhodes’ attorney Lee Bright said that the Oath Keepers were fearful in 2020, as the country was largely in lockdown amid the Covid pandemic. Then, riots erupted amid the protests that accompanied the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer — including in Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

“They saw their country burning,” Bright said.

What resulted, he said, was “horribly heated rhetoric” and “bombast” — not a genuine intention to topple the government. He emphasized that no one had any idea that Jan. 6 was going to be a major event until just two weeks before when Trump called for a rally and protest.

Bright also mocked prosecutors’ contention that the Oath Keepers’ arsenal of firearms was an effort to bring “weapons of war” into Washington, D.C. He described it as a routine function of the Oath Keepers’ protocols when they performed security details at major events.

 

Rhodes and his merry crew of dipshits need to be spending decades in prison for their terrorism, to stand as a warning to the rest of the MAGA trolls waiting for their own chance to harm or kill Americans over Trump losing the 2020 election.

 

How many 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls will commit to pardoning Rhodes and his co-conspirators if they are convicted? My guess is "anyone who wants to actually win the nomination". For all the lousy pretending that the GOP took back the House on "kitchen issues" understand that all of them are anti-American terrorists, and their voters are more than happy to scream LOCK THEM UP at every Democrat they can find.

 

We're possibly only a few years from that happening, along with the roundup of political enemies as payback.

Fight For Every Seat

Neither party fields candidates for every House seat, but seeing Lauren Boebert headed for a likely recount gives me hope that Dems can pull this one seat off.

 

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, a renowned conservative firebrand whose combative style helped define the new right, is likely headed to an automatic recount in her bid to fend off a surprisingly difficult challenge by a Democratic businessman from the ritzy ski town of Aspen.

The Associated Press has declared the election in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District too close to call. AP will await the results of a potential recount to call the race. With nearly all votes counted, the incumbent Boebert leads Democrat Adam Frisch by 0.16 percentage points, or 551 votes out of nearly 327,000 votes counted.

A margin that small qualifies for an automatic recount under Colorado law, in a race that has garnered national attention as Republicans try to bolster their advantage in the U.S. House after clinching a narrow majority Wednesday night.

As counties finalized unofficial results on Thursday, Boebert’s already slim lead was cut in half. All but one of the 27 counties in the district had reported final results by Thursday evening. Otero County plans to finalize its numbers on Friday.

In Colorado, a mandatory recount is triggered when the margin of votes between the top two candidates is at or below 0.5% of the leading candidate’s vote total. On Thursday night, that margin was around .34%.

 

It's extremely unlikely that Frisch will be able to win, maybe he can shave 50 votes off with a recount, but likely not 500+. Curing votes, the process of correcting errors on the ballot in order to make them count, has a far likelier chance of moving the needle.

The updated results follow a hectic few days for both campaigns as they scrambled to “cure” ballots — the process of confirming voters’ choices if their ballots had been rejected in the initial count. Both the Republican and Democratic national campaign committees had boots on the ground in Colorado to support the efforts.

Spokespeople for Frisch’s and Boebert’s campaigns declined to comment.

 

Boebert has declared victory already and most likely she's correct. But the race never should have been this close in the first place. There's zero chance that Boebert moderates her disgusting nonsense with the GOP taking control of the House, so maybe she can put herself out of a job in two years.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Remember, Trump's Russian collusion has always been true, and now it's a legal and criminal fact.

A Republican political strategist was convicted of illegally helping a Russian businessman contribute to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.

Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

Elections “reflect the values and the priorities and the beliefs of American citizens,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Parikh said in her closing argument this week. “Jesse Benton by his actions did damage to those principles.”

The evidence at trial showed that Benton bought a $25,000 ticket to a September 2016 Republican National Committee (RNC) event on behalf of Roman Vasilenko, a Russian naval officer turned multilevel marketer. (Vasilenko is under investigation in Russia for allegedly running a pyramid scheme, according to the Kommersant newspaper; he could not be reached for comment.) The donation got Vasilenko a picture with Trump and entrance to a “business roundtable” with the future president.

Vasilenko connected with Benton through Doug Wead, an evangelical ally of the Bush family who was also involved in multilevel marketing. Vasilenko sent $100,000 to Benton, who was working for a pro-Trump super PAC at the time, supposedly for consulting services. Benton subsequently donated $25,000 to the RNC by credit card to cover the ticket.

Witnesses from the RNC and the firm hired to organize the event said they weren’t told Vasilenko was a Russian citizen. Benton said in an email to his RNC contact that Vasilenko was “a friend who spends most of his time in the Caribbean”; he described Vasilenko’s interpreter as “a body gal.” In fact, according to the testimony, Benton and Vasilenko had never met.

Benton argued that he followed the advice of his previous counsel, David A. Warrington, who has also represented Trump. Warrington testified that Benton contacted him at the time to ask if he could give a ticket to a political fundraiser to a Russian citizen. Warrington said he told Benton “there is no prohibition on a Russian citizen receiving a ticket to an event” and that “you can give your ticket that you purchased to a fundraiser to anybody.”

Prosecutors said Benton failed to tell Warrington that he was getting reimbursed by the Russian citizen for the donation. Benton asked for the advice only “to cover his tracks,” Parikh said.

Benton also claimed that he earned the $100,000 acting as a tour guide in Washington for Vasilenko, whose interest was not politics but self-promotion.

Wead — who died at age 75 last December after he was indicted with Benton — had previously discussed with Vasilenko the possibility of a photograph with Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama or Steven Seagal before suggesting Trump.

“If Oprah was available,” defense attorney Brian Stolarz said in his closing argument, “we wouldn’t even be here.”

 

Oprah of course isn't subject to campaign finance laws involving illegal money from Russian oligarchs buying political access to the Oval Office.

 

Again, the Russian collusion was always real. Trump should be disqualified from office, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced.

Nancy, Steny, Jim, Hakeem And The Animal House Remake

Republicans have secured 218 House seats to secure control of the lower chamber of Congress, and will probably end up at 221 or 222 (in a dark mirror of the Dems' current 222-213 margin) when the smoke clears and the dust settles. As such, current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced she's stepping down from Democratic leadership.

 

Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House, who helped shape many of the most consequential laws of the early 21st century, said Thursday that she will step down after two decades as the Democratic Party’s leader in the chamber.

“With great confidence in our caucus I will not seek re-election to Democratic leadership in the next Congress," Pelosi said in a speech on the House floor.


Pelosi was speaker from 2007 to 2011 and returned to the top job in 2019. She announced her decision just a day after NBC News and other news outlets projected that Republicans had flipped control of the House in last week’s midterm election, sending Pelosi and the Democrats back to the minority.

More personally, just weeks ago, her husband of nearly 60 years, Paul Pelosi, survived an assault by a hammer-wielding intruder at the family’s home in San Francisco.

Pelosi won't be leaving Congress after winning her 19th term last week. She is expected to remain, at least temporarily, given the GOP’s razor-thin majority.

As Pelosi took the mic, the chamber was packed with Democratic lawmakers, while the Republican side of the aisle was largely empty — a symbol of how politics have changed over Pelosi’s three and a half decades in the House. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., did not attend the speech in person, but House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., was present. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., crossed the Capitol to watch Pelosi speak, while the front row on the Democratic side of the chamber was filled with fellow female lawmakers from California.

 

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is bowing out along with Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, meaning that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries is the favorite to take control of the House Democrats. 

 

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn (S.C.) announced Thursday they will remain in Congress next year but won’t seek a leadership position, joining Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who had announced the same decision moments before.

The surprise development clears the way for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), the current chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, to jump several rungs up the leadership ladder to replace Pelosi in the next Congress, when Republicans will take control of the lower chamber.

In a letter to fellow Democrats, Hoyer said he’s proud of his work in leadership, but “now is the time for a new generation of leaders.” He quickly endorsed Jeffries, who faces no other challenger.

“I look forward to serving as a resource to him, to the rest of our Democratic leadership team, and to our entire Caucus in whatever capacity I can best be of assistance as we move forward together to address the nation’s challenges,” Hoyer wrote.

Hoyer, a 42-year veteran of Capitol Hill, said he intends to return to the powerful Appropriations Committee — a post he had held before joining leadership — to work on issues including education, health care and efforts to boost domestic manufacturing.

“I also look forward to continuing my focus on voting rights, civil rights, and human rights which I have made priorities throughout my public life,” he wrote. 

 

The torch is being passed to a new generation in the House Democratic caucus.

 

But voters having handed control of the House over to the GOP, Republicans are focusing on the important issues to the American voter, like Hunter Biden's laptop and shutting the government down in order to force Medicare and Social Security cuts.

Although House Republicans will still face a Democratic White House and Senate aimed at blocking their legislative aims, McCarthy — who is working feverishly to cement his ascension to speaker despite growing discontent in his ranks — has already made it clear the party plans to launch investigations into the Biden administration and at least one of the president’s family members.

But McCarthy and other leaders will have their hands full as they try to keep their wafer-thin majority united and corral conservative bomb throwers who are clamoring to shut down the government and impeach President Joe Biden and his top allies.

"The era of one-party Democrat rule in Washington is over. Washington now has a check and balance. The American people have a say in their government," McCarthy, flanked by his new leadership team, said Tuesday after he won his race to be the party's nominee for speaker.

Here’s what the new 118th Congress will look like under House GOP rule:

Investigations will dominate the new Congress, from the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and allegations of politicization at the Justice Department to America's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. But none will attract as much attention as the GOP’s planned investigation into the business dealings of the president’s son Hunter two years before a potential Biden re-election bid.

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the incoming Oversight Committee chairman, has said an investigation into Hunter Biden and other Biden family members and associates will be a priority as Republicans try to determine whether the family’s business activities “compromise U.S. national security and President Biden’s ability to lead with impartiality.”

Republicans allege that Hunter Biden has used his father’s successful political career to enrich himself: He joined the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company in 2019, and an investment firm he co-founded helped a Chinese firm buy a Congolese cobalt mine from a U.S. company in 2016, among other financial endeavors. 

 

Get used to James Comer making Kentuckians look like fools, America.

The Marriage Of Church And State

The good news is that the Senate easily beat a Republican filibuster on a federal same-sex marriage bill. The bad news it easily passed a filbuster because the Senate GOP knows that when the Roberts Court inevitably reverses Obergefell v. Hodges, same-sex marriages will be left up to the states like abortion is in a post-Dobbs era. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern:

Congress is on the brink of enshrining marriage equality into federal law by passing the most consequential gay rights measure in history. On the brink of this victory, however, there’s still a great deal of confusion over what, exactly, the bill does—and some debate among progressives about whether it’s even worth supporting. The short answer is that this measure, the Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), is worthy of not just support but celebration: It repeals a bigoted federal statute while creating a crucial backstop for marriage equality in the states if the Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges. As recently as 2015, it would’ve been unthinkable that such a sweeping bill could pass into law.

What the RFMA does not do is “codify” Obergefell, as many media outlets have inaccurately reported. So it’s worth delving into the details to understand precisely how this landmark legislation operates. Keep in mind that its central provisions will only become relevant if the Supreme Court overturns its marriage equality decisions. The RFMA will benefit same-sex couples if, and only if, SCOTUS overrules the right to equal marriage.

Start with the easy part: The RFMA repeals the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law that bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. It replaces DOMA with a requirement that the federal government recognize any marriage that was “valid in the place where entered into.” So if a same-sex couple obtains a valid marriage license from any state, the federal government must recognize their union.

The Supreme Court found DOMA unconstitutional in 2013’s U.S. v. Windsor, but that decision is on thin ice today. It relied on an expansive definition of “liberty” that the Supreme Court largely repudiated when overturning Roe v. Wade. Right now, Windsor would also be vulnerable to a Republican president eager to roll back gay rights. More than 1,000 federal laws grant rights and privileges to married couples, and the Obama administration aggressively applied Windsor to as many of them as possible. That means important benefits involving health care, immigration, labor, military service, taxes, Social Security—pretty much everything—are currently extended to same-sex couples by executive mandate.

It would be all too easy for a future Republican president (say, a hypothetical President Josh Hawley) to direct his administration to withdraw this mandate. A Hawley administration could purport to limit Windsor to its facts, refusing to apply its reasoning to the entire federal code—just like Republican judges are currently refusing to apply the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Bostock beyond the Civil Rights Act. In the process, a President Hawley could test Windsor’s continued vitality at our hard-right Supreme Court. (The Trump administration provided a preview of this tactic when it unsuccessfully tried to discriminate against the children of binational same-sex couples.) Far better for Congress to preempt such backsliding by wiping DOMA off the books for good, declaring that same-sex couples must receive every right and privilege of marriage granted by the federal government. And that’s precisely what the RFMA does.

Turn now to the second prong of the bill: Its requirement that every state recognize a valid same-sex marriage. It’s this provision that has upset some progressives, because it does not go as far as Obergefell. In that decision, the Supreme Court directed every state to license same-sex marriages—that is, to issue a marriage certificate to same-sex couples. The RFMA does not codify this component of Obergefell. Instead, it directs every state to recognize every same-sex marriage that “is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into.”

So the RFMA does not force Texas to issue a marriage certificate to a same-sex couple. But it does force Texas to recognize a marriage certificate issued to a same-sex couple by New Mexico. In a post-Obergefell world, a same-sex couple in Texas could drive to New Mexico, obtain a certificate, and force Texas to respect their marriage like any other.

Why did Congress draw a distinction between licensing and recognizing marriages? Because it wanted to remain on firm constitutional ground, and that’s is as far as the Supreme Court could plausibly let it go. Time and again, the court has ruled that the federal government cannot “commandeer” states to enforce federal laws or pass specific statutes. If Congress compelled states to license same-sex marriages, the judiciary would invalidate the law as a violation of this anti-commandeering doctrine.

The federal government’s authority to make states recognize same-sex marriages, by contrast, is extremely well-established, and very likely to be upheld. That’s because the Constitution’s full faith and credit clause gives Congress the power to make states grant “full faith and credit” to the “public acts, records, and judicial proceedings” of other states. As I explained in July, Congress has repeatedly used this authority to command nationwide uniformity in family law. For instance, it has ordered every state to grant full faith and credit to custody determinations and child support orders issued by another state. There is no constitutional reason why Congress could not also order each state to grant full faith and credit to a valid marriage license held by a same-sex couple. Even a Supreme Court willing to overturn Windsor and Obergefell would probably affirm this power.

Making states recognize same-sex marriages from out of state will "probably" be upheld when the Roberts Court trashes Obergefell. That's as good as we're going to get in this shameful era of SCOTUS.

Last Call For A Better Man Than Fetterman

WaPo's Greg Sargent crunches the numbers from the American Communities Project on where, why, and how John Fetterman won his election last week, broadly outperforming Biden in PA, but also in specific counties.

 

How this happened is illustrated by the ACP data. Fetterman significantly reduced his opponent’s margins of victory — relative to Biden’s 2020 performance against Trump — in three types of counties where Trump has done extraordinarily well.

In the ACP’s taxonomy, those three county types are known as the Middle Suburbs, Working Class Country, and Rural Middle America.

The Middle Suburbs. These types of suburban counties are Whiter and more working class than your typical inner-ring suburb, which tends to be more diverse, cosmopolitan and professional.

We often think of the suburbs as anti-Trump, but his large margins in Middle Suburbs across the country were key to his 2016 victory. Four years later, when Trump made veiled racial appeals to the “Suburban Housewives of America,” these are the places he probably meant to target.

In Pennsylvania’s Middle Suburbs, Fetterman limited Oz’s margin of victory to 11 points, significantly down from the 15-point margin Trump racked up in 2020, according to ACP data provided to me.

This mattered, because Middle Suburbs tend to be more populated than most other red-leaning county types, says Dante Chinni, the director and founder of ACP.

“There’s a lot of votes in those places,” Chinni told me. “They’re really important to Republicans, especially Trump Republicans.”

There are more than a dozen such counties in the state, Chinni said, including suburban counties outside Pittsburgh that still have a “blue-collar vibe.”

Working Class Country. These counties are even Whiter than Middle Suburbs and tend to be rural and sparsely populated. They often have low college education rates.

In Pennsylvania’s Working Class Country counties, Fetterman shaved Oz’s margin of victory to 27 points, down from Trump’s 2020 margin of 36 points. Such counties include ones along the state’s northern border or in the southwest corner of the state, abutting West Virginia.

Rural Middle America. These counties are also rural, but also tend to include a lot of small towns and smaller metro areas. They are somewhat less agriculture-dependent than Working Class Country.

In Pennsylvania’s Rural Middle America counties, Fetterman limited Oz’s gains to 31 points, down from Trump’s 37-point margin in 2020. As Chinni noted, nearly three dozen of these counties are spread throughout Pennsylvania’s vast heartland.

These three county types capture different elements of the Trump vote. The Middle Suburbs are right-leaning parts of the suburbs that shifted toward Trump even as other suburbs turned against him. Working Class Country and Rural Middle America are the sort of regions where reporters used to go on “Trump safaris” to seek out Republican voters in diners. “The fact that Fetterman narrowed the margins in all of them is a big deal,” Chinni said.

 

Fetterman still lost these counties by double digits, but he reduced the margins by 4-6 points over Biden. Fetterman was able to do this in both rural and more exurban/suburban red counties. At least some folks out there in Trumplandia listened to him.

I hope we don't continue to obsess with these mostly white "Trump Diner" voters, but they vote just like anyone else, and peeling them away from Trump is how Fetterman won.

Not So Slick Rick Licked By Hick

Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott wasted tens of millions on loser Senate candidates as NRSC chair, failing so far to pick up a single seat and losing Pennsylvania to John Fetterman. He couldn't leave well enough alone and declared that his "leadership" is what the Senate GOP needs, coming at the Turtle for the Senate GOP leadership job anyway.

 

Florida Sen. Rick Scott said Tuesday that he will mount a long-shot bid to unseat Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, opening the latest front in an intraparty battle between allies of McConnell and former President Donald Trump over the direction of the GOP following a disappointing showing in last week’s midterm elections.

The announcement by Scott, who was urged to challenge McConnell by Trump, came hours before the former president was expected to launch a comeback bid for the White House. It escalated a long-simmering feud between Scott, who led the Senate Republican’s campaign arm this year, and McConnell over the party’s approach to reclaiming a Senate majority.

“If you simply want to stick with the status quo, don’t vote for me,” Scott said in a letter to Senate Republicans offering himself as a protest vote against McConnell in leadership elections on Wednesday.

Restive conservatives in the chamber have lashed out at McConnell’s handling of the election, as well as his iron grip over the Senate Republican caucus. The leadership vote was scheduled for Wednesday morning, though it could be postponed if Texas Sen. Ted Cruz succeeds with his effort to delay it until after a Georgia runoff election in December.

A delay could give leverage to Trump-aligned conservatives who are hoping their clout will grow after the outcome of races in Georgia, where former NFL star Herschel Walker is challenging Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Alaska, where moderate Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski faces a conservative challenger.

Yet it appears unlikely that their numbers could grow enough to put McConnell’s job in jeopardy, given his deep support within the conference. And Trump’s opposition is hardly new, as has been pushing for the party to dump McConnell ever since the Senate leader gave a scathing speech blaming the former president for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Still, it represents an unusual direct challenge to the authority of McConnell, who is set to become the longest-serving Senate leader in history if he wins another leadership term.

“We may or may not be voting tomorrow, but I think the outcome is pretty clear,” McConnell told reporters Tuesday. “I want to repeat again: I have the votes; I will be elected. The only issue is whether we do it sooner or later.”

 

Indeed he had the votes as McConnell was reelected this afternoon as Senate Minority Leader, 36-10.  Rick Scott came at the Turtle and missed, and now he's paying the price.

The GOP’s post-election finger-pointing intensified Tuesday, with two senators calling for an audit of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

During a tense, three-hour-long meeting of the Senate GOP Conference, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said there should be an independent review of how the party’s campaign arm spent its resources before falling short of its goal of winning the majority.

The discussion comes amid an all-out war enveloping the party following last week’s election. Over the past week, the political operations aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and NRSC Chair Rick Scott (Fla.) have clashed openly, blaming the other for the disappointing outcome — even before Scott launched a long-shot leadership challenge to McConnell.

But the recriminations took a new turn on Tuesday, with one of the party’s main political vehicles now facing the prospect of a financial review. According to two people familiar with the discussion, Blackburn told Scott during the meeting that there needed to be an accounting of how money was spent, and that it was important for senators to have a greater understanding of how and why key decisions involving financial resources were made. To move forward, Blackburn said, the party needed to determine what mistakes were made.

Tillis spoke out in support of the idea, arguing that there should also be a review of the committee’s spending during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, which would allow for a comparison to be made.

It would not be the first time a Republican Party committee underwent an audit: During the 2008 election, the National Republican Congressional Committee’s finances were reviewed as it faced an accounting scandal.

 

Marsha Blackburn is pretty mean to begin with, and you'll find Thom Tillis's prints on the knife used to backstab our old friend Madison Cawthorn in his failed primary reelection bid. If they're serious about a campaign audit of known Medicare fraudster Rick Scott, things could get very ugly, very fast. 

Stay tuned.

Eight Billion Reasons

The UN reports that Earth's population of variably miserable humans has now reached eight billion after hitting seven billion just 11 years ago, but population growth is now slowing considerably and expected to continue to slow in the years ahead.

People around the world are living longer and having fewer children. Those are just a few of the trends the United Nations described in a report on the world's population.

While the average life expectancy is projected to rise from 72.98 in 2019 to 77.2 in 2050, the rate of growth will continue to slow down across the globe, according to the report released Tuesday.

The world reached 7 billion people in 2011 and the U.N. predicts it will not reach 9 billion for another 15 years.

While the milestone is notable, the exact size of the global population is less critical than the dynamics of where people are living, working and moving, says Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University.

"I think what's important about 8 billion is that were going to be connected, and so we have to get used to the idea that what happens in other places will directly affect our quality of life here," Goldstone tells NPR's Morning Edition.

This decelerated growth in population is explained by a number of factors, including more readily available birth control and better education. Some countries have birth rates so low the U.N. predicts they will not be able to maintain their populations.

Life expectancy for the least developed countries lagged seven years behind that of the most developed countries as of last year. The U.N. cautions that countries with older populations will need to develop better systems to take care of their elders, including social security and universally available health care.

Goldstone says that despite finite resources and climate change, the world could still manage with a population of 9 or even 10 billion as long as it's paying attention to "what people are doing, how they live and which specific areas or groups are growing the fastest."

The report also forecasts a reordering of the most populous countries. China will be overtaken by India as the number one most populous country in 2023 and remain so through 2050, the report predicts. The United States will be displaced by Nigeria for the third most populous country in that same time period.

 

And this is without factoring in more pandemic waves, which I think are going to be a major factor in limiting population growth and even reversing it in some places. We can't foresee all the factors ahead, but it seems like slowing population growth worldwide is a smart bet. Sustainability is going to be an issue, as will climate change.

 

We'll see.

Last Call For Orange You Glad He's Running Again

Yes, he's running for 2024, NPR with the headline of the evening.

The Washington Post is even more brutal.

100% factual stuff. Screw you for making me create the damn 2024 Elections tag already, you asshole. Let the pillorying begin.

And hopefully the indictments.

They Voted Like Their Country Depended On It, Con't

Arizonans elected Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs for Governor, sending Kari Lake to the bottom of the mud.

Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has defeated Republican Kari Lake in Arizona's race for governor, NBC News projected Monday.

Hobbs' victory is key for Democrats in a presidential battleground state and a rebuke to a prominent election denier — although the closeness of the contest left the result up in the air for nearly a week.

“I am honored to have been selected to serve as the next Governor of Arizona,” Hobbs said in a statement Monday night. “I want to thank the voters for entrusting me with this immense responsibility. It is truly an honor of a lifetime, and I will do everything in my power to make you proud.”

A record number of early ballots were dropped off on Election Day in Maricopa County, officials said, which had to be processed in a more time-intensive manner that includes signature verification. Maricopa, the state's most populous county, said Sunday that it estimated that its count was 94% complete after it received a historic 290,000 of those early ballots on Election Day.

Lake, a MAGA firebrand and former local newscaster who closely linked her campaign to former President Donald Trump and his false claims of a rigged election in Arizona, ultimately fell short after polling in the final weeks of the campaign suggested she was grabbing the lead from Hobbs, who as secretary of state in 2020 vocally defended the state's election system and the accuracy of the count.

About 90 minutes after NBC News called the race for Hobbs, Lake tweeted: "Arizonans know BS when they see it."

 

Lake of course is not going to give up. Me, I expect Arizona Republicans to propose a recall election next spring, as California Republicans tried to do to Gov. Gavin Newsom. According to Arizona's recall process, Hobbs would have to be in office for at least six months, and then Republicans would need to collect enough signatures for a total of 25% of all 2022 voters within 120 days.

However even will all that, the soonest a recall could be put to voters is 2024 given that there's a 60-day period to review signatures, and that "The recall election will occur on the first consolidated election date that is at least 90 days in the future", meaning that there wouldn't be enough time to put it on the 2023 ballot (if off-year elections even count as "consolidated").

Keep an eye on that page to see if recall petitions are filed.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Rudy Edition

The federal probe into Rudy Giuliani's lobbyist chicanery in Ukraine has been officially closed with no charges brought. 

Federal prosecutors investigating Rudy Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine have closed their investigation after more than two years and said no criminal charges will be brought.

Prosecutors with the office of US Attorney for the Southern District of New York have been investigating Giuliani, the former personal attorney to former President Donald Trump, for possible violations of foreign lobbying laws since early 2019.

On Monday, they informed a judge overseeing the investigation that they were closing the case.

The notification came in a court filing with prosecutors asking the judge to terminate the special master who was appointed to oversee a review of documents obtained when the FBI executed a search warrant on the former New York City mayor’s home in April 2021.

“The Government writes to notify the Court that the grand jury investigation that led to the issuance of the above-referenced warrants has concluded, and that based on information currently available to the Government, criminal charges are not forthcoming,” prosecutors wrote.

A spokesman for the US attorney’s office declined to comment.

“It’s wonderful, long-expected news,” said Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani. “Unfortunately, Mayor Giuliani had to spend two and a half years to three years with this cloud over his head.”

Ted Goodman, a spokesperson and political adviser to Giuliani, said: “The mayor has been completely and totally vindicated. We hope this will help bring an end to the unwarranted attacks on the mayor - a man who is quite literally the most successful prosecutor of the most dangerous criminals over the past fifty years. I challenge someone to find a more successful crime fighter than Rudy Giuliani, a man who cleaned up city government and took down the mafia."

 

This is astonishing. Are you telling me as incompetent as Giuliani was, all the mistakes made, all the clear foreign lobbyist violations he made, that the investigation is over without a single charge being filed? 

You couldn't find a way to make charges stick to this idiot?

Any charges at all?

The Special Master on this case, Judge Barbara Jones, is moving on to become the Independent Monitor of the Trump Organization NY state case.

Make of that what you will, all I see is red and green.