Border Line...Sanity?

WaPo's Greg Sargent opines on the lame-duck immigration deal struck between NC Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Synema that would actually consist of helping to fix the border and immigration in general, and frankly, neither side seems happy with the bill at all.

Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have reached an agreement on a draft framework of immigration reform compromises, sources familiar with the situation tell me. They involve issues such as the fate of “dreamers” brought here as children and the processing of asylum seekers at the southern border. Will the 10 Republican senators necessary to overcome a filibuster go along?

 

Short answer, no. Long answer:

 

A white paper laying out this Tillis-Sinema blueprint is circulating on Capitol Hill, congressional aides and advocates plugged into the talks tell me. Though the details are in flux, here’s a partial list of the major items it contains:

• Some form of path to citizenship for 2 million dreamers.
• A large boost in resources to speed up the processing of asylum seekers, including new processing centers and more asylum officers and judges.
• More resources to expedite the removal of migrants who don’t qualify for asylum.
• A continuation of the Title 42 covid-health-rule restriction on migrants applying for asylum, until the new processing centers are operational, with the aim of a one-year cutoff.
• More funding for border officers.

The idea behind this compromise is this: It gives Democrats protection for 2 million dreamers and strengthened defenses of the due process rights of some migrants. It gives Republicans faster removal from the country of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum, a continued restriction on applications for the next year and more border security.

The boost in resources would hopefully reduce the strain at the border by moving migrants through the asylum application process more quickly. The processing facilities would be temporary detention centers, but additional lawyers would be present, enabling more robust representation.

On the flip side, if migrants fail the initial interview determining whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if returned to their home countries, they’d be removed much more quickly. A “Title 42” health rationale, which is indefensible as a border-management tool, would be kept ostensibly to control flows while the reforms are implemented. The Government Accountability Office would have the authority to end it after one year if the processing centers are up and running.

It’s hard to say whether 10 Republican senators would back such a deal to get it past a GOP filibuster. This will become harder when former president Donald Trump and adviser Stephen Miller scream that it represents a massive betrayal by “elites,” as they undoubtedly will, and right-wing media propagandists such as Tucker Carlson amplify that toxic message to enrage the base.

If 10 GOP senators could support this, they’d be drawn from those who are retiring (Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania) or those willing to challenge the Trump wing of the party (Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska).

A big question is whether these Republicans will see any advantage in genuinely trying to fix the problems at the border. They might decide that the GOP won’t get any credit even if the effort succeeds — that credit might go to President Biden — and that it’s better to retain the permanent “border crisis” as an issue.

But this is the last chance for these GOP senators to try to reach a bipartisan compromise. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who hopes to be the next speaker, has vowed not to pass any immigration reform legislation until he deems the border secured, which will never, ever happen. By backing this, retiring GOP senators could plausibly argue that they helped move the party on from Trump and add bipartisan reform on a brutal national problem to their legacy.

On the other side, however, it’s not clear whether 50 Democratic senators would support such a compromise. The continuation of Title 42, which has been a human rights disaster, and the beefed up removal process might make it a nonstarter among progressives in both chambers.

 

So yeah, like every other "bipartisan" immigration reform in the FOX Noise era, it will fail. Republicans don't want immigration reform because they don't want immigration, period. They want to yell racist nonsense about MS-13 and diseases coming across the border and drug cartels and they're taking our jobs, They want caravans on TV, and eventually M1 Abrams tanks on the damn border.

And even if all Democratic senators are willing to put up with Title 42 removals -- a huge "if" -- there just aren't 10 Republicans willing to go along. I don't think the legislation will even get 50 votes.

No, this one is going to crash and burn, folks.

Last Call For California Schemin'

California Democrats passed the FAST Recovery Act into law last year, which was designed to put wages for the state's hundreds of thousands of fast food workers before a council selected by Gov. Gavin Newsom that would determine fair wages for employees. But restaurant groups and fast food franchisees immediately challenged the law in January and now say they have enough signatures to send the law to voters in November 2024, almost three years after the law was supposed to take effect.

A restaurant business coalition announced on Monday that it has gathered enough signatures to challenge a new California law that would create a state-backed labor council to set pay and working conditions for the fast-food industry.

Save Local Restaurants, a coalition opposing the law, it filed more than 1 million signatures to postpone the law and place a referendum on the November 2024 ballot.

Counties will now have eight business days to provide a count to the secretary of state’s office. Opponents need roughly 623,000 valid signatures.

If the statewide total reaches the required amount, counties will have 30 business days to verify signatures through random sampling.

Sufficient valid voter signatures would place a question on the 2024 ballot asking voters whether the law should take effect.

It could also lead to a costly battle between organized labor and the fast food industry, with spending reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. Save Local Restaurants raised more than $13.7 million between last January and September.

The law, known as the FAST Recovery Act, would create a first-in-the-nation labor council to set wages and working standards for fast food workers. The council’s regulations would apply to any chain restaurant with at least 100 locations in the United States and could set minimum wages at $22 an hour for fast workers by next year.

The law was set to take effect Jan. 1 after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the legislation last September. But one day later, opponents filed a referendum to halt the formation of the council.

They argue the law would result in higher food prices and new regulatory burdens for franchise owners. “The FAST Act would have an enormous impact on Californians, and clearly voters want a say in whether it should stand...it is no surprise that over one million Californians have voiced their concerns with the legislation,” the coalition said in a statement. ”


Supporters say the law would give workers a voice in regulating a sector of the state economy that employs more than a half-million people.

Service Employees International Union, which has been supporting the fast-food workers, said companies are “trying to silence voices of half a million Black and Latino workers to increase their billion-dollar profits.”

“It is abhorrent that these corporations have already spent millions of dollars in an attempt to deliberately mislead California voters and stamp out the progress fast-food workers have won, said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry in a statement. “California’s referendum process has been completely taken over by corporations who think they can buy the right to overturn laws they don’t like and exempt themselves from accountability.”

 

Henry is right about this. Sending legislation to a ballot referendum is exactly how Uber and Lyft beat California's law turning rideshare drivers into full-time employees, meaning they would be eligible for benefits. The rideshare giants spent billions convincing Latino voters in the state they they would be fired first unless the law was defeated, and it worked.

Expect much of the same to follow in the years ahead.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As the federal tax fraud case against the Trump Organization goes to jury today, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's case against Trump over the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels is heating up.

 

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is hiring a former senior Justice Department official with a history of taking on Donald J. Trump and his family business as the office seeks to ramp up its investigation into the former president.

The official, Matthew Colangelo, who before acting as third in command at the Justice Department, led the New York attorney general’s civil inquiry into Mr. Trump, is likely to become one of the leaders of the district attorney’s criminal inquiry into the former president.

The hire marks the latest turn in a long-running investigation that has proceeded in fits and starts in recent years. When Mr. Bragg took office in January, his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had directed prosecutors to begin presenting evidence about Mr. Trump’s inflation of his assets to a grand jury.

But Mr. Bragg grew concerned about the strength of the case. In February, when he told the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned, clouding the future of the inquiry.

Mr. Bragg insisted that it was continuing, and in recent months, his prosecutors, led by the office’s head of investigations, Susan Hoffinger, have renewed their focus on a hush-money payment to a porn star who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Colangelo’s work in the New York attorney general’s office may also be relevant in his new job: Manhattan prosecutors have also scrutinized whether the former president illegally inflated the value of his assets, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, looked at the same practices. In September, she filed a lawsuit accusing the former president of overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.

By then, Mr. Colangelo was working at the Department of Justice, having been appointed as acting associate attorney general when President Biden took office. In that job, the third highest-ranking at the department, Mr. Colangelo helped oversee the Civil, Civil Rights, Antitrust and Tax divisions, among others.

He stepped aside when a permanent associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, was appointed but continued working as her deputy and supervised lawyers in those divisions.

Mr. Colangelo, 48, who also worked in the Obama administration as a senior Labor Department official, will join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel. In addition to helping with its “most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations,” he is expected to focus on housing and tenant protection and labor and worker protection, priorities for Mr. Bragg.

“Matthew Colangelo brings a wealth of economic justice experience combined with complex white-collar investigations, and he has the sound judgment and integrity needed to pursue justice against powerful people and institutions when they abuse their power,” Mr. Bragg said in a statement confirming the hire.

The U.S. attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, said in a statement that he had relied on Mr. Colangelo’s “wise counsel and excellent judgment” since his first day in the office.

 

So now that Bragg is staffing up, I can think of six cases Trump now has to deal with off the top of my head:

 

1. Jack Smith's special counsel investigation at the federal level
2. The Trump Organization tax fraud case
3. The Manhattan DA's investigation into Stormy Daniels hush money
   
4. Fani Willis's investigation into Georgia election fraud by Trump and the Georgia GOP
5. Tish James and the NY State investigation into Trump
6. E. Jean Carroll's sexual assault case against Trump.

 

At least one of these has to put Trump in prison somehow., right?

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Local Edition

Here in Kentucky, the city of Bowling Green canceled its annual Christmas parade and outdoor market over the weekend because of specific white supremacist terrorist threats.

 

Bowling Green, Kentucky, has canceled its annual Christmas parade scheduled for Saturday due to threats against protests related to the notorious lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.

The city announced the cancellation in tweet. In a video posted on Facebook, Police Chief Michael Delaney said at least three groups planned to protest at noon on Saturday at two locations.

Warren County Sheriff Brett Hightower said his office learned of threats late Friday evening “to shoot anyone who is protesting” or assisting protesters, Hightower said.

“At this moment, we have not been able to determine the validity of the threat; however, we believe it’s important to alert our citizens,” the sheriff said.

The protesters want a Mississippi court to order the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman now in her late 80s who accused Till of whistling at her in 1955 in Mississippi, according to CNN affiliate WBKO. He was abducted, tortured, and lynched, in a case that drew national attention and helped galvanize attention on the civil rights movement.

According to WKBO, Donham’s last known address is believed to be an apartment in Bowling Green.

Donham was never arrested in connection with Till’s death, but a warrant for her arrest was found earlier this year in a Mississippi courthouse basement. A grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict Donham in August.

 

So yeah, a bit to unpack here. Carolyn Brady Donham was the woman who accused Emmett Till of whistling at her almost 70 years ago. Till was lynched and dragged behind a car to his death as a result. Donham lives in Bowling Green, and when word of a possible protest on Donham at the Christmas parade of Mississippi once again refusing to serve justice got around, that protest became the direct target of white supremacist terrorist violence, so much so that the city and county cancelled the parade.

Remember, this is 2022. We're still having the same conversation about racial justice in this country as we did 70 years ago. A lot has changed.

A lot is still the same.

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Friday's strong job numbers and the latest news that inflation is moderating is good news for the country and for President Biden heading into 2023.

The price of gasoline is dropping like a rock. Chicken wings are suddenly a bargain. And retailers drowning in excess inventory are looking to make a deal.


After more than a year of high inflation, many consumers are finally starting to catch a break. Even apartment rents and car prices, two items that hammered millions of household budgets this year, are no longer spiraling out of control.

Global supply chains are finally operating normally, as more consumers spend more on in-person services like restaurant meals and less on goods like furniture and computers that come from an ocean away. The cost of sending a standard 40-foot container from China to the U.S. West Coast is $1,935 — down more than 90 percent from its September 2021 peak of $20,586, according to the online freight marketplace Freightos.

The moderation in inflation is just beginning to appear in government statistics. In October, the Federal Reserve’s preferred price gauge, the personal consumption expenditures index, posted its smallest monthly increase since September of last year, and is up 6 percent over the past 12 months. The better-known consumer price index is rising at an annual rate of 7.7 percent, down from 9.1 percent in June.

“The worst of the inflation is behind us,” said Steven Blitz, chief U.S. economist for TS Lombard in New York. “The question is where does inflation settle?”

The Fed has been raising interest rates sharply since March in a bid to get inflation back to its 2-percent price stability target. Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell on Wednesday noted signs of progress, but said it was far too early to claim victory. Friday’s stronger-than-expected jobs report, which showed wages rising too quickly for policymakers’ tastes, only underscored the point. The central bank does not expect to reach its inflation goal until 2025.

“It will take substantially more evidence to give comfort that inflation is actually declining. By any standard, inflation remains much too high,” Powell told an audience at the Brookings Institution.

Still, there are clear signs of improvement in merchandise prices, as consumers resume their pre-pandemic spending patterns. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, goods prices rose in October by 5.1 percent, down from a 12.3 percent annual rate in February.

But as goods prices begin cooling, pressure is building on services. Rising demand and limited supply — think short-staffed restaurants — has services inflation running at an annual 6.7 percent rate, more than twice the year-ago figure.

“The expectation is that goods prices will continue to disinflate. But services inflation will more gradually slow and will be much stickier,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide.

 

So we're nowhere near being out of the woods yet, but we're past the halfway point. Whether or not we can get through without the economy slamming into recession ditch in the next year or so is the real battle. I have to believe that if Trump were still in charge, we'd already be in a recession. 

We'll see how things go, but I'd much rather have Biden's team in charge of the economy. Fed Chair Jerome Powell, well, we'll see.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

I absolutely guarantee that these two stories from the Fayetteville Observer back home in NC are related:

The drag show must go on: Organizers say death threats won't stop Southern Pines event

 

Organizers of a downtown Southern Pines drag show say they aren’t backing down after receiving threats of violence from far-right activists.

The Downtown Divas show planned for Saturday at Sunrise Theater is the fourth drag event hosted by Sandhills Pride in the last few years, Executive Director Lauren Mathers said, but never have the shows caused such a stir in the sleepy Moore County town.

“Most of the time, if people don’t want to see something, they don’t buy a ticket,” she said.

This time, the opposition went on a “crusade” to shut down the event by claiming drag performers are pedophiles with intentions of grooming children, Moore County political blog writer Cheryl Christy-Bowman said.

 
Sheriff: Moore County power outage being investigated as vandalism

 

Authorities in North Carolina believe vandalism may have caused a power outage that affected thousands of customers Saturday night.

A mass power outage in several communities beginning just after 7 p.m. Saturday “is being investigated as a criminal occurrence," the Moore County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post.

“As utility companies began responding to the different substations, evidence was discovered that indicated that intentional vandalism had occurred at multiple sites,” the sheriff's office said.

Moore County deputies and other law enforcement responded and were providing security at the affected sites, the sheriff's office said.

Utility company Duke Energy said nearly 38,000 customers were without power in Moore County, while the Randolph Electric Membership Corporation reported outages affected nearly 3,000 customers in the county's southern area, WRAL-TV reported.

 

Yeah, the substations were shot up "just after 7 pm Saturday" when the Downtown Divas show was beginning.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what's going on here, less than 12 hours after Donald Trump called for the suspension of the Constitution in order to declare himself Maximum Leader of America.

This wasn't "vandalism". Vandalism is tagging a hospital or library or school with "Jeff Rules" in safety orange spray paint.  Knocking out power to half of a county in a coordinated effort to damage four substations at once in order to stop a drag show is a terrorist attack and a hate crime.

We need to both treat it as such, and send a warning to these assholes that the consequences of this are going to be very long stints in prison.

Sunday Long Read: The Big Sleep

If we're ever to go to Mars in my lifetime, we're going to have to find a way to get astronauts from Earth to the Red Planet and back, and that's a three-year round trip. The biggest concern is safety, food, and water. and cracking the hibernation code could provide the answer, as Wired's Brendan Koerner explains.

ONE DAY IN 1992, near the northern pole of a planet hurtling around the Milky Way at roughly 500,000 miles per hour, Kelly Drew was busy examining some salmon brains in a lab. Her concentration was broken when Brian Barnes, a zoophysiology professor from down the hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, popped by her bench for a visit. With a mischievous grin, he asked Drew—a neuropharmacologist early in her career—to hold out her hands and prepare for a surprise. A moment later, she felt a hard, furry lump deposited in her palms. It was some sort of brown rodent with dagger-like claws, curled up into a tight ball and so cold to the touch that Drew assumed it was dead. To her astonishment, Barnes gleefully explained that it was actually in perfect health.

The creature, an Arctic ground squirrel, was just hibernating, as it does for up to eight months of the year. During that span, the animal's internal temperature falls to below 27 degrees Fahrenheit, literally as cold as ice. Its brain waves become so faint that they're nearly impossible to detect, and its heart beats as little as once per minute. Yet the squirrel remains very much alive. And when spring comes, it can elevate its temperature back to 98.6 degrees in a couple of hours.

Drew cradled the unresponsive critter in her hands, unable to detect even the faintest signs of life. What's going on inside this animal's brain that allows it to survive like this? she wondered. And with that question, she began to burrow into a mystery that would carry her decades into the future.

AT THIS POINT, in the year 2022, no fewer than three major entities—NASA, the Chinese National Space Administration, and SpaceX—are vying to put the first human on Mars by 2040 or so. To win that race, a team must first solve a series of vexing design riddles. As an executive at SpaceWorks, an Atlanta-based engineering firm that tackles ambitious research projects for NASA, John Bradford has spent the past decade running the brutal math on one of them.

Unfortunately for the engineers trying to get humans to the Red Planet, we're a pretty high-maintenance species. As large endotherms with active brains, we burn through copious amounts of food, water, and oxygen in our daily quest to survive. All that consumption makes it extra hard to design a spacecraft light enough to reach—and eventually return from—a planet some 140 million miles from our own. Based on the eating habits of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, for example, a crew of four will need at least 11 tons of food to complete an 1,100-day mission to Mars and back. Those meals alone would weigh nearly 10 times more than the entire Perseverance rover, the biggest payload ever to reach the Martian surface. Add in all the other life-support essentials, to say nothing of the engines and the tools necessary to set up camp, and the weight of a fully fueled Mars-bound ship could easily exceed 330 tons as it departs Earth's atmosphere—more than two fully grown blue whales. It's nearly impossible to see how a vessel that massive could generate the power necessary for its entire round-trip journey.

The obvious solution to this problem—at least to anyone who's read any Arthur C. Clarke novels or watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey—is to slow the metabolism of crew members so they only need to ingest a bare minimum of resources while in transit. In 2001, astronauts lie down in sarcophagus-like hibernation pods, where their hearts beat just three times a minute and their body temperature hovers at 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Bradford has devoted a huge chunk of his 21-year career at SpaceWorks to investigating a question that Kubrick had the artistic license to ignore: How, exactly, can we safely power down a human body so it's just one step removed from death, then revive it on demand?

Early on in his research, Bradford glimpsed some promise in therapeutic hypothermia, a medical technique in which people who have experienced cardiac arrest are chilled—typically with intravenous cooling fluids—until their internal temperature reaches as low as 89 degrees Fahrenheit. This decreases their metabolism so much that their cells can function on roughly 30 percent less oxygen and energy—a lifesaver for a damaged body that's struggling to heal amid reduced blood flow. Patients are usually kept in this hypothermic state for only a day or two, mostly because the cold triggers intense shivering that must be controlled with powerful sedatives and neuromuscular-blocking drugs. But Bradford identified a few rare cases in which patients were kept hypothermic for as long as two weeks. “And we started asking, why can't you do that for longer?” he says. “How long can you sustain that comatose-like state?”

Bradford was wary of going public with his curiosity, fearing he'd be branded a crank for suggesting astronauts be put on ice—a concept uncomfortably similar to the one touted by the dubious cryonics industry. But in 2013 he persuaded NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program to fund a project assessing the feasibility of “human torpor.” His successful pitch centered on the potential weight savings: He estimated that if astronauts could be kept frigid for the bulk of their trip to Mars, the mass of their life-support resources could be cut by as much as 60 percent. Bradford also hypothesized that torpor could help astronauts fend off a number of serious health hazards, ranging from radiation to the psychological perils of extreme boredom and isolation. (“You're in the blackness of space, you don't have real-time communications,” he says. “A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, I'll just read a lot of books.’ But I think that will get old quick.”)

A lot of space sci-fi books and movies have tackled the concept over the years, from the Alien films to hard sci-fi from authors like Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton. But if we can conquer death in a way, it may help us explore the solar system and beyond. 

Orange Meltdown, Con't

I mean we've gotten to the point where Trump has gone so far into the ether now that he's demanding that the entire Constitution be scrapped and that he declared Maximum Leader.

 

DONALD TRUMP, the former president and the person that polls show is still the most likely GOP presidential nominee in 2024, today on Truth Social called for the suspension of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election, citing false conspiracy theories about election fraud.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote, hours after new details of Twitter’s internal moderation deliberations in 2020 were released at the behest of new owner ELON MUSK. (More on that below.)

Every Republican will be asked about Trump’s statement. The former president dined with antisemites last week, and now he says the Constitution should be discarded. If you are a Republican who thinks being asked to take a position on this is just some liberal media trap, consider what you would say if BARACK OBAMA or JOE BIDEN tweeted this.

 

Yes folks, the Twitter nonsense from yesterday about Hunter Biden is now grounds for "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" and this is straight up, pure-tee, no holds barred fascism right here, folks.

This is who the GOP is and has been.

Always.

The Snowden Job, Con't

Dudebro Defector Ed Snowden is now all but a Russian comrade, subject to whatever Daddy Putin wants him to do.

 

Edward Snowden swore an oath of allegiance to Russia and has collected his Russian passport, his lawyer said Friday.

The 39-year-old former intelligence contractor who leaked highly classified information in 2013 was granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin in September.

He faces espionage charges and 30 years in prison in the United States if he were to return.

"Edward received a Russian passport yesterday and took the oath in accordance with the law," his lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said, according to Russia's Interfax news agency.

"He is, of course, happy, thanking the Russian Federation for the fact that he received citizenship," he continued. "And most importantly, under the Constitution of Russia, he can no longer be extradited to a foreign state."

 

At least, we think he's still alive. Who actually knows?

 

More importantly, who actually cares after handing over the crown jewels of American intelligence over to Vlad?

 

I tell you what, if there's a prime example of the term "traitor" here in the last decade, it's this guy. None of the Trump stuff happens without the Russians having the keys to essentially every US network out there. They knew everything and they leveraged it to do more damage to America than any bomb or weapon possibly could. 

I know as a Black man I don't owe this country any allegiance, but Russia has never, ever been our friend in my lifetime, either.

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

Gasoline prices have fallen sharply since Election Day, but the news behind that price drop at the pump isn't exactly great.

 

The cost of gasoline is falling so fast that it is beginning to put real money back in the pockets of drivers, defying earlier projections and offering an unexpected gift for the holidays.

Filling up is now as cheap as it was in February, just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine touched off a global energy crisis. AAA reported the average nationwide price of a gallon of regular Wednesday was $3.50, and gas price tracking company GasBuddy projected it could drop below $3 by Christmas. And all of that relief probably helped drive robust shopping over Thanksgiving weekend.

“People are realizing that they might be back to spending $50 to fill their tank instead of $80,” said Emma Rasiel, a professor of economics at Duke University. “It is the main signal consumers notice on inflation. It is the one thing they are likely to track, how much it has gone up or down, because every week they need to fill up their car.”

But Rasiel cautioned that less-expensive gas can also give consumers the wrong idea. Prices of other goods and services are much less volatile, and there is no indication that this moment of more-affordable fuel is pushing the cost of other things down.

Even as the plunge in prices at the pump helps fuel a national holiday shopping spree, it is a reflection of the financial strain consumers and businesses are confronting worldwide. Prices are going down because demand for oil and gas is falling as countries brace for recession, coronavirus outbreaks in China threaten major financial disruption and drivers cut back on gas-guzzling as they try to save money to cover skyrocketing mortgage payments and stock market losses.

Earlier worries that sanctions on Russian oil would create a shortage in supply and send prices soaring toward the end of the year have, for now at least, given way to ailing economies and jittery financial markets.

“We’re heading into serious recession in Europe and further economic slowdown in the U.S. as people struggle with high interest rates and worry about their personal wealth and savings,” said Ben Cahill, an energy security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Add it all up and it creates a bleak picture for oil demand. Prices are reflecting that.”

Also helping keep prices low at the moment are some key U.S. oil refineries that returned to churning out gasoline after months of being out of commission for maintenance and repairs.

But just as big a factor is the turmoil in China. As its leaders signal that new coronavirus lockdowns are imminent, touching off protests throughout the country, the expected economic fallout has turned oil traders bearish.

China alone accounted for 16 percent of global oil demand last year, according to the research firm Capital Economics, which projects its purchase of oil will drop by 1 million barrels per day in December as coronavirus infections spread. The effect of such a drop on global oil markets is considerable, reducing the price of Brent crude by as much as $10 a barrel, or more than 10 percent.

 

So the Russian oil doomsday scenario hasn't come to pass quite yet, but the global economy is headed for some bad times in 2023. How hard the landing is going to be is still up in the air, but at least gas prices are headed back under $3 for a while. 

Diesel out here in the Midwest is still $4.50-$5 a gallon though, so that's still costing consumers more at checkout. Still, gas prices here in KY are below $3 in several counties.

Beshear also applauds gas prices dropping across the state. ^AH pic.twitter.com/OkQuwvG56l

— Bluegrass Politics (@BGPolitics) December 1, 2022

We'll see what the Fed decides to do with interest rates later this month.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Now that Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has easily prevailed in the 2022 midterms, and Disney CEO Bob Chapek has been shitcanned in favor of a return to former CEO Bob Iger, the stage is set for both sides to come to the table and reverse Florida's very expensive decision to eliminate Disney's special tax district status.

Florida lawmakers are working on plans to reverse a move that would strip Disney of its right to operate a private government around its theme parks, potentially resolving the fallout from the “Don’t Say Gay” controversy that dragged the entertainment giant into the culture wars.

In April, the Florida legislature voted to dissolve Disney’s 55-year-old special tax district following a public feud between Ron DeSantis, the state’s governor, and then-chief executive Bob Chapek over a new state law restricting discussion of LGBTQ issues in classrooms.

The set-up allows Disney to tax itself to cover the costs of providing water, power, roads and fire services in the area, known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. The special district is seen as essential for the theme park operator to maintain high standards for visitors.

However, state lawmakers are working on a compromise that would allow Disney to keep the arrangement largely in place with a few modifications. Some believe the return of Bob Iger as CEO last month will help pave they way for a resolution, according to people briefed on the plan.

Randy Fine, the Republican lawmaker who drafted the law to end Disney’s control over the 25,000-acre Reedy Creek property, said that Chapek’s removal from executive office last week improved the chances that “something will get sorted out” over the district. “It’s easier to shift policy when you don’t have to defend the old policy,” Fine said. “Chapek screwed up, but Bob Iger doesn’t have to own that screw-up.”

Since returning to Disney, Iger has steered clear of criticising Florida for a bill that he had warned would “put vulnerable, young LGBTQ people in jeopardy” when it was introduced in February. Iger’s full-throated opposition to the legislation, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics, put pressure on Disney to reverse course this spring and come out against the bill after initially refusing to take a stand. The vacillation helped fuel a sense Chapek was struggling to make big calls as CEO.

At a town hall meeting with employees on Monday, Iger said he was “sorry to see us get dragged into [the] battle” over Reedy Creek and needed time to “get up to speed” on the issue.

“What I can say [is] the state of Florida has been important to us for a long time and we have been very important to the state of Florida,” Iger said. “That is something I’m extremely mindful of and will articulate if I get the chance.”

Iger struck the right tone for reaching a compromise, said an influential figure in Florida state politics. “That was a good olive branch message to Disney employees and the state of Florida,” he said. “It was a diplomatic kind of message.”

Meanwhile, tax officials and lawmakers have warned dissolving Disney’s private government threatens to shift an enormous financial burden to taxpayers and potentially transfer a $1bn debt load to the state.

 

Both Disney and DeSantis know quite a bit about putting on a show for the folks in Florida, and both sides will get what they want. Keep this is mind as Ron goes after Apple over Twitter next.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of Republicans criticizing Apple after Twitter owner Elon Musk claimed the tech giant threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store, strengthening the GOP’s ties to Musk and amplifying their shared criticism of major tech companies.

Removing Twitter from the App Store would be a “huge, huge mistake and a really raw exercise of monopolistic power,” DeSantis said Tuesday while speaking at an unrelated event in Duval County, adding that he believes the move would call for a congressional response.

Apple has not publicly responded to Musk, who tweeted about the alleged threat Monday afternoon, or confirmed that it threatened to remove Twitter’s app.

DeSantis speculated Apple’s alleged threat was based on Musk’s reinstatement of Twitter accounts that were “unfairly and illegally suspended for putting out accurate information about Covid,” he said, though Musk has said it’s unclear why Apple issued the warning.

 

At this level folks, it's all a show.

 

Long Train Runnin', Con't

As expected, the Senate easily passed the bill to force unions and the railroad corporations to accept the tentative deal from September, but Senate Republicans -- and Joe Manchin -- killed the sick leave proposal.

 

The Senate on Thursday voted to force a labor agreement to try and avert a looming strike of the nation's railway workers.

A bipartisan majority of senators approved a House bill that will codify a tentative agreement between the rail companies and rail unions, which was brokered in September and subsequently rejected by some of the workers.

The Senate separately voted down two additional provisions to address the labor dispute: whether to institute a 60-day extension of the cooling-off period between both sides and whether to grant workers seven days of paid sick leave.

The first vote, on the cooling off period, failed 69-26.

The second vote, to add seven paid sick days for workers, needed 60 votes to pass and fell short with a 52-43 total. Six Republicans -- Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Michael Braun and John Kennedy -- voted to add sick leave while one Democrat, Joe Manchin, voted no.

The third vote, to uphold an agreement negotiated by the White House between freight employees and their bosses in September, passed 80-15. Five members of the Democratic caucus -- Bernie Sanders, an independent, as well as John Hickenlooper, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Merkley -- voted no.

President Joe Biden has vowed to quickly sign the labor agreement into law.

The Senate’s move to try and end the labor fight comes as the White House has emphasized that they believe the chamber needs to send legislation "by this weekend" to avert a work stoppage or the nation could see potentially “devastating effects," given how much of the economy relies on rail to move goods.

The workers' unions reacted with open dismay, they said, at the government's intervention and Biden has described himself as a "proud pro-labor" president who made a difficult decision for the good of the larger economy.

At Biden's urging, the House on Wednesday passed a law enforcing the September tentative agreement plus separate legislation to add sick days for workers, which had become a major sticking point in the unsuccessful negotiations.

Representatives voted 290-137 to adopt the deal between the rail companies and employees that was negotiated by the White House and 221-207 for the sick leave -- a key provision in addressing progressive Democrats' concerns to further protect workers.

Sanders had been urging his colleagues to consider boosting paid leave provisions for the rail workers and spoke on the floor between votes.

“Workers who do difficult and dangerous work have zero paid sick days. Zero. You get sick, you’ve got a mark against you. Couple of marks, you get fired. This cannot and must not happen in America in 2022,” he said.

 

The rail unions are vowing not to forget this in the future.  Kinda don't blame them. But I hope they remember that Senate Republicans made sure they ended up with zero sick days, too. 

Still, it was Democrats who passed this billand Biden who will sign it, when Republicans were perfectly happy to have an economy-destroying rail strike two weeks before Christmas.

 

The real villains remain the railroad companies, but America can't exist without rail freight. We've been having this fight for 150 years, folks.

It's not going to get better anytime soon.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Team Trump just got destroyed by judges he appointed as all three Republican picks on the 11th Circuit panel overseeing his case on the Mar-a-Lago document special master ordered Judge Aileen Cannon's previous decision vacated.

The three-judge panel of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed US District Judge Aileen Cannon’s order appointing a so-called special master to sort through thousands of documents found at Trump’s home to determine what should be off limits to investigators.

“The law is clear,” the appeals court wrote. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so.”

The 11th Circuit said that either approach would be a “radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations” and that “both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”

The opinion – which was issued jointly by the three-judge panel made up of all GOP appointees – dismantled Trump’s arguments for why a special master was necessary. The court said that only in extraordinary circumstances should courts intervene in Justice Department investigations that are still in their early stages, and that standard had not been met here.

“This restraint guards against needless judicial intrusion into the course of criminal investigations—a sphere of power committed to the executive branch,” the court wrote.

The ruling is a stinging rebuke of how Cannon inserted herself into the dispute. In addition to reversing the order, the appeals court is instructing her to dismiss the entire case.

The appeals court said that its new ruling will go into effect in seven days, unless a party in the case successfully seeks an order – known as a stay – pausing the ruling from going into effect while it is appealed.

 

Ahh, but that last part means Trump and the Roberts Court have a week to reinstate the order and take the case. We'll see if the Shadow Docket™ acts and puts the case in limbo for the next 8 months. After all, this is the court that decided to overturn precedent in Dobbs and turn half the country into wards of the states they are in. You think it won't protect Trump from legal peril at the federal level for as long as it can?

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

And while nationally the "Red Wave" was a trickle, in Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and company finished off most of the rest of the Democrats in the state, leaving them in a flaming trash heap. As a result, DeSantis-backed school board members are already claiming the heads of educators in the state's largest school districts.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis put his weight behind dozens of conservative school board candidates across Florida during the midterms. Now they’re in office — and are purging some educational leaders who enforced Covid-19 mandates.

New board members in two GOP-leaning counties essentially sacked their school superintendents over the span of one week. The ousters were spurred by how the superintendents carried out local policies like efforts to support the rights of parents, an issue inflamed by schools imposing student mask mandates last fall in defiance of DeSantis.

And while not tied to the 2022 election, the school board in Broward County earlier this month fired its superintendent through an effort led by five members appointed by DeSantis. All combined, school boards with ties to DeSantis pushed out three superintendents in November alone — and each of them served over districts that implemented student mask mandates.

“We had a wave in school districts that spit in parents’ faces,” said state Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay), who earlier this year sought to punish schools with mask mandates. “And now the people who did that are gone.”

In Brevard and Sarasota counties, embattled school leaders have faced immediate pressure from newly-installed board members and offered to leave voluntarily rather than risk a vote on their terminations.

The boards in both counties now have conservative majorities who sought a change in leadership immediately after the midterms. Although school boards are nonpartisan posts, lines between Democratic and Republican candidates were drawn in many counties through endorsements from each party as well as outside groups. The newly-elected board members in these cases support parental rights while opposing critical race theory and teaching gender orientation in schools.

DeSantis in particular used his clout to endorse more than two dozen school board candidates during the 2022 election cycle, a rare move for a Florida governor that came with $1,000 cash contributions from DeSantis and other GOP lawmakers. Most of the candidates DeSantis endorsed won their elections and are now transforming the make-up of school district leadership and will have huge influence over policies affecting hundreds of thousands of students in the state.

Both Sarasota and Brevard’s school boards put the superintendents on the chopping block the same day that new members endorsed by DeSantis and conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty were sworn into office.

 

Expect more of this in the weeks ahead. Where Republicans have won and all but removed any resistance? Florida.

It won't get better anytime soon, folks.

How The Republicans Blew The "Red Wave"

Despite a three-point national vote lead in the 2022 Midterms, Republicans only gained around 8-10 seats in the House. Granted, that's enough to give them the majority next year, but that number should have been 28-30 or even 48-50 House seats. The difference? Democrats finally got as good as the GOP when it came to gerrymandering and defending their turf in a structural change from ten years ago, as Decision Desk's Zach Donnini analyzes.

The US House structural bias was more favorable to Democrats than expected for three reasons. First, as a byproduct of their previous house majority, Democrats held an incumbency advantage in most competitive districts. Republicans had to bear the burden of flipping Democratic seats to win the chamber. This challenge certainly cost Republicans several seats, where strong Democratic incumbents resisted national trends and held their Trump-won districts even as the nation shifted six points to the right. To compound the issue, Republicans did not even take advantage of the incumbents they could have had. Supported by Donald Trump, loyalist Republicans Joe Kent and John Gibbs led ousters of popular and electorally successful incumbents Jamie Herrera-Beutler and Peter Meijer, handing two districts to Democrats. Second, Democratic gerrymanders were highly effective. While Democrats could only pass optimal partisan gerrymanders in four states (Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, and Illinois), they took advantage of the opportunity with clinical efficiency. Democrats won 24 of 30 (80%) of seats in these four states, despite only winning 54% of the combined house popular vote (controlling for uncontested districts). The third and final reason is the most worrisome for Republicans: the new Republican coalition—built by Donald Trump—is not remotely designed for success in the US House.

Fast Fact: Although recent political realignment has allowed Republicans to acquire a massive structural advantage in the US Senate, it is helping Democrats counteract gerrymandering and gain a structural advantage in the US House.

Why are Republicans Developing A Geographic Disadvantage in the House?

While Republicans were successful in rural America well before Donald Trump arrived on the political scene, it was not until the 2016 Presidential Election that the party began to dominate the regions. In 2012, Democrats wasted far more votes than Republicans in blowout House races. While 30 Democrats won their race by 60 points or more, only 7 Republicans won by the same wide margin. The 2016 election was an election of regional polarization: very blue areas (generally cities) became bluer, and very red areas (generally more rural areas) become redder. In the 2012 presidential election, only ~33% of Americans lived in a “non-competitive” area, a county where either Democrats or Republicans won >65% of the vote. But in 2016, this number increased to 43%. Democrats did boost their numbers in heavy blue areas, but it was Republican success in rural areas that primarily drove this increase, closing the gap between the two parties in wasted votes.



Ancestral rural Democrats across the country, particularly in the Midwest, left their party in droves for Trump and the GOP. For the most part, Republican House candidates did not need this marked improvement in the reddest areas, these were the districts Republicans were already holding easily. Of course, some of these rural voters were districted with blue areas and did contribute to battleground seats, but most of these rural improvements were turning 50-point wins into 60-point wins for the GOP.

Although Republicans disproportionately improved in very red areas in 2016, serious problems did not start to develop until 2020. Partisan realignment since 2016 (educational polarization and racial depolarization) has proven to be disastrous for the GOP in the House. To oversimplify American politics, the safest blue districts tend to be in cities, and the safest red districts tend to encompass rural areas and small towns. The battleground districts are disproportionately located in high-education suburban areas, where Republicans are slipping. Conversely, Republicans enjoy higher and higher levels of minority support as Black and Hispanic voters trend toward the party. Dividing all counties into five categories, ordered by the highest to the lowest proportion of the vote won by Biden, Trump only gained between 2016 and 2020 in the bluest counties. To make matters worse, Democrats gained the most in the most competitive counties.



Republicans will have to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that trading a suburban vote (in a competitive House district) for an urban vote (in a deep blue House district) deeply harms their ability to hold a geographic advantage. If educational polarization continues at this rate, it could be Democrats that hold a significant advantage in the US House by the end of the decade—but not because of gerrymandering.

 

Republicans did better in states like New York, Florida and California. But Democrats did better in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, the big five battleground states. Dems won competitive districts that needed fewer increases in votes to win, while Republicans did things like turning 30 point losses into 20 point losses in deep blue House races. Dems also picked up House seats that they shouldn't have in GOP states like Ohio, and Republicans handed them wins by purging their party of "moderate" seats in states like Oregon and NC.

If Democrats had fixed New York's gerrymander, we would have kept the House, because going forward the competitive suburban House districts are where Democratic vote growth is the best.