Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Not content with his rapidly improving poll numbers over Donald Trump out this week, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling for a state Supreme Court grand jury investigation into vaccine makers for "criminally misleading" Floridians into believe vaccines are safe, which is an amazing amount of fascist bullshit even for Ron DeSantis.

 

At a roundtable he convened of Covid vaccine skeptics and opponents — including his own surgeon general — he formally called on the state Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines, a position at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

DeSantis was a major booster of the vaccines last year and once called them lifesaving, but he later turned against them, mirroring a shift in conservative Republican opinion. By January, he refused to say if he even got a booster, and that prompted Trump — whose Operation Warp Speed led to the rapid development of the vaccines — to take a thinly veiled shot at him, albeit not by name, for being “gutless.”

The decision by DeSantis to now investigate the vaccines was widely panned by those in Trump’s orbit.

“Prior to this, his position was identical to Trump’s, and he advocated the efficiency and safety of vaccines. That’s his record,” said Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump and an outspoken critic of DeSantis.

“This is a shot across the bow. We know exactly what Ron is up to,” said another Trump adviser who spoke more bluntly, but on the condition of anonymity to be able to speak freely.

“The fact is, we’ve seen this coming for a year, ever since Ron started to get anti-vax,” the Republican said, explaining the governor's opposition to the vaccine. “Yes, there’s a portion of our base that is anti-vax and some people could walk away from Trump over it. That’s why Ron is doing it. It’s so transparent.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said in a written statement that that “after China unleashed this deadly virus onto the rest of the world, President Trump’s administration worked tirelessly to secure medical equipment to save the lives of Americans who were infected."

"Operation Warp Speed was a once-in-a-lifetime initiative that gave people the option of utilizing therapeutics if they wished to do so," he added. "He also fought against any attempt to federalize the pandemic response by protecting every state’s right to ultimately decide what is best for their people because of the unique challenges each state faced.”

Those familiar with DeSantis’ thinking downplayed the political ramifications, pointing out that he was one of the first high-profile Republicans to challenge expert opinions and health care professionals when it came to the Covid response, from his decision to reopen the state and schools early to banning vaccine and mask mandates to hiring Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has been criticized for questioning vaccines in far-right social media channels.

DeSantis was also an early public critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, during the pandemic who became anathema to conservatives in 2020, even as Trump resisted pressure to oust him (while still often criticizing him).

“This isn’t about 2024. This is about what DeSantis believes in,” said one Republican who was not authorized to speak publicly on his behalf.

 

Oh, by the way, not only are the Covid vaccines safe, they have saved 3.2 million lives so far. 

And yes, that last statement in the article there is an absolute lie, because if DeSantis's dog and pony show here is absolutely designed to tie Trump to Biden, Fauci, and the vaccine and use it to destroy him in 2024.

The Trumpies are already upset over this and calling DeSantis a hypocrite.

But if there's any group in America immune to charges of hypocrisy, it's Republican primary voters.

 

In any fair universe, this would be the end of DeSantis. Nothing, of course, is fair.  In fact, House Republicans and more than a few Democrats want the same kind of investigation into Covid's origins.

Bipartisan legislation to create a Sept. 11-style independent panel to investigate the pandemic response by both the Trump and Biden administrations appears stalled on Capitol Hill, despite a 20-to-2 vote in favor of the measure by the Senate health committee. Backers say their last hope for passage is to tack it onto an upcoming spending bill, the final major must-pass piece of legislation of the current Congress.

The commission would be created as part of a sprawling bill called the PREVENT Pandemics Act. The measure would also make the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a Senate-confirmed position and take other steps to improve pandemic preparedness, including increasing coordination among public health agencies and addressing supply chain deficiencies.

There has been no vocal opposition to the bill, but it has been in limbo since it passed the health committee in March — a victim of inertia and a lack of White House support.

There is no companion measure in the House, where Republicans are planning their own pandemic-related investigations once they take control of the chamber next month. More significantly, President Biden has not taken a public position on the bill, and the White House is privately resisting it, according to an official familiar with the measure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its status.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who has focused his efforts on judicial nominations and the president’s agenda, has not brought the legislation up for a floor vote. The White House declined to comment.

 

So yeah, odds are they are going to get it. DeSantis is jumping on it first, so when House Republicans start their own probe, they will be "following his lead".

They should be following him to the dustbin of history.

Last Call For A Life And No Death Situation

As one of her final acts before fellow Democrat Tina Kotek is sworn in, Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown is commuting the sentences of all of the state's 17 death row inmates to life without parole.

Gov. Kate Brown announced on Tuesday afternoon that she would commute the sentences of all 17 individuals on Oregon’s death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the latest in her end-of-term string of clemency decisions.

“I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even if a terrible crime placed them in prison,” Brown said in a statement sent out in a press release.

“This is a value that many Oregonians share,” Brown said.

Oregon has not executed anyone on death row for a quarter century and Brown continued the moratorium that former Gov. John Kitzhaber put in place in 2011. Governor-elect Tina Kotek, who like Brown and Kitzhaber is a Democrat, is personally opposed to the death penalty based on her religious beliefs and said during the campaign that she would continue the moratorium.

Voters have gone back and forth on the death penalty over the years, abolishing and reinstating it repeatedly. Voters’ most recent decision on the death penalty was in 1984, when they inserted it into the state Constitution.

Oregon is one of 27 states that authorizes the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

 

Not everyone is pleased by this.

Randy Lee Guzek was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death for Rod and Lois Houser, of Terrebonne. Sue Shirley, the Housers’ daughter, said Tuesday she was aware of the governor’s decision to commute Guzek’s sentence, but had not heard from the state directly.

“I’m horrified and outraged and I don’t know what this means,” Shirley said Tuesday. “Will true life be true life?”

Shirley noted that Guzek has been resentenced four times over the past 24 years as the Legislature has changed rules, though his death penalty sentence has been repeatedly upheld.

“All I know is that we never get to have a say,” she said Tuesday. “Forty-eight jurors have said the just sentence was the death penalty, but that’s been a moving target. The Legislature has changed the rules time and time again and it’s just been a nightmare.”

But Oregon has effectively ended the death penalty in the state and hasn't executed anyone in nearly 25 years.

 

In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill that limited the crimes that qualified for the death penalty by narrowing the definition of aggravated murder to killing two or more people as an act of organized terrorism; intentionally and with premeditation kilIing a child younger than 14; killing another person while locked up in jail or prison for a previous murder; or killing a police, correctional or probation officer.

More than two years have passed since the Brown administration dismantled Oregon’s death row, a move that acknowledged the effective end of capital punishment in the state.

Brown said in her statement Tuesday that commuting the sentences of people currently serving on Oregon’s death row was consistent with what she described as lawmakers’ “near abolition” of capital punishment.

“Unlike previous commutations I’ve granted to individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary growth and rehabilitation, this commutation is not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the individuals on death row,” Brown said. “Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral. It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.”

 

Governor Brown could not be more correct. The death penalty is a barbaric relic that never should have been allowed in this country, and overwhelmingly it has been used against Black folk to deliver the ultimate sanction without warrant or evidence.

 

Actually being pro-life means getting rid of capital punishment.

Hot New Fusion Cuisine

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have apparently achieved a breakthrough in fusion technology: getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put into it, known as ignition.

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.

Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.

The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

From an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal. Within the sun and stars, fusion continually combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing sunlight and warmth that bathes the planets.

In experimental reactors and laser labs on Earth, fusion lives up to its reputation as a very clean energy source, devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy.

There was always a nagging caveat, however. In all of the efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consumed more energy than the fusion reactions generated.

That changed at 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility blasted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen nubbin of hydrogen encased in diamond.

The laser beams entered at the top and bottom of the cylinder, vaporizing it. That generated an inward onslaught of X-rays that compresses a BB-size fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium, the heavier forms of hydrogen.

In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet. Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, an energy gain of 1.5.

This crossed the threshold that laser fusion scientists call ignition, the dividing line where the energy generated by fusion equals the energy of the incoming lasers that start the reaction.

“You see one diagnostic and you think maybe that’s not real and then you start to see more and more diagnostics rolling in, pointing to the same thing,” said Annie Kritcher, a physicist at Livermore who described reviewing the data after the experiment. “It’s a great feeling.”

The successful experiment finally delivers the ignition goal that was promised when construction of the National Ignition Facility started in 1997. When operations began in 2009, however, the facility hardly generated any fusion at all, an embarrassing disappointment after a $3.5 billion investment from the federal government.

 

And they didn't just get a bit more energy out of it, they got 50% more energy out of it, meaning that this is an honest-to-goodness real advancement in power. I know it's kind of basic, but a fusion experiment that didn't release enough energy to cover the cost going in wasn't of much use to anyone, and that's where the fusion lab has been for the last 13 years.

Until last week.  That was the big obstacle, and they cracked it wide open.

So what does that mean now?

I wouldn't expect commercially available fusion power in my lifetime, to be honest.  Maybe in Millennial or Gen Z years. But it's a start, and a big one.

And that's if we don't splatter ourselves all over history with fusion weapons in the interim, which given the state of humanity today is a very real outcome down the line. Someone's going to decide that nuclear blast damage without all the nasty plutonium fallout is a really good idea and worth pursuing.

But yeah, this is a huge step in humanity, one of those Civilization game-level milestones on the tech tree.

This is a big one, folks.  Trust in that.

Going All Judge Mental, Con't

I've been saying for months now that conservative judges weren't going to stop taking rights away from marginalized groups like women, Black folk, the LGBTQ+ community, and more in the wake of Dobbs and the death of Roe v Wade. They were never going to just give up and stop there, and wouldn't you know it, they're going after contraception after all.

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.

Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.

This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.

Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.

 

Title X is the main vehicle through which government entities fund birth control at clinics and  practices across the country. Family planning services are vital, and here we have a lunatic judge saying no adolescent in America can even get birth control unless specifically approved by parents. Just like the entire flap about school boards, parents, not experts like doctors, now make choices for teen health.

 

And we know at the college age level, Title X contraception improves the graduation rate of women by 10-12%.  Requiring parental permission for that is awful.

Of course, if there's no right to contraception, then requiring consent for birth control before anyone in America has sex means once again, women have no right to their own bodies.

And that's the point.

Last Call For Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Josh Marshall's crew over at Talking Points Memo are publishing the January 6th related texts from former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and while some have been published, TPM has gotten their hands on the bulk of the texts and is running a major expose on Meadows and the GOP January 6th conspiracy.

 

The messages you are about to read are the definitive, real-time record of a plot to overturn an American election.

TPM has obtained the 2,319 text messages that Mark Meadows, who was President Trump’s last White House chief of staff, turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Today, we are publishing The Meadows Texts, a series based on an in-depth analysis of these extraordinary — and disturbing — communications.

The vast majority of Meadows’ texts described in this series are being made public for the very first time. They show the senior-most official in the Trump White House communicating with members of Congress, state-level politicians, and far-right activists as they work feverishly to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The Meadows texts illustrate in moment-to-moment detail an authoritarian effort to undermine the will of the people and upend the American democratic system as we know it.

The text messages, obtained from multiple sources, offer new insights into how the assault on the election was rooted in deranged internet paranoia and undemocratic ideology. They show Meadows and other high-level Trump allies reveling in wild conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and crackpot legal strategies for refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory. They expose the previously unknown roles of some members of Congress, local politicians, activists and others in the plot to overturn the election. Now, for the first time, many of those figures will be named and their roles will be described — in their own words.

Meadows turned over the text messages during a brief period of cooperation with the committee before he filed a December 2021 lawsuit arguing that its subpoenas seeking testimony and his phone records were “overly broad” and violations of executive privilege. The committee did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Since then, Meadows has faced losses in his efforts to challenge the subpoena in court. However, that legal battle is ongoing and is unlikely to conclude before next month, when the incoming Republican House majority is widely expected to shutter the committee’s investigation. Earlier this year, Meadows reportedly turned over the same material he gave the select committee to the Justice Department in response to another subpoena. These messages are key evidence in the two major investigations into the Jan. 6 attack. With this series, the American people will be able to evaluate the most important texts for themselves.

Meadows has not, thus far, responded to multiple requests for comment. The texts Meadows provided to the select committee encompass the period from election night in 2020 through President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. It is not clear which, if any, texts Meadows withheld from the committee, but the text message log offers multiple hints it is only a partial record of his conversations. There are discussions that clearly lack prior context and messages where participants indicate there is further communication taking place on encrypted channels.

But despite the seeming gaps, Meadows’ text record is still incredibly revealing. Some of the contents of the log were published in “The Breach,” a book about the Jan. 6 attack that I co-wrote with Denver Riggleman, a former Republican congressman and senior technical adviser to the committee. In our book, Riggleman described how he and his fellow committee investigators dubbed Meadows’ text log “the crown jewels” because they served as the “road map to an insurrection.” Along with the text messages that appeared in “The Breach,” some of Meadows’ messages have also been revealed by media outlets. The Washington Post published his exchanges with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some of Meadows’ conversations with Fox News personalities and other members of the media were disclosed by the select committee. CNN and I have published Meadows’ conversations with some Republican members of Congress including; Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Additionally, CNN has published Meadows’ texts with Fox News personality Sean Hannity and his messages from the period directly surrounding the Jan. 6 attack. However, there’s more. So much more.

TPM is kicking off this series with an exclusive story showing that the log includes more than 450 messages with 34 Republican members of Congress. Those texts show varying degrees of involvement by members of Congress, from largely benign expressions of support for Trump to the leading roles played by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jody Hice (R-GA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the plot to reverse Trump’s defeat. We reached out to all these legislators, and will be detailing their roles and responses to our questions in the first installment of the series, which is coming later today.

 

Those files begin with today's installment, posted here. 

One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office.

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!Ralph NormanRN

The text, which has not previously been reported, is a particularly vivid example of how congressional opposition to Biden’s election was underpinned by paranoid and debunked conspiracy theories like those about Dominion voting machines. Norman’s text also showed the potentially violent lengths to which some congressional Republicans were willing to go in order to keep Trump in power. The log Meadows provided to the select committee does not include a response to Norman’s message.

Reached via cell phone on Monday morning, Norman asked TPM for a chance to review his messages before commenting.

“It’s been two years,” Norman said. “Send that text to me and I’ll take a look at it.”

TPM forwarded Norman a copy of the message calling for “Marshall Law!!” We did not receive any further response from the congressman.

Based on TPM’s analysis, Meadows received at least 364 messages from Republican members of Congress who discussed attempts to reverse the election results with him. He sent at least 95 messages of his own. The committee did not respond to requests for comment. Some of Meadows’ texts — notably with Fox News personalities and a couple members of Congress — have already been made public by the committee, media outlets, and in the book “The Breach.” However, the full scope of his engagement with congressional Republicans as they worked to overturn the election has not previously been revealed.

 

It's going to take a while to chew through all this, but keep in mind, January 6th Chair Bennie Johnson has all but said that Trump, Meadows, Rudy, and others will be referred to Merrick Garland for prosecution as part of the J6 Committee's final report coming next week.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

I understand that the Southern Poverty Law Center can be hyperbolic at times, but bird-dogging the Manhattan chapter of the NY Young Republicans Club's gala where white nationalist club president Gavin Wax declared "We want total war" is absolutely notable.

 

A collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders gathered in Manhattan for the New York Young Republicans Club’s (NYYRC) annual gala Saturday night, where that group’s president declared “total war” on perceived enemies.

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax declared to a room full of supporters at 538 Park Ave., an event venue on New York’s Upper East side.

“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.

At the five-hour event, which Hatewatch reporters attended, white nationalists Peter and Lydia Brimelow of VDARE hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official. Donald Trump Jr. was also in attendance.

Republicans publicly lauded members of an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era German Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.

“Then Jan. 6 happened. And next thing you know, I organized the whole thing, along with Steve Bannon,” Greene said, referring to allegations that she had led reconnaissance tours of the Capitol for soon-to-be insurrectionists in the days prior to the violence.

“I will tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I organized that, we would have won,” she said, as attendees erupted in cheers and applause. “Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

 

Sitting Republican members of Congress are not only in attendance of this who's who of hate crimes, but calling for more armed revolution and sedition against the United States. 

 

We fended them off in November, but they still have a lot of power and eventually they're going to find a way to use it to set off a war that might not be stopped in my lifetime. 

And I don't know what else to do but say "They want a war, and they want to kill those who they see as enemies, and that means millions of Americans. maybe tens of millions" and we as a collective country continue to go back to arguing about the NFL instant replay rules.

Maybe it's safer that way, but not for much longer.  Eventually the violence is going to come full stop, instead of just random attacks, and we're going to have to find a way to stop it.

And even after all that's happened in the last six, seven years now, we're still not ready as a country to even begin the conversation we need to have.

Getting Out Of A Space Jam

NASA's unmanned, proof-of-concept Orion mission to the moon was an unqualified success as the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific on Sunday afternoon.

 

NASA completed a significant step Sunday toward returning astronauts to the lunar surface with the successful completion of a test mission that sent a capsule designed for human spaceflight to orbit the moon and return safely to Earth.

The Orion spacecraft, which had no astronauts on board, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:40 p.m. Eastern off the Baja California peninsula of Mexico under a trio of billowing parachutes.

Orion’s homecoming came 50 years to the day after the Apollo 17 spacecraft landing on the lunar surface in 1972 at the Taurus-Littrow valley, the last human mission to the moon. And it heralded, the space agency said, a series of upcoming missions that are to be piloted by a new generation of NASA astronauts as part of the Artemis program.

The flight was delayed repeatedly by technical problems with the massive Space Launch System rocket and the spacecraft. But the 26-day, 1.4 million-mile mission went “exceedingly well,” NASA officials said, from the launch on Nov. 16 to flybys that brought Orion within about 80 miles of the lunar surface and directly over the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base.

“From Tranquility Base to Taurus-Littrow to the tranquil waters of the Pacific, the latest chapter of NASA’s journey to the moon comes to a close. Orion, back on Earth,” NASA’s Rob Navias said during the agency’s live broadcast of the event.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said it was “historic because we are now going back to space, to deep space, with a new generation.” The successful mission augurs a new era, he added, “one that marks new technology, a whole new breed of astronauts, and a vision of the future.”

Now that the spacecraft is safely home, NASA will immediately begin to assess the data gathered on the flight and prepare for the Artemis II mission — which would put a crew of astronauts on the spacecraft for another trip in orbit around the moon. NASA hopes that mission would come as early as 2024, with a lunar landing to come as early as 2025 or 2026. That would be the first time people walk on the moon since the last of the Apollo missions.

 

Any manned mission to another planet in our Solar System was going to require us going back to Luna as a testing ground, and Orion proved we can test the testing ground in the next few years.  It's exciting to see us getting back to exploring space in my lifetime, and yeah, the next big step is that Mars landing I hope I get to see.

Great job, NASA.

Oh, and I'm damn glad to see Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Like John Glenn and Mark Kelly, Nelson was an astronaut himself before joining the US Senate, and now he's been running the rocket show for 18 months. Orion is a great feather for his cap.

Here's to more success.

Last Call For The New McCarthyism, Con't

Putative incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he will subpoena dozens of FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence officials under oath before the House Intelligence Committee for the "possibly criminal act" of signing a letter in 2020 calling the NY Post Hunter Biden laptop story disinformation. The NY Post's Mark Moore can barely contain his glee at the prospect that they will get revenge.

House Minority Leader ​Kevin McCarthy has ​vowed to subpoena 51 former intelligence officials who called The Post’s Hunter Biden expose Russian disinformation in the wake of the “Twitter Files” revelations about how the social media colossus censored the reporting. ​

The California Republican — who is expected to become speaker when the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives in January — said what Twitter did with The Post’s bombshell October 2020 report was “egregious.”

“Those 51 intel agents that signed a letter that said the Hunter Biden information was all wrong, was Russia collusion, many of them have a security clearance,” McCarthy said on Fox News’ “One Nation” on Saturday.

“We’re going to bring them before a committee. I’m going to have them have a hearing​,​ bring them and subpoena them before a committee. Why did they sign it? Why did they lie to the American public?” he said.

Former CIA Director John Brennan and ex-National Security Council Director James Clapper were among a group of former intelligence officials who signed a statement days after the expose, claiming it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” 

McCarthy questioned the move. “Why did you use the reputation that America was able to give to you … but use it for a political purpose and lie to the American public?” he said on Fox.  

McCarthy and his nutjob House GOP caucus don't actually care about any of the real problems facing the American public right now, they just want to promise their audience buckets of blood and the fantasy that "Democrat" officials will be marched off to jail.

Now, you can definitely argue that plenty of folks on the left sold that "fantasy" to us about Trump and his inner circle in orange jumpsuits, but the difference is the latter actually should happen because they actually broke laws, and God willing, it'll come to pass.

Warren Terrah: Old School Edition

It took most of my lifetime, but the US finally has the Libyan bombmaker responsible for building the explosive device that downed Pam Am Flight 103.

A Libyan intelligence official accused of making the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 in an international act of terrorism has been taken into U.S. custody and will face federal charges in Washington, the Justice Department said Sunday.

The arrest of Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi is a significant milestone in the decades-old investigation into the attack that killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground. American authorities in December 2020 announced charges against Masud, who was in Libyan custody at the time. Though he is the third Libyan intelligence official charged in the U.S. in connection with the attack, he would be the first to appear in an American courtroom for prosecution.

The New York-bound Pan Am flight exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on Dec. 21, 1988. Citizens from 21 different countries were killed. Among the 190 Americans on board were 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.

The bombing laid bare the threat of international terrorism more than a decade before the Sept. 11 attacks. It produced global investigations and punishing sanctions while spurring demands for accountability from victims of those killed.

The announcement of charges against Masud on Dec. 21, 2020, came on the 32nd anniversary of the bombing and in the final days of the tenure of then-Attorney General William Barr, who in his first stint as attorney general in the early 1990s had announced criminal charges against two other Libyans intelligence officials.

The Libyan government initially balked at turning over the two men, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, before ultimately surrendering them for prosecution before a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands as part of a special arrangement.

The Justice Department said Masud would appear soon in a federal court in Washington, where he faces two criminal counts related to the explosion.

U.S. officials did not say how Masud came to be taken into U.S. custody, but in late November, local Libyan media reported that Masud had been kidnapped by armed men on Nov. 16 from his residence in Tripoli, the capital. That reporting cited a family statement that accused Tripoli authorities of being silent on the abduction.

In November 2021, Najla Mangoush, the foreign minister for the country’s Tripoli-based government, told the BBC in an interview that “we, as a government, are very open in terms of collaboration in this matter,” when asked whether an extradition was possible.

 

Biden administration played hardball and got their man. Let's hope Al-Marimi isn't the last. 

As a personal aside, I was in middle school when the Lockerbie bombing happened. Poppy Bush had easily won the 1988 contest and Reagan was too annoyed because it was interrupting his last Christmas as President, ironically asking reporters if shutting down all air traffic would have been the right thing to do.

They didn't get the bastards.  Joe Biden did, almost 35 years later.

Remember that.

Sunday Long Read: Spies Like Her

In this week's Sunday Long Read, Helen Warrell at the Financial Times gets the Brits to discuss the biggest unkept secret in espionage: Women make the best spies, because men have all the important information and are dumbasses.

 

My journey to the school for spies starts in the half-light of a waking city. I do not know where I am going and have only been instructed to meet my contact at a central London landmark. 

 

We travel by car, boat and train to a place where officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the overseas espionage agency known as SIS, learn their craft. I am not allowed to describe it to you, but I can tell you this: it is giant and austere and the slicing wind makes my eyes water. 

 

At the door, I am met by a small, cheerful woman with short, wavy blonde hair whose beaming welcome is at odds with the sterile eeriness of this place. Kathy, who is in charge of all intelligence operations by SIS officers and their agents around the world, ushers me over to a bank of armchairs next to a large window overlooking a paved landscape. 

 

She jokes that when she was first offered a job at the agency, also known as MI6, her mother questioned whether she wanted to commit herself to something so “wacky and unfamiliar”. “My dad just said, ‘Go for it.’” This self-effacing northerner says she is “not particularly brave”. But she is one of the most powerful spies in Britain. 

 

Kathy is one of four directors-general at SIS, each of whom reports to the chief, known as “C”. For the first time, three of them are women. They work in the most important and rapidly evolving areas of spycraft. Kathy is director of operations. Rebecca is the chief’s deputy, who oversees strategy. The most storied MI6 job of all belongs to Ada, who is the head of technology, known as “Q” after James Bond’s mastermind gadgeteer. I have spent six months interviewing them about how they reached the top in a traditionally male career and trying to understand what the life of a female spy is really like. 

 

Since the chief of MI6 is the only member of the agency who is named or permitted to speak in public, and because all of them have been men, this is the first time that female SIS officers have ever spoken on the record. I have agreed to change their names and omit certain details to protect them and the sources they work with. They agreed to speak to encourage women applicants and correct the perception of espionage as a man’s game.

The low profile of these three senior officers is in keeping with the history of women in British intelligence. In the past, women have been overlooked, relegated to secretarial roles or, before the SIS era, deployed as “honeytraps” to ensnare or blackmail enemies. When Vernon Kell co-founded MI6’s precursor in 1909, he identified as his ideal recruits men “who could make notes on their shirt cuff while riding on horseback”. His views on women were less well-known, but it is said that he once commented: “I like my girls to have good legs.” Despite having proved themselves with significant skill and bravery during the second world war, women in MI6 and its sister agency MI5 struggled to progress and were not regularly recruited as intelligence officers until the late 1970s.

 

This misogyny was repeated and exaggerated in popular novels written by former spies such as Ian Fleming and John le Carré. The fictional MI6 officer James Bond gropes his secretary, spices his operations with extravagant liaisons and encounters few female spies, the most famous being the dowdy Russian counter-intelligence officer Rosa Klebb. Film versions of Fleming’s books made famous an entire genre of “Bond girls”, conquests rather than fully drawn human beings. Le Carré, best known for the cold war spy chronicles starring a gnomic intelligence officer, George Smiley, expresses a similarly two-dimensional view. His women are sirens who exert a potent sexual hold over male protagonists but have little to say for themselves. The one exception, “Moscow-gazer” Connie Sachs, is a caricature in the opposite direction — an eccentric with an encyclopedic memory who succumbs to alcoholism after being sidelined from the job at which she excels. 

 

Sexist depictions are hardly confined to spy films, but they matter more in a profession in which mystery is encouraged and reality is classified. The perceptions built up through cultural references are, like so many aspects of the Bond legacy, double-edged. The films have built SIS a legendary brand, but their portrayal of ad-hoc killings and solo operations is far from accurate. For MI6, the historical absence of women is both a serious omission and a secret weapon. The UK’s main adversaries today — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — are repressive societies with few women in positions of power. For the female spy, this weakness in the enemy is exploitable. Precisely because they are so likely to be overlooked, women have the potential to be the best spies of all.

 

The countries of the world are more than happy to help spread the notion that spycraft is done by men, because the real work has been done by women for decades now, and will only continue to increase as more dumb, horny men get into positions of authoritarian power in strongman regimes all over the planet.

I'm good with that.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

As I've been telling you for years now, Republicans consider any election they lose to be "fraud", and Arizona GOP loser Kari Lake is no different.

 

Kari Lake, the losing Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, filed a lawsuit Friday contesting the results of an election that was certified by the state this week.

Ms. Lake’s lawsuit came after she had spent weeks making a series of public statements and social media posts aimed at sowing doubt in the outcome of a contest she lost by more than 17,000 votes to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. That loss was certified in documents signed on Monday by Ms. Hobbs, who currently serves as secretary of state.

A former news anchor, Ms. Lake centered her candidacy on false conspiratorial claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Donald J. Trump, who had endorsed her. For the past month, Ms. Lake, her campaign and other allies have been soliciting Election Day accounts from voters on social media and at rallies.

“If the process was illegitimate, then so are the results,” Ms. Lake said on Twitter on Friday evening after announcing her lawsuit. “Stay tuned, folks.”

Ms. Hobbs called Ms. Lake’s suit “baseless” in a post of her own on Twitter, describing it as the “latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.”

Ms. Lake sued Ms. Hobbs as well as officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is Arizona’s largest county.

The suit claims that the election was corrupted in Maricopa County and that she should be declared the winner. The 70-page filing relies on a hodgepodge of allegations, ranging from voter and poll worker accounts to poll numbers claiming that voters agreed with Ms. Lake on the election’s mismanagement. Some of what is cited comes not from last month’s election but from the 2020 contest. Other allegations accuse officials of wrongdoing for taking part in efforts to try to tamp down election misinformation.

Fields Moseley, a spokesman for Maricopa County, said the court system was the proper place for campaigns to make their case to challenge results.

“Maricopa County respects the election contest process and looks forward to sharing facts about the administration of the 2022 general election and our work to ensure every legal voter had an opportunity to cast their ballot,” Mr. Moseley said.

A number of those cited as experts in the lawsuit and one of the lawyers who filed the case — Kurt Olsen — are part of a loose election-denial network led by Mike Lindell, the pillow company entrepreneur who has been pushing conspiracy theories about election machines since early 2021. Another Lake lawyer, Bryan Blehm, represented the contractor Cyber Ninjas during the partisan audit of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results last year and also represented supervisors in Cochise County this year in a lawsuit over an attempt to carry out a hand-counted audit plan.

Ms. Lake’s legal action came as lawsuits were also filed Friday by two other Arizona Republicans who lost their midterm elections: Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, and Abe Hamadeh, the attorney general candidate. Mr. Hamadeh, who is trailing his opponent by 511 votes in a race that is undergoing a recount, was joined in his lawsuit by the Republican National Committee.

Mr. Hamadeh previously filed suit late last month seeking to overturn the election, but the suit was dismissed by a Maricopa County judge for being filed prematurely. His new suit — filed in Mohave County, a Republican stronghold where he won 75 percent of the vote — is more narrow than Ms. Lake’s, claiming that it is not questioning the election’s validity. But, as with Ms. Lake, Mr. Hamadeh is seeking an order overturning the election results and declaring him the winner, claiming he is not alleging widespread fraud but rather “certain errors and inaccuracies.” On Twitter late Friday, Mr. Hamadeh wrote that “Maricopa County faced unprecedented and unacceptable issues on Election Day.”

Dan Barr, a lawyer for Mr. Hamadeh’s opponent, Kris Mayes, said the lawsuit was “based on speculation” and contained “no real facts.” He said he planned to file motions to dismiss it and move it to Maricopa County early next week.

Mr. Finchem, one of several secretary of state candidates around the country who denied the results of the 2020 presidential race, lost by more than 120,000 votes. In his suit, filed in Maricopa County, Mr. Finchem alleged that Arizona had “failed miserably” to administer a “full, fair, and secure election” and asked that the court declare the election “annulled” and name him the winner.

That suit was filed by Daniel McCauley, who also represented Cochise County in its recent failed attempt to deny certification of the election results.

 

You can't have a circus without clowns, and there are plenty involved in this "legal" process. The whole point of course is to justify the violence coming against Arizona Democrats who won. If you somehow still thought that Mike Lindell and his army of election liars were just going to go away, well, you have your answers.

Only crushing sanctions, disbarment, and punitive contempt charges are going to begin to slow these guys down.

We'll see.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Special Counsel Jack Smith is already tired of Team Trump's lies when it comes to boxes of stolen classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago and is asking for a federal judge to hold the Trump legal eagles in contempt of court.

 

Prosecutors have urged a federal judge to hold Donald Trump’s office in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a May subpoena to return all classified documents in his possession, according to people familiar with the matter — a sign of how contentious the private talks have become over whether the former president still holds any secret papers.

In recent days, Justice Department lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell to hold Trump’s office in contempt, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sealed court proceedings. The hearing is scheduled for Friday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The request came after months of mounting frustration from the Justice Department with Trump’s team — frustration that spiked in June after the former president’s lawyers provided assurances that a diligent search had been conducted for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club and residence. But the FBI amassed evidence suggesting — and later confirmed through a court-authorized search — that many more remained.

One of the key areas of disagreement centers on the Trump legal team’s repeated refusal to designate a custodian of records to sign a document attesting that all classified materials have been returned to the federal government, according to two of these people. The Justice Department has repeatedly sought an unequivocal sworn written assurance from Trump’s team that all such documents have been returned, and Trump’s team has been unwilling to designate a custodian of records to sign such a statement while also giving assurances that they have handed documents back.

The precise wording of the filing could not be determined because it remains under seal. Trump is under investigation for three potential crimes: mishandling classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government records.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the former president’s lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent.” He added: “This is a political witch hunt unlike anything like this country has ever seen.”

 

Except of course both of those statements by Cheung are lies as well.

 

Trump has given up on his special master nonsense too, Judge Aileen Cannon served her purpose and essentially destroyed her career by allowing Trump to dodge any consequences until after the midterm elections, and with Cannon no longer being of any use to him, he's letting his request die without calling in the conservatives on the Roberts Court to bail him out.

Former President Donald Trump does not plan to appeal to the Supreme Court a lower court order that put an end to the special master review of documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN.

Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that a lower court judge had erred when she ordered the appointment of a third party, or special master, to review about 100 classified documents that investigators found when they searched his Florida home in August.

The former president’s legal team previously argued that they needed an outside expert to decide whether any of documents found at Mar-a-Lago could be privileged. They had until Thursday to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

On Thursday afternoon, the US 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued the mandate that puts its ruling into effect, meaning the time period Trump had been given to seek an order pausing the ruling has expired.

The Trump team’s decision not to appeal would mark the end of a monthslong legal battle over whether the review should take place and will allow the Justice Department to push forward in their investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents.

 

Judge Cannon was savaged by the three judges on the 11th Circuit panel, all Republican appointments, two of them appointed by Trump himself for the decision. Nobody on SCOTUS was going to touch it, and Trump no longer needed the delays anyway now that he's pitched his Big Mac-stained MAGA hat in the ring.

The terrible legal week from hell continues for Trump.

Sinema Verite', Con't

While she will still caucus with the Democrats, for now at least, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema says she's leaving the Democratic party to register as an independent.

 

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is changing her party affiliation to independent, delivering a jolt to Democrats’ narrow majority and Washington along with it.

In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans and suggested that she intends to vote the same way she has for four years in the Senate. “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she said.

Provided that Sinema sticks to that vow, Democrats will still have a workable Senate majority in the next Congress, though it will not exactly be the neat and tidy 51 seats they assumed. They’re expected to also have the votes to control Senate committees. And Sinema’s move means Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — a pivotal swing vote in the 50-50 chamber the past two years — will hold onto some but not all of his outsized influence in the Democratic caucus.

Sinema would not address whether she will run for reelection in 2024, and informed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of her decision on Thursday.

“I don’t anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure,” Sinema said, adding that some of the exact mechanics of how her switch affects the chamber is “a question for Chuck Schumer … I intend to show up to work, do the same work that I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent.”

 

What it means is if the last two years in the Senate was all about Chuck Schumer about keeping Joe Manchin happy, the next two now mean keeping Sinema from caucusing with the GOP, she might do in order to force another two years of 50-50 Senate power sharing, and even if the Dems can somehow magically defend all their other 2024 seats, we're stuck with Co-President Sinema for a long time.

But the big thing is that it now means any sort of primary challenge to her in 2024 is doomed and would assure someone like Blake Masters would win easily. She knew she was facing political oblivion if she stayed a Democrat as Rep. Ruben Gallego was waiting for his opportunity to knock her out of the running.

Now she can safely say that it's her way or the GOP. A three way race would go to the GOP, every time. Kyrsten Sinema did this to save Kyrsten Sinema's narrow ass, full stop. The caucusing with the GOP threat is secondary if she can't stay in her seat.

On the gripping hand, maybe she's just doing this for the lobbyist cred and she won't run in 2024 at all.

The Independent thing worked for Bernie, and worked for Angus King in Maine. It'll work for her if she wants it to.

We'll see.

Last Call For Bugging Out The Troops

The Biden White House is pissed tonight that House Democrats and Nancy Pelosi folded and gave in to Kevin McCarthy's extortion on the Pentagon funding bill, as McCarthy had threatened to kill the bill entirely unless Pelosi removed the military's Covid vaccine mandate.

The Biden administration fumed Wednesday at the near-certainty that Congress will strip away the Defense Department’s requirement that all military personnel be vaccinated against the coronavirus, upending a politically divisive policy that has led to the dismissal of nearly 8,500 service members and numerous lawsuits disputing its fairness.

The agreement, brokered as part of the Pentagon’s next spending bill, was celebrated by Republicans as a victory for individual choice. It comes despite opposition from President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who characterized the vaccine mandate as a way of protecting troops from covid-19 and preventing sprawling outbreaks that sideline entire units, undermine the military’s readiness and endanger national security.

The looming reversal — spurred by Republicans who had threatened to block passage of the $858 billion spending bill if the mandate wasn’t struck down — creates a rat’s nest for the Pentagon. Commanders whose job it was to enforce the mandate will face the onerous task of assessing whether — and how — to allow back into uniform those already separated from the military for refusing to follow orders. Managing overseas deployments, especially in countries that require visitors to be vaccinated, will create burdensome logistical headaches as well, officials said.

John Kirby, a White House spokesman, would not say whether Biden would entertain vetoing the bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), if as expected the legislation passes both chambers of Congress with the repeal intact. But Kirby emphasized that the administration believes scrubbing the vaccine mandate is a “mistake” and castigated those in the GOP who pushed to end it.

Republicans, he said, “have obviously decided that they’d rather fight against the health and well-being of those troops rather than protecting them.”

Privately, some Defense Department personnel were even more pointed.

One senior defense official said that when service members “inevitability get sick, and if they should die, it will be on the Republicans who insisted upon this.” The official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the polarizing issue, cited the sprawling coronavirus outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in spring 2020. The vessel — a major power-projection weapon — was sidelined for weeks through a cumbersome quarantine process with more than 1,200 cases in a crew of about 4,800, and one sailor died.

“How does this impact deployments? How does this impact overseas training assignments? How does this impact overseas assignments generally?” this official asked. “What are the downstream consequences of this shortsighted insistence in the new law?”

 

In fact, Republicans got several victories in the House version of the Pentagon funding bill.

 

“Make no mistake: this is a win for our military,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a statement late Tuesday night, warning that when the GOP takes over the House next year, Republicans will “work to finally hold the Biden administration accountable and assist the men and women in uniform who were unfairly targeted.”

While the decision to roll back the vaccine mandate was politically divisive, freezing negotiations between Republicans and Democrats on the House and Senate armed services committees for several days, it is far from the only Pentagon policy challenged in the compromise defense bill. The measure, which the full House and Senate still must vote to approve, pushes the Defense Department and related agencies to adopt several ventures, including new programs to arm Taiwan and scrutinize military assistance to Ukraine, and retain aging weapons systems the Biden administration has slated for decommissioning.

The bill creates several new accountability measures for the billions of dollars in military assistance being sent to Ukraine. Those include ordering reports from the Defense Department and a consortium of inspectors general about the methods being employed to track weapons, with the aim of identifying potential shortfalls.

While enhanced oversight of Ukraine aid has become a rallying cry for Republicans skeptical of the continued provision of advanced systems and munitions, the measures included in the defense bill had earlier secured bipartisan support in the House. The Senate never voted on its version of the bill before the compromise legislation’s unveiling.

 

And the reason this happened of course is that neither Pelosi nor Chuck Schumer had the votes to pass the bill without GOP support.

The sausage got made again, $850 billion worth of it.

 

It's A Harding Knock Life

Florida Republican state Rep. Joe Harding, the asshole behind the state's "Don't Say Gay" law, is facing numerous federal charges for pandemic business loan fraud.

 

The Florida legislator who sponsored legislation critics dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay" bill was accused of illegally obtaining tens of thousands of dollars in Covid-relief funds, authorities said Wednesday.

Joseph Harding, 35, was indicted on six counts of wire fraud, money laundering, making false statements and other crimes, the U.S. attorney’s office for Northern Florida said in a release.

Harding, a Republican whose district is south of Gainesville, is accused of seeking Covid-relief loans from the Small Business Administration in 2020 for two companies, Vak Shack Inc. and Harding Farms, according to the indictment.

The indictment alleges that in applications to the agency, Harding said the companies had half a dozen employees and gross revenues from the previous year totaling more than $800,000.

The companies had no employees, and state records showed they had been dormant in the months before the applications were filed, the indictment says.

Harding sought more than $150,000 in loans and received roughly $45,000 in January and February 2021, according to the indictment.

Harding pleaded not guilty to the charges in court Wednesday, court records show. Neither he nor his lawyer immediately responded to requests for comment.

 

Which is really funny, because after he embezzled tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars, he had the balls to go after Broward County businesses that got pandemic relief funds in March.

The news about Broward County’s new coronavirus aid-funded hotel had one Representative Thursday calling for Broward County to be shut out of future member funding projects — and had some of his Republican colleagues nodding in agreement.

“Maybe the FL Legislature should ban all member projects for Broward since they have so much money they can make ridiculous expenditures such as this,” Republican Rep. Blaise Ingoglia wrote. He quote tweeted a national Associated Press story that highlighted Broward County’s hotel and the $140 million in federal coronavirus aid it received in the first paragraph.

But at least one Broward County Senator called the Spring Hill lawmaker’s framing of the aid “complete misinformation.”

“His treatment is so emblematic of how we are treated in this Legislature,” said Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky, explaining the “we” as lawmakers from Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties. Those counties send more tax money to Tallahassee than they receive, she said.

“The hostility … it’s so palpable and it’s frustrating,” Polsky added.

Besides the “high-end,” 29-story, 800-room hotel that will go with the county’s expanded Convention Center, the story also detailed other projects around the U.S. that the American Rescue Plan helped fund. Those include a minor-league baseball stadium renovation, a ski area and an effort to woo the 2026 World Cup to New Jersey.

Reached later, Ingoglia said, “I’m sick and tired of local governments spending lavishly and egregiously and yet still crying poor and asking the Florida Legislature for money and continuing to raise taxes on people locally,” he said.

Republican Rep. Joe Harding responded with a meme, “I’m in.”

 

You'll have plenty of time to think up funny memes in prison, Joe.

 

Next time, keep your damn mouth shut, and keep your hands out of the cookie jar.