Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Homeschooling your kids is a choice millions of parents are making, and while I know people who have done that for reasons I approve of, there's also plenty of people homeschooling their kids so that they can do damage to public schools, and then there's the type who basically indoctrinate them into awful cults. Now, sometimes when I say "awful cults" I mean quasi-religious scary stuff that these kids spend the rest of their lives trying to break", and sometimes when I say "awful cults" in 2023, I mean "actual neo-Nazi white supremacists."

 

Earlier this month, while the rest of the country was celebrating the achievements of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., parents and children in the “Dissident Homeschool” network opened a lesson plan and were greeted with the words: “As Adolf Hitler wrote…”

The contents of the MLK lesson plan would be shocking for almost anyone, but for members of the 2,400-member “Dissident Homeschool” Telegram channel, this was a regular Monday at school.

“It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was,” the administrator of the network’s Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. ”He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.”

Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.

VICE News joined the group simply by clicking on a link, though the list of members was not publicly visible.

What’s even more disturbing, however, is that the couple who run the channel are not only teaching parents how to indoctrinate their children into this fascist ideology, they’re also encouraging them to meet up in real life and join even more radical groups, which could further reinforce their beliefs and potentially push them toward violent action.

The “Dissident Homeschool” network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon.” This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.

The researchers were able to identify the Lawrences through biographical details they shared in the Telegram channel’s group chat and on podcast appearances. One of the key clues to identifying them came when they revealed that they owned a German Shepherd called Blondi—the same name as Hitler’s dog.

The researchers found photos that Katja posted on Facebook with her German Shepherd, and were also able to confirm Katja Lawrence’s ownership of this dog through the Wyandot County dog licensing website dog search feature.

The Lawrences did not respond to multiple emails, text messages, social media messages, and phone calls from VICE News to discuss the contents of the report and their neo-Nazi homeschooling group.

Katja Lawrence, who is in her mid-30s, launched the channel in October 2021, because she “was having a rough time finding Nazi-approved school material for [her] homeschool children,” as she told the neo-Nazi podcast “Achtung! Amerikaner” last year.

Later in the same podcast episode, Lawrence expanded on her view on why she wanted to educate her children at home. “We have our children’s best interest at heart and nobody can do a better job than we can because it’s our child. We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” she said.

 

So yeah, Ohio Homeschooling Nazis, wanting to recruit people to join domestic terrorist militia groups. Yeah, I'd say there's probably a lot more networks like this that haven't been exposed yet. And remember, one of our political parties is doing everything they can to run cover for these actual, literal Nazis.

Countdown Shutdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

House GOP Circus Of The Damned Ringmaster Kevin McCarthy is predicting that President Biden will fold and give the GOP Clown Car the trillions in cuts to infrastructure, health care, and social programs Biden championed over the last two years, because the GOP is more than happy to crush the economy and throw us into a UK-style decade-long depression.

 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday he thinks President Joe Biden will come to an agreement with him regarding the debt ceiling, despite the Biden administration’s previous assertions that they wouldn’t negotiate with House Republicans on the issue.

“His staff tries to say something different, but I think the president will be willing to make an agreement together,” McCarthy said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” The pair are scheduled to meet Wednesday, McCarthy said.

Biden previously confirmed he planned to meet with the House speaker to talk about raising the nation’s borrowing limit, in order to pay back money that’s already been spent.

McCarthy has taken the opportunity to attempt to force government spending cuts; the U.S. needs to both lift the nation’s debt ceiling and “take control of this runaway spending,” McCarthy told host Margaret Brennan on Sunday.

The Biden administration has argued Congress has the responsibility to pass a debt limit increase without conditions attached, noting that Congress did exactly that three times during former President Donald Trump’s tenure.

Asked about White House concerns that some Republicans are seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare, McCarthy said, “Let’s take those off the table.”

Cuts to defense spending, however, are still in play, McCarthy suggested.

“I want to look at every dollar no matter where it’s being spent,” he said, when asked specifically about defense. “I want to eliminate waste wherever it is.”

 

The last "agreement" that the House GOP extracted out of a Democratic president was sequestration, which prolonged the Great Recession by years.  Biden learned his lesson a dozen years ago.

 

In 2011, after faltering debt limit negotiations with House Republicans brought the U.S. to the brink of economic calamity, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden sat by the fireplace in the Oval Office, with their top aides on the couch. While relieved at having narrowly averted disaster, they were stunned by what had transpired.

Obama and Biden made a vow: Never again.

They agreed that going forward, “Nobody can use the threat of default or not increasing the debt limit as a negotiating tool,” said a former Obama official involved in the fiscal discussions, who recounted the Oval Office meeting and the “lesson of 2011” they all discussed. “It made you hold your stomach. You couldn’t believe you were at this situation," the official said.

The U.S. had just suffered its first credit downgrade. Markets were rattled. Consumer and business confidence was shaken. Stocks took a hit. And the recovery from the Great Recession was in question. Democrats averted the cliff — by acceding to $2 trillion in spending cuts the GOP had demanded after negotiations on a “grand bargain” broke down — but Obama and Biden agreed that the mere threat of default had taken a serious toll.

“They said: This is the sad lesson we’ve learned,” the Obama official said, describing the mood in the room. “It was an unimaginable self-inflicted wound in 2011.”

Twelve years later, Biden is executing on that lesson as he faces down a new Republican-controlled House that is similarly demanding spending cuts as a concession for extending the debt ceiling. He says there won’t be any negotiations, and Congress must allow the government to pay its bills. “I will not let anyone use the full faith and credit of the United States as a bargaining chip,” Biden said Thursday in Virginia.

 

Having said that, Obama and Biden's hard lesson prolonged the Great Recession well into 2014 and Black families still haven't recovered. The Black middle class in this country is gone and it's likely never coming back.

Another blow like sequestration would finish off tens of millions of Americans, and Biden knows that.

That's The Sound Of The Police, Con't

Once again, Democrats want a "national conversation" on police brutality, violence, and murder of civilians and especially Black folk, but America is not and never will be in my lifetime ready for a serious conversation on anything involving race.

Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin said Sunday that the brutal footage of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols demonstrated the need for “a national conversation” on law enforcement.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” the Illinois Democrat said, “We need a national conversation about policing in a responsible, constitutional and humane way. These men and women with badges put them on each day and risk their lives for us. I know that, but we also see from these videos horrible conduct by these same officers in unacceptable situations.”

Durbin told host Martha Raddatz “that law enforcement, by and large, is a state and local responsibility,” but added that Congress can insert itself into the conversation, noting a package of police reforms that Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) had been working on after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police in May 2020.

That legislation stalled. One factor was a debate over the question of whether to retain “qualified immunity” for police officers.

“I think,” Durbin said of Booker, “he and Senator Scott should sit down again quickly to see if we can revive that effort.”

Nichols died Jan. 10, three days after being beaten repeatedly after a police stop by five Memphis officers, who have since been fired and charged in his death.

As for his own reaction to the footage of the beating of Nichols, Durbin said he was aghast.

“It was horrible. Inhumane. My heart goes out to the Tyre Nichols family to think that their son went through this,” he said, adding later: “What we saw on the streets of Memphis was just inhumane and horrible.”

First-term Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) said she found Nichols’ death horrifying but not surprising, saying it was not the first time the nation has seen an African American mother grieve in response to her child’s death.

“There are so many Black cities across the country that have re-lived this,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But it’s painful every single time and never gets any easier.”

 

The conversation on police and race is "Actual effective police reforms, oversight, and consequences of police violence against Americans they are supposed to be protecting will never happen, because it would deprive the national white supremacist party of one of its most effective tools in enforcing white supremacy."

You can dance around it all you want to, but the millions of law enforcement officers in America are there to chiefly oppress the descendants of slaves for the last 160 years. The "conversation" has been going since long before I was born, all of my life, and will be going long after I'm dead and gone as even a digital memory.

Democrats at least acknowledged the problem exists at the systemic level. They don't know what to do, and can't do much at all without Republicans blocking, destroying, and reversing it, but at least they know we're dying out here.

The other guys, well, they're actively assisting the killing.

Sunday Long Read: Fit As A Fiddle

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Chicago Magazine and Elly Fishman, who answers the question "Who do you call when you have a sick Stradivarius?"

It’s a few minutes past 10 in the morning, and John Becker stands just inside the door to his company’s office in the Fine Arts Building downtown. He wears a black workman’s apron, which he fits to his body by wrapping the ties around his torso twice. With his shoulders slightly hunched, he quietly observes the almost surreal scene unfolding before him.

A few feet away, Joshua Bell and James Ehnes, two of the most prominent solo violinists on the planet, hover over an Arts and Crafts–style wood table. Normally, Bell, a former child prodigy known for his virtuosic, animated playing, and Ehnes, a musician’s musician celebrated for his technical prowess, would be the superstars in the room. Both have won multiple Grammy Awards, and between the two of them, they have performed in nearly every major concert hall and with all the best orchestras in the world. But here, in Becker’s studio inside his office, another icon takes center stage.

“I’m really nervous and excited,” says Bell, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “It’s like meeting my wife again after two months. I’m a little overwhelmed.”

“Oh yeah, I understand the feeling,” Ehnes chimes in, his tone nearly giddy. His eyes are set on an object perched on a gray cloth that covers the tabletop. “I’ve never seen this violin before. It’s incredible. It’s so beautiful.” He pauses as though to take in every contour. The spruce wood — a swirl of orange and red hues — glows under the morning light. “It’s stunning.”

The violin in question belongs to Bell. The 310-year-old instrument, which Bell has said is worth as much as $15 million, is among the roughly 650 made by the renowned 18th-century Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari that survive today. Bell left it with Becker for repairs, and over the past two months, the master luthier applied protective polish to preserve the original varnish, removed the top to make internal repairs, and handcrafted several cleats to reinforce tiny cracks in the wood. Bell has flown in from New York to retrieve the violin, which has been his concert instrument since 2001, before he departs on a tour of South America and Italy.

Ehnes plans to leave his own Strad with Becker for more minor repairs — a bridge adjustment, a varnish touchup, a new sound post — which will take only a day. The Canadian has made this essential stop before heading to concerts in South Korea and Japan.

Becker turns to Bell and asks if he wants to give the violin a try. It may look beautiful thanks to the fresh polish, but after 213 hours of painstaking work, the true test is how it feels and sounds.

“Yes, I do,” Bell responds, eagerly picking up the instrument.

Becker doesn’t play violin, but his ears are more attuned to the famed sound of Stradivarius instruments than perhaps anyone else’s in the world. He steps back as Bell raises his bow.

 

It pays to remember that some of the greatest artists in the world don't play music or paint pictures or sing arias, they allow those artists to keep doing so with their own talent and dedication to the craft. To read about two world-famous violinists fanboying out over the master who keeps their multi-million dollar instruments in top condition is gratifying to say the least.

Last Call For Hammer Heads

The security video of Paul Pelosi's attacker being released this weekend should end the ridiculous conspiracy theories, but as Vanity Fair's Bess Levin reminds us, we all know that the Right-Wing Noise Machine will just move the goalposts.

 

In the immediate wake of a man breaking into Nancy Pelosi’s San Fransisco home and viciously attacking her husband, the right-wing media, Republicans, and their conservative followers got into formation to do what they do best: spread baseless rumors about the assault and mock the victim.

Tucker Carlson fueled conspiracy theories that Paul Pelosi and his attacker, David DePape, were lovers. Elon Musk, who’d become the owner of Twitter just three days prior, shared a story with his 112 million followers from a website known to traffic in false information, that the man was a prostitute with whom Pelosi had gotten into a dispute. (He later deleted the tweet but not before writing, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.”) Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a “Paul Pelosi” Halloween costume made up of simply underwear and hammer, writing: “The internet remains undefeated.” Representative Claudia Tenney commented “LOL” on a photo of a group of men holding hammers beside a gay pride flag, before deleting the tweet. Charlie Kirk, the conservative YouTube host, said on his podcast he hoped an “amazing patriot” would go bail out DePape, “ask him some questions,” and become a “midterm hero.”

On Thursday, Fox News host Sean Hannity had a guest on his show who speculated that set-to-be-released footage of the attack would “not help the prosecution” and raise “more questions than it answers.”

On Friday, footage of the attack was released. In addition to being deeply difficult to watch—viewers can see the moment when DePape beats the 82-year-old Pelosi with a hammer—it also makes the gang at Fox News and beyond not only look very stupid but like the depraved ghouls they are. Will they see it that way and apologize to the victim and his family? We’re going to go out on a limb and assume the answer starts with an “h” and ends with a “—ell f--king no.” Are you familiar at all with how these people operate? They’re about to double down, if they haven’t already.

 

Yep. This is going to be an enduring conspiracy theory, and your Fox-watching uncle will go to his grave believing it.

 

 

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The Memphis PD body cam footage of the brutal murder of Tyre Nichols at a traffic stop earlier this month was released to the public, and it is even worse than most experts feared. I won't post it here, but it is available at the NBC News story linked.

 

Video released by authorities in Memphis Friday shows police officers beating Tyre Nichols after a traffic stop that ended with his hospitalization and death.

The four videos released by the Memphis Police Department include video from surveillance and body worn cameras.

The city’s top police official, Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis, has previously described the conduct captured in the disturbing and graphic video as “heinous, reckless and inhumane.”

Nichols, 29, was hospitalized in critical condition and died three days after Memphis police officers stopped him Jan. 7. Details about what occurred between Nichols and the officers have been sparse; police initially said Nichols ran during the reckless driving stop and that a "confrontation" occurred in an effort to detain him.

However, Davis told MSNBC Friday that an investigation and review of available camera footage could not "substantiate" the reckless driving claim.

Nichols' family was offered a private viewing of the video Monday. His mother, RowVaughn Wells, made it only through the first minute, family attorneys Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci said.

While she hasn’t seen all the footage, Wells said “what I’ve heard is very horrific.”

“Any of you who have children, please don’t let them see it,” she added during a news conference Friday.

 

The utterly brutal thing about this particular murder by cop is that the officers were all Black, and they killed him anyway.  They were all part of the department's "Scorpion Squad", supposedly elite officers with the training to respond to the city's Black neighborhoods.

And they still butchered him.

The Justice Department and FBI chief Chris Wray are making a full investigation, so hopefully we'll see these assholes in a box somewhere. Police Chief Cerelyn Davis has fired the officers, and all have been charged with murder.

We'll see what happens, but I'm hoping very long prison sentences.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Ronna Rolls On

Ronna Romney McDaniel is rewarded again for her terrible RNC performance, because the party of losers rewards losing races abut getting money.

The Republican National Committee on Friday voted to reelect Ronna McDaniel to a fourth two-year term as party chair, opting not to punish her for the GOP’s recent string of electoral defeats.

McDaniel fended off a challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, a California lawyer who has represented former president Donald Trump and the unsuccessful Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, seizing on grass-roots furor demanding new leadership. McDaniel positioned herself as a steady hand and honest broker who can hold together the party’s factions and continue building out the RNC’s financial and field resources. She prevailed on the first ballot, 111-51.

McDaniel argued that the RNC did its job in the midterms by providing the infrastructure for turning out voters. She acknowledged that the party struggled with its nominees — a problem that many Republicans have attributed to influence of Trump, though McDaniel didn’t address the former president in her remarks on Friday morning.

“The RNC, we don’t get to pick the candidates, the voters do,” McDaniel said. “We don’t get to call the plays, we don’t get to say what the campaigns run on. But we do provide resoureces and we build a critical infrastructure to help candidates win.” McDaniel said Republicans won the popular vote by 4 million, equivalent to 297 Electoral College votes, and made inroads with minority voters.

Interviews with RNC members gathered at a luxury resort here suggested that Dhillon’s appearances on conservative media and her alliance with right-wing influencers failed to sway, and in some cases even backfired with, many of the 168 committee members whose votes will decide the outcome. Still, a nod of support Thursday morning from potential presidential candidate Ron DeSantis underscored the competitiveness of the challenge, with a person close to Dhillon’s campaign saying she picked up 11 votes after the Florida governor’s endorsement.

“Only 168 people can vote,” said Benjamin Proto, a committee member from Connecticut who is supporting McDaniel. “I don’t care what Tucker Carlson thinks the next chairman should do, or what Charlie Kirk does,” he said, referring to the Fox News host and Turning Point USA founder respectively. “So I think that was a mistake on Harmeet’s part, it was just a strategic error.”

 

Ronna McDaniel knows how to schmooze and how to stay in power, much like Democrats had with Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Neither knew how to have their party win elections very well, and McDaniel in particular only was appointed *after* Trump won in 2016. In 2018, 2020, and 2022 Republicans won minimal gains in the House and lost the Senate, and oh yeah, lost the White House.

Why anyone thinks she'll make a difference in 2024? It's all about the fundraising.

Last Call For In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions, Con't

The great Kroog asks:

 

Can Anything Be Done to Assuage Rural Rage?

 

Short answer: No.

Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism. As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters; but this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.

But is this shift permanent? Can anything be done to assuage rural rage? 

Long answer: After 30, 40 years of making white rural voters hate everything that isn't a white rural voter? 

 

Hell no. Stop trying and move on already, we're deep into triage mode now. Save who you can.

 

Really Long Answer: Yes, but it's going to take a generation to undo the damage since the Newt Gingrich era, and we have to ask ourselves if we have the time and energy to do that before the fascists gain permanent one-party control of several states, and the hard data shows it's largely too late in places like Ohio, Florida, and Alabama. 

 

The process of reforming these states will take decades and while we have to get started on saving people, the greater good of the rest of the country's federal government has to take priority. 

 

Take it from a person in Kentucky, just one gubernatorial election this year away from one-party Republican rule for the next 20 years.

This has been In Which Zandar Answers Your Burning Questions.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's idea of "criminal justice reform" when the rest of the country is openly questioning the death penalty's efficacy as a deterrent, when thousands of death row inmates have been exonerated by evidence, when prosecutions have been wiped clean due to racism and railroading, is to make it easier to sentence people to die.

 

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday outlined a sweeping criminal justice proposal that came packed with changes that have long been politically popular with conservatives, setting up a fight with outmatched Democrats during the 2023 legislative session.

DeSantis addressed the Florida Sheriffs Association on Monday and rolled out his criminal justice package at the Miami offices of the Miami Police Benevolent Association.

At both events, DeSantis stressed he wanted the GOP-led Legislature to change Florida law to allow juries to administer the death penalty by a supermajority rather than requiring unanimity, which has been state law since 2017. DeSantis has tied this proposal to the case of the Parkland school shooter, who shot and killed 17 people but was spared the death penalty because one of the jurors was against the death penalty.

“One juror should not be able to veto that,” DeSantis said Thursday. “I don’t think justice was served.”

DeSantis also wants lawmakers to crack down on colorful fentanyl pills that look like candy and are commonly referred to as “rainbow fentanyl.” His proposal would make it a first degree felony to possess, sell, or manufacture fentanyl that resembles candy. It would also make it a $1 million penalty for trafficking those pills to children. It’s the second year in the row DeSantis focused on fentanyl. Last year, he championed increased mandatory minimum sentences for fentanyl trafficking.

 

Just need eight people out of twelve to kill a person, and a million dollar fine for selling something that doesn't actually exist. 

Meanwhile, last week's Desantism is causing a major ruckus, because there's no possible way it's not outright racism.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is facing mounting backlash regarding his administration’s decision to prohibit an Advanced Placement high school course on African American studies, with Black leaders rallying in the capital, a prominent civil rights lawyer threatening to sue and state lawmakers urging him to reverse the decision.

Attorney Ben Crump accused DeSantis of violating the federal and state constitutions Wednesday by refusing to permit the course. His legal team noted that a federal judge found a 2010 law in Arizona that banned a Mexican American studies program from Tucson schools unconstitutional and officials “motivated by racial animus.”

The state Department of Education contends that the class is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law.” A new education law championed by DeSantis requires lessons on race be taught in “an objective manner” and “not used to indoctrinate or persuade students to a particular point of view.” Some education advocates and teachers say the law is so broadly framed that it is having a chilling effect on the teaching of Black history.

“If he does not negotiate with the College Board to allow AP African American Studies to be taught in classrooms across the state of Florida, these three young people will be the lead plaintiffs in a historic lawsuit,” Crump said before he introduced the students.

Crump has been involved in several high-profile civil rights cases involving Black Americans and vowed that DeSantis “cannot exterminate our culture.”

The latest controversy in Florida education policies began this month, when the DeSantis administration said a pilot Advanced Placement course on Black history would not be approved by the state Department of Education because it violated state law and “lacks educational value.”

 

DeSantis knows he's going to sued. What he's dreaming of is a Supreme Court that will agree with him that Black history has no educational value, and make erasing it from US history nationwide possible.

The Durham Debacle Debate

The NY Times takes a hard look at Special Counsel John Durham and Trump AG Bill Barr, having utterly failed at the charges he brought against Democrats after years of screwing around, and discovers among other things that he sat on apparent wrongdoing that he discovered Donald Trump doing and refused to move on it.

It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years — far longer than the Russia investigation itself — Mr. Durham’s work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws — including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court — that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos — suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation — to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham’s decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign’s myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

 

There was never any doubt that the Durham investigation was a completely partisan witch hunt, essentially everything Trump accused the Mueller probe of being, and it was so inept it couldn't find any actual criminal activity.

But he sure did go after Hillary Clinton and George Soros, while completely ignoring Trump's criminal activities.

Maybe Merrick Garland should, you know, investigate.

Last Call For Recession, Receding

We're not in a recession, folks. We're just in a booming economy, because we have a Democratic president, and a hateful, garbage media.

 

The U.S. economy finished 2022 in solid shape even as questions persist over whether growth will turn negative in the year ahead.

Fourth-quarter gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced for the October-to-December period, rose at a 2.9% annualized pace, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected a reading of 2.8%.

The growth rate was slightly slower than the 3.2% pace in the third quarter.

Stocks turned mixed following the report while Treasury yields were mostly higher.

Consumer spending, which accounts for about 68% of GDP, increased 2.1% for the period, down slightly from 2.3% in the previous period but still positive.

Inflation readings moved considerably lower to end the year after hitting 41-year highs in the summer. The personal consumption expenditures price index increased 3.2%, in line with expectations but down sharply from 4.8% in the third quarter. Excluding food and energy, the chain-weighted index rose 3.9%, down from 4.7%.

While the inflation numbers indicated price increases are receding, they remain well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

Along with the boost from consumers, increases in private inventory investment, government spending and nonresidential fixed investment helped lift the GDP number.

A 26.7% plunge in residential fixed investment, reflecting a sharp slide in housing, served as a drag on the growth number, as did a 1.3% decline in exports. The housing drop subtracted about 1.3 percentage points from the headline GDP number.

Federal government spending rose 6.2%, due largely to an 11.2% surge on nondefense outlays, while state and local expenditures were up 2.3%. Government spending in total added 0.64 percentage points to GDP.

Inventory increases also played a significant role, adding nearly 1.5 percentage points.

“The mix of growth was discouraging, and the monthly data suggest the economy lost momentum as the fourth quarter went on,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics. “We still expect the lagged impact of the surge in interest rates to push the economy into a mild recession in the first half of this year.”

 

If we have another situation in 2023 like we did in the first half of last year with negative GDP turning positive the second half, we're going to still be good. Yes, interest rates are going to slow the GDP. The Fed is still the Fed, and it will raise rates until inflation is smashed under 2%. That's going to take another 6-12 months.

We'll see how much pain the labor market goes through. I want to believe that the economy won't slide into a real hardcore recession, but with the House GOP ready to completely collapse us into a recession over the debt ceiling, all bets are off.

Orange You Glad He's Back, Con't

Facebook says they are reinstating Donald Trump's account...now with guardrails to protect America, or something.

 

Social media is rooted in the belief that open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values, especially at a time when they are under threat in many places around the world. As a general rule, we don’t want to get in the way of open, public and democratic debate on Meta’s platforms — especially in the context of elections in democratic societies like the United States. The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box. But that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of real world harm — a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse — we act.

Two years ago, we took action in what were extreme and highly unusual circumstances. We indefinitely suspended then-US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts following his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. We then referred that decision to the Oversight Board — an expert body established to be an independent check and balance on our decision-making. The Board upheld the decision but criticized the open-ended nature of the suspension and the lack of clear criteria for when and whether suspended accounts will be restored, directing us to review the matter to determine a more proportionate response.

In response to the Board, we imposed a time-bound suspension of two years from the date of the original suspension on January 7, 2021 — an unprecedented length of time for such a suspension. We also clarified the circumstances in which accounts of public figures could be restricted during times of civil unrest and ongoing violence, and introduced a new Crisis Policy Protocol to guide our assessment of on and off-platform risks of imminent harm so we can respond with specific policy and product actions. In our response to the Oversight Board, we also said that before making any decision on whether or not to lift Mr. Trump’s suspension, we would assess whether the risk to public safety has receded.

The suspension was an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances. The normal state of affairs is that the public should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms. Now that the time period of the suspension has elapsed, the question is not whether we choose to reinstate Mr. Trump’s accounts, but whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified.

To assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021 has sufficiently receded, we have evaluated the current environment according to our Crisis Policy Protocol, which included looking at the conduct of the US 2022 midterm elections, and expert assessments on the current security environment. Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out. As such, we will be reinstating Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. However, we are doing so with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.

Like any other Facebook or Instagram user, Mr. Trump is subject to our Community Standards. In light of his violations, he now also faces heightened penalties for repeat offenses — penalties which will apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated from suspensions related to civil unrest under our updated protocol. In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.

I give it until St. Patrick's Day before Trump gets banned again for one of his tirades. Only this time when he's punished, the House GOP will be ready to go with subpoenas and hearings, and plenty of fundraising off the circus mess.

The notion that the Trump threat has "subsided" is laughable, but I guess we're going to have to watch him call for another insurrection or worse until someone decides to put him in jail.

Last Call For The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

The Biden administration announced a national package of renter protections as rents have soared 20% or more in the last two years.

 

Under pressure to address the nation’s soaring housing costs, the Biden administration on Wednesday announced significant new actions to protect tenants and make renting more affordable.

The announcement involves multiple federal agencies that will gather information on unfair housing practices. It also includes a “Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights” that, while not binding, sets clear guidelines to help renters stay in affordable housing. The White House is also launching a call to action, dubbed the “Resident-Centered Housing Challenge,” that aims to get housing providers as well as state and local governments to strengthen policies in their own markets.

After months of deliberation, the moves come as the housing market continues to pose a serious problem for people who don’t own their homes — and for the economy overall. While inflation has fallen for the past six months, average rental prices have continued to increase rapidly, disproportionately hurting vulnerable households that spend the bulk of their budgets on rent. Meanwhile, the country is stuck in a massive housing shortfall, complicating efforts to lower costs or simply find enough places for the 44 million American renter households to go.

“This is something the president identified as being necessary on the campaign trail, and is not necessarily purely a product of the current surge in rents, because this is much more expansive than thinking about this in the context of rent growth,” said Erika Poethig, special assistant to the president for housing and urban policy at the Domestic Policy Council, in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s about thinking about many other aspects of what contributes to a fair market.”

For over a year, tenant leaders, housing experts and legal organizations have pushed the Biden administration to do everything in its power to tackle soaring rent costs, arguing that America’s housing issues are an economic crisis. In recent months, advocates say they were frustrated that the proposals weren’t coming faster or with more force, arguing that the White House was hesitant to test the limits of its executive authority or issue direct requirements to local governments and federal agencies. Tenants and community organizers also met with White House officials and agency heads, and held a congressional briefing sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in November to push for a sweeping set of new regulations.

Organizers with People’s Action and the Homes Guarantee said the announcement included some wins, like getting the Federal Housing Finance Agency to work on identifying ways to adopt and enforce tenant protections, including policies that limit high rent increases at properties with FHFA-backed mortgages.

But in an analysis of the proposals, they said the policies weren’t enough to change “tenants’ lives materially today.” The announcement includes no conditions on federal financing, for example, but instead gets closest with a carrot approach, like providing incentives to landlords who accept vouchers.

 

The solution is MORE RENTAL MULTIFAMILY HOUSING but nobody wants to build it, and nobody wants to live near it in a owned home, so when it does get built it's way out in the middle of nowhere.

 

The incentives are a start, but we need more housing period.

The Circus Of The Damned, Con't

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has made good on his purely political promise to his fellow GOP clowns, removing Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Select Intelligence Committee, in retaliation for Republicans being voted off committees two years ago for fomenting violence.

 

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday unilaterally exiled Representatives Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the House Intelligence Committee, making good on a longstanding threat to expel the California Democrats in his first major act of partisan retribution since taking the majority.

The move was a much-anticipated tit-for-tat after Democrats, then in the majority, voted in 2021 to eject two Republicans, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, from congressional committees for internet posts that advocated violence against their political enemies. It was also payback for the decision by Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, to bar Republicans who had helped former President Donald J. Trump spread the election lies that fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol from sitting on the special committee investigating the riot.

Now that he is in control, Mr. McCarthy sought to punish Mr. Schiff and Mr. Swalwell, two favorite foils of Republicans who had played key roles in the two impeachments of Mr. Trump, though he denied that his decision was retaliatory. Instead, he argued that both men had displayed behavior unbecoming of the committee tasked with overseeing the nation’s intelligence services.

In a letter outlining his decision to Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, Mr. McCarthy decried what he described as “the misuse” of the intelligence panel during the last four years, arguing that it had “severely undermined its primary national security and oversight missions — ultimately leaving our nation less safe.” He called the dismissals of Mr. Schiff and Mr. Swalwell necessary “to maintain a standard worthy of this committee’s responsibilities.”

Mr. McCarthy has said that Mr. Schiff “openly lied to the American people” when he chaired the intelligence panel during Mr. Trump’s presidency. In September 2019, Mr. Schiff was excoriated by Republicans for dramatically paraphrasing the contents of a telephone call in which Mr. Trump had pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, and for implying, falsely, that his committee had had no contact with a whistle-blower raising concerns about their conversation.

Earlier, in March 2019‌, ‌Republicans on the committee had demanded that Mr. Schiff step aside for having said that he had seen “more than circumstantial evidence” of collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russians in 2017. That claim had been called into question by the findings of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who had looked into the matter, which Attorney General ‌William P. Barr‌ had summarized in a letter to certain members of Congress. Republicans accused Mr. Schiff of having compromised the integrity of the panel by knowingly promoting false information.

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday night, Mr. Schiff countered that Mr. McCarthy was “trying to remove me from the intel committee for holding his boss at Mar-a-Lago accountable.”

“It’s just another body blow to the institution of Congress that he’s behaving this way, but it just shows how weak he is as a speaker,” he added.

Republicans have railed against Mr. Swalwell, who served as a manager in Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, citing an Axios report that reported that Mr. Swalwell was targeted by a suspected Chinese spy as part of an influence campaign in 2014, before he served on the intelligence panel. The report said that around 2015, federal investigators alerted Mr. Swalwell to their concerns and he “cut off all ties.”

“This is all about political vengeance,” Mr. Swalwell said of Mr. McCarthy’s action.

Because the intelligence panel is a “select” committee, the speaker has the authority to dictate who can serve, just as Ms. Pelosi was able to block Republicans appointed by Mr. McCarthy from the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. However, Mr. Schiff and Mr. Swalwell are not expected to lose their other committee assignments.

 

It's about revenge, pure and simple. McCarthy, being the weak, vacillating buffoon that he is, may not have the votes to strip Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of her committee assignments however. 

Mr. McCarthy has also threatened to remove Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from congressional committees for criticism of Israel that Republicans and some Democrats have condemned as anti-Semitic. Ms. Omar apologized in 2019 for saying that support for Israel in Washington was “all about the Benjamins baby,” a comment that members of both parties denounced as a reference to an anti-Semitic trope. She was criticized again in 2021 when she made statements that appeared to compare human rights abuses by Israel with acts committed by Hamas and the Taliban, and later said she had not meant to equate them.

It was not clear whether Mr. McCarthy, who holds a razor-thin majority, had the votes to oust Ms. Omar. At least two Republicans have publicly expressed qualms about doing so.

And the Minnesota Democrat on Tuesday night told reporters at the Capitol that some Republicans had told her privately they believed such a move would be “uncalled for.”

“They are trying to do whatever it is that they can within their conference to make sure there is no vote to remove me from the Foreign Affairs Committee,” she added.

 

We'll see what Kevin promises to give away to keep what little power he has left.

Tech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, Con't

The antitrust legal troubles for Google continue with another massive federal lawsuit over the company's monopoly on digital ads, and a recommendation from the Justice Department that the company be broken up.

 

The Justice Department and a group of states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally abusing a monopoly over the technology that powers online advertising, in the agency’s first antitrust lawsuit against a tech giant under President Biden and an escalation in legal pressure on one of the world’s biggest internet companies.

The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising.” The lawsuit asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to force Google to sell its suite of ad technology products and stop the company from engaging in allegedly anticompetitive practices.

It was the fifth antitrust lawsuit filed by U.S. officials against Google since 2020, as lawmakers and regulators around the world try to rein in the power that big tech companies exert over information and commerce online. In Europe, Amazon, Google, Apple and others have faced antitrust investigations and charges, while regulators have passed new laws to limit social media’s harms and some practices such as data collection.

In the United States, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was sued in 2020 over claims that it illegally crushed nascent rivals. Google has faced particular scrutiny. In 2020, a group of states led by Texas filed an antitrust lawsuit against it involving advertising technology, while the Justice Department and another group of states separately sued Google over claims that it abused its dominance over online search. In 2021, some states also sued over Google’s app store practices.

The Justice Department and Google didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Biden administration is trying to use uncommon legal theories to clip the wings of some of America’s largest businesses. The Federal Trade Commission has asked a judge to block Meta from buying a virtual-reality start-up, a rare case that argues a deal could harm potential competition in a nascent market. The agency has also challenged Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of the video game publisher Activision Blizzard, a notable action because the two companies are not primarily seen as direct competitors. 

 

It's definitely not helping Google's case when it does things like "Make $13 billion in profits in 2022" and then "Lay off 10,000 employees" because $13 billion in profits is apparently not enough. 

Still, it's going to be difficult to win this case.

The administration’s efforts are expected to meet fierce resistance in federal courts. Judges have for decades subscribed to a view that antitrust violations should mostly be determined by whether they increase prices for consumers. But Jonathan Kanter, the chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair, have said they are willing to lose cases that allow them to stretch the boundaries of the law and that put corporate America on notice.

 

So, don't expect much here from this particular case. Google is still going to control nearly all digital advertising in the US and will for the foreseeable future.