Russian To Judgment: Well That Was Fast

Friday night's coup in Russia was over by Saturday night, as Putin supposedly has cut a deal with Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercs, but at this point both Putin and Prigozhin, and the war on Ukraine, are both on borrowed time and everyone knows it.

 

A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.

Prigozhin and his men came within 125 miles of the capital—that is, closer to Moscow than Philadelphia is to Washington, D.C. He then said that a deal had been struck and that Wagner’s forces were turning around to avoid bloodshed. Apparently, however, the blood Prigozhin saved from being shed was his own. If the “deal” announced by the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accurately reflects an actual settlement, Prigozhin has in the space of a day gone from being a powerful warlord to a man living on borrowed time in a foreign country, waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable retribution.

According to Peskov, Russia is dropping all charges against Prigozhin, who must now go into exile in Belarus. Wagner fighters who did not take part in the rebellion will be given amnesty, and then they will sign contracts that will bring them under the control of Shoigu’s Ministry of Defense. I suggested yesterday that Shoigu’s attempt to seize Wagner’s men and dissolve the force might be one of the reasons Prigozhin went on the march. This outcome is a defeat of the first order for Prigozhin, who has now lost everything except his life.

We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly. One possibility is that Prigozhin had allies in Moscow who promised to support him, and somehow that support fell through: Perhaps his friends in the Kremlin got cold feet, or were less numerous than Prigozhin realized, or never existed at all. Prigozhin, after all, is not exactly a military genius or a diplomat; he’s a violent, arrogant, emotional man who may well have embarked on this scheme huffing from a vat of his own overconfidence.

Nonetheless, this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin. The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game. Putin reportedly worries a great deal about being assassinated, and so perhaps he wanted to hunker down until he had more clarity about who might be in league with Prigozhin. But whatever the reason, he vowed to deal with Prigozhin decisively and then blew town, probably to his retreat at Valdai, in a move that looked weak and disorganized.

Bringing in President Aleksandr Lukashenko as a broker at first seemed an odd choice on Putin’s part, but it makes a bit more sense in light of the supposed deal. The Belarusian autocrat could personally vouch for Prigozhin’s safe passage; Lukashenko has no connections in Moscow that are more important than Putin; he does not live or work in the Kremlin and so he was a secure choice to carry out Putin’s terms; he owes Putin his continued rule and has no reason to betray him. Also, sending in Lukashenko was something of a power move: Putin is a former intelligence officer, and in that world, Prigozhin is merely a scummy convict. The two men were friendly before this, but they were not equals. It would have been a huge loss of face for the president of a great power to negotiate with his former chef in person.

Prigozhin gets to stay alive, at least for the moment, but his life as he knew it (and maybe in any sense) is over. Putin, however, is now politically weaker than ever. The once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict—again, in Putin’s culture, among the lowest of the low—just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine.

Prigozhin drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. Putin, however, may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation. All of the options were terrifying: Ordering the Russian military to attack armed Russian men would have been a huge risk, especially because those men (and their hatred of the bureaucrats at the Defense Ministry) have at least some support among Russia’s officers and political elites. Killing Prigozhin outright was also a high-risk proposition; with their leader dead and the Russian military closing in, the Wagnerites might have decided to fight to the death.

This wound to Putin’s power goes deep, but how deep is difficult to gauge for now, especially because we do not know whether Shoigu or Gerasimov still have their jobs. And although the rebellion has taken Wagner off the field in Ukraine, Putin may still seek to cover this ignominious moment by escalating Russia’s brutality there. But two things appear certain. First, Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals both with Prigozhin and with his own colleagues in the Kremlin that are, by any definition, a humiliation. And second, Yevgeny Prigozhin has changed the Russian political environment surrounding Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Prigozhin’s rebellion and its effects will last beyond today, but how long he will live in Belarus—or stay alive in Belarus—to see how the rest of it plays out is unclear.

 

At this point nobody knows how this will end, and anyone who says they do is lying. But the current situation in both Ukraine and Russia is untenable. We've already seen one massive crack in the dam. More are coming. And Ukraine now has even more of a reason to fight back.

Sunday Long Read: Behind The Silicon Curtain

"Artificial Intelligence will come for your job" is the prevailing conventional wisdom, but like most wild and disruptive predictions of the future, the reality is a lot more boring.

 

A few months after graduating from college in Nairobi, a 30-year-old I’ll call Joe got a job as an annotator — the tedious work of processing the raw information used to train artificial intelligence. AI learns by finding patterns in enormous quantities of data, but first that data has to be sorted and tagged by people, a vast workforce mostly hidden behind the machines. In Joe’s case, he was labeling footage for self-driving cars — identifying every vehicle, pedestrian, cyclist, anything a driver needs to be aware of — frame by frame and from every possible camera angle. It’s difficult and repetitive work. A several-second blip of footage took eight hours to annotate, for which Joe was paid about $10.

Then, in 2019, an opportunity arose: Joe could make four times as much running an annotation boot camp for a new company that was hungry for labelers. Every two weeks, 50 new recruits would file into an office building in Nairobi to begin their apprenticeships. There seemed to be limitless demand for the work. They would be asked to categorize clothing seen in mirror selfies, look through the eyes of robot vacuum cleaners to determine which rooms they were in, and draw squares around lidar scans of motorcycles. Over half of Joe’s students usually dropped out before the boot camp was finished. “Some people don’t know how to stay in one place for long,” he explained with gracious understatement. Also, he acknowledged, “it is very boring.”

But it was a job in a place where jobs were scarce, and Joe turned out hundreds of graduates. After boot camp, they went home to work alone in their bedrooms and kitchens, forbidden from telling anyone what they were working on, which wasn’t really a problem because they rarely knew themselves. Labeling objects for self-driving cars was obvious, but what about categorizing whether snippets of distorted dialogue were spoken by a robot or a human? Uploading photos of yourself staring into a webcam with a blank expression, then with a grin, then wearing a motorcycle helmet? Each project was such a small component of some larger process that it was difficult to say what they were actually training AI to do. Nor did the names of the projects offer any clues: Crab Generation, Whale Segment, Woodland Gyro, and Pillbox Bratwurst. They were non sequitur code names for non sequitur work.

As for the company employing them, most knew it only as Remotasks, a website offering work to anyone fluent in English. Like most of the annotators I spoke with, Joe was unaware until I told him that Remotasks is the worker-facing subsidiary of a company called Scale AI, a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley data vendor that counts OpenAI and the U.S. military among its customers. Neither Remotasks’ or Scale’s website mentions the other.

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.

For Joe’s students, it was work stripped of all its normal trappings: a schedule, colleagues, knowledge of what they were working on or whom they were working for. In fact, they rarely called it work at all — just “tasking.” They were taskers.

The anthropologist David Graeber defines “bullshit jobs” as employment without meaning or purpose, work that should be automated but for reasons of bureaucracy or status or inertia is not. These AI jobs are their bizarro twin: work that people want to automate, and often think is already automated, yet still requires a human stand-in. The jobs have a purpose; it’s just that workers often have no idea what it is.

 

Nobody seems to actually know what this is going to be, and it all reminds me of the dot-com boom and bust 25 years ago.  A lot of people think there will be a huge revolution, but that revolution has been predicted for decades now.

We'll see.

Russian To Judgment: Judgment Russian Edition

So, helpful tip if you ever find yourself the dictator of a major power: don't turn your military over to a large mercenary company, toss them into a year-plus long meat grinder invading your neighbor, and then treat those mercs like shit, because they might decide that they don't like you any more, and they have lots and lots of things that go boom and bang.

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

 

Break out the popcorn from your old bunkers, because this one is going to be historic.

 

And yes, this is 100% the end of Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the beginning of something...else.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis isn't the only person looking into Trump's conspiracy to defraud the US with his Georgia fake electors scheme in 2020, for Special Counsel Jack Smith is building his own federal case and is getting fake electors to flip on Trump.

 

Special counsel Jack Smith has compelled at least two Republican fake electors to testify to a federal grand jury in Washington in recent weeks by giving them limited immunity, part of a current push by federal prosecutors to swiftly nail down evidence in the sprawling criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The testimony, described to CNN by people familiar with the situation, comes after a year of relative dormancy around the fake electors portion of the investigation and as a parade of related witnesses are being told to appear before the grand jury with no chance for delay.

That activity could signal that investigators are nearing at least some charging decisions in a part of the 2020 election probe, sources added. It also comes just as the special counsel’s office filed charges against former President Donald Trump for his handling of classified documents.

Prosecutors initially obtained documents and interviews last spring from many of the Republicans who signed false certificates to the federal government, asserting they were the rightful electors for Trump in seven battleground states won by Joe Biden.

Prosecutors have played hardball with some of the witnesses in recent weeks, refusing to grant extensions to grand jury subpoenas for testimony and demanding they comply before the end of this month, sources said. In the situations where prosecutors have given witnesses immunity, the special counsel’s office arrived at the courthouse in Washington ready to compel their testimony after the witnesses indicated they would decline to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment, the sources added.
Locking in witness statements

The compelled testimony has allowed the special counsel’s office to lock in witness statements and potentially information that other investigators who have looked at the aftermath of the 2020 election couldn’t obtain.

At least one other witness has spoken to investigators in the past two weeks outside of the grand jury with an agreement the person would be protected from potential prosecution, another source said.

At least half a dozen witnesses have testified before the federal grand jury in Washington over four days in the past two weeks, with many of the sessions focused on the fake electors’ plot orchestrated by attorneys assisting the Trump campaign in 2020. The numbers, profile of the witnesses and prosecutor tactics suggest a probe picking up its pace, several people familiar with the investigation said.

 

More charges against Trump are coming later this summer, folks.

 

Count on it.

Highway To Heaven

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made it happen, folks: The overpass that collapsed in a tractor trailer fire two weeks ago on I-95 in Philly is repaired and traffic is open well before the July 4th holiday travel rush.

The reopened portions of I-95 have been “completed safely” and are “available for traffic,” Mike Carroll, Pennsylvania’s secretary of transportation, said Friday.

Workers labored through the night. Some worked up until a few minutes before state officials held a press conference about the reopening, installing guide rails on the road, Carroll said.

The partially reopened bridge was constructed with “the high standards that exist for our structures across the state,” Carroll said, and “every bit of material used to construct this facility has been rigorously tested and used in multiple applications for many years in Pennsylvania, and across the nation from Maine to Arizona.”

“This road is being opened because it’s completed, it’s safely completed, and it’s ready for traffic,” Carroll reiterated. “And I don’t think the people of Philadelphia want to wait one more minute to put a vehicle across 95.”

Next up, said Gov. Josh Shapiro, is building the rest of the bridge around the reopened lanes in a process officials have said they expect to take months, and to “keep traffic flowing while that work goes on.”

 

So a new permanent bridge will be completed later this year, but the new temporary lanes are good to go. 

Nice job, Philly.

 

Hunting The Hunter, Con't

The right-wing "Biden bribery scandal" noise is now loud enough to reach the big newspapers, with the Washington Post calling the allegations by IRS investigator Gary Shipley "potentially damning" if any of it is actually true.

 

An IRS agent who supervised the investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter told lawmakers that Justice Department officials slowed and stymied the investigation, whittling away the most serious evidence of alleged tax crimes, according to a transcript of his account released Thursday.

The agent, Gary Shapley, offered a detailed and potentially damning account of prosecutors who were either timid or uninterested when it came to examining the financial misdeeds of Hunter Biden, which Shapley said included instances in which the president’s son treated prostitutes and their travel costs as his business expenses.

The agent’s account to the House Ways and Means Committee also directly challenged congressional testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland, in which he said that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss — a holdover from the Trump administration — had full authority to lead the investigation into Hunter Biden and could do whatever he wanted in the case.

A Justice Department spokesman stood by Garland’s previous comments, and the lead Democrat on the House committee said the allegations should not have been released publicly while lawmakers are still vetting them.

The transcript almost certainly will fuel criticism of the Justice Department’s five-year investigation of Hunter Biden, which this week led to a proposed plea agreement on two misdemeanor charges that will probably allow him to avoid jail time. Biden is due in federal court in Wilmington, Del., on July 26 to enter his guilty plea, which must be approved by a judge.

The criminal probe of Biden was given the code name Sportsman, Shapley told lawmakers, and it was “an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.”

His account offers a host of new allegations, including a text message that Biden allegedly sent on July 30, 2017, that invoked his father — at that time a former vice president — as he tried to get a business partner to fulfill some expected promise.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” the younger Biden allegedly told businessman Henry Zhao. “And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

It is unclear what specific commitment the message refers to. A spokeswoman for Hunter Biden’s legal team did not immediately comment.

 

Here's the thing though:

 

If all this is true, then yes, Biden, Merrick Garland, Chris Wray, they're done. 

But "If this is all true" is carrying about the mass of Jupiter on its shoulders though. We have the word of the IRS agent, but the great thing about "The President ordered a cover up to protect his criminal son and ordered the AG to make it happen" is that there's nothing anyone can do to disprove it: any evidence of reality just becomes more cover up.

Republicans are creating this scandal in order to hurt Biden going into 2024. They did it before with Benghazi and Hillary Clinton's emails.

I fully expect the Village to fall for this shitshow again.

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

The latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll of OBGYN doctors and healthcare in America, one year after the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade, shows that the availability, quality, and outcomes of women's healthcare in America have fallen off a cliff.

 

Sweeping restrictions and even outright abortion bans adopted by states in the year since the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling have had an overwhelmingly negative effect on maternal health care, according to a survey of OBGYNs released Wednesday that provides one of the clearest views yet of how the U.S. Supreme Court decision has affected women’s health care in the United States.

The poll by the health research nonprofit KFF reveals that the Dobbs ruling — which ended federal protection on the right to abortion — affected maternal mortality and how pregnancy-related medical emergencies are managed, precipitated a rise in requests for sterilization and has done much more than restrict abortion access. Many OBGYNs said it has also made their jobs more difficult and legally perilous than before, while leading to worse outcomes for patients.

The findings are the first nationally representative survey of OBGYNs since the Dobbs ruling, after which at least 15 states now ban abortion outright or within a few weeks of conception.

Nearly 7 in 10, or 68 percent of OBGYNs, said the effects of Dobbs have made the management of pregnancy-related medical emergencies worse, while 64 percent said the ruling has worsened pregnancy-related mortality. The poll, conducted between March 17 and May 18, collected responses from a random sample of 569 board-certified OBGYNs across the country who provide sexual and reproductive health care to patients in office-based settings.

The striking responses come as the number of Americans who die while giving birth — or in the weeks after — has been on the rise since 2018, from 658 that year to 1,205 in 2021, according to a March report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data from 2022 has not yet been released.

The responses were even grimmer regarding the already stark racial and ethnic inequities in maternal health care: 70 percent of OBGYNs said Dobbs has widened that gap. Black women are already twice as likely to suffer serious complications during pregnancy and are three times as likely to die as women of other races.

Some of the earliest signs of the impact of Dobbs on women’s health were evident within weeks of the ruling. Patients with emergencies such as miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other complications were confronted with a maze of delays or denials of care as providers were mired in confusion over swiftly changing restrictions.

The Washington Post reported on several such instances last July, including on a Wisconsin woman who experienced an incomplete miscarriage and bled for more than 10 days after emergency room staff refused to remove the fetal tissue amid confusion over restrictions. At a hospital in Kansas City, Mo., administrators temporarily required “pharmacist approval” before dispensing medications used to stop postpartum hemorrhages because those drugs can also be used for abortions.

In the months since, those challenges have not abated. In the KFF poll, 40 percent of OBGYNs in states where abortion is banned said they have personally experienced “constraints on management of miscarriages,” while 37 percent reported constraints on management of pregnancy-related medical emergencies.

 

Those who need reproductive care are pissed off, and they are coming for the GOP. 

When the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion, between 50 and 60 percent of Americans wanted the right to stay in place. But while abortion was legal throughout the country up to a certain point in pregnancy, Americans had the luxury of not having strong or cohesive views on the topic, or thinking much about abortion at all. Their views were messy and sometimes contradictory, and there was little evidence suggesting that the issue was a political priority for anyone except Christian conservatives. In the fall of 2021, with the Dobbs case looming on the horizon, many Americans thought that Roe wasn’t in real danger.

Now, a FiveThirtyEight analysis finds that after one of the most disruptive Supreme Court decisions in generations, many Americans — including women, young people, and Democrats — are reporting more liberal views on abortion than major pollsters have seen in years. Even conservatives, although the changes are slight, are increasingly supportive of abortion rights. There are other signs that longstanding views are shifting: For instance, Americans are more open to the idea of unrestricted third-trimester abortion than they were even a year ago. And although it’s hard to predict what will shape upcoming elections, there are indications that abortion has the potential to be a major motivator for some Americans when they go to vote in 2024.

Even before last summer, there was some evidence that Americans’ views were getting slightly more liberal on abortion, driven mainly by Democrats who were increasingly likely to say that abortion should be legal (and also more likely to prioritize the issue politically). But when asked about their opinions, most chose a middle-ground option that allowed for abortions in at least some cases, and their ambivalence about the issue was clearly visible in other questions. Legal abortion was consistently much more popular in the first trimester than later in pregnancy. Majorities of Americans were simultaneously OK with some restrictions on abortion access, while saying they wanted women to obtain legal abortion in their own communities, without pressure to change their mind.

But over the past couple years, views have shifted. FiveThirtyEight gathered every poll that asked a standard question about abortion — whether it should be legal in all cases, legal in some cases, illegal in some cases, or illegal in all cases — since September 2021, and found that the share of American adults who want abortion to be legal in at least some cases is rising, and the share of Americans who want abortion to be illegal in all cases is falling.

 

That's because abortion rights affect everyone. 

Everyone who votes and doesn't vote has a stake.

You should choose the former.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Georgia officials have finally cleared the two Black women election officials in Fulton County that Donald Trump accused of election fraud, finding no evidence that either woman committed any wrongdoing in 2020.

 

State officials have formally dismissed two high-profile claims of election fraud stemming from the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.

Investigators found no wrongdoing in a complaint against two Fulton County election workers whose lives were upended when former President Donald Trump falsely accused them of fraud. In a separate complaint, they also found no evidence of “pristine ballots” that fueled suspicions of election fraud.

The conclusions in the final investigation reports echo what the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office has been saying for two years and a half years – that it found no evidence to support allegations of rampant fraud in these and other cases. But the State Election Board formally dismissed both complaints Tuesday, bringing to a close investigations of some of Trump’s most sensational claims.

The first case involved allegations of election fraud against Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, the mother and daughter captured in an infamous video from State Farm Arena on election night. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani played portions of the video to Georgia lawmakers in December 2020, claiming it was “smoking gun” evidence of election fraud.

It wasn’t. Investigators from the FBI, the GBI and the secretary of state’s office interviewed election workers and reviewed hours of video. They determined the video showed normal ballot counting.

What’s more, the FBI interviewed the person who created a fake Instagram account that appeared to contain a post by Freeman admitting she conspired to influence the election results. The creator of the account confirmed the content was fake.

“All allegations made against Freeman and Moss were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit,” the investigation report concluded.

Freeman and Moss endured death threats and other harassment because of the false claims. They have filed defamation lawsuits against people and organizations that spread the allegations and have already recovered a settlement from One America News Network. Lawsuits against Giuliani and the Gateway Pundit are still pending.

“This serves as further evidence that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss – while doing their patriotic duty and serving their community – were simply collateral damage in a coordinated effort to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election,” one of their attorneys, Von DuBose, said of the investigation report. “Lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have been proven false over and over again, and those who perpetuate them should be held accountable.”

 

Donald Trump personally ruined the lives of these two Black women because he knew he'd get away with it. An entire conspiracy to try to generate fake evidence sprang up upon Trump's command. I hope the defamation suits break him.

 

I hope the Georgia election fraud RICO case that Fulton County DA Fani Willis is bringing adds decades to his prison time, and that she rounds up multiple members of his inner circle -- and the corrupt Georgia GOP as well.

Retribution Execution, Con't

As with any criminal legal case like the one Special Counsel Jack Smith filed against Donald Trump this month, the discovery process in Trump's federal trial means that Jack Smith's team is handing over evidence used to obtain the grand jury indictment to Trump's lawyers. It also means Trump will know exactly who ratted him out, and why.

Special counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence in the Mar-a-Lago documents case to Donald Trump, according to a Wednesday court filing that hints that investigators collected for the case multiple recordings of the former president – not just audio of an interview Trump gave at Bedminster for a forthcoming Mark Meadows memoir.

Prosecutors in the filing used the plural “interviews” to describe recordings of Trump – made with his consent – obtained by the special counsel that have now been turned over to his defense team. It is unclear what the additional recordings may be of or how relevant they will be to the Justice Department’s case against the former president, though the recordings include the Bedminster tape where Trump speaks about a secret military document to a writer and others, the prosecutors said in the filing.

The prosecutors’ update to the court on Wednesday night marks another swift move toward trial, which the Justice Department has said should happen quickly, and captures at least some of the extent of the evidence investigators secured to build their historic case against Trump.


The first batch of discovery production – made up of unclassified materials – includes transcripts of witness testimony in front of the grand juries in Washington, DC, and Florida that were probing the mishandling of government documents from Trump’s White House. It also includes materials collected via subpoenas and search warrants; memos detailing other witness interviews given through mid-May in the investigation; and copies of the surveillance footage investigators obtained in the probe.

The first batch of evidence, provided on Wednesday, “includes the grand jury testimony of witnesses who will testify for the government at the trial of this case,” the special counsel’s office wrote.

“Defense counsel can contact the government to arrange for inspection of unclassified items seized at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022,” the filing said.

The new submission indicates that Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta has not yet received discovery, but the Smith team said they will promptly provide it once a lawyer enters an appearance for him in the case. Nauta is scheduled to be arraigned next Tuesday.

Given that the people who turned state's evidence against Trump in the grand jury proceedings will likely be called to testify against Trump in the trial, I hope US Marshals are protecting these folks, because as I've mentioned before, Trump has a long history of witness tampering and intimidation over the years. I guarantee you that Trump will try to get to them, because he has to in order to survive.

Yes, Trump only needs one juror to escape justice, but I don't know if he can do that with all the charges unless he can critically damage the testimony of witnesses. The stakes however have never been higher for Trump.

He'll do whatever he needs to do in order to sink this case.

Last Call For Losing The Clown Show

House GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy has now fully lost control of his own caucus, with Rep. Lauren Boebert now trying to force an impeachment vote on President Biden as well as a second censure vote for Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy urged House Republicans to vote against the resolution brought forward by GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado forcing a vote to impeach President Joe Biden this week, arguing now is not the right time, multiple sources in the closed door meeting told CNN.

House Republicans are divided over Boebert’s resolution, with a number of members emerging from the meeting expressing frustration with the conservative congresswoman’s push to force a vote on the politically contentious issue.

McCarthy argued that Republicans should let committee investigations play out and warning that jumping to impeachment now could threaten their slim majority, the sources said. The speaker noted that House Republicans have taken back the House five times in the last 100 years, and two of those times lost the majority the next cycle.

“What majority do we want to be,” McCarthy asked his conference, according to a source in the room “Give it right back in two years or hold it for a decade and make real change?”

McCarthy said he asked Boebert to speak during the closed door conference meeting and she declined, a source familiar told CNN. Boebert did not attend the Wednesday meeting, the source said. CNN has reached out to Boebert’s office for comment.

McCarthy told reporters on Wednesday he does not support the resolution.

“I think to prematurely bring something up like that, to have no background in it, it undercuts what we’re doing” at the committee level, he said.

A number of House Republicans have filed articles of impeachment against Biden since the party took the House majority, but Boebert made a specific procedural move on Tuesday that would force the chamber to vote on the impeachment of Biden this week.

It’s not clear when the vote will happen, if at all. Boebert told CNN she would not force the full House to vote Wednesday night, and it’s still possible a vote to kill the impeachment resolution could happen later this week.

Now, it's 100% clear that Boebert doesn't have the votes, but McCarthy is now juggling bottles of nitroglycerin during an earthquake. If he kills the vote, he's going to have a revolt on his hands. If he allows the vote, he's also going to have a revolt on his hands.  He's survived so far, but less than six months into his term as House Speaker, he's already looking at a moment that could break his circus tent poles in half and bring the whole mess down on his head.

There's not much left for McCarthy to give away to keep Boebert sweet, and it'll only take one furious Republican to call for a vote of no confidence in McCarthy's ringmaster performance.

Get the popcorn, folks.

 

Supremely Corrupt Cads, Crooks, And Creeps, Con't

ProPublica, after exposing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his massive "gifts" from GOP megadonor and Nazi memorabilia enthusiast Harlan Crow, has now zeroed in on Justice Samuel Alito, and boy will you not be surprised at what they discovered.

In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

Justices are almost entirely left to police themselves on ethical issues, with few restrictions on what gifts they can accept. When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself.

ProPublica’s investigation sheds new light on how luxury travel has given prominent political donors — including one who has had cases before the Supreme Court — intimate access to the most powerful judges in the country. Another wealthy businessman provided expensive vacations to two members of the high court, ProPublica found. On his Alaska trip, Alito stayed at a commercial fishing lodge owned by this businessman, who was also a major conservative donor. Three years before, that same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.

Such trips would be unheard of for the vast majority of federal workers, who are generally barred from taking even modest gifts.

Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.

ProPublica’s examination of Alito’s and Scalia’s travel drew on trip planning emails, Alaska fishing licenses, and interviews with dozens of people including private jet pilots, fishing guides, former high-level employees of both Singer and the lodge owner, and other guests on the trips.

ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s head spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito would not be commenting. Several hours later, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito responding to ProPublica’s questions about the trip.

 

So yes, Justice Alito banged out a "pre-buttal" op-ed in the friendly WSJ yesterday, attacking the ProPublica story as "misleading" and stuffed that behind its paywall. Josh Marshall at TPM braves the muck to rake it:

You’ve likely seen that TPM Alum Justin Elliott and the team at ProPublica is back with another big exclusive about the Supreme Court. This time, for once, Clarence Thomas is in the clear. Now we’re talking about the intemperate and peevish Sam Alito who took an all expenses paid fishing trip to Alaska back in 2008, courtesy of hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. In a characteristic move, Alito refused to respond to the reporters’ questions and then published his answers as an oped in The Wall Street Journal in a kind of prebuttal and attack. Because yes, he’s that guy.

The bulk of the story is a detailed run-down of what Alito did, what a Justice needs to disclose and what kind of high powered gifts should dictate a recusal in cases where Singer had some direct stake – there’ve been a number. But the gem in Alito’s piece is the explanation the private jet flight.

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant. It was my understanding that this would not impose any extra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.

Alito seems to suggest that he was flying to Alaska and it turned out Singer happened to be flying to Alaska too. And he happened to have a spare seat on his private jet. So what sense would there be in having the seat go to waste? In the spirit of the Alaskan wilderness taking the seat was sort of a resource conservation effort in which Alito was lending a hand.

But of course Singer didn’t just happen to going to Alaska. He was going to Alaska specifically to spend quality time with Sam Alito. The whole thing had been arranged by The Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who asked Singer if he and Alito could fly up with him on his private jet.

And here’s where the whole picture starts to come into focus – both the Alito story and the Thomas ones. Needless to say none of these billionaires are just old friends in the sense you or I might recognize. But they didn’t just glom on to their Justice on their own. Everyone here is part of Leo’s network. Harlan Crow is a big Republican donor but also a big Federalist Society donor. So is Paul Singer. So is the owner of the fishing lodge. In fact, Leo’s network is so vast and deep-pocketed that eventually he decided he was too big for the Federalist Society and struck out on his own. Indeed last year he secured a record-breaking $1.6 billion donation as a kind of judicial corrupt grub steak to fund all his future endeavors.

 

So we know that at least two Supreme Court Justices are bought and paid for by Federalist Society jackasses, and probably all six of the conservative justices. 

Keep that in mind as the most damaging rulings taking rights from tens of millions are handed down in the next week or so.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

It's slowly beginning to dawn on Team Trump that former Trump WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows may have cut a deal and is cooperating with Jack Smith.

 

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Donald Trump sent some of his lawyers and political advisers on a “small fact-finding mission,” as a person with knowledge of the matter describes it to Rolling Stone. The former president wanted to know, according to that source and another person close to Trump: “What is Mark doing?”

Trump was referring to his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Justice Department investigators and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office had been keen on questioning Meadows under oath about Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and to hoard government documents. And it’s been an ongoing mystery to Trump and his team how much Meadows has given the feds, and whether or not he’s actually cooperating. Months ago, Meadows and his lawyer severed communications with most of Trumpland, in a move that continues to frustrate people working to keep the now twice–indicted former president out of deeper legal peril.

The Trump attorneys and advisers who went looking for answers returned with bad news for Trump: They couldn’t figure out what was going on, leaving them to repeat rumors and speculation.

Meadows, his lawyer, and Trump’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment from Rolling Stone.

Meadows’ team is keeping quiet. Early this month, The New York Times revealed that Meadows had indeed testified before the grand jury, but scant details have been unearthed about what he discussed or to which specific topics his testimony was related. And Meadows’ lawyer George Terwilliger this month offered only vagueness: “Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”

That cryptic statement did not sit well with much of Trumpworld. In recent weeks, several lawyers and confidants had already discussed their unconfirmed suspicions with Trump that Meadows was being very useful to the feds in order to reduce Meadows’ own possible legal exposure, two other people familiar with the matter say. Both sources independently tell Rolling Stone that when the topic has come up within the past several months, Trump has at times said that he doesn’t know what Meadows is doing, adding that it would be a “shame” if the MAGAland rumors were true.

In the days since Terwilliger’s brief statement to media outlets, some of Trump’s longtime allies and close advisers have taken to sardonically referring to Meadows by using the rat emoji in their private conversations, according to a source with knowledge of the situation and a screenshot reviewed by Rolling Stone.

However, others in Trump’s immediate orbit have recently sought to reassure him that, for now at least, he should not read too much into Meadows’ silence, two people with direct knowledge of the matter say. Despite all the rumors that have been flying, these individuals have told Trump that there is no hard evidence yet that Meadows is formally cooperating, and that he could simply be following lawyers’ advice to keep a low profile, answering the feds’ questions when he has to until the special counsel investigation runs its course.
Unfortunately for Meadows and other witnesses, Trump has for years often seen little difference between a witness having an official cooperation agreement with prosecutors, and someone who is legally required to answer questions and in doing so offers up potentially damning information to the authorities, according to sources who’ve spoken to Trump about federal probes and other investigations over the decades. Indeed, Trump was furious over the degree of detail in the notes made by his own attorney, Evan Corcoran, which have since become very useful for prosecutors in this case.

There's no proof that Meadows is singing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but the Trump camp is deep into the paranoid style, and Meadows continues to refuse to deny the accusations.

Personally, I hope Meadows is indeed giving Jack Smith the grand jury info necessary to indict Trump for January 6th and a host of other charges.

We'll see who's right: if Meadows was cooperating, somebody would have ratted him out for doing so by now.

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie about the 2020 election continues unabated.

 

Three-in-10 Americans still believe President Joe Biden won his 2020 election only due to voter fraud, a new poll shows — a durable number that highlights the disconnect on one of the foundational issues facing American democracy.

A new Monmouth poll finds 30% of respondents believe Biden's victory came thanks to voter fraud, while 59% say he won the election "fair and square." That share is virtually unchanged in Monmouth's polling since November of 2020 — the share of Americans who believe it remained between 32% and 29%.

There remains no evidence that widespread fraud substantially affected the outcome of the 2020 election, and virtually all of the dozens of legal cases filed by former President Donald Trump and allies were dismissed or withdrawn. But despite that, Trump has continued to repeat his claims the election was stolen from him, accusations elevated by other prominent allies along the way.

Virtually all Democrats (93%) say Biden won the election fairly, a view shared by 58% of independents. Just 21% of Republicans believe Biden won his election fair and square, while 68% say he won "due to voter fraud."

That's very similar to Monmouth's findings in the weeks after the 2020 election, when 18% of Republicans, 67% of independents and 95% of Democrats said Biden's election victory was fair.

While there has been only small movement among Republicans on the question of the 2020 election's legitimacy, Monmouth finds more significant movement on questions related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Forty-four percent of Republicans say it's appropriate to describe the events that occurred that day as a "riot," down from 62% in June of 2021. And only 15% of Republicans say it's appropriate to describe the events as an "insurrection," down from 33% in June of 2021.

 

This won't change anytime soon.  Republicans will continue to swear that 2020 was stolen from them, and that belief will be used to justify a lot of things in the weeks and months ahead.

Paxton Versus Paxton Versus The Stupid

In one of the most brazenly corrupt examples of state government I've seen, impeached Texas AG Ken Paxton will be tried by the state Senate, including his wife, Angela.

The wife of embattled Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday she will “carry out (her) duties” as a state senator and not recuse herself ahead of her husband’s upcoming impeachment trial.

Angela Paxton, who represents a Dallas-area district, said Texas law compels each member of the Senate to attend the impeachment proceedings on Tuesday when the chamber meets to set the rules for Paxton’s impeachment trial.

The Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach the attorney general in an unprecedented move last month following a legislative probe that faulted the third-term Republican for a yearslong pattern of corruption, including abusing his office’s powers, retaliating against whistleblowers and obstructing justice.

“As a member of the Senate, I hold these obligations sacred and I will carry out my duties, not because it is easy, but because the Constitution demands it and because my constituents deserve it,” Paxton said in a statement, indicating that she will not recuse herself from her role representing a Dallas-area district as the legislative body convenes her husband’s trial.

In 2020, multiple top aides publicly accused Paxton of bribery and abusing his office. The aides, who also reported their allegations to the FBI, were all fired, put on leave or resigned.

The whistleblowers had accused him of using his authority to benefit political friend Nate Paul, a real estate investor who had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Paxton’s campaign. The impeachment vote had its origins in an investigation launched in March by the General Investigating Committee of the Texas House after Paxton had asked the legislature to approve $3.3 million in government funds to settle a lawsuit with four whistleblowers who were fired from his office.

One of the impeachment articles accuses Paxton of using employees of the attorney general’s office to write a legal opinion intended to help Paul avoid the foreclosure sale of properties owned by Paul and his businesses.

It was among a series of articles focused on Paxton’s relationship with Paul, including accusations he hired an outside attorney who issued more than 30 grand jury subpoenas while investigating a “baseless complaint” made by Paul, benefited from Paul hiring a woman with whom Paxton “was having an extramarital affair,” and provided Paul with favorable legal help in exchange for renovations on Paxton’s home.

The articles of impeachment also detail what are described as Paxton’s efforts to cause “protracted” delays in the securities fraud investigation. And the articles say voters in November, who voted for Paxton’s third term did not have a full understanding of Paxton’s legal troubles because he had intentionally obscured the details of the charges he faces.

I don't expect the GOP-controlled state Senate to make Angela Paxton recuse herself, but at the very least she could be a material witness to the case and she should be nowhere near being allowed to sit in judgment of her own husband's bribery and corruption case.

And people are pretending this is okay?

Jesus, this is ludicrous even for Texas GOP nonsense.

BREAKING: Hunter Biden To Plead Guilty On Tax Charges

After a five-year investigation, President Biden's son Hunter will take a plea deal on three misdemeanor tax charges and a felony gun possession charge.

 

The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Delaware has reached a plea agreement with Hunter Biden, in which he is expected to plead guilty to two federal misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes. Biden also faces a separate gun possession charge that will likely be dismissed if he meets certain conditions, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.

Two sources familiar with the agreement told NBC News that it includes a provision in which the U.S. attorney has agreed to recommend probation for Biden for his tax violations. Legal experts also said that the tax and gun charges will most likely not result in any jail time for President Joe Biden’s son.

The decision by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2018, indicates an end to the sweeping, five-year investigation by federal prosecutors, FBI agents and IRS officials into Hunter Biden’s conduct. The Biden administration has kept Weiss in place in order to avoid having a U.S. attorney appointed by the president oversee his son’s criminal case.

Chris Clark, attorney for Hunter Biden, told NBC News in a statement: “With the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the Unites States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.

"Hunter will take responsibility for two instances of misdemeanor failure to file tax payments when due pursuant to a plea agreement. A firearm charge, which will be subject to a pretrial diversion agreement and will not be the subject of the plea agreement, will also be filed by the Government. I know Hunter believes it is important to take responsibility for these mistakes he made during a period of turmoil and addiction in his life. He looks forward to continuing his recovery and moving forward.”

 

Expect weeks, if not months or even years of Republican screeching that Joe Biden should resign, drop out of the 2024 race, wear a horsehair and sackcloth shirt, and gnash his teeth for the rest of his days. And expect no small amount of horseshoe theory leftists to demand the same. Hell, I expect to see Biden supporters demand Merrick Garland resign for "election interference".

None of this should or will happen. Yes, it grinds my gears to see Hunter Biden rung up on tax charges when Jared Kushner took billions in Saudi blood money and the Trumps are busy cutting a real-estate deal in non-extradition country Oman.

But justice must be served, even if it means the President's son is charged with tax fraud and gets probation. Notice the Biden administration didn't interfere in the investigation or the charges. I suspect Hunter told his father that the deal was coming, lord knows I'd tell Zandardad if I was, I dunno, about to cut a plea deal with the Feds.

This is the right thing on all sides. The GOP will try to force Biden to drop charges against Trump now, but that plea deal ship sailed long ago, didn't it?