AI, Oh You And Sometimes Why

The Federal Trade Commission is taking aim at ChatGPT at a time when the agency has been slapped down by the courts on multiple occasions, and chair Lina Khan is under heavy fire from Republicans.

 

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an expansive investigation into OpenAI, probing whether the maker of the popular ChatGPT bot has run afoul of consumer protection laws by putting personal reputations and data at risk.

The agency this week sent the San Francisco company a 20-page demand for records about how it addresses risks related to its AI models, according to a document reviewed by The Washington Post. The salvo represents the most potent regulatory threat to date to OpenAI’s business in the United States, as the company goes on a global charm offensive to shape the future of artificial intelligence policy.

Analysts have called OpenAI’s ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer app in history, and its early success set off an arms race among Silicon Valley companies to roll out competing chatbots. The company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, has emerged as an influential figure in the debate over AI regulation, testifying on Capitol Hill, dining with lawmakers and meeting with President Biden and Vice President Harris.

But now the company faces a new test in Washington, where the FTC has issued multiple warnings that existing consumer protection laws apply to AI, even as the administration and Congress struggle to outline new regulations. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has predicted that new AI legislation is months away.

The FTC’s demands of OpenAI are the first indication of how it intends to enforce those warnings. If the FTC finds that a company violates consumer protection laws, it can levy fines or put a business under a consent decree, which can dictate how the company handles data. The FTC has emerged as the federal government’s top Silicon Valley cop, bringing large fines against Meta, Amazon and Twitter for alleged violations of consumer protection laws.

The FTC called on OpenAI to provide detailed descriptions of all complaints it had received of its products making “false, misleading, disparaging or harmful” statements about people. The FTC is investigating whether the company engaged in unfair or deceptive practices that resulted in “reputational harm” to consumers, according to the document.

The FTC also asked the company to provide records related to a security incident that the company disclosed in March when a bug in its systems allowed some users to see payment-related information, as well as some data from other users’ chat history. The FTC is probing whether the company’s data security practices violate consumer protection laws. OpenAI said in a blog post that the number of users whose data was revealed to someone else was “extremely low.”

OpenAI and the FTC did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent on Thursday morning.

News of the probe comes as FTC Chair Lina Khan is likely to face a combative hearing Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, where Republican lawmakers are expected to analyze her enforcement record and accuse her of mismanaging the agency. Khan’s ambitious plans to rein in Silicon Valley have suffered key losses in court. On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected the FTC’s attempt to block Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy the video game company Activision.

The agency has repeatedly warned that action is coming on AI, in speeches, blog posts, op-eds and news conferences. In a speech at Harvard Law School in April, Samuel Levine, the director of the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the agency was prepared to be “nimble” in getting ahead of emerging threats.

“The FTC welcomes innovation, but being innovative is not a license to be reckless,” Levine said. “We are prepared to use all our tools, including enforcement, to challenge harmful practices in this area.”

 

Khan, quite frankly, has been less than effective in battling Big Business so far, having lost on a number of antitrust court battles involving everything from Facebook to Altria to this week's loss to stop Microsoft from buying gaming giant Activision Blizzard. 

I don't exactly have a lot of faith in her or the agency to stop ChatGPT from running rampant.

Still, she's the FTC chair we have, and I just hope the agency is able to rein in ChatGPT and its competitors before the thousands of layoffs becomes, say, millions.

With the Hollywood writers' strike now turning into a full blown actors' strike, you'd better believe entertainment companies are going to be moving quickly on using AI to replace as much creative talent as possible and as soon as they can, and that's only going to be the start.

Last Call For Blacked Out In College

The Nation's Elie Mystal doesn't mince words, stating plainly that colleges and universities are going to have to all but eliminate Black students from admissions, lest they be sued out of existence by white students accusing them of back-door, unconstitutional affirmative action.

 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case banning race consciousness in college admissions, is facially unenforceable. That’s an underreported aspect of Chief Justice John Roberts’s gobbledygook ruling, mainly because most of the white people doing the reporting have adopted the gospel of “race-neutral” and “color blindness” without giving those concepts a whole lot of critical thought. But humans cannot retroactively make themselves unaware of race. People cannot un-conscious themselves, and ordering them to not think about race just ensures that they will. (In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called it a “classic pink-elephant paradox.”) The court expects college admissions officers to know about the race of their applicants, and not care, but there’s really not going to be any way to tell if colleges are disregarding the precise bit of information the court wants them to.

As a result, the real upshot of the affirmative action ruling is this: Colleges and universities must now punish Black applicants by decreasing the enrollment of Black students, by any means necessary. That’s because the only way universities can show compliance with Roberts’s new rules is to show that they’ve decreased the number of Black kids they let into school. Anything less than that will likely trigger litigation from the white supremacists who have already promised to hunt down schools that admit too many Black people, as determined by their own white-makes-right accounting system.

This intended revival of segregationist educational opportunities flows directly from the sheer hubris of Roberts’s attempt to legislate how admissions officers think, along with his open threats to universities that do not comply with his version of thought-policing. In his decision, Roberts expects that colleges and universities will be responsible for self-enforcing his ruling, but he also warns them that additional litigation will be coming their way if they try a work-around to achieve racial diversity in their classes. Again, the white media has made a big deal about the part of Roberts’s ruling where he says that colleges can still consider how race has affected an applicant (for instance, as described in a college essay), but they’ve ignored the last lines of his ruling where he specifically threatens schools that use those very essays to achieve racial diversity.

Roberts writes:

But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today…. “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”… A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.

I’s sho hopes Massa Roberts thinks I is a good Negro wit the determination to keeps learnin’ my letters at the fancy school.

Roberts’s closing flourish here is trash on many levels. First of all, I don’t recall anyone appointing him as the chief judge for how Black people are supposed to overcome racial discrimination. Second, I’d argue that college admissions officers should pay special attention to applicants who didn’t fully overcome the hurdles white people put in their way, but might do so in the future. And third, Roberts’s paean to model minorities is still a white man’s wishes disguised as a legal remedy: How in the hell will Roberts know if some essay reader saw “courage and determination” in an applicant? How can Roberts possibly know what constitutes a unique contribution to a university, and how can Roberts place himself in a position to second-guess what the admissions officers on the ground think are worthwhile contributions?

Most important of all, how can Roberts, or anybody else, know if universities are following his rules? Roberts doesn’t tell us outright, but he sure drops a powerful hint. In his decision, he effectively accuses Harvard of using a backdoor quota system to maintain a consistent rate of Black students. He writes: “For the admitted classes [at Harvard] of 2009 to 2018, black students represented a tight band of 10.0%-11.7% of the admitted pool.” He adds in a footnote: “Harvard must use precise racial preferences year in and year out to maintain the unyielding demographic composition of its class.”

Even if you think Roberts is right (and I’ll point out that Roberts offered no evidence that Harvard “must” be using precise racial preferences to achieve this kind of diversity, nor did the trial court, whose presentation of facts was what Roberts was supposed to be bound by, instead of his own conglomeration of fact-free inferences), how will a school like Harvard prove, to Roberts’s satisfaction, that it is not using racial preferences in the future?

The answer: Only a decrease in Black enrollment is likely to satisfy Roberts. If Harvard maintains its class diversity, Roberts will accuse it of using racial preferences. If Harvard increases Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of using newly unconstitutional race-consciousness to promote Black applicants—beyond historical levels, he’ll likely say. Only a decrease in Black enrollment will satisfy Roberts’s unworkable standard of ignoring race. It doesn’t actually matter how Harvard goes about putting together its class: If this doesn’t produce Roberts’s desired outcome of decreasing Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of thinking about race.

Of course, Roberts doesn’t say by how much universities will have to decrease their Black enrollment to satisfy his new legal requirements. If he had, white media might actually have reported on this aspect of his ruling. Instead, Roberts can almost certainly rely on the efforts of outsourced goons to keep an eye on universities and sue them if too many Black kids get in. One goon squad leader in particular, Trump political adviser Stephen Miller, has already volunteered to do this work, and has basically said the quiet part aloud.

 

Every Black student at a non-HBCU is going to have to "prove" they didn't get in from affirmative action, just like we've been doing for decades now. The difference with the end of race in college admissions is now non-Black students can sue.

 

Expect a sharp drop in college admissions for Black students as a result.

 

Which is the point.

 

Oh, and wait until the Roberts Court gets rid of the EEOC. If you're Black and employed in anything more than an entry-level minimum-wage job, well, that's affirmative action, and you need to be fired as a result.

 

Stay tuned.

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

You have got to be friggin' kidding me.

 

Several lawyers who have had business before the supreme court, including one who successfully argued to end race-conscious admissions at universities, paid money to a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. The payments appear to have been made in connection to Thomas’s 2019 Christmas party.

The payments to Rajan Vasisht, who served as Thomas’s aide from July 2019 to July 2021, seem to underscore the close ties between Thomas, who is embroiled in ethics scandals following a series of revelations about his relationship with a wealthy billionaire donor, and certain senior Washington lawyers who argue cases and have other business in front of the justice.

Vasisht’s Venmo account – which was public prior to requesting comment for this article and is no longer – show that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”, in an apparent reference to the justice’s initials.

However, it remains unclear what the funds were for.

The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.

Other lawyers who made payments include Manuel Valle, a graduate of Hillsdale College and the University of Chicago Law School who clerked for Thomas last year and is currently working as a managing associate at Sidley, and Liam Hardy, who was working at the Department of Justice’s office of legal counsel at the time the payment was made and now serves as an appeals court judge for the armed forces.

Will Consovoy, who died earlier this year, also made a payment. Consovoy clerked for Thomas during the 2008-09 term and was considered a rising star in conservative legal circles. After his death, the New York Times reported that Consovoy had come away from his time working for Thomas “with the conviction that the court was poised to tilt further to the right – and that constitutional rulings that had once been considered out of reach by conservatives, on issues like voting rights, abortion and affirmative action, would suddenly be within grasp”.

None of the lawyers who made payments responded to emailed questions from the Guardian.

According to his résumé, Vasisht’s duties included assisting the justice with the administrative functioning of his chambers, including personal correspondence and his personal and office schedule.

 

I mean Venmo is convenient and all.

 

It also leaves a transaction record for this exact reason.

 

Don't do crimes with Venmo, kids.

Their Gal Friday

TPM's Josh Marshall recounts the long, crazy ride of Gal Luft, the House GOP's supposed star mystery witness in the Biden "bribery scandal", who apparently is also a wanted fugitive by the Justice Department.  Republicans are howling at the indictment, but the problem is Luft was indicted last year, well before his spurious accusations.

“The timing is always coincidental according to the Democrats and the Department of Justice,” Comer told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday evening. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said that Luft could be a key witness, said on Sunday that he “does not trust the Department of Justice.”

The facts, as laid out in and around the indictment, tell a far more familiar story of D.C. grubbiness.

Per the docket, unsealed on Tuesday, the indictment came down on Nov. 1, 2022. That’s eight months before the DOJ made it public, and three months before Luft himself first loudly alleged that he was the victim of a Biden political persecution.

And per the indictment, Luft’s assertion that he’s been charged with “thought crimes” appears far-fetched.

He faces eight separate counts, including two charges of making false statements to federal officials, one for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and five counts relating to separate schemes which allegedly involved Luft trying to trade in sanctioned Iranian oil and broker deals for a Chinese firm to supply, among other things, “strike UAVs” to Kenya and anti-tank missile launchers to Libya.

The foreign agent scheme, prosecutors say, had less to do with the Bidens than it did with the Trump administration’s entrance to power in 2016.

Luft, while co-director for a Maryland energy security think tank, allegedly agreed in 2015 to receive annual payments of $350,000 from CEFC, the Chinese energy firm that would go on to ink contracts with Hunter Biden. The payments were made, prosecutors say, as part of an agreement with Luft to advance China’s interests in the U.S.

Luft was, the indictment alleges, to do three things in exchange for the payments: arrange an “international meeting” in a major U.S. city on “energy security issues,” secure CEFC’s chair an honorary position at a separate energy group that Luft advised, and help make a member of that energy group a “senior advisor” to CEFC.

The arrangement allegedly continued through the 2016 election, when Luft began to develop a relationship with a person whose description in the indictment matches that of former CIA Director James Woolsey.

At one point, prosecutors cite a quote from a December 2016 conference in D.C. about China’s Belt and Road project, in which Woolsey allegedly said that “We want to joyfully participate with China in international trade operations and economic growth.” The same quote appears attributed to Woolsey in a China Daily article about the meeting.

When Woolsey was named in a September 2016 article as a Trump campaign adviser on national security policies, Luft allegedly sent a celebratory email to an unnamed associate.

Luft, prosecutors say, tried to use his relationship with Woolsey — and the prospect that Woolsey might be asked to take a top position in the Trump administration — as part of his agreement to help China. That included an alleged plan for Luft’s think tank to make a monthly payment of $6,000 to Woolsey from November 2016 to October 2017, in exchange for which Woolsey would allegedly publish pro-China articles. In one case alleged by prosecutors, Luft purportedly edited an introductory email that Woolsey planned to send to another Trump adviser post-election.

 

Knowing that he was indicted, Luft came up with a scheme to not only skip town, but to accuse President Biden of "bribery" and to contact House Republicans as a wanted fugitive. Doesn't exactly seem like the "star witness" that Jim Comer promised, does he? 

No, all this seems like nonsense to try to cover up the fact that Luft was a spy for China during the Trump regime, and that he faces a long stint in prison if convicted as a result. Republicans are going to call him as a witness anyway, it seems.

Good luck with that, I guess.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

This year's El Nino climate event is already on top of record surface temperature, and that means the oceans are several degrees above normal in North America, including the state of Florida, setting new temperature records daily this July.

 

Not only is Florida sizzling in record-crushing heat, but the ocean waters that surround it are scorching, as well. The unprecedented ocean warmth around the state — connected to historically warm oceans worldwide — is further intensifying its heat wave and stressing coral reefs, with conditions that could end up strengthening hurricanes.

Much of Florida is seeing its warmest year on record, with temperatures running 3 to 5 degrees above normal. While some locations have been setting records since the beginning of the year, the hottest weather has come with an intense heat dome cooking the Sunshine State in recent weeks. That heat dome has made coastal waters extremely warm, including “downright shocking” temperatures of 92 to 96 degrees in the Florida Keys, meteorologist and journalist Bob Henson said Sunday in a tweet.

“That’s boiling for them! More typically it would be in the upper 80s,” tweeted Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV in Tampa.

The temperatures are so high that they are off the scale of the color contours on some weather maps.

The warmth registers as a Category 3 out of 5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine heat wave scale. NOAA defines a marine heat wave as a period with persistent and unusually warm ocean temperatures, “which can have significant impacts on marine life as well as coastal communities and economies.” The agency describes Category 3 as “severe.”

Such warm water temperatures “would be impressive any time of year, but they’re occurring when the water would already be rather warm, bringing it up to bona fide bathtub conditions that we rarely see,” Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami and hurricane expert for Capital Weather Gang, said in an email.

The toasty waters are influencing temperatures on land by raising the humidity, which makes it harder for temperatures to cool off at night. Numerous records for temperatures and heat indexes have been broken since mid-June, and the heat wave is expected to continue for at least a week. According to McNoldy, Miami’s heat index soared to 110 degrees on Monday and has reached at least 100 on 30 straight days.

Miami, Tampa and Fort Myers are expected to hit a heat index of 105 or higher on each of the next seven days, according to the The Washington Post’s heat tracker.

“It’s an astounding, prolonged heat wave even for a place that’s no stranger to sultry weather,” said McNoldy, who also cautioned that the warm waters could make tropical storms or hurricanes stronger. “It’s not something we like to see near land simply because it would allow a storm to maintain a high intensity right up to landfall or rapidly intensify as it approaches landfall.”

Hurricane forecasters have recently upped their predictions for the season in response to the rising ocean temperatures.

The marine heat wave is also causing coral bleaching, which can leave corals vulnerable to deadly diseases. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch has recorded an “Alert Level 1” off the coast of South Florida. That is the second-highest level, described by NOAA as “significant bleaching likely.”

 

Not that I expect Ron DeSantis to do anything, he'll just block any efforts to mitigate the damage and scream something about diesel and microbeads being good for fish.

 

When Florida's tourism, fishing, and farming industries collapse, you can thank him.

Oh, and the latest insurance provider to pull out of the state is Farmers, and President Biden's energy efficiency program to provide consumers rebates for saving energy? DeSantis trashed those too: nearly $400 million has just gone up in smoke for Florida residents.

Guess the state's going to have to drown, burn, and melt before Florida gets rid of him.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump's lawyers want to delay his federal documents trial indefinitely, claiming that a trial date can't be set until all of the legal motions surrounding the case have been decided by Trump Judge Aileen Cannon.  

 

The written filing — submitted 30 minutes before its deadline of midnight on Tuesday — presents a significant early test for Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who is overseeing the case. If granted, it could have the effect of pushing Mr. Trump’s trial into the final stages of the presidential campaign in which he is now the Republican front-runner or even past the 2024 election.

While timing is important in any criminal matter, it could be hugely consequential in Mr. Trump’s case, in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to 31 classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim them.

There could be complications of a sort never before presented to a court if Mr. Trump is a candidate in the last legs of a presidential campaign and a federal criminal defendant on trial at the same time. If the trial is pushed back until after the election and Mr. Trump wins, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.

Some of the former president’s advisers have been blunt in private conversations that he is looking to winning the election as a solution to his legal problems. And the request for an open-ended delay to the trial of Mr. Trump and his co-defendant, Walt Nauta, a personal aide, presents a high-stakes question for Judge Cannon, who came into the case already under scrutiny for making decisions favorable to the former president in the early phases of the investigation.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers pitched their request to Judge Cannon as a plea for cautious deliberation and as a means of safeguarding democracy.

“This extraordinary case presents a serious challenge to both the fact and perception of our American democracy,” wrote the lawyers, Chris M. Kise and Todd Blanche for Mr. Trump, and Stanley Woodward Jr. and Sasha Dadan for Mr. Nauta.

“The court now presides over a prosecution advanced by the administration of a sitting president against his chief political rival, himself a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States,” they wrote. “Therefore, a measured consideration and timeline that allows for a careful and complete review of the procedures that led to this indictment and the unprecedented legal issues presented herein best serves the interests of the defendants and the public.”

The lawyers also took note of the unusual intertwining of law and politics in the case, suggesting that Mr. Trump’s status as a presidential candidate should be factored into the timing of the trial.

“President Trump is running for president of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee,” they wrote. “This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election on Nov. 5, 2024.”

“Mr. Nauta’s job requires him to accompany President Trump during most campaign trips around the country,” they continued. “This schedule makes trial preparation with both of the defendants challenging. Such preparation requires significant planning and time.”

 

The question isn't whether the motion is bullshit (it is) but whether Judge Cannon will grant it. Trump having the trial pushed back to after the 2024 election means if he wins the election he can dispose of the case, or more likely order the interim Attorney General he has after firing Merrick Garland drop the case as Trump would then be president.  If he doesn't win, and Cannon still has the case, Trump will just file for 2028 and demand another delay, and get it. 

We're about to find out whether this case goes to trial at all, and that's solely up to a judge that has already ruled that the government completely overstepped its bounds in obtaining evidence in the case in the first place.

Judge Cannon has the means here to effectively eliminate this case. We'll see if she does. Remember, she's tried to before. And I don't think being smacked down by the 11th Circuit previously will matter to her all that much, and there's not a lot the 11th Circuit can do here to interfere without blowing up the case and delaying it further.

It's literally in her court now.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

As widely expected, and widely demonstrated by Republican lawmakers in red states, anti-trans policies to "protect children" are now anti-trans policies directly targeting trans adults. 

 

A Kansas judge has ordered Gov. Laura Kelly's administration to stop changing gender markers on driver's licenses for transgender people.

Shawnee County District Court Judge Teresa Watson issued the temporary restraining order on Monday at the request of Attorney General Kris Kobach, who is suing two officials at the Kansas Department of Revenue over the practice.

The lawsuit is an attempt from Kobach, a Republican, to force the agency under Kelly, a Democrat, to follow new state law from Senate Bill 180.

The law went into effect July 1 with a strict biological definition of sex. The attorney general and governor have disputed whether or not the law bans the current practice of changing gender markers on both driver's licenses and birth certificates.

"The Attorney General points out that driver's licenses are issued for a period of six years and are difficult to take back or out of circulation once issued," Watson wrote. "Licenses are used by law enforcement to identify criminal suspects, crime victims, wanted persons, missing persons, and others. Compliance with stated legal requirements for identifying license holders is a public safety concern.

Taryn Jones, vice chair and lobbyist for the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Kansas, acknowledged the concern that allowing the state to keep making changes would make it more difficult for law enforcement, but asked, “How many criminals are you having that are trans?” She said trans people will still be able to change their names to align with their gender identities.

Jones also said potential problems for law enforcement should be weighed against the harm to the mental health and safety of transgender people who don’t have licenses that match their gender identities.

“You know, it’s hard enough being trans right now in America, especially in a conservative place like Kansas,” she said.

"Allowing Respondents to issue non-compliant driver's licenses pending a court hearing is an immediate and irreparable injury that supports the grant of a temporary restraining order on the terms requested by the Attorney General."

The order is in effect for 14 days, but may be modified, vacated or extended by the court.

Under Kansas law, a court is allowed to issue a temporary restraining order without providing prior notice to the other party if the facts "clearly show that immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage will result to the movant before the adverse party can be heard in opposition."

 

First of all, it's our old fascist friend Kris Kobach, who I have covered extensively on ZVTS over the last decade plus years, so you know this is some fascist bullshit of the nth degree.

 

But second, did you catch that? The legal argument is that the state acknowledging trans people existing in official identification is a public safety concern preventing law enforcement from doing their jobs.

The state recognizing trans folks existing is a public safety concern that has to be stopped. That's where we are, and if you define a group out of existence, the state can simply eliminate members of that group.

Do you see where the GOP is going on this? Germans did this 90 years ago, folks.

It will end badly.

Last Call For Jobapalooza, Con't

With more than 200,000 jobs created in June in the US economy, Heather Long at the Washington Post takes a look at who's getting those new jobs, and for the most part it's Black, Asian, Hispanic, and immigrant workers taking advantage.

 

The U.S. labor market is on a gravity-defying streak. The June jobs report was a tad softer than expected, but the overall trend is so strong that recession fears are fading. Hiring remains solid across many industries, including construction, and companies are largely holding on to their workers.

There’s growing optimism that the country can avoid a downturn. One key reason this is possible is the surge of new workers. Nearly 4 million more people are employed now than just before the pandemic hit. That’s more families with steady incomes to spend, which helps explain the vigorous sales of everything from cars to gardening supplies. There has also been a big upshift in the labor force since the pandemic: Low-paying hospitality employment still hasn’t recovered, as workers have traded up to higher-paying business, health-care and warehouse work. This has brought another boost to incomes and an important mental shift as more workers who used to hop from job to job now see themselves on a steady career path.

The mistaken notion that Americans don’t want to work can now be put to rest. Nearly 81 percent of Americans ages 25 to 54 are working, the highest share since 2001. What has been particularly jaw-dropping is how resilient job gains have been since March 2022, when the Federal Reserve started aggressively hiking interest rates. Back then, Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell argued the labor market was “unhealthy.” There was a misguided belief that it would take a recession to get supply and demand for goods — and workers — back to more normal levels. But what many experts missed was how many workers of color and immigrants wanted to work and were still looking for opportunities.

Fewer White people are employed now than pre-pandemic. In contrast, over 2 million more Hispanics are employed now, over 800,000 more Asian Americans and over 750,000 more African Americans. This same trend played out just before the pandemic. Companies were also complaining then that they could not find workers, and experts were saying the nation was at “full employment.” Yet month after month, Black and Hispanic people (largely women) kept entering the labor force and getting jobs. It’s also notable that over 2 million more foreign-born people are employed now than before the pandemic. This means that more than half of the new workers have been immigrants.

If the U.S. economy ends up having a soft landing, it will largely be because immigrants and people of color have kept entering the labor force — helping to keep production going, consumption solid and wage growth (and inflation) cooling to a more sustainable level.

What’s going on is partly a result of low unemployment, what economists often dub a “tight” labor market. Black and Hispanic people often do not get hired until late in a recovery. In the past year, there has also been a strong uptick in jobs in government and health care, sectors in which women of color have historically found employment opportunities. Employers have also expanded their hiring searches, improved pay and benefits, and removed requirements for college degrees for many positions. All of this has helped expand opportunities. This past spring, for the first time, Black Americans were as likely to be employed as White Americans.

"There is sufficient demand that employers aren’t discriminating. They need workers,” economist William Spriggs told me in a conversation shortly before his death last month.

 

The other big shift is the increase in remote work. Working from home definitely helps single parents take better jobs than flipping burgers or ringing up checkout orders and it greatly helps to eliminate childcare costs. That means more money for working moms to help their families. It's a win-win situation and employers, now having remote work infrastructure in place because of the pandemic, are able to hire more folks and do it quickly.

 

It's another big reason why remote work isn't going anywhere. Yes, employers want workers back in the office, but not everyone has to be, and employers are taking advantage of that to hire good people who'd otherwise be barred by structural issues like child care, and commuting time and money costs. Take those away and suddenly you have a much larger pool of available employees to choose from. It especially helps Black women enter the workforce as a result.

It's smart all the way around, and it's a bit weird that Long doesn't mention this.

Ridin' With Biden, Eurotrip Edition, Con't

Well, we know what Turkey's price is for dropping opposition to Sweden joining NATO: Turkey wants full EU membership.

 

Turkey's path to membership of the European Union should be cleared before Sweden's NATO membership, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"First, let's clear Turkey's way in the European Union, then let's clear the way for Sweden, just as we paved the way for Finland," Erdogan said during a press conference Monday ahead of a NATO summit in Lithuania.

"Turkey has been waiting at the gate of the European Union for over 50 years now," said Erdogan. "Almost all NATO member countries are European member countries."

Some context: Sweden and Finland both formally requested NATO membership shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

While Finland was granted accession in April 2023, Turkey continues to veto Sweden's bid, accusing the country of housing Kurdish “terrorist organizations.”

Erdogan has previously said Turkey would not approve Sweden’s NATO membership unless the country extradites “terrorists” upon Turkish request.

Sweden has made clear this won’t happen and for now, the process is stuck.

 

I mean with Britain gone, there's a spot at the EU table, I guess.  But that definitely means Sweden's NATO bid isn't going anywhere this week. The European Union isn't exactly known for doing things quickly. We'll see where this does go, but for now, Turkey has named its price, and as to whether or not the EU will let Erdogan in is anyone's guess.

The Swedes may have to budge on extradition of Kurds to Ankara before this may go anywhere, too.

 

On the Ukraine side, NATO has at least decided to put Kyiv on the short list instead of the waiting list. 

NATO has decided to drop a requirement for Ukraine to follow a Membership Action Plan (MAP) setting out targets to be met before joining the military alliance, Ukraine's foreign minister said on Monday.

In comments on the eve of a NATO summit, he said such a move would shorten Ukraine's path to joining the alliance.

"Following intensive talks, NATO allies have reached consensus on removing MAP from Ukraine's path to membership. I welcome this long-awaited decision that shortens our path to NATO," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.

NATO did not immediately comment on Kuleba's remarks.

NATO leaders meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius are aiming to overcome divisions over Ukraine's drive for membership.

Kyiv wants to receive a clear invitation to join the alliance after Russia's war on Ukraine ends, and hopes to receive security guarantees until that time.

 

So there's that, but again, don't expect any miracles this week.

As I said, it's complicated, man.

[UPDATE] And as soon as this posts, NATO announces they have struck a deal with Turkey for Sweden's admission.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday that Turkey has agreed to back Sweden’s bid to join the military alliance – a major development on the eve of the NATO summit.

The announcement epresents a stunning about-face from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had earlier on Monday suggested Sweden could only join the alliance after his country is accepted into the European Union. Erdoğan has stood in the path of Sweden joining NATO for more than a year over a multitude of concerns.

Speaking at a news conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, following a meeting with Erdoğan and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Stoltenberg said that the Turkish president “has agreed to forward the accession protocol for Sweden to the Grand National Assembly as soon as possible, and work closely with the Assembly to ensure ratification.”

Erdoğan dropping his opposition marks a major step forward, but does not mean that Sweden will immediately become the next member of the alliance. Stoltenberg did not offer a specific timeline for when Erdoğan would move the document forward to the Turkish Parliament, which must then vote to approve it. Hungary also has not voted to approve Sweden’s membership, though Stoltenberg said Monday that Hungary had made clear that it would not be the last to ratify Sweden’s bid.

The movement on NATO’s accession comes after months of opposition and demands from Ankara. Turkey claimed that Sweden allows members of recognized Kurdish terror groups to operate, most notably the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey had also accused Swedish officials of complicity in Islamophobic demonstrations, such as the burning of the Quran.

At his news conference Monday, Stoltenberg noted that Sweden and Turkey had “worked closely together to address Turkey’s legitimate security concerns.”

Don't expect miracles, but hell, I guess they happen. I was right about Sweden having to budge, and that's apparently what happened.

Insane With The Methane

Arctic climate researchers are at this point warning us that 2023 may be the tipping point in the methane climate feedback loop, with up to a million of tons of methane trapped under glaciers now free to enter the atmosphere and rapidly making things warmer and warmer in the years ahead.

 

Scientists working in one of the world’s fastest-warming places found that rapidly retreating glaciers are triggering the release into the atmosphere of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that causes global temperatures to rise.

The releases are triggered as glaciers across the archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, rapidly retreat and leave behind newly exposed land, scientists said. If the phenomenon is found to be more widespread across the Arctic — where temperatures are quickly rising and glaciers melting — the emissions could have global implications.

As the Svalbard glaciers move and land is left behind, groundwater beneath the Earth seeps upward and forms springs. In 122 out of 123 of them, the scientists found, the water is filled with apparently ancient methane gas at very high concentrations that bubble upward under pressure. The amount of emissions these springs are emitting are not well-quantified.

“This is a feedback loop that’s caused by climate change,” said Gabrielle Kleber, the study’s lead author and a scientist based at the University of Cambridge and the University Center in Svalbard. “Glaciers are retreating due to climate warming, and they are leaving these exposed forefields behind, which are encouraging methane gas to be released.”

Most concerning is the apparent age of the methane — the fact that it appears to be ancient suggests it could be coming from very large underground reservoirs with the potential to unleash a lot of gas. The researchers found that the most intense gas flows occurred in regions with underground shale layers that are millions of years old.

“It’s not methane being produced contemporarily by microbes, it’s methane that was created when the rocks were formed,” said Kleber.

This implies that the gas has been sequestered for long periods in ancient deposits of fossil fuels, principally natural gas and coal — but that something has recently removed what scientists call a “cryospheric cap,” once provided by glaciers or permafrost. It kept a lid on the methane, and its removal allowed the once stable gas to escape upward. Svalbard is widely known to be rich in fossil fuels — the largest settlement, Longyearbyen, was originally established as a coal-mining town.

Scientists said the current phenomenon could certainly be happening in many places other than Svalbard, potentially adding another accelerator of warming in the Arctic.

“Shale is Earth’s most abundant sedimentary rock, and there’s plenty of it in the Arctic (or rocks like it),” Andy Hodson, a co-author of the study and also a scientist at Norway’s University Centre in Svalbard, said in an email.

The study was published on Thursday in Nature Geoscience by Kleber, Hodson and colleagues based at universities in Norway, Canada and the United Kingdom. The scientists studied 78 Svalbard glaciers that are based on land and several additional glaciers that stretch all the way into the ocean.

If the methane releases represent a new phenomenon tied to the warming of the planet, Svalbard is an appropriate place for it. The string of islands has seen extraordinary warming, causing the strong retreat of glaciers. Svalbard has warmed dramatically since 1976, based on temperature measurements taken at the Svalbard airport near Longyearbyen.

There’s no official quantification of how large methane emissions from retreating glaciers around the world could be. The phenomenon would add an additional source of methane emissions in the Arctic. Scientists have found that thawing permafrost also releases the gas into the atmosphere, but the phenomenon is not well understood. An official scientific assessment puts those at between zero and 1 million tons of methane per year, underscoring the uncertainty about the scope of the problem.

The emissions from retreating glaciers would count as a different source — there is usually no permafrost beneath the glaciers, Kleber said. Rather, the glacier ice itself, which crushes the ground downward, is serving as the apparent cap holding the methane in. 

And there's no putting the cap back on this genie's bottle. We're on the roller coaster to hell, and we're all going to roast soon.

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Eurotrip Edition

President Biden will be in Europe this week, visiting King Charles III of Britain on the way to a NATO summit in Lithuania where Ukraine and Sweden's entry into the group is the top billing.

President Joe Biden begins a five-day swing through Europe on Sunday with a focus on NATO gathering later this week in Lithuania, as allied countries look to boost support for Ukraine and the possibility of Sweden's approval to join the military alliance.

"We're looking forward to a busy week in Europe. And we're looking forward to the president being able to further solidify, strengthen and give momentum to the strong united alliance that has been standing up so effectively against Russian aggression," White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters Friday afternoon.

The president begins his trip in London, where he will meet King Charles III at Windsor Castle on July 10, the first time Biden will meet with the king since his coronation. First Lady Jill Biden represented the United States at the coronation with their granddaughter Finnegan in May.

"While in London, he will meet with King Charles at Windsor Castle and engage with a forum that will focus on mobilizing climate finance especially bringing private finance off the sidelines for clean energy deployment and adaptation in developing countries," Sullivan said Friday.

Biden is also expected to meet with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak -- the sixth time the leaders will meet in the past six months. They last met at the White House in June.

From London, Biden heads to Vilnius, Lithuania, to attend the 74th NATO summit -- which is expected to center around the alliance's support for Ukraine amid Russia's ongoing invasion.

"Ukraine will not be joining NATO coming out of this summit," Sullivan stressed, but he added there will be discussion of "what steps are necessary as it continues along its path."

"Vilnius will be an important moment on that pathway towards membership because the United States, our NATO allies and Ukraine will have the opportunity discuss the reforms that are still necessary for Ukraine to come up to NATO standards. So, this will, in fact, be a milestone. But Ukraine still has further steps it needs to take before membership in NATO," Sullivan added.

Ukraine's counteroffensive is underway and has allowed their forces to regain territory in the southeast, but President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he'd like it to be accomplished sooner. He's repeatedly asked the U.S. for F-16 fighter aircraft, which he says would give them an "opportunity to move faster."

The Biden administration had resisted that request but is now working with allies to train Ukrainians on F-16s and eventually help get them jets for the war.

The NATO summit also takes place with an additional member, Finland, after being approved in April, and a lingering question of whether Turkey and Hungary will drop objections to Sweden joining the alliance.

 

The real draw here is what Ankara wants from NATO to allow Sweden to join, because as Vox's Jen Kirby explains, it's complicated, man.

All NATO members must approve new ones, so Erdoğan’s opposition is effectively a veto. The Turkish president is not alone; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is also holding out, but Hungary has signaled it won’t be the final roadblock. Erdoğan has continued to insist that Sweden has not done enough to crack down on people in Sweden with ties to Kurdish militants and other groups that Turkey has deemed terrorists.

Sweden has tried to appease Turkey, including passing a new anti-terrorism law that went into effect June 1. But Erdoğan’s definition of terrorists is pretty expansive, and often includes dissidents and others critical of his regime. And even if Turkey has a case, Sweden has to follow due process and rule of law and can’t just, say, extradite a bunch of people on a whim. A recent Quran-burning outside a Stockholm mosque has added to tensions, as Turkey interprets these as Sweden’s permissive attitude toward anti-Islamic protests rather than freedom of speech.

Sweden, alongside NATO allies, has been doing some furious diplomacy to try to persuade Turkey to approve Sweden’s bid. Swedish and Turkish officials talked Thursday, with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg saying they made “good progress” but issues remained unresolved. Stoltenberg will meet Monday with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Erdoğan, a day before the Vilnius summit kicks off.

Until then, the impasse prevails. Which means the thing everyone really wanted to happen — that Sweden would join NATO, becoming its 32nd member — might not happen this week in Lithuania. This will deny NATO its unity narrative in Vilnius, something the alliance very much wants to project.

But it is more than just the storyline: Sweden is cooperating and planning closely with NATO, but it remains outside the alliance, and its mutual defense protections. If Erdoğan won’t budge here, after everyone shuttling to meet with Turkish officials, after Swedish concessions, and during the military alliance equivalent of the Super Bowl, it’s not clear when he would — which could leave Sweden stuck outside the alliance at time when NATO is trying to redefine and reinvigorate itself amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

 

The proverbial Siberian Kodiak in the room is of course Putin, whom Erdogan wants to keep on his good side as much as he wants to be buddies with Biden.  We'll see if diplomacy can get things moving this week in Vilnius.

P.S. Can you imagine the disaster that would be Trump in the White House right now at this juncture?

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

We're back on a regular schedule today, and I wish I had better news to do that with. But late last night the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals here in Cincinnati issued a 2-1 ruling overturning the injunction against Tennessee's anti-trans law taking effect, and as Law Dork's Chris Geidner looks at this garbage fire of a ruling, the ban on Kentucky's anti-trans law will be overturned in short order.

 

The Saturday ruling itself alters the legal landscape for these bans, at least temporarily.

First, and most immediately, Tennessee is free to enforce its ban, pending any further court orders.

While calling the ruling “wrong on the facts and on the law,” Chase Strangio, who is one of the key ACLU lawyers on this and several other challenges to anti-transgender laws, added, “We also know that things are moving quickly and for many families, waiting for legal relief is not an option. The untenable position that adolescents, their caregivers and their doctors have been put in is not only illegal, but also deeply unethical and dangerous.”

One of the most prominent trans legal advocates in the country over recent years, Strangio added a personal note to those affected by Sutton’s ruling, telling Law Dork: “From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry. I know it feels bleak now and I am also confident that in time, working together, we will prevail.”

Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice within the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, added that the ACLU “will continue to aggressively litigate these cases in Tennessee and across the country.”

It was not immediately clear, however, whether the challengers would seek to get the stay lifted, either by the full Sixth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. “We are still evaluating all our options with our primary concern of course being how can we help ensure that people in Tennessee are not cut off from the care they need,” Strangio stated.

Second, the Sixth Circuit set a very quick schedule for the merits appeal of the preliminary injunction — with the “goal” of reaching a resolution by Sept. 30.

Third, Kentucky is within the Sixth Circuit and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron has already cited the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in a filing at the district court in the case challenging Kentucky’s ban as a reason why the court should “immediately” issue a stay of its June 28 ruling granting a preliminary injunction.

Fourth, the Sixth Circuit also consolidated Cameron’s appeal of the Kentucky injunction in a separate order Saturday, which not only brings that case on the same schedule as the Tennessee appeal but also essentially confirms that Sixth Circuit would almost certainly issue a stay of the Kentucky injunction if the district court does not do so.

Finally, the new, if tentative, lack of unanimity itself matters for two reasons — one rhetorical and one practical. Obviously, having unanimity is its own argument against the constitutionality of these bans. Additionally, although only at the stay request posture, the ruling increases the likelihood that a “circuit split” on these bans will develop — a factor that greatly increases the chances of the U.S. Supreme Court taking up one of these cases.

Few people know that better than Sutton.

It was, after all, Sutton’s 2014 decision in the marriage cases out of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee that prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue of same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marriage equality. Less than two months before Sutton’s decision in those cases, the Supreme Court denied other states’ requests to hear similar appeals when the federal appeals courts were in unanimity on the issue. After Sutton’s decision created a circuit split, however, the Supreme Court took up the issue.

 

The most ominous part of the decision is that two Republican judges decided that the Dobbs ruling can be applied to other medical care issues.  Even if a doctor agrees that gender-affirming care is the correct issue, the state can still ban it.

 

Of course, it gets worse. 

Republican attorneys general from seven states signed a letter Wednesday to Target (TGT), warning clothes and merchandise sold as part of the retail giant’s Pride month campaigns could violate their state’s child protection laws.

GOP attorneys general from Indiana, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina signed the letter, writing they were “concerned by recent events involving the company’s ‘Pride’ campaign.” The letter asserts the states are obliged to “enforce state laws protecting children” from “content that sexualizes them,” including obscenity laws. The letter also suggests Target may be breaching the law by making decisions that are allegedly “unprofitable” and not in the best interests of its shareholders, citing it as a violation of the company’s fiduciary duty.

The AGs said they believed the campaign was a “comprehensive effort to promote gender and sexual identity among children,” criticizing items such as “LGBT-themed onesies, bibs, and overalls, T-shirts labeled ‘Girls Gays Theys’; ‘Pride Adult Drag Queen Katya’ (which depicts a male dressed in female drag’); and girls’ swimsuits with ‘tuck-friendly construction.’”


The letter does not provide specific details regarding potential legal consequences if Target continues to sell the merchandise in question. It follows a wave of bills introduced in various states aiming to ban LGBTQ+ content under obscenity laws, as well as a record-shattering year for anti-LGBTQ legislation, with particular scrutiny on gender-affirming health care access for transgender children and teenagers. Nineteen states have passed laws restricting it.

The Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the US, slammed the letter as “another attempt from the extreme right to bully anyone who stands by values of inclusion and diversity.”

“These attorneys general are trying to rile up their far-right base and force us back into the closet. It’s not going to work,” Jay Brown, HRC’s Sr Vice President of Programs, Training and Research said in a statement provided to CNN.

 

Steve M. is correct in his assessment. 

If you're saying that it's a potential violation of the law to sell children's products proclaiming that LGBTQ people exist, are equal citizens, and should be celebrated, you're a very short step from declaring that it's illegal to be a gay parent. If the presence of pro-LGBTQ clothing results in unlawful sexualization of children, so does the ongoing presence of an LGBTQ parent -- right?

"Because we have to do whatever is necessary to protect the children" mean Republicans can criminalize, harass, and imprison whomever they deem to be "bad." Steve continues:

These AGs are implying that legal action might be appropriate because Target made a business decision they don't like. That's a heavy-handed use of the power of government to try to enforce ideological conformity. And, of course, this was a questionable business decision only because the AGs' ideological allies in the right-wing rage community were encouraged to vent their wrath at Target. So first these folks boycott your company, then they threaten legal action because you as a corporation should have known they were going to do that.

 

And then these Republicans will pass laws giving legal power of the state behind these threats, because they are "necessary to save kids". It's bullshit, of course. But that's where we're headed, a toxic, corrosive mix of Hobby Lobby and Dobbs where the existence of trans folks, and eventually all LGBTQ+ folks, will be banned because people existing violates the "closely held religious beliefs" of asshole bigots and "we have to protect the children from teh gayz".

 

By the way, I expect that the next step in this battle will be contraception, eventually SCOTUS will decide that Griswold v Connecticut is void too and that women will soon have to get permission from their husbands to use birth control in a state like Missouri or Texas, and that the state has a "vested interest" in banning birth control altogether. We've been through this fight before, decades before I was even born. We're going to have it again.

The path of the falling dominoes is easy to predict, and it leads to a significant percentage of women of child-bearing age in prison for failing to give birth. And this too will be done to "protect the children".

 

When you remember the goal is to overturn the entire civil rights era and put us back into Jim Crow, where everyone who isn't a married, straight white male has second-class citizenship and fungible rights, all of this makes sense.

Sunday Long Read: Red Meat For Red States

This week's Sunday Long Read explores the questions involving where the hatred on the MAGA side keeps coming from, in states like Missouri where Republicans are banning everything from abortion to gender-affirming care with seemingly no care about the people being destroyed by these laws. Rene Pfister from Der Spiegel meets one such family under siege.

"That was her in tears," says Daniel Bogard as he sets down his mobile phone, after receiving a call from her. He, too, needs a brief moment to collect himself. "We'll figure it out," he had just told his wife. But the truth is that he has no idea what to do either.

Bogard had long been hoping that things wouldn’t ultimately get this bad. That the Republicans only wrote the law to produce a few eye-catching headlines. That they spewed all the invective ("pedophile," "child abuser," "groomer") just to shore up their support from conservative voters.

But now, on this sunny Wednesday morning in May, they’ve really gone through with it. They actually passed the Missouri Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act, a law that doesn’t just ban all medical care for those under the age of 18 who do not identify with their biological gender. It also threatens doctors with the withdrawal of their licenses should they defy the ban. The law, signed by Missouri Governor Mike Parson, goes by the acronym SAFE – a cruel joke to Bogard’s ears.

For the first time, he says, he can understand how Jews in Germany must have felt in the 1930s. He says he sometimes finds himself thinking about where he could escape to with his family. Perhaps Illinois, where a Democratic governor is in power? Or to Canada? A few months ago, that may have sounded a bit overwrought. But now? In the current situation? "The political power of that hate is so enormous," says Bogard.

He is sitting barefoot, kippa on his head, on the veranda of his home in Creve Coeur, an idyllic suburb of St. Louis with verdant green grass, gently rolling hills and old trees with squirrels scampering among the branches. A guitar is leaning against the wall of the house.

Bogard is the rabbi of a liberal Jewish synagogue in St. Louis, a city that has always been a left-leaning enclave in an extremely conservative state. Around 70 percent of Missouri residents are deeply devout Christians, and many of them voted for Donald Trump. In the 2020 presidential election, he received 56.8 percent of the vote in Missouri.

Highway 70 leading west from St. Louis toward the state capital of Jefferson City is lined by a seemingly endless string of churches: Faith Christian Family Church, New Life Church, Independence Baptist Church.

Faith in the Almighty in Missouri is only exceeded by faith in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right to bear arms. The state capitol, an attractive neo-classical structure on a bluff over the Missouri River, is open to any citizen who would like to enter, including those who are carrying a firearm with a permit.

Bogard is heavily involved in politics, and isn’t particularly thin-skinned, a necessary quality for someone who leans to the left in a state like Missouri. There have always been stories from the capitol that conservative lawmakers drink their coffee from cups reading "Liberal Tears." But something has changed in recent years – something that Bogard can’t really explain.

Was it Trump? Twitter? The pandemic? Or a mixture of all three?

There have always been freaks in Missouri politics, Bogard says. Men like Mike Moon, for example, a Senator from the rural, south-western part of the state, who made headlines for saying during a floor debate that he knows of girls who got married at the age of 12, and that they are still married. It sounded a lot like Moon thought it was perfectly sound policy to allow underage marriage – which he would later deny.

Among Republicans in Missouri, says Bogard, there have always been people like Moon. Now, though, he says, extremists have taken over – and they need a constant stream of new issues to keep the base happy. Bogard refers to it as "red meat."

The right to abortion long served as the largest slice of "red meat" in Missouri, a perfect windmill for Republicans to tilt at, particularly because there were no consequences for doing so. The right to abortion, after all, was protected by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling, which was applicable to the entire country. That changed in June 2022, when the court’s new, conservative majority overthrew the ruling almost 50 years after it was originally passed. Today, Missouri has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the entire country, not even allowing for exceptions in cases of rape or incest. Republicans celebrated passage of the law like it was an epochal victory, but it proved to be a double-edged sword: Where was the red meat to come from now?

Their gaze fell on families like Daniel Bogard’s. He and his wife have twins, and Bogard realized early on that one of them wasn’t entirely comfortable with their biological gender. Ever since his child was able to choose what clothing to wear, they would always go into their older brother's room to borrow his clothes, Bogard says. When he was taking his child to bed one evening, they asked: "Can God make me over again as a boy?" – at age four, maybe five Bogard recalls.

Bogard is rather progressive, but it took quite some time before he could accept his child’s new identity. He loved the long hair, but his child kept asking to have it cut shorter and shorter, first to the shoulders, then to the chin and then over the ears. At some point came the request for a new name, a boy’s name. It was a huge step, but Bogard was relieved. "It shook me when he said it because it was so much better."

Bogard’s son is receiving medical care from doctors in Missouri, but the father says he doesn’t know what will happen now. The next step would likely be the prescription of puberty blockers to prevent female gender attributes from developing. But the therapy will be banned once the new law goes into effect in late August.

An intense debate is raging in the U.S. over whether and how early trans children may be prescribed puberty blockers and hormone therapy. There is even debate among experts, in part because of the relative paucity of studies. Studies, though, are of no interest to the Republicans. Nor are they particularly committed to a sensible solution. The fight against "trans ideology" is the newest front in the culture war, and it can only be effectively fought if there is a clear right and a clear wrong. Worried parents and "child abusers" in lab coats.

In a video released in late January, Donald Trump pledged that he would stop the "chemical, physical and emotional mutilation of our youth." Should he be re-elected, he would pass a law that would ban teachers from even talking with children about the possibility that they may have been born in the wrong body.

According to a survey performed by the New York Times, 13 Republican-led states have passed laws completely proscribing gender-affirming medical care, including Missouri, Texas, Florida and Idaho.

"Republicans have declared war on democracy and have chosen trans kids as cannon fodder in this war," Bogard says on his veranda. He says that two families from his circle of friends have already left Missouri. But Bogard doesn’t want to be driven out so easily. Missouri is his home, and the house where he lives was designed and built by his father. Plus, he says, he doesn’t want to give up his work as a rabbi. It means a huge amount to him, Bogard says. "All we're asking is that the government leave us alone."

 

But MAGA state governments will not do that. The entire point is to drive a wedge between Bogard and his neighbors Majorities of Americans want to see gender-affirming care denied to kids, poll after poll shows that even Democrats want laws like this on the books.

 

And then Republican lawmakers will come for the next group. And the next. And the next...

Indepen-Dunce Week: Trump Cards

Donald Trump's legal problems continue to mount on multiple fronts this weekend, first, his former Cheif of Staff John Kelly has testified under oath that Trump openly discussed having the IRS go after former FBI agents and Trump-Russia investigators Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

 

John F. Kelly, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s second White House chief of staff, said in a sworn statement that Mr. Trump had discussed having the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies investigate two F.B.I. officials involved in the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Mr. Kelly said that his recollection of Mr. Trump’s comments to him was based on notes that he had taken at the time in 2018. Mr. Kelly provided copies of his notes to lawyers for one of the F.B.I. officials, who made the sworn statement public in a court filing.

“President Trump questioned whether investigations by the Internal Revenue Service or other federal agencies should be undertaken into Mr. Strzok and/or Ms. Page,” Mr. Kelly said in the statement. “I do not know of President Trump ordering such an investigation. It appeared, however, that he wanted to see Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page investigated.”

Mr. Kelly’s assertions were disclosed on Thursday in a statement that was filed in connection with lawsuits brought by Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, a former lawyer in the bureau, against the Justice Department for violating their privacy rights when the Trump administration made public text messages between them.

The disclosures from Mr. Kelly, made under penalty of perjury, demonstrate the extent of Mr. Trump’s interest in harnessing the law enforcement and investigative powers of the federal government to target his perceived enemies. In the aftermath of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Congress made it illegal for a president to “directly or indirectly” order an I.R.S. investigation or audit.

The New York Times reported last July that two of Mr. Trump’s greatest perceived enemies — James B. Comey, whom he fired as F.B.I. director, and Mr. Comey’s deputy, Andrew G. McCabe — were the subject of the same type of highly unusual and invasive I.R.S. audit.

It is not known whether the I.R.S. investigated Mr. Strzok or Ms. Page. But Mr. Strzok became a subject in the investigation conducted by the special counsel John Durham into how the F.B.I. investigated Mr. Trump’s campaign. Neither Mr. Strzok nor Ms. Page was charged in connection with that investigation, which former law enforcement officials and Democrats have criticized as an effort to carry out Mr. Trump’s vendetta against the bureau. Mr. Strzok is also suing the department for wrongful termination.

 

And speaking of Strzok's wrongful termination suit, Trump will be deposed in that legal arena as well.

A federal judge on Thursday rejected an effort by the Justice Department to prevent former President Donald Trump from sitting for a deposition related to a pair lawsuits filed by former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

The order, issued by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington, D.C., is a victory for Strzok's attorneys, who are seeking Trump’s deposition to determine whether he met with and directly pressured FBI and Justice Department officials to fire Strzok or urged any White House aides to do so.

The order was in response to the Justice Department's request that she reconsider an earlier ruling that said Strzok's attorneys could move forward with a deposition of Trump in lawsuits against the Justice Department and the FBI that Strzok and Page filed in 2019.

The Justice Department had argued Wednesday that "newly available evidence" stemming from FBI Director Christopher Wray's testimony last week, as well as sworn testimony from other high-level government officials with "direct knowledge" of Trump's communications regarding Strzok and Page, was grounds for reconsidering a deposition involving Trump.

"The availability of that evidence to Mr. Strzok means the deposition of former President Trump is not appropriate,” the government attorneys wrote, expanding on their earlier argument in support of what's known as the apex doctrine, which states that officials are generally not subject to depositions unless they have some personal knowledge of the matter and the information can't be obtained elsewhere.

Justice Department attorneys had argued that Wray's testimony could make it unnecessary to have a deposition with Trump. Much of the "newly available evidence" cited by the Justice Department was redacted from the court filing.

 

Should be fun times for everyone.

 

Indepen-Dunce Week: Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem

A January 6th terrorist drove to the Obama residence with a pile of guns and ammo after Trump basically doxxed the Obamas and this is basically straight-up scary now.

 

Former President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform what he claimed was the home address of former President Barack Obama on the same day that a man with guns in his van was arrested near the property, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in revealing new details about the case.

Taylor Taranto, 37, who prosecutors say participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, kept two firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition inside a van he had driven cross-country and had been living in, according to a Justice Department motion that seeks to keep him behind bars.

On the day of his June 29 arrest, prosecutors said, Taranto reposted a Truth Social post from Trump containing what Trump claimed was Obama’s home address. In a post on Telegram, Taranto wrote: “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s.” That’s a reference to John Podesta, the former chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign.

Taranto also told followers on his YouTube live stream that he was looking to get a “good angle on a shot.”

A federal defender representing Taranto did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

His wife told investigators that he had come to Washington this time because of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's offer earlier this year to produce unseen video of the Jan. 6 attack, the federal detention memo states. Taranto already faces four misdemeanor counts related to the Capitol assault, when prosecutors say he joined the crush of rioters who broke into the building and made his way to the entrance of the Speaker's Lobby outside the House chamber.

Since then, prosecutors say, Taranto has been active online, posting a Facebook video of himself in the Capitol that day and endorsing a conspiracy theory that the death of Ashli Babbitt — who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she began to climb through the broken part of a door leading into the Speaker's Lobby — was a hoax.

The FBI had been monitoring Taranto's online activities because of his involvement in the riot, and began searching for him last Wednesday after he asserted on his YouTube livestream that he was in Gaithersburg, Maryland on a “one-way mission” and intended to blow up the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The following day, he continued his live stream from the Washington neighborhood where Obama lives — an area heavily monitored by the U.S. Secret Service — and said that he was looking for “entrance points” and wanted to get a “good angle on a shot,” according to the Justice Department’s detention memo. Officials said he was spotted by law enforcement a few blocks from the former president’s home and fled, though he was chased by Secret Service officers.

 

The Secret Service stepped in and collared this asshole, and I'm extremely glad that they did. But the bigger issue is that Trump implied violence against the Obamas, and that violence almost happened. Trump can't be convicted and jailed quickly enough, because he's still an existential threat to America.