Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

According to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Ukraine forces have now retaken half of the territory claimed by Russia as the counteroffensive continues.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday that Ukraine has already retaken about 50 percent of the territory seized by Russia and that the counteroffensive is still in its “relatively early days.”

“In terms of what Russia sought to achieve, what Putin sought to achieve, they’ve already failed. They’ve already lost. The objective was to erase Ukraine from the map, to eliminate its independence, its sovereignty, to subsume it into Russia. That failed a long time ago,” Blinken told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview on “GPS.”

“Now Ukraine is in a battle to get back more of the land that Russia seized from it. It’s already taken back about 50 percent of what was initially seized. Now they’re in a very hard fight to take back more,” Blinken said. “These are still relatively early days of the counteroffensive. It is tough.”

Blinken projected optimism about Ukraine’s prospects in the counteroffensive attack, which it launched after months of preparation to retake land that Russia seized. 

 

There's still a long way to go however.

 

While the counteroffensive started off strong, Ukraine’s progress has slowed as it has quickly gone through its munitions and has had to navigate Russian minefields.

“The Russians have put in place strong defenses, but I’m convinced that with the equipment and support they’ve received now from more than 50 countries, with the training that their forces have gotten, and many of the forces who’ve gotten that training have not yet been put fully into this fight — and maybe more than anything else, with the fact that unlike the Russians, Ukrainians are fighting for their land, for their future, for their country, for their freedom. I think that is the decisive element, and that’s going to play out,” Blinken said.

“But it will not play out over the next week or two. We’re still looking, I think, at several months,” he added. 

 

Remember that the EU has basically given Ukraine until September to show progress. This is definitely progress if Kyiv can keep and hold it. Besides, the EU has no choice if Moscow is blocking grain shipments out of Ukraine, and Putin this weekend all but threatened to invade Poland next.

President Vladimir Putin on Friday accused NATO member Poland of having territorial ambitions in the former Soviet Union, and said any aggression against Russia's neighbour and close ally Belarus would be considered an attack on Russia.

Moscow would react to any aggression against Belarus, which forms a loose "Union State" with Russia, "with all the means at our disposal", Putin told a meeting of his Security Council in televised remarks.

Warsaw's Security Committee decided on Wednesday to move military units to eastern Poland after members of the Russian Wagner mercenary force arrived in Belarus, the state-run news agency PAP quoted its secretary as saying on Friday.

Poland denies any territorial ambitions in Belarus.

In his remarks Putin had also stated that the western part of Poland was a gift from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to the country and that Russia would remind Poles about it.

In apparent reference to that, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted on Friday evening that "Stalin was a war criminal, guilty of the death of hundreds of thousands of Poles. Historical truth is not debatable."

"The ambassador of the Russian Federation will be summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs", he said.

On Thursday, Belarus said Wagner mercenaries had started to train Belarusian special forces at a military range just a few miles from the Polish border.

 

No wonder Putin is trying to distract everyone from how bad he's losing in Ukraine this summer.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

President Biden will announce the designation of three historical sites as part of the Emmett Till National Monument this week, marking what would have been Till's 82nd birthday on Tuesday.

 

The new monument will be established across three locations in Illinois and Mississippi in an effort to protect places that tell Till's story, as well as reflect the activism of his mother, who was instrumental in keeping the story of Till's murder alive.

In August 1955, two white men abducted, tortured and killed Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, after he whistled at a white shopkeeper's wife in a grocery store in Mississippi. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted but later confessed to the killing in a magazine. Fifty years after the crime, the shopkeeper's wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham, also admitted to lying about Till touching her.

Among the sites that will be honored is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral service was held in September 1955.

About 1,700 people filled the church to its capacity, while 10,000 more stood outside and listened to the service over loudspeakers. The ceremony was also remembered for Till-Mobley's brave decision to keep the casket open, showing Till's mutilated body.

In Mississippi, Graball Landing will become a monument. Locals believe it is the spot where Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. In 2008, a memorial sign dedicated to Till was installed near the site.

But over the years, the sign was routinely stolen, vandalized or shot at and forced to be replaced. A fourth edition now stands at the site — this time bulletproof and details the history of vandalism.

The third monument location will be the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, also in Mississippi, where Till's killers were acquitted by an all-white jury. In October 2007, Till's family visited the courthouse to receive an apology from the town's leaders.

 

The million-dollar question in a country where one party is dedicated to erasing the entire civil rights era of the last 60-plus years: Will the existence of this monument, the history of the events being marked, and the reasons why the monument is being created be taught in states like Florida at all, or is that illegal? 

Someone in our national media should ask Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and the rest of the GOP field if they agree with the national monument designation and if it's appropriate to teach this history in schools.

 

Even ten years ago this wouldn't have been controversial at all. Teaching that a Black man was lynched by white folk on the word of a white girl in the lifetimes of even some of you reading this right now should absolutely be taught as a lesson, and a national monument marking this tragedy, serving as a solemn reminder of America's dark past, would be universally agreed upon as necessary to prevent it from ever happening again.

But of course one political party doesn't see it that way, and the people running for president in that party should be made to answer about why that is, and why that history is being erased under penalty of law.

 

Black Lives Still Matter.

Sunday Long Read: Chip, Shot

Brexit has been a catastrophic economic disaster for the UK, and things have gotten so bad in the last few years with price spikes in food, energy, and housing that even Scotland's most famous fish and chips shops are facing what one British economist calls "an extinction event." The Guardian's Tom Lamont has our Sunday Long Read:

One summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland. This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound “tattie” lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.

The driver of the tattie lorry, a red-cheeked Scotsman named Richard Murray, carried keys for most of the businesses on his route, to save from waking any tired friers who’d been up late the night before, poring anxiously over their sums. War in Ukraine coupled with ongoing complications from Brexit had driven up prices of almost all the goods that fish and chip shops depended on, from live ingredients to oil and salt to packaging. More distressing was the problem of rising energy costs. This meal is prepared using a great guzzler of a range cooker that must be kept on and roiling at all hours of a trading day. As the price of gas and electricity threatened to double, then triple, through 2022, friers were opening their energy bills with gritted teeth. A trade association called the National Federation of Fish Friers said that as many as a third of the UK’s 10,500 shops might go dark, warning of a potential “extinction event”.

It was about 8am when Murray drove his tattie lorry into a village called Pittenweem. He was met on the road by Alec Wyse, a skilled frier, 59 years old and known as Eck, who ran a takeaway called the Pittenweem Fish Bar. The tiny shop had been bought by Wyse’s father using money from the sale of a family fishing boat. There were nautical portraits on the walls. A peg-letter menu listed eight unchanging menu items, one of which was described in its entirety as “FISH”. Working together, Wyse and Murray unloaded sacks of potatoes from the lorry, carrying them inside on their shoulders.

A mile along the shore from Pittenweem, in the smarter harbour town of Anstruther, Murray parked his lorry outside a fish and chip shop called the Wee Chippy. Founded by Ian Fleming, a 64-year-old seafood trader with a tattoo of a shark on his forearm, the Wee Chippy stood across from a seaweed-covered strip of beach and a cobbled jetty. Fleming later told me it ruined his marriage, this fish and chip shop. “The hours,” he growled in explanation. Daily operations had long since passed to his business partner, a chef in his 40s called Chris Lewis. But Fleming kept a close eye on the Wee Chippy, which had absorbed such a big part of his life.

Leaving Anstruther behind, the tattie round almost done, Murray swung his lorry inland, in the rough direction of Dundee and a fish and chip shop called the Popular. Bright and cramped, the Popular had an eye-catching facade that was painted brown and baize green, making it resemble a snooker table turned on one side. A family concern, the Popular was staffed six days a week by a man called Graham Forbes, his wife Angela, and their two adult children. Though Forbes was in his mid-70s, he was the one who rose early to let the tattie man in. He liked to get started at about the same time the sun came up, feeding potatoes into the Popular’s rumbling peeler.

These three businesses – the Pittenweem Fish Bar in Pittenweem, the Wee Chippy in Anstruther, the Popular in Dundee – shared not only a potato supplier but the near-religious devotion of the communities they serviced. They were run by men and women who had thick skins, literally so when it came to their fingertips, which had become so desensitised to heat that they could be brushed against boiling oil to better position a fillet of frying fish or test the readiness of chopped potatoes as they fizzed and crisped. But these people were not invulnerable to strain. By the following summer, two of the three businesses would be gone, forced to close against their owner’s will.

I visited the East Neuk several times during that difficult year: in high tourist season, in the eerie quiet of winter, in the limbo between. As a national industry foundered, I wanted to document what it was like for a group of friers as they were brought to the brink, competing against each other even as they helped each other out, always prepping for tomorrow, cooking for today, running their numbers at night, trying not to become yet another fish and chip shop that disappeared. Between July 2022 and July 2023, things got tougher and sadder in the East Neuk than anybody predicted they would. By the time I made my last visit, people were in mourning, having said goodbye to a beloved local figure who gave their all to a cherished, suddenly endangered trade; and it was no longer so difficult to imagine a world without fish and chips.

A perfect storm of Brexit, Ukraine's invasion by Russia causing massive food shortages and price spikes, ocean acidification wrecking the fish population, and energy prices out of control means that the venerable chippie doesn't have much time left, and that an internationally famous fast food staple is now on the edge of extinction. 

Here in the land of burgers and fries there's a lesson to be learned about sustainable food in the coming decades as the global population heads for ten billion and climate change makes feeding that population less and less viable. Imagine an America without burgers, steak and fries, and the realization is that we need to face that reality as well. Millenials will have to, and Gen Z will absolutely need to face it, even as the newest generation is being born into a world that will be far different than even ten years ago.

Food for thought. 

Last Call For Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

More performative nonsense here from Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as he's suggesting he wants the state to sue Anheuser-Busch parent company InBev over shareholder stock losses for the state's pension fund due to the stupid controversy over Dylan Mulvaney's TikTok ad for Bud Light, but it's also an open threat against Fortune 100 companies that's working.

 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is hinting at legal action against Bud Light's parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, for the beer brand's promotion earlier this year with TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney.

Bud Light's March Madness promotion with Mulvaney, a transgender actress and activist, sparked an uproar among some conservatives, including singers Kid Rock and Travis Tritt, who called for a boycott of the popular beer. An ongoing sales slump for Bud Light has been attributed to backlash from both conservatives and the LGBTPQ community over the marketing campaign.

In an interview Thursday with Fox News, DeSantis said that Florida's pension fund contained over $50 million worth of Anheuser-Busch shares. Bud Light's decision to team with Mulvaney was followed by a sales slump, and as a result the state's pension fund has suffered collateral damage, according to the 2024 presidential candidate.

"When you start pursuing a political agenda at the expense of your shareholders, that's not just impacting very wealthy people, it impacts hardworking people who were firefighters, police officers and teachers," DeSantis told Fox News.

"And it could be something that leads to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida pension fund," he added. "Because, at the end of the day, there's got to be penalties for when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people."

In the letter, DeSantis said AB InBev has struggled recently because the company decided "to associate its Bud Light brand with radical social ideologies."

"It appears to me that AB InBev may have breached legal duties owed to its shareholders and that a shareholder action may be both appropriate and necessary," DeSantis wrote.

 

Steve M does the math on how much Florida taxpayers have been "harmed" by a trans woman drinking watery beer online:

Let's break that down.

The pension fund is $180 billion. Florida held $46 million in AB InBev stock, which means it constituted approximately .026% of the fund. The stock lost $8 a share; $8/share times 682,000 shares = a $5,456,000 loss. That's something like .0028% of the fund. You're going to sue over that? How much would it cost the state to try to recoup that tiny amount, which is a relatively normal stock loss?

Oh and let's look at that decline in context:

The company’s stock price has fallen since then from $66 a share to $58, though it’s still higher than its 52-week low of $44 from September 2022, which was well before the company’s recent controversies.

So the stock has gained 31% over the last eleven months.

This seems like an empty threat. But I think lawsuits of this kind are coming.

 

He's right. The real target isn't Mulvaney herself or even InBev, it's your employer's diversity, equality and inclusiveness initiatives.

Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold.

Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments.

Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shake out last fall. Some chief diversity officers say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target.

“There’s a combination of grief, being very tired, and being, in some cases, overwhelmed,” says Miriam Warren, chief diversity officer for Yelp, of the challenges facing executives in the field. Warren says the fear that company commitments are imperiled fuel her and others to feel “more committed to the work than ever.” Yelp’s DEI budget has grown for the past five years.

In interviews, current and former chief diversity officers said company executives at times didn’t want to change hiring or promotion processes, despite initially telling CDOs they were hired to improve the talent pipeline. The quick about-face shows company enthusiasm for diversity initiatives hasn’t always proved durable, leaving some diversity officers now questioning their career path.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020, companies scrambled to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite. In 2018, less than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed someone in the role, and by 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from Russell Reynolds, an executive search firm.

Once mostly tasked with HR matters, today’s diversity leaders are expected to weigh in on new product development, marketing efforts and current events that have an impact on how workers and consumers are feeling. Warren and other CDOs said the expanded remit is playing out in a politically divided environment where corporate diversity efforts are the subject of frequent social-media firestorms.

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.

“I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work.

 

The goal here, as I have said on numerous occasions, is the roll the country back to before the civil rights era.  It's to make America's largest employers limit their hiring of non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-Christian employees, lest they be attacked for discrimination and right-wing boycotts, which affect the stock price, which allows red states to sue as pension shareholders. which leaves the company open to attacks that they discriminate against white, straight Christian males and lowers the stock price, and so on.

The goal is to make the act of hiring someone who isn't a white straight Christian male subject to penalties, so that companies just stop doing it.  It's performative now, but it's having its intended effect. The right is celebrating this, and have every reason to push harder on this, and imply to white voters that they will directly benefit from total Republican rule.

Believe me, multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar corporations will abandon every pretense of diversity, equality and inclusiveness if red states make it prohibitively unprofitable to do so in order to operate in their states. It's already happening.

It'll carry the penalty of law soon, and that's when the employment picture changes dramatically across the country, rolling back decades of improvements, out of fear of shareholder lawsuits and civil action.

More of this is absolutely coming.

Trump Cards, Con't

Trump gets the federal documents trial delay he was looking for, from the judge he appointed.

 

 

A federal judge ordered Friday that the trial in the classified documents case that special counsel Jack Smith brought against former President Donald Trump begin in May 2024.

US District Judge Aileen Cannon said that the trial could begin as early as May 20. A pretrial hearing in the case will be held on May 14.

If that timeline holds, then the trial would fall deep in the 2024 race for the White House, coming amid multiple GOP presidential primaries. It would be a rebuke to Trump and his legal team, who wanted to postpone the trial until after the general election takes place in November 2024.

However, Cannon’s order also means that the case will unfold at a far slower speed than what Smith’s team was proposing, when it recommended a fast-paced timeline that would start the trial in mid-December of this year. Such a schedule would have a trial wrap up before primary voting gets underway in the 2024 election, where Trump is the leading GOP candidate.

The vast majority of state primaries will be finished by mid-May, although Nebraska, Maryland and West Virginia are set to hold their primary elections on May 14. Oregon votes the following week and a handful of states, including New Jersey, are now scheduled to vote on June 4. During his first presidential run, Trump effectively clinched the nomination at the end of May 2016 – before formally becoming the party’s nominee in July at the GOP convention in Cleveland.

While it’s likely the nominating process will be essentially decided by May, recent history has plenty examples of the race remaining a delegate fight until early summer.

 

It's within Judge Cannon's purview to delay the trial until next May, but the issue is she's personally responsible for delaying the proceedings for several months before we even got to this. 

Otherwise, she literally split the difference. How Solomonic. Marcy Wheeler explains it all:

Her order is not, on its face, unreasonable. It sets a CIPA trial for 49 weeks after it was charged, which is solidly within the scope of what it normally takes to bring these cases to trial. She has made this a complex case which is similarly not unreasonable.

The most unreasonable part of her order, thus far, is that she set the trial to be held in her tiny courtroom in Fort Pierce, making it utterly unworkable for the press.

The second most unreasonable part of her order is that she has treated the classified protective order as a month-long fully briefed affair, effectively absolving Trump and his co-defendant of conferring like grown-ups, such that classified discovery might not begin until after August 25, two months of delay she is adding to this timeline on top of the three months of delay she created last year.

Finally, she deferred on the question of whether the election will make jury selection next May impossible.

Again, this is not unreasonable, at least thus far. But she is letting Trump and Walt Nauta stall by obstructing from the outset.

 

Cannon has learned the difference between putting a thumb on the scale of justice instead of 318 metric tons of concrete.  Progress!

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Hugo Lowell has been covering the Trump crime beat for The Guardian for years now, and his reporting has been indispensable as much as it has been accurate, so when he reports that Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis is preparing RICO indictments for Trump as myself and others have predicted, I believe it.

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.

The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.

In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.

Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.

The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.

The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.

For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.

The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.

The copied data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines, which are used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged.

Though Coffee county is outside the usual jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, the racketeering statute would allow prosecutors to also charge what the Trump operatives did there by showing it was all aimed towards the goal of corruptly keeping Trump in office.

A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to requests for comment. 

 

The outline of a broad racketeering trial is here, and it's something that Lowell's sources say is coming in the next couple of weeks. We'll see if he's right, but the evidence at hand is strongly pointing in more indictments in the next 2-3 weeks.

Hopefully these racketeering charges will apply to multiple Georgia GOP officials as well. And let's not forget, Jack Smith is taking a look at these false electors too at the federal level, and that includes Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.

It's going to be a hot summer for the GOP.

Last Call For The Road To Gilead, Con't

A Nebraska teenager was sentenced this week for violating the state's abortion ban after Facebook turned over her private messages between herself and her mother, taking a plea deal for 90 days in jail, and if this isn't exactly what reproductive rights advocates have been warning about for years now, it's definitely the new reality of how having a womb of child-bearing age is now probable cause for law enforcement.

Police in Norfolk, Nebraska went to great lengths to build a case against the teen and her mother, seeking both her medical records — to determine how far along her pregnancy was — and private Facebook messages exchanged between the two.

Nebraska currently bans abortion at 12 weeks gestation; at the time, in April 2022, Nebraska law prohibited abortions after 20 weeks. Telemedicine abortions are also prohibited by Nebraska law. (The FDA has approved Mifepristone and Misoprostol to end pregnancies up to 10 weeks.)

According to messages that Facebook’s parent company, Meta, turned over to police in Nebraska, the teenager spoke about being anxious to end the pregnancy and worried about “evidence” of her illegal abortion being discovered. Burgess admitted to police that she miscarried after taking the pills and, with the help of her mother and a third person, burned and buried the remains.

At the sentencing hearing on Thursday, Burgess told the judge that her family would not have been able to afford a proper cremation or burial, “financial-wise.”

“I wanted to do the right thing, but I didn’t know if what I was doing at the time was the right thing,” the 19-year-old said. “I do regret my decisions very much.”

In addition to 90 days in jail — she had faced up to two years — Celeste Burgess was sentenced to two years probation.

 

The teenager's mother is facing years in jail after pleading guilty earlier this year in helping her daughter.

Jessica Burgess has pleaded guilty to three charges: Providing an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, false reporting and tampering with human skeletal remains. It is the first time that anyone has been charged with illegally performing an abortion after 20 weeks in Nebraska, the county prosecutor said. She is scheduled to be sentenced in September.

 

Putting thousands in jail is the point, folks. They want people to see having a womb means reproduction, and never sex for any other reason, something that has to be controlled and regulated under pain of the carceral state. The message is "If you have sex for any reason other than to reproduce along with a male, there are consequences up to and including prison time."

And sometimes, that choice is made by others. That's the real message. You don't own your own body. Men do. "Maybe you should settle, ladies."

Again, the GOP plan to end of the civil rights era doesn't mean we're going back to the 1950's just on issues of race, folks.

AI, Oh You, And Sometimes Why, Con't

Google wants to "help" major newspapers with its Genesis AI bot technology to "help" write news articles, which is not at all a ploy to put the final nail in print journalism in America so that Google can take over that sector too.

 

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news content, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.

Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.

Jenn Crider, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement that “in partnership with news publishers, especially smaller publishers, we’re in the earliest stages of exploring ideas to potentially provide A.I.-enabled tools to help their journalists with their work.”

“Quite simply, these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles,” she added. Instead, they could provide options for headlines and other writing styles.

A News Corp spokesman said in a statement, “We have an excellent relationship with Google, and we appreciate Sundar Pichai’s long-term commitment to journalism.”

The Times and The Post declined to comment.

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and media commentator, said Google’s new tool, as described, had potential upsides and downsides.

“If this technology can deliver factual information reliably, journalists should use the tool,” said Mr. Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

“If, on the other hand, it is misused by journalists and news organizations on topics that require nuance and cultural understanding,” he continued, “then it could damage the credibility not only of the tool, but of the news organizations that use it.”

Media outlets misusing technology to abuse the public trust and to spread disinformation and propaganda in order to make gobs of cash and to control the country?

 

Hell, we don't need media bots for that, it just means whatever Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller/Yevgeny Prigozhin op to control the 2024 election narrative can be highly automated and that there will be 90% fewer journalists around in any effort to combat it.

Should be fun when your "local newspaper" is managed from a server farm in Wyoming...or Novosibirsk.

Last Call For The GOP Circus Of The Damned, Con't

With Trump facing an imminent third set of indictments, he's apparently coming to collect one of the many markers he has from the House GOP Circus of the Damned, and its Ringmaster, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Problem is, McCarthy may not be able to deliver what Trump wants: expungement of Trump's impeachments.

 

Several moderate House Republicans are loath to revisit Trump’s impeachments — especially the charges stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. (In fact, though only 10 of their GOP colleagues voted with Democrats to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 attack, several more wanted to but were too worried about threats to their offices and families to take the plunge.)

But should McCarthy follow through, those members won’t have a choice. Given the speaker’s tenuous position with Trump allies in the House and the threat of his ouster looming over every move, McCarthy has no real option but to bow to the former president’s whims — even if it means putting vulnerable frontliners in a precarious political position.

The speaker has denied that he made such a promise to Trump at all, according to one Hill aide. From McCarthy’s point of view, he merely indicated that he would discuss the matter with his members — putting him and Trump on a collision course.

McCarthy’s own leadership team is divided on the matter.

House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who many believe is angling to be Trump’s running mate should he win the nomination, has pushed for an expungement vote. In late June, she teamed up with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on a resolution that would’ve cleared Trump of the impeachment charges.

But in a recent leadership meeting, moderate Republicans pushed back on the idea, arguing that any expungement vote would be poisonous to the reelections of members in Biden-won districts — particularly given that polling suggests most Americans disapprove of Trump’s actions on Jan. 6.

It’s also unclear whether an expungement vote even has enough support to pass the House, given the GOP’s slim five-seat majority. Two sitting Republicans — Reps. David Valadao (R-Calif.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) — voted to impeach Trump, and are unlikely to support expungement.

Then, beyond the skittish moderates who’d prefer not to take the vote, there’s the clutch of constitutionally minded conservatives — who, we are told, have privately voiced skepticism that the House has the constitutional authority to erase a president’s impeachments.

Some senior Republicans — even those who back Trump — worry that an expungement vote would expose divisions in their ranks and only embarrass Trump if the effort comes up for a vote and loses.

“I’m for Trump,” one senior GOP member tells Playbook. “The problem is: If you have an expungement, and it goes to the floor and fails — which it probably will — then the media will treat it like it’s a third impeachment, and it will show disunity among Republican ranks. It’s a huge strategic risk.”

For now, some in McCarthy’s leadership team are under the impression that a vote won’t happen, with one person calling it “too divisive.” And though McCarthy has publicly backed the push, senior Republicans speculate that his words were merely an attempt to curry favor with the former president.

“I think it’s more of a messaging thing to please Trump,” one senior GOP aide said.

 

No foolin?

 

The fact that McCarthy most likely lacks the votes for this is hysterical, and we'll see what happens when Trump tries to get his asterisk in the history books.

He should be more worried about spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

The government of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has completed their rewrite of Black history in the state for students this fall and the results are just as bad as I warned you they would be.

The Florida State Board of Education approved new rules Wednesday for how Black history will be taught in public schools that critics are decrying as a “step backward.”

The updated standards say students should learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and that in teaching about mob violence against Black residents instructors should note “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

“These standards are a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994,” the Florida Education Association (FEA), the state’s largest teachers union, said in a statement.

The standards are the latest development in an ongoing debate in Florida over how Black history should be taught in school. Earlier this year, the education board rejected a new Advanced Placement high school course on African American studies, arguing it lacked “educational value,” igniting protests and outrage.

Meanwhile, the state legislature has passed a raft of new laws backed by Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who contends the measures remove “woke indoctrination” and empower parents. The laws ban the teaching of critical race theory, an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism, and forbid teachers from offering instruction that makes other students “feel guilt” because of actions committed by others in the past.

Education Commissioner Manny Diaz argued at Wednesday’s meeting in Orlando that the changes to the Black history curriculum make it more “robust.”

“I think this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states,” Diaz said, adding that Florida would continue to “teach the good, bad and the ugly of American history” in an age-appropriate manner.

But critics said the dozens of new “benchmark clarifications” to the existing Black history curriculum water down that history. The changes include teaching elementary school children to “recognize Rosa Parks and Thomas Jefferson as individuals who represent the United States.” The FEA criticized the approach, saying it excludes a deeper teaching of their “histories and struggles” in favor of easy identification and memorization.

Genesis Robinson, political director of Equal Ground, a voter education group, said the new standards omit important lessons regarding the history of civil rights in Florida and ultimately dehumanize people of color.

“Black history is more than being able to identify well-known Black people,” he said.

A spokesman for DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment. Alex Lanfranconi, communications director for the state Department of Education, echoed Diaz’s remarks on Twitter, saying the new standards “teach it all.”

“Don’t believe the union lies,” he wrote.

More than a dozen speakers at Wednesday’s board meeting opposed the changes, including state Sen. Geraldine Thompson (D), who helped pass a law in 2020 that requires schools to teach lessons about the Ocoee Massacre. The incident in 1920 began when several Black residents attempted to vote, and ended with as many as 60 people dead, making it the deadliest instance of Election Day violence in U.S. history.

Thompson said the new curriculum “suggests that the massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That’s blaming the victims. ”

 

Has anyone stopped to consider that Black kids in Florida might "feel guilt" over having the schools tell them that our ancestors were responsible for their own massacres because they wanted to, you know, not be slaves?

Of course not. By the way, Florida's Education Secretary saying  “I think this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states” is an open threat to criminalize Black History.

Treat it as such.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As we get closer and closer to Donald Trump's expected federal indictment on January 6th crimes, Trump Whisperer Maggie Haberman and crew find that Jack Smith's target letter included the notion that Trump's 2020 election fraud efforts may be prosecuted under civil rights statutes.

 

Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.

But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to discuss the target letter and Mr. Smith’s theory for bringing the Section 241 statute into the Jan. 6 investigation. But the modern usage of the law raised the possibility that Mr. Trump, who baselessly declared the election he lost to have been rigged, could face prosecution on accusations of trying to rig the election himself.

A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.

In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”

In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”

The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.

“It seems like under 241 there’s at least a right to an honest counting of the votes,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “Submitting an alternate electoral certificate to Congress (as opposed to casting false votes or counting wrong) is a novel scenario, but it seems like it would violate this right.”

 

It seems fitting to go after Trump with a law used to stop Klan intimidation of voters.

 

We'll see what happens, but expect Jack Smith to go to his grand jury very soon to get indictments.

Last Call For Like A Wolverine

Trump and the GOP were all watching Georgia and DC when it came to his legal troubles, but people should have been paying attention to Michigan.

 

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Tuesday that she has filed charges against 16 people who signed paperwork falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had won the 2020 election as part of a scheme to overturn the results.

Presidents are technically voted in by slates of electors from each state who cast their votes for the candidates selected by their states’ popular votes. In December 2020, as Trump tried to overturn the results of the election, his allies readied alternative slates of electors in several states.

They appear to be the first charges filed against fake electors.

The announcement came the same day Trump said he has been notified that he is the target of an investigation by a Washington-based grand jury examining the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The 16 people being charged in Michigan allegedly met in the basement of the state's Republican Party headquarters and signed multiple certificates claiming they were “the duly elected and qualified electors for president and vice president of the United States of America for the state of Michigan,” Nessel said in recorded remarks.

“That was a lie. They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it,” she said.

Some of the electors tried to deliver the false documents to the state Senate but were turned away, she said; the documents were later sent to the U.S. Senate and the National Archives "with the intent that Vice President Pence would overturn the results of the election, using the false electoral slate," she said.

Nessel said the "false electors" are being charged with eight felony counts each, including forgery.

"The false electors' actions undermine the public's faith in the integrity of our elections and not only violated the spirit of the laws enshrining and defending our democracy, but we believe also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan and peaceably transfer power in America," she said.

The 16 people include state GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock and state Republican National Committeewoman Kathy Berden. Michele Lundgren, who was also charged, has told NBC affiliate WDIV of Detroit that she thought she was signing an attendance sheet for a meeting.

"I didn't even know what an elector was, let alone a fake elector," she told the station

Berden and Lundgren did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

When reached for comment, Maddock called the charges "political persecution," saying the country and judges would "put a stop to this to restore our judicial system."

"The democrats know they can’t beat Trump in 24 so they have to use lawfare to try to imprison their opponents," Maddock wrote in an email to NBC News.

 

It's one thing to see Trump indicted again and for Republicans to respond with "Boring, nobody cares".

 

It's entirely another thing to see other Republicans go down because of Trump.  I figure the same will happen in Georgia very, very soon, and let's remember that Jack Smith has been looking into possible federal charges for months now. Felony fraud charges may just be the beginning.

I hope there's a lot more coming.

Trump Cards, Con't

Looks like Trump is going to get his federal documents trial delayed until 2024 after all.

 

The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case in South Florida said Tuesday she doesn’t think the 2024 election will be a deciding factor for her in determining when the ex-president's historic trial begins.

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon made the comment during a nearly two-hour public hearing on the 37-count criminal indictment that Special Counsel Jack Smith secured in June against Trump and his personal valet and co-defendant, Walt Nauta.

Among Cannon's top early priorities is establishing a schedule for the legal proceedings, and Tuesday's hearing marked the first time she's brought together federal prosecutors and defense attorneys for Trump and Nauta to discuss the matter.

Smith's team has been pressing for a mid-December beginning to the Trump trial, while lawyers for Trump and Nauta want the entire proceeding postponed until after the 2024 election that the former president is running in with the hope of winning back his old White House job.

During Tuesday's hearing, Smith's team appeared to concede their December proposal was aspirational.

"We feel it is very important that we have a trial date to work from, realizing that the trial date may not be set in stone," said Jay Bratt, the Chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Justice Department's National Security Division.

Such a schedule may depend on whether the cases against Trump and Nauta are labeled complex, a designation that the government has opposed. Cannon appeared inclined to find that it was, pressing prosecutors on whether any similar Espionage Act case had such an ambitious schedule. Bratt appeared to concede that he couldn't find one, though he added that Trump's case was different from the fold in an important aspect. The evidence has been available for nearly a year, since the FBI searched and seized the documents at issue in the case in August 2022.

Pressing both the government and the defense, Cannon similarly showed little interest in basing her ultimate decision on waiting until the November 2024 election has passed.

"I can appreciate that more time is necessary, but we need to set a schedule," Cannon told Trump's attorney, Todd Blanche, early in the afternoon session.

Cannon, a Trump appointee, did not issue a decision on a trial date during Tuesday's hearing. Instead, she said she'd be weighing a number of other factors in determining a schedule, including the volume of discovery materials Smith team will be handing over to Trump's defense so it can prepare for the trial.

Court watchers have viewed the trial schedule as a key test for Cannon, whose rulings in favor of the 45th president of the United States received a blistering rebuke late last year.

After the FBI seized the documents from Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Cannon issued an injunction blocking the government from using them in their investigation. A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit overturned that order in a blistering rebuke that accused Cannon of undertaking a “radical” restructuring of criminal procedure on behalf of the ex-president.

In the shadow of that decision, Cannon shot down attempts by Trump's team to weigh the case's political backdrop into her consideration, or for prosecutors to respond to insinuations of political persecution by the former president's legal team. Trump's attorney Christopher Kise previously hinted, but had not outright stated, that they wanted to postpone a trial until after the 2024 election.

At one point, Cannon pressed Kise to go on-the-record about that desire.

"Your position is there can be no trial until after the election?" the judge asked.

After Kise answered in the affirmative, Cannon told him that the volume of discovery and anticipated motions would provide a more "suitable" framework for her under the Speedy Trial Act. Trump's attorneys previously accused the government of seeking an "expedited" criminal trial, but special counsel attorney David Harbach said that this formulation gets it backwards.

"It's not a speedy trial that has to be justified," Harbach noted. "It's deviation from a speedy trial that has to be justified."

Despite the unprecedented Justice Department prosecution of a former president, Harbach argued that Trump was no different from any other "busy, important person" who's been indicted.

 

Judge Cannon was all but begging Trump's lawyers to give her a discovery excuse, that the volume of documents would be too much for Trump's team to handle before at least this time next year or something perverse like that.

I don't know exactly how she's going to delay this case until after the election, but it looks like she's going to try.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Lawfare's Ben Wittes makes a convincing argument that Trump will be indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith's grand jury on January 6th charges as soon as Friday and the indictment unsealed next week. Once again the reasoning is fueled by the fact Trump can't keep his damn mouth shut as he went on a Truth Social tirade on Tuesday over Smith naming Trump as a target of his January 6th investigation.

There are very few facts in Trump’s statement, but it does seem to say clearly enough that on Sunday evening, Trump received a target letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith in the Jan. 6 investigation. Trump also claims that the letter gave him “a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury.”

Trump is not a reliable narrator on factual matters, but he has twice before announced that he expected to be indicted and been right both times. There seems to me little reason to suspect that he would make up his receipt of a target letter—especially because we know from news reporting that the Jan. 6 grand jury has been active and was clearly approaching the decision-making phase of its work. Indeed, only on Friday, I noted that the absence of a target letter story in the press was the only reason to think an indictment wasn’t yet imminent at that time: “It sure looks like we’re basically at decision time. Except for one thing—and I think the one thing is overwhelmingly likely to happen before an indictment does. We have not seen a story about a target letter, a meeting with Trump’s lawyers, a negotiated surrender, or an indictment filed under seal.”

Well, thanks to Trump, that one thing is now in place. A target letter almost always precedes an indictment by only a short time. So it’s reasonable to infer that if Trump has received one, the indictment will follow soon.

Trump offers another useful factual claim, which is his vague reference to a time frame. It’s not clear precisely what he means by “giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury,” but I suspect it means that prosecutors have invited him to testify before the grand jury and given him a deadline of Thursday to do so. That would likely mean an indictment will immediately follow the lapse of that deadline, assuming Trump does not actually show up. The indictment will likely be filed under seal so as to allow an orderly process for Trump to show up for surrender and arraignment—as happened with the Mar-a-Lago indictment.

A few additional inferences are possible. This indictment will take place in Washington, D.C. We know this not merely because Trump claims it in the last paragraph of his statement. We know it also because the grand jury has been meeting for months at the courthouse here in Washington, and unlike with the Mar-a-Lago case, that has continued up until the present; the locus of activity has not shifted elsewhere as it did in the Mar-a-Lago case, which was taken up late in the game by a grand jury in Florida.

One thing Trump gives no sign of in his statement is what he will be charged with. The possibilities here are broad. There has been a lot of talk in the press about possible wire fraud charges in connection with some of the post-election fundraising. There is also the possibility of charges in connection with the pressure exerted on Vice President Pence and other elected officials or Trump’s efforts to procure fake electors. The subject matter of the indictment also has implications for the possibility of possible co-defendants—if any—a subject on which Trump is also silent. We do know, however, because of the subject matter of the grand jury investigation and the limitations of Smith’s jurisdictional mandate that the charges will concern Jan. 6 in some meaningful sense.

There is no point speculating about these matters at this stage, although that surely won’t stop cable news pundits from doing so incessantly until the text of any indictment becomes public. The most one can responsibly say is that a third indictment appears to be forthcoming, and that it’s reasonable to expect the grand jury to act as early as the end of this week.

 

Which explains in part why Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis is waiting until next month to unveil her state charges against Trump, letting Jack Smith go first with those "possibly broad" charges. Rolling Stone's Jana Winter:

THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S letter to Donald Trump related to Jan. 6 listed the federal statutes under which Trump is expected to be charged, including conspiracy, obstruction, and civil rights violations, according to a source with knowledge of the contents of the target letter.

Special counsel Jack Smith sent the letter to Trump on Sunday, informing him he was a target of the Justice Department. Trump on Tuesday announced he’d been sent the letter via a post on the social media platform Truth Social.

The letter mentions three federal statutes: Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States; deprivation of rights under color of law; and tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant. It does not offer further details, nor does it detail how the special counsel believes Trump may have violated the statutes, the source tells Rolling Stone.

The letter does not mention statutes on sedition or insurrection, according to the source. Trump is the only person named in the letter, the source says.

 

Sedition and insurrection are going to be hard to prove in court. Defrauding the United States with a false slate of electors and witness tampering, well, Trump has kinda already admitted to that publicly and on several occasions, hasn't he?

Stay tuned. This weekend could be a hell of a ride.

Last Call For Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

House Republicans are doing everything they can to punish the LGBTQ+ community for existing, and that means millions of dollars in cuts to eliminate federal projects entirely.

 

House Republicans struck three Democratic projects that would provide services to the LGBTQ community during Tuesday’s fiscal 2024 Transportation-HUD Appropriations markup, enraging Democrats on the committee.

The three earmarks total $3.62 million, with two in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania. The projects were eliminated as part of a Republican en bloc amendment that advanced a range of Republican cultural priorities, including a provision that would ban flying gay pride flags over government buildings. The vote was along party lines, 32-26.

Subcommittee ranking member Mike Quigley, D-Ill., then introduced an amendment to add the three projects back into the bill.

That amendment remained pending as the committee recessed around 3:45 p.m. as it awaited advice from the parliamentarian, after Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., asked that a statement Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis. made be struck from the record.

“There’s a saying, how do you show you’re a bigot without saying you’re a bigot," Pocan said during debate over the GOP amendment. "I’m just saying, there’s a saying."

Pocan also said Harris was too tired from reading the websites of the organizations he opposes to listen to what Pocan was saying, another comment Harris objected to.

Earlier in the meeting, Pocan said the committee’s move to strip the earmarks was “bigoted” and described his own experience getting attacked leaving a gay bar that left him unconscious.

“This is what you guys do, by introducing amendments like this,” Pocan said. “Taking away from people’s earmarks is absolutely below the dignity of Congress, and certainly the Appropriations Committee.”

The earmarks that are set to be stripped include two in Pennsylvania: $1.8 million that Rep. Brendan F. Boyle requested for an expansion project at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia and $970,000 that Rep. Chrissy Houlahan requested for a transitional housing program at the LGBT Center of Greater Reading.

“This cruel and unjust decision is not rooted in any legitimacy, but instead in bigotry and hatred,” Houlahan said on Twitter.

The third project is $850,000 that Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, D-Mass., requested for LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc. to convert a former Boston Public School building into 74 units of affordable housing for seniors.

Harris criticized the Greater Reading center for offering services to children as young as 7, and argued the Philadelphia center promotes protests held by the Young Communist League of Philadelphia. And he said the Massachusetts project would discriminate against those who are not LGBTQ or allies.

Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont. said taxpayers should not be paying for the resources for transgender individuals that the LGBT Center of Greater Reading offers.

“The question is, should taxpayers pay for this?” he said. “The answer is no.”

 

And there you are. 

 

Republicans are now instituting a dollar cost for keeping the T in LGBTQ+ in an effort to punish and split the community. Pretty soon it's going to be a legal and criminal cost as well if Republicans have their way in states they control, but these cuts are specifically happening in blue states too.

And yes, this is all part of hundreds of billions in cuts that House Republicans want to defund from President Biden's infrastructure and green energy bills.

A series of GOP bills to finance the federal government in 2024 would wipe out billions of dollars meant to repair the nation’s aging infrastructure, potentially undercutting a 2021 law that was one of Washington’s rare recent bipartisan achievements. The proposed cuts could hamstring some of the most urgently needed public-works projects across the country, from improving rail safety to reducing lead contamination at schools.

Some of the cuts would be particularly steep: Amtrak, for example, could lose nearly two-thirds of its annual federal funding next fiscal year if House Republicans prevail. That includes more than $1 billion in cuts targeting the highly trafficked and rapidly aging Northeast Corridor, which runs between Boston and Washington, prompting Amtrak’s chief to sound early alarms about service disruptions.

In recent days, Republicans have defended their approach as a fiscally responsible way to reduce the burgeoning federal debt. They’ve largely tried to extract the savings by slimming down federal agencies’ operating budgets next year, technically leaving intact the extra funding that lawmakers adopted in the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

But the effect would be the same: The GOP bills would reduce the federal money available for repairs. The cuts would come at a time when the country is grappling with the real-life consequences of its own infrastructure failures, from train derailments in Ohio and Pennsylvania to the collapse of a key portion of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia last month.

I guarantee you that these same House Republicans will blame Democrats when these cuts are forced into must-pass legislation later this year. 

The cruelty is the point.