Last Call For The Journey Of Turning Attorneys

As with Dubya, Obama, and Trump before him, Joe Biden is mostly cleaning house at the various DoJ US Attorney offices with the goal of Senate appointments for new federal prosecutors. However, Biden is leaving several in place, including the one trying to railroad his own son Hunter.

The Justice Department, as soon as Tuesday, is expected to ask US attorneys appointed by former President Donald Trump to submit their resignations, a turnover expected to spare two top prosecutors in Delaware and Connecticut overseeing two sensitive Trump-era investigations, a senior Justice Department official said. 

In a call Monday night, acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson asked Delaware US Attorney David Weiss to remain in office, where he is overseeing the tax probe of Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son. John Durham, appointed as special counsel by former Attorney General William Barr to reinvestigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, will also continue his work, but he is expected to resign as US attorney in Connecticut, the Justice official said. 

The resignation request is expected to apply to 56 Senate-confirmed US attorneys appointed by Trump. 

Justice officials have scheduled a call with US attorneys around the country to discuss a transition that is expected to take weeks. The Justice official didn't say when the resignations would take effect.

The changeover of US attorneys is routine, but is often fraught with political overtones. In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked 46 Obama-appointed US attorneys to submit their resignations. A handful were allowed to stay on for a brief period, but most had to leave immediately.

Distrust of Trump-era appointees led the Biden administration to appoint a career Justice Department official as acting attorney general while it waits for the US Senate to confirm Merrick Garland, the President's nominee to lead the department. 

Garland's confirmation hearing was expected to begin on February 8, but it has been delayed by former Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham who, until this week when Democrats took formal control of the Senate, opposed moving quickly on Garland's hearing. 

Graham said he needs time to question Garland on current investigations and wrote a letter on Tuesday to Wilkinson urging him "not to interfere in or call off" the investigations. 

Of the 94 US attorneys serving in districts across the country, 25 are serving in acting positions after some Trump appointees resigned ahead of the Biden inauguration. 

Among those the Biden administration may keep for a while, according to people briefed on the matter, are Michael Sherwin, acting US attorney in Washington, DC, who is overseeing the sprawling probe of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Sherwin is a career prosecutor from Miami, but was installed in DC by former Attorney General William Barr, and among the options Biden administration officials have discussed is having him continue to lead the insurrection probe, perhaps from Justice headquarters, while making room for Biden's own appointee in the DC office. 

Less certain is how long acting US attorneys in New York City will remain in their posts: Seth DuCharme in Brooklyn and Audrey Strauss in Manhattan. 

Some high-profile US attorneys who had not resigned ahead of Biden's inauguration included US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio David DeVillers, Utah US Attorney John Huber and Pittsburgh US Attorney Scott Brady. 

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown had made clear to a local news outlet that DeVillers is going to be replaced and has put out a call for resumes, according to Cleveland.com. DeVillers is currently overseeing two high-profile corruption investigations involving a former Republican lawmaker and Cincinnati council members that includes a Democrat.

Biden's a lot nicer than I'd be about this, but Chuck Schumer needs to pay a visit to Lindsey Graham's office and get Merrick Garland as AG done already.

And yes, the Democrat that the article mentions at the end there here in Cincy is P.G. Sittenfeld, who is almost certainly going to prison for bribery and fraud for a few years instead of being the city's next Mayor.

Still, we'll see what becomes of all these leftover Trump regime "investigations". I doubt Garland will have much in the way of patience for the usual political nonsense.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Democrats aren't wasting any time in looking ahead to 2022 US Senate races, knowing that there are several seats they have an opportunity to pick up. Arguably the big one is retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey's seat in Pennsylvania, and a popular Democrat is stepping in already: current Lieutenant Gov. John Fetterman.

 

“I’m running for the United States Senate for the same reason I ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 and mayor of Braddock 16 years ago—because I believe in a set of core truths,” John Fetterman said in a statement, before listing off priorities such as the “dignity of a paycheck,” unions and healthcare as a “fundamental, basic human right.”

Fetterman initially earned recognition for his attempts to revitalize the small, western Pennsylvania town of Braddock, which saw a steep decline after the steel industry collapsed there in the 1970s and 1980s. A 2011 New York Times Magazine article coined Fetterman as the “Mayor of Rust,” noting his creative efforts to bring back the town of just several thousand people. “We’ve lost 90% of our population and 90% of our buildings,” Fetterman told the Times then. “Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill. So we took a two-pronged approach. We created the first art gallery in the four-town region, with artists’ studios. We did public art installations. And, I don’t know if you consider it ‘arts,’ exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.”

Big Number: $1.4 million. That’s how much Fetterman has raised from small-money donors in the weeks before officially launching his bid.

Fetterman is a big proponent of marijuana legalization and criminal justice reform. On Twitter Monday, the day he launched his candidacy, Fetterman wrote: “If you’re cool with Pennsylvania minting 20,000 NEW criminal records every single year for getting caught sipping some weed, I am not your dude for 2022.”

Two unions, which carry big influence in Pennsylvania, have already endorsed Fetterman: United Steelworkers District 10 and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776. The two unions together represent more than 80,000 workers, according to Politico.

Other candidates to enter the race. Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) is seen as another potential Democrat to run for Toomey’s seat. Prospective GOP candidates include: Rep. Ryan Costello, real-estate developer Jeff Bartos, former Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite and 2018 gubernatorial candidate Paul Mango, among others.  

 

Also, at 6'8", Fetterman would be the tallest US Senator since Alabama Republican Luther Strange (6'9") and Alan "Simpson-Bowles" Simpson at 6'7".

Personally, I like Fetterman. He played the public foil to the PA GOP's circus efforts to overturn the election and made them look like the clowns they are, and he did it on several occasions over the last two months.

We'll see how he does in the primaries.

Trial Of The Century 2.0, Con't

 Nobody seems happy with the Trump impeachment trial, on the right (who want to trial dismissed on "constitutional grounds") and on the left, who want Democrats to call Sen. Lindsey Graham's bluff and call witnesses to testify not only against Trump, but against the Republicans who enabled him, as Greg Sargent explains.

The Democrats’ fear appears to be that if the full GOP is implicated, that makes conviction less likely. To be fair, there are genuine complexities here: Trump is the one on trial, and drawing out the GOP’s role might be challenging (though hardly undoable) in a trial context.

Calling out the GOP might also give GOP senators a (bad faith) way to scream that Democrats politicized the trial, giving them cover to acquit.

But the idea that refraining from this will make it more plausible that 17 Republican senators will vote to convict is at odds with everything we know. Republicans are publicly saying in every which way that acquitting Trump is key to their party’s future, so he’ll keep the voters he brought into politics in the GOP coalition.

So acquittal is a foregone conclusion. If anything, Democrats need to make it as politically uncomfortable for Republicans as possible to acquit — and to extract a political price for it among the suburban moderates whom the GOP continues to alienate with its ongoing QAnon-ification.

It’s hard to see how insulating the GOP from Trump’s effort to overturn U.S. democracy helps accomplish that.

Separately, Politico reports that some of the impeachment managers want witnesses at the trial, and that some Senate Democrats are leaning against it.

This is more complex than it appears: A person familiar with ongoing talks over the trial structure between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and McConnell tells me there will be a vote on whether to have witnesses, if the managers want them.

So this is up to the managers. And it’s still unclear whether the managers do or do not want witnesses. Many of their aides declined to tell me.

The case for witnesses is strong. There’s a lot we don’t know about Trump’s behind-the-scenes conduct during the rampage: He reportedly refused entreaties to call off the mob, even from terrified lawmakers under siege, because he was enjoying watching it on TV.

People like former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who is now spinning away Trump’s culpability, should be forced to testify to what Trump was doing during that time. A trial with witnesses could also probe the role of some House Republicans in the “Stop the Steal” movement leading to the insurrection, and any of Trump’s communications with them.

A full accounting is critical. Republicans on the state level are racing forward with new voter-suppression efforts, and Democrats have proposed national reforms that expand voting rights and curb counter-majoritarian tactics. They must be prepared to nix the filibuster to make these reforms law.

A big political battle is coming over all this as well. Democrats must fully dramatize the GOP’s continuing radicalization when it comes to embracing such tactics, so the public understands the stakes of what will be nothing less than a full-scale war over the future of our democracy.

That won’t be helped by any failure to create a full record of the most sustained effort to overturn an election and our democracy in modern times, including via intimidation and violence, or any failure to implicate the GOP in it.

 

Sargent is correct that Democrats should call witnesses and make it hurt. I also agree with him that the GOP will acquit Trump, and that the conclusion is foregone. But the fact remains that they need Trump regime people testifying under oath in front of the country as to what Donald Trump did, because the country has to have the truth. 

I don't have high hopes, however. Being honest, I believe zero Republicans will vote to convict, and the moment he is acquitted he'll announce his 2024 candidacy and use that run to shield himself from any state or federal charges against him.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Officials in Florida say hackers gained remote access to a water treatment plant in Pinellas County and attempted to poison the water system by manipulating chemical levels.
• Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is in self-quarantine for two weeks after a member of his security detail tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday.
• Georgia GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office is opening an official investigation into Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the presidential election in the state through coercion.
• The New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that the state charges against former Trump official Paul Manafort after his federal pardon, are effectively double jeopardy, dismissing the state case.
• House Democrats are looking into whether social media app Parler has Russian financial ties regarding the spread of Trump regime "elction fraud" disinformation.
  

Last Call For (Minimum) Waging War

The Congressional Budget Office has scored Bernie Sander's $15 an hour minimum wage bill as good news and bad, that it would initially reduce employment by about 1.4 million jobs and cost $54 billion over ten years, but that more jobs would be created over those five years elsewhere, and that nearly a million American households would be lifted out of poverty.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bill to hike the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour would grow the deficit by $54 billion over a decade, Congress’s independent budget scorekeeper estimated Monday.

That prediction of a deficit pile-up could work in Sanders’ (I-Vt.) favor as he fights to include the minimum wage increase in the package Democrats are crafting to enact President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.

Under the fast-tracked budget process Democrats could use to clear the aid package with just 51 votes in the Senate, the bill must have a direct and substantial impact on federal spending, revenues or the debt. So the Congressional Budget Office score is a boon for Democrats fighting for the minimum wage hike to be included, even as Biden casts doubt on whether it would past muster under Senate rules for the reconciliation process.

“What that means is that we can clearly raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour under the rules of reconciliation,” Sanders said about CBO’s predictions.

“Let’s be clear. We are never going to get 10 Republicans to increase the minimum wage through ‘regular order,’” said Sanders, chair of the Senate Budget Committee. “The only way to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour now is to pass it with 51 votes through budget reconciliation.”

The wage proposal, S. 53 (117), would gradually hike the federal hourly minimum from $7.25 to $15 by 2025 and index future increases to median wage growth. It would also eliminate the sub-minimum tipped wage.

 

The final call is the Senate Parliamentarian, but they are allowed to work with the Senate once they have a CBO score to consider, which they now do. So it's possible to put the $15 minimum wage hike in the reconciliation bill.

We'll see if it makes it.  Gonna want to see how the Senate GOP votes against it, and every single one of them will most likely, but again, it only matters if voters feel like making them pay.

It worked in Georgia.

Republicans Go Viral, Con't

Texas Republican Ron Wright has died from COVID-19 after being admitted to a hospital along with his wife two weeks ago, marking the second House Republican to die from the virus in the last few months.

 

“Congressman Wright will be remembered as a constitutional conservative. He was a statesman, not an ideologue,” according to a statement released by Wright’s office. “Ron and Susan dedicated their lives to fighting for individual freedom, Texas values, and above all, the lives of the unborn. As friends, family, and many of his constituents will know, Ron maintained his quick wit and optimism until the very end. Despite years of painful, sometimes debilitating treatment for cancer, Ron never lacked the desire to get up and go to work, to motivate those around him, or to offer fatherly advice.”

According to the statement, Wright had been keeping a vigorous work scheduled before contracting the virus. Two weeks ago Wright and his wife were admitted to Baylor hospital in Dallas because of COVID-19 side effects.

Wright, a former Tarrant County Tax Assessor, is survived by his wife, Susan; his daughter Rachel, his sons Derek and Justin, his brother, Gary and nine grandchildren.

 

House Republican Congressman-elect Luke Letlow of Louisiana died at the end of last year, but Republicans ignored his death, saying his heart attack had absolutely nothing to do with his COVID-19 diagnosis when of course Letlow had no evidence of heart issues and was only 41, with right-wing news listing Letlow's death as solely from a heart attack.

So no, I don't expect congressional Republicans to start wearing masks either. You'd think from purely a cold political standpoint that they would start requiring serious COVID-19 procedures because dead Republican lawmakers can't vote against everything the Democrats want to do, but that's just me.

Democrats Versus The Austerity

Congressional Democrats are hitting Republicans right where it hurts: by actually helping Americans with kids by increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit substantially.

 

House Democratic leaders will unveil legislation Monday that would give millions of families at least $3,000 per child, advancing a key provision in President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package. 

Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Richard Neal, who is leading the crafting of the legislation for the stimulus package, will introduce the enhanced Child Tax Credit bill, according to a committee spokesperson. 

"The pandemic is driving families deeper and deeper into poverty, and it's devastating. We are making the Child Tax Credit more generous, more accessible, and by paying it out monthly, this money is going to be the difference in a roof over someone's head or food on their table," Neal said in a statement provided to CNN. 

CNN obtained a copy of the 22-page bill. The Washington Post first reported on it. 

The legislation would provide $3,600 per child under the age of six and $3,000 per child age six through 17 for a single year. The full benefit is available to single parents earning up to $75,000 annually and for couples earning up to $150,000. Payments would phase out after those thresholds. 

Families can receive the Child Tax Credit payments on a monthly basis, which advocates say will make it easier to pay their obligations compared to getting a lump sum at tax time.
If this particular legislation is passed by Congress, the payments would begin in July for one year. 

Another big change: The credit would become fully refundable for the year. Some 27 million children currently live in low-income families who receive a partial or no tax credit because they earn too little, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 

The current Child Tax Credit provides up to $2,000 per child under the age of 17. The credit phases out for single parents with a modified adjusted gross income over $200,000, and $400,000 for married couples. Families receive a single payment. 

Some 90% of families with children will receive an average credit of $2,380 in 2020, according to a non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimate. 

Reps. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, Suzan DelBene of Washington and Ritchie Torres of New York are also set to introduce on Monday standalone legislation that would continue the expanded benefit permanently.

 

Going to be interesting to see how Senate Republicans try to kill this by saying American parents need to pay more in taxes, but my guess is they'll say the lower phaseouts amount to a "major middle class tax hike" when it actually doesn't, the phaseouts for the current $2,000 payment would be the same as they are now for any single parents making $75k-$200k and for married couples $150k-$400k.

But it means American parents making less than that get a considerable boost, and can choose to get that boost monthly.

Those are the major differences, and I expect Republicans are going to just claim IT'S TIME TO TIGHTEN AMERICA'S BELT and vote against it anyway, but not all of them will.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• George Shultz, Treasury Secretary under Nixon and Secretary of State under Reagan, has died at age 100 in his California home.
• Reversing Trump policy, the Biden administration is making a major push to expand LGTBQ+ rights worldwide through the State Department.
• President Biden says it will be a "challenge" for America to reach COVID-19 herd immunity status by the end of the summer.
  
• The government of Hatian President Jovenel Moise has arrested at least 20 people on suspicion of a coup to kill Moise and overthrow the Haitian government.
• Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced the biggest overhaul to antitrust regulations in more than four decades in new legislation called CALERA.
  

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Newly-confirmed Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is wasting no time in dealing with the largest problem in America's military: the fact that it's been a hotbed of disaffected white supremacist terrorism in America for decades, from Tim McVeigh to today.

 

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has signed a memo ordering commanding officers and supervisors to hold a one-day "stand-down" to discuss extremism within the armed forces in the next 60 days, the Department of Defense announced Friday.

Why it matters: After multiple current service members and veterans were arrested for their actions during the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol siege, the Pentagon has increased efforts to combat white supremacy and other forms of extremism in its ranks, according to the New York Times.

What they're saying: "This stand-down is just the first initiative of what I believe must be a concerted effort to better educate ourselves and our people about the scope of this problem and to develop sustainable ways to eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce," Austin, the first Black man to lead the Pentagon, said in the memo. 

"We will not tolerate actions that go against the fundamental principles of the oath we share, including actions associated with extremist or dissident ideologies. Service members, DoD civilian employees, and all those who support our mission, deserve an environment free of discrimination, hate, and harassment." 

"We owe it to the oath we each took and the trust the American people have in our institution."

 

Whether or not this remains symbolic remains to be seen, but let's remember that the Trump regime was not only actively encouraging white supremacist domestic terrorism in the ranks of the US military, Trump was doing it in order to overthrow the government and take over the country.

 

It came depressingly close to working.

 

Getting rid of the neo-Nazis, fascists, and terrorists in our armed forces will take a long time, and it will take an even longer time to do so from America's police forces. But at least the Biden administration acknowledges that the problem, you know, exists.

Black History Still Matters

Insert the joke here about how Black History Month in America is the shortest month of the year, but apparently in one Utah school, Black history actually doesn't matter.

A Utah charter school that incorporates Black History Month into its lesson plans is now facing backlash from some after the school announced it was allowing parents to opt students out of the curriculum.

Maria Montessori Academy Director Micah Hirokawa announced the decision in a Friday post on the school’s private Facebook page, according to local news outlet the Standard-Examiner.

Hirokawa wrote that he “reluctantly” sent a letter to families stating that administrators were allowing them “to exercise their civil rights to not participate in Black History Month at the school.”

Hirokawa said in the post that “a few families” had asked not to participate in the curriculum, though he declined to tell the Standard-Examiner the exact number of parents who had contacted the school or the reasons they gave for making the request.

The public charter school director added that the demand from parents “deeply saddens and disappoints me.”

“We should not shield our children from the history of our Nation, the mistreatment of its African American citizens, and the bravery of civil rights leaders, but should educate them about it,” Hirokawa said.

Hirokawa told the Utah news outlet that the school, which serves elementary and middle school students, incorporates Black History Month into social studies and history lessons, with a particular effort this year to highlight the achievements of African American figures in U.S. history.

Hirokawa, who is of Asian descent and noted that his great-grandparents were sent to a Japanese internment camp, told the outlet that he believes there is “a lot of value in teaching our children about the mistreatment, challenges, and obstacles that people of color in our Nation have had to endure and what we can do today to ensure that such wrongs don’t continue.”

"Why should THE BLACKS have their own history, they're American and they should be grateful for it, they could be back in Africa!", said Joe Whiteman, whose Irish paternal and Italian maternal grandfathers respectively were not considered "real Americans" seventy years ago, and who didn't consider Black folk to be human either.

Black history *is* American history, because y'all brought us here, and we built the monuments to America's "singular vision of freedom" with our bloody hands and bowed backs while your ancestors congratulated themselves on how clever they were for owning people as chattel. The African diaspora didn't exactly arrive on this continent through our ancestors' own volition, dig?

And hey, let's remember that kids today are learning how slavery wasn't that bad and "MaDe LiVeS BettEr FoR PoOr AfRiCaNs" just like their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents learned over the last century.

That brings me back to a hard and fast rule that the Biden administration is going to have to deal with: charter schools are always a scam, and none of them should get a dime from the federal government.

Not a dime.

You want to exclude your kids from Black History Month?

Homeschool them to be ignorant assholes who can't pass a GED, can't hold a job, and grow up to hate the folks "taking our jobs", but I sure as hell don't want to pay tax dollars for that.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Black History Still Matters.

Sunday Long Read: How America Went Q-Q

The New Republic's Melissa Gira Grant takes a deep dive into how the far right used conspiracy theories to leave a broken, ungovernable political class in its wake, realizing their demographic end meant that if that the country couldn't be ruled by the white male theocracy, it could never be ruled by anyone.

“I think that the TNT is about to go off.” An Oregon woman named Jo Rae Perkins was livestreaming to Facebook at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, sipping occasionally from a metal water bottle so as not to be interrupted and told to put on her mask, as Covid-19 protocols there now mandate. “I want you guys to please be alert, please be aware—please be prepared.”

Perkins was dressed in a chartreuse mock neck top, with matching chartreuse dangling crystal earrings and thickish lines of cobalt drawn on her upper lash line. She was reflecting on the attempted occupation of the Capitol the day before, January 6, 2021. “All you-know-what is going to break loose. We are not going to lose our country.” A young child’s voice floated over the stream as Perkins greeted some people who just logged on at a rapid clip. “Hello Amy, hey Jeff, Tina, and Darren.” She asked for prayers, and then predicted: “Do not be surprised if martial law happens in the next few days.” Now is the time to gather food and water, Perkins advised, and don’t be surprised if social media goes down. “After yesterday, with Mrs. Babbitt being murdered, that was the shot heard around the world for the second American Revolution.”

About two months before declaring from Sea-Tac that the revolution was here, Perkins won 912,814 votes in her race to represent Oregon in the U.S. Senate. That was close to the total number of votes Trump received in the state. Perkins had stunned national political observers earlier in 2020, when she won the Republican primary, beating out three other candidates. That result perhaps gives a more clear sign of her hard-core base of support: 178,004, just below 50 percent of the GOP primary vote. What had shocked whatever remains of the Republican establishment was Perkins’s avowed, enthusiastic support for the right-wing conspiracy cult QAnon, which places Donald Trump and select government insiders at the center of a crusade against pedophiles and sex traffickers imagined to secretly wield power over America. “Together, we can save the Republic,” Perkins pledged to her supporters after her primary victory. She called her opponent, Senator Jeff Merkley, a “traitor.” The lines were drawn in ways that would become only more clear as the year wore on.

At the time of Perkins’s upset primary win, in May, it seemed unlikely that a believer in QAnon’s constellation of antisemitic and increasingly apocalyptic conspiracy theories could be elected to Congress. Yet she was one of two dozen or so QAnon-affiliated candidates who would appear on the ballot on November 3. (Two, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Burgess Owens of Utah, are now sitting members of the House of Representatives.)

The gradual fusion of Q paranoia and standard Republican political organizing was a leitmotif of the Perkins campaign. In September, a Perkins for Senate fundraiser at Volcanoes Stadium in Keizer, Oregon, doubled as a QAnon road show. Under a smoky sky, from wildfires days before, around 50 people paid between $20 and $100 each, as Tess Riski reported for Willamette Week, to hear Perkins speak, alongside Shady Grooove, a host of the since-removed YouTube channel InTheMatrixxx, popular with QAnon followers, and Captain Roy Davis, author of the books QAnon and the Great Awakening and White Hats, Swamp Creatures and QAnon: A Who’s Who of Spygate. When the Marion County GOP advertised the event on its website, party publicists called Davis “a best-selling author closely associated with QAnon,” with the word “QAnon” linking to a New York Times story titled “G.O.P. Voters Back QAnon Conspiracy Promoter for U.S. Senate.”

“Grooove wasted no time telling the audience that QAnon was a nameless, faceless organization that would protect its ‘digital soldiers,’ as civil unrest escalated after Election Day,” wrote Riski. With words echoing the usual QAnon liturgy about the sacred cause of liberty and the patriots rising up in its defense, Grooove told the people at the fundraiser, “I am one of those people who would be willing to go anywhere Donald Trump sent me because I believe this man is fighting for us.” Grooove claimed, in the tradition of prophecy, that a great reckoning loomed: “This is not gonna end on Nov. 3. And I’m here to tell you this, and I want to prepare you for it. It’s not going to end on Nov. 3. It’s going to continue. How long it continues? It’s up to us.”

QAnon influencers such as Shady Grooove have helped bring the movement’s theology to a far broader audience. Before he was stumping for a congressional candidate, he had built a burgeoning following on Twitter and YouTube. He and other social media brand names spread the messages attributed to Q—the apocryphal highly placed government official at the center of all the unhinged intrigue—from lesser-known image boards like 8kun. They posted musings on the meaning of bread crumbs (as followers have dubbed these gnomic dispatches from Q) to their own social media platforms, putting them in front of yet more followers, who can chew them over and share them again. QAnon takes every platitude about the internet democratizing the media and marries it to the far more instrumental cult of the personal brand. It generates more “truths” than can be true—and, for a few, a kind of celebrity.

Perkins participates in this media and meaning-making, too. Her airport call, soberly alerting Q believers to the next phase of the storm (as the Q faithful term the coming reckoning), no doubt struck many of her viewers as another telltale realization of a prophecy. In reality, of course, it was simply another installment in the same rolling con, one that stretches far back in the tradition of American prophecy belief: foretelling, envisioning, and then stalling for the judgment day that is always right around the corner, just out of view.

 

Part pyramid scheme, part political messiah movement, part viral social media, and all violence against anyone who isn't white, Christian, and conservative, these Q-balls are walking time bombs. Unless they are defused, they will explode and take thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or more, with them when they detonate. 

We'll need the bomb squad for decades to deprogram these cultists.

 

Tales From The Trump Depression, Con't

We still have a long way to go in order to emerge from the Trump Depression, all while American businesses in the age of COVID are learning exactly how they can automate to replace and remove workers in the years ahead. It should come as no surprise then that it's Black and brown workers who are being left behind as the new jobs of the future are being created today.

The mass disruption of the workplace because of the pandemic is accelerating employers’ move toward job-displacing automation, and neither the government nor the American labor force is prepared for the sweeping fallout.

The hemorrhaging of jobs is refueling a national debate over how to give workers the skills to survive the brutal market and fill the millions of positions that automation will inevitably also create — albeit at a far slower pace than positions are being shed. Lawmakers, labor unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are all calling for more spending on workforce training. The employment and training programs now available — there are no fewer than 43 spread across the government — are inadequate, uncoordinated and underfunded, they say.

“We’ve fast-forwarded 10 years of change in the space of less than 10 months,” said Andy Van Kleunen, CEO of the National Skills Coalition, a policy research group that promotes workforce training. “We don’t really do a good job making it easy for someone who has lost their job due to no fault of their own, particularly in an industry that’s downsizing, to get into a new occupation in a new industry," he said. "We just need a whole reboot of that.”

For President Joe Biden, this could be one of the most far-reaching economic issues that he will face, and failing to resolve it would undercut his vow to restore the U.S. labor market. Biden, who has strong support from organized labor, is pledging to expand partnerships between unions, businesses and community colleges, scale up work-based learning programs and build out individual career services.

Yet despite the bipartisan calls for action, it may be a struggle for Biden to convince Republicans to agree to fund a large-scale and expensive overhaul of how the government tackles reskilling workers. Even the $1.9 trillion economic relief package he has proposed contains no new funds specifically for job training. Congress has invested only $345 million in workforce development to address Covid-19, according to the House Education and Labor Committee, compared to the nearly $6 billion it appropriated to respond to the Great Recession.

This “is not just an opportunity lost if we don’t help people get the skills for the jobs that are being created, it’s going to be a real drag on the economy,” said Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer at the Chamber of Commerce. “It’s going to mean a lot of suffering for a lot of individuals.”

Forty-three percent of businesses anticipate reducing their workforce because of new technology, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs survey. In December, searches for automation engineering equipment on Thomas, a product-sourcing platform, were up more than 300 percent from the previous year. And research firm Gartner found in February that Covid-19 had caused seven out of 10 boards of directors to accelerate their digital business.

The lightning-fast shift has created a more urgent demand for worker training than ever. With an estimated 97 million new job categories that could arise from automation, companies estimate that 40 percent of workers will require reskilling.

Though automation typically affects blue-collar workers most in manufacturing and food service, the rise of other technologies like artificial intelligence is poised to imperil white-collar employees, too.

Still, Black and brown workers are bearing the brunt of the impact: Lower levels of education and other barriers to opportunity mean that minority workers are more likely than whites to be employed as cashiers, cooks, and in other occupations susceptible to automation. Even pre-pandemic, 23 percent of Black workers were in danger of losing their jobs by 2030 due to automation, by one estimate.

 

Shocker.

 

It's already bad enough that "essential workers" are going to be replaced by automation in the next decade, but without retraining the workforce, America is going to be a massive wasteland of unemployed. Yes, I expect the Biden administration to eventually raise the minimum wage , but it won't help if the jobs are all automated out. 

We're going to have to come to terms with this and quickly, or we're looking at another lost decade, and it's one tens of millions of us will never recover from in our lifetimes.

Last Call For The Dumbest Man In Congress

And of course the first major GOP idiot to run afoul of the new metal detector rules in the House is Louie Gohmert of Texas.

“This fine has nothing to do with following the rules and everything to do with furthering the Democrats’ never ending scheme to demonize and punish their political opponents,” Gohmert said in a statement Friday night. 

A senior Democratic aide had relayed news of the violation after the House voted in favor of a Democratic-led measure to impose fines that would deduct $5,000 from the salaries of members of Congress who refuse screening by metal detectors outside some doors of the House chamber.

Repeated attempts to circumvent security screening could yield fines of $10,000. Gohmert and Rep. Andrew Clyde (GA) appear to be the first lawmakers to be assessed for the fines following approval of the new rule earlier this week.

In the Friday statement Gohmert vowed to appeal after being slapped with the fine, saying he had first complied with the screening, but after leaving the House floor to use the restroom declined being “wanded” upon re-entry. 

“Unlike in the movie The Godfather, there are no toilets with tanks where one could hide a gun, so my reentry onto the House floor should have been a non-issue,” Gohmert wrote, adding: “I will be appealing the fine and taking whatever action is necessary, especially considering this policy is unconstitutional.”

Gohmert’s fury comes as House Republicans have increasingly pushed back on reinforced safety measures in the wake of the deadly Capitol riot last month.

On Friday, Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) joined by 41 House Republicans, issued a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) urging for the removal of fencing around the Capitol that was installed in preparation for President Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony on Jan. 20. Reports have indicated that the fencing could be permanent, but Budd and his group of GOP colleagues have pushed back on the measure which they say will turn the Capitol into a “permanent fortress.”

In a statement after Tuesday’s vote to approve the hefty fines for skipping the detectors, Pelosi chastised GOP colleagues who she said “began disrespecting our heroes by refusing to adhere to basic precautions keeping members of our Congressional community safe — including by dodging metal detectors, physically pushing past police, and even attempting to bring firearms into the chamber.”

“It is beyond comprehension why any Member would refuse to adhere to these simple, common-sense steps to keep this body safe,” Pelosi said at the time.

Like Trump, Gohmert is expecting the Roberts Court to magically remove the House's Constitutional abilities to set its own rules. Somehow, I bet he's going to end up owing tens of thousands of dollars.

Another Supreme Mistake, Con't

Following the recent Roberts Court New York church decision in November, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strip California of the ability to close churches for pandemic health reasons, decreeing instead that the state can continue to limit attendance capacity.

The court ruled in cases brought by South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista and Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena. The churches said restrictions imposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, violated the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion.

The restrictions set varying limits on attendance at religious services by county, depending on infection rates. With the pandemic raging, in-person worship services were entirely barred in Tier 1, which covers almost all of the state.

In a brief, unsigned opinion, the court blocked that total ban but left in place a 25 percent capacity restriction and a prohibition on singing and chanting. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have blocked all of the restrictions. Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented, saying they would have left all of the restrictions in place.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in a concurring opinion, explained why a middle ground was appropriate. He said that the court should generally defer to public health experts but that there were limits to that deference.

“The state has concluded, for example, that singing indoors poses a heightened risk of transmitting Covid-19,” he wrote. “I see no basis in this record for overriding that aspect of the state public health framework.”

“At the same time,” the chief justice continued, “the state’s present determination — that the maximum number of adherents who can safely worship in the most cavernous cathedral is zero — appears to reflect not expertise or discretion, but instead insufficient appreciation or consideration of the interests at stake.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her first opinion, wrote that she would not have blocked the restrictions on singing and chanting based on the available evidence. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined her opinion.

Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the state had favored its entertainment industry over worship services.

“If Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues and mosques,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “something has gone seriously awry.”

In dissent, Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor, said the majority had intruded into matters best left to public health officials.

“Justices of this court are not scientists,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Nor do we know much about public health policy. Yet today the court displaces the judgments of experts about how to respond to a raging pandemic.”

“The state is desperately trying to slow the spread of a deadly disease,” she wrote. “It has concluded, based on essentially undisputed epidemiological findings, that congregating together indoors poses a special threat of contagion. So it has devised regulations to curb attendance at those assemblies and — in the worst times — to force them outdoors.”

“In the worst public health crisis in a century,” Justice Kagan wrote, “this foray into armchair epidemiology cannot end well.” 

 

The Roberts Court has yet to make any sweeping national rulings on COVID-19 restrictions on churches and definitely has the votes to do so if they wanted to, but for now they are settling on what their usual strategy is: begging for someone to send them a case where they can make a federal precedent, which is why Biden has been careful to restrict mask mandates to interstate transportation and why he hasn't made any capacity mandates at all for indoor gatherings in offices, even federal ones.

We're going to find out though that should a national ruling come down that keeps open all churches, that it's going to extend the pandemic by months or more.

Biden Boxing With Briefs

I like the fact that President Joseph R. Big Effin Deal Biden recognized that Donald Trump should never be allowed near an intelligence briefing again, ever, period, because he's a damn Russian asset.

President Joe Biden said Friday that Donald Trump should not be allowed to receive classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy that historically has been granted to outgoing presidents.

Asked in an interview with CBS News what he feared if Trump continued to receive the briefings, Biden said he did not want to “speculate out loud” but made clear he did not want Trump to continue getting them.

“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings,” Biden said. “What value is giving him an intelligence briefing? What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said earlier this week that the issue of granting Trump intelligence briefings was “something that is under review.”

Some Democratic lawmakers, and even some former Trump administration officials, have questioned the wisdom of allowing Trump to continue to briefed.

Susan Gordon, who served as the principal deputy director of national intelligence during the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, in a Washington Post op-ed last month urged Biden to cut off Trump.

“His post-White House ‘security profile,’ as the professionals like to call it, is daunting,” Gordon wrote days after a pro-Trump mob laid siege to the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers sought to certify his defeat in last November’s election. “Any former president is by definition a target and presents some risks. But a former president Trump, even before the events of last week, might be unusually vulnerable to bad actors with ill intent.”

Whether to give a past president intelligence briefings is solely the current officeholder’s prerogative. Biden voiced his opposition to giving Trump access to briefings as the former Republican president’s second impeachment trial is set to begin next week.

 

I'm glad that Biden is making it clear it's not happening, for America's sake.