Last Call For Orange You Glad He's Gone, Con't

Apparently the GOP is now resorting to participation trophies in order to keep Donald Trump from turning on them, because they own the Tangerine Temper Tantrum Tyrant for the rest of his days.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump embarrassed Republican donors by delivering a rambling, grievance-laden speech that attacked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as a “dumb son of a bitch.” This morning, by an odd coincidence, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced it was creating a new annual prize: the Champion for Freedom Award. And the inaugural winner is … Donald J. Trump!

There are several unusual things about this award. One is that there is no evidence the NRSC had any intention of giving it out before Trump attacked the party’s leader. The second is that Trump, who adores awards so much he sometimes invents them, did not even bother to put on a sport coat to receive this. The third is that the NRSC apparently plans to give it out every single year from now on.

But perhaps most interesting is the basis for the award. The silver bowl seems to have been awarded on the basis of four criteria:

1) Conservative leader
2) Work tirelessly
3) Protect values that make our country great
4) Stop the Democrats’ socialist agenda

Trump’s strongest claims are No. 1 and No. 3. He is definitely a conservative leader (indeed, some would describe him as outright authoritarian bordering on fascistic). And while the “values that make our country great” are highly subjective, the NRSC and Trump clearly share those values, and it couldn’t have hurt Trump’s application that “make our country great” is very close to his campaign slogan.

And yet the other two criteria would seem to be highly problematic for his application. Trump does not work tirelessly. As innumerable staffers have told the media over the years, he barely works at all. As president, he would roll into the office around 11, check out at six, and spend much of the time watching television or ranting on the phone with his buddies. He could barely be bothered to listen to a briefing.

The biggest shortcoming on his résumé is No. 4. If you want to “stop the Democrats’ socialist agenda,” at minimum you need to prevent them from gaining control of at least one of the presidency, the House, or the Senate. Republicans controlled all three when Trump took office. Now, they have none.

This is literally something given to appease Trump because he is a toddler who likes shiny objects. His pathological malignant narcissism demands that he be recognized or he will destroy everyone he can, and both Trump and the GOP know he can do fatal damage to Republicans heading into 2022, particularly in the Senate.

So they gave him a "sorry your coup failed" trophy.

Jesus, what a bunch of losers.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

As the trial of George Floyd's killer, Derek Chauvin, continues, the Twin Cities were rocked Sunday by another police killing of an unarmed Black man, Daunte Wright.

 

A Brooklyn Center police officer fatally shot a man during a traffic stop Sunday afternoon, inflaming already raw tensions between police and community members in the midst of the Derek Chauvin trial.

Relatives of Daunte Wright, 20, who is Black, told a tense crowd gathered at the scene in the northern Minneapolis suburb Sunday afternoon that Wright drove for a short distance after he was shot, crashed his car, and died at the scene.

Protesters later walked to the Brooklyn Center police headquarters near N. 67th Avenue and N. Humboldt Avenue and were locked in a standoff with police in riot gear late Sunday night. Officers repeatedly ordered the crowd of about 500 to disperse as protesters chanted Wright's name and climbed atop the police headquarters sign, by then covered in graffiti. Police used tear gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets on the crowd.

National Guard troops arrived just before midnight as looters targeted the Brooklyn Center Walmart and nearby shopping mall. Several businesses around the Walmart were completely destroyed, including Foot Locker, T Mobile, and a New York men's clothing store.

Looting was widespread late Sunday into early Monday, spilling into north and south Minneapolis. Reports said that stores in Uptown and along Lake Street were also being looted.

Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott issued a curfew order until 6 a.m. Monday. Precautions were being taken into Monday, with Brooklyn Center canceling or closing all school buildings, programs and activities.

Sunday's fresh outrage came as Twin Cities officials and law enforcement are already on edge as Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, stands trial on murder and manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.

Another Black man killed by police for no good reason. Another round of rage and looting. The cycle continues.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Meathead Matt's Me Too Moment, Con't

While NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo continues to hold on to power after revelations of multiple women accusing him of sexual assault and now racking up nearly two-thirds of a million in private plane fees, if seems the fortunes of GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, also facing sexual assault accusations, are headed the other way as Florida Republicans are circling his House seat like sharks with blood in the water.

Rep. Matt Gaetz insists he’s not resigning amid an ongoing federal investigation, but Republicans in his deep red Florida district are already eyeing his seat.

Several Republican elected officials and others who live in the sprawling Panhandle district said they received a robo-call over the weekend asking voters if they thought Gaetz would step down due to his legal woes. They were also asked about potential candidates — including Laura Loomer, the provocateur who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for a South Florida congressional seat last year.

“The seat is not open. Congressman Gaetz isn’t resigning,” said State Rep. Alex Andrade, a Pensacola Republican. “If the seat became open at some point I would strongly consider it.”

Andrade won’t be alone. For many Republicans in the area, a spot in Congress may be the pinnacle of their political career. And Florida’s 1st congressional district — one of the safest Republican districts in the country — has only come open three times in the last 40 years.

 

At least a half-dozen Republicans are looking at replacing Gaetz, and the only question is how quickly he goes down to federal charges.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

 We're back on a normal schedule this week with StupidiNews!

• Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says that the White House expects "major action" by Congress on the American Jobs Plan bill by Memorial Day.
• Thousands of low-level prisoners currently under house arrest due to COVID-19 concerns could soon be headed back to prison in states like Texas, Georgia, and Florida.
• Iranian state TV is declaring a power blackout at the Natanz nuclear site to be "nuclear terrorism" and says swift action will be taken against the perpetrators.
• Voters in Ecuador went to the polls Sunday to choose a government with the fate of both an International Monetary Fund relief deal and an alliance with the US at stake.
• A US appeals court has ruled that Florida grocer Winn-Dixie not making their websites accessible to the blind is not an violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
  

Sunday Long Read: Checking Out Fact Checking

In today's Sunday Long Read, Vivienne Fairbanks at The Walrus argues that in order for America to escape the "post-truth" Trumpism era, we'll need more than fact, but truth.

 

OF COURSE, few people outside of journalism know about traditional fact-checking. Even within the industry, the practice has become increasingly rare over the past decade of media layoffs and budget cuts. But it’s the approach I’m most familiar with: behind-the-scenes and meticulous, with a touch of pretentiousness. This standard was established by Time and The New Yorker in the early 1900s, when magazines were most concerned with protecting themselves from public criticism and libel lawsuits. (Back then, fact-checking was a woman’s job. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, writers such as gonzo journalist Tom Wolfe saw The New Yorker’s fact-checking department as “a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.”)

This kind of fact-checking, however, wasn’t built for the immediacy and viral spread of online news. Amid the growing phenomenon of “fake news,” journalists needed something more reactive. The term fake news became widely used during the 2016 US presidential election, when the internet was flooded with inaccurate information. A BuzzFeed News investigation at the time showed that many of these deliberately false headlines came from an unexpected source: content writers in Macedonia were profiting off the advertising revenue from the increased traffic on their sites.

False content online has only multiplied over the years. But the fake news designation has also been used to serve all kinds of purposes—including, increasingly, to disparage real news reporters—so most experts now avoid the term. Instead, researchers usually talk about disinformation, which is purposefully false, and misinformation, which is unwittingly false (either because the publisher made a mistake or because the person sharing the content did). As false content spreads through social media networks, it can oscillate between the two, and it can manifest in various forms, including memes, tweets, or “imposter” content made to imitate real news stories. Last summer, for example, a list of advice—some accurate, some dangerously inaccurate—about COVID-19 prevention made the rounds on social media, falsely attributed to various health officials including BC’s Bonnie Henry.

We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Governments and social media companies have employed various strategies to address the threat of disinformation, including closer scrutiny of political ads, flagging posts as “inaccurate,” or tweaking algorithms to favour reliable outlets. But these efforts have had little effect on the widespread production and sharing of disinformation.


Journalists and media organizations, on their end, have championed fact-checking as the silver bullet—not the prepublication kind done at Harper’s or The New Yorker but the public-facing kind done by PolitiFact or the Washington Post: instead of verifying stories written by an outlet’s own reporters, fact checkers apply the same filter to public claims, such as politicians’ statements or other outlets’ reporting, then publish the results. According to this interpretation, to fact-check someone’s claim is to find all the relevant primary sources (budget documents, election results) and point out, in a published article, any errors in their declaration. Instead of printing only what one knows to be true by virtue of having fact-checked it, journalists explicitly call a person or organization wrong in order to correct the record after the fact. In this sense, the most famous fact checker of our time is reporter Daniel Dale, who rose to fame via the ambitious goal of itemizing the lies told by Donald Trump throughout his presidency (a total of 30,573 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post).

In 2014, there were fewer than sixty initiatives around the world focused exclusively on checking others’ claims, according to the Duke Reporters’ Lab; today, there are more than 300. The growing instinct to fact-check isn’t particular to journalists either: it’s part of a growing cultural movement emphasizing revision and debunking. Popular podcasts such as Revisionist History and You’re Wrong About ask us to change our understanding of well-known stories, while tell-all memoirs promise to give us the “real story” about crime, government misconduct, and our favourite celebrities.

Like many journalists, I used to subscribe to what philosopher Neil Levy calls the naive view of fake news: that today’s problems of political polarization and extremism are caused at least in part by the spread of inaccurate information, and that “careful consumption and fact-checking can eliminate the problem.” According to this view, people who share false content do so because they believe it to be true. Everyone means to share real news—they are simply making a mistake when they don’t. If this were true, then by simply correcting the record, we would make all of our post-truth problems go away. Instead, those concerns have grown, and I now wonder: What if it is precisely our manner of clinging to the idea of “facts” that has aggravated the problem?

I’ve now come to believe there’s another, more salient characteristic of our age, beyond the post-truth designation. It is a relic of the past few centuries of rationalism in the Western world: the idea that there can ever be a definitive distinction between fact, on the one hand, and everything else, on the other. We maintain that journalists—our de facto heroes in the fight against mis and disinformation—are capable of distilling truth from the murky waters of interpretation, opinion, and ambiguity in such a way as to present the only true reality of the world. Implicit in the presentation of 2016 as the year after which facts needed to be differentiated from their “alternatives” is the idea that it is actually always possible to do so—that we can know immediately and with absolute certainty, for example, that homemade cloth masks provide reliable protection against COVID-19. In theory, it may seem easy enough to agree on whether a statement is true: simply check whether all available evidence supports the claim or at least does not refute it. But, in practice, we struggle to agree on what makes a fact and how to present it—even as we agree on the importance of being able to do so. We intuitively maintain that opinion and truth exist in different realms, yet removing interpretation entirely from factual reporting is impossible.

Today, I believe the naive view of facts has only fuelled the rise of disinformation and polarization. Fact check has become a political signal such that journalists’ very attempt at neutrality ruins any chance of communicating with those who don’t already believe them. This is not just a media industry problem; it is a pressing issue with consequences for everyone hoping to engage in productive dialogue. Though journalists have clearly invested in fact-checking, trust in news media has continued to erode, and researchers have found that exposure to contentious media discussions about fake news decreases trust further. According to Gallup’s annual governance poll, by 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they trusted mass media “not very much” or “not at all.” This problem cannot be solved only by fact-checking Trump’s press conferences: those who already believe Trump have no reason to accept our fact checks. Without a trusted forum for conversation, we lose the ability to establish a common ground from which to converse and debate; we lose the ability to understand or negotiate with one another at all.

 

We need a new baseline, a new normal where facts and truth matter again, and the disinformation is stopped. But we're not equipped for either, and this week's Long Read goes a long way as to explaining why.

Egghead Week: All Your Eggs In One Basket

As Steve M. points out, Fox News Chief Racism Officer Tucker Carlson is now openly pushing the "white replacement theory" to tens of millions of viewers.

If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. So I don't understand why -- everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. You know the white replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting right question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote. They are diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do it. Why are we putting up with this? 

The Biden administration wants an eight-year path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in America, but Carlson is talking here as if immigrants cross the border unlawfully, establish a toehold in America -- and then begin voting immediately.

If you believe that's happening, it's because you think our elections are riddled with corruption, all of it favoring Democrats. I don't know why Republicans win so many elections in America if that's the case, but Republicans seem to take it as a given that voting here can't be trusted. And why shouldn't they believe that? Since the Bush era, they've been told by the right-wing media, Republican politicians, and conservative advocacy groups that pro-Democratic cheating is widespread.

They think mail ballots are fraudulent and voting machines flip votes to Democrats and, for all I know, they think Biden votes were beamed in from Alpha Centauri last November. But they also believe that undocumented immigrants vote in large numbers -- just after he was inaugurated, Donald Trump reportedly told congressional leaders that 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted against him. Trump's first press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that a study demonstrated that 14% of the votes in the 2016 election were cast by non-citizens.

This is what your right-wing relatives believe: that border crossers today will be Democratic voters tomorrow -- literally.

 

We're now at the point where "Democrats can only win by election fraud" is a given among the majority of Republican voters. Republicans aren't bothering apologizing anymore for voter suppression efforts, straight-out saying now that fewer people voting is better for the country. 

 

The next step in that blood-soaked chain is "And Democrats voting must be stopped by any means necessary".

In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.

Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”

The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.

Now the government accountability group Common Cause Texas — which published the footage Thursday — is raising the alarm that such an effort could instead serve to intimidate and suppress voters in metro Houston.

“It’s very clear that we’re talking about recruiting people from the predominantly Anglo parts of town to go to Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Anthony Gutierrez, the group’s executive director, told The Washington Post.

“This is a role that’s supposed to do nothing but stand at a poll site and observe,” he added. So “why is he suggesting someone needs to be ‘courageous’?” Gutierrez asked.

 

Expect armies of angry, white, GOP "poll-watchers" in red states in 2022.

 

Emphasis on army.

Egghead Week: Scrambled Labor

Amazon was able to successfully crush an attempt to unionize employees at a distribution center warehouse in Alabama, with fewer than 30% of workers voting to join the union.

 

Workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse have voted not to unionize, a major victory for the e-commerce giant but not the end of the fight for labor organizers.

Out of the 3,215 employees who participated, 1,798 "no" votes and 738 "yes" votes were recorded before voided and challenged ballots were counted. Fifty-percent plus one of the employees would have had to vote “yes” for the union to gain National Labor Relations Board recognition.

Although the initial vote has gone against them, the union plans to challenge the results.

"We won’t let Amazon’s lies, deception and illegal activities go unchallenged, which is why we are formally filing charges against all of the egregious and blatantly illegal actions taken by Amazon during the union vote," RWDSU president Stuart Applebaum said. "Amazon knew full well that unless they did everything they possibly could, even illegal activity, their workers would have continued supporting the union."

The vote count had been going on for over four hours when Amazon reached the threshold needed to guarantee a win, starting Thursday afternoon before wrapping up Friday morning. NLRB staff hand counted each ballot, double checking the count after every hundred votes in each direction.

Amazon and the RWDSU both had in-person representatives watching the vote, which was streamed publicly on Zoom to a small number of outsiders.

The union went public last October, just months after the Bessemer plant opened.

Workers at the facility had raised concerns about intense work quotas, insufficient wages and Amazon’s handling of employee safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon maintained since the beginning of the unionization push that it provided sufficient wages and worker protections, warning employees against voting yes.

Workers were critical of some of the company's tactics, like petitioning to change traffic lights or installing a mailbox in the parking lot.

That latter tactic is likely to precipitate a challenge from the RWDSU, especially after the union obtained emails between Postal Service employees showing that Amazon pressed the agency to install the box just as voting began.

John Logan, an expert on anti-union strategy at San Francisco State University, told The Hill that the mailbox placement “appears to be a form of ballot harvesting and thus a violation of federal law.”

 

This was always headed for failure, the real test was always going to be the Biden Administration's response to Amazon's union-busting tactics, and willingness to go after a trillion-dollar corporation. Understand that unionizing a company the size of Amazon would have been a sea change nationwide in the fortunes of organized labor. This had to die painfully, publicly, and with gallons of threats. 

The real fight starts now.

Egghead Week: Trump's Dirty Nest Egg

Several countries have accused the US of hoarding vaccine doses, millions of them. It turns out that thanks to Donald Trump and Operation Warp Speed, we're required to do so...even if we had the capacity, and all indications are that we're facing another major surge in new cases.

On the morning of March 31, roughly 25 Biden administration officials gathered at the White House, double-masked, for a meeting called on short notice by a member of the National Security Council. They were there, they believed, to debate how best to broaden the federal government’s COVID-19 response beyond U.S. borders, and reclaim America’s traditional role as the world’s public health leader.

The challenges they planned to address were daunting. The Trump administration had poisoned relations with the rest of the world, first severing ties with the World Health Organization and then politicizing the pandemic, referring to COVID-19 as the Wuhan virus and even “kung flu.” Into the vacuum rushed Russia and China, who began currying favor around the world by distributing their own vaccines—of possibly dubious quality.

Inside the U.S., all eyes have been focused on the chaotic rollout of vaccinations. But if current trends continue, it will be months if not weeks before every adult who wants a shot is able to get one. Very soon, the U.S. will be in possession of a vast COVID vaccine surplus. And that, global-health experts within the government agree, could quickly turn into a P.R. nightmare. “Can you imagine the condemnation of the world if America has vaccines sitting on warehouse shelves expiring with the rest of the world dying?” said one senior government official with knowledge of the meeting.

Unfortunately, sending doses overseas is no simple matter. To even begin planning in earnest how to do so, an essential document entitled The Framework for International Access needed to be greenlit. That was a goal of several officials in attendance at the meeting at the White House last Wednesday.

Instead, those in attendance heard a stark and dismaying message: The pandemic was spiraling out of control here at home. There was no capacity to deal with global donations, meaning that planning would come to a “screeching halt,” said the senior government official.

Two days earlier, CDC director Rochelle Walensky had veered off script in a press briefing to express her feeling of “impending doom” in the face of a deadly uptick in cases. Now, those gathered for the White House meeting discussed the alarming reversal of recent U.S. gains, driven in part by reckless reopenings and spring break travel: a surge of more infectious variants, a rising rate of hospitalizations for patients under 40, and a staggeringly high nationwide positivity rate of more than 13%. Roughly 2.9 million Americans were being vaccinated each day, and deaths had dipped below 900 per day, but every other indicator was bad. “They are going into full hunker-down mode to figure out what’s going wrong,” said the senior official.

The domestic situation was “so severe,” said the official, that every federal entity that might work on overseas donations had instead been tasked with vaccinating more Americans. The rest of the world would have to wait.

That's the bad news. We're reopening too soon, and we're looking at skyrocketing case figures heading into April.

That's the bad news, and it's very bad. Now the worse news.

For all the well-documented failures of its pandemic response, the Trump administration exceeded expectations when it came to developing COVID-19 vaccines. Thanks in part to Operation Warp Speed, a multibillion-dollar joint venture of the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, and private pharmaceutical companies, a handful of manufacturers were able to gain approval for new vaccines in record time, accomplishing in under a year what might normally have taken a decade.

Still, given the nature of the Trump administration, this signal accomplishment came with some substantial asterisks. Upon taking office, the Biden team discovered that the previous administration’s plans for the distribution of vaccinations to individual citizens were woefully inadequate. And the Trump team’s unwillingness to enact a national testing plan, or even to clearly advocate for basic protective measures, allowed the virus to run rampant, leading the U.S. to suffer more deaths than any other country on earth.

For officials hoping to finally pivot from domestic to international vaccination strategy, there was another major catch, reported here for the first time.

The contracts the Trump administration signed with the vaccine manufacturers prohibit the U.S. from sharing its surplus doses with the rest of the world. According to contract language Vanity Fair has obtained, the agreements with Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Janssen state: “The Government may not use, or authorize the use of, any products or materials provided under this Project Agreement, unless such use occurs in the United States” or U.S. territories.

The clauses in question are designed to ensure that the manufacturers retain liability protection, but they have had the effect of projecting the Trump administration’s America First agenda into the Biden era. “That is what has completely and totally prohibited the U.S. from donating or reselling, because it would be in breach of contract,” said a senior administration official involved in the global planning effort. “It is a complete and total ban. Those legal parameters must change before we do anything to help the rest of the world.”

We're legally not allowed to donate vaccine to any non-US territory or state, thanks to Trump. And we're headed for a fourth wave of cases with a deadly P1 variant of the COVID-19 virus that could put us right back in the hole again.

It was a terrible winter. But we're nowhere near the finish line this spring.

Egghead Week: Yolks On You, Bob

Turns out the "It's not racism, it's economic anxiety!" lie is so durable, it took until now for University of Chicago political researcher Robert Pape to realize that yeah, it's about white folk scared that those people will take their power and it has been for decades.

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.

Law enforcement officials have said 800 to 1,000 people entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, and prosecutors have spent the past three months tracking down many of them in what they have described as one of the largest criminal investigations in U.S. history. In recent court filings, the government has hinted that more than 400 people may ultimately face charges, including illegal entry, assault of police officers and the obstruction of the official business of Congress.

In his study, Mr. Pape determined that only about 10 percent of those charged were members of established far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers militia or the nationalist extremist group the Proud Boys. But unlike other analysts who have made similar findings, Mr. Pape has argued that the remaining 90 percent of the “ordinary” rioters are part of a still congealing mass movement on the right that has shown itself willing to put “violence at its core."

 

So....basically everything I've been telling you guys for a year now.

Where's my grant money?

Egghead Week: Cracking The Filibuster

Excellent news for Senate Democrats and for America: Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough has ruled that budget reconciliation can be used another time this fiscal year for another spending and taxation bill, meaning that despite my misgivings, the American Jobs Act may actually have a chance.

On Monday night, the Senate parliamentarian — an in-house rules expert — determined that Democrats would be able to do a third budget reconciliation bill this year, a massive development that gives lawmakers more room to pass legislation without Republican support.

Already, Democrats had the ability to do two budget reconciliation bills: one focused on fiscal year 2021 and one focused on fiscal year 2022. Unlike most other bills, budget measures can pass with just 51 votes, instead of 60, which means Democrats are able to usher through the legislation they want if all 50 members of their caucus are onboard. (With the American Rescue Plan, for instance, 50 Democrats were able to approve the $1.9 trillion package as part of the FY2021 budget bill, even though no Republicans backed it.)

“The Parliamentarian has advised that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions,” said a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement. “This confirms the Leader’s interpretation of the Budget Act and allows Democrats additional tools to improve the lives of Americans if Republican obstruction continues.”

With the new decision from the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, Democrats can now do a third budget reconciliation bill, which means they can push through more ambitious measures as long as they are related to taxing and spending. The decision is based on MacDonough’s interpretation of Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which allows lawmakers to revise a budget resolution before the end of the fiscal year that it covers. Given her decision, Democrats can now edit the 2021 budget resolution they already passed, and include instructions for another bill.

Schumer’s spokesperson also noted that “no decisions have been made on a legislative path forward using Section 304 and some parameters still need to be worked out.”

Budget reconciliation has its limits: It can’t be used for policies like voting rights reforms or gun control, but it’s still a helpful tool that Democrats have already leveraged to pass a huge expansion of the child tax credit, enhanced unemployment aid, and another round of stimulus checks.

Democrats now have another opportunity to advance parts of their agenda that Republicans would otherwise block. And the decision to push for a workaround shows how limited Democrats’ other options are to pass their agenda.

 

The bad news is that the For The People Act is pretty much dead and has zero chance of passage still.  Republicans aren't about to give away their white supremacy advantage in controlling voting in a majority of states and Senate races.

Cracking the filibuster like an egg is still 100% necessary in order to save American democracy.

Egghead Week: GOP Bad Eggs Are Still Cracked

Reuters and polling firm Ipsos finds that majorities of Republicans continue to believe the lies that the January 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol was a false flag operation to make "Trump look bad" and more importantly that Trump won and had the election "Stolen" from him last November.

 

Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.

Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.

Since the Capitol attack, Trump, many of his allies within the Republican Party and right-wing media personalities have publicly painted a picture of the day’s events jarringly at odds with reality.

Hundreds of Trump’s supporters, mobilized by the former president’s false claims of a stolen election, climbed walls of the Capitol building and smashed windows to gain entry while lawmakers were inside voting to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory. The rioters - many of them sporting Trump campaign gear and waving flags - also included known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said the rioters posed “zero threat.” Other prominent Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, have publicly doubted whether Trump supporters were behind the riot.

Last month, 12 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution honoring Capitol Police officers who defended the grounds during the rampage, with one lawmaker saying that he objected using the word “insurrection” to describe the incident.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows a large number of rank-and-file Republicans have embraced the myth. While 59% of all Americans say Trump bears some responsibility for the attack, only three in 10 Republicans agree. Eight in 10 Democrats and six in 10 independents reject the false claims that the Capitol siege was “mostly peaceful” or it was staged by left-wing protestors.

“Republicans have their own version of reality,” said John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University. “It is a huge problem. Democracy requires accountability and accountability requires evidence.”

The refusal of Trump and prominent Republicans to repudiate the events of Jan. 6 increases the likelihood of a similar incident happening again, said Susan Corke, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

“That is the biggest danger – normalizing this behavior,” Corke said. “I do think we are going to see more violence.”

 

Essentially nothing has changed for the GOP since the attack. The majority believe Trump is the rightful "President" and do not accept Biden's rule, or the Democratic party being in charge of Congress. They imagine themselves as the brave, heroic resistance against the rest of the planet's evil. Most of all, they see this as justification for whatever violence is coming next. 

Republican hopefuls in Virginia's gubernatorial race this November are running on "Biden stole the election and I will help stop the Democrats from stealing more in November."

Most have not disavowed the false narrative put out by Trump that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden because of voter fraud. Candidate Amanda Chase, one of the early favorites for the May 8 Republican nominating contest, has gone a step further. Following the ex-president’s November loss, she encouraged him in a Facebook post to impose martial law to cling to power. She cheered the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. capital on Jan. 6 as “patriots.”

It’s a playbook that could spell trouble for Republican hopes in Virginia, experts and pollsters say. The former battleground state in recent years has elected a Democratic governor, a Democratic-controlled state legislature and two Democratic U.S. senators, largely on the strength of college-educated, suburban voters.

Fealty to Trump is emerging as a litmus test for Republican hopefuls looking to appeal to the former president’s devoted base to win next month’s nominating battle. But conspiracy theories about election fraud are likely to turn off many moderate voters needed to win the Nov. 2 general election, said Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster.

“This is probably the most significant political conundrum I have ever seen,” said Luntz, who called Virginia a test case for the future of the Republican Party.

Virginia’s off-year contests are traditionally viewed as a harbinger for national political trends in the wake of a presidential election. The Republican campaigns here signal that the election-fraud myth is now a key plank for party hopefuls, said Al Cardenas, a veteran Republican strategist.

“‘The Big Lie’ will continue to be perpetuated,” he said.

 

Only a quarter of Virginia Republican voters believe Biden is the legitimate President.  It's only a matter of time before a Democratic elected who won is physically harmed by a Republican who believed they "stole" the race.

Egghead Week: The Return

Seems like a good time to take a break this week, but I should be making at least one post daily.

I do appreciate all of you. I've seen some of you folks around for over a dozen years now and it still surprises me that anyone would stick around for my goofy-ass opinions after all this time.

I remain humbled, as I do regularly. It's been a hell of a journey, and we continue it daily.

Here's Babish's Eggs Florentine recipe, because man, I love Cooking With Babish.

A Whole New Ballgame, Con't

Both Republicans and Democrats in Georgia believe Major League Baseball's decision to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta this summer over GOP Gov. Brian Kemp's voter suppression laws will politically profit them, but as with baseball, only one side gets to win the game in the end.

Brian Robinson, a GOP strategist skilled in explaining the state’s Republican base to a mainstream audience, predicted it could be a singular moment in the 2022 race.

“The Democrats in one week have united a fractured Georgia GOP, rallied Republicans to Brian Kemp at a time when many had abandoned him and appalled the same independent voters who broke heavily toward them last year,” he said, before invoking Kemp’s likely 2022 rival.

“Stacey Abrams couldn’t have done more for Brian Kemp’s reelection hopes if she’d written a $10 million check to his super PAC.”

There was one Republican who didn’t stick to the same GOP script on Friday: Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan. In a statement, the former minor league pitcher said he disagreed with Commissioner Rob Manfred’s decision but respected the outcome.

Then Duncan repeated what he’s said since November: He criticized Trump for promoting lies about Georgia’s election, saying the post-election misinformation campaign “continues to manifest itself and divide our nation.”

“And now, misinformation surrounding Georgia’s new elections reform has furthered that divide – even reaching MLB baseball.”

To be clear, Duncan’s stance is no surprise. He was one of the first elected GOP leaders to loudly debunk the pro-Trump conspiracy theories, and it earned him the enmity of the former president. Earlier this year, he refused to preside over the vote on a previous, and more restrictive, proposal.

But Duncan’s comments raise even more questions about his chances in 2022, when he’s up for another term, and his plans to promote a “GOP 2.0.” As one senior Republican official posited, Duncan’s statement was a “weird way to announce you aren’t seeking re-election.”

State Democrats want to make Georgia the poster child for federal voting legislation that’s stalling in Congress, and party leaders hope the white-hot spotlight on the new law helps them build their case.

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, facing another election next year, said Friday’s fallout only proves the federal overhaul is needed more urgently. And Abrams, the once-and-likely-future gubernatorial candidate, called on corporate and political leaders to support the voting expansions pending in Congress to “mitigate the harm” in Georgia.

Georgia Democrats also have their eye beyond the U.S. Capitol and the Gold Dome. That’s one of the reasons they’ve stepped up their criticism of the new law and urged major corporations to publicly oppose it even though it’s already in the books.

Dozens of restrictive voting measures are pending in other states, and the pressure campaign aims to force local lawmakers to think twice before passing those laws in other state legislatures, too.

In Texas, for one, legislation that would limit early voting hours and restrict mail-in voting is gaining traction, while Florida legislators could soon consider a measure that would curb the use of drop boxes.

Democrats shaped the national narrative of Georgia’s election measure early, in part because they capitalized on proposed measures that included more far-reaching restrictions that never reached a final vote.

As Duncan, the GOP lieutenant governor, put it: Republicans “fell into the trap set by the left and allowed them to make the bill into something that it’s not.”

Now Democrats have their own challenge: At the start of what could be a growing boycott movement, how do they avoid getting blamed for the economic backlash? 

 

That's what's going to determine the political fallout over this, but remember that Republicans are the one who should be blamed for the outcome of this. Whether they are is another thing entirely.

Sunday Long Read: The Mission Was Impossible

Vanity Fair's Marc Wortman gives us this week's Sunday Long Read, and you folks know I can't resist a true heist story. For years the most daring and brazen thievery in Europe was carried out in the name of getting the most coveted prizes on the planet: rare books. And the crew that pulled off heist after heist made themselves look like movie stars, and the police like clowns.

 

"Impossible,” said David Ward. The London Metropolitan Police constable looked up. Some 50 feet above him, he saw that someone had carved a gaping hole through a skylight. Standing in the Frontier Forwarding warehouse in Feltham, West London, he could hear the howl of jets from neighboring Heathrow Airport as they roared overhead.

At Ward’s feet lay three open trunks, heavy-duty steel cases. They were empty. A few books lay strewn about. Those trunks had previously been full of books. Not just any books. The missing ones, 240 in all, included early versions of some of the most significant printed works of European history.

Gone was Albert Einstein’s own 1621 copy of astronomer Johannes Kepler’s The Cosmic Mystery, in which he lays out his theory of planetary motion. Also missing was an important 1777 edition of Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, his book describing gravity and the laws of physics. Among other rarities stolen: a 1497 update of the first book written about women, Concerning Famous Women; a 1569 version of Dante’s Divine Comedy; and a sheath with 80 celebrated prints by Goya. The most valuable book in the haul was a 1566 Latin edition of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, by Copernicus, in which he posits his world-changing theory that Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. That copy alone had a price tag of $293,000. All together, the missing books—stolen on the night of January 29, 2017, into early the next day—were valued at more than $3.4 million. Given their unique historical significance and the fact that many contained handwritten notes by past owners, most were irreplaceable.

Scotland Yard’s Ward was stunned. He couldn’t recall a burglary like this anywhere. The thieves, as if undertaking a special-ops raid, had climbed up the sheer face of the building. From there, they scaled its pitched metal roof on a cold, wet night, cut open a fiberglass skylight, and descended inside—without tripping alarms or getting picked up by cameras. “Dangerous work,” he says. “This is not something ordinary burglars try to accomplish.”

Then there was the loot. In a warehouse laden with valuables coming in and out of Heathrow for customs clearance, the thieves had taken their time in the darkness, more than five hours, to select from among hundreds of books—choosing the most precious ones. They made off with nothing else from the vast freight building except for some nearby tote bags—heavy satchels that they snatched from another shipping container. Ward tells me on a call from London, “You must have a lot of patience, strength, and ingenuity not to trigger the sensors and to get the books back through that hole in the roof.”

The items belonged to three respected rare book dealers, two in Italy and one in Germany. They had shipped their wares through Heathrow, bound for an antiquarian fair in California. Informed of the heist that day, Alessandro Bisello Bado, a dealer in Padua whose shipment had been pilfered, nearly fainted. He boarded the next flight to London. Walking inside the warehouse, he saw that nearly everything in the trunk was gone, more than $1.2 million worth. Michael Kühn, a Berlin-based dealer, couldn’t believe it at first. “I had never heard of so many books being stolen at once,” he says. Why these books? he wonders. “Insurance fraud? Somebody who wanted to harm one of us? A book lover who wanted to have one item and threw away the rest of the books to cover his intentions?” All he knew was that his losses might bankrupt him.

As Ward looked for answers, the thieves weren’t waiting. Over the next few days, they moved their bulky cache around the city. On February 5, a van pulled up at a London house. Soon the vehicle and the trove were on their way out of the country. Some of the burglars also left, by air. But new operatives flew in to replace them. That very night, the reconstituted team embarked on another brazen high-wire raid on a warehouse. Many more would follow—a dozen, in fact, mainly around London.

Scotland Yard raced to follow leads—and wondered where the burglars would strike next. The U.K. press, meanwhile, remained focused on the Frontier Forwarding break-in, dubbing it the “Mission: Impossible theft”—a tip of the hat to its similarities with the movie’s iconic scene in which Tom Cruise, as Ethan Hunt, suspended by a cable, breaks into a CIA vault.

Ward could see these weren’t random warehouse robberies. But why…books? Someone must have tipped them off. “They knew what they wanted,” he says. “There were plenty of other valuables nearby. They targeted the books deliberately.”

The Met Police assigned organized crime specialist Andy Durham to oversee the case while Ward and other detectives did what Durham calls the “grunt work.” But they had little to go on. They even checked to see if a circus had come to town, so acrobatic was the feat.

 

This story is a good one, so pull up a chair and sit a spell for a great detective story.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon, the Black lawmaker who was swarmed by Georgia state police and physically brought down for the crime of knocking on the door to the office where GOP Gov. Brian Kemp was signing the state's Jim Crow voting restrictions into law behind closed doors last month, now faces eight years in state prison on two felony charges.

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon, who was arrested last week after attempting to gain access to the office where Gov. Brian Kemp was signing a controversial voting restriction bill into law, said Thursday that her actions were justified.

“I felt as if time was moving in slow motion,” Cannon said, fighting back tears as she described the details of the incident. “My experience was painful, both physically and emotionally, but today I stand before you to say as horrible as that experience was ... I believe the governor signing into law the most comprehensive voter suppression bill in the country is a far more serious crime.”

It was the first time Cannon has spoken publicly about the incident since her arrest. Video of her knocking on the door to Kemp’s office before being forcibly removed by police went viral on social media, drawing further attention to the new restrictions on voting.

Flanked by a handful of supporters and fellow Democratic lawmakers at the base of a mural of civil rights icon John Lewis in Atlanta, Cannon described the law as a “voter suppression bill” and said that with “one stroke of a pen” Kemp “erased decades of sacrifices, incalculable hours of work, marches, prayers, tears and ... minimized the deaths of thousands who have paid the ultimate price to vote.”

The Election Integrity Act of 2021, or Senate Bill 202, imposes new voter ID requirements for absentee ballots, limits the number of drop boxes across the state and gives state-level officials the power to take over county election boards, possibly allowing GOP officials to decide the ballot count in Democratic strongholds.

The bill, which Kemp signed into law just over an hour after it was passed in the General Assembly, also criminalizes passing out food or drinks to voters waiting in line.

Republicans say the law’s stricter requirements will ensure that future Georgia elections will be more secure, but Democrats contend it was designed to suppress the elderly and Black vote, and was written in direct response to GOP losses in the 2020 presidential election in the state as well as two runoff contests that handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. A record 5 million Georgians voted in the last election cycle.

Fortune 500 companies based in Georgia and others headquartered nationally, including Delta, Home Depot and Coca-Cola, have condemned the new election law.

In a Wednesday memo to Delta employees, CEO Ed Bastian said it was “evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.”

Cannon is now facing two felony charges from last week’s arrest — obstruction and preventing or disrupting a General Assembly session, according to the Fulton County Department of Public Safety website.

She told reporters Thursday that she is facing eight years in prison for those charges, which she called “unfounded.” Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr did not respond to a request from Yahoo News for comment for this story.

 

Republicans are now putting their political enemies in jail, folks, and for purely political reasons. History tells us that it only gets much worse from here.

Especially for Black folk, and specifically for Black women.

Park Cannon is going to made an example of for Democrats, Black folk, women, and Black women most of all around the country: know your place or white supremacy will put you in it by force.

"Lock her up!" is happening. It is real. Republicans are furious. Republicans know full well that the coalition of voters in Georgia that helped elect Joe Biden and did elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate has to be destroyed.

 

Now they are going to put sitting Democratic lawmakers in jail in order to keep power. This is a very dangerous moment in our history, and one we don't come easily back from.