Last Call For Biden Versus The Tax Cheats

Republicans have been attacking the IRS since the Obama days, and the damage both they and Donald Trump did to the agency was render it largely incapable of going after the most egregious tax scofflaws, and leaving the agency to deal with the low-hanging fruit of regular people owing a few hundred or so to go after. President Joe Biden wants to change that to collect the $700 billion in unpaid taxes from the wealthiest tax cheats.

President Biden is expected to propose giving the Internal Revenue Service an extra $80 billion and more authority over the next 10 years as he looks for ways to raise money to pay for his economic agenda, according to two people familiar with the plan.

Mr. Biden is expected to propose beefing up the I.R.S. to crack down on individuals and corporations that evade paying federal taxes. He will use the recouped tax funds to help pay for the cost of his American Families Plan, which he will detail before addressing a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

Mr. Biden’s plan, which comes on top of a $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, is expected to cost at least $1.5 trillion and include funding for universal prekindergarten, federal paid leave, efforts to make child care more affordable, free community college and tax credits meant to fight poverty.

The plan will also call for tax increases, including raising the top marginal income tax rate for wealthy Americans and raising the rate that people who earn more than $1 million a year pay on profits earned from the sale of stocks or other assets. Mr. Biden is also expected to call for raising the rate on income that those earning more than $1 million a year get from stock dividends, according to a person familiar with the proposal.

The administration will portray these efforts, coupled with new taxes it is proposing on corporations and the rich, as a way to level the tax playing field between typical American workers and high earners who employ sophisticated efforts to minimize or evade taxation.

Administration officials have privately concluded that an aggressive crackdown on tax avoidance by corporations and the rich could raise at least $700 billion on net over 10 years. The $80 billion in proposed funding would be an increase of two-thirds over the agency’s entire funding levels for the past decade.

 

This is directed at the deficit scolds, which of course now includes every Republican in Congress, and not an insignificant number of Democrats. Those who scream WELL HOW DO YOU PAY FOR IT the answer is simple: collect revenue owed.

Imagine that. Like a business, even.

Of course, Republicans are going to scream about this, warning that Biden will target "conservatives" who apparently have enough tax lawyers to not actually end up paying taxes.

Woke As A Pejorative

Ol' James Carville argues in an interview with Vox's Sean Illing that working-class white gains made by Biden in states like Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona will be irrevocably lost if Dems don't abandon social justice and Black Lives Matter.

Sean Illing 

What do you make of Biden’s first 100 days?

James Carville

Honestly, if we’re just talking about Biden, it’s very difficult to find something to complain about. And to me his biggest attribute is that he’s not into “faculty lounge” politics. 

Sean Illing

“Faculty lounge” politics? 

James Carville

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “LatinX” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in ... neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not. 

Sean Illing

Is the problem the language or the fact that there are lots of voters who just don’t want to hear about race and racial injustice? 

James Carville

We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” shit doesn’t work and we have to stop it.

There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain’t the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about. 

Sean Illing 

Sounds like you got a problem with “wokeness,” James. 

James Carville

Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud. 

Sean Illing

Why not? 

James Carville

Because they’ll get clobbered or canceled. And look, part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign. Well, you kinda do. It really matters.

I always tell people that we’ve got to stop speaking Hebrew and start speaking Yiddish. We have to speak the way regular people speak, the way voters speak. It ain’t complicated. That’s how you connect and persuade. And we have to stop allowing ourselves to be defined from the outside.

I'm the first to admit that the Squad Twitter Bubble is not indicative of the entire Democratic Party, and that Carville has a point about language being a weapon that Republicans use against us and define us with all the damn time.

Having said that, Carville wrong about wokeness. Some of the language being used by Black and brown folks are being used to reclaim what has been taken from us over the centuries, and it's supposed to make folks uncomfortable, because what has been done to non-white culture in this country, especially Black culture, is a hell of a lot worse than uncomfortable.

Besides, I'm not going to argue about wokeness language when the other side is straight up using phrases like "Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage". And all the wokeness argument is doing is giving more ammo to Republicans to come after their political foes with fascist tactics and laws punishing those who speak out.

 

Today’s GOP critique of business is not without antecedent. Decades before Ross Douthat was credited for coining the term “woke capitalism” in 2018, conservative publications and think tanks criticized notions of “corporate social responsibility” and “corporate citizenship,” recalling Milton Friedman’s admonition that corporations’ only true responsibility is to their shareholders. Conservatives often griped when companies took an interest in environmentalism—even if the businesses were just paying lip service to it—and grumbled about corporate “diversity and inclusion” efforts.

Notes Thomas Edsall, the “muscle” of woke capitalism was “evident as early as 2015 in Indiana and 2016 in North Carolina, when corporate opposition forced Republicans to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation.” And after decades of protecting Silicon Valley—safeguarding its profits with tax cuts and resisting attempts at regulation—Republicans have in recent years started to complain about “Big Tech,” especially when it comes to matters of the companies removing users from their platforms.

But the GOP’s clash with business over the last few weeks is different in two ways from what came before.

First, on the business side, this case is different because the “activism” in question—the holding back of donations, the criticism—is not related to some matter of policy or party but rather to election administration and the preservation of democracy itself.

And on the GOP’s side, this case is different because it is based solely upon the politics of retaliation. Republicans are proposing punitive action in direct response to political speech from companies about the post-election Big Lie, the attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and Georgia’s recently enacted voting law. Threatening to use the power of the state to crack down on that speech is repulsive. (Acting on such threats could in some cases be unconstitutional.) The fact that those who endlessly thump their chests about “cancel culture” are so eager to act in this way shows how hypocritical the strategy is: “Free speech for me, not for thee.”

It’s all happened very fast.

 

They want retribution. They want war. They want fighting.  Most of all, they want to win.

And they want the rest of us to lose everything and serve beneath them.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

As with Minneapolis and George Floyd, AG Merrick Garland is opening a federal practices and procedures investigation into Louisville Metro PD over Breonna Taylor.

 

The Justice Department is opening a sweeping probe into policing in Louisville, Kentucky after the March 2020 death of Breonna Taylor, who was shot to death by police during a raid at her home. It’s the second such sweeping probe into a law enforcement agency announced by the Biden administration in a week.

The 26-year-old Taylor, an emergency medical technician who had been studying to become a nurse, was roused from sleep by police who came through the door using a battering ram. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired once. A no-knock warrant was approved as part of a narcotics investigation. No drugs were found at her home.

The new investigation is known as a “pattern or practice” — examining whether there is a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing — and will be a more sweeping review of the entire police department.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who made Monday’s announcement, last week announced a probe into the tactics of the police in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.

 

Good to see AG Merrick Garland is going to do what KY AG Daniel Cameron refuses to. 

I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised to see Merrick Garland aggressively pursue police pattern/practice investigations after the Trump regime ended them completely. They didn't have to do that, and lord knows Republicans tried to block Garland and both his main subordinates, Anita Gupta and Lisa Monaco. They very nearly did, but in the end even some Republicans caved.

Now we're seeing the direct result of the new administration making things right.

That's the good news. The bad news is yet another unarmed Black man was summarily executed by police last week, Andrew Brown.

Attorneys for Andrew Brown Jr.'s family said Monday they were frustrated only to be shown 20 seconds of body camera footage of sheriff's deputies shooting and killing Brown last week.

But what they did see amounted to an "execution," family attorney Chantel Cherry-Lassiter told reporters.

Sheriff's deputies shot and killed Brown, a 42-year-old Black man, while carrying out search and arrest warrants at his home Wednesday in Elizabeth City, N.C.

Family attorneys said the footage began with deputies firing at Brown, who had his hands on the steering wheel of his vehicle while being shot at in his driveway. Cherry-Lassiter said Brown then drove his vehicle away from the deputies while they continued to shoot. She said Brown did not present a threat to the deputies. Deputies continued to shoot after Brown's car crashed, she added, saying his vehicle was "riddled" with bullets.

"It's just messed up how this happened," Brown's son Khalil Ferebee said. "He got executed. It ain't right."

Cherry-Lassiter said about seven or eight law enforcement officers were present in the video.

"We do not feel that we got transparency," family attorney Ben Crump told reporters. "We only saw a snippet of the video."

Attorneys said they wanted to see footage from before the shooting began, but that Pasquotank County Attorney R. Michael Cox only allowed the "pertinent" portion to be shown. Brown family lawyers said they expected there to be additional law enforcement bodycam video from all the deputies involved as well as a light pole camera.

Pasquotank County officials said they're still working to release the video to the public — a process that is required to go through the courts.

 

You can forget any additional bodycam footage, it'll never be released. Brown had his hands on the steering wheel, and deputies made no effort to subdue or to arrest him. No "hands up" or no effort to disable the vehicle. They simply killed him. 

Black Lives Still Matter though.

Last Call For Another Supreme Mess, Con't

It bears repeating, but we'll be cleaning up the Trump years in the courts for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear an appeal to expand gun rights in the United States in a New York case over the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.

The case marks the court’s first foray into gun rights since Justice Amy Coney Barrett came on board in October, making a 6-3 conservative majority.

The justices said Monday they will review a lower-court ruling that upheld New York’s restrictive gun permit law. The court’s action follows mass shootings in recent weeks in Indiana, Georgia, Colorado and California.

The case probably will be argued in the fall.

The court had turned down review of the issue in June, before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.

New York is among eight states that limit who has the right to carry a weapon in public. The others are: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

In the rest of the country, gun owners have little trouble legally carrying their weapons when they go out.

Paul Clement, representing challengers to New York’s permit law, said the court should use the case to settle the issue once and for all. “Thus, the nation is split, with the Second Amendment alive and well in the vast middle of the nation, and those same rights disregarded near the coasts,” Clement wrote on behalf of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association and two New York residents.

Calling on the court to reject the appeal, the state said its law promotes public safety and crime reduction and neither bans people from carrying guns nor allows everyone to do so.

Federal courts have largely upheld the permit limits. Last month an 11-judge panel of the federal appeals court in San Francisco rejected a challenge to Hawaii’s permit regulations in an opinion written by a conservative judge, Jay Bybee.

“Our review of more than 700 years of English and American legal history reveals a strong theme: government has the power to regulate arms in the public square,” Bybee wrote in a 7-4 decision for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The issue of carrying a gun for self-defense has been seen for several years as the next major step for gun rights at the Supreme Court, following decisions in 2008 and 2010 that established a nationwide right to keep a gun at home for self-defense.

 

If the Roberts Court finds that there's a constitutional right to concealed carry, then basically every gun limitation goes out the window.

Well, the ones that will be enforced on white folks, anyway.

There's a good chance that by the November 2022 elections we'll live in an America where states can't regulate guns but can eliminate safe abortion procedures.

Another Hat In The Ring, Con't

The big political news here in the Tri-State is Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan announcing his candidacy for Senate, going up against the seat of retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman and a mess of Republicans trying to out-Trump each other for the primary.

Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan launched a bid for U.S. Senate Monday.

Ryan, 47, of Howland Township outside Youngstown, entered the race after several months of speculation that the 2020 long-shot presidential candidate would run to replace Sen. Rob Portman. He is the first and only Democrat in the U.S. Senate field so far.

Several Republicans have already entered the fray, trying to prove their allegiance to former President Donald Trump. Ryan, who raised $1.2 million in the first weeks of 2021, might stand alone on the Democratic side.

Ryan is wagering that his appeal to working-class Ohioans can turn the red-leaning state blue again. He has borne witness to the Mahoning Valley's transformation from a blue-collar Democratic stronghold into a Republican bastion for Trump. That shift has been so stark that Ryan's safe congressional district could be erased or redrawn by Republicans during redistricting.

"I am running to fight like hell in the U.S Senate to cut workers in on the deal," Ryan said in a release Monday. “Ohioans are working harder than ever, they’re doing everything right, and they’re still falling behind."

So Ryan knows what he's up against in the race to replace Portman. A longtime advocate of unions, Ryan has made a career of talking to working Ohioans. He recently rebuked Republicans for focusing on Dr. Seuss's books pulled from print rather than a proposal to strengthen unions.

"Heaven forbid we pass something that's going to help the damn workers in the United States of America! Heaven forbid!" he said on the floor. "Now, stop talking about Dr. Seuss and start working with us on behalf of the American workers."

Ryan has served in Congress since 2013, replacing notorious lawmaker Jim Traficant. Before that, Ryan worked in Traficant's office.

 

Census redistricting is the big issue here. Ohio's almost certainly going to lose a congressional district in 2022 along with WV, MI, MN, PA, and IL and odds are very good it will be Ryan's. He has nothing to lose really by going after the Senate seat, because it's basically the only way he'll stay in Congress. Ryan certainly hasn't made friends on the Democratic side by his hilariously failed bid to replace Nancy Pelosi in 2016 as majority leader, either.

 

But Ryan has a legitimate shot at the Senate seat, if Sherrod Brown is any indication. Running as a moderate Dem is about the only shot Ryan has in a state like Ohio, growing increasingly whiter and older in its electorate like most Midwest states as Black and brown and Asian folks leave for the coasts. And if President Biden can continue to deliver and Ryan can make that clear to white non-college voters, he just might pull it off. 

We'll see.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

A new CBS News poll finds three-quarters of Americans agree with the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin in the murder trial of the death of George Floyd, which means that non-Republicans are overwhelmingly for the guilty verdict, and Republicans are split.

Three in four Americans think the jury reached the right verdict in which former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murder in the death of George Floyd, a majority view that spans across all racial, age and partisan groups.

Most White and Black Americans share the view that the jury reached the right verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer found guilty on all three counts in the death of George Floyd. Americans — both young and old —— within these racial groups agree with the verdict.

Reaction to the verdict among White Americans is largely related to partisanship. White Democrats overwhelmingly think the jury reached the right verdict, while White Republicans, like Republicans overall, are more divided.

The smaller portion of Americans — 25% — who believe the jury reached the wrong verdict strongly disagree with the ideas of the Black Lives Matter movement. This group is composed of more men than women, is disproportionately White and they mostly identify as conservative.

President Biden, who has called the verdict a step forward, gets a 60% approval rating for his general handling of matters surrounding George Floyd's death and Chauvin's trial. This is similar to his overall job rating as he closes in on 100 days in office.

Floyd's death sparked protests across the country by Black Lives Matter and other groups concerning the treatment of racial minorities by police.

Today, more Americans agree than disagree with the ideas expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Americans, Democrats and younger people are particularly likely to agree.

Overall though, people still have mostly positive views of their local police. Most Americans rate the job they are doing as at least somewhat good.

On balance, Black Americans rate their local police more positively than negatively, but they (17%) are less likely than Whites (39%) to say their local police are doing a "very good" job in their community.

 

So two observations, first, people agree broadly with Black Lives Matter, but they also support their local cops. Abolishing police, well, it doesn't have a whole lot of support.  People like their local police still, for the most part.

The problem is, police still kill people. And remember, Republicans don't think racism even exists, let alone leads to systemic police murders.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham denied on Sunday that there is systemic racism in the US, claiming "America's not a racist country" as President Joe Biden and others urge people to directly confront the issue as the nation grapples with a spate of police killings of Black Americans.

Citing the elections of former President Barack Obama, who is African American, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is both Black and South Asian, Graham told Fox News that "our systems are not racist. America's not a racist country," adding: "Within every society you have bad actors." 

The comments from the South Carolina Republican come several days after a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on all charges in the death of George Floyd, a Black man whose killing last year sparked a racial reckoning in the US and abroad and led to calls for police reform as more Black Americans die during encounters with law enforcement officers.

"The Chauvin trial was a just result," Graham said. "What's happening in Ohio, where the police officer had to use deadly force to prevent a young girl from being stabbed to death, is a different situation in my view. So this attack on police and policing -- reform the police, yes, call them all racist, no."

"America is a work in progress," he added.

Black Lives Still Matter.

StupidiNews!

• EU officials say fully vaccinated Americans will be able to fly to Europe this summer, although an exact timetable is still in the works.
• Turkey says it will respond "in time" to President Biden's "outrageous" recognition last week of Armenian genocide 100 years ago.
• The US will provide India raw medical materials and vaccine components as COVID-19 cases there are spiking out of control.
• A new poll finds Peruvian opposition candidate Pedro Castillo with a 20-point lead over Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori. 
• A generation after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster killed 31 and irradiated thousands, a new study finds that the children of clean-up workers do not have long-term DNA damage.
  

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne argues that Biden's approval rating remaining in the low 50's after his first 100 days in office is a direct result of both our polarized electorate and the fact that Biden has stuck to middle-class kitchen table issues and dared the GOP to attack him. They have, and Biden's managed to peel off Republican voters as a result.

 

The political core of Bidenism rests on his answers to two questions: What accounted for the setbacks experienced by recent Democratic presidencies? And how can his party ease the discontents that led to the rise of Donald Trump?

As President Biden addresses Congress on Wednesday to mark his first 100 days in office, the driving priorities of his administration are clear: the essential task of ending the pandemic, ambitious public investment to drive robust, long-term economic growth and aggressive efforts to reverse 40 years of expanding inequality.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that the Democrats’ big midterm defeats under Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010 were caused in significant part by sluggish economic recoveries.

As a result, Biden has taken no chances: He pressed relentlessly for his $1.9 trillion economic rescue bill, and continues to advance infrastructure investments and other programs to speed growth and lift incomes. He will pursue these plans with Republicans if possible and, more likely, without them if necessary.

Similarly, Biden has touted his climate plan at least as much for its job-creating potential as for its environmental benefits, pushing back against conservatives who have long cast action against climate change as a drag on the economy.

A pain-before-gain policy on climate proved politically deadly when House Democrats passed their elegant but complicated cap-and-trade bill in 2009 to put a price on carbon.

Cap-and-trade or a carbon tax are rational, direct responses to the problem, but neither deals with the fears of workers in regions where the coal, oil and natural gas industries have long supported well-paying livelihoods. Biden’s priority is to make clear that he gets these worries, and the United Mine Workers of America union’s endorsement last week of “a true energy transition” suggests his approach is resonating in unexpected places.

The shaping of Biden’s climate agenda reveals the contours of his larger effort to drive a wedge into the Trump constituency. A majority of Trump’s loyalists — the most fervent Republicans, ardent immigration foes, hard cultural conservatives, gun rights zealots, racial backlash voters — will never be available to Biden or the Democrats.

But Biden is banking on his ability to use populist economics (relief checks, upward pressure on wages, a “Buy America” campaign to bring home more manufacturing work, confining tax increases to corporations and those earning more than $400,000 annually) to win back Trump voters whose dissatisfactions are primarily economic.

Biden’s proposals have thus far won support in the polls from about a third of Republicans and a substantial majority of lower-income Republicans (in the case of the relief act). Their response has allowed Biden to challenge the traditional definitions of bipartisanship — House and Senate Republican votes for his bills — that hamstrung his predecessors. Instead, Biden argues that what he is doing is good for many Republican voters, and that a significant share of them agrees.

Biden continues to move far more to the left than I expected, embracing both the right time and the right thing to do. He's correctly disarming the populism fuse for the GOP by doing widely popular things too. I know it seems simple, but Obama was held back, and it hurt us all. Biden isn't constrained by the additional fetters of racism.

I hate that being true, but it is, and Biden is able to do things Obama should have been, but wasn't able to.

Sunday Long Read: The Algorithm Never Forgets

Big Tech never forgives, nor does it forget, as author Lauren Goode can attest to in today's Sunday Long Read. Calling off her wedding two years ago, the internet constantly reminds her of her "happy day" and will probably do so forever. The algorithms, you see, don't differentiate between major events of joy and those you want to forget. They are just data to be sold, and so are you.

I STILL HAVE a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and canceled a wedding. It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west. I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything.

Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app. The time stamp jolted my actual memory. It was May 2019 when we split up, back when people canceled weddings and called off relationships because of good old-fashioned dysfunction, not a global pandemic. Back when you wondered if seating two people next to each other at a wedding might result in awkward conversation, not hospitalization.

Did I want to see the photo again? Not really. Nor do I want to see the wedding ads on Instagram, or a near-daily collage of wedding paraphernalia on Pinterest, or the “Happy Anniversary!” emails from WeddingWire, which for a long time arrived every month on the day we were to be married. (Never mind that anniversaries are supposed to be annual.) Yet nearly two years later, these things still clutter my feeds. The photo widget on my iPad cycles through pictures of wedding dresses.

Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped. It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons. In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere. Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.

Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when apps started co-opting memories, madly deploying them to boost engagement and make a buck off nostalgia. The groundwork was laid in the early 2010s, right around the time my now ex and I started dating. For better or worse, I have been a tech super-user since then too. In my job as a technology journalist, I’ve spent the past dozen years tweeting, checking in, joining online groups, experimenting with digital payments, wearing multiple activity trackers, trying every “story” app and applying every gauzy photo filter. Unwittingly, I spent years drafting a technical blueprint for the relationship, one that I couldn’t delete when the construction plans fell apart.

If we already are part cyborg, as some technologists believe, there is a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married. The real me would really like to move on now.

 

There are certainly events in my digital life that I'd like to not be reminded of on a yearly basis, but of course the algorithm makes sure we can never forget, unless we leave it for good.

 

Maybe that's not a terrible idea for some of us.

These Disunited States, Con't

Montana GOP Gov. Greg Gianforte has decided that federal gun laws simply don't apply to the state, and is prohibiting enforcement of any federal firearms limiting regulation, because apparently Montana is no longer part of the United States.

Gov. Greg Gianforte on Friday signed a bill that prohibits state and local law enforcement in Montana from enforcing federal bans on firearms, ammunition and magazines.

Supporters of the law have said it would protect the Second Amendment from stiffer gun control laws that could come from federal legislation or executive orders by President Joe Biden in the wake of several mass shootings that took place this year, including a recent shooting that killed eight people in Indianapolis.

Opponents of the bill have said it would make it difficult for local law enforcement to collaborate with federal authorities on issues beyond gun access when such collaboration is essential to protect public safety, including in cases of domestic violence and drug offenses.

Montana law would prohibit law enforcement officials and other state employees from enforcing, implementing or spending state funds to uphold federal bans on particular kinds of firearms, ammunition and magazines.

Biden announced this month several executive actions to address gun violence, including a move to crack down on "ghost guns," homemade firearms that lack serial numbers used to trace them and are often purchased without a background check. The U.S. Justice Department is expected to release new rules on ghost guns in coming weeks.

The president has also called for a ban on assault weapons, but such legislation will likely face an uphill climb.

Montana is one of at least a dozen states that has sought to nullify new gun restrictions this year. The state's Republican-controlled Legislature has attempted to pass similar measures into law for almost a decade. Such bills were vetoed by former Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock in 2013, 2015 and 2017.

 

I mean at this point with firearms, abortion, and trans kids, Republicans just don't care to be part of the US anymore unless they are in charge. The thing is, we had this fight 155 years ago and they lost, but they never recognized that either.

 

I'd say that this will only end in violence, except we're already well into the violence part.

 

Turkish De-Fight

President Joe Biden is taking step to do what decades of American presidents before him refused to do: recognize that Turkey's Ottoman Emprie assault on Armenians a century ago was in fact, genocide.

The United States is formally recognizing that the systematic killing and deportation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century was “genocide” as President Joe Biden used that precise word that the White House has avoided for decades for fear of alienating ally Turkey.

With the acknowledgement, Biden followed through on a campaign promise he made a year ago Saturday — the annual commemoration of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day — to recognize that the events that began in 1915 were a deliberate effort to wipe out Armenians.

While previous presidents have offered somber reflections of the dark moment in history via remembrance day proclamations, they have studiously avoided using the term genocide out of concern that it would complicate relations with Turkey — a NATO ally and important power in the Middle East.

But Biden campaigned on a promise to make human rights a central guidepost of his foreign policy. He argued when making the campaign pledge last year that failing to call the atrocities against the Armenian people a genocide would pave the way for future mass atrocities. An estimated 2 million Armenians were deported and 1.5 million were killed in the events known as Metz Yeghern.

“The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today,” Biden said in a statement. “We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”

Turkish officials immediately criticized Biden’s statement, while Armenians praised Biden for making what they said was a principled move.

“Recognition of the Armenian Genocide is important not only in terms of respecting the memory of 1.5 million innocent victims, but also in preventing the repetition of such crimes,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in a letter to Biden.

“We reject and denounce in the strongest terms the statement of the President of the US regarding the events of 1915 made under the pressure of radical Armenian circles and anti-Turkey groups,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu tweeted that “words cannot change history or rewrite it,” and that Turkey “completely rejected” Biden’s statement.

Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin suggested on Twitter than Biden was repeating “the slander of groups whose only agenda is being hostile to our country.” He added: “We recommend that the U.S. President takes a look at his own history and today.”

During a telephone call Friday, Biden informed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of his plan to issue the statement, said a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to publicly discuss the private conversation and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. and Turkish governments, in separate statements following Biden and Erdogan’s call, made no mention of the American plan to recognize the Armenian genocide. But the White House said Biden told Erdogan he wants to improve the two countries’ relationship and find “effective management of disagreements.” The two also agreed to hold a bilateral meeting at the NATO summit in Brussels in June.

 

So Biden not only did the right thing here -- and I know it's easy to say "words don't matter in human rights, actions do" here and shit all over Biden -- but the point is the US has even refused the words step until now. Biden stood up when it counted.

 

And guess what? The realpolitik is that Turkey is a NATO ally and important Middle East player, and Biden and Erdogan are going to meet in six weeks or so. Still.

 

Biden so far this week has stood up to Putin's military exercises in Ukraine and Erdogan on Armenian genocide.

 

The guy's not Trump, that's for damned sure.

The Big Lie Forever

They can't go after Biden's birth certificate I guess, so we're stuck with state Republican parties constantly auditing Biden's wins in red states like Arizona forever and ever.

A Maricopa County judge on Friday temporarily halted a Republican-led effort in Arizona to recount ballots from the 2020 presidential election, after Democrats filed a lawsuit arguing that the audit violated state election security laws.

But the judge, Christopher Coury of Maricopa County Superior Court, said the pause would go into effect only if the state Democratic Party posted a $1 million bond to compensate a private company — Cyber Ninjas, a cybersecurity firm based in Florida — that Republicans have hired to review the ballots. In a statement on Friday afternoon, Democratic officials said they would not do so, but they vowed to continue the fight in court. 

Another hearing was set for Monday morning, and the judge emphasized that he expected the audit to move forward.Republican State Senate officials hired Cyber Ninjas to review nearly 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa, the state’s largest county, though there is no substantiated evidence of significant fraud or errors. 

Election officials and local courts have found no merit in the allegations, and the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors has also objected to the recount.

The lawsuit, brought by the state Democratic Party and Maricopa County’s only Democratic supervisor, argues that the State Senate is violating Arizona laws and regulations over the confidentiality and handling of election materials, and questions whether Senate officials can contract audit-related activities to private third-party vendors.

 

And remember, Arizona Republican passed a law earlier this year to specifically make these garbage audits easier to conduct and impossible to fight.

The Arizona Senate passed a bill allowing the Arizona legislature to subpoena election records, which means they can now check tabulating equipment and ballots for any evidence of tampering.

Under this bill, county election equipment, records, systems and other information that are under control of the county personnel will no longer be considered confidential. The bill also opens these records for subpoena and the legislature has the right to conduct any investigation into these items without infringement from any law.

State Sen. Warren Petersen helped introduce the bill. The GOP has been trying to investigate any tampering during the 2020 presidential election and they targeted Maricopa County but the latter voted against any subpoenas. The Maricopa County Board of supervisors sought judgment from a court to clarify if they are mandated to release those records or not.

Senators from Arizona filed a countersuit asking the court to enforce their subpoenas and help release the records they are asking for. The court decided against it and dismissed the case.

The bill would give the state legislature the authority to issue subpoenas for election records and equipment.

 

They're doing it on purpose. The Big Lie is there to make it easier to steal the election next time.

Never forget that.

Last Call For No Good Republicans Left

I'm in complete agreement with Steve M. here. There are no good Republicans left, and it's years past the time that we need to accept that, but nobody cares, least of all our broken Village press.

Bush, Boehner, Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney still consider themselves Republicans in good standing. Donors who said they'd withhold money from pro-insurrection GOP officeholders are giving to those officeholders again, as Glasser notes.

No one ever asks Republican critics of the party how they can remain members in good conscience. We know the answer: It's because what's happening now is an evolution, not a break with the past. Boehner, Bush, and others engaged in or enabled right-wing radicalism until it went too far for them.

But if it really has gone too far and some of them think we're in a crisis, they have to make a clean break, or they're still enablers. The press has to ask every Republican who claims to be appalled by Trumpism and January 6: So shouldn't you quit the party? Do you see any evidence that the party will abandon the Big Lie of Democratic election theft, that it will abandon the extremism Trump embodied (but didn't create), that it will abandon nativism and white nationalism? And if you think you this is a temporary crisis, what are you doing to bring it to an end, and why isn't it working? Why does it seem to be getting worse?

But that won't happen. These people will still win praise from the mainstream media and from moderates (and some liberals) for, in effect, doing nothing. They'll never be questioned this way.

 

And the best part is if anyone in our press does ask the question, the answer will be "You should be asking after (Insert Democratic bogeyman of the moment here, which currently is Maxine Waters) why anyone can remain a Democrat in good conscience."  

 

The level of false equivalence to Trump inciting a seditionist white supremacist terrorist attack on the US Capitol with the intent of a coup is staggering, but will 100% play out as "both sides!" because that's how the game works. Village reporters get cut off otherwise, or worse, targeted as "FAKE NEWS" by the Trump cultists.

This gulf of false equivalencies has grown exponentially since the days of the Clintons. It's a no-win situation, and we're all losing as a result.

 

Vaccination Nation, Con't

Red states are starting to turn down more vaccine doses from the Biden administration, because they have no takers left. Nearly the half the country plans to remain unvaccinated, and that will make herd immunity impossible without hundreds of thousands more deaths.

Louisiana has stopped asking the federal government for its full allotment of COVID-19 vaccine. About three-quarters of Kansas counties have turned down new shipments of the vaccine at least once over the past month. And in Mississippi, officials asked the federal government to ship vials in smaller packages so they don’t go to waste.

As the supply of coronavirus vaccine doses in the U.S. outpaces demand, some places around the country are finding there’s such little interest in the shots, they need to turn down shipments.

“It is kind of stalling. Some people just don’t want it,” said Stacey Hileman, a nurse with the health department in rural Kansas’ Decatur County, where less than a third of the county’s 2,900 residents have received at least one vaccine dose.

The dwindling demand for vaccines illustrates the challenge that the U.S. faces in trying to conquer the pandemic while at the same time dealing with the optics of tens of thousands of doses sitting on shelves when countries like India and Brazil are in the midst of full-blown medical emergencies.

More than half of American adults have received at least one vaccine dose, and President Joe Biden this week celebrated eclipsing 200 million doses administered in his first 100 days in office. He also acknowledged entering a new phase to bolster outreach and overcome hesitancy.

Across the country, pharmacists and public health officials seeing the demand wane and supplies build up. About half of Iowa’s counties have stopped asking for new doses from the state, and Louisiana didn’t seek shipment of some vaccine doses over the past week.

In Mississippi, small-town pharmacist Robin Jackson has been practically begging anyone in the community to show up and get shots after she received her first shipment of vaccine earlier this month and demand was weak, despite placing yard signs outside her storefront celebrating the shipment’s arrival. She was wasting more vaccine than she was giving out and started coaxing family members into the pharmacy for shots.

“Nobody was coming,” she said. “And I mean no one.”

In Barber County, Kansas, which has turned down vaccine doses from the state for two of the past four weeks, Danielle Farr said she has no plans to be vaccinated. The 32-year-old said she got COVID-19 last year, along with her 5- and 12-year-old sons and her husband.

Blood tests detected antibodies for the virus in all four of them, so she figures they’re already protected.

“I believe in vaccines that have eradicated terrible diseases for the past 60, 70 years. I totally and fully believe in that,” said Farr, who works at an accounting firm. “Now a vaccine that was rushed in six, seven months, I’m just going to be a little bit more cautious about what I choose to put into my body.”

Barbara Gennaro, a stay-at-home mother of two small children in Yazoo City, Mississippi, said everybody in her homeschooling community is against getting the vaccine. Gennaro said she generally avoids vaccinations for her family in general, and the coronavirus vaccine is no different.

“All of the strong Christians that I associate with are against it,” she said. “Fear is what drives people to get the vaccine — plain and simple. The stronger someone’s trust is in the Lord, the least likely they are to want the vaccine or feel that it’s necessary.”

Another challenge for vaccinations in a rural state like Mississippi is that in many cases, doses are being shipped in large packages with one vial containing at least 10 doses.

During a news conference in early April, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves said Mississippi officials have requested that the federal government send the vaccines in smaller packaging so it’s not going to waste.

“If you’re in New York City, and you’re sending a package to one of the large pharmacies in downtown Manhattan, there are literally millions and millions of people within walking distance most likely of that particular pharmacy,” Reeves said. “Well, if you’re in rural Itta Bena, Mississippi, that’s just not the case.”

 

Until we have the political will to make this mandatory, we've basically reached the end of the vaccine rollout phase here in the US. May will be cleanup and second shots for people getting the vaccine in April, but after that, by June 1, I expect we're going to be reaching a hard limit. Some 40%-50% of American adults will never take the vaccine unless forced, and frankly, that may be too many to force.

 

The rest of 2021 is not going to be a fun time.

Retribution Execution, Con't

In order for Donald Trump to continue his rule of the GOP, he has to not just stop the opposition to him among Republicans, has has to burn it to the ground and salt the ashes. The top targets are the handful of House Republicans who voted for his impeachment, apparently starting with Ohio GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez.

The crowd crammed into an indoor-outdoor bar at a sprawling mall in this teeming suburb south of Cleveland. The head of the local Republican club took to the mic on a small stage—and pledged vengeance.

“Sign the petition to ask Congressman Anthony Gonzalez to resign,” Shannon Burns said to a burst of cheers. “If you’re looking at your neighbor right now and saying, ‘What’s he talking about?’ … get with it!”

The second-term representative “betrayed his constituents,” in Burns’ assessment, when he voted in January with nine other House Republicans and every Democrat to impeach Donald Trump.

“He thinks a year from now when it’s election time for the primary you’re all going to forget and he’s going to get reelected,” Burns went on, eliciting snickers and jeers. “And I’m telling you right now: We’re going to make sure you don’t forget.”

In a normal political world and in a normal political time, a second-generation Cuban-American former NFL player from the Rust Belt with an MBA from Stanford would be considered practically by definition a rising GOP star. But Gonzalez’s impeachment decision made him a traitor in the eyes of the man who is manifestly the unofficial leader of the party. It’s the reason Trump wasted no time endorsing Max Miller—a former aide with next to no name ID plus an arrest record—to try to take out Gonzalez. And it’s why the 16th District of Ohio is now a singular early battlefield in the former president’s intensifying intraparty war.

“Anthony Gonzalez should not be representing the people of the 16th District because he does not represent their interest or their heart,” Trump said in a statement barely more than a month after he left office. “Max Miller has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

A 32-year-old Cleveland native, Miller has been endorsed, too, by the Club for Growth, which commissioned a poll that suggests he has a wide lead at this early stage. “If the election was today, Anthony Gonzalez would lose,” Jim Renacci, the pre-Gonzalez Republican congressman here, told me last month. “He’s done,” said Harlan Hill, a Trump-aligned consultant who’s done work in the district. “Max is going to beat the hell out of Anthony.”

 

I'm actually looking forward to this fight on one level, but at this point it's clear that Gonzales is going to be obliterated. There's not going to be a lot of soul-searching either for Ohio Republicans, who are most likely going to eliminate three of the four remaining Democratic House members in the state through gerrymandering and the loss of a House seat through the Census.

By the time 2023 rolls around, Ohio will be as red as Indiana or Kentucky, and it will be as Trumpy. No dissent will be tolerated in red states.

It's not going to be a fun time around here.