Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

I honestly have come to the conclusion that the gun-humpers on the right want to refight and win the Civil War and reconstitute slavery, and they keep telling us that this is what they want to do.

Conservative activist Rogan O'Handley argued over the weekend that the government should provide firearm subsidies so that people can protect themselves from "looting, violence and murder" that he blamed on Black Lives Matter.

O'Handley made the remarks while appearing on OAN, a conservative news channel.

"America owns more guns than 50% of the planet," O'Handley said. "There are more guns than people in this country. God bless the Second Amendment and our Founding Fathers. I am absolutely loving seeing these huge, huge gun numbers."

The conservative activist went on to praise first-time gun buyers who fear Black Lives Matter protests..

"People that have never owned a gun in their life are looking around and seeing BLM and antifa burning down courthouses, police stations... looting, violence, murder," he said. "And they're saying, you know what? Maybe I have to look at protecting myself and my family. Maybe I should start exercising my constitutional right to keep and bear arms."

O'Handley added: "And I will say I'm in the camp where I think we should actually have subsidies for gun ownership in this country. You know, we subsidize schools, housing, everything. Why are we not subsidizing guns? That's a constitutional right and one of the most important. Very happy to see these huge numbers."

 

To reiterate, we're at the point now where the white supremacists are openly saying the government should give people guns to stop Black Lives Matter and Antifa. 

 

This is their idea of utopia.

 

Millions of people agree with this lunatic. My "The Second Civil War" tag is not an exaggeration, folks.

 

This will only end in catastrophe.

The Kids Are Alright (And Voting)

The Silent generation and Boomer generation are now well into AARP territory while Millennials, now firmly in their 20's and 30's are becoming the new electoral majority. That's helping to push the country to the left finally, but there are some major caveats, mainly that white Millennials still favor Republicans across the board, and that Boomers are living longer and voting more conservative as they age.

More members of the millennial generation and Generation Z voted in the 2020 presidential election than in any prior election, according to several studies of the electorate that have taken place in recent months.

And for the first time in American history, a majority of eligible voters under the age of 30 cast a ballot in an election.

As the oldest millennials creep toward their 40th birthdays and more members of Generation Z age into the electorate, the data show those two groups became substantially more powerful within the electorate, as occasional voters cast ballots more regularly and first-time voters began their voting careers in greater proportions.

“Basically 40 percent of the electorate are essentially Gen Z and millennials and some young Xers in there,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics who helped the Biden campaign survey younger voters. “They are replacing the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers. For every one of those who are exiting the electorate, they are being replaced by someone more progressive.”

About 21 million voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast a ballot in 2020, up from 18 million in 2016, according to data from the Democratic firm TargetSmart. And 23 million voters between the ages of 30 and 39 cast ballots, an increase of almost 3 million from the last presidential contest.

In both cases, those voters made up a slightly larger share of the overall electorate — up 0.5 percent among 18 to 29-year-olds and up 0.2 percent among 30 to 39-year-olds.

Their gains came as voters between the ages of 40 and 65 declined as an overall share of the electorate. Turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds jumped 9 percent, and by 7 percent among 30- to 39-year-olds. Turnout among those between the ages of 40 and 65 rose 6 percentage points.

“In a pandemic election, where many young Americans found their lives uprooted by college campus closures, the youth vote still expanded over the 2016 benchmark,” said Tom Bonier, TargetSmart’s chief executive.

For the first time, the millennial generation and Generation Z combined to make up a greater share of the electorate than Generation X.

And more of those younger voters are getting more comfortable casting their ballots: Among those between the ages of 30 and 39, almost half are frequent voters, up from just over a third four years ago, a sign that a generation long dismissed for its apathy is engaging in politics more habitually.

There are signs that the emerging younger electorate is likely to provide a windfall for Democratic candidates. In states where voters are allowed to register by party, 52 percent of voters 18 to 29 are registered Democrats, compared with just 35 percent who are registered Republicans. Among 30- to 39-year-olds, the gap is even wider: 53 percent are registered Democrats, while just 34 percent are registered Republicans.

“Young voters were a critical component of the Democratic coalition that formed the Blue Wave in 2018, and will be perhaps even more central to Democratic hopes in the 2022 midterm elections,” Bonier said. “Meanwhile, as the electorate grows increasingly younger and more diverse, Republicans are left clinging to hopes of higher turnout among older and less educated white voters.”

Some Republicans acknowledge the growing generational challenge their party faces.

“The big problem that we have is that we’re not putting forward policy proposals that people are willing to listen to, particularly in those generations,” said Evan Siegfried, the author of "GOP GPS: How to Find the Millennials and Urban Voters the Republican Party Needs to Survive." “Instead of reacting to proposals and statements by Democrats with mockery and memes, which only appeal to the base and voters you already have, it would benefit Republicans to respond with alternatives and thoughtful debate.”

 

But that goes to show you how fragile our country is right now: without record-shattering numbers of voters age 18-45 going to the polls, Biden would have been crushed and we'd be locked in the hell of a Trump second term with Republican dominance of Congress. If those voters don't show up in 2022, we're going to lose the House and Senate.  If they don't show up in 2024, well...

A lot is riding on motivating people to care about voting, and as a whole, we barely give a damn.

Especially younger voters.

We need all of us, folks.

The Village Gets Used Again

One of the main reasons the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has gone on so long, longer than my entire life and nearly as long as the Zandarparents have been alive is that both sides fully understand that the war is being fought in the global public opinion battlefield as well as in Gaza and the West Bank, and always has been. The international press ends up getting drafted in this fight, and it never turns out well for them.

Israel shared intelligence with the US showing how Hamas operated inside the same building with the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera in Gaza, officials in Jerusalem said on Sunday. 

Officials in more than one government office confirmed that US President Joe Biden’s phone call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday was, in part, about the bombing of the building, and that Israel showed Biden and American officials the intelligence behind the action. 

“We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building,” a source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said. “I understand they found the explanation satisfactory.” 

Another senior Israeli official admitted that the fact that the bombing took place two days after a tweet by the IDF misled some foreign media into reporting that ground troops had entered Gaza made the situation more difficult from a public diplomacy perspective.
But in government-to-government diplomacy, Israeli officials felt that the situation was still good. 

The US was the only country to inquire about the IDF strike on the building, which the military said housed Hamas military intelligence offices, as well as AP and Al Jazeera, other news outlets, and other offices and apartments. 

“From an analysis the Foreign Ministry did [on Sunday], 80% of the 90 countries we spoke to in recent days released official statements supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. They aren’t calling to stop the operation,” the ministry source said. 

Ashkenazi also spoke to over 30 foreign ministers around the world. 

“We’re still in a positive place when it comes to our legitimacy to act,” the Foreign Ministry source added. “There is very clear support for the Israeli stance that the terrorism crossed a line.” 

The IAF struck the 12-story tower in Gaza on Saturday, giving a warning an hour in advance. 

“The building housed the offices of civilian media, which the terrorist organization Hamas hides behind and uses as human shields,” the IDF said in a statement. "The terror organization Hamas deliberately places its military assets in the heart of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip. Prior to the attack, the IDF warned the civilians who were in the building and gave them sufficient time to evacuate.”

 

Even if the intelligence is BS, and using the Associated Press as pawns is the IDF's master stroke to evacuate all the international press out of Gaza "for their own safety", or whether Hamas really was running intel operations from the building, betting that Israel wouldn't touch the place, the point is that the Associate Press, Al Jazeera, and other media outfits in Gaza not only allowed themselves to become the story, but to become part of the conflict itself.

That alone necessitates AP CEO and President Gary Pruitt's resignation, and that of the AP's Gaza staff. Maybe that's not fair, but AP's been in that building for 15 years. Perhaps they should have known, being a news-gathering organization in a war zone. Things aren't fair in war, especially this war.

Either the IDF is terrible or Hamas is terrible (and both being terrible is the most likely outcome) but again, the AP allowed themselves to get pulled into this.

We need better media run by better people.

StupidiNews!

• At least one person is dead and four injured after a mass shooting in Toronto on Sunday, the shooting took place near the Pearson International Airport in the Ebitocoke neighborhood.
• Embattled Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is ruling out a Gaza cease fire, saying the IDF will pursue Hamas terrorists "for as long as necessary" as fighting there enters a second week.
• A new WHO study finds that stroke and heart disease deaths caused by overwork in 2020 rose 30% from 2000, claiming nearly three-quarters of a million people worldwide.
• Ireland's government is confirming a second cyber attack on the country's health system in three days as hackers continue to shut down hospital and heath care computers.
• Archaeologists in Italy believe a naval officer's body found near Mount Vesuvius may have been part of a failed rescue mission 2100 years ago.
  

Last Call For The Big Lie, Con't

Trump continues to lie to America and the world as his cultists continue to try to manufacture a scandal in Arizona's 2020 vote count, declaring that the entire Maricopa County voter database was deleted ahead of Monday's election board meeting, a lie so laughably false that the county's Republican top election official publicly tweeted that Donald Trump is "unhinged".

"Wow. This is unhinged."

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer's tweet Saturday castigated former President Donald Trump for alleging "election crime" in an email he sent Saturday.

Trump's premature leap to unsubstantiated conclusionsdrew Richer's attention before a scheduled meeting Monday in which Maricopa County officials say they will respond to questions raised by Arizona Senate-hired private contractors auditing the county's general election.

Richer took office in January, after the election, the election count and county accuracy tests and a county-directed audit were conducted.

He and other Republican county officials are sounding alarms as claims about a deleted database such as the one made by Trump — and the audit's own Twitter account — burn across social media like wildfire.

"Wow. This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now," Richer posted on Twitter in response to Trump's claims.

He added: "We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country."

Trump wrote in one of his Saturday emails, "The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!" He called it "illegal" and an "election crime," despite the audit spokesperson walking back such claims two days earlier. Trump also alleged that "seals were broken on the boxes that hold the votes, ballots are missing, and worse."

On Wednesday, the auditors' Twitter account alleged Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases before the election equipment was delivered to the audit, claiming spoliation of evidence.

But Ken Bennett, the audit spokesperson, walked back a claim of wrongdoing.

"We didn’t say there was anything malicious," Bennett said Friday of the database in question. "Maybe it was deleted because it was a duplicate of something that was elsewhere."

Bennett said auditors seek an explanation from the county.

 

The explanation is simple: "You're all a bunch of liars, and you most likely will be hearing from our lawyers if not country prosecutors." 

And I don't feel sorry for Stephen Richter at all. The proper thing to do is to resign very publicly, very loudly, and to encourage every other Republican remaining in the party to leave as well, stating very clearly that Donald Trump's Big Lie cannot be allowed to stand. Back up those words with actions.

Leave. The. Party.

Because those who remain will be part and parcel of the violence that will inevitably come.

 

There's no middle ground anymore, because those who are disloyal to Trump are being purged anyway.

When House Republicans ousted Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post, it spoke to the direction of the Republican Party in at least one specific way: what should happen to those who publicly break with former President Donald Trump? So, we surveyed the nation's self-identified Republicans to learn what they thought of the week's events. They still very much want their party to show loyalty to Mr. Trump and adhere to the idea that President Biden didn't legitimately win.

Their views on Cheney, in turn, now reflect those wishes.

Eighty percent of Republicans who'd heard about the vote agree with Cheney's removal — they feel she was off-message, unsupportive of Mr. Trump, and that she's wrong about the 2020 presidential election. To a third of them, and most particularly for those who place the highest importance on loyalty, Cheney's removal also shows "disloyalty will be punished."

Those Republicans opposed to her removal — just a fifth of the party right now — say it's mainly because there's room for different views in the party, not all need support Mr. Trump and this was a distraction. But when we look down the line to any potential electoral impact, theirs might be even more limited: this group is also less likely to report voting in Republican primaries. 

Republicans say that Mr. Trump himself represents their views just as well as they think the party does; it's a personal connection to him we've seen for years. Today, loyalty also means they specifically want the party to follow more of the former president's examples across a range of items, including economics, issues of race and immigration, how to treat the media, using power and leadership, generally.

 

There is no GOP anymore. There is only the Trump party now. And it will very soon go to war with America itself.

God help me, we're not prepared to win that war, either.

Retrubution Execution, Con't

The Liz Cheney fight is over, and Donald Trump has claimed 100% victory with Elise Stefanik taking Cheney's role as House GOP conference chair. As CNN's Harry Enten notes, Republicans are now moving on to winning back Congress in 2022.

The House GOP's move to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position is widely seen as the latest move to placate the base at the risk of alienating the center of the electorate. Cheney had voted to impeach former President Donald Trump and has continued her critiques of him while most other Republicans seem to have a hard time distancing themselves from him. 

But a look at the statistics reveals that Republicans may be playing it right when it comes to Trump. 

The belief that Republicans should not try to placate Trump or his supporters comes down to the fact that he is unpopular and just lost a presidential election. 

That said, there's little sign that Trump is even on the minds' of most voters these days. He's not on Twitter, and Google searches for him are way down. Indeed, there's not much of a sign that the GOP's association with Trump is hurting them at this point. 

Take a look at the generic congressional ballot. Democrats hold a slight lead of about 3 to 4 points in an average of polls. Trump lost the 2020 election by 4.5 points, and House Republicans lost nationally by 3.1 points. 

In other words, Republicans are in no worse position than they were in the 2020 election. In fact, they're actually polling better now on the generic ballot than they were heading into the last election by about 3 to 4 points because polling across the board underestimated Republicans.

 

In other words, without Trump reminding people daily why the GOP is corrupt and terrible, they're actually doing better in the polls, better enough to win back Congress by a healthy margin. Biden's big legislative wins and the COVID vaccine progress aren't enough. People actually like Republicans more now, because they're the "outsider" party and everything is now the Democrats' fault because they're in control.

Unless Democrats find a way to make the GOP pay a price for their continued support of Trump, the Biden admin will be over and done in 2023 when Republicans take over Congress and impeach him three, maybe four times just to make sure Trump is no longer the "most impeached" Oval Office occupant.

You think I'm kidding. I'm being deadly serious.

Sunday Long Read: The Coldest Of Cases

This week's Sunday Long Read mystery doesn't get much more "cold case" than the disappearance of a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains during the Soviet era more than 60 years ago, but as author Douglas Preston tells us in the New Yorker, the mystery may finally be solved.

Igor Dyatlov was a tinkerer, an inventor, and a devotee of the wilderness. Born in 1936, near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), he built radios as a kid and loved camping. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, in 1957, he constructed a telescope so that he and his friends could watch the satellite travel across the night sky. By then, he was an engineering student at the city’s Ural Polytechnic Institute. One of the leading technical universities in the country, U.P.I. turned out topflight engineers to work in the nuclear-power and weapons industries, communications, and military engineering. During his years there, Dyatlov led a number of arduous wilderness trips, often using outdoor equipment that he had invented or improved on. It was a time of optimism in the U.S.S.R. Khrushchev’s Thaw had freed many political prisoners from Stalin’s Gulag, economic growth was robust, and the standard of living was rising. The shock that the success of Sputnik delivered to the West further bolstered national confidence. In late 1958, Dyatlov began planning a winter expedition that would exemplify the boldness and vigor of a new Soviet generation: an ambitious sixteen-day cross-country ski trip in the Urals, the north-south mountain range that divides western Russia from Siberia, and thus Europe from Asia.

He submitted his proposal to the U.P.I. sports club, which readily approved it. Dyatlov’s itinerary lay three hundred and fifty miles north of Sverdlovsk, in the traditional territory of the Mansi, an indigenous people. The Mansi came into contact with Russians around the sixteenth century, when Russia was extending its control over Siberia. Though largely Russified by this time, the Mansi continued to pursue a semi-traditional way of life—hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. Dyatlov’s group would ski two hundred miles, on a route that no Russian, as far as anyone knew, had taken before. The mountains were gentle and rounded, their barren slopes rising from a vast boreal forest of birch and fir. The challenge wouldn’t be rugged terrain but brutally cold temperatures, deep snow, and high winds.

Dyatlov recruited his classmate Zina Kolmogorova, and seven other fellow-students and recent graduates. They were among the élite of Soviet youth and all highly experienced winter campers and cross-country skiers. One was Dyatlov’s close friend Georgy Krivonishchenko, who had graduated from U.P.I. two years before and worked as an engineer at the Mayak nuclear complex, in the then secret town of Chelyabinsk-40. Jug-eared, small, and wiry, he told jokes, sang, and played the mandolin. Two other recent graduates were Rustem Slobodin and Nikolay Thibault-Brignoles, of French descent, whose father had been worked nearly to death in one of Stalin’s camps. The other students included Yuri Yudin, Yuri Doroshenko, and Aleksandr Kolevatov. The youngest of the group, at twenty, was Lyuda Dubinina, an economics major, a track athlete, and an ardent Communist, who wore her long blond hair in braids tied with silk ribbons. On a previous wilderness outing, Dubinina had been accidentally shot by a hunter, and survived—quite cheerfully, it was said—a fifty-mile journey back to civilization. A couple of days before the group was due to set off, the U.P.I. administration unexpectedly added a new member, much older than the others and largely unknown to them: Semyon Zolotaryov, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Second World War with an old-fashioned mustache, stainless-steel crowns on his teeth, and tattoos.

The party left Sverdlovsk by train on January 23rd. Several of them hid under seats to avoid buying tickets. They were in high spirits—so high that on a layover between trains Krivonishchenko was briefly detained by police for playing his mandolin and pretending to panhandle in the train station. We know these details because there was a communal journal, and many of the skiers also kept personal journals. At least five had cameras, and the pictures they took show a lively and strikingly handsome group of young people having the adventure of their lives—skiing, laughing, playing in the snow, and mugging for the camera.

After two days on trains, the party reached Ivdel, a remote town with a Stalin-era prison camp that, by then, held mostly criminals. From there the group travelled another day by bus, then in the back of a woodcutter’s truck, and finally by ski, guided by a horse-drawn sleigh. They slept in an abandoned logging camp called Second Northern. There Yuri Yudin had a flareup of sciatica that forced him to pull out of the trip. The next day, January 28th, he turned back, while the remaining nine set off toward the mountains. The plan was to end up at the tiny village of Vizhai around February 12th, and telegram the U.P.I. sports club that they had arrived safely. The expected telegram never came.

At first, the U.P.I. sports club assumed that the group had just been held up; there had been reports of a heavy snowstorm in the mountains. But, after several days passed, families of the group began placing frantic phone calls to the university and to the local bureau of the Communist Party, and, on February 20th, a search was launched. There were several search parties: student volunteers from U.P.I., prison guards from the Ivdel camp, Mansi hunters, local police; the military deployed planes and helicopters. On February 25th, the students found ski tracks, and the next day they discovered the skiers’ tent—above the tree line on a remote mountain that Soviet officials referred to as Height 1079 and that the Mansi called Kholat Syakhl, or Dead Mountain. There was no one inside.

The theories are quite entertaining as to what happened to the Dyatlov party, as good as some of Preston's novels featuring seminal New Orleans FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast. The reality may actually be a bit more frightening, however.

I avoid skiing anyway. Mountains will kill you, you know.

Israeli A Problem Here, Con't

We've now reached the inevitable "Israeli airstrikes destroy international press offices" stage of the 2021 iteration of Middle-East Peace™ and I'm wondering how President Biden will choose to respond.

An Israeli airstrike targeted and destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza City that housed offices of The Associated Press and other media outlets hours after another Israeli air raid on a densely populated refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians from an extended family, mostly children, on Saturday.

The strike on the high-rise came nearly an hour after the military ordered people to evacuate the 12-story building, which also housed Al-Jazeera, other offices and residential apartments. The strike brought down the entire structure, which collapsed in a gigantic cloud of dust. There was no immediate explanation for why it was attacked.

The earlier Israeli airstrike on the Gaza City refugee camp was the deadliest single strike of the current conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. Both sides are pressing for an advantage as cease-fire efforts gather strength.

The latest outburst of violence started in Jerusalem and spread across the region over the past week, with Jewish-Arab clashes and rioting in mixed cities of Israel. There were also widespread Palestinian protests Friday in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot and killed 11 people.

The spiraling violence has raised fears of a new Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising, when peace talks have not taken place in years. Palestinians on Saturday were marking Nakba (Catastrophe) Day, when they commemorate the estimated 700,000 people who were expelled from or fled their homes in what was now Israel during the 1948 war surrounding its creation. That raised the possibility of even more unrest.

U.S. diplomat Hady Amr arrived Friday as part of Washington’s efforts to de-escalate the conflict, and the U.N. Security Council was set to meet Sunday. But Israel turned down an Egyptian proposal for a one-year truce that Hamas rulers had accepted, an Egyptian official said Friday on condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations.

Since Monday night, Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, which has pounded the Gaza Strip with strikes. In Gaza, at least 139 people have been killed, including 39 children and 22 women; in Israel, eight people have been killed, including the death Saturday of a man killed by a rocket that hit in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv.

The strike on the building housing media offices came in the afternoon, after the owner received a call from the Israeli military warning that the building would be hit. AP’s staff and others in the building evacuated immediately, and were reported safe.

 

It was nice of the IDF to warn the AP to evacuate before their Gaza office was deliberately targeted and bombed to hell so that they can no longer report on what the IDF will be bombing next.  

 

See, the IDF is friendly and full of the good guys!

The Big Lie, Con't

Well what do you know, we actually found voter fraud in the 2020 election, well this changes everything! I mean it's all over for Biden and the Democrats now, nobody...

...wait, I'm being told that this was Republican voter fraud to illegally help Donald Trump in Colorado, by a man accused of not just voting his estranged wife's ballot, but killing her as well.

Barry Morphew, who is charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of his wife who remains missing, is now accused of submitting a ballot for her in the November presidential election.

Suzanne Morphew was last seen in May 2020, and while she has not been found, the Chaffee County Sheriff's Office (CCSO) announced earlier this month the arrest of her husband Barry and said they believe Suzanne is no longer alive.

He was previously facing charges of:

• First-degree murder after deliberation
• Tampering with physical evidence
• Attempting to influence a public servant

New charges were announced this week and include:

• Forgery of public record
• Election mail ballot offense

Back in October 2020, the Chaffee County Clerk reported to the sheriff's office that she had received a mail-in ballot for Suzanne Morphew, a person she knew was missing since May 2020, an arrest affidavit from CCSO for Barry Morphew's arrest says.

The ballot was provided to the sheriff's office and seized as evidence.

It did not have the signature of the voter as required and instead, the affidavit says, the name Barry Lee Morphew was handwritten on the line for the witness's legal name.

In April, Barry Morphew was interviewed about the ballot and asked why he submitted it.

He replied, "Just because I wanted Trump to win," the affidavit says. He further stated, according to the affidavit that "I just thought give him [Trump] another vote."

He went on to say, according to the affidavit, "all these other guys are cheating," and I know she [referring to his wife] was going to vote for Trump anyway."

When asked if knew submitting the ballot was illegal, he responded, "I didn't know you couldn't do that for your spouse," the affidavit says.

 

I have to say, if this guy killed his wife and then stole her identity to cast two ballots for Joe Biden, this would have been the leading news story on FOX for six goddamn months. It would have taken on BENGHAZI status. The trial would be covered daily, with Democrats constantly asked to disavow Biden's "obvious cheating" and for him to do everything up to and including resign.

But this asshole voted for Trump, so nobody cares.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

I've said this before and I will say it again: there is no greater example of systemic racism in America than the housing market.

Carlette Duffy felt both vindicated and excited. Both relieved and angry.

For months, she suspected she had been low-balled on two home appraisals because she's Black. She decided to put that suspicion to the test and asked a white family friend to stand in for her during an appraisal.

Her home's value suddenly shot up. A lot.

During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic last year, the first two appraisers who visited her home just west of downtown Indianapolis, valued it at $125,000 and $110,000, respectively.

But that third appraisal went differently.

To get that one, Duffy, who is African American, communicated with the appraiser strictly via email, stripped her home of all signs of her racial and cultural identity and had the white husband of a friend stand in for her during the appraiser's visit.

The home's new value: $259,000.

"I had to go through all of that just to say that I was right and that this is what's happening," she said. "This is real."

Now she wants justice. Along with the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana, Duffy has filed fair housing complaints against the mortgage lenders and appraisers she accuses of undervaluing her home because of her race.

Housing experts and historians say residential real estate has been historically marred by discrimination. Across the nation, homes owned by Black Americans are significantly undervalued next to homes in comparable white neighborhoods, according to a study by Brookings.

 

Being Black in America costs you so much. There is a deliberate tax on everything we do, at every stage, at every turn, in every way, that white people do not have to pay or even think about.

In Indianapolis and cities around this country, being Black costs you more than half the value of your home.

That's just for starters.

 

It costs you wealth, opportunity, and security. It hurts your family, your ability to remain middle class, your ability to stay afloat.

 

It costs you status, peace of mind, and if the wrong person decides it, it costs you your life.

Every waking moment. The Black middle class has all been erased from existence. Every time we make progress, that progress is halted and reversed, and we are blamed for being too lazy to care about it.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Last Call For Meathead Matt's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz is desperately trying to change the subject from his almost certain upcoming federal indictment on child sexual abuse and sex trafficking charges for "dating" an underage girl, and the Sword of Damocles dangling above his head just lost a few hairs holding it up.

 

The former Florida tax official whose criminal case led to a sex trafficking investigation of Rep. Matt Gaetz has agreed to plead guilty to six of the charges against him and to cooperate with federal investigators, court filings show.

In a copy of the plea agreement submitted in federal court in Orlando on Friday, Joel Greenberg said he will plead guilty to charges of identity theft, stalking, wire fraud, conspiracy to bribe a public official and sex trafficking of a minor — a fraction of the 33 charges that prosecutors had already slapped him with.

The filing also said he agrees “to cooperate fully with the United States in the investigation and prosecution of other persons, and to testify, subject to prosecution for perjury or making a false statement, fully and truthfully before any federal court proceeding or federal grand jury in connection with the charges in this case.”

If he cooperates fully, the government will seek a reduced sentence. A judge will hold a hearing on the proposed deal on Monday.

It's uncertain what the agreement means for the investigation into Gaetz, who has not been charged with any crime and who's repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Federal investigators are looking into whether Gaetz and Greenberg used the internet to search for women they could pay for sex. They are also investigating whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a minor and paid for her to travel with him, The New York Times reported.

According to the court filing, Greenberg spent over $70,000 in 150 transactions between 2016 and 2018 to pay women for sex.

One of those women was under 18 “for part of the time” Greenberg paid her for sex acts “with him and others.”

 

The clock is almost up for Gaetz. If Greenberg turns states' evidence on him and tosses him under the bus, and then levitates the bus 40 feet into the air just to drop it on him a few more times like I suspect is going to happen over the next several weeks, then this is going to get ugly fast. Gaetz doesn't have Daddy Trump or Bill Barr to protect him anymore, either. If he's indicted, he will be jettisoned by the rest of the GOP as soon as they can safely memory hole their relationships with him.

 

And Gaetz may be far from the only GOP lawmaker that this case ensnares.  Just sayin'.

Vaccination Nation, Congress Edition

Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill are all vaccinated and proud of it. Even all but a handful of GOP Senators are too. But less than half of House Republicans are vaccinated, and that's a major problem.

Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have a 100% vaccination rate against Covid-19, a CNN survey of Capitol Hill found this week, significantly outpacing Republicans in the House and Senate and illustrating the partisan divide over the pandemic. 

For Republicans, at least 44.8% of House members are vaccinated and at least 92% of senators are, CNN found. 

In a follow-up to a March House-wide survey and interviews with members, CNN confirmed that 312 of the 431 members of the House -- just over 72% of the 431-member body -- have now received a Covid-19 vaccination. Of that, all 219 House Democrats have reported being vaccinated. Among the Republican conference, 95 of the 212 members -- 44.8% -- have said they are vaccinated. 

One hundred and twelve Republican offices did not respond to multiple CNN inquires. 

Although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 do not need to wear masks or practice social distancing indoors or outdoors except under special circumstances, the House mask requirement will remain in place until all members and floor staff are fully vaccinated. 

"No," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said when asked if the rule mandating masks unless a member is speaking on the House floor would be modified. She then asked, "Are they all vaccinated?"

 

Now guess which House Republican is the proudest and loudest about not being vaccinated.

 

Go on, guess. 

 

One House Republican, Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky, said he is not vaccinated.

"The Pfizer and Moderna trials showed no benefit from the vaccine for those previously infected, so I will not be taking the vaccine," Massie said in a statement to CNN.

Both clinical trial and real-life data finds the mRNA vaccines are more than 95% effective at preventing severe Covid-19 illness, hospitalizations and death.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, of course it's my own Congressmoron, Thomas Massie. What a spectacularly performative dumbass.

 

Three other Republicans -- Reps. Greg Steube and Kat Cammack of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia -- said they did not want to share the information.

"I'm not going to talk about it. I don't think anybody should have to share their personal, private medical information with anybody," Steube told CNN.

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania told CNN, "I have the antibodies" when asked if he had been vaccinated. But experts don't know how long antibodies last in a person who has recovered from Covid-19, and research suggests that coronavirus vaccines will provide better protection, especially when it comes to some of the worrying variants. One study found that people in South Africa who received the Pfizer vaccine after B.1.351 became the dominant circulating virus were still very strongly protected from infection, and that protection lasted for at least six months.

 

Even Insurrection Barbie is like "None of your beeswax!" But Rep. Massie?

Performative ignorance of the highest degree, and yet he'll easily be re-elected for as long as he wants.

Prince Of Darkness, Con't

So yes, the whole "Erik Prince brought in a British spy to train Project Veritas operatives to run Trump loyalty sting operations" thing was absolutely 100% true, and yes, they tried to infiltrate Democratic campaigns and unions as well. But their big targets were the FBI and the Trump White House itself.

A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.

The campaign shows the obsession that some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy “deep state” trying to blunt his agenda — and the lengths that some were willing to go to try to purge the government of those believed to be disloyal to the president.

Central to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.

The efforts to target American officials show how a campaign once focused on exposing outside organizations slowly morphed into an operation to ferret out Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the government’s ranks.

Whether any of Mr. Trump’s White House advisers had direct knowledge of the campaign is unclear, but one of the participants in the operation against Mr. McMaster, Barbara Ledeen, said she was brought on by someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar.”

 

McMaster was targeted after a dinner with Oracle founder Larry Page and his wife, who ratted the former National Security Adviser's opinion of Trump out to the White House directly through Don McGahn.

To recap, Trump hired Erik Prince to train James O'Keefe and his merry band of grifters to be seekrit ageunts™ and they tried to run honeypot ops on Trump own national security team and the FBI.

This is who they always were, folks.

StupidiNews!

• New CDC guidance states that fully vaccinated Americans no longer have to wear masks, even indoors, and can go about most activities safely.
• Nine people were shot in Rhode Island in a drive-by shootout, three in critical condition, as gunmen in a vehicle attacked a Providence home Thursday night.
• Israeli army forces fired artillery shells into Gaza Friday as Hamas rocket attacks continue, the UN Security Council is expected to meet on Sunday after the US objected to an earlier meeting.
• A Trump spokesman says he will resume "regular" political rallies next month, with venues still to be determined.
• Washington state Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell is taking issue with NASA's choice of SpaceX for its Artemis Program, Jeff Bezos-owned competitor Blue Origin was passed over.
  

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

If Joe Manchin's top secret plan for getting things passed in the Senate is suggesting reasonable things that Republican senators public take flaming dumps on, then I guess it's working like a charm.

 

It didn’t take long for a supposedly bipartisan compromise on voting rights legislation that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is floating to get dumped on by a key Republican.

At a Thursday Senate Judiciary Committee meeting to vote on one of President Biden’s key Justice Department nominees, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) didn’t call out Manchin by name. But he referenced a proposal Manchin has recently floated — first to a local news outlet, and then more explicitly in an interview Wednesday with ABC News — for addressing voting rights.

Manchin is currently the lone Senate Democrat not publicly supporting the For The People Act, Democrats’ sprawling democracy overhaul legislation that would beat back many of the restrictive state-level voting policies advancing across the county. The For the People Act — also known as S1 — stands no chance of becoming law for as long as Manchin and other centrist Democrats oppose blowing up the filibuster to ram it through.

Manchin says he would not support major elections legislation done on a purely partisan basis. Instead, Manchin has suggested that lawmakers focus on a restoring the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. The Supreme Court invalidated the formula that determined which states — based on their history of discriminating against minority votes — must get federal approval for changes to their election practices.

Manchin is now pitching a fix to the Voting Rights Act that would subject all 50 states to the so-called preclearance process. That goes farther than the VRA restoration legislation that has been previously introduced, which is moving separately from s1 so Democrats can create the kind of legislative record that will make the law more resistant to legal attack. Manchin nonetheless has described the approach as something to be done with bipartisan support.

On Thursday, Cornyn signaled that such an idea would not get much buy-in from the Republican Party.

He characterized it in suspicious terms. The idea of a 50-state preclearance system has only been outlined by Manchin in vague terms, which to Cornyn, meant that there is an “effort afoot” to do through the “back door” what S1 was trying to do through the “front door:” a supposed federal “takeover” of the U.S. election system.

 

Subjecting all 50 states to VRA pre-clearance would remove the bias that the Roberts Court cited in 2013 when they ripped that entire section of the act out. Mitch McConnell has been blocking a fix to the VRA ever since, and he knows that if federal elections were free from GOP interference at the state level, that the GOP would never win again.

 

If Manchin's fixes are being tossed out as non-starters, then when does Manchin finally say "screw it" and kill the filibuster?

 

Answer: who knows?

 

But our entire democracy depends on his whims, and I'm rapidly getting sick of it.