Last Call For Droning On About Food

Here in the Cincy area, Kroger is testing grocery delivery by drone starting this week and I can't wait for the wacky stories that come out of this.

Drone-flown deliveries of groceries will start Wednesday in an area within a mile of Kroger’s Centerville store, signaling a new era in flight and grocery shopping.

The Kroger Co. has been working with a Monroe company, Drone Express, to deliver groceries via drones, and actual flights responding to customer orders will start happening this week.

Erin Rolfes, a spokeswoman for Kroger, on Monday said drone flights have been tested for several days, and deliveries will be ready to go on Wednesday.

For the first pilot program, no charge will be levied for these flights, Rolfes said. But that’s temporary. At some point, there will be charges, but Rolfes did not have a date for that.

Drone orders can be made through a web site, Kroger.com/dronedelivery. Deliveries will be scheduled first come, first served.

“While of course we’re all very excited about the drone piece, I think it’s one part of a larger narrative of how Kroger is really reacting to what customers are asking for and giving them that product anytime that they want, anywhere that they are,” Rolfes said. 

The drone can carry only about five pounds worth of items. Pilots will oversee the drones as they fly to customer’s homes in the prescribed area around the Marketplace store at 1095 S. Main St.

“Right now, per FAA guidance, we’re only flying the drone to deliver within one mile of the store,” Rolfes said.

Kroger and Drone Express, part of New Jersey-based TELEGRID Technologies Inc., last month first announced the pilot program to offer grocery delivery via autonomous drones.

“Everything’s going well,” said Beth Flippo, principal engineer for the Drone Express delivery service. “Wednesday we are good to go.”

The company has about 10 pilots working in Monroe and Centerville at the moment, Flippo said. The pilots work in shifts at the Centerville store, covering nights and weekends, she said.

The problem of course is economies of scale here. Not every Kroger is going to be able to afford 10 drone pilots and the requisite support staff required for a one-mile delivery radius. I would only expect this to be in the nicest neighborhoods with the kind of area that can support the delivery fees, which are going to be significant when rolled out, and even then, you're going to see NIMBY folks go berserk trying to keep drones out of their neighborhood the first time a pilot drops 4 pounds of groceries on someone's car, or a drone gets vandalized, smashed, or stolen while on the ground.

No, this technology is going to get shelved until they can replace the pilots with computers at best, and at worst it'll go like the way driverless vehicles are going now: nowhere because of lawsuits, regulatory rage at Big Tech, and because the technology itself is still decades away, and the regulatory framework even further.

If we have any readers in Centerville, let me know how this is going.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The Louisiana State Police are under an internal investigation into the treatment of Black suspects after Ronald Greene was stunned and beaten to death by four white cops two years ago, but as we all know, internal affairs investigations never ever find cops guilty of hurting Black folk, because that's the job description.

The same Louisiana State Police unit whose troopers stunned, punched and dragged Ronald Greene on video during a deadly 2019 arrest is now under internal investigation by a secret panel over whether its officers are systematically targeting Black motorists for abuse.

The panel, whose existence was confirmed to The Associated Press by four people familiar with it, was set up in response to Greene’s death as well as three other violent stops of Black men: one who was punched, stunned and hoisted to his feet by his hair braids in a body-camera video obtained by the AP, another who was beaten after he was handcuffed, and yet another who was slammed 18 times with a flashlight.

“Every time I told him to stop he’d hit me again,” said Aaron Bowman, whose flashlight pummeling left him with three broken ribs, a broken jaw, a broken wrist and a gash to his head that required six staples to close. “I don’t want to see this happen to nobody — not to my worst enemy.”

The panel began working a few weeks ago to review thousands of body-camera videos over the past two years involving as many as a dozen white troopers, at least four of whom were involved in Greene’s arrest.

The review is focused on Louisiana State Police Troop F, a 66-officer unit that patrols a sprawling territory in the northeastern part of the state and has become notorious in recent years for alleged acts of brutality that have resulted in felony charges against some of its troopers.

“You’d be naïve to think it’s limited to two or three instances. That’s why you’re seeing this audit, which is a substantial undertaking by any agency,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a New Orleans-based watchdog group. “They’ve got to identify these people and remove them from the organization.”

Other than the federal civil rights investigation into Greene’s death, the state police panel is the only known inquiry into possible systemic abuse and racism by its troopers.

Its seven members, drawn from officials from across the State Police, are not only scouring the videos for signs of excessive force, the people told the AP, but also examining whether troopers showed racist tendencies in their traffic stops and pursuits, and whether they mislabeled body-camera videos, turned off their cameras or used other means to hide evidence from internal investigators.

It’s not clear if the panel has a deadline or if it plans to expand the inquiry to the eight other troops in the 1,200-officer state police.

The State Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

The problem with the logic that there have to be incidents of racial injustice and police brutality that Troop F is hiding is that it means all other troops are doing it too, as well as all other police departments, state and local, across the US. The only issue is the degree of guilt and the severity of the abuse.

It is systemic. This is what we mean when we say systemic racism is an unavoidable, everyday fact of being Black in America. You only live because a cop hasn't killed you yet.

But Black Lives Still Matter.

The Law Of The Lone Star

Texas Attorney General Dan Patrick is facing possible disbarment as the state's Bar Association is investigating whether Paxton's Supreme Court lawsuit to block Joe Biden's presidency was unethical.

The Texas bar association is investigating whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s failed efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election based on bogus claims of fraud amounted to professional misconduct.

The State Bar of Texas initially declined to take up a Democratic Party activist’s complaint that Paxton’s petitioning of the U.S. Supreme Court to block Joe Biden’s victory was frivolous and unethical. But a tribunal that oversees grievances against lawyers overturned that decision late last month and ordered the bar to look into the accusations against the Republican official.

The investigation is yet another liability for the embattled attorney general, who is facing a years-old criminal case, a separate, newer FBI investigation, and a Republican primary opponent who is seeking to make electoral hay of the various controversies. It also makes Paxton one of the highest profile lawyers to face professional blowback over their roles in Donald Trump’s effort to delegitimize his defeat.

A spokesman for the attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Paxton’s defense lawyer, Philip Hilder, declined to comment.

Kevin Moran, the 71-year-old president of the Galveston Island Democrats, shared his complaint with The Associated Press along with letters from the State Bar of Texas and the Board of Disciplinary Appeals that confirm the investigation. He said Paxton’s efforts to dismiss other states’ election results was a wasteful embarrassment for which the attorney general should lose his law license.

“He wanted to disenfranchise the voters in four other states,” said Moran. “It’s just crazy.”

Texas’ top appeals lawyer, who would usually argue the state’s cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, notably did not join Paxton in bringing the election suit. The high court threw it out.

Paxton has less than a month to reply to Moran’s claim that the lawsuit to overturn the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was misleading and brought in bad faith, according to a June 3 letter from the bar. All four of the battleground states voted for Biden in November.

From there, bar staff will take up the case in a proceeding that resembles the grand jury stage of a criminal investigation. Bar investigators are empowered to question witnesses, hold hearings and issue subpoenas to determine whether a lawyer likely committed misconduct. That finding then launches a disciplinary process that could ultimately result in disbarment, suspension or a lesser punishments. A lawyer also could be found to have done nothing wrong.

The bar dismisses thousands of grievances each year and the Board of Disciplinary Appeals, 12 independent lawyers appointed by the Texas Supreme Court, overwhelmingly uphold those decisions. Reversals like that of Moran’s complaint happened less than 7% of the time last year, according to the bar’s annual report.

Claire Reynolds, a spokeswoman and lawyer for the bar, said state law prohibits the agency from commenting on complaints unless they result is public sanctions or a court action.

The bar’s investigation is confidential and likely to take months. But it draws renewed attention to Paxton’s divisive defense of Trump as he and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush vie for the former president’s endorsement in the Republican primary to run for attorney general in 2022.

 

While Jeb!'s son is definitely gunning for the job his uncle had in Texas and in Washington and needs Paxton out of the way, I don't see how he's going to be able to take advantage of this bar investigation in any way. Anything short of complete agreement with whatever Paxton's position is, being martyred in Trump's "noble" defense, is the end of Potted Plant's career and he knows it. 

Granted, an AG being disbarred from practicing law in the state where he resides kind of makes it impossible to do the job, but there's nothing he can do other than stay out of the way of this hurtling trainwreck.

Last Call For Removing The Keystone

The Keystone XL pipeline project is officially dead and buried, sufficiently killed by a combination of COVID-19 crushing crude oil demand, green energy activism, and the Biden administration yanking the construction permits back in January.

 

The company behind the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline said Wednesday it's officially terminating the project. TC Energy already had suspended construction in January when President Biden revoked a key cross-border presidential permit. The announcement ends a more than decade-long battle that came to signify the debate over whether fossil fuels should be left in the ground to address climate change.

Environmentalists opposed the pipeline in part because of the oil it would carry— oil sands crude from Alberta. It requires more processing than most oil, so producing it emits more greenhouse gases.

TC Energy had begun construction on the pipeline last year and said about 300 miles of the $8 billion project had been built. It would have carried oil from landlocked Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL supporters, including most of the oil industry, said the pipeline construction would have created much-needed construction jobs.

"It's unfortunate that political obstructionism led to the termination of the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a blow to U.S. energy security and a blow to the thousands of good-paying union jobs this project would have supported," said Robin Rorick, American Petroleum Institute vice president of midstream and industry operations.

The oil industry and its allies have claimed that Keystone XL would have created hundreds or even thousands of jobs. Most of those positions would have been temporary construction jobs. The State Department estimated full-time permanent jobs to be closer to 50.

Climate activists cheered the decision.

"For 13 years, an international movement of frontline communities in the U.S. and Canada, Indigenous leaders, and environmentalists fought back against this terrible proposed project at every turn," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. "Today, we can say yet again, that our efforts were a resounding success."

Keystone XL would have passed through Nebraska, and for years, a coalition of Indigenous tribes, ranchers and local environmentalists demonstrated, lobbied and sued to halt the pipeline's construction. Its proposed route in Nebraska cut through the Ogallala Aquifer, the groundwater source for millions of Plains states residents.

The pipeline's opponents in Nebraska feared that any leak from Keystone XL would damage the critical aquifer, and they welcomed the end of the project. "On behalf of our Ponca Nation we welcome this long overdue news and thank all who worked so tirelessly to educate and fight to prevent this from coming to fruition. It's a great day for Mother Earth," Larry Wright Jr., chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, said in a statement.

 

 

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Nearly a third of Republicans think Trump and his regime will be "reinstated" before the end of the year, and I remind you, that's tens of millions of Americans who are going to get very angry, if not violent, when that doesn't happen.

Those close to Donald Trump have sought to publicly downplay a report that the former president thinks he will be reinstated in the Oval Office later this year, but a sizable minority of Republican voters believe it will happen anyway.

According to a new Morning Consult/Politico survey, 29 percent of Republican voters said it is at least somewhat likely that Trump will be restored as president in 2021 – including 17 percent who said it is “very likely.”

The June 4-7 poll was conducted among 1,990 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points. For the first time in a Morning Consult/Politico poll, the responses were weighted on 2020 presidential vote in addition to the typical weighting variables of age, gender, race and ethnicity, educational attainment and region.

The survey was conducted after New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman reported that the former president had told a number of people in his orbit that he expects to be reinstated by August. The paper’s chief Trump chronicler alluded to Trump’s regular statements on such developments as Arizona’s ongoing election review as evidence of the former president’s preoccupation with the notion that President Joe Biden’s certified victory in the 2020 presidential election could be overturned.

There is no existing constitutional mechanism to accomplish such a goal, as Corey Lewandowsi, a top Trump adviser, acknowledged on Fox News over the weekend, a fact that was not lost on the nearly 3 in 4 voters – including 84 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans – who said it is unlikely that Trump will return to the White House this year.

While the idea of Trump’s reinstatement is far-fetched at best, the electoral and political impact of Trump’s repeated attacks on the 2020 outcome is very real, polling data suggests.

Recent Morning Consult polling has shown Democrats and Biden voters with an early enthusiasm advantage over Republicans and voters who backed Trump in 2020 ahead of the midterm elections. Republican leaders have also pressed Trump to drop his public denial of Biden’s victory and instead focus on attacking Biden and his agenda, but he instead doubled down on his false claims during remarks at the North Carolina Republican Party convention over the weekend.

Trump’s loss – and his behavior following it – did a number on Republican confidence in American elections, and it’s already been blamed by GOP strategists for a number of electoral problems, including the GOP’s loss in two Georgia special elections for Senate in January and the poor showing in a special election for House in New Mexico earlier this month, as both parties look toward a midterm cycle where there is no room for error.

From October to November, the share of Republican adults who said they had “a lot” or “some” confidence in the electoral system fell 22 percentage points, to 45 percent. In the latest May 28-May 30 survey, just 2 in 5 Republicans said they have confidence in American elections, compared with 62 percent of Democrats.

Amid Republicans’ Trump-fueled erosion of faith in the integrity of U.S. elections and Democrats’ fear and anger following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and a spate of state-level voting legislation, the vast majority of Americans said that they felt the world’s oldest continuous democracy is at risk.

With another 10% of Republicans saying they don't know whether or not Trump will be "reinstated" we're talking about the number of  Republicans who believe it can happen is about the same as the number of Republicans who no longer believe in the electoral system.

The next putsch/coup/junta attempt will be a lot bloodier, folks.

Closing Out The Mistakes Of The Past

When President Obama tried to close Guantanamo, Republicans (and several Democrats) rose up in Congress to make it impossible to do. President Biden says he won't make the same mistakes as we come up on the 20th anniversary of the Forever War.

President Joe Biden has quietly begun efforts to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, using an under-the-radar approach to minimize political blowback and to try to make at least some progress in resolving a long-standing legal and human rights morass before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

After initial plans for a more aggressive push to close the facility — including rebuffed attempts to recruit a special envoy to oversee the strategy — the White House changed course, sources said. The administration has opted to wait before it reaches out to Congress, which has thwarted previous efforts to close the camp, because of fears that political outcry might interfere with the rest of Biden's agenda.

"They don't want it to become a dominant issue that blows up," a former senior administration official involved in the discussions said of Biden officials. "They don't want it to become a lightning rod. They want it to be methodical, orderly."

The administration hopes to transfer a handful of the remaining terrorism suspects to foreign countries, the people familiar with the discussions said, and then persuade Congress to permit the transfer of the rest — including 9/11 suspects — to detention on the U.S. mainland. Biden hopes to close the facility by the end of his first term, the people familiar with the discussions said.

But even though just 40 people are left at Gitmo, the Biden administration faces many of the same obstacles that doomed President Barack Obama's much more public effort to close it a dozen years ago.

President George W. Bush opened the detention facility in 2002. At its peak, it held nearly 800 detainees, including 9/11 suspects and combatants from the battlefield in Afghanistan. By the time Obama took office in 2009, fewer than 300 detainees were in the camp.

During his campaign for president, Obama had pledged to shutter the prison within a year of taking office. Two days after he was inaugurated, he issued an executive order to close Gitmo by the end of the year, and he restated the goal in media interviews.

Congress, however, resisted the transfer of detainees to the U.S. The House and the Senate rejected funding for the move and also blocked the transfers, with many Democrats voting against the Obama administration's plans.

By the end of his second term, Obama had reduced Guantánamo's population from 245 to 41 detainees, transferring many to foreign countries, but the prison remained in use.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order keeping it open. One detainee was transferred to a foreign country during his tenure.

 

I personally think Trump will do everything he can to sabotage this and rally his cult against the closing, because if Trump couldn't get credit for it, nobody will. 

Give it a week, and the GOP will be rallied. Give it a month, and the plan will be dead.

 

StupidiNews!

• Former Virginia Dem Gov. Terry McAuliffe has won the state's gubernatorial primary, Virginia governors are allowed two terms but not consecutively.
• The US Senate has confirmed the first federal judge under President Biden, Julien Neals, on a 66 - 33 vote.
• Peruvian socialist Pedro Castillo is holding a narrow lead over Keiko Fujimori in the country's presidential elections, but Fujimori is challenging the margin in the nation's election court.
• President Biden's talks with Senate Republicans over a major infrastructure bill ha reportedly broken down, leaving Democrats turning to budget reconciliation to pass the legislation.
• Ohio GOP Attorney General Dave Yost is suing Google to force the company to be treated as a common carrier public utility and to have all of its goods and services regulated by the state.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Everybody sing along with the chorus: Senate Republicans killed the January 6th committee because it would reveal that Republicans were plotting a coup. The thing is, we need to remember that while it was clearly the most obvious sign of a Republican coup on the government, the US Capitol wasn't the only building attacked and that several state legislatures were also besieged in the final days of Trump's reign. In Oregon, Republican State Rep. Mike Nearman just got caught red-handed planning out his part in coup to attack Democrats and now faces expulsion and almost certainly prison.

A Republican state lawmaker faces being expelled from office after a video emerged apparently showing him choreographing how he would let far-right protesters into the closed Oregon Capitol days before he did so in December.

The crowd entered the building during an emergency legislative session, and some sprayed chemical irritants at police.

On Monday, Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek introduced a resolution that would have the Democrat-controlled House expel Rep. Mike Nearman if two-thirds of its members vote in favor. She appointed a committee to consider the matter.

GOP members of the House also wrote a letter to Nearman on Monday, saying he should step down.

“Today, we strongly recommend that you resign from the Oregon State House of Representatives,” all 22 House Republicans said in the joint letter. “Given the newest evidence that has come to light ... it is our beliefs as friends and colleagues that it is in the best interest of your caucus, your family, yourself, and the state of Oregon for you to step down from your office.”

The lawmakers were referring to video that emerged late Friday in local news reports that appeared to show Nearman coaching constituents on how to text him so they could get into the Capitol.

The committee appointed by Kotek, a Democrat, will convene later this week. It is composed of three Democrats and three Republicans.

Nearman himself said Monday he believes there are enough votes to expel him, which he said would make him the first House member to be expelled by its members in Oregon history. He joked in a call to the Lars Larson Show, a conservative talk radio program, that this would eventually make him the subject of a question on TV’s “Jeopardy!”

He did not say whether he would resign.

“I’ll put myself in God’s hands and see how that works out for me,” Nearman said.

 

Needless to say, if there was a bipartisan committee that looked into January 6th, they'd find Republicans who absolutely enabled, abetted, and assisted the mob to enter the Capitol with the intention of overthrowing the election. We'd have to do things like "arrest seditionist GOP lawmakers in Congress" and that would almost certainly lead to exciting new paradigms in political violence across the country. 

We can't have full accountability of course. That would be unacceptable. But the evidence is piling up that Republican lawmakers and Trump regime officials had a direct hand in the terrorist attack events on January 6th.

The U.S. Capitol Police had specific intelligence that supporters of President Donald Trump planned to mount an armed invasion of the Capitol at least two weeks before the Jan. 6 riot, according to new findings in a bipartisan Senate investigation, but a series of omissions and miscommunications kept that information from reaching front-line officers targeted by the violence.

A joint report, from the Senate Rules and Administration and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees, outlines the most detailed public timeline to date of the communications and intelligence failures that led the Capitol Police and partner agencies to prepare for the “Stop the Steal” protest as though it were a routine Trump rally, instead of the organized assault that was planned in the open online.

Released Tuesday, the report shows how an intelligence arm of the Capitol Police disseminated security assessments labeling the threat of violence “remote” to “improbable,” even as authorities collected evidence showing that pro-Trump activists intended to bring weapons to the demonstration and “storm the Capitol.”

“There were significant, widespread and unacceptable breakdowns in the intelligence gathering. . . . The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the homeland security panel, told reporters. “The attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight.”

The bipartisan report is the latest to examine the security failures that contributed to the mayhem as Congress tallied electoral college results certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Its release comes just days after the Senate rejected legislation to create an independent investigative commission that passed the House with strong bipartisan support, and as lawmakers continue to wrestle with how to pay for security improvements to the Capitol campus.

The report’s recommendations, which call for better planning, training and intelligence gathering, largely mirror those of other investigators who have examined the topic, and its contents steer clear of offering any assessment or conclusion about Trump’s responsibility for the riot.

Still, the report provides a vivid picture of how poor communication and unheeded warnings left officers underequipped to face violent threats about which they had not been made aware, leaving the Capitol vulnerable to an attack that otherwise might have been preventable.

According to the report, Capitol Police intelligence officers knew as early as Dec. 21 that protesters planned to “bring guns” and other weapons to the Jan. 6 demonstration and turn them on any law enforcement officers who blocked their entry into the Capitol. They knew that would-be rioters were sharing maps of the Capitol campus online and discussing the building’s best entry points — and how to seal them off to trap lawmakers inside. But that information was shared only with command officers.

A separate security assessment dated Dec. 23 made no mention of those findings. Neither did a follow-up Dec. 30.

The only hints about what the Capitol Police’s Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division knew appeared at the end of a 15-page report released on Jan. 3, which stated that “there is the possibility that the protesters may be inclined to become violent,” and that their desperation “may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike.” But even that warning was fleeting: In the days that followed, in the Capitol Police’s daily intelligence assessments, such notes about violence were nowhere to be found.

In a statement Tuesday responding to the committees’ findings, the Capitol Police acknowledged an imperative to improve how it collects and shares intelligence internally and with its partners, saying “significant changes” have been implemented since the riot. But the agency insisted that, “At no point prior to the 6th did it receive actionable intelligence about a large-scale attack.”

“Before January 6, the Capitol Police leadership knew Congress and the Capitol grounds were to be the focus of a large demonstration attracting various groups, including some encouraging violence,” the statement says. “Based on this information, the Department enhanced its security posture and tried to get support from the National Guard. What the intelligence didn’t reveal, as Acting Chief [Yogananda] Pittman has noted, was the large-scale demonstration would become a large-scale attack on the Capitol Building as there was no specific, credible intelligence about such an attack. The USCP consumes intelligence from every federal agency. At no point prior to the 6th did it receive actionable intelligence about a large-scale attack.

“ … The known intelligence simply didn’t support that conclusion.”

 

The Trump regime plotted a coup. It almost happened.  We barely got through it, any number of things could have led to dozens of dead Democratic lawmakers and a true Trump dictatorship. If we don't start putting the people behind this plot in prison, they will absolutely try again.

And I fear they will eventually succeed.

An Air Force sergeant accused of killing law enforcement officers last year in California was part of an extremist cell plotting "war" against police, according to newly revealed court filings.

Alleged shooter Steven Carrillo was part of the "Grizzly Scouts" militia associated with the "Boogaloo" movement that conducted firearms training and conducted surveillance on protests as part of their preparations for an attack on police while posing as Antifa, or anti-fascist, demonstrators, reported the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

"It's the tactically sound option," Robert Jesus Blancas told other militia members, according to court filings. "[Police and Antifa] f*cking each other up only helps us."

A federal grand jury indicted the 33-year-old Blancas along with accused "Grizzly Scout" militants 29-year-old Jessie Alexander Rush, 23-year-old Simon Sage Ybarra, and 21-year-old Kenny Matthew Miksch.

The filings confirm Carillo, who is accused of killing an officer from Oakland and another from Santa Cruz, was a member of the group, which hoped then-president Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act in response to protests over George Floyd's killing by a Minneapolis police officer."[T]hat ^^^ will be our sign," Rush allegedly texted to other militia members. "That effectively means the federal gov has declared war on things they're afraid of."

The militants described law enforcement officers as "enemy forces" and discussed taking some prisoner.

"POWs will be searched for intel and gear, interrogated, stripped naked, blindfolded, driven away and released into the wilderness blindfolded with hands bound," one militant wrote to the others.

 

They want a war. They may very well get it.

Taking Pride In America

The latest Gallup poll on same-sex marriage finds the highest support ever for it, a whopping 70% of Americans now approve of it, thirty points higher than just a dozen years ago.

U.S. support for legal same-sex marriage continues to trend upward, now at 70% -- a new high in Gallup's trend since 1996. This latest figure marks an increase of 10 percentage points since 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states must recognize same-sex marriages.

These data are from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 3-18.

Today's 70% support for same-sex marriage marks a new milestone in a trend that has pointed upward for a quarter of a century. A small minority of Americans (27%) supported legal recognition of gay and lesbian marriages in 1996, when Gallup first asked the question. But support rose steadily over time, eventually reaching the majority level for the first time in 2011.

By the time of the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, support for gay marriage had reached 60%. Since then, the issue has been less prominent in U.S. politics, and public support for same-sex marriage has continued to increase.

Gallup has recorded other shifts in Americans' ideas on marriage over time, historically, including expanded support for interracial marriage, which had 87% approval as of Gallup's 2013 update.

Republicans, who have consistently been the party group least in favor of same-sex marriage, show majority support in 2021 for the first time (55%). The latest increase in support among all Americans is driven largely by changes in Republicans' views.

Democrats have consistently been among the biggest supporters of legal same-sex marriage. The current 83% among Democrats is on par with the level of support Gallup has recorded over the past few years. This could suggest that support for gay marriage has reached a ceiling for this group, at least for now. Meanwhile, support among political independents, now at 73%, is slightly higher than the 68% to 71% range recorded from 2017 to 2020.

 

That's the good news. Even Republicans approve of it. Of course, the bad news is Republicans are still doing everything they can to attack trans folks and kids in particular, same-sex couples adopting children, and actually mentioning that same-sex marriage exists in TV and movies.

And why are Republicans coming around on same-sex marriage? The same reason Republicans "like" affirmative action: the main beneficiaries of both policies have been white people, from both a political and economic standpoint. It serves the GOP on both of those fronts to attack trans folks, too. Republicans can tolerate the L and G and even the B, as long as everyone agrees that the T need to go away.

Republicans haven't gotten "better" on equality. They just moved the goalposts to attack the most vulnerable and split the coalition. It's what they do.

StupidiNews!

• Boston Mayor Kim Janey has fired Police Commissioner Dennis White over domestic violence accusations by White's ex-wife stemming from 1999.
• Donald Trump says the solution to stopping ransomware cyberattacks on American businesses and infrastructure is to "go back to paper"
• Senate Republicans say they will filibuster any attempt to ratify Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's G7 corporate global tax deal, calling it "anti-competitive and anti-US"
• President Biden is inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to Washington ahead of a planned US-Russia summit in Geneva next week.
• Apple has announced iOS 15 will be going into beta this week and into wide release in the fall, as well as a premium iCloud+ tier with additional data protection features.
  

Last Call For (Un)Vaccination Nation, Con't

Texas naturally joins Florida by banning businesses requiring employees to have or even to ask about COVID vaccination status, making it a criminal act punishable by huge fines.

 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas is now open 100% — without any restrictions or limitations or requirements on businesses.

In a Monday tweet, Abbott — who has fiercely pushed for opening businesses during the pandemic — said he would sign legislation prohibiting businesses in the state from requiring COVID-19 vaccine “passports” or any other information.

Abbott said back in April that he wouldn’t allow government-mandated proof of vaccination cards in order to travel.

“Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives,” he said in a video posted online. “We will continue to vaccinate more Texans and protect public health and we will do so without treading on Texans’ personal freedoms.” 

 

Expect more red states to make this happen. The question is how businesses respond to this, and the bigger question is how the courts respond.

 

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent argues that Sen. Joe Manchin's position on Republican intractability on legislation is politically, morally, and logically untenable.

 

By now you’ve heard that Sen. Joe Manchin III has essentially declared he has consigned us to a future of minority rule. In a new piece, the West Virginia Democrat says he’ll vote against his party’s voting rights legislation and will never, ever vote to “weaken” the filibuster.

This appears to lock Manchin into a position that guarantees efforts to protect democracy will fail. But it also locks Manchin into a position that will soon grow untenable for him, at least if his own words have any meaning.

That’s because at the heart of Manchin’s stance is a question he cannot answer: What happens when Republicans fail to support any voting rights legislation, including legislation Manchin himself wants?

In his piece for the Charleston Gazette-Mail and on the Sunday shows, Manchin stated three essential propositions:

• Acting in defense of voting rights is urgently necessary to defend our freedom
  
• Yet protecting voting rights must only be done on a bipartisan basis, or it cannot happen at all
• Therefore, Democrats must continue seeking Republican support, which will ultimately materialize, precisely because the urgency of acting is so great

If all those are true, what happens when that Republican support does not materialize? Should Democrats not act alone at that point? If so, by Manchin’s own lights, our freedom will be in jeopardy, yet they must continue constraining themselves from acting to defend it.

Manchin says in his piece that he supports the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore federal preclearance requirements for changes in voting rules gutted by the Supreme Court.

Manchin declares this acceptable, because it has “bipartisan support,” as it’s backed by one Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. But he will vote against the sweeping voting rights protections that passed the House, because no Republicans support it:

I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.

If rewriting voting rules on a “partisan” basis will destroy our democratic bonds, we already live in that world. GOP state legislatures are passing such changes largely on party lines across the country, including voter suppression, efforts to take control of election machinery to potentially overturn outcomes, and preparations for extreme gerrymanders.

Manchin does not explain why Democrats acting on partisan lines to blunt those changes — as the For the People Act would — will destroy our democracy in a way that allowing those Republican changes to proceed on similarly partisan lines would not.

What’s remarkable, however, is that Manchin holds this position even as he agrees those GOP changes threaten our freedom. Asked by CBS’s John Dickerson why GOP senators would support even the John Lewis measure, given that it would make it harder for GOP legislatures to pass those measures, Manchin said:

The fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections. If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.

Because of what’s at stake, he added, Republicans will “understand we must come together on a voting rights bill in a bipartisan way.”

And when 10 Republicans don’t do this? By Manchin’s own declaration, the “freedom of our elections” is on the line, and failing to defend them — God help us — will be a calamity.

At that point, how does Manchin continue arguing that Democrats must do nothing, on the grounds that voting rules changes cannot be partisan, when this will allow partisan Republican rules changes to proceed undisturbed in a way that Manchin himself declares a threat to freedom?

 

Well, at that point Manchin is either revealed as a fraud or villain. The thing is Manchin has made multiple previous statements on bipartisanship, and every time he revises the bar for what qualifies downward towards to Republican side.

Logically and morally it's already untenable, but it remains politically feasible because of all the power Manchin has leveraged being the 50th Dem senator. He plays this game as well as Susan Collins has on the GOP side. Kyrsten Sinema tries, but she's inexperienced at it. Manchin though is a master of maverick kabuki theater.

As long as it remains politically tenable for him, nothing changes. That's the key. What will make it so? I'm not sure. Short of throwing Manchin out of the party or forcing his retirement, which would immediately allow GOP Gov. Jim Justice to appoint a Republican and either way give the Senate back to Mitch McConnell, nobody on the Dem side can really call his bluff.

Dems need another senator or two. Unfortunately, unless Manchin changes his mind now, that will be far too late.

Election Projection, Con't

CNN's Harry Enten posits that if Joe Biden can remain broadly popular like he is now, that the Democrats have a decent shot at keeping both the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms.

Democrats have to defy history to hold onto the House in the 2022 midterms. As I've noted before, the president's party almost always loses House seats in the midterms. History, though, is a guide, not a fortune teller. 

This week's special election in New Mexico's 1st congressional district is part of a larger trend that shows us that if President Joe Biden remains as popular as he is now, Democrats have a fighting chance to maintain House control. 

Democrat Melanie Stansbury beat Republican Mark Moores by 26 points in the special election to replace Deb Haaland, who represented the district until she joined the Biden administration as interior secretary earlier this year. She did so in a district that Biden won by 23 points in 2020, Haaland took it by 16 points that same year and Hillary Clinton won by 17 points in 2016. In other words, Stansbury didn't just match but slightly exceeded the baseline Democratic performance in the district. 

Of course, this was just one special election. But there have been a slew of special elections, mostly on the state legislative level since Biden became president, that seem to indicate something similar. Look at these specials using the past two presidential elections (giving more weight to 2020) as a baseline. 

Democrats seem to be doing 2 points to 5 points better than you'd expect in a neutral political environment, depending on whether you look at all special elections involving at least one Democrat and Republican or those taking place with only one Democrat and one Republican. 

This 2 to 5 point Democratic advantage matches pretty much what we saw in the national congressional generic ballot. It is also pretty much identical to the results we witnessed in last year's election. Biden won by 4.5 points nationally, and Democrats were victorious in the national House vote by about 3 points. 

The common thread through these special elections is that Biden is popular. His approval rating has been north of 50% throughout his entire presidency. When we limit ourselves to only polling that asked voters (i.e. not all adults), Biden's approval rating is still above 50%. 

Presidential approval ratings aren't all that matter during midterm elections -- but they do matter. There have been six presidents who have lost House majorities during a midterm in the polling era. All but Dwight Eisenhower (a war hero who always seemed to do worse politically than his approval rating indicated) had an approval rating below 50%.

 

In other words,  Biden being Teflon is what the Dems need in this polarized era. Worked for Reagan after all.

 

I think the Dems can pull it off, but either way, it's going to be generally as close a margin in the House as it is now. Where the Dems might actually pick up seats is in the Senate.  We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• Britain's Prince Harry and wife Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have announced the birth of their second child, daughter Lilibet Diana, on Sunday. 
• Wildfires in Arizona have already scorched nearly 65,000 acres as residents in the town of Superior were evacuated Sunday out of the path of the oncoming blaze.
• More than 30 are reported dead as two trains carrying passengers collided in southern Pakistan early Monday, with scores of injured.
• Vice President Kamala Harris has reached Guatemala for a scheduled regional meeting of American states on immigration after her plane was forced to turn back and land due to a technical issue.
• The US Air Force wants to use advances in commercial spaceflight rocket technology to deliver military cargo from point to point anywhere on earth using rockets.

Last Call For Israeli A Problem, Con't

As the clock runs out on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's top security official is warning of domestic terrorist attacks against Israeli lawmakers, in what would almost certainly be the Israeli version of our January 6th terrorist attacks.

 

The head of Israel's internal security service said that "extremely violent and inciting discourse" targeting the lawmakers who are seeking to end Benjamin Netanyahu's 12-year tenure as prime minister could take a potentially lethal form — a grim echo of the warnings ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Shin Bet chief Nadav Argeman said Saturday that the spike in vitriol targeting Netanyahu’s opponents online and in public demonstrations “may be interpreted by certain groups or individuals as one that allows for violent and illegal activities that may even, God forbid, become lethal.”

He called on public officials to rein in the groups that have vowed to do “anything possible” to prevent the swearing in of a new power-sharing government that has been spearheaded by centrist politician Yair Lapid.

Netanyahu has said he condemns any incitement and violence, but he said at a meeting with his Likud party on Sunday that “incitement against us is also raging.” He called on lawmakers to vote against the formation of the “fraudulent” alternative government.

“Mr. Netanyahu, don’t leave scorched earth behind you,” Naftali Bennett, the right-wing religious nationalist politician who is poised to unseat him, said Sunday. “We, the entire nation, want to remember the good that you did in your service for the country.”

The new government, in which Bennett is to serve as prime minister for two years before handing the job off to Lapid, is expected to come to a vote in the Knesset this week. It’s composed of eight ideologically divergent political parties, including leftists, centrists, former right-wing Netanyahu allies, and, for the first time in Israel’s history, Arab-Islamists.

“With his brother-in-arms Trump out-of-power, consumed by incoherent ranting and mumbling in Mar-a-Lago about how the election was stolen from him by Democrats and the media, Netanyahu has one last page to copy from Trump’s playbook: creating his own ‘January 6,’” Alon Pinkas wrote in the left-leaning daily Haaretz. “As a result of incitement and disinformation, judges, prosecutors and now also the leaders of the opposition are receiving extra protection after Netanyahu’s cultlike supporters threatened their lives.”

After the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol left five dead and more than 140 people injured, Netanyahu said he would leave office if voted out of power. He called the storming of the Capitol by thousands of pro-Trump supporters “disgraceful” and “the stark opposite of the values that Americans and Israelis uphold.” In the following days, Netanyahu removed a picture of him with Donald Trump from his Twitter banner. He continued to boast of policy achievements such as the relocation of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem that took place during the Trump presidency.

But since Lapid’s “change coalition” announced last week they were able to achieve a parliamentary majority, Netanyahu has launched a fierce, multi-fronted campaign to keep the it from assuming power. He has uploaded social media posts including old videos of Bennett and his partners pledging to never allow Lapid to become prime minister and called on right-wing lawmakers “to oppose this dangerous, left-wing government.”

 

Needless to say, things could quite possibly go as bad as things did here in the US on January 6th. The real problem is that there's entirely reason to believe that things could go much, much worse. I have a bad feeling about all this, so keep a weather eye on things in Tel Aviv.