Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Former Guy™ really cannot stop himself from saying the quiet part out loud, only now there's no White House staff to hold him back or to parse his criminal admissions as bravado as his disastrous tour continues across the country, this time in Florida.

Former president Donald Trump lashed out at Manhattan prosecutors Saturday night for indicting his organization and its chief financial officer for tax fraud, calling it “prosecutorial misconduct” in his most extensive comments on the charges since they were unsealed Thursday.

As Trump criticized the investigation, he appeared to acknowledge the tax schemes while questioning whether the alleged violations were in fact crimes.

“They go after good, hard-working people for not paying taxes on a company car,” he said at a rally in Sarasota, Fla. “You didn't pay tax on the car or a company apartment. You used an apartment because you need an apartment because you have to travel too far where your house is. You didn't pay tax. Or education for your grandchildren. I don't even know. Do you have to? Does anybody know the answer to that stuff?”

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged the Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg with orchestrating a 15-year scheme to avoid taxes by providing benefits hidden from the federal government. Weisselberg, they said, evaded taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits, which included the Trump Organization paying his rent, leasing him cars and other gifts. The Trump Organization and Weisselberg both pleaded not guilty this week, and Trump was not charged in the case.

But Trump excoriated the prosecutors for what he argued was a politically motivated investigation and one that came at the expense of focusing on violent crimes.

“For murder and for selling massive amounts of the worst drugs in the world that kill people left and right, that's okay,” he said. “Think of it, think of how unfair it is. Never before has New York City and their prosecutors or perhaps any prosecutors criminally charged a company or a person for fringe benefits. Fringe benefits. Murders, okay. Human trafficking, no problem — but fringe benefits, you can’t do that.”

Tax experts have said prosecutions centered on fringe benefits are rare, but some have compared the charges to the case against Leona Helmsley, a New York real estate developer who was convicted of evading $1.2 million in taxes in the 1980s.

Yet Trump maintained that he was the victim of “the radical left” who failed to “get him” in Washington with the Mueller investigation and said prosecutors only want to target him and other Republicans.

“Every abuse and attack they throw my way, it's only because I have been fighting for you against the corrupt establishment,” he said. “That's all it is.”

But prosecutors for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office argued Thursday that the business practices were not “standard practice,” attempting to counter Trump’s argument that the investigation is politically motivated.

“There is no clearer example of a company that should be held to criminal account,” said Carey Dunne, a prosecutor working for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D).

Trump has no external filter people anymore. He's talking himself into investigation after investigation here. Most importantly, he's not saying he's innocent. He's saying he's being persecuted for actually doing these things. He fully expects to get away with it all this time too because he's gotten away with it in the past so many times. He's not saying "I didn't do this!" He's saying "Of course I did it, why is it a crime? It's not a real crime like murder or human trafficking!"

You have to wonder why he's bringing those crimes up.

And of course, he's saying he's only being hounded because he's "fighting the corrupt establishment" for his cult followers. Fighting how? He's fundraising off these, fleecing his faithful. Folks, he is the corrupt establishment.

Oh, and you know who was nowhere near this hate rally? GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis. Don't think Trump will forget...or forgive.

Bull In The Pulpit

Pastors, preachers, ministers, reverends, and priests in Trump Country aren't about to tell their congregations to get vaccinated against COVID-19, even if their respective flocks are putting themselves and clergy at health risk. No, they fear the hand of man and an enraged audience on Sundays more than the specter of the Delta variant.

Biden administration and state officials hoped that pastors would play an outsized role in promoting Covid-19 vaccines, but many are wary of alienating their congregants and are declining requests to be more outspoken.

POLITICO spoke with nearly a dozen pastors, many of whom observed that vaccination is too divisive to broach, especially following a year of contentious conversations over race, pandemic limits on in-person worship and mask requirements. Public health officials have hoped that more religious leaders can nudge their congregants to get Covid shots, particularly white evangelicals who are among the most resistant to vaccination.

The White House, which acknowledged it will fall shy of its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of adults by July 4, has stressed its robust campaign to inoculate the country will continue for months to come, though the strategy has largely shifted from mass vaccination sites to more targeted local efforts. With the rapid spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, particularly in areas of the country where vaccination rates are lagging, the Biden team is making a renewed effort to enlist help from trusted community leaders like pastors while other initiatives like million-dollar lotteries and giveaways have failed to meaningfully blunt the steep drop-off in vaccinations.

State health officials are conducting informal focus groups and outreach to try to ease pastors’ concerns about discussing vaccination, but progress is often elusive, they said. Many pastors said they have already lost congregants to fights over coronavirus restrictions and fear risking further desertions by promoting vaccinations. Others said their congregations are so ideologically opposed to the vaccine that discussing it would not be worth the trouble.

“If I put forth effort to push it, I’d be wasting my breath,” said Nathan White, a pastor at Liberty Baptist Church in Skipwith, Va., a small town near the North Carolina border.

The pastors POLITICO spoke with are located across Virginia and Tennessee, mostly in predominantly white communities. Some in rural areas lead overwhelmingly conservative congregations while some in more suburban areas said their churches were more politically mixed. Each pastor had been vaccinated but not all were eager to discuss it with their congregations.

Polls have consistently shown that white evangelicals are among the groups most hardened against vaccination. The most recent, a June survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that 22 percent of white evangelicals said they would “definitely not” get the vaccine, a figure that’s barely budged since April. About 11 percent said they wanted to “wait and see” how the vaccines perform.

 

In other words, these faith leaders are all cowards. They care more about the size of their congregations and their collection plates on Sunday than saving lives. I've become disillusioned with religion in my life after being raised a Catholic, and it's awful behavior like this that makes me never want to return. The word of God keeps being delivered by the most sinful of people, and I tuned them out a log time ago.

Sunday Long Read: Critical Of A Racist's Theories

The screeching throng on the right would have you believe that colleges and universities haven't changed since the days of the movie "PCU" more than 25 years ago, and that higher education for anyone my age and younger was an uphill battle against the "horrors of political correctness". The current yowling by the right about critical race theory is a new name for a battle that's been going on for all my adult life.

That's not to say that some instructors and professors aren't terrible people, as this week's Sunday Long Read details in the San Francisco Chronicle, the story of avowed racist teaching his students that Black and Hispanic students should be in college, and that they're all taking the place of more qualified Asian and white kids.

With one painful exception that she still thinks about today, Marisol Schowengerdt enjoyed her classes at Cal State East Bay. 

She enrolled in 2014 at age 41, older than most students, but no one gave her a hard time. The university’s Hayward campus was an inviting, diverse place, as East Bay’s marketing stresses: 86% of undergraduates are non-white, and many are the first in their families to attend college. Even at the business school, where a stock ticker flashed market prices as students arrived to class, officials emphasized social justice. 

“The ‘American Dream’ is the ideal that everyone living in the U.S. should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity,” reads a recent mission statement by East Bay’s College of Business and Economics. “We make the Dream possible for an exceptionally diverse student population.” 

Schowengerdt is the daughter of an immigrant cherry farmer, a man born in Mexico who came to the U.S. in the mid-’60s and raised seven children. She had spent her 20s and 30s building a successful career in California real estate and finance. But she lacked a college degree and aimed to change that. 

After two years at a junior college, she transferred to East Bay — part of Cal State, the largest four-year public university system in the country — and majored in economics. She liked almost all of her professors, she said, and they seemed to believe the stuff about the dream. 

Then there was Gregory Christainsen. 

A white man with salt-and-pepper hair, Christainsen was 60 at the time and had taught economics at East Bay since the 1980s. Schowengerdt enrolled in his public sector economics course, a requirement for her to graduate. The syllabus promised lessons in government finance and health insurance markets. 

But to Schowengerdt’s surprise, she said, Christainsen spent hours of class time talking about which racial groups were smarter than others. 

In one of the first lectures, Christainsen said Black and Hispanic people get involved in politics at lower rates than whites, Schowengerdt recalled. Then he showed a photo of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign staff in Chicago. Most staffers were white or Asian American. The photo, she said Christainsen told the class, demonstrated that even a Black man needs white people to get elected. 

As the semester continued, she said, the professor lectured repeatedly about race and intelligence, insisting they are linked. He taught students that white people and those of Chinese heritage are smarter on average than Black and Hispanic groups; he said this was proved by gaps in average IQ scores between races. 

Although scientists overwhelmingly attribute these gaps to societal factors like racism, poverty and cultural biases in the tests, Christainsen said the IQ disparities are inherent, rooted in genetics. He spoke with pride about his own family’s heritage: Telling students that his wife was Chinese, he called himself a “white tiger.” 

For Schowengerdt, these lessons felt like bigotry, not teaching, and it was all the more upsetting, she said, whenever she swiveled her head in class: Most of the 25 or so students were non-white, and many were Black. She vented sometimes with a classmate in her study group, Alex Bly, one of the few white students in the course. 

Originally from Texas, Bly, now 35, said she found the experience “surreal.” One day, she said, Christainsen gave students an article about how Jews run Hollywood. It struck her as a classic anti-Semitic trope, which “blew my mind,” she recalled. But it also seemed irrelevant: What did Jews in Hollywood have to do with public sector economics? 

About halfway through the semester, around March 2014, Bly drafted a complaint about the class. She addressed it to Jed DeVaro, chair of the economics department. To protect herself from possible retaliation, Bly created an anonymous email account. 

She hit send, then waited for the university to do something.

 

What followed of course was the controversy last year over Christainsen and his courses, and the somehow still-ongoing "debate" that Black and brown folk are genetically inferior to Asian and white folk.  If anything, Cal State East Bay did nothing about this racist asshole for years, because dealing with him would have made the school a target of billionaire-funded right-wing garbage fires like Campus Reform, Turning Point USA, and the Young America's Foundation.

The funny thing about "political correctness" is that college campuses today are absolutely terrified of being correct about anything, especially in red states where higher education funding has been brutalized over the last 15 years. This story shows that even in blue states, I wouldn't count on college administrators to give a damn until they are forced to do so.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Massachusetts police in Wakefield arrested nine sovereign citizen militia members this morning after an armed standoff where the militia blocked a highway after being confronted by police.

 

A bizarre incident unfolded Saturday morning in Wakefield, Massachusetts. According to local police: "during a motor vehicle stop, several heavily armed men claiming to be from a group that does not recognize our laws exited their vehicles and fled into the woodline" near Interstate Highway 95.

The incident unfolded around 1:30 a.m. when a state trooper came across a group of 8 to 10 people refueling on the side of the I-95 highway in Wakefield, a suburb of Boston. The group was dressed in military-style uniforms, carried tactical gear like body cameras and helmets and had long guns slung over their shoulders.

They told officials they were on their way to Maine from Rhode Island for "training," Col. Christopher Mason said.

Officials said they made two initial arrests and the rest of the group, which calls itself "Moorish American Arms," fled into a wooded area that is now surrounded by police. As a result, a stretch of I-95 was closed and shelter-in-place orders were set for people who live nearby.

Police negotiators talked to those hiding in the woods throughout the early morning.

"We're trying to successfully and peacefully resolve this," Mason said.

As of 10:30 a.m. Saturday the "remaining suspects on highway" were taken into custody by MSP Special Tactical Operations Team, Massachusetts State Police said in an update.

Officials had conducted searches of the two vehicles the suspects were in and the surrounding woods.

"Two additional suspects were located in their vehicles, bringing the total number of those arrested to 11 (two initially on North Avenue and nine outside and inside the vehicles)," the MSP tweeted.

"7 additional suspects being transported for booking ... Total of 9 in custody counting the initial 2 arrests," MSP had tweeted earlier.

 

Now, of course, note they are Black right-wing domestic terrorists, and that they were not shot. Immediately you ask, "But Zandar, if what you've been saying about racism and police is true, they would have all be gunned down instantly. Doesn't that prove race has nothing to do with it, and that you've basically been wrong for a decade? How do you explain this?"

Answer's really simple, guys. You can be Black, and you can serve white supremacy. Happens all the time. As to why the cops didn't immediately open fire, well, there were an awful lot of them, openly carrying. And even then the cops chose to arrest these guys and, I don't know, not have an open  firefight at a gas station by the gas pumps.

Here's hoping the terrorism convictions go quickly and without incident.

Going, Going, Af-Gone-Istan

Well, the US and its coalition allies really are pulling out of Afghanistan, and there's no bigger symbol of that long, looooooooong overdue withdrawal than the US military unceremoniously leaving Bagram AFB in Kabul, the center of US operations in the country for the last twenty goddamn years.

 

American troops and their Western allies have departed the U.S. military base that coordinated the sprawling war in Afghanistan, officials said on Friday, effectively ending major U.S. military operations in the country after nearly two decades. 

For generations of American service members, the military hub, Bagram Air Base, was a gateway to and from a war that cut across constant changes on the battlefield and in presidential administrations. But the final withdrawal overnight on Thursday occurred with little fanfare and no public ceremony, and in an atmosphere of grave concern over the Afghan security forces’ ability to hold off Taliban advances across the country.

The American exit was completed quickly enough that some looters managed to get into the base before being arrested, Afghan officials said.

The quiet leave-taking from the base weeks before the planned withdrawal of American troops in mid July, and months ahead of President’s Biden announced Sept. 11 departure, highlights Washington’s efforts to signal two different messages: one to the U.S. public that its longest foreign war is ending, and another to the Afghan government that the United States is not abandoning the country in the middle of a Taliban offensive, and would retain some ability to conduct airstrikes if need be.

“We are on track, exactly where we expected to be,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House Friday of the withdrawal. 

Bagram was operating at full capacity until the end on Thursday. Fighter jets, cargo planes and surveillance aircraft relied on the twin runways until it was no longer feasible to keep them in the country.

Now, air support for the Afghan forces and overhead surveillance will be flown in from outside the country, from bases in Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, or from an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. A contingent of 650 troops will remain to protect the American Embassy in Kabul, the capital. How long that type of support will continue is unclear, but the Pentagon has until Sept. 11 — when the American military mission is supposed to formally conclude — to decide.

The departure comes at a perilous time for Afghanistan.

Some U.S. intelligence estimates predict that the Afghan government could fall to its rivals, the Taliban, in from six months to two years after the Americans complete their withdrawal. The Taliban are inching closer to Kabul after having taken about a quarter of the country’s districts in the past two months.

Hundreds of members of the Afghan security forces have surrendered in recent weeks, while their counterattacks have taken back little territory from the Taliban. And as the Afghan forces fracture, regional militias have appeared with renewed prominence, in an echo of the country’s path toward civil war in the 1990s.

“Civil war is certainly a path that can be visualized,” the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, told reporters on Tuesday.

Early Friday morning, looters entered the base, grabbing gas canisters and some laptops, said Darwaish Raufi, a district administrator for Bagram, adding that some were arrested by the police.

Mr. Raufi said the Americans had failed to coordinate their departure with the Afghan forces, leaving a gap in security at the base. But Col. Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, said the transfer of the base had been “closely coordinated.”

 

I'll be the first to say that there has been no greater single example of bipartisanship in the US than the two decades, trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan all lost completely thanks to the efforts of both Republicans and Democrats during my adult lifetime.

Having said that, Trump really wanted credit for getting us out, and fully expected to have taken a second term to take a victory lap. Instead, Biden is the one completing the withdrawal. Remember that.

 

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

We don't often put New Hampshire in such terms, but it's a Republican-controlled swing state with a history of voter suppression tactics headed by a GOP Governor, Chris Sununu. The state has long been a battleground over the legality of Sununu's major voting suppression law, Senate Bill 3, which was signed into law back in 2017 as one of the NH GOP's first acts. After nearly four years however, the law has just be struck down entirely in a unanimous decision by the state's Supreme Court.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court has struck down in its entirety the 2017 Republican-authored voter registration law known as Senate Bill 3, finding it imposes burdens on voters that are in violation of their rights under the state constitution.

The law created a new process for people to prove that they are residents of New Hampshire if they registered to vote within 30 days of an election or on Election Day without a photo ID.

The state's highest court agreed with a 2020 Superior Court ruling that the new requirements and forms involved in the process are confusing, could deter people from registering and voting and "imposes unreasonable burdens on the right to vote."

“We affirm the trial court’s ruling that SB3 violates Part I, Article 11 of the New Hampshire Constitution,” Associate Justice Patrick Donovan wrote in a unanimous, 4-0 opinion. The constitutional article cited guarantees each "inhabitant" of the state 18 years of age and older an "equal right to vote."

The court concluded that, given the burdens, Senate Bill 3 “must be stricken in its entirety”

Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, who was attorney general at the time the suit was brought, did not sit on the case. Two of the justices, Donovan and Barbara Hantz-Marconi, are appointees of Gov. Chris Sununu, who signed Republican-authored and Republican-backed bill into law in 2017.

Also concurring were Associate Justices Gary Hicks and James Bassett.

Sununu said in a statement shortly after the ruling was issued:

“It’s disappointing that these commonsense reforms were not supported by our Supreme Court, but we have to respect their decision and I encourage the Legislature to take the court’s opinion into account and continue working to make commonsense reforms to ensure the integrity of New Hampshire’s elections.”

One of the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case, New Hampshire Democratic Party legal counsel William Christie, said: "Today is a great day for voting rights. A unanimous New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed that the Republican voter suppression law, SB 3, is unconstitutional.

"This is one of the strongest opinions in the country protecting the right to vote," Christie said. "We will continue to fight against any effort to suppress the right to vote in New Hampshire."

 

It doesn't get much more clear-cut than "This law imposes unconstitutional burdens on voters and therefore must be struck down in its entirety" in a unanimous decision, folks. 

It's what Republicans do. They can't win, so they make it harder for them to lose.

A Taxing Explanation, Con't

David Frum argues that the biggest sign that that case Manhattan DA Cy Vance has leveled against the Trump Organization on tax fraud charges is serious, serious trouble for Trump himself comes not from what Trump said, but what he did not say in his defense.

A grand-jury indictment of Donald Trump’s business and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, unsealed this afternoon in New York, alleges tax evasion arising from an attempt to pay Weisselberg and other Trump Organization executives extra money “off the books.” Prosecutors charge that Weisselberg and others received rent payments and other benefits without paying the appropriate taxes on them. Weisselberg and the Trump Organization have said they will plead not guilty.

So far, the danger is to Trump’s friends and his business, not the former president himself. But the danger could spiral, because Trump knew only so many tricks. If Trump’s company was bypassing relatively moderate amounts of tax on the income flows to Trump’s friends, what was it doing with the much larger income flows to Trump and his own family? Even without personal testimony, finances leave a trail. There is always a debit and a credit, and a check issued to the IRS or not.

An early indication that things may end badly for Trump is the statement released today from the Trump Organization. “Allen Weisselberg is a loving and devoted husband, father and grandfather who has worked for the Trump Organization for 48 years. He is now being used by the Manhattan District Attorney as a pawn in a scorched earth attempt to harm the former President. The District Attorney is bringing a case involving employee benefits that neither the IRS nor any other District Attorney would ever think of bringing. This is not justice; this is politics.”

Here is what is missing from that statement: “I’m 100 percent confident that every investigation will always end up in the same conclusion, which is that I follow all rules, procedures, and, most importantly, the law.” That’s the language used by former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke when he was facing ethics charges in 2018. Likewise, when Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe was accused of violating campaign-finance laws in 2016, he too was “very confident” that “there was no wrongdoing.” Plug the phrases very confident and no wrongdoing into a search engine and you will pull up statement after statement by politicians and business leaders under fire. For some, their matter worked out favorably; for others, not so much. Either way, everybody expects you to say that you’re confident you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s the thing an innocent person would want to say. So it’s kind of a tell when it goes unsaid.

An earlier statement from Trump himself likewise omitted an affirmative defense of his company and its employees, and instead attacked the professional prosecutors as “radical Left” (not to mention “rude, nasty, and totally biased”). The key line in Trump’s own statement is an anticipation of the possibility that one or another of his friends might flip: “They”—the prosecutors—continue to be “in search of a crime; and will do anything to frighten people into making up the stories or lies that they want.”

One of Trump’s skills as a politician is preparing the battlefield in advance. In the case of his first impeachment, he chose to argue outright innocence—“it was a perfect call”—and no matter how mountainous the evidence of wrongdoing, that was the line he maintained to the end.

This time, though, Trump is not claiming that “all taxes were paid” or that “it was a perfect tax return.” He’s readying his supporters for bad revelations about his company’s taxes and directing them to a fallback line that singling him out as a tax scofflaw is politically unfair.

That line of defense may well rally Trump’s supporters. It will not do him much good in court. It’s impossible for tax collectors to scrutinize every return. Selecting high-profile evaders and holding them to account is how tax laws are enforced. And if a former president numbers among those high-profile evaders, that makes the case for targeting him stronger, not weaker. It sends the message that the tax authorities most want to send: Everybody has to pay, especially powerful politicians. In 1974, former President Richard Nixon faced a review of his taxes that ultimately presented him with a bill equal to half his net worth at the time. Members of Congress have faced indictment for tax evasion, as have high-profile state and local officials.

Trump and his team already appear to expect that the law will be against him. They are counting on that fact not to matter very much—not enough to overcome the political hullabaloo they hope to raise in Trump’s defense.

 

In the grand tradition of a stopped grandfather clock being right twice a day, Frum here has this correct. Already in circles outside Trump's direct orbit, this case is being presented as political harassment for something "everybody" does but "nobody" is ever charged for. He's guilty of a non-crime.

If that's you're best defense, that you're not innocent at all, but what you did isn't criminal, when you're changed with, well, criminal fraudulence, you're going to lose and lose badly.

Everyone knows it.

Biden's Jobapalooza, Con't

Another grand slam month of jobs created under President Biden, but The Former Guy™ got us into such a depressionary hole with COVID and incompetence, that we still have months, if not years, to go.

The US economy added 850,000 jobs in June, when adjusted for seasonal changes. It was far more than economists had expected and a signal that American job growth is accelerating.

It was the biggest monthly jobs gain since August 2020, when the economy added 1.6 million jobs.

The hospitality and leisure sector grew the strongest, having the most ground to cover after the pandemic devastated the travel and service industries. That sector added 343,000 jobs. More than half of them were at restaurants and bars.

It was a "bright" jobs report, even though there is still plenty to worry about, wrote Kate Bahn, interim chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, in a tweet. It "just means it's good foundation to grow," she added.

America's once-strong labor market is still far from being back to normal, down 6.8 million jobs compared with February 2020. According to the report, 6.2 million people reported that they didn't work at all or worked less because their employer had been affected by the pandemic.

The unemployment rate stood at 5.9%, up from 5.8% in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. 

Even though the labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.6%, the number of people quitting their jobs voluntarily to look for another position jumped by 164,000 in June. 

It's a tale of a job market in imbalance: Employers are struggling to attract and retain staff as the reopening spurred a hiring surge, because some workers are still not ready to return to work. Many fear infection, or worry about adequate care for their children or elderly relatives. The expanded jobless benefits that were created to soften the pandemic blow also allow people to take longer in choosing the right job for them, rather than to rush back into the labor market. 

All of this is creating an unprecedented mismatch between worker supply and demand. 

Although many economists rejected claims that pandemic-era jobless benefits are keeping people comfortably at home and away from work, various states have cut the special programs ahead of the September deadline. 

But that didn't move the needle much in June. Early data from states that ended those programs shows that didn't push workers to resume their job search, said Cailin Birch, global economist at The Economist Intelligence Unit, in emailed comments. 

"Most states will phase out these benefits in September, which could have a more noticeable impact," she added. "More than this, however, we expect an additional few months of economic growth, more progress on Covid vaccinations and the resumption of in-person education in September to be the main factors driving a stronger increase in labor-force participation in the fall."

 

So things are improving, but slowly at best. We'd need another 10-12 months like June to get back to  February of 2020. That's how many jobs were destroyed under Trump.

Last Call For A Supreme Attack On Voting Rights

In a 6-3 Alito decision where all the Supreme Court's conservatives sided with the state of Arizona, the Roberts Court declared that Arizona's GOP had every right to restrict out-of-precinct voting and ballot harvesting, and that of course they weren't violations of the Voting Right Act, no siree.

 

The court upheld two provisions of the Arizona law. The first provision says in-person ballots cast at the wrong precinct on Election Day must be wholly discarded. Another provision restricts a practice known as "ballot collection," and says only family caregivers, mail carriers and election officials can deliver another person's completed ballot to a polling place. 

"In light of the principles set out above, neither Arizona's out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection law violates §2 of the VRA," Alito wrote. "Arizona's out-of-precinct rule enforces the requirement that voters who choose to vote in person on election day must do so in their assigned precincts. Having to identify one's own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the "usual burdens of voting.'" 

The case comes as several Republican-led states, encouraged by former President Donald Trump's unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud, are considering more restrictive laws and Democrats are fighting a frantic battle in courts to combat what President Joe Biden has called an "assault on democracy."

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So of course your vote gets tossed out completely if you vote in the wrong precinct. And of course, Arizona Republicans are doing everything they can to make sure that Black and brown voters vote in the wrong precinct. It's the new Jim Crow, whee!

 

The bottom line is that states are basically free to pass whatever voting restrictions they want to, because this court will never rule that they are obvious suppression efforts of Black voters.

 

It's open season on your voting rights, and the VRA is officially all but dead from a legal standpoint. We're right back to 1898 and Williams v. Mississippi.

Even worse, the Roberts Court handed down a decision that struck down California's state law requiring donor disclosure to super PACs on the same 6-3 lines, saying that was not only unconstitutional, but that it was clearly political in nature and obviously designed to hurt wealthy donors.

The Supreme Court on Thursday invalidated a California rule that requires charitable organizations to disclose the names of contributors in a case that could impact the future of "dark money" politics.

 

The opinion was 6-3 along conservative-liberal lines.

"The upshot is that California casts a dragnet for sensitive donor information from tens of thousands of charities each year, even though that information will become relevant in only a small number of cases involving filed complaints," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

Campaign finance reform had expressed fear that such a ruling could eventually lead to more anonymous money -- called dark money -- to enter the political sphere.

The case had pitted the interest of charities to maintain the privacy of their donors against the states' interest in policing charitable fraud.

California mandated that non-profit charities that solicit donations in the state identify their substantial donors to the California attorney general. The same information already goes to the IRS -- found on the IRS Form 990. The Schedule B attachment required the organizations to report the names and addresses of their largest contributors. Failure to comply had the potential to lead to late fees and suspicion of their registration as a charitable organization.

 

Roberts ruled that the fraud policing was a purely political pretext that violated the rights of wealthy people to exercise their cash-based free speech.  Oh no!

Actual votes can be thrown out on a technicality, but heaven forbid we ever have millionaires reveal they gave money to politicians in order to control them. One is perfectly legal, the other is a VIOLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION AND GOD HIMSELF.

But her emails, I guess.

Tales From Bevinstan, Con't

It seems the universe isn't quite done yet with former Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, who is now facing a federal investigation for a possible pay-for-play pardon scheme during his term.

Two years after Gov. Matt Bevin pardoned a convicted killer whose family hosted a political fundraiser for the governor, the FBI and federal prosecutors are investigating the executive action.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenna Reed told a federal judge during a hearing June 22 her office is conducting an "ongoing investigation" of Bevin’s pardon of Patrick Baker, whose family hosted a fundraiser at their home in Corbin that raised $21,500 to retire the debt from Bevin’s 2015 campaign.

Bevin has adamantly denied he pardoned Baker because of the fundraiser hosted by Baker's brother Eric and his wife, but the revelations show the former governor still faces possible criminal liability.

Spokesmen for the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Lexington did not respond to questions about the pending investigation.

At the June 22 hearing, FBI Task Force Officer Mark Mefford testified he and other investigators interviewed Baker’s ex-girlfriend Dawn Turner last Dec. 28 about the fundraiser.

“And was the sole purpose of that interview was to discuss Mr. Baker's pardon and a fundraiser that was conducted for Mr. Baker?" Reed asked him.

“Yes,” Mefford replied.

Reed told U.S. District Judge Claire Horn Boom another prosecutor was heading the investigation.

Mefford testified that that joining him in the interview of Turner were FBI Special Agent Jim Huggins, FBI forensic accountant Chris Darman and Kentucky Attorney General investigator Matt Easter.

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported Monday that Turner told investigators in December she believed the purpose of the fundraiser was to influence Bevin to give Patrick Baker a pardon and the donor event was “crucial” in getting it.

She also said she thought Baker’s parents wanted her at the fundraiser so Bevin would see her autistic son and it would make him more sympathetic to letting Baker out of prison, according to the Herald Leader story, which also reported she said Baker’s mother gave her $500 to contribute at the event.

Boom ordered a transcript of Turner's interview sealed after the hearing.

A jury in 2017 convicted Baker, now 43, of reckless homicide in the death of a Knox County drug dealer shot in the chest during an attempt to rob him of money and pain pills.

Baker also was convicted of robbery, impersonating a police officer and tampering with physical evidence for allegedly disposing of the homicide weapon.

A judge sentenced him to 19 years in prison in December 2017, but just two years later, Bevin commuted the sentence and pardoned him.

The commutation became among the most controversial of hundreds granted by Bevin as he left office after The Courier-Journal revealed the fundraiser.

Bevin said the evidence against Baker was “sketchy at best,” but the Kentucky Court of Appeals in an opinion called it overwhelming.

 

There's zero doubt that what Bevin did was immoral and done as a direct favor for a fundraiser in exchange for a pardon. Proving that in federal court, that's another thing. Let's remember that the Roberts Court made it clear with the overturning of the bribery conviction of Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2016 that criminalizing politics was "unconstitutional", and NY state Senate leader Sheldon Silver's corruption conviction in 2017 was overturned by a federal appeals court after the McDonnell ruling for the same reason.

No, even if Bevin's convicted, his conviction will absolutely be overturned.

Just another tale from Bevinstan, you see.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

White Donald Trump won't be charged (most likely ever, as it will ignite political violence around the country and we're nowhere near being ready for that cost and the aftermath as a society) his businesses will be this week as the Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg face tax fraud charges from Manhattan DA Cy Vance's three-year investigation.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to charge the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer with tax-related crimes on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said, which would mark the first criminal charges against the former president’s company since prosecutors began investigating it three years ago.

The charges against the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg, the company’s longtime chief financial officer, are a blow to former President Donald Trump, who has fended off multiple criminal and civil probes during and after his presidency. Mr. Trump himself isn’t expected to be charged, his lawyer said. Mr. Weisselberg has rejected prosecutors’ attempts at gaining his cooperation, according to people familiar with the matter.

The defendants are expected to appear in court on Thursday afternoon, the people said.

The Trump Organization and Mr. Weisselberg are expected to face charges related to allegedly evading taxes on fringe benefits, the people said. For months, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and New York state attorney general’s office have been investigating whether Mr. Weisselberg and other employees illegally avoided paying taxes on perks—such as cars, apartments and private-school tuition—that they received from the Trump Organization.

If prosecutors could show the Trump Organization and its executives systematically avoided paying taxes, they could file more serious charges alleging a scheme, lawyers said.

Mr. Weisselberg and his lawyers haven’t commented on the investigation or impending charges.

Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing and said the investigations, conducted by offices led by Democrats, are politically motivated. Earlier this week, he said in a statement that the case is composed of “things that are standard practice throughout the U.S. business community, and in no way a crime.”

In recent virtual meetings, lawyers for Mr. Trump and his company tried to persuade prosecutors not to charge the Trump Organization, arguing that charging a company over fringe benefits or employee compensation was unheard of, The Wall Street Journal and others reported this week. Former prosecutors say it is rare to charge an individual or company for failure to pay taxes on employee benefits alone, although such charges are used as part of larger cases.

 

Again, I'm just some guy on the internet here who has been grouchy for a dozen years online, but even I have to say this looks like Vance is trying to get Weisselberg to flip and turn states' evidence against Trump and/or his kids.

 

We'll see what happens, but the outrage meter on the right is maybe even going to exceed that of Trump's impeachment, where they knew with 100% certainty that nothing actually consequential was ever going to happen to Trump from any attempt to impeach. This...this is something they cannot fully control.

It only gets bad from this point on, folks.

Last Call For The GOP's Race to The Bottom, Con't

Once again, sitting Republican members of Congress are openly appearing with and siding with known white supremacists in order to earn white supremacist votes, because for all the screaming about how the word "racism" is "meaningless" in 2021 from the right, what it means is "We, the Republican party, want to exclude people from power because they are not white."

For years, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was a thorn in the side of the GOP, lodging extreme remarks on race and immigration that often flew beneath the radar because of his status as a backbencher, but put his party in an uncomfortable spot. Then he crossed the line with his party when he was quoted by the New York Times saying, “White nationalist, White supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Republican leaders who had glossed over King’s past controversies stripped him of his committee assignments, and he soon lost a primary.

Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) apparently didn’t get the memo that this was a red line. And just as with King, Gosar suddenly appears to be a problem his party can no longer ignore.

The question increasingly for Republicans is how much its tolerance for this kind of thing has changed in the past two years.

Images cropped up on social media Monday night advertising a Gosar fundraiser with America First PAC, a group run by young far-right operative Nick Fuentes, who has promoted white-nationalist ideas and whom the Justice Department has labeled a “white supremacist.” Below is a tweet from former GOP congressman Denver Riggleman (Va.).

Fuentes has defended segregation and bemoaned the United States losing its “White demographic core.” He has cast doubt on the millions of deaths in the Holocaust and engaged in a lengthy metaphor likening the deaths to cookies baking in an oven. He labeled the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol “awesome” and the racist rally in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a counterprotester “incredible.”

There was some question Monday night as to whether the joint event between Gosar and Fuentes was legitimate, and Gosar’s office and campaign haven’t responded to requests for comment. But the congressman appeared to defend it late Monday night.

“Not sure why anyone is freaking out. I’ll say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First,” Gosar said in an apparent reference to the America First PAC, which caters to young members of the far right. “They will not agree 100% on every issue. No group does. We will not let the left dictate our strategy, alliances and efforts. Ignore the left.”

Crucially, the fundraiser would represent a doubling down for Gosar. Back in February, Gosar was criticized for serving as a keynote speaker at an America First PAC event in Orlando in which Fuentes delivered a white-nationalist speech.

A day later, Gosar defended reaching out to new audiences but said in a speech to another conservative audience, “I want to tell you, I denounce … white racism. That’s not appropriate.” He later told The Washington Post’s David Weigel that the comment specifically referenced Fuentes’s speech. In the speech, Fuentes made the remarks about the Capitol riot being “awesome” and the country losing its “White demographic core.” Fuentes also claimed Black Lives Matter wanted to create “a new racial caste system in this country, with Whites at the bottom.”

Gosar’s extremism, of course, is hardly limited to his ties to the America First PAC. He has lodged conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and claimed protester Ashli Babbitt was “executed” by police. He has done the same with Charlottesville, suggesting it was a false flag by the left. Gosar’s office even confirmed this week that the congressman was in regular contact with “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander ahead of the Jan. 6 riot.

If it was legal to put a bullet in the heads of anyone in America who wasn't a white "Christian" these would be the assholes who would be pulling the trigger on a daily basis. Don't tell me to remain calm or to stop sounding the alarm over people who want people like me dead in the street.

And at this point, we have one of the two major political parties and multiple media outlets dedicated to white supremacy. They don't even bother trying to hide it anymore.

Well, It's Certainly *A* Cosby Show

CNN Reporting this afternoon that Pennsylvania's state Supreme Court has overturned and vacated the sexual assault conviction of Bill Cosby, ordering his immediate release from state prison and barring the case from being prosecuted any further thanks to a previous 2005 plea deal with another prosecutor.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction, setting the stage for the release of the 83-year-old comedian later in the day.

The state’s highest court tossed Cosby’s conviction as a result of an agreement he had with a prior prosecutor that would have prevented Cosby from being criminally charged in the case. This new ruling bars any retrial in the case, court documents say.

Cosby is two years into a three-to-10-year prison term.

Cosby was accused of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand, the former Temple University employee whose allegation was the basis of the criminal case, at his estate in 2004. He was charged in 2015 for the alleged attack and arrested just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired. He was sentenced in 2018.

A written agreement from the previous Montgomery County prosecutor, Bruce Castor, stated that he would not criminally prosecute Cosby in the Constand case. Castor testified that while he was district attorney, he promised not to file criminal charges against the comedian if Cosby would testify in a civil lawsuit that was filed by Constand in 2005.

Castor had determined that the prosecution would have trouble corroborating forensic evidence without Cosby confessing to the alleged charges.

“Seeking ‘some measure of justice’ for Constand, D.A. Castor decided that the Commonwealth would decline to prosecute Cosby for the incident involving Constand, thereby allowing Cosby to be forced to testify in a subsequent civil action, under penalty of perjury, without the benefit of his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination,” the court document said.

Cosby testified during four days of depositions by Constand’s attorneys and the civil suit was settled for more than $3 million in 2006.

Criminal charges that resulted in Cosby’s incarceration were brought in 2015 by Prosecutor Kevin Steele, who succeeded Castor as the county’s district attorney.

The supreme court’s opinion also disagreed with the trial court judge’s decision to let prosecutors call five other accusers in addition to Constand.

Originally, the trial judge had allowed just one other accuser to testify at Cosby’s first trial. However, after the jury deadlocked, the judge then allowed five other accusers to testify at Cosby’s retrial.

This testimony tainted the trial, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said, even though the lower appeals court had found it appropriate to show a pattern of behavior.

 

Well, I mean again, I'm not a lawyer, and while I know plenty of them, I have to say "a 2005 plea deal by the same county that precluded future prosecution where Cosby was prosecuted and convicted" is...yeah, that's going to result in overturning on appeal, and like it or not, that's exactly what happened.

PS, the Montgomery County PA who cut the deal with Cosby? Bruce Castor? Went on to become PA AG?

He also went on to become Trump's impeachment lawyer during his second impeachment. You know, this chucklehead. 

 

Rep. Raskin's opening impeachment trial statement: "Their argument is that if you commit an impeachable offense in your last few weeks in office, you do it with constitutional impunity." pic.twitter.com/lIrRiu36IF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 9, 2021

 

Makes sense now, this does. Good job, Bruce!

School Of Hard Right Knocks, Con't

The parade of county school board meetings here in Kentucky being taken over by angry white parents protesting "critical race theory" (when what they are really against is any effort to improve the situation for Kentucky's Black kids) continues, this time in Oldham County near Louisville.

A week after protesters derailed a school board meeting in Kentucky's largest district, discord around "critical race theory" dominated another school board meeting Monday.

Most of the 25 people who spoke during the public comment portion of an Oldham County school board meeting Monday evening opposed the majority-white, affluent district's diversity efforts, falsely believing them to be "critical race theory."

"What is equity?" one woman asked. "It is to take something where someone earned it and go on and give it to someone else."

She, along a handful of other parents, said she will keep her son home and teach him herself.

"And I will encourage other parents to do it," she said. "Because this does not need to happen in our great county and our great schools."

Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines how racism is baked into and perpetuated by systems and policies, rather than individual actions. It is typically not taught in K-12 schools, and Oldham County officials said it is not taught in the district.

But the phrase has come to be used as an umbrella term for any kind of equity work in schools, as well as ideologies that see students solely based on race.

A conservative-led push against CRT, and often racial equity work, has caused a wave of legislation that would stifle conversations about race in classrooms and a flood of opponents to school board meetings, demanding that the theory be eradicated from classrooms it is not in.

Outgoing Superintendent Greg Schultz began his final school board meeting with a brief update on the district’s Inclusion Coalition but did not provide details or draw a reaction from the crowd.

Started in March 2019, the group of district and school officials, teachers and staff reviewed disparities in discipline and achievement, and the effects of "racism and social marginalization" on students.

More than four-fifths of Oldham County students are white; around one-fifth live at or near the poverty line.

Black students make up about 2% of Oldham County's more than 12,000 kids. Like in other districts, they receive a disproportionate amount of suspensions and face double-digit achievement gaps in test scores compared to their white peers.

Several speakers appeared to misunderstand what the coalition's job is, falsely saying white students are told they are inherently racist or should feel bad due to their skin color. Such beliefs are not taught in school and are not part of critical race theory’s teachings.

 

So two things, first of all Louisville Courier-Journal education reporter Olivia Trauth is 100% correct in this story. "Critical Race Theory" is absolutely being used as a catch-all bogeyman for efforts of racial inclusion in a district where only 2% of kids are Black, and it's being used around the country right now to apply to any efforts in any field of anything socially related.

Secondly, if this is happening in small-town Kentucky, it's happening where you live too. I stress once again that people need to get involved in local politics, and especially in school board meetings if you have kids in public school.

This is going to be the battle cry of 2022 and 2024 and we're not going to win if we ignore this nonsense.

Last Call For the Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie is now costing Maricopa County, Arizona taxpayers millions to replace voting equipment tainted by the ridiculous "audit" farce that all but destroy the chain of custody for the machines themselves, and I swear that the county should sue the state GOP for every dollar.

Maricopa County will not reuse most of its voting equipment after it has been with Arizona Senate contractors for its audit of November election results, the county announced Monday.

The potential cost to taxpayers is so far unknown. The county is about half way through a $6.1 million lease with Dominion Voting Systems for the equipment, but it's unclear whether it will have to pay the rest of the money owed under that lease, and whether the county or Senate will be on the hook.

The county's Board of Supervisors wrote in a June 28 letter to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs that they share her concerns about whether the hundreds of vote-counting machines that they had to give the Senate's contractors are safe to use, in part considering the contractors are not certified to handle election equipment in the United States.

The Senate got the voting machines, as well as nearly 2.1 million ballots and voter information from the Nov. 3 election in April after issuing subpoenas and after a judge ruled the subpoenas were valid.

The Senate handed the machines over to contractors in an attempt to tell whether they had been hacked or manipulated during the election, even though a previous independent audit commissioned by the county found that was not the case and the machines counted votes properly.

Hobbs had written in a May 20 letter to the county's Board of Supervisors, recorder and Elections Department director that if the county tries to use the machines again, even if it performs a full analysis in an attempt to determine whether the machines were still safe to use, her office would "consider decertification proceedings." In Arizona, voting systems must be certified to be used in elections.

The county's three-year lease with Dominion for the equipment ends in December 2022. The Election Department still owed about $3.3 million as of May, since the lease is paid monthly.

The subpoenas covered all equipment used in the November election, which included most of the equipment under that lease.

It's unclear whether the county will be able to get out of that lease without paying for the remainder of the cost.

But it's also unclear whether the county would be on the hook for that cost. The Senate signed an agreement with the county that said the county is not liable for any damages to the equipment while in the Senate's custody.

The supervisors have not yet decided whether to ask the Senate to pay for any costs related to replacing the machines under that agreement, said county communications director Fields Moseley.

The county said in a statement Monday it is working with Dominion to replace the subpoenaed equipment so it will be able to serve voters for the November election. County officials are discussing with Dominion the terms for replacing the equipment, Moseley said.

The county broke the chain of custody, or the procedures for properly securing and tracking the machines, when it was required to give the machines to the state Senate under subpoenas, Hobbs wrote in her letter.

 

Any way you look at it, it's millions flushed down the toilet in order to serve the Big Lie. This is who the Republican party are: a bunch of delusional, dangerous imbeciles who destroy everything in their path on the way to power.

 

So stop voting for them, America.