Last Call For Do You Know Who My Dad Is?

Glenn Youngkin may have won the Virginia gubernatorial race (and you notice that Terry McAuliffe isn't screeching about "election fraud" or anything) and the Beltway Pundits will tell you that Youngkin won because of angry parents.

The problem is we know exactly how Republicans handle parenting because Youngkin's 17-year-old son tried to commit voting fraud in order to vote for his dad and was turned away.

Twice.

The 17-year-old son of Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) tried to cast a ballot in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election twice despite being too young to vote, Fairfax County officials said in a statement released Friday.

The statement, which identified the teen as Youngkin’s 17-year-old son, emphasized that he did not end up voting and stated that he did not violate any state election laws. The Washington Post is not including the teen’s first name because he is a juvenile and has not been charged with a crime.

The teen walked into the voting precinct inside the Great Falls Library on Tuesday afternoon, presenting his driver’s license to election officials when asked for a proof of identity, according to Jennifer Chanty, the precinct captain there.

Chanty said in an interview with The Post that she realized who the teen was when she looked at his ID. Upon seeing his age, she said she informed him that he must be at least 18 to be eligible to vote in Virginia.

She said she offered to register him to vote for the next election, but the teen declined and walked out.

About 20 minutes later, the teen returned, insisting that he be allowed to vote, saying that a friend who was also 17 had been allowed to cast a ballot, Chanty said.

“I told him, ‘I don’t know what occurred with your friend, but you are not registered to vote today. You’re welcome to register, but you will not be voting today,’ ” Chanty, a Democrat, recalled saying.

Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Youngkin, issued a statement Friday.

““It’s unfortunate that while Glenn attempts to unite the Commonwealth around his positive message of better schools, safer streets, a lower cost of living, and more jobs, his political opponents — mad that they suffered historic losses this year — are pitching opposition research on a 17-year old kid who honestly misunderstood Virginia election law and simply asked polling officials if he was eligible to vote; when informed he was not, he went to school,” O’Malley wrote. 

 

You don't get to play the "innocent mistake" card when you were told no the first time and tried to come back and insist that you could vote the second time because "somebody else did it!" That's entitled "But I'm rich and my dad's important!" bullshit.

 

Especially when Republicans have been screaming about ZERO TOLERANCE for WIDESPREAD VOTER FRAUD and whaddya know, it's nearly always Republicans actually committing fraud. 

Jerk.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Another home run month for the labor economy as the Biden administration continues to rapidly dig out of the Trump Depression hole that cost us 22 million jobs.

The American economy added 531,000 jobs in October, the Labor Department said Friday, a sharp rebound from the previous month and a sign that employers are feeling more optimistic as the latest coronavirus surge eases.

Economists polled by Bloomberg had been looking for a gain of 450,000 jobs. The unemployment rate declined to 4.6 percent, from 4.8 percent.

The October gain was an improvement from the 312,000 positions added in September — a number that was revised upward on Friday, along with the August figure, providing a more upbeat picture of the last few months.

The increase in employment was broad, with sizable gains at restaurants and bars, as well as in factories and offices. And in another sign that conditions are gradually returning to normal, the proportion of employed people who worked remotely at some point last month fell to 11.6 percent from 13.2 percent.

“This was a strong employment report that shows the resilience of the labor market recovery from the pandemic,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco. “I think we will see a pretty strong bounce back in economic growth in the fourth quarter.”

Hiring has seesawed this year along with the pandemic, especially in vulnerable sectors like hospitality and retail, where workers must deal face to face with customers. White-collar employees have fared better, because many can work remotely.

Some employers are complaining of a shortage of workers, as many people remain on the sidelines of the job market. The labor force participation rate — the share of the working-age population employed or looking for a job — was flat in October, at 61.6 percent, and up slightly among those 25 to 54.

The stubbornly low participation rate underscores the damage the pandemic has done to the economy, and why it will take time to recover, despite strong months like October.

 

Still, even with the lower workforce participation numbers, we'll climb out of the hole next summer. Rememeber, the Trump regime's "recovery" stalled out last winter when we were still ten million jobs in the hole. It's Biden's policies that got us more than halfway out from there in just 9 months.

Give it another nine months and we'll be back in business, hopefully after today's infrastructure plan vote in the House.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Meanwhile, the time bomb that the Trump regime left in the Justice Department in the form of the Durham "investigation" just exploded.

 

Federal authorities on Thursday arrested an analyst who in 2016 gathered leads about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia for what turned out to be Democratic-funded opposition research, according to people familiar with the matter.

The arrest of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, is part of the special counsel inquiry led by John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing, the people said.

Mr. Danchenko, was the primary researcher of the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials in Moscow’s covert operation to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.

The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity because the indictment of Mr. Danchenko had yet to be unsealed. A spokesman for Mr. Durham did not respond to a request for comment.

Some claims from the Steele dosser made their way into an F.B.I. wiretap application targeting a former Trump campaign adviser in October 2016. Other portions of it — particularly a salacious claim about a purported sex tape — caused a political and media firestorm when Buzzfeed published the materials in January 2017, shortly before Mr. Trump was sworn in.

But most of the important claims in the dossier — which was written by Mr. Danchenko’s employer, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent — have not been proven, and some have been refuted. F.B.I. agents interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017 when they were seeking to run down the claims in the dossier.

The interview suggested that aspects of the dossier were misleading: Mr. Steele left unclear that much of the material was thirdhand information, and some of what Mr. Danchenko — who was born in Russia but lives in the United States — had relayed was more speculative than the dossier implied.

A 2019 investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.

The inspector general report also said that a decade earlier, when Mr. Danchenko worked for the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think-tank, he had been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian agent.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, Mr. Danchenko defended the integrity of his work, saying he had been tasked to gather “raw intelligence” and was simply passing it on to Mr. Steele. Mr. Danchenko — who made his name as a Russia analyst by exposing indications that the dissertation of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia contained plagiarized material — also denied being a Russian agent.

“I’ve never been a Russian agent,” Mr. Danchenko said. “It is ridiculous to suggest that. This, I think, it’s slander.”

Mr. Steele’s efforts were part of opposition research that Democrats were indirectly funding by the time the 2016 general election took shape. Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion G.P.S., which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mr. Danchenko said he did not know who Mr. Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a nonpartisan analyst and researcher.

Mr. Durham has been known to be interested in Mr. Danchenko and the Steele dossier saga. In February, he used a subpoena to obtain old personnel files and other documents related to Mr. Danchenko from the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Danchenko had worked from 2005 until 2010.

The charges against Mr. Danchenko follow Mr. Durham’s indictment in September of a cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, which accused him of lying to the F.B.I. about who he was working for when he brought concerns about possible Trump-Russia links to the bureau in September 2016.

 

The NY Times at least makes it clear what Durham's goal is: to pin Trump's actual ties to the Russian mob and the actual crimes they committed on Hillary Clinton's campaign as a Russian disinfo operation.  The best part is that it's entirely possible that ol' KGB Vlad played both sides of the record at the same time, helping Trump and leaving the "too good to be true" Steele Dossier where the Clinton team would eventually find it.

We'll see where this all goes.

Last Call For Sour Virginia, Con't

The simple reason as to why Democrats lost in Virginia on Tuesday, very nearly lost New Jersey, and almost lost the House and Senate in 2020, is that white non-college women are anti-Trump Republicans, and without Trump on the ballot, they voted for the white supremacy party.

White women voters may have made the difference for Republicans in Virginia’s high-profile gubernatorial race Tuesday, swinging by double digits towards the GOP and giving the party a potentially winning playbook in future elections.

For some Democrats surveying the wreckage from a bad night, the 13 percentage point swing towards the GOP among white women — fueled by a 37 point shift among white women who didn’t go to college — was the number in NBC News exit polls that stood out among a sea of bad ones.

“That white non-college woman is very sobering,” said Scott Kozar, a Democratic consultant who worked on the Virginia lieutenant governor and House of Delegate races.

Democrats had attributed much of their victories in 2018 and 2020 to driving up their margins with women, helping propel the party to control of Congress by tilting key districts away from their previous Republican slant.

But that tide appears to have receded.

The startling shifts enabled Republican Glenn Youngkin to cut into Democrats’ margins in the booming Virginia suburbs and run up the score in conservative rural counties, providing the formula for GOP success in a state that has steadily trended blue since former President Barack Obama snapped a decades-long Republican winning streak in the commonwealth in 2008.

Youngkin made schools and “parents rights” the centerpiece of his campaign. And his party is already picking up the baton, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announcing Wednesday that Republicans plan to introduce a “parents bill of rights” in Congress soon.

“He put together a coalition where he did even better than Trump did with base voters and rural voters, and he improved a lot in the suburbs, where Trump was toxic,” former Virginia Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock, a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, said on MSNBC. “Which is why he closed that gender gap to single digits, instead of Trump’s yawning gender gap.”

 

White voters overwhelmingly want Republicans in charge. Last night proved that. Trump served his purpose even with a Democratic president and Congress, because the best we can do is whatever table scraps President Manchin allows us to have. Republicans have two-thirds of white voters, the courts, the corporations, and the billionaires.

The hard lesson is only overwhelming voter turnout of non-white voters will move the needle, and there's not enough of us to stem the tide of angry white Virginia folk who want us removed from the country, like the Charlottesville and Richmond terrorists.

For a month, FBI agents listened in as two members of a white supremacist group discussed their sinister plans: a plot to use a pro-gun rights rally in Richmond, Virginia, to engage in mass murder and attacks on critical infrastructure, which they believed would mark the start of a racial civil war.

Patrik Mathews, a former Canadian Army reservist illegally in the U.S., and Brian Lemley, a Maryland resident and self-described white nationalist, fantasized about the brutal murders they'd soon carry out against law enforcement and Black people, all with the goal of bringing about the "Boogaloo," or the collapse of the U.S. government in order to prop up a white ethno-state, according to recordings of the pair's discussions.

"We need to go back to the days of ... decimating Blacks and getting rid of them where they stand," Mathews said in one recording. "If you see a bunch of Blacks sitting on some corner you f***ing shoot them."

"I need to claim my first victim," Lemley said in another recording. "It's just that we can't live with ourselves if we don't get somebody's blood on our hands."
MORE: Inside the neo-Nazi hate group 'The Base,' which is the center of an FBI investigation

The two men were each sentenced in late October to nine years in prison, and ABC News has now obtained newly released audio from the FBI's secret recording of Mathews and Lemley at their Delaware residence in late 2019.

The tapes offer a chilling look into the private plotting of the two members of "The Base," a white supremacist extremist group that the FBI says has, since 2018, recruited members both in the U.S. and abroad through a combination of online chat rooms, private meetings, and military-style training camps. In their plea agreements and at sentencing, Mathews and Lemley both acknowledged their membership in the group.

After the two men were arrested in January 2020, just days before the Richmond rally was set to take place, law enforcement found tactical gear, 1,500 rounds of ammunition, and packed cases of food and supplies in their residence.

In the course of their investigation they also found that Lemley and Mathews had both attended military-style training camps with other members of The Base, and had built a functioning assault rifle that they tested out at a gun range in Maryland.

The recordings captured by the FBI included Mathews and Lemley discussing potential acts of terror they could carry out around the Richmond rally that would lead authorities and, eventually, the U.S. government, to capitulate to the chaos and bloodshed taking place.

"You wanna create f***ing some instability while the Virginia situation is happening, make other things happen," Mathews said. "Derail some rail lines ... shut down the highways ... shut down the rest of the roads ... kick off the economic collapse of the U.S. within a week after the [Boogaloo] starts."

"I mean, even if we don't win, I would still be satisfied with a defeat of the system ... and whatever was to come in its place would be preferable than what there is now," Lemley said. "And if it's not us, then you know what, we still did what we had to do."

 

Plenty of your friends, neighbors, co-workers and church congregants think Mathews and Lanley are American heroes. 

They showed up in Virginia to vote this week, too.

The people siding with these assholes are exactly who we're up against. For some of us, it's a matter of survival, and less of "Well I didn't get X from Biden so I'm sitting this one out."

Remember that.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis wants a brand new state election police force as part of a new raft of voter suppression measures, and this should be setting off klaxons all around the state.

Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed on Wednesday to create a fully-staffed statewide law enforcement office whose sole job would be to crack down on election crimes, despite previously praising Florida’s smooth 2020 elections and rebuffing calls by members of his own party for an audit.

DeSantis, who is running for reelection and is considered a potential 2024 presidential contender, is also pressing state lawmakers to increase the criminal penalty for violating new restrictions on collecting mail-in ballots. He also wants to enact a tight new 100-day deadline on when local election officials must scrub their voter rolls for those who died, moved or been convicted of a felony.

The new law enforcement office will cost nearly $6 million, according to a document obtained by POLITICO.

“I guarantee you this: The first person that gets caught, no one is going to want to do it again after that,” said DeSantis at a West Palm Beach event billed as a “press conference” but featured dozens of DeSantis supporters who loudly applauded the governor. At one point, the crowd cheered “Let’s go Brandon” — a conservative rallying cry against President Joe Biden.

The governor also said he wants the GOP-controlled Legislature to put additional restrictions on the use of drop boxes.

“I don’t even think we should have drop boxes,” said DeSantis even though he signed the bill two years ago that first authorized their use in the state.

The Republican governor’s push comes just months after he successfully got state legislators to enact a controversial new voting law that adds new restrictions on the collection of mail-in ballots including a clampdown on when and where drop boxes could be located. It also comes as some Republicans in the state, echoing former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, are pushing for an audit of the 2020 election over DeSantis’ objections.

That new election law has drawn multiple federal lawsuits from civil rights and voting rights groups who contend those restrictions unfairly discriminate against elderly voters, voters with disabilities and minority voters. These additional proposals could throw another hot-button issue into an upcoming regular session where Florida legislators will be working on redistricting, abortion restrictions and another battle with tech companies over data privacy. The session starts in January.

Democrats — who have little power to stop the changes — quickly condemned the governor’s plans.

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat, said on Twitter, “More attacks on voting coming to Florida. Just like in 2020 we had elections last night in our state w/no issues. Why does our Governor keep creating partisan chaos. Why can’t we just focus on problems like housing, hunger, taxes, our environment & public transportation?”

One of the biggest changes contained in the new law was a two-ballot limit on how many mail-in ballots someone could gather and turn in on behalf of the elderly or sick and disabled voters, though there is an exception for immediate family members. This ban on “ballot harvesting” is a misdemeanor that DeSantis wants increased to a felony.

DeSantis also said that many local election offices and local prosecutors either do not want to — or lack the expertise — to investigate election crimes. In late September, the governor asked Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee to investigate whether Facebook interfered with the 2020 election even though her office does not have any investigators.

Under the governor’s proposal, Florida would create an “Office of Election Crimes and Security” that would have sworn law enforcement agents as well as other investigators to probe voter fraud and other election law violations. A three-page outline obtained by POLITICO says the governor’s election police force would cost $5.7 million in the first year and have 52 employees, including 20 sworn law enforcement agents who would be based in Tallahassee and in five field offices.

The breakdown of the governor’s proposal also calls for uniform reporting of felony convictions to election supervisors, banning cities from using ranked voting — which is already banned for the state — and a new deadline for determining voter eligibility. Local supervisors are already required to report to the state twice a year on how many voters they have removed in the previous six months.

 

So yeah, armed election police that would go after election officials with guns drawn, I guess. The second these clowns suspect "election fraud" they go in and what, arrest voters? Remove election machines in the middle of an election? How much power would these assholes have?

If you thought terrorism against state and county-level election officals was bad enough coming from Trump cultists, imagine what it will be like coming from gung-ho election cops.

This is literally DeSantis's special police, guys.

This road goes straight to fascism.

Flipping The Flipper

Real estate giant Zillow played with fire (and hundreds of billions in house flipping properties) and got absolutely burned when the computer algorithm designed to push housing prices up broke as the housing market cooled off last month, and they're out of the game.

 

Zillow Group Inc. is pulling the plug on its tech-powered home-flipping operation, after an ambitious effort to transform the company collapsed when its vaunted pricing algorithms proved unequal to the task.

The company plans to take writedowns of as much as $569 million and reduce its workforce by 25% as it winds down the business in coming months, according to a statement Tuesday. Zillow shares plunged as much as 11% to $76.22 in late trading.

The decision to abandon home flipping comes as the company’s third-quarter results showed it lost more than $380 million in the operation, called Zillow Offers. The business hit a major snag in recent months as Zillow tweaked its algorithms to make more aggressive offers, causing it to overpay for houses just as the heated U.S. market began to cool slightly.

With the company’s losses mounting, Chief Executive Officer Rich Barton said it had become too risky to scale the business in a U.S. housing market that has been running hot for well over a year during the pandemic.

“Fundamentally, we have been unable to predict future pricing of homes to a level of accuracy that makes this a safe business to be in,” Barton said on an earnings call.

Seattle-based Zillow is the best-known real estate company in America. And for millions of owners who watched their home values surge during the pandemic, the company’s quick exit raises an uneasy question: Is the boom over? Barton emphasized instead that buying and selling thousands of homes every month required the company to put too much capital at risk.

Zillow has had a turbulent few weeks. On Oct. 18, it issued a statement confirming a Bloomberg News report that it wouldn’t make any new offers on houses for the rest of the year as it struggled to find workers to fix the homes it had under contract. In the weeks after, it became clear that the company had overpaid for properties and was taking bigger losses on sales.

On Monday there was another sign that something had gone wrong: Bloomberg reported that the company was marketing about 7,000 homes for roughly $2.8 billion to institutional investors.

For most of Zillow’s 15-year history, the company has been known for publishing online real estate listings and home-price estimates -- called Zestimates -- and seeking to profit by connecting agents with potential clients. In 2018, Barton, one of the company’s founders, reclaimed the role of CEO and pivoted into the high-tech home-flipping business, called iBuying.

Zillow used pricing algorithms to buy homes from their owners, make light repairs, and put them back on the market. Barton set an ambitious goal, seeking to buy 5,000 homes a month by 2024.

Only one problem: Zillow didn't have buyers for the houses they fixed up anymore, and they forgot to stop the computers from buying more.

The real question is if the damage Zillow and other private equity firm backed real estate giants blew out the pandemic housing bubble entirely, in which case, we're all going to have a lot of problems in the months ahead.

StupidiNews!

• New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy has narrowly won re-election, becoming the state's first reelected Democratic governor in more than four decades.
• Far-right wing cable news outlets OANN and Newsmax are facing billions in defamation damages from election technology company Smartmatic over false reports voting machines were rigged.
• UN agencies have announced a major investment in weather forecasting technology for developing countries as part of a large effort to enable smaller nations to fight climate change.
• Senate Republicans blocked a federal voting rights bill a third time this year as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the John Lewis Voting Rights Act a "Trojan Horse" for Democrats.
• Alaska GOP Governor Mike Dunleavy joins Texas, Florida, and several other Republican governors in ordering the state to ignore any federal vaccine mandates and to sue the Biden administration.
  

Last Call For The New Mayor In The Queen City

Across the river in Cincy, Aftab Pureval has become the city's first Asian mayor, succeeding John Cranley in a relatively easy win over Republican David Mann.

 

Aftab Pureval is Cincinnati's next mayor, nabbing a whopping 66% of the vote.

He defeated longtime Cincinnati politician David Mann, who conceded the race at 10 p.m.

"We made history in Cincinnati," Pureval said to supporters who gathered to celebrate his win.

He'll be the first Asian-American mayor in the city's history and the only one in the Midwest.

Pureval's mother and brother were with him during his victory speech at Lucius Q in Pendleton.

Pureval told the crowd of their journey "to a place called Ohio" from New Delhi for a better life.

"What on earth were they thinking?" He said to laughter. "They came to this country to provide a better life for their sons. Because of that incredible decision, our family went from being refugees to mayor of Cincinnati."

Mann was gracious, tweeting: "Congratulations to Aftab on his well-deserved victory. I have spoken with him and wish him nothing but the best, and it has been the honor of my lifetime to serve this community as a councilman, mayor, and member of congress throughout my career. Thank you, Cincinnati!"

 

In City Council elections, after an ugly bribery scandal left no fewer than four council members facing criminal charges over bribery and misconduct over the past two years, voters cleaned house and elected 8 Democrats and one Republican, Liz Keating, who squeaked in at 9th place. Only Democrat Greg Landsman remains from 2019.

We'll see what Pureval and the new City Council can do. They have a lot of problems ahead.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

Donald Trump and Republican politicians in the House spent nearly a million bucks with digital advertising firm Event Strategies to advertise the January 6th terrorist attack, and used right-wing social media propaganda platforms like Gab and Parler to do it.

 

When then-President Donald Trump held his “Stop the Steal” protest on Jan. 6, he turned to a firm called Event Strategies to set up the rally. And while the violent results of that protest may give other politicians pause about using that firm again, Event Strategies has instead become Trump’s preferred staging group—as well as a new go-to for other GOP committees in the months after the riot.

A review of public financial disclosures shows that multiple entities involved in the Jan. 6 rallies have continued to rake it in after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, with various Republicans and GOP groups continuing to give these entities business even as investigators look into their roles with the insurrection.

Public records also show a number of curious payments on and around Jan. 6—including more than $25,000 in advertising that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) paid to right-wing social media platform Parler, with one transaction on the day of the riot.

In total, Trump’s fundraising apparatus has paid Event Strategies roughly $800,000 since Jan. 6, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, with the latest payment coming on Aug. 13. That $31,358 expense was for “event staging,” and footed by Make America Great Again Action—the Trump-endorsed super PAC run by former top aide Corey Lewandowski which was shuttered earlier this month amid allegations that Lewandowski had sexually assaulted a donor.

None of the other top event management firms on Trump’s payroll between October 2020 and the riot have worked for him since Jan. 6.

But Trump is hardly the only Republican to pay Event Strategies this year.

In April, the National Republican Congressional Committee—the official national committee for House Republicans—reported spending about $3,675 with the firm for “facility rental,” and dropped another $6,000 for “audio visual/staging” expenses on June 29. And in late August, the Alabama Republican Party and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), a key player in efforts to overturn the election, shelled out $200,000 and $7,038 to the company, respectively, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

In the 2020 cycle, Trump’s groups paid more than $4.3 million to people and companies involved in organizing the Jan. 6 rally, OpenSecrets reported this week. Of that amount, about $2.8 million went to Event Strategies, records show. But the only 2020 payments other committees made to the firm came after the election, in connection to the Georgia Senate runoffs.

FEC data shows that the NRCC had not paid Event Strategies since 2009, and neither Brooks nor the Alabama GOP previously contracted the company.

Bluebonnet Fundraising, the firm run by rally organizer and former Trump campaign adviser Caroline Wren—who last month was subpoenaed by House investigators—raked in tens of thousands of dollars after the riot.

Some of that cash came from the leadership PAC belonging to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who paid Bluebonnet $1,280 in fundraising fees six days after the attack, per FEC records. Lynda Blanchard, a Republican challenging Brooks in the 2022 Alabama Senate race, also forked over $22,000 in consulting fees to Bluebonnet in May. And in late January, Bluebonnet also got an $86,800 boost from Save the US Senate PAC, a group founded last year by associates of Donald Trump Jr.

 

Trump's propagandists of choice are more than glad to take GOP dollars to drum up hatred and division, and they're making millions doing it. Maybe they should actually pay a price.

Coming Up Short In Virginia

Virginia reverted to form with the party out of power in the White House winning the Governor's Mansion a year later. The only person to beat that curse in the last 40+ years was...Terry McAuliffe in 2009. That didn't happen last night as Slate's Jim Newell explains.

 

Republican Glenn Youngkin, a private equity magnate turned friendly sweater-vest campaign dad, defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Tuesday, leading by nearly three points when networks called the race. It’s Republicans’ first gubernatorial win in Virginia since 2009. This now makes it 11 out of the last 12 governor’s races in the state that the party not controlling the White House has won. (The lone exception was McAuliffe in 2013, who pulled off a squeaker against ideologue Ken Cuccinelli. So at least he has that.)

While there will be plenty of miscalculations for Democrats to pick over in the coming days and weeks, it’s that last statistic, about the out-party traditionally winning the Virginia gubernatorial race, that provides the architecture of McAuliffe’s loss.

This pattern is not a coincidence. One year after an election, the base voters of the party that just lost a presidential race are going to be pissed off, and wake up each morning dreaming of the next time they can vote against the president’s party. (There’s a critical addendum to this in Virginia’s case, too: Republicans had lost every statewide race for nearly a decade in a state they used to dominate. Each loss irritated them more! They were ready to go this time.) The president’s party’s base, meanwhile, can’t match that level of enthusiasm. The president, about whom everyone was so excited to elect the previous year, takes ownership of national problems and sags, or plummets, from their post-election high. This is also the basic structure of why the president’s party typically loses ground in midterm elections the following year. (Just wait!)

In this case, Democrats’ problems accumulated over the summer with a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan; the Delta variant, which brought a new, post-vaccine wave of the pandemic; and inflation and supply chain kinks that turned voters’ opinions of the economy sharply negative. As I pointed out earlier this week, an NBC News national poll from this weekend showed that only 22 percent of voters felt the country was on the right track, compared to 71 percent who said it was on the wrong track. Joe Biden’s average approval rating is 42 percent. I’m not sure which closely contested election Democrats expect to win when that’s the case.

Terry McAuliffe, a lifelong Democratic operative, is not a generational political talent. But Washington also didn’t give McAuliffe much material to work with. As I write, we are on month… 3… 4… 17?…of congressional Democrats saying they’ll pass a monumental pair of bills any day now. This week? Eh, might have to push it to next week. How does your December look? This meant McAuliffe had little-to-nothing to point toward as examples of what Democrats can get done if you just give them the chance.

So, McAuliffe basically ran on Trump. His opposition to Youngkin largely hinged on tying him to Trump. This will be treated in the punditry as a catastrophic mistake and extrapolated into broader conclusions about the futility of even bothering to mention Trump from now on. But such conclusions would be news to the Youngkin campaign, which worked strenuously, and oftentimes awkwardly, to keep its distance from Trump (who was eager to embrace Youngkin) and to keep General Election Youngkin sequestered from Primary Election Youngkin, when the latter said an awful lot of nice things about Trump and the need to ensure “election integrity.”

 

No state, with the exception of Pennsylvania, is more "We're not with the guy in DC, that asshole" than Virginia when it comes to governors, but it sure didn't help that Democrats still haven't passed the Build Back Better plan or the Senate infrastructure bill after talking about it for over a year, and then winning the White House and both chambers of Congress. 

 

Yes, I know the problem is Manchin, Sinema, and the filibuster. Yes, the Democrats are still being jerked around by the pair. Yes, it's hurting the Democrats as a whole, making them look comically ineffective. That wasn't Terry McAuliffe's fault at all.

But he lost because a 75% white electorate voted 60% for the Republican. That's 45% for the Republican before a single non-white vote is counted, and that's a guaranteed Democratic loss scenario.

And in particular, McAuliffe was completely undone by non-college White voters, who made up 36% of the electorate.

And this is with the Biden-passed stimulus and child tax credit putting thousands in the pockets of working-class white parents, and with Northam at the state level legalizing weed, ending the death penalty, and restoring voting rights to 70,000 people.

White voters simply reverted to the Southern state norm, voting overwhelmingly Republican. It wasn't voter suppression in Virginia, Democrats in the state made it easier to vote than in 2020 and expanded early voting. Turnout for an off-year governor's contest was a record. McAuliffe won college-educated white voters by 6. He lost non-college white voters by 52.

The people who showed up were overwhelmingly white, and they voted overwhelmingly for Youngkin.

Dems continue to ignore GOP propaganda at their own peril. Trumpism without Trump wins. If they can't find a solution to at least stay closer than a 50-point loss with non-college white voters, it's going to be ugly from here.

And Biden's popularity in the low 40's isn't helping. At all.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

StupidiNews!

• The Atlanta Braves won their first World Series in 26 years with a 7-0 victory over the Houston Astros in Game 6. 
• Senate Democrats and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski have introduced the John Lewis voting rights bill, but the bill finding nine more Republican votes is questionable at best.
• China's UN Ambassador Zhang Jun called the Glasgow COP26 climate change summit full of "empty slogans" among criticism that Chinese President Xi Jinping refused to attend.
• Boston has elected Michelle Wu as mayor, who ran and won on the city implementing a "Green New Deal" and rent control, both tall orders in the state legislature.
• CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has signed off on a unanimous agency advisor vote for COVID-19 vaccinations for children age 5-11 to begin as early as today.
  

Last Call For Sour Virginia

No matter what the outcome is in Virginia tonight, Republicans are already screaming about the vote being rigged.

This is how it’s going to be forever: Republicans and conservatives will claim that any election they lose is fraudulent. Donald Trump established this as the playbook for his party-cum-cult. And the full embrace of this authoritarian and dangerous tactic has been evident in the much-watched and tight-as-a-tick governor’s race in Virginia between Republican Glenn Youngkin and Democrat Terry McAuliffe.

Days before the final balloting on November 2, right-wingers and Republicans began hurling the accusation: The Democrats are stealing this election. They had no evidence. They were just beating this tribal drum. But the aim was to create an echo chamber for the delegitimization of the election should McAuliffe, the former governor, prevail.

The strategy is simple: repeat the phony charge over and over to block full public acceptance of an unfavorable result. And this attack has come from multiple directions. Steve Bannon, the once-indicted-and-Trump-pardoned strategist has inserted himself into the race, and appearing on a Virginia-based talk show on October 29 to discuss the election, warned, “They’re Democrats. They’re going to try to steal it. They can’t win elections they don’t steal, right? They understand this. This is what they did in ’20. It’s time now to start calling them out.”

At a Youngkin rally on October 27, country singer John Rich, who was campaigning for the Republican, suggested to the crowd that a Democratic conspiracy involving Stacey Abrams was afoot: “Why the hell is Stacey Abrams in Virginia right now? What is that? What is she doing up here? We know what she’s doing up here. She’s working on it… Do you really think California voted for Gavin Newsom again? I don’t think so. Stacey Abrams was probably out there, too.” Abrams had been campaigning in Virginia for McAuliffe, much as Rich was doing for Youngkin. (Newsom survived the recall election with 61.9 percent of the vote.)

That same day, conservative talk show host John Fredericks huffed, “Everything’s moving in Youngkin’s direction and the Republicans, but a lot of people fear that this is going to get stolen, they’re gonna try and cheat. We’ve got all kinds of irregularities right now going on.” In another show, Fredericks claimed that Democrats were going into nursing homes to “extract votes from people that were incapacitated.” He did not produce any proof of this nefarious plot.

On one recent episode of Fredericks’ show, John Mills, a former cybersecurity official at the Defense Department who now provides commentary to the conspiratorial-minded and pro-Trump Epoch Times, claimed that security is intentionally poorly designed at vote-counting facilities and “people can walk in and out.”

Amanda Chase, a Republican state senator from Virginia who has campaigned with Youngkin, has been a constant champion of the-Democrats-are-cheating disinformation. On her Facebook page, she declared, “I know how their [sic] cheating. We know. Watching closely.” Appearing on Newsmax, she asserted, “I know how Democrats are cheating, and that information has been given to the Youngkin campaign.” She also told this far-right network that an unidentified man had showed her “exactly how they’re stealing elections in Virginia.” She maintained, “They’re moving, in cyberland, they are switching inactive voters to active voters, all in the same week, it’s undetectable. I know what they’re doing…and now the Youngkin campaign has all that information.” When Virginia attorney general Mark Herring, a Democrat, demanded Chase hand over any material she possessed indicating improbities in the election, a Chase spokesperson told Talking Points Memo, “We don’t owe Herring a thing.” Chase also posted on Facebook a debunked charge that voters had been turned away from early voting in Virginia because they had been sent absentee ballots they never requested.

 

My prediction is this: Trump will demand an audit no matter who wins, and if McAuliffe's early voting lead holds out for a win, we'll see actual violence in the state. Virginia should be prepared to deal with both.

So should all of us.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The Roberts Court heard oral arguments on Monday over Texas's ridiculous crowdsourced anti-abortion law, and it didn't exactly go well for the Lone Star State, as Vox's Ian Milihiser explains.

 

Texas’s anti-abortion law is, Chief Justice Roberts wrote previously, “not only unusual, but unprecedented.” It effectively prohibits all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, but does so through a scheme that, in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s words, was “engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”

Under a doctrine known as “sovereign immunity,” private plaintiffs typically are not allowed to sue a state directly in federal court. But the Court held in Ex parte Young (1908) that private plaintiffs may sue the state official tasked with enforcing the law that such a plaintiff wishes to challenge. So, for example, if a law permitted the state attorney general to bring criminal proceedings against abortion providers, a party challenging the law would sue the attorney general.

But SB 8 explicitly forbids any “officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity” in Texas from enforcing it. Instead, it may only be enforced through private lawsuits. These lawsuits may be filed by “any person” who is not an employee of the state against anyone who either performs an abortion or who “aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” Plaintiffs who prevail in these lawsuits receive a bounty of at least $10,000, which must be paid by the defendant.

So the idea is that no one can sue to stop the law because no state official is a proper defendant.

This structure, it should be noted, does permit abortion providers to perform an abortion that violates SB 8, wait until they are sued, and then argue in Texas state court that SB 8 is unconstitutional. The problem with that approach, as Hearron told the justices, is that “no rational abortion provider would violate this law.”

Anyone who does so could be bombarded with thousands of lawsuits, forced to hire an army of lawyers to defend against them, and then be ordered to pay a bounty of at least $10,000 — which means that there is no upper limit on that bounty.

The abortion provider plaintiffs’ primary argument is that, under Young, they may sue state court judges who hear SB 8 lawsuits, and the state court clerks who docket those cases. Yet, while the justices did spend a good deal of time discussing whether judges and clerks are proper defendants, their most revealing questions focused on whether a law like SB 8 should be allowed under any circumstances.

The three most conservative justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — appeared likely to uphold Texas’s scheme, although Thomas did ask some tough questions of Stone, the Texas lawyer. Thomas noted that SB 8 is unlike other laws permitting lawsuits against private defendants because other laws typically only allow plaintiffs who’ve been injured in some way to file suit.

SB 8, by contrast, effectively deputizes anyone who is not a state official to enforce the state’s anti-abortion law — regardless of whether a particular plaintiff was actually injured by the person they are suing. As Thomas put it, SB 8 plaintiffs are “acting in concert with the state” to enforce the state’s law.

The three liberal justices, meanwhile, left no doubt that they view SB 8 as unacceptable. Sotomayor, for example, pointed to the Court’s school segregation decision in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), which held that the Constitution “can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes.”

Justice Stephen Breyer, meanwhile, quoted early 20th century Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, “I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as the laws of the several States.” SB 8, Breyer suggested, would prevent the Court from striking down state laws.

Roberts, meanwhile, seemed to share the liberal justices’ concerns. He imagined a slightly different version of SB 8, where the minimum bounty was $1 million instead of just $10,000 — and warned that no one would reasonably be willing to risk violating such a law because the cost of losing would be so high. He also criticized Texas for passing a law that allows abortion providers to be sued anywhere in the state, rather than following the ordinary rules governing which legal venues are appropriate.

So that leaves Kavanaugh and Barrett as the justices in the middle, and both appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ arguments.

 

Indeed, Justices Kickstand and Karen seemed rather worried about the argument that blue states could do to guns what Texas is trying to do to abortion: set up a bounty system to stop gun purchases in the state, and use citizens to enforce it. This made Kavanaugh very upset, actually. 

If SB 8 is upheld, and the Court permits the use of private bounty hunters to limit constitutional rights, another state could easily use this mechanism not just to restrict abortions and reproductive care, but also to chill other constitutional rights. As the Firearms Policy Coalition argued in its amicus brief, “it takes little in the way of creative copying for States hostile to the Second Amendment — New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, etc. — to declare that the ownership or sale of a handgun is illegal ... and set up a bounty system with the same unbalanced procedures and penalties adopted by Texas in this case.”

This possibility seemed to bother Kavanaugh, who asked about whether a state could authorize a million-dollar bounty against anyone who sells an AR-15, a popular form of semi-automatic rifle.

Even more significantly, Kavanaugh appeared to echo the liberal justices’ concerns that Texas is gaming the system. “There’s a loophole that’s been exploited here,” he told Stone, and suggested that the question before the Court in the Whole Woman’s Health case is “should we extend the principle of Ex parte Young to close this loophole?”

Stone, meanwhile, had a disastrous exchange with Kavanaugh where he argued that someone targeted by an SB 8-style law would have to lobby Congress to enact a federal law protecting their constitutional rights. It “would be difficult to get legislation through Congress,” Kavanaugh deadpanned in response to Stone — an acknowledgement the federal government’s dysfunctional legislative branch is not likely to do much of anything at all.

Barrett, meanwhile, played her cards a little closer to her chest than Kavanaugh, but she seemed bothered that there was no adequate way to challenge SB 8 unless the federal judiciary intervenes. At one point, she expressed concern that abortion providers “cannot get full review” of the law in state court. At another, she questioned whether an SB 8 defendant would be able to get a broad injunction blocking the law in state court.

So, while it remains to be seen how each justice votes, it appears that there may be as many as six votes to allow a lawsuit against SB 8 to move forward. The possibility that any constitutional right could be undermined by an SB 8-style law appeared to bother at least some of the conservative justices who ordinarily vote against abortion rights.

 

The good news is the right to sue Texas over this appears to be in the cards. The bad news is if the court overturns Roe v Wade next year, it's a moot point since Texas and any other Republican state will be able to ban abortion outright. 

A win to allow Texas to be sued and the law enjoined would be cold comfort for tens of millions of women headed to the forced breeding scenario of Gilead.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

President Joe Biden Manchin has decreed that we will not have a House vote today on the infrastructure bills, or soon, or maybe at all.

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on Monday called on Democrats to slow down in their work to advance a $1.75 trillion plan to overhaul the country’s health care, education, climate and tax laws, raising new doubts about the party’s timeline to advance a critical piece of President Biden’s economic agenda as soon as this week.

Speaking to reporters, Manchin lamented some of the “social” spending in the still-forming package, the means by which Democrats have crafted it, and the potential that it could add to the deficit while spurring new inflation. He called for more time to evaluate its broader fiscal effects.

“I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact it will have on our national debt, our economy and the American people,” Manchin said. “Every elected representative needs to know what they are voting for and the impact it has, not only on their constituents, but the entire country.”

“I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward,” the senator added. “But I’m equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.”

In making his remarks, Manchin also rebuked liberal House Democrats who have refused to vote on a parallel measure to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections. These left-leaning lawmakers, represented by the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus, have held up the infrastructure plan in the hopes of securing Manchin’s firm commitment on their other spending priorities — a strategy that the senator chastised on Monday.

“Holding this bill hostage is not going to work,” he said, urging an immediate vote on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan.

Manchin’s statement immediately generated new uncertainty about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to hold a vote this week on both of Biden’s long-sought economic packages. Liberal lawmakers have held firm in insisting that the chamber must vote on both bills in tandem, a position that some maintained despite the senator’s stern criticism.

“We intend to pass both bills in the next couple of days,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said during an interview Monday on CNN.

Reacting to Manchin’s allegation that liberals had held the infrastructure bill “hostage,” Jayapal dismissed the critiques, urged lawmakers to “keep tempers down” and stressed that Democrats should trust that the president can ultimately deliver the 51 votes necessary to pass it in the Senate.

“Pramila Jayapal is right,” Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, added in a tweet shortly after her interview ended on CNN. “Let’s vote these two bills out of the House this week.”

The White House, meanwhile, saw in Manchin’s comments a cause for optimism. In her own statement, press secretary Jen Psaki said that the $1.75 trillion bill meets the senator’s criteria to combat inflation, create jobs and cover its costs in full.

“As a result, we remain confident that the plan will gain Senator Manchin’s support,” Psaki said.

 

Manchin cutting off the Biden administration, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer by holding this press conference on Monday is a clear sign that he continues to hold all the leverage.  Rep. Jayapal and the House progressive caucus are already signaling that they will no longer hold the Senate bipartisan bill up, and that they recognize Manchin has all of the power here because unlike Jayapal, he's ready to destroy both bills.

People keep forgetting this. Manchin has the motive, the means, and the opportunity to commit a double homicide here and he's said at every opportunity that he will pull the trigger.

Biden is trying to ignore him, Jayapal is trying to go around him, but any solution is going to have to go through him.

That's just the damn truth. And should Jayapal and Pelosi relent and the House vote on the Senate plan get wrecked a third time and delayed once again, I don't think any of it's going to pass.

At all.

Last Call For The Big Lie

Pew Research has come out with a comprehensive poll measuring a number of culture war subjects, but by far the most disturbing trend is the Big Lie and the near guaranteed violence it will cause in the future.

 

After the violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the prospect of political violence threatening a peaceful transfer of power has become more than an abstract question. As noted above, nearly one in five Americans (18%) agree with the statement “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Republicans (30%) are more likely to agree with this than independents (17%) and Democrats (11%). Among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources, agreement increases to 40%, compared to 32% among those who most trust Fox News and 22% among those who most trust mainstream news sources.

White evangelical Protestants (26%) are the religious group most likely to agree that true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country, while 23% of those who follow non-Christian religions, 22% of Hispanic Catholics, 19% of white Catholics, 19% of other Christians, 17% of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants, 16% of Black Protestants, and 13% of religiously unaffiliated Americans agree.

The belief that violence could be an option is stronger among those who support former President Donald Trump and view changing culture as a threat. Among those who think the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, 39% agree that true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country, compared to only 10% among those who do not think the election was stolen.

Those who agree that things have changed so much they feel like strangers in their own country (29%) are more likely than those who disagree (12%) to agree that violence might be necessary, and those who think American culture has mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s (23%) are more likely than those who think it has changed for the better (14%) to say so.

Christian nationalist sympathies matter, as well: Among those who believe God has granted America a special role in human history, 27% agree that violence might be necessary, compared to 12% among those who do not think God granted America a special role.

 

No matter how you slice it, it represents tens of millions in this country who say that violence is now an option that they support for political power, including nearly 40% of Big Lie Republicans.

Political terrorist violence is inevitable, frankly.