Last Call For Grays And Greens

The Pentagon isn't about to confirm the existence of aliens, but the Defense Department's new Office Of Weird Crap will go over all the reported encounters with unidentified "anomalies" just in case.

 

A new office at the Pentagon is scrutinizing hundreds of reports of unidentified objects in air, sea, space and beyond, senior U.S. defense officials said Friday, and while it has discovered no signs of alien life, the search is set to expand.

The issue has taken on increasing seriousness as a bipartisan group of lawmakers presses the Defense Department to investigate instances of unidentified phenomena and disclose publicly what they learn. Established in July, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office is evaluating recent reports and soon could evaluate accounts that date back decades, officials said.

The Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Ronald Moultrie, told reporters during a news conference, the first to discuss the office and its ongoing work, that “At this time … we have nothing” to affirm the existence of space aliens.

The proliferation of drones, including those operated by foreign adversaries and amateur hobbyists, account for many of the reports, officials said.

“Some of these things almost collide with planes,” said Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the new office, who spoke to the media alongside Moultrie on Friday. “We see that on a regular basis.”

The U.S. government employs sophisticated sensors around the globe to collect data, and the office analyzes it for relevant information, they said, declining to elaborate.

While most of the reports the Pentagon investigates are about aerial objects, defense officials are increasingly concerned about unusual activity below the surface of the ocean, in space and on land. For that reason, the Pentagon now uses the term unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, rather than previous descriptions such as “unidentified flying object.”

Moultrie said that, “Unidentified phenomena in all domains … pose potential threats to personal security and operational security, and they deserve our urgent attention.”

Unidentified “trans-medium” objects, he said, is a class of phenomena that would jump between domains, like from the air to the sea. None has been documented yet, Moultrie noted.

The research is likely to expand next year. Congress wrote a provision into the next defense policy bill, which is awaiting President Biden’s signature, that requires the Defense Department to complete a “historical record report” about detailing unidentified phenomena observed and documented by the United States. If approved by Biden, the National Defense Authorization Act will then trigger “quite a research project, if you will, into the archives,” Kirkpatrick said.

Defense officials already are digging through old reports. Kirkpatrick, a physicist and career intelligence officer, said he will “adhere to the scientific method — and I will follow that data and science wherever it goes.” Some past reports, he acknowledged, may be highly classified and not yet known to him.

 

So yeah, Mulder and Scully are on the job in this era of instant information, deepfakes, drones and conspiracy theories. Even the Pentagon has to admit publicly now that the truth is out there.

Has to be a really wildly compelling job though if all my years watching X-Files, Special Unit 2, Warehouse 13 and Alien Nation meant anything.

 

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

An accused January 6th terrorist from Tennessee is now facing even more criminal legal trouble after being charged with a terrorist plot to kill the FBI agents investigating his previous January 6th terrorism.

 

Edward Kelley, who was previously charged with assaulting an officer during the Capitol riot, and Austin Carter, also from Tennessee, have been charged with conspiracy, retaliating against a federal official, interstate threats and solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

According to an affidavit, Kelley and Carter had a list of names of 37 law enforcement members to assassinate.

The list noted which officers were involved in Kelley’s arrest in May in Knoxville, Tennessee, on the January 6-related charges or present during the search of his home, and it included some of their phone numbers, according to the affidavit.

An “acquaintance” of Kelley and Carter gave the list to police and began cooperating with investigators, according to the affidavit.

CNN has reached out to Kelley’s attorney. Carter’s attorney, Joshua Hedrick, told CNN in a statement, “Our investigation is only just beginning, but we are looking forward to providing a zealous defense of Mr. Carter, who has asserted his innocence.”

In a news release Friday, the Justice Department said Kelley not only discussed attacking law enforcement agents with Carter and their unnamed acquaintance, but also planned to attack the FBI’s Knoxville, Tennessee Field Office.

“If I’m extradited to DC or you don’t hear about my status within 24 or 48 hours..if they are coming to arrest me again, start it,” Kelley told the acquaintance during a recorded call Wednesday, according to the affidavit. “You guys are taking them out at their office. What you and [Carter] need to do is recruit as many as you can…and you’re going to attack their office.”

When the acquaintance asked if Carter was in support of part of Kelley’s plans, Carter told the individual that “this is the time, add up or put up” and “to definitely make sure you got everything racked, locked up and loaded.”

 

We already had the attempted terrorist attack on the Cincinnati FBI field office this year in retaliation against the search of Mar-a-Lago for stolen classified materials. What do you think's going to happen when Trump starts facing indictments?

Oh, and if a Black or Muslim man plotted to kill dozens of FBI agents, the right wing noise machine would be talking about it for years.  January 6th terrorist does it and nary a peep out of the BACK THE BLUE crowd.

There's a reason for that.

Cajun Country Criming

If you can't beat your lifelong rival for parish Sheriff in a fair election, blow 'em up with a pipe bomb, right?

Politics is serious business in Cajun country, but Lafourche Parish Sheriff Duffy Breaux said he didn’t think it would get so serious that a onetime rival for office would try to kill him.

Social patterns are strongly influenced in this town 50 miles southwest of New Orleans by those who work in the dominant industries, oilfield roughnecks, commercial fishermen and farmers - quick to laugh and quick to anger.

They love good times, LSU football and politics.

U.S. Attorney John Volz says former sheriff Cyrus ″Bobby″ Tardo, 58, twice defeated for office by Breaux, hired a crew of former law officers and their associates to set a pipe bomb that almost blew Breaux’s foot off 10 days before Christmas.

Tardo also was charged last week with attempted first-degree murder in Lafourche Parish, where a bond of $2 million has been set for him.

Tardo and his three co-defendants have all professed their innocents, though they have not yet entered pleas.

Investigating authorities have declined to speculate on a motive, but Breaux said political revenge may have been involved.

″I can only see one thing - it’s a political thing,″ Breaux said. ″I always defeated him. Maybe he wanted me out of the way. I never thought a man would stoop that low.″

Tardo, a former state policeman, was elected sheriff in 1971. Breaux defeated him for the sheriff’s office in 1975, then won again when Tardo challenged him in 1979. Tardo then ran for parish president and won. He lost that post to Vernon Galliano in 1986. Parish is the Louisiana term for county.

Louis Breaux, a cousin of the sheriff and a second-term councilman, said he cannot believe the charges brought against Tardo.

″Talk to anyone in the parish. It’s hard to believe. He was pretty much of a loner, not much of a good mixer, not a hothead at all,″ he said Friday. ″People take their politics seriously in Lafourche Parish, but to try to kill a man? That’s going pretty far out.″

 

Something tells me Pardo and Breaux have hated each other for decades, and they finally made national news over that seething rivalry. Congrats, gents. It'll make a fascinating HBO comedy.

Last Call For A Taxing Explanation, Con't

With the House Democrats about out of time for Trump investigations, the issue of Trump's tax returns may find the Dems releasing those returns to the public next week.

 

House Democrats will likely unmask new details about former President Donald Trump’s long-hidden taxes following a key meeting now set for next week.

That would be a highly unusual move sure to ignite another post-presidential controversy surrounding Trump, who is running again for the White House.

Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal won access to Trump’s filings in November, after a long court fight, but they remain closely held, with only a handful of lawmakers and aides allowed to examine them. They’re still protected by strict privacy laws that make it a felony for anyone to divulge even basic details about Trump’s taxes.

But there is a way around those rules: Neal’s committee could vote privately to make them public, and that’s what the Massachusetts Democrat wants his colleagues to consider in a closed-door meeting now set for Tuesday at 3 p.m.

Democrats intend to release specifics from the returns, though what exactly will be unveiled is unclear. They could release Trump’s entire returns or perhaps something more limited, such as a summary.

Most of Neal’s colleagues have yet to see the filings, though he has granted access to the panel’s ranking Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

It would be extremely rare for lawmakers to forcibly release someone’s tax information, especially a former president’s, and Trump was not legally required to disclose any of his tax information while he was running for president or after he was elected.

But he defied a decades-old tradition of presidents voluntarily releasing their returns, incensing Democrats, who waged a three-and-a-half year court fight for the documents. A century-old law allows the heads of Congress’ tax committees to see anyone’s returns.

Many Democrats say the public has a right to know where the president’s earnings come from, and how much he pays in taxes. They also want to know how vigorously the IRS has been implementing a long-standing policy of automatically auditing every president.

“Nearly four years ago, the Ways and Means Committee set out to fulfill our legislative and oversight responsibilities, and evaluate the Internal Revenue Service’s mandatory audit program,” said Neal, in a statement.

“As affirmed by the Supreme Court, the law was on our side, and on Tuesday, I will update the members of the committee.”

Democrats believe the law granting Neal access to the filings only applies to the chairs of the tax panels, not their ranking members, so they’re racing to act before Republicans take over the House on Jan. 3.

Neal demanded Trump’s personal returns and filings for eight business entities from 2015 to 2020.

That overlaps with some of the records previously reported by the New York Times but also includes ones from additional years.

Trump’s real estate business was convicted earlier this month of tax fraud. He is promising an appeal.

 

So between Trump's tax returns and the January 6th Committee's final report, next week is going to be an absolute hurricane.

Stay tuned, dear readers. We're going to have a lot on our hands in a few days.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump didn't change the narrative from his legal troubles with his NFT trading card nonsense. so noe people are going to be talking next week about the charges the January 6th Committee will vote on recommending.

The Jan. 6 select committee is preparing to vote on urging the Justice Department to pursue at least three criminal charges against former President Donald Trump, including insurrection.

The report that the select panel is expected to consider on Monday afternoon, described to POLITICO by two people familiar with its contents, reflects some recommendations from a subcommittee that evaluated potential criminal referrals. Among the charges that subcommittee proposes for Trump: 18 U.S.C. 2383 Insurrection; 18 U.S.C. 1512(c) obstruction of an official proceeding; and 18 U.S.C. 371 Conspiracy to defraud the United States government.

It’s unclear whether the report will recommend additional charges for Trump beyond the three described to POLITICO. The document, according to the people familiar, includes an extensive justification for the recommended charges.

 

Indeed, House Democrats aren't waiting for those charges to be actually filed by the Justice Department and Special Counsel Jack Smith, and are looking to bar Trump from future office under the 14th Amendment.

House Democrats introduced legislation Thursday—sure to never make it out of a GOP-led House that takes over in January—that would bar former President Donald Trump from being president again under the 14th Amendment, part of a broader effort by Democrats and activists to keep Trump from holding future office through a little-used constitutional provision as he launches his 2024 campaign.

Section Three of the 14th Amendment states no one can serve in Congress or “hold any office, civil or military” who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the [United States], or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

More than 40 House Democrats introduced a bill Thursday that would disqualify Trump from office under that statute based on his trying to overturn the 2020 election and “mobilizing, inciting, and aiding” his supporters who attacked the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, which the bill argues constitutes engaging in an insurrection.

The bill points to Section Five of the 14th Amendment as giving Congress the power to enforce Trump’s disqualification under the amendment, but the Congressional Research Service notes that it’s possible Trump could also be barred from office without Congress and through lawsuits or criminal charges being brought against him instead.

The Justice Department could charge Trump with treason or engaging in an insurrection, which would likely result in him being prohibited from holding office if found guilty, the CRS notes, and charges against him could also give lawmakers more leverage to successfully use the 14th Amendment against him in Congress.

A rival candidate or voters could also try suing Trump and asking a court to bar him from taking office, the CRS notes, though it would be up to judges or the Supreme Court to determine if that strategy would succeed. 

Advocacy groups Free Speech for People and Mi Familia People have launched a campaign asking Secretaries of State and other elections officials to declare Trump is disqualified from being elected as president in their state’s election, which could keep Trump from being president if enough battleground states decided to keep him off the ballot to affect the election results.

51%. That’s the share of respondents in a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday who believe Trump should be disqualified from holding office under the 14th Amendment, after he called for “terminating” the Constitution in order to reverse his 2020 election loss.

 

And while that might even get a vote in the House, it'll never pass the Senate.

 

House Republicans will never allow Trump to be banished, even if convicted. their MAGA constituents will turn on them with breathtaking violence if they do.

 

Still, it'll be bad times ahead for Tang the Conqueror.

 

Tech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself, Con't

"Free speech" supporter Elon Musk is permanently banning journalists critical of him on Twitter, saying that tweeting publicly available information and videos involving him violate Twitter's rules, which he made up last night.

 

Twitter suspended the accounts of roughly half a dozen prominent journalists on Thursday, the latest change by the social media service under its new owner, Elon Musk.

The accounts suspended included Ryan Mac of The New York Times; Drew Harwell of The Washington Post; Aaron Rupar, an independent journalist; Donie O’Sullivan of CNN; Matt Binder of Mashable; Tony Webster, an independent journalist; Micah Lee of The Intercept; and the political journalist Keith Olbermann. It was unclear what the suspensions had in common; each user’s Twitter page included a message that said it suspended accounts that “violate the Twitter rules.”

The moves came a day after Twitter suspended more than 25 accounts that tracked the planes of government agencies, billionaires and high-profile individuals, including that of Mr. Musk. Many of the accounts were operated by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.

Last month, Mr. Musk had said he would allow the account that tracked his private plane to remain on Twitter, though he said it amounted to a security threat. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” he said in a tweet at the time.

But he changed his mind this week, after he claimed a car in which one of his sons was traveling was accosted by a “crazy stalker.” On Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted that any account that posted “real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”

Some of the journalists whose accounts were suspended had written about the accounts that tracked the private planes or had tweeted about those accounts. Some have also written articles that have been critical of Mr. Musk and his ownership of Twitter. Many of them had tens of thousands of followers on the platform.

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment and Twitter did not respond to an email for comment. In a tweet, Mr. Musk said Twitter’s rules on “doxxing” — which refers to the sharing of someone’s personal documents, including information such as their address — “apply to ‘journalists’ as well as everyone else.” He did not elaborate.

“Tonight’s suspension of the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent journalists, including The New York Times’s Ryan Mac, is questionable and unfortunate,” said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times. “Neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”

A representative for The Post did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Kristine Coratti Kelly, a CNN spokeswoman, said the suspensions were “concerning but not surprising” and that “Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses” it. In an appearance on CNN after his account was suspended, Mr. O’Sullivan said Twitter’s actions could intimidate journalists who cover companies owned by Mr. Musk.

“I was disappointed to see that I was suspended from Twitter without explanation,” Mr. Webster, whose account was suspended, said in an emailed comment. He added that he had tweeted about the Twitter account that tracked Mr. Musk’s private plane before his suspension.

Mr. Binder, the Mashable journalist, said that he had been critical of Mr. Musk but had not broken any of Twitter’s listed policies.

After his suspension from Twitter, Mr. Sweeney turned to Mastodon, an alternative social network. After Mastodon used Twitter to promote Mr. Sweeney’s new account on Thursday, Twitter suspended Mastodon’s account. As some journalists shared the news of Mastodon’s suspension, their own accounts were suspended.

Mr. Musk, who purchased Twitter in October for $44 billion, had said that his takeover would expand free speech on the platform and allow more people to participate in the public conversation. In recent weeks, he allowed some banned users to return to the platform, including former President Donald J. Trump, who was barred from his account after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots on Capitol Hill.

 

So, understand that if you've ever posted public information about someone else, or shared a video with people besides yourself in it, Twitter can now ban you at any time.

 

Who these policies will actually be enforced against will solely be the category of people who criticize Elon Musk and his friends, of course. But expect a lot more journalists and liberal activists to get permanent bans in the days and weeks ahead, and expect a lot more to move to competitors like Mastodon.

I'm at https://universeodon.com/@Zandarvts myself. Drop on by.

Last Call For The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin is getting a consolation prize for the failure of his legislation to significantly reduce environmental regulations for the coal, gas, and nuclear industry earlier this year by taking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hostage in the final days of the 117th Congress.

 

Angered by a pre-election presidential swipe at the coal industry, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has taken a hostage. Revealingly, that hostage is a chief architect within the executive branch of energy permitting reforms, which is supposedly a top priority of Manchin’s. (He recently sponsored a reform package that Republicans blocked.)

Late last week, Politico reported that Manchin would not hold a nomination hearing for Richard Glick, the current chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Glick’s term expired in June, and without confirmation by the end of the year, he would have to step down from FERC, leaving the agency deadlocked between Democrats and Republicans.

That could stall out the work FERC is doing on accelerating the electricity transmission build-out, which is generally seen as among the biggest challenges to the green transition. If more transmission lines cannot be built to move renewable energy from where it is produced to where power is needed, much of the clean-energy benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act will be lost, and hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases that could be avoided will be emitted per year.

Manchin conditioned his support for the IRA on getting a vote for his permitting reform bill. Ultimately, he pulled the package from the continuing resolution to fund the government in September because it didn’t have the votes. Manchin has talked about adding permitting reforms to the defense policy bill, which passes Congress every year.

The permitting package Manchin introduced earlier this year included electric transmission reforms that would give FERC “siting authority” to approve the construction of transmission lines (even over objections of regional planners) if they are deemed in the national interest. FERC has no such preemption authority now for transmission; it does have it for natural gas pipelines. The permitting bill would also allow FERC to undertake all environmental reviews for transmission projects, and to allocate the costs of such projects unilaterally.

This would hand FERC a considerable amount of power, which would all go to waste if the agency mired in gridlock because the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—Manchin—refused to confirm its leader in a fit of pique. Even without new powers, Biden’s FERC is actively working to accelerate transmission permitting, which Manchin’s maneuver would also hamper.

The situation calls into question whether Manchin cares all that much about bolstering domestic energy production, or if he is more myopically interested in getting particular fossil fuel projects in West Virginia approved and built, over local objections. At any rate, it’s hard to say he’s a sincere believer in improving transmission build-out, when he’s stalling its biggest champion in the government.

Manchin spokesperson Sam Runyon would only give the Prospect a brief one-line statement about the Glick nomination and its impact on permitting reform, one he has given other outlets. “The Chairman was not comfortable holding a hearing,” Runyon said in an email.

 

So no, Manchin will get his pound of flesh, and if he's still the Chair of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, he can continue to block the nomination of a FERC head for another two years by denying any Biden appointment a confirmation hearing. Biden may have won a major battle getting his Green New Deal passed, but it looks like America will be paying the Manchin toll on that road for a long time to come.

Trump Cards, Con't

 No really.  Trump cards.

The grifter-in-chief has now discovered NFTs.

The indictments cannot come quickly enough.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Decade Of Death And Destruction Edition

Ten years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, school shootings and open carry are even more prevalent as America stocks up for a war against itself.

Marking a decade since the Sandy Hook school massacre, President Joe Biden said Wednesday the United States must do more to tackle the nation's gun violence epidemic and people should have "societal guilt" for taking too long to address it.

Biden said in a statement that 10 years ago, on Dec. 14, 2012, "the unthinkable happened," when 20 young children and six educators were killed at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Survivors "still carry the wounds of that day," he said.

“We should have societal guilt for taking too long to deal with this problem. We have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again,” he said. “We owe it to the courageous, young survivors and to the families who lost part of their soul ten years ago to turn their pain into purpose.”

The president touted the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that he signed into law in June, the most sweeping legislation aimed at preventing gun violence in 30 years. Passed after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, the legislation provides grants to states for “red flag” laws, enhances background checks to include juvenile records, and closes the “boyfriend loophole” by keeping guns away from unmarried dating partners convicted of abuse. It will also require enhanced background checks for people ages 18 to 21 and funding for youth mental health services.

"Still, we must do more," Biden said. "I am determined to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines like those used at Sandy Hook and countless other mass shootings in America."

Banning assault weapons has been at the top of Biden's agenda this year, though it faces uncertain legislative odds due to opposition from Republicans in Congress. Then-President Bill Clinton signed the first and only U.S. assault weapons ban into law in 1994, but it expired in 2004.

Blue states will enforce the BSCA. Red states will not. They'll take the money for it and just give it to police departments to buy them more weapons to use against us. Besides, the Roberts Court will find a case to eliminate gun safety legislation nationwide, and unfettered access to firearms and ammo in all 50 states and DC (well, maybe not DC) will make the next Sandy Hook massacre look quaint.

No, what Sandy Hook marked in American history was the end of gun regulation. I laid out the path ten years ago.

If you want to stop guns, go after the manufacturers and the lobbyists. Period. Guns are a product, sold in the US. They have arguably the most powerful product lobby on Earth. You're going to need to start with them.

That time has come. 

Ten years later, even with a mortally wounded NRA, that battle has absolutely been lost. 

Welcome to Gunmerica.

Last Call For Equal Opportunity Offender

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ordered a list of all transgender Texans in the state in June. He never got it because the Texas Department of Public Safety wanted to know exactly why it was needed, but gosh, nobody seems to know exactly why a Republican AG in a state like Texas would want a list of all transgender folks in the state, least of all Ken Paxton's office.

 

Employees at the Texas Department of Public Safety in June received a sweeping request from Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office: to compile a list of individuals who had changed their gender on their Texas driver’s license and other department records during the past two years.

“Need total number of changes from male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month,” the chief of the DPS’s driver license division emailed colleagues in the department on June 30, according to a copy of a message obtained by The Washington Post through a public records request. “We won’t need DL/ID numbers at first but may need to have them later if we are required to manually look up documents.”

After more than 16,000 such instances were identified, DPS officials determined that a manual search would be needed to determine the reason for the changes, DPS spokesman Travis Considine told The Post in response to questions.

“A verbal request was received,” he wrote in an email. “Ultimately, our team advised the AG’s office the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced. Thus, no data of any kind was provided.”

Asked who in Paxton’s office had requested the records, he replied: “I cannot say.”

The behind-the-scenes effort by Paxton’s office to obtain data on how many Texans had changed their gender on their license came as the attorney general, Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican leaders in the state have been publicly marshaling resources against transgender Texans.

 

Yep. It's a complete and total mystery. Bonus enigma points:

Paxton’s office bypassed the normal channels — DPS’s government relations and general counsel’s offices — and went straight to the driver license division staff in making the request, according to a state employee familiar with it, who said the staff was told that Paxton’s office wanted “numbers” and later would want “a list” of names, as well as “the number of people who had had a legal sex change.”

 

Surely small government, free speech, and civil liberties loving Texans like Paxton would never dream of using a list like that against citizens of the Lone Star State, especially targeting the people on that list as enemies of the Republic of Texas.

Right?

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Six months after Dobbs and the death of Roe v Wade, anti-abortion lunatics are furious that tens of thousands of women, medical staff, and abortion advocates and activists haven't been put in state prisons yet, and they are doing everything in their power to change that even as Republicans realize that abortion cost them dozens of races across the country last month.

The largest anti abortion organization in Texas has created a team of advocates assigned to investigate citizens who might be distributing abortion pills illegally.

Students for Life of America, a leading national antiabortion group, is making plans to systematically test the water Erin Brockovich-style in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants they say result from medication abortion.

And Republican lawmakers in Texas are preparing to introduce legislation that would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child pornography.

Nearly six months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, triggering abortion bans in more than a dozen states, many antiabortion advocates fear that the growing availability of illegal abortion pills has undercut their landmark victory. Now they are grasping for new ways to crack down on those breaking the law.

Antiabortion advocates had hoped the June decision would significantly decrease the number of abortions in the United States. But abortion rights activists have ramped up efforts to funnel abortion pills — a two-step regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that is widely regarded as safe — into states with strict new bans, working with rapidly expanding international suppliers as well as U.S.-based distributors to meet demand.

Now many conservatives are complaining that the abortion bans are not being sufficiently enforced, even though much of the illegal activity is happening in plain sight, as abortion rights advocates seek to reach women in need. Leaders interviewed on both sides of the debate had not heard of any examples of people charged for violating abortion bans since Roe fell, a crime punishable by at least several years in prison across much of the South and Midwest.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who has started to speak with Republican governors about the prevalence of illegal abortion pill networks. “It hasn’t happened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t.”

Abortion bans include penalties only for people involved in facilitating illegal abortions, not for the pregnant women themselves.

The push on the right for enforcement reflects the extent to which both sides of the abortion battle are recalibrating after a tumultuous year that has challenged many long-held assumptions about the politics of the issue — and left the state of abortion access in the United States hard to assess. Interviews with more than 30 of the most influential advocacy group leaders, policymakers and litigators on the abortion issue found that far from settling the decades-old abortion question, the fall of Roe has triggered a major new phase of combat set to play out over the next few years in courtrooms, state capitals and the next presidential election.

 

The real issue is that at some point, any Republican 2024 hopeful is going to have to come out and say they are going to ban abortion medication nationwide, and that's going to get them destroyed in the general election.

The best example of the disconnect is here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul easily won reelection by smashing Charles Booker by 20+ points, but the state's constitutional amendment eliminating the right to an abortion lost by almost 5 points.

Republicans finally caught the car they were chasing, and they are getting dragged all over the road now. And don't believe them when they say they won't criminalize women getting abortions, because they are absolutely going to and they have lied about every other aspect of this.

Politics aside, abortion restriction states are killing women and children anyway.

New research released Wednesday adds to a growing body of evidence showing a link between more restrictive abortion policies and higher rates of maternal and infant mortality.

The analysis comes from the Commonwealth Fund, an independent research organization focused on health policy. It found that strict restrictions on abortion are associated with poorer access to health care for pregnant people and infants, which in turn raises the risk of negative outcomes such as mental health challenges and death.

According to the report, states that heavily restricted abortion access in 2020 had maternal death rates that were 62% higher than they were in states where abortion was more easily accessible.

The disparity may be aggravated by state-level changes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, the report says.

People of color, those who are uninsured and those who live on low incomes or in underserved areas already face additional risks that threaten their lives during pregnancy, such as difficulty accessing consistent pre- and post-natal care, said Dr. Laurie Zephyrin, the senior vice president for advancing health equity at the Commonwealth Fund.

"Then, on top of all that, you're adding this variation in abortion services, reproductive health services, by states," Zephyrin said. "We're just adding on to an already fractured system."

62% higher rates of infant and mother mortality, and that was before Dobbs. And of course, the people suffering the most are Black women.

The cruelty is the point.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Not content with his rapidly improving poll numbers over Donald Trump out this week, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is calling for a state Supreme Court grand jury investigation into vaccine makers for "criminally misleading" Floridians into believe vaccines are safe, which is an amazing amount of fascist bullshit even for Ron DeSantis.

 

At a roundtable he convened of Covid vaccine skeptics and opponents — including his own surgeon general — he formally called on the state Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines, a position at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

DeSantis was a major booster of the vaccines last year and once called them lifesaving, but he later turned against them, mirroring a shift in conservative Republican opinion. By January, he refused to say if he even got a booster, and that prompted Trump — whose Operation Warp Speed led to the rapid development of the vaccines — to take a thinly veiled shot at him, albeit not by name, for being “gutless.”

The decision by DeSantis to now investigate the vaccines was widely panned by those in Trump’s orbit.

“Prior to this, his position was identical to Trump’s, and he advocated the efficiency and safety of vaccines. That’s his record,” said Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump and an outspoken critic of DeSantis.

“This is a shot across the bow. We know exactly what Ron is up to,” said another Trump adviser who spoke more bluntly, but on the condition of anonymity to be able to speak freely.

“The fact is, we’ve seen this coming for a year, ever since Ron started to get anti-vax,” the Republican said, explaining the governor's opposition to the vaccine. “Yes, there’s a portion of our base that is anti-vax and some people could walk away from Trump over it. That’s why Ron is doing it. It’s so transparent.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said in a written statement that that “after China unleashed this deadly virus onto the rest of the world, President Trump’s administration worked tirelessly to secure medical equipment to save the lives of Americans who were infected."

"Operation Warp Speed was a once-in-a-lifetime initiative that gave people the option of utilizing therapeutics if they wished to do so," he added. "He also fought against any attempt to federalize the pandemic response by protecting every state’s right to ultimately decide what is best for their people because of the unique challenges each state faced.”

Those familiar with DeSantis’ thinking downplayed the political ramifications, pointing out that he was one of the first high-profile Republicans to challenge expert opinions and health care professionals when it came to the Covid response, from his decision to reopen the state and schools early to banning vaccine and mask mandates to hiring Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has been criticized for questioning vaccines in far-right social media channels.

DeSantis was also an early public critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, during the pandemic who became anathema to conservatives in 2020, even as Trump resisted pressure to oust him (while still often criticizing him).

“This isn’t about 2024. This is about what DeSantis believes in,” said one Republican who was not authorized to speak publicly on his behalf.

 

Oh, by the way, not only are the Covid vaccines safe, they have saved 3.2 million lives so far. 

And yes, that last statement in the article there is an absolute lie, because if DeSantis's dog and pony show here is absolutely designed to tie Trump to Biden, Fauci, and the vaccine and use it to destroy him in 2024.

The Trumpies are already upset over this and calling DeSantis a hypocrite.

But if there's any group in America immune to charges of hypocrisy, it's Republican primary voters.

 

In any fair universe, this would be the end of DeSantis. Nothing, of course, is fair.  In fact, House Republicans and more than a few Democrats want the same kind of investigation into Covid's origins.

Bipartisan legislation to create a Sept. 11-style independent panel to investigate the pandemic response by both the Trump and Biden administrations appears stalled on Capitol Hill, despite a 20-to-2 vote in favor of the measure by the Senate health committee. Backers say their last hope for passage is to tack it onto an upcoming spending bill, the final major must-pass piece of legislation of the current Congress.

The commission would be created as part of a sprawling bill called the PREVENT Pandemics Act. The measure would also make the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a Senate-confirmed position and take other steps to improve pandemic preparedness, including increasing coordination among public health agencies and addressing supply chain deficiencies.

There has been no vocal opposition to the bill, but it has been in limbo since it passed the health committee in March — a victim of inertia and a lack of White House support.

There is no companion measure in the House, where Republicans are planning their own pandemic-related investigations once they take control of the chamber next month. More significantly, President Biden has not taken a public position on the bill, and the White House is privately resisting it, according to an official familiar with the measure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its status.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who has focused his efforts on judicial nominations and the president’s agenda, has not brought the legislation up for a floor vote. The White House declined to comment.

 

So yeah, odds are they are going to get it. DeSantis is jumping on it first, so when House Republicans start their own probe, they will be "following his lead".

They should be following him to the dustbin of history.

Last Call For A Life And No Death Situation

As one of her final acts before fellow Democrat Tina Kotek is sworn in, Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown is commuting the sentences of all of the state's 17 death row inmates to life without parole.

Gov. Kate Brown announced on Tuesday afternoon that she would commute the sentences of all 17 individuals on Oregon’s death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the latest in her end-of-term string of clemency decisions.

“I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even if a terrible crime placed them in prison,” Brown said in a statement sent out in a press release.

“This is a value that many Oregonians share,” Brown said.

Oregon has not executed anyone on death row for a quarter century and Brown continued the moratorium that former Gov. John Kitzhaber put in place in 2011. Governor-elect Tina Kotek, who like Brown and Kitzhaber is a Democrat, is personally opposed to the death penalty based on her religious beliefs and said during the campaign that she would continue the moratorium.

Voters have gone back and forth on the death penalty over the years, abolishing and reinstating it repeatedly. Voters’ most recent decision on the death penalty was in 1984, when they inserted it into the state Constitution.

Oregon is one of 27 states that authorizes the death penalty, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

 

Not everyone is pleased by this.

Randy Lee Guzek was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to death for Rod and Lois Houser, of Terrebonne. Sue Shirley, the Housers’ daughter, said Tuesday she was aware of the governor’s decision to commute Guzek’s sentence, but had not heard from the state directly.

“I’m horrified and outraged and I don’t know what this means,” Shirley said Tuesday. “Will true life be true life?”

Shirley noted that Guzek has been resentenced four times over the past 24 years as the Legislature has changed rules, though his death penalty sentence has been repeatedly upheld.

“All I know is that we never get to have a say,” she said Tuesday. “Forty-eight jurors have said the just sentence was the death penalty, but that’s been a moving target. The Legislature has changed the rules time and time again and it’s just been a nightmare.”

But Oregon has effectively ended the death penalty in the state and hasn't executed anyone in nearly 25 years.

 

In 2019, the Legislature passed a bill that limited the crimes that qualified for the death penalty by narrowing the definition of aggravated murder to killing two or more people as an act of organized terrorism; intentionally and with premeditation kilIing a child younger than 14; killing another person while locked up in jail or prison for a previous murder; or killing a police, correctional or probation officer.

More than two years have passed since the Brown administration dismantled Oregon’s death row, a move that acknowledged the effective end of capital punishment in the state.

Brown said in her statement Tuesday that commuting the sentences of people currently serving on Oregon’s death row was consistent with what she described as lawmakers’ “near abolition” of capital punishment.

“Unlike previous commutations I’ve granted to individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary growth and rehabilitation, this commutation is not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the individuals on death row,” Brown said. “Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral. It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably.”

 

Governor Brown could not be more correct. The death penalty is a barbaric relic that never should have been allowed in this country, and overwhelmingly it has been used against Black folk to deliver the ultimate sanction without warrant or evidence.

 

Actually being pro-life means getting rid of capital punishment.

Hot New Fusion Cuisine

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have apparently achieved a breakthrough in fusion technology: getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put into it, known as ignition.

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.

Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.

The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”

From an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal. Within the sun and stars, fusion continually combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing sunlight and warmth that bathes the planets.

In experimental reactors and laser labs on Earth, fusion lives up to its reputation as a very clean energy source, devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy.

There was always a nagging caveat, however. In all of the efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consumed more energy than the fusion reactions generated.

That changed at 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility blasted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen nubbin of hydrogen encased in diamond.

The laser beams entered at the top and bottom of the cylinder, vaporizing it. That generated an inward onslaught of X-rays that compresses a BB-size fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium, the heavier forms of hydrogen.

In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet. Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, an energy gain of 1.5.

This crossed the threshold that laser fusion scientists call ignition, the dividing line where the energy generated by fusion equals the energy of the incoming lasers that start the reaction.

“You see one diagnostic and you think maybe that’s not real and then you start to see more and more diagnostics rolling in, pointing to the same thing,” said Annie Kritcher, a physicist at Livermore who described reviewing the data after the experiment. “It’s a great feeling.”

The successful experiment finally delivers the ignition goal that was promised when construction of the National Ignition Facility started in 1997. When operations began in 2009, however, the facility hardly generated any fusion at all, an embarrassing disappointment after a $3.5 billion investment from the federal government.

 

And they didn't just get a bit more energy out of it, they got 50% more energy out of it, meaning that this is an honest-to-goodness real advancement in power. I know it's kind of basic, but a fusion experiment that didn't release enough energy to cover the cost going in wasn't of much use to anyone, and that's where the fusion lab has been for the last 13 years.

Until last week.  That was the big obstacle, and they cracked it wide open.

So what does that mean now?

I wouldn't expect commercially available fusion power in my lifetime, to be honest.  Maybe in Millennial or Gen Z years. But it's a start, and a big one.

And that's if we don't splatter ourselves all over history with fusion weapons in the interim, which given the state of humanity today is a very real outcome down the line. Someone's going to decide that nuclear blast damage without all the nasty plutonium fallout is a really good idea and worth pursuing.

But yeah, this is a huge step in humanity, one of those Civilization game-level milestones on the tech tree.

This is a big one, folks.  Trust in that.

Going All Judge Mental, Con't

I've been saying for months now that conservative judges weren't going to stop taking rights away from marginalized groups like women, Black folk, the LGBTQ+ community, and more in the wake of Dobbs and the death of Roe v Wade. They were never going to just give up and stop there, and wouldn't you know it, they're going after contraception after all.

Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, spent much of his career trying to interfere with other people’s sexuality.

A former lawyer at a religious conservative litigation shop, Kacsmaryk denounced, in a 2015 article, a so-called “Sexual Revolution” that began in the 1960s and 1970s, and which “sought public affirmation of the lie that the human person is an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology, and that marriage, sexuality, gender identity, and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.”

So, in retrospect, it’s unsurprising that Kacsmaryk would be the first federal judge to embrace a challenge to the federal right to birth control after the Supreme Court’s June decision eliminating the right to an abortion.

Last week, Kacsmaryk issued an opinion in Deanda v. Becerra that attacks Title X, a federal program that offers grants to health providers that fund voluntary and confidential family planning services to patients. Federal law requires the Title X program to include “services for adolescents,”

The plaintiff in Deanda is a father who says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage.” He claims that the program must cease all grants to health providers who do not require patients under age 18 to “obtain parental consent” before receiving Title X-funded medical care.

This is not a new argument, and numerous courts have rejected similar challenges to publicly funded family planning programs, in part because the Deanda plaintiff’s legal argument “would undermine the minor’s right to privacy” which the Supreme Court has long held to include a right to contraception.

But Kacsmaryk isn’t like most other judges. In his brief time on the bench — Trump appointed Kacsmaryk in 2019 — he has shown an extraordinary willingness to interpret the law creatively to benefit right-wing causes.

This behavior is enabled, moreover, by the procedural rules that frequently enable federal plaintiffs in Texas to choose which judge will hear their case — 95 percent of civil cases filed in Amarillo, Texas’s federal courthouse are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. So litigants who want their case to be decided by a judge with a history as a Christian right activist, with a demonstrated penchant for interpreting the law flexibly to benefit his ideological allies, can all but ensure that outcome by bringing their lawsuit in Amarillo.

And so, last Thursday, the inevitable occurred. Kacsmaryk handed down a decision claiming that “the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.”

Kacsmaryk’s decision is riddled with legal errors, some of them obvious enough to be spotted by a first-year law student. And it contradicts a 42-year-long consensus among federal courts that parents do not have a constitutional right to target government programs providing contraceptive care. So there’s a reasonable chance that Kacsmaryk will be reversed on appeal, even in a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees.

Nevertheless, Kacsmaryk’s opinion reveals that there are powerful elements within the judiciary who are eager to limit access to contraception. And even if Kacsmaryk’s opinion is eventually rejected by a higher court, he could potentially send the Title X program into turmoil for months.

 

Title X is the main vehicle through which government entities fund birth control at clinics and  practices across the country. Family planning services are vital, and here we have a lunatic judge saying no adolescent in America can even get birth control unless specifically approved by parents. Just like the entire flap about school boards, parents, not experts like doctors, now make choices for teen health.

 

And we know at the college age level, Title X contraception improves the graduation rate of women by 10-12%.  Requiring parental permission for that is awful.

Of course, if there's no right to contraception, then requiring consent for birth control before anyone in America has sex means once again, women have no right to their own bodies.

And that's the point.