The Turtle Versus History, Con't

Kentucky certainly isn't immune to battles over the new bogeyman of "Critical Race Theory" that Republicans are misusing and purposefully misrepresenting, as Senate GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell believes it's the issue that will give him the Senate majority 20 months from now.

The University of Louisville has issued a rare rebuke of one of its most famous and powerful graduates, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, over McConnell’s comments on Monday about the significance of slavery in American history.

Taking questions at a U of L event, McConnell was asked about his stance on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which seeks to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”

The name of the project refers to the year enslaved Africans were first brought to American shores.

“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history,” McConnell said Monday. “I simply disagree with the notion that the New York Times laid out there that the year 1619 was one of those years.”

On Thursday, a senior U of L administrator and the head of the committee overseeing the university’s new antiracism initiative snapped back at McConnell in a university-wide email.

“To imply that slavery is not an important part of United States history not only fails to provide a true representation of the facts, but also denies the heritage, culture, resilience and survival of Black people in America,” V. Faye Jones, U of L’s interim senior associate vice president of diversity and equity, said in the email.

She continued, “It also fails to give context to the history of systemic racial discrimination, the United States’ ‘original sin’ as Sen. McConnell called it, which still plagues us today.

“What we know to be true is that slavery and the date the first enslaved Africans arrived and were sold on U.S. soil are more than an ‘exotic notion.’ If the Civil War is a significant part of history, should not the basis for it also be viewed as significant?”

Jones added that U of L President Neeli Bendapudi shares her view: "President Bendapudi, Provost (Lori Stewart) Gonzalez and I reject the idea that the year 1619 is not a critical moment in the history of this country."

McConnell, a 1964 U of L graduate, has long been a booster of the university and maintained close ties to it. In 1991, he established U of L’s McConnell Center, a nonpartisan program that “seeks to identify, recruit and nurture Kentucky’s next generation of great leaders.”

Bendapudi, who was hired in 2018, has embraced an “antiracist agenda” for the university and added the word “antiracist” to U of L’s formal mandate from the legislature to become a “premier metropolitan research university.”

Bendapudi has said such an agenda should not be controversial.

“To me, anti-racism is extremely simple,” she told WDRB in October 2020. “A racist idea is when you say that one race, by itself, is superior or inferior to another. So, anti-racism is the very simple premise that your race does not confer any inherent inferiority, or superiority, to somebody.”

 

McConnell of course wants a fight over this, knowing it will help the KY GOP defeat Gov. Beshear in 2023. The larger issue is that President Bendapudi is right, but Republicans will just say that anti-racism is racism because it makes white people the villains and thus "inferior" in the eyes of other folks. It'll never end, it's the battle America's been fighting for 400 years, and it just ebbs and flows depending on how this current generation of mostly white electorates feel.

And so it goes.

Retribution Execution, Con't

It's no longer a question of if Rep. Liz Cheney will remain in the House Republican leadership, it's a question of how soon she's ejected from from Congress and the party itself by the Wyoming GOP.

Rep. Liz Cheney’s colleagues are set to boot her from House GOP leadership this month. Now Republicans back in her home state of Wyoming are plotting how to remove her from Congress entirely.

There is no shortage of Republicans eager to take on Cheney in a 2022 primary since her vote to impeach President Donald Trump and her subsequent criticism of him tanked her popularity in Wyoming. But the crowded field is also a risk for the anti-Cheney forces, making it more possible for her to win with a plurality.

That might be the only path back to Washington for Cheney, barring a drastic change of fortune: Internal polling conducted for Trump’s PAC in January and, more recently, for the pro-Trump Club for Growth show a majority of Wyoming Republicans disapproving of Cheney and continuing strong support for Trump.

The collapse in support is a remarkable fall from grace for Cheney, who just last year passed on an open Senate seat in her state to remain in House leadership instead. After ascending to GOP conference chair — the same post her father once held — she was touted as a future House speaker. Now, it’s impossible to call her anything other than an underdog in her own congressional seat.

Trump and his orbit have taken a strong interest in the race, and an endorsement could help clarify the field, which already features four Republicans who have filed to run against Cheney. But more contenders are waiting on the sidelines, and Trump’s political team, according to two people familiar with the efforts, has shown early interest in recruiting a pair of Republicans who aren’t already in the race: attorney Darin Smith, who ran for the seat in 2016, and Wyoming Secretary of State Ed Buchanan.

“I think anybody who's a decent Republican is going to get behind whoever Donald Trump eventually endorses,” Smith said in an interview. “He's gonna look under every rock and look over the lay of the land, and he's going to determine who that person that he's going to get behind is.”

He said he’s been approached about entering the race and is seriously considering it. "We need somebody, for sure, that will export Wyoming's values to Washington and not the other way around,” Smith said.

Smith placed fourth in Wyoming’s Republican congressional primary in 2016, when the seat was open, and appears more likely to enter the fray than Buchanan, who would have to forgo reelection as secretary of state to challenge Cheney. The two are unlikely to both jump into the primary, and people close to Buchanan said they think he is leaning against a run. 

I wouldn't go out of my way to feel bad for Liz Cheney though, she's just as awful as her father.  If she does lose her seat, she'll land at a law firm and then move on to think tanks and fellowships for a while. But she will stand as an object lesson to Trump and the GOP, and hopefully to voters who will realize which side really is using "cancel culture" to crush all dissent.

Hint: it's not the Democrats, guys. And after the GOP gets done smashing all resistance in their party, they'll come for the rest of us. As Adam Serwer reminds us, Cheney is a fraud who made Trump possible, and she's upset she's lost control of the monster she made.

During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat.

Until the insurrection, she was a loyal Trumpist who frequently denounced the Democratic Party. “They’ve become the party of anti-Semitism; they’ve become the party of infanticide; they’ve become the party of socialism,” she said in 2019. Her critics now, such as Scalise and the buffoonish Representative Matt Gaetz, formerly gushed over her ability to bring, as the Times put it in 2019, “an edge to Republican messaging that was lacking.”

That “edge” was Cheney’s specialty from the moment she emerged as a rising star in the GOP. In 2010, Cheney launched a McCarthyite crusade against seven unnamed attorneys in the Obama-era Justice Department who had previously represented terrorism suspects held in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration’s assertions of imperial power in the War on Terror violated the Constitution many times over—the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agreed—and the lawyers who represented detainees were defending the fundamental constitutional right to counsel. They were affirming the integrity of the American legal system; Cheney smeared them as terrorist sympathizers, as The Enemy.

“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Cheney lamented in her Washington Post op-ed. But her colleagues are merely following her example.

“Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al-Qaeda Seven,” a 2010 ad from Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, intoned ominously, as if it were referring to the actual 9/11 hijackers and not the attorneys who had represented them in court. “Whose values do they share?" The Enemy has no rights, and anyone who imagines otherwise, let alone seeks to uphold them, is also The Enemy.

This is the logic of the War on Terror, and also the logic of the party of Trump. As George W. Bush famously put it, “You are either with us or with the terrorists.” You are Real Americans or The Enemy. And if you are The Enemy, you have no rights. As Spencer Ackerman writes in his forthcoming book, Reign of Terror, the politics of endless war inevitably gives way to this authoritarian logic. Cheney now finds herself on the wrong side of a line she spent much of her political career enforcing. Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, infamously announced that America might have to employ “the dark side” in its fight against al-Qaeda; forgetting the entire point of Star Wars, which is that the dark side ultimately consumes its adherents. Not until the mob ransacked the Capitol in January, it seems, did she begin to understand that millions of Americans believe the things their leaders tell them.

 

Cheney, Scalise, Trump, Stefanik, Gaetz, and Taylor Greene: they're all fascists who want complete control of the country by any means necessary. They just have slightly different tolerances for various tactics.  

The answer to the Trump problem is not "better Republicans".

The answer is voting them all out of power.

Last Call For Laboring Under A Misconception

The Trump states would rather punish workers for not working than help raise people out of poverty, starting with Montana's GOP government planning on rejecting all federal COVID-19 relief bill unemployment funds because Biden was the person who signed the bill into law.

Montana plans to stop some of its federally-funded unemployment benefits to address “the state’s severe workforce shortage,” according to its labor department, which will leave many out-of-work residents without any support at all.

“Nearly every sector in our economy faces a labor shortage,” Governor Greg Gianforte said in a statement on Tuesday. “The vast expansion of federal unemployment benefits is now doing more harm than good.”

Instead, the state will begin to offer return-to-work bonuses to help employers looking to hire.

Starting June 27, Montanans will lose access to the extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits, but maintain their regular benefits. Contractors, gig workers, and others will also lose access to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, meaning those workers won’t get any benefits.

Those relying on the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which gives additional weeks of unemployment benefits to workers, will stop receiving benefits. The state also plans to reinstate the requirement that stipulates workers must be actively searching for a job to qualify for unemployment benefits.

“Montana’s move to end these fully federally-funded UI programs, along with their COVID-19 exceptions, is cruel, ill-informed, and disproportionately harms Black and Indigenous People of Color and women,” Alexa Tapia, unemployment insurance campaign coordinator at the National Employment Law Project, told Yahoo Money. “Ending these programs would leave 22,459 people unable to support their families and hurt thousands more.”

Montana's unemployment rate was 3.8% in March, down from its 11.9% pandemic peak in April 2020, according to data by the Labor Department.

The federally-funded unemployment programs run through September 6 nationwide. Montana’s cancellation would cost workers at least $3,000 per worker in supplement benefits if they couldn’t find work through the program expiration. Workers on PUA and PEUC would lose at least $4,500 in benefits because they no longer will be eligible for the base unemployment benefit.

Different papers have established that the extra $600 in benefits distributed earlier in the pandemic had limited labor supply effects and likely didn’t disincentivize work, including one by the National Bureau of Economic Research and another by Yale University. The current supplemental benefit is worth half of what those papers reviewed.

“The 100% federally-paid unemployment benefits have boosted spending and contributed to the strong economic recovery,” Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told Yahoo Money. “It's shortsighted for the state to sacrifice that economic stimulus based on the anecdotal labor shortages concerns of a few employers, especially given the limited evidence of work disincentives from unemployment pay during the pandemic."

 

Of course, being shortsighted and disproportionately hurting Black, brown, and Indigenous folks in Montana is the entire point of the "labor shortage" lie. Montana's minimum wage is just now getting to $8.75 an hour, and people don't want to work for peanuts even in states with low costs of living. The answer is to make more high-paying jobs available and to raise wages to attract more workers, but that side of economics doesn't exist for the GOP.

Unemployment benefits don't keep workers from working, but if you think $300 a week is too much, maybe pay workers more to work?

Naah, let's just hurt those people some more.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

As more and more Americans live in states that no longer allow the death penalty, the remaining states are going for MAXIMUM OVERDEATH.

The South Carolina House voted Wednesday to add a firing squad to the state’s execution methods amid a lack of lethal-injection drugs — a measure meant to jump-start executions in a state that once had one of the busiest death chambers in the nation.

The bill, approved by a 66-43 vote, will require condemned inmates to choose either being shot or electrocuted if lethal injection drugs aren’t available. The state is one of only nine to still use the electric chair and will become only the fourth to allow a firing squad.

South Carolina last executed a death row inmate 10 years ago Thursday.

The Senate already had approved the bill in March, by a vote of 32-11. The House only made minor technical changes to that version, meaning that after a routine final vote in the House and a signoff by the Senate, it will go to Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who has said he will sign it.

There are several prisoners in line to be executed. Corrections officials said three of South Carolina’s 37 death row inmates are out of appeals. But lawsuits against the new death penalty rules are also likely.

“Three living, breathing human beings with a heartbeat that this bill is aimed at killing,” said Democratic Rep. Justin Bamberg, rhythmically thumping the microphone in front of him. “If you push the green button at the end of the day and vote to pass this bill out of this body, you may as well be throwing the switch yourself.”

South Carolina first began using the electric chair in 1912 after taking over the death penalty from individual counties, which usually hanged prisoners. The other three states that allow a firing squad are Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Three inmates, all in Utah, have been killed by firing squad since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Nineteen inmates have died in the electric chair this century.

South Carolina can’t put anyone to death now because its supply of lethal-injection drugs expired and it has not been able to buy any more. Currently, inmates can choose between the electric chair and lethal injection. Since the drugs are not available, they choose injection.

The bill retains lethal injection as the primary method of execution if the state has the drugs, but requires prison officials to use the electric chair or firing squad if it doesn’t.

“Those families of victims to these capital crimes are unable to get any closure because we are caught in this limbo stage where every potential appeal has been exhausted and the legally imposed sentences cannot be carried out,” said Republican Rep. Weston Newton.

The lack of drugs, and decisions by prosecutors to seek guilty pleas with guaranteed life sentences over death penalty trials, have cut the state’s death row population nearly in half — from 60 to 37 inmates — since the last execution was carried out in 2011. From 2000 to 2010, the state averaged just under two executions a year.

The reduction also has come from natural deaths, and prisoners winning appeals and being resentenced to life without parole. Prosecutors have sent just three new inmates to death row in the past decade.

Democrats in the House offered several amendments, including not applying the new execution rules to current death row inmates; livestreaming executions on the internet; outlawing the death penalty outright; and requiring lawmakers to watch executions. All failed.

Seven Republicans voted against the bill, while one Democrat voted for it.

Opponents of the bill brought up George Stinney, the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century. He was 14 when he was sent to South Carolina’s electric chair after a one-day trial in 1944 for killing two white girls. A judge threw out the Black teen’s conviction in 2014. Newspaper stories reported that witnesses said the straps to keep him in the electric chair didn’t fit around his small frame.

“So not only did South Carolina give the electric chair to the youngest person ever in America, but the boy was innocent,” Bamberg said.

 

To sum up, the party that considers the possibility of fraudulent voting enough to overturn a presidential election and resort to armed insurrection has no problem murdering people who may be wrongfully convicted, and wants to murder them more quickly. 

With guns!

Because guns are always the answer here in Gunmerica.

The Next Housing Crisis, Con't

Republicans got their federal judge to overturn the CDC's moratorium on evictions as a public health measure, this time in the DC Circuit, which almost certainly means this will be fast tracked to the Supreme Court.

Federal Judge Dabney Friedrich struck down on Wednesday the national eviction moratorium, potentially leaving millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes two months earlier than expected.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has banned most evictions across the country since September. The protection was slated to expire at the end of January, but President Joe Biden has extended it, first until April, and later through June.

Some 1 in 5 renters across the U.S. are struggling to keep up with their payments amid the coronavirus pandemic, and states are scrambling to disburse more than $45 billion in rental assistance allocated by Congress.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said it planned to appeal the ruling. It also seeks a stay of the decision, meaning the ban would remain in effect throughout the court battle.

Speaking at her daily briefing, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said the Biden administration recognized the importance of the eviction moratorium for Americans who’ve fallen behind on rent during the pandemic.

“A recent study estimates that there were 1.55 million fewer evictions filed during 2020 than would be expected due to the eviction moratorium, so it clearly has had a huge benefit,” Psaki said.

Housing advocates have said that the national ban is necessary to stave off an unprecedented displacement of Americans, which could worsen the pandemic just as the country is turning a corner.

Researchers have found that allowing evictions to continue in certain states caused as many as 433,700 excess cases of Covid-19 and 10,700 additional deaths in the U.S. between March and September, before the CDC ban went into effect nationwide.

At least two other federal judges have questioned the CDC’s power to ban evictions. And landlords have criticized the policy, saying they can’t afford to continue housing people for free.

 

Here in Cincinnati, the vote for more affordable housing failed spectacularly this week.

The city of Cincinnati will not have to find $50 million to fund a new affordable housing trust fund.

Voters on Tuesday rejected Issue 3, a charter amendment designed to force city leaders to provide additional housing for Cincinnati’s low-income residents, according to unofficial results from the Hamilton County Board of Elections.

With all precincts reporting, 73% of voters had said no, while only 27% approved of the measure.

“We knew that the voters would come through for us,” said Matt Alter, president of the Cincinnati Firefighters Union Local 48. “We knew that they would see through this.”

The union leaders and politicians who fought against Issue 3 agree the city needs more affordable housing, he said, and now must work to find other, better ways to create that.

“I know the Cincinnati Labor Council and some of the other stakeholders, including some of the political parties, are interested in also sitting down and being a part of that,” Alter said. “The voters voted ‘no’ on this. But how do we make sure that this doesn’t just fall to the back burner, and we continue on this pace to ensure that we can bring affordable housing to Cincinnati in a responsible manner that doesn’t damage and doesn’t hurt current services?”

 

City police and firefighter unions made sure the vote died screaming, warning that they would all but go on strike if Issue 3 passed, and they got what they wanted. Aftab Pureval, the Hamilton County Clerk running for Mayor, also opposed the bill. Issue 3 essentially had no chance.

Pureval is the favorite for replacing outgoing Mayor John Cranley, which is all you need to know about where Cincy's affordable housing situation is going.

It's worse here on the Kentucky side of the river, believe me.

Last Call For The Galleria Of Crime, Con't

Jared Kushner's family real estate firm just got rung up by a Maryland judge as being a slumlord, forcing thousands of tenants in their substandard apartment buildings to overpay for rent without the company providing basic repairs and utilities under state law.

It’s been six years since Dionne Mont first saw her apartment at Fontana Village, a rental housing complex just east of Baltimore. She was aghast that day to find the front door coming off its hinges, the kitchen cabinet doors stuck to their frames, mouse droppings under the kitchen sink, mold in the refrigerator, the toilet barely functioning and water stains on every upstairs ceiling, among other problems. But she had already signed the lease and paid the deposit.

Mont insisted that management make repairs, but that took several months, during which time she paid her $865 monthly rent and lived elsewhere. She was hit with constant late fees and so-called “court” fees, because the management company required tenants to pay rent at a Walmart or a check-cashing outlet, and she often couldn’t get there from her job as a bus driver before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff. She moved out in 2017.

Four years later, Mont has received belated vindication: On April 29, a Maryland judge ruled that the management company, which is owned by Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm, violated state consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to prior to signing a lease, and by assessing them all manner of dubious fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 of the company’s current and former tenants, including Mont, testified.

“I feel elated,” said Mont. “People were living in inhumane conditions — deplorable conditions.”

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh brought the consumer-protection case against Westminster Management, the property-management arm of Kushner Companies, in 2019 following a 2017 article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine on the company’s treatment of its tenants at the 15 housing complexes it owned in the Baltimore area, which have served as profitable ballast for a company better known for its gleaming properties in New York. The article revealed the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants in court over unpaid rent and broken leases, even in cases where tenants were in the right, as well as the shoddy conditions of many units.

To build its case, the attorney general’s office subpoenaed records from the company and solicited testimony from current and former tenants, who provided it via remote video link to Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker late last year.

In her 252-page ruling last week, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Daneker determined that the company had issued a relentless barrage of questionable fees on tenants over the course of many years, including both the fees identified in the 2017 article and others as well. In more than 15,000 instances, Westminster charged in excess of the state-maximum $25 fee to process a rental application. In more than 28,000 instances, the company also assessed a $12 “agent fee” on court filings against tenants even though it had incurred no such cost with the courts — a tactic that Daneker called “spurious” and which brought the company more than $332,000 in fees. And in more than 2,600 instances, the Kushner operation assessed $80 court fees to tenants at its two complexes within the city of Baltimore, even though the charge from the courts was only $50. “The practice of passing court costs on to tenants, in the absence of a court order,” Daneker wrote, “was deceptive.”

The manifold fees suggested a deliberate strategy to run up tenants’ tabs, Daneker wrote, repeatedly calling the practices “widespread and numerous.” She concluded that “these circumstances do not support a finding that this was the result of isolated or inadvertent mistakes.”

Daneker also found that the company violated consumer law by failing to have the proper debt-collection licenses for some of its properties and by misrepresenting the condition of units being leased to tenants. However, she found that the attorney general’s office did not establish that the company violated the law in several other areas, such as by misrepresenting its ability to provide maintenance on units or in some of its calculations of late fees.

Kushner Companies, which has since sold some of the complexes and put others of them on the market, declined to be interviewed for this article. A statement from Kushner general counsel Christopher Smith suggested that the ruling amounted to a victory for the company, despite the judge’s many findings against it. “Kushner respects the thoughtful depth of the Judge’s decision, which vindicates Westminster with respect to many of the Attorney General’s overreaching allegations,” Smith said.

In previous statements, the company had alleged that Frosh, a Democrat, had brought the suit for political reasons, and was singling out the company owned by the then-president’s son-in-law for a host of practices that the company said were common in the multi-housing rental industry. In her ruling, Daneker stated that she found no evidence of an “improper selective prosecution” in the suit.

The attorney general’s office declined to comment, noting that the case is not yet final. Each side will next have the chance to file exceptions, as objections are known, that will be considered by the final arbiter in the consumer protection division of the attorney general’s office. The state’s lawyers will also propose restitution sums for tenants and a civil penalty. Once the consumer protection arbiter issues a ruling, both sides will have the right to challenge it in the state’s appeals courts.

Also awaiting resolution is a separate class-action lawsuit brought by tenants that alleges, among other things, that the company’s late fees exceeded state limits. A Court of Special Appeals judge has yet to issue a ruling following a January oral argument on the plaintiffs’ appeal of previous rulings against both their attempt to certify themselves as a class and against the substance of their claim regarding late fees.

 

So there's still a huge legal fight ahead, but it's one Kushner Companies is bound to lose, and it's going to be costly for them. Frankly, by then I hope Jared Kushner is in prison along with his wife and orange father-in-law.

 

Retribution Execution, Con't

As I told you yesterday, not only is GOP Rep. Liz Cheney's goose cooked, but the smart money was on Rep. Elise Stefanik to replace her as the Number 3 House Republican. Today, that looks to be all but assured.

Former President Trump and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise are openly supporting Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to replace Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as House Republican conference chair.

The latest: "Liz Cheney is a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party Leadership," Trump said in a statement. "Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair. Elise is a tough and smart communicator!"

Why it matters: The public endorsements of Stefanik mark a new escalation in Republicans' internal feud over Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and has continued to criticize the former president. The rift has threatened to derail Republicans' chances of taking back control of the House in the 2022 elections. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) — the leader of the largest conservative caucus in the House — suggested to Axios last week that Cheney could be ousted within a month. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was caught on a hot mic on Tuesday saying he's "lost confidence" in Cheney and "has had it with" her behavior.

What they're saying: “House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda, and Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for Conference Chair,” Scalise’s spokesperson Lauren Fine said in a statement. Scalise told Axios late last month that the "idea that you just disregard President Trump is not where we are, and, frankly, he has a lot to offer still."

The other side: "Liz will have more to say in the coming days. This moment is about much more than a House leadership fight," Cheney spokesperson Jeremy Adler said in a statement.

Between the lines: While Stefanik rose to prominence in part due to her defense of Trump during his first impeachment, she only voted in line with the former president's positions 77.7% of the time — compared to Cheney's 92.9%, according to FiveThirtyEight.

What to watch: The House GOP conference will meet next Wednesday, May 12, at which point most members expect the process to oust Cheney will begin.

 

Now House Republicans under Kevin McCarthy are capable of messing up a two-car parade, so who knows how the actual vote next week will go once we come down to it. But Cheney, for her part, seems to want to make the House GOP pay a public price for doing this, and she's not expected to resign. 

Still, Cheney is willing to lie about everything but Trump's election being stolen, so don't feel bad for her. She'll be back.

Trump Cards, Con't

Facebook, to my great surprise, is upholding Trump's account perma-ban.

Facebook Inc (FB.O)'s oversight board on Wednesday upheld the company's suspension of former U.S. President Donald Trump in a much-awaited verdict that may signal how the company will treat rule-breaking world leaders in the future.

Facebook indefinitely blocked Trump's access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts over concerns of further violent unrest following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of the former president.

At the time of the suspension, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that "the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great." The company later referred the case to its recently established board, which includes academics, lawyers and rights activists, to decide whether to uphold the ban or restore Trump.

"Both of those decisions are no-win decisions for Facebook," said Kate Klonick, an assistant law professor at St. John's University who embedded at Facebook to follow the board's creation. "So, offloading those to a third party, the Oversight Board, is a win for them no matter what."

The binding verdict marks a major decision for the board, which rules on a small slice of challenging content decisions and which Facebook created as an independent body as a response to criticism over how it handles problematic material. Facebook has also asked the board to provide recommendations on how it should handle political leaders' accounts.

 

Meanwhile, Trump is getting his own social media platform. A blog! Wow, what loser still uses blogs in 2021?

Former President Trump has rolled out a new tool to communicate with his supporters in lieu of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, which banned his accounts.

Trump's platform, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” features videos from the former president and statements from his leadership PAC, which have been sent out over email for several weeks.

Supporters can sign up to get notified when Trump sends out a message from his site, similar to functions on other social media platforms.

While users do not have the ability to reply to Trump’s posts, they can like them and share them on their own Twitter or Facebook accounts.

"This is just a one-way communication," one source familiar with the space told Fox News, which was the first to report on the platform. "This system allows Trump to communicate with his followers."

The website’s “About” page also includes a statement touting Trump’s administration and a slew of mission statements, including “We are committed to defending innocent life and to upholding the Judeo-Christian values of our founding” and “We believe in FREE SPEECH and Fair Elections. We must ensure fair, honest, transparent, and secure elections going forward – where every LEGAL VOTE counts.”

“Over the past four years, my administration delivered for Americans of all backgrounds like never before. Save America is about building on those accomplishments, supporting the brave conservatives who will define the future of the America First Movement, the future of our party, and the future of our beloved country. Save America is also about ensuring that we always keep America First, in our foreign and domestic policy,” the website says.

The website says it is run by Campaign Nucleus, a digital firm founded by Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager.

The platform could provide a way for Trump to reach out to his supporters online while he is kicked off of Twitter and Facebook, two vehicles he used to get his message out during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

 

I mean I at least have a comment section so you guys can yell back at me. 

Seriously though, this is Trump rolling out marching orders to his army, tens of millions strong. expect daily (if not hourly) attacks on biden and the Democrats, and on everyone else who doesn't toe the Trumpist line, and his posts will end up on millions of Facebook accounts anyway, so the ban is useless.

Now, if Facebook polices this and if news outlets ignore Trump's awful two-minute hate missives, we'll be okay. What I fear though is a rush to cover his posts on a regular basis, repeated verbatim not just on FOX (of course) but on every other news, cable, and web political outlet as well so that Trump dominates all coverage again. Our news ecosystem can't handle Trump.

It's what he wants.

It's what he'll most likely get.

Last Call For Israeli A Mess, Con't

The Netanyahu debacle continues in Israel, as the PM is on trial for corruption and in the fifth round of trying to form a government, meaning tat Israel has now gone two years without an actual elected leadership.

In less than a week, Netanyahu has twice attempted to subvert the rule of law to his advantage and pivoted, at the speed of light, to deflect responsibility for the nation’s worst civilian disaster — the fatal stampede at a Galilean religious pilgrimage in which 100,000 worshipers gathered, with no permit but with the permission of Netanyahu’s government, in a spot the size of a small park.

Israel has been without a functional government for more than two years. During this time, the country was dragged through four general election campaigns in which Netanyahu failed to win enough votes to form a stable governing coalition — but succeeded in preventing anyone else from doing so each time.

Stuck in political purgatory, Israel has no budget, and it’s at risk of losing its international credit ratings. The Knesset is not operational, with the prime minister’s allies scrambling to reshape every rule and motion into a parachute that will save his political life. And the cabinet is incapacitated.

The crux of the problem for Netanyahu is that he is on trial, accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. On April 5, the first day of witness testimony, Netanyahu slammed Israel’s judiciary, calling the proceedings “an abuse of the destructive power held by the prosecution.”

“This is what the illegitimate use of power looks like,” the prime minister thundered. “This is how you try to topple a strong right-wing prime minister! This is what an attempted coup looks like!”

But it is Netanyahu who seeks to perpetrate a coup — even as he has effectively given up on governing.

By coincidence, his trial started on the same day President Reuven Rivlin invited Netanyahu, whose Likud party won 30 of 120 Knesset seats in the most recent election, to establish a government. The math meant Rivlin had no choice, but he didn’t hide his disgust.

Netanyahu has until Tuesday to come up with a coalition. If he fails, Rivlin may call on the opposition leader to try, but Netanyahu is attempting to stymie that possibility and lead Israel to a fifth round of elections, entrenching Israel’s leadership crisis — and, crucially, preserving his position as caretaker prime minister for a few months more.

With that goal still out of reach, he is instead floating an outlandish proposal — to partially cancel the results of the March 23 election, detaching the party vote for Knesset from the vote for prime minister. This would allow him, personally, to run again for reelection with no parliamentary majority, in an alternative Israel in which he can change election laws on a whim. Mid-game, he’s asking for a mulligan.

Meanwhile, spooked by his trial and by the looming deadline, Netanyahu last week forced an illegal vote through his cabinet, “appointing” a political lackey justice minister. The point of this maneuver was to enable Ofir Akunis, currently the minister for regional cooperation, to control the appointment of a new state prosecutor, one of many essential jobs left empty by Israel’s political limbo. Netanyahu’s interest in imposing his will on the state prosecution needs no explanation. The full slate of Likud ministers, who like their leader no longer pretend to govern, ignored the attorney general’s exclamations about the illegality of the stunt and voted like automatons to confirm Akunis.

Among the state affairs that fell through the cracks was an urgently needed overhaul of services provided to wounded military veterans. The issue gained prominence after Itzik Saidian, a 26-year-old disabled veteran who fought in the 2014 war in Gaza, set himself on fire outside Israeli army headquarters April 13, the day before Israel’s Memorial Day.

No resolution is on the horizon. The cabinet was due to discuss the proposal last week, when the cabinet meeting was hijacked by Netanyahu’s unlawful attempt to install a vassal justice minister. It was rescheduled for a vote at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but instead of leading his cabinet in mourning, Netanyahu canceled the meeting, saying he did it out of respect for those killed in the stampede.

 

Netanyahu is essentially pulling Trump's staying in power coup in a parliamentarian-style democracy, and it's working. As long as Netanyahu has enough allies to keep the opposition from ever forming a government, then he can stay in power semi-permanently.

The major wrench in the works is the trial. That's the one thing that he hasn't been able to stop so far and if he's convicted, all hell will break loose.

We'll see where this goes.

Retribution Execution, Con't

At this point House Republicans are now openly plotting the ouster of Liz Cheney, the one Republican willing to risk her party leadership to say that Trump's Big Lie is full of crap.

House Republicans are moving closer to ousting Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from leadership, and are already considering replacements — including Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) and Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), congressional aides tell Axios.

What we're hearing: Most members recognize Cheney can't be succeeded by a white man, given their top two leaders — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) — fill that demographic. Selling such a team in a midterm year would compound the GOP's challenges with suburban women. 

The conference meets next Wednesday, May 12. Most members expect the process to oust Cheney to begin then, whether formally or informally, after some of McCarthy's top lieutenants broadened their complaints against her. It would take up to a two-thirds vote of the 212 caucus members to replace her — a relatively high bar if a secret ballot is held.

Behind the scenes: When Cheney faced an uprising within the party in February over her vote to impeach former President Trump, McCarthy supported her and told his colleagues he wanted her to remain as GOP conference chair. But leadership and many in the rank and file were angry last week when Cheney's criticism of Trump dominated coverage of the House Republican conference in Orlando, Florida.

 

Both Walorski and Stefanik voted to throw out the Presidential election results to validate the Big Lie, while Wagner and former House #3 Cathy McMorris Rodgers did not, so my money is on Stefanik. And when people are openly talking about who will be replacing you and why rather than could, the writing's on the wall for both Cheney and the GOP.

We'll see next week just how long Cheney may have left.

And reminder: Cheney is still an awful, repugnant human being who would support 99% of what Trump did, especially if she was doing it herself.

Florida Definitely Goes VIral, Con't

GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has lifted all COVID-19 restrictions and has declared the pandemic "over" in the state of Florida, saying "We are no longer in a state of emergency".

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order Monday that immediately suspends all outstanding local Covid-19 emergency orders and related public health restrictions.

“The fact is, we are no longer in a state of emergency,” DeSantis said during a news conference. He acknowledged that Florida was still not done with its fight against the coronavirus but reiterated the nation’s decline in Covid-19 cases and deaths.

“I think that’s the evidence-based thing to do,” DeSantis said, adding that asking vaccinated individuals to continue to wear masks would undermine confidence in the coronavirus vaccines.

Private businesses can still require masks and enforce social distancing and other protective measures.

DeSantis signed a bill Monday that codifies the executive order into law, effective July 1. The executive order, he said, was designed to “bridge the gap” until then. The measure, which effectively ends all local pandemic-related restrictions, also bans vaccine passports.

 

So no more COVID health measures, local, state or otherwise.  We're back to "suggestions" that everyone is free to ignore and that the vast majority will do so. And this is an absolute recipe for disaster:

 

Florida has reported the third-most Covid-19 cases in the U.S. at more than 2.2 million since the beginning of the pandemic and the fourth-highest death toll at more than 35,000 fatalities, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Average new cases there, however, have fallen by more than 13% over the last week, dropping to 4,885 as of Sunday, according to the data.

 

And by July 4th, expect to see an "unexpected" spike in new cases. Biden will be blamed of course. We'll be right back to where we were this time last year, with red states refusing new restrictions and a big summer swell in cases and deaths.

As I said earlier, get used to the new normal.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The backlash against the idea that America is structurally racist is now in full force, with white Republicans going to the mats to destroy any hint of critical race theory being taught to anyone.

 

Nine months after officials in the affluent Carroll Independent School District introduced a proposal to combat racial and cultural intolerance in schools, voters delivered a resounding victory Saturday to a slate of school board and City Council candidates who opposed the plan.

In an unusually bitter campaign that echoed a growing national divide over how to address issues of race, gender and sexuality in schools, candidates in the city of Southlake were split between two camps: those who supported new diversity and inclusion training requirements for Carroll students and teachers and those backed by a political action committee that was formed last year to defeat the plan.

On one side, progressives argued that curriculum and disciplinary changes were needed to make all children feel safe and welcome in Carroll, a mostly white but quickly diversifying school district. On the other, conservatives in Southlake rejected the school diversity plan as an effort to indoctrinate students with a far-left ideology that, according to some, would institutionalize discrimination against white children and those with conservative Christian values.

Candidates and voters on both sides described the election as a "fork in the road" for Southlake, a wealthy suburb 30 miles northwest of Dallas. "So goes Southlake," a local conservative commentator warned in the weeks leading up to the election, "so goes the rest of America."

In the end, the contest was not close. Candidates backed by the conservative Southlake Families PAC, which has raised more than $200,000 since last summer, won every race by about 70 percent to 30 percent, including those for two school board positions, two City Council seats and mayor. More than 9,000 voters cast ballots, three times as many as in similar contests in the past.

Hannah Smith, a prominent Southlake lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, defeated Ed Hernandez, a business consultant, to win a seat on the Carroll school board. In a statement to NBC News on Sunday, Smith, who is white, said the election "was a referendum on those who put personal politics and divisive philosophies ahead of Carroll ISD students and families, and their common American heritage and Texas values."

"The voters have come together in record-breaking numbers to restore unity," Smith said. "By a landslide vote, they don't want racially divisive critical race theory taught to their children or forced on their teachers. Voters agreed with my positive vision of our community and its future."

Hernandez and other candidates running in support of new diversity and inclusion programs said they were not particularly surprised by the outcome in a historically conservative city where about two-thirds of voters backed President Donald Trump last year, but they were dismayed by the margin of their defeat.

Hernandez, an immigrant from Mexico, said he worries about the signal the outcome sends to dozens of Carroll high school students and recent graduates who came forward with stories about racist and anti-gay bullying over the past two years. To demonstrate the need for change, members of the student-led Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition collected more than 300 accounts from current and former Carroll students last year who said they had been mistreated because of their race, religion or sexual orientation.

"I don't want to think about all these kids that shared their stories, their testimonies," Hernandez said, growing emotional Saturday moments after having learned the election results. "I don't want to think about that right now, because it's really, really hard for me. I feel really bad for all those kids, every single one of them that shared a story. I don't have any words for them."

The fight in Southlake dates to the fall of 2018, when a video of white Carroll high school students chanting the N-word went viral, making national headlines. In the aftermath, school leaders hosted listening sessions with students and parents and appointed a committee of 63 community volunteers to come up with a plan to make Carroll more welcoming for students from diverse backgrounds.

 

Declaring war on "Critical Race Theory" is the new in thing for the GOP, and it will be attacked, denigrated, and criminalized until us Blacks back down and shut up, I guess. Black Lives Matter, but only if it's convenient for white folks to say so. 

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he doesn’t think 1619 is one of the most important points in U.S. history.

That's the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to and sold in the Virginia colony, a point often considered as the beginning of American slavery.

“I think this is about American history and the most important dates in American history. And my view — and I think most Americans think — dates like 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861-1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” McConnell said during an appearance at the University of Louisville.

“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that the year 1619 was one of those years.

“I think that issue that we all are concerned about — racial discrimination — it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it,” he continued. “We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.”

 

Black lives matter only if white folk give us permission to matter. Same goes for Black history, Black culture, Black labor, Black pain, Black everything. Otherwise, we should just "get past it" and "Lose the victim mentality" and "Be grateful we're in America".

 

You know, while they kill us.

 

We should be grateful for that, because it could be worse.

 

Worse than killing us.

 

Think about that.

 

 

A Herd Of Toddlers With Immunity To Reason

The CDC no longer believes COVID-19 herd immunity is possible here in the US, given the fact that 40% of American adults refuse to take the vaccine and never will. What it means is we'll be living with yearly variants of the virus for years to come, and infection spikes that will kill tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands annually.

 

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe.

“The virus is unlikely to go away,” said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “But we want to do all we can to check that it’s likely to become a mild infection.”

The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity — by the summer, some experts once thought possible — captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another “why bother” to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated.

Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.

“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,” he said.

“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,” he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.” 

 

The shift now is to triage, and to your annual COVID vaccinations for this year's variants in the years ahead, because Americans are petulant, selfish kids. Meanwhile, people will end up in hospitals and die from the disease, and tens of millions of us will still refuse the yearly variant as well. Some of them will get sick. Some will end up in the hospital on a respirator. And some will end up on a morgue slab.

The new normal, indeed.

The Mess In Texas

Democrats better figure out what's wrong in Texas and fast, because they are basically at the point of not even being able to field a primary runoff candidate in Texas's 6th District special election.

Republicans Susan Wright and Jake Ellzey will advance to a runoff in the special election for Texas' 6th Congressional District.

CNN projected Wright would take the first spot in the runoff, but Ellzey and Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez had been locked in a tight race for second.

Sanchez conceded the race on Sunday, thanking volunteers, staff and supporters in a statement posted on social media.

"Democrats have come a long way toward competing in Texas but we still have a long way to go. Unfortunately, tonight we came up short, and two Republicans will be competing to represent this Congressional district," Sanchez wrote. "We'll keep fighting for a healthier, equitable and prosperous Texas and to elect leaders who care about meeting the needs of Texans, although it won't happen in this district immediately."

It won't happen in 2022 either. Another round of GOP-controlled Census redistricting in states like Texas, Georgia, Florida and Ohio will put dozens of House seats out of play for the Democrats come 18 months from now, and it will take a miracle for the Dems to hold on to the House in a second half of a Biden term.

And at this point, before that's all even happened, we can't even bother to bring enough voters to the table to get a candidate on the ballot. Trump waltzed right into the race and locked it down.

I know Democrats are busy governing, but they can't govern if they don't win, and they can't win if they can't even get on the goddamn ballot.

I expect to see that level of Democratic party incompetence here in the OH/IN/KY Tri-State, but in Texas it's a threat to the entire country.

Do better, guys.

StupidiNews!

• San Diego rescue officials say at least three people are dead and another 20 have been hospitalized after a tour boat capsized off the Pacific Coast Sunday.
• UK PM Boris Johnson is facing more questions from Parliament about personal spending on the Queen's shilling, including refurbishing his personal apartment and paying for child care.
• The Biden Administration is denying Iran state media reports of a prisoner swap deal as part of a revamped nuclear treaty, saying no such arrangement has been reached.
• Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins is joining a growing number of Republicans who are saying DC should join Maryland if its citizens want House and Senate representation, rather than statehood.
• The Biden Administration will keep the current Trump-revived National Space Council, with VP Kamala Harris set to join as the group's chair.