Watching The Watchmen, Con't

 Gotta love it when the feds step in to deal with corrupt NYPD cops.

Federal investigators descended Tuesday on the Lower Manhattan headquarters of the NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association, the union headed by fiery and controversial president Ed Mullins, the Daily News has learned.

While the details of the probe remained under wraps, an FBI spokeswoman confirmed to The News that the agency was “carrying out a law enforcement action in connection with an ongoing investigation” into the SBA.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.

The union is headed by Mullins, a brash leader known for his over-the-top social media attacks on NYPD leadership and Mayor de Blasio. Mullins, a member of the NYPD since January 1982, took over as head of the SBA on July 1, 2002.

“No comment for now,” said Mullins’ lawyer Andrew Quinn about the morning raid. The typically outspoken Mullins could not immediately be reached for a response.

He came under fire in 2020 when he posted the arrest report of de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara de Blasio, on social media following her arrest during George Floyd protests. Mullins was hit with departmental charges for the violation of NYPD rules.

In another instance during the pandemic, Mullins tweeted that the city’s health commissioner was a “b---h” who had “blood on her hands” after she sparred with the NYPD over half a million hospital-grade face masks.

In a piece written earlier this summer for the MailOnline, the Greenwich Village native tore into the soon-to-depart mayor’s two terms in City Hall.

“Since first taking office in 2014, de Blasio’s incendiary anti-police rhetoric has already resulted in three police officers being executed while sitting in police vehicles, Molotov cocktails being lobbed at officers and into police vehicles, armed assaults on police facilities, cops being pelted with debris, and wholesale damage to police and public property,” he wrote.

 

I understand that unions are badly needed in the US to give workers power, but police unions exist to protect cops who murder Black and brown folk, period. And there's no goddamn way Ed Mullins remains the head of the NYPD SBA for 20 years without being part and parcel of that systemic corruption.

I hope the feds fry Mullins and all these bastards up, because they've been helping to cover up literally thousands of police murders of Americans over the decades.

Police killed roughly 30,800 people between 1980 to 2018, about 17,000 more than what’s recorded in a federal database on police killings, according to a new study published Thursday.

In their report, researchers at the University of Washington pointed to clerical errors as well as "substantial" conflicts of interest between medical examiners and police as reasons for the major discrepancy.

Medical examiners and coroners may face pressure to underreport police killings because many of them “work for or are embedded within police departments,” according to the study, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet.

The researchers compared their data to the National Vital Statistics System, a federal database managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that keeps track of births and deaths.

Activists — and even several coroners — have called out that corrupt relationship for years. For example, back in 2017, two medical examiners from San Joaquin County in California quit after alleging the county sheriff pressured them to alter autopsy results for deaths that occurred in police custody.

Some medical examiners have also been accused of providing cover for police during criminal trials. For example, attorneys for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd in May 2020, enlisted Maryland’s former chief medical examiner to testify as an expert witness during Chauvin's trial.

Despite overwhelming evidence showing Chauvin murdered Floyd, the former medical examiner, Dr. David Fowler, testified that the cause of death should have been left “undetermined.” He also said Floyd died of a sudden heart rhythm disturbance as a result of heart disease and carbon monoxide poisoning from vehicle exhaust.

Notably, a New York Times report in May brought to light racist trends in medical examiners’ diagnoses. The Times found doctors have used the sickle cell trait — disproportionately found in Black people — to help explain away instances of anti-Black violence by police.

 

It's all one huge corrupt system designed to protect cops from America, not the other way around. Police unions are 100% part of that.

 

They need to be burned out and prosecuted. More of this nationwide, please.

School Of Hard-Right Knocks, Con't

US Attorney General Merrick Garland is finally stepping in to deal with the hundreds of threats made by screaming Trump cultists against school board members, educators, and administrators over "critical race theory".

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday directed federal authorities to hold strategy sessions in the next 30 days with law enforcement to address the increasing threats targeting school board members, teachers and other employees in the nation’s public schools.

In a memorandum, Garland said there has been “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”

To address the rising problem, Garland said the FBI would work with U.S. attorneys and federal, state, local, territorial and tribal authorities in each district to develop strategies against the threats.

“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” he said.

The action is in response to an urgent request last week from the National School Boards Association. The group, which represents school board members around the country, asked President Joe Biden for federal assistance to investigate and stop threats made over policies including mask mandates, likening the vitriol to a form of domestic terrorism.

The association asked for the federal government to investigate cases where threats or violence could be handled as violations of federal laws protecting civil rights. It also asked for the Justice Department, FBI, Homeland Security and Secret Service to help monitor threat levels and assess risks to students, educators, board members and school buildings.

The group’s letter documented more than 20 instances of threats, harassment, disruption, and acts of intimidation in California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio and other states. It cited the September arrest of an Illinois man for aggravated battery and disorderly conduct for allegedly striking a school official at a meeting. In Michigan, a meeting was disrupted when a man performed a Nazi salute to protest masking.

“We are coming after you,” a letter mailed to an Ohio school board member said, according to the group. “You are forcing them to wear mask — for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.” It called the member “a filthy traitor.”

 

I'll give you one guess as to how the Right-wing Noise Machine is covering this:

 

The permanent victimization mindset of the right has been awaiting the Biden administration's entrance into the fray with feverish glee. They know now that they can sell Garland protecting school board members and teachers from threats as "Biden's Gestapo Targets Concerned White Parents" and that will be the rage mindset well into 2022 election season.

There's a reason fascists incite violence from the citizenry and then call it a noble revolution of the people. It's worked for decades in countries around the world, countries that are now ruled by authoritarian monsters of various degrees, but they all have one thing in common: they style themselves as a necessary evil to prevent "the enemy" from gaining power.

January 6th has now become hundreds of smaller fires burning in every school board in America. The fight for institutional white supremacy rages around the country, the granddaughters and grandsons of those who lynched Black folk in the South to stop school integration 70 years ago and busing 40 years ago are the ones leading that charge today.

 

This was always the plan.

Last Call For The GOP Grift Never Stops

The FBI investigation into Lebenese-Nigerian billionaire donor Gilbert Chagoury's illegal donations to Republican politicians has now snared House Appropriations ranking GOP member Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska.

The top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee's agriculture panel raised money for a legal defense fund with claims he’s facing federal prosecution that a spokesperson later disavowed.

Driving the news: On a fundraising page for a new legal expense fund — which was later taken off-line — Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) wrote: "[President] Biden’s FBI is using its unlimited power to prosecute me on a bogus charge."  Neither Fortenberry nor the FBI responded immediately to requests for comments, but a Fortenberry spokesperson later said the congressman "never saw or approved that language." 

The investigation in question, the spokesperson said, had to do with illegal campaign contributions by a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire to a number of congressional Republicans. “It’s been previously reported that the FBI investigated an effort by a foreign national to illegally funnel money to U.S. political campaigns, including Rep. Fortenberry’s," he wrote. "The people involved in that scheme were prosecuted and no charges were filed against him. This legal expense trust was established in part to address costs associated with that investigation.”

Between the lines: Fortenberry's present-tense appeal was made after his campaign committee paid a new law firm over the summer, according to Federal Election Commission records. In June, it reported paying $25,000 to Bienert Katzman Littrell Williams LLP, a California firm specializing in white collar criminal defense. It was the campaign's largest payment for legal services, to date.

Until Axios posted a story Monday morning, Fortenberry's legal expense fund was soliciting contributions of up to $5,000 per donor per year. Under House rules, the fund may accept donations from individuals, corporations and political action committees but not registered lobbyists. Records on file with the House clerk showed Fortenberry established the legal expense fund on August 27. 

"Unlike Swamp Creature Nancy Pelosi, I’m a principled conservative who has NEVER abused my seat in Congress to get wealthy," its fundraising page said. "And right now I'm facing the Deep State's bottomless pockets."

 

Except of course he's being investigated for just that kind of power abuse. 

The story is however that all Republicans are Donald Trump now: pocket the illegal cash, blame the "Deep State witch hunt" when you get caught, and plead for defense donations on your fundraising channels. Only this time there's no Trump to pardon these assholes.

We'll see where this goes. I'd like to see him in jail and his seat vacated, but it's Nebraska. It'll just end up in another crooked Republican's hands.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

We've got two more years of this grift as Trump raises money for his legal fees and con games with this whole "will he or won't he run?" nonsense, and the Village press can't get enough of it, because candidate Trump sold newspapers, clicks, and ads like nobody else.

 

As turmoil in Afghanistan reached a crescendo in August, Donald Trump began talking again with advisers about whether he should announce his 2024 campaign for president right away.

They responded by urging patience, according to three people familiar with the discussions, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. An announcement would force a reshuffling of his newly formed fundraising apparatus, advisers argued, and could complicate his ability to appear on broadcast television without triggering equal time rules.

Some of his advisers were concerned that Democrats might use his announcement in their effort to frame the midterm elections around his candidacy, potentially boosting their own turnout and hampering his plans if Republicans fall short next year. Advisers also argued that he could be more effective electing like-minded Republicans next year if he was not an official candidate himself.

“The biggest point we drove home was that he doesn’t want to own the midterms if we don’t win back the House or Senate,” said one person familiar with the conversations.

The arguments won Trump over, for the time being at least. Instead of a presidential campaign announcement, Trump, 75, has settled on a strategy of winks and nods. As some in his party worry, he is acting like a candidate for public office, and making clear he intends to be one again, without actually declaring so himself.

“He tacitly keeps the 2024 crowd on notice that nobody can move a major muscle until he decides what he’s doing,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former top White House adviser to Trump who served as his campaign manager in 2016. “As for 2024, there has been a shift from intention to urgency as he watches in horror the many failings of this administration.”

Trump has returned to traveling the country for rallies — including a planned gathering Saturday in Iowa — designed to look identical to his campaign events. He is raising money with the same aggressive online tactics he used during his last campaign — an unprecedented move for a former president. With Trump still cut off from Facebook and Twitter after his supporters attacked the Capitol when he encouraged them to “stop the steal,” aides send out daily emails — often riddled with false statements — on his behalf going after Democrats, detractors and wayward Republicans.

An informal poll of 13 of his current and former advisers in recent days indicated that 10 believed he would run, two said it was a public relations ploy, and another said he was not sure.

“We’re not supposed to be talking about it yet, from the standpoint of campaign finance laws, which frankly are ridiculous,” Trump said on Sept. 11, when asked if he would again be a candidate for president. “But I think you are going to be happy. Let me put it that way.”

 

Which brings up a good point: If it's so obvious that Democrats are doomed in 2022 and will lose dozens, if not scores of House and Senate seats combined, why is Trump holding his cards? Going on the campaign trail with rally after rally will certainly put him on the news regularly. 

Does anyone here really think the biggest ego on Earth is going to be able to resist not making 2022 all about himself, as he has done with every facet of US politics since 2015?

I don't.

Throwing The (Face)Book At Them, Con't

Last night's 60 Minutes report on Facebook featuring corporate whistleblower Frances Haugen revealing that the company is a willing and integral part of the GOP disinformation machine is only shocking if you haven't been paying attention to Silly Con Valley techbros over the last decade.

She secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of Facebook internal research. She says evidence shows that the company is lying to the public about making significant progress against hate, violence and misinformation. One study she found, from this year, says, "we estimate that we may action as little as 3-5% of hate and about 6-tenths of 1% of V & I [violence and incitement] on Facebook despite being the best in the world at it."

Scott Pelley: To quote from another one of the documents you brought out, "We have evidence from a variety of sources that hate speech, divisive political speech and misinformation on Facebook and the family of apps are affecting societies around the world."

Frances Haugen: When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other, the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.

'Ethnic violence' including Myanmar in 2018 when the military used Facebook to launch a genocide.

Frances Haugen told us she was recruited by Facebook in 2019. She says she agreed to take the job only if she could work against misinformation because she had lost a friend to online conspiracy theories.

Frances Haugen: I never wanted anyone to feel the pain that I had felt. And I had seen how high the stakes were in terms of making sure there was high quality information on Facebook.

At headquarters, she was assigned to Civic Integrity which worked on risks to elections including misinformation. But after this past election, there was a turning point.

Frances Haugen: They told us, "We're dissolving Civic Integrity." Like, they basically said, "Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn't riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now." Fast forward a couple months, we got the insurrection. And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, "I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous."

Facebook says the work of Civic Integrity was distributed to other units. Haugen told us the root of Facebook's problem is in a change that it made in 2018 to its algorithms—the programming that decides what you see on your Facebook news feed.

Frances Haugen: So, you know, you have your phone. You might see only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll on for, you know, five minutes. But Facebook has thousands of options it could show you.

The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you've engaged with the most in the past.

Frances Haugen: And one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is -- optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it's easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.

Scott Pelley: Misinformation, angry content-- is enticing to people and keep--

Frances Haugen: Very enticing.

Scott Pelley:--keeps them on the platform.

Frances Haugen: Yes. Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money.

Haugen says Facebook understood the danger to the 2020 Election. So, it turned on safety systems to reduce misinformation—but many of those changes, she says, were temporary.

Frances Haugen: And as soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety.

And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.

Facebook says some of the safety systems remained. But, after the election, Facebook was used by some to organize the January 6th insurrection. Prosecutors cite Facebook posts as evidence--photos of armed partisans and text including, "by bullet or ballot restoration of the republic is coming!" Extremists used many platforms, but Facebook is a recurring theme.

After the attack, Facebook employees raged on an internal message board copied by Haugen. "…Haven't we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?" We looked for positive comments and found this, "I don't think our leadership team ignores data, ignores dissent, ignores truth…" but that drew this reply, "welcome to Facebook! I see you just joined in November 2020… we have been watching… wishy-washy actions of company leadership for years now." "…Colleagues… cannot conscience working for a company that does not do more to mitigate the negative effects of its platform."

Scott Pelley: Facebook essentially amplifies the worst of human nature.

 

The profit motive for Facebook is to continue to spread GOP disinformation to willing consumers who eat up every last bit of it and spread it around. Facebook makes billions off of clicks, ads, and targeted posts. They don't care who gets hurt as long as they make money.

 

In effect, Facebook wants an American authoritarian propaganda state. They'd have a forced audience of hundreds of millions and would make hundreds of billions.

They have no reason to stop the GOP disinformation, and every reason to continue to amplify it.

StupidiNews!

• An oil spill of more than 125,000 gallons of crude oil off of California's coast is a looming environmental disaster for the Huntington Beach area and Orange County.
• Donald Trump says he would easily beat all primary challengers in 2024, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
• New Japanese PM Fumio Kishida plans to form a government this week after his upset win over Liberal Democratic Party candidates to lead the party. 
• US Pandemic expert Dr. Anthony Fauci says the country is finally turning the corner with Delta variant cases in the South and Midwest, but growing infection spreads continue in other US states.
• A new study finds that switching to renewable energy could save the world trillions in energy costs over the next decade, with renewable energy prices continuing to drop as technology improves.
  

Last Call For The Good Package, Con't

Even Bernie Sanders is now freely admitting that the "art of the possible" is what Actual President Joe Manchin and Actual Vice President Kyrsten Sinema will allow America to have.

In order for the bipartisan infrastructure bill and larger social spending package to pass, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Sunday the $3.5 trillion budget resolution price tag will likely be lowered.

"Three and a half trillion should be a minimum, but I accept that there's gonna have to be a give and take," Sanders told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

House progressives have warned leadership they will not vote on President Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill until the larger human infrastructure bill is also ready for a vote. The budget resolution calls for investments in climate change policy, child care and other social programs, and is wider in scope than the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which includes measures to improve the nation’s physical infrastructure.

"Both these bills are going forward in tandem," Sanders said, reiterating the progressive call to hold out on passing infrastructure until the social spending bill is also passed.

Moderate Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have said they will not support the bill’s $3.5 trillion price tag. Due to the slim Democratic majority in the Senate, neither bill will pass unless they have all the votes of the Democrats.

Sinema released a statement Saturday accusing progressives of "an ineffective stunt" and slammed House Democratic leadership for failing to pass the bipartisan infrastructure deal.

"Denying Americans millions of good-paying jobs, safer roads, cleaner water, more reliable electricity and better broadband only hurts everyday families," Sinema wrote.

Asked by Karl to respond to her statement, Sanders said he thinks Sinema is "wrong" and said both bills must go forward together, adding that he voted for the infrastructure bill.

"We're not just taking on or dealing with Sen. Manchin and Sen. Sinema, we're taking on the entire ruling class of the country," Sanders responded. "Right now the drug companies, the health insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry are spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent us from doing what the American people want."

"This really is a test on whether democracy can work," Sanders said. "I hope very much and I expect that the Democratic caucus and the president -- I know he will -- stand firm."

 

Sanders is, for once, 100% correct. The corporations that have purchased President Manchin and Vice President Sinema's votes bought them cheaply compared to the taxes they'll be forced to pay, maybe half a mil in lobbyist donations for something that will save them billions over the next decade.

The only question is how much Manchin and Sinema get to take off the top. The rest of us get to watch the super rich continue to play the game and win.

A massive trove of private financial records shared with The Washington Post exposes vast reaches of the secretive offshore system used to hide billions of dollars from tax authorities, creditors, criminal investigators and — in 14 cases involving current country leaders — citizens around the world.

The revelations include more than $100 million spent by King Abdullah II of Jordan on luxury homes in Malibu, Calif., and other locations; millions of dollars in property and cash secretly owned by the leaders of the Czech Republic, Kenya, Ecuador and other countries; and a waterfront home in Monaco acquired by a Russian woman who gained considerable wealth after she reportedly had a child with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Other disclosures hit closer to home for U.S. officials and other Western leaders who frequently condemn smaller countries whose permissive banking systems have been exploited for decades by looters of assets and launderers of dirty money.

Read key takeaways from the Pandora Papers investigation

The files provide substantial new evidence, for example, that South Dakota now rivals notoriously opaque jurisdictions in Europe and the Caribbean in financial secrecy. Tens of millions of dollars from outside the United States are now sheltered by trust companies in Sioux Falls, some of it tied to people and companies accused of human rights abuses and other wrongdoing.

The details are contained in more than 11.9 million financial records that were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and examined by The Post and other partner news organizations. The files include private emails, secret spreadsheets, clandestine contracts and other records that unlock otherwise impenetrable financial schemes and identify the individuals behind them.

The trove, dubbed the Pandora Papers, exceeds the dimensions of the leak that was at the center of the Panama Papers investigation five years ago. That data was drawn from a single law firm, but the new material encompasses records from 14 separate financial-services entities operating in countries and territories including Switzerland, Singapore, Cyprus, Belize and the British Virgin Islands.

The files detail more than 29,000 offshore accounts, more than double the number identified in the Panama Papers. Among the account owners are more than 130 people listed as billionaires by Forbes magazine and more than 330 public officials in more than 90 countries and territories, twice the number found in the Panama documents.

 

In the end, the rich win.

Retribution Execution, Con't

 I keep telling people that 2020 was a failed dry run for permanent authoritarian GOP government in America and basically all of Trump's orcs and goblins are ready to make sure we lose it all next time. When Steve Bannon speaks, every liberal, Democrat, progressive and human being better 100% pay attention, because like the megalomaniacal supervillain he is, he's giving his evil plan away ahead of time.

Scores of former Trump political appointees gathered at a GOP social club Wednesday night to hear Steve Bannon detail how they could help the next Republican president reconfigure government.

"If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately," Bannon said in a telephone interview with NBC News. "I gave 'em fire and brimstone."

Bannon, who ran former President Donald Trump's first campaign and later worked as a top adviser in the White House, said that Trump's agenda was delayed by the challenges of quickly filling roughly 4,000 slots for presidential appointees at federal agencies and the steep learning curve for political officials who were new to Washington.

He is not alone in that view. His appearance at the Capitol Hill Club came at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, which was formed to create a resource for future GOP officials tapped to fill federal jobs.

"There are so many statutes and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first come in," said Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Broadcasting Board of Governors official who is one of the organizers of the group. "This is an organization that has a very narrow, clear and much-needed purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not just for the Republican Party but for the country."

Trump often railed publicly about career civil servants and Obama administration political appointee holdovers whom he saw as obstacles to his agenda, referring to them collectively as the "deep state."

Bannon said he wants to see pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies when the next Republican president takes office. For the most part, that means the tiers of presidential appointees whose postings don't require Senate confirmation.

"We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies," he said, referring to Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan and describing a 2024 electoral victory as a "second term."

 

Bannon's happy to tip his hand, because he knows he's going to win. He knows he's going to have his own Deep State ready to go in 2024, and that will be the end of democracy around here in your lifetime. He doesn't need Trump, he'll execute this plan with whoever gets he 2024 nod.

We got lucky once. We have to push these barbarians back again and again to survive.

We're just now finding out how close we were to an American authoritarian state.

However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse.

The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself.

In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand.

Mr. Eastman’s unusual visit was reported at the time, but a new book by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides the details of his proposed six-point plan. It involved Mr. Pence rejecting dozens of already certified electoral votes representing tens of millions of legally cast ballots, thus allowing Congress to install Mr. Trump in a second term.

Mr. Pence ultimately refused to sign on, earning him the rage of Mr. Trump and chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” by the rioters, who erected a makeshift gallows on the National Mall.

The fact that the scheme to overturn the election was highly unlikely to succeed is cold comfort. Mr. Trump remains the most popular Republican in the country; barring a serious health issue, the odds are good that he will be the party’s nominee for president in 2024. He also remains as incapable of accepting defeat as he has ever been, which means the country faces a renewed risk of electoral subversion by Mr. Trump and his supporters — only next time they will have learned from their mistakes.

That leaves all Americans who care about preserving this Republic with a clear task: Reform the federal election law at the heart of Mr. Eastman’s twisted ploy, and make it as hard as possible for anyone to pull a stunt like that again.

Democrats have to reform the Electoral Count Act, among other voting rights reforms, or it's over. The GOP is openly telling us they will use the full power of the US government as a weapon against dissent.  We have to make sure this happens or we're all going to burn.

Sunday Long Read: The Con Is On

Our Sunday Long Read is another true crime art heist story, this time from the Truly*Adventurous crew, who bring us the tale of Alfredo Martinez, art forger extraordinaire, and FBI agent Bob Wittman, the agency's most dogged undercover art theft detective.

 

The art dealer wanted his certificates, or the game was up.

Two Basquiat drawings sat on the desk of Lio Malca, a smartly dressed Colombian who’d built an empire from his plush, Chelsea office. Malca wanted them, but their accompanying documents didn’t look right.

“I don’t care what you’re doing,” he told the seller sitting across from him. “If this transaction is to go on, I must have the original certificate.”

Alfredo Martinez, over six feet tall and almost as wide, with unkempt hair and a straggly, black beard, barely missed a beat. Art by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the famed neo-Expressionist, had skyrocketed in price since the artist’s death over a decade before, and Alfredo was determined to pocket a hefty sum for the two works.

Not a problem, Alfredo told Malca. He knew where the certificates were, he just needed some time to go get them. He got up and left the office.

Outside, Alfredo fretted. He thought the certificates he’d forged and presented to Malca were, like the drawings, good enough to fool anyone. Now he had to get his hands on the genuine articles — and quickly enough to avoid suspicion. The clock was ticking on the biggest payday of his life.

He raced across town and, hoodwinking a friend who owned the original drawings, returned to Chelsea in just a few hours. He was getting sloppy, desperate — and Malca, a connected international figure with a history of drug related crimes, was not a man to double-cross.

Malca ran his fingers over the raised seal of the certificate and, happy with it, shook hands on the deal. Alfredo breathed a sigh of relief.

Little did he know that the sale had dropped him clean in the crosshairs of America’s greatest art detective.

 

This one's a movie you can see in your head almost, and it's a rollicking tale, all true.

Last Call ForThe Good Package, Con't

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are going back to the drawing board, or back to the mattresses, depending on how you look at the fact that the House vote of the God Package has been delayed until Halloween.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Saturday set a new deadline of Oct. 31 for the House to pass the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

In a "Dear Colleague" letter released on Saturday, Pelosi said that “more time was needed” to pass the infrastructure bill along with the larger, $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package after scrambling over the past two days to get enough votes.

The Speaker said she wants to pass the bipartisan bill by Oct. 31, when the 30-day reauthorization of federal highway programs expires. The House passed the extension Friday night amid the Democratic infighting over infrastructure.

“There is an October 31st Surface Transportation Authorization deadline, after last night’s passage of a critical 30-day extension,” Pelosi wrote. “We must pass BIF [bipartisan infrastructure framework] well before then – the sooner the better, to get the jobs out there.”

House Democrats tried to break an impasse between moderates and progressives on the bipartisan infrastructure package after progressives threatened to sink it if the larger “human infrastructure” bill would not pass via budget reconciliation.

President Biden visited Democrats on Friday seeking to ease tensions between the two factions, during which he told moderates that the vote would not happen that day. However, he also called for the liberal wing of the party to be willing to compromise.

Both bills are critical to realizing Biden's domestic agenda.

 

Vice-President Kyrsten Sinema smells blood in the water after she called Nancy Pelosi's cards earlier this week and got her to pull the vote.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) on Saturday slammed the decision to delay a vote this week on the bipartisan infrastructure deal that she helped negotiate, calling it “inexcusable.”

Good-faith negotiations, the Arizona centrist argued, "require trust."

"Over the course of this year, Democratic leaders have made conflicting promises that could not all be kept — and have, at times, pretended that differences of opinion within our party did not exist, even when those disagreements were repeatedly made clear directly and publicly," Sinema said in a statement.

“Canceling the infrastructure vote further erodes that trust. More importantly, it betrays the trust the American people have placed in their elected leaders and denies our country crucial investments to expand economic opportunities,” Sinema continued.

 

Sinema clearly believes she has won this fight. Time will tell if she actually has won or not. The biggest loser is Rep Pramila Jayapal and her progressive caucus in the House. Sinema beat all of them with one manicured hand tied behind her back. 

Like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe did during the Obama stimulus fight, the "moderates" know they hold 100% of the power, the leverage, and the votes.

What passes will only be what Sinema and Manchin allow, and it was never going to be any different.

 

The Vax Of Life, Con't

 America's COVID-19 death toll has now topped 700,000, a grim figure in 22 months of grim figures.

The United States surpassed 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Friday, a milestone that few experts had anticipated months ago when vaccines became widely available to the American public.

An overwhelming majority of Americans who have died in recent months, a period in which the country has offered broad access to shots, were unvaccinated. The United States has had one of the highest recent death rates of any country with an ample supply of vaccines.

The new and alarming surge of deaths this summer means that the coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest in American history, overtaking the toll from the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which killed about 675,000 people.

“This Delta wave just rips through the unvaccinated,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. The deaths that have followed the wide availability of vaccines, he added, are “absolutely needless.”

The recent virus deaths are distinct from those in previous chapters of the pandemic, an analysis by The New York Times shows. People who died in the last three and a half months were concentrated in the South, a region that has lagged in vaccinations; many of the deaths were reported in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. And those who died were younger: In August, every age group under 55 had its highest death toll of the pandemic.

That month, Brandee Stripling, a bartender in Cottondale, Ala., told her boss that she felt as if she had been run over by a freight train.

Ms. Stripling, a 38-year-old single mother, had not been vaccinated against the coronavirus, and now she had tested positive. Get some rest, her boss, Justin Grimball, reassured her.

“I thought she would pull through and get back to work and keep on living,” Mr. Grimball said.

Last week, he stood in a cemetery as Ms. Stripling was buried in her family plot. A pastor spoke comforting words, her children clutched one another in grief and a country song, “If I Die Young,” played in the background.

Her death came in the virus surge that gripped the country all summer, as the Delta variant hurtled through the South, Pacific Northwest and parts of the Midwest. Close to 100,000 people across the United States have died of Covid-19 since mid-June, months after vaccines were available to American adults.

 

For 100,000 more Americans to die with vaccine's widely available is horrific. That there is an organized, criminal disinformation campaign to kill thousands of Americans is far, far worse.

These Disunited States, Con't

A new University of Virginia/Sabato's Crystal Ball deep dive into America's political views gives us some pretty sobering results and that tens of millions of American believe that it's time to go our separate ways as a culture, as a people, and as a nation.

The University of Virginia Center for Politics has partnered with Project Home Fire, a new initiative dedicated to finding common ground in American politics, on an innovative new data analytics and polling project to explore the social, political, and psychological divides between those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Some of the key takeaways from today’s release are:

— Majorities of Trump and Biden voters express support for several elements of the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills being debated in Congress, but there are marked differences in their levels of support. (see Table 1 below)

— Majorities — often large majorities — of both Biden and Trump voters express some form of distrust for voters, elected officials, and media sources they associate with the other side. A strong majority of Trump voters see no real difference between Democrats and socialists, and a majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that there is no real difference between Republicans and fascists. (see Table 2 below)

— Significant numbers of both Trump and Biden voters show a willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms if needed to serve their priorities. Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters strongly agree it would be better if a “President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts,” and roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union. (see Table 3 below)

The Center for Politics and Project Home Fire will be releasing findings from this study in the coming weeks through a series of articles in Sabato’s Crystal Ball and other publications, as well as public symposiums that will each explore major, divisive subjects in American life. Those topics include: immigration, political violence, pandemic response, and other prominent national issues.

From July 22 to Aug. 4, 2021, Project Home Fire worked with InnovateMR, an industry-leading top 20 marketing research data collection firm, to capture online responses to more than 300 questions spanning social, political, and psychological topics from 1,001 Donald Trump presidential election voters and 1,011 Joe Biden voters (N=2,012), with a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points.

As part of this study, the Center for Politics and Project Home Fire will provide information not just about the divides between Biden and Trump voters, but also which kinds of voters in both camps are most open to finding common ground and which kinds of messages stand the best chance of spurring compromise.

“The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous. The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed,” said UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato.

“In order to figure out ways to bridge these divides, we need to understand not just the divides themselves, but also understand the ways in which we can, together, move forward to reach common ground. This project helps us do both,” said Larry Schack of Project Home Fire.

I don't think this is going to get fixed anytime soon, it's just a matter of when and how badly this "cold civil war" turns into a shooting one.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Feds turned to Google's geolocation technology to confirm people's phones were inside the US Capitol building, and the FBI is more than happy to use that in order to issue arrest warrants for January 6th charges.

COURT DOCUMENTS SUGGEST the FBI has been using controversial geofence search warrants at a scale not publicly seen before, collecting account information and location data on hundreds of devices inside the US Capitol during a deadly invasion by a right-wing mob on January 6.

While Google receives over 10,000 geofence warrants for location data in the US a year, those covering the Capitol breach appear to have been particularly productive, apparently enabling the FBI to build a large, searchable database in their hunt for the rioters.

Geofence warrants are intended to locate anyone in a given area using digital services. Google has been the target for many geofence warrants because its location technologies, which leverage GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth signals to pinpoint a phone within a few yards, are powerful and widely used.

Investigators can and do also serve warrants on phone companies. However, cell phone towers can only locate phones to within about three-quarters of a mile. While court documents suggest that the FBI collected cell tower records for “thousands of devices that were inside the Capitol” during the riot, Google’s data offers a much higher degree of accuracy.

The use of a geofence search warrant was first reported by The Washington Post, and others have previously noted specific instances of investigations that used Google geolocation data. But WIRED has found 45 federal criminal cases that cite Google geolocation data to place suspects inside the US Capitol on January 6, including at least six where the identity of the suspect appears to have been unknown to the FBI prior to the geofence warrant. One of these involved a serving Chicago police officer.

“I'm terribly concerned about the potential for misuse of that technology,“ says Ari Waldman, professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “Even if I think staging a coup against a democratic government is abhorrent, it doesn't mean that constitutional privacy protections shouldn't be in place.”

In fact, court documents refer to two geofence warrants relating to January 6, one of which a government filing seems to say was served even as the riot was raging. They were immediately sealed and are unlikely to be made public for years. However, a close reading of hundreds of court filings reveals that both the secretive geofence warrants and further Google-focused geolocation warrants delivered a wealth of information about dozens of suspects.

 

Don't get me wrong, the potential for abuse from geolocation data is massive, and the article goes on to make painfully clear.

 

For once, the technology was used to do the right thing.

 

But it will be used in other ways, much worse ones, that I can guarantee.

StupidiNews!

 Only one story, and it's pretty much everything:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed Thursday night's votes on both the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion Biden plan, as Dems don't have the votes for either.

Last Call For Biden, Ridin' Again

 President Joe Biden has rebounded from his August polling lows as it turns out Afghanistan wasn't the "disaster" that everyone predicted.

 

Since the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan a month ago, President Biden's approval rating has recovered some in the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Last month, just 43% of survey respondents approved of how he was doing his job and a majority — 51% — disapproved. Since then, Biden has gained back some of that, drawing to about even, with 45% approving and 46% disapproving.

"Some of it had to do with the proximity of Afghanistan, and that has sort of faded a little bit and is not as prominent in people's minds," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. Miringoff said Biden appears now to be at "more of a plateau" rather than a continued decline.

The survey of 1,220 adults was conducted from Sept. 20 through Sunday and has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points, meaning Biden's approval rating could be about 3 points higher or lower. The 7-point net change in his approval rating from one month to the next is slightly outside the margin of error.

Biden's somewhat-recovered numbers come from registered Democrats and independents. Miringoff noted that Republicans are essentially maxed out in their disapproval of Biden, and that of the 9% of respondents unsure of how they feel about the job the president is doing, many are Democratic-leaning voters.

"There are still some Democrats on the table," he said. "Those are winnable people. If he can get past this current congressional battle, there's the potential some of them could come home."

Democrats on Capitol Hill are currently negotiating with themselves over two massive spending bills. Centrists want the price tag of one bill to come down, while progressives want as much investment as they can get in infrastructure, social spending, climate and other measures while Democrats retain control of Congress.

 

If Biden can deliver the Good Package, things are going to take a major turn upwards for Democrats in general.

 

If he can't, well...