I Don't Buy Mike Rounding On Trump

Not sure why South Dakota GOP Sen. Mike Rounds would be on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, as he's a back-bencher in the minority party with no leadership roles, but that's how the media treats Republicans (when's the last time, say, Catherine Cortez Masto or Tom Carper were on a Sunday show?) over Democrats. Rounds did make some news I guess with a...less...than enthusiastic endorsement of Trump in 2024.

 

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said on Sunday that while he previously stated he would support the next Republican presidential nominee, he would take a "hard look" at supporting former President Trump if he ran again in 2024.

ABC "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos asked Rounds, who has shot back at GOP assertions that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, if he could support Trump if he ran for office again.

"I will take a hard look at it," said Rounds.

"Personally, what I have told people is, is I'm going to support the Republican nominee to be president. I'm not sure that the eventual nominee has even shown up yet," he said. "There's still — we're two years to go, where we're going to focus on the next election cycle. It's critical that we take back the House. It's critical that we take back the United States Senate."

Rounds said that he would leave it to the courts to decide whether Trump can run for office again. Democrats have been quietly exploring ways to prevent Trump from running for president again, including using the 14th Amendment.

"I think this is an issue which the courts can decide. And, most certainly, if there's evidence there, this is going to be up to the Justice Department to bring it forward and to move with it. But, once again, every single person has protections under that system. The former president has protections under that system as well," Rounds told Stephanopoulos.

"But this is something that should be decided in the courts. And I don't think it's something that we should be legislating on right now," he added.

 

Now, "I'll support the eventual nominee" is boilerplate dodge, but "If the Justice Department has evidence it's up to them to bring it forward" may be the first time I've heard any congressional Republican admit that Merrick Garland is anything other than a fiendish legal hitman working for Biden to take our freedoms and crap. 

Not only that, but it's an admission that hey, Garland may indeed have the goods, which is weird because Rounds doesn't serve on Judiciary or Intelligence. The Democrats aren't going to try to pass any legislation based on the 14th Amendment to ban Trump from running for office again, that's just not going to happen.

But...maybe Merrick Garland really does have something.

 

On the other hand, Trump is pissed. 

 

Trump issues a statement attacking GOP Sen. Mike Rounds, who said over the weekend that Biden won 2020 election fair and square.

"Even though his election will not be coming up for 5 years, I will never endorse this jerk again."

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) January 10, 2022

 

And yet, nobody doubts Trump will still be the GOP kingmaker in 2026.

StupidiNews!

• NYC fire officials say a space heater was most likely responsible for a Sunday Bronx apartment fire that left 19 dead, including 9 children, and injured 63 more.
• NASA has completed deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope over the weekend, with the orbital platform traveling to Earth's second Lagrange point over the next five and a half months.
• Australia has surpassed 1 million COVID infections as the Omicron variant continues to spread across the island nation.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is open to the idea of another round of federal relief aid for COVID ahead of a February deadline for keeping the government open.
• Game developer Sega says it will reconsider plans to explore gaming NFTs after a major customer backlash, saying the company will now "carefully assess" what is acceptable to users.
  

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

New year, same old Joe Manchin games, same old Biden administration getting the football yanked away.

The week before Christmas, Sen. Joe Manchin III sent the White House a $1.8 trillion counteroffer to President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda that included substantial funds for climate, health-care and education initiatives.

About four weeks later, the West Virginia Democrat has made clear that he does not currently support advancing even that offer following a breakdown in negotiations between Manchin and the White House right before Christmas, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

Manchin said publicly this week that he was no longer involved in talks with the White House over the economic package. Privately, he has also made clear that he is not interested in approving legislation resembling Biden’s Build Back Better package and that Democrats should fundamentally rethink their approach. Senior Democrats say they do not believe Manchin would support his offer even if the White House tried adopting it in full — at least not at the moment — following the fallout in mid-December. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Negotiations deteriorated quickly in December after a White House news release named Manchin as the obstacle to passing the legislation. Manchin then surprised the administration by criticizing the bill on Fox News, after which the White House released a blistering statement calling his credibility into question. Manchin, who has drawn protesters’ ire because of his opposition to the legislation, later said the decision to name him in the news release imperiled the safety of his family.

The White House has continued to project optimism that it will eventually secure Manchin’s vote and approval of a major economic plan by Congress. And Manchin’s $1.8 trillion counteroffer suggested that much common ground between the two sides remained on the policy substance. He said in recent days that he supports much of the administration’s climate agenda, for example.

But Democratic leaders in Congress have abruptly pivoted from trying to complete the economic package to addressing voting rights legislation, leaving unclear the fate of the White House’s chance to remake big parts of the U.S. economy and provide the biggest-ever investment in fighting climate change.

Manchin has talked with a range of public officials trying to sway him on Build Back Better, such as senior White House aide Steve Ricchetti; Larry Kudlow, who was an adviser to President Donald Trump; and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), among others.

White House allies, including several officials in the White House itself, have in recent days expressed confusion as to how the administration could pass up on the potential for $1.8 trillion deal that would amount to one of the most significant pieces of domestic policy in decades.

Manchin’s offer included permanent funding for universal prekindergarten, an expansion of the Affordable Care Act and hundreds of billions of dollars in climate-related spending — measures staunchly opposed by congressional Republicans. His plan also included support for a tax on billionaires, which would amount to the most aggressive plans to reduce wealth inequality in modern American history. And Democrats may not see another majority in Congress for many years.

“A $1.8 trillion package along the lines of what Manchin offered last month would be one of the most transformative, progressive pieces of legislation in modern history,” said Ben Ritz, a budget expert at the Progressive Policy Institute, a D.C. think tank. “The White House should absolutely take it if they can.”

 

Last month, Manchin was the villain, and what he needed most was a way to kill Build Back Better without being the obvious bad guy. Now he's won on that, and the BBB plan is 100% dead.

It'll be blamed on "Biden and the progressives" for not taking his offer, which was never really an offer anyway. He would have objected to his own offer on the table in order to reset the news cycle, but now he doesn't have to lift a finger.

He's most going to get away with it.

On A Need To Don't Know Basis

Expect a lot more of this going forward in one-party, permanent GOP rule states.

When Iowa’s 2022 legislative session commences Monday, there will be a notable absence on the floor of the state Senate: reporters.

Republican leaders in the state Senate told journalists last week they will no longer be allowed to work on the chamber floor, a change that breaks with a more than 140-year tradition in the Iowa Capitol. The move raised concerns among free press and freedom of information advocates who said it is a blow to transparency and open government that makes it harder for the public to understand, let alone scrutinize, elected officials.

The new rule denies reporters access to the press benches near senators’ desks, a proximity current and former statehouse reporters told The Washington Post is crucial for the most accurate and nuanced coverage. The position allows reporters to see and hear everything clearly on the Senate floor and to get real-time answers and clarifications during debates.

Beginning this session, reporters will be seated in a public upper-level gallery.

“When you take journalists and restrict their access and then you couple that with changes that have occurred in the past couple of years with procedures in Iowa, it makes it that much harder for the public to know what’s going on,” said Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a government transparency watchdog.

In an email to statehouse reporters obtained by The Washington Post, Senate Republican spokesperson Caleb Hunter said the new rule arose from the “evolving nature and definition of ‘media.' ”

“As nontraditional media outlets proliferate, it creates an increasingly difficult scenario for the Senate, as a governmental entity, to define the criteria of a media outlet,” the email said. Hunter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

To critics of the new rule, including members of the Iowa Capitol Press Association and Democrats in the state Senate, the change is little more than a thinly veiled retaliation against news outlets for unflattering coverage of the Republican-controlled legislature. Longtime statehouse reporters also called the justification specious and said there are no instances of nontraditional media causing disruptions.

“Keeping reporters out doesn’t make reporters more accurate or fair. [Senators] would be better off letting those folks in and getting to know them,” said Kathie Obradovich, editor in chief of the Iowa Capital Dispatch, who also serves as vice president of the Iowa Capitol Press Association (ICPA). She called the move “discouraging” and unprovoked.

Obradovich noted that the Iowa House, the judiciary and the governor’s office have all managed to define criteria for media outlets and said the Iowa Senate will have to eventually, whenever it next holds news conferences that require credentialing.

Unlike the Washington press corps covering Congress and the White House, the media space at the Iowa Capitol is allocated by the party that has control of the Iowa House and Iowa Senate; both chambers of the statehouse and the governor’s office are currently controlled by Republicans.

The change in access comes as government accountability and media watchdogs raise the alarm about the effects of dwindling statehouse coverage across the United States as larger swaths of the country become local news deserts.

 

Understand that authoritarians only want you to know about laws after they are passed, and that Republican state legislatures are hurtling towards regime status at these statehouse levels. 

 

When I say "please, please get involved in local politics like county commissions, city councils and school boards where you live" I mean it, because literal white supremacist domestic terrorists are more than happy to do so.

On the morning she met her opponent for coffee, Sarah Cole walked in with a front-runner’s confidence.

To Cole, the school board seat in this rural red district about an hour outside Seattle was all but hers. Educators and community leaders had endorsed her. She had name recognition from years in the Parent Teacher Association. And, besides, she was running against Ashley Sova, a home-schooling, anti-masking member of the far-right Three Percent movement.

“I kind of thought I had it in the bag,” Cole recalled.

Their coffee date that October day, as recounted by both women, was an exercise in gritted-teeth civility. Cole asked about the Three Percent logo tattooed on Sova’s neck in red, white and blue bullets. Sova tried to corner Cole on critical race theory. At the end, they took a photo and promised to work together no matter who was elected, each privately expecting Cole to win.

In December, however, it was Sova who was sworn in, the second Three Percenter on the five-person Eatonville School Board. Three Percenter ideology, part of the self-styled militia movement, promotes conspiratorial views about government overreach and imagines “patriotic” Americans revolting against perceived violations of the Constitution.

Presented as “defending liberty,” extremism analysts say, those far-right views are spreading in conservative places like Eatonville, where the school board race spiraled into a fight over mask mandates and how race is taught in school. Cole lost by more than 200 votes.

“The race was basically sabotaged by the national narrative,” Cole said. She sounded incredulous that parents felt best represented by a Three Percenter whose kids aren’t even in public school: “I don’t even know how to explain it except to say, in the face of the facts, they still chose to run with fears.”

What happened in Eatonville, according to extremism trackers, is bigger than a small-town upset. In recent years, far-right groups have been moving away from national organizing to focus on building grass-roots support, harnessing conservative outrage to influence school boards and other local offices. That effort was stepped up after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol left much of the militant right under federal scrutiny and in operational disarray.

Eatonville is among several rural, conservative parts of the West where members of self-styled militias are making inroads through what researchers call a mix of opportunism and intimidation. Once-fringe views about government “tyranny” now match the mainstream conservative discourse on vaccine and mask mandates, softening the public image of movements linked to political violence.

“If you’re going to make a change, you don’t do it by storming the Capitol. You make change by using the process that you’ve been given and starting at the bottom,” said Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent and a member of the Eatonville School Board.

Two years ago, watchdog groups warned that Marshall’s election represented the dangerous creep of anti-government extremism. Today, the Washington Three Percent claims members in dozens of official posts throughout the state, including a mayor, a county commissioner and at least five school board seats. Sova, an officer with the group, was among four female members who ran in local races this cycle. Three won.

 

The fascists like Steve Bannon are organizing and are winning at the local level as Ezra Klein points out.

The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.

“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”

An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”

Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”

America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’ would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.

But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.

“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.

 

If we give up these local offices to the terrorists and anti-democracy authoritarians, they will be taken and used against everyone who isn't them.

 

And this is why GOP authoritarians don't want local and state legislation covered until it's far too late.

Sunday Long Read: Post-Trump Stress Disorder

"Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance is running for Rob Portman's US Senate seat in Ohio against perennial GOP loser Josh Mandel, and while Mandel is leading the primary race, Vance is the threat in the long term because of his Trumpian radicalization, as our Sunday Long Read from WaPo's magazine's Simon van Zuylen-Wood documents.

Let’s start with the beard. J.D. Vance didn’t used to have one. The Vance who in 2016 achieved incandescent literary fame with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” was all baby fat and rounded edges. The Vance I’m watching now, from the back of a coffee shop in the depressed steel town of Steubenville, Ohio, has covered up his softer side. In small-format events like this one, addressing a couple dozen primary voters, he spends about 15 minutes attacking corporate and governmental elites for failing the country, then answers questions and mingles for maybe another 45 minutes. Vance, 37, is comfortable in the folksy idiom of GOP campaigning (e.g., “she loved the Lord, she loved the f-word — that’s what Mamaw was”) but he tends to gloss over his famously traumatic childhood, immortalized on screen in Ron Howard’s 2020 film adaptation of his book. In Steubenville, he paces the room with a Big Gulp-sized foam cup in his hand, an Everyman touch that accentuates his new aesthetic.

I’m not the only one thinking about J.D. Vance’s beard. Recently, I asked one of his law school friends to tell me about his personality. “He’s lovely,” the friend said, describing Vance’s smile and laugh. Then he paused. He wanted to talk about Vance’s facial hair. Even as a slightly older law student — Vance had served four years in the Marines before enrolling at Ohio State as an undergraduate — he came across as guileless, boyish. No longer. “He looks different,” the friend said. “He’s going for a kind of severe masculinism thing. He looks like Donald Trump Jr.” Toward the end of our conversation, which was mostly about the way the culture shock of Yale Law School informed Vance’s politics, I asked the friend if he wanted to discuss anything else. He returned to the beard. “That’s honestly occupied an outsized amount of my attention,” he said.

The beard isn’t a bad symbol for Vance’s U.S. Senate campaign — or at least for how that campaign is being received. Discourse around the race centers mostly on the idea that Vance is a changed or fraudulent person. Five years ago, Vance was eloquently decoding Donald Trump supporters for liberal elites, while lamenting the rise of Trump himself. Vance, whose mother is a recovering heroin user, compared Trump to an opioid, calling him an “easy escape from the pain.” Now, since announcing his run, he’s reversed himself on Trump and adopted a bellicose persona at odds with the sensitive, bookish J.D. of his memoir. On Veterans Day, 48 hours after the Steubenville event, Vance tweeted that LeBron James — of Akron, Ohio — is “one of the most vile public figures in our country.” (James had joked that Kenosha, Wis., shooter Kyle Rittenhouse “ate some lemon heads” before crying on the stand during his trial.) Watching Vance campaign, I felt him straining to deliver his talking points in an angry register. It wasn’t just that steel jobs had been offshored; they were outsourced by “idiots” in Washington, to countries that “hate us.”

Commentary about Vance from Never-Trumpers and liberals tends to strike a note of personal chagrin about his evolving image. Pundit Mona Charen, writing about Vance as if he had died, called him an “extremely bright and insightful man who could have been a fresh voice for a fundamentally conservative view of the world.” Frank Bruni of the New York Times predicted that a Vance tweet about Alec Baldwin’s recent accidental shooting incident would “endure as one of the boldest markers of his descent.” In Ohio, meanwhile, the pressure on Vance runs entirely in the opposite direction. Every campaign stop he makes, he patiently tries to explain away his past Never-Trumpism, which has been exhumed in the form of deleted tweets and “Charlie Rose” clips. An attack ad playing his anti-Trump sound bites ends with a woman saying, “That’s the real J.D. Vance.”

Vance’s friends split the difference: They say he’s the same guy but he’s been radicalized. “I think he’s gotten a lot more bitter and cynical — appropriately,” conservative blogger Rod Dreher told me. To Dreher, the change in tone is justified by the course of American politics over the past five years. “Trump remained Trump — but the Left went berserk,” he wrote in a post defending Vance. Still, Dreher — who attended Vance’s 2019 baptism into the Catholic Church — worries about the toll campaigning is taking on his friend. “S--t-posting has become the signature style of young radicals on the right, and this is particularly a hazard I think for Christians,” he told me.

The surface-level changes are indeed striking. Yet the more I watched him, the more it seemed to me that the emerging canon of “what happened to J.D. Vance” commentary was missing the point. Vance’s new political identity isn’t so much a façade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story. And now there’s an ideological home for that worldview: Vance has become one of the leading political avatars of an emergent populist-intellectual persuasion that tacks right on culture and left on economics. Known as national conservatism or sometimes “post-liberalism,” it is — in broad strokes — heavily Catholic, definitely anti-woke, skeptical of big business, nationalist about trade and borders, and flirty with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. In Congress, its presence is minuscule — represented chiefly by Sens. Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio — but on Fox News, it has a champion in Tucker Carlson, on whose show Vance is a regular guest. And while the movement’s philosopher-kings spend a lot of time litigating internal schisms online, the project is animated by a real-life political gambit: that as progressives weaken the Democratic Party with unpopular cultural attitudes, the right can swoop in and pick off multiracial working-class voters.

Vance’s Senate race is an almost perfect test of these ideas because the front-runner in the Republican primary, former state treasurer and tea party product Josh Mandel — who, according to recent polling, leads Vance by 6 points — is the candidate of traditional conservative tax-cutters. To those watching the Vance-Mandel slugfest from afar, it may just look like two candidates trying to out-flank each other on the right; but the fissures between them run deep. The Club for Growth, known for its free-market zealotry, is supporting Mandel and has spent roughly $1.5 million on anti-Vance attack ads. One TV spot highlights a tweet in which Vance says he “loved @MittRomney’s anti-Trump screed.” The narrator does not linger on the rest of the message, which reads: “too bad party will do everything except admit that supply-side tax cuts do nothing for its voters.” Before Vance deleted his old anti-Trump tweets, he tended to attack Trump for abandoning his stated commitment to economic populism. In a 2020 interview with anti-establishment pundits Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, Vance contended that Trump’s great political failure wasn’t his handling of the pandemic, but his signature corporate tax cut and his attempts to undo Obamacare.

A couple of weeks after I saw him in Steubenville, Vance called me from the road, on his way to an event in Toledo. I asked about his sudden estrangement from polite society. “The price of being beloved by the establishment is you don’t say anything interesting,” he told me. “And if you don’t say anything interesting, you’re not going to be a useful part of solving any of the problems we have in this country.” What Vance is saying now may or may not prove appealing to voters, but it certainly meets the test of being interesting. “Dominant elite society is boring, it is completely unreflective, and it is increasingly wrong,” he told me. In other words: “I kind of had to make a choice.”

 

The term "radicalization" is true, but it also partially absolves Vance of his screaming, hateful racist rhetoric. As he says in the last paragraph above, he made a choice.

That choice was deciding, as so many white Americans have done over the years, that blaming, attacking and destroying the rights, lives, and humanity of those who are not white is the best way for a white Americans to stay in power at our direct expense.

 

There's a significant chance he ends up as Ohio's next senator, where he will seek to codify that racism into permanent law.

Vance isn't anything new, but something as old as America itself.

From Frankfort To Hickman

Kentucky Republicans are redistricting the state's six congressional districts this week as the 2022 General Assembly gets underway in Frankfort, and the first order of business is to make sure GOP Rep. Andy Barr never has a Democratic challenge again.

The Kentucky General Assembly approved new redistricting maps Saturday, mere days after its Republican leaders introduced their plans to redraw the boundaries for the state's legislative and congressional seats.

Redistricting happens every 10 years to reflect shifts in population, and this is the first time the GOP has fully controlled that process in Kentucky.

The Kentucky House of Representatives and Senate usually don't meet on weekends, but they did Saturday to pass this set of maps. Leading House Republicans unveiled their proposal just before the new year, while the Senate's GOP leadership waited to release their redistricting plans until the state's annual lawmaking session began this week.

The bills lawmakers approved Saturday and sent to Gov. Andy Beshear's desk included new maps for the state House and Senate as well as for the commonwealth's six congressional seats. The General Assembly also passed legislation that changes the Kentucky Supreme Court's districts for the first time in decades.

Leading Republican lawmakers have said they made sure these new maps meet all legal and constitutional requirements for redistricting.

It's possible, however, that someone could try to challenge the new redistricting plans in court.

The first redistricting plan that got final passage Saturday was the Senate GOP's redrawn map for Kentucky's congressional districts.

The House gave that proposal the last approval it needed in a 65-25 vote Saturday morning.

The new congressional map doesn't chop up Kentucky's 3rd Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth, as some people feared it might. That district still will include most of Jefferson County, except for an eastern and southeastern swath that now will be represented by Rep. Brett Guthrie's 2nd Congressional District.

The particularly controversial part of the new map is Rep. James Comer's reshaped 1st Congressional District, which will stretch further northeast and take Franklin County — the home of the Democrat-friendly state capital of Frankfort — out of Rep. Andy Barr's 6th Congressional District. That's expected to make Barr's seat safer.

Rep. Derrick Graham, D-Frankfort, criticized that shift in Franklin County's representation to Comer's district, which is primarily based in Western Kentucky.

"What it does to Franklin County is wrong," Graham said Saturday. "Franklin County was and is and always will be a part of Central Kentucky, both geographically and in spirit. ... Franklin County shares a lot of bonds with Western Kentucky, but we should not share a congressman."

So yeah, expect 5-1 US House delegations in favor of the GOP here long into the future. 

 

At the state level, the KY GOP is making sure that it can keep their three-quarters super majority in both chambers in perpetuity, too. They only need 50% + 1 to override a Beshear veto, but...why not grab all the power you can? Worked for Ohio's GOP, after all.

 

The Senate signed off on the House's redistricting plan Saturday in a 23-10 vote, with a few Republicans joining the chamber's Democrats in opposition.

The House already had approved that bill earlier in the week on a mostly party-line vote, as Democrats repeated their objections that the maps were unfairly drawn to split urban areas and further help Republican candidates.

Democrats and the League of Women Voters of Kentucky have heavily criticized the House map. Common complaints have been that it unnecessarily splits some of Kentucky's biggest counties into different districts and targets women by pitting two sets of incumbent women against each other in Jefferson County.

Top Republicans have defended their plan, with House Speaker David Osborne recently saying he believes they achieved their goal of drawing "a thoughtful map that complied with every legal and constitutional requirement."

The House gave the Kentucky Senate's redrawn districts the final approval they needed in a 67-23 vote.

When the Senate passed the new map for its chamber earlier in the week, the Republican plan actually got the support of most Senate Democrats, none of whom will have to run against each other in the same district.

One criticism some people have raised is the way this map splits a few of the state's biggest counties into different districts.

Rep. Patti Minter, D-Bowling Green, said Saturday her home county of Warren had to be divvied up because it has gained so many residents in recent years, but she argued it should only have been cracked into two districts, not the three that make up its territory in this map.

 

Right now the KY GOP has 75 of 100 state House seats, and 30 or 38 Senate seats.  The news plan will probably make it closer to 80-20 in the House and 32-6 in the Senate, meaning that there's absolutely no chance Democrats will ever be in power again in my lifetime, and that the GOP can pass whatever laws they want and override any possible veto from any future Democratic governor easily, and never have to pay a political price for it.

One party rule for good here, folks. Not a fun place to be in the years ahead.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Kazakhstan, Con't

 Me, on Kazhakstan's unrest on Thursday:

 

We'll see where this lands, but behind all of this is a Russian president who wants a new Soviet Union. Don't be surprised if Moscow steps in to "bring order" back to the country as they did in Ukraine.  

 

And 48 hours later, I hate to once again be right about something.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and his Kazakh counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on Saturday discussed restoring "order" in Kazakhstan following days of violence and unrest, as several high-profile officials were detained on suspicion of treason. 

Tokayev told Putin the situation in his country was "progressing on the way to stabilization" and expressed his "appreciation" for the deployment of a Russia-led military bloc to Kazakhstan to try and control violence on the streets, the Kremlin said in a statement on Saturday. 

Meanwhile, former head of Kazakhstan's National Security Committee Karim Massimov and some other unnamed officials have been detained on suspicion of treason, the country's National Security Committee announced, according to state media Khabar 24 on Saturday.

 

And just like that, President Tokayev is literally inviting Russian troops onto his soil to "restore order".

 

Thing is, these Russian troops aren't leaving for a long, long time. 

As for the "traitors" being rounded up, well it's not like Kazakhstan is going to need a national security  anything for much longer anyway, since that job will got to Moscow very soon.

Looks like Vlad is getting his old neighborhood watch together. Kyiv's sweating, that's for sure. If Putin wanted to make it clear what's in store for Ukraine in the days ahead, he just made a hell of a test case.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The Guardian's Hugo Lowell continues his reporting on the January 6th Committee with information that the investigation is now focusing on Donald Trump and his lackeys being part of a criminal conspiracy as well as obstruction of justice.

 

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House’s scheme to stop Joe Biden’s certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter.

The committee’s new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department.

House investigators are interested in whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy after communications turned over by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others suggested the White House coordinated efforts to stop Biden’s certification, the sources said.

The select committee has several thousand messages, among which include some that suggest the Trump White House briefed a number of House Republicans on its plan for then-vice president Mike Pence to abuse his ceremonial role and not certify Biden’s win, the sources said.

The fact that the select committee has messages suggesting the Trump White House directed Republican members of Congress to execute a scheme to stop Biden’s certification is significant as it could give rise to the panel considering referrals for potential crimes, the sources said.

Members and counsel on the select committee are examining in the first instance whether in seeking to stop the certification, Trump and his aides violated the federal law that prohibits obstruction of a congressional proceeding – the joint session on 6 January – the sources said.

The select committee believes, the sources said, that Trump may be culpable for an obstruction charge given he failed for hours to intervene to stop the violence at the Capitol perpetrated by his supporters in his name.

But the select committee is also looking at whether Trump oversaw an unlawful conspiracy that involved coordination between the “political elements” of the White House plan communicated to Republican lawmakers and extremist groups that stormed the Capitol, the sources said. 

 

We also learned this week that the Committee wants to talk to two people specifically as part of that raft of messages pointing to a criminal conspiracy: FOX News host Sean Hannity, whose cooperation is being requested after messages between him and Mark Meadows advising Trump how to act on January 6th were made public, and former VP Mike Pence himself, who is at the center of the conspiracy to try to steal Biden's win through decertification of electors and throwing it to the House delegations to decide in Trump favor.

As far as Hannity goes, the fact that he hasn't immediately been fired or even suspended, or that he hasn't announced a "previously planned vacation"is proof enough that FOX News is the propaganda arm of the Trumpists (if not the Trumpists being the long-term political arm of the far right media monsters.)  Hannity is even more awful than Tucker Carlson is, while Carlson is still an unrepentant racist authoritarian who cozies up to dictators like Putin and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Hannity is the thin patina of respectability in the FOX stable of hosts, and with the direct ear of basically all the major Trump players, including Trump himself.

As for Mike Pence? I honestly think he's running scenarios through his head where he emerges as the "reformed" face of Trumpism and is a "hero" respected by voters of all camps and creeds who will consider his "service" to the country by refusing Trump's orders to make him history's good guy, the way Gerald Ford was portrayed. And remember, for all Ford's "heroism" and pardoning of Nixon, his reward was a loss to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

We do seem to be getting closer to the point where Donald Trump is going to be referred for criminal prosecution, and then it's all Merrick Garland from there.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Again, predicting the Supreme Court is a mug's game, but if the questions are any indication from Friday, well, as Vox's Ian Millihiser points out, the Biden administration vaccine mandate is pretty much toast.

Benjamin Flowers is Ohio’s solicitor general, and he was supposed to be at the Supreme Court on Friday to ask the justices to nullify a Biden administration rule requiring most workers to either be vaccinated against Covid-19 or to be regularly tested for the disease.

But Flowers had to argue his case over the phone. The reason why? He himself has Covid, and therefore could not enter the justices’ workplace and risk endangering them and their staff.

It’s an elegant metaphor for the kind of see-no-evil approach to Covid-19 that Flowers, and several other lawyers arguing against policies from President Joe Biden’s administration, would impose on the nation. Flowers would have the justices block one of Biden’s most significant efforts to halt a potentially deadly disease that, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted multiple times during Friday’s arguments, is infecting about three-quarters of a million Americans every day this week.

And yet, if Friday’s argument in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor is any sign, there will almost certainly be at least five votes on the Supreme Court to block the workplace Covid rule, which applies to employers with 100 or more employees.

Meanwhile, in separate case Biden v. Missouri, the Court considered a rule requiring health providers that accept Medicare and Medicaid funds to be vaccinated. This oral argument was less of a bloodbath for the government, and it seems possible that this more limited rule for health providers will be upheld.

But the oral argument in the first case, NFIB, suggests that the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority is inclined to hand down a very broad decision — one that won’t simply hobble many of the Biden administration’s efforts to quell a pandemic that has killed nearly 830,000 Americans, but that could also fundamentally rework the balance of power between elected federal officials and an unelected judiciary.

Both the NFIB case and the Missouri case involve very broadly worded laws, enacted by Congress, which give federal agencies sweeping authority to protect the health and safety of workers or Medicare patients. But all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared uncomfortable with letting these agencies — and especially the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — fully exercise the power Congress has given them.

Multiple justices appeared eager to impose new restrictions on Congress’s ability to delegate authority to federal agencies. Indeed, the Court could easily give itself a sweeping new power to veto agency regulations that a majority of the justices disapprove of.

A majority of the Court, in other words, appeared much more bothered by the implications of letting the Biden administration fight the pandemic than they are bothered by the many deaths caused by the pandemic itself.

If the Court does wind up drastically shrinking the federal government’s authority, that won’t exactly be a surprise. The Court’s been signaling that it is eager to transfer power from federal agencies to the judiciary since shortly after then-President Donald Trump replaced the relatively moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy with hardline conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

But, while the Court has foreshadowed the most likely result in the NFIB case for quite a while, that does not mean that a decision striking down OSHA’s vaccinate-or-test rule would be any less profound. NFIB is likely to be a turning point in the right-wing Roberts Court’s relationship with the elected branches — and it could permanently disable the federal government’s ability to address crises like the Covid-19 pandemic in the future.

 

Again, I've been warning about this for a while now. What the Roberts Court appears ready to do is to absolutely hamstring federal agencies and give nearly all of the regulatory and rule-making power to Congress, where Senate Republicans can simply block regulations from ever being made, and the rest can be delegated to the states.

Outside of State, Justice, and the Pentagon, the rest of the Executive branch is about to get torn to shreds, with entire agencies possibly rendered powerless. Mostly though, it's about making sure government can't work for the American people, and that the GOP's long-term authoritarianism is codified.

But Zandar, you say, if the GOP wants an authoritarian government, why cripple the executive? The answer, as I said, is the Senate. Democrats aren't going to get rid of the filibuster, and the Senate will always have at least 41 Republicans in any possible future scenario. A broad ruling that destroys regulatory authority in the executive means that the Senate can block any attempts to legislate that regulatory power, too.

As I've been saying, by July 4th, it's going to be painfully clear how bad things are going to be in the years ahead.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Today the three white men convicted last year in Georgia of the brutal murder of unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced in court today, and the judge did not hesitate to hand down the maximum sentences.

Three white men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced Friday to life in prison, with a judge denying any chance of parole for the father and son who armed themselves and initiated the deadly pursuit of the 25-year-old Black man.

Greg and Travis McMichael grabbed guns and chased Arbery in a pickup truck after spotting him running in their neighborhood outside the Georgia port city of Brunswick. Neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan joined the pursuit and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael blasting Arbery with a shotgun.

In November, a jury convicted all three defendants of murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and attempted false imprisonment.

Murder carries a mandatory life sentence under Georgia law. The trial judge ordered both McMichaels to serve life without parole. Bryan was granted a chance of parole, but must first serve at least 30 years in prison.

The Feb. 23, 2020, killing became part of a larger national reckoning on racial injustice when the video was posted online two months later.

 

The three still face a federal hate crimes trial as well.

 

Justice was never an option with one trial for a broken system, but accountability I will take. 

Black Lives Still Matter.

Jobapalooza, Con't

A huge miss on jobs numbers, but pretty good news on everything else in the December 2021 jobs report.

The U.S. economy added far fewer jobs than expected in December just as the nation was grappling with a massive surge in Covid cases, the Labor Department said Friday.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 199,000, while the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That compared to the Dow Jones estimate of 422,000 for the payrolls number and 4.1% for the unemployment rate.


Stock market futures edged lower following the report, while bond yields were in positive territory though off their highs of the morning.

Job creation was highest in leisure and hospitality, a key recovery sector, which added 53,000. Professional and business services contributed 43,000 while manufacturing added 26,000.

The unemployment rate was a fresh pandemic-era low and near the 50-year low of 3.5% in February 2020. That decline came even though the labor force participation rate was unchanged at 61.9% amid an ongoing labor shortage in the U.S.

A more encompassing measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons slid to 7.3%, down 0.4 percentage points. Though the overall jobless rates fell, unemployment for Blacks spiked during the month, rising to 7.1% from 6.5%. The rate for women 20 years and older fell sharply, to 3.1% from 3.7%.

"The new year is off to a rocky start," wrote Nick Bunker, economic research director at job placement site Indeed. "These less than stellar numbers were recorded before the omicron variant started to spread significantly in the United States. Hopefully the current wave of the pandemic will lead to limited labor market damage. The labor market is still recovering, but a more sustainable comeback is only possible in a post-pandemic environment."

Average hourly earnings rose more than expected as the U.S. sees its fastest inflation pace in nearly 40 years. Wages rose 0.6% for the month and were up 4.7% year over year. That compares to respective estimates of 0.4% and 4.2%.

While the establishment survey showed much lower than expected job gains, the household count told a different story, with a gain of 651,000. There also were upward revisions for prior months, with the final October tally pushed up to 648,000, an increase of 102,000, while November's disappointing report gained 39,000 in its first revision to 249,000.

 

So unemployment is back under 4%, and we still added 200,000 jobs in December, with wages up 4.7% for the year. The bad news, inflation was up by almost twice that, so yeah, Americans felt that in their pocketbooks for sure, and it's definitely hurting Biden's poll numbers.

We'll see where we go in 2022. The broad forecasts are for the economy to cool off from "hurtling towards the stars" to just "pretty good" and to lower inflation along with it. If that happens, things will improve for average Americans and oh yeah, for the Democrats.

Because you know what? 2021 was actually a great year economically.

 

6.4 million jobs created in one year: a new record

Unemployment rate drop from 6.2% to 3.9%: a new record

This was the greatest jobs growth year in modern American history, and it’s not even close.

— Jesse Lee (@JesseLee46) January 7, 2022

 

But remember, the GOP wants you to think the economy is miserable, and it's just not. As I mentioned above, inflation sucks, but also 6.4 million jobs since Biden took office, so the miss this month actually is a drop in the bucket in the year that was 2021.

Keep that in mind.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

A year after the January 6th insurrection, we have to remember that not only was the attack on the US Capitol building going on, but that there were multiple pipe bombs found in Washington DC that day as well. We still don;t know who was behind the attempted bombings, but we now know that one of the potential victims was VP Harris herself.

Then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was inside Democratic National Committee headquarters on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pipe bomb was discovered outside the building, according to four people familiar with her movements that day.

Capitol Police began investigating the pipe bomb at 1:07 p.m., according to an official Capitol Police timeline of events obtained by POLITICO. The timeline says that Capitol Police and the Secret Service evacuated an unnamed “protectee” at approximately 1:14 p.m, seven minutes later. The four people, among them a White House official and a former law enforcement official, confirmed that Harris was the Secret Service protectee identified in the timeline, which has circulated on Capitol Hill.

Harris’ presence inside the building while a bomb was right outside raises sobering questions about her security that day. It also raises the chilling prospect that the riots could have been far more destructive than they already were, with the incoming vice president's life directly endangered. Federal law enforcement officials have faced harsh criticism for failing to anticipate the chaotic scene around the Electoral College certification one year ago, despite receiving a host of warnings about possible chaos.

The DNC bomb threat was neutralized at 4:36 p.m., according to the timeline. Another pipe bomb discovered at the RNC was neutralized at 3:33 p.m. No suspects have been arrested so far in relation to the bombs.

The FBI has described both bombs as “viable” and said they “could have been detonated, resulting in serious injury or death.” Authorities say both bombs were placed by a single suspect the night before the Capitol attack. The RNC bomb was placed in an alley behind the building, and the DNC bomb was placed near a park bench. The FBI recently issued a new call for help seeking the suspected pipe bomber, who was captured on video in the vicinity of the DNC and RNC buildings.

Harris’ DNC evacuation on Jan. 6, as authorities raced to respond to the bomb threat, has not been previously reported. She occasionally used party headquarters to conduct nongovernment business as the vice presidential nominee and later in advance of the Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration — a standard practice for elected officials in both parties. Aides had previously declined to reveal her location during the attack, citing security reasons.

Harris alluded to her absence from the Capitol during the breach as she delivered televised remarks Thursday, though she was cryptic about her location.

“I had left, but my thoughts immediately turned not only to my colleagues, but to my staff who had been forced to seek refuge in our office, converting filing cabinets into barricades,” she said.

 

So the timeline of the investigation now includes the fact that if the viable bomb had been detonated when VP Harris was nearby, it could have been lethal.

It would have been an assassination.

All of the January 6th criminals have to be brought to justice, including the masterminds like Trump. But that also means the identity of the pipe bomber has to be discovered, and the person has to face justice as well.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life

The ban on Biden's federal OSHA vaccine mandate rules will remain here in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee after the 6th Circuit upheld a lower court ruling blocking employer vaccine mandate rules.

A federal appeals court has declined to lift a ban in three states on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for workers who contract with the federal government.

The ruling comes after a nationwide ban on the mandate for federal contractors was imposed by a federal judge in Georgia last month.

A judge in Louisville, Kentucky, blocked the Biden rule in November for that state and two others: Tennessee and Ohio.

A panel of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld the injunction for the three states in a 2-1 ruling Wednesday.

“This ensures, while the case continues to proceed, that federal contractors in Kentucky aren’t subject to the Biden Administration’s unlawful mandate,” Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican who filed the suit challenging the mandate, said in an emailed statement Thursday. Cameron said in a release last year that federal contractors accounted for about one-fifth of the country’s labor force and $9 billion in contracts in 2021.

 

This was largely expected, as two Trump-appointed judges agreed with KY GOP AG Cameron that the mandates were unconstitutional. 

The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments tomorrow on the OSHA vaccine mandate rules.

In the midst of the latest surge in omicron COVID-19 cases, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Friday on whether the Biden administration can force private-sector firms to vaccinate or test tens of millions of employees.

The court is expected to make a decision swiftly that could freeze the vax-or-test mandates on businesses with more than 100 workers — and the threat of fines — or let the Biden plan be implemented, legal experts say. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, which regulates workplace safety, has said it could begin fining businesses that fail to comply with the mandates on Jan. 10.

Employers “are waiting to see the outcome in the courts,” Wendell Young IV, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, which represents 35,000 Pennsylvania union members, said last week.

John S. Ho, co-chair of OSHA-Workplace Safety Practice at Cozen O’Connor, said that companies should be developing a “roster of vaccination status” of employees to show OSHA “good faith” in complying with the mandates.

“You should have that roster in place by Jan. 10,” he said. But Ho also is advising companies to take a “wait-and-see approach” on implementing the vaccination mandates that could lead some employees to quit.

A firm can be fined $13,600 per violation. OSHA is expected to mostly enforce the mandate through employee complaints. “It’s a politically charged issue. There is no way to avoid that,” Ho said.

The Biden administration says the emergency rules could save the lives of 6,500 workers and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations in the next six months as COVID-19 presents a “grave danger” to employees where they work. The Inquirer estimates that 1.8 million Philly-area workers fall under the mandates. Nationally, two out of three employers fall under it, representing about 80 million workers.

Firms, business trade associations, and 27 states say that the Biden administration has exceeded its authority at the workplace safety agency with the mandates that appear designed to boost vaccination rates and that many workers remain unpersuaded in vaccine benefits.

The case has made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in lightning speed. OSHA announced the mandates in early November and they were immediately challenged in court. On Nov. 12, the appeals court in New Orleans stayed, or froze, the mandates, saying that they were “staggeringly overbroad.” The ruling added that they raised issues of the government’s “virtually unlimited power to control individual conduct under the guise of a workplace regulation.”

Meanwhile, mandate cases filed nationwide were consolidated in the appeals court in Cincinnati. A panel of judges there lifted the stay on Dec. 17. “COVID has continued to spread, mutate, kill and block the safe return of American workers to jobs. To protect workers, OSHA can and must be able to respond to dangers as they evolve,” the court said in its decision. 

So while the nationwide ban has been stayed, the 6th Circuit ban remains in place for Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. We'll see what the Roberts Court has to say, but my guess is that the vaccine mandate will not survive, and that a real danger remains that a broad ruling against executive branch regulatory agencies like OSHA could suddenly cripple the American workplace nationwide.

More tomorrow.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

President Biden did not pull his punches this morning with a much-welcomed strident defense of American democracy against Donald Trump's coup attempt.

President Joe Biden on Thursday marked the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection by forcefully calling out former President Donald Trump for attempting to undo American democracy, saying such an insurrection must never happen again.

Biden vowed to defend the nation's founding ideals from the threats posed by the violent mob that stormed the Capitol one year ago and the prevailing lies that Trump and his allies continue to repeat about the 2020 election. An animated Biden made one of the most passionate addresses of his still-young presidency as he harkened back to critical moments from the nation's past, casting the assault as a living symbol of the inflection point in American history he so often speaks about. 

"For the first time in our history, a President had not just lost an election. He tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob reached the Capitol," Biden said in a speech from the US Capitol that lasted just under 30 minutes. "But they failed. They failed. And on this day of remembrance, we must make sure that such an attack never, never happens again." 

In a direct shot at Trump, Biden added, "His bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution, he can't accept he lost." 

Biden has typically avoided speaking directly about his predecessor since taking office, and pointedly did not say his name on Thursday -- instead making more than a dozen references to "the former President." 

But the President's blistering speech nonetheless confronted Trump's election lies and post-presidency behavior, accusing him of spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, refusing to accept defeat and holding him accountable for inciting a violent mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol. 

"A former President of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He's done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country's interest and America's interest," Biden said. 

Biden again emphasized the core message of his 2020 presidential campaign and the reason why he ran against Trump: "We are in a battle for the soul of America." 

The President warned democracy and the "promise of America" is at risk and called on the American public to "stand for the rule of law, to preserve the flame of democracy." 

He called for protecting voting rights across the nation and blasted Trump and his supporters for attempting to "suppress your vote and subvert our elections." 

"It's wrong. It's undemocratic. And frankly it's un-American," Biden said.

 

I know that "This is the Joe Biden I voted for" is somewhat anodyne if not banal, but in this case it's sincere. It's also the most animated and even angry that I've seen Biden, a whole "A wise person fears the wrath of  the gentle" situation, and believe his impassioned defense.

On anyone other than Biden (or Obama) it would have come across as posturing. From Biden, this was sincerity, and it showed as truthful anger.

We need more of this right now, and the will to bring justice for once. I will repeat this as well, that we know Trump planned a coup, that multiple Republicans still in Congress were suborned into the plot, that state election officials were threatened to go along, and that the singular reason we're all in the Biden era right now is because Mike Pence was too much of a coward to go along.

The guardrails not only have to be restored on the road to democracy, we need barrier walls and other protections to make sure we don't veer off again.

Meanwhile In Kazakhstan

Protests over the weekend in several cities in Kazahkstan over a major rise in fuel and gas prices has led to mass unrest and the resignation of parliament and the prime minister. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev is cracking down on protests across the nation.

Protesters in Kazakhstan’s largest city stormed the presidential residence and the mayor’s office on Wednesday and set both buildings on fire, according to new reports, as demonstrations sparked by a rise in fuel prices in the Central Asian nation escalated sharply.

Police fired on some protesters at the presidential palace before fleeing. They have clashed repeatedly with demonstrators in recent days, deploying water cannons in the freezing weather, tear gas and concussion grenades.

The government resigned in response to the unrest and the president vowed to take harsh measures to quell it. In possibly the first of those efforts, Kazakh news sites became inaccessible late in the day, and the global watchdog organization Netblocks said the country was experiencing a pervasive internet blackout.

Although the protests began over a near-doubling of prices for a type of liquefied gas that is widely used as vehicle fuel, the size and rapid spread of the unrest suggest they reflect wider discontent in the country that has been under the rule of the same party since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Kazakhstan, the ninth-largest country in the world, borders Russia to the north and China to the east and has extensive oil reserves that make it strategically and economically important. Despite those reserves and mineral wealth, discontent over poor living conditions is strong in some parts of the country. Many Kazakhs also chafe at the dominance of the ruling party, which holds more than 80% of the seats in parliament.

Hours after thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the presidential residence in Almaty, Russia’s Tass news agency reported that it was on fire and that demonstrators, some wielding firearms, were trying to break into it. Police fled from the residence after shooting at demonstrators, according to the report, which was filed from Kazakhstan.

Many of the demonstrators who converged on the mayoral office carried clubs and shields, according to earlier reports in Kazakh media. Tass later said the building was engulfed in flames.

Protesters also broke into the Almaty office of the Russia-based Mir television and radio company and destroyed some equipment, the broadcaster said. It later reported that a crowd broke into the Almaty building of the Kazakh national broadcaster.

The protests began Sunday in Zhanaozen, a city in the west where resentment of the government was strong in the wake of a 2011 oil-worker strike in which police fatally shot at least 15 people. They spread across the country in the following days and on Tuesday large demonstrations broke out in the capital, Nur-Sultan, and in Almaty, the country’s largest city and former capital.

The protests appear to have no identifiable leader or demands.

In a televised statement to the nation on Wednesday, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said that “we intend to act with maximum severity regarding law-breakers.”

Tokayev said police have died in clashes with demonstrators, but there were no immediate casualty figures for police or civilians.

In the statement, he also promised to make political reforms and announced that he was assuming the leadership of the national security council. The latter is potentially significant because the council had been headed by Nursultan Nazarbayev, who was president from 1991 until he resigned in 2019.

Nazarbayev dominated Kazakhstan’s politics and his rule was marked by a moderate cult of personality. Critics say he effectively instituted a clan system in government.

After the demonstrations spread to Almaty and the capital, the government announced its resignation, but Tokayev said the ministers would remain in their roles until a new Cabinet is formed, making it uncertain whether the resignation will have significant effect.

 

We'll see where this lands, but behind all of this is a Russian president who wants a new Soviet Union. Don't be surprised if Moscow steps in to "bring order" back to the country as they did in Ukraine. 

Russia and its allies pledged to send troops to help quell protests in Kazakhstan that posed the biggest threat to the central Asian country’s leadership for decades.

Dozens of anti-government protesters were killed by security forces, police said Thursday, after President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev ordered an “anti-terrorist operation” to put down the demonstrations. Banks were ordered temporarily shut for the day Thursday. Tokayev imposed a state of emergency nationwide and internet access was cut in much of the country.

Thousands of protesters had taken to the streets around the country in recent days, seizing government buildings and killing several law-enforcement officials after fuel-price rises unleashed a wave of popular anger over falling living standards.

Sending what Russia and the handful of other members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization called “peacekeeping forces” was a dramatic move by the Kremlin-led bloc to shore up a longtime ally in the region in the face of public protests. There was no immediate word on the size of the deployment, which followed reports of Kazakh security forces surrendering to demonstrators and a late-night appeal from Tokayev.

Prices for uranium surged almost 8% amid the unrest in the world’s largest supplier of the nuclear fuel. Kazakh bonds and the tenge slipped. There was no sign of disruption to oil output, the central Asia’s country biggest export, however.

Kazakhstan’s central bank suspended operations of the nation’s banks and the stock exchange, according to spokesman Olzhas Ramazanov. For now, the halt is planned only for Thursday, he said. Tokayev ordered price controls on key fuels and banned exports of some farm products for 180 days to stem inflation, Interfax reported.

Oh, and as Columbo would say, "Just one more thing..."

Almost a fifth of Bitcoin's hashrate (essentially mining and verifying transactions) is/was in Kazakhstan, where there are now power and internet outages, fuel shortages, and street protests. pic.twitter.com/i7eFdzIzZr

— JacobSilverman.shill (@SilvermanJacob) January 6, 2022

 

Nothing in politics exists in a vacuum. Putin is upping the stakes on Ukraine via Kazakhstan. Suddenly Russian troops are all over the world's largest uranium mines and crypto mines are both a "friendly" reminder that sanctions against Russia could escalate very quickly...