Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorist Problem, Con't

The January 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol is officially sedition, folks.

 

Joshua James, one of the 11 Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy alongside the group’s founder Stewart Rhodes, appears poised to plead guilty Wednesday afternoon, a major development in the most serious criminal case to emerge from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

James was a member of the Oath Keeper’s leadership who repeatedly messaged with other Oath Keepers about planning for Jan. 6. Prosecutors say he breached the Capitol’s rotunda doors along with other Oath Keepers in the early part of the mob assault on the building.

The indictment against Rhodes and the others indicated that James described a massive arsenal of weaponry that the group had “on standby” in case violence escalated. Prosecutors have accused the Oath Keepers of stockpiling weapons at a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va., though they never ultimately deployed it.

James was one of the Oath Keepers who was seen riding in golf carts from the group’s D.C. hotel to the Capitol, breaching the building about 30 minutes after a first wave of Oath Keepers also charged in the attack.

“While entering the Capitol building, JAMES and [Oath Keepr Roberto] MINUTA pushed past Capitol Police officers who placed their hands on JAMES and MINUTA in unsuccessful attempts to stop them from advancing toward the Rotunda,” prosecutors alleged in the indictment.

It’s unclear what the broader impact of James’ plea agreement will be, but other plea agreements from Jan. 6 defendants have typically included agreements to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Cooperation by James could provide prosecutors with valuable insight about the planning and mindset of those organizing the attack.

In addition to the 11 charged with seditious conspiracy, another nine Oath Keepers are facing obstruction charges for breaching the building along with their associates. The charges facing the group are the most serious to emerge from the attack on the Capitol.

 

Repeat after me:

 

Donald Trump orchestrated a terrorist attack as cover for a palace coup, and he would have gotten away with it if his minions had executed their plan more effectively.

 

It was an armed attempt to overthrow the government, and more importantly, as the January 6th committee filed in federal court yesterday, Donald Trump was materially involved.

The Jan. 6 select committee says its evidence has shown that then-President Donald Trump and his campaign tried to illegally obstruct Congress’ counting of electoral votes and “engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

In a major release of its findings, filed in federal court late Wednesday, the committee suggested its evidence supported findings that Trump himself violated multiple laws by attempting to prevent Congress from certifying his defeat.

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee wrote in a filing submitted in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.

In a major release of the panel’s findings, including excerpts of nearly a dozen depositions from top aides to Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, the committee described a president who had been informed repeatedly that he lost the election and that his claims of fraud were unfounded — only to reject them and continue to mislead the American public.

He then pushed top advisers to continue strategizing ways to overturn the election results.

 

They tried to steal the election, folks. 

One final note from Marcy Wheeler:

The most important detail from his statement of offense, as I heard it, is they had a plan to surround the White House, with arms, to ensure no one got to Trump.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) March 2, 2022

 

At this point, the damage to the country from not charging Trump with federal crimes will exceed the backlash from his cultists.

 

 

Up to you, Merrick Garland.

The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

President Manchin lays out the Build Back Better bill that he "wants", and that he won't actually accept because he's been operating in bad faith for nearly a year now, and surprise, it's a much, much smaller bill than what Biden proposed in December.

 

Hours after President Joe Biden laid out what he hopes to salvage from Democrats’ defunct “Build Back Better” social spending plan, Joe Manchin is quickly assembling his counteroffer.

In a Wednesday afternoon interview, the West Virginia centrist laid out a basic party-line package that could win his vote, lower the deficit and enact some new programs, provided they are permanently funded. It may be Democrats’ best and last chance to get at least some of their biggest domestic priorities done before the midterm elections, but would require everyone in the party — particularly liberals — to concede that what’s possible doesn’t come close to the $1.7 trillion package Manchin spurned in December.

Manchin said that if Democrats want to cut a deal on a party-line bill using the budget process to circumvent a Republican filibuster, they need to start with prescription drug savings and tax reform. He envisions whatever revenue they can wring out of that as split evenly between reducing the federal deficit and inflation, on the one hand, and enacting new climate and social programs, on the other — “to the point where it’s sustainable.”

“If you do that, the revenue producing [measures] would be taxes and drugs. The spending is going to be climate,” Manchin said.

“And the social issues, we basically have to deal with those” afterward, he added.

Though he prefers everything in Congress to be bipartisan, Manchin said he has “come to that conclusion” that changing the tax code to make the rich and corporations pay their fair sure can only be done with Democratic votes. As far as whether he thinks his party finally understands his parameters for joining the talks, he said that Democrats “know where I am. They just basically think that I’m going to change.”

Biden’s State of the Union address called for congressional action on some of the individual portions of the wide-ranging social spending measure that the House passed last year, including drug pricing, child care, tax hikes on the wealthy and climate change. The momentum that Democrats had mustered for their trillion-dollar-plus proposal has mostly evaporated, and some lawmakers are increasingly open to slimmed-down legislation or even standalone bills to address their policy priorities.

And while Manchin said no “formal” talks are happening with the White House, there’s “informal back-and-forth.” He declined to say if he’s spoken to Biden recently about it: “Different White House people reach out, and we talk from time to time.”

 

What Manchin means by "dealing with social issues afterward" is "not at all in this bill, take what I allow you to have and be grateful because you won't get a single Republican vote for it." Then when progressives point out Manchin is being an asshole, he'll leave the table.

 

As I've been saying for months now, Manchin doesn't hold every single card, but he's willing to play every card that he does have, and he remains 100% in control of the process as a direct result. He wins because he lays out what he'll "accept", then refuses to actually do so because he knows he can get away with bad faith negotiations, then shuts down negotiations for a period, then moves the goalposts to a new, much smaller bill.

We'll see what that means, as if the legislation doesn't pass by Labor Day, it's almost certainly done for another decade or two.

Last Call For Biden Goes Viral, Con't

Part of President Biden's State of the Union speech last night was dedicated to the White House's plan on COVID-19 moving forward, and that plan, unlike the Trump "plan" of "deal with it" is "we now have the weapons to fight the virus and we're going to use them".

The White House on Wednesday unveiled a plan to move the nation to a new stage of the pandemic where Covid-19 "does not disrupt our daily lives," while also preparing the nation for any new variants that may emerge.  

The National Covid-19 Preparedness Plan, which will require additional funding from Congress, is focused on spending on treatments for Covid-19, preparing for new variants, keeping schools and businesses open and continuing the effort to vaccinate the nation and the world. 

"Vaccines, treatments, tests, masks -- these tools are how we continue to protect people and enable us to move forward safely and get back to our more normal routines. Going out to eat at a restaurant, taking that trip that's been long delayed, arranging a play date for your kids, attending a sports game, a movie or a concert again," White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters at a White House briefing. 

A major new part of the plan includes a new "Test to Treat" initiative that President Joe Biden announced during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. He said Americans would be able to get tested for Covid-19 at a pharmacy and receive free antiviral pills "on the spot" if they test positive.  

Zients said hundreds of these "One-Stop Test to Treat" locations will open across the country this month. These sites will be at pharmacy-based clinics, community health centers, long-term care facilities and US Department of Veterans Affairs facilities across the country. 

Pfizer's antiviral pill, Paxlovid, has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalizations and severe illness and was authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration last year. Upon its authorization, Biden announced a purchase of 10 million courses. The President has since said the federal government will double its order from 10 million to 20 million treatment courses.  

Zients said Americans who have already received free at-home Covid-19 tests that they ordered through COVIDtests.gov will be able to place a second order starting next week. He said the administration will continue to make hundreds of millions of high-quality masks available to Americans at pharmacies, grocery stores and community health centers across the country. 

The administration will launch a website later this month, Zients said, to help Americans locate vaccines and masks at convenient locations. 

"This plan lays out the roadmap to help us fight Covid-19 in the future as we move America from crisis to a time when Covid-19 does not disrupt our daily lives and is something we prevent, protect against and treat," a summary of the plan shared with CNN reads. 

"We look to a future when Americans no longer fear lockdowns, shutdowns, and our kids not going to school. It's a future when the country relies on the powerful layers of protection we have built and invests in the next generation of tools to stay ahead of this virus." 

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters that the administration has distributed more than 270 million N95 masks to local pharmacies and community health centers and that 70 million households have received rapid at-home Covid-19 tests.

 

It's a good start to a plan, but Biden completely fails to address three huge problems:

 

First, the one-quarter to one-third of American adults who still refuse vaccinations aren't going to give a damn about tests, antiviral treatments, N95 masks, or anything. That guaranteed tens of millions of Americans as a fertile ground for further mutations of COVID-19 well past Omicron.

 

Second, immune system compromised Americans who can't vaccinate will still face a populace where COVID is rampant, continuous, and a threat.

Third, the rampant mutations could very well lead to a super-strain of COVID that is not affected by our current arsenal, and all of this goes back to the dumbasses who refuse the damn vaccine.

Still, Katie Mack is right.

Depressing to see Covid denial follow exactly the same trajectory as climate denial:
> It’s not real
> It’s real but not bad
> It’s real & bad but there’s nothing we can do
> We could do something but it would inconvenience us (& mostly help the more vulnerable) so not worth it

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) February 28, 2022

 

We're definitely into phase four here, moving on from a preventable disease that killed roughly 60,000 Americans in February. We're still in the part where we're averaging 2,000 dead per day.

 

COVID death denial is like climate denial at this point, she absolutely right.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The White House is considering sanctioning Russian oil exports over Ukraine as part of the snowballing sanctions by the US and EU.

 

The possibility of the US sanctioning Russian oil exports is "still on the table" as President Joe Biden looks for more ways to punish the country for its invasion of Ukraine, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday. 

Taking such a step would be an extraordinary measure that could have an intense effect on domestic gas prices, however, and Psaki made clear that the White House's top priority is to minimize the impact at home. 

"What (Biden) does not want to do is topple the global oil markets or the global marketplace or impact the American people more with higher energy and gas prices," Psaki told CNN's John Berman on "New Day." 

"That's something we heavily weigh. It's still on the table. It's not off the table. But again, that's how the President looks at this as we're announcing and pursuing additional steps," she added. 

The US has already announced a slew of sanctions against Russia and President Vladimir Putin since the country's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last week. But the unprecedented step of sanctioning its oil experts would likely send prices skyrocketing, dealing a painful blow to consumers around the world as Russia is the world's No. 2 oil producer. 

Though the US consumes very little Russian oil -- oil imports from Russia stood at just 90,000 barrels per day in December -- the interconnected global market means supply shocks in one part of the world can impact prices everywhere.

 

However, that 90,000 barrels per day is almost certainly going to be blocked by Congress whether Biden wants it or not.

U.S Senator Joe Manchin is calling for President Joe Biden to halt oil imports from Russia, following its invasion of Ukraine last week.

The West Virginia Democrat said it was "hypocritical" to ask other countries to, "do what we can do for ourselves."

"If there was ever a time to be energy independent, it is now," Manchin said. "While Americans decry what is happening in Ukraine, the United States continues to allow the import of more than half a million barrels per day of crude oil and other petroleum products from Russia during this time of war."

Manchin has been openly critical of Biden's efforts to scale back U.S. oil production in a bid to address climate change at the same time he has called on OPEC+, of which Russia is a member, to pump more crude to offset recent price increases.

 

Senators ranging from Kansas Republican Roger Marshall to Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey want to ban Russian oil imports, and that seems like a bill that will be on Biden's desk with a veto-proof margin before the end of the month, if not in the next week or two.

 

On the other hand, Biden knows this will drive gas prices higher, especially international sanctions on Russian oil, but the US blocking imports will still force oil higher. It's already at $110 a barrel. It's a trap and Republicans will blame Biden in every commercial from now until November 2024 if he does, even if Republicans are forcing him.

On the gripping hand, of course we're in the middle of a European Land War™ so all bets are off.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

Legislation passed y the House last November to legalize abortion healthcare services in all 50 states was of course killed in the Senate by Republicans, and of course, by Joe Manchin.

 

Republicans on Monday blocked the Senate from taking up sweeping abortion rights legislation as Democrats sought to put lawmakers on the record on the issue in advance of the midterm elections and a coming Supreme Court ruling on access to abortion.

Democrats fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to bring the Women’s Health Protection Act to the floor for consideration after the House last September passed it on a narrow party-line vote. One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, joined all Republicans in opposition to beginning debate on the measure.

Lawmakers said it was the first time that the Senate had voted on a separate bill to enact the constitutional protections of Roe v. Wade into law. The outcome was anticipated, but Democrats were determined to hold the vote as members of both parties draw battle lines over what is expected to be a major election-year issue. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court is set to rule later this year on a case that could undermine or overturn the landmark abortion decision.

“We want Americans to know where their legislators stand on this important issue,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat and a leading backer of the abortion rights bill.

The measure would codify in federal law abortion rights that have long been protected by the 1973 court ruling. It was pursued by Democrats and abortion rights groups as a way to counter the increasingly severe abortion restrictions being enacted at the state level as well as the prospect of a high court ruling upholding tough new abortion limits in Mississippi and leaving in place a Texas law that has severely limited abortion in that state.

“People are counting on the Senate to do what the Supreme Court will not,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

About two dozen states have readied legislation that would immediately restrict abortion rights if the court upholds the Mississippi law, which bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, about two months earlier than Roe and subsequent decisions allow.

During Supreme Court arguments in December, conservative justices indicated a willingness to scale back, if not undo, the federal abortion protections and leave most of the regulation up to individual states. Democrats say the measure is needed to guarantee that women around the nation have equal access to abortion and to prevent states from imposing restrictions that are not medically necessary as a way to unconstitutionally curtail abortion.

 

So, as with voting rights, Democrats both don't have the votes to change the filibuster, and don't have the then necessary 50 votes to pass the Senate anyway, thanks to the same Dems blocking filibuster reform.

 

By 4th of July, medically safe abortion procedures will be illegal in roughly half of the US. Your rights to your womb will depend entirely on where you live.

 

And I'm pretty sure a large enough percentage of women voters, especially white women, will not give a shit in November that Republicans will control Congress again. (We already know that the vast majority of men won't.) 

I just don't think either letting half the states ban abortion or banning it altogether in the country will create a enough of a backlash against GOP control. If that were true we'd be seeing signs of it now, but I guess joni Mitchell is right. Don't know what you've got til it's gone.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

I'm definitely not an expert on geopolitics, but I do try to gather as many opinions from the actual experts as I can, and nearly all the Russia experts that I've read have said the same thing: Putin wants to, at the minimum, recreate the Soviet Union. It's humbling that anyone reads my opinions, and I've gotten plenty of stuff wrong in the past, both on my opinions and on material facts that I glossed over (and you, the readers, have definitely called me out on it.)

But one person who has consistently been right about Putin, Russia, and the Ukraine situation now has been former CIA Russia analyst and author Fiona Hill, and if anything, she says that we're vastly underestimating the lengths that Putin will go to when it comes to building a new Russian empire out of the ashes of Europe and Asia in this interview with Politico Senior Editor Maura Johnson.

Maura Reynolds: You’ve been a Putin watcher for a long time, and you’ve written one of the best biographies of Putin. When you’ve been watching him over the past week, what have you been seeing that other people might be missing?

Fiona Hill: Putin is usually more cynical and calculated than he came across in his most recent speeches. There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine. The pretext is completely flimsy and almost nonsensical for anybody who’s not in the echo chamber or the bubble of propaganda in Russia itself. I mean, demanding to the Ukrainian military that they essentially overthrow their own government or lay down their arms and surrender because they are being commanded by a bunch of drug-addled Nazi fascists? There’s just no sense to that. It beggars the imagination.

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin. He spotlighted this during the performance of the National Security Council meeting, where it became very clear that this was his decision. He was in a way taking full responsibility for war, and even the heads of his security and intelligence services looked like they’ve been thrown off guard by how fast things were moving.

Reynolds: So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan?

Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.

Back then I was a national intelligence officer, and the National Intelligence Council was analyzing what Russia was likely to do in response to the NATO Open Door declaration. One of our assessments was that there was a real, genuine risk of some kind of preemptive Russian military action, not just confined to the annexation of Crimea, but some much larger action taken against Ukraine along with Georgia. And of course, four months after NATO’s Bucharest Summit, there was the invasion of Georgia. There wasn’t an invasion of Ukraine then because the Ukrainian government pulled back from seeking NATO membership. But we should have seriously addressed how we were going to deal with this potential outcome and our relations with Russia.

Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?

Hill: It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.

I’ve kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness — that Putin’s been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He’s said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he’s gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he’s gone after Lenin and he’s gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.

Reynolds: Dominance in what way?

Hill: It doesn’t mean that he’s going to annex all of them and make them part of the Russian Federation like they’ve done with Crimea. You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.

We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.

But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets. When we look at old maps of Europe — probably the maps he’s been looking at — you find all kinds of strange entities, like the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that? These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.

Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?

Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way. Before this last week, he had multiple different options to choose from. He’d given himself the option of being able to go in in full force as he’s doing now, but he could also have focused on retaking the rest of the administrative territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. He could have seized the Sea of Azov, which he’s probably going to do anyway, and then joined up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions with Crimea as well as the lands in between and all the way down to Odessa. In fact, Putin initially tried this in 2014 — to create “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia,” but that failed when local support for joining Russia didn’t materialize.

Now, if he can, he is going to take the whole country. We have to face up to this fact. Although we haven’t seen the full Russian invasion force deployed yet, he’s certainly got the troops to move into the whole country.

 

If you think about it, we're in the same kind of "But he won't go that far, right?" mentality about Putin as a lot of Americans we were about Trump. Trump tried a palace coup, folks. Putin is doing the same thing, only the palace is Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He's already invaded Ukraine, and continues to commit more force to the theater every day.

 

In response, Ukraine has applied to join the European Union in an expedited fashion and President Zelenzskiy is asking the bloc to "prove that you are with us".

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the EU on Tuesday via video link to an emergency session of the European Parliament to "prove that you are with us" in Ukraine's war with Russia, a day after Kyiv officially asked to join the bloc.

European Union lawmakers, many wearing #standwithUkraine T-shirts bearing the Ukrainian flag, others with blue-and-yellow scarves or ribbons, gave Zelenskiy a standing ovation.

"We are fighting to be equal members of Europe," Zelenskiy said in Ukrainian in a speech translated into English by an interpreter who spoke through tears.

"Do prove that you are with us. Do prove that you will not let us go. Do prove that you are indeed Europeans, and then life will win over death and light will win over darkness," he said. "The EU will be much stronger with us."

Zelenskiy has remained in Kyiv to rally his people against the invasion. As he spoke on Tuesday, a Russian armoured column was bearing down on Ukraine's capital. read more

The presidents of eight central and eastern European nations on Monday published an open letter calling for Ukraine to be granted immediate EU candidate status and for the start of formal membership talks. read more

But Ukraine is well aware that any membership process will be long and difficult, even if it manages after the war to avoid falling back under Moscow's domination.

Charles Michel, the chairman of EU leaders, told the EU Parliament after Zelenskiy's speech that the bloc would have to seriously look at Ukraine's "legitimate" request to join.

But he added: "It is going to be difficult, we know there are different views in Europe (about further enlargement)."

According to a draft text they will vote on later on Tuesday, EU lawmakers are expected to brand Russia a "rogue state" and urge member states to agree even tougher sanctions.

The EU has taken unprecedented steps, including financing weapons deliveries to Ukraine, after President Vladimir Putin launched war on Russia's neighbour last week. read more

According to the draft resolution and amendments backed by the assembly's main parties, lawmakers will call for the scope of sanctions to be broadened and "aimed at strategically weakening the Russian economy and industrial base, in particular the military-industrial complex".

Russia's invasion of Ukraine "effectively makes Russia a rogue state," the lawmakers are set to say.

We've already slapped sanctions on him and the Russian ruble faceplanted this week. There are still more sanctions we can impose, but at some point there won't be.

Putin's hoping he can just get to that point and yell "Whatcha got left, boys?"  The notion that Putin will cut and run in Ukraine is not going to happen. He wants, if not needs, a direct military conflict with the West, and he's going to keep turning up the heat. If there's a miscalculation with the stakes that high, well, we all pay the price.

Take all of this seriously, folks. Realize that 21st century Europe is being forged before our eyes. It only gets more complicated and more visceral from here, and the consequences of something spiraling out of control get worse every day.

Interesting times are not fun and I want to get off this ride some days.

Like A Trouble Over Water, Bridge

The Brent Spence Bridge replacement project has always been a political landmine around here, former GOP Gov. Matt Bevin lost reelection because his plan was to charge tolls in Northern Kentucky to get to work in Cincinnati, which cost him just enough support in NKY counties in 2019 to lose. 

After decades of being blocked by Kentucky GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell, making a new span alongside the JFK Camelot-era bridge is finally getting off the ground thanks to the Biden Infrastructure bill and Ohio GOP Gov. Mike DeWine and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

 

The Brent Spence Bridge between Ohio and Kentucky could finally be getting its companion bridge – and it won't require new tolls.

At a news conference Monday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced plans to apply for two federal grants totaling up to $2 billion to fund a new bridge to carry Interstates 71 and 75 over the Ohio River.

"I want to be able to break ground next year,'' said Beshear, a Democrat, during the news conference.

The application for funding is expected to be submitted within the next few months and a final decision on the funding could happen in the fall of 2023, officials said.

The total cost of the new bridge would be about $2.8 billion, according to DeWine, a Republican. Kentucky and Ohio will contribute whatever funds aren't covered by the federal government.

Both states will apply for the grants together once the U.S. Department of Transportation releases guidance on the application process. Governors DeWine and Beshear said it's unclear exactly when that may be.

Transportation officials estimated construction of the companion bridge and improvements to the Brent Spence would take about five years to complete.

Beshear and DeWine said the new bridge would be built without tolls.

In the 1990s, the Federal Highway Administration declared the Brent Spence functionally obsolete because its narrow lanes carried more cars than it was designed for – with no emergency lane.

The Brent Spence was built in 1963 to handle 80,000 vehicles a day, but is now used by double that number.

Improvements to the existing bridge and building a new companion bridge would add much-needed capacity by separating local and through traffic to ease the ongoing traffic backups and accidents.

 

Now there's still quite a bit that could go wrong here, but it's the Brent Spence Bridge that put Andy Beshear in office, and getting ground broken on that project before election day next year will be the only shot he has of winning a second term. 

 

Considering the bridge was out of commission for six weeks in November and December 2020 after a major truck accident, getting it replaced has suddenly become a major local priority for Democrats and Republicans considering how much damage was done to NKY's economy.

 

Mike DeWine gets to avoid being the bad guy here, too. He gets to look like the sensible, bipartisan type (despite being a screaming right-wing nutjob) and he gets to put something on the board other than the state's massively corrupt GOP state legislature.

 

But I'm guessing, cynically, that McConnell will take credit for the eventualy groundbreaking for the bridge in 2024, when Kentucky almost certainly has a new Republican governor.

Last Call For Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

...because it does. And while Democrats look like they are actually going to come out ahead in redistricting, that still leaves the more than two dozen retirements of long-time Democratic House members, the latest being Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch.

Florida Rep. Ted Deutch announced on Monday he will not seek reelection in November, the latest in a string of Democratic members of Congress who have decided to retire or seek another office in a challenging political environment. 

Deutch has represented Fort Lauderdale since winning his first election in 2010. He will resign from office this fall to serve as the next Chief Executive Officer of the American Jewish Committee. 

Deutch, the chairman of the House Ethics Committee and member of the Foreign Affairs and Judiciary committees, became an outspoken advocate for gun control measures following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in his district. 

"Our community was profoundly changed on February 14, 2018," said Deutch in a statement. "Seventeen students and teachers of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were killed that day, and I have tried every day since to be there for their families and to help them honor the memories of their loved ones in all the ways they are working to make our schools and community safer." 

"I have also tried to support the survivors in any way I can, though it is their powerful voices that have helped create desperately needed change," he added. "The Parkland families and student survivors inspire me every day." 

Deutch also noted his work trying to secure Iran hostage Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, and grieving the news of his passing in 2020 alongside his family. "I have been forever changed by serving the people of Broward and Palm Beach Counties in Congress," said Deutch. 

Already 30 House Democrats have decided to retire or seek higher office rather than run for reelection in 2022. While not all of those members serve competitive districts, the exodus is a sign that Democrats are not confident of holding the House majority after November's midterm elections.

 

Redistricting battle or no, House Democrats have lost about 15% of their members before a single vote has been cast, and it's can't be a good thing.  That means primaries are going to be super important, so get involved now and recheck your voter registration.

Vote like your country depends on it. It does.

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

As Vladimir Putin and the Russian military is finding out, the old adage of "Your war plan rarely survives contact with the enemy" still holds true here in the digital age.

The war in Ukraine isn’t going Russia’s way.

Videos posted on social media show whole columns of tanks and armored vehicles have been wiped out. Others have been stopped in their tracks by ordinary Ukrainians standing on the street to block their advance.

Lightly armed units propelled deep into the country without support have been surrounded and their soldiers captured or killed. Warplanes have been shot out of the skies and helicopters have been downed, according to Ukrainian and U.S. military officials.

Logistics supply chains have failed, leaving troops stranded on roadsides to be captured because their vehicles ran out of fuel.

Most critically, Russia has proved unable to secure air superiority over the tiny Ukrainian air force — despite having the second-largest air force in the world, Pentagon officials say. Its troops have yet to take control of any significant city or meaningful chunk of territory, a senior U.S. defense official said Sunday.

On Sunday, a Russian attempt to seize control of the city of Kharkiv, less than 30 miles from the Russian border, was repelled. A fresh push toward the capital, Kyiv, came to a smoking end in the suburb of Irpin, where videos posted on social media showed the charred remains of Russian tanks and armored vehicles strewn around the streets while Ukrainian soldiers removed weapons from the bodies of dead Russians.

These scenes of humiliation have played out widely on social media, where the Ukrainians have won a clear advantage. Multiple videos from around the country have portrayed scenes of burned Russian tanks, dead Russian soldiers and captured Russians, some barely out of their teens, making plaintive calls home to their parents.

The Russian military has meanwhile issued little in the way of reporting on the Ukraine war, in contrast to the prolific reporting that came out of its intervention in Syria. On Sunday, a spokesman acknowledged that there had been Russian casualties and losses, while saying they were “many times less” than those suffered by Ukraine.

“Russian servicemen are showing courage and heroism while fulfilling combat tasks in the special military operation. Unfortunately, there are killed and injured among our comrades,” the state news agency Tass quoted military spokesman Igor Konashenkov as saying. “The losses of the Russian Armed Forces are many times less than the number of servicemen of the Ukrainian armed forces.”

 

We've gone from Baghdad Bob to Moscow Mikhail. 

 

Meanwhile, on the global finance front, Moscow is getting hammered and sickled.

Russia was scrambling to prevent financial meltdown Monday as its economy was slammed by a broadside of crushing Western sanctions imposed over the weekend in response to the invasion of Ukraine. 

President Vladimir Putin was due to hold crisis talks with his top advisers after the ruble crashed to a record low against the US dollar, the Russian central bank more than doubled interest rates to 20%, and the Moscow stock exchange was shuttered for the day. 

The European subsidiary of Russia's biggest bank was on the brink of collapse as savers rushed to withdraw their deposits. Economists warned that the Russian economy could shrink by 5%. 

The ruble lost about 20% of its value to trade at 100 to the dollar at 6 a.m. ET after earlier plummeting as much as 40%. The start of trading on the Russian stock market was delayed, and then canceled entirely, according to a statement from the country's central bank. 

The latest barrage of sanctions came Saturday, when the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada said they would expel some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global financial messaging service, and "paralyze" the assets of Russia's central bank. 

"The ratcheting up of Western sanctions over the weekend has left Russian banks on the edge of crisis," wrote Liam Peach, an emerging market economist at Capital Economics, in a note on Monday. 

Putin's government has spent the past eight years preparing Russia for tough sanctions by building up a war chest of $630 billion in international reserves including currencies and gold, but at least some of that financial firepower is now frozen and his "fortress" economy is under unprecedented assault. 

"We will ... ban the transactions of Russia's central bank and freeze all its assets, to prevent it from financing Putin's war," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement Sunday. 

The United States also banned US dollar transactions with the Russian central bank in a move designed to prevent it accessing its "rainy day fund," senior US administration officials said. 

"Our strategy, to put it simply, is to make sure that the Russian economy goes backward as long as President Putin decides to go forward with his invasion of Ukraine," a senior administration official said. 

Peach at Capital Economics estimates that about 40% of Russia's reserves are now off limits to Moscow. 

"External conditions for the Russian economy have drastically changed," the Russian central bank said. "This is needed to support financial and price stability and protect the savings of citizens from depreciation," the bank added.

 

Putin has drastically underestimated both the density of Ukraine's collective spine and just how much the rest of Europe truly hates his ass, with Ukraine President Zelenskyy's impassioned plea for help from the European Union falling on very receptive ears. 

As the leaders of the European Union gathered for an emergency summit on Thursday night, momentum was already moving toward imposing tough new sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

But a handful of key leaders, notably including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, were reluctant to proceed with some of the harshest proposals. Scholz told reporters on the way into the meeting in Brussels that he wanted to focus on implementing sanctions that had already been approved before enacting new ones.

After a perfunctory debate, the presidents and prime ministers quickly approved sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and some of Russia’s biggest banks. Talk of barring Russia from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, however, stalled amid skepticism on the part of Scholz and the leaders of Austria, Italy and Cyprus, according to officials familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.

Then Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dialed into the meeting via teleconference with a bracing appeal that left some of the world-weary politicians with watery eyes. In just five minutes, Zelensky — speaking from the battlefield of Kyiv — pleaded with European leaders for an honest assessment of his country’s ambition to join the European Union and for genuine help in its fight with the Russian invaders. Ukraine needed its neighbors to step up with food, ammunition, fuel, sanctions, all of it.

“It was extremely, extremely emotional,” said a European official briefed on the call. “He was essentially saying, ‘Look, we are here dying for European ideals.’” Before ending the video call, Zelensky told the gathering matter-of-factly that it might be the last time they saw him alive, according to a senior European official who was present.

Just that quickly, Zelensky’s personal appeal overwhelmed the resistance from European leaders to imposing measures that could drive the Russian economy into a state of near collapse. The result has been a rapid-fire series of developments boosting Ukraine’s fight to hold off the Russian military and shattering the limits on European assertiveness in national security affairs.

The actions culminated on Saturday, when the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union announced they would bar several major Russian banks from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, crack down on Russian oligarchs, and prevent the Russian central bank from bailing out the domestic economy.

 

Putin is suddenly on the losing end of this, or at least his best case now is the Pyrrhic victory end of this. He figured Zelensky would flee, the government would collapse, Russian Quislings could be brought in, and his $630 billion in the bank would hold out for the rough bits.

He's been wrong on all accounts.  This was supposed to be over by now in Kyiv. Vladimir is finding out reality is hard outside the Kremlin bubble.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

Another month, another Trump regime slimeball trying to ooze their way back into polite political company with a tell-all book that trashes Dear Leader, all while making millions on the side, and this month is former Attorney General Bill Barr's turn.

Former Attorney General William Barr writes in a new book that former President Donald Trump has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” and that it is time for Republicans to focus on rising new leaders in the party.

The release of the former attorney general’s 600-page book, “One Damn Thing After Another,” is coming as Mr. Trump, who remains the GOP’s dominant figure, contemplates another presidential run. Mr. Barr writes that he was convinced that Mr. Trump could have won re-election in 2020 if he had “just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness.”

“The election was not ‘stolen,’ ” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.” Mr. Barr urges conservatives to look to “an impressive array of younger candidates” who share Mr. Trump’s agenda but not his “erratic personal behavior.” He didn’t mention any of those candidates by name.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Barr’s book. Last summer the former president called his former attorney general “a disappointment in every sense of the word.”

Mr. Barr’s memoir adds to a growing list of books by senior Trump administration officials and journalists about the former president. It is scheduled for release March 8 by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins. Both HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.

The recollections and conclusions by Mr. Barr are notable because he was one of Mr. Trump’s most powerful cabinet secretaries and was once such a close ally that Democrats accused him of acting more like the president’s defense attorney than an apolitical law-enforcement official.

 

Barr goes on to explain how everyone at the Trump White House and the Justice Department that he ran were all the real problem and not him, but he saves some ammo to blast Trump:

Mr. Barr also describes times when he was privately frustrated by Mr. Trump’s aggressive style and constant comments on the Justice Department’s work.

He provides the details of a contentious meeting on Dec. 1 in the Oval Office hours after Mr. Barr said publicly that there wasn’t evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election that could reverse Joe Biden’s victory, contradicting Mr. Trump’s claims.

“This is killing me—killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me,” Mr. Trump shouted at Mr. Barr, according to the book. “He stopped for a moment and then said, ‘You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.’ ”

Mr. Barr writes that he reminded Mr. Trump that he had “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged,” but that the Justice Department had not been able to verify any of his legal team’s assertions about mass voter fraud.

Mr. Trump then launched into a list of other grievances he had with his attorney general: that the federal prosecutor Mr. Barr ordered to review the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe that preceded the Mueller report hadn’t released his findings before the 2020 election, and that Mr. Barr declined to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey after a department watchdog rebuked him for sharing memos that contained sensitive information about his interactions with Mr. Trump, a complaint brought up repeatedly by the president.

Mr. Barr countered by offering to submit his resignation, according to the book. “Accepted!” Mr. Trump yelled, banging his palm on the table. “Leave and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!” White House lawyers persuaded Mr. Trump not to follow through with Mr. Barr’s ouster.

Mr. Barr resigned a few weeks later, bringing a tumultuous end to his time in office.

After the election, Mr. Barr said that Mr. Trump “lost his grip” and that his false claims of voter fraud led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters trying to thwart the certification of Mr. Biden’s November, 2020, victory.

“The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Barr writes.

 

So yeah, the real bravery was the Attorney General of the United States witnessing Trump breaking federal law and not doing a goddamn thing about it.

 

 

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

A reminder that while there are several white supremacist domestic terrorism groups out there, by far the largest, most powerful, and most dangerous of those groups, is the Republican Party.

A Republican state senator fawned over the leader of a white nationalist movement on Friday and told his followers that she fantasizes about hanging her perceived enemies from gallows.

“I’ve said we need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country,” Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, said Feb. 25 in her speech to the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida.

Rogers told the white nationalists who were assembled in the ballroom at the Orlando World Center Marriott that they were “patriots.”

She addressed the AFPAC crowd remotely, speaking from Arizona, where she said she was busy pushing legislation. Rogers effusively praised Nick Fuentes, the event’s racist organizer, who she said had been “de-platformed everywhere” because he says things that upset “the media and the far left.”

“I truly respect Nick because he’s the most persecuted man in America,” she said to loud cheers, adding later that he was “standing up to tyranny” by creating AFPAC.

Fuentes, an advocate of turning America into a nation only for white Christians, is one of the leaders of the so-called “groyper” movement — along with the founder of American Identity Movement, a white nationalist group formerly known as Identity Ervopa — and Rogers is one of its emerging icons. The groyper movement is a collection of white nationalists who seek to normalize racism and make it a part of mainstream conservative political ideology.

AFPAC opened with Fuentes soliciting a round of applause from the crowd for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The white nationalists chanted in response, “Putin! Putin! Putin!”

In his closing speech, Fuentes said “the United States is the evil empire in the world.”

“Now, they’re going and saying,’’Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing,” he said, before nervously laughing and adding, “Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Rogers lamented that there was no longer freedom of speech, and said “we can’t even laugh at comedy any more” for fear of being banned from social media platforms. (The First Amendment protects people from being punished by the government for their speech, but it does not apply to businesses or exempt people from facing consequences for their speech.) She pined for the 1980s and 1990s, when “we could say the craziest stuff and people would just laugh and not take offense, because it was simply light-hearted.”

“Now, they deplatform and debank people like Nick Fuentes, and even President (Donald) Trump,” she said. “This is like the USSR, but worse.”

The crowd at AFPAC included prominent members of America’s white nationalist movement, among them Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow. Taylor garnered a following as the editor of a now-defunct pseudo-academic magazine that published pieces from open racists, and he hosts an annual conference that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a place “where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.” Brimelow publishes a popular white nationalist website and has said “the U.S. is a white nation.”

One speaker at the event was Vincent James Foxx, a stalwart white nationalist who said he wanted to “criminalize” LGBTQ Americans and warned of the “Great Replacement.” That idea, popular among white supremacists, holds that white Americans are being replaced by non-white immigrants.

It has also inspired violence. Fears of immigrants undermining his vision of a white Christian Europe motivated Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous rampage in 2011 at a Norwegian youth summer camp. In the U.S., the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 was the deadliest attack against the Jewish community in United States history. Just before it took place, the killer took to right-wing social media site Gab to say he believed that immigrants were being brought in to replace and “kill our people.” The next year in New Zealand, 51 people would be killed and 40 injured but not before the shooter would post a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement.”

After Foxx spoke, Rogers gushed over him on Telegram: “Vincent James run for office.”

 

Also at this white nationalist confab in Florida this weekend, sitting House Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who gave the keynote address at this same event last year.

 

Greene and Gosar are a problem, Wendy Rogers is a problem, but the larger one is the fact that the vast majority of Republican politicians and voters agree with them.

 

Sunday Long Read: The Tale Of The Terrible Thomases

Our Sunday Long Read is a vitally important story, as Danny Hakim and Jo Becker at New York Times Magazine presents the case as to why Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas should be removed from the bench over his wife Ginny's unprecedented political activism, up to and including her influence on SCOTUS pertaining to Donald Trump's plan to steal the 2020 election with the Court's help.

 

The call to action was titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?” Shared in the days after the 2020 presidential election, it urged the members of an influential if secretive right-wing group to contact legislators in three of the swing states that tipped the balance for Joe Biden — Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The aim was audacious: Keep President Donald J. Trump in power.

The group, the Council for National Policy, brings together old-school Republican luminaries, Christian conservatives, Tea Party activists and MAGA operatives, with more than 400 members who include leaders of organizations like the Federalist Society, the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council. Founded in 1981 as a counterweight to liberalism, the group was hailed by President Ronald Reagan as seeking the “return of righteousness, justice and truth” to America.

As Trump insisted, without evidence, that fraud had cheated him of victory, conservative groups rushed to rally behind him. The council stood out, however, not only because of its pedigree but also because one of its newest leaders was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime activist in right-wing circles. She had taken on a prominent role at the council during the Trump years and by 2019 had joined the nine-member board of C.N.P. Action, an arm of the council organized as a 501(c)4 under a provision of the tax code that allows for direct political advocacy. It was C.N.P. Action that circulated the November “action steps” document, the existence of which has not been previously reported. It instructed members to pressure Republican lawmakers into challenging the election results and appointing alternate slates of electors: “Demand that they not abandon their Constitutional responsibilities during a time such as this.”

Such a plan, if carried out successfully, would have almost certainly landed before the Supreme Court — and Ginni Thomas’s husband. In fact, Trump was already calling for that to happen. In a Dec. 2 speech at the White House, the president falsely claimed that “millions of votes were cast illegally in swing states alone” and said he hoped “the Supreme Court of the United States will see it” and “will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election.”

The Thomases have long posed a unique quandary in Washington. Because Supreme Court justices do not want to be perceived as partisan, they tend to avoid political events and entanglements, and their spouses often keep low profiles. But the Thomases have defied such norms. Since the founding of the nation, no spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has been as overt a political activist as Ginni Thomas. In addition to her perch at the Council for National Policy, she founded a group called Groundswell with the support of Stephen K. Bannon, the hard-line nationalist and former Trump adviser. It holds a weekly meeting of influential conservatives, many of whom work directly on issues that have come before the court.

Ginni Thomas insists, in her council biography, that she and her husband operate in “separate professional lanes,” but those lanes in fact merge with notable frequency. For the three decades he has sat on the Supreme Court, they have worked in tandem from the bench and the political trenches to take aim at targets like Roe v. Wade and affirmative action. Together they believe that “America is in a vicious battle for its founding principles,” as Ginni Thomas has put it. Her views, once seen as on the fringe, have come to dominate the Republican Party. And with Trump’s three appointments reshaping the Supreme Court, her husband finds himself at the center of a new conservative majority poised to shake the foundations of settled law. In a nation freighted with division and upheaval, the Thomases have found their moment.

This article draws on hours of recordings and internal documents from groups affiliated with the Thomases; dozens of interviews with the Thomases’ classmates, friends, colleagues and critics, as well as more than a dozen Trump White House aides and supporters and some of Justice Thomas’s former clerks; and an archive of Council for National Policy videos and internal documents provided by an academic researcher in Australia, Brent Allpress.

The reporting uncovered new details on the Thomases’ ascent: how Trump courted Justice Thomas; how Ginni Thomas used that courtship to gain access to the Oval Office, where her insistent policy and personnel suggestions so aggravated aides that one called her a “wrecking ball” while others put together an opposition-research-style report on her that was obtained by The Times; and the extent to which Justice Thomas flouted judicial-ethics guidance by participating in events hosted by conservative organizations with matters before the court. Those organizations showered the couple with accolades and, in at least one case, used their appearances to attract event fees, donations and new members.

New reporting also shows just how blurred the lines between the couple’s interests became during the effort to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the rally held at the Ellipse, just outside the White House grounds, aimed at stopping Congress from certifying the state votes that gave Joe Biden his victory. Many of the rally organizers and those advising Trump had connections to the Thomases, but little has been known about what role, if any, Ginni Thomas played, beyond the fact that on the morning of the March to Save America, as the rally was called, she urged her Facebook followers to watch how the day unfolded. “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” she posted before the march turned violent. “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING!”

But her role went deeper, and beyond C.N.P. Action. Dustin Stockton, an organizer who worked with Women for America First, which held the permit for the Ellipse rally, said he was told that Ginni Thomas played a peacemaking role between feuding factions of rally organizers “so that there wouldn’t be any division around January 6.”

“The way it was presented to me was that Ginni was uniting these different factions around a singular mission on January 6,” said Stockton, who previously worked for Bannon. “That Ginni was involved made sense — she’s pretty neutral, and she doesn’t have a lot of enemies in the movement.”

 

That's right.

 

Ginny Thomas helped organize the January 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol.

 

It actually gets worse ahead. This is one of the more important SLR articles in quite some time, folks.

 

Clarence Thomas has to go.

 

Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

With the final diplomatic stumbling blocks over Russian sanctions from the EU and especially Germany gone, the economic pain for Putin and his crew of oligarchs is now in full swing.

The United States, Britain, Europe and Canada on Saturday moved to block Russia's access to the SWIFT international payment system as part of another round of sanctions against Moscow as it continues its assault against Ukraine.

The measures, which will also include restriction on the Russian central bank's international reserves, will be implemented in the coming days, the nations said in a joint statement.

"We commit to ensuring that a certain number of Russian banks are removed from SWIFT," Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the European Union's executive, said in a statement to the media.

"This will ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally."

She said that cutting Russian banks off the system will stop them from conducting most of their financial transactions worldwide and effectively block Russian exports and imports.

She said allies would stop Russia from "using its war chest," paralysing the assets of its central bank, freezing its transactions and making it impossible for the central bank to liquidate its assets.

"Finally, we will work to prohibit Russian oligarchs from using their financial assets on our markets," she said.

EU foreign ministers will discuss the sanctions package at a virtual meeting on Sunday evening, the fourth time they come together in a week.

 

The move effectively freezes Russia's finances and is the global finance equivalent of unplugging Russia from the world's financial grid. The UN Security Council is expected to formally call for a special meeting tomorrow as well, the move effectively disables any veto from the five permanent members, including Russia.

Putin picked a fight and at this point with Kyiv still holding after 72 hours and a world of financial hurt coming for Monday, he's got a fight.

Whether it's the fight he wanted, we'll see.

Our Little Russian White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

America's cadre of white supremacist domestic terrorism groups sure love them some Vladimir Putin as a prime example of their bloodlust for conquest of the "impure", and they might even love him more than the Mango Malefactor.

White nationalist livestreamer Nicholas Fuentes has made no secret of where his loyalties lie in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“I wish Putin was president of America,” he mused to his 45,000 subscribers on Telegram on Wednesday morning.

Fifteen hours later, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. And Fuentes, who’s hosting a far-right conference in Florida Friday night, was psyched.

“I am totally rooting for Russia,” he wrote the following morning. “This is the coolest thing to happen since 1/6.”

“UKRAINE WILL BE DESTROYED", added Fuentes, who describes himself as a “Christian nationalist,” someone who thinks the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation. “I never doubted you [Putin], my Czar."

Over on the Gab platform, its CEO Andrew Torba also expressed his support for Putin.

“Lol Putin is brilliant. Western Media, which is obsessed with ‘muh Nazis’ will have a tough time spinning this one,” wrote Torba, who’s sponsoring Fuentes’ conference, the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), this weekend. “What he really means is Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Wednesday night, far-right personalities have declared Russia a beacon of anti-wokeness and Putin a strong ethnonationalist. In their minds, Ukraine is just a corrupt pawn in a vast “globalist” conspiracy.

It may seem confusing that much of the American far-right, who increasingly describe any policies they dislike as “communism,” would be rooting for Russia, given the history of the Soviet Union. But for at least a decade, Russia has been cultivating deep ties and even bankrolling ultranationalist and far-right movements elsewhere. Religious fundamentalists and white supremacists, inspired partially by the writings of a Kremlin-linked ideologue, have hailed Putin as a white Christian crusader on a mission to restore traditional values.

The far-right’s support for Russia also has roots in fringe narratives about Russia that have been simmering for decades, according to Matthew Kriner, managing director of the Accelerationism Research Consortium (ARC). For example, some antisemitics have long claimed that Russia’s communist era was a historical blip and the result of a “Jewish conspiracy.”

“They’re looking past the communist era,” said Kriner. “Those who can see a deeper ethnonationalist, ethnofascist component to Russia can find comfort and affinity toward what Putin is doing.”

In the U.S., “wokeness”—a catchall term for progressive or inclusive policies—is increasingly characterized on the right, especially among Christian nationalists, as antithetical to American values. That way of thinking has bled into pro-Putin rhetoric from the far-right this week. Some have mocked the U.S. for its inclusive policies on transgender recruits.

“Putin’s military gets Ukraine,” wrote Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who is speaking at AFPAC, on her Telegram channel. “Our military gets trannies and face masks.”

 

And let's not forget for a moment that the cadre I spoke of earlier includes dozens of sitting Republican political candidates at all levels of government, state legislators, and members of Congress, like Wendy Rogers.

If these assholes get control of the country again, well...

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

With their possible options down to Hail Mary status as North Carolina's Supreme Court has ruled their gerrymandering plans unconstitutional again and again, NC Republicans are throwing a long bomb to the US Supreme Court in order to create a vile precedent that would leave the final word on redistricting up to state legislatures, not state supreme courts, and remake redistricting across the country.

In a late Friday afternoon filing as war raged in Ukraine and as President Joe Biden announced Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, North Carolina Republicans dropped their own bombshell: a legal filing in the Supreme Court that if successful would not only restore the state legislature’s ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering and perhaps tip control of Congress, but would radically alter the power of state courts to rein in state legislatures that violate voting rights in federal elections. There are strong arguments Republicans should lose this case, but don’t count them out before a polarized and politicized Supreme Court.

A few years ago, in a case called Rucho v. Common Cause, the U.S. Supreme Court shut the federal courthouse door to partisan gerrymandering claims—claims that political parties drawing maps for electing members of Congress or state legislative bodies manipulated those maps purely for partisan gain. The Rucho court majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts explained that there were other paths for reining in this conduct, including Congress passing legislation (as the Freedom to Vote Act would have done), the creation of independent commissions, and state courts. Indeed, the court noted: “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in policing nefarious redistricting practices.

And that’s exactly what happened in North Carolina. The state Supreme Court recently held that the North Carolina Republican-controlled legislature’s gerrymandering of Congressional and other districts was a partisan gerrymander grossly favoring Republicans violating the state constitution’s provisions guaranteeing free elections. This ruling was going to lead to a much fairer map in a state that is mostly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

Now the Republican-dominated general assembly has struck back raising what’s come to be known as the “independent state legislature” theory. This move was something I feared would happen weeks ago as Republicans were running out of options. They’ve argued in a new filing before the Supreme Court that the North Carolina Supreme Court does not have the power even in reliance on the state Constitution and despite Rucho to rein in partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts when done by a state legislature.

 

The GOP argument is that since Article I, section 4gives the state legislatures the power to set elections, Republicans argue they are the final arbiter, and without judicial oversight at all. It's hogwash, but if there's five votes on SCOTUS, then that's how it is.

We'll see if the dreaded shadow docket strikes again.