Saud Songs They Sing

With the US average of gas prices headed back for $4 per gallon after OPEC's production cut, both the Biden administration and high-ranking Democratic members of Congress suddenly, finally has a real appetite for cutting the Kingdom loose with potential significant effect.

President Biden is re-evaluating the relationship with Saudi Arabia after it teamed up with Russia to cut oil production in a move that bolstered President Vladimir V. Putin’s government and could raise American gasoline prices just before midterm elections, a White House official said on Tuesday.

“I think the president’s been very clear that this is a relationship that we need to continue to re-evaluate, that we need to be willing to revisit,” the official, John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council at the White House, said on CNN. “And certainly in light of the OPEC decision, I think that’s where he is.”

Mr. Kirby signaled openness to retaliatory measures proposed by Democratic congressional leaders outraged by the oil production cut announced last week by the international cartel known as OPEC Plus. Among other things, leading Democrats have proposed curbing American security cooperation with Saudi Arabia, including arms sales, and stripping OPEC members of their legal immunity so they can be sued for violations of American antitrust laws.

“The president’s obviously disappointed by the OPEC decision and is going to be willing to work with Congress as we think about what the right relationship with Saudi Arabia needs to be going forward,” Mr. Kirby said. He sounded a note of urgency. “The timeline’s now and I think he’s going to be willing to start to have those conversations right away,” he said. “I don’t think this is anything that’s going to have to wait or should wait quite frankly for much longer.”

The comments came just a day after Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assailed Saudi Arabia for effectively backing Russia in its brutal invasion of Ukraine and called for an immediate freeze on “all aspects of our cooperation with Saudi Arabia,” vowing to use his power to block any future arms sales.

“There simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict — either you support the rest of the free world in trying to stop a war criminal from violently wiping off an entire country off of the map, or you support him,” Mr. Menendez said. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia chose the latter in a terrible decision driven by economic self-interest.”

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said on Tuesday morning that Saudi Arabia clearly wanted Russia to win the war in Ukraine. “Let’s be very candid about this,” he said on CNN. “It’s Putin and Saudi Arabia against the United States.

If long-time Democratic foreign policy hands like Menendez and Durbin, and eve Biden himself, are tossing Prince Bonesaw McGraw and his merry band of sheiks  out of the tent, this is real. The question is how much damage Riyadh has done. It might be the first time I can remember where US foreign policy is about to take major steps back on Saudi Arabia.

Biden can't push them too far though. If Riyadh decides to start pricing oil in rubles instead of greenback, the dollar craters and everyone now it. They've subtly mentioned this earlier this year, not exactly correcting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov when he said that the Saudis were invited to join the BRICS compact. Such a move really would be siding with Putin against the US.

We'll see, but the OPEC production cut is going to have consequences, and so will the US and European actions that follow.

Big Buckeye Battleground Blitz

Republicans know that with Herschel Walker's campaign in Georgia capsizing and Sen. Raphael Warnock increasing his lead in what was a tight race that f Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan knocks out Hillbilly Racist J.D. Vance next month, they lose any shot at the Senate. The GOP is going all out, dropping tens of millions in Ohio to defend Rob Portman's seat in the final weeks, and that means Ryan is pretty much on his own as he heads into this week's debate with Vance.

Democrats are increasingly fearful that they are squandering a chance to flip a Senate seat in Ohio — a state that once seemed off the map but, according to polls, remains close four weeks from Election Day.

Although the Republican, “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, has struggled to raise money, national groups have propped up his campaign by pouring in more than $30 million worth of advertising.

Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democratic nominee, has been a more prolific fundraiser. But because national Democratic groups have provided comparatively little help on the airwaves, Ryan has had to spend cash as fast as it comes in just to keep up with the GOP onslaught.

The lopsided funding has unnerved Democrats in Ohio and across the country, according to interviews with a dozen party leaders and operatives. Many worry that Democrats will regret not doing more to try to pull Ryan ahead of Vance, a right-wing ally of former President Donald Trump.

“Tim Ryan is running the best Senate race in the country and having to do it all by his lonesome,” said Irene Lin, an Ohio-based Democratic strategist who managed Tom Nelson’s Senate primary campaign in Wisconsin this year. “If we lose this race by a few points, and the Senate majority, blame should squarely fall on the D.C. forces who unfairly wrote off Ohio.”

In an interview with NBC News after a campaign appearance Saturday in Cleveland, Ryan sounded resigned to going it alone.

“The national Democrats … trying to talk them into a working-class candidate, it’s like pulling teeth sometimes,” Ryan said as he tossed a football with his 8-year-old son in a parking lot behind an Irish pub. “We’re in Ohio and we got a candidate running around with a tinfoil hat on. We’re out here fighting on our own. I mean, it’s David against Goliath.”

Ryan and Vance are running to succeed Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican who is not seeking re-election. Independent polls suggest the race is a toss-up, with slim leads by either candidate falling within the margin of error. The candidates will meet Monday night in Cleveland for the first of two televised debates.

After losing two presidential campaigns and a race for governor in the state since 2016, national Democrats are wary about spending in Ohio, once a quintessential battleground. Republicans are treating it as a state they can't afford to lose.

Trump’s super PAC was the latest group to jump into the race, reserving more than $1 million in ads last week. The barrage includes a spot attacking Ryan, who has portrayed himself as a moderate, as a party-line voter beholden to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. But even the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC, a major presence in other states key to determining partisan control of the chamber, has been largely absent from Ohio.

Through Monday, Republicans had spent or reserved at least $37.9 million worth of advertising on the general election, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm. Only $3.7 million of that had come directly from Vance’s campaign, with another $1.6 million split between the campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee through coordinated advertising.

I'm a bit baffled that anyone is surprised that Ryan is being cut off at the knees here in the eleventh hour. How quickly people forget that Ryan declared war on Nancy Pelosi after the 2018 midterms.

 

Ryan, who hails from post-industrial Youngstown, was blunt in his assessment of the Democratic Party this week: “We need a brand change.” He tells Rolling Stone that he wants a less coastal Democratic Party, pointing out the lack of House leaders from the middle of the country. “It’s a pretty large swath of the country to completely ignore,” he says. “How in God’s name do we expect to win the House, have a significant majority, hold it, have a party brand that’s connecting to people, and have nobody in the Midwest at all?”

In past interviews, Ryan has lamented his party’s turn toward political correctness. “We can’t have these purity tests,” he said, before listing a few key characteristics all Democrats should have. “You can’t be racist. You can’t be sexist. You can’t be homophobic — you’ve got to check those boxes — and then be economically progressive,” he said. “Other than that, we’ve got to be a big-tent party.” Ryan said he wants Democrats to come up with an umbrella economic agenda that can unify the party’s diverse coalition: “A robust economic message that all of those different groups could hear and go, ‘Yeah, you know, That’s me. I’m in on that.’”

 

So here you go, Tim. Here's your change to prove that "all working-class voters matter" can win you the race as a Dem, and you have a uniquely terrible faux working-class populist power to win against.

Off you go, chmap, and good luck. We're pulling for you. I want to see J.D. Vance crash into the ground like a meteor and blow up as much as anyone, but I also remember what Ryan has said nationally about the "coastal elites".

I know I've said in the past that you have to match the candidate to the electorate and Blue no matter who. Both remain true here.

But it's also true that when you come for the queen, you best not miss, and Ryan wasn't even in the same time zone. He's held on with no national support as it is, and even won a primary. He's a smart guy. Maybe he's got what it takes to win this seat.

Vote for Ryan if you're in Ohio, surely.

Just don't expect a national flood of cash at the end.

The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

I know that the Senate GOP is terrified of losing control of the upper chamber for another two years and that they believe they are going to fail to get to 51 seats, because nobody stopped Alabama GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville from screeching racist garbage at a Trump rally just 3 1/2 weeks from the midterms.  Will Bunch:

“They want to take over what you’ve got,” Tuberville warmed up the pro-Trump crowd — “they” his amorphous term that could have meant Democrats, or Black people, or the Washoe People, or some other “Other” — in what the journalist Matthew Chapman noted is a literal echo of language used by the KKK to rile up Southerners in the 1960s.

The Alabama senator made his pitch for Nevadans to elect Republican Adam Laxalt, the challenger with 2022′s best shot at unseating a Democratic incumbent in Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, by echoing the new party line that Democrats are “pro-crime,” in a year when voters are more alarmed than usual about that issue. But then he took it next-level by leaving no doubt who he wants his audience to see as the criminals.

“They want to control what you have!” Tuberville told the assembled Trumpists. “They want crime because they want to take over what you’ve got! They want to have reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit!” The crowd roared. “They’re not owed that.”

Suddenly, the ambiguity surrounding “they” was all cleared up, since the main (although not only) group that’s made a case for reparations are African Americans, once enslaved and then subject to racial apartheid, especially in Tuberville’s Alabama and the rest of the Deep South. A U.S. senator was openly equating Blackness with criminality, layering on the outrageous claim that “they” have the nerve to demand reparations while taking your stuff.

‘I mean, I’ve watched and listened to A LOT of old George Wallace speeches,” Tom Moon, a columnist for Alabama Political Reporter, wrote on Twitter. “You’d be hard pressed to find many that were worse than this. In 2022. Just disgusting.”

Tuberville’s Minden speech was so blatantly racist that — just a few short years ago — it’s easy to imagine at least a few Republican Party elders condemning it. But on this Sunday morning in October 2022, the silence so far has been as loud as that Minden fire siren. A political party that weeks ago was in full panic mode after its overreaches on the Supreme Court and abortion rights had energized young and women Democrats has now found its footing with the same appeal to white supremacy as the “nostalgia” for an era of “sundown” laws. 

 

If anything, Republicans are defending Tuberville's racism, because the entire party agrees with his racism. It's not a dealbreaker.

It's a requirement.

Sunday Long Read: Crazy Train

 Our Sunday Long Read is the NY Times profile by Ralph Vartabedian on how greed, techbro ego, and good old-fashioned political corruption killed high speed rail for a generation in California and the United States.

 

Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor.

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.

A review of hundreds of pages of documents, engineering reports, meeting transcripts and interviews with dozens of key political leaders show that the detour through the Mojave Desert was part of a string of decisions that, in hindsight, have seriously impeded the state’s ability to deliver on its promise to create a new way of transporting people in an era of climate change.

Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state’s farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live.

The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.

When California voters first approved a bond issue for the project in 2008, the rail line was to be completed by 2020, and its cost seemed astronomical at the time — $33 billion — but it was still considered worthwhile as an alternative to the state’s endless web of freeways and the carbon emissions generated in one of the nation’s busiest air corridors..

Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal.

Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the “final plan” raised the estimate to $113 billion.

The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.

“We would make some different decisions today,” said Tom Richards, a developer from the Central Valley city of Fresno who now chairs the authority. He said project executives have managed to work through the challenges and have a plan that will, for the first time, connect 85 percent of California’s residents with a fast, efficient rail system. “I think it will be successful,” he said.

 

It won't.

 

It will never, ever be finished.

 

There are too many industries dedicated to destroying mass transportation in America: automakers, energy companies, homebuilders,  fast food chains, you name it, it's because most Americans drive there on the way to and from work daily. You make a mass transportation system like high speed rail in a huge state like California, other states will want to do the same.

So turning it into a boondoggle that costs hundreds of billions will be proof positive that the American way of cars and trucks forever is the only path forward.

Remember Hyperloop?

Yeah.

The Big Lie, Con't

Arizona Republicans have been fundraising for this entire cycle off of "efforts to find election fraud" to the tune of millions.

Arizona’s Republican Party raised record sums in 2021 with repeated appeals to supporters for money to help audit the 2020 presidential election. “Pitch in to Help Us Finish America’s Audit!” and “Help America’s Audit” were among the dozens of pitches from the party.

But Kelli Ward, the state party chairwoman, was sending a very different message to top Republicans in Washington at the time.

“We have not been raising money to pay for the audit,” Ward wrote in one June 25, 2021, text message, according to a person with knowledge of the message, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal details. “We were expressly told that we could/should not raise money for the audit and auditors before the audit began.”

Instead, Ward wrote in the text, the party was going to “keep the pressure” on for an audit and “communicate” about an audit.

The text message suggests that Arizona GOP leaders had no intention of using donations to help pay for the audit effort, despite what it had been telling its supporters in fundraising pleas. In the end, the $6 million audit was bankrolled through a separate fundraising effort by election denier groups, along with $150,000 in initial taxpayer money.

The final report, which was prepared by private contractors and submitted to Republican leaders of the state Senate, reaffirmed President Biden’s victory in the battleground state over former president Donald Trump.

Arizona GOP spokeswoman Kristy Dohnel did not address questions about the text message, but said in a statement that the state party “contributed to covering costs for security to ensure the safety of those who participated in the nonpartisan audit.”

“The Republican Party of Arizona has been able to raise millions of dollars under Chairwoman Kelli Ward’s leadership with amazing partners and relentless grass roots donors,” Dohnel said. “They know that Dr. Ward is honest, operates with integrity, and because of this, they trust her team with their resources. The role of the state party is to keep the political pressure on different entities.”

Arizona Republican officials discovered that raising money off the audit was a smashing success. From May to September 2021, at least 92 emails mentioned the audit as a reason to give to the Arizona GOP. The state party secured almost $1.1 million during that five-month period of a non-election year, compared to about $865,000 for 2020 and 2022 combined.

“In order to be on track to finish this historic, thorough, nonpartisan effort to strengthen our republic, we’ll need to raise $40K before the end of the month!” read one June 24, 2021, email. “We know these sound like lofty goals, but we’re fighting for our very right to have strong, secure elections. Will you rush in your support with everything that’s on the line?”

The pattern was evident around the country. In total, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol found that more than $250 million was raised off fraudulent claims that the election was stolen. Trump’s campaign continued to raise money for an “Election Defense Fund” that did not exist. Trump’s PAC has raised more than $100 million, much of it on claims the election was stolen, and he has largely hoarded the money while spending some on candidates and some on his own lawyers.

 

Millions and millions of rubes were parted from their cash across the country and The Big Lie raised a quarter billion dollars.

And if you think pointing out all these millions of people were scammed will stop a single one of them from voting, well. You haven't been paying attention these last two years.

The Big Lie is the most successful, profitable psy-op the GOP has run in years.

Better vote the Big Liars out or they'll reshape reality to make all of this true, for every election they can steal.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Hurricane Ian is shaping up to be the most deadly Florida storm in nearly 90 years, because people in the path didn't evacuate in time, and the reason people didn't evacuate at ground zero, resort-laden Lee County, was because GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis didn't compel mandatory evacuation until more than 24 hours after the rest of the region had been told to clear out.

As stories of death emerged from the destruction in southwest Florida, President Biden, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and local authorities have clashed over Ian’s casualty toll. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno told “Good Morning America” that deaths could range into the hundreds. Biden warned that Ian could be the “deadliest hurricane in Florida’s history.” The governor has downplayed deaths in daily briefings, saying the tropical cyclone’s numbers will not come near the 1928 hurricane that killed a record 2,500.

Yet Ian already is shaping up to be the deadliest storm to pound Florida since 1935. State authorities have documented 72 deaths thus far — slightly under Hurricane Irma’s toll in 2017, according to the National Hurricane Center. County sheriffs have reported dozens more, pushing the total to at least 103. That makes Ian more fatal than Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Ian’s storm surge has claimed the most lives, according to the Florida Medical Examiners Commission, which is tallying direct and indirect deaths. Slightly more than half of Ian’s victims drowned, the latest data shows, underscoring what experts call a frequently overlooked reality: Water usually kills more people than wind.

Storm surge as high as 18 feet blasted through homes, trapping some people inside while sweeping others into brownish rivers. One woman was found tangled below her house in wires. Many of those who drowned were elderly.

“I don’t want to scare people, but they need to understand: The leading cause of death is going to be drowning,” said W. Craig Fugate, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Florida Division of Emergency Management. “Storm surge doesn’t sound inherently deadly unless you understand it.

One week after landfall, rescue teams continue to wade through wrecked communities — often with only a vague idea of who might be buried in the rubble. Lee County Manager Roger Desjarlais admitted at a news conference Monday that officials do not know how many people they are searching for. First responders are relying on cadaver dogs.

“We don’t have anything,” Virginia Task Force 2 leader Brian Sullivan said Tuesday as his team scoured Red Coconut RV Park in Fort Myers Beach, the storm’s ground zero. “The sheriff’s office was trying to work to compile a missing persons list. We haven’t received any information regarding that area.”

Counting the dead is an imprecise science — there is no certain tally from Hurricane Katrina, for instance — and throughout the years, officials have debated what qualifies as a storm death. Hurricane Maria’s toll was initially in the dozens, with officials including only drownings and blunt force trauma. But an analysis of excess deaths later pushed the total into the thousands. Many elderly people died in Puerto Rico as the island’s blackout continued for months and medical care was hard to reach.

DeSantis at first indicated that indirect deaths might not be counted.

“For example, in Charlotte County, they recorded a suicide during the storm,” he said the day after the storm. “They also had somebody pass away from a heart attack because you don’t have access to emergency services.”

But the agency tasked with cataloguing the deaths, the Florida Medical Examiners Commission, adheres to a broader definition.

“We include motor vehicle accidents if someone is trying to evacuate and they hydroplane,” spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said. “If someone had a heart attack when medical services were down. … If there was any suspicion it was related to a hurricane, that’s a storm death.”

 

There's a very good chance that the storm's death toll could be two or three times what it is now, a toll in the hundreds, plural, not just hundred, singular. But all Ron DeSantis cares about is how this makes him look bad. 

It makes him look bad because he failed Florida completely.

This should be the end of his political career, and Florida should be getting Charlie Crist as governor next month.

That's up to you, Florida.

Vote like your state depends on it.

 

The Big Lie, Con't

The vast majority of Republicans running in 2022 incorrectly believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and the vast majority of those Republicans will easily win safe red state seats in November and will work to enact actual election fraud in 2024 and beyond.

 

A majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 in all — have denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Candidates who have challenged or refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory are running in every region of the country and in nearly every state. Republican voters in four states nominated election deniers in all federal and statewide races The Post examined.

Although some are running in heavily Democratic areas and are expected to lose, most of the election deniers nominated are likely to win: Of the nearly 300 on the ballot, 174 are running for safely Republican seats. Another 51 will appear on the ballot in tightly contested races.

The implications will be lasting: If Republicans take control of the House, as many political forecasters predict, election deniers would hold enormous sway over the choice of the nation’s next speaker, who in turn could preside over the House in a future contested presidential election. The winners of all the races examined by The Post — those for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, Senate and House — will hold some measure of power overseeing American elections

Many of these candidates echo the false claims of former president Donald Trump — claims that have been thoroughly investigated and dismissed by myriad officials and courts. Experts said the insistence on such claims, despite the lack of evidence, reflects a willingness among election-denying candidates to undermine democratic institutions when it benefits their side.

The Post’s count — assembled from public statements, social media posts, and actions taken by the candidates to deny the legitimacy of the last presidential vote — shows how the movement arising from Trump’s thwarted plot to overturn the 2020 election is, in many respects, even stronger two years later. Far from repudiating candidates who embrace Trump’s false fraud claims, GOP primary voters have empowered them.

 

Republicans are tired of elections. They want power, they want it now, and they will destroy whatever is in their way so that they can get it. Their candidates want it, their elected want it, and they want it.

 

Democrats need to figure this out.

 

There are no good Republicans.

 

There are no good people who remain in support of Republicans. Not a one.

 

Vote, or soon, you'll never have to.

Last Call For Border Line Insanity, Con't

House Republicans, supremely confident that they will take control of the House in January, are promising to impeach President Biden and basically every cabinet official in hearing after hearing after hearing until Democrats just throw the towel in and abandon the administration, I guess. They've already promised to go after Biden, AG Merrick Garland, and VP Kamala Harris, and now House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has it in for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy will be swiftly confronted in a Republican majority with a politically dicey proposition gaining steam within his conference: Launching impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden’s top official in charge of the southern border.

Senior Republicans and a number of McCarthy allies are signaling little appetite – for now – in immediately impeaching Biden himself, despite the push among a handful of far-right Republicans seeking to remove the sitting President from office if their party takes the House in next month’s midterms.

But more than a dozen of former President Donald Trump’s top congressional allies – and several Republicans close to the leadership – told CNN that the focus instead should be on targeting Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and that a new GOP majority should hold impeachment proceedings over the problems at the border. Senior GOP sources close to leadership say it’s a matter of when – not if – House Republicans initiate an impeachment inquiry and that Mayorkas has become their No. 1 target, with their base itching for revenge after Trump’s two impeachments.

Impeaching a Cabinet official has only happened once in US history, and the issue would become moot if Mayorkas were to resign. But talk of impeaching Mayorkas already has prompted internal pushback among some veteran Republicans who are skeptical that their policy disputes with the Cabinet secretary meet the bar of charging him with committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Yet as they have railed over the migrant crisis in their push to regain the House, a number of leading Republicans fully endorse the idea and acknowledge it’s one that McCarthy will have to deal with if he wins the speakership following the midterms.

“Mayorkas deserves (impeachment) for sure, because we no longer have a border,” said Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a McCarthy ally who is in line to chair the powerful House Judiciary Committee, which oversees impeachment proceedings.

But while Jordan personally supports the idea, he believes it will be “a conference decision,” saying, “I think we’ll all sit down. Kevin is open to sitting down and figuring out what we do.”

Added Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a freshman GOP firebrand who has already endorsed impeachment articles for both Biden and Mayorkas: “Secretary Mayorkas should be a priority. Joe Biden’s his own demise.”

Yet McCarthy must also contend with a larger yet less vocal group of moderate and mainstream Republicans, who are wary of the potential political blowback over such a move and warning their colleagues not to weaponize the most powerful oversight tool at their disposal.

GOP Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said Republicans “should focus on policy” and “leave some of the other more emotional topics for another day.”

“The risk is if people lose faith in the ability of Congress to even do its basic function,” Womack said of voter blowback for impeaching Mayorkas. “The people that I talk to from all stripes tell me they want a Congress that works – not a Congress that is preoccupied with kind of revenge-type agendas. Because then a lot of other things (that) need to happen don’t get to happen. And then that hurts the country.”

 

McCarthy being Speaker of the House being beside the point, I don't think the odds of this are as good as both CNN and the GOP are telling you, the notion that whoever is leading the GOP in January won't be impeaching Biden officials for all of 2023 is laughable. Of course these idiots will waste America's time and work to ruin the economy, and vastly overplay their hand. That's a given.

Perhaps then the point of this story is to convince the people who think impeaching Biden's cabinet on Day One might be a bad idea to vote for the Dems.

I certainly think that this would be a solution.

The Dank Brandon Rises

President Biden will pardon all federal simple marijuana offenses and take a look at rescheduling or even removing weed from the Controlled Substances Act, something that will free thousands. It's a BFD.

 

President Joe Biden on Thursday announced he is taking executive action to pardon Americans who've been convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law.

The action will benefit 6,500 people with prior federal convictions and thousands of others charged under the District of Columbia's criminal code, according to senior administration officials.

"No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana," Biden said in a statement outlining the administration's new actions. "Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit."

"Criminal records for marijuana possession have also imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities," Biden continued. "And while white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates."

Biden is also urging governors to do the same for individuals with state convictions and is requesting Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to expeditiously review how marijuana is scheduled under federal law. 

 

Biden is finally fulfilling this promise, and you don't get much more serious on federal criminal justice reform than pardoning thousands for simple weed possession. 

And yes, states remain way out front on this ahead of Biden and the feds, but this is still massive. It means we're paving the way for decriminalization nationwide, where the vast majority of those arrested on pot charges are people of color.

This is the Joe Biden I voted for, and will vote for again.

Walker, Tales's Rearranger

Things just went from bad to cavernously abyssal for Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker.

 

After a woman revealed that Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker had urged her to have an abortion, Walker adamantly denied the story and claimed he had no idea who this woman could be.

But there’s a good reason the woman finds that defense highly doubtful: She’s the mother of one of his children.

When the woman first told The Daily Beast her story, we agreed not to reveal certain details about her identity over her concerns for safety and privacy. But then Walker categorically denied the story and said he didn’t know who was making this allegation.

On Wednesday morning, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade asked Walker whether he had figured out the woman’s identity, based on details in the original report.

“Not at all,” Walker replied. “And that’s what I hope everyone can see. It’s sort of like everyone is anonymous, or everyone is leaking, and they want you to confess to something you have no clue about.”

Walker then spun the report as an attack from “desperate” Democrats eager to maintain control of the pivotal Senate seat. Instead of being deterred by his now-public hypocrisy, he said he now feels “energized.”

“They see me as a big threat, and I know that and I knew it when I got into this race. But they don’t realize that I think they came for the wrong one. They energized me,” Walker said. “They energized me, because I know how they really want to try to keep this seat.”

The anonymous woman said that defense sounded ridiculous.

“Sure, I was stunned, but I guess it also doesn’t shock me, that maybe there are just so many of us that he truly doesn’t remember,” she said. “But then again, if he really forgot about it, that says something, too.”

The woman, a registered Democrat whose years-long relationship with Walker continued after the abortion, told The Daily Beast that her chief concern with revealing her name was because she is the mother of one of Walker’s own children and she wanted to protect her family’s privacy as best she could while also coming forward with the truth. (Walker has publicly acknowledged the child as his own, and the woman proved she is the child's mother and provided credible evidence of a long-term relationship with Walker.)

The Walker campaign declined to comment for this story.

 

To recap, Walker paid for an abortion, then continued to have a relationship with the woman, as well as fathering a child with her, who Walker wanted to also pay for a second abortion, then lied about all of it on national TV multiple times.

 

You live by the "family values campaign" that treats women as property, you get wrecked by it.

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Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Chatter among the CHUD class is rising rapidly the closer we get to November 8th.

 

Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.

But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.

Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the F.B.I.’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.

“The question is what does ‘civil war’ look like and what does it mean,” said Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Homeland Security Department under Mr. Trump. “I did not anticipate, nor did anyone else as far as I know, how rapidly the violence would escalate.”

Ms. Neumann now works for Moonshot, a private security company that tracks extremism online. Moonshot found a 51 percent increase in “civil war” references on the most active pages on 4Chan, the fringe online message board, in the week after Mr. Biden’s Sept. 1 speech.

But talk of political violence is not relegated to anonymous online forums.

At a Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday night, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, said that “Democrats want Republicans dead,” adding that “Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state.” At a recent fund-raiser, Michael T. Flynn, who briefly served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, said that governors had the power to declare war and that “we’re probably going to see that.”

On Monday, federal prosecutors showed a jury in Washington an encrypted message that Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers armed extremist group, had sent his lieutenants two days after the 2020 presidential election: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”

Experts say the steady patter of bellicose talk has helped normalize the expectation of political violence.

 

Eventually, I expect we'll be in a situation closer to the turn of the millennium, where we have attacks like the OKC bombing, Atlanta Park bombing, and the DC Sniper, only far more common and widespread. Democrats will be accused to election fraud, and they will be targeted for it.

It will get worse before the dawn, but the dawn will break. I have to believe that.

Im

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

Senate Democratic candidates are ready to rumble in the last five weeks of the election cycle as third quarter fundraising numbers are in. Dems have the money to compete as John Fetterman and Raphael Warnock are showing, but Dems also have a big advantage across the board in races like Wisconsin.

 

Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes raised more than $20 million in the third quarter of 2022, according to details from the Wisconsin lieutenant governor’s campaign, dwarfing what he raised throughout his entire bid for Senate.

Barnes is aiming to unseat Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican incumbent who is seeking a third term, in what has become one of the most closely watched Senate campaigns of the midterms. With an evenly divided Senate, every race this November could tilt the balance of power in the legislative body, but Barnes’ race against Johnson represents one of the best chances for Democrats to flip a Senate seat this cycle.

The race has been tight for months. A Marquette University Law School Poll, released in mid-September, found 49% of likely voters in Wisconsin supported Johnson, compared to 48% who backed Barnes – a statistical dead heat. But the poll was an improvement for Johnson: The same poll had found Barnes at 52% in August with the incumbent at 45%.

Barnes’ fundraising haul should help Democrats level the advertising playing field in the race after being outspent in September.

 

In Nevada, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has raised more than $15 million for her tight race last quarter.

With just weeks left before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto will report raising more than $15 million between the beginning of July and the end of September leaving roughly $5 million cash on hand, her campaign announced Monday — another record in a record-breaking fundraising election cycle for Cortez Masto, and roughly double the $7.5 million she raised in the second quarter of 2022.

In a statement, her campaign touted individual donations from more than 170,000 contributors in the third quarter, with an average donation amount of $44. Her campaign did not immediately release quarterly spending figures, numbers that will likely remain unavailable until a federal filing deadline on Oct. 15.

It comes as Nevada’s U.S. Senate contest between Cortez Masto and her Republican opponent, former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, has become one of just a handful nationwide that could decide control of a U.S. Senate split 50-50 between the two major parties.

Cortez Masto, like many major Democratic candidates nationwide, has dominated the candidate-side fundraising race, raising more than three times as much as Laxalt — $30.1 million to $7.3 million, respectively — through the second quarter of 2022, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

As of Monday morning, Laxalt had yet to publicly announce his third-quarter fundraising. In the second quarter, he raised a little more than $2.8 million, less than half of Cortez Masto’s total.

 

In North Carolina, Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley raised more than $16 million in Q3 and has a real shot at retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr's seat.

So given Democrats’ struggles to win federal races in the state, let’s run through a couple reasons why Beasley could be the first federal candidate in almost 15 years to win a statewide race — and why she could be yet another Democrat to narrowly lose a Senate race in North Carolina.

For starters, Beasley, who already has experience running and winning a statewide race in North Carolina, has so far maintained a significant financial edge over Budd. Her impressive fundraising skills have allowed her to spend over $10 million on TV ads, according to The Cook Political Report, which cited data from AdImpact. That’s in contrast to nearly $2 million from Budd, according to the outlet.

Beasley is also hoping that the state’s demographics will work in her favor. She hasn’t been shy in admitting that she hopes she can gin up support among Black voters, who make up about 22 percent of the citizen voting-age population. And if Beasley wins, she’d become the state’s first Black U.S. senator.

“The Democratic Party has been trying hard to put forward candidates who reflect the diversity of the country,” said Whitney Manzo, a professor of political science at North Carolina’s Meredith College. “And I think the party is banking on [Beasley] appealing to voters of color, with the hope that she will energize voters in the same way that Barack Obama did in 2008.”

The increased salience of abortion access following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization might also give Beasley a lift — something that other Democrats in competitive states are similarly hoping for.

 

And in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan has raised more than $17 million in the last three months.

 

Democrat Tim Ryan’s campaign reported raising $17.2 million in the third quarter — nearly doubling what was raised in the prior quarter and once again breaking a fundraising record for a U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio.

The Howland resident previously had set the record for most money in a quarter between April and June with $9,133,487 and before that, had the old record with $4,111,765 in the year’s first quarter.

Ryan, a 10-term congressman, is facing Republican J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” in the general election. Most polls have the race as a statistical tie.

The $17.2 million between July and September is almost as much as the $21,773,132 Ryan raised for the entire campaign before the third quarter.

The $17.2 million includes 105,455 new donors in the third quarter, according to his campaign, and more than 95 percent of the donations were $100 or less. The average online donation was $39.57, the campaign stated.

Ryan is spending money almost as fast as he is raising it with much of it going toward advertising.

His campaign said he had just over $1.5 million in his campaign fund as of Sept. 30, the last day of the third quarter filing period.

Ryan ended the second quarter on June 30 with $3,567,175 in his campaign fund.

 

If Dems fail to keep the Senate, it's not because they didn't spend money on their campaign ads targeting the GOP. They are ready to go.

 

They just need us.

 

Vote like your country depends on it.

The Big Lie, Con't

The Big Lie won't stop until Republicans start going to jail for breaching of election security, fraudulent elector conspiracy charges, and meddling with voting machines and data. In Michigan at least, we could finally be close to the beginning of this.

 

A Michigan township official who promotes false conspiracy theories of a rigged 2020 election could face criminal charges related to two voting-system security breaches, according to previously unreported records and legal experts.

A state police detective recommended that the Michigan attorney general consider unspecified charges amid a months-long probe into one breach related to the Republican clerk’s handling of a vote tabulator, according to a June email from the detective to state and local officials. Reuters obtained the email through a public-records request.

The clerk, Stephanie Scott, oversaw voting in rural Adams Township until the state last year revoked her authority over elections. Scott has publicly embraced baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against former U.S. President Donald Trump and has posted online about the QAnon conspiracy theory.

In a second breach of the township’s voting system, the clerk gave a file containing confidential voter data to an information-technology expert who is a suspect in other alleged Michigan election-security violations. The expert, Benjamin Cotton, worked with voter-fraud conspiracists seeking unauthorized access to election systems in other states, according to court records reviewed by Reuters. The incident has not been previously reported.

Scott denies any wrongdoing. The attorney general and state police declined to comment on the allegations against the clerk.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the top election official in this battleground state, stripped Scott of her authority over elections last year after the clerk refused to perform regular maintenance and accuracy testing on voting equipment. Scott believed, incorrectly, that the process would erase 2020 election data, which she believed might contain fraud evidence.

Scott’s actions are part of a national effort by public officials and others seeking evidence of Trump's false stolen-election claims. The allegations against Scott have parallels to the high-profile case of Tina Peters, the clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, who enjoys cult-hero status in the election-conspiracy movement and faces felony charges related to similar voting-system breaches.

Scott’s case illustrates what some election-security experts describe as a growing insider threat from officials tasked with safeguarding American democracy. Reuters has documented 18 incidents nationally, 12 of them in Michigan, in which public officials and others are accused of breaching or attempting to breach election systems. Such violations can expose confidential voter information and enable election-tampering by revealing security protocols.

"The insider threat question is what keeps many people up at night,” said Matthew Weil, executive director of the Democracy Program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank.

If charged, Scott would become the second elected clerk nationally to face criminal prosecution related to a security breach following the November 2020 election. The Mesa County district attorney accuses Peters of helping an unauthorized person make copies of her voting machine hard drives. She has pleaded not guilty to 10 criminal counts, including seven felonies, and is set to go to trial in March.

Both Peters and Scott have insisted they had a duty to investigate fraud allegations. Peters did not respond to a request for comment.

 

The bigger problem remains that multiple Republican election officials and candidates for election offices like Secretary of State in multiple states continue to lie about the 2020 election and are vowing if elected to make sure no Democrat in their jurisdiction wins ever again.

We have to stop them, and we need your vote to help.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

As I mentioned last month, Donald Trump's quixotic quest to block the Justice Department's investigation into his trove of illegally held classified documents will now be going to the Supreme Court, or it would, if Trump's lawyers were actually arguing that.

 

Former President Donald J. Trump asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to intervene in the litigation over sensitive documents that the F.B.I. seized from his Florida estate, saying that an appeals court had lacked jurisdiction to remove them from a special master’s review.

But Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not ask the Supreme Court to overturn the most important part of the appeals court’s intervention: its decision to free the Justice Department to continue using documents with classification markings in its criminal investigation of Mr. Trump’s handling of government records.

The new filing was technical, saying that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, had not been authorized to stay aspects of a judge’s order appointing a special master to review all materials that the F.B.I. had seized in its search of Mr. Trump’s residence, Mar-a-Lago.

“The 11th Circuit lacked jurisdiction to review the special master order, which authorized the review of all materials seized from President Trump’s residence, including documents bearing classification markings,” the application said.

The court requested a response from the Justice Department by 5 p.m. next Tuesday.

Even were Mr. Trump to prevail, his victory would be distinctly modest. It would merely allow the special master to review those documents even as the Justice Department continues its work.

Although the Supreme Court is dominated by six conservative justices, three of them appointed by Mr. Trump, it has rejected earlier efforts to block the disclosure of information about him, and legal experts said Mr. Trump’s new emergency application faced significant challenges.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said Mr. Trump was pursuing a limited and curious litigation strategy in trying to reinstate part of a ruling from Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida.

Mr. Trump’s application, Professor Vladeck said, presented “technical procedural questions on which the justices may be even less likely to be sympathetic to the former president.”

In other words, the Trumpies are arguing over how much should be included in Special Master Raymond Dearie's review, not over blocking the investigation. The former is likely to grant Trump additional months to delay the investigation, and the latter means nothing's going to happen until after the midterms.

We'll see how this shakes out, but don't be surprised if we get a shadow docket unsigned order from SCOTUS next week in Trump's favor.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Con't

A key race for Democrats to hold the Senate is Georgia, where Sen. Raphael Warnock is locked in a tight race with Republican and former NFL running back all-star Herschel Walker.

Having said that, I don't think it's going to remain tightly locked much longer after the week Walker has had, as AJC's Greg Bluestein assesses the damage.

Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker has weathered crises that have leveled other campaigns and still remained within striking distance of Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock thanks to relatively unshakable support from many in the GOP base.

But the one-two punch on Monday of a Daily Beast story that accused Walker of paying for his then-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009 coupled with his adult son’s stunning attacks on his father’s candidacy may pose the greatest threat yet to the Republican’s bid.

Just weeks before the midterm election, the shocking developments have some GOP figures despondent about Walker’s chances of defeating Warnock in a November race that could determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson said the fallout is “probably a KO” for Walker’s midterm chances. Nicole Rodden, a former Republican House contender, blamed party leaders for backing a candidate who has “cost the GOP the US Senate for a second time.”

Walker reacted by condemning the Daily Beast report as a “flat-out lie” and said on Fox News he “never asked anyone to get an abortion, I never paid for an abortion.” His attorney has pledged to file a defamation lawsuit against the publication, which stands by the story.

The Republican and his allies had a more muted response toward his son Christian Walker’s claims that his father threatened to kill his family members and entered the race despite opposition from “every single one” of his relatives.

“I LOVE my son no matter what,” Walker tweeted.

The developments complicate Walker’s campaign at a pivotal time.

Already struggling to consolidate Republican support, Walker now stands accused of brazen hypocrisy over one of his campaign’s signature issues.

An avowed opponent of abortion, Walker called for a “total ban” on the procedure even in cases of incest or rape throughout his campaign. And he endorsed a 15-week federal abortion restriction proposed by U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham even as other Republicans in key races distanced themselves from the measure.

His son’s sudden outspoken treatment of his father amounts to a different sort of blow. Christian Walker’s mother, Cindy Grossman accused Herschel Walker of choking her and putting a gun to her head when they were married. She obtained a restraining order against him in 2005 in response to the threats.

Warnock’s ads feature wrenching footage of Grossman recounting his abusive relationship, and the Republican has refused to directly address the allegations on the campaign trail beyond attributing his behavior to a mental health illness.

Though he runs influential social media accounts with droves of followers, Christian Walker hasn’t used his platform to advance his father’s campaign. His arms-length approach was an ongoing concern for his father’s supporters -- and the subject of ongoing fascination in political circles.

 

Now nationally, Republicans don't care about hypocrisy, and every single Republican will tell you that the end of legalized abortion in two dozen states means more voters will turn out for them to make the ban national than Democrats to stop it.

National Republicans have stayed focused on the Georgia race’s impact in the broader contest for control of the Senate. “This election is about the future of the country,” Mr. Law said. “Herschel Walker will make things better, Raphael Warnock is making it worse. Anything else is a distraction.”

Mr. Warnock, who won the seat in a runoff election in January 2021, is seeking a full six-year term and is seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the nation, running in a state with a long Republican lineage but that Democrats carried in 2020.

Since Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, many Christian conservatives have chosen to overlook a politician’s personal failings for the sake of achieving broader policy goals.

Ralph Reed, the prominent social conservative leader based in the state, dismissed the latest report, saying that he expected “100 percent” that evangelical Christians would stick with Mr. Walker.

He compared the report’s timing to that of the “Access Hollywood” recording that threatened Mr. Trump’s bid in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. “We’ve seen this movie before,” Mr. Reed said. “They’re trying to take down a good man.”

The statements of support from fellow Republicans came quickly on Tuesday.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said on Tuesday, “Herschel has denied these allegations and the N.R.S.C. and Republicans stand with him."

Except, locally, Georgia Republicans are running from Walker as fast as they can.

Gov. Brian Kemp’s office issued a statement Tuesday backing the Republican ticket after a cascade of revelations threatened Walker’s bid. But he stopped short of specifically pledging his support for the former football star.

“As he has said repeatedly throughout this campaign, the governor is laser-focused on sharing his record of results and vision for his second term with hardworking Georgians,” spokesman Cody Hall said, “and raising the resources necessary to fund the advertising, ground game and voter turnout operation needed to ensure Republican victories up and down the ballot on Nov. 8.”

And Attorney General Chris Carr would not say whether he continues to back Walker’s campaign, instead through a spokesman taking a shot at Kemp’s opponent, Stacey Abrams,without answering a question about the Republican Senate nominee.

 

Walker is, granted, only in trouble because there are so many undecided Georgia voters still.  Fox News and Marist College both have Warnock up by five points for example, but with double digit undecided voter percentages in both.

Then again, if you're still undecided about Republican candidates like Walker...this isn't going to change anything at all.

We'll see