Inside Job, Con't

Some 44% of Americans believe the federal government is controlled by a secret cabal, in a result that was inevitable thanks to decades of conspiracy theories, and oh yeah, rampant antisemitism.

Joel Benenson, the renowned pollster for President Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, gave a first look at the results of a question he'd never asked before: "We wanted to test QAnon's language that the world is controlled by a secret cabal."

What he found: 44% of registered voters said they believe it."Given that the U.S. is the world's strongest democracy, we wanted to see how far the appeal of language like that might reach," Benenson said.

The figure is especially arresting because of this result in the same poll:59% of voters agree that the U.S. is a strong democracy.

The breakdown: 66% of Democrats ... 55% of Republicans ... 54% of independents.

 

Which is weird because that means there are people who believe we're controlled by a secret cabal AND we're a "strong democracy". The growing evidence is that neither is actually true. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk just laid off half of Twitter, including basically all of the people working to fight misinformation on the platform.

Mass layoffs at Twitter on Friday battered the teams primarily responsible for keeping the platform free of misinformation, potentially hobbling the company’s capabilities four days before the end of voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections, one current and six former Twitter employees familiar with the cuts told NBC News, five of whom had been recently laid off.

Two former Twitter employees and one current employee warned the layoffs could bring chaos around the elections, as they hit especially hard on teams responsible for the curation of trending topics and for the engineering side of “user health,” which works on content moderation and site integrity. The seven people asked to withhold their names out of worry over professional retribution and because they weren’t authorized to speak for the company.

CEO Elon Musk, who’s facing sizable future debt payments and declining revenue at Twitter, said the cuts were needed to ensure the health of the company’s long-term finances a week after he bought it for $44 billion.

The cuts appeared to affect many people whose jobs were to keep Twitter from becoming overwhelmed by prohibited content, such as hateful conduct and targeted harassment, the seven sources said.

Twitter has not announced any moderation policy changes, and earlier this week, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said the company was remaining vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations about the midterms. Musk has said the company won’t allow anyone back on Twitter who had been previously banned for at least a few more weeks.

But Gita Johar, a Columbia University business professor who has studied misinformation on Twitter, said the job cuts risk turning the site into a “free-for-all with rumors, conspiracy theories and falsehoods taking hold on the platform and in people’s imagination.”

 

The fact that Musk is doing this just days before the midterm elections is being done on purpose, when the GOP rumors of "election fraud" fly rampant on Tuesday and well into the future, Twitter will be ground zero.

Vote if you haven't already. Even Kentucky has early voting this weekend.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

With federal and state pandemic eviction moratoriums coming to an end, and rents jumping 20% or more nationwide from just two years ago, millions are being tossed out into the holiday months with nowhere to go.

 

On a recent Friday morning, more than 100 renters facing eviction filed through Arizona Judge Anna Huberman’s court in what’s becoming a typical day for her, as a wave of evictions hits Phoenix and other cities large and small across the country.

The vast majority of the renters that day had missed their October payments a few weeks earlier and were now at risk of being removed from their homes within days, according to the judge. One woman said her rent money that month went to pay for her mother’s funeral, a day care worker said she didn’t get paid for two weeks when her workplace temporarily shut down due to Covid, and another man said he started a new job and had yet to get his first check, Huberman said.

Eviction filings have been on the rise and were above their historical averages in half of the 1,059 counties tracked by Legal Services Corp., a federally-funded legal aid group, during either August or September. The problem is expected to get worse in the coming months as federal rental assistance money runs out and people are unable to keep pace with rising rents and decades-high inflation, according to interviews with more than a dozen housing advocates, government officials and industry experts.

“Now that rental assistance is over, and now that local moratoriums are over, we’re playing catch-up to what the pandemic did, and my biggest fear is the cliff that we’ve been all anticipating is here. From here on out, it’s going to be a very, very difficult time,” said Tim Thomas, research director at the Urban Displacement Project at the University of California, Berkeley. “I don’t want to be a doom and gloom person, but we’re probably about to see the worst of what’s about to happen.”

During the first year of the pandemic, evictions tumbled after a federal moratorium was put in place making it extremely difficult for landlords to kick out tenants for not paying rents. That moratorium was lifted in August 2021, but even without that restriction in place, the number of evictions stayed well below typical levels in most states and cities because of federal funding that provided emergency rental assistance to tenants.

But that federal money began running out in many areas this summer and the Treasury Department estimates that less than $7 billion out of a total of $46.5 billion remains available, removing the last lifeline of pandemic-era protections that more than 7 million renters have relied on.

The struggle to find affordable housing comes amid wider anxiety and pessimism Americans have around the economy, which voters have consistently ranked as a top concern ahead of next week's midterm elections. A CNBC poll in October found just 16% of voters believed the economy is “excellent” or “good,” and 59% of voters expect there will be a recession over the next 12 months.

Despite a relatively strong job market and historically low unemployment, nearly 7.8 million Americans said they were behind on their rent in October and 3 million felt they were likely to be evicted in the next two months, according to a census survey the same month. That survey found that 2.5 million people had experienced a rent increase of more than $500 over the past year.

"With inflation and the massive increases in rental prices that we've seen over the last few years, it's much worse for low-income renters than it was before the pandemic when we were already in an affordable housing crisis," said Daniel Grubbs-Donovan, a researcher at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.

The increase in rents has begun to slow as inflation and overall economic uncertainty have more people holding off on moving, according to an analysis by Redfin. Still, rents nationwide were up 9% in September, compared to a year earlier, and more than a dozen cities had double-digit rent increases, it said.

In Phoenix, for example, rent increases have slowed in recent months, but in June were up 24% year over year, with a median asking rent of $2,261. In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, evictions are at their highest levels since at least 2016, with more than 45,000 filings this year.

“Lately, it just seems to be all that we’ve been doing,” said Huberman, the presiding justice of the peace for Maricopa County.

 

And whether people want to admit it or not, Covid is still out there. It's going to be a bad winter.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The FBI is warning of credible and widespread threats to synagogues in New Jersey mere days before midterm elections.

The FBI warned of a “broad threat” to New Jersey synagogues on Thursday, urging people to “stay alert.”

“The FBI has received credible information of a broad threat to synagogues in NJ,” the FBI’s Newark, N.J., field office wrote on Twitter. “We ask at this time that you take all security precautions to protect your community and facility.”

The office added that its warning is a “proactive measure” while it investigates the threat.

The warning comes amid a recent spate of antisemitic comments from several high-profile figures.

 

Trump, Ye, and suspended NBA Brooklyn Nets star Kylie Irving to be specific. American White supremacy isn't just anti-Black, anti-Latino or anti-Asian, it's antisemitic and anti-Mulsim as well. Anyone who isn't a White "Christian" is a target, and siding with them won't save you.

And yes, domestic terrorism threats against synagogues in the US are very, very real.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Justice Department response to Trump announcing his candidacy after the midterms will apparently be another Special Counsel, because the last one went so well.

As Donald Trump inches closer to launching another presidential run after the midterm election, Justice Department officials have discussed whether a Trump candidacy would create the need for a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations related to the former president, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

The Justice Department is also staffing up its investigations with experienced prosecutors so it’s ready for any decisions after the midterms, including the potential unprecedented move of indicting a former president.

In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. But behind the scenes, investigators have remained busy, using aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles to compel testimony from witnesses in both the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at his Palm Beach home.

Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency.

“They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged.

“This is the scary thing,” the attorney said.

Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

Indicting an active candidate for the White House would surely spark a political firestorm. And while no decision has been made about whether a special counsel might be needed in the future, DOJ officials have debated whether doing so could insulate the Justice Department from accusations that Joe Biden’s administration is targeting his chief political rival, people familiar with the matter tell CNN.

Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.

The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

 

I'm not totally being fair to Robert Mueller, his investigation did result in convictions, and those convictions were pardoned by Trump. That wasn't Mueller's fault, because he wasn't allowed to pursue Trump when he was in the Oval Office and never would have been able to under any circumstances.

On the other hand, Trump is no longer in the White House, and the Justice Department continues to signal that they will play by the rules that increasingly don't matter to Trump, the GOP, the Supreme Court, or ten of millions of their voters and supporters.

We'll see.  I still believe an indictment is coming, but if Trump announces his candidacy on, say, November 9th, all bets are off.

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

A bullet was fired into a window at the home of Republican US House candidate Pat Harrington a few weeks ago. The Harrignton campaign is choosing now getting around to revealing this happened on October 18, and local police and the FBI are investigating.

The problem for me is that NC-14 is near where I grew up, and where the Zandarparents still live.

 

The Hickory Police Department says someone fired a shot into a home owned by the parents of Pat Harrigan, the Republican nominee for North Carolina’s 14th Congressional District. 

 

Harrigan’s children were in the home at the time of the shooting, according to his campaign. The shooting was reported to police Oct. 19. 

 

No arrests have been made. No one was injured. The investigation is ongoing, said Kristen Hart, a spokeswoman for the Hickory Police Department.

 

The bullet hit a window in the home’s laundry room, according to the police report.

 

The story was first reported by The Carolina Journal. Harrigan is running against Democrat and state Sen. Jeff Jackson for the 14th Congressional District, which includes uptown Charlotte, southern and western Mecklenburg County and much of Gaston County.

 

Here's my other problem.  The "Carolina Journal" is one of those faux news outlets owned by GOP sources, namely the John Locke Foundation, arguable one of the worst "glibertarian" outfits in the state. This has led to charges of NC's "corrupt media ignoring political violence against Republicans" by the right, who are all screaming about this story this week.

You know, the story that happened two weeks ago.

I don't like this one bit. Whoever fired that bullet absolutely needs to be in jail, certainly. But if Republicans are suddenly worried about stray bullets injuring children, that would be a first.

Ridin' With Biden, Con't

In the wake of last week's assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi by a right-wing domestic terrorist that invaded the Pelosi's home, President Biden laid out his final argument before the midterms why MAGA trolls are the biggest threat to American democracy in decades.

Signs of strain in the nation’s democratic system mounted Wednesday with less than a week left before the midterm elections, as President Biden warned that candidates who refuse to accept Tuesday’s results could set the nation on a “path to chaos.”

Biden’s grim assessment in a speech Wednesday evening came as the FBI and other agencies have forecast that threats of violence from domestic extremists are likely to be on the rise after the election. In Arizona, voters have complained of intimidation by self-appointed drop-box monitors — some of them armed — prompting a federal judge to set strict new limits. And the GOP has stepped up litigation in multiple states in an effort to toss out some ballots and to expand access for partisan poll watchers.

Speaking at Washington’s Union Station — steps from the U.S. Capitol, which was attacked by a pro-Trump mob in the wake of the nation’s last major election — Biden warned of an ongoing assault on American democracy. The president spoke as a growing number of major Republican candidates have said they may follow in former president Donald Trump’s footsteps and refuse to concede should they lose.

“It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American,” Biden said. “As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”

The virtually unprecedented presidential message — a plea to Americans to accept the basic tenets of their democracy — came as millions of voters have already cast their ballots or are planning to go to the polls on Election Day, and as some election officials expressed confidence that the system would hold.

Biden spoke days after an assailant armed with a hammer broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and, according to police and prosecutors, bludgeoned her 82-year-old husband, Paul. Biden opened by addressing the gruesome early Friday morning assault.

“We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “No place, period. No place, ever.”

Last week, multiple government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, issued a memo warning that threats posed by domestic violent extremists would probably increase in the 90-day post election period, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post.

The memo listed possible scenarios that could trigger more violence, including “actual or perceived efforts to suppress voting access.”

“Following the 2022 midterm election, perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets — such as ideological opponents and election workers,” the memo read.

 

Judging from the screeching and howling from the right today, Biden's plea for  basic human dignity is falling on deaf ears. As John Ganz writes, Biden is on the right side of history here, and you can't make people who don't want democracy actually want democracy.

The idea that one party, even if it has a clear-cut ideological or partisan agenda, can also embody the democracy as such has a lot of historical precedent. That was part of Roosevelt’s appeal. It’s also an old tradition in France, where the entire left would periodically identify itself with the republic and adopt a politics of “republican defense” against the right, usually when the right would engage in some coup-like behavior. The last great example of this, the Popular Front of the 1930s, was not a government of centrist compromise but quite radical in the social reforms it pushed through. The idea was that the surge of the far-right suggested a fundamental social problem that needed to be remedied through bold action. Did that approach work? Well, in some ways yes and in some ways no, but let’s leave that for another time.

Democracy is not simply the presence of a multi- or two-party system: That’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. There are some actual substantive commitments that come with it. One of the most important of these is a belief in popular sovereignty, which is the principle that virtually all Republican politics are designed to get around: either in the old fashioned form of Senatorial or Judicial anti-majoritarianism and gerrymandering or its more recent politics of menacing putschism and election denial. The former is bad, but conforms to the rule of law and one hopes can be remedied over time. The latter breaks the system. Fused together, as they are now, they form the basis of potential one-party rule.

Look, they even say it all the time—“We’re a republic, not a democracy,”—or some such similar bullshit. It’s just the simple truth: They don’t want the country to be a democracy anymore. They know it. We know it. But for some reason all these pundits say we shouldn’t say it. The centrist pundit, in either his cynical or naive form, loves to warn about the dangers of rhetoric, but this kind of equivocation about the parties sets the predicate for political cynicism and resignation: everyone shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Well, they are both bad, they Democrats have their authoritarian side, too, after all. I mean, look at all that manipulative ‘ saving democracy’ talk.” It also allows us to settle for the curtailing of democracy, but not an absolute destruction: some kind of hybrid regime: “Well, it’s not really an authoritarian dictatorship, there’s an opposition, after all, look, there’s still a Democratic mayor of…Ann Arbor.”

Are the Democrats incompetent, cynical, flailing, etc.? Of course. After all, this is the Democratic Party we are talking about. But, as always, they are still not the Republicans.

 

Choose a side, folks.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Trump stolen document mess just went from "really bad for Trump" to "someone's getting indicted before the end of the year."

The Justice Department offered on Wednesday to allow Kash Patel, a close adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, to testify to a federal grand jury under a grant of immunity about Mr. Trump’s handling of highly sensitive presidential records, two people familiar with the matter said.

The offer of immunity came about a month after Mr. Patel invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in front of the grand jury and refused to answer questions from prosecutors investigating whether Mr. Trump improperly took national security documents with him when he left the White House and subsequently obstructed attempts by the government to retrieve them.

During Mr. Patel’s initial grand jury appearance, one of the people familiar with the matter said, Judge Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington acknowledged Mr. Patel’s Fifth Amendment claims and said that the only way he could be forced to testify was if the government offered him immunity.

The decision by the Justice Department to grant immunity in the case, the person said, effectively cleared the way for the grand jury to hear Mr. Patel’s testimony.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

The disclosure that Mr. Patel has received immunity for his testimony comes as prosecutors have increased their pressure on recalcitrant witnesses who have declined to answer investigators’ questions or have provided them with potentially misleading accounts about Mr. Trump’s handling of documents.

Kids, if Kash Patel just cut a deal to turn grand jury testimony, it has to be something that will make a case for charges, and pretty much the only bigger fish than Patel in this mess is Trump himself. If there was any doubt left that an indictment is coming after the midterms, it just got put to rest.

It's going to be a fun Thanksgiving, and the turkey is going to be orange, and very well cooked.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Yes, the Trump regime was counting specifically on Justice Clarence Thomas to allow Trump to steal the 2020 election.

 

Donald Trump’s attorneys saw a direct appeal to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as their best hope of derailing Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election, according to emails newly disclosed to congressional investigators.

“We want to frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt,” Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro wrote in a Dec. 31, 2020, email to Trump’s legal team. Chesebro contended that Thomas would be “our only chance to get a favorable judicial opinion by Jan. 6, which might hold up the Georgia count in Congress.”


“I think I agree with this,” attorney John Eastman replied later that morning, suggesting that a favorable move by Thomas or other justices would “kick the Georgia legislature into gear” to help overturn the election results.

The messages were part of a batch of eight emails — obtained by POLITICO — that Eastman had sought to withhold from the Jan. 6 select committee but that a judge ordered turned over anyway, describing them as evidence of likely crimes committed by Eastman and Trump. They were transmitted to the select committee by Eastman’s attorneys last week, but remained largely under wraps until early Wednesday morning.

House General Counsel Douglas Letter acknowledged Wednesday afternoon that his office effectively released the messages by including a link to them in copies of messages publicly filed with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“We were not aware that the links in Dr. Eastman’s email remained active, and had no intention to provide this type of public access to the materials at this stage. Providing public access to this material at this point was purely inadvertent on our part,” Letter told the appeals court in a brief letter. The emails, as produced to the committee, included formatting errors that removed “i”s and “l”s. POLITICO has included the missing letters for clarity.

 

The conspiracy to defraud the United States included the Trump White House, the House and Senate GOP, and the Supreme Court. There's no way Thomas should be on the Court anymore, but he's being protected by co-conspirators.

 

We're already a banana republic, the rule of law in America is all but dead, and a GOP win next week will allow the conspiracy to carry forward into 2024, where the American experiment will end.

 

We can still do something about it, but after next week, it gets increasingly impossible.

 

Vote like your country depends on it.

Taking The Red Line Home

I've talked about the racial disparities in America's suburbs where homes owned by Black families are selling at a fraction of the prices white families in the same neighborhood can garner even here in "racism is a relic of the barbarous past" 2022, but the issue is now so widespread nationally that it requires heavy intervention from the Biden administration in enforcement of HUD and Fair Housing Act rules and regulations.

White homeowners can expect their homes’ values to increase at twice the rate of homeowners of color, a stark confirmation of systemic racial bias in home appraisals, according to a new report.

Despite ongoing accounts of ingrained discrimination over the past two years, researchers exploring racial inequality in the housing market have not had access to appraisals. This changed last week, when, following a directive from the Biden administration, the Federal Housing Finance Agency released 47 million appraisal reports to the public for the first time.

The appraisals, which were compiled between 2013 and 2021, present evidence of a persistent, widespread practice in the home appraisal industry to give higher values to homes when the occupants are white, and devalue them if the owners are people of color.

Analyzing the millions of appraisals by using census tracts as a proxy for neighborhoods and comparing communities with nearly identical housing stock, two researchers found that the results showed a clear correlation: The higher the proportion of white residents in each community, the higher the appraised value of individual homes.

The researchers restricted their study to neighborhoods in metropolitan areas with at least 500,000 people and at least 50,000 residents of color, and ensured that not only did the houses in the compared communities look similar, but residents were of the same socioeconomic status, and amenities like parks, grocery stores and local services such as banks and post offices were on par.

Set side by side, the only discernible differences in the communities was their racial composition, said the researchers, Junia Howell, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, an assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Both are respected sociologists who study segregation, housing markets and racial inequality in American cities. The report was jointly published by Washington University in St. Louis and the nonprofit Eruka, which was founded by Dr. Howell.

Inequity within the appraisal system stems from the housing industry’s long legacy of racism, Dr. Howell said. Policies like redlining, a Depression-era practice that kept homeowners of color out of certain neighborhoods, continue to cast a shadow over communities of color and deny their residents of resources.

“The appraisal system is supposed to be our checks and balances, because it’s supposed to show us how much a home is worth. But we’ve created a system that starts with racism, based on who lives in an area,” Dr. Howell said. “And who lives in what area is always connected to our racial hierarchy. So where white people live, those homes are always valued for more.”

In recent years, dozens of homeowners have made allegations of discrimination, trying to prove bias through what is known as the “whitewashing experiment.” Homeowners scrub their property of any signs that Black people are the occupants.

After a white appraiser gave their Baltimore-area house a value of $472,000 last year, Nathan Connolly and his wife, Shani Mott, both professors at Johns Hopkins University, conducted a whitewashing experiment, removing family photos, posters and books from their home and asking a white friend to stand in for them at the door. A second appraiser, unaware a Black family lived in the home, gave the property a value of $750,000.

While many accounts of systematic bias in the appraisal industry have focused on Black homeowners, Dr. Korver-Glenn and Dr. Howell found that the pricing difference was greatest for homes in areas where the population is comprised primarily of other people of color. In 2021, their report says, homes in white neighborhoods were appraised at three times the value of comparable homes in communities where residents were primarily of American Indian, Alaska Native, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander descent.

On average, homes in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are white are appraised for $371,000 more than in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are people of color, the researchers found. This gap in values has increased 75 percent since 2013.

 

It's not just a couple of bucks, folks.

 It's nearly $400,000.

White wealth in home equity compared to Black wealth for a similar neighborhood, controlled for all other factors, is a one-third of a million dollar tax on non-white homeowners. 

If you're white, your home sells for twice the price. There's literally an entire industry enforcing redlining in America through the "free market" and they're all complicit.

But please, white folk, tell me how you're all the victims here, make it about you.

Benjamin Revenge 'N' 'Em

In a gigantic warning sign for America regarding one orange man, Israel's fifth general election in four years has produced the return of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, along with his far-right coalition dead set on collecting political, metaphorical, and actual heads of the opposition. 

 

Former prime minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to become Israel's next prime minister, according to the counting of almost all of the ballots. By Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu held his lead with more than 80 percent of the votes counted across the country.

Arab party Balad was originally said to be close to crossing the threshold but by Wednesday afternoon that option seemed to dissipate. Had it happened, Netanyahu's bloc would have potentially dropped to 60 seats, one short of a coalition majority. Likud had sent an urgent letter to the police commissioner on Tuesday night demanding that allegations of voter fraud in the Arab sector be immediately investigated.

According to the exit polls on Tuesday night, Netanyahu's bloc, which includes Likud, Religious Zionist Party (RZP), United Torah Judaism (UTJ) and Shas, crossed the 61-seat threshold and will be able to form the next coalition.

Netanyahu's Likud party was expected to receive 31 seats according to Channel 12 and 32 seats according to Channel 13, while Lapid's Yesh Atid party is expected to get 23 seats according to both polls.

The Religious Zionist Party - led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich - saw a dramatic rise in contrast to previous years with channels reporting between 13-14 seats.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz's National Unity Party is expected to get 11 seats, while Yisrael Beytenu wins five to six seats.

Israel's ultra-Orthodox parties saw a large voter turnout with Shas getting 10 seats in both polls and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) earning seven seats

Meanwhile, Israel's Left managed to keep its head above the water with five seats going to Labor and four seats going to Meretz.

Finally, while there was concern over the turnout of the Arab vote, Hadash-Ta'al is expected to receive either four or five seats and Ra'am is expected to receive five seats. According to all channels, the Netanyahu bloc has 62 seats while the Lapid bloc has 54-53 seats. 

All indications are that a new Netanyahu government is going to get very nasty, very quickly. His bribery trial, still ongoing, is now expected to be all but thrown out. 

 

The new coalition, if it comes to be, could radically change the face of the country and significantly alter Israel’s status in the global diplomatic community.

Netanyahu is currently on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, an unprecedented situation which barely figured in the 4-month-long election campaign.

His allies have promised to transform the nation’s governing structure by passing a law which would override the Supreme Court and canceling two out of the three crimes with which Netanyahu is charged.

“If the results we are seeing this evening hold true,” Pleaner said, “the coalition that will form the next government is poised to propose a series of reforms that would seek to politicize the judiciary and weaken the checks and balances that exist between the branches of government and serve as fundamental components of Israeli democracy.”

 

Rule of law is about to be eliminated in Israel, and it's going to be a radically different country soon. It should serve as a cautionary tale for Democrats here in the US.

 

We're about to see what happens when democracy loses at the ballot box.

Last Call For The Mask Slips Once Again...

...and a Republican accidentally tells the truth about what they will do if elected.

 

Hinting at his plans to overhaul how elections are run, the Republican running for governor of Wisconsin this week said his party would permanently control the state if he wins.

“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” construction executive Tim Michels told supporters Monday at a campaign stop.

Michels is seeking to unseat Gov. Tony Evers (D), who over his four years vetoed a string of Republican-backed bills that would have changed voting rules in a battleground state that Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020.

Michels has promised to sign similar legislation and has said he would restructure the state’s bipartisan elections commission. He has never spelled out what specific changes he would make to the commission, which is run by three Democrats and three Republicans.

Michels, who won his August primary with Trump’s endorsement, has left open the possibility that he would try to decertify the 2020 election in Wisconsin, which legal scholars say is impossible. He has declined to say whether he would certify the results of the 2024 election.

 

Now of course the Michels camp is saying that economic growth in Wisconsin will be so good under one-party rule that nobody will want to vote Democratic, but of course Wisconsin is the most gerrymandered state in the nation, where Democrats could get 51% of the state's US House votes and still only win two of the state's 8 districts, and would have to win 57% of the state's US House votes to get to 5 of 8.

We'll see how it goes next week with Democrat Tony Evers trying to keep his place as governor.

The Nice Italian Fascist, Con't

With all the recent turmoil at 10 Downing Street in the UK, Lula's comeback win this weekend in Brazil, and US midterm elections in just a week (and early voting ongoing in multiple states), it's easy to overlook that Italy's new PM, Giorgia Meloni, is a fascist empowering other fascists in the home of Rome.

Galeazzo Bignami, a lawmaker of the rightist Brothers of Italy party who sparked outrage in 2016 after a newspaper published a picture of him wearing a Nazi swastika on his left arm, was named junior infrastructure minister on Monday.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who personally announced Bignami's appointment at a news conference, is the leader of Brothers of Italy, a group which traces its roots to the post-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI).

Bignami, 47, was elected last month to a second term in parliament. He has long been part of the Italian hard-right but has spent part of his political career in former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's more moderate Forza Italia.

He said in a statement on Monday that he felt "profound shame" for the pictures and firmly condemned "any form of totalitarianism," calling Nazism and any movement connected to it "the absolute evil".

Meloni did not comment on the 2016 photo but repeatedly condemned the infamous racist, anti-Jewish laws enacted by dictator Benito Mussolini in 1938 and last week told parliament she "never felt any sympathy for fascism".

"I have always considered the (anti-Semitic) racial laws of 1938 the lowest point of Italian history, a shame that will taint our people forever," she said in parliament.

Bignami will serve under the right-wing League party leader Matteo Salvini, who is the infrastructure minister and deputy prime minister.

 

The "former" Nazi has literally been appointed to help make sure the trains run on time.

 

You can't make this up, folks.

 

Hey Mark, And The Masters Of The Puny Versus

Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters received a last-minute endorsement from departing independent candidate Marc Victor in the race for incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly's seat, but it's probably not enough to put Masters over the top.

 

The Libertarian candidate running for Senate in Arizona — who had threatened to play spoiler in the closely watched race — is dropping out and endorsing Blake Masters, the Republican nominee.

The decision, announced on Tuesday, gives Mr. Masters a lift heading into the final week as he seeks to unseat Senator Mark Kelly, the Democratic incumbent, who has generally held a narrow lead in the polls.

“This is another major boost of momentum as we consolidate our support,” Mr. Masters said in a statement to The New York Times.

Marc Victor, the Libertarian candidate, and Mr. Masters spoke on Monday for a 20-minute recorded conversation that Mr. Victor is expected to publish, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Mr. Victor had made such a conversation a precondition to quitting, technically offering such an opportunity both to Mr. Masters and to Mr. Kelly.

“I found Blake to be generally supportive of the Live and Let Live Global Peace Movement,” Mr. Victor said in a statement. “After that discussion, I believe it is in the best interests of freedom and peace to withdraw my candidacy and enthusiastically support Blake Masters for United States Senate.”

Mr. Victor’s underfunded campaign had a chance to make more of an impact than some other third-party candidates this year, in part because he was onstage for the race’s lone debate. (He made waves in the appearance by suggesting the “age of consent” is something “that reasonable minds disagree on” and “should be up for a vote.”)

Mr. Masters appears to have gone to some lengths to court libertarian-minded voters and assuage any concerns from Mr. Victor. Last Thursday, he posted a picture from 2010 of himself with Ron Paul, the former congressman and libertarian folk hero, saying he was “honored” to have Mr. Paul’s endorsement. Mr. Masters also made recent appearances on Mr. Paul’s podcast and another libertarian podcast.

Mr. Victor had previously been funded at least in part by Democrats, presumably hoping to redirect some votes away from the Republican nominee.

Donations included $5,000 from the Save Democracy PAC, which says on its website that it is pursuing “a nationwide effort to confront and defeat Republican extremism” and another $5,000 from Defeat Republicans PAC. In May, Ron Conway, the California-based Democratic investor, gave Mr. Victor part of more than $45,000 in donations from various people who share the Conway last name in California; those funds account for about one-third of everything Mr. Victor raised in total.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday showed Mr. Kelly ahead, 51 percent to 45 percent, with Mr. Victor garnering 1 percent support. Mr. Victor has been shown as earning a larger share of the vote in other polls, including one in mid-October from the progressive group Data for Progress that had Mr. Victor pulling in 3 percent with Mr. Kelly and Mr. Masters tied.

 

Normally I'd say that Kelly is in real trouble here, and that his loss would almost certainly result in GOP control of the Senate. It's that last paragraph there that shows why I'm not worried however: if Kelly is over 50%, nothing Marc Victor does can save Blake Masters.  Instead of losing 51-46, he loses 51-48...but he still loses.

Kelly being over 50% is all that's required. Having said that, the margin of error in those polls could now be the difference. If you're in Arizona, VOTE MARK KELLY. Get your relatives and friends in AZ to do so too.

We need every blue vote in the state.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Opening statements in the NY state criminal trial against the Trump Organization began on Monday as the Manhattan DA's office laid out a tale of corruption, greed, and fraud in Donald Trump's real estate business over 15 years.

New York prosecutors set the table for the criminal tax fraud trial against the Trump Organization Monday, telling jurors the case is about “greed and cheating.”

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger laid out an alleged 15-year scheme within the Trump Org. to pay high-level executives in perks like luxury cars and apartments without paying taxes on them.

Two Trump Organization entities are charged with nine counts of tax fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records in what prosecutors allege was a 15-year scheme to defraud tax authorities by failing to report and pay taxes on compensation provided to employees.

The scheme, according to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, was orchestrated by the company’s long-time Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, the top executive handling the books of the company. Prosecutors allege the companies benefited from the scheme by paying less taxes on the employee salaries while keeping their longtime employees happy.

“At the end of the day, keeping the trusted CFO happy by paying him more without him being taxed on that income, that was also a benefit to these companies,” Hoffinger said during her opening statement.

The jury will see portions of former President Donald Trump’s personal ledger and the checks he signed from his personal account to pay school tuition for Weisselberg’s grandchildren for years, the prosecutor said.

Trump is not a defendant in the case and is not expected to be implicated in any wrongdoing, but the charges against the real estate business he built from the ground up are the closest any prosecutor has gotten to Trump, and the political ramifications of the case has irritated the former president, people familiar with the matter say.

“Donald Trump didn’t know that Allen Weisselberg was cheating on Allen Weisselberg’s personal tax returns. The evidence will be crystal clear on that,” defense attorney Susan Necheles said.

She also cautioned the jurors to leave their political views out of their deliberations.

“You must not consider this case to be a referendum on President Trump or his policies. That type of thing has no place in our criminal justice system,” Necheles said.

 

On one hand, the case against the Trump organization is going to be pretty strong. On the other, it will only take one Trump voter on the jury to deadlock deliberations leading into a mistrial, which I expect will happen.

It's possible that there may be convictions for some of Trump's real estate fraudsters, but the reality is I expect a mistrial to be declared later this year, and you should too.

Affirmative In The Negative

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether or not colleges and universities can consider race at all for admissions, and it's all over but the shouting for decades of affirmative action programs in higher education. The only question is how far the Roberts Court will go in ending them, driving Black and Hispanic kids out of the top schools for a generation in both public and private universities.

The end of affirmative action, at least on college campuses, is almost certainly near.

The big picture: The Supreme Court said in 2003 that colleges and universities could consider race as a factor when deciding which students to admit, for the sake of building a diverse student body. But now, the much more conservative court appears to be changing its mind.

Driving the news: The court is set to hear oral arguments this week over the admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both of which give a little extra weight to applicants who come from certain underrepresented groups.Life is full of surprises, but the court has sent just about every conceivable signal that it’s likely to put a stop to those sorts of policies.

Why it matters: Harvard and UNC — supported by a host of other schools, as well as business organizations — argue that diversity is essential to the educational experience and that the only effective way to ensure diversity is to make it an explicit part of the admissions process.But they’ll be making that argument to a court that is extremely skeptical of any sort of racial preference. 

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion about the use of race when assigning kids to public schools. 

From voting rights to K-12 education to employment law and probably now college admissions, the court over the past several years has consistently knocked down programs that tried to correct racial inequities by explicitly taking race into account.

This is all largely one man’s doing. Conservative activist Ed Blum has organized and funded a slew of high-profile lawsuits explicitly designed to get the court to strike down affirmative action.He orchestrated a 2013 case in which a white student sued because she didn’t get into the University of Texas — and the sequel, in which the same student came back to the high court again in 2016. 

This time around, the named plaintiffs are not only white students but also Asian Americans, who say they’ve been discriminated against because of the way Harvard and UNC give preference to applications from Black and Hispanic students. 

This is not a particularly secretive endeavor. Blum is open about the fact that this is, effectively, a campaign, and that he is the campaign manager. 

"I'm a one-trick pony," Blum recently told Reuters. "I hope and care about ending these racial classifications and preferences in our public policy." 

Blum also had a hand in the landmark case that nullified a key section of the Voting Rights Act — another instance in which the conservative court said policies designed to offset a history of discrimination had outlived their usefulness.

 

The goal for Republicans and conservative millionaires and billionaires is the elimination of the Civil Rights Era and a rollback of federal protections, if not return us to the era where states can resume Jim Crow laws.in education, employment, housing, and more.

But it won't be enough to eliminate federal protections. Open, overt discrimination as "free speech" is nearing the norm. America will not survive as a country if that happens, not without massive social upheaval.