Last Call For Shutdown Countdown: The Shutdownening

Control of the House remains up for grabs tonight, and may do so for days. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is making it clear that the first order of business in the lame duck session is disarming the debt ceiling bomb that Republicans will try to use next year in order to detonate the US economy.

Congressional Democratic leaders on Sunday vowed to tackle the nation's debt ceiling in coming weeks, saying their party's election victories offer them leverage even as Republicans have promised a potentially explosive fight.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said they would act while President Joe Biden's fellow Democrats control both chambers.

"Our best shot, I think, is ... to do it now," Pelosi told ABC News' "This Week" program. "Winning the Senate gave us a lot of leverage for how we go forward... in the lame duck," she said.

Schumer said that Senate Democratic leaders would meet this week to discuss the legislative path forward, though he declined to offer any specifics.

"The debt ceiling of course, is something that we have to deal with. And it's something that we will look at over the next few weeks," he said.

Democrats clinched control of the Senate late on Saturday. It is still not clear which party will control the House.

Biden's Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, has urged lawmakers to act before the new Congress is seated in January, with the nation's $31.4 trillion line of credit expected to be exhausted sometime in the first quarter of 2023.

The debt ceiling must be approved each time it needs to be raised in order to ensure that the United States avoids a default, which would have catastrophic effects.

The mechanism is meant to control the nation's rising debt, although it has been ineffective in recent decades.

Republicans have said the debt ceiling would be an "important tool" to rein in federal spending if they take control of the House.

Pelosi warned Republicans would use the debt fight to take aim at two popular health and income insurance programs for older Americans, Medicare and Social Security.

Pelosi and Chuck Schumer need to ditch the debt ceiling completely.  It's been done before, and it's frankly a 105-year-old relic. Move on.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential candidacy this week in order to try to protect himself from both indictments and rivals, other potential GOP candidates are thinking that the time to strike is now in order to knock Tang the Conqueror off his golden toilet.

Five days after a disappointing midterm election result and two days before former president Donald Trump is expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, Republicans are grappling with an almost existential quandary: Who can lead the party to a post-Trump future?

In private conversations among donors, operatives and other 2024 presidential hopefuls, a growing number of Republicans are trying to seize what they believe may be their best opportunity to sideline Trump and usher in a new generation of party leaders.

Many blame Tuesday’s midterm results — Republicans made smaller-than-expected gains in the House and failed to gain control of the Senate — on the former president, who during the primaries elevated extremist candidates who fared poorly in the general election. The discouraging election outcomes, combined with Trump’s 2020 loss to Biden, have increased both public and private talk of considering a post-Trump world.

Many of the party’s top donors are actively trying to back other candidates and are tired of Trump, according to Republican officials and operatives in touch with them, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

Many donors and operatives are already raving over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who has fashioned himself as a Trump-lite Republican and cruised to a nearly 20-point victory over Democrat Charlie Crist on Tuesday night, flipping Miami-Dade County — a heavily Hispanic, densely populated county that has not been won by a Republican gubernatorial candidate in two decades.

Other potential Republican candidates — from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to former vice president Mike Pence to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — are also quietly taking stock of what their own presidential bids might look like.

“The issue set was clearly in our favor — on inflation, on the border, on crime — and yet we failed to meet expectations,” said Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff. “The question is: Are there different candidates out there where the issue set still works, but with a different style that is also more in our favor?”

A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Uncertainty also looms over the Republicans eager to move beyond Trump. After all, Trump’s poor showing Tuesday and the calls for him to recede have echoes of previous moments when Trump seemed politically doomed, only to resuscitate himself: The early days of his first presidential bid, when he dismissed the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam prisoner of war, as “not a real war hero.” The final days of his 2016 campaign, when an “Access Hollywood” tape emerged showing Trump crudely boasting about groping women. In the aftermath of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack, when Trump, having lost the presidency, encouraged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol.

 

The issue is that any of the non-Trump Republicans would be worse in every way than actual Trump himself. Without Trump's crippling ego, emotional instability, and his litany of personal grudges weighing his rivals down, they would be able to focus almost exclusively on rewriting America into an avowed white supremacist theocracy instead of weekly stories on nuking hurricanes or buying Greenland.

Yeah, I want to see Trump fail, but as I've said time and time again, Trump is only the symptom of a diseased, cancerous GOP infected with racist, religious zealots who want to purge America of anyone who isn't willing to serve their horrible version of Jesus. Even with Trump facing charges, the party will eventually pick someone to be their ridiculously racist avatar, and the battle will be joined again.

Apparently, that battle begins now.

Sunday Long Read: A Date, With Destiny

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Smithsonian Magazine, where Matti Friedman chronicles how ubiquitous and revered the sticky, sweet date is in cultures around the world.

It’s possible to divide the world in two: the part that venerates the humble-seeming fruit known as the date, and the part that does not. The part that does is home to hundreds of millions of people, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco across North Africa and Egypt to Mesopotamia and east to India. In this part of the world there aren’t really “dates,” because only a philistine would speak in such generalizations. There’s the plump sugar-bomb medjool, the chewy khalas beloved of Emirati connoisseurs, sweet and sticky Saudi sukkary, tart yellow barhi peeled and eaten fresh, the varieties picked early, called rutab, and served frozen with coffee at the upscale cafés of Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. There’s ajwa from Medina, said to be the favorite of the Prophet, the dark Persian kimia, the translucent deglet noor, and many others with evocative names like halawi or Sagai VIP.

I grew up in the part of the world that doesn’t care (in my case, Canada), where supermarkets banish this queen of fruit to remote corners of the health-food aisle with the lowly prune and the most obscure nuts. But I’ve spent the last three decades living and writing in Israel, part of the world where the date reigns. Now when I visit North America and see these fruits languishing on their remote shelves, it feels like climbing into an Uber with that Washington, D.C. driver who was once finance minister of Afghanistan. You can almost hear them whispering: Don’t you know who I am?

In Israel, I was first drawn to eating dates mainly because they were around all the time, served plain or stuffed with walnuts to guests in living rooms. Then I began to see them less as a fruit than as a kind of cultural marker. There are so many forces pulling apart the people of the Middle East and North Africa. But the date and its magnificent tree are woven through thousands of years of common history, rising elegantly above the dividing lines. The date offers a different view of the region than the one we’re familiar with, and the best place to start its extraordinary story is at the top.

At ten feet up the trunk of a date palm and rising, you’re still thinking about the ground receding beneath your feet, but at 20 feet your gaze shifts upward toward the approaching explosion of green above your head. At 40 feet the hydraulic platform shakes to a halt, and Yuval Shabo and the other workers at this Israeli date orchard grasp the trunks and leap into the fronds. It’s spring, when date palms reproduce, and the workers use curved knives to harvest pollen from male flowers, place the pollen in squeeze bottles and then apply it to the white petal clusters atop the female trees. It’s a different world at this height—birds gliding at eye level, the Jordan Valley stretching north toward Syria and south toward Egypt, the green frond sea waving in all directions. The workers stop on occasion to sip water or roll a cigarette. Ground-bound humans and their concerns seem irrelevant. Up here all that matters is the little brown fruit.

I found the same attitude in an orchard 1,300 miles away, near the Persian Gulf in the United Arab Emirates, at the famed oasis of Al-Ain. Here, too, it was pollination season, but at this oasis the old methods are preserved, and the treetops aren’t reached by hydraulic cranes but by fearless workers climbing barefoot. Instead of modern drip irrigation, the trees are watered by an ancient system known in Arabic as aflaj, which pipes in water from springs miles away and distributes it through an ingenious network of open channels, flooding each farmer’s plot in turn. As I crossed the oasis a flash of white fabric far above my head alerted me to a young man named Maksood Baluchi, holding a curved dagger and a basket of male flowers. He shouted down greetings but didn’t have much time to talk. There were lots of trees to go.

The same overriding sense of the date’s importance struck me several times during the past few months, sitting in air-conditioned libraries, hunched over books, looking at the ancient art and literature of this part of the world. When I began my research, the date palm seemed to appear merely as a background detail in art, from pharaonic tombs and Assyrian palaces to a 2,500-year-old seal impression showing the Persian Emperor Darius shooting arrows at a lion. But after a while my perception changed. The date palms stopped looking like decorations and came to the fore. After all, the pharaohs are long gone and Darius no longer matters, but the date palm does, feeding multitudes, linking people with their ancestors, rising everywhere like millions of green fireworks frozen mid-blast. Maybe these trees are the stars in the story of this region, and we’re the extras?

 

It's a fascinating historical and cultural saga and worth your time, if only as a reminder that we have more in common than we do differences.

Last Call For Nifty Fifty, Disunited States

Catherine Cortez Masto has pulled it off in Nevada, and that means with John Fetterman's pickup, Democrats will hold on to the Senate regardless of the outcome of the Georgia runoff next month.

The picture in the Senate became clear late Saturday after Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada narrowly defeated Republican Adam Laxalt to win re-election, putting her party over the threshold, NBC News projected Saturday.

"Thank you, Nevada!" Cortez Masto said in a tweet Saturday evening after its two most populous counties, Clark and Washoe, finished counting mail-in ballots.

Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona won his re-election contest in Arizona, NBC News projected Friday evening, directing all eyes to Nevada. Both Laxalt and Masters were endorsed by Trump and promoted his false claims about the presidential race he lost.

Masto's victory means Democrats will hold the Senate regardless of the outcome of Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff election, when Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will face each other again after neither cleared the 50% threshold required under state law.

A Walker win would keep the Senate 50-50, where Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote for Democrats.

A Warnock victory would make it 51-49, giving Democrats one extra vote in a chamber where they have often been stymied by internal dissent from members like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Biden can now count on partners in the Senate to confirm his judicial and administration appointments, even if his legislative agenda ends up effectively blocked because of a Republican takeover of the House.

Republicans headed into Tuesday's election confident a "red wave" would sweep them into power in the Senate and give them a commanding majority in the House.

As it became clear that neither would materialize, conservative leaders and media figures began pointing fingers and blaming each other for the surprising defeat — with Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy all facing backlash.

"The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new," Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted after it became clear his party had lost hope of retaking the Senate.

 

The GOP needs to be buried alright. Keep in mind though that all of the Republicans attacking Trump want to be Trump "without the baggage" and support all of Trump's policies, picks, and panders.

Getting rid of Trump won't stop the GOP's vile rancor any more than cutting out a tumor would save a person after the cancer has already spread. It's needed, for sure, but it won't cure the problem.

And we absolutely need Warnock to win in December to defuse Joe Manchin's threats.

Ron's Gone Wrong (But Won Anyway)

The one state where the Democrats crashed and burned on Tuesday was Florida. GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis trounced Democratic former Rep. Charlie Crist, GOP Sen. Marco Rubio handily beat Democratic Rep. Val Demings, and the difference in both cases was the loss of the Latino vote in the state to the GOP, especially in Miami-Dade County.

Inside a packed section of La Carreta, the iconic Cuban restaurant in Little Havana, trays were packed with croquetas and guava pastelitos, while a DJ blasted music for people wearing María Elvira Salazar T-shirts. 

 

The election night party was for the freshman Miami Congresswoman of Florida’s Congressional District 27 — a district with the largest share of Hispanic residents anywhere in the state — who danced her way past the treats, onto the makeshift stage to declare victory for a second term. 

 

“This election proves what Ronald Reagan famously said, that Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it,” Salazar said Tuesday at her victory party, declaring an early night win over her Colombian-American opponent, Democrat Annette Taddeo.

Until tonight, because 2022 has been the year of the Hispanic Republicans,” she added.

 

Salazar’s statement is true for Florida, where Hispanic support for Republicans in the 2022 election — and for Gov. Ron DeSantis in particular — was crucial to a decisive and crushing victory over Democrats, according to a Miami Herald analysis of precinct-level results. The margin of victory for DeSantis — a nearly 20-percentage-point difference — has catapulted him onto the national political stage and into a potential 2024 presidential run.

Nationally, Dems did considerably better with Latino voters, especially in Nevada, New Mexico, California and Arizona. But Florida, and Miami-Dade County in particular, is where the hopes of Florida Democrats went to die.

DeSantis got 90%+ of the Latino vote in several precincts there. Republicans rolled to easy victories and increased the margin of their supermajority in the state legislature.  The results from Tuesday mean that the GOP legislative policies that lost elsewhere will be front and center in the Sunshine State.  

 

 

Supercharged by a supermajority in the House and Senate, Florida legislative leaders broke their silence Wednesday and confirmed they are prepared to discuss further abortion restrictions in Florida in the next year. 

 

But how far they will go is the big question, and interviews with the presiding officers indicate they already appear to be taking different approaches. 

 

Incoming Senate President Kathleen Passidomo told the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times in an interview that she wants to see the 15-week ban approved last year by lawmakers reduced to 12 weeks with the addition of an exclusion for rape and incest, which is currently not allowed.

 

“I went on record on the abortion bill in support of an exclusion for rape and incest, and I’d like to see that,’’ said Passidomo, a Naples Republican who will be sworn in this month as the third woman to be Florida’s Senate president. “And I think in order to accomplish that, I think we would have to reduce the weeks. I don’t have a problem going to 12 weeks.”

 

Under the law passed earlier this year, all abortions are banned 15 weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period. Women can still obtain an abortion after that cutoff if their health is threatened or if their baby has a “fatal fetal abnormality,” but there is no exception for victims of rape or incest.

 

Incoming House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast, said the House is likely to support additional restrictions as well but he was unwilling to “put a number on it.”

 

“I don’t think it’s time for me to put a number on it until we’ve organized,’’ Renner said, noting that there are 30 new legislators joining the House after the election, including a record 85-member Republican majority. He was not prepared to say if they will want to see an outright ban on all abortions or further limits on the existing 15-week ban. 

 

“I personally am pro life and would like to see us move more in that direction,’’ he said. “But I want to hear from my colleagues in the House and my colleagues in the Senate before we take any steps in that direction.”

Florida Republicans openly talking about how many more rights will be restricted and/or lost, and Florida voters are happy to go along. Texas and Ohio are bad too, but Democrats won there, flipping several US House seats in both states. Texas counties along the border elected Democrats with Latino voters leading the way.

 

But Florida may be lost for quite some time until Democrats can figure out a way to beat DeSantis.

They Voted Like Our Country Depended On It, Con't

With Dems now needing only a Senate win in Nevada or in the GA runoff to keep control, and the House still up for grabs this morning, Greg Sargent gives us five Village narratives that were shattered on Tuesday.

1. Democracy was on the ballot, and (for now) it’s winning.

We have long been told that inflation and crime are “real” issues that truly matter, while Democratic warnings about the fate of democracy wouldn’t motivate voters. I also feared this.

The precise role of those warnings in driving Democratic overperformance is uncertain. But we can already say Donald Trump-fueled election denialism suffered a rebuke at the polls, and that voters meaningfully reduced the threat it poses.

With Democrats sweeping gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where GOP governors could have certified sham presidential electors for a losing GOP candidate — a big pathway to a stolen or crisis-ridden 2024 election has been choked off.

And if Kari Lake’s gubernatorial bid in Arizona fails, as appears possible, none of the five most crucial swing states in the 2020 presidential election would have election-denying governors. (Republican Brian Kemp, who defied Trump, won in Georgia.) There’s also a real chance that none will have an election-denying secretary of state.

And so, while dozens of election deniers did win reelection to the House, we seem to be avoiding a situation in which voters failed to hold the most prominent deniers accountable for brashly flaunting their intentions to subvert democracy, which at bottom was a test of the public’s appetite for authoritarianism. 

2. Kevin McCarthy’s dance with Trump has been a disaster.

Just after Jan. 6, 2021, the House minority leader privately concluded Trump should resign. Then he made a public pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to cement their alliance, and helped cover up Trump’s coup attempt for the next 20 months.

For a time, McCarthy’s game was widely treated in the media as clever. He was harnessing the energy of the Trump base to retake the House, even as the GOP didn’t appear poised to pay any political price for helping place Trump beyond accountability. We’ll never know what would have happened if McCarthy had taken the other path — using Jan. 6 to marginalize Trump — but we do know now that harnessing Trumpist energy failed to produce the decisive rout he predicted.

In a poetic twist, the Trumpier House Republicans now see McCarthy as a wounded animal, Punchbowl News reports. Even if Republicans win the House majority, its sheer narrowness is likely to make it easier for members of the MAGA caucus to knife McCarthy in the back, legislatively or with a leadership challenge — a fitting end given the corrupt bargain he struck. 

3. Democratic “meddling” in primaries worked.

When Democrats elevated MAGA Republicans in primaries, believing they would be weaker general-election opponents, the roar of pundit criticism was deafening. And to be fair, at first it looked prone to backfiring by letting election deniers sneak into office.

But it was a bet that seemingly paid off. As HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard demonstrates, six of the most prominent election-denying candidates who were boosted by Democrats in House, Senate and gubernatorial races went down.

The critics oversimplified this matter. If you believe the House could pose its most dire threat to democracy simply by virtue of being GOP-controlled, and you also believe elevating a few election deniers might make that outcome less likely, then it’s not an entirely cynical strategy. It risked one outcome (adding a few election deniers to the House) to reduce the risk of another, worse outcome (a House under GOP control).

In fairness, it was probably too risky to elevate election deniers running for executive positions in states, where they could seriously subvert democracy. That said, they don’t seem to be getting into office either. As power politics, this strategy succeeded.

4. “Invasion” language did little for Republicans.

House Republicans poured enormous sums into ads depicting the migrant “invasion” in the vilest of terms. Republicans have long enjoyed a presumption of a major advantage on this issue, but aside from Trump’s 2016 victory, it keeps failing to deliver. The border was central in the 2018 and 2020 elections, and Republicans lost both (though with House pickups in the latter).

Some will argue that Democrats neutralized immigration this time by keeping some of Trump’s border policies, and it’s true that the party hasn’t made a case for its own immigration vision. Still, GOP confidence that President Biden’s “disastrous open border” would spark major electoral repudiation, giving Republicans space to hyper-radicalize their base around the issue, has proved wrong.

And if Blake Masters loses in the Arizona Senate race — after openly embracing “great replacement theory” and running ads featuring the most lurid and militarized “invasion” imagery imaginable — that will only add more evidence against the political effectiveness of this GOP strategy. 

5. A radicalized MAGA House might not have free rein, after all. 

It has long been suggested (including by me) that a GOP-controlled House would be able to run amok with Benghazi-style investigations and impeachments of everyone down to the White House chef.

But if the majority remains narrow, it’s unclear whether the votes will be there to impeach Biden. And while zealous investigations are expected to roar forward, Republican leaders are almost certainly going to struggle to prevent the unruly MAGA caucus from truly driving things off the rails.

Republicans will likely still win the House and the Senate is still in play. But the big emerging story of these midterm elections is that MAGAfied authoritarian forces enthusiastically embraced by the GOP suffered unexpected and potentially grave setbacks.

Whether Republicans will accept this interpretation and act on it is another matter entirely.

 

I'll go ahead and add Number Six here: The Dobbs decision cost the GOP dozens of winnable races.  Every single state constitutional amendment on the ballot to enshrine abortion won and drove women to vote. Every single ballot measure to end abortion lost.

Even here in Kentucky.

The anti-abortion measures failed across the board. But the pro-abortion measures won big, and especially in Michigan, saved the Democrats. The people who told you abortion wouldn't matter in November?

They were wrong. All of them.

Oh, and let's make it seven. 

Joe Biden spent the last three months warning Americans about threats to democracy.

Kamala Harris spent the last five months traveling the country to talk about abortion.

The keys our victories were threats to democracy and abortion.

Give @POTUS and @VP credit where it's due.

— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) November 12, 2022

 Here endeth the lesson.

America Gets Away Scott Free

So Republicans are very mopey and disappointed as the Red Wave sputtered out, and while the big losers were Trump, Kevin McCarthy and Fox News, the biggest loser on Tuesday night was Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who bet it all on using the National Republican Senate Committee he chaired in retaking the Senate, being the hero, and going straight for Mitch McConnell's job.

Then Batboy got kicked in the nuts by reality.

For nearly two years, former President Donald Trump has demanded Senate Republicans dump Mitch McConnell as their leader but has never offered an alternative.

This week, one was set to emerge: the man in charge of the Senate Republican campaign arm who has been feuding with McConnell for much of the year.

Senator Rick Scott of Florida was poised to challenge McConnell, Republicans briefed on his plans told me, until he decided against a bid Wednesday morning, when it became clear Republicans may not capture the majority and there was to be a Senate runoff in Georgia.

Scott had cut an announcement video declaring his intentions, word had reached some prominent conservatives outside the Senate and a handful of GOP senators had gotten wind of his plan and started calculating just how many votes his longshot campaign could accrue at the leadership vote next week in the Capitol.

He would have been virtually certain to lose. But Scott’s challenge was not so much aimed at unseating the longtime Senate Republican leader as it was channeling the anger of grassroots conservatives, and the former president, who were peeved at McConnell’s criticism of the “candidate quality” of this year’s roster of Senate GOP candidates.

The idea was that those supposed mediocrities would romp to victory, credit Scott for his steadfast support and shame McConnell for his lack of faith — while also starting to loosen the 80-year-old’s grip on his leadership post. But only one of those candidates — Ohio’s J.D. Vance — won his race outright. Arizona’s Blake Masters appears likely to lose, Georgia’s Herschel Walker is in a runoff, and Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz and New Hampshire’s Donald Bolduc were defeated.

With Republican hopes for claiming the majority now dependent on a tenuous vote advantage in Nevada, McConnell’s August assessment of the candidates looks prescient. Because of recruitment failures and Trump’s interventions in primaries, the GOP was saddled with candidates who lost, are likely to lose or simply cost McConnell’s super PAC and Scott’s campaign committee tens of millions of dollars in bailouts.

In other words, Rick Scott got left holding the bag, and if say, both Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump want someone to blame for Republicans failing to take the Senate, a convenient scapegoat just wandered up and shit in the front yard.

Watching Republicans rip strips of flesh off each other for the next two years is going to be fun, and everything they deserve.

Just wait until the indictments come.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Former Trump Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf (the Bad Wolf) apparently searched long and hard for a reason to declare Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters as terrorist groups after the George Floyd protests in 2020 to act as a pretext to round up thousands of people.

The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.

An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.

The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump’s false claims about “Antifa,” an “organization” that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to drum up proof ever existed.

The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment; “twisted efforts,” Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting “baseless conspiracy theories” to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s “political gain.” The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the “friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests” — up to and including “First Amendment speech activity.” Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an “anarchist extremist” specifically because “sufficient facts” were never found “to support such a characterization.”

One field operations analyst told interviewers that the charts were hastily “thrown together,” adding they “didn’t even know why some of the people were arrested.” In some cases, it was unclear whether the arrests were made by police or by one of the several federal agencies on the ground. The analysts were never provided arrest affidavits or paperwork, a witness told investigators, adding that they “just worked off the assumption that everyone on the list was arrested.” Lawyers who reviewed 43 of the dossiers found it “concerning,” the report says, that 13 of them stemmed from “nonviolent crimes.” These included trespassing, though it was unclear to analysts and investigators whether the cases had “any relationship to federal property,” the report says.

A footnote in the report states that “at least one witness” told investigators that dossiers had been requested on people who were “not arrested” but merely accused of threats. Another, citing emails exchanged between top intelligence officials, states dossiers were created “on persons arrested having nothing to do with homeland security or threats to officers.”

Questioned by investigators, the agency’s chief intelligence officer acknowledged fielding requests by Wolf and his acting deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, to create dossiers “against everyone participating in the Portland protest,” regardless of whether they’d been accused of any crime, the report says. That officer, Brian Murphy, then head of the agency’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), told interviewers that he’d rejected the idea, informing his bosses that he could only “look at people who were arrested,” and adding that it was something his office had done “thousands” of times before.

The DHS report, finalized more than a year ago, includes descriptions of orders handed down to “senior leadership” instructing them to broadly apply the label “violent antifa anarchists inspired” to Portland protesters unless they had intel showing “something different.”

Once the dossiers were received by the agency’s emerging threat center, it became clear that DHS had no real way to tie the protesters to any terrorist activities, neither at home nor abroad. Efforts to drum up evidence to support the administration’s claim that a “larger network was directing or financing” the protesters — a task assigned to another unit, known as the Homeland Identities, Targeting and Exploitation Center, diverted away from its usual work of analyzing national security threats — “did not find any evidence that assertion was true,” the report says.

 

The only reason DHS didn't round up thousands, maybe tens of thousands, is because they weren't smart enough to come up with "evidence" of "terrorist activity".

 

The next Republican administration will dispense with the theatrics and just start arresting people.

 

Will other countries demand our "political dissidents" be freed?

They Voted Like Their Country Depended On It

As Will Bunch points out, voters under 30 were the difference in keeping Democrats in striking distance of keeping the House and Senate, an unprecedented midterm move in my lifetime, and they voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic party.

What a difference a day makes: 24 little hours. As the darkness descended across America on Tuesday, editors at the New York Times locked in their doom-for-Democrats front page while 3,000 miles west in Arizona, the extremist femme fatale Kari Lake was boasting to reporters that “I’m going to be your worst frickin’ nightmare” as Arizona’s next governor. Inside the Beltway, the pundits who’d issued a political tsunami watch gazed out on the waters with their binoculars, waiting for a “red wave” to roll ashore.

Hardly anyone was paying attention to what was happening on college campuses from Tempe, Ariz., to Champaign, Ill., where teens and 20-somethings stood and waited for hours to cast their ballots in the 2022 midterms, patiently scrolling through their iPhones or even sneaking in some homework. At the University of Michigan, in a state where abortion rights were on the ballot through both a referendum and a pro-choice governor, hundreds of students — some draped in blankets as the mercury plunged — stood on a line for two to three hours to cast their ballot. It was a new twist on the save-America battle cry of “Wolverines!” from the 1984 movie Red Dawn.

“I was voting based on women’s rights in terms of candidates who were supporting women’s choice,” said Lauren Snyder, who endured Tuesday’s massive line at the University of Illinois. She added: “It’s important — as a student — as a young person to come out and vote for issues that I care about.”

As bright sunshine broke across America on Wednesday morning, the outlines of an epic and truly historic election were starting to come into clear focus. If democracy was on the ballot in 2022, as President Joe Biden and so many others had warned, then it was young Americans — especially those under 30, including women like Snyder — who just saved it. Shocked into action by the loss of their reproductive rights and repulsed by candidates who threatened not to count their votes going forward, Millennials and Gen Z put down their books (or their beers) to make sure any “red wave” was subsumed by the deep blue sea.

Here’s the situation, less than 12 hours after the nation’s last polling place closed: Control of Congress is very much up in the air, defying predictions that Republicans were on track for double-digit gains in the House and possibly tipping the currently 50-50 Senate. The situation remains fluid but it looks as if Democrats could have 50 or even 51 Senate seats; network projections show the GOP with maybe a five- to seven-seat House majority, but that could be undone by late vote-counting out West. Scores of Republican election deniers fell Tuesday, led by a landslide defeat for Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano. Arizona’s gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is currently behind in that state’s slow count — meaning future harassment of the press may have to come in a cranky letter to the editor, not from the governor’s mansion.

We got here through a Democratic surge among voters under age 45, but especially in the 18-to-29 bracket, and a female electorate that was clearly energized by the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision that had guaranteed abortion rights for nearly a half century. That was especially true here in Pennsylvania, where a preliminary CBS exit poll showed the No. 1 voter concern was not inflation, as experts predicted, but abortion rights, cited by 36%. CNN’s national exit poll showed the GOP won over-45 voters, while Democrats, who narrowly won the 30-to-44 bracket, gained from a whopping 28% win among voters aged 18 to 29.

“I think young people realize that this election cycle is so much about the issues,” Victor Shi of the group Voters of Tomorrow presciently told the radio host Dean Obeidallah shortly before the election. “Because the other side, Republicans, really have no issue that they can offer young people in terms of how they’re going to support our lives and how they’re going to improve it.”

The determination of young voters to be counted in 2022 clearly flummoxed a political establishment and a punditry that looked like a cadre of baffled generals fighting the last wars. Certainly in the past, midterm elections have tended to be disastrous for the party in the White House, especially with exacerbating factors like high inflation. The New York Times, in particular, struggled to turn the “Dems-in-disarray” battleship around, finally landing on a front page that read “GOP GAINS EDGE, BUT ITS EXPECTATIONS DIM.” Not quite “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” but not great. Remember, Politico had commissioned a poll that picked up the late Democratic surge on the congressional ballot, but dismissed it as “an outlier.”

Spoiler alert: It wasn’t an outlier.

 

Voters age 18 to 29 voted for Team Blue by a whopping 28 points, and made up more than 12% of the electorate, according to CNN's national exit polling. Even white voters under 30 overwhelmingly picked the Dems, 58-40%. Hell, even 18-29 white voters without college degrees chose the Democrats 53-46%.

Expect Republicans to get rid of early voting, college campus voting, and to try to raise the voting age in response.

The kids are alright.

Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrane, Con't

While we're waiting on vote counts to be finalized here in the US, in Ukraine, Putin and the Russian Army have retreated from the Ukrainian city of Kherson. Well, maybe.

Russia announced Wednesday that it was withdrawing forces from Kherson, a key city in southern Ukraine, in what could turn out to be the most humiliating setback in President Vladimir Putin’s war.

Ukrainian officials remained cautious about the Russian forces’ intentions with some suggesting on social media that it was a trick but in televised comments, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said he was ordering the withdrawal of troops across the Dnieper River.

Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, proposed taking up defensive lines on the eastern bank of the river.

The announcement of the withdrawal followed weeks of Ukrainian advances toward the city and a race by Russia to relocate more than 100,000 of its residents.

“We will save the lives of our soldiers and fighting capacity of our units. Keeping them on the right (western) bank is futile. Some of them can be used on other fronts,” Surovikin said.

Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed the move and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has suggested that the Russians were laying a trap pullout from Kherson in order to lure Ukrainian forces into battle.

Zelenskyy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak also expressed skepticism over Russia's announcement.

If Ukraine wins in Kherson it could put the Zelenskyy government in a better position to negotiate, U.S. and Western officials have told NBC News. But, they added, it could also discourage Russia from coming to the table if Putin believes he’s not negotiating from a position of strength.

The announced Russian withdrawal from Kherson, which is in a region of the same name, came after Ukrainian officials said Russian forces were deliberately blowing up bridges around the city — the only regional capital to be captured by Russian forces since the invasion began on Feb. 24.

“The occupiers are currently undermining absolutely all the bridges on the right bank of the Kherson region,” Serhii Khlan, the deputy head of Kherson’s regional council, said in a Telegram post.

 

If this is a trap somehow, it's not a very good one. I'm no War College graduate, but even I know that while announcing a retreat and then milling about smartly hoping that a bunch of The Enemy happily come to you so you can enfilade the bejesus out of them is not the best plan. It may have been effective before satellites and drones, but even ancient armies did recon to check out the situation before committing the bulk of troops.

I think The Boys are a bit smarter than that.

We'll see.

The Red Wave That Wasn't

Republicans and pundits alike promised that last night would be the functional end of the Biden administration, and that overwhelming losses by Democratic incumbents in both the House and Senate would lead to a White House drowning in impeachments, investigations, and hearings.

That may still happen. But the odds of that went from certainty to question mark as Dems picked up several House seats and the Senate seat in Pennsylvania last night, and control of Congress is very much up in the air this morning.

As many in the country were going to bed last night, President Biden and his advisers – up late into the night watching the midterm returns come in — felt convinced of two things: Races across the board looked competitive, and Democrats appeared to have avoided a bloodbath that some had predicted and feared.

The White House wakes up this morning to real reasons for that optimism from the previous night to continue: The possibility of Democrats’ keeping the Senate in their hands very much remains intact, and they’ve seen Democratic governors of big swing states and key House frontliners in their party win their races.

A huge outstanding question, of course, remains the fate of the House – and just how many seats Republicans will ultimately end up picking up.

Whether Democrats can keep control of the Senate – and how the makeup of the House will ultimately shake out – will have huge implications for President Biden and his party’s ability to govern in the second half of his first term.

And as the White House is poised to highlight some of the bright spots from last night’s results, a challenge for them will be whether they can successfully make the case that some of these Democrats were able to hold their own because of the White House and President Biden – not in spite of them.

Leading up to Election Day, there was already starting to be plenty of finger-pointing at the White House. Some House Democrats, for example, told CNN that Biden and his team failed to drive hard at an economic message, at a moment when voters have made clear that it is overwhelmingly their most important issue.

One progressive House member put it bluntly to CNN: “We knew the economy would be bad… and they didn’t have an economic message at all.”

The lawmaker lamented – echoing sentiments expressed by some of their colleagues – that they also didn’t see the White House adequately take credit for Democrats’ legislative wins, including last year’s passage of a major bipartisan infrastructure bill. It was a “total failure to take a victory lap,” they said.

But if many Democrats were ready to start playing the blame game, the results so far could have bought everyone some breathing room – the White House most of all —at least for a few days.

White House officials have insisted in the final stretch of the midterms that Biden has consistently discussed the economy and made economic issues key to his political messaging.

They’ve also made clear that they believe voters are considering a range of issues as they head to ballot boxes – and not just the economy – and that it was critical for the leader of the Democratic Party to publicly discuss issues like abortion rights, gun safety and protecting democracy, which they believe have played major roles in animating the Democratic base.

We'll see if Dems can hold out.  The pickup for Team Blue with John Fetterman is huge, as Catherine Cortez Masto is in the fight of her life in Nevada still and in Georgia, Raphael Warnock is headed for a runoff. Dems will have to win one of those two in order to keep the upper chamber.

In the House, Republicans have already picked up enough House wins to put McCarthy in the Speaker's office, but Dems have picked up enough seats to keep control for now. It may be days or weeks before we know who will control Congress next year.

But I'll take that in a heartbeat over the "Red Wave" scenario, where we were supposed to know who won by midnight.

Vote Like Your Country Depends On It

Because it does.

 

We'll see how it goes.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Putin's oligarchs are openly admitting to and bragging about the fact that they are interfering in US midterm elections.

Kremlin-connected entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted Monday that he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue to do so — confirming for the first time the accusations that he has rejected for years.

“Gentlemen, we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do,” Prigozhin boasted in remarks posted on social media.

The statement, from the press service of his catering company that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef,” came on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections.

It was the second major admission in recent months by the 61-year-old businessman, who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin has previously sought to keep his activities under the radar and now appears increasingly interested in gaining political clout — although his goal in doing so was not immediately clear.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Prigozhin’s comments “do not tell us anything new or surprising.”

“It’s well known and well documented in the public domain that entities associated with Yevgeny Prigozhin have sought to influence elections around the world, including the United States. The U.S. has worked to expose and counter Russia’s malign influence efforts as we discover them,” she said, noting that Yevgeny has been sanctioned by the United States, the U.K. and the European Union.

“Part of Russia’s efforts includes promoting narratives aimed at undermining democracy and sowing division and discord. It’s not surprising that Russia would be highlighting their attempted efforts and fabricating a story about their successes on the eve of an election,” she added.

In September, Prigozhin also publicly stated that he was behind the Wagner Group mercenary force — something he also had previously denied — and talked openly about its involvement in Russia’s 8-month-old war in Ukraine. The military contractor also has sent its forces to places like Syria and sub-Saharan Africa.

Video also has emerged recently of a man resembling Prigozhin visiting Russian penal colonies to recruit prisoners to fight in Ukraine.

In 2018, Prigozhin and a dozen other Russian nationals and three Russian companies were charged in the U.S. with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord and dividing American public opinion ahead of the 2016 presidential election won by Republican Donald Trump. They were indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.

The Justice Department in 2020 moved to dismiss charges against two of the indicted firms, Concord Management and Consulting LLC and Concord Catering, saying they had concluded that a trial against a corporate defendant with no presence in the U.S. and no prospect of meaningful punishment even if convicted would likely expose sensitive law enforcement tools and techniques.

In July, the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information about Russian interference in U.S. elections, including on Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm in St. Petersburg that his companies were accused of funding. Prigozhin also has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for election interference.

Until now, Prigozhin had denied Russian involvement in election interference.

 

It would be the most Russian thing ever for Prigozhin to try to claim that $10 million after this. And while the Biden Administration is perfectly aware of Russia's attempts to interfere, the 2020 elections were safe, and the 2022 elections will be too.

It's the Big Lies about the elections that are hurting, and we can thank Trump and his Russian friends for that, too.

Vote tomorrow. Take friends to vote. We need you. Even here in red states like Kentucky.

Please.

Vote tomorrow if you haven't done so already.

Climate Of Destruction, Con't

As the COP27 UN Climate Change conference gets underway this week in Egypt, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is warning the world that without a climate pact between industrialized and developing countries, the planet is on the "highway to climate hell".

As presidents and prime ministers from around the globe gathered on Monday to tell the world what they are doing to tackle climate change, the United Nations secretary-general delivered a characteristically dire message about the rapidly warming planet, warning: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

The secretary general, António Guterres, set the tone for the annual United Nations-led international climate talks, which officially began on Sunday as the accumulating threats of war, warming and economic crisis take a toll on every continent, hitting the world’s most vulnerable people the hardest.

“We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” Mr. Guterres said in opening remarks at the summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. Dozens of world leaders delivered brief addresses at the event on Monday.

The talks opened under the shadow of grim new data: The World Meteorological Organization said on Sunday that the planet had likely witnessed its warmest eight years on record, including every year since countries came together in 2015 to create the landmark Paris agreement. That was aimed at pivoting the global economy away from fossil fuels and slowing down warming.

The biggest fault line of this year’s talks is the question of what rich, industrialized countries that account for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions owe to those bearing the brunt of climate hazards. On that there was a small breakthrough on Sunday — progress on the contentious issue of who will pay for the irreversible damage that climate change is wreaking on the world’s most vulnerable.

In his opening remarks, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called on leaders to act with urgency to implement their commitments. “For the sake of future generations, here and now we are facing a unique historical moment, a last chance to meet our responsibilities,” he said.

The government’s policies, however, have undermined its attempts to frame Egypt as a climate champion of the developing world, and some have called into question its role as host, given its troubling records on the environment and human rights. The country’s most prominent dissident, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who has spent more than 200 days on a hunger strike in an effort to pressure the authorities to let him go, vowed to begin a water strike as the summit began.

The climate talks are the 27th session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations convention, which is why the event is known as COP27. Over 44,000 people have registered to attend, including representatives of government, business, and civil society groups.

The talks come at the end of a year that saw extraordinary heat waves across the northern hemisphere, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and Nigeria, and a punishing drought in China.

According to a list posted by the United Nations, 110 heads of state and government are addressing the conference, a larger number than at many previous climate conferences. Of those, just seven are women.

 

Remember, the number one reason why there isn't a global climate agreement remains the existence of the Senate filibuster and the GOP using it every single time one is proposed.  We're deep into the triage phase of climate change, and Republicans will deny any action on that, too.

Unless you think the massive hurricanes that have hit the Gulf Coast in the last several years and the flooding accompanying them are flukes.

The GOP Race To The Bottom, Con't

Should Republicans retake the House and/or Senate, there will be a test run for tremendous damage that they can and will do to blue states in order to destroy as many civil rights as possible nationwide. The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein:

If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.

Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law. The practical effect of these proposals would be to require blue states to live under the restrictive social policies that have burned through red states since President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. “I think the days of fealty [to states’ rights] are nearing an end, and we are going to see the national Republicans in Congress adopting maximalist policy approaches,” Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group that advocates for stricter gun control, told me.

None of the proposals to nationalize the red-state social agenda could become law any time soon. Even if Republicans were to win both congressional chambers, they would not have the votes to overcome the inevitable Biden vetoes. Nor would Republicans, even if they controlled both chambers, have any incentive to consider repealing the Senate filibuster to pass this agenda until they know they have a president who would sign the resulting bills into law—something they can’t achieve before the 2024 election.

But if Republicans triumph this week, the next two years could nonetheless become a crucial period in formulating a strategy to nationalize the red-state social-policy revolution. Particularly if Republicans win the House, they seem certain to explore which of these ideas can attract enough support in their caucus to clear the chamber. And the 2024 Republican presidential candidates are also likely to test GOP primary voters’ appetite for writing conservative social priorities into national law. Embracing such initiatives “may prove irresistible for a lot of folks trying to capture” the party’s socially conservative wing, Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me.

It starts with abortion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in September introduced a bill that would ban the procedure nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In the House, 167 Republicans have co-sponsored the “Life Begins at Conception Act,” which many legal analysts say would effectively ban all abortions nationwide.

In elections, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has proposed legislation that would impose for federal elections nationwide many of the voting restrictions that have rapidly diffused across red states, including tougher voter-identification requirements, a ban on both unmonitored drop boxes and the counting of any mail ballots received after Election Day, and a prohibition on same-day and automatic voter registration.

In education, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed to federalize restrictions on how teachers can talk about race by barring any K–12 school that receives federal money from using “critical race theory” in instruction. Several Republicans (including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri) have introduced a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would mandate parental access to school curriculum and library materials nationwide—a step toward building pressure for the kind of book bans spreading through conservative states and school districts. Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director for PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, predicts that these GOP proposals “chipping away” at free speech are likely to expand beyond school settings into other areas affecting the general population, such as public libraries or private companies’ training policies. “This is not something that is likely to stop at the current arena, but to go much more broadly,” she told me.

Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, along with several dozen co-sponsors, recently introduced a federal version of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida pushed into law. Johnson’s bill is especially sweeping in its scope. It bars discussion of “sexually-oriented material,” including sexual orientation, with children 10 and younger, not only in educational settings, but in any program funded by the federal government, including through public libraries, hospitals, and national parks. The language is so comprehensive that it might even prevent “any federal law enforcement talking to a kid about a sexual assault or sexual abuse,” David Stacy, the government-affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told me.

 

The nightmare scenario is that Republicans hold the debt ceiling hostage and collapse the US economy until Biden signs all of these into law, along with trillions in cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The prevention of this scenario is to vote Blue today and tomorrow.