The Circus Of The Damned, Con't

Ringmaster of Hell Kevin McCarthy handed out committee assignments this week for his troupe of clowns, and the show is about to begin.

Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona have been given committee assignments for the new Congress, after being booted from their committees by Democrats and some Republicans for their incendiary remarks, sources told CNN.

The House GOP Steering Committee on Tuesday agreed to place Greene on the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over the border and will likely play a role in potentially impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

And Gosar got a seat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, where he previously served.

Both decisions were made unanimously by the steering panel, sources told CNN, which is stocked with members who are close to and a part of House GOP leadership. The committee rosters will still need to be ratified by the entire House GOP, but typically the conference approves whatever the Steering Committee recommends.

Greene and Gosar were also among several GOP hardliners – which also included Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania – added to the House Oversight Committee, according to Republican sources.

The addition of Greene is notable since she had lobbied for that spot and was a prominent defender of Kevin McCarthy’s during the speaker’s race. Gosar, who like Greene lost committee spots in the last Congress as Democratic retaliation for incendiary remarks, voted against McCarthy but later flipped to him.

McCarthy has long vowed to put Greene and Gosar back on committees, while he has pledged to kick some House Democrats off of theirs.

Perry also ultimately supported McCarthy after opposing him. Boebert helped McCarthy win by voting “present.”

The addition of the hardliners will give them the ability to shape some of the most aggressive investigations into the Biden administration.

Both chambers of Congress are out of session for the week, but the Steering Committee is meeting Tuesday to nail down committee assignments for members of the Republican Conference. Capitol Hill observers have been waiting to see which lawmakers will end up on which committees in the new GOP-controlled House, given the role those panels will play in investigating the Biden administration.

Rep. Roger Williams, a Texas Republican who is chairing the Small Business Committee, told CNN that embattled freshman Rep. George Santos of New York will be named to his panel. Santos has faced calls for his resignation, including from Republicans, following revelations that he repeatedly lied about his resume and identity.

“I don’t condone what he said, what he’s done,” Williams told CNN. “I don’t think anybody does. But that’s not my role. He was elected. He represents a million people.”

Santos was also awarded a seat on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, according to multiple GOP sources.

 

A 9/11 Truther and January 6th insurrectionist will be on the Homeland Security Committee, an avowed white supremacist will be making laws on environmental racism, and a known con man with multiple aliases will be on both the Small Business and Space and Tech committees. McCarthy knows what kind of people he wants in his circus, and we're all going to be paying the ticket price in the years ahead.

Last Call For Sick Of It All

More than one-third of Americans put off health care in 2022 due to medical inflation and red states cutting back on Medicaid.

 

The percentage of Americans reporting they or a family member postponed medical treatment in 2022 due to cost rose 12 points in one year, to 38%, the highest in Gallup’s 22-year trend.

Each year since 2001, Gallup has tracked Americans’ self-reports of delaying medical care in the past 12 months due to cost. The latest reading, from Gallup’s annual Health and Healthcare poll conducted Nov. 9-Dec. 2, is the highest by five points and marks the sharpest year-over-year increase to date.

This change came amid the highest inflation rate in the U.S. in more than 40 years, which made 2022 a challenging year for many Americans. A majority of U.S. adults have said inflation is creating at least a moderate hardship for them. The public continues to view the state of the U.S. economy negatively, and Americans were more likely to name inflation as the most important problem facing the U.S. in 2022 than at any time since 1984.

The latest double-digit increase in delaying medical treatment came on the heels of two consecutive 26% readings during the COVID-19 pandemic that were the lowest since 2004. The previous high point in the trend was 33% in 2014 and 2019. An average 29% of U.S. adults reported putting off medical treatment because of cost between 2001 and 2021.

Americans were more than twice as likely to report the delayed treatment in their family was for a serious rather than a nonserious condition in 2022. In all, 27% said the treatment was for a “very” or “somewhat” serious condition or illness, while 11% said it was “not very” or “not at all” serious. Since 2004, more U.S. adults have said the medical care needed was for a serious than nonserious condition, but the 16-point gap in the perceived seriousness of forgone treatment in 2022 is the second largest on record to a 17-point gap in 2019.

Lower-income adults, younger adults and women in the U.S. have consistently been more likely than their counterparts to say they or a family member have delayed care for a serious medical condition.

In 2022, Americans with an annual household income under $40,000 were nearly twice as likely as those with an income of $100,000 or more to say someone in their family delayed medical care for a serious condition (34% vs. 18%, respectively). Those with an income between $40,000 and less than $100,000 were similar to those in the lowest income group when it comes to postponing care, with 29% doing so.

Reports of putting off care for a serious condition are up 12 points among lower-income U.S. adults, up 11 points among those in the middle-income group and up seven points among those with a higher income. The latest readings for the middle- and upper-income groups are the highest on record or tied with the highest.

 

Rural hospitals are closing by the dozens, leaving people without basic health care options in hundreds of US counties. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical company revenues were nearly $2 trillion worldwide in 2022, with record-shattering profits.

Health care in America is still very much broken.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Nobody on earth should be surprised that Albuquerque police have arrested a loser Republican for the shootings over the last month at New Mexico Democrats' homes and offices. 

 

Police in Albuquerque on Monday announced the arrest of a failed candidate for state Legislature in a string of shootings at locations associated with high-profile Democratic leaders.

Republican Solomon Peña is accused of conspiring with and paying four men to carry out four shootings at the homes of two Bernalillo County commissioners and two state legislators.

Two other shootings previously believed to be linked to the case so far have not been connected to the suspect, police said at a news conference early Monday evening.

On Jan. 9 police announced the arrest of another suspect in the case and said they took possession of a firearm possibly used in one of the shootings.

But on Monday, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina described Peña as the initiator of the shootings.

"It is believed that he is the mastermind behind this," he said at Monday's news conference.

Peña was arrested by a SWAT team in the Albuquerque area Monday, the chief said. Ballistics evidence from one of the shootings connected the case to the suspect, Medina said.

 

So yeah, a Republican who lost paid people to terrorize the Democrats who won.

Sounds like a terrorist conspiracy to me, which should land Mr. Peña in prison for several decades. Let's see what Merrick Garland and the DoJ decide to do here. He made dozens of Twitter references that his election loss was "fraud" and "stolen."

Then he paid people to shoot up the homes and offices of the Democrats who beat him.

Remember, the Republican response to a Democratic win is to attack it legally...and illegally.

The Body Politic Electric

Wyoming, still the nation's least-populated state, says it will "symbolically phase out' electric vehicles in the state by 2035 in order to "protect" the state's oil and gas industry.

REPUBLICANS IN WYOMING’S state senate are considering a resolution banning new electric vehicle sales in the state by 2035, an answer to California and New York states’ recent laws that would bar the sale of gas-powered vehicles in those states by the same year.

“The Legislature would be saying, ‘If you don’t like our petroleum cars, well, we don’t like your electric cars,’” said the resolution’s sponsor, Republican State Sen. Jim Anderson, Cowboy State Daily reported.

The Wyoming resolution, “Phasing Out New Electric Vehicle Sales By 2035,” is largely a symbolic gesture, as it would not be legally binding if passed. But Wyoming Republicans still think it’s important enough to consider passing, even if only to troll Democratic states that favor electric vehicles.

The bill states that “oil and gas production has long been one of Wyoming’s proud and valued industries” and has generated “countless jobs” and “contributed revenues” to the state. It goes on to say that Wyoming’s “vast stretches of highway, coupled with a lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure” would make “widespread use of electric vehicles impracticable.”

“I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life,” GOP co-sponsor Sen. Brian Boner said, according to Cowboy State Daily. “I just don’t appreciate when other states try to force technology that isn’t ready.” 

 

Wyoming women of child-bearing age, residents of Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and trans folks were not asked to comment on "how other states shouldn't get to determine things where you live."

 

Also, no Republican wants to "discuss the issues" with electric vehicles any more than they want to have real discussions on race, gender, religion, or civil rights.  It's all bad-faith trolling, like this legislation and the people trying to pass it.

 

Last Call For Ridin' With Biden, Con't

Why I voted for Joe Biden, and why I would continue to do so, is that he's updated his views on race and has realized what Republicans are trying to do, rewriting the entire civil rights struggle out of American history and pretending we're all a "post-racial society". We're not, and everything the GOP does proves that. Biden gets that, and he understands what he has to do.

President Joe Biden on Monday criticized Republican attempts to limit how educators discuss race and systemic discrimination in schools, arguing that teaching these topics isn’t about being “woke” but about acknowledging history.

Speaking at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast in Washington, D.C., the president highlighted some of his administration’s recent accomplishments including establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday — which was met with opposition from some Republicans who decried the effort as “identity politics.”

“The idea that we’re supposed to remain silent on the abuses of the past, as if they didn’t occur? That’s not being woke, that’s being honest,” Biden said. “That’s talking about history.”

 

Remember that being honest about America's faults, faults that still exist today, in order to try to improve those issues, is "hating America". 

Biden’s remarks come amid renewed efforts by some Republicans to ban “critical race theory” in schools. Critical race theory is an academic discipline that studies how race has influenced societal, legal and political structures, but the term has been used by Republicans in recent years as a blanket indictment of any discussion of systemic racism or discrimination. Across the country, Republican legislators have pushed bills seeking to restrict how these topics are taught in public schools, including by banning books.

Most recently, newly inaugurated Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signed an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory” in public classrooms. Sanders, who previously served as former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, defended the ban Sunday on “Fox News Sunday,” arguing teachers “shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country.”

And in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is looking to overhaul public universities, beginning with the historically progressive New College in Sarasota where he recently appointed six conservative trustees to the board.

 

Republicans want to take America back to the pre-civil rights era 60's and invent a new America where it never happened. They expect enough people will agree with them, and cast the rest of us into the abyss.

 

Biden at least defends the dvil rights era. Nobody who would ever be nominated in this Republican party for president would ever do so, in fact they would run on the opposite.

Fantasma Santos, Prizrak Edition

That George Santos was somehow going to be involved with Russian oligarch money may actually be the least shocking thing about the whole pack of lies he's told to get elected.

 

George Santos, the freshman Republican congressman from New York who lied about his biography, has deeper ties than previously known to a businessman who cultivated close links with a onetime Trump confidant and who is the cousin of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, according to video footage and court documents.

Andrew Intrater and his wife each gave the maximum $5,800 to Santos’ main campaign committee and tens of thousands more since 2020 to committees linked to him, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Intrater’s cousin is Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the Russian energy industry.

The relationship between Santos and Intrater goes beyond campaign contributions, according to a statement made privately by Santos in 2020 and a court filing the following year in a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against a Florida-based investment firm, Harbor City Capital, where Santos worked for more than a year.

Taken together, the evidence suggests Santos may have had a business relationship with Intrater as Santos was first entering politics in 2020. It also shows, according to the SEC filing, that Intrater put hundreds of thousands of dollars into Santos’ onetime employer, Harbor City, which was accused by regulators of running a Ponzi scheme. Neither Santos nor Intrater responded to requests for comment. Attorneys who have represented Intrater also did not respond.

The congressman, whose election from Long Island last year helped the GOP secure its narrow House majority, has apologized for what he called “résumé embellishment” while rebuffing calls for his resignation. He is under scrutiny by prosecutors in New York and Rio de Janeiro.

Ties between Santos, 34, and Intrater, 60, reflect the ways Santos found personal and political support on his path to public office.

While Intrater is a U.S. citizen, his company, the investment firm Columbus Nova, has historically had extensive ties to the business interests of his Russian cousin. As recently as 2018, when Vekselberg was sanctioned by the Treasury Department, his conglomerate was Columbus Nova’s largest client, the company confirmed to The Post that year.

Intrater’s interactions in 2016 and 2017 with Michael Cohen, who at the time was working as a lawyer for Donald Trump, were probed during special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible links between Trump and the Kremlin.

Intrater’s company paid the lawyer and self-described Trump fixer to identify deals for his business, and court records show they exchanged hundreds of texts and phone calls. Neither Intrater nor Vekselberg was accused of wrongdoing in Mueller’s investigation.

 

Sure, but Michael Cohen was.

 

Look how much stuff that has been uncovered since people began digging into Santos, and look how much the GOP leadership knew and ignored in order to get him into office.

 

None of it is a coincidence, I assure you.

Dr. King's Legacy, Con't

This Dr. Martin Luther King Day finds Letter From A Birmingham Jail turning 60 years old, and Dr. King's views on the "white moderate" are, more than ever, both relevant and representative of the Republican Party as a whole.

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

 

Today's Republican Party is the party of unjust laws, and applied injustice. They are trying to undo the last sixty years and say that Dr. King's dream as been achieved, and that just laws are no longer necessary, that protection for Black, Hispanic, and other classes of marginalized people aren't needed because we're somehow past the bad old days.

And they they want to use the lack of those protections to bring those days back, to "Make America Great Again" and continue down that track as far as possible, rolling us back before anyone other than white land-owning men had citizenship at all

 

I implore you, as I do every MLK Day, to ask yourself if you are the white moderate waiting for a more convenient season, now that we're a couple years removed from the George Floyd protests.

It's not on Black America to solve racism, and it never was.

Last Call For Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Seems the gun crazies in Texas sure don't like it when a small business owner exercises their rights and excludes hateful bigots who got away with a double murder.

 

A Conroe brewery says it’s been inundated with harassment and some threats after announcing Friday that it would no longer allow a “rally against censorship” featuring Kyle Rittenhouse to be held there later this month.

“It’s been kind of a shitstorm,” Southern Star Brewery CEO Dave Fougeron said in a Saturday morning interview. “But now I’m more certain than ever that I made the right decision.”

Fougeron also said that he was not aware until a few days ago that the event’s “special guest” was Rittenhouse. And he disputed claims – including those from Rittenhouse and others – that the cancellation came after pressure from a “woke mob” or distributors such as H-E-B.

Rather, he said, it was primarily concerns from local patrons that led to the decision. Fougeron described himself as apolitical, and said his brewery, which produces well-known local craft beers such as Bombshell Blonde, strives to be a place that’s welcoming to all.

“Our place is super inclusive,” he said. “We are super pro-veteran, super pro-law enforcement. We’re trying to be good people in the community. We’re friends with our firefighters, with our police department…. We have a lot of gay patrons who come in because it’s a place of inclusivity. It’s crazy that we’re getting threats from people.”

On Friday evening, Rittenhouse – who was famously acquitted of fatally shooting two people in Kenosha, Wis. at a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020 – accused the brewery of censoring him.

“It’s really disappointing to see that places continue to censor me and not allow my voice and many other voices to be heard because they bend to the woke crowd,” Rittenhouse posted to his nearly one million followers on Twitter. Other high-profile right-wing accounts similarly accused the brewery of censorship after it announced that it was canceling the event because it “doesn’t reflect our own values.”

 

It's not enough for the inchoate CHUDs to let their voices be heard, you have to be willing to celebrate the butchery of liberals or else you face harassment, death threats, and more.

 

You're either with them or you their next target, but please tell me again how this is a "free speech issue".

 

 

School Daze, Con't

Stephanie Saul at the NY Times argues that colleges and universities admissions departments need to prepare now for the end of affirmative action by the Roberts Court later this summer.

In cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court is widely expected to overturn or roll back affirmative action in college admissions. Many education experts say that such a decision could not only lead to changes in who is admitted, but also jeopardize long-established strategies that colleges have used to build diverse classes, including programs that are intended to reach specific racial and ethnic groups for scholarships, honors programs and recruitment.

Those rollbacks could then help spur colleges to end other admissions practices that critics say have historically benefited the well-heeled. Some schools have already ended their standardized test requirements and preferences for children of alumni. There is also pressure to end early decision, which admits applicants before the general deadline.

College officials warn that there is no way of knowing how sweeping the court decision will be. But the ruling, expected by June, is likely to have a broad impact on a range of schools, according to Vern Granger, the director of admissions at the University of Connecticut.

“Most people are thinking about the admissions process at selective institutions,” he said, “but I would say that this decision is going to be far-ranging and it’s going to be expansive.”

The cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, first filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, an anti-affirmative action group, argued that the universities discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preferences to Black, Hispanic and Native American students. The universities said they use race-conscious admissions because diversity is critical for learning, a claim that drew skepticism from the court’s conservative supermajority during the October hearing.

Recent polls suggest that most people believe colleges should not consider race or ethnicity in admissions decisions.

If the court rules as expected, the class admitted for the fall of 2024 will look quite different, education officials said.

“We will see a decline in students of color attending college before we see an increase again,” said Angel B. Pérez, the chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “We will be missing an entire generation.”

Mr. Granger, who also serves as president of the association for college admission counseling, expects changes even at the community college level. Citing drops in applications following statewide bans on affirmative action in Michigan and California, he said that some students from underrepresented groups may simply not apply.

The institutions most likely to be dramatically affected are the 200 colleges and universities regarded as “selective” — meaning they admit 50 percent or fewer of their applicants. And for smaller, highly selective liberal arts colleges, like Wesleyan, the impact on college culture could be particularly noticeable, as professors on these tightly knit campuses say their small classes thrive on interactions by a diverse group of students.

A group of 33 of these schools submitted a brief in August to the Supreme Court. Some of them had graduated Black students even before the Civil War.

“The probability of Black applicants receiving offers of admission would drop to half that of white students, and the percentage of Black students matriculating would drop from roughly 7.1 percent of the student body to 2.1 percent,” the brief said, predicting a return to “1960s levels.”

 

Which is the point. Black and Hispanic Gen Z kids, already having their educations the most affected by Covid measures, will have a far tougher time in college in the future. It's going to unwind sixty years of progress for us, because white conservatives don't want educated Black and Hispanic kids, they want subservient ones. 

If you think the wealth gap between Black and white families in America is bad now, give it ten years, when the admissions rates for Black students are down to the low single digits in most colleges, and HBCUs will rapidly be forced out of business by GOP education cuts. Give in ten years to see that college admissions for Black students will be in the low single digits again, and graduation rates will be statistical blips.

"Capitalism needs that underclass" is America's legacy for the last four centuries.

Sunday Long Read: Running, Out Of Time

Our Sunday Long Read this week is a story of redemption, in a fashion. Nearly 25 years after the scandal, Insider's Ryan Lenora Brown takes a look at South Africa's Motsoeneng brothers, Sergio and Arnold, and how their plans to cheat at the country's premier ultra-marathon rocked the nation on the same day Mandela stepped down as the country's leader.

 

Some of you will know this story already. Some of you will think you do. In South Africa, it's lodged in the collective memory, sticky and stubborn. The race. The twins. The watches. The subterfuge. In the world of global running, meanwhile, it still makes lists of the greatest marathon cheats. Even now. Even 23 years later.

But before the scandal and the shame, the comeback and the infamy, was the event itself. And to understand how things ended up where they did, there's nowhere else to start but right there.

It's Wednesday, the 16th of June, 1999. South Africa, five years clean of apartheid rule, is the world's darling. And today happens to be the day that Nelson Mandela will step down as the nation's first Black president. In a few hours, he'll hand over the reins to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki.

At 5:59 a.m., when this story starts, it's still pitch black outside. We're in Pietermaritzburg, a tidy colonial city an hour's drive inland from Durban. In front of the red brick city hall stand 12,794 runners. It's the starting line of the Comrades, a 89.9-kilometer (56-mile) race that cuts through the rolling hills that tumble out from here to the Indian Ocean. In addition to the runners gathered on the start line, and the tens of thousands who will flank the route from here to Durban, many South Africans are watching live on television.

South Africans became obsessed with this homegrown event, the largest and oldest ultramarathon in the world, when a global boycott targeting its racist apartheid government barred the country from big international sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup. In the lonely depths of South Africa's isolation, winners of this insanely long race were catapulted to fame and landed lucrative sponsorship deals. Even after apartheid was toppled and South Africa was invited back into the global fold, the Comrades retained its caché, and now it also had big-ticket prize money.

One of the runners at the start line this morning, not yet attracting any attention, wears the race number 13018 – Sergio Motsoeneng. At 21, he's one of the youngest runners here, competing in a field crowded with world champions, in a sport where people often peak in their 30s or 40s. He's come here from Phuthaditjhaba, an impoverished area near the Lesotho border. He's never run this far in his life.

First prize in the Comrades is 100,000 South African Rand ($16,400 at the time). This year, the big corporate running clubs are offering additional money to runners who could break the course records. Sergio's club is offering a R1 million ($164,000) bonus, the equivalent of 70 years of his father's salary. Sergio has nine siblings to help support, and no job. This race is going to be his ticket out.

From the loudspeakers, the theme song from the running cult film Chariots of Fire blasts into the crowd. Runners peel off the trash bags and ratty sweatshirts they've brought to keep warm while they wait. On a raised platform above the start line, Pietermaritzburg's mayor lifts a handgun. He fires. The race is on.

For years, the idea of winning the Comrades has vibrated through Sergio and his younger brother, Arnold, at a constant frequency. Beginning as teenagers, they won race after race, dominating the sport in Phuthaditjhaba, a small city in the bowl of the Maluti Mountains, a poor and rural corner of the country near South Africa's border with Lesotho. They were rewarded mostly in dinky plastic trophies and bragging rights, plus the occasional cash prize.

But the boys had bigger ambitions. When Sergio was about 15, and Arnold about 13, they started training informally with a white coach named Eugene Botha. Then in his late 20s, Eugene was short and jovial, with the twitchy excitability of a boxer. He'd been a pro runner in Johannesburg. Now, he ran a fire extinguisher business in the town of Bethlehem, 165 miles to the southeast. The tidy town center – once named the cleanest town in South Africa – was nearly all white. The township of matchbox houses and shacks crowded together on its perimeter was all Black.

Eugene ran his business from his living room and coached high school running on the side. Sergio and Arnold noticed that his runners were good. They wanted to know how he did it.

Eugene was charmed by the brothers' drive to show what they could do on a bigger stage. "A runner can always recognize another runner," Eugene tells me. "They were the best in Phuthaditjhaba. At all the races they entered, they won them by far." Sergio, he says, "had the style, the strength, the everything."

Eugene's business often brought him to Phuthaditjhaba, an hour drive from Bethlehem, and he began taking Sergio and Arnold on long runs through the mountains, or to a track for speedwork drills. It wasn't yet clear to him if Sergio and Arnold were just Phuthaditjhaba good or once-in-a-generation good. But they had pluck.

From the start, the boys were impatient. They wanted to run longer distances, the ones with the big prize money. Hold back, Eugene told them. It didn't make sense to punish their bodies like that, not when they had so much potential, not when they were just getting started.

Against their mentor's advice Sergio and Arnold decided the Comrades was the race to win. And not in ten years. Now.

 

 They didn't win, but they did get caught, and the story is worth reading for what happened then, and where they are now.

Last Call For The Boomers Pack It Up

One of the big reasons why unemployment is so low is that Covid deaths have left close to a half-million people being removed from the workforce. But as tragic and as awful as that is, the real workforce reductions in America's worker pool is coming from the fact the oldest Boomers turned 75 in 2020 and that they are starting to retire by the millions.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell struck a particularly somber note at his press conference earlier this week when he mentioned that one reason the labor market is so tight right now is that many workers died from COVID-19.

The big picture: Economists have theorized for a while about the impact of COVID deaths on the labor market. Now, research has started to emerge and key public figures like Powell are starting to talk about it explicitly."Close to a half a million who would have been working ... died from COVID," Powell said while talking about the U.S. labor shortage.

Go deeper: In a footnote to a speech he gave on Nov. 30, Powell estimates that 400,000 working-age Americans died in excess of what was anticipated pre-pandemic.

State of play: Compared to pre-pandemic projections, there are around 3.5 million people effectively missing from the American workforce, as Powell explained in that speech at the Brookings Institution.This number includes older workers who left the labor force earlier than expected. "These excess retirements might now account for more than 2 million of the ... shortfall," he said.

The other 1.5 million comes from a decline in immigration and "a surge in deaths." Overall, 1.09 million Americans lost their lives to COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Our thought bubble: The role these deaths play in the economy often gets overlooked, possibly because it's so devastating to contemplate.But when considering the state of the U.S. workplace, it's worth remembering that many Americans lost colleagues, friends and loved ones over the past few years. It's a toll that will take many years to understand and lifetimes to grieve.

 

With hundreds of thousands of Americans retiring every month, no wonder Republicans want to dismantle the economy and Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs, and no wonder they want Covid precautions to end. 

Dead Boomers don't collect benefits.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

We're at the point where House Republicans are proudly displaying symbols widely adopted by white supremacists at their Capitol offices in a post-January 6th terrorist insurrection America, in full support of  the people who tried to overthrow the government, and frankly they no longer care about or fear the consequences of doing so.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman has a Christian nationalist flag connected to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol displayed outside his congressional office.

On Friday morning, Grothman posted a picture of the flag — which shows an image of a pine tree and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” on a white background — to his Twitter account with a message inviting people to visit him in the Longworth House Office Building.

“With the 118th Congress underway, the People’s House has finally reopened to visitors,” Grothman wrote. “If you’re in Washington DC, I encourage you to stop by my office and say hello!” A white flag with a pine tree and the phrase “Appeal to Heaven” is visible in the photo, placed closer to the door than the U.S. and Wisconsin state flags.

Grothman’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the decision to display the flag, but experts say it has ties to a sect of Christian nationalism that was deeply connected to the planning of the Jan. 6 riot. Christian nationalism is a belief that Christians must fight to take back America from non-Christians.

Matt Taylor, Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, tells the Wisconsin Examiner there were possibly hundreds of Appeal to Heaven flags flying on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 and at least two documented instances in which the flags were flown by rioters who breached the building that day.

The Appeal to Heaven flag, which was designed during the American Revolution and used by the Massachusetts Navy, is associated with George Washington because he commissioned a number of ships that flew the flag. The phrase is taken from the philosopher John Locke and is meant to symbolize citizens’ right to armed revolution against tyranny.

“It’s a reference to John Locke, saying human beings can appeal to government but at some point you have to appeal to heaven, you have to have a revolution and fight it out,” Taylor says. “There’s a revolutionary, anti-democratic dimension to it. They’re saying ‘democracy isn’t working so we have to appeal to heaven for God’s will to be done.’”

Taylor’s research has found that a group of Christian leaders heavily involved in the planning of Jan. 6 have adopted the flag as a symbol of their beliefs.

The flag has also been displayed in a number of state capitol buildings, including Arizona, Missouri and Illinois. Former Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano appears to have a particular fondness for the flag, having made a number of television and public appearances with the flag nearby.

“The prevalence of the Pine Tree flag could be viewed as a dog-whistle signaling kinship between these far-right and white supremacist movements and the Christian Nationalist and Christian Dominionist movements,” Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism reported in 2021.

Grothman knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows exactly who he's sending a message to, and he'll continue to do it until he can no longer get away with it.

Brazil arrested thousands of their insurrectionists.

America elected theirs to run the House.

Phantasma Santos, Con't

Professional con man and Republican Congressman (but I repeat myself) George Santos is discovering the hard way that when your entire life is a juicy lie and that the GOP crime family had dirt on you, there's no longer a reason for the press to stop digging.

 

In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.

Campaigns frequently rely on this kind of research, known as vulnerability studies, to identify anything problematic that an opponent might seize on. But when the report came back on Mr. Santos, the findings by a Washington research firm were far more startling, suggesting a pattern of deception that cut to the heart of the image he had cultivated as a wealthy financier.

Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing. When Mr. Santos disputed key findings and vowed to continue running, members of the campaign team quit, according to three of the four people The New York Times spoke to with knowledge of the study.

The episode, which has not been previously reported, is the most explicit evidence to date that a small circle of well-connected Republican campaign professionals had indications far earlier than the public that Mr. Santos was spinning an elaborate web of deceits, and that the candidate himself had been warned about just how vulnerable those lies were to unraveling.

Fraudulent academic degrees. Involvement in a firm accused of a Ponzi scheme. Multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license. All of it was in the report, which also said that Mr. Santos, who is openly gay, had been married to a woman. The report did not offer conclusive details, but some people briefed on the findings wondered whether the marriage was done for immigration purposes.

It remains unclear who else, if anyone, learned about the background study’s contents at the time, or if the information made its way to party leaders in New York or Washington. Mr. Santos, 34, managed to keep almost all of it from the public until after he was elected, when an investigation by The Times independently unearthed the problematic claims documented by researchers and others that they missed.

After The Times sent a detailed list of questions for this story, a lawyer for Mr. Santos, Joe Murray, said “it would be inappropriate to respond due to ongoing investigations.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Santos’s congressional office did not respond to a similar request for comment.

Mr. Santos himself has admitted to some fabrications, but insists he was merely embellishing his qualifications. He has vowed to serve out a two-year term in Congress. State, local and federal prosecutors are now investigating his activity.

So it's no longer an issue of whether or not Kevin McCarthy and the crooks, thieves, and grifters will protect their fellow criminal George Santos, it's all about why they have to do so in order to save their own hides.

They knew.

The existence of the vulnerability study underscores one of the most vexing questions still surrounding the strange saga of George Santos: How did the gate-keeping system of American politics — Republican leaders, adversarial Democrats and the prying media — allow a fabulist who boasted about phantom mansions and a fake résumé get away with his con for so long?

Interviews with more than two dozen associates, adversaries and donors, as well as contemporaneous communications and other documents reviewed by The Times, show that Mr. Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party.

Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.

But in each case, rather than denounce Mr. Santos publicly, the Republicans looked the other way. They neglected to get the attention of more powerful leaders or to piece together shards of doubt about him, and allowed him to run unopposed in the 2022 primary. Some assumed that Mr. Santos’s falsehoods were garden variety political embellishments; others thought Democrats would do their dirty work for them and Mr. Santos would be exposed in the heat of a general election campaign.

 

"We ran a crook, but it's the Dems' fault they didn't find out!"

 

Sure, Jan.

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

A Trump "alternate" elector for Wisconsin is of course on the Wisconsin Election Commission, and he's more than happy to reveal the goals of the Republican controlled panel to keep Black people from voting however they can.

 

Republican Robert Spindell, a member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is proud as a peacock of the work Republicans did to suppress the vote in Milwaukee in the November 2022 election. Spindell, who also serves as chairperson of the party’s Fourth Congressional District, which includes much of Milwaukee County and almost all of the city of Milwaukee, sent an email to Republicans in the district hailing the party’s success at undermining the democratic process:

“In the City of Milwaukee, with the 4th Congressional District Republican Party working very closely with the RPW, RNC, Republican Assembly & Senate Campaign Committees, Statewide Campaigns and RPMC in the Black and Hispanic areas, we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

“…this great and important decrease in Democrat votes in the City” was due to a “well thought out multi-faceted plan,” Spindell bragged, that included:

• “Biting Black Radio Negative Commercials run last few weeks of the election cycle straight at Dem Candidates…

• A substantial & very effective Republican Coordinated Election Integrity program resulting with lots of Republican paid Election Judges & trained Observers & extremely significant continued Court Litigation.”

Urban Milwaukee shared these comments with Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, who was momentarily stunned.

“Wow,” Wikler said. “That’s as ugly as it gets. I have never seen someone take credit so blatantly for suppressing the vote. We saw the same techniques with the Russian effort to suppress the vote in 2016.”

In the 2016 presidential election, Russian trolls targeted Black people with social media messages attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton to “confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage” Black citizens and other pro-Clinton blocs from voting.

Spindell’s message also pointed to Republican efforts to sell GOP candidates to Black and Hispanic voters, including opening party offices in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and holding Black & Hispanic Republican oriented events, but the net efffect, he noted, was to convince them not to vote. “Promoting the Republican “Cares” Message; pointing out the many flaws of the Democrat Candidates; coupled with a Lack of Interest, persuaded many voters not to vote,” his message bragged.

 

The goal is to rob Black voters of their vote, period. This is what I mean by systemic racism, plain and simple.

 

Never forget that they see us as subhumans who deserve to be controlled like pets or destroyed like vermin.  They hate us that much, and are willing to spend tens of millions to make billions in hurting us.

I'm tired of it.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition

House Republicans are planning to destroy the economy entirely in order to strip funding from Medicaid, infrastructure, and everything else that the Biden administration passed last year.

House Republicans are preparing a plan telling the Treasury Department what to do if Congress and the White House don’t agree to lift the nation’s debt limit later this year, underscoring the brinkmanship newly empowered conservatives will bring to the high-stakes negotiations over averting a U.S. default, according to six people aware of the internal discussions.

The plan, which was previously unreported, was part of the private deal reached this month to resolve the standoff between House conservatives and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over the election of a House speaker. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a leading conservative who helped broker the deal, told The Washington Post that McCarthy agreed to pass a payment prioritization plan by the end of the first quarter of the year.

The emerging contingency plan shows how Republicans are preparing to threaten to not lift the nation’s debt ceiling without major spending cuts from the Biden administration. Congress must pass a law raising the current limit of $31.4 trillion or the Treasury Department can’t borrow anymore, even to pay for spending lawmakers have already authorized. Economists warn that not raising the debt limit could cause the United States to default, sparking a major panic on Wall Street and leading to millions of job losses.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Friday said that the Treasury Department will begin “extraordinary measures” next week to ensure the federal government is able to meet its payment obligations but that it cannot guarantee the United States will make it beyond early June without defaulting. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated Friday that the administration will not negotiate over the debt ceiling.

Treasury Department aides declined to comment on the GOP plan, and a spokesman for McCarthy did not return requests for comment.

Understand that if the debt ceiling breaches, the economy collapses. These idiots are about to destroy the country's economy for years, if not decades. Massive inflation, interest rate hikes, and unemployment going fro 4% to 14% overnight is just the beginning.

In the preliminary stages of being drafted, the GOP proposal would call on the Biden administration to make only the most critical federal payments if the Treasury Department comes up against the statutory limit on what it can legally borrow. For instance, the plan is almost certain to call on the department to keep making interest payments on the debt, according to four people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. House Republicans’ payment prioritization plan may also stipulate that the Treasury Department should continue making payments on Social Security, Medicare and veterans benefits, as well as funding the military, two of the people said.

Such a move would be unprecedented and hugely controversial, and even releasing the plan could turn into a major political liability for the GOP. A hypothetical proposal that protects Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and the military would still leave out huge swaths of critical federal expenditures on things such as Medicaid, food safety inspections, border control and air traffic control, to name just a handful of thousands of programs. Democrats are also likely to accuse Republicans of prioritizing payments to U.S. bondholders — which include Chinese banks — over American citizens.

“Any plan to pay bondholders but not fund school lunches or the FAA or food safety or XYZ is just target practice for us,” a senior Democratic aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a proposal that hasn’t yet been released publicly.

McCarthy and House conservatives intentionally left the details of the prioritization plan unsettled in their initial agreement, with the understanding that it could take weeks for Republicans to decide which federal spending programs must be protected, the two people familiar with the talks said, and amid uncertainty about the best way to draft the legislation.

 

So the House GOP will decide who lives and who dies. Millions, maybe tens of millions, will be out of work. Entire government departments will be shut down and the impact of misery will be immediate. There's no way these clowns will get a loaded revolver pointed at Uncle Sam's head through the Senate, let alone Biden's desk, so we're looking at a wipeout of trillions of dollars.

 

Not to mention that the secondary knock-on effects will trigger economic disasters across the country. It will be absolute chaos, and people will suffer and die as a result.

 

They'll blame Biden for it. They won't be able to "prioritize" a damn thing, because the economy will break completely.

We warned all of you this was coming, and people voted to break the government anyway.