Caring About Carolina

With dozens of rural hospitals closing in the wake of COVID-19, North Carolina Republicans are realizing that dead constituents have a difficult time voting GOP and and now finally working with state Democrats and Gov. Roy Cooper to expand Medicaid in the state after resisting it for more than a decade.

The top leaders in North Carolina’s legislature reached an agreement that is expected to expand Medicaid coverage. The momentous deal, announced Thursday, is the culmination of more than a decade of political wrangling and a Republican change of heart.

The deal will allow North Carolina, at no cost to state government, to give health insurance to hundreds of thousands of the state’s working poor. The federal government will pay for 90% of the cost, and the rest will be covered by a new tax on hospitals and insurance companies.

House Speaker Tim Moore said that factor — as well as the fact that the federal government will also pay North Carolina $1.8 billion extra if expansion passes — was a big motivating factor for GOP leaders like him to change their minds and support Medicaid expansion, after spending over a decade fighting against it.

“I mean, it’s staggering numbers,” Moore said.

Democrats have pushed for expansion for years. The state had around 900,000 uninsured residents in 2021 — nearly one in every 10 people — and expanding Medicaid would allow most of those people to have health insurance.

But Republicans fought it, in part because of its association with former Democratic President Barack Obama — Medicaid expansion only exists because of Obamacare — but also because of fears that Republicans in Congress would repeal Obamacare, leaving states on the hook for the extra costs of expansion. After national Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare under President Donald Trump, despite controlling both Congress and the White House, it put local GOP leaders more at ease about the future of the program.

Another major factor that caused GOP lawmakers to change their minds in 2022: The 2021 stimulus package, signed into law by Democratic President Joe Biden, that offered signing bonuses to states that expanded Medicaid — in North Carolina’s case, the $1.8 billion that Moore mentioned.

Biden reacted happily to Berger and Moore’s announcement Thursday. “This is what I’m talking about,” Biden said in a statement, adding for national context: “That'll be 40 states who've expanded. 10 more to go.”

We'll see if any other states sign on this year. I doubt it, however. Texas, Florida and Georgia are the big ones, as are the rest of the Southeast, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Wyoming.  Hell, even South Dakota has gotten on board.

Maybe red states should be taking care of their residents rather than wasting time with anti-trans bills and fascist, unconstitutional bullshit, but that's just me speaking.

Even Kentucky figured this out, folks.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

If a Black or Muslim person detonated seven pipe bombs over the course of the last three months and destroyed six vehicles and a mailbox, FOX would have been screaming about ANTIFA TERRORISTS IN OUR MIDST for weeks.  But if multiple white suspects were brought in with white supremacist Nazi stuff and meth all over their hideout apartment, well you won't hear a peep.

 

A man with a large collection of Nazi and white supremacist regalia has been arrested in connection with a string of pipe bombings around Fresno, California.

Police say that Scott Anderson, 44, was responsible for seven pipe bombings in total since Dec. 13. Six of the devices were placed under vehicles (one of which was a county probation vehicle) and the seventh explosion involved a mailbox.

Though no one was injured in the bombings, the devices were becoming more sophisticated over time, Fresno Police Chief Paco Balderrama said in a press conference Wednesday.


“It became apparent very quickly that the suspect, or suspects, in this case were progressing in skill level of making bombs, and also their frequency,” Balderrama said.

Anderson is currently facing two sets of charges, federal and state. Four of Anderson’s alleged associates—Paul New, Amanda Sanders, Frank Rocha, and Steven Burkett—are also facing an array of state charges, including possession of bomb making materials, selling methamphetamine, and owning guns despite prior felony convictions. 

 

And when I say Nazi and meth paraphernalia were "all over" the apartment, I mean all over it.

Bomb components and meth were seized in Fresno by the joint task force. https://t.co/8CHX8mhNeY

— Fresno Bee (@FresnoBee) March 2, 2023

 

"Nazis Bomb Fresno In Months-Long Terror Campaign" is not something I expected to type but there you are. 

We're at the point where we should regularly be expecting stuff like this in 2023, and it's only going to get worse.

Last Call For The Big Lie, FOX News Edition, Con't

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent argues that with the recent revelations involving the network's defamation case, it's well past time for Democrats to stop treating FOX News as anything other than the propaganda arm of the GOP.

 

For years, Democrats have been deeply conflicted about Fox News. At times, they’ve shunned the network as an irredeemable source of disinformation, boycotting it or banning it from covering Democratic presidential primary debates. But such efforts have been temporary: They have tended to resume appearing on the network and have reverted to treating it as more or less a news channel, albeit a hostile one.

Now, however, it’s becoming clear that interacting with Fox News as a news outlet in any sense is no longer an option for Democrats. In light of the news that network personalities knowingly deceived viewers about the 2020 election for cynical pecuniary purposes, Democrats plainly have to take on Fox News in a new way. And some of them know it.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment like this, where a major news network has been exposed as deliberately deluding its viewers or readers,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me. “This is a seminal moment in the history of mass media. And we need to treat it that way.”

But what should that look like?

This week, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled an aggressive posture in a letter to Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. The two New York Democrats demanded that the network get star anchor Tucker Carlson and others to recant their lies about the 2020 election on the air. The letter said:

Though you have acknowledged your regret in allowing this grave propaganda to take place, your network hosts continue to promote, spew, and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day.

This might be the first time that the Democratic congressional leadership has formally labeled Fox News content “propaganda.”

The term is entirely apt. As newly revealed texts from Carlson and other on-air personalities and executives demonstrate, they feared that telling their audience the truth about the 2020 vote could cost them a disastrously high number of viewers. Instead, Fox News personalities kept lying about it while executives looked the other way.

Carlson even rage-texted that a Fox News reporter who fact-checked President Donald Trump’s lies about Dominion Voting Systems and the ballot count should be fired for “measurably hurting” News Corp.’s “stock price.” The texts, which emerged in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, also show that Carlson and host Sean Hannity agreed that the channel’s accurate call of Trump’s loss in Arizona threatened its “brand.”

Murdoch himself admitted in a deposition that Fox News had failed to do enough to prevent its personalities from pushing lies about the election. In short, the network deliberately sought to keep its viewers captive in its propaganda bubble to keep ratings up — and revenue flowing.

Given these revelations, doesn’t that oblige Democrats to adopt an approach commensurate with the reality that Fox News is systematically and concertedly deceiving millions of people about the most fundamental workings of our governing institutions?

 

It does, and Democrats should stop going on FOX News completely. The White House should boot FOX News from the White House Press Room, and the White House Correspondents' Association should toss FOX to the wolves.

None of this will happen of course, so We go back to trying to beat them at their own games instead of dismantling the problem.

Should Democrats again refrain from appearing on Fox News? They have long been conflicted about this, with some arguing that Democrats shouldn’t forgo the opportunity to reach right-leaning voters wherever possible. But in light of the new revelations, there might be a better way to think about it.

Dan Pfeiffer, who was senior communications adviser to President Barack Obama, says Democrats should remember that their appearances on Fox News will never reach many conservative voters in unadulterated form. A Democrat’s quotes will inevitably be diced into incriminating bites and fed to a larger conservative audience via high-rated opinion shows and right-wing social media.

However, Pfeiffer says, because a Democrat’s appearance on Fox News will intrinsically generate media interest, party members should appear if they want to — but with eyes wide open, expressly to create viral moments that will reach the Democratic base and independent voters.

“Go on looking for a fight,” Pfeiffer advises. “The press will cover what you say on Fox.” As a result, he says, this will facilitate “reaching people outside of the Fox audience.” Similarly, strategist Simon Rosenberg is urging fellow Democrats to confront Fox News’s mythmaking by “getting loud” themselves, to displace right-wing agitprop with Democrats’ own media-conscious messaging and theater.

Such ideas seem more in tune with the realities of today’s media ecosystem than other tactics Democrats have toyed with. For instance, it has been suggested that Democrats consider steps such as trying to get Fox News expelled from the White House press corps.

Ultimately, that seems trivial and small. Democrats should proceed from an enlarged understanding of the network’s role as a kind of Death Star in the broader universe of right-wing and GOP information warfare. As Brian Beutler notes, when House GOP leaders granted Carlson exclusive access to Capitol riot surveillance footage, this constituted a clear declaration that the party fully endorses Fox News’s efforts to swamp our politics with propaganda, and sees the outlet’s interests as synonymous with its own.

The real lesson from the revelations is that this Fox-GOP synchronization will remain fundamental to Republican and right-wing politics for the foreseeable future. Like it or not, Democrats are in an information war. As they work through their response, specific tactics seem less important than internalizing this baseline realization and allowing it to shape everything they do.

 

I'm loathe to admit it, but loud shouting on FOX in order to throw red meat (blue meat?) to Dems is better than letting FOX draft Dems in their information war. We'll see if any Dems are up to the challenge, and the few who are wouldn't get on FOX for precisely that reason. It's still FOX's network, you see.

Trying to use FOX against the GOP is...a...strategy. I'm not sure if it's the best one. On the other hand, it's certainly better than the current "I'll go on FOX to make my case to right wing white rural voters" strategy, because rural white right-wing voters want everyone involved in liberalism dead or in prison because they don't consider Dems or their voters as human.

So, there's that.

Israeli A Problem Here, Con't

The phoenix-like rise of Benjamin Netanyahu from the ashes of defeat a few years ago really is the defining story of the nation of Israel as it has gone from a state created for the preservation and safety of the Jewish people to one wholly dedicated to the open genocide of Palestinians.

 

Israel’s far-right finance minister’s call for a Palestinian town “to be erased” was harshly condemned by US State Department spokesperson Ned Price on Wednesday, who described the comments as “repugnant” and “irresponsible.”

Bezalel Smotrich, who also leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, said earlier on Wednesday that the Palestinian town of Huwara “needs to be erased.”

The incendiary comment was in reference to the town in the occupied West Bank where two Israeli brothers were shot and killed on Sunday, prompting a rampage through the area by Israeli Jewish settlers that left at least one Palestinian man dead, others injured, and homes and cars burned.

Smotrich was asked Wednesday why he had liked a post on Twitter after the brothers were shot, but before the settler rampage, saying that Huwara should be erased.

“I think the village of Huwara needs to be erased,” he told a reporter at a conference run the Israeli business magazine The Marker. “I think the State of Israel needs to do this, and not – God forbid – private citizens.”

Price issued a strong condemnation from the US State Department podium Wednesday, saying, “I want to be very clear about this. These comments were irresponsible. They were repugnant. They were disgusting.”

“And just as we condemn Palestinian incitement to violence, we condemn these provocative remarks that also amount to incitement to violence,” he said at a State Department briefing.

Price also called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “and other senior Israeli officials to publicly and clearly reject and disavow these comments.”

“We condemn, as we have consistently, terrorism and extremism in all of its forms, and we continue to urge that there be equal measures of accountability for extremist actions, regardless of the backgrounds of the perpetrators or the victims,” he said.

 

Netanyahu built his comeback along with Israel's far-right fascists who want to see Palestinians wiped off the face of the Earth in a precarious coalition of zealots, revanchists and hardliners, so he can't push too hard or it will all come down. On the other hand, the Biden administration is making it very clear that there are big red lines and that crossing them will cost Netanyahu dearly.

Without US support, Israel is in dire trouble. But without his rogue's gallery of a cabinet, Netanyahu is in trouble himself.

Don't expect the situation to get much better here, and for it to get infinitely worse for Palestinians.

The High Price Of A Dollar Store

It really says something that the reason that the retail apocalypse didn't happen over the last three years was because so much commercial real estate went to discount stores like Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree. In fact, one-third of the retail stores opened during the last two years were dollar stores, and while that means thousands of new locations and jobs, some towns and cities are fighting back and sending these retailers packing.

Since 2019, at least 75 communities have voted down proposed dollar stores, while roughly 50 have enacted moratoriums or other broad limits on dollar store development, according to a new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an organization that is critical of corporate retailers and their impact on communities.

By comparison, from 2015 to 2018, about 25 communities voted down proposed dollar stores while only six enacted moratoriums or ordinances limiting their growth.

Although the number of blocked stores is much smaller than the thousands that Dollar General and similar chains have opened in recent years, the movement against the industry has created an unusual group of allies. On many other issues, they disagree, but they are united in their fight against dollar stores.

Rural, Republican-leaning communities in places like southern Virginia and North Carolina are pushing back against dollar stores. (In 2020, President Donald J. Trump easily carried Morgan, Minn.) And leaders in cities like Toledo, Ohio, and Birmingham, Ala., have also mounted opposition, saying the stores are fueling crime and unhealthy food choices. Across Georgia, 18 cities and towns have restricted dollar store development, according to the think tank’s report.

The stores typically operate with lean staffing, and their employees, by some measures, are paid at the bottom of the retail industry’s scale. According to a survey by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, 92 percent of Dollar General workers earn less than $15 an hour, lower than many other companies surveyed, including Burger King, Walmart and Dunkin’. About 20 percent of Dollar General workers earn less than $10 an hour.

At the same time, the company is highly profitable. In December, Dollar General said its quarterly operating profit had increased about 10 percent from a year earlier while net sales had increased 11 percent, to $9.5 billion. Dollar Tree, which also owns the Family Dollar chain, is posting strong results as well. On Wednesday, Dollar Tree said its profit in fiscal year 2022 increased 23 percent to $2.2 billion and net sales rose 7.6 percent to $28.3 billion.

More than one-third of all stores that opened in the United States in 2021 and 2022 were dollar stores. Dollar General alone opened 2,060 locations during those years, far more than any other retailer, according to Coresight Research, and the company now operates 19,000, more than twice as many as Walmart and Target combined.

“As divided as Americans are politically, there’s remarkable agreement that too much of what passes as a legitimate business model is, in fact, fundamentally destructive and unfair,” said Stacy Mitchell, a co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Federal policymakers have let big corporations run amok. Cities and towns of all stripes have learned that if you want to protect your community, you have to do it yourself.”

 

Some areas are blocking the stores, some are regulating them heavily, like Dekalb County, Georgia.

When Lorraine Cochran-Johnson was first running for a seat as a county commissioner in DeKalb County, Ga., in 2018, dollar stores were not something she paid attention to. But after a woman at a campaign event warned her about the stores’ impact on Black neighborhoods, she began to do some research online and by simply looking around her district, just east of Atlanta.

The stores were mostly in predominantly Black neighborhoods. She also witnessed, over a two-week span, two brazen thefts at the same dollar store.

She talked with one of the cashiers about the crimes. “She told me, ‘This is business as usual,’” Ms. Cochran-Johnson said. “There was a normalcy to this situation that no one should find normal.”

Ms. Cochran-Johnson, a Democrat, was elected to the commission in 2019. The next year, she persuaded the commission to pass a moratorium on dollar store developments in DeKalb County.

The moratorium ended in December, but the county is putting into effect new requirements for dollar stores, including that they install video surveillance in their stores and parking lots and turn over security camera footage to the police within 72 hours of a crime. A new store cannot be within a mile of an existing store, and 10 percent of a store’s shelf space must be dedicated to “healthy foods,” a category that includes frozen vegetables.

“This is about community and creating the best outcomes,” Ms. Cochran-Johnson said. 

 

So yes, dollar stores are increasingly providing better, healthier options for shoppers, and it's not like huge grocery oligopolies like Kroger and Walmart don't need direct competition. The problem is, both sets of stores have their own problems, and food inflation over the last two years has only made these companies more profit at our direct expense.

Last Call For Ridin With Biden, Con't

President Biden and Senate Democrats have been putting pressure on Big Pharma to cap insulin for all patients at $35 for more than a year now (as Republican blocked that measure in Congress) but today drugmaker Eli Lilly announced they will do just that.

 

Eli Lilly will cap the out-of-pocket cost of its insulin at $35 a month, the drugmaker said Wednesday. The move, experts say, could prompt other insulin makers in the U.S. to follow suit.

The change, which Eli Lilly said takes effect immediately, puts the drugmaker in line with a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, which in January imposed a $35 monthly cap on the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for seniors enrolled in Medicare.

President Joe Biden praised the move in a tweet, calling on other drugmakers to also lower insulin prices. Biden made insulin costs a focus of his State of the Union speech last month.

The American Diabetes Association also applauded the decision, and encouraged other insulin manufacturers to lower costs.

Insulin makers have faced pressure from members of Congress and advocacy groups to lower the cost of the lifesaving medication. Insulin costs in the U.S. are notoriously high compared to the costs in other countries; the Rand Corporation, a public policy think tank, estimated that in 2018, the average list price for one vial of insulin in the U.S. was $98.70.

"Patients should have a consistent and lower cost experience at the pharmacy counter," David Ricks, Eli Lilly’s CEO, said on a press call Wednesday.

The cap automatically applies to people with private insurance. People without insurance will be eligible as long as they sign up for Eli Lilly’s copay assistance program.

That program began providing insulin to patients — regardless of their insurance statuses — for no more than $35 a month in 2020 because of the pandemic.

The cap applies to all of Eli Lilly’s insulin products, said Kelly Smith, a spokesperson for the company. In addition to the cost caps, the company will lower the list price for several of its products, including Humalog, this year.

Ricks said that the decision came as a result of conversations between the company and members of Congress about the cost of the medication.

The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act resulted in a "split situation" in the U.S., he said, where seniors benefited from a $35 out-of-pocket monthly cap, but people with private insurance and the uninsured did not.

 

Another impressive victory for the American people here. And yes, other Big Pharma companies need to follow suit.

 

Good job, Dems.

Wacky Fascist Roundup Time

Republicans in Oklahoma, Florida and Iowa are pushing legislation to make their polical enemies as miserable as possible as GOP fascism rolls on across the USA. First, Oklahoma is making all gender-affirming care ineligible for insurance and banning procedures completely for those under 18.

 

The Oklahoma House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would prohibit gender transition services for minors.

House Bill 2177 would ban health care professionals from providing, attempting to provide or providing a referral for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgeries for minors. State Reps. Kevin West, R-Moore, and Jim Olsen, R-Roland, co-authored the measure.

The House passed the bill with an 80-18 vote.

"This legislation is about protecting our children from those who would seek to profit from their gender confusion," West said in a news release. "As a state, we must not be partner to irreversible health practices that permanently change the bodies of our children before they are of an age where they can fully understand the consequences of their decisions."

The bill allows exceptions for minors with a medically verifiable disorder. The legislation grants a six-month time period to tape off any minor currently on hormone therapy.

House Bill 2177 also prohibits insurance coverage for gender transition services performed within Oklahoma on any minor or adult.

"Common sense tells us that the decisions people make as a teenager may be shortsighted and later regretted, especially in regard to a major action like these irreversible procedures," Olsen said. "Even one child who undergoes a life-altering procedure and later laments their decision is one too many. I'm proud to stand against these reprehensible actions and proud to protect Oklahoma's children."

Groups – including Freedom Oklahoma, the ACLU of Oklahoma and Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes – have spoken out against the bill and call on the legislature to end an attack on best-practice medical care for transgender Oklahomans.

 

The bill would also allow anyone who received these services to file action up to age 45.  

Meanwhile in Florida, Republicans are trying to outlaw the entire Florida Democratic Party.

The Florida Democratic party would not exist if a new Senate bill is passed and signed into law.

Spring Hill Republican Senator Blaise Ingoglia has filed SB 1248, which would be called "The Ultimate Cancel Act."

While it does not mention the Democratic party's name, it would direct the Florida Division of Elections to "immediately cancel the filings of a political party, to include its registration and approved status as a political party, if the party’s platform has previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude."

Southern Democrats advocated for slavery during the Civil War.

Under the Bill, registered Democrats would be automatically re-registered as having "no party affiliation." The Democratic party officers could reorganize, but only under a substantially different name.

"For years now, leftist activists have been trying to "cancel" people and companies for things they have said or done in the past. This includes the removal of statues and memorials, and the renaming of buildings. Using this standard, it would be hypocritical not to cancel the Democrat Party itself for the same reason," explained Sen. Ingoglia.

 

That's entirely not a fascist, authoritarian thing to do, isn't it?

Finally, Iowa Republicans are planning a direct challenge to Obergefell v Hodges by trying to ban same-sex marriage as "religious freedom".

Nearly eight years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and several months after Congress codified gay nuptials, Iowa legislators proposed banning such unions in their state constitution.

“In accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s God, the state of Iowa recognizes the definition of marriage to be the solemnized union between one human biological male and one human biological female,” says the joint resolution, introduced Tuesday by eight Republican members of the state House.

If the measure becomes law, it would conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges, and Congress’ bipartisan passage of the Respect for Marriage Act late last year. Therefore, it is unclear that such a law could be enforceable, as federal law and the federal Constitution take precedence over state law.

State Rep. Brad Sherman, one of the bill’s eight co-sponsors, said in an email that the joint resolution "would take several years to accomplish."

"Should the people of Iowa vote for such an amendment, laws would have to be adjusted to make laws fair for all," he said.

The seven other co-sponsors did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Several Iowa Democrats were quick to criticize the proposal, saying it would take the state — which became one of the first to legalize same-sex marriage in 2009 — “backwards.”

“No, @IowaGOP, we will not be going back to the days when committed, loving same-sex couples don’t have the same right to marriage equality as everyone else,” state Rep. Sami Scheetz tweeted. “This kind of disgusting hatred and backwards thinking has no place in Iowa. And I’ll fight it every single day.”

This is clearly being set up as a massive SCOTUS fight for 2024, where they clearly expect both Obergefell and the Respect for Marriage Act to get trashed, and a Supreme Court that would side with Iowa in this case would absolutely put us on the 8-lane interstate highway to a Christian white supremacist theocracy and eliminate the entire Civil Rights era in the name of "closely held religious beliefs".

Things are getting scary out there, folks. Republicans want LGBTQ+ folks and hell, even Democrats eliminated. They're going to certainly try it. 

There is darkness and buckets of blood down this path, I guarantee.

Lights Out For Lightfoot

Lori Lightfoot becomes the first Chicago Mayor to lose a re-election bid in my lifetime, as she barely got 16% of the vote and failed to make an April runoff.

 

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her bid for re-election Tuesday, ending her historic run as the city’s first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve in the position.

The Democratic incumbent failed to gain enough votes in the nine-person race to move on to an April 4 runoff election, according to projections by The Associated Press.

Paul Vallas, a former superintendent of Chicago schools, will face Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union.

Ideologically, the choice between Vallas and Johnson is stark. Vallas ran as a moderate law-and-order candidate, while Johnson ran on an unabashedly progressive agenda.

But Chicagoans sent a message that they wanted change, rejecting both an incumbent mayor and a sitting congressman. Lightfoot is the first incumbent elected Chicago mayor to lose re-election since 1983.

The mayor conceded defeat Tuesday night at her party in downtown Chicago, saying, "Obviously we didn't win the election today, but I stand here with my head held high."

Lightfoot has been dogged by persistent crime in the city, which has been a top concern among Chicagoans. Crime spiked within her term, though the mayor has repeatedly touted that it dropped year-over-year in 2022.

Vallas was widely expected to emerge from the first round of voting, having built his campaign around a tough-on-crime theme and garnering support in the vote-rich northern and northwestern sides of the city. He also gained the backing of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police.

It's a bitter end to a tumultuous tenure for Lightfoot, who quickly developed an image as a national lightning rod for conservatives and repeatedly clashed with institutional interests, from the Chicago Teachers Union to the media to the police rank and file. She was at times lauded for her handling of the pandemic but saw violent riots in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of a white police officer.

Lightfoot faced long odds and was in danger of an early re-election knockout. Having lost the support she once held along Chicago’s lakeshore neighborhoods and with major labor unions working against her, Lightfoot was among seven Black candidates competing for votes among the city’s Black population. But she faced stiff competition, particularly from Johnson, who had the backing and organizational benefits of the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, as well as Willie Wilson, a Black entrepreneur who had been polling ahead of Johnson.

 

Lightfoot's spiral into oblivion should be held as a warning sign to both Eric Adams in NYC and  Karen Bass in LA. What voters in America's biggest, bluest cities want is somebody who actually gets shit done, and so far both Bass and Adams are headed for the trash heap, especially Adams.

 

Lightfoot made the mistake of picking fights with everybody in Cook County, and she lost those fights substantially. To not even get 20% of the vote as an incumbent is an embarrassment.  Ross Barkan at NY Magazine sums it up:

The nonpartisan race attracted national attention because it offered the rarest of political tableaus: an incumbent mayor struggling for survival. After winning a commanding election victory four years ago on a platform of political and police reform, Lightfoot was forced to govern through crises that would break any executive: a deadly pandemic and a long summer of social unrest. Homicide rates spiked in Chicago as residents, overwhelmingly, began to worry about crime more than any other pressing issue. And Lightfoot, a former prosecutor who had never held elected office before, stumbled repeatedly as she strained to hold together the coalitions that made her mayor in the first place.

Lightfoot alienated just about every ideological faction in Chicago. The city’s second Black mayor, Lightfoot battled Johnson, a proud progressive, for support in Chicago’s pivotal African American neighborhoods. Left-leaning organizations and local leaders viewed Lightfoot with increasing skepticism, portraying her as a pro-police neoliberal like her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel. She managed to feud, almost equally, with two influential unions that hold starkly different political views: the Chicago Teachers Union, which is left-wing and backed Johnson, and the city’s police union, Fraternal Order of Police, which is headed by a proud Donald Trump supporter.

We'll see how April's runoff turns out, I hope Brandon Johnson can prevail, but I'm expecting Vallas to win. Lightfoot however, well, good riddance.

 

Any Chicagoans want to chime in, feel free.

Last Call For Supremely Unforgiving

It's pretty clear from the oral arguments in today's SCOTUS hearing on President Biden's student debt forgiveness program that there's five, if not six votes to scrap the idea completely, and at the minimum the argument is whether even congressional approval would be constitutional.

Conservative justices holding the Supreme Court’s majority seem likely to sink President Joe Biden’s plan to wipe away or reduce student loans held by millions of Americans.

In arguments lasting more than three hours Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts led his conservative colleagues in questioning the administration’s authority to broadly cancel federal student loans because of the COVID-19 emergency.

The plan has so far been blocked by Republican-appointed judges on lower courts.

It was not clear that any of the six justices appointed by Republican presidents would approve of the debt relief program, although Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett appeared most open to the administration’s arguments.

Biden’s only hope for being allowed to move forward with his plan appeared to be the slim possibility, based on the arguments, that the court would find that Republican-led states and individuals challenging the plan lacked the legal right to sue.

That would allow the court to dismiss the lawsuits at a threshold stage, without ruling on the basic idea of the loan forgiveness program that appeared to trouble the justices on the court’s right side.

Roberts was among the justices who grilled the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Elizabeth Prelogar, and suggested that the administration had exceeded its authority with the program.

Roberts pointed to the wide impact and expense of the program, three times saying it would cost “a half-trillion dollars.” The program is estimated to cost $400 billion over 30 years.

“If you’re talking about this in the abstract, I think most casual observers would say if you’re going to give up that much ... money. If you’re going to affect the obligations of that many Americans on a subject that’s of great controversy, they would think that’s something for Congress to act on,” Roberts said.

Kavanaugh suggested that the administration was using an “old law” to unilaterally implement a debt relief program that Congress had rejected. He said the situation was familiar: “in the wake of Congress not authorizing the action, the executive nonetheless doing a massive new program.”

That, he said, “seems problematic.”

Kavanaugh noted that the administration was citing the national emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic as authority for the debt relief program. He argued that some of the “finest moments in the court’s history” have been “pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power.”

 

I know redicting SCOTUS is a mug's game as I've said in the past, but even I don't have any optimism of a win here. This is just six conservative justices being cruel for cruelty's sake, and they're going to take the opportunity to be terrible people.

 

If the standing issue is the only defense the Biden administration has here, this case is already pushing up daisies.

 

Bonus points for everyone who'll blame Biden for this in 2024 and solemnly declare they'll never vote Democratic again, as if somehow abdicating voting leading to Republican wins isn't what put six conservatives on SCOTUS in the first place.

The Big Lie, FOX News Edition

Another court filing in the Dominion Voting Services defamation case against FOX News finds that under oath, FOX chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted some particularly nasty stuff in a deposition last month.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, and that he could have stopped them but didn’t, court documents released on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, according to a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

Asked whether he doubted Mr. Trump, Mr. Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”

Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated as it tries to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a reckless pursuit of ratings and profit.

Proof to that effect would help Dominion clear the high legal bar set by the Supreme Court for defamation cases. To prevail, Dominion must show not only that Fox broadcast false information, but that it did so knowingly. A judge in Delaware state court has scheduled a monthlong trial beginning in April.

The new documents and a similar batch released this month provide a dramatic account from inside the network, depicting a frantic scramble as Fox tried to woo back its large conservative audience after ratings collapsed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss. Fox had been the first network to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden on election night — essentially declaring him the next president. When Mr. Trump refused to concede and started attacking Fox as disloyal and dishonest, viewers began to change the channel.

The filings also revealed that top executives and on-air hosts had reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to various fictitious allegations about Dominion. These included unsubstantiated rumors — repeatedly uttered by guests and hosts of Fox programs — that its voting machines could run a secret algorithm that switched votes from one candidate to another, and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.

 

Kinda hard for Rupert to throw Trump under the bus when he's admitting to FEC violations in the process, too.

 

Dominion details the close relationship that Fox hosts and executives enjoyed with senior Republican Party officials and members of the Trump inner circle, revealing how at times Fox was shaping the very story it was covering. It describes how Mr. Murdoch placed a call to the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, immediately after the election. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch testified that during that call he likely urged Mr. McConnell to “ask other senior Republicans to refuse to endorse Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and baseless claims of fraud.”

Dominion also describes how Mr. Murdoch provided Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, with confidential information about ads that the Biden campaign would be running on Fox.

 

I'm pretty sure Dominion's going to get every dime of that $1.6 billion and then some. Oh, and just maybe people go to jail?

 

At any rate, if there still remained any doubt that FOX is not a news organization but the corporatized media arm of the GOP, and therefore shouldn't be subject to journalistic protections in any way, that died this week. 

Good luck with your new owners, FOX.

 

Ron's Gone Wrong, Mouse Trap Edition

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has just scored a resounding victory in his battle with Disney, and any business in Florida needs to be paying attention lest they become his next target of extortion.

More Florida Republicans who dished out big bucks to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ re-election bid have been appointed to powerful public jobs—this time on the revamped board of a special tax district that oversees the Walt Disney Company.

DeSantis announced Monday that Martin Garcia, a Tampa lawyer, was appointed to the board of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District—previously named the Reedy Creek Improvement District—just a year after his private investment firm, Pinehill Capital, cut a check to DeSantis’ campaign for $50,000.

Garcia will now join four other DeSantis allies—also appointed Monday—in replacing senior Disney employees on the district's board, the latest bout in DeSantis’ clash with the entertainment giant since it opposed Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in 2022.

The special district had allowed Disney to act as its own government for over five decades, controlling everything from land use to running its own fire department, and saving itself millions in taxes annually.

Now, the district will be at the mercy of DeSantis and his five appointees, as the governor now has the legal power to replace the district’s board unilaterally at his beck and call.

“Today, the corporate kingdom finally comes to an end,” DeSantis said Monday in Central Florida. “There’s a new sheriff in town, and accountability will be the order of the day.”

Joining Garcia on the board is fellow conservative Bridget Ziegler, the wife of the Florida GOP’s chair and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, who also recently donated to DeSantis; Mike Sasso, an attorney who donated over $9,000 to Florida Republican candidates, including DeSantis, last election; Brian Aungst Jr., a Central Florida attorney who specializes in land use law; and Ron Peri, who founded the ministry “The Gathering,” which regularly spews nonsense about “Christian Nationalism” and the decaying of local schools.

Ziegler lashed out at Disney last year when it asked a marching band to cover up its Native American logo to perform at Magic Kingdom. The school’s principal didn't oblige, pulling the band from the performance altogether.

“Shameful to see Disney continue to use children as pawns to advance their WOKE political agenda,” Ziegler blasted to Twitter. “Kudos to staff for not kowtowing to their demands.”

While her recent comments have been critical of Disney, old Instagram posts showed she visited the parks and their on-property hotels with her family in 2015 and 2016.

Since then, however, Ziegler has become a conservative firebrand in Florida, particularly on issues related to education. She’s repeatedly gone on Fox News to rage about critical race theory and gender ideology in Florida schools, calling the former “anti-American.”

The Florida Senate, which is controlled by Republicans and regularly operates at the behest of DeSantis, will have to confirm the governor’s picks. The board members will not be paid a salary.

If approved, the board will garner the power to manage the special district’s infrastructure, services, taxing authority, and more. DeSantis suggested Monday that the board might push for a say in Disney’s content if the corporation wants its tax-friendly home base to remain as is.

“When you lose your way, you gotta have people that are going to tell you the truth,” DeSantis said. “All these board members very much would like to see the type of entertainment that all families can appreciate.”

No matter how you feel about Disney, a multi-billion dollar entertainment conglomerate that own huge percentages of global TV, movies, sports programming and resorts on the entire planet, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to ESPN to its own cruise line, understand that now Ron DeSantis owns Disney. If they don't play ball with his agenda, he's in a position to exact billions of dollars in retributive tax punishment on the company, crash the stock, and coerce the company's board to do his bidding as far as hiring and firing goes.

It's flat out extortion, and everyone knows it. Don't expect Disney's lawyers to get much traction, either: DeSantis will simply have his lackeys in Tallahassee change the laws again to favor the state over Disney. 

Now it's very possible that DeSantis will end up overplaying his hand like he's doing with the state's education system, but he can do a lot of damage in the meantime. And yes, what DeSantis is actually doing is exactly what Republicans accuse Democrats of doing all the time: forcing corporate decisions to further their agenda.

Leave it to the fascist to make me actually root for the $200 billion entertainment monolith because it's now the lesser of two evils, for crissakes.

Last Call For The Failbert Files

Author, cartoonist, professional racist shitbag and "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams went on a racist tirade on his YouTube channel that was so vile that it actually got him fired from the funny pages and the bookstores.

 

Andrews McMeel Universal, the company that syndicates “Dilbert,” said it is cutting ties with the comic strip’s creator, Scott Adams, after his racist remarks about Black Americans led hundreds of newspapers across the country to drop the satirical cartoon.

In a joint statement, Andrews McMeel Chairman Hugh Andrews and CEO and President Andy Sareyan said that the syndication company was “severing our relationship” with Adams and condemned his remarks, saying “we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”

The publisher of a forthcoming book from Adams also said Monday that it would no longer move forward with publishing the title.

The Penguin Random House imprint, Portfolio, said it won’t publish Adams’ upcoming book, “Reframe Your Brain.” The book was set to release in September.

“My publisher for non-Dilbert books has canceled my upcoming book and the entire backlist,” Adams wrote Monday on Twitter. He also said his book agent “canceled” him.

Portfolio published Adams’ previous titles, including “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” and “Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America.”

 

Observations:

 

1. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA this is the funniest this guy has been in the entire 21st century so far!
2. Asshole.
3. No seriously, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
4. Adams has been a MAGA jackass for years now if anyone had bothered to notice, and Dilbert was pulled from nearly 80 newspapers the last time he went on a racist tirade back in September.
5. He claimed that his UPN Dilbert show was canceled in 2000 because he's white.
6. If you haven't seen the Dilbert Show, it was Rick and Morty for Gen X. We thought it was edgy back then and for 2000 it was. It got canceled because the ratings were terrible, even for UPN.
7. Asshole, still.
8. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA what an asshole. Even Ol' Teddy Beale despises him.
9. Racist ASSHOLE. 
10. Why wasn't he canceled sooner after finally, after three decades, introducing the first Black character in the strip as Dave, the engineer who "identifies as white" back in May? Guess we'll never know.
    

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Ken's Definitely Gone Wrong, Con't

Not to be one-upped by Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and his war on public education, Black and Hispanic history, and LGBTQ+ America, Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton is declaring war on the entire federal government.

 

Earlier this month, Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit claiming that the $1.7 trillion spending law that keeps most of the federal government — including the US military — operating through September of 2023 is unconstitutional.

Paxton’s claims in Texas v. Garland, which turn on the fact that many of the lawmakers who voted for the bill voted by proxy, should fail. They are at odds with the Constitution’s explicit text. And a bipartisan panel of a powerful federal appeals court in Washington, DC, already rejected a similar lawsuit in 2021.

Realistically, this lawsuit is unlikely to prevail even in the current, highly conservative Supreme Court. Declaring a law that funds most of the federal government unconstitutional would be an extraordinary act, especially given the very strong legal arguments against Paxton’s position.

But the case is a window into Paxton’s broader litigation strategy, where he frequently raises weak legal arguments undercutting federal policies before right-wing judges that he has personally chosen because of their ideology. And these judges often do sow chaos throughout the government, which can last months or longer, before a higher court steps in.

Texas’s federal courts give plaintiffs an unusual amount of leeway to choose which judge will hear their case, an odd feature of these courts that Paxton often takes advantage of to ensure that his lawsuits will be heard by judges who are likely to toe the Republican line. These decisions, moreover, appeal to the deeply conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Paxton filed the Garland case in Lubbock, Texas, where 100 percent of all federal lawsuits are heard by a Republican appointee. Two-thirds of such cases are automatically assigned to Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who will hear this suit.

Hendrix, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, is a bit of an unknown quantity. In his brief time on the bench, Hendrix did hand down one poorly reasoned decision undercutting a federal statute that requires most hospitals to perform medically necessary abortions. But Hendrix’s thin record does not tell us enough to know whether he’d actually be so aggressive as to declare most of the United States government unconstitutional.

The Texas federal bench is also riddled with judges — Matthew Kacsmaryk, Drew Tipton, and Reed O’Connor are probably the best known among them — who’ve largely behaved as rubber stamps for any right-leaning litigant who appears before them. It’s notable that Paxton chose to bring this case in Lubbock, where he was likely to draw Hendrix as his judge, rather than bringing this suit before Kacsmaryk or Tipton (Kacsmaryk hears 100 percent of federal cases filed in Amarillo, Texas. Tipton hears all cases filed in Victoria, Texas). But it remains to be seen whether Hendrix will show the same contempt for the rule of law as a Kacsmaryk or a Tipton.

So, while this case probably isn’t an immediate cause for alarm, it is a reminder that no lawsuit filed in Texas’s federal courts can safely be ignored.

 

Paxton, who is arguing that the current government spending bill is illegal because of House proxy voting, doesn't actually have to win the case.

 

He just has to get a judge to issue an injunction while the case is being decided. An injunction against the entire federal government. Boom, immediate government shutdown.

 

It would get worse, of course. Any new budget would have to be redone on terms of the House GOP Circus of the Damned writing the new plan.  They could then get every cut they want, because the hostage (in this case, the entire US economy) would have been shot already and would be bleeding out. 

Hours would matter, and gamesmanship could lead to a disaster that would break the country's machinery of operation.

Of course, everyone would blame Biden. Biden could ignore the order, but that's an immediate Constitutional crisis, and one with real consequences far into the future.

I'm really hoping this case gets dismissed, but again, all it takes is one crapass Trump judge to derail the country.

We'll see.

It would be a nightmare.

The Jackson Blues, Con't

In seething rage after the state GOP was called out for destroying the state capital's water system, Mississippi Republicans are now moving to put as much of the city of Jackson under state control as they can, and are passing legislation to make the changes permanent. The result is an effort to effectively dismantle the city's government and to rip power from Black leaders in the most Black city in the country.

 

Citing rising crime, Mississippi’s Republican-controlled House recently passed a bill that would expand areas of Jackson patrolled by a state-run Capitol Police force and create a new court system with appointed rather than elected judges. Both would give white state government officials more power over Jackson, which has the highest percentage of Black residents of any major U.S. city.

The state Senate has also passed a bill to establish a regional governing board for Jackson’s long-troubled water system, with most members appointed by state officials. The system nearly collapsed last year and is now under control of a federally-appointed manager.

The proposals for state control have angered Jackson residents who don’t want their voices diminished in local government, and are the latest example of the long-running tensions between the Republican-run state government and the Democratic-run capital city.

“It’s really a stripping of power, and it’s happening in a predominantly Black city that has predominantly Black leadership,” said Sonya Williams-Barnes, a Democratic former state lawmaker who is now Mississippi policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund. “You don’t see this going on in other areas of the state where they’re run by majority white people.”

Norris notes state government officials have long been unwilling to help Jackson with the water system and other problems.

“We had to go through all this by ourselves. Solo,” he said. “Now, all of the sudden you want to come and take it and say, ‘OK, well, we’re going to take over.’ You know, treating us like kids. We’re not kids.”

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said the proposal for courts with appointed judges reeks of apartheid and “plantation politics.”

“If we allow this type of legislation to stand in Jackson, Mississippi, it’s a matter of time before it will hit New Orleans, it’s a matter of time before it hits Detroit, or wherever we find our people,” Lumumba said.

The sponsor of the expanded police and court bill, Republican Rep. Trey Lamar, from a rural town more than 170 miles (275 kilometers) north of Jackson, said it’s aimed at making Mississippi’s capital safer and at reducing a backlog in the judicial system.

“I can assure you that the bill has zero racial intent whatsoever,” said Lamar, who is white, in response to arguments that courts with appointed judges would disenfranchise Jackson voters. “There is nothing racial about the bill on its face, and there is no intent for the effect to be racial."

 

Not any more racial that cross burnings or poll taxes, folks. 

Nowhere is the Republican playbook to destroy government more apparent than in the Jim Crow South, where a city regularly doomed by a white supremacist state government is set up to fail at every turn, and then the local government services are taken into receivership by the kindly Republicans trying to "save" those people from themselves.

It's American apartheid. Subjecting Black folk to a white court system, a white police department, white water and infrastructure, and white government without any say over their own city.

And yes, Mayor Lumumba is right, cities like New Orleans, Detroit, Milwaukee, Louisville, and Omaha are next if the GOP has its way.

You may want to wash your hands of red states and let the people who live there "get what they deserve" but the people who live there don't deserve this.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump, "bastion of free speech" that he is, had pathetically thin skin white in the White House and still does to this day.

 

IN EARLY 2018, the American national security apparatus was fixated on reports that North Korea was building nuclear weapons that could reach the U.S. or that Russia was plotting chemical weapons assassinations in Europe. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump was busy targeting his idea of an enemy of the state: late night host Jimmy Kimmel.

The then-president, according to two former Trump administration officials, was so upset by Kimmel’s comedic jabs that he directed his White House staff to call up one of Disney’s top executives in Washington, D.C., to complain and demand action. (ABC, on which Jimmy Kimmel Live! has long aired, is owned by Disney.)

In at least two separate phone calls that occurred around the time Trump was finishing his first year in office, the White House conveyed the severity of his fury with Kimmel to Disney, the ex-officials tell Rolling Stone. Trump’s staff mentioned that the leader of the free world wanted the billion-dollar company to rein in the Trump-trashing ABC host, and that Trump felt that Kimmel had, in the characterization of one former senior administration official, been “very dishonest and doing things that [Trump] would have once sued over.”

The incident was so bizarre that news of it spread around the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Other administration officials who had nothing to do with the pressure campaign began hearing from their contacts at Disney about how confused they were that the White House kept telling them Trump wanted Kimmel to tone down his anti-Trump humor.

“At least one call was made to Disney [that I know of],” a third former official, who worked in the Trump White House, recalls. Sources spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely and to preserve ongoing relationships in Trumpworld and conservative circles. “I do not know to who[m], but it happened. Nobody thought it was going to change anything but DJT was focused on it so we had to do something…It was doing something, mostly, to say to [Trump], ‘Hey, we did this.’”

Rolling Stone was able to identify one target of the White House’s ham-fisted, destined-to-fail pressure campaign: former Disney top lobbyist Richard Bates. The sources say Trump’s staff reached out to Bates to convey the president’s anger regarding Kimmel’s monologues and jabs. Bates, who served as a prominent Disney executive and was a Washington fixture for over 30 years, passed away in December 2020.

The pressure campaign ultimately failed, but the previously unreported effort marked yet another moment in which Trump showed an eagerness to wield the immense powers of his office for personal gain and highly petty reasons. (Indeed, one of Trump’s two impeachments was caused by this very impulse.)

And now, as Trump campaigns for the White House once again, there is no sign that his desire to use federal power in this way has ebbed an inch. In a recent radio interview, the former president said he’s entitled to a “revenge tour” if he wins the presidency in 2024 while claiming he wouldn’t avail himself of the opportunity in the event he’s reelected.

But throughout his presidency, Trump devoted inordinate amounts of time toward threatening late night television shows and celebrities over their jokes about the famously thin-skinned former game show host.

 

Remember, Trump wanted FCC chair Ajit Pai to pull CBS's broadcast license over Stephen Colbert's constant Late Show mockery of Trump as "obscenity", as well as NBC's Saturday Night Live for the same reason. Now we find out they went after ABC and Jimmy Kimmel too.

 

You'd better believe that in a second Trump term in 2024, criticism of Tang the Conqueror on the nation's late-night airwaves won't be dismissed so easily. 

The Vaxx Of Life, Con't

The US Energy Department under Secretary Jennifer Granholm say that new information has moved the agency's outlook on the origins of Covid-19 to the lab leak hypothesis, rather than natural occurrence, but this should be taken with grains of large, visible rock salt. 

 

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

So the majority of the country's agencies that have looked into Covid-19's origins, and the DNI's office, still are concluding that it's natural spread of the virus, most likely from a Chinese "wet market". It would be nice to know what this new intelligence is, frankly.  The agency that did change its mind still assesses the reality with "low confidence" at best.

Perhaps the House GOP Circus of the Damned will make its own "lab leak" to explain why the DoE changed its mind.

The bigger issue remains though that the majority of the agencies involved still consider the natural occurrence theory to be correct three years later.

That didn't change today.

Sunday Long Read: Training The Coup-Coup Birds

Nobody who has followed ZVTS over the last 14 years and change should be surprised that the US Military has been training African officers to take over their respective countries in military putsches over the last several years, because our chief export is "coups" and has been for longer than my entire lifetime. Rolling Stone's Nick Turse has the details:

 

ONE YEAR AGO, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba was a military leader on the rise. The 41-year-old officer had just overthrown Burkina Faso’s democratically-elected government and was about to be sworn in as the West Africa’s nation’s new president. Wearing a red beret and military fatigues, he appeared on TV and threw down a gauntlet. “To…gain the upper hand over the enemy, it will be necessary… to rise up and convince ourselves that as a nation we have more than what it takes to win this war,” he said.

Just nine months later, an upstart underling—34-year-old Captain Ibrahim Traore—decided Damiba did not have what it takes to win the war and toppled him. Traore, now the youngest world leader, recently shored up his popularity by ordering a withdrawal of French forces fighting a long-running Islamist insurgency by groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Burkina Faso.

When Damiba seized power last year, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) admitted that the United States had mentored him over many years. Damiba’s putsch was just the latest in a recent spate of coups in West Africa by U.S.-trained officers. But when Rolling Stone asked AFRICOM if Traore was the latest to follow in this tradition, they couldn’t say. “We are looking into this,” said Africa Command spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, noting the command needed to “research” it. “I will let you know when I have an answer.”

Four months later, AFRICOM still hasn’t provided an answer. In fact, the U.S. government appears unwilling to address its role in mentoring military officers who have sown chaos in the region; men who have repeatedly overthrown the governments the U.S. trains them to prop up.

For decades, U.S.-trained officers —from Haiti’s Philippe Biamby and Romeo Vasquez of Honduras to Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan— have overthrown U.S.-allied governments all over the world. Rarely, however, have so many coups been so concentrated in a region over such a short period of time.

Last fall, after returning from a trip, alongside other top State Department and Pentagon officials to the Sahelian states of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, Ambassador Victoria Nuland was upbeat. “We went to the region in force. We were looking, in particular, at how the U.S. strategy towards the Sahel is working. This is a strategy that we put in place about a year ago to try to bring more coherence to our efforts to support increased security,” she said during an October conference call with reporters.

After Rolling Stone pointed out that U.S.-trained military officers had conducted seven coups in these same countries—Burkina Faso, three times; Mali, three times; and Mauritania, one time—since 2008, Nuland was less sanguine. “Nick, that was a pretty loaded comment that you made,” she replied. “Some folks involved in these coups have received some U.S. training, but far from all of them.”

The fact is the leaders of all of these coups have received significant U.S. training. Before Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba overthrew Burkina Faso’s president last year, for example, he twice participated in an annual U.S. special operations training program known as the Flintlock exercise. He was also previously accepted into a State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course; twice attended the U.S.-sponsored Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa; and twice participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil Military Support Element.

In 2014, another U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida—schooled via a Joint Special Operations University counterterrorism training course at Florida’s MacDill Air Force Base and a military intelligence course that was financed by the U.S. government—seized power, during popular protests against a presidential power-grab, in Burkina Faso. The next year, yet another coup in that country installed Gen. Gilbert Diendéré, another prominent Flintlock attendee.

Col. Assimi Goïta, worked with U.S. Special Operations forces for years, participating in both Flintlock exercises and a Joint Special Operations University seminar at MacDill Air Force Base—and also headed the junta that overthrew Mali’s government in 2020. After staging the coup, Goïta stepped down and took the job of vice president in a transitional government charged with returning Mali to civilian rule. But less than a year later, he carried out his second coup.

Similarly, in 2012, Captain Amadou Sanogo, who learned English in Texas, received infantry-officer basic training in Georgia, and underwent military intelligence schooling in Arizona, and overthrew Mali’s democratically elected government. “America is a great country with a fantastic army,” he said after the coup. “I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.” In 2008, the Pentagon-funded Stars and Stripes reported that Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the leader of a coup against Mauritania’s elected president, had also “worked with U.S. forces.”

Why did these officers who were trained by the United States to defend their governments topple them instead? If Nuland has any idea, she won’t say. “You need to talk to them about why they are overthrowing their governments,” she told Rolling Stone, referring to the coup-makers.

 

A lot of crazy conspiratorial right-wing trash keeps popping up next to State Department career diplomat Victoria Nuland's name (see Sy Hersh's Nord Stream pipeline fantasy) but I'll be damned if the truth about her isn't actually worse.

She comes off as Julia-Louis Dreyfus's character in the MCU, and if you haven't seen Falcon and the Winter Soldier or Wakanda Forever, know that she's bad, bad news from an evil US career civil service person standpoint.

Still, this remains a huge problem for the Pentagon and the Biden administration.

Last Call For Sam's Club

Indicted billionaire crypto-scammer Sam Bankman-Fried is now facing a second set of federal indictments involving campaign finance violations, as he illegally spent $10 million on midterm campaigns for Democrats...and more than twice that on Republicans in 2022, and there's more hidden.

 

On Thursday prosecutors updated their indictments against former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, expanding on allegations the feds initially filed in December. Bankman-Fried ran the now-collapsed FTX crypto-trading platform and made a name for himself as a disheveled, casually dressed boy genius. He made no secret of his desire to use his new wealth to support Democratic candidates. According to campaign finance records, in 2022 he was a prolific donor—the sixth largest overall—who contributed more than $36 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes. But the indictments on Thursday, which added four new campaign finance charges to the one that was filed last year, seem to support a story that Bankman-Fried began telling after FTX’s collapse. They suggest that Bankman-Fried actually donated far more money than was previously known—to politicians on both sides of the aisle—but that he hid much of it.

According to the new indictments, Bankman-Fried made “over 300 political contributions, totaling tens of millions of dollars,” that were illegal because they were made through another donor giving on his behalf—an arrangement known as a straw donor. The exact total isn’t cited, but the new filing does note that internal bookkeeping records at Alameda Research—an investment firm that Bankman-Fried also operated and which investigators say improperly mixed its assets with FTX’s—suggest that as much as $100 million may have been set aside for political contributions.

One key thing that’s missing from all of this is the names of the recipients of all that money—and, more importantly, whether they were aware of the alleged scheme. Straw donor schemes are not that unusual; during every election cycle, several are discovered and prosecuted. The reasons for using straw donors vary. Sometimes the goal is to exceed the legal limits on how much a donor can give to a candidate, and other times the purpose is to hide from the public eye who a politician’s financial backers really are. According to the new indictment, Bankman-Fried was mostly concerned about the latter and used two different employees to make donations for him—one to give to lefty candidates that Bankman-Fried didn’t want to be publicly associated with, and the other to give money to Republicans.

“All my Republican donations were dark,” Bankman-Fried said in an interview after FTX’s collapse. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super-liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”

Again, according to the indictment, Bankman-Fried’s intentions were to use his donations to influence politicians. At one point, federal prosecutors are alleging, a political consultant working for Bankman-Fried told the FTX executive charged with donating to progressive candidates and groups that they had to donate $1 million to support a candidate who was linked to LGBTQ causes. The consultant wrote in a message to the executive that “in general, you being the center left face of our spending will mean you giving to a lot of woke shit for transactional purposes.” The executive balked, but the indictment says that on Bankman-Fried’s orders, the donations were made.

Donations made for “transactional purposes” could themselves be illegal—campaign finance law says that donations can’t be made in exchange for a quid pro quo. In fact, that’s known as bribery. All the more reason, from Bankman-Fried’s perspective, to keep the donations hidden. But contributions that are so large and so frequent and made for “transactional purposes” also raises the possibility that—unless they were made completely ineptly—the beneficiaries of the donations may well have known who was really supplying the money and why.

Recipients of straw-donor schemes are rarely held accountable when prosecutors file charges. There are a variety of reasons for that, including a general reluctance to charge elected officials and the difficulty of proving their knowledge of the true source of the money. But the schemes also rarely involve such large sums of money—it’s much harder to say a politician didn’t know about donations as large as those Bankman-Fried is alleged to have made, especially when there’s apparent evidence that the donor was so focused on “transactional purposes.”

Of course not all of the money went directly to campaigns—some of the largest donations were apparently to super-PACs, which are not legally allowed to coordinate their activities with candidates. But candidates are often very aware of who the super-PAC donors are. In fact, candidates often fundraise for the super-PACs directly. Whether the money went to a candidate or to a super-PAC supporting candidates, if Bankman-Fried made the donations with “transactional purposes” in mind, it means a lot of politicians likely knew what he was doing.

If Bankman-Fried really did direct as much as $100 million to support politicians across the political spectrum—and everything about Bankman-Fried and his calculations is a big “if” at this point—it’s increasingly difficult to see how those who took the money shouldn’t be held accountable as well.

 

He didn't try to buy off a few politicians.

 

He tried to buy an entire Congress. 

The people in that Congress who took his money knowingly?

They need to go.

Our Little White SUpremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester recently confirmed he's running for a fourth term in 2024, and the response from the Trumpiest state in the union was immediate.

A Kalispell man accused of threatening to injure and murder Montana U.S. Senator Jon Tester was arraigned on Feb. 23 on an indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Friday in a news release.

Kevin Patrick Smith, 45, pleaded not guilty to an indictment filed on Feb. 22 charging him with two counts of threats to injure and murder a United States senator, the news release said.

If convicted of the most serious crime, Smith faces 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathleen L. DeSoto presided. Smith was detained pending further proceedings.

The news release detailed the following, citing court documents:

On Jan. 30, Smith allegedly made numerous threatening calls to Sen. Tester by phone, leaving voicemails at Sen. Tester’s office in Kalispell. In one instance, Smith stated:

“There is nothing I want more than to have you stand toe to toe with me. You stand toe to toe with me. I rip your head off. You die. You stand in a situation where it is physical between you and me. You die.

“I will never stop. … And I would love to destroy you and rip your (obscenity) head from your shoulders. That is no problem. Call that a threat. Send the FBI.

“I would love to (obscenity) kill you. I would love to see your FBI at my door. I would love to see something in the news.”

According to court documents, Smith allegedly acknowledged in the recording that he threatened Sen. Tester, and such threats were “on purpose.”

Court documents further allege that on Feb. 1, the FBI contacted Smith and instructed him not to threaten physical violence toward Sen. Tester. On Feb. 10, Smith again called Sen. Tester, stating in one voice message, “I want you to understand. If I ever pull my trigger, I know what dies.”

As further alleged in the indictment, Smith stated in another voicemail, “It is important for you to understand that I won’t live under your rule.…If it becomes time that I die, I’d take a significant number with me.”

Tester is a Democrat and Montana’s senior senator. He announced this week he will seek a fourth term in 2024.

Tester was reportedly reconsidering running earlier this month and was undecided after the first threat. I'm glad that he wasn't scared off, we need him on the Democratic side.

But we need to be real about the dangers facing Democrats at all levels heading into 2024.