It's 2008 All Over Again, Con't

The 2023 version of the 2008 Big Bank Casino Bonanza is nowhere near over, as California regional bank First Republic has finally failed over the weekend, with the FDIC seizing the bank's remaining assets to sell to Jaime Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.

 

Federal regulators have seized First Republic Bank and sold it to JPMorgan Chase Bank in a deal aimed at quelling renewed weakness in the nation’s banking industry.

In a statement issued early Monday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said that all depositors of First Republic Bank will become depositors of JPMorgan and will have full access to their deposits.

The deal involved a “highly competitive bidding process,” the FDIC said in its statement, but it did not say what JPMorgan is paying to purchase First Republic.

Under the deal, JPMorgan acquires “substantially all” First Republic assets and agrees to assume responsibility for all of its deposits, including those above the federal insurance limit of $250,000 per account. First Republic had about $229.1 billion in assets and $103.9 billion in deposits.

JPMorgan personnel are now reaching out to First Republic customers, CEO Jamie Dimon said.

Federal regulators approached JPMorgan about bidding on First Republic’s assets, said Jeremy Barnum, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer. The bank “did not seek out this deal,” Barnum told reporters Monday.

Dimon reiterated that the broader banking system was sound and said the deal would stabilize the system after the country’s third bank failure in two months. Still, Dimon acknowledged that as interest rates continue to rise, the economy is not immune to consequences or stress.

“Hopefully people will be properly prepared for it,” Dimon said.

In March, JP Morgan was one of the banks that put billions of dollars into beleaguered First Republic, as regulators and the industry scrambled to contain a crisis that had led to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Barnum said the ultimate demise of First Republic wasn’t a sign that that effort failed. Rather, it helped buy time “when time was needed.”

JP Morgan is not assuming First Republic’s corporate debt or preferred stock, it said in a statement.

First Republic’s failure is expected to cost the FDIC about $13 billion, the agency said. The money will come from the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund, which insured banks pay into every quarter.

First Republic’s 84 offices in eight states will reopen as branches of JPMorgan, and depositors will be able to access all of their money when they open Monday.

The closure and sale of First Republic comes seven weeks after the abrupt failure of Silicon Valley Bank in California prompted an extraordinary federal rescue effort aimed at averting a wider financial crisis.

Unlike SVB, which failed in a matter of days, First Republic has been wobbling for weeks. The delay gave regulators and industry executives time to evaluate the bank and prepare for its demise.

 

The difference between SVB's failure in March and First Republic this morning is that the big investors were given time to make an orderly exit and even profit from First Republic.

 

Everyone's acting like this is the end of the performance rather than the coda to the first movement of the symphony where the second biggest bank failure in US history just happened. 

If the Fed raises interest rates even more to slow down the inflation train, more of this will happen. And if the GOP causes a debt default on America's credit, all bets are off even in the Big Casino.

It's going to be a wild summer.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

If Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's terrible little swamp kingdom antics are really meant as red meat for GOP presidential primary consumption, then he doesn't have many takers at his feast table. CNN's Harry Enten:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the past few months running to the right ahead of his expected entry into the 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign. From signing into law a six-week abortion ban to fighting with Disney, the governor has focused on satisfying his party’s conservative base.

So far at least, those efforts have not paid off in Republican primary polling, with DeSantis falling further behind the current front-runner, former President Donald Trump.

Things have gotten so bad for DeSantis that a recent Fox News poll shows him at 21% – comparable with the 19% that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, is receiving on the Democratic side. 

DeSantis was at 28% in Fox’s February poll, 15 points behind Trump. The Florida governor’s support has dropped in the two Fox polls published since, and he now trails the former president by 32 points.

The Fox poll is not alone in showing DeSantis floundering. The latest average of national polls has him dropping from the low 30s into the low 20s.

This may not seem like a big deal, but early polling has long been an indicator of how well presidential candidates do in the primary the following year. Of all primary elections since 1972 without incumbents running, candidates at around 30% in early primary polls (like DeSantis was in February) have gone on to become their parties’ nominees about 40% of the time. Candidates polling the way DeSantis is now have gone on to win about 20% of the time. 

I will, of course, point out that 20% is not nothing. DeSantis most certainly still has a chance of winning. The comparison with Kennedy is not a remark on Kennedy’s strength but on DeSantis’ weakness.

There is no historical example of an incumbent in President Joe Biden’s current position (over 60% in the latest Fox poll) losing a primary. At this point in 1995, Bill Clinton was polling roughly where Biden is now, and he had no problem winning the Democratic nomination the following year.

In that same campaign, Jesse Jackson was polling near 20% in a number of early surveys against Clinton. So what we’re seeing from Kennedy now is not, as of yet, a historical anomaly.

 

So no, the notion that the "moderate" Republicans are going to abandon Trump for DeSantis is foolishness.  Yes, something may still happen to Trump, and DeSantis may benefit, but there's way too much baggage working against him.

No, he'll go back to making Florida an authoritarian state like Viktor Orban's Hungary.

Sunday Long Read: Crimes Of Collier County

In 2004, two men vanished in Collier County, Florida. One, Terrance Williams, was Black. Three months apart, Felipe Santos, was Latino. The last time either man had been seen was in the back of a patrol car with a white Sheriff's Deputy named Steven Calkins. Fifteen years later, CNN took a four-year investigation into these disappearances resulting in this week's Sunday Long Read.

“It is my belief that they were killed because of their color,” said Doug Molloy, who was an assistant US attorney in 2004 and led a multi-agency task force that investigated the disappearances as potential hate crimes.

Sheriff’s investigators surveyed the evidence and determined that Calkins was not telling the truth about his encounter with Terrance Williams. One investigator made a list of nearly two dozen untruthful or inconsistent statements that Calkins made about the day he met Williams. In August 2004, about seven months after Williams disappeared, then-Sheriff Don Hunter fired Calkins. As he later wrote, “I have lost trust in Calkins and his ability to describe incidents in detail and to recall them.”

Meanwhile, investigators got to work. They searched the woods and the waters near where the missing men were last seen. They put a tracking device on Calkins’ car. They did a complete forensic inspection of the car, paying special attention to the trunk. No trace of Santos or Williams turned up.

The FBI delivered a target letter to Calkins and asked him to answer questions from a federal grand jury about the disappearances. Calkins declined. And the investigators’ suspicions did not lead to probable cause. No one could prove these were hate crimes, or even crimes at all. Years passed, and the cases remained open, and both men’s children grew up without their fathers. Calkins repeatedly denied harming the men. He was never criminally charged.

Now 68 years old, Calkins was last known to be living in Iowa. Through his attorney, he declined multiple interview requests from CNN.

Marcia Williams kept a lock of her son’s hair, and a picture of him, wearing a navy blue T-shirt, looking at the camera, which made it seem as if Terrance were looking at her when she walked past. And across the Gulf of Mexico, in the state of Oaxaca, friends and relatives remembered Felipe Santos.

“He didn’t deserve to be disappeared in this way,” his friend Francisca Cortés told CNN. “It isn’t right that he hasn’t been found after so many years and we don’t know what happened to him. As his parents say, ‘If we find his remains, we can give him a Christian burial so we have somewhere to cry and pray for him.’ But in this case there isn’t anywhere. And there isn’t any way to do that. Everything is in limbo and we are never going to know what happened.”

In 2019, a CNN reporter began a new inquiry into the disappearances of Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams. Eventually, two more reporters joined the project. Nearly 70 people were interviewed. The reporters filed dozens of open-records requests with government agencies, yielding more than 10,000 pages of documents and many hours of audio recordings.

Using phone records, dispatch logs and interview transcripts, CNN built minute-by-minute timelines of the days each man disappeared. CNN also obtained every available incident and arrest report from Calkins’s career with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, more than 2,000 reports from 1987 to 2004. This story is the result of CNN’s efforts to untangle one of the most disturbing unsolved mysteries in the recent history of American law enforcement.

This is a shocking story, even for a crooked cop true crime tale, and a reminder that American law enforcement has been corrupt, insular, and villainous for decades.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

Folks like Alex Shephard at TNR continue to believe that Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP are trying to run a hostage negotiation and that they are doing it badly, and while that would be true if McCarthy was actually trying to play the standard Washington kabuki script, that's not what is actually going on.

What McCarthy and the Circus of the Damned are actually doing is trying to crash the economy so that America blames Biden and elects the GOP to power in 2024. If you accept they will not negotiate and will kill as many hostages as possible until their terms are 100% met, everything they are doing makes complete sense.

 

McCarthy has been more or less open about the fact that this is not a real bill. “This bill is to get us to the negotiations,” he said on Tuesday. “It is not the final provisions, and there’s a number of members who will vote for it going forward to say there are some concerns they have with it. But they want to make sure the negotiation goes forward because we are sitting at $31 trillion of debt.”

This bill may get the Republican Party to those negotiations over raising the debt limit, which must be done by early June or the United States will face potentially calamitous economic consequences. It’s hard to assess what the outcome of potential negotiations will be, especially since the White House’s position is “Send a clean debt limit bill, or pound sand.” What is clear, however, is that this bill is a disaster for Republicans.

It is not being treated that way everywhere. The New York Times’ Carl Hulse, who should know better, described it as “a narrow win but a win for Speaker Kevin McCarthy nonetheless.” Politico’s Playbook, meanwhile, declared that this was a coronation of sorts, an occasion in which McCarthy “proved his naysayers wrong.” I suppose if you squint a certain way, you can see it, but these laurels should actually be seen as participation trophies.

Sure, if McCarthy had failed to get anything across the line he would have looked completely incompetent, even by the standards of recent Republican House leaders. Nevertheless, a bill filled with devastating cuts and manifestly unpopular positions is arguably worse than getting anything done at all. The GOP passed a messaging bill that provides Democrats with the better message, something that they can use to hurt the GOP in swing districts for the next two years; a bill that shows that Republicans’ ultimate goal is to gut health care and food stamps and education—and even veterans benefits. There is no universe in which a clean bill, raising the debt ceiling and moving on, isn’t more politically advantageous for the GOP.

The whole sorry episode has only shown that Kevin McCarthy just isn’t good at this. It’s never been entirely clear why he wanted to be speaker of the House in the first place. It’s always been clear, however, that he is not up to the task. To gain the gavel, McCarthy had to make a series of humiliating, enfeebling concessions to his far-right flank that more or less disempowered him. Now, put in a position where he needed to get something done, he once again had to cave to the same right flank—indeed, it was Matt Gaetz, who had previously relished holding back McCarthy’s ascendence to the speakership, who forced him to add more draconian Medicaid work requirements to the bill.

McCarthy essentially wakes up every morning conscripted into a race to the bottom by those in his party with the worst political instincts and ideas. This should not be particularly surprising to McCarthy, but his abject supplication is nevertheless notable. This bill does not matter. It will not pass. It is not intended to pass. Republicans had an opportunity to aim a productive salvo at swing voters, the better to convince them that GOP majorities can deliver prosperity, and giving them some sign that the party was tacking back from the heights of extremism that alienated voters in the last midterm elections. Instead, the message being sent is that the party is all about owning the libs and slashing aid for veterans and the poor. The GOP can’t even fake being a party interested in governing anymore. That’s bad news for the man stuck presiding over this clown show.

 

Again, the problem is the assumption that the goal is to get to a negotiation without crashing the economy, and that's completely wrong, and the more quickly people realize this, the fewer people suffer.

 

This isn't a hostage negotiation, it's a hostage execution with manufactured post-facto justification. Republicans are admitting as such as Paul Davies at WaPo explains:

“However you want to frame it, we’ve got to sit down and talk. And so I think it’s critically important that all the parties sit down, at the White House with the president, and start having these conversations. And they should meet every single day until they get there, together,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told reporters Friday.

But those House Democrats, having lost the majority in last November’s elections, lack the leverage to actually start such talks. Instead, from the relatively moderate Coons to a fiery liberal like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Senate Democrats view even a modest concession, such as a relatively powerless debt commission, as a reward for taking this hostage.

“The problem with that approach is that it signals to the rest of the world that America’s commitment to paying its debts is contingent on some underlying political negotiation over spending that is otherwise too damn contentious to get through on its own,” Warren told reporters Thursday.

But this Democratic approach seems to assure that little will happen until the deadline draws perilously close and then, at that momentous hour, assumes House Republicans will cave out of fear for getting blamed for tanking the economy.

That strategy, so far, is nowhere close to working. House Republicans in swing districts are digging in for a protracted fight and expressing little interest in passing a so-called clean debt hike. They are demanding spending cuts that will begin to rein in the debt.

“It’s certain that if we don’t raise the debt ceiling our economy will crash, but if we don’t do things to limit spending, our economy will also crash,” said Rep. Nick LaLota, one of six New York Republicans on the Democratic target list for next year’s elections. “Reasonable people should adopt that dual-pronged understanding.”

“We have to negotiate. Passing a clean debt ceiling [hike] is not going to happen. He’s going to have to meet us partway,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), whose district favored Biden by 6 percentage points in 2020, recently told reporters.

Democrats also seem to be betting that Senate Republicans will step in as more mature political actors and defuse this situation, but even one of the most productive dealmakers is supporting McCarthy’s approach.

“This bill is not the final deal, but it opens the door for a negotiated deal,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said Thursday.

Cassidy noted that in past fiscal showdowns, the perceived victor tended to be the one that made the other party look most reckless.

“Partly the public perception of this is going to be really important,” he said.

 

To recap, Republicans are looking to see how many hostages they can kill and still come out looking like the good guys. The second Democrats give in, that number goes up to "everyone".

Republicans believe they can win the political standoff by making Biden and Democrats look petty by refusing a basic negotiation. Fresh off his narrow win on his debt bill, McCarthy held a valedictory news conference Wednesday evening in Statuary Hall.

“The Democrats need to do their job. The president can no longer ignore [us] by not negotiating,” McCarthy said.

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

It's not that America can't do anything about the 400 million guns in the country, it's that we purposely choose not to do anything about it.

Five people are dead after being shot in a Texas home by a suspect armed with AR-15 style rifle in a horrific series of "execution style" shootings, police said.

The incident occurred at 11:31 p.m. local time when officials from the San Jacinto County Sheriff's Office received a call about harassment in the town of Cleveland, about 55 miles north of Houston.

When authorities arrived at the location, they found several victims shot at the property, police said.

The youngest victim in the shooting was 8 years old and two female victims were discovered in the bedroom lying on top of two surviving children, authorities told ABC News.

Police said they believe the massacre occurred after neighbors asked the suspect to stop shooting his gun in the front yard because there was a baby trying to sleep.

"My understanding is that the victims, they came over to the fence and said 'Hey could [you not do your] shooting out in the yard? We have a young baby that's trying to go to sleep," and he had been drinking and he says 'I'll do what I want to in my front yard,'" San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told KTRK.

He said that authorities believed some of the victims were trying to shield their children -- with bodies found on top of children who were unharmed

"In my opinion, they were actually trying to take care of the babies and keep them babies alive," Capers told KTRK.

 

It's the guns, but it will never stop until we're all dead.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked an assault weapons ban in Illinois, ruling that multiple plaintiffs who sued alleging that the law violates their Second Amendment rights have a “reasonable likelihood” to succeed in their argument.

U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn issued a preliminary injunction on Friday against the state’s Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA), which Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed into law in January to ban the sale and distribution of assault-style weapons, high capacity-magazines and switches that convert handguns into assault-style firearms.

The ruling comes after another federal judge rejected a request to block the law earlier this week.

McGlynn, a Trump appointee, said his ruling is not a final decision on the merits of the case, but he found that the individuals, gun shop, gun range and firearm industry trade association that sued met their burden for an injunction to be issued.

The ruling was issued in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision last year in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down a New York law requiring that applicants for concealed carry permits show “proper cause.” The majority ruled that gun control measures need to be consistent with the country’s “historical tradition.”

 

That "historical tradition" is our 400-year history as a white supremacist nation, and lethal force used against us through technology has long been a part of that.

Welcome to Gunmerica.

 

 

Last Call For Jury-Rigged Gerrymander

When Democrats win state supreme Court races as in Michigan and Wisconsin (or force appointments of liberals as in New York) it opens up a huge realm of possibilities for real progress. 

When Republicans win those races, North Carolina's coming maximum GOP gerrymander is the result.

 

The North Carolina Supreme Court has overturned its own past ruling that said partisan gerrymandering is illegal, clearing the way for Republicans there to redraw the state’s congressional lines in a way that heavily favors the GOP.

The ruling clears the way for North Carolina legislators to aggressively gerrymander the congressional map, which is currently represented by seven Democrats and seven Republicans. Now Republicans in Raleigh could re-create the map they initially passed last cycle which a Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court struck down, netting as many as four seats.

The court issued a 5-2 decision, with the court’s Republican justices voting to overturn the past ruling and the two Democratic justices dissenting. The court flipped from 4-3 Democratic control to 5-2 Republican control during elections last November.

The state court’s ruling issued Friday could also result in the U.S. Supreme Court dropping a closely watched case about the power of state legislatures over federal elections. The justices heard arguments on the issue in December, but signaled last month that they were considering changing course as a result of the effort to get the North Carolina court to reverse its earlier ruling.

In a separate ruling, the court also overturned another one of its past decisions on a voter ID law, on a similar 5-2 split strictly along party lines. That ruling issued Friday will clear the way for a long-litigated photo ID law to go into effect in the state.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who now runs a Democratic redistricting group, denounced the ruling as a nakedly political exercise.

“This shameful, delegitimizing decision to allow the unjust, blatant manipulation of North Carolina’s voting districts was not a function of legal principle, it was a function of political personnel and partisan opportunism,” Holder said in a statement. “Neither the map nor the law have changed since last year’s landmark rulings — only the makeup of the majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court has changed.”

The previous Democratic majority on the state court issued a series of recent decisions in the last year that ruled that partisan gerrymandering was illegal in North Carolina, while also blocking implementation of the state’s photo ID law. The new majority’s decision to rehear arguments on these cases so quickly was an unusual one, and many court observers believed the decision to do so meant that it was a matter of when, not if, the new court would allow for partisan gerrymandering.

In a lengthy decision issued by the court Friday, the conservative justices concluded that they could not adjudicate claims of partisan gerrymandering, saying that is the role of the state legislature.

“There is no judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims. Courts are not intended to meddle in policy matters,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote in his 144-page opinion for the court’s majority.

 

To recap, the corrupt Roberts Court ruled that federal courts have no business interfering in state redistricting because the Voting Rights Act exists to stop disenfranchisement. This of course was just after Chief Justice Roberts gutted the same VRA, making it unenforceable.

Now North Carolina's GOP state supreme court has ruled that the state legislature has ultimate power, and can gerrymander how it sees fit.

Which they will, locking in GOP one-party rule for decades to come.

Like Ohio before it, NC will be a permanent red state by 2024, and along with it will come corrupt one-party GOP rule.

Only by voting in massive numbers will the needle be moved now.

Supremely Corrupt Crooks, Cads, And Creeps

SCOTUS conservatives are corrupt as hell.

We know Clarence Thomas took gifts from conservatives who had business before SCOTUS for decades. We know Neil Gorsuch also had at least one sweetheart property deal with the head of one of America's biggest law firms. We know Chief Justice John Roberts isn't going to lift a finger about any of it. And now, we know the Senate sexual misconduct investigation into Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings left out the sexual misconduct part.

 

A 2018 Senate investigation that found there was “no evidence” to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault against the US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh contained serious omissions, according to new information obtained by the Guardian.

The 28-page report was released by the Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the then chairman of the Senate judiciary committee. It prominently included an unfounded and unverified claim that one of Kavanaugh’s accusers – a fellow Yale graduate named Deborah Ramirez – was “likely” mistaken when she alleged that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a dormitory party because another Yale student was allegedly known for such acts.

The suggestion that Kavanaugh was the victim of mistaken identity was sent to the judiciary committee by a Colorado-based attorney named Joseph C Smith Jr, according to a non-redacted copy of a 2018 email obtained by the Guardian. Smith was a friend and former colleague of the judiciary committee’s then lead counsel, Mike Davis.

Smith was also a member of the Federalist Society, which strongly supported Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination, and appears to have a professional relationship with the Federalist Society’s co-founder, Leonard Leo, whom he thanked in the acknowledgments of his book Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State.

Smith wrote to Davis in the 29 September 2018 email that he was in a class behind Kavanaugh and Ramirez (who graduated in the class of 1987) and believed Ramirez was likely mistaken in identifying Kavanaugh.

Instead, Smith said it was a fellow classmate named Jack Maxey, who was a member of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, who allegedly had a “reputation” for exposing himself, and had once done so at a party. To back his claim, Smith also attached a photograph of Maxey exposing himself in his fraternity’s 1988 yearbook picture.

The allegation that Ramirez was likely mistaken was included in the Senate committee’s final report even though Maxey – who was described but not named – was not attending Yale at the time of the alleged incident.

In an interview with the Guardian, Maxey confirmed that he was still a senior in high school at the time of the alleged incident, and said he had never been contacted by any of the Republican staffers who were conducting the investigation.

“I was not at Yale,” he said. “I was a senior in high school at the time. I was not in New Haven.” He added: “These people can say what they want, and there are no consequences, ever.”

The revelation raises new questions about apparent efforts to downplay and discredit accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh and exclude evidence that supported an alleged victim’s claims.

 

So yeah, Kavanaugh straight-up lied about his alibi on that, and he had help lying about it, aided and abetted by the Federalist Society and the Senate GOP.

Seems like we have a wildly illegitimate court here and when your least horrible member on the conservative side is Amy Coney Barrett, you've got serious problems...

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Team Biden has figured out that Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis having school libraries living in fear and banning books to keep from being defunded is, you know, a major vulnerability for the entire Republican party.

Presidential campaigns often are waged on whether or not the country is ready to “turn the page.” President Joe Biden wants his reelection bid to hinge on whether or not there is a page to turn.

The president’s team has made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos. He referred to GOP efforts to restrict curriculum — Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was the third most banned title in America last year — in his first two campaign videos. He presents himself in each video as the defender of the country’s core values, a bulwark against an extreme Republican Party rolling back America’s freedoms.

The campaign’s first TV ad, a 90-second spot running in seven states over the next two weeks as part of a seven-figure buy, warns Republicans “seek to overturn elections, ban books and eliminate a woman’s right to choose.” Biden followed up with a tweet hitting “MAGA extremists … telling you what books should be in your kids’ schools.” That followed the explicit reference to book bans in Biden’s launch announcement video Tuesday.

The early focus on book banning is part of the campaign’s attempt to reinforce a broader message, said one Democratic adviser involved in the effort: Biden is the only one standing between the American people and a Republican Party determined to roll back rights and limit freedoms.

“People just don’t understand why we should ban books from libraries,” said the adviser, who spoke with candor about the campaign’s strategy on the condition of anonymity. “So it’s a measure of extremism and another thing [Republicans] are trying to take away.”

Biden’s message is based on mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months, as the president’s advisers and the Democratic National Committee have expanded the constellation of pollsters and data analysts tracking voter attitudes and the effectiveness of certain messages.

The potency of book bans, along with issues like abortion and gun safety, is quite clear, according to multiple people familiar with the campaign’s data.

“Book banning tests off the charts,” said Celinda Lake, one of the Democratic pollsters who tested the issue for Democrats. “People are adamantly opposed to it and, unlike some other issues that are newer, voters already have an adopted schema around book banning. They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany.”

Authoritarian book bans: poll-tested, voter disapproved!

I keep seeing all this agita over Biden being too old and too unpopular to win a second term, and all I have to say is "It's pretty easy to beat the party that's in the news weekly for banning books in schools and public libraries."

At least, I hope it is.  I mean, it's not like Trump is disagreeing with the concept, either.

Or, anyone in the GOP, for that matter. This is a slam dunk and I'm glad to see Biden opening with the most obvious "These parties are not the same" comparison in decades.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow

If you're still wondering why Republicans are trying to exterminate LGBTQ+ America now, it's because they are a major part of our future.

 

About 1 in 4 high school students identifies as LGBTQ, according to a report the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday, using data from 2021.

In 2021, 75.5 percent of high school students identified as heterosexual, the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) found.

Among high school students, 12.2 percent identified as bisexual, 5.2 percent as questioning, 3.9 percent as other, 3.2 percent as gay or lesbian and 1.8 percent said they didn’t understand the question.

The CDC says the number of LGBTQ students went from 11 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2021.

The health organization said a potential reason for the increase in LGBTQ students could be from their wording around students who are questioning their sexuality.

“Increases in the percentage of LGBQ+ students in YRBSS 2021 might be a result of changes in question wording to include students identifying as questioning, ‘I am not sure about my sexual identity (questioning),’ or other, ‘I describe my sexual identity in some other way,’” the report reads.

 

Gen Z is asking questions that Republicans don't want answered by anything other than brutality, collective punishment, and genocide. Even if the number is just those who question their sexuality, 1 in 4 Gen Z kids is 25% too many.

 

The GOP knows it has no future in an America that increasingly is not straight, not white, and not Christian. The rest of us have to be cowed or destroyed for that shrinking minority to continue to rule over half the country.

 

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Team Trump has lost yet another court fight trying to block his former VP Mike Pence from testifying in front of a grand jury for Special Counsel Jack Smith.

 

 

Former President Donald Trump has lost an emergency attempt to block former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying about their direct conversations, in the latest boost to a federal criminal investigation examining Trump’s and others’ actions after the 2020 election.

The former president has repeatedly tried and failed to close off some answers from witnesses close to him in the special counsel’s investigation. This latest order from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals likely will usher in Pence’s grand jury testimony quickly – an unprecedented development in modern presidential history.

The decision, from Judges Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Greg Katsas on the DC Circuit, came in a sealed case on Wednesday night that CNN previously identified as Trump’s executive privilege challenge to Pence. No dissents were noted on the public docket.

Trump has tried to block Pence from testifying about their direct communications, even after the former vice president wrote about some of those exchanges and a lower-court judge had ruled against him.

Trump asked the DC Circuit for emergency intervention weeks ago. The court refused to put on hold Pence’s subpoena and to override the lower-court ruling, flatly denying Trump’s requests.

Trump could try to appeal again and even press the issue at the Supreme Court. Yet he gave up pushing several past executive privilege challenges to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation after similar rulings from this court of appeals.

Pence has already said he was not appealing part of a lower court’s decision, and would comply with the subpoena. Judge James Boasberg of the DC District Court has acknowledged Pence could have some congressional protections during the time he served as president of the Senate on January 6, 2021. But that ruling does not appear to prevent him from answering questions before the grand jury about his many conversations with Trump from Election Day on, when Trump and his allies were pressuring Pence to block the congressional certification of the vote.

 

Trump's folks are going to tell him that the last thing he wants is a SCOTUS ruling that can be used against him in the future should he be reelected, and Trump's ego is gargantuan enough to be swayed by that argument. 

But the wheels of justice continue to grind on as Jack Smith and Merrick Garland slowly put together the pieces to build an impregnable case. Too slowly for some, and there are days, but I have to believe that justice will come.

The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Last Call For The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

With WV GOP Gov. Jim Justice expected to announce his bid to take WV Dem Sen. Joe Manchin's job in 2024 this week, Manchin needed some quick political theater to knock the wind out of Justice's announcement sails, and the absence of California's Dianne Feinstein presented the perfect opportunity for some truck-kun kabuki. 

The Senate voted Wednesday to rescind a Biden administration emissions regulation for heavy-duty trucks that Republicans decry as too burdensome, warning it will hurt the trucking industry and have negative ripple effects through the economy.

The vote was 50-49, with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia the only Democrat to vote with Republicans.

Republicans utilized the Congressional Review Act, which allows them to bypass Democrats who control the chamber and force a floor vote to revoke the rule at a majority threshold, not the 60 votes often needed to pass legislation.

The Republican-led House is expected to pass the measure as well, although it’s unlikely either chamber would be able to override an expected veto by President Joe Biden. The Office of Management and Budget issued a veto threat ahead of the vote.

The final rule, which was adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency in December, sets “new emission standards that are significantly more stringent and that cover a wider range of heavy-duty engine operating conditions compared to today’s standards,” according to the EPA, which said the change is needed because emissions from those trucks are “important contributors to concentrations of ozone and particulate matter and their resulting threat to public health.”

 

Of course Biden will veto it should it make it to his desk, so all of this was as fake as pro wrestling. Manchin gets to say he stood up to Biden for WV truckers, and nothing is actually going to happen.

Why Manchin would take his shot on this lets you know just how much of a problem Jim Justice is going to be for Manchin...if Justice can make it through the primary.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

We're at the point where we're headed for the ugly, multi-billion dollar court battle between Disney and Florida GOP GOv. Ron DeSantis, and I'm betting (as I always have) that Disney has better lawyers.

Walt Disney Co. sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday, alleging the Republican governor has waged a “relentless campaign to weaponize government power” against the company amid a protracted fight over a controversial classroom bill.

The federal lawsuit alleges that DeSantis “orchestrated at every step” a campaign to punish Disney that now threatens the company’s business.

The move dramatically escalates the drawn-out feud between DeSantis, who is expected to become a top Republican contender for the 2024 presidential race, and Disney, which is among Florida’s largest employers.

The fight began last year, Disney came out against a Florida bill limiting classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by critics. Soon after, the governor and his allies targeted the special tax district that has allowed Disney to essentially self-govern its Florida operations since the 1960s.

The lawsuit was filed on the same day that the district’s board of supervisors, which DeSantis had picked to take control over Disney’s Orlando-area parks, moved to undo a development deal that it says Disney struck to thwart its power.

The panel unanimously voted to declare “void and unenforceable” that development deal, which was approved shortly before DeSantis replaced the Disney-approved board with his preferred supervisors.

The lawsuit called that action the “latest strike,” saying the development contracts “laid the foundation for billions of Disney’s investment dollars and thousands of jobs.”


“The government action was patently retaliatory, patently anti-business, and patently unconstitutional,” Disney alleged in the civil complaint in U.S. District Court in northern Florida.

 

Two things, one, this is a federal lawsuit, meaning this is going to be appealed to SCOTUS at some point. There's too much at stake for it not to.

 

Second, DeSantis is now welded to the outcome of this trial. He's either the Man Who Destroyed Disney, or the Man Who Was Destroyed By Disney, and there's not much middle ground here.

 

We'll see who wins, but I'm betting it's not going to be DeSantis.

Cruzin' For A Bruisin', Con't

It turns out one of the conversations that former FOX News producer Abby Grossberg has in her collection of evidence in her harassment suit against the network (and now former host Tucker Carlson) involves Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz advising the network on how Senate Republicans could help Trump steal the 2020 election.

Sen. Ted Cruz advocated the creation of a congressionally appointed electoral commission ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to make a credible assessment of unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, according to a recording made by Abby Grossberg, a former producer at Fox News.

The Jan. 2, 2021, recording, provided to The Washington Post by Grossberg’s attorney, largely mirrors previous reports and public statements made by Cruz about efforts to overturn the election results. But the tape featuring a previously private conversation among Cruz, Grossberg and Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on the push to deny the certification of Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, sheds new light on the scope of Cruz’s scheming to assist Donald Trump in overturning Biden’s victory.

Cruz says in the recorded conversation that he successfully organized 11 senators to object to the electoral certification as the mechanism to establish a commission. Cruz was the first senator to object to the electoral college results, joining Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) in challenging Arizona’s electoral certification. The Post has previously reported on Cruz’s proposal of delaying the certification of the electoral college results to spark a 10-day “audit” that could enable GOP state legislatures to overturn the election results.

“You need an adjudicatory body with fact-finding and investigative authority to consider the facts to examine the record and to make determinations — that’s how they did it in 1877,” Cruz told Grossberg and Bartiromo, referencing the commission created to investigate voter fraud in the 1876 Hayes-Tilden election.

Cruz added that he would have rather seen “these facts developed in a court of law” but goes on to cast doubt on the Supreme Court’s ultimate determination to reject the lawsuits filed to challenge the election Trump had lost. “Unfortunately the courts that heard these cases — we did not have a full and thorough consideration,” Cruz said.

Cruz tweeted on Tuesday night in response to the tape, first reported by MSNBC host Ari Melber: “This @msnbc [clown] is breathlessly reporting that I ‘secretly’ said in a phone call … the EXACT same thing I said on national television the next morning! And then said again on the Senate floor four days later.”

In the plan Cruz laid out to the Fox News host and her producer, if a majority of the House and the Senate objected to electoral certification on Jan. 6, 2021, then an electoral commission would be stood up immediately, commencing a 10-day review period to be completed before the inauguration.

If the commission found “credible evidence of fraud that undermines confidence in the electoral results in any given state,” then the state would then call a special session and recertify results, according to Cruz.

“Is there any chance you can overturn this?” Bartiromo asked Cruz.

“I hope so,” he responded.

 

Cruz's defense is that he publicly announced he was trying to help Trump steal the election through the creation of election fraud that didn't actually exist, so I'm not sure why everyone's so upset, other than reminding everyone that Ted Cruz should probably be in prison for seditious insurrection. That was true in January 2021, and it remains true now.

The Road To Gilead Goes Through North Dakota

With a 12-week ban already on the books and facing a state supreme court challenge, North Dakota Republicans passed a more restrictive, even more unconstitutional six-week abortion ban, signed into law Monday by GOP Gov. Doug Burgum.

 

North Dakota on Monday adopted one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country as Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed legislation banning the procedure throughout pregnancy, with slim exceptions up to six weeks’ gestation.

In those early weeks, abortion would be allowed only in cases of rape, incest or medical emergency, such as ectopic pregnancy.

“This bill clarifies and refines existing state law ... and reaffirms North Dakota as a pro-life state,” Burgum said in a statement.

Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide has triggered multiple state laws banning or restricting the procedure. Many were met with legal challenges. Currently, bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy are in place in at least 13 states and on hold in others because of court injunctions. On the other side, Democratic governors in at least 20 states this year launched a network intended to strengthen abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that eliminated women’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy and shifted regulatory powers over the procedure to state governments.

The North Dakota law is designed to take effect immediately, but last month the state Supreme Court ruled a previous ban is to remain blocked while a lawsuit over its constitutionality proceeds. Last week, lawmakers said they intended to pass the latest bill as a message to the state’s high court signaling that the people of North Dakota want to restrict abortion.

Supporters have said the measure signed Monday protects all human life, while opponents contend it will have dire consequences for women and girls.

North Dakota no longer has any abortion clinics. Last summer, the state’s only facility, the Red River Women’s Clinic, shut its doors in Fargo and moved operations a short distance across the border to Moorhead, Minnesota, where abortion remains legal. The clinic’s owner is still pursuing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of North Dakota’s previous abortion ban. 

It’s expected that this new ban will also be the subject of legal challenges.

 

I figure by November 2024, everyone will know of at least one relative, friend, co-worker or acquaintance who was forced to give birth by Republicans. Hopefully they will vote accordingly for the Democrats on the ballot.

 

But North Dakota is yet another one-party rule state by the GOP with supermajorities in both the state House and Senate that would have overridden Burgum even if he was a Democrat. The real problem is that in state after state we're seeing Republicans carve out permanent empires with no hope of Democrats ever getting a lick of power again, and tens of millions of citizens forced into authoritarian rule.

It's a war, and it's one we're designed to lose unless we make major changes in 2024.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump goes on trial today facing allegations of rape from author E. Jean Carroll, who has outlasted and persisted through every dirty trick, legal avenue, stall, quash attempt and everything else Trump has thrown at her just to get to the opening remarks in today's federal proceedings.

 

In a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, a jury will begin hearing E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that former President Donald J. Trump raped her more than two decades ago in a department store dressing room, in a proceeding that seeks to apply the accountability of the #MeToo era to a dominating political figure.

The trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, expected to last one to two weeks, stems from a lawsuit and will take place amid a barrage of legal action aimed at Mr. Trump, who is running to regain the presidency and arguing that the suits and investigations are meant to drag him down.

Ms. Carroll, a former magazine columnist, said nothing publicly about the encounter for decades before publishing a memoir in 2019 that accused Mr. Trump of attacking her.

In the suit, Ms. Carroll, 79, says that one evening in the mid-1990s, she visited the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman, where she was a regular shopper. There, the suit says, she ran into Mr. Trump. The two had met at least once before, and they traveled in the same New York City circles, the suit says. He said he was shopping for a present for “a girl,” and he asked her to advise him. She says she eventually accompanied him to the lingerie department where, she contends, he maneuvered her into a dressing room and raped her.

Mr. Trump, 76, has denied that he raped Ms. Carroll, has accused her of lying and has attacked her repeatedly in public statements and on social media, both while in office and after leaving. In 2019, after she published her account, he called her allegation “totally false” and said he could not have raped her because she was not his “type.” Last October, he said again, in a post on Truth Social, that she was not telling the truth and that the case was a “complete con job.”

Ms. Carroll’s lawyers will ask the jury to find Mr. Trump liable for battery, and if he is found responsible, to award monetary damages.

 

On top of that, there's a storm on the horizon and it looks like a doozy.

 

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday said she would announce this summer whether former President Donald Trump and his allies would be charged with crimes related to alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election.

Willis revealed the timetable in a letter to local law enforcement in which she asked them to be ready for “heightened security and preparedness” because she predicted her announcement “may provoke a significant public reaction.”

In the letters, Willis said she will announce possible criminal indictments between July 11 and Sept. 1, sending one of the strongest signals yet that she’s on the verge of trying to obtain an indictment against Trump and his supporters.

“Please accept this correspondence as notice to allow you sufficient time to prepare the Sheriff’s Office and coordinate with local, state and federal agencies to ensure that our law enforcement community is ready to protect the public,” Willis wrote to Fulton Sheriff Patrick Labat.

Similar letters were hand delivered to Darin Schierbaum, Atlanta’s chief of police, and Matthew Kallmyer, director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency.

“We have seen in recent years that some may go outside of public expressions of opinion that are protected by the First Amendment to engage in acts of violence that will endanger the safety of those we are sworn to protect,” Willis wrote. “As leaders, it is incumbent upon us to prepare.”

Trump has called for mass demonstrations in response to overreach from prosecutors — triggering concerns about violent unrest not unlike the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection he promoted.

investigation, which Willis launched more than two years ago, said the letters suggest that Willis will seek charges against the former president.

“It obviously seems to imply the case against Trump will be presented to a grand jury,” former Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter said. “I don’t think any of the other targets would raise that level of caution. I think that’s the obvious implication.”

Norm Eisen, a former ethics czar under President Barack Obama who co-authored a Brookings Institute report on the Fulton probe, agreed.

“While she does not have the former president’s name in her letter, the evidence and the applicable law in Georgia point to the substantial likelihood that Donald Trump and his principal co-conspirators will be included when she follows through on the plans she confirms in this letter,” Eisen said.

 

Granted, we'll have another 3-4 months before Fani Willis makes her indictment decisions in Georgia, and another 4 months after than before Trump faces Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, but the year keeps getting significantly worse for Trump on his legal battle, and I couldn't be happier.