Orange Meltdown, Peach State Edition, Con't

We've now officially reached the "I was only following orders" stage of Georgia Republican party flunkies turning evidence against Trump as Fulton County DA Fani Willis lines up her evidence for later this summer.

 

Lawyers representing David Shafer, the embattled chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, are arguing their client should not be charged with any crimes for his actions following the 2020 election because he was following advice provided by attorneys working for former President Donald Trump, according to a letter sent to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis last week.

Specifically, Shafer’s attorneys say their client was relying on “repeated and detailed advice of legal counsel” when he organized a group of “contingent” electors from Georgia and served as one himself, thus “eliminating any possibility of criminal intent or liability,” according to a copy of the May 5 letter.

The letter, which was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, comes as Willis and her team of prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are planning to make an announcement on possible charges against Trump or his allies later this summer.

Shafer, who sources previously told CNN could be among those indicted when Willis makes her charging announcements, has come under scrutiny for his role in the effort to put forward alternate slates of electors to block the certification of the 2020 presidential vote.

In their letter to Willis’s office, Shafer’s lawyers say he was “given very direct, detailed legal advice on the procedure he should follow, and he followed those instructions to the letter.”

“I believe that any fair-minded person, with possession of all the facts, would conclude that Mr. Shafer and the other presidential elector nominees acted lawfully and appropriately,” the letter adds.

The district attorney’s office declined to comment.

 

Again, this is the chair of the Georgia Republican party saying Donald Trump ordered him to break the law, and when you've reached this point of your defense where the capos and consiglieres are turning on The Don here, it's all over but the paperwork. Willis is going to have a field day.

And maybe, just maybe, Trump gets what he deserves.

Last Call The Worst Little Pervert In Texas

Facing an all but guaranteed expulsion vote from the Texas House, Republican state Rep. Bryan Slaton has resigned rather than face the music over his inappropriate relationship with one of his staff members.

 

Rep. Bryan Slaton resigned from the Texas House on Monday after an investigation determined that he had an inappropriate sexual relationship with a 19-year-old woman on his staff, providing her with enough alcohol before their encounter that she felt dizzy and had double vision.

Pressure had mounted on the Royse City Republican to resign since Saturday, when the House General Investigative Committee released a 16-page report finding Slaton, who is 45 and married, had engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct with his aide. The committee of three Republicans and two Democrats recommended that Slaton be the first state representative expelled from the body since 1927.

Slaton's resignation, however, may not stop a planned Tuesday vote on a House resolution expelling him from office.

Rep. Andrew Murr, a Junction Republican who leads the investigative committee, said Monday that he still plans to call up the resolution that he drafted and filed on Saturday.

“Though Representative Slaton has submitted his resignation from office, under Texas law he is considered to be an officer of this state until a successor is elected and takes the oath of office to represent Texas House District 2,” Murr wrote on Facebook.

Slaton did not address the inappropriate relationship that led to his downfall in his resignation letter to Gov. Greg Abbott, saying instead that he looked forward to spending more time with his young family. He was not on the House floor Monday.

State Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, blasted Slaton for not apologizing in the letter, calling it “inconceivable.”

“His resignation gave no apology to the young woman he violated, his wife whom he betrayed or his district that he failed,” Toth said on social media. “No remorse. No acceptance of responsibility. He’s the victim that rides off in to the sunset. That was the resignation of a narcissist.”

In a statement, Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi commended the House for responding swiftly to “the reprehensible actions of Representative Slaton,” which were first reported in early April. He said the misconduct detailed in the report “should never be tolerated and is proper grounds for expulsion.”

“These actions have betrayed the trust that the people of Representative Slaton’s district put in him as an elected official, and he has rightly resigned,” Rinaldi said. “We are encouraged that this investigation signals that the House has entered a new era of accountability where all members will be held to the same fair and high standards.”

 

Remember, Slaton didn't resign because of the relationship, he resigned because he was caught in the relationship.  And yes, this is the same Bryan Slaton who loudly and repeatedly raged against Democrats as "groomers".

It's always projection with these assholes.

Read All About It

The annual Trust in Media survey from polling outfit YouGov is out, and it shows vast differences in where Democrats and Republicans trust to get information from.

 

The divide between Democrats and Republicans on which news sources are trustworthy remains stark.

Last year, The Economist / YouGov published the results of a poll asking Americans where they get their news from and how much they trusted 22 prominent media organizations. YouGov revisited the topic this year by asking Americans to share how much trust they place in even more broadcast, digital, print, and social media outlets: 56 in total.

In this year's trust in media poll — conducted from April 3 - 9, 2023 — YouGov asked Americans to say whether they trust, distrust, or neither trust nor distrust the media organizations. From the results, it is possible to determine each outlet's net trust score – that is, how much more likely Americans are to say the outlet is trustworthy or very trustworthy than untrustworthy or very untrustworthy.

Even with the additions to the group of outlets polled about, The Weather Channel remains the most trusted news source among Americans overall. Americans are 53 points more likely to call The Weather Channel trustworthy as they are to call it untrustworthy. It's also the only outlet that YouGov asked about that more Democrats (+64) and Republicans (+47) trust than the shares who distrust it. The Weather Channel is just one of two outlets polled about that a majority of Republicans trust; the other one is Fox News (56% of Republicans trust it, with a net trust score among them of +41).

When it comes to the national rankings, The Weather Channel is followed by national public broadcaster PBS (+30), the U.K. news outlet BBC (+29), and The Wall Street Journal (+24) in national trust. This year's poll has the same group in the top four as last year's poll — even with the additions to this year's poll.

There also are more people who trust than distrust Forbes (+23), the Associated Press (+22), ABC (+21), USA Today (+21), CBS (+20), and Reuters (+20). Only a handful of outlets from the list are viewed by more Americans as untrustworthy than the share who view it as trustworthy: Infowars (-16), the Daily Caller (-4), Breitbart News (-3), and Daily Kos (-1).

In this poll, the three broadcast networks had similar levels of trust, while there was a slightly lower level of trust in each of the three cable networks: 44% say they trust ABC, 43% trust CBS, 42% trust NBC, 40% trust CNN, 38% trust Fox News, and 36% trust MSNBC.

 

Observations:

 

• This is already out of date I'd think, before Fox News fired Tucker Carlson. I'd dare say Republican trust in Fox is significantly lower today than it was a month ago.
• Everyone loves the Weather Channel, nobody trusts Infowars.
• Republicans trust a handful of outlets, and with Fox News increasingly out of the picture, expect to see that number shrink, not grow.
• Democrats trust several right-wing news sites more than Republicans do, namely National Review, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, and two Murdoch papers, Wall Street Journal and the NY Post. This also includes Village insider baseball politics sites like Politico, Axios, The Hill, and Business Insider.
• More Dems trust Fox News than Republicans trust ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, or MSNBC if you're still wondering about the massive lurch to the right in those networks in the last year.

 

The media has a long way to go to stop being broken, but the bigger issue is they keep chasing Republicans who will never like them, and Democrats who actually believe the bad actors.

Border Line Insanity, Con't

At least eight people are dead after an SUV plowed into a group of migrant workers waiting at a bus stop in Brownsville, Texas, and indications are the act could very well have been deliberate.

 

Brownsville police investigator Martin Sandoval said the crash happened about 8:30 a.m. local time. The driver, Sandoval said, is a Hispanic male who was hospitalized for treatment of injuries before being taken in to police custody on charges of reckless driving. More charges are expected soon, he said.

Sandoval said the cause of the crash has not been determined, but that police are awaiting results from a blood sample taken from the driver to see if he was under the influence. The driver, apparently injured when his silver Range Rover overturned in the crash, is not cooperating with officers and had not yet been identified, he said.

The death toll climbed by one Sunday after a victim succumbed to their injuries at the hospital, Mayor Trey Mendez said Sunday evening in a statement. “We have had one more casualty as one of the injured tragically passed away from their injuries at the hospital,” Mendez said. “The total lives lost is currently 8 and several more remain critical.”

Luis Herrera, who was among those hit by the SUV, said in an interview that many of the victims already had tickets out of Brownsville, some to reunite with their families. Herrera, 33, who suffered a broken arm and was released from the hospital Sunday afternoon, said the driver was taunting people standing at the bus stop, driving past them and yelling insults.

“He crossed the street and he hit the gas and he drove by my legs, and hurt my arm,” he said in Spanish. “The others, he killed almost all of them.”

He recalled the driver yelling: “You’re invading my property!”

Sandoval said the driver allegedly ran a red light and plowed into a group of people standing at a local bus stop in this border city in southeastern Texas. The victims were standing outside the Bishop Enrique San Pedro Ozanam Center, a migrant and homeless shelter in the border town.

Those injured were taken to hospitals, Sandoval said, including one who was airlifted.

“He just hit the people,” he said.

Police were still trying to confirm the names and ages of the victims. Sandoval said some were migrants from Venezuela who recently crossed the border. The bus stop serves migrants and U.S. citizens in this city of 190,000 residents.

“This is a public bus stop,” he said. “So we don’t know if some residents of ours were there.”

Police are awaiting help from the U.S. Border Patrol to identify the victims, since some may have been recently processed at the border. “Definitely, there were some migrants there,” Sandoval said.

The homeless shelter had been housing several recent border crossers. Brownsville is one of the areas receiving large numbers of migrants as the federal government prepares to lift pandemic travel restrictions Thursday and reopen the border to asylum seekers.

Video obtained by The Washington Post showed the driver running the red light about 100 feet away from where the victims were waiting for a bus.

Witnesses said the driver tried to run away afterward, Victor Maldonado, director of the Ozanam center, told The Post. But the witnesses stopped him from leaving the scene, Maldonado added. Some witnesses said he appeared to be driving under the influence, Maldonado said.

 

Maybe the driver was drunk, maybe he wasn't, but eight people are dead, several of them migrant workers. We still have a gun problem for sure, but yeah, there are other ways to commit mass killings in America.

Another Day In Gunmerica, Con't

Another day in Gunmerica Saturday as an armed man with an AR-15 killed eight and injured seven more at a Dallas-area outlet mall before a police officer arrived to "neutralize" the shooter.

 

Authorities responded to the Allen Premium Outlets to investigate a shooting Saturday afternoon that killed eight victims and sent others to hospitals, with a victim as young as 5 years old.

The Allen Police Department said one of its officers responded to the outlet mall for an unrelated call, when they heard gunshots just after 3:30 p.m.

That officer "engaged the suspect and neutralized the threat," police said.

There were nine people who died, including the shooter. Seven were pronounced dead on scene, while two others died at the hospital.

The Allen Fire Department transported nine victims, but others may have been transported by other agencies or driven to a hospital by friends or family.

Police said there are three victims in critical condition and four in stable condition.

A spokesperson for Medical City Healthcare said eight victims ranging from 5 to 61 years old are being treated at their facilities.

There were multiple agencies that responded to secure the scene, including the Allen Police Department, Collin County Sheriff's Office, FBI, and ATF.

Police said there is no active threat at this time, and they believe the shooter acted alone.

"We were outside the Converse store and we just heard all this popping," said Elaine Penicaro, who was shopping with her daughter. "We kind of all just stopped, and then a second later, just 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,' and there were sparks flying like it was right in front of us."

 

A five-year-old victim, and we will do nothing. If anything, the message in permitless, open carry Texas is the victims who died did so because they didn't exercise their own 2nd Amendment rights in a building where guns were prohibited.

That's surely what people who witnessed the massacre will be told by police, friends, and family. "Maybe if you were armed and trained that five-year-old would still be alive today. Maybe you need to be the person who acts next time. You need to be the good guy with the gun from now on."

Just another day in Gunmerica. Texas Republicans have done nothing but offer thoughts and prayers and that's all they'll ever do the next time a massacre happens.

 

For his part, President Biden wants Congress to send him an assault rifle ban, but this will never happen as long as Republicans keep being elected, and voters decide to change that.

Sunday Long Read: The Woman Who Won

More than 35 years ago in 1986, a woman named Barbara Lowe became a five-time winner on Jeopardy! and then she vanished from the program's massive archives. The episodes were considered lost until recently as our Sunday Long Read from Claire McNear at the Ringer details, and the story of Lowe is a byzantine tale of quiz show drama. Well, partially.

 

For decades, whispers have circulated among game show aficionados about a mysterious Jeopardy! contestant from 1986. She went by Barbara Lowe and won five games in a row, which at the time—in just the second season of the reboot hosted by Alex Trebek—was the upper limit for returning champions. Later that year, when the show aired its Tournament of Champions contest with the best recent players, for which five-day champs automatically qualified, Lowe was nowhere to be found. Then, bizarrely, her episodes seemed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

In the 1990s, Game Show Network re-aired Season 2 of Jeopardy!; eagle-eyed fans noticed that the five episodes featuring Lowe were unceremoniously skipped. When the show launched a 24-hour streaming radio program and a Pluto TV channel that broadcast old episodes, Lowe’s episodes still failed to appear. In markets where affiliate stations play reruns on the weekends, Lowe’s episodes are omitted, again and again.

But the why of that matter, and what exactly happened during those games to incur the enduring wrath of the nation’s foremost quiz show, has long proved elusive. This is particularly bedeviling to Jeopardy! superfans, for whom detailed knowledge of operas, world capitals, and even television ephemera looms large. There are few corners of pop culture where facts and certainty are as celebrated as they are on Jeopardy! Yet one day in 1986, something happened—and nearly 40 years later, no one could say what. For the show’s most devoted fans, hunting for clues about Lowe—Jeopardy!’s biggest mystery and, some claimed, its greatest villain—became a calling unto itself.

Now, for the first time, Lowe is ready to open up about what happened, having caught wind of her place in Jeopardy! lore when one of those superfans tracked her down to see whether maybe, just maybe, she might have recordings of her games. She says she didn’t have the heart to tell him that when she’d moved a couple of years earlier, she’d thrown out a stack of VHS tapes that included her Jeopardy! appearances.

“He said that my episode is regarded as the holy grail of episodes,” Lowe tells The Ringer. “I was absolutely hysterical about it. I thought, ‘That’s insane.’”

And yet Lowe’s episodes were finally found late last year. The discovery of the lost tapes and Lowe’s first interview addressing her experience answer some questions and raise a host of new ones for the people who spent decades looking for the footage. Why were her games shrouded in secrecy for almost four decades? Was there really bad blood between the show and the five-time champ? What transpired during her time on set? And how did this saga come to take on a life of its own?

 

This one's not quite as mysterious as people make it out to be, but it's still a good story.

Last Call For Thrill Of The Hunter

For once, Jonathan Lemire and Team WIN THE MORNING actually are correct about Republicans looking desperately to get the news cycle off of abortion, mass shootings, holding the country hostage with the debt ceiling, and Donald Trump's multiple legal defenses. They want the focus to turn to Hunter Biden, and it doesn't matter if he's actually indicted or not, they're going to call it the biggest corruption scandal in American presidential history anyway.

The White House is bracing for the political fallout from the charging decision in the Hunter Biden case.

And they’ve concluded that Republicans will attack them over it whether President Joe Biden’s son is criminally indicted or not.

In conversations, Democrats and senior West Wing aides are downplaying the potential impact, arguing Hunter Biden was a factor in the 2020 election and voters elected his father anyway. They point out the president’s top rival, Donald Trump, was just indicted himself.

But people close to Biden still worry about the personal toll it will take on a father who has already felt anguish about a son’s struggles amid a long history of family tragedy. And they wonder how long he can compartmentalize personal anger with the attacks on Hunter and the political calculation that he’s better off not responding to it. Biden has long agonized over the fate of his surviving son, expressing that worry in phone calls with longtime friends and to Hunter himself.

Attorneys for Hunter Biden met at Justice Department headquarters in Washington last week to discuss the tax- and gun-related case with prosecutors, according to a person familiar with the matter. Often a signal that an investigation is concluding, such meetings are used by defense lawyers to urge prosecutors to refrain from seeking an indictment or to consider reduced charges. The probe has centered on whether Biden failed to report all of his income and whether he lied on a form for buying a gun. His attorneys declined comment.

“Obviously, the Biden team would hope that this investigation does not result in an indictment for a multitude of reasons,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who served as President Barack Obama’s communications director. “But the Republicans have failed — both in the 2020 campaign and in their 2023 congressional hearings — to have questions about Hunter Biden impact public opinion and I don’t think they will succeed now, regardless of what DOJ decides.”

 

I was afraid that the Biden camp would try to play this as nobly as possible, and not admit that every Republican in view of a microphone wouldn't be calling for his immediate resignation regardless of the decision by the DoJ.  They are not wearing blinders, thankfully. 

They understand that this is going to be used as leverage in the debt ceiling too. They know there's a very good chance that, whatever the decision to charge Hunter Biden or not ends up being, it will be used as a pretext to trash negotiations and to let the country default on its debt, triggering a near immediate recession.

Democrats are thankfully well aware of this, and are looking for a way out.

Time, of course, is running out too, we're maybe 4-6 weeks from the economy throwing a rod and ripping a huge chunk of the engine driving the country out and tossing it through a nearby building full of puppies.

Rest assured though that the Republican response will be entirely predictable and awful.

Tales Of The Shattered Rainbow, Con't

The GOP anti-trans agenda is working as intended in red states, and is gaining substantial support across America under the guise of "protecting women and kids".

Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children, a Washington Post-KFF poll finds, offering political jet fuel for Republicans in statehouses and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation and medical care.

Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth. A 57 percent majority of adults said a person’s gender is determined from the start, with 43 percent saying it can differ.

And some Americans have become more conservative on these questions as Republicans have seized the issue and worked to promote new restrictions. The Pew Research Center found 60 percent last year saying one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at birth, up from 54 percent in 2017. Even among young adults, who are the most accepting of trans identity, about half said in the Post-KFF poll that a person’s gender is determined by their sex at birth.

Alyssa Wells, 29, a behavior therapist in Daytona Beach, Fla., who participated in the Post-KFF survey, said her views have changed on this issue in recent years as she has learned more, chiefly from Christian podcasts.

“At first I was on the side of acceptance, like using the pronouns and stuff, because I want people to be kind to each other. I don’t want people fighting all the time,” she said. But she has come to see things differently. “My concern with transgender is mostly with the children.”

“We can’t vote until we’re a certain age, we can’t smoke, drink or whatever, but we can change our bodies’ anatomy and how it works?” she said. “It just doesn’t seem like that’s okay to me.” Treatments for trans youth sometimes include hormone therapies, but not genital surgery, which guidelines generally say doctors should not provide until patients are 18.

Still, as the country engages in a national debate over public policy around gender identity, interviews and other poll findings suggest that many Americans hold complicated and sometimes contradictory views on the subject.

While a majority of Americans oppose access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children and teenagers, for instance, clear majorities also support laws prohibiting discrimination against trans people, including in K-12 schools.

“You have a big swath of the American public still trying to make sense of this issue,” said Patrick Egan, a scholar of American politics and public opinion at New York University. “This is a battle and a debate that is unfolding in real time before our eyes, and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”

 

I disagree completely with Mr. Egan there. History tells us exactly how this will turn out, and it's already happening. 

 

Anti-trans legislation targeting trans kids and their parents and families will be expanded to include prohibitions of gender-affirming care for trans adults as well, being regulated into impossibility the way hundreds of abortion clinics were shut down over the last five years. Pretty soon in half the states, birth certificate changes won't be recognized and trans folks will be legislated out of existence, forced into a miserable limbo where they have no rights, no legal recourse, and no hope.

There aren't "complicated and sometimes contradictory views", there is only "should trans folks be allowed to exist" and increasingly the answer is "not here." All it needs to work is otherwise good people ready to stand by and do nothing.

The poll's crosstabs make it clear there's a wide array of groups willing to sacrifice trans folks.

But hey, maybe red states will make special places for trans folks where they can exist.

You know, camps.

 

Where populations of these people can be concentrated.

History again, it's like we've never learned anything from it in America.

The New Chief Chief For The Commander-In-Chief

With current Joint Chief of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley expected to step down, his replacement is slated to be Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, only the second Black JCS head after the late Colin Powell.

 

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate Gen. C.Q. Brown, the Air Force’s top officer and the first Black person to lead any branch of the military, to succeed Gen. Mark Milley as the next Joint Chiefs chair, two people familiar with the discussion said on Thursday.

If confirmed, Brown would become the second Black Joint Chiefs chair in the nation’s history, after the late Colin Powell.

Biden hasn’t given Brown the official stamp, and it’s unclear when he plans to make an announcement, said the people, a Democratic lawmaker and a congressional aide familiar with the White House’s planning, both of whom were granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“When President Biden makes a final decision, he will inform the person selected and then announce it publicly,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said when asked for comment. “That hasn’t happened yet.”

Brown’s reputation and command experience in both the Pacific and the Middle East made him the odds-on favorite to be Milley’s heir apparent dating back to the Trump administration. But his appointment seemed less of a sure thing in recent months, as the White House seriously considered Gen. David Berger, the Marine Corps commandant, for the top job.

He rose through the ranks as the sole Black pilot in classrooms filled with white men, an experience he spoke about in an emotional video after George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020.

Those who know Brown say he has the right experience to keep the military focused on its top priority: China. Brown’s most recent command experience was in the Pacific, as chief of Pacific Air Forces.

Brown also commanded troops in the Middle East, as head of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, and was serving in Europe when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, as a director of operations for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration at U.S. Air Forces in Europe. He was confirmed unanimously by the Senate for his current role as Air Force chief of staff in August, 2020.

 

So yeah, the Senate already unanimously confirmed him for the Air Force job, but who knows what te GOP will do.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

A certain Florida resident is about to have a bad, bad weekend with his staff, so you should at least kee them in your thoughts.

 

At least eight of the 16 Georgia Republicans who convened in December 2020 to declare Donald Trump the winner of the presidential contest despite his loss in the state have accepted immunity deals from Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating alleged election interference, according to a lawyer for the electors.

Prosecutors with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) told the eight that they will not be charged with crimes if they testify truthfully in her sprawling investigation into efforts by Trump, his campaign and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, according to a brief filed Friday in Fulton County Superior Court by defense attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow.

Willis has said that the meeting of Trump’s electors on Dec. 14, 2020, despite Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s certification of Biden’s win, is a key target of her investigation, along with Trump’s phone calls to multiple state officials and his campaign’s potential involvement in an unauthorized breach of election equipment in rural Coffee County, Ga.

Georgia was among seven states where the Trump campaign and local GOP officials arranged for alternate electors to convene with the stated purpose of preserving legal recourse while election challenges made their way through the courts. Among the questions both Willis and federal investigators have explored is whether the appointment of alternate electors and the creation of elector certificates broke the law. Another question is whether Trump campaign officials and allies initiated the strategy as part of a larger effort to overturn Biden’s overall victory during the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

The news that some — but likely not all — of the electors will not be charged raises new questions about the scope of Willis’s examination of the meeting of electors, all of whom she had previously identified as criminal targets in her investigation. The electors who accepted immunity did so without any promise that they would offer incriminating evidence in return, and they all have stated that they remain unified in their innocence and are not aware of any criminal activity among any of the electors, Debrow said.

“In telling the truth they continue to say they have done nothing wrong and they are not aware of anyone else doing anything wrong, much less criminal,” said an individual familiar with the investigation who requested anonymity to discuss the case.

Among the electors who appear to remain targets are David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party who presided over the gathering, and Shawn Still, a state senator who at the time was state finance chair for the party and who told congressional investigators he played a role confirming electors’ identities and admitting them into the room at the Georgia Capitol where they convened.

None of the electors responded to efforts by The Washington Post to reach them. Shafer has denied that convening to cast electoral votes for Trump was a crime, saying repeatedly — including during the gathering itself — that the electors were meeting on a contingency basis to preserve Trump’s legal remedy in the event that he prevailed in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the Georgia result.

 

As we saw earlier this week with the January 6th seditious conspiracy convictions, once you can prove there was a conspiracy, you can roll up everyone involved in the plot. If Fani Willis is being hand delivered testimony that proves the Georgia slate of fraudulent electors were conspiring against Georgia and the United States, well, a lot of heads can roll.

 

Maybe even a certain orange Floridian, too.

Supremely Corrupt Cads, Crooks, And Creeps, Con't

More corruption was revealed today involving Justice Clarence Thomas being bought like the puppet he is. First up, Right-wing billionaire and Nazi memorabilia enthusiast Harlan Crow paid for years of tuition for Thomas's grandnephew to attend a private boarding schools.

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

 

Crow's lawyer confirmed yesterday that this happened.

It was bad enough for Thomas yesterday morning, and then yesterday evening's corruption story dropped.

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group called the Judicial Education Project and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the Judicial Education Project filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, an adviser to the Judicial Education Project and a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012. The documents reviewed by The Post do not indicate the precise nature of any work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or the Polling Company.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

In response to questions from The Post, Leo issued a statement defending the Thomases. “It is no secret that Ginni Thomas has a long history of working on issues within the conservative movement, and part of that work has involved gauging public attitudes and sentiment. The work she did here did not involve anything connected with either the Court’s business or with other legal issues,” he wrote. “As an advisor to JEP I have long been supportive of its opinion research relating to limited government, and The Polling Company, along with Ginni Thomas’s help, has been an invaluable resource for gauging public attitudes.”

Of the effort to keep Thomas’s name off paperwork, Leo said: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

 

Again, if any other federal employee did a fraction of what Justice Clarence Thomas has copped to in the last few weeks, the Justice Department would have already opened the investigation, if not issued charges. 

At some point, the theory is, it'll be too much for Thomas to keep his job.

How much exactly "too much" is, well. We'll see.

Jobapalooa, Con't

The Biden Boom in the jobs market continues to thunder ahead with another great month. Steve Benen:

 

Expectations heading into this morning showed projections of about 180,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in April. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those projections turned out to understate what appears to be an extension of the hot job market. CNBC reported this morning:

Job growth fared better than expected in April despite bank turmoil and a decelerating economy, the Labor Department reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls increased 253,000 for the month, beating Wall Street estimates for growth of 180,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate was 3.4% against an estimate for 3.6% and tied for the lowest level since 1969.

While the unemployment rate isn’t my favorite metric, it’s worth noting for context that in January 2021, when President Joe Biden was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 6.3%. Now, it’s 3.4% — a level the United States did not reach at any point throughout the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Before this year, the last time the jobless rate reached a figure this low was May 1969. (We hadn’t yet landed on the moon and Woodstock was still a few months away.)

I’m mindful of the chatter about whether the economy is in a recession, but by any reasonable measure, these are not recession-like conditions.

As for the politics, let’s circle back to previous coverage to put the data in perspective. Over the course of the first three years of Donald Trump’s presidency — when the Republican said the United States’ economy was the greatest in the history of the planet — the economy created roughly 6.35 million jobs, spanning all of 2017, 2018 and 2019.

According to the latest tally, the U.S. economy has created nearly 13.2 million jobs since January 2021 — roughly double the combined total of Trump’s first three years.

 

Again, Biden has created double the number of jobs in 27 months than Trump did in 36, but the economy is "in a recession" and Biden's marks for the economy continue to be dismal because that's what the Villagers are telling them. 

Oh, and at a record-low 4.7%, Joe Biden has given us the lowest Black unemployment rate so far.  Biden cut that in half since he took over, and it's the first time that Black unemployment has been under 5%. The gap between Black and white unemployment is also the lowest it's been, 1.8% (White unemployment is 3.1% right now).

Let me say this again, white unemployment is three point one percent and white voters say this is the worst economy of their lifetimes and shit like that.

It's ludicrous how this is being portrayed in the hostile right wing noise machine.

But hey, the numbers speak for themselves.

Last Call For Lake Of Fire, Con't

The "election fraud" fraud is coming apart in Arizona, and Kari Lake's legal team is now facing the first of many sanctions and punishments in the months ahead as the hammers drop.

 

Republican Kari Lake’s lawyers were sanctioned $2,000 Thursday by the Arizona Supreme Court in their unsuccessful challenge of her defeat in the governor’s race last year to Democrat Katie Hobbs.

In an order, the state’s highest court said Lake’s attorney made “false factual statements” that more than 35,000 ballots had been improperly added to the total ballot count. The court, however, refused to order Lake to pay attorney fees to cover the costs of defending Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in Lake’s appeal.

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel cited Lake’s challenge over signature verification remains unresolved.

Hobbs and Fontes said Lake and her attorneys should face sanctions for baselessly claiming that over 35,000 ballots were inserted into the race at a facility where a contractor scanned mail-in ballots to prepare them for county election workers to process and count.

When the high court first confronted Lake’s challenge in late March, justices said the evidence doesn’t show that over 35,000 ballots were added to the vote count in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of the state’s voters.

Lawyers for Hobbs and Fontes told the court that Lake and her lawyers misrepresented evidence and are hurting the elections process by continuing to push baseless claims of election fraud. Attorneys for Fontes asked for the court to order Lake’s lawyers to forfeit any money they might have earned in making the appeal, arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to benefit from their own misconduct.

Lake’s lawyers said sanctions weren’t appropriate because no one can doubt that Lake honestly believes her race was determined by electoral misconduct.

Lake, who lost to Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes, was among the most vocal 2022 Republican candidates promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races in November, Lake did not.

 

The good news for Kari Lake is that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review. 

The bad news for Kari Lake is also that her claim of voter signature discrepancies is being sent back to a lower state court for review.

 

When that ruling goes against her, that's going to open her up to yet more sanctions and worse.

 

Stay tuned as this Lake of Fire is going to get torched.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Proud Boys terrorists arrested and charged in the January 6th insurrection are now official seditious conspirators, guilty of conspiring against the United States of America.

 

AFTER A TRIAL that stretched nearly four months, four Proud Boys have been found guilty of seditious conspiracy in connection to the insurrection of Jan. 6.

The jury delivered guilty verdicts for Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of Proud Boys; Ethan Nordean, who was the leader on the ground in Washington; Zachary Rehl, a top Proud Boy from Philadelphia, and Joseph Biggs, one of the best known militants, with a big social media following.

A fifth Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola — who smashed out a window — at the Capitol was found guilty, along with the other four, on a secondary charge of obstructing Congress.

In one of the last, major high-profile cases stemming from the insurrection, prosecutors succeeded in proving the Proud Boys defendants engaged in sedition. The verdict builds on the previous convictions of numerous Oath Keepers on the same seditious conspiracy charge.

The verdict was a partial one, and before it was entered, the judge urged the jurors to continue working for unanimity on the remaining counts.

The Proud Boys are a far-right drinking and fighting club that promotes “Western Chauvinism” — which they define as a refusal “to apologize for creating the modern world.” The Associated Press dubs them “a neofacist group” and they are deemed a terrorist entity by the government of Canada.

The Proud Boys are infamous for brawling with antifa activists during street protests. At the bitter end of the Trump era, the group had become increasingly militia-like in its M.O., and staunchly backed the MAGA president. Trump even said during a debate ahead of the 2020 election that the group should “stand back and stand by.” Tarrio’s lawyer said during closing arguments on Tuesday that the directive led the Proud Boys to “grow so large that vetting became difficult.”

 

This should be the end of a number of Republican careers, starting with MTG, Lauren Boebert, and Donald Trump.  It won't be, all three will run on overturning the convictions and Trump in particular will promise to pardon them.

Republicans supporting convicted seditious conspirators should be grounds for expulsion from Congress and the end of Trump's campaign, but sadly, it will only benefit them as they rally around these new MAGA martyrs and ensure that yet more domestic terrorist attacks will continue.

Walker, Georgia Arranger

Former Georgia GOP Senate loser Herschel Walker is in real trouble this week as the Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger has broken what looks like a huge campaign finance fraud scandal, if not outright embezzlement.

 

When Herschel Walker emailed a representative for billionaire industrialist and longtime family friend Dennis Washington in March 2022, he seemed to be engaging in normal behavior for a political candidate: He was asking for money.

But unbeknownst to Washington and the billionaire’s staff, Walker’s request was far more out of the ordinary. It was something campaign finance experts are calling “unprecedented,” “stunning,” and “jaw-dropping.” Walker wasn’t just asking for donations to his campaign; he was soliciting hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal company—a company that he never disclosed on his financial statements.

Emails obtained by The Daily Beast—and verified as authentic by a person with knowledge of the exchanges—show that Walker asked Washington to wire $535,200 directly to that undisclosed company, HR Talent, LLC.

And the emails reveal that not only did Washington complete Walker’s wire requests, he was under the impression that these were, in fact, political contributions.

In the best possible circumstances, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the emails suggest violations of federal fundraising rules; in the worst case, they could be an indication of more serious crimes, such as wire fraud.

But Walker—who had been schooled on campaign finance rules since his campaign launched in August 2021, according to a person involved in those conversations—appears to have dismissed the Washington team’s concerns that the money may have gone to the wrong place. When a third party informed a Washington Companies executive that the money couldn’t be used for political purposes, they raised the issue with Walker, asking at one point whether the funds should be redirected to a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Walker never contributed any of his own money to his campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and it’s unclear what happened to these particular funds. Walker may have ultimately returned the money to Washington, but he did not reroute the money to the super PAC, according to FEC filings and a person with direct knowledge of the events.

“It was good talking with you today,” Tim McHugh, executive vice president for the Washington Corporations, wrote to Walker last November. “After our call, [redacted] reached out to me and said [a person] clarified with you that any funds sent to the HR Talent account cannot legally be used for political purposes. Political contributions must go to either the Team Herschel or 34N22 accounts.”

34N22 was a super PAC supporting Walker. Walker was not allowed to solicit donations for the super PAC in excess of federal limits, which this amount of money explicitly was. But that was not McHugh’s concern; he was worried about the hundreds of thousands of dollars his boss had wired to HR Talent in March.

“We will need your assistance to get the prior contributions made to the HR Talent account in March corrected,” McHugh concluded in the email.

While Walker’s campaign was battered from the jump by a hurricane of controversies, this situation stands out.

According to the legal experts who spoke to The Daily Beast for this article, this scheme appears to not just be illegal—it appears to be unparalleled in its audacity and scope. The transactions raise questions about a slew of possible violations. In fact, these experts all said, the scheme was so brazen that it appears to defy explanation, ranking it among the most egregious campaign finance violations in modern history.

Saurav Ghosh, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center, called the arrangement “jaw-dropping.” Jordan Libowitz, communications director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said if Walker “used the campaign to funnel money into his own business, that’s one of the biggest campaign finance crimes I’ve ever heard of.” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director of Documented, remarked that the exchanges were “stunning and, to my knowledge, without parallel in recent history.”

“Campaign finance laws are designed to prevent massive under-the-table payments like those described here,” Fischer said. “While we don’t have all the facts, these emails point to highly illegal, potentially even criminal activity.”

 

I'm hoping this means the feds come knocking and Merrick Garland has a few surprises for him, as this looks like the most slam dunk campaign fraud scam in recent history.

We'll see how this going, but my question is would we ever have known about this if Walker had won five months ago?