James.galbraith

In a perfect example of the Republican party beginning to devour itself, a GOP group has begun running ads against Georgia senate nominee and Trump-endorsee Herschel Walker.

Part of a $10 million effort to “defeat anti-democracy Republicans in key battleground states,” the Republican Accountability PAC (RAPAC) launched a $1 million ad slamming Walker.

“Herschel Walker might have been a great football player, but he clearly doesn’t deserve to be a senator… That’s why our campaign is built around the voices of Georgia Republicans who know that he’s unfit for office,” Sarah Longwell, the treasurer of RAPAC, said in a statement sent to The Hill. 

RELATED STORY: In Georgia Senate race, Herschel Walker's running against his own mouth—and from every debate

The new ad, titled The Real Herschel Walker, focuses on the Heisman Trophy winner’s history of domestic violence. His ex-wife, Cindy DeAngelis, is featured, as HuffPost notes.

RPAC’s website is dedicated to the takedown of Walker and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. The website highlights allegations of domestic abuse against Walker, as well as his lack of “understanding of the major problems facing Georgians.”

Daily Kos has covered the numerous and real issues Walker has presented as a nominee and now candidate.

Walker can’t tell the truth, articulate a cogent thought, or explain legislation comprehensively, and aside from accepting one debate where he can get the topics ahead of time, he can’t even debate his Democratic rival, Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Walker has touted a bogus anti-COVID-19 spray to keep the virus away, hid from the public (and his own campaign staff!) that he’d fathered three children, said he’d graduated from college when didn’t, and claimed that he’d co-founded a veterans organization when he hadn’t. Walker is incompetent and shouldn’t be running for senate in Georgia or anywhere.

RAPAC writes that “Walker also lied about the 2020 election, including the outrageous proposal that Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin should re-run their elections.”

In a statement sent to The Hill, Walker’s camp said:

The “ad itself is incredibly misleading, and this liberal dark money group and their allies should be ashamed of their efforts. … As you can see in the full interview, Herschel has taken full responsibility for his actions, had treatment for years, and has worked to end the stigma around mental health,” the statement reads. “Herschel is going to keep working to support those struggling with mental health issues like he did, no matter how many million-dollar misleading ads are run by Raphael Warnock and out-of-state groups.”

According to Politico, Walker is trailing in the polls to Warnock, but the two are polling so closely that there’s a worry that the election might end in a runoff.

Georgia is not a blue state—not yet, anyway—and this year’s midterm will certainly feel like a 2020 Groundhog Day if Warnock can’t clear the 50% mark in November. In Georgia, a candidate must get a majority vote. Otherwise, the top two nominees must head into a special election runoff—the exact same situation that happened in 2020 in the senate race between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue.

Democrats are, once again, in a battle for control of the Senate. Sukari Johnson, chair of the Clayton County Democratic Party, tells Politico. “Nobody wants a runoff. … Because it’s very difficult for people to come back out, and at that point, you’re spending time and money to get people to come back out. And nobody wants to do that after November.”

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Attorney General Merrick Garland is making a statement at 2:30 PM ET on Thursday, following days of public silence since the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday. That search was reportedly for classified documents Trump had taken with him when he left White House, and it has given rise to huge amounts of Republican conspiracy theories, as well as broader public pressure for the Justice Department to offer up information.

But Garland’s Thursday statement is no guarantee that this silence will be broken, since Thursday has also seen an armed man attempt to breach an FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Howdy folks! Pardon my July hiatus, as I was uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, before I get started, I’m back now and have some good news, which is that the McMansion Hell Patreon tiers have been updated – it’s never been such a good time to support McMansion Hell.

For $1/month you can get access to the Good House posts (McMansion Eyebleach) and the wonderful McMansion Hell Discord, a great, friendly community which is where many houses on here now come from. $3/month tiers will now receive an entire bonus MMH post in addition to the Good House posts that follow every edition of MMH. $5/month tiers still get a monthly house roasting livestream complete with bingo. $10/month tiers now get a bonus livestream that’s much more intimate and also includes voice chat participation. All in all, it’s more of what you want from McMansion Hell. Tiers above $10/month get a selection of exclusive merch along with other benefits.

Ok, awkward marketing moment over. Let’s get down to business. Big business.

We’re back in Denton County, Texas, one of the ground zeros of McMansion Hell, with a “Greek Revival” house built in 1989 but remodeled in the early aughts. Sitting at $2.5million (that’s a lot of oil money) and 6500 square feet, it’s just another example of how everything’s bigger in Texas. Let’s continue.

Lawyer Foyer

Whomst remembers swag? Absolutely dated bit of millennial slang now. Also get used to weird stairs because nothing in this home seems to be on the same level.

??? Room

I guess this is an office? It’s mostly a collection of things just for the sake of things. Peak McMansion.

Living Room

My mom did the red/green thing in her bathroom back in the day so I’m weirdly nostalgic for it. Still it was real. A lot of talk on HGTV at the time about mixing opposing colors (warm/cool) and pops of color (which were kind of missed in the greige era though they are coming back.)

Kitchen

The kitchen was probably renovated later than the rest of the house (I date it around 2009 or so - mismatched islands were kind of a thing then.) Still, no one really knows what to do with that much space and the result is almost always not very economical.

Speaking of…

Bedroom

If you don’t have a stuff corner in your bedroom are you even wealthy?

Bathroom

See the white carpet thing is only a problem when people actually use the tub which they almost never do.

bonus room

What’s the point of having all them trinkets if yer not pondering em???

Well that’s all for this edition folk— wait. wait.

What?

Bonus house-cels coping and seething at pool-chads.

Anyway, let’s look at the back of this thing:

The Dyingest Lawn In Texas is a free album name for anyone who wants it. (Did I mention I was born in Texas yet? That’s a fun fact.)

Anyway, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. See y'all soon.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including extra posts and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because inflation is ruining my life and coffee is like $4/cup now.

Joe Kent checks all the boxes: He spouts extremist rhetoric that reflects a white nationalist worldview. He associates with far-right extremists, including Proud Boys and their neofascist street-brawling cohorts. He insists that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, angrily defends the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as innocent, patriotic Americans, and is currently demanding the disembowelment of the FBI and the Justice Department for their recent search of Mar-a-Lago. Naturally, he also sports Trump’s avid endorsement.

So it wasn’t terribly shocking when the final results of last week’s Washington state primary election showed that Kent, a political novice, had defeated six-term Republican incumbent Jamie Herrera-Beutler after she had made the politically fatal mistake of voting to impeach Trump in February 2021. But his victory represents much more than just Trump’s revenge: It manifests the intimate and profound relationship between Trumpism and the far-right extremism that has overwhelmed the Republican Party.

Kent, an Iraq War veteran who served 11 tours of combat, led the parade of Republicans who showed up on Fox News this week to denounce the Department of Justice and FBI for serving a search warrant at Trump’s Florida estate. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s nightly program on Fox—where Kent had previously appeared to attack the Jan. 6 committee—he essentially reiterated his tweet from earlier that day claiming that “we must bring the national security state to heel or we won’t have a country anymore,” and that “we start with the FBI & DOJ.”

He told Carlson’s fill-in host, Will Cain:

We’ve seen the complete and total weaponization of our national security state. You mentioned how this all began with the Russiagate sham hoax and we saw the national security state at the highest levels weaponized against President Trump and his campaign throughout his administration. And now with the narrative coming from Jan. 6—and make no mistake, this is where the narrative really really was fortified to turn these potent tools against not just President Trump, but many of his top advisers, people who were working on the ground Jan. 6, and then people who were put away, thrown essentially into political prisons without any kind of due process.

Now the national security state continues to be on the hunt against President Trump, or now even all the way down to parents who show up to school board meetings. We have to realize that we are at war. When we take back the House in 2023, bringing the national security state to heel must be our top priority. Any Republican who is not ready for that fight is unfit for duty.

In June, Kent had appeared on Fox News with Carlson himself as they attacked the Jan. 6 committee hearings—and Republican Liz Cheney particularly—for conducting what they considered one-sided hearings. Carlson complained that the hearings would only be worthwhile “if there was somebody defending the rest of the county up there, and there doesn’t seem to be.”

Kent replied:

No, and that’s supposed to be the Republican Party, and that’s a big reason I jumped in and decided to run for Congress. The woman who I voted for, the Republican I voted for, voted for the impeachment of President Trump, which gave this Jan. 6 narrative, which is being smeared against every conservative or anybody who has an issue with the way things are being conducted in the country or the way the last election went, it’s being used to turn the national security state against us. She voted for that impeachment, and then she voted for the formation of this very sham trial, Soviet kangaroo court Soviet-style.

Carlson and Kent were particularly put off by how Cheney shamed Republicans at the end of that day’s hearing. Kent huffed a thin rationalization and then threatened Democrats with dire consequences in classic conspiracist “Patriot” movement fashion:

She also brings up this whole, ‘Oh, it must be a Trump thing.’ No, it’s not a Trump thing. There is, the fact of the matter, the reason people were there on that day of Jan. 6, is that the American people, a vast majority of them, did not feel that their voices were heard at the election box, and therefore things started to get a little bit dicey.

And if our ruling class won’t actually go back and adjudicate what happened with our elections, our system is going to continue to decay. And no matter how much people in Congress lecture us or ignore these problems, our system will continue to crumble, until we get people in there, like I think we’re going to have this November, that can actually say, ‘Hey, we hear you, we’re going to go back, we’re going to look at the election of 2020, we’re going to have a full committee, we’re going to keep the Jan. 6 committee going, we’re going to disclose to the American people once and for all what really happened.’ Disclose all the footage. Disclose the government’s involvement.

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Those far-right notes weren’t an accident: Kent’s entire background in politics is imbued with his close relationship to far-right Patriot movement activists and their Proud Boys cohorts. As Brian Slodysko’s recent profile of Kent for the Associated Press lays out in gory detail, Kent’s associations with conspiracists and far-right activists, including white nationalists, are extensive and varied.

Of those soon facing elections, Kent stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe that has long existed in the Pacific Northwest but is often obscured by the region’s overwhelming liberal politics.

Campaign finance disclosures reveal Kent recently paid $11,375 for “consulting” over the past four months to Graham Jorgensen, who was identified as a Proud Boy in a law enforcement report and was charged with cyberstalking his ex-girlfriend in 2018. The charges were dismissed in late 2019. But a judge in Vancouver, Washington, issued an order of protection requiring Jorgensen to stay away from her, records show.

More to the point is Kent’s long association with Joey Gibson, the founder and leader of the street-brawling group Patriot Prayer, which has an extensive history with a rotating cast of violent extremists and white nationalists. Many of Kent’s early campaign appearances—including a January 2022 rally against the COVID-19 vaccine based on misinformation—featured Gibson joining him on stage as a speaker.

Kent announced his candidacy in February 2021 and made his first campaign foray with a video explaining that he had been inspired to run following his return to the Pacific Northwest and the Portland, Oregon, area where he had grown up.

“I left my job in the intelligence community and returned home to the Pacific Northwest. But peace wasn’t in store for us. Shortly after we returned home I watched Portland and Seattle devolve into nightly riots and lawlessness. Once beautiful cities destroyed by the left’s quest for power. I wanted to do something to stop the downward spiral that our society was heading.”

He went on: “The events of 2020, including the lockdowns, riots and a presidential election manipulated by a cabal of technocrats and bureaucrats followed by a sham impeachment—a sham impeachment that our congresswoman voted for—made it clear to me that I had to go forward and fight once more.”

By that summer Kent had formed an alliance with Gibson, both appearing at various COVID-denialist events as speakers, including an “Unmasked Unjabbed Uncensored Rally” at Vancouver’s Esther Short Park in August. Kent also was photographed socializing with Gibson and several of his Patriot Prayer cohorts at an August gathering at Cottonwood Beach near Washougal to honor the memory of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of the group who had been shot to death a year beforehand by a Portland resident who was tracked down and killed in short order. Kent also shows up in a Patriot Prayer group selfie taken by one of Patriot Prayer’s more notorious figures, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, currently awaiting trial on multiple felony assault counts.

By then, Kent had already secured Trump’s endorsement by coming out early as a critic of Herrera-Beutler for her vote to impeach Trump. A July Washington Post piece quoted Kent, speaking at conspiracist “America First” rallies and tweeting: “We need to fight for election integrity. Do not reward incumbents that refused to contest the 2020 election.”

Trump endorsed Kent in June. Within a matter of weeks, he had financial backing from pro-Trump billionaires like Steve Wynn and Peter Thiel.

Kent began appearing on a variety of far-right programs with nationwide reach. He was a guest of Infowars’ Owen Shroyer on two occasions. He started appearing regularly on ex-Trump aide Stephen Bannon’s War Room podcast. On one of those occasions, he promoted his and Gibson’s January 2022 rally against “COVID tyranny” and the “forced quarantine.”

Kent was one of the featured speakers at a September 2021 rally in support of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists currently awaiting trial for their actions that day, calling them “political prisoners.”

“Our fellow citizens when their constitutional rights are taken, if we do not speak out against that we are guilty of standing by and watching those rights erode,” he said, claiming that Jan. 6 rioters were “detained and have their due process denied.”

“That’s not the way this works—this is a slippery slope and we are on it right now,” he said, telling the audience that the Capitol Police officers who defended Congress from the rioters “are not our enemy.”

Our enemies are those that will deny people their constitutional rights, and will take a narrative that labels all of us as terrorists or insurrectionists for just questioning things. It’s our God-given right and duty as Americans to actually question things, to question the narrative. It’s our job.

In February, he got into a well-publicized spat with white nationalist Nick Fuentes after the latter’s infamous America First PAC convention at which a number of Republicans spoke. Fuentes also caught considerable attention for praising Russia’s Vladimir Putin and comparing him favorably to Adolf Hitler.

These remarks sent Kent—who had previously embraced the “America First” label, and reportedly had conversed with Fuentes about social-media strategy—running for cover. Fuentes went on his popular podcast and described the call with Kent. One of Kent’s Republican opponents called on him to denounce the association with Fuentes.

Kent, who has a Twitter following of 125,000, claimed his opponents were “spreading lies about me,” and insisted that he condemned Fuentes’ politics. He said he didn’t seek the white nationalist’s endorsement “due (to) his focus on race/religion.”

About a month before the dispute broke out, Kent had been interviewed by David Carlson of the Groyper-adjacent white nationalist group American Populist Union (which shortly thereafter rebranded itself as American Virtue), a kind of competing far-right organization that embraces most of the ideological fundamentals of white nationalism but tries to eschew the incendiary rhetoric of groups like Fuentes.

After the feud broke out with the Groypers—culminating in Fuentes taunting Kent: “You’re not for white people. You’re not for America. You’re not for Christianity. You’re not for our heritage”—Carlson reinterviewed Kent, who repeated his reasons for distancing himself from Fuentes.

But it was simultaneously clear that their differences were more stylistic than ideological. Kent assiduously avoided any direct endorsement of white nationalist views on race and demographics, but his own previously stated positions (particularly his endorsement of an “immigration moratorium,” a longtime white nationalist agenda item) made it hard to run too far away.

Kent ended up agreeing that he doesn’t see “anything wrong with there being a white people special interest group,” that America’s racial demographics should remain in their current state, and that “legacy Americans whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution” should have their needs prioritized over those of (in the words of a questioner) “Chinese-speaking anchor baby citizens.” These are all classic white nationalist positions.

The interview revealed Kent’s own inner white nationalist:

Carlson: If the constituency of the movement is young white Christian men that would be true the same way the constituency of BLM is black people, you know that doesn’t mean it’s only for those people, right, there’s also like white liberals that self-hate that are part of BLM.

Kent: Yeah, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white people special interest group. They have to be very careful about the way they couch that and the way they frame that, obviously in terms of messaging and in terms of getting credibility. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. As far as me running as a candidate, running out there and saying this is all about white people, that does not seem like a winning strategy.

Carlson seemed unpersuaded, and eventually posed a question shaped by white nationalists’ favorite conspiracy theory, that of “white genocide”:

Carlson: We’re talking about demographics here. American demographics right now are like what, 70 percent white, 30 percent minority. Um, I mean, at what point have we lost America?

Kent: It has a lot more to do with, like, who are we bringing in. I think America is very lucky in the fact that like the people to our south the Hispanic community most of them are Christians, they’re Catholic right, so I think that’s why they are so easy to kind of absorb. Again I don’t want to absorb all. But we are very lucky compared to Europe who their version of Mexico is Africa and the Middle East where there’s drastic cultural and religious differences, so we’re fortunate in that place. I don’t know what the ideal ratio is, I would never want to look at it in terms of racial percentages, I would want to keep it very close to the way it is right now.

After the Associated Press published Slodysko’s revealing portrait of Kent, his campaign was dismissive. “The establishment is attacking me b/c they fear us, 1 day they say I’m a Bernie bro, the next they copy a page out of the dem’s play book & call me a nazi,” he tweeted. “I’m targeted at my town halls by the far left & real racists—I take them all on b/c truth is on my side.”

He now faces a Democratic opponent, Marie Glusenkamp Perez, who finished with the most votes in the top-two primary. However, Kent will be favored in a district that has traditionally voted Republican.

Gluesenkamp Perez said the November race will be “a national bellwether for the direction of our country,” and denounced his ties to far-right nationalists, saying his “unapologetic extremism and divisive approach demonstrate he is unfit for public office.”

For his part, Kent has simply doubled down. Appearing on Bannon’s podcast this week, he declared: “We are at war.”

“The left isn’t the left of 10, 15 years ago,” Kent went on. “These guys don’t care about winning arguments anymore. … It’s a total, full-frontal assault, and they’re going after every one of us.”

“So what we have to do when we take back power … we have to play smash-mouth.”

If Kent does win this fall, he’ll certainly have one distinction: He will be the closest thing the Proud Boys get to having “their guy” in Congress.

The grubbier and more personal his misdeeds, the more he has to say, "It's not about me, it's about you."

This has been floating around, but is worth confirming: Yes, the felony Donald Trump is suspected of committing—moving classified national security documents to his for-profit golf club—is only a felony because Donald J. Trump himself made it one. And yes, the ex-blowhard-in-chief did it specifically as part of his "Lock Her Up" blowhardism against his 2016 election rival, Hillary Clinton.

You may remember that Republicans, during the years of 2016 through 2021, believed that it was an absolute abomination to consider prosecuting any political figure for any crime other than "mishandling classified information," but "mishandling classified information" was such a severe crime that it required, as the loud jackasses who populated Trump's every rally constantly shouted, locking somebody up.

From Politico:

"Notably, Trump—after a fierce campaign against Clinton in which he called for her to be jailed for her handling of classified material—signed a law in 2018 that stiffened the penalty for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents from one year to five years, turning it into a felony offense."

Yeah. Yeah, he did do that.

Here's the law in question, and it wasn't a big, dramatic deal so much as it was the sort of petty performative sniping that House and Senate Republicans burped forth on a weekly basis. Republicans were, or so they claimed for what seems like 150 years or so, extremely put out that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, back in the days when the federal government was still attempting to get its act together on anything internet-related, was using a personal email address for government work. (Her predecessor Colin Powell also did this, and nobody gave a particular petunia.) References to classified information were found among those emails, and that's where "Lock Her Up" came from.

Well, one of the things. There was also a transparently crooked Steve Bannon-pushed "Clinton Cash" book that Guilianied through a whole confusing list of theoretical and hoax-premised alleged crimes, and something about pizza, and take your pick after that. But it was mainly the email thing.

So Donald Trump, two long damn years after his inauguration as the worst American leader in all of history, still took the time to loudly boost "mishandling classified information" to felony status. It was him, and he did it out of personal, meaningless spite. As always.

Fast forward to Donald Trump scuttling out of the White House exactly two years later, and what happens? The omnicrook and his family end up shipping an unknown quantity of document-filled boxes from the White House to Donald Trump's for-profit Florida house; the National Archives gets upset because government records are government property, not papers for Donald Trump to raffle off during Palm Beach buffets; government investigators dealing with the mess discover classified markings on some of the documents he took; and, well, here we are.

At first, Trump returned 15 boxes of documents to the National Archives. Reports from the FBI search indicate that the government took another dozen or so boxes with them when they left. That's nearly 30 boxes of stuff, and we know some of it is classified because federal investigators straight-up said, "We looked at the documents and saw the classified markings."

Now, there are a lot of rules about classified documents. I don't know all of them, and you probably don't either, but among the top rules are "when leaving your government job, do not take numerous classified national security documents with you and put them in your for-profit club." That's really sort of the top-line rule that shouldn't even need to be said. No putting them in your pockets. No putting them in with your private collectibles, like the government weather map you drew a fake forecast on. No tucking them alongside draft versions of self-pardons you never got around to signing, and absolutely no taking them to your foreign-agent-infested members-only club to be left in an unlocked room while you run off to New Jersey for a Saudi-funded sportswashing golf tournament.

That's very illegal, and thanks to Donald J. Trump's obsession with every single grudge he's ever had, it's now a felony. It's now something that will get you thrown in prison.

AHEM.

Oh—and that's also probably the reason Trump and whatever remaining lawyers are still so hard-up they're willing to work for him are probably not going to be showing us the delivered warrant papers anytime soon. The Trump-signed law is quite likely to be among those cited as justifications for authorizing the FBI’s search warrant.

Now that we're almost certain that the FBI search was related to classified documents Trump either refused to turn over or claimed he never had to begin with, speculation abounds as to what might happen next. One theory is that this is likely the end of it; the urgent government need was to get classified national security information out of Donald Trump's golf resort and back into government hands, and that's a whole different thing from coming back and putting Donald Trump in handcuffs for taking the documents in the first place.

That's depressingly likely, because if the federal government had the spine to put Donald Trump in handcuffs for any of his previous crimes, we wouldn't be here to begin with. It is quite likely that the FBI could, in their search for documents, discover that Eric Trump's bed consists entirely of a three-foot-high pile of cocaine with a pillow on top, and they still wouldn't charge anyone on the premises with a crime. That's how rich people's law works, and we all know it.

But this also would be a case of Donald Trump evading felony prosecution for provably and brazenly doing something he himself had made a felony to begin with, and ... I mean, come on. If you have that sort of karma lurking nearby, it's almost a separate crime not to invite it in. That's just shameful.

As to the question of whether Donald Trump should face federal prison time for mishandling classified documents in pretty much the most egregious example of mishandling classified documents you could possibly think of, then: Yes. Abso-freaking-lutely, Donald Trump should face felony indictment here.

For starters, it's the right thing to do. Nobody is above the law, and nobody is above even the laws that they themselves signed during one of their sneering multi-year snits. This isn't a case where prosecutors will have to grasp at straws to make their case. There's simply zero question that Trump took classified documents and put them in his, sigh, golf resort.

But just as importantly, it would be the funniest thing to ever happen in America in the last hundred years. No question. It would be absolutely freaking hilarious, and the nation needs this. We've gone through a pandemic. We've gone through terrorism. We've watched as the Supreme Court burned its own legitimacy with rulings that took their arguments from Newsmax conspiracy theories. We watched an attempted coup inside the U.S. Capitol.

After all that suffering, America deserves to see Donald Trump marched away in handcuffs for violating the law that he signed with his own hand as a Republican publicity effort to spite Hillary Clinton, two full years after she conceded her defeat.

America has earned this. We have earned this. It is, without question, time to ...

Lock Him Up.

RELATED STORIES:

Watch Fox News staff and other Republicans make the case for the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago

Why won’t Trump show us the warrant? Because it shows his criming

What do you say when you know the feds have the goods? Trumpland says, 'planted evidence'

GOP lawmakers out of their minds over search on their leader by Trump-appointed FBI director

In a letter obtained by POLITICO, the panel's Republicans are demanding documents and communications between the two agencies relating to the Trump search.

Ever since Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was searched by FBI agents on Monday, the conservative world has been revving its engines about political abuses of power by the Biden administration. The general theme has been that the FBI, headed by a Trump appointee, is ginning up fake charges and crimes in order to wrongfully imprison the Democrats’ political opponents.

At the same time, the Republican Party is promising that they will, if they come back into majority control of the executive and legislative branches of government, use their powers to actually wrongfully imprison their political opponents. This isn’t an idle threat. They’ve been priming the pump for decades.* “But her emails” has made a lot of conservative t-shirt printers rich.

On Tuesday, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah decided to put together a simple supercut of footage from Mar-a-Lago as agents executed the search warrant for sensitive documents (or, what Donald Trump and others have called a “raid” by federal agents). Over the flashing police lights and gated compound, that supercut also includes Fox News personalities and Republican officials’ statements about how and why the FBI acted rightfully and in service to America—when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was under investigation for allegations of mishandled documents. It’s too perfect to miss.

See Benghazi and the Kenneth Starr investigation of Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinski.

Enjoy!

RELATED STORY: A breakdown of all 126 seditious Republicans who signed on for a coup d'état

In their rage over the search of Mar-a-Lago, they fantasize about tearing the government apart piece by piece.

It’s easy to secure court orders blocking major policies when you can choose your own judges.

One of the biggest impediments to President Joe Biden’s ability to govern is a small crew of Republican-appointed federal trial judges, all of whom sit in Texas.

In August of 2021, for example, a Trump-appointed judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy, known as “Remain in Mexico,” which forced many migrants to live in awful conditions on the Mexican side of the US/Mexico border. Although the Supreme Court eventually determined that Kacsmaryk egregiously misread federal immigration law, it left his order in place for nearly a year — and the Court’s most recent decision concerning Remain in Mexico makes it very easy for Kacsmaryk to seize control of federal border policy once again.

Indeed, the status of this case, known as Texas v. Biden in Kacsmaryk’s court, is changing almost by the hour. On Monday, Kacsmaryk lifted his original order requiring the Biden administration to implement Trump’s policy — something he had to do given the Supreme Court’s decision — and the administration swiftly announced that it would wind down the program.

But almost as soon as Kacsmaryk lifted his original order, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a new motion asking Kacsmaryk to seize control of federal border policy once again.

This one Trump judge’s ability to override an elected president’s policies and assume the powers of a Cabinet secretary is just one aspect of a much larger problem. With the Supreme Court’s tacit blessing, Texas officials and other right-wing litigants can handpick the trial judge who will hear their challenges to Biden administration policies. And when those handpicked judges overreach in ways that even this Supreme Court deems unacceptable, decisions by men like Kacsmaryk can remain in place for as much as a year — effectively replacing governance by an elected presidential administration with rule by unelected Republican judges.

In another, similar case, the Supreme Court allowed a Trump judge named Drew Tipton to temporarily strip Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of much of his authority over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is the same Drew Tipton who issued a legally dubious order six days after Biden took office, which blocked the Biden administration's call for a 100-day pause on deportations while the new administration was figuring out its immigration policies.

And then there’s Judge Reed O’Connor, the Fort Worth, Texas, judge known for rubber stamping nearly any legal outcome requested by Republicans. O’Connor is best known for his order in Texas v. United States, holding that Obamacare must be repealed in its entirety. That decision was so poorly reasoned that seven justices — including four Republican appointees — eventually ruled that no federal judge had any business hearing Texas’s anti-Obamacare lawsuit in the first place.

But that experience did nothing to humble the Rubber Stamp of Fort Worth. In January, O’Connor forced the US Navy to deploy personnel that it deemed unfit for deployment because they are not vaccinated for Covid-19. The Supreme Court blocked most of O’Connor’s ruling in March, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing that the highly partisan judge “in effect inserted [himself] into the Navy’s chain of command, overriding military commanders’ professional military judgments.”

Meanwhile, O’Connor is widely expected to strike down the Affordable Care Act’s provisions requiring health insurers to cover a wide range of vaccinations and preventive care in a pending case called Kelley v. Becerra.

The fact that all these cases — and this is just a sample of the many policy-setting lawsuits being shunted to a handful of the most conservative judges in Texas — are winding up before a few GOP-appointed judges is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate strategy, made possible by procedural rules that effectively allow litigants to select which judge will hear their lawsuits, and by all appearances, intentionally pursued by the Texas attorney general’s office.

These Texas federal judges’ orders, moreover, appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, almost certainly the most conservative federal appeals court in the country, which tends to regard those orders with the same level of partisanship that is a feature in Kacsmaryk, Tipton, and O’Connor’s courtrooms.

So the Biden administration’s policies are routinely blocked, not because an impartial judge gives those policies a fair hearing and determines them to be illegal, but because Republican litigants can ensure that lawsuits seeking to undermine President Biden are heard by some of the most partisan judges in the country.

Why Texas gets to choose which judges hear its lawsuits

Chance normally plays a big role in federal litigation. When a plaintiff files a lawsuit, that suit is typically assigned to a district judge at random from among the federal trial judges who sit in the same geographic region. On appeal, the overwhelming majority of cases are heard by three-judge panels selected at random from among an appeals court’s judges. Only at the Supreme Court level, where a fixed panel of nine justices hears all cases, are litigants normally sure which judges will hear their case.

In Texas, however, things work a little differently. Texas is divided into four large geographic regions known as “districts,” each overseen by a federal district court. These districts are further subdivided into smaller “divisions.” Anti-Obamacare Judge O’Connor, for example, sits in the Fort Worth Division of the Northern District of Texas.

A problem arises, however, because federal law permits each federal district court to determine how cases are divided among the court’s judges, and Texas’s district courts divide their work in ways that make it easy for plaintiffs challenging a federal policy to choose which judge will hear their case.

When a plaintiff files a lawsuit in a division of one of Texas’s federal district courts, their case will typically be heard by one of the judges in that division. Some divisions, however, are fairly small and may have a single judge who hears all or nearly all of the cases. In the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, for example, 95 percent of all civil cases are assigned to Kacsmaryk. In the Victoria Division of Texas’s Southern District, Tipton hears virtually all civil cases.

To be clear, it’s unlikely that these geographic case assignment rules arose from an intentional effort to let litigants choose their own judges — they are most likely a response to the fact that Texas is very large, and litigants don’t want to travel hundreds of miles to a federal courthouse in a distant part of the state every day for a lawsuit — but they’ve certainly had that effect. While the Texas case assignment rules would be benign in a world where federal judges can be trusted to be fair and impartial, they take on a much more sinister cast in a world where judges like O’Connor exist. It’s the combination of well-known judges who act as rubber stamps for a political party, and local court rules that frequently allow plaintiffs to select which judge will hear their case, that effectively rigs Texas’s federal court system for the GOP.

Many normal litigants still file at their closest federal courthouse. But if you are a plaintiff determined to undermine Biden, why would you file a lawsuit in Austin or Dallas when you can drive a few hours to a courthouse presided over by a Kacsmaryk or a Tipton?

The Texas attorney general’s office is particularly ruthless in doing just that, manipulating the rules to ensure that its lawsuits will be heard by the GOP’s allies on the bench.

As Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, documented in a recent amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court, “the Texas Attorney General appears to have filed 19 cases in the Texas district courts” against the Biden administration. Of these 19 cases, “judges appointed during Republican presidencies are presiding in all but one.”

Texas achieved this feat by being very selective about where it files lawsuits. As Vladeck writes, Texas filed 12 of its 19 lawsuits against the Biden administration “in divisions where judges appointed during Republican presidencies preside over 100 percent of newly filed civil cases.” The remaining seven “were filed in divisions where judges appointed during Republican presidencies preside over 95 percent of new civil cases.”

Notably, the Texas AG’s office has not filed a single case in Austin — the city where that office is actually located — a choice that most likely can be explained by the fact that half of all federal cases filed in Austin are heard by Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee.

The Supreme Court has largely encouraged this behavior

Although the Supreme Court has, at times, disagreed with the judges Texas’s Republican leaders selected to hear their lawsuits, it’s done nothing to discourage the Texas AG’s judge-shopping. Indeed, if anything, it’s encouraged it.

Recall, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Texas, which determined that Judge Kacsmaryk mangled federal immigration law when he ordered the Biden administration to reinstate the Remain in Mexico program. While that was a victory, both for Biden and for the rule of law, it was an exceedingly narrow one.

Ten months before the justices handed down their decision rebuking Kacsmaryk, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to block his order while the case was making its way through the appeals process. But the Court refused to do so, with only its three Democratic appointees registering their dissent. That meant that Kacsmaryk wielded much of DHS Secretary Mayorkas’s policymaking authority for nearly an entire year.

Then, even when the Court did rule against Kacsmaryk in its Biden decision, it explicitly left open several legal questions which Kacsmaryk could easily latch onto to seize control of federal border policy once again. Texas has already asked Kacsmaryk to do so.

Just a few weeks after its decision in Biden, moreover, the Court issued a similar order to the one allowing Kacsmaryk to set border policy for 10 months. In this case, Judge Tipton effectively placed himself in charge of ICE’s decisions about which immigrants to target for enforcement actions by striking down a memo from Mayorkas that set enforcement priorities for the agency.

Tipton’s order is egregiously wrong — among other things, a federal statute explicitly gives Mayorkas the power to establish “national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Nevertheless, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to leave that order in place, at least until the justices can fully consider the case later this year. Even if the Court does correct Tipton’s error in this case, it could feasibly not hand down its decision until June of 2023 — leaving Tipton as the de facto head of ICE for nearly a full year.

Notably, the Court was far quicker to intervene when lower court judges blocked Trump administration policies. In early 2020, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that her GOP-appointed colleagues were “putting a thumb on the scale in favor of” the Trump administration in cases asking the Court to temporarily block lower court decisions while a case was still on appeal.

Around the same time, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch complained about a system where any one of the “more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges, sitting across 94 judicial districts” could block one of the Trump administration’s policies. Although liberal litigants typically did not engage in judge-shopping to the same degree that Texas now does, litigants suing the Trump administration would often file lawsuits in left-leaning districts such as the Northern District of California.

In any event, Gorsuch appears to have lost interest in solving the problem of judge-shopping and nationwide injunctions after a Democrat moved into the White House.

So what can be done?

Every year Chief Justice John Roberts releases a “year-end report on the federal judiciary.” The document is normally quite brief; his 2021 report was only nine pages long, and three of those pages were charts and statistics describing the workload of the federal courts.

And yet, Roberts devoted a considerable amount of that report to what he described as “an arcane but important matter of judicial administration.” Patent litigators throughout the country were taking advantage of the same judge-shopping rules that Texas uses to its advantage in order to shunt a high percentage of patent infringement suits to a single federal trial judge in Texas (not one we’ve discussed here). And Roberts announced that he’d asked one of the federal judiciary’s internal governing bodies to look into this problem of judge-shopping in patent litigation.

In what was likely a response to Roberts’s rebuke, the Western District of Texas recently announced that it would randomly assign patent cases to one of 12 judges, thus ending this one judge’s monopoly over so many of these cases. But Texas’s federal courts have not taken similar action to stop Texas Republicans from shopping around for sympathetic judges. And Roberts has not urged them to do so.

If the courts want to solve the problem of judge-shopping, it would not be hard for them to do so. One solution is to apply the same rule to Texas’s anti-Biden litigation as the Western District of Texas now applies to patent litigation — if a party seeks an order blocking a federal policy, that case will be randomly assigned to any judge within the entire district court where it is filed, not just one in the smaller division.

Alternatively, a court could assign lawsuits seeking a nationwide injunction against a federal policy to a panel of three judges. That’s the solution Fifth Circuit Judge Gregg Costa proposed in a 2018 piece published by the Harvard Law Review’s blog.

In any event, the details of such a solution don’t matter all that much. The important thing is that litigants who are actively trying to sabotage the United States government should not be allowed to handpick judges who share their agenda. For the moment, however, the courts seem to lack the will to address this problem. Texas Republicans can shop around for the judges they want, and that seems to suit a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees just fine.

Burger King has just emailed thousands of customers with a blank order email receipt. The Verge reports: The blank emails started appearing at around 12:15AM ET, leaving Burger King customers confused whether the company has been breached by a hungry hacker attempting a midnight feast, or if the emails are simply a giant whopper of a mistake. Twitter users were quick to turn to the social network in a state of confusion over the blank emails, with some even receiving two Burger King emails in an apparent double whopper of a mistake. The order emails are totally blank, and were sent by Burger King's main promotional marketing email address. After this story was published, an email from "BK PR Team" responded to our request for more information, claiming the issue was "the result of an internal processing error." We have asked for a specific individual to attribute the information to.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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America’s right-wing extremists have been hankering for a civil war for a long time now, and in particular have been eager to start using their guns in defense of Donald Trump ever since he came onto the political scene. They tried to start a civil war on Trump’s behalf after he lost on Jan. 6, 2021.

So to no one’s great surprise, they’re currently flooding social media and right-wing media bandwidth with vows to begin a civil war on Trump’s behalf after the FBI executed a search warrant at the ex-president’s Florida waterfront estate, Mar-a-Lago, and seized evidence in a yet-unspecified investigation. The rhetoric is mostly a mixture of over-the-top hysteria and dark threats, and it’s being wielded by everyone from congressional Republicans to anonymous militiamen.

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Back when Trump was facing his first impeachment, he tweeted out a hint that the proceedings might unleash a civil war—which did unleash a deluge of militiamen and Trump supporters vowing to do exactly that. The sentiments they voiced then were remarkably similar to the threats of violence directly preceding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Right after news of the Mar-a-Lago search broke, mentions of “civil war” on Twitter suddenly spiked, as Donie O’Sullivan reported.

The most prominent elected Republican to weigh in on the matter was Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose tweets became increasingly militant as the day progressed. They started out in typically unhinged fashion:

The FBI is raiding President Trump’s home in Maralago!

This is the rogue behavior of communist countries, NOT the United States of America!!!

These are the type of things that happen in countries during civil war.

The political persecution MUST STOP!!!

Later in the day, Greene’s tone became threatening: “What is happening will NOT be tolerated!!!” she wrote. “We are coming.”

A Florida Republican legislator running for Congress, Anthony Sabatini, wants the Florida state government to get involved and protect Trump from the evil federal government:

It’s time for us in the Florida Legislature to call an emergency legislative session & amend our laws regarding federal agencies

Sever all ties with DOJ immediately

Any FBI agent conducting law enforcement functions outside the purview of our State should be arrested upon sight.

Right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who is also running for Congress in Florida, was even more incendiary:

Time to take the gloves off. It’s been time. If you’re a freedom loving American, you must remove the words decorum and civility from your vocabulary. This is a WAR!

And it’s time to obliterate these communists. Tonight they attacked President Trump. If you sit on the sidelines and refuse to act, they will attack you and your family next.

What will you choose? Will you be a fighter? Or will you be a victim of the Deep State?

Arizona’s far-right Republican nominee for the governor’s seat, Kari Lake, posted a statement warning of the nation’s imminent demise:

This is one of the darkest days in American history: the day our Government, originally created by the people, turned against us. This illegitimate, corrupt Regime hates America and has weaponized the entirety of the Federal Government to take down President Donald Trump.

Our Government is rotten to the core. These Tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the Patriots who are working hard to save America. This is an incredibly horrendous abuse of power. If we accept it, America is dead.

We will not accept it. The 10th Amendment can and will save our Republic and the road to stripping the Feds of power travels right through Arizona.

We must fire the Federal Government. As Governor, I will fight these Tyrants with every fiber of my being. America—dark days lie ahead for us. May God protect us and save our Country.

Trump-loving right-wing pundits were similarly running around with their hair on fire, urging their audiences to prepare for war—and not just the metaphorical kind.

Jesse Kelly—the right-wing radio talk-show host who believes fascism is an inevitability for the American right, and is good with that—gave a shout-out to the so-called “constitutional sheriffs” who have threatened to get involved in the nation’s election apparatus in defense of Trump. “Do you have a county sheriff who will stand between you and a federal agent trying to violate your rights? If you don’t, you better get one. Or better yet, BECOME one,” Kelly tweeted.

He later tweeted out a quote with threatening implications: “Do not quote laws to men with swords.’ -Pompey Magnus,” Kelly tweeted.

Far-right pundit Candace Owens had a regular meltdown on Twitter:

The FBI must be legally and formally dissolved.

What happened to President Trump is positively stunning and a mark of unchecked government power.

I no longer recognize the country I live in. Left or right, we must all come together to fight this evil.

Meanwhile, longtime Fox News host Monica Crowley decided it was time to throw down the gauntlet: “This is it,” she tweeted. “This is the hill to die on.”

White nationalist pundit Jack Posobiec, who now hosts a daily show for the right-wing campus organization Turning Point USA, posted a series of tweets that essentially urged his audience to gird their loins for a real shooting war:

Are you ready.

The federal security state has declared war on Donald J Trump and his supporters.

The country you grew up in no longer exists.

We are living through the times our forefathers warned of.

Preemptive coup.

Welcome to the end game.

Longtime conspiracy theorist Steven Crowder’s unhinged tweet was shorter and more succinct: “Tomorrow is war,” he wrote. “Sleep well.”

The ominous suggestions that the base become engaged in violence could be heard on Fox News as well thanks to host Jesse Waters, who told his guest, Dan Bongino:

I think there is going to be some more action you are going to see out on the streets from the base after they see this break tonight... They've had it with what this corrupt government and what the FBI has done.

Another Fox News host, Mark Levin, claimed that investigating Trump was an attack on the nation itself:

This is the worst attack on this republic in modern history. Period. And it’s not just an attack on Donald Trump. It’s an attack on everybody who supports him. It’s an attack on anybody who dares to raise serious questions about Washington, D.C., and the establishment in both parties. I haven’t heard a damn thing from the Republican leadership in the Senate! Have you? Not one of those guys has put out a statement. Because they’re weak. That’s why.

Onetime Trump aide Sebastian Gorka tweeted: “This is the real insurrection.”

On Trump’s social media site Truth Social, radio host Wayne Root, Trump’s longtime fan and supporter, wrote: “This is now officially Nazi Germany Gestapo meets Soviet Union KGB.”

Trumpist pundit Carmine Sabia also penned a series of increasingly unhinged tweets to his 80,000-plus followers:

It is time for a #NationalDivorce before there is a Civil War. We cannot be a part of the same nation anymore.

And if I haven’t been direct enough let me say it again. If you are not for Donald Trump you are my enemy. I did not believe that four hours ago. But I believe it now. This was a gigantic fucking mistake Democrats.

This is war. Pick a side. There is no gray area.

The America that you knew and loved as a kid is gone. It’s gone and it’s never coming back.

These same sentiments could be found throughout right-wing social media, being voiced by ordinary randos and trolls at large and often at high volume.

• “The Dems are starting a civil war.”
• “Is this the first shot of a civil war? Is this the tyranny mentioned in the 2nd Amendment? The Founding Fathers would have started shooting a long time ago!”
• “It’s time for a civil war. The deep state has proven they are real, they are corrupt, they are dictators.”
• “Civil war! Pick up arms people!”
• “The fbi just declared war on the republic. Treat them accordingly.”
• “A civil war is coming after what the DOJ did today.”
• “August 8, 2022 will be remembered forever. The start of Civil War II.”
• “Our government is pushing for a civil war. Americans are only going to take so much.”
• “I already bought my ammo”
• “Civil War 2.0 just kicked off.”
• “Let’s do the war.”
• “One step closer to a kinetic civil war.”
• “Lock and load”
• “Let history show that Biden and his DOJ drew first blood with this raid on Mar-a-Lago.”
• “FBI is headed by Jews. I warned you about these demons.”
• “We’re at war.”
• “It’s going to be wonderful to see FBI agents get killed in the future!”

“Prior to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, we saw unprecedented plans online to conduct real-world violence,” observed Advance Democracy president Daniel J. Jones, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staff member, in a statement to NBC News. "The online outrage was based on false allegations of voter fraud and bizarre theories of coordinated government corruption. The raid by the FBI has provoked similar violent rhetoric online—including from at least one individual charged in relation to the insurrection on January 6th.”

Jones added: “The promotion of broad government conspiracy theories by political leaders, elected officials, and political entertainers continues to undermine our democracy—and will likely lead to additional political violence.”

Trump and his followers proved on Jan. 6 how dangerously close they came to overturning our democracy. Help cancel Republican voter suppression with the power of your pen by clicking here and signing up to volunteer with Vote Forward, writing personalized letters to targeted voters urging them to exercise their right to vote this year.

A Mississippi grand jury has decided not to indict the white woman, now in her 80s, whose lie is said to have motivated the mob that killed 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, prosecutors announced on Tuesday. 

Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi when he is said to have whistled at Carolyn Bryant Donham on a trip to the store she worked at. According to a Vanity Fair profile of author Timothy Tyson's effort to catch up with Donham years after Emmett’s death, Donham was married to Roy Bryant at the time, who with his half-brother J.W. Milam, was accused of lynching and brutally beating Emmett to death. Donham's court testimony helped free the men.

Donham told Tyson when she was 72 years old that she made up much of her testimony. Since then, Till's relatives were able to unearth from court documents an unserved warrant for Donham dating back to 1955. They had hope it would finally lead to jail time for Donham.

Although Roy Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder charges, Donham was never arrested in Emmett’s death. Leflore County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said in a news release obtained by The Associated Press that the grand jury determined, after upward of seven hours of testimony from witnesses and investigators, that the evidence to charge her now with kidnapping or manslaughter was insufficient.

RELATED STORY: Newly discovered warrant may inspire arrest of white woman whose lies likely sparked murder

The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation is still calling for Richardson to serve the warrant against Donham. The nonprofit tweeted: "#CarolynBryantDonham has still never been charged with a crime, despite the overwhelming new evidence that proves her culpability in the kidnapping of #EmmettTill." 

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Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr. told CBS News in a statement that the grand jury's decision is "unfortunate, but predictable." 

"The prosecutor tried his best, and we appreciate his efforts, but he alone cannot undo hundreds of years of anti-Black systems that guaranteed those who killed Emmett Till would go unpunished, to this day," Parker said in the statement. "The fact remains that the people who abducted, tortured, and murdered Emmett did so in plain sight, and our American justice system was and continues to be set up in such a way that they could not be brought to justice for their heinous crimes."

President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law in March to officially make lynching a federal hate crime. It took some 67 years after Emmett's death.

RELATED STORY: 'Let the people see what they did to my boy': Mom's bravery nets law nearly 67 years after lynching

Biden said during a Rose Garden signing ceremony that 4,400 Black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. “Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,” the president said.

During the ceremony, Vice President Kamala Harris went off-script in talking about the "importance of the Black press" to "tell the truth when no one else is willing to tell it."

Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett's mother, had allowed Jet Magazine to take photos of Emmett's body before his funeral and share them with other news sources. "Let the people see what they did to my boy," she said after viewing her son’s body.

Many argue that act of courage catapulted the Civil Rights Movement.

"The newspaper coverage and murder trial galvanized a generation of young African Americans to join the Civil Rights Movement out of fear that such an incident could happen to friends, family, or even themselves," the Library of Congress reported in an article.

Warning: This video contains images of Till’s body after being lynched, which may be triggering for viewers.

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Republicans sure aren’t acting like there’s an election in a few months, and that they might just have a real opportunity to take back the Senate. Look at this weekend’s Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ reconciliation bill that is chock-full of stuff that will be helpful to the American people. Not only did Republicans not support helping people save money on their energy bills and their health insurance, they made sure diabetics have to continue to pay extortionate prices on insulin to stay alive.

That was right on the heels of telling veterans to pound sand in a fit of pique over the reconciliation bill. Back in June, all but 14 Republicans voted with Democrats to make sure veterans who had been exposed to toxic substances, including burn pits, got the benefits and health care a grateful nation owes them. Because Democrats decided to do more to help more people, Republicans inexplicably decided it was smart politics to reverse course and get Jon Stewart and a bunch of really pissed off veterans on their asses. The inevitable result was they had to reverse course again, and cave to doing the right thing.

Republicans really are putting a lot of faith in their ability to rig elections and the idea that it’s going to be a low turnout election where they’ll have the more motivated voters. An election in which they think voters won’t remember all this. Kansas should have disabused them of that notion, but it sure didn’t seem to. They’re blithely moving forward with their very bad ideas that will make many voters angry. Take, for example, seniors.

Donate now to give Democrats a true majority in the Senate.

Right now older Americans, as represented by AARP, are looking forward to the benefits of the IRA and the lower prescription drug prices they’ll be enjoying. All thanks to Democrats, by the way.

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Meanwhile, Republicans just can’t stop showing how excited they are at the prospect of destroying Social Security and Medicare. We have Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s infamous plan to make sure all federal laws expire after five years, requiring these programs to have to be passed again and again and again.

There’s South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, promising that if Republicans retake the Senate, “entitlement reform” will be a “must.” Which means ending the promise of Social Security and Medicare—which every working person in the country pays for out of every paycheck.

Not to be outdone, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who is actually running for reelection this year, has yet another plan to kill the programs. He wants to end the promise by turning the programs into discretionary programs that Congress has to haggle over funding every single year. Now, you could write that off as Johnson once again saying something incredibly blockheaded because that’s what he is, but you really can’t because it just keeps coming back up.

They want to end Social Security, and they are spending an inordinate amount of time and energy into figuring out ways to do that, and it’s the only real effort they’re making to create policy. You’d think that with less than 12 weeks to go until the election, they’d start trying to at least pretend they give a damn about voters.

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Leading Republicans are in thrall to a dangerously conspiratorial view of the US government.

After news of the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home broke on Monday night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy responded by openly threatening Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” he said in a statement. “Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”

Think about this for a second. Here you have the likely next speaker of the House claiming without the tiniest shred of evidence that the Justice Department is persecuting a former president — and vowing to use his authority to punish them as a result. His response to his baseless claim of the politicization of investigative powers is to promise a politicized investigation of his own.

McCarthy was far from alone. Trump, who confirmed the raid in a lengthy statement, called it “an attack by the Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024” — an allegation that set the tone for much of the party in the wake of the dramatic FBI operation.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the leading non-Trump candidate in the 2024 GOP primary race, called the raid “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” Florida Sen. Rick Scott, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, called it “3rd World country stuff.” New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, called for “an immediate investigation and accountability into Joe Biden and his Administration’s weaponizing this [Justice] department against their political opponents.”

Some leading Republicans, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, did not engage in such fevered speculation and kept their counsel. But the backlash from the party has been loud and broad, revealing the GOP as basically in lockstep with the Trumpian line that the Justice Department has been fully politicized and needs to be brought to heel.

David McNew/Getty Images

There is no evidence to support the idea that the raid on Mar-a-Lago was politically motivated. FBI Director Christopher Wray is a Trump appointee and would almost certainly have personally signed off on the warrant; so too would the attorney general and a federal judge. The Biden White House, by contrast, says it was not informed of the search in advance. We also know the target was real — possibly classified documents Trump improperly brought back to his private residence — and that there are a number of serious crimes that Trump might well have committed in office. It’s possible that the raid turns out to be an overreach or a mistake — FBI history is certainly full of those — but, as of right now, there is no evidence of any kind of political misconduct on the part of the agency.

The Republican attacks on the Mar-a-Lago raid result not from reasonable skepticism of law enforcement, but something darker: a belief on the right that the government’s functions must necessarily be partisan, either wielded for Republicans’ benefit or against them.

It is an idea that has become increasingly dominant during the Trump years — and one that threatens the foundations of American democracy.

Republicans against the rule of law

Democratic governance depends on the idea that the rules are applied neutrally: that when a legislature passes a law, agents of the state enforce that law based on their best reading of its text, without regard to the identity of the people who are breaking it. This is the essence of “the rule of law,” one of liberal democracy’s foundational principles.

Reality, of course, does not match this lofty vision. But when government agents depart from it — systemic racial biases in policing, for example — it’s rightly considered a scandal, an injustice that ought to be corrected. Trying to address the gulf between principle and reality is one of the perennial struggles of democratic political life around the globe.

During the Trump era, however, Republicans began to embrace an increasingly radical critique, one that rejected the very notion of a neutral “rule of law” as illusory under current conditions.

In their view, Democrats and liberals have so thoroughly seized control of major American institutions — including the federal bureaucracy and law enforcement apparatus — that nonpartisan governance is functionally impossible. This belief, ironically reminiscent of some arguments made by critical race theorists, argues that the very idea of small-l liberal neutrality is a fiction — that politics is a no-holds-barred struggle for power, and the question is whether it is wielded for us or against us.

Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images

Michael Anton, the chief theorist of Trumpism as a political doctrine, laid out this argument plainly in a late July essay.

“The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again,” Anton writes. “Plan A is to use the Jan. 6 show trials to make it impossible for Trump to run again. ... Plan B is for the Jan. 6 committee to lay the groundwork for an indictment of Trump.”

In his essay, Anton describes a hypothetical Trump prosecution as part of a “regime” plot against the former president and his supporters. Anton lays out “their” motivation — the conspiratorially unspecified “they” is a frequent feature in his prose — as a corrupt power play, a pretext for keeping Trump out of office and potentially even “unleashing the security state” against his supporters.

Think about what it would mean if Anton’s theory were true. The entire Justice Department and FBI would have to be staffed by “regime apparatchiks” who operate at the beck and call of “the people who really run the United States.” The government is occupied hostile territory, led by an anti-Trump and anti-Republican conspiracy, that will stop at nothing to entrench its own hold on power just to keep Trump and the people he represents out of power.

Anton is not a fringe figure: He was a high-ranking official in Trump’s National Security Council and an influential writer on the pro-Trump right. His rhetoric is directly echoed in the GOP responses to the Mar-a-Lago raid: Look at how DeSantis, for example, called it an attack on “the Regime’s political opponents.” The claim that the US government has been captured by a capital-R regime is a feature of radical right-wing rhetoric, popular among Anton-style Trumpists and the so-called “New Right” — but here it’s being echoed by one of the country’s most influential Republican politicians.

And such theories are informing actual policy. Last month, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported on a large-scale GOP plan to reshape the federal bureaucracy in a second Trump presidency: reissuing a 2020 executive order called “Schedule F” with the intent of “purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his ‘America First’ ideology.”

The premise of the plan, according to Swan, is that “Schedule F will finally end the ‘farce’ of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.”

It is this specter, more than anything else, that explains the furious Republican reaction to the Mar-a-Lago raid. It confirms the hardcore Trumpist belief that the “deep state” is aligned against them, a conspiracy theory that the GOP’s leaders have adopted either out of sincere conviction or political expediency.

And the consequences of this belief’s spread could soon prove dire. On Monday night, popular conservative YouTube personality Steven Crowder tweeted out an ominous take:

Whether Crowder meant “war” literally is somewhat immaterial; after January 6, we know messages urging individuals to rise to the defense of Republicans against a vast liberal conspiracy can mobilize violent actors who are all too real. If you really believed that the US government were controlled by shadowy forces who hate you, wouldn’t you act to try and save your beloved president from their clutches?

The posters on Patriots.win, a radical pro-Trump web forum, are thinking along these lines. “They’re treating it as a hot civil war,” one poster writes in the thread on the Mar-a-Lago raid. “When this is all said and done, the people responsible for these tyrannical actions need to be hanged, and memorialized with statues of loafers and high heels cast in bronze in their home towns.”

The most popular response in the thread is much shorter, just three words long: “lock and load.”

We begin today’s roundup with analysis of the historic search conducted by the FBI at Mar-a-lago, the residence of Donald Trump. First up, Brian Ellsworth and Sarah Lynch at Reuters:

Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday and broke into his safe in what his son acknowledged was part of an investigation into Trump's removal of official presidential records from the White House to his Florida resort.

The unprecedented search of a former president's home would mark a significant escalation into the records investigation, which is one of several probes Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business.

Marc Caputo and Ryan Reilly at NBC News:

Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine asks the key question -— what’s in the safe?

I called a few former aides to the former president to see what they remembered about his secure storage methods. Had he talked about his safes? Had anyone seen his safe? Was it gold? [...]

Another former Trump staffer did remember something from 2015, however. “We were talking about him running for president and he was saying he was serious,” this person said. Trump was scheduled to stop in Louisiana before flying out of the country. On the 24th floor of Trump Tower, two staffers waited on the boss. “He comes down and he goes, ‘Shit, I have to go to the safe,’” this person said. “He comes down with one of those TRUMP-MAR-A-LAGO bags — downstairs, if you bought a tie or something at the Trump store, you’d get a nice fancy shopping bag like you’d get at Saks – with about $50,000 in cash and six containers of white Tic-Tacs. And he was going through the border. I know he didn’t declare that to customs!”

More analysis at Yahoo! News:

[F]or a deliberate Justice Department keen to turn the page from the politicization of the Trump era, the raid of Mar-a-Lago most likely required reviews at the highest levels and convincing evidence supporting a finding of probable cause, legal experts said.

"I cannot imagine the amount of probable cause set forth in a search warrant's supporting FBI affidavit of Trump's Florida home," said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor from Northern Virginia. He added in an email to Insider that the number of "review levels" for the search warrant "must have been enormous, including by Trump's FBI appointee Christopher Wray."

 David Smith at The Guardian analysis the unsurprising reaction from the right:

The Republican response on Monday drew from a familiar playbook: Trump has long maintained that the Russia investigation, for example, was a “hoax” and part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him. Scrutiny of his removal of presidential records, or his role in the January 6 insurrection, is likely to produce a similar backlash.

Joe Walsh, a Trump critic and former Republican congressman, tweeted: “The Republican Party has abandoned the rule of law. Just listen to them tonight. They’re at war with the rule of law.

Kat Bouza at Rolling Stone:

After years of defending the continued militarization of law enforcement agencies across the United States, Republican lawmakers appeared to have a change of heart Monday after learning the FBI executed a search at the Florida estate of former President Donald Trump. Faced with the possibility that the “good guys” might not be on their side after all, prominent members of party that made backing the blue a central tenet of its political platform in recent years began spouting rhetoric that suspiciously mirrored the talking points of Conservatives’ most feared bogeyman: antifa.

And on a final note, here’s Harry Litman at The Los Angeles Times on our “long national nightmare”:

It might seem puzzling, even disappointing, that the Justice Department and the FBI would have chosen to throw down the gauntlet for a crime — “concealment, removal, or mutiIation generally” of official documents — that is far from the most serious of those we think the former president may have committed, such as obstruction of justice, fraud against the United States and, most dramatically, seditious conspiracy. [...] 

But a charge of mishandling or destroying official documents is no petty offense, not under the federal code (which provides for a prison sentence of up to three years) and not in the culture of the Justice Department, which takes it very seriously.

In Trump’s case, no surprise, the potential offense appears to be particularly brazen and damaging. Among the documents he reportedly took with him and has declined to return are true historical items that belong to the American people, including the letter President Obama left for him when he took office and his bizarre valentines to North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Un.

Further, a documents charge, as presidential accusations go, would be relatively easy to prove and would sidestep issues of 1st Amendment protected political activity that Trump no doubt would claim if he were indicted in relation to, say, his incendiary speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6.

And most important, there’s this: Anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” official documents “shall be” disqualified — barred for life — from holding future federal office.

Advocates for reining in decades-old presidential war powers have their eyes on must-pass defense legislation as a vessel for finally achieving their goal in the Senate.

A push to repeal the 2002 Iraq War authorization, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.), has garnered bipartisan support. The move, which is backed by President Joe Biden, has yet to come up for a vote despite a pledge last year by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to do so.

That has senators eyeing adding the proposal to the Senate’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act to get the job done, mirroring a move by the House last month.

“I’ve talked with Senator Schumer about it [and] he had promised a floor vote on this at some point,” Kaine told POLITICO. “He obviously wants to do it in a way that does not chew up the maximum amount of time, so we’re trying to figure that out.”

Kaine said tacking the repeal onto the defense policy bill or holding a standalone vote in connection with the 20th anniversary of the vote that preceded the U.S. invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime are possibilities.

But with control of the Senate a tossup headed into the midterms, advocates are staring down dwindling opportunities to pass something as Democrats scramble to enact their last legislative priorities. The defense bill is one of the few major pieces of legislation to reliably become law each year, making it a magnet for other efforts.

A war powers overhaul would likely face much longer odds in a GOP-led Senate. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has opposed efforts to take the 2002 authorization off the books, calling the move “reckless” when the House voted to do so last year.

The House voted to repeal several old war powers — the 2002 Iraq War authorization, a 1991 measure enacted for the Gulf War and a Cold War-era 1957 resolution for military force in the Middle East — as part of its own defense bill with little controversy in July.

A key problem for the Senate is finding the time to do the vote. Congress just kicked off its long summer recess and will be out of session much of the next several months with elections looming. Ahead of the recess, Senate Democrats had been preoccupied passing their top priority: a party-line tax, climate and health care package, which was finally approved on Sunday.

A spokesperson for Schumer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Democratic leaders’ plans for a vote. Schumer pressed for a vote on Kaine and Young’s proposal as part of the Senate defense bill last fall, but a vote was scuttled by a partisan dispute over amendments.

Young said he last huddled with Kaine on their war powers proposal roughly a month ago, but agreed that the defense bill may be the most viable target for attaching the AUMF repeal.

“I've been reassured by Senator Kaine that we will likely have a vote between now and year's end,” Young said in a brief interview. “I agree that the NDAA is the most logical vehicle, but frankly we'll hitch a ride wherever we can catch it. It's a busy calendar."

Critics of the broad presidential war powers granted in the wake of 9/11 want to pull back the Iraq War authorization and other old laws as a down payment on a larger, and much more politically fraught, overhaul that restores lawmakers’ authority to authorize military force.

"The further you go back, the more absurd leaving these zombie authorizations on the book looks,” Young said.

Keeping old authorizations on the books, advocates contend, makes them ripe for abuse by the executive branch. Former President Donald Trump cited the 2002 AUMF as part of his administration’s legal justification for the 2020 killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, a move that revived debate on Capitol Hill over presidential war powers.

Kaine and Young have pushed standalone legislation to repeal the Iraq War resolution as well as the 1991 Gulf War authorization, which cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with bipartisan support last August. The measure would likely garner the requisite 60 votes to advance on the Senate floor.

The House has voted several times to roll back aging war powers, including in annual defense appropriations and policy legislation as well as in standalone bills that passed last year.

Finding floor time has already proved difficult. The response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has engulfed foreign policy deliberations. The waning weeks of July and the early days of August were crowded by efforts to cement a reconciliation deal, ratify a treaty to admit Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance and muscle through an expansion of veterans health care stemming from burn pit exposure.

“The last time we talked about it he said, ‘I really want to do it, I just got to figure out a way so it doesn’t block a whole lot of other things from happening,’” Kaine said of his discussions with Schumer.

That may make the broader defense bill an attractive option, as the House bill already includes the repeal. But it’s not without risk after the Senate failed to pass its own bill last year.

Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said incorporating the repeal in the NDAA “makes some sense,” though no definite plans have been made.

Senators will have to hustle to clear their own defense bill, regardless of the war powers debate.

Reed is aiming to pass his legislation in a brief window in September when the Congress returns from its summer recess. Even then, the NDAA may compete with efforts to prevent a government shutdown.

Already, Senate Republicans are hammering Schumer to quickly bring a defense bill to the floor. The Senate failed to pass its own bill late last year after Republicans blocked the measure in a dispute over amendment votes, leaving House and Senate Armed Services leaders to work out a separate compromise.

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If you were wondering if the rumblings of a search warrant carried out by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago were true, look no further than the club’s owner—Donald Trump—to confirm this latest development. Florida Politics’ Peter Schorsch first got the scoop from two sources that the former president’s beachfront estate was in the process of being raided early Monday evening. It didn’t take long before Trump said what the FBI seemingly didn’t confirm until after his Truth Social post.

The FBI refused to comment about any specifics on the matter, but Trump found it necessary to issue dozens of words describing the influx of a “large group of FBI agents” at Mar-a-Lago whose orders Trump readily complied with, though the insurrection ringleader claimed the FBI broke into his safe and that they were carrying out an unnecessary, inappropriate form of prosecutorial misconduct. The horrors that come with allowing the FBI into your house willingly! Are they like vampires?

It’s anyone’s guess what latest controversy Trump may be mired in, though I welcome your guesses in the comments.

Also, why does Trump capitalize the word “Countries”? Someone who’s good at Q math, please solve this problem.

The Republican Party's plan to find all the worst people in America and run them for office just keeps on going. This time it's Kim Crockett, who has a good shot at becoming the party's nominee for Minnesota secretary of state on Tuesday. Crockett wants to be in charge of Minnesota elections. Crockett has some extremely peculiar ideas about which Americans even ought to be allowed to vote to begin with.

In a 2020 radio interview resurfaced by The Huffington Post, Crockett mused on a state Supreme Court ruling allowing voters to ask for help in casting their vote if they have a disability or don't feel confident in their ability to read English. And by "mused," we mean:

"So, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that indeed you can help an unlimited number of people vote if they are disabled or can’t read or speak English, which raises the question, should they be voting? We can talk about that another time."

Ohhh yes, I think we will. Crockett is now furiously (and very dubiously) backtracking, but her question was a straightforward one. If you don't speak English or if you can't, say, physically make it up the steps outside your assigned voting location, "should they be voting?"

Well, neither of those things is a requirement for being an American citizen, so unless we're going to start classifying wheelchair use or poor vision or dyslexia or not speaking English as a felony, those people do get to vote. It's not, uh, controversial. Unless you're a Nazi, of course.

This is the sort of eugenics-adjacent ick that most people wouldn't think to even say in private, much less on the radio, but saying such things on the radio is how your state Republican Party decides they want to endorse you as their candidate for office. But Crockett has much more on her resume. She's a promoter of election conspiracy hoaxes, which is why she was grousing about the state Supreme Court letting disabled people vote to begin with. She's anti-immigrant, which is why she was grousing about the "can't speak English" part.

HuffPost notes a 2019 New York Times story quoting Crockett as saying America was "at the breaking point," in terms of immigration, because "These aren't people coming from Norway, let's put it that way. These people are very visible." She's also a promoter of antisemitic rhetoric, thinks Biden's win was "illegitimate," and is in general just an absolute garbage fire of a human being.

Again: She won the Minnesota Republican Party's endorsement just last May, as Republican state parties become functionally indistinguishable from early Naziism. Is suggesting that disabled people shouldn't vote or presenting, to the party convention, a video depicting the Jewish incumbent of the office you're running for is a "puppet" of George Soros—is that the "Minnesota nice" we keep hearing about?

Or just the burps of midwest fascists?

There is a whole lot of extremely-adjacent-to-Nazism rhetoric coming out of state Republican candidates this cycle, and it's stuff that the party would be extremely unlikely to stomach a decade ago. That's ancient history. This time around, high-profile Republican candidates are using rhetoric plucked right from Klan rallies.

Yeeeesh. And in the meantime, fascist cells promoting the notion that democracy itself must take a back seat to hard-right goals are getting gauzy profiles from a press still unwilling to pick sides between fascism and not-fascism.

Republican campaigners are no longer self-filtering. They'll tell you exactly what they think, and they think that whole segments of Americans shouldn't be voting and that "Marxists" are infiltrating schools to promote "LGBTQ degeneracy." These people are not good. These people are hateful, bigoted, racist, paranoid, cruel, paranoid, compulsively lying, paranoid, and paranoid people. This is a whole party that's made a game of finding the people in America most willing to work themselves up into an absolutely batshit froth, then put Republicanism's official backing behind the lot of them.

I don't know how you find someone like Kim Crockett. That takes some doing. I'm also stunned the Republican Party found her before Fox News signed her to host her own evening show.

Daily Kos has endorsed Democrat Steve Simon in this race. Donate to his campaign and other Democratic secretary of state candidates now to stop Republican attempts to subvert our elections from the inside.

Republicans killed Roe v. Wade, but getting them to agree to support for parents and children? Good luck.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), to his very minimal credit, wants to ensure that some of the people being forced to have children get some financial support from the government, albeit minimal. He has a few Republican takers, a very few. And absolutely no support from leadership. According to Sen. Mitch McConnell, people are being coddled enough already.

“There are actually a lot of resources for expecting and new Moms, including Medicaid and S-CHIP for health care, maternal nutrition and child care programs,” McConnell spokesman Scott Sloofman told The Washington Post. “What we shouldn’t do is expand massive government stimulus programs which would exacerbate the runaway inflation that is crushing Kentucky’s working families.”

Get that? Kentucky’s working families don’t need any more help for those children Republicans are forcing them to have. Because all those programs exist, despite repeated efforts by Republicans to end them.

Donate now to protect abortion rights in Kentucky.

One of the main reasons people have been having abortions since, well, forever, is economic. Having a child upends work, education, ability to care for other family members, and just costs a lot of money. 

That’s one reason why a group of 154 distinguished economists and researchers filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court of the United States in advance of the Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, where the court overturned Roe and ended federal protection of abortion rights.

Some Republicans kind of get it. Along with Romney, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has been thinking about helping working families. “We have a history of laissez faire economic policies in the Republican Party,” he told the Post. “But there are things that are important for the well-being of our country, and one of them is the strength of our families.” Rubio has one proposal that’s blatantly anti-abortion for that, allowing pregnant people to claim a child tax credit for an unborn child—that’s essentially an outgrowth of the “personhood” movement giving a fetus rights at least equal to that of the person carrying it. He also has what he calls a “pro-work” child tax credit proposal, meaning the help would come with a work requirement.

You would think last week’s lesson on abortion rights from Kansas  might make McConnell rethink his stance on abortion rights and all of the politics around it. You’d think wrong.

“Republicans have a major, major problem right now with women, exacerbated by abortion but made a lot worse by their refusal to balance that liability with support for any kind of family benefits,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the Post. “That could really make them pay a price in the fall, particularly with women, but there’s no evidence they’re going to change.”

Thanks to the voters in Kansas, they’re not going to be able to avoid that discussion this fall.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon.com hasn't just bought a maker of robot vacuum cleaners. It's acquired a mapping company. To be more precise: a company that can make maps of your home. The company announced a $1.7 billion deal on Friday for iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. And yes, Amazon will make money from selling those gadgets. But the real value resides in those robots' ability to map your house. As ever with Amazon, it's all about the data. A smart home, you see, isn't actually terribly smart. It only knows that your Philips Hue lightbulbs and connected television are in your sitting room because you've told it as much. It certainly doesn't know where exactly the devices are within that room. The more it knows about a given space, the more tightly it can choreograph the way they interact with you. The smart home is clearly a priority for Amazon. Its Echo smart speakers still outsell those from rivals Apple and Google, with an estimated 9.9 million units sold in the three months through March, according to the analysis firm Strategy Analytics. It's complemented that with a $1 billion deal for the video doorbell-maker Ring in 2018, and the wi-fi company Eero a year later. But you still can't readily buy the Astro, Amazon's household robot that was revealed with some fanfare last year, is still only available in limited quantities. That, too, seemed at least partly an effort to map the inside of your property, a task that will now fall to iRobot. The Bedford, Mass.-based company's most recent products include a technology it calls Smart Maps, though customers can opt out of sharing the data. Amazon said in a statement that protecting customer data is "incredibly important." Slightly more terrifying, the maps also represent a wealth of data for marketers. The size of your house is a pretty good proxy for your wealth. A floor covered in toys means you likely have kids. A household without much furniture is a household to which you can try to sell more furniture. This is all useful intel for a company such as Amazon which, you may have noticed, is in the business of selling stuff.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.