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Donors to the Republican National Committee (RNC) might believe that their dollars are going to support congressional campaigns in 2022 or creating a war chest for the next GOP presidential candidate in 2024. But a lot of those dollars are being spent right now on something that most contributors might not expect: Donald Trump’s legal costs. Trump, who is neither a holder of any office nor an announced candidate for any race, is collecting six-figure payments from the RNC to cover the cost of legal fees.

That’s a highly unusual, and possibly unique, situation all on its own. However, as The Washington Post reports, the payments being made to Trump aren’t even connected to his ongoing efforts to withhold information from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6. The payments aren’t even in connection to Trump’s long-running effort to block the House Ways and Means Committee’s legal right to see his tax returns. The RNC has actually paid out at least $121,670 to a law firm trying to protect Trump from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James in their criminal investigation of Trump’s financial activities in New York. 

It’s astounding evidence of how the Republican Party currently serves as a front for Trump—and it comes as The Washington Post is also reporting an expansion into the investigation of Trump’s endless grifting.

In 2018, Donald Trump was forced to fold his family foundation for “persistent illegal activity.” Included in that activity was repeated use of the foundation to act as a slush fund for Trump’s legal issues, including paying off a suit related to a lost golf bet. That same foundation was also used as a source of funds for Trump’s campaign, as well as a means of funneling money back to Trump through payments to one of his 500+ companies.

Now it appears that the RNC has replaced the foundation as Trump’s all-purpose source of cash. In an interview with Bloomberg, the attorney involved made it clear he was being paid “to represent Donald Trump,” not in any official capacity, but as an individual. Bloomberg calls these payments “likely legal under FEC precedents.” That’s because while the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has enforced rules against candidates using their own campaign funds for personal expenses, there is no history of such payments coming from a party committee.

The job of that attorney is only getting bigger as it’s now clear Trump is being investigated for one of his most conspicuous abuses of the system: inflating the price of his properties when reporting their worth to obtain loans and investments, then drastically reducing their reported worth when paying his taxes.

In one example cited by the Post, Trump boasted that his 40 Wall Street building was worth $527 million in a presentation to lenders, but told tax officials that the same building was worth $16.7 million—less than the price of a single high-end Manhattan condo. James has reportedly convened a new grand jury to consider criminal charges.

This move doesn’t seem to be a last-minute addition, but a central part of the case that state and and city prosecutors are building against Trump. A great deal of time has been spent examining everything from the history of his various buildings to the geology underlying his golf course to better understand how Trump has gamed the system and prepare for any possible defense.

But making this case may be less cut and dry than it seems. According to experts interviewed by the Post, neither overvaluing nor undervaluing property may be a criminal act. Prosecutors will have to prove that Trump intentionally misrepresented the value in order to charge either bank fraud or tax fraud. That may seem obvious, but making the legal case may require prosecutors to locate a “smoking gun” document from a man who notoriously does not write things down and speaks to his underlings in terms designed to code his intent.

In May, the RNC shelled out $175,000 to rent a meeting room at Mar-a-Lago. They handed over half a million to one of Trump’s bodyguards for “security services.” And the RNC has been forced to return over $120 million to donors after the Trump campaign sent out emails in which the option to turn a campaign donation from a one-time offering into a recurring payment was “pre-checked,” resulting in many Trump followers finding themselves in the hole for thousands when they expected to make a relatively small donation. However, the RNC reports that with the help of Trump, it collected over $136 million in the first quarter of 2021.

Kansas House and Senate Republicans today introduced legislation that demands that the state reject any vaccine mandate, saying that individuals cannot be fired, and if they are fired they are allowed to receive back pay, as well as potential fines that can go to the state of Kansas.

The legislation is a series of mandates on employers telling them they must recognize religious or moral exemptions, but the employer is not allowed to ask if the employee actually has a real religious belief or not. Republican Sen. John Doll asked how far this policy goes:

Republicans asking about the exemptions from other Republicans? Even they don’t understand what is going on.

Republicans now face a divide. Several companies, especially those receiving Medicare and Medicaid funding—long-term care facilities, mostly—would struggle. The legislation would fine noncompliant businesses up to $50,000 per day, but losing federal funds for noncompliance might bankrupt them.

This exact problem has led to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce chiming in that the legislation as proposed has problems.

If you can’t get your way? Just start coughing on people and yell out. Because that is how we get things done.

Well, as the day goes on, Republicans start debating other conspiracies. You know, let’s talk about JFK’s assassination.

At this point, describing Facebook as a cesspool of right-wing hysteria is nothing new. It wouldn’t be hard for many of us to think of a distant relative who posts anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, for example, or is still reposting memes with lies about Hunter Biden or—gasp—Ukraine. Sadly, this doesn’t mean Facebook doesn’t have influence, or that folks aren’t sharing (and reading) material without realizing the far-right sources before them aren’t, well, legitimate.

One concerning example? As covered in a deep-dive study from Media Matters for America, when it comes to the content shared about trans issues on Facebook, right-wing pages get way, way more attention. That’s a problem for a lot of reasons.

According to a study published this November by Media Matters, the organization dove into posts about trans issues from October 2020 to September 2021. The top “pages” posted about trans issues were all conservative or alt-right. Some examples? Fox News, Franklin Graham, Dan Bongino, Breitbart, and even Ben Shaprio. The Daily Wire got the most Facebook shares when it came to trans issues, coming in at more than 13 million interactions. Yikes. Out of the top pages to make the cut, only CNN and NPR aren’t right-leaning.

When zeroing in on the top 200 posts, more than 100 were about trans athletes and more than 50 were about state-level legislation (with Florida and Arkansas at the top). These posts received more than 8 million interactions, which is about one-third of all posts with more than 50,000 interactions. Whew.

Media Matters found that posts about trans issues with significant interactions—defined here as more than 50,000 interactions per post, as mentioned previously—more than three-quarters were from conservative sources. Again, yikes. For the curious, Media Matters found that other major news topics mentioned in top posts include Assistant Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine, the Equality Act, and pronoun use.

Perhaps surprisingly, right-leaning pages shared more often about trans issues than left-leaning pages. In terms of basic numbers, right-leaning pages contributed more than 16,000 posts about trans issues. Left-leaning pages contributed fewer than 6,000, while “nonaligned” pages shared more than 12,000. Posts about trans issues made on right-leaning pages received an average of about 3,700 interactions. Meanwhile, posts about trans issues on left-leaning pages got about 2,700, and nonaligned pages about 1,500.

Let’s look at this data another way: According to Media Matters, right-leaning Facebook pages got 60 million interactions on posts about trans issues, for example, while left-leaning pages received only 16.1 million. For publications that don’t have an official ideology (described this way because we know no news source is truly entirely objective), they received about 18 million interactions. So, the left and “moderate” sources combined are still less than the right-leaning.

According to Media Matters, the algorithm has some responsibility here. How so? In a press release for the study, author Brennan Suen said Facebook’s algorithm has “amplified hatred and dangerous misinformation” specifically about trans youth, and specifically about health care, sports, and safety at schools—all huge issues in the news right now, largely thanks to Republican lawmakers who want to stomp down on vulnerable youth.

In short? Conservatives love to say they’re being silenced and censored, but numbers strongly suggest otherwise. 

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

Gas prices are falling now? Fine, but this doesn’t come close to making up for the gelding of Mr. Potato Head or the fiendish plot to make children’s books marginally less racist.

Heading into the holiday season, Republicans are clearly rooting for bad news. To the extent that they can engineer bad outcomes, they’re doing just that—largely through their noxious resistance to proven COVID-19 mitigation efforts (remember COVID-19?), and their attempted quashing of progressive policies that flout a plutocrat-friendly status quo and put cash back into working people’s coffers.

One key pillar of their campaign to undercut their president is their promotion of a false narrative—namely, that inflation is the worst thing ever to happen to the economy and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. And that would likely be an effective message if this were a major election year, but it’s not—and we’re now seeing the first signs of progress, in no small part because of President Biden’s leadership.

What? Oil prices are dropping?

Well, that must mean gas prices will be … FUCK! Quick! Send a news copter to Central America! There has to be a migrant caravan assembling somewhere, right? If we’re lucky, one of the migrants is selling Ebola monkeys out of the back of his El Camino.

Even worse for Republicans, this appears to be the doing—at least in part—of President Biden himself.

Bjornar Tonhaugen, head of oil markets at the consultancy Rystad Energy, [said] that the biggest factor driving prices right now is the expected release of strategic reserves from the United States and China.

According to the White House, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the "importance of taking measures to address global energy supplies" during their virtual summit this week. That sparked chatter about a coordinated move initiated by the White House to put millions of barrels of oil on the market.

In other words, Biden and Xi put a bug in traders’ ears about releasing strategic oil reserves, and that appears to have put downward pressure on prices. Meanwhile, Biden has asked the FTC to investigate potential price gouging. So he’s taking action to address the nation’s problems … instead of endlessly and fecklessly tweeting about them.

Of course, Biden’s potential actions on gas prices are at best stopgap measures, but then that may be all he needs to restore some measure of stability, CNN reports:

But more lasting relief could be coming. The IEA said in a report this week that it expects global oil supplies to rise by 1.5 million barrels per day over November and December as some production in the United States picks up again.

Fuel prices have an oversized impact on inflation, so this is definitely a positive step. And if supply lines start to get sorted out as well, it will force Republicans to come up with boogeymen that are even more fake and phantasmagorical than the supposed scourge of critical race theory. 

Oh, I have no doubt they can do it. For instance, the War on Christmas season is right around the corner, and as you can see, they’re going hammer and tongs at their newest yellow peril, Big Bird. 

This isn’t to say Democrats will sweep the midterms, or even that they’re a lock to hold the White House in 2024. But the current manic coverage about Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ supposed floundering—just 10 months into their first term—is a bit much, especially less than a year removed from The Former Guy’s straight-up coup attempt.

So let’s all calm down and see how this plays out. In a year, we could be a lot closer to normal than we’ve been in a long time. Hopefully, that will be enough to keep the GOP wolves at bay.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

The Rock, Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds, and Cleopatra’s eggs?

Netflix’s Red Notice spent the week enjoying a run at the top of Netflix’s Top 10. A fun, slick archeology heist flick in the tradition of Indiana Jones meets Ocean’s Eleven, the film stars The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot; reportedly came with a massive production price tag, possibly as high as $300 million; and was originally subject to a huge bidding war from various Hollywood studios when writer Rawson Thurber pitched it in 2018.

Yet despite its hugeness, Red Notice seems to barely exist on the cultural radar. While the Netflix streaming numbers are striking — the film racked up an impressive 148 million viewing hours in its first week, according to Netflix’s newly released top 10 metrics — and there was some buzz on social media, Red Notice looks and feels like the kind of movie that would be subject to a balls-to-the-wall marketing campaign and widespread distribution in US movie theaters. Why is the kind of cheesy, big-budget fun that would make a perfect summer blockbuster debuting on Netflix in November?

It’s the kind of thing that feels like an anomaly but probably shouldn’t. With Covid-19 changing the way we experience the movies, and Netflix still disrupting the industry, the trajectory of Red Notice provides us with interesting insight into the direction “big” movies are headed: to a small screen near you.

Red Notice seems like it should be a big-screen summer blockbuster, not a pre-holiday streaming aperitif

Hear me out: Yes, it’s become routine for films to either premiere exclusively on streaming platforms or to debut on streaming simultaneously or shortly after an in-theater run. The pandemic, obviously, has made staying indoors and streaming films preferable to braving long lines at the movieplex. Even before the pandemic, there was a reason “Netflix and chill” became the new euphemism for staying indoors and relaxing for the night.

Additionally, streaming companies often negotiate partnerships with major studios, like the surprising “same day-and-date release” contract that HBO Max and Warner Bros. briefly tried out for this year (though Warner Bros. quickly pivoted to an exclusive in-theater window only for 2022).

So, yes, movies are streaming now. That’s not the weird part about Red Notice.

What does feel weird is that Red Notice, panned by critics and beloved by audiences, seems like a film that’s designed to pack ’em in movie houses — and in another age, it would have. Red Notice is one of those films that seem destined to play to fans of niche geekery as well as fans of high camp. Reviewers dinged it for having terrible writing, an absurd plot, and a cast whose cardboard chemistry made the aforementioned terrible writing excruciating. All of this is profoundly true, and yet I, a plebeian, howled with laughter the whole time I watched it. I actually went and microwaved popcorn, because it felt like such an enjoyably popcorn-y movie.

The plot of Red Notice, such as it is, involves a deeply earnest search for “Cleopatra’s third egg,” a deeply ridiculous jeweled MacGuffin. Ryan Reynolds even refers to it as a MacGuffin, shortly after whistling the Raiders of the Lost Arc theme song, which tells you the no-fucks-given meta ambiance we’re dealing with. There’s also a deeply unsexy, hilariously flat tango between The Rock and Wonder Woman, and a splashy Ed Sheeran cameo. That’s everything you need to know.

In short, it’s the kind of frothy, superfluous glossy action comedy you want to watch on a big screen. Too bad that’s probably not going to happen, unless you live near a small town with a relatively large independent movie theater.

Originally, Red Notice was meant to be a big hit for Universal, which acquired the rights based on Thurber’s idea for a Dwayne Johnson star vehicle. (Thurber had previously directed The Rock in Central Intelligence and Skyscraper, which both had significant global box office returns despite flopping domestically.) After Universal got cold feet due to a flagging production schedule, however, a bidding war ensued and Netflix snapped up the film and committed to a hefty budget, reportedly between $130 million and $200 million.

From there, Red Notice’s fate shifted significantly. Netflix taking on the film meant a trade-off: The platform was able to commit to the blockbuster-size budget and hefty star salaries, and the massive size of Netflix’s subscriber base — now 214 million worldwide — guaranteed that a huge number of people would be directly introduced to the film when they logged on to their Netflix account.

But the Netflix acquisition also meant a much shorter run in movie theaters and a very nontraditional marketing rollout. That’s because Netflix films, in general, tend to have a hard time getting play in mainstream cinemas. And that’s because, as independent movie theater owner Jay Levin told me, cinema franchises were never going to release these films in traditional movie houses.

“The big boys — AMC and all — they’re not playing games with Netflix,” he told me. “They have enough films. ... They’re not going to just bow to Netflix and just get a two-week [distribution window]. It’s not worth it to them.” The terms under which Netflix and other streaming platforms work with movie studios and distributors can vary widely and be subject to change. In other words, which films actually make it to theaters and how successful they’ll be alongside a streaming release is something of “a crapshoot,” Levin said.

“I only do it because they’re very reasonable in their terms,” he added. “And I [have] seven screens — I certainly wouldn’t do it if I had less.”

Levin runs the Bellmore Playhouse, an independent theater on Long Island. Red Notice played there, but just for a few days. The movie, he said, “is really what they call a filler” — but the prospect of a seat filler doesn’t appeal to major movie distribution franchises. A movie theater franchise like AMC, he told me, would “rather hold something from a major [film] company rather than go to Netflix.”

While other major streaming platforms like HBO Max and Disney+ also release their films in theaters, most of them have much longer windows for theaters to show the films in. Disney, for example, is giving all of its upcoming films an exclusive 45-day theatrical release before releasing them on Disney+. But because Netflix is solely a streaming company rather than a movie studio like Disney or a cable network like HBO, its ultimate goal is to drive subscribers. Therefore, it has less incentive to push for a longer in-theater release.

The difference makes itself felt at the box office: Red Notice star Gal Gadot’s 2020 hit Wonder Woman: 1984 premiered the same day on HBO Max and in theaters; but with a much longer release window, it went on to gross over $166 million worldwide. Compare that to Red Notice’s estimated opening weekend take of barely $1 million.

The short distribution window, combined with Netflix’s upstart role in the industry, means that a lack of a traditional movie run for these big-budget movies may be inevitable — at least as things currently stand. For Red Notice, the move to Netflix meant that not only did its time in movie theaters shrink, but the number of theaters showing it became minuscule. In the region around New York City, for example, Red Notice in its opening week primarily played a handful of independent theaters in small towns in New Jersey.

Granted, it wasn’t all bad; the movie chain Cinemark, which reportedly showed Red Notice in 750 theaters around the country, proudly declared in a November 12 press release that Red Notice was its best-performing Netflix film to date. But neither Netflix nor Cinemark has actually disclosed Red Notice’s box office performance — an omission that highlights just how nontraditional Netflix movies are.

So even though Red Notice is a blockbuster-size movie, we have to adjust our expectations for what its success looks like.

Netflix has started to swing toward big-budget movies with limited theatrical releases

This minuscule theater run is part of an increasingly typical pattern for Netflix, in which the company has focused on producing and distributing high-budget genre movies with big rollouts straight to the platform. In lieu of a traditional theater release, the buzzy 2020 Netflix action flick Old Guard still gave the platform the ability to boast about its high streaming numbers — even if the movie quickly vanished from the Netflix Top 10.

In February 2021, Netflix pushed the Korean sci-fi flick Space Sweepers, whose $22 million budget was atypically large for Korean cinema, to a receptive global audience of geeks, and that film, too, hit No. 1 on its opening day on the platform. Then came Zack Snyder’s May horror movie Army of the Dead, a major summer release with ongoing buzz — but one that, again, opened directly on Netflix. Though Army of the Dead did get a run in a few hundred Cinemark theaters, it was only a week-long deal, and the film grossed less than $800,000 in its opening weekend at the box office.

Levin pointed out that AMC recently negotiated a 45-day theatrical release window for Warner Bros. films, superseding the previous day-and-date release deal Warner Bros. had with HBO Max. That deal had been controversial, and seemed to produce disappointing returns for Warner Bros. — perhaps, as Levin noted, because the lack of an exclusive distribution time in theaters meant that audiences, conditioned to stay home due to the pandemic, were more likely to choose to watch the film on the streaming platform. (Vox has reached out to AMC for comment.)

It’s also arguable that Netflix doesn’t really need to offer a longer distribution window. The October prequel to Army of the Dead, for example, Army of Thieves, didn’t get the same in-theater treatment but was still a major success for the platform. If Netflix’s ultimate goal is generating new subscribers, then overall optics — like its newly public top 10 lists — are more important than the success of an individual film or series.

Netflix increasingly uses nontraditional marketing for its most traditional movies

Still, it certainly seems like Red Notice, which potentially offers the kind of silly, fun moviegoing experience that was routine before the pandemic, should be a film that plays on a big screen. Levin told me it did well for his movie house, pulling in about $1,500 for its one-screen, one-week run, but added that this was unsurprising, given its stars.

Levin observed that even though critics hated the film, it had the right ingredients to have done well at the cineplex with a traditional rollout. “It had Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. ... If they had done the right advertising, it should have been a picture that probably would have grossed $30 million, even with the bad reviews, because they’re very likable guys, you know?”

Levin pointed out that Red Notice also didn’t get a traditional marketing campaign — you won’t see many ads for it on television, for example — but this is arguably by design. Reached for contact, a Netflix spokesperson pointed out that the company did a widespread global ad campaign for the movie, including targeted advertising on television shows and sporting events. The trio of stars did the typical talk show circuit, but also dabbled in more unconventional forms of marketing like Ryan Reynolds’s Antiques Roadshow drop-in, as well as a major — and, honestly, deeply weird — TikTok trailer campaign.

Cringe though the TikTok marketing may be, it’s effective. The TikTok trailers have racked up more than 180 million views overall, and indicate that traditional, pre-Covid movie marketing may be neither as effective nor as necessary in 2021. And Netflix, perhaps more than any other streaming platform, has always had the added advantage of access on its side: As Ted Sarandos, then the company’s chief content officer and now its co-CEO, said in a 2015 interview, Netflix can forgo typical marketing campaigns because all it needs to do is serve content directly to viewers.

“A lot of the heavy lifting of getting audiences to the show is done with the user interface,” he noted. “We can launch a lot of these shows without spending any marketing. ... The actual viewing of shows, the user interface is driving almost all of that.”

The company’s size and aims have obviously ballooned in the six years since that interview. Red Notice was part of a half-billion-dollar push to bring big-budget films to the platform; the runaway hit Squid Game was part of a half-billion-dollar investment in Korean entertainment and part of an even larger campaign to generate Asian subscribers. But the company’s approach to marketing seems largely unchanged: Awkward TikTok campaigns notwithstanding, the platform’s main marketing tool seems to be itself.

That said, Netflix has always been aware of the power an in-theater run holds for its prestige films — its Oscar-nominated titles like Mank and The Irishman have all had theater runs, if only to satisfy the Academy’s eligibility requirements. Its current crop of fall prestige films have each been given one- to two-week limited theater runs. And recent reports indicate the company is interested in expanding its in-theater window for films in order to make a bigger cultural impact.

It’s pretty hard to envision Netflix’s cultural impact becoming any bigger, but it’s true that individual Netflix films lack the cultural staying power of its major series. Arguably no Netflix movie has had the cultural cachet of Stranger Things or Orange Is the New Black, for example. Could a movie like Red Notice, despite the critical pans, wedge its way into the zeitgeist with a little more exposure?

There’s only one way to find out. But even if Netflix commits to a longer theatrical release window, there’s one unpredictable factor that no industry change can control.

“I don’t think we will ever see the [audience] numbers that we saw pre-Covid,” Levin observed, assessing the state of pandemic moviegoing. “The [studios] see now that the theaters can give relatively big grosses, still, on the big pictures. The little pictures still have trouble. And the arthouses are a disaster.”

Will they come back eventually? “I don’t know,” he said. “You just never know what’s going to happen next.” But whatever fate befalls movie theaters and their audiences, one thing seems abundantly clear: Netflix wins in the end, whether audiences stay home or not.

According to data collected by Microsoft's network of honeypot servers, most brute-force attackers primarily attempt to guess short passwords, with very few attacks targeting credentials that are either long or contain complex characters. From a report: "I analysed the credentials entered from over -- million brute force attacks against SSH. This is around 30 days of data in Microsoft's sensor network," said Ross Bevington, a security researcher at Microsoft. "77% of attempts used a password between 1 and 7 characters. A password over 10 characters was only seen in 6% of cases," said Bevington, who works as Head of Deception at Microsoft, a position in which he's tasked with creating legitimate-looking honeypot systems in order to study attacker trends.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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In general, old fables need more psyops.

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Given the amount of precious metals and weapons they keep underground... are dragons preppers?

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Sometimes it mutters but I think the CPU is permanently broken.

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Flying during the holidays is always chaotic, but it might be messier this year.

The airlines have spent 2021 gearing up for the holidays. It is the travel industry’s season finale, an end-of-year opportunity to significantly recover from the pandemic-induced travel slump. Millions of Americans are expected to fly at near pre-pandemic rates this Thanksgiving, and international travel restrictions have been lifted.

But recovery, unfortunately, is not as simple as flipping a switch. It’s a rocky, turbulent phase for an industry scrambling to hire workers to handle the holiday travel surge after a year of reduced flights and limited operations.

The staffing shortages plaguing airlines and airports aren’t exactly new. It was a problem set into motion by industry-wide layoffs in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Airlines, desperate to cut overhead expenses, urged employees to voluntarily quit their jobs, offering early retirement deals and cash severance. Since June, though, airports have struggled to staff back up on all kinds of workers, from TSA agents to concession-stand workers. Airlines, too, are operating with a shortage of pilots, flight attendants, and ground crew members. In the weeks leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday, American and Southwest Airlines had to cancel and delay hundreds of flights across the country, due in part to inclement weather events. These operational meltdowns were triggered by storms but exacerbated by the lack of available pilots and flight attendants.

The dearth of airline and airport workers has had a domino effect on the industry. And its effects will likely culminate during the busiest travel time of the year. The airlines have no choice but to recruit more workers to keep up with demand.

“No one expected travel to rebound as quickly as it did,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and the president of Atmosphere Research Group. “That rebound was a double-edged sword. It’s great that people are traveling again, but the airlines were caught with their pants down. They had to bring grounded planes back into service. They had to bring back employees.”

The nightmarish turn of events is bad news for eager travelers. Fares are up (the cost of jet fuel has increased), middle seats are full again, and airlines are no longer as flexible with their booking policies. Holiday fliers should expect the short end of the travel stick: crowds, long security lines, packed planes, poor customer service, and an overall meh flying experience, unless they can afford first-class treatment. Travel experts suggest booking trips with few to no connecting flights if possible, and to select airlines with a larger flight network, in case of cancellations.

Airline bookings for the week of Thanksgiving have exceeded pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the Adobe Digital Economy Index, which is a good sign for the industry. Yet it’s possible airlines may be adding more flights than they can handle to keep up with demand, especially when winter weather is notoriously unpredictable.

“It’s one thing to have a meltdown at the end of October,” FlightAware’s Kathleen Bangs told NPR. “But it’s another thing completely if you ruin somebody’s Thanksgiving or Christmas or make them miss it altogether. That is on a whole other level.”

In September, when the Biden administration announced its workplace vaccine mandate for federal contractors (which includes airlines), some carriers were at risk of laying off unvaccinated workers in early December, decimating their already-limited staff before the end-of-year travel rush. The mandate, however, was pushed back until January 18, which means airlines and airports won’t have to worry about getting all their workers vaccinated until after the new year.

“We basically kicked the can down the road,” Harteveldt said. “Just about every airline in the country is a federal contractor. This might not be so much of an issue for Delta and United, whose workers are, for the most part, vaccinated. It’s more of a concern for Southwest and American.”

In recent months, it seems that among the major carriers, Delta and United have experienced fewer unexpected slowdowns compared to American and Southwest. Those two carriers have received fire for canceling and delaying hundreds of flights on holiday weekends — Southwest on Indigenous People’s Day, American on Halloween. The federal workplace vaccine requirement has further sent them scrambling: CNBC reported in October that executives of both carriers are trying to assure employees of their job security while also urging them to apply for vaccine exemptions if they qualify.

The reason for all these operational struggles? Depending on whether you ask the carriers or the workers themselves, it varies from staffing shortages to overall mismanagement. The solution is not as simple as hiring more people, which workers argue is only a stopgap for industry-wide issues. Like the restaurant and retail industries, airlines are grappling with the fallout from the “great resignation,” and they have a history of offering low starting wages and few bonuses compared to other jobs. (In August, for example, Southwest Airlines raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, which will boost the salaries of about 7,000 existing employees. This wage floor, however, does not apply to contracted airline workers.)

Plus, potential workers have to undergo background checks and various layers of screenings and trainings before they can start on the job. Some workers believe that it’s not about the number of staff available, according to the New York Times, but how they are deployed by the airlines.

It hasn’t helped that passengers are acting up at significantly higher rates than before; in some cases, they’ve verbally or physically abused flight attendants. Since January, the Federal Aviation Administration has received more than 5,000 reports of unruly passengers; 991 of those cases are currently under investigation. The frequency of these incidents has skyrocketed compared to pre-pandemic years: In 2019, the FAA investigated only 146 reports.

The specifics of the staffing issues vary from airline to airline and from city to city. On-the-ground airport workers, for example, are often hired by private contractors and aren’t characterized as airline employees, so they’re exempt from the hourly wage increases airlines have publicized. These contracted workers have spent months protesting for better wages and benefits.

Meanwhile, American is in the middle of contract negotiations with its pilot union. In an effort to avoid widespread delays and cancellations going into the holiday season, American offered to pay pilots as much as double their wages for holiday trips. The union declined, and instead pushed the carrier to implement more permanent changes to its schedules. According to the Dallas Morning News’s Kyle Arnold, both the pilots’ and flight attendants’ unions have complained of difficulties securing lodging, food, and transportation during summer trips. They’ve also claimed that American’s scheduling strategy “puts too many pilots on standby, nearly double the industry average,” Arnold reported.

Southwest’s pilots’ union released a similar statement after the airline’s operational meltdown in October. “What was a minor temporary event for other carriers devastated Southwest Airlines because our operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure,” wrote Casey Murray, the union’s president. “Our operation and our frontline employees have endured continuous and unending disruptions since the first time our airline made headlines in early June due to widespread IT failures.”

It’s likely that some airlines have bitten off more than they can chew over the past year. Texas Monthly’s Joe Pappalardo reported that Southwest “undertook the most aggressive single-year expansion in its fifty-year history” by adding 17 new destinations in 2020. American similarly broadened its domestic network to make up for revenue losses from grounded international flights. As a result, these carriers now cover more ground but have fewer pilots and crew members to fly the added routes.

As I’ve previously reported, it isn’t quite accurate to claim that these issues — which undoubtedly affect passengers — are a result of a labor shortage without contextualizing the airline industry’s working conditions and standards:

A shortage does little to acknowledge the fluctuations in work consistency and lack of financial security that many have contended with. The industry has long relied on an understaffed and underpaid workforce, with many clocking in on the front lines (which, again, are unusually stressful these days).

These managerial and operational problems, when combined with unexpected weather events or other crises, can trigger a logistical domino effect of flight cancellations and delays across the country. The influx of travelers during the holiday season could spell trouble for the carriers, especially if winter storms are on the horizon. Still, experts think travel across the board will be chaotic in the coming months.

“If you’re driving, roads and highways will be packed. So will hotels,” said Harteveldt, the travel analyst. At least one thing is for certain: Travel is back, and it probably won’t taper off anytime soon.

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The House Democrats finally passed Build Back Better! Can this day get better? Why yes, yes it can. Friday, President Joe Biden announced his nominees for the United States Postal Service Board of Governors, “to replace outgoing Governors Ron Bloom and John Barger.”

Yes, current board chair Ron Bloom—Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s greatest champion—will not be returning when his term is up on Dec. 8. Thank you, President Biden!

Biden is nominating Daniel Tangherlini, the former administrator of the General Services Administration in the Obama administration, to replace Bloom. Derek Kan, Republican and former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, would replace Republican John M. Barger. The board is made up of nine members, and is bipartisan. There are currently four Democrats, four Republicans, and one Independent. Biden will have appointed five members once these nominations are confirmed.

“The USPS serves hundreds of millions of Americans across the nation every day,” the White House wrote in the statement announcing the nominations. “President Biden is committed to supporting USPS workers so that they can continue delivering for their fellow Americans, particularly those in rural communities, veterans, and older Americans who rely so heavily on the Postal Service.”

“President Biden is also committed to strengthening and modernizing this critical public institution and its services to ensure it continues serving the American people for decades to come,” the statement continues.

Tangherlini, the White House said in making the announcement, “served in leadership roles in the public, non-profit and private sectors. His interest is in bringing increased equity and efficiency to business, philanthropy, and government through the thoughtful application of technology, process, and systems reform.” In addition to his time at the head of GSA, he served as “Chief Financial Officer at the Department of the Treasury, as City Administrator and Deputy Mayor of Washington, D.C. under Mayor Fenty; as Interim General Manager of DC’s Metro; the first Director of the D.C. Department of Transportation; the CFO of the DC Metropolitan Police Department; and various roles in the Federal Government at the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.”

Kan is currently an executive at Deliverr, an e-commerce fulfillment startup. He’s also served as an executive for Lyft, and was a director of the Amtrak Board, nominated by President Barack Obama. He also served as a policy adviser to Mitch McConnell when he was Majority Leader in the Senate, along with a revolving set of executive offices under Trump, including as Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy in the United States Department of Transportation, under then-Secretary Elaine Chao—who is also McConnell’s spouse. Seems like the administration found the most McConnell-friendly nominee possible.

The Washington Post has some delicious nuggets on the story, including the fact that “Bloom as recently as last week told confidants he expected to be renominated, said one person familiar with his conversations.” At their November 10 meeting, the Trump-appointed majority on the board voted to keep Bloom as chair over the objections of the Democrats on the board. That vote of confidence from Trumpsters clearly wasn’t enough to sway Biden.

Behind the scenes, a core group of Democratic senators told Biden to boot Bloom. At least two Senate Democrats, Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and Jon Tester (Mont.),” the Post reports, “cited ethics concerns in communications with the White House over Bloom’s renomination, according to representatives from their offices.” In addition to them, Wisconsin’s Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Sens. Kirstin Gillibrand (New York), Jeff Merkley (Oregon), and Vermont’s Independent Bernie Sanders have all told the White House Bloom’s ongoing support of DeJoy disqualifies him from the post.

Gillibrand said she would “vigorously oppose” Bloom if he were nominated again. “During a time when Americans have relied on the Postal Service for prescriptions, benefits and voting, DeJoy has slashed service hours, arbitrarily removed mail processing equipment and caused unprecedented and widespread delays,” she told the Post.  Sanders said that the “major crises” confronting the demand “a Postal Service board of governors that is committed to replacing Mr. DeJoy with a postmaster general who will protect and strengthen the Postal Service, not undermine and sabotage it.”

The Board of Governors, which will have a majority of Biden nominees once these confirmations are done, has the power to remove DeJoy—they’re the only ones that can do it and now two of DeJoy’s biggest boosters will be gone. The White House has made it clear that they’re not happy with DeJoy, with White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying back in February, “I think we can all agree, most Americans would agree, that the Postal Service needs leadership that can and will do a better job.”

Is Tangherlini going into this with the expectation that he’ll hasten DeJoy’s departure? I’m pretty sure that’s a yes. DeJoy has been a walking, talking conglomeration of corruption since he took office, straight from his big donations to Republicans and the Trump convention through to his investments with Bloom’s investment firm. On the way, the company he founded and still has a financial interest in has gotten some sweet USPS contracts.

If the corruption wasn’t bad enough, there’s the destruction of the Postal Service during a pandemic—the delayed mail, the dismantling of post office infrastructure, the 10-year plan to purposely make mail delivery a lot slower and cost more—all of this. DeJoy seemingly bribed his way into the job, and Trump put him there to screw up the mail ahead of the 2020 election. DeJoy has got to go, and now it looks like his days in the office are numbered. The remaining board members are going to have to nail down anything he might be able to steal on the way out.

If you believe your opponents are literally trying to destroy America, democracy will only get in your way.

After almost three days of deliberation, the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has found the teenager not guilty on all five counts. The news came as Kenosha, Wisconsin, prepared for potential unrest, deploying 500 guardsmen from the Wisconsin Guard. The will be staged outside the city unless requested by law enforcement. Hundreds of officers already volunteered to respond ahead of Tuesday’s verdict. Many schools chose to switch to remote learning ahead of the verdict being delivered.

“The Kenosha community has been strong, resilient, and has come together through incredibly difficult times these past two years, and that healing is still ongoing,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said in a statement. “I urge folks who are otherwise not from the area to please respect the community by reconsidering any plans to travel there and encourage those who might choose to assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights to do so safely and peacefully.”

Judge Bruce Schroeder praised the jurors for their job rendering the verdict and said that none of them are under any obligation to discuss the case with the media. “You’re welcome to discuss the case as little or as much as you want,” Schroeder said. The jurors are now exempt from serving for four years.

Twelve jurors were chosen at random, with Rittenhouse himself being tapped by Judge Schroeder to pick alternates by hand-selecting six pieces of paper from a tumbler. The move is considered highly unusual though not illegal. The six jurors chosen at random by Rittenhouse waited inside the Kenosha County courthouse in case they were needed. Throughout the trial and even into deliberations, jurors were never sequestered. They were simply told not to talk about the case or watch, listen to, or read anything to do with it.

Rittenhouse appeared overwhelmed about the outcome, crying and hugging attorney Corey Chirafisi as attorney Natalie Wisco handed him some water. He faced five charges—one of which carried a mandatory life sentence—over his killing of Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum last August during protests over the police shooting of a Jacob Blake. Rittenhouse also shot and injured Gaige Grosskreutz at the time, severing his bicep.

Two charges were thrown out over the course of the trial: failure to comply with an emergency order from state or local government, which the judge dismissed over what he claimed was not enough evidence from prosecutors; and possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18. Schroeder took issue with the Wisconsin law and claimed that the size of the gun’s barrel that Rittenhouse was carrying exempted him from breaking that law.

Republicans just voted against taxing the rich and corporations, while posing as anti-elite.

“It’s time to clean house in America,” one influential right-wing activist wrote this week. And he’s not alone.

Chris Rufo is arguably the most important intellectual entrepreneur on the political right today. A senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute, he is nearly single-handedly responsible for the rise of critical race theory as a right-wing boogeyman — an issue that came to dominate the national political conversation during the Virginia gubernatorial election.

On Tuesday, Rufo elaborated a bit more on the project he has in mind: “It’s time to clean house in America: remove the attorney general, lay siege to the universities, abolish the teachers’ unions, and overturn the school boards,” he tweeted.

Confronted with unsavory parallels to militant fascist rhetoric against intellectuals, Rufo clarified that he was not calling for violence. “For the Godwin’s Law aficionados: remove the attorney general through resignation or impeachment, lay siege to the universities through cutting federal subsidies, abolish the teachers’ unions through legislation, and overturn school boards through winning elections,” he tweeted on Tuesday night.

Some of the clarifications are reassuring (there’s nothing wrong with contesting elections). But others, in particular the comments on universities and teachers unions, were disturbing. Rufo is calling for the use of law as a weapon to weaken or even eliminate the social bases of his opponents’ political power. It’s a vision of politics in which power is not shared democratically but wielded against one’s enemies.

He’s been quite explicit about this. During an appearance at the National Conservatism Conference in early November, Rufo argued that “reform around the edges is not enough” to protect America from the progressive “revolution.” Instead, conservatives should embrace a “defund the left” political strategy in which they “strangle new identity programs in red tape” and “accelerate the student loan Ponzi scheme [and] make universities partially responsible for defaults.”

Rufo’s ruthlessness is best understood as the applied version of a political vision that has become widespread in influential right-wing intellectual circles. From demagogues like Tucker Carlson to highbrow thinkers like Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen, the emerging right-wing line is that America’s core institutions have become captured by the left and must be seized if the country is to be saved.

This means going on offense when you have power — not merely to accomplish conservative policy goals but to crush the left and stamp out its cultural viability.

The “post-liberal” right wants to go on offense

The Postliberal Order is a new Substack publication by four right-wing Christian intellectuals: Deneen, Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule, University of Dallas’s Gladden Pappin, and Catholic University’s Chad Pecknold. Its premise is that “the modern liberal ordering of the world is exhausted” — meaning not just liberalism in the American political sense but the more capacious philosophical one.

Liberal ideals of individual rights, separation of church and state, and free markets have, in their view, created a society “ever more solitary, ever more detached from ourselves, from our families, from our countries, and our God.”

In an essay published Wednesday, Deneen essentially develops an intellectual framework for Rufo-ism — the high-level justification for using the state to crush liberals and their institutions.

Deneen believes that conservatism is in a “defensive crouch” — and has been so “since its rise in the 20th century.” This may seem odd to liberals and leftists, who have seen a string of conservative victories in the past several decades: the withering of the social safety net, the demolition of labor unions, the spread of strict state-level abortion restrictions, and even the restructuring of the electoral system in the GOP’s favor. Yet in Deneen’s view, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on social issues over that time — abortion, same-sex marriage, and trans anti-discrimination protections — left progressivism ascendant.

“It began to dawn on many conservatives that, in spite of apparent electoral victories that have occurred regularly since the Reagan years, they have consistently lost, and lost overwhelmingly to progressive forces,” he writes.

What is the reason for this failure? Deneen cites mainstream conservative adherence to seven liberal principles — religious liberty, limited government, “the inviolability of private institutions (e.g., corporations),” academic freedom, constitutional originalism, free markets, and free speech — as the root of its defects.

“Liberalism has become consistently more aggressive in extending each of these features to their logical conclusion — their own contradiction in the form of liberal totalitarianism,” Deneen argues. Liberalism inevitably produces “the evisceration of all institutions that were originally responsible for fostering human virtue: family, ennobling friendship, community, university, polity, church.”

This so-called liberal totalitarianism — Deneen is not specific on what current policies exactly resemble Soviet or Nazi repression — cannot be defeated by the conservative establishment because it accepts basic liberal premises. In his view, mainstream conservatives “play a key role in propping up the regime,” acting as a “controlled opposition” for “the powers behind the powers — the oligarchs, the corporations, the power elite.”

Jon Cherry/Getty Images

Deneen, a political theorist who likes to write at a high level of abstraction, does not lay out what policies follow from his diagnosis. But he does suggest that any progress requires abandoning core liberal commitments to ideals like free speech and religious liberty — that any new conservatism should not see a respect for the diversity inherent in a large and complex society as a defining value.

“What to liberalism seems a tolerant and decent regime, in the eyes of its predecessor tradition seems nothing more than cruel indifference, allowing clear vices not only to proliferate, but to enjoy implicit public approval,” he writes, calling for a return to pre-modern Christian politics in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas.

So what does it mean to actually practice a politics that’s no longer “indifferent” to “clear vices”?

Rufo provides an answer. There is a reason both Rufo and Deneen single out universities for special ire: For all their flaws, they are one of the key places where liberal cultural ideals flourish.

There are differences between the two: Rufo places more emphasis on left-wing racial politics while Deneen is more exercised by debates over gender and sexuality. But what they share is a vision of conservatism on offense, wielding the power of the state against its political opponents.

The right against America

Rufo and Deneen are part of a bigger intellectual trend on the right — one in which America’s core institutions are described as hopelessly corrupted by liberal forces.

Take Tucker Carlson. His new documentary, Patriot Purge, is a conspiratorial retelling of January 6 in which peaceful demonstrators were pushed to violence by FBI agents.

This isn’t true, obviously. But think about what it would mean if it were: that the FBI, of all government agencies, was so deeply in league with Democrats and liberals that it had masterminded a totalitarian crackdown on Trump supporters. It would mean the entire edifice of the American state has become a tool for repressing conservatives.

That is the more or less explicit message of the documentary. “If permanent Washington is willing to launch a second war on terror on its citizens, what else are they capable of?” Carlson asks. “They’re telling you that crushing the civil rights of American citizens is necessary. ... We must spy on our political opponents, silence them, defame them, prevent them from having jobs, take away their bank accounts, throw them in solitary confinement, shoot them in the neck.”

The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California, is dedicated to developing a more highbrow version of Carlson’s worldview — one in which American institutions and even citizens are the right’s enemy. Claremont is undoubtedly the most radically pro-Trump of any major right-wing intellectual institution, its thinkers willing to defend both his presidency and his false claims of a stolen election.

Claremont’s output in the past year or two has been astonishingly radical, all but openly calling for regime change and rebellion.

In a May Claremont podcast, Hillsdale College lecturer and former Trump administration official Michael Anton chatted with entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin — a self-described monarchist who wants to appoint a Silicon Valley CEO king of America — about their shared desire to topple what Anton terms the American “regime,” a government Yarvin characterizes in the podcast as a “theocratic oligarchy” controlled by a cadre of progressive “priests.”

During the episode, Yarvin muses about how an American strongman — whom he alternatively calls “Caesar” and, more honestly, “Trump” — could seize authoritarian control of the US government by turning the National Guard and FBI into his personal stormtroopers.

In a March article in the American Mind, Claremont’s blog, writer Glenn Elmers declares that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and wage “a sort of counter-revolution” against these “citizen-aliens,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured.”

And an August essay in the Claremont Review of Books by scholar Angelo Codevilla describes a country whose government is clinging to “an illusion of legitimacy” after “a half-century of Progressive rule’s abuse” has demolished American society.

Views like these — that repudiate America’s core institutions and ideals, up to and often including its democracy — are becoming more and more mainstream on the right. They can be found at right-wing intellectual gatherings, like the National Conservatism conference. They can be found from one of the right’s leading moneymen, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who once argued that “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” They even have champions on Capitol Hill, like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), a critic of “woke capitalism” who has argued that the idea that a person should be free to “define your own values” is a kind of “heresy.”

It’s easy to dismiss this kind of illiberal language as purely rhetorical: radical posturing with few practical implications. But the past year of conservative politics, from the January 6 riot to the spread of voting restrictions and extreme gerrymandering to the rise of Rufo’s war on the education system, has shown that the right’s illiberal impulses are actually shaping our reality.

Conservatism, in theory, is supposed to be an ideology of preservation. But the current right is increasingly being shaped by a reactionary impulse bent on the radical transformation — if not the outright destruction — of America’s leading institutions.

Standard disclaimer: Like most Republicans, Liz Cheney is simply awful. But also like most Republicans, she’s not nearly as awful as Ted Cruz, whose (mostly) tongue-in-cheek association with the Zodiac Killer gives me the barest whiff of sympathy for the now-brutally defamed Zodiac Killer.

More importantly, Cheney has stood up to the potentially republic-ending nonsense of Donald Trump, who simply can’t own up to his decisive loss in the 2020 presidential election. So, naturally, Cruz thinks Cheney’s fealty to our democracy and the simple truth is actually indicative of her “derangement.”

On Tuesday night’s edition of Sean Hannity Holds You Down and Farts in Your Mouth Till You Call Him Ragnar, sponsored by Gold Bond Medicated Powder, Cruz projected like an IMAX movie, claiming Cheney was actually the one whom Donald Trump “broke.”

“She hates Donald Trump so much that it just has overridden everything in her system,” said Cruz. “She’s lashing out at Trump and Republicans and everything, and she’s become a Democrat and it’s sad to watch what has happened. It is Trump derangement syndrome.”

I’d argue that Trump derangement syndrome is actually defined by the inability to see that Trump is deranged, but in this case, Cruz is implying that any criticism of his ocher overlord for—gee, I don’t know—literally trying to end American democracy is somehow out of bounds.

Of course, Cheney was having none of that. On Wednesday, she clapped back, telling CNN’s Melanie Zanona that the broken one was Cruz himself:

For the nontweeters:

@Liz_Cheney is hitting back at @tedcruz after he went on Fox News last night & accused her of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” saying she was “broke” by Trump. “Trump broke Ted Cruz,” Cheney told me. “A real man would be defending his wife, and his father, and the Constitution.”

I’d like to give Cheney credit for this, but pointing out that Ted Cruz is 99.44% bullshit—and that defending our Constitution is more important than defending the guy who tried to shred it—is not exactly a heavy lift. Then again, it apparently is a Sisyphean task for Teddy Cruz and His Cancun Cravens—i.e., pretty much every congressional Republican not named Cheney or Kinzinger. 

So keep yappin’, Ted. Maybe one day your fondest wish will be fulfilled and you’ll become a real boy. Becoming a man? Nah. That’s permanently out of your reach at this point.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

The score everyone's been waiting for is here, and it looks good for the BBB. But it's beside the point.

Two days before January 6, Kimberly Guilfoyle reportedly sent a text message to White House liaison Katrina Pierson bragging about how she had raised a whopping $3 million for the rally in Washington that would eventually descend into chaos and bloodshed.

ProPublica was first to report the correspondence, noting that the text messages posed the “strongest indication yet” that Trump’s inner circle of family, fundraisers, and hangers-on were “directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally” on Jan. 6.

The messages allegedly show Guilfoyle eager to bask in the spotlight alongside former President Donald Trump when he would take the stage that morning and address a mass of his supporters assembled at the Ellipse.

But when Trump’s liaison Katrina Pierson—who has already been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 Committee—responded that spots were only available for people that Trump had chosen himself, Guilfoyle was quick to boost her credentials.

Guilfoyle, ProPublica reported, said she wanted to introduce her boyfriend, Donald Trump Jr. to the crowd and reminded Pierson how she had “raised so much money for this.”

Then, referencing Julie Jenkins Fancelli, the Publix supermarket heiress, Guilfoyle pleaded: “Literally one of my donors, Julie, at $3 million.”

ProPublica notes that if Guilfoyle’s claim is true and she fundraised off Fancelli for the rally on Jan. 6, it would be the first time someone other than Caroline Wren—another top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign—is shown to have coordinated with Fancelli.

Wren, notably, was listed as VIP Adviser on a permit for the rally on Jan. 6. She has been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 Committee already and is believed to be cooperating with congressional investigators.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Fancelli threw $300,000 in donations toward the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally at the Ellipse. Currently, it is estimated that the event cost $500,000.

As for Wren, like Guilfoyle, she too has said she raised $3 million for the rally.

Wren reportedly told Dustin Stockton, a Republican activist and confidante of former White House strategist Steve Bannon, that she “parked” funds for the Jan. 6 gathering with a series of nonprofits, including the Republican Attorneys General Association, the young Republican hub Turning Point, and the Tea Party Express.

Since much of the funding flowed to “dark money” organizations, or organizations that do not have to disclose their donors, however, public records are lacking.

But if accurate, that would mean that between Wren and Guilfoyle’s claims to fundraising fame, the amount actually spent for the Jan. 6 rally wildly exceeded the estimated $500,000 reported earlier this year.

In a statement from Wren’s attorney to ProPublica, Guilfoyle had no involvement in raising funds for any events on January 6th. At least, not to Wren’s knowledge.

The Jan. 6 Committee has not issued a subpoena to Guilfoyle but its probe is grinding away behind closed doors for now.

Joe Tacopina, Guilfoyle’s attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Daily Kos.

Guilfoyle, well known in recent years for her flamboyant speech at the Republican National Convention, was also filmed celebrating behind the scenes on Jan. 6, just before the Capitol siege. 

“Have the courage to do the right thing! Fight!” she exclaimed. 

Microsoft's head of Xbox said he's "evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard and making ongoing proactive adjustments," in light of the recent revelations at the video game publisher. From a report: In an email to staff seen by Bloomberg News, Phil Spencer said he and the gaming leadership team are "disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions" at Activision Blizzard. He referred to the Wall Street Journal story earlier this week that said Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick knew of sexual harassment at the company for years and that he mistreated women. "This type of behavior has no place in our industry," Spencer wrote. He joins a swell of outcry from employees to investors and shareholders in demanding a stronger response from the U.S.'s second-biggest gaming publisher. On Wednesday, Sony Group's PlayStation Chief Jim Ryan sent a similar note to staff, writing that he and his leadership were "disheartened and frankly stunned to read" that Activision "has not done enough to address a deep-seated culture of discrimination and harassment."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study found improving public transportation makes it easier for people to make it to their doctor appointments.

We don’t commonly think of public transportation as part of health care policy, though the people who work in public health know it’s important. But maybe we should, according to a new study focused on the opening of a light-rail line in the Twin Cities.

A group of researchers from the Urban Institute, Harvard Medical School, Mass General, and the University of Minnesota studied what happened to no-show outpatient appointments at a major health system when the Green Line opened in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in 2014, connecting those two cities’ downtowns. The new Metro line was more reliable — less susceptible to traffic jams or bad weather — and ran more frequently than the buses that had previously covered the same route.

By looking at data from before the rail line’s opening and differentiating between patients who lived near the new transportation service versus those who did not in order to establish a baseline, the authors were able to isolate the effect of the Metro line. The impact they found was significant, much more than previous studies that had attempted to measure the effects of transportation on patients’ behavior.

They found a meaningful reduction in the number of no-show appointments among patients who lived near the Green Line, with the no-show rate dropping by 4.5 percent compared to the baseline. The effect was particularly profound for Medicaid patients, who saw their no-show rate decline by 9.5 percent compared to the baseline.

The researchers also found an increase in same-day appointments for patients and clinics located near the new rail line, indicating the expanded transportation options also made it easier for people to get urgent or otherwise unplanned medical care.

Why does this improvement in attendance matter? Patients get more reliable care, which can help head off bigger health problems down the road, and providers don’t end up with a bunch of empty slots that could have been filled by other patients.

Here is how the researchers explained the significance of their findings, published in the journal Health Services Research:

Even a small decrease in no-shows benefits both patients and providers. For patients, completing appointments improves care continuity and avoids potentially harmful lapses in screening and treatment. This may be especially true for patients with chronic illness, who are also more likely to experience transportation barriers. Outpatient care can help chronically ill patients access appropriate medications, achieve better disease control, and avoid future emergency department use or hospitalizations associated with their conditions. For providers, fewer no-shows increases revenue and reduces scheduling inefficiencies.

Their study also serves as a corrective to some of the prior research on this subject. Previous studies had tried to detect any effect resulting from a mass transportation strike or the offer of ride-sharing services specifically to patients.

Neither had found much of an impact. But the first was more than 20 years old and the second dealt with a sample size of fewer than 2,000 patients.

The data set analyzed in this new study covered more than 3.5 million appointments and 370,000 unique patients. The effect they found was meaningful, especially for low-income patients (disproportionately people of color) for whom structural obstacles to health care, including transportation options, have been profound.

“By documenting a decrease in no-show appointments and an increase in same-day appointments following a public transportation expansion — especially for low-income individuals — we provide important new evidence on the importance of adequate public transportation to achieve equity in access to care,” the authors state in their conclusion.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, now signed into law by President Joe Biden, will pump nearly $40 billion into local public transit — a nice down payment, but not enough to fundamentally change the trajectory of the US’s ailing public transit system, according to experts.

The Build Back Better Act being debated in Congress right now would provide some additional funding for public transit. But it won’t be nearly enough to address the estimated $176 billion backlog of repairs and improvements that civil engineers believe currently exists in the United States.

There are lots of reasons to invest more money in public transit. But here is one more: It makes it easier for people, particularly those living in marginalized communities, to get to their doctor. Look at what happened in Minnesota.

House Republicans have been previewing their midterm platform and, instead of hailing issues, it's nothing but a sea of threats aimed at their Democratic colleagues over perceived grievances.

No governing, no solutions. Just promises of retribution for Democrats seeking lawful, constitutional forms of accountability over things like death threats made by GOP members and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made it exceedingly clear on Tuesday that he not only won't hold his caucus accountable for making violent threats against other members of Congress, but he will actively seek revenge against anyone who insists on the accountability he refuses to provide.   

Indeed, as the House debated censuring GOP Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona for publicly fantasizing about murdering a Democratic colleague, McCarthy promised it would be "a new standard to be applied in the future." As if any House Democrats would be deranged enough to tweet out animated videos of them executing their GOP colleagues.

"It means that under the Pelosi precedent, all of the members I have mentioned will need approval of the majority to keep those positions in the future," McCarthy said of Gosar ultimately being censured and stripped of his committee assignments on a mostly party-line vote. Only GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois thought Gosar's portrayal of murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was beyond the pale.

But these GOP threats of retribution are all par for the course now. The party is effectively filled with a bunch of lawless gang members who foment violence, flout the law, and trample the Constitution, and when anyone threatens to rein them in, the GOP's knee-jerk responses are promises of revenge.

Last week, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio pledged to get even with Democrats after the Justice Department indicted Trump henchman Steve Bannon on Friday.

"There are a lot of Republicans eager to hear testimony from Ron Klain and Jake Sullivan when we take back the House," Jordan tweeted, claiming that President Joe Biden had "eviscerated" executive privilege. Just a guess that Ron Klain, White House chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, would show up for questioning if they were subpoenaed. Bannon didn't even bother.  

But per usual, reality isn't really at issue for Republicans. The game is all about training their voters to believe they have been slighted and disrespected, that Democrats have committed an unforgivable abuse of power, and that Republicans will make them pay for it. That is the GOP platform, and Republicans keep running that play over and over again because their low-information voters aren't capable of seeing past it. In fact, the GOP's politics of revenge are exactly what the base craves—it's among their main reasons for living, breathing, and voting.

And it's not just House Republicans, as The Washington Post's Aaron Blake points out. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been practicing the dark arts of the double standard for over a decade.

As talk began earlier this year of Senate Democrats eliminating the 60-vote procedural hurdle for passing legislation, McConnell promised such a move would invite a "scorched-earth" approach to governing moving forward.

“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin—can even begin to imagine—what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like,” McConnell said in a Senate speech.

Of course, McConnell never thought twice about nuking the filibuster for approving Supreme Court justices when he began packing the high court with conservative ideologues back in 2017. And he won't think twice about nuking it the next time he lacks the 60 votes for any particular thing he’s intent on doing.

Republican threats also aren't confined to their Democratic colleagues in Congress. In August, McCarthy, increasingly emboldened by GOP prospects for retaking the majority, promised his caucus would never forget if telecommunications companies complied with lawfully issued subpoenas from the select committee investigating Jan. 6.

“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy charged in a mind-bending inversion of what's actually true. In fact, the companies were compelled to comply with the congressional subpoenas. Nevertheless, McCarthy persisted, “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”

This is classic Trumpism, right? Picking winners and losers based entirely on GOP loyalty tests with no regard whatsoever for the rule of law. McCarthy wasn’t standing up for Americans, he was running scared over an investigation that could well implicate multiple members of his caucus.

But this is the kind of punitive and twisted leadership Republicans are promising as they eye a potential takeover of Congress next year. They are putting forward no policy solutions for the American people or aspirational bills they hope to enact. Instead what they’re offering is plain and simple: It is the politics of revenge.

And that is very clearly exactly what GOP base voters want.  

Being lucky enough to live in a progressive city and work with (and for) fellow progressives, I sometimes trick myself into forgetting just how deeply I, as an openly queer person, am hated by some folks. Here in the United States, these people are largely (though certainly not always) Republicans. LGBTQ+ people are so maligned, apparently, that plenty of people don't even want to risk being perceived as trying to get our vote. And this is how we end up in a head-scratching situation where Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel is stumbling over herself to reassure her committee of more than 150 conservatives that she wasn't really trying to create a safe space for LGBTQ+ people in the party… while launching an initiative aimed at recruiting LGBTQ+ voters.

What? Exactly. On Nov. 6, McDaniel appeared at an event held at Mar-A-Lago (of course) and announced the launch of the RNC Pride Coalition, which in partnership with Log Cabin (a group for conservative LGBTQ+ people) would work on outreach for queer voters, as reported by Metro Weekly. The goal was that these LGBTQ+ voters would switch from voting Democratic to Republican, ideally in time for the midterms, and for things like canvassing and organizing for Republican candidates. You (literally) couldn't pay many queer people—including me—to help the Republican party, so it's largely moot, but that didn't stop far-right branches of the party from melting down over the potential of being remotely inclusive to LGBTQ+ voters.

QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, lost her mind on Twitter, arguing that rainbows are actually "God's sign" and that trying to be inclusive to LGBTQ+ people is just "identity politics." And according to Greene, identity politics is for Democrats, not Republicans—because she would never see being straight, cisgender, and white as an identity, mind you.

Here's that tweet. (And yes, of course, she shared a link to The Daily Wire.)

In addition to our QAnon Congresswoman, Republicans were really, really upset that McDaniel allegedly didn't clear this initiative with the entire committee. People immediately worried they might be perceived as remotely inclusive, and some went as far as to call for McDaniel's resignation.

Within a few hours, according to Metro Weekly, McDaniel emailed to follow up and reassure those concerned that the Republican party is remaining just as archaic as ever. McDaniel stressed that, among other shameful attributes, the Republican party is still committed to its harmful stances on immigration, same-sex marriage, and religious exemptions for discrimination protections. Lovely!

"We are actively committed to fighting the radical left on culture issues," McDaniel reportedly wrote, noting that this includes advocating for "religious liberty," the ever-dubious "family values" and "Republicans of faith."

"We would never, ever organize or communicate with organizations that undermine our values," she continued. "You have my word on that. The goal of this new outreach is simply to get more voters to vote Republican in 2022. That's it." McDaniel noted that the Trump campaign included LGBTQ+ outreach, and this is merely a continuation of that effort, claiming that the party is also trying to reach more evangelicals, Jewish people, and Catholics, as well as more young voters and veterans. 

If these people didn't hold positions of enormous power and privilege, their loathing of LGBTQ+ people would almost be funny—almost. 

If they draw district lines right, Republicans can lock in their power permanently, no matter what voters want.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger remains in a precarious spot in Republican Party politics. He has been singled out by Donald Trump and, indeed, the entire fascist wing of the party for his failure to comply with Trump's post-election demands that he "find" enough votes to overturn Trump's Georgia loss. To alter the vote totals of an American election would be both criminal and a betrayal of the country; Trump may yet face criminal charges for attempting to intimidate Georgia officials into doing so. Raffensperger is already facing a primary challenge from Republicans who are irate over his refusal to help topple the government. It's looking unlikely, at this point, that his party will return him to the office next year.

It's tempting to mark Raffensperger down as the courageous sort after he stood up for a principle as basic as: "No, I'm not going to fraudulently alter the votes in a United States election based on the say-so of a delusional, barking lump of self-regard." But the man is still devoted to a Republican Party that backed, and continues to back, those treasonous demands. He was unwilling to go to prison to help the party cheat, but he has otherwise toed the party line; he very quickly endorsed state Republican moves to make voting more difficult, each premised on the same "election fraud" notions he previously swore did not happen.

If anything, this should cleanly demonstrate just what it is that his party now finds unforgivable. He's fully on board when it comes to finding new ways to keep Americans from voting. But the Republican was unwilling to commit crimes to erase Joe Biden's Georgia win, and for that his fellow Republicans consider him an enemy of the party.

That's the background that Raffensperger now brings to television interviews. And while MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan wrote that he was "stunned" after Raffensperger dodged question after question on whether he would support Trump's reelection after Trump unleashed the whole of fascist America on Raffensperger and his family, it's not so stunning if you remember that (1) Raffensperger is desperately trying to get back in good standing with his Republican Party and (2) Raffensperger is willing to remain silent as his party becomes a hoax-promoting, violence-provoking enemy of American democracy if that's what it takes to meet requirement.

It ain't that subtle, Mehdi. What we have here is a man who needs to be on the winning side of whatever happens, and whatever happens to the rest of you doesn't enter into it.

In the interview, Hasan repeatedly asks Raffensperger if Raffensperger would vote for Donald Trump to retake the presidency if the Republican Party again nominates the extortionist thug for the position. Raffensperger isn't willing to answer either way, only saying he's focused on his own reelection instead.

An incredulous Hasan: "This is a guy who incited violence against you and your family and you're considering maybe voting for him? You're not saying, tonight, no way am I ever voting for that guy?"

Yep! That's exactly what Raffensperger is saying. You're trying to get him to say that the man who led an attempted coup, the man who pressured him into falsifying election totals, the one who became so furious when Raffensperger and others refused to topple democracy for the sake of his own personal ego that he publicly marked Raffensperger as an enemy and unleashed, on his family and others, that large chunk of America that has been absolutely itching for the erasure of current government and the creation of a new one that would put violence-seeking white conservative men at the undisputed top of the nation's power structure—you're trying to get Raffensperger to say that man is unfit to be president on national television.

If Raffensperger were the sort of patriot who could unflinchingly say that members of his party who rely on hoaxes, thuggery, extortion, and mob violence should absolutely be condemned and rejected, he would answer the question speedily. But Raffensperger just told you he's focused on his own reelection, not whether the country should be governed by autocrats, so there you go.

The last thing he's going to do is condemn his party's Dear Leader figure during his fight to convince the party that he is not, in fact, their sworn enemy.

Raffensperger's been willing to tolerate the death threats because, again, his alternative is abandoning the party. In his personal hierarchy of needs, maintaining his own position of authority is of more importance than whether the party that has given him that authority has devolved into one that defends criminality in service to party goals.

There are Republican pundits who have abandoned the party and condemned Trump rather than be associated with such evils. The number of elected Republicans willing to do the same—how many have appeared? How many have told voters, “I will not be a part of this”?

We have now heard all we need to hear from Raffensperger. Journalists, pundits, and Democrats all focused their eyes on him when it was learned that he had rejected the Trump White House's insistence that he needed to recount the votes by whatever new standard he could invent that would give Trump a win; the state of the Republican Party is so rancid that the sight of a single named official refusing Trump—after the whole party rallied around him to protect him from a litany of corruptions, and for years—was a man-bites-dog moment. The not-crackpot parts of the nation have been looking for heroes willing to condemn the party's corruption: Could this, finally, be one of them?

We soon learned that the answer was no. No, being unwilling to go to prison in a far-fetched scheme to erase vote totals and write in new ones, a scheme that would never survive even a cursory audit afterwards, would not extend to condemning the myriad party officials who were furious when it didn't happen. Raffensperger has been attempting to make nice with his party ever since, and if that means suggesting to television viewers that this whole attempted crime thing, the attempted overthrow of democracy, the deaths, the death threats, and the rest have still not definitively disqualified Trump from being the great Dear Leader other party thugs consider him to be ... so be it.

We've got it. Brad is a company man, and this is all we'll be getting from him. We can stop inviting him to display courage now; it will only get more humiliating for him and for his interviewers from here on in.

As American families confront higher prices for everyday needs, Republicans celebrate their economic calamity and root for more to come.

With eyes aglow, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Senate Republicans’ campaign chief, allowed himself to imagine just how bad things could get for the American public.  

“You can see what’s going to happen next. We’re going to continue to have inflation, and then interest rates will go up,” Scott told the Wall Street Journal, clamoring for the Federal Reserve to raise rates, thereby making borrowing more expensive for consumers and slowing economic growth, among other things.

“This is a gold mine for us,” Scott added, clearly unable to contain his glee.

Republicans have been pounding home inflationary concerns for months in hopes that they will spiral out of control and backfire on Democrats in the midterms next year. But Republicans aren’t just cheerleading for economic calamity; they are doing their level best to make it a reality.

Much of today’s inflation, which is a global problem at the moment, is being propelled by supply chain issues due to the pandemic.  

Among the best ways to ease inflation is to further contain the pandemic, which would lessen inflationary pressure in multiple ways, including the fact that U.S. consumers would start putting more money into the service economy again (eating out, taking trips, etc.) rather than primarily focusing their buying power on goods.

That’s precisely why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a longtime GOP booster, is now urging businesses with 100-plus employees across the country to follow President Joe Biden’s mandate on either vaccinating their workforce or implementing weekly coronavirus testing—because containing the pandemic is good economic policy.

The vaccination/testing mandate from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been indefinitely put on hold by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals due to a GOP-driven court challenge. The emergency standard would cover some 84 million employees, about two-thirds of the private-sector workforce.

But Chamber vice president Marc Freedman recommended that employers implement the Biden mandate anyway in a statement to CNBC.

“Ultimately, the courts are going to decide, but employers still need to take this as a live ETS until it is definitively shut down,” Marc Freedman said of the temporary emergency standard. “They should not bank on the preliminary actions of the 5th Circuit.”

In the meantime, Republican politicians are doing everything in their power both legally and politically to jettison Biden’s mitigation efforts despite what is being counseled by a dependable GOP ally and one of the top business lobbies in the country.

Along with multiple GOP governors banning local officials and school districts from requiring vaccinations or masking, Republican officials at the state level have joined forces to mount a legal challenge to the OSHA order. That legal push follows on another GOP-led effort to turn back Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors.

So Republicans are doing more than just rooting for the U.S. economy to tank, taking American families’ finances and economic security with it. They are also actively combatting the Biden administration’s efforts to save lives and get the economy up and running again at full force.

Some might call that supremely unpatriotic, but at the very least it is a huge f-you to everyday Americans trying to make ends meet.