James.galbraith

Progressive threats to vote down the bipartisan infrastructure bill have forced a delay.

For years, progressives have floated the idea of acting as a bloc and using their power to shape the Democratic agenda, a tactic levied by several of the most influential congressional caucuses.

On Thursday, they finally did: Progressives stood by a threat they issued this summer, when they promised to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill if it was considered in the House without a concurrent vote on a much larger reconciliation bill (which contains a vast investment in social programs and measures to address climate change). Effectively, they argued, the infrastructure bill wouldn’t pass unless a broader $3.5 trillion package did first.

By holding their ground and pursuing a course of action that could derail both bills, progressives hope to force moderates in their own party to offer some type of commitment on the reconciliation measure.

More than half the members of the 96-person Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) maintained their intention to vote down the infrastructure bill on Thursday, thereby guaranteeing its failure. That commitment led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay a planned vote, since Congress still hasn’t agreed on what the reconciliation package should include.

This move marks a huge shift in the way the CPC has used its power and what it has asked of its members. Prominent progressives have long argued that if even a subset of the caucus stayed united, it could influence major legislation and make ambitious policy demands — modeling themselves after methods used by groups such as the conservative Freedom Caucus and the moderate Blue Dog Coalition.

To get to that point, House progressives have had to think differently about congressional power as well as their own caucus. “It was a really important social club, for people with shared values to come together. But there wasn’t really any infrastructure built to support the organizing work,” CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal told Vox.

This thinking has been pushed by a new guard in the progressive caucus as well. “The thing that gives the caucus power is that you can operate as a bloc vote in order to get things done,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Jacobin magazine in 2018.

Such coordination, though, has often proved elusive for the CPC.

Prior to this term, there have been scattered efforts by the group to work as a unit but few actual requirements of its members. Formal whip operations were rare, and the caucus had no rules governing how members needed to vote. This lack of structure coupled with the ideological diversity within the progressive caucus diluted both its cohesion and power.

In the last year, however, the caucus has passed new rules requiring members to vote with the bloc in certain situations, including the expectation that members support a position when two-thirds of the caucus agrees on it. The CPC also outlined key priorities for a reconciliation bill, such as lowering prescription drug prices and funding child care subsidies. Further, the caucus consolidated leadership behind one chair so that the group can respond more quickly and effectively in negotiations.

This change in strategy has been central to the way progressives have approached infrastructure talks. By acting as a bloc, the caucus has been able to make substantive demands — sometimes in the form of direct threats — and pressure moderate senators like Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to bring a concrete reconciliation offer to the table. Thus far, Manchin has said he would support a $1.5 trillion package, while Sinema has yet to publicly draw a red line. (While the number of progressives threatening to vote against the infrastructure bill on Thursday didn’t appear to reach the group’s two-thirds threshold, the bloc is still one of the largest the caucus has been able to rally in recent memory.)

Whether the CPC can secure simultaneous votes on the two bills — and whether Manchin and Sinema bend to additional pressure and back more ambitious legislation — remains to be seen. There’s the possibility, for instance, that moderates walk away altogether, meaning that neither the infrastructure bill nor the budget reconciliation package get passed.

Despite these risks, progressives’ confidence in their gambit underscores a new willingness to stand by their position, and use their weight, as real stakes hang in the balance.

“Try us,” Jayapal told reporters earlier in September. “Now, we’re ready,” she emphasized to Vox ahead of Thursday’s showdown.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is working to overcome past divisions

Over the past year, progressive members of Congress have strategized about how the caucus could more effectively leverage its power while Democrats control both chambers and the White House.

Because Democrats have such a narrow majority in both the House and the Senate, any faction, however small, can derail key votes and lobby for their legislative priorities. During the bipartisan infrastructure negotiations, these small margins gave progressives leverage to reschedule a vote on the bill.

In the past, there have been a few key barriers to progressives using their caucus to execute credible threats. First, there’s the size and wide-ranging ideological positions of the group, an issue it’s still navigating. The CPC has included lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez who skew further to the left, as well as Democrats who’ve taken more establishment positions, such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who has long accepted contributions from corporate donors, a strategy rejected by some members of the caucus, who rely on small-dollar fundraising. In some cases, members didn’t display a clear dedication to its core goals. As a result, there hasn’t necessarily been unified stances on measures including contentious votes on immigration and foreign policy.

“It was a large caucus, and it was not very cohesive. And a lot of the members of the caucus were, frankly, not all that progressive,” said former Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) of his time in the group prior to retiring from Congress in 2013.

As Jayapal noted, the group didn’t have many ways of identifying members’ policy stances or compelling them to work together. Previously, the caucus offered recommendations to members on key votes, but it didn’t have any formal procedures in place to urge them to vote in a certain way.

Then there’s the dynamics of congressional legislation. In the past, progressives have typically advocated for more expansive legislation, but they’ve also been willing to cave when needed for Democratic priorities to advance. In the case of the Affordable Care Act, for instance, progressives advocated for a public option but ultimately agreed to support a version of the bill without one to get something done.

“There’s a long history of progressive Democrats saying they will do a thing and it petering out,” said University of Chicago political scientist Ruth Bloch Rubin. “This may be the first time that Democrats are taking their threats more seriously.”

Caucus threats are nothing new in Congress, of course, but progressives have historically hesitated to follow through. The Freedom Caucus, a conservative group, has leveraged its strength as a bloc to push Republican bills to the right, including on measures addressing border security and repealing the ACA. But it’s also been willing to sink GOP bills entirely, which has helped it wield power.

Now, progressives have started taking steps toward establishing similar influence.

Progressives’ conscious efforts to expand their power

Last fall, the CPC approved a new rules package intended to strengthen its ability to operate as a bloc. It required members to attend a number of meetings, respond to whip counts on key votes, and vote together in certain situations, including when two-thirds of the caucus share the same position on an issue, the Intercept reported. Those who don’t vote with the bloc at least two-thirds of the time could face probation or expulsion.

While some of these reforms, including meeting attendance, seem like straightforward requirements, they speak to both the limited engagement the caucus has seen in the past and the willingness of some people to use their membership for clout. Members’ responses to whip counts during infrastructure negotiations, for example, have been key to understanding whether the CPC has the votes needed to make serious threats on the bill.

Those rules emulate practices utilized by the conservative Freedom Caucus and the moderate Blue Dog Democrats. If 80 percent of Freedom Caucus members take the same position, for instance, that approach is binding for everyone else.

At the same time, the ranks of the CPC have moved further to left, with lawmakers like Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Mondaire Jones (D-NY) winning their primaries in 2020.

The CPC’s latest actions also build on the organizing work of past leaders including Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who oversaw a progressive push in 2015 to oppose legislation expediting approval of President Barack Obama’s trade deals.

In recent years, progressives have leaned further into this power, threatening to withhold votes on a 2019 prescription drug bill pushed by House Democrats. In doing so, they were able to secure changes to the legislation, doubling the amount of drugs covered by the legislation. Additionally, House progressives were among those who successfully lobbied for more expansive stimulus checks in President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan after some moderate Democrats attempted to narrow eligibility for the payments even further.

“There have been a lot of mini-flexes that have built this muscle,” said Mary Small, the legislative director for Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group.

Progressives’ unity on reconciliation comes after months of internal organizing. In April, the CPC agreed on five key policy priorities for Biden’s American Jobs Plan — a broad package that’s since been split into two bills — after surveying its members. These priorities include lowering prescription drug prices; creating a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients and certain other immigrants; investments in affordable housing, child care subsidies, and paid family leave; and support for climate jobs programs.

The potential of a progressive bloc

The big question now is whether progressives’ threats will ultimately be effective.

Critics of the CPC’s strategy counter that progressives’ tactics could mean that neither the bipartisan infrastructure bill nor the larger social spending package will pass, leaving Democrats nothing to show for their months of work.

Some political experts, however, consider this scenario unlikely, arguing that tying both infrastructure bills together gives moderates and progressives alike an incentive to work together. Because moderates want to advance an infrastructure bill that they can take back to their constituents — and progressives are similarly committed to the reconciliation measure — the two party factions have real motivations to bargain.

“It gives the progressives more power because the moderates want something,” said Alison Craig, an assistant government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s not just a matter of moderates being opposed, it’s a matter of them wanting something.”

The infrastructure debate also offers a glimpse into the type of influence a united progressive bloc can wield. Jayapal said her caucus is open to using similar tactics moving forward.

“I don’t think when we passed those rules reforms and talked about collective power, that that was intended for one event,” she told Vox. “We can do that on multiple things.”

But whether progressives can replicate these maneuvers in future policy fights remains an open question. The reconciliation measure is a uniquely prominent Democratic agenda item, one that is popular with the public and has the backing of the White House. Biden, after all, is personally invested in making sure the legislation doesn’t fail.

And despite the broad-based agreement the caucus has built on its care economy and climate priorities, its members often still split on other issues. In some cases, the new unity can go only so far: A much smaller subset of lawmakers in “the Squad” voted down funding for the Capitol Police and Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, for example. Not “every voting dimension” enjoys the same level of cohesion, said Josh Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

Progressives could face a different dynamic, for instance, if they didn’t have some White House support for their position or if they disagree on legislation. Ultimately, holding the line would be tougher in both of those scenarios.

“If they get a win from this, then they will be emboldened by that. But they still need the circumstances to align,” UT Austin’s Craig said.

By Tara Marie Published: September 30th, 2021

In August, right-wing racist fascism cosplay group the Oath Keepers were highlighted on CBS’s 60 Minutes. During an interview, Arizona Oath Keeper leader Jim Arroyo boasted, “Our guys are very experienced. We have active-duty law enforcement in our organization that are helping to train us. We can blend in with our law enforcement and in fact, in a lot of cases, our training is much more advanced because of our military backgrounds.” Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes has also boasted a large swath of current and retired law enforcement in the group’s ranks. The fact that at least 31 law enforcement officers across 12 states were being investigated for their part in the attempted coup d’etat at the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, should have been a red flag for even the most naive among us.

On Thursday, Gothamist and WNYC reported on a joint investigation the two news outlets conducted of online records purporting to show links between the New York Police Department and a secret membership database of Oath Keepers. According to the outlets, “hacked membership records were sent to a transparency nonprofit group called Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), which shares leaked data with journalists and researchers.” The leaked data does not show whether or not a member is still active, but the current or one-time members in question are definitely still active in New York as officials and officers.

A spokesman for Mayor de Blasio told Gothamist that there will be an investigation: "The Oath Keepers are a vile, extremist, anti-government organization. An immediate internal investigation has been launched." 

The Oath Keepers were founded by Stewart Rhodes in 2009 after President Obama’s inauguration, with calls by Rhodes for a new “civil war” to take place in our country. In recent years, with the rise of Donald Trump and the white supremacist foundation of the GOP becoming completely flagrant, the Oath Keepers have been able to reemerge from their doomsday-prepper caves in full jilted-bigot regalia. Being involved with the Oath Keepers is to be involved with a domestic terrorist organization, birthed out of racism against our country’s first, and so far only, Black president.

According to Gothamist, there are at least three New York public officials listed in the membership logs who claim they are no longer active members of the group. Their names were not published. However, the responses reporters got when they tried to contact various folks on the membership logs showed a real caginess that does not generally imply innocence. One of those matches was an active Staten Island officer who works in the Strategic Response Group—a group “deployed to quell protests, including those that erupted in New York City last year in response to the murder of George Floyd.”

When WNYC/Gothamist called the phone number associated with that membership entry, a man answered but did not confirm whether or not he was the officer in question. When asked if he was a member of the Oath Keepers, the man paused and asked how his number was obtained. He then declined to answer further questions.

Oswego County, NY’s 25th District Legislator Ralph Edward Stacy Jr., a Republican (gasp/eye roll), is also on the leaked membership list. He told Gothamist that it has been a very long time since he had filled out a membership for the never-not-racist-and-fascist organization, but that he hadn’t interacted with the group for over a decade.

“I do not condone what happened at the Capitol building and was not involved in what occurred,” said Stacy, who said he had never spoken to anyone involved with the organization and made clear he had not participated in the Capitol riot. “I certainly do believe in the right to peaceful assembly to protest one's cause, but I do not believe in any sort of criminal trespass or criminal activity as a means to an end.”

In March, New York Daily News reported that active-duty officer Sal Greco, who was getting money from Trump surrogate and super-sketchy rich guy Roger Stone, was being investigated for his part as a possible under-the-table bodyguard for Stone. Stone used Oath Keepers as bodyguards during his time in D.C. around the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Daily News report connected Greco to the Oath Keepers circumstantially and through a strange Venmo account. 

Former Republican candidate for New York’s 6th Congressional district, Thomas Zmich, told Gothamist/WNYC that, while he had been part of the New York chapter of the Oath Keepers, that was a suuuuuper long time ago. [Cough] Three years ago, the New York chapter closed, which is when Zmich says he stopped being in the organization. While in Trump years that may feel like a lifetime ago, in the objective reality the rest of us live in, three years ago is three years ago. 

None of this is surprising to readers around these parts. One of the larger national groups of fascist-wannabe seditionists congregated at our country’s Capitol on January 6 of this year. Law enforcement officials who fought bravely to defend our democracy testified in open court as to the disappointment and dangers they saw that day—including some insurrectionist cops. As the weeks have passed, more and more evidence has shown that Oath Keepers, amongst others, were very much involved in a conspiracy that day.

In recent weeks, the FBI has made it clear that they are pursuing a “seditious conspiracy” investigation. Oath Keepers have cut plea deals and more than a dozen other Oath Keepers are looking down the barrel of whatever the snitches and prosecutors have on them. This investigation is directly connected to the Oath Keepers’ presence in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6.

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slack_justyb writes: As previously reported the web host Epik was hacked by a group identifying themselves with the group Anonymous. However, in the most recent leaks from this group the scale of data that was stolen is becoming apparent, and signs point to a wholesale theft of data with no stone left unturned. We're told the dump is a 70GB archive of files and "several bootable disk images of assorted systems" that represent Epik's server infrastructure. Journalist Steve Monacelli, who broke the news of the first data release, said the latest leak expands to 300GB. "This leak appears to be fully bootable disk images of Epik servers, including a wide range of passwords and API tokens," he added.WhiskeyNeon, a Texas-based hacker and cybersecurity expert who reviewed the file structure of the leak, told the Daily Dot how the disk images represented Epik's entire server infrastructure. "Files are one thing, but a virtual machine disk image allows you to boot up the company's entire server on your own," he said. "We usually see breaches with database dumps, documents, configuration files, etc. In this case, we are talking about the entire server image, with all the programs and files required to host the application it is serving." Daily Dot brings some word on Epik CEO Rob Monster response to the latest news:Epik CEO Rob Monster, who did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Dot, would go on to hold a more than four hour long live video conference online to address the initial hack. The meeting would see Monster break out into prayer numerous times, make attempts to vanquish demons, and warn viewers that their hard drives could burst into flames due to "curses" placed on the hacked data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The head of Microsoft's games business told The Wrap that a shortage of chips wasn't the only thing stopping the company getting as many Xbox Series X/S consoles onto store shelves as it would like. From a report: "I think it's probably too isolated to talk about it as just a chip problem," he said. "When I think about, what does it mean to get the parts necessary to build a console today, and then get it to the markets where the demand is, there are multiple kind of pinch points in that process. And I think regretfully it's going to be with us for months and months, definitely through the end of this calendar year and into the next calendar year. The thing that's most disappointing is just the fan disappointment," Spencer continued. "People really want this new generation of consoles -- they're good consoles, both from us and the other platform holders -- and they want the new functionality. We're working hard to bring them to market but it's going to be a challenge that we'll work through for quite a while."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A serious bug in the iOS 15 Messages app can cause some saved photos to be deleted, according to multiple complaints reported by MacRumors readers and Twitter users. From the report: If you save a photo from a Messages thread and then go on to delete that thread, the next time an iCloud Backup is performed, the photo will disappear. Even though the image is saved to your personal iCloud Photo Library, it appears to still be linked to the Messages app in "iOS 15," and saving it does not persist through the deletion of the thread and an "iCloud" backup. This is a concern because most users keep the "iCloud" Backup feature enabled and it's something that happens automatically. If you're someone who regularly deletes message threads, if there's a photo that you want to keep, you won't be able to keep it with "iCloud" Backup turned on. To replicate this bug, the following steps must be taken: 1. Save a photo from a Messages conversation to your Camera Roll. 2. Check to see that the photo has been saved. 3. Delete the Messages conversation the photo came from. The photo will still be in your "iCloud Photo Library" at this point. 4. Perform an "iCloud" Backup, and the photo disappears.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instead of getting vaccinated and following the very simple social distancing and mask requirements public health officials at every level are suggesting, millions of (mostly) conservative Americans continue to put their faith in unproven drugs to free them from the anxieties produced by our global coronavirus pandemic. The tortured lengths to which some people will go to get access to ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug most frequently used as a horse dewormer, would be laughable if the results weren’t so tragic. But ivermectin—and its predecessor in this area, hydroxychloroquine—have both been proven to not do much of anything for people suffering from COVID-19. 

The United States spent a boatload during the Trump administration to collect millions of doses of hydroxychloroquine. Florida’s anti-science nightmare of a governor, Ron DeSantis, used taxpayer money to end up sitting on a pile of around 980,000 doses of the anti-malaria drug that can treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, but not COVID-19. Florida continues to see rising deaths and hospitalizations even though vaccinations and public distancing have been proven, in other states of the union, to prevent these terrible outcomes. But don’t you worry: According to a new report, the people making money are on the exact same team as the people pushing the wrong medicine.

According to The Intercept, there’s a nice “network” of health care providers who have made millions on ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic. Do you remember the right-wing conspiracy theory-laden group of white medical uniform-wearing folks who called themselves America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS)? They promoted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle answer to COVID-19, and were able to get Republicans like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to reverse course on hydroxychloroquine bans. Guess what The Intercept found?

America’s Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group founded last year to promote pro-Trump doctors during the coronavirus pandemic, is working in tandem with a small network of health care companies to sow distrust in the Covid-19 vaccine, dupe tens of thousands of people into seeking ineffective treatments for the disease, and then sell consultations and millions of dollars’ worth of those medications. The data indicate patients spent at least $15 million — and potentially much more — on consultations and medications combined.

The AFLDS got its foothold after disgraced person Donald Trump retweeted a batshit ridiculous video of one doctor, Stella Immanuel, saying things like, "You don't need masks, there is a cure … You don't need people to be locked down. All you fake doctors out there that tell me, 'Yeah. I want a double blinded study.' I just tell you, quit sounding like a computer, double blinded, double blinded. I don't know whether your chips are malfunctioning, but I'm a real doctor … we have neurosurgeons, like Sanjay Gupta saying, 'Yeah, it doesn't work and it causes heart disease.' Let me ask you Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Hear me. Have you ever seen a COVID patient?"

Another prominent AFLDS person you might recognize is its founder, Simone Gold. The doctor and lawyer who helped get AFLDS off the ground was also known for telling the world in a May 2020 video: “We’re all acting as though there’s a huge medical crisis. I’m not sure that it’s front-page news.” Instead, Gold told viewers that “constitutional rights” being “trampled on” were the real issue. Now, Gold is better known for her more recent appearance as an insurrectionist on Jan. 6, 2021. Gold—who spoke into a bullhorn after trespassing into the Capitol building rotunda—is now facing five counts for her part in the insurrection.

But as The Intercept discovered, the AFLDS wasn’t just saying awfully misleading and incorrect things into microphones, they were the propaganda wing of a nice money-making medical network. The network included telemedicine company SpeakWithAnMD.com, medical consultation platform CadenceHealth.us, and online pharmacy Ravkoo. They way it works is that AFLDS refers its followers to SpeakWithAnMD.com, which uses the Cadence Health and Ravkoo platforms to offer up $90 phone “consultations” with doctors who have supposedly been trained by the AFLDS to prescribe you drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

But besides profiting off of misinformation and bad science and putting millions of people’s lives at risk, these scammers couldn’t even find the decency to go through with the farce they were creating. TIME reported on how people like “Mike,” seemingly suffering from COVID-19 and too frightened to go to the hospital, spent his $90 and got … zilch.

A week later, he was still anxiously waiting for the consultation. Calls and emails to AFLD went unreturned, he says. Finally, he called his bank to report a fraudulent charge. “Not even an apology,” Mike, whom TIME is referring to using a pseudonym because of his concerns about his job, told TIME in an interview. “This is absolutely nuts. This organization is not helping anyone but their pocketbooks.”

Reportedly, Mike’s story is one of many that have made the community that has been following quack doctors and self-appointed pseudoscientists wonder if they’ve been had. (Spoiler alert: They have been had.) TIME did an investigation that showed many of these poor folks find themselves ponying up $90 bucks with nothing to show for it. Others—having been told how the government doesn’t want you to know about ivermectin and COVID-19 because it’s so cheap compared to a free vaccine—were referred to online pharmacies “that quoted excessive prices of up to $700 for the cheap medication.” 

“My mom has now been admitted to the hospital with Covid,” one user wrote Aug. 12 on the group’s channel on the messaging app Telegram. “AFLDS has not returned a call or message to her and they’ve taken over $500 out of her account!”

And if you do get that consultation, a lot of times you get the opportunity to pony up another $59.99 for a follow-up consultation. At The Intercept, some of the files they obtained came from “hackers” who easily got into the online platforms. The files they obtained show that between July 16 and Sept. 12, 2021 alone, Cadence Health got at least 281,000 patients signed up—“90 percent of whom were referred from America’s Frontline Doctors.” Guess how much “phone consultation” money was pulled in over those 62 days? About $6.7 million. When they confronted Cadence Health’s Roque Espinal-Valdez, he told The Intercept he was “flabbergasted,” and that he and his family were vaccinated and were shutting the platform down because he didn’t want to profit off of “quackery.” According to Espinal-Valdez, when he found out what was happening, he ended up attending an “emergency meeting” via Zoom that included SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, Encore Telemedicine, and its 16 lawyers. He says he told them he was ending the contract and he signed off.

As for online pharmacy Ravkoo, which TIME describes as “a digital pharmacy in Auburndale, Florida, whose address listed online appears to be a dilapidated white structure by a strip mall,” The Intercept was able to see records for 340,000 prescriptions between November 2020 and September of this year. The results include “an estimated $8.5 million in drug costs.” And to be clear, in this context, this is snake-oil money. “Forty-six percent of the prescriptions are for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, and another 30 percent are for zinc or azithromycin, two other ineffective medications that the SpeakWithAnMD physicians, who America’s Frontline Doctors claims it trains, prescribe in their Covid-19 consultations.”

Ravkoo says they don’t know nothing about nothing and have cut ties with AFLDS, though it seems the tie-cutting took place super duper recently—like right after they found out hacked files had been given to reporters detailing their business making money off of misery.

And let’s be crystal on this point: They know what they’re doing.

At least one of the prescribers is aware that medical experts recommend against using these drugs to prevent or treat Covid-19 but prescribed them anyway, according to patient records. One physician included this disclaimer in their consultation notes with several patients: “I, [physician’s name], have a complete understanding of the recent release from the WHO, FDA, CDC, and NIH on March 5th, 2021 as it pertains to the use and prescribing of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. I understand that these two medications have been deemed ‘Highly Not Recommended’ by the for-mentioned [sic] medical governing bodies but are not illegal to prescribe. … I have explained that I will not be held legally or medically responsible for an adverse reaction by this patient should they choose to take them and have explained they will not be able to hold me medically neglectful, pursue any form of malpractice, nor any criminal and civilly [sic] suits.”

That’s a lot of digital snake oil.

Nearly 250 asylum-seekers and migrants who have been jailed for weeks without any charges under Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s “legally dubious” Operation Lone Star scheme are set to be released, The Texas Tribune reports. The development comes following a sometimes chaotic court hearing on Tuesday where legal advocates challenged “widespread violations of state law and constitutional rights to due process,” the report said.

Two men who had been charged, asylum-seekers Ivan Nava and David Muñoz, have been detained for more than 50 days. But in a win Tuesday, those charges were dismissed, when attorneys challenged their unlawful arrests. “It shows what a sham these arrests and prosecutions are,” Texas Fair Defense Project Executive Director Amanda Woog told The Texas Tribune. “When they’re actually put to the test, they fold.”

The Texas Tribune reports that about 1,000 mostly Latino men have been jailed under Abbott’s Operation Lone Star scheme, which legal and immigrant rights advocates have said “was designed to be abusive, dangerous, and unlawful.” Nava and Muñoz, for example, “were forced to sign pre-filled legal forms in English they could not understand,” Grassroots Leadership and Just Futures Law said. Others detained have received little to no legal help while being detained for weeks, some for months.

“During the hearing today before the 63rd District Court in Val Verde County, Texas, attorneys for Nava and Muñoz argued that the State of Texas failed to meet its probable cause burden and engaged in unconstitutional acts of selective prosecution and unlawful detention,” the two organizations said on Tuesday. They called the dismissal of the charges against Nava and Muñoz by the prosecutor’s office “a major victory,” and said it was “the first of its kind for people detained under Operation Lone Star.”

But advocates cautioned that that asylum-seekers and migrants set to be released by Texas are still at risk because the state could still turn them over to federal immigration officials and be detained under harmful immigration detention. This could be the case for Nava and Muñoz. 

“After today’s court ruling, we are moving forward to secure the men’s immediate release from Texas jail and to assure that they are not detained by federal authorities,” Just Futures Law Staff Attorney Kevin Herrera said. “Operation Lone Star relies on racial profiling and systemically violates due process. We demand DHS halt transfers of any of our clients to ICE or CBP, and that DHS cease any collaboration with this unconstitutional program."

While the Biden administration has successfully challenged other anti-immigrant policies by Abbott, it’s unclear—and frustrating—why it hasn’t done the same when it comes to Operation Lone Star, advocates have said. “The White House could fight this,” Grassroots Leadership Co-Executive Director Claudia Muñoz told Prism. “They are choosing not to. Texas is acting really unhinged right now, and we have to push the federal government to take action.”

She described seeing escalated levels of Texas State Troopers, with out-of-state law enforcement swarming in to be a part of Abbott’s scheme. Advocacy groups have noted that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have “provided planes, boats, and state personnel to aid Texas authorities, all of whom operate under the authority of the Texas Department of Public Safety.” 

Federal action against Texas is urgently needed because advocates and groups say it appears Abbott is set to only ramp up Operation Lone Star. “He plans to keep this operation running for years, and is now seeking almost $2 billion from the state legislature to sustain and expand Lone Star,” Just Futures Law, Grassroots Leadership, Texas Fair Defense Project, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF said.

”We have learned that the Texas Department of Public Safety has hotels reserved for law enforcement for the next two-and-a-half years,” Muñoz continued to Prism. “We’ve heard through the grapevine they’re trying to empty more prisons to hold migrants charged under Operation Lone Star. The level of resources that have already been dedicated to this—and the level of political maneuvering that Greg Abbott has done to make this possible—I’ve just never seen a threat to immigrants like this before.”

It's Shurtleff v. City of Boston; here's an excerpt from the decision below, which the Court will now review:

The case has its genesis in a suit filed by plaintiffs Harold Shurtleff and Camp Constitution in which they complained that the defendants — the City of Boston and Gregory T. Rooney, in his official capacity as Commissioner of Boston's Property Management Department (collectively, the City) — trampled their constitutional rights by refusing to fly a pennant, openly acknowledged by the plaintiffs to be a "Christian Flag," from a flagpole at Boston City Hall. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the City. Concluding, as we do, that the government speech doctrine bars the maintenance of the plaintiffs' free speech claims and that their remaining claims under the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause lack bite, we affirm….

The City owns and manages three flagpoles in an area in front of City Hall referred to as City Hall Plaza. The three flagpoles are each approximately eighty-three feet tall and are prominently located in front of the entrance to City Hall — the seat of Boston's municipal government. Ordinarily, the City raises the United States flag and the POW/MIA flag on one flagpole, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts flag on the second flagpole, and its own flag on the third flagpole. Upon request and after approval, though, the City will from time to  time replace its flag with another flag for a limited period of time….

In a twelve-year period (from June 2005 through June 2017), the City approved 284 flag-raising events that implicated its third flagpole. These events were in connection with ethnic and other cultural celebrations, the arrival of dignitaries from other countries, the commemoration of historic events in other countries, and the celebration of certain causes (such as "gay pride"). The City also has raised on its third flagpole the flags of other countries, including Albania, Brazil, Ethiopia, Italy, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Mexico, as well as China, Cuba, and Turkey. So, too, it has raised the flags of Puerto Rico and private organizations, such as the Chinese Progressive Association, National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, Bunker Hill Association, and Boston Pride. Broadly speaking, we group these approvals as approvals for "the flags of countries, civic organizations, or secular causes."

Against this backdrop, we introduce the plaintiffs. Camp Constitution is an all-volunteer association that seeks "to enhance understanding of the country's Judeo-Christian moral heritage." Shurtleff is the founder and director of Camp Constitution. In July of 2017, the plaintiffs emailed Lisa Menino, the City's senior special events official, seeking leave to fly their own flag over City Hall Plaza. In their words, the proposed event would "raise the Christian Flag" and feature "short speeches by some local clergy focusing on Boston's history."

At the time of this request, the City had no written policy for handling flag-raising applications. What is more, Rooney had never before denied a flag-raising application. On this occasion, though, the plaintiffs' request "concerned" Rooney because he considered it to be the first request he had received related to a religious flag.

Of course, some of the flags that the City had raised contained religious imagery. The Portuguese flag, for instance, contains "dots inside blue shields represent[ing] the five wounds of Christ when crucified" and "thirty dots that represent[ ] [sic] the coins Judas received for having betrayed Christ." As another example, the Turkish flag situates the star and crescent of the Islamic Ottoman Empire in white against a red background. Indeed, the City's own flag includes a Latin inscription, which translates as "God be with us as he was with our fathers." None of the flags that the City had previously approved, however, came with a religious description.

Mulling the plaintiffs' application, Rooney conducted a review of past flag-raising requests and determined that the City had no past practice of flying a religious flag. He proceeded to deny the plaintiffs' flag-raising request. In response to the plaintiffs' inquiry into the reason for the denial, Rooney responded that the City's policy was to refrain respectfully from flying non-secular third-party flags in accordance with the First Amendment's prohibition of government establishment of religion. Rooney offered to fly some non-religious flag instead. The plaintiffs spurned this offer….

The record is pellucid that the City is not receptive to any and all proposed flag designs. As we previously indicated, the City controls which third-party flags are flown from the third flagpole. A flag-raising is approved only after Rooney "screen[s]" a proposed flag for "consisten[cy] with the City's message, policies, and practices" and provides his final approval. Furthermore, all 284 flags previously flown were flags of countries, civic organizations, or secular causes. That the City had not rejected prior requests is insufficient to conclude that the City accepts any and all flags because the record shows that the City had criteria for approval that limited flagpole access and that all flags flown satisfied those criteria. Here, the City's permission procedures evince selective access to the third flagpole, and "[t]he government does not create a designated public forum when it does no more than reserve eligibility for access to the forum to a particular class of speakers, whose members must then, as individuals, `obtain permission.'" The City's restrictions demonstrate an intent antithetic to the designation of a public forum, and those restrictions adequately support the conclusion that the City's flagpole is not a public forum.

That ends this aspect of the matter. Because the City engages in government speech when it raises a third-party flag on the third flagpole at City Hall, that speech is not circumscribed by the Free Speech Clause. The City is therefore "entitled" to "select the views that it wants to express." This entitlement includes both the right to decide not to speak at all and the right to disassociate itself from speech of which it disapproves….

The Arizona senator's caginess is bordering on a betrayal of public duty.

In most regards, Moscow, Idaho, is the embodiment of the bucolic college town: tree-covered neighborhoods, quiet streets, quaint shops downtown, and a pretty University of Idaho college campus. But for people who live there, the insidious presence of Pastor Doug Wilson’s cult-like Christ Church—not at all obvious on the surface, but cumulatively overwhelming at times—can make life on the Palouse surreal, even nightmarish.

Moreover, as a deep profile by Sarah Stankorb at Vice reveals, Wilson’s domineering evangelical church—which buys up property and businesses throughout the Latah County community and bullies both members and non-members who question either his edicts or his far-right theology—is built on a fundamentally misogynist worldview that permits male members to rape their wives, and threatens any women who object.

Stankorb’s report details the stories of the women who have survived Christ Church’s “culture that normalizes sexual abuse and harassing survivors.” One described being raped repeatedly by her husband, then becoming an outcast when she divorced him. Others describe being sexually abused as teenagers by men who taught in the church’s schools.

This ethos within the church is a direct outgrowth of the theology that Wilson teaches. He asserts that husbands have complete spiritual responsibility for the household, which includes preventing the wife from failing to submit to his will in “spending habits, television viewing habits, weight, rejection of his leadership, laziness in cleaning the house, lack of responsiveness to sexual advances.”

Wilson contends that modern society has stripped men of their intended roles, including their sexual mores. He has written that “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”; instead, “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants,” while a “woman receives, surrenders, accepts,” he argues. He concludes that “true authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”

Despite its location in a remote rural college town, Christ Church is not merely a fringe cult. Wilson is a major figure in the evangelical home-schooling and “classical Christian school” movements, having helped found the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which accredits institutions similar to Wilson’s. He also operates a publishing house, Logos Books, that provides curriculum materials for both homeschoolers and “classical schools.”

Its current expansion plans in Moscow include a new complex for Logos School, built on 30 acres of land on the town’s northwestern perimeter. A fundraising video reminds viewers “that much of what we are doing in education […] is exported to hundreds of classical Christian schools across the country and beyond.”

Much of what Wilson teaches has long been controversial. In 2004, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok exposed both his church’s cult-like creeping takeover of Moscow, as well as the far-right Dominionist beliefs embedded in his school literature, including a defense of the Confederacy and slavery.

Wilson co-wrote a book, Southern Slavery: As It Was, featured in the Logos Books curriculum, which claimed in part: "Slavery as it existed in the South [...] was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence.”

It argued: "There has never been a multiracial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. [...] "Slave life was to them [slaves] a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care."

At a 2003 public forum in Moscow, Wilson attempted to defend the book, claiming it had been misinterpreted. "My defense of the South does not make me a racist," he said. "I am not interested in defending slavery. I don't believe we should practice slavery.

“What I said is that a Christian man in the South could be a slave owner. He needed to follow the rules in the New Testament. Christian slave owners were compelled to teach their slaves to read [and] teach them Christian values. When there is a chance for freedom, the Bible tells the slaves to take it. Paul lays out the peaceful end to slavery. That is not how Southern slavery ended in the United States."

Wilson has taken other racially incendiary positions. In 2013, he denounced pastors who voted for Barack Obama as unfit for the pulpit.

“Any evangelical leader—by which I mean someone like a minister or an elder—who voted for Obama the second time, is not qualified for the office he holds, and should resign that office,” Wilson wrote. “Unless and until he repents of how he is thinking about the challenges confronting our nation, he should not be entrusted with the care of souls.”

Moreover, Wilson wrote, Black pastors were especially corrupt in backing Obama: “Not only must the dignity of human life be upheld by white and black Christian leaders alike, to the extent we may allow any differences, it should be to expect a greater vehemence in opposing abortion (in the person of its advocates and enablers) from black leaders,” he opined. “This is because it is their people who are being disproportionately targeted by the white Sangerites. And a black Christian leader who cannot identify a Sangerite is a rabbit leader who does not know what a hawk looks like.”

In recent years, he has heightened his “traditionalist” attacks on modern mores, including a 2020 speech he gave on the UI campus titled “The Lost Virtue of Sexism,” in which he argued that everyone can agree the Bible is sexist—but that the Bible is always right. In the speech, he denounced the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira as “a skankfest,” adding: “You might think that women are being elevated by an activity that I would regard as degrading.”

Wilson’s church has also played a leading role in Moscow-area protests against COVID-19 health measures, including mask mandates. Three church members arrested in one of those protests, including Christ Church deacon Gabriel Rench, filed a federal lawsuit in March against Moscow city officials over their arrests at a September 2020 event.

As the home of a liberal-arts college, Moscow has long been viewed statewide as a hotbed of leftist politics, and its voting record has remained predominantly Democratic in most elections, including in 2020, when Latah County was one of Idaho’s few counties to vote for Joe Biden.

This, in fact, is the situation that Wilson has long intended to change. He calls his plans for Moscow a “spiritual takeover.”

“Basically this is a blue dot in a very, very red state and the blue dotters are pleased,” Wilson told Religion News Service in an interview. “Our mission is ‘All of Christ for all of life’ and if you drill that down, then for all of Moscow.”

Local residents have begun organizing a kind of underground resistance to Wilson’s takeover, reflected in the website The Truth About Moscow, which tracks all of Christ Church’s operations in the town. Other residents have begun speaking out in local forums.

“Christ Church’s goal promotes division and excludes our many friends of whatever faiths including Jewish, Muslim, atheists or anyone besides Christians, as defined by Christ Church. Moscow should not be defined by any religion and certainly not owned nor controlled by any church,” Moscow resident Linda Pike opined in a recent Moscow-Pullman Daily News letter to the editor.

Wilson himself sees no room for compromise, foreshadowing the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection in a 2019 interview opining that the cultural war in Moscow reflected what was happening nationally. The country, he said, seems to be in a “slow-motion civil war with no bullets.”

“The only possible solution is a massive religious revival,” he said. “Short of that and we’re headed for trouble.”

The headlines are coming fast and furious: United Airlines is firing nearly 600 workers who have refused to follow its vaccination mandate. This or that hospital chain is firing a couple hundred workers for the same reason. While those headlines do show that companies are serious about their vaccination mandates, they’re obscuring the most important point: The results show that mandates work, and the number of people quitting or getting fired is tiny compared to the number of people getting vaccinated.

Take United. The 593 workers being fired for refusing to be vaccinated, and even the 3% who have requested exemptions from the requirement, are a tiny minority of the company’s workforce of 67,000 people in the United States. The company is still getting plenty of applications for jobs it posts, too, with 20,000 applications for 2,000 flight attendant positions.

When Delta Airlines announced that unvaccinated workers would pay a $200 a month surcharge to be on the company health plan, 20,000 workers were unvaccinated. Within a month, nearly 9,000 got a shot—a major improvement, but not approaching United’s level of success. Strong encouragement works, in other words, but not as well as outright requirement.

In one poll, 16% of people said they would quit or look for another job if their employer required vaccination. But so far, the numbers of people following through on that claim are much, much smaller. At Indiana University Health, 125 people quit … out of 35,800 employees. At Novant Health, a North Carolina-based hospital chain, 175 people were fired for refusing vaccination … out of 35,000 employees. And the firings came after 375 workers were first suspended, and 200 of them chose vaccination. Similarly, of the dozens of Massachusetts state troopers who reportedly planned to quit over a vaccination mandate, only one has actually done so.

Mandates spur a whole lot of big talk, but not so much action.

New York’s mandate for health care workers went into effect on Monday. The results? As of Monday, “92 percent of the state’s more than 650,000 hospital and nursing home workers had received at least one vaccine dose, state officials said. That was a significant increase from a week ago, when 82 percent of the state’s nursing home workers and at least 84 percent of hospital workers had received at least one dose.”

In Kansas City, Truman Medical Centers/University Health required vaccination, and just 39 out of 5,000 workers left.

A worker at the Curry Up Now restaurant chain who had hesitated to be vaccinated but now has her first shot after her employer mandated either vaccination or twice-weekly testing told the Associated Press, “It’s a good thing we’re required to get the vaccine, to ensure people’s safety.”

Tyson Foods, one of the meatpacking companies that have been slammed with COVID-19 outbreaks, instituted a vaccine mandate, and within less than two months, with a month to go before the requirement kicks in, the first-shot rate among its workers had gone from 50% to 80%.

This is the way forward. While masking and other precautions are very important until vaccination rates rise and daily case rates drop dramatically, the U.S. needs more people vaccinated to lower the rates of serious illness and death and clear out ICUs. Even so, a tiny minority of people will refuse, but for many more people who were genuinely just hesitating and being told it’s vaccination or your job, these requirements will work. They’re working already.

No word yet on whether she is going to be able to leverage some of that Andy Cohen gay influence and celebrity to catch her fall.

The natural gas industry was losing in cities across the US. Then came an obscure partisan tactic called preemption.

When Regina Romero took office as the Democratic mayor of Tucson, Arizona, in 2019, she wanted her city to take action on climate change. Local building codes might have been a logical place to start: In the US, some 70 million buildings rely on fossil fuels that warm the planet, such as oil and gas, for heating and cooking. They generate a hefty 13 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions.

While many answers to climate change require national and even international action, cities often have the unilateral power to craft local rules like building codes. But before the city of Tucson could even look at possible building reforms, the Republican-led state legislature took away its power to do so — by passing a state law that natural gas utilities are “not subject to further regulation by a municipality.”

Supporters of the Republican bill were trying to beat climate advocates to the punch and “preempt” restrictions on fossil fuels. “We wanted to get ahead of what we viewed as an economically damaging trend, and stop it before it could gain a foothold here,” says Garrick Taylor, a spokesperson for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, one of the lobbying groups that supported the bill.

With those few lines of text, Arizona blocked a path for cleaning up a significant source of Tucson’s climate pollution — even as nations around the world are racing to transition to cleaner energy and slow disastrous climate change.

The Arizona law “made it more difficult for local governments to act on climate change,” Mayor Romero said in a statement to Vox. The law is “limiting the pool of potential policy solutions we can enact ... tying the hands of local officials in Arizona, inhibiting progress and innovation in our cities and towns,” she added.

Arizona was the first of many US states where “localities are cut off at the knees, because they’re in states where lawmakers are hostile” to these kinds of climate regulations, says Sheila Foster, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in urban environmental law.

Interest groups for the natural gas industry, worried about losing energy customers, have now promoted bills in half the country to strip cities of basic powers to set greener building codes and help phase out fossil-fuel pollution. These “preemption” laws have swept through 20 state legislatures; three more states have bills pending this year.

Rebecca Leber/Vox

American government has always involved power-sharing among federal, state, and local governments. When federal and state laws clash, the federal law typically “preempts” the state law, and the state law must give way. Similarly, state governments often have the power to preempt laws passed by local governments.

But legal scholars say that the wave of state laws preventing local climate action and other progressive priorities, which they call “new preemption,” is different. States are increasingly using preemption as a partisan tool that prevents any regulation on a given issue. Foster likens the tactic to a “partisan hit-job,” while University of Virginia law expert Richard Schragger calls it an “attack on American cities.”

Local policies like building codes may seem unimportant in the larger context of the climate crisis, but they turn out to be a hidden linchpin in the fossil-fuel economy. Your home may depend on oil or gas for heating, power, and various appliances. You may pipe gas, for example, directly into your kitchen stove.

Even as President Joe Biden tries to change the country’s course with wide-ranging climate policies at the federal level, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry have been wildly successful at propping up gas on the state level. And because local action is critical to meeting national and international goals, these tactics could pose a threat not only to climate activists’ ambitions, but to the future of the planet. They show that Republicans and their fossil fuel allies can block climate action even without controlling Congress or the White House.

Republicans are using a partisan tactic to quietly deregulate US cities

Americans who may not be familiar with the term “preemption” are still feeling its sweeping effects.

The strategy of state-by-state preemption was pioneered in part by the tobacco industry, which wanted to stem a flood of smoking regulations in the 1990s and 2000s. It has been advanced by the National Rifle Association to restrict gun regulations in cities.

Republicans have also used this strategy during the pandemic. In April 2020, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that said it overrode “any conflicting official action or order issued by local officials in response to COVID-19.” Governors in Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi followed suit. Other Republican-controlled states, like Texas, have set policies that stop cities from setting mask and vaccine mandates.

There’s an irony to this emerging conservative playbook: Lawmakers on the right have often argued — on issues as varied as guns, voting, the environment, and public health — that the federal and state government should not overreach by encroaching on local rights to govern. With new preemption, conservative lawmakers are arguably doing what they complain about: stripping local leaders and voters of their autonomy.

Now Democratic lawmakers are complaining about Republican overreach. A pending state preemption bill in the Pennsylvania legislature, for example, would limit Philadelphia’s ability to encourage energy efficiency and electrification. Derek Green, a member of the city council, worries that the bill could create “artificial restrictions” that tie local regulators’ hands.

“It does not help constituents in this city,” Green said. “It creates an inaccurate market, because it doesn’t allow you to continue to be creative and innovative in local ideas and opportunities.”

The US can’t afford to cut cities out of the fight against global warming

Some US cities responded to Donald Trump’s presidency by becoming leaders in local climate action. In 2019, environmentalists heralded Berkeley, California, as the first city to pass an ordinance requiring all new construction to be powered by electricity instead of gas. Berkeley helped prove that despite Trump’s rollback of national climate policies, progress on climate goals could accelerate locally.

As of September 2021, at least 50 other cities and counties in California have followed suit, passing variations on new building codes that would help to phase out fossil fuels in their building sectors.

Together, this kind of local action can make a monumental difference in addressing climate change. Policies that cities, states, and businesses already have on the books are expected to lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by almost a fifth in the next five years. More ambitious policies could achieve cuts of up to 37 percent by 2030, according to a 2020 report from the climate advocacy group America Is All In.

Without help from local governments, even the ambitious climate proposals in Biden’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package won’t be enough to cut US emissions by half in the next decade.

One powerful way to shrink these emissions would be to embed clean technologies in new construction. For example, it’s cheaper to outfit buildings from the outset with electric heaters and stoves than to replace them later on. The world’s top climate science organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wrote in 2018 that the “buildings sector is characterized by very long-living infrastructure,” so “immediate steps are hence important to avoid lock-in of inefficient carbon and energy-intensive buildings.”

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

In other words, it often takes many years for anyone to upgrade dirty technology or remodel an older home or office. Gas-powered buildings will always pollute, while electrified buildings will become cleaner as the power sector switches to renewables.

Local climate policies can only make progress if state laws don’t get in the way — and Republicans have been very effective at winning control of state governments. “You’ve got these blue islands — cities and urban areas — getting bluer, and wanting more progressive policy in red states, where the state leaders don’t agree,” Foster says.

The natural gas industry sees preemption as key to its survival

Republicans who support preemption bills throughout the country say they’re not preempting local governance, but fighting for “energy choice,” arguing that a city shouldn’t pick and choose what energy sources customers rely on. They say they’re preventing extreme environmental priorities from engulfing states and raising energy bills for consumers.

“We have been able to observe what happens in cities like Berkeley, California, that take these radical steps to tell people: ‘This is what you will use, whether you like it or not,’” said Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative, in a 2020 floor debate, NPR reported.

“Activists across the nation, even right here in Florida, are pursuing bans on natural gas as an energy source,” said Josie Tomkow, a Florida state representative who co-sponsored a 2021 preemption bill that is complicating city campaigns for clean energy.

Their stance closely mirrors arguments that seem to have originated in the natural gas industry. In 2019, the chair of the nation’s top natural gas trade group, the American Gas Association, suggested that the industry was under siege from environmental regulation.

“The current narrative has shifted from attacking production and transmission of natural gas, e.g., anti-fracking and anti-pipelines, to removing energy choice for communities and limiting or prohibiting customer access to natural gas,” the chair said, according to meeting minutes that the watchdog group Climate Investigations Center obtained by public records requests.

The map below, from a 2020 briefing for an American Gas Association board meeting, shows where members of the trade group campaigned for preemption laws. According to the map, gas utilities in states highlighted in turquoise — Arizona, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Oklahoma — worked to pass “legislation to protect consumers’ energy choice.” The association was directly involved in at least one state, Tennessee, asking a utility over email to support the bill, the Guardian reported.

Climate Investigations Center public records request

A spokesperson for the American Gas Association told Vox that the trade group was “supportive of the effort in states to produce a choice of utilities for their constituents.”

“We’re not actively involved in any of the efforts,” the spokesperson added, though the group’s documents listed them as a priority in 2020. One of the association’s top goals that year was to “expand efforts at the federal, state, and local levels to ensure policies, regulations and other initiatives include the option of natural gas for consumers and preserve customer choice of energy,” the briefing says.

Richard Meyer, an energy markets and standards executive for the American Gas Association, told Vox that states should be “keeping all options on the table,” arguing that they would not necessarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating gas in buildings.

Climate advocates told Vox that arguments like Meyer’s seem deliberately short-sighted. Right now, it’s true that some buildings might switch from natural gas to electricity and wind up drawing energy from coal or gas power plants. But in the decades or even centuries that these buildings are around, the grid will get cleaner, and so will electrified buildings.

Calling these bills “energy choice” legislation is also misleading, says David Pomerantz, director of the environmental group Energy and Policy Institute. A building’s energy source is not usually an individual’s decision to start with, because the infrastructure that’s available depends on policies in their zip code. “No one person is drilling for gas in their backyard and piping it into their kitchen,” he says.

The bottom line is that the more new buildings that pipe in fossil fuels like natural gas, the slower the transition to alternative sources of energy, and the less time the world has to stave off climate catastrophe.

The history of preemption shows how dangerous this tactic could be

Before it empowered state Republicans and the gas industry, “preemption was a critically important part” of shielding the tobacco industry from regulators, according to Allan M. Brandt, a Harvard historian of medicine who wrote The Cigarette Century. Big Tobacco helped block many cities from banning smoking in public spaces during the 1990s and 2000s, for example, as part of a strategy that’s now known as the “tobacco playbook.”

“Other incredibly harmful industries have followed this idea of preempting other forms of regulation, through agreements that looked like they were positive, but what they really did was restrict future regulatory legislation and action,” Brandt says.

The tactic gained steam in the 2010s, starting when the Tea Party helped Republicans win state legislatures across the country. As governors and legislatures have gone red, preemption has helped them achieve “deregulation without replacement,” says Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies local governance.

Lobbying interests use this tactic to block the will of voters, Briffault says, and tend to focus on state politics instead of launching individual fights in hundreds of cities across the country. By concentrating on the states, where they have more power, lobbyists can concentrate their considerable resources on the politicians already listening, instead of trying to gain influence locally.

“This is a pretty tried-and-true playbook,” says Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law. For instance, American Legislative Exchange Council, a lobbying group that advances corporate legislation at the state level, has pushed preemption bills in dozens of states.

Over the years, lawmakers have used state preemption to target local bans on plastic bags, plastic straws, and fracking, as well as local efforts to increase the minimum wage. “We have certain cities across the states trying to implement their own community-level minimum wage policies,” said Taylor, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry spokesperson. He said his organization supports preemption of laws and regulations that, in their view, cause statewide “disruption” and “bureaucracy.”

When you understand the playbook, you begin to see variations on it everywhere. In Berkeley, the gas utility SoCalGas has argued in a state lawsuit — along with the National Restaurant Association — that Berkeley’s codes conflict with federal law and should be thrown out. In Spokane, Washington, local gas utilities backed a local referendum to stop the city from pursuing cleaner building codes. (A Washington state court recently threw out the referendum.)

Federal lawmakers have also attempted to attach preemption to national legislation: Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) offered an amendment to the infrastructure bill that would have prevented cities from using federal funds to limit natural gas, S&P Global reported. So far, these efforts have been unsuccessful.

Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images

The state-by-state trend has continued, however. Texas passed a preemption law earlier this year, and the city of Austin has been feeling its effects. A city council member in Austin, Greg Casar, says that the Texas preemption law has hurt the city’s efforts to ensure new building projects don’t hook up to gas pipelines. The preemption law “does reduce the tools that we have to require new buildings to be hooked up to electricity, rather than to gas,” Casar told Vox.

Austin still has some tools, like using tax benefits to encourage electric hookups, but the city can’t penalize builders for hooking up to gas. It’s difficult to change a city with incentives alone, Casar says. “It’s always harder to reach goals, not having both carrots and sticks,” he says.

Short of changing the political makeup of state legislatures, cities don’t have much recourse against preemption. In most cases, it’s not clear Republicans are breaking any laws with preemption bills, even as their tactics get bolder and bolder. As the gas industry runs out of thoroughly red states to advance preemption in, similar bills have popped up in states like Pennsylvania and Colorado.

“What’s most worrying is the continued trend of the legislature favoring oil and gas interests over taking any form of action on climate change,” Casar says. “It’s one thing for them not to do much — it’s another for them to actually get in the way of what cities are able to do.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from War Is Boring: An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, this time after someone revealed some US stealth technology testing going on and posted it to the Chinese government-affiliated platform. The stealthy object -possibly a component of a new drone or plane- was filmed on a tractor-trailer platform at Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility. After making their debut on a social media platform tied to America's top adversary, images of the object quickly made their way to the internet, gracing everything from 4chan to Reddit. It is unknown what project the object is tied to, though speculation has ranged from a new Boeing product to even the famed "TicTac" UFO sighted by Naval Aviators in recent years. Steve Trimble of Aviation Week wrote in a tweet: "I showed this to Gen Mark Kelly, Air Combat Command chief. His immediate reply was that he had no idea what it was. And then he took my laptop and stared at it for about 20 seconds. His expression was (WARNING: my impression) somewhere between confused and impressed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

em1ly shares a report from Motherboard: Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project. The documents, which largely use Astro's internal codename "Vesta" for the device, give extensive insight into the robot's design, Amazon's philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a "stranger" is and whether it should take any sort of "investigation activity" against them. The meeting document spells out the process in a much blunter way than Amazon's cutesy marketing suggests. "[Astro] slowly and intelligently patrols the home when unfamiliar person are around, moving from scan point to scan point (the best location and pose in any given space to look around) looking and listening for unusual activity," one of the files reads. "Vesta moves to a predetermined scan point and pose to scan any given room, looking past and over obstacles in its way. Vesta completes one complete patrol when it completes scanning all the scan point on the floorplan." [...] Developers who worked on Astro say the versions of the robot they worked on did not work well. "Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable," a source who worked on the project said. "The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended or retracted position, and there's no way to ship it to Amazon when that happens." "They're also pushing it as an accessibility device but with the masts breaking and the possibility that at any given moment it'll commit suicide on a flight of stairs, it's, at best, absurdist nonsense and marketing and, at worst, potentially dangerous for anyone who'd actually rely on it for accessibility purposes," the source said.

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It’s been almost a year since Donald Trump got voted out of office, but that doesn’t mean he and his minions can’t still make headlines … for the worst reasons. Newly released emails indicate that when Trump ordered three associates from his private club Mar-a-Lago to reorganize the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in 2017, those associates also tried to persuade the VA to sell veterans’ medical records—for profit.

The emails were released as part of a joint congressional investigation that has been going on for at least 19 months. The three men involved have been accused of violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires the transparency of advisory groups. As a result of the investigation, hundreds of email exchanges were released in which the Trump-era advisory team gave orders to officials even though they had no official role in the department. Other emails indicated that Trump was overall pleased with how the trio was handling the Department of Veterans Affairs. It is important to note that none of the men had any experience in the military or in government, according to a 2018 report by ProPublica.

The team was formed on Jan. 11, 2017, because Trump believed “veterans were treated badly.” Of course the best way to treat them is to profit off them, right? According to an email released by U.S. lawmakers Monday, the team consisted of Marvel executive Isaac Perlmutter, Washington, D.C.-based lawyer Marc Sherman, and Dr. Bruce Moskowitz, a West Palm Beach, Florida, physician.

According to ProPublica, as the trio began advising the VA on budgeting and contracting issues, they pitched the idea of selling veterans’ medical data. According to the outlet, more than 9 million veterans get medical care from the department at more than 1,000 facilities nationwide.

“Patient data, in my opinion, is the most valuable asset of the Department of Veterans Affairs,” Terry Fadem, a consultant who ran a private nonprofit organization created by Moskowitz said in June 2017, according to one of the emails released by the Oversight and House Commissions and Department of Veterans Affairs. “It can be used for hundreds of millions of revenues.”

Moskowitz apparently told David Shulkin, then-secretary of the VA, that talks had taken place with Johnson & Johnson, CVS, and Apple about a potential deal. According to the released emails, Shulkin was open to the plan. Whether or not veterans were asked for consent or signed any contract to sell medical data is not indicated in the documents released.

However, the emails do indicate that the trio wasn’t the only group of Trump minions involved. An email dated March 31, 2017 indicates that Trump’s daughter Ivanka introduced Perlmutter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky to explore the proposal.

While the emails do not indicate whether Trump himself knew of the plan to sell veterans’ patient data, both his daughter and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were involved, according to the emails. An email from Kushner did suggest that Trump was “excited” to meet Perlmutter to discuss his plans for the VA. 

The group clearly knew what they were doing was not right. One email indicates that when White House official Reed Cordish said that the group was subject to FACA requirements, Perlmutter responded, “The good news is that we have been advised that FACA does not apply because we are not a formal group in any way,” screenshots of their emails show.

According to the House Surveillance Commission and the Veterans’ Home Commission, investigations into the trio’s behavior began in 2019. “The Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) requires groups that advise governments to operate with a transparent and balanced approach,” the commission said Monday.

"The Mar-a-Lago Trio refused to comply with this law and, with the knowledge of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump (using a personal email account), and other top White House advisors, hid their efforts to influence VA policies from public view."

The commission added that the group, "bolstered by their connection to President Trump's private Mar-a-Lago club violated the law and sought to exert improper influence over government officials to further their own personal interests.” According to the commission, the trio also outlined plans to work with their own companies, including “working with Marvel to set up a team of celebrity ambassadors” for a public awareness campaign on suicide prevention.

While the group was created under the guise of Trump’s love and care for veterans, they instead clearly looked to take advantage of the vulnerable population.

“From the well-chronicled wait time issues to quality of care concerns, there had been numerous setbacks in providing our veterans with the level of care they deserve. That is why, when the President and the senior leadership at the VA asked for our help, we gladly volunteered our time to do so,” the cronies said in a statement.

In a statement to ProPublica, Perlmutter, Sherman, and Moskowitz said: "We were asked repeatedly by former Secretary Shulkin and his senior staff, as well as by the President, to assist the VA and that is what we sought to do, period."

A spokesperson for the group maintained that it was not their responsibility to follow FACA regulations. Despite this, in March 2021 a federal appeals court in Washington held that a liberal veterans group could proceed with a lawsuit to enforce FACA’s disclosure requirements around the Mar-a-Lago trio.

Thomas Claburn writes via The Register: Microsoft Exchange clients like Outlook have been supplying unprotected user credentials if you ask in a particular way since at least 2016. Though aware of this, Microsoft's advice continues to be that customers should communicate only with servers they trust. On August 10, 2016, Marco van Beek, managing director at UK-based IT consultancy Supporting Role, emailed the Microsoft Security Response Center to disclose an Autodiscover exploit that worked with multiple email clients, including Microsoft Outlook. "Basically, I have discovered that it is extremely easy to get access to Exchange (and therefore Active Directory) user passwords in plain text," he wrote. "It doesn't necessarily require any breach of corporate security, and at its most secure, is only as secure as file level access to the corporate website." His proof-of-concept exploit code, which affected Outlook (both Mac and PC), default email apps for Android and iOS, Apple Mail for Mac OS X, and others, consisted of 11 lines of PHP, though he insisted the exploit probably could have been reduced to three lines. Microsoft acknowledged on August 11, 2016, that it had reproduced the issue in van Beek's report. Then on August 30, 2016, the Windows titan responded to van Beek by saying the report doesn't describe a genuine vulnerability: "Our security engineers and product team have reviewed this report and determined that it is not a security issue to be serviced as part of our monthly Patch Tuesday process. 'Never accept an SSL certificate without a matching host name' is already recommended for clients in the doc cited by your report: [link]. Before you send a request to a candidate, make sure it is trustworthy. Remember that you're sending the user's credentials, so it's important to make sure that you're only sharing them with a server you can trust. At a minimum, you should verify: That the endpoint is an HTTPS endpoint. Client applications should not authenticate or send data to a non-SSL endpoint. That the SSL certificate presented by the server is valid and from a trusted authority." "This response casually forgets to consider that a hacked web server still retains a perfectly valid certificate -- it just happens to use that trusted tunnel to serve up problems," said van Beek. "Also, I have only found one Exchange client so far which actually checks the hostname against the certificate, which is Microsoft's own test tool." Van Beek said he thought it was incredible that Microsoft confirmed the behavior he reported within hours but does not consider it to be a problem. He suggested three mitigations: changing the order of operations so that DNS gets checked first; never accepting an SSL certificate without a matching host name; and reviewing why and when clients respond to authentication requests. When asked if the company plans to take any steps to address credential exposure and whether it believes its guidance adequately addresses the problem, a Microsoft spokesperson said: "We are continuing to investigate the specific scenario shared by the researcher."

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It is both disturbing and refreshing that accountability for police violence often only comes after a story picks up media interest. Refreshing, because at least accountability is even approached at all. For decades, stories like that of a handcuffed Black man shown in witness video being attacked by a police dog were buried off-camera and easily overlooked. That is not happening after a recording featuring three Missouri police officers taking turns holding the man and controlling the dog was posted to Facebook last Monday and viewed some 8,700 times. That’s one single post. It was also picked up and shared on other social media sites by reporters, activists, and attorneys, including noted civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

“K9 dogs only attack on command, so it was NO accident when a K9 near St Louis viciously mauled a Black man multiple times while 3 cops stood & watched,” Crump tweeted on Sunday. “This cruel & unusual punishment is FAR TOO similar to the use of dogs against civil rights protestors in 1960s South!” The FBI has since launched an investigation into the violent arrest, which the applicable Woodson Terrace Police Department is assisting in, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Derk Brown, an on-air personality at 96.3 The Lou, shared the video with a warning about its graphic nature. "I was just tagged in a video of a disturbing arrest this morning at around 8:45am that took place in #WoodsonTerrance/#StAnn (#StLouisCounty)," he wrote in his Facebook post. "The video shows police allowing a K-9 dog to continue biting a man after he gave up and not resisting."

Warning: The videos in this story contain violent footage that may be triggering for some viewers.

Woodson Terrace Chief Randy Halstead said in an email the Post-Dispatch obtained that his department is “fully cooperating” with federal investigators and that St. Louis County prosecutors have requested information about the arrest, which happened in the St. Louis suburb at around 7:15 AM. Police were called to the area with a report of a break-in at a local business, officials said in a statement posted on Facebook. They said the man seemed to be on drugs and was placed under arrest when he threatened officers and proclaimed to be a “sovereign citizen.” Officials also said he didn’t comply with their commands, resisted arrest, and continued resisting even after they warned him that the police dog would be released.

“The suspect continued to resist, causing minor injuries to one of the officers so the K-9 was released and the K-9 gained control of the suspect’s foot,” police said in the statement.

View the complete police statement:

***** Press Release *****

On Monday, 09/20/2021 at approximately 7:18 am our officers responded to a local business for a subject trespassing and refusing to leave. The caller was fearful the subject was going to remain in the building. Upon the officers arrival the subject left the business and was located by the officers walking towards another business. Our officers made contact with the subject and the subject immediately started threatening to kill the officers and identified as a sovereign citizen. The subject continued yelling obscenities and telling the officers he would not comply and he “will not obey your contract”.  The subject continued to walk away from the officers and several commands to stop were given by the officers but the subject failed to comply and continued to walk away into rush hour traffic on Woodson Road. The officers had to block traffic to keep the subject from getting struck by vehicles. The officers observed that the subject was under the influence of a narcotic and advised him he was under arrest. The officers advised the subject to place his hands behind his back but he refused and when the officers attempted to place the subjects hands behind his back the subject resisted and refused to comply. The officers attempted to get the subject to cooperate with them but the subject continued resisting. The subject was then warned several times that if he did not comply the K9 would be released. The subject continued to resist causing minor injuries to one of the officers so the K9 was released and the K9 gained control of the suspect’s foot. The suspect went to the ground and the K9 was pulled off the subject. After the K9 was pulled off of the suspect the officers attempted to place the subject into handcuffs but due to the subject being under the influence of drugs he continued to resist and the officers were unable to restrain the subject. The subject got up and attempted to flee from the officers and the K9 was released again biting the suspect on his leg. The officers were able to handcuff the subject and the K9 was pulled off. An ambulance responded but the subject refused medical attention and he was transported to the Woodson Terrace Police Department. The subject began complaining about his injuries so the ambulance responded and transported the subject to the hospital. After the subject was arrested the officers found suspected Methamphetamine on the subject which would explain why the officers were unable to restrain the subject. The subject was released pending application of warrants.

A spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell told the Post-Dispatch the office has not made a decision about whether to prosecute, and said the man who was attacked has not been charged. Bell told the newspaper he promises to conduct a “thorough review” of the encounter. Protesters who showed up outside the police department on Friday demanded the officers involved be fired and prosecuted after seeing the video. It began with police allowing the dog to bite the man’s foot while he’s restrained on the hood of a car. The dog is then shown biting the man for about 10 seconds before an officer tries to pull him back, but the dog continues gnawing at the man's foot. "Help," he yelled repeatedly. The dog continued biting the man even as officers arrested him, with the mauling lasting more than 25 seconds.

Michael Gould, a K-9 expert with more than 35 years of experience in handling police dogs, told NBC-affiliated KSDK the video is "problematic." "The fact of the matter is, it's a human reflex response, you can't have an 80-pound dog puncturing your skin and be compliant," he said. "It's virtually impossible."

In an an editorial given the headline “Woodson Terrace officers keep Bull Connor's legacy alive,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board compares the attack to the tyranny of the 1960s and one Birmingham public safety chief, Bull Connor, who in the name of shutting civil rights protesters up allowed them to be brutalized by police dogs. “There was nothing so urgent in the Woodson Terrace arrest that prevented officers from trying alternative techniques so cooler heads could prevail,” the editorial board wrote. “The sole message seemed to be: If you as a Black person show the slightest resistance, here’s what we can do to you.”

Amazon has been successful in nearly every industry it has entered, from books and grocery shopping to cloud computing and movie streaming. So it has been puzzling to many that success in the lucrative video game business has eluded the tech giant. On Tuesday, Amazon gave producing its own video games another try. From a report: After more than a year of delays, it released New World, an online multiplayer game in which players join factions, fight monsters, fight one another and colonize a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The $40 computer game, which received generally positive reviews as players tested early versions over the past few months, arrives at a crucial time for the tech giant's disappointing gaming efforts. After spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars, neither of the other two big-budget games that Amazon announced it was producing in 2016 alongside New World exists today. Some of its top gaming hires have departed over the years without putting out any notable titles. Last year, the company also removed another game from storefronts after a poor reception. New World "has to be our breakthrough game -- there's no doubt about it," said Christoph Hartmann, the vice president of Amazon Games. "Just for morale of people, at some point you want to see some success." Amazon's biggest accomplishment in the gaming industry so far has been the acquisition of Twitch, the livestreaming video site, which the company bought in 2014 for about $1 billion. Amazon has also forged ahead with a new gaming subscription service, Luna, and recently announced a new development studio in Montreal.

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Democratic 'frontliners' have plenty to gain from a robust reconciliation package, too.

On Jan. 6, more than 30 minutes after the first attackers breached barricades erected to protect the Capitol, the Department of Homeland Security sent an incongruous update to the Pentagon.

“There are no major incidents of illegal activity at this time," read an internal Army email sent to senior leaders at 1:40 p.m. that day, referring to an update the service had just received from DHS’s National Operations Center (NOC).

The Pentagon has faced scorching criticism for taking hours to deploy National Guard units to the Capitol. But the glaring omission, detailed in an email obtained through a public records request, provides new information about inaccurate communications the Defense Department received as the day’s horrors unfolded. And it heightens concerns about the role of DHS, established in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, as pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, and the department’s ability to respond to crises.

“These emails raise serious questions about the response to the threat of January 6th,” said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog group that obtained the email through a public records request and shared it with POLITICO.

A DHS spokesperson declined to directly address the previous administration’s Jan. 6 response, or answer follow-up questions about whether the department conveyed additional updates to the Pentagon via other channels.

“Under Secretary Mayorkas’ leadership, addressing domestic violent extremism is a top priority for DHS,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The Department is working closely with federal, state, local, tribal, and non-government partners to improve our ability to detect, evaluate, and mitigate the threats posed by domestic terrorists.”

Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith said Army senior leaders worked with real-time information “to assess the situation and determine the best response options available to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army.”

The Pentagon did receive more accurate information about the threat on Jan. 6 via frequent communications throughout the day with other agencies, as well as lawmakers, the White House, the DC mayor and the local law enforcement. A detailed timeline released by DOD at the time reflects multiple phone calls between the Army Secretary, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Metropolitan Police Department leadership, as well as others between DOD leaders and lawmakers.

The email listing DHS’s updates was sent from someone at the Army’s operations center in the basement of the Pentagon to a number of senior Army officials, including Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, who at the time was serving as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, plans and training at the Pentagon (and who is the brother of Trump’s former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn); and then-Army Undersecretary James McPherson. Before sharing the email with CREW in response to their request, the Defense Department redacted the name of the sender.

The updates from DHS were conveyed over an internal government messaging system, which automatically converted the time stamp to Greenwich Mean Time, according to an Army official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

The document shows that at 1:40 p.m. senior DOD officials received the "DHS National Operations Center update as of 1330, 06 Jan," as described in the Army email.

The NOC “Provides timely reporting and products...to support senior-leader decision making,” according to DHS’s website. Part of its mission is “to link senior leaders to facilitate unity of effort and incident management efforts.”

In other words, the center exists to get accurate information to decision-makers right when they need it. Its updates routinely go out in realtime to the Army Operations Center, which then forwards them to the relevant Army officials, according to people familiar with the process.

The first item on DHS’s 1:30 p.m. update list wasn’t even about D.C, according to the Army email; it was about National Guard units deployed in Wisconsin “in anticipation of prosecutorial decision” in the case of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot in the back seven times by a white police officer. The shooting left Blake partially paralyzed and generated national outcry. The DHS update noted that 851 National Guard personnel were ready for “Civil Disturbance Operations” in the wake of a local prosecutor’s announcement that he would not bring charges against the officer.

Then the update listed “DC Events Reported to DHS NOC” as its second item.

“In the last 2 hrs - There are no major incidents of illegal activity at this time,” the report read.

Then it listed a number of non-issues: A suspicious package at a Metro station near the capitol was “cleared no threat;” a law enforcement agency “determined Proud Boys threatening to shut down the water system in the downtown area not a credible threat;” and “Protestors near 16th & Pennsylvania Ave reportedly with baseball bats; exaggerated report.”

It also noted that two buildings in the Capitol Complex were being evacuated because of a bomb threat against the Capitol Hill Club. The report did not note that that club — a hangout for Republican lobbyists and operatives — is next door to the Republican National Committee. A pipe bomb was found there that day.

As the two hours covered in that update came to a close, the attacks on the Capitol had already started. But you wouldn’t know it from the update.

“Why were significantly more National Guard personnel prepared to protect the Kenosha, Wisconsin area after the decision not to prosecute the police officer who shot Jacob Blake than were on hand to protect DC from Trump supporters?” said Libowitz. “An update as of 1:30 PM reported up to 20,000 people marching to the Capitol, but ‘There are no major incidents of illegal activity at this time.’ But by 1 PM, rioters had already breached the barricade at the Capitol. Why did they not consider what was clearly going on to be serious?”

The events playing out at the Capitol throughout the afternoon, shown on live TV across the world, belied the understated DHS tick tock.

At 12:52 p.m. that day, then-U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund had said he realized danger was imminent. A huge group was heading to the Capitol, he said in congressional testimony, and it wasn’t any old D.C. protest.

“It was immediately clear that their primary goal was to defeat our perimeter as quickly as possible and to get past the police line,” Sund testified. “This mob was like nothing I have seen in my law enforcement career. The group consisted of thousands of well-coordinated, well-equipped violent criminals. They had weapons, chemical munitions, protective equipment, explosives, and climbing gear. A number of them were wearing radio earpieces indicating a high level of coordination.”

At 12:53 p.m., protesters had breached the Capitol Building’s outer perimeter, according to The New York Times.

At 12:58 p.m., Sund asked the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department for help.

At 1:05 p.m., Washington Post reporter Rebecca Tan tweeted a picture of the growing crowd. “Protesters are charging toward the Captiol [sic] steps,” she wrote. “Some tried to scale the construction structures and have been tackled by police. They want to enter the building and are making attempts at intervals. Capitol police trying to hold them back.”

At 1:09 p.m., Sund urged the Sergeants at Arms — officials responsible for the day-to-day operations of the House and Senate — to send in support and “authorize the National Guard,” he later testified.

The danger was great enough that Capitol Hill’s top law enforcement officer had called for the National Guard to come in. But those troops didn’t arrive until after 5 p.m.

At 1:26 p.m., according to the DOD timeline, the U.S. Capitol Police “ordered the evacuation of the Capitol complex.”

DHS sent out another update “as of 1400,” or 2 p.m. ET, according to the Army email. It gave a slightly more accurate picture of the chaos.

“US Capitol is reportedly locked down due to multiple attempts to cross police barriers and police injuries,” it read, followed by a partially redacted sentence that ended with the phrase “situation continues to develop.”

That characterization is a drastic understatement. From 1:30 to 2 p.m., the situation at the Capitol grew far worse. At 1:44 p.m., Trump supporters were climbing the scaffolding outside the building, according to Just Security.

At 1:49 p.m., Sund called the head of the D.C. National Guard, Maj. Gen. William Walker. Walker later testified that Sund said “there was a dire emergency on Capitol Hill and requested the immediate assistance of as many Guardsmen as I could muster.”

Ivan Nava and David Muñoz, two of the people who have been arrested under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “legally dubious” scheme sweeping up and prosecuting migrants who have recently come into the state, “were forced to sign pre-filled legal forms in English they could not understand,” said Grassroots Leadership and Just Futures Law, two organizations representing the asylum-seekers. Both asylum-seekers have been held in inhumane conditions for more than 50 days now.

Hundreds of migrants have in fact been detained under Operation Lone Star for weeks at a time, some for months, The Texas Tribune reports. Many don’t speak English. Many have not received any legal assistance at all. They are completely in the dark—and it’s all on purpose. 

The Texas Tribune reports that state law “requires that defendants be released from jail if prosecutors delay cases by not filing charges quickly,” which is anywhere from 15 to 30 days for the kinds of trespassing charges Abbott has sought against migrants under his plan. But that deadline has “fallen by the wayside,” the report said. This is Greg Abbott, so that’s no accident. Advocates are now seeking their release, “[c]iting the widespread violations of state laws and constitutional due process rights.”

“We can’t have a country or a system where people are being rounded up like this and sort of tucked away and hidden without the oversight and respective rights that the Constitution demands,” Restoring Justice attorney Amrutha Jindal told The Texas Tribune. “The system crumbles without due process.” Just Futures Law attorney Kevin Herrera said Operation Lone Star “decimates basic constitutional protections in the Texas legal system,” calling the arrests “racially motivated and unlawful.” Along with Grassroots Leadership, the organization has petitioned for Nava and Muñoz’s release.

Just Futures Law, Grassroots Leadership, Texas Fair Defense Project, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF have previously said that when it comes to those prosecuted under Operation Lone Star, “[r]eports of the first convictions are alarming. Horrific videos posted by one county sheriff show individuals herded into mass hearings in parking lots.” The groups estimate that more than 400 people “are currently detained pretrial in a state prison, many without access to counsel.”

“Governor Abbott has been open about Lone Star’s mission: use local and state law enforcement to create a new class of ‘criminal aliens’ that can be deported quickly and prevent their return,” they continued. “In other words, Governor Abbott built his own state deportation force and is using state funds to power it. He plans to keep this operation running for years and is now seeking almost $2 billion from the state legislature to sustain and expand Lone Star.”

Facing primary opponents even more right wing than he is, Abbott is using asylum-seekers and migrants, including children, as his human props. Because of Abbott, facilities sheltering unaccompanied children are currently running without state licenses. “When children are in unlicensed facilities, the lack of licensing safeguards may result in threats to their health and safety, such as insufficient staffing levels, inappropriate staff, inadequate services, harmful disciplinary actions, and risks of physical/sexual abuse and trafficking,” 70 outraged advocacy groups told him. But you won’t hear about any of that from the so-called family values crowd. Abbott’s actions amid the Republican primary have also stooped to the downright ridiculous, last week touting a “steel wall” consisting of state-owned cars lined up along the Rio Grande.

When it comes to Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, Grassroots Leadership and Just Futures Law said in their statement they’re set to go to court on Tuesday to call for Nava and Muñoz’s charges to be dismissed, for charges against all migrants arrested under Operation Lone Star to be dismissed, and for an immediate end to the program.

“The men trapped in this process have faced considerable obstacles gaining access to legal counsel, access to courts, and continue to be incarcerated despite grounds for release due to their unlawful arrest and procedural delay,” said attorney Kathryn Dyer. “Rather than focus on actual public safety concerns, Governor Abbott has prioritized using unconstitutional means to a political end.” Grassroots Leadership Co-Executive Director Annette Price said the program “was designed to be abusive, dangerous, and unlawful; that makes Texas a very dangerous place for migrants and people of color.”

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