A MAGA-backed candidate for New Jersey governor turned his well-appointed home into a parsonage and is now living in it free of property taxes.
Phil Rizzo — who leads the tiny City Baptist Church in Hudson County — and his wife, Jennifer, paid $1.55 million in 2015 for a five-bedroom, seven-bath home on six secluded acres in New Vernon, Morris County, about 45 minutes away from the church. Two years later, the Rizzos sold the house for $1.65 million to City Baptist Church. Rizzo has said his family still lives in the house — property-tax free. Public records list it as a property tax-exempt parsonage, saving more than $15,000 in taxes per year in the state that has among the highest property taxes in the country.
Rizzo, who according to his online bio is a third generation real estate developer, ranks behind Jack Ciatterelli in the race for the Republican nomination, making him a longshot to become governor of the Garden State. The winner of that contest will face incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in November. On Twitter, Rizzo has espoused baseless claims about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and conspiracy theories that left-wing activists were responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Since selling the house to the church, the home has undergone luxury improvements, according to the Zillow listing. In September 2020, it was put up for sale, but the listing was withdrawn in November, according to Zillow. The asking price was $2.65 million.
“Builder is putting final touches on this stunning 5 bedroom home, all with private en suite baths,” the listing states.“The home has been totally renovated top to bottom.”
According to the listing, the house features three fireplaces, a six-burner Viking stove, two Sub-Zero freezers, a wet bar, a pond and a heated concrete swimming pool with attached hot tub. There’s also a detached two-car garage with some finished space inside.
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Rizzo said that when he “decided to walk away” from his business of building and renovating homes, his church was not able to provide a salary.
“Instead, the church decided to purchase my home as an asset and allow my family and I to continue living there,” he said. “In addition, the home provided peaceful and beautiful acreage in Harding, out of the city, where we could bring our church and community for family dinners, picnics, games, Bible studies, and kids events. You can fault me for many things — just ask my kids! But I don’t believe this is one of them.“
Rizzo’s campaign declined to answer follow-up questions about how the church was able to raise the money to purchase his home, why it paid him more for the house than he paid for it, whether he or the church paid for the renovations and examples of recent church events he held at the home.
The house is now exempt from property taxes, according to public records. According to the Zillow listing, it was assessed at $1.37 million in 2018 and the property taxes were $15,388. According to public records, the house was assessed at nearly $1.84 million in 2020.
Rizzo’s candidacy for governor has been backed by some of New Jersey’s pro-Trump personalities, including radio host Bill Spadea, who emceed a recent fundraiser for him, and former Ocean County GOP Chair George Gilmore, whose influence waned after he was convicted of three federal tax offenses, but was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump in January.
Rumors about Rizzo’s home have been circulating on the internet, and Rizzo was asked about it last month during a Republican event in Hudson County by a reporter for an internet news show. The question referred only to his living in a tax-free house and not to its luxurious amenities.
“As a third generation real estate developer and somebody who owns a small business, I know plenty about paying taxes. Now, my church is a small church. They don’t pay me a very big salary," Rizzo said in response to the question. “... So our church owns my home, and it is tax free. It’s completely by the book. We had attorneys look at it. We had accountants look at it. It is by the book. I’m not doing anything to save money or to make money that’s going to land me in trouble. … And so we were able to accept the benefit according to the tax law of New Jersey.”
It’s not clear what Rizzo’s salary is. His church has a Hoboken post office box and a small storefront in North Bergen. According to the church’s website, it has only one other person on its staff.
POLITICO called the number on the real estate listing and reached Jennifer Rizzo.
“We just changed our minds, and we took it off the market,” Jennifer Rizzo said when asked why the real estate listing was pulled.
Jennifer Rizzo declined to answer additional questions about the house.
Rep. Matt Gaetz’s week is going from bad to worse. On Wednesday night, CBS News reported federal prosecutors were looking into a trip Gaetz took to the Bahamas with Florida ‘ganjapreneur’ and hand surgeon Jason Pirozzolo, and whether women were trafficked across international boundaries for the entertainment of these men.
If that isn’t bad enough, Gaetz’s buddy, former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, has agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors and intends to cooperate with the federal investigation. Greenberg is facing 33 felony charges including sex trafficking of a minor, stalking, wire fraud, bribery, and more.
In March when U.S. Marshals showed up to take him into custody, Greenberg was reportedly threatening to use firearms and explosives, and even threatened suicide. This does not sound like someone eager to spend a decade or more in prison. So, he’s cooperating to lessen his own time behind bars.
Prosecutors don’t offer such a deal unless they are aiming higher. In other words, Rep. Matt Gaetz has gone from hot water to boiling hot water in no time flat. My colleague Mark Sumner did a rundown of the known investigations into and accusations against Gaetz, which include possibly trafficking minors across state lines, illegally using campaign funds to pay for said travel, and traveling to the Bahamas with women (or minors) being trafficked.
As far as the trip to the Bahamas, Jason Pirozzolo, the man at the center of that investigation, spent time with other notable Florida politicians. Thanks to The Intellectualist for locating these photos and videos.
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump greeted by Gov. Ron DeSantis, his wife Casey and Jason Pirozzolo, an Orlando hand surgeon and GOAA board member. pic.twitter.com/5b9QbYifYb
It is rather stunning given the current accusations that Matt Gaetz has not offered to resign and even worse, none of his Republican colleagues are calling for him to resign. It’s one more clear instance of how Republicans operate under different standards (or no standards whatsoever), but apply the strictest of standards to Democrats. Fox News has barely even mentioned the Gaetz scandal. Is there any doubt it would spur 24/7 commentary on the network if it were a Democrat involved in sex trafficking of minors? Matt Gaetz hasn’t been convicted and everyone deserves their day in court, but the appearance of impropriety is so strong that anyone with a moral or ethical backbone would resign so the people living in Florida’s 1st district could have representation in Congress that wasn’t under such a dark cloud of investigation. When you can’t get your colleagues to stand beside you and even Jim Jordan stops answering your calls, it’s time to step aside.
There is no question now that resignation is coming. Who will be the first Republican to call for Matt Gaetz’s resignation? It would serve Gaetz right for Lynn Cheney to pick up that megaphone. After all, he recently went to Wyoming to mount a public smear campaign against Cheney because she voted to impeach Donald Trump after he led an insurrection in January. Standing on the steps of the Wyoming capitol, Gaetz bellowed, "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican Party, and I intend to win it." I imagine Liz Cheney is somewhere sharpening a knife as I type.
Of course, there is another layer of intrigue in this case. As Matt Gaetz realizes just how boinked he really is and starts grappling with how much serious prison time he could be facing, will he offer prosecutors something they can’t pass up? After all, there is little doubt Gaetz knows where a few bodies are buried in the swamps of Florida.
“This is really the fallout from the 10 weeks of misinformation that flew in from former President Donald Trump,” Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said on CNN of the law’s provisions stripping power from local elections boards and handing it to the Republican-controlled state legislature. “I went back over the weekend to really look at where this really started to gain momentum in the legislature, and it was when Rudy Giuliani showed up in a couple of committee rooms and spent hours spreading misinformation and sowing doubt across, you know, hours of testimony.”
I’m sorry, what? It’s true, but if a Democrat said this, Republicans would howl in protest.
The overall law, Duncan said, “ultimately was a culmination of Democratic and Republican ideas,” which would come as news to the vast majority of Democrats. But there you go—the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia says that a key part of the law was “the fallout from the 10 weeks of misinformation that flew in from former President Donald Trump,” including specifically that shoveled by Rudy Giuliani.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, meanwhile, is wholeheartedly embracing the voter suppression law as his best chance to grovel his way back into the good graces of Trump’s base following Trump’s attacks on him for refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump isn’t going for it, but some Republicans in the state suggested to The New York Times that it might be working to head off the strongest primary challengers.
Defending voter suppression is familiar ground for Kemp, who as secretary of state got into the governor’s office in part by stalling 53,000 voter registration applications from a disproportionately Black group of people. Now he’s all in on Trump-style bluster about this law, doing dozens of interviews to rail against companies that belatedly spoke out in support of voting rights.
Businesses like Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, and Major League Baseball “folded like a wet dishrag to the cancel culture,” he said in one Fox Business appearance. “It is woke in real life, and Americans and Georgians should be scared. I mean, what event are they going to come after next? What value that you have—the way that you live your life—are they coming after next? Are they going to come after your small business?”
Well, that’s a calm, measured response to statements of opposition by a few companies and the relocation of one baseball game.
Republicans came for the votes of hundreds of thousands of Georgians based in part on what one of their top officials says was misinformation. Their message is that the real thing to fear is public outcry against that voter suppression. One of these things is not like the other.
There’s a deposition of Wayne LaPierre that is being reported on everywhere, and for good reason. In it LaPierre is asked about his luxurious lifestyle and why he spent so much free time on Hollywood producer David McKenzie’s 80-foot yacht. A yacht named “Illusions.”
In the summer after shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Newtown, Connecticut, took the lives of children, LaPierre said he felt he and his family’s lives were unsafe. Instead of arming more good guys in his family with guns, as is the NRA claim to fame, LaPierre took a free vacation on a very fancy yacht.
Question: When was your first stay on the yacht Illusions?
LAPIERRE: I think it was after the Sandy Hook shooting, the summer after the Sandy Hook shooting.
The deposition of LaPierre, that can be read starting around page 50, includes questions as to how it came to be that LaPierre was gifted a yacht to stay on, with at least four staterooms, “two or three or four staff people,” a cook, fully fueled and food-stocked, “a hydraulic state-of-the-art swim platform,” a 16-foot jet boat, and two WaveRunners? More specifically, did it ever occur to LaPierre that in having an all-expenses paid free vacation on this yacht, he was in “potential violation of the conflict of interest policy with the NRA?”
WAYNE LAPIERRE: I actually thought that given the security threat that I was under and the fact that NRA was -- was at almost a loss as to how to protect somebody with the amount of threat that I was having, that -- that my work and the threat that came with it, this was -- was a place that I could go and be safe, and it was related to that that I -- that I -- that I did it.
He was asked a few times in a few different ways to really explain how he concluded it was okay for him to take this all-expenses paid “security” vacation. Asked if Pierre thought “the value of a 108-foot yacht with a full crew, full of supplies and fuel exceeds $300?” He answered that while he did agree it was worth more than $300, he was in a “totally unique situation that I think hardly anybody else in the U.S. experienced that type of threat, other than maybe the president.” Riiiiggghhttt. “I mean, I had presidential threat without presidential security and was looking for a place to be safe.”
Asked if the NRA security director signed off on this yacht experience, LaPierre was more evasive saying his security director just told him to “get out of town,” and so he “struggled” his way onto that 108-foot yacht, with a staff and a pool, and some WaveRunners … and a cook. But if you really want to see what rich and powerful people think and feel for the rest of us, and you want to see why it is hard to write dark satire these days, this exchange might chill you.
Question: When was your first stay on the yacht Illusions?
LAPIERRE: I think it was after the Sandy Hook shooting, the summer after the Sandy Hook shooting.
The deposition also included questions about LaPierre’s relationship to the NRA’s Board of Directors, and his use of a private jet to get places. Much of the deposition served as a reminder that LaPierre carries himself as someone who believes he himself is the most important thing about the NRA. It is this ego and sense of entitlement that has New York officials looking into LaPierre’s use of nonprofit money for personal luxury.
It was not exactly a surprise that when the law enforcement agency tasked with investigating the death of antifascist Michael Reinoehl at the hands of federal Marshals Service contractors last September—the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office in western Washington state—finally issued its report on the matter this week, it exonerated their actions, claiming that Reinoehl had fired first.
Nor was it a surprise that the report’s version is full of contradictory and fairly obvious holes, and that Reinoehl’s family is far from persuaded that he was not the victim of a summary extrajudicial execution encouraged by Donald Trump himself.
Among other claims, the report says Reinoehl fired at police first with his handgun. But that handgun was found in Reinoehl’s front pants pocket—with six full rounds in the magazine. The scenario the report depicts means he would have had to have fired a shot at police, reloaded the weapon, and stuck it back in his pants pocket before being killed by five shots to his head and torso as he emerged from the vehicle—which is unlikely at best.
An earlier, independent investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting into the case raised serious issues about the Sept. 3 killing, the result of Reinoehl’s shooting of a far-right demonstrator named Aaron Danielson in downtown Portland on Aug. 29. The portrait that emerged of how the shooting transpired, including witnesses saying the police gave no warning and that Reinoehl did not display a gun, suggested that the 48-year-old fugitive was not arrested so much as he was simply executed.
Donald Trump seemingly confirmed at an October campaign rally that this was the case, commenting approvingly on the killing by telling the audience in Greenville, North Carolina, that there was no intention of arresting Reinoehl:
We sent in the U.S. Marshals, it took 15 minutes and it was over, 15 minutes and it was over ... They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes that ended. And they call themselves peaceful protesters.
The shooting happened in the early evening. Reinoehl had been on the lam ever since the shooting of Danielson, and apparently was hiding out that day in a neighborhood near Lacey, Washington, some 119 miles north of Portland. He had given an interview to Vice magazine earlier in the day, telling the reporter that he had acted in self-defense. He was leaving the apartment where he had been in hiding, and had just gotten into his car when a cluster of SUVs containing U.S. Marshals Service contractors descended and surrounded him.
“We could not confirm with 100% certainty that he fired out of the car because (investigators) couldn’t find the round or where it impacted,” Thurston County Sheriff’s Lt. Cameron Simper told the Seattle Times. “But we do believe that that’s what happened.”
The Thurston investigation concludes not only that Reinoehl fired first, but that he failed to comply with orders to surrender and was reaching for a gun in his possession when he was shot. However, other witnesses, including 21 people interviewed by The New York Times, said they did not hear officers identify themselves or give commands before opening fire.
“There was no, ‘Get out of the car!’ There was no, ‘Stop!’ There was no nothing. They just got out of the car and started shooting,” one witness said.
Another described it similarly: “There was no yelling. There was no screaming. There was no altercation. It was just straight to gunshots.”
Reinoehl’s family has a lot of questions about the report’s exoneration of law enforcement’s actions that day. Their attorney, Fred Langer of Seattle, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that investigators’ version of the facts of the case “absolutely strain credulity.”
“The narrative that police are putting out just doesn’t make any sense,” said Langer.
Investigators haven’t released their full report, but the Thurston Sheriff’s Office said last week that it had completed its review and turned it over to prosecutors for a final ruling on whether the killing was justified. It issued a two-page summary of findings that said, based on officer and witness statements, Reinoehl was reaching for a firearm in his possession.
Citing “witness statements,” the summary stated, “there was an exchange of gunfire, which was initiated by Reinoehl from inside his vehicle.”
A .380 caliber shell casing found in the back seat area of Reinoehl’s car came “from the pistol found in Reinoehl’s possession” after he was shot, according to analysts at the state crime lab, and the same gun was also definitively linked to Danielson’s shooting in Portland, according to Simper.
However, Simper did not respond to the Seattle Times’ follow-up questions—notably, including whether those state forensics tests determined how recently Reinoehl’s gun had been fired.
Why aren’t the Portland Police ARRESTING the cold blooded killer of Aaron “Jay” Danielson. Do your job, and do it fast. Everybody knows who this thug is. No wonder Portland is going to hell!
Afterward, Attorney General William Barr issued a statement on the Justice Department letterhead that was equally bloodthirsty:
The tracking down of Reinoehl—a dangerous fugitive, admitted Antifa member, and suspected murderer—is a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities. I applaud the outstanding cooperation among federal, state, and local law enforcement, particularly the fugitive task force team that located Reinoehl and prevented him from escaping justice. The streets of our cities are safer with this violent agitator removed, and the actions that led to his location are an unmistakable demonstration that the United States will be governed by law, not violent mobs.
Trump subsequently told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News: “This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I'll tell you something—that's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution."
This all stood in stark contrast to how the Trump administration led a right-wing parade of support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August.
Trump himself had openly sympathized with Rittenhouse. “That was an interesting situation,” he told a rally in Kenosha. “You saw the same tape as I saw. And he was trying to get away from them. I guess it looks like he fell and then they very violently attacked him. And it was something that we’re looking at right now, and it’s under investigation. But I guess he was in very big trouble. He would have been—probably would have been killed, but it’s under investigation."
Soon-to-be former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz heard there were unaccompanied minors at the border, so he headed down there, ready to accompany some.
If you spend a lot of time in the world of LGBTQ+ politics, you probably know that certain phrases trigger concern. For example, “sexual preference,” “homosexual,” and “homosexual marriage” tend to evoke a special kind of pause. One such recent example of just that phrase? As reported by the Courier Journal, a sign hangs in the window of Aries Tax Service in Radcliff, Kentucky, informing potential customers what documents and forms to bring to a tax appointment meeting. Makes sense, up until you get to the last line: “Homosexual marriage not recognized.”
Yes, really. Ken Randall, the registered tax return preparer at the business, told the Journal in an email that he has “moral objections to homosexual marriage.” Randall stressed to the Journal that this is legal. He said he does not ask about “sexual preferences” before filing a return, and that he does file for “homosexuals” who are single.
What to know in this ugly case? Unfortunately, the county actually does not have a Fairness Ordinance banning discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. Some states, of course, have state-wide bills that offer these protections, but none have passed the Kentucky General Assembly. According to the Journal, one protection does exist, in that you cannot discriminate based on sex under state law if the business is “supported directly or indirectly" by funds from the government.
Does this mean it’s fair or remotely progressive? Of course not. But it’s a big reminder that we need high-level, structural protections for LGBTQ people at all levels. It’s all too easy to feel that marriage equality was the beginning and end of modern queer issues in politics, but that’s far from the truth. We have an ongoing cross-country effort to push anti-trans legislation (especially targeting vulnerable trans and queer youth) as well as holes remaining in state and local protections that leave LGBTQ people in the dust.
We also must always keep in mind that LGBTQ people (and other marginalized groups) live everywhere, even if they aren’t always getting the spotlight in national conversations. The answer is never simply to “just move” to a blue city or state. Progressive work isn’t done until everyone is safe and protected.
Broadband use surged 30% to 40% during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, and even reached 60% in some areas, an industry group has concluded. CNET reports: The Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group released data this week that it gathered from internet service providers, broadband analytics firms, and networking companies that help deliver data. We all consumed more downstream data -- the flow from the internet to the home -- but upstream use grew faster. That's an important consideration given that most cable and DSL services offer much higher downstream capacity. All those videoconferences for work meetings and online schooling likely were involved in the upstream data traffic. "Some networks saw more than 300% increase in the amount of video conferencing traffic from February to October 2020," the report said.
Though the internet itself held up well overall, there are problems. "Rural and low-income households have struggled" with broadband access to online services, the report said, and some households suffered with older equipment that couldn't handle heavy traffic or the increase in networked devices in the home. If you're having problems at home, you should consider an Ethernet cable connection to your network router, upgrading to a mesh network with multiple network access points, upgrading your PC or phone, or paying for a faster internet connection if it's available.
Yep, and there are fewer republicans than democrats in the world. Not many successful businesses of any size sign up for a shrinking market full of rabid lunatics.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has had quite a week. On Monday, McConnell threatened American businesses with "serious consequences" if they spoke out against the rash of GOP voter suppression laws sweeping the nation. On Tuesday, he doubled down, saying, "My warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics." McConnell quickly added that he wasn't "talking about political contributions," because of course not. Effectively—‘shut your traps and donate, or else the GOP will quit doing your bidding.’
Perhaps being extorted isn't sitting so well with the GOP's corporate donor base. On Wednesday, McConnell tried to put a more genteel spin on his threat.
"I didn't say that very artfully yesterday," McConnell told Kentucky reporters, referring to his explicit threat. "They certainly are entitled to be involved in politics. They are," he conceded, referring to the corporations that have spoken out against Georgia's voter suppression law. "My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill,” he said of corporate CEOs.
Gosh, golly gee, what a relief. For a second, it seemed as though McConnell had declared both the free enterprise and free speech of the corporate sector dead all in one breath. American businesses had to either toe the GOP line or suffer the consequences. It was quite a reversal for McConnell and Republicans, who have spent decades prioritizing the rights of corporations over the rights of everyday Americans, even when lives were on the line. But with corporate profits no longer aligning with Republicans' ongoing culture war, McConnell was drawing a line in the sand.
Let's be clear: the damage has been done. McConnell may be trying to soften the blow and give himself an out, but that threat was heard loud and clear in board rooms across the nation. And this is by no means the end of the story. The GOP's grievance politics will continue to be at odds with a culture that is rapidly outstripping Republicans and the increasing number of corporations trying to market to that culture.
The Environmental Protection Agency will be issuing revised fuel economy standards by the end of July, said new EPA Administrator Michael Regan, rewriting Trump-era limits that dictate emissions limits for cars and light trucks through the 2026 model year. The goal with the revised standards, he added, will be to mitigate certain climate impacts.
The new fuel efficiency standards will have to be significantly more stringent than those issued by the Trump-era EPA, which only finalized its rules in March 2020 after a 1.5-year-long process. Those limits call for 1.5 percent annual increases in efficiency through 2026 rather than the 5 percent target under Obama-era rules. Fuel efficiency standards in the US are overseen by both the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an agency of the Department of Transportation.
“We’re taking a strong look at what the science is urging us to do. We’re looking at where technologies are,” Regan said in an interview with Bloomberg News. “We’re marrying our regulatory policy and what we have the statutory authority to do with where the science directs us and where the markets and technology are.”
Immigration Impact reports that Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate introduced nearly a dozen anti-immigrant bills during a six-day period last month, including despicable pieces of legislation discarding vital court protections in order to keep children detained longer, and amending decades-old law to allow the quick expulsion of unaccompanied asylum-seeking kids.
“The likelihood of these bills passing in the current Congress is slim,” the report said. “But it’s important to continue to monitor these and other anti-immigration measures, as they will likely come up again in the lead up to the 2022 midterm elections.” And we all know that despite their electoral defeats, Republicans will continue the nativism for 2022.
“Five of the new bills target asylum specifically,” and children in particular, Immigration Impact reported. Proposed changes would “[a]llow children to be detained for up to 100 days, far beyond the 20-day limit currently set by the Flores Settlement Agreement.” Further proposals would “[a]mend the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act to allow unaccompanied children to be immediately expelled from the border.”
“The remaining four bills focus on immigration-related funding and enforcement issues,” Immigration Impact continued. Proposed legislation would “[d]efund several actions taken during Biden’s first week in office, including a reversal of ICE’s new enforcement priorities and revoking federal support for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative.” Never mind that even the previous administration didn’t try to end the program a second time when it had the chance, maybe recognizing it would be a really, really unpopular move in an election year.
And before Republicans try to tell us oh we do like immigration, we just want it done legally, they don’t want it to happen legally, either (though it must be mentioned that asylum is also legal immigration). “Two of the recently introduced bills target legal immigration channels,” Immigration Impact said, including elimination of the program “which grants green cards to 50,000 randomly selected people from countries with low levels of immigration to the United States.”
None of the proposals take any action to improve our unfair immigration system. If they wanted that, they could have rallied en mass behind any one of the several legalization bills introduced in this session of Congress. While two significant pieces of legislation recently passed the House with bipartisan support, the vast majority of Republicans remained opposed to those bills and their popular paths to citizenship. Recent polling found “the DREAM Act to have 72% support, citizenship for undocumented farmworkers to have 71% support, and citizenship for undocumented essential workers to have 66% support.”
The path to citizenship for the overall undocumented community is similarly popular, with polling showing that voters prefer legalization over deportation, 79% to 21%. “Even base Republicans prefer citizenship over deportation by a 61% to 39% margin,” researchers said. “Citizenship for the undocumented is a consensus issue—not a divisive one—as the major citizenship proposals facing Congress are all very popular, with substantial support across partisan lines.”
The twice-impeached president may be out of office, but Republicans have made a clear decision to remain aligned with his policies. “Will racism and xenophobia deliver victory for Republicans in 2022? Let’s check the record,” America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry said, referencing the losses of notorious anti-immigrant loudmouths like Steve King, Kris Kobach (twice!), Lou Barletta, Corey Stewart, and, of course, the former occupant of the White House. Stephen Miller, strategic genius he is not.
“Well, it failed and backfired in races from 2017 through 2020,” Sharry continued. “Republicans may be desperately casting about for a racist dog-whistle hot button issue, but Mr. Potato Head and cancel culture may be more promising than reprising a wedge issue that has lost its edge.”
Republicans aren’t making any secret of their approach to winning future elections. It has nothing to do with coming up with better positions. Nothing to do with expanding their base. It has everything to do with restricting the number of people allowed to vote and creating those restrictions in such a way that they favor the rural white population that is increasingly the only stronghold of the Republican Party.
The structure of both the Senate and the Electoral College already gives Republicans an unwarranted advantage by discounting voters in more populous states and elevating the votes of those who live in the least populous states. With each passing year, that lopsided valuing of voters grows. However, it’s clear that Republicans are completely aware that this is not enough to save them. In order to preserve any chance of Republican victory, not just at the national level, but in a growing number of states, they need a system that makes in-state voting as unequal as federal voting. And then some.
That’s why, as of April 1, there were 361 bills spread across 47 states with the pure intention of making it harder for Americans to vote in local, state, and federal elections. That’s why conservative magazines are openly making a plea for “fewer, better voters.” And it’s why South Carolina’s governor is using language that’s lifted straight from not just the era in which men like him fought openly against extending voting rights in the 1960s, but from the time men like him fought against freedom in the 1860s.
On Tuesday afternoon, the all-too-appropriately named Gov. Henry McMaster delivered a speech in which he threatens to defy federal law in order to uphold the "constitutional sovereignty" of South Carolina because the federal government is seeking to protect equal rights for Black citizens. Sometimes history doesn't just rhyme, it recycles.
The direct target of McMaster’s ire is House bill H.R. 1, also known as the For The People Act. The legislation is designed to provide more uniform access to the polls, and to prevent Republicans from throwing up the kind of voting roadblocks enshrined in the new Georgia law. It also happens to be the subject of Sen. Raphael Warnock’s first floor speech.
Republicans have no illusion about H.R. 1. They know it represents a substantial threat to exactly the sort of suppression that is absolutely necessary for them to long maintain any semblance of power. But the card that McMaster is playing is something beyond Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp making false claims about the legislation passed there.
Here is McMaster explaining his position (and I encourage you to spent a minute listening to it).
“This bill, H.R. 1, threatens the constitutional sovereignty of the state of South Carolina. And those are not just words. That’s very important. This country, our state, is built on the sovereignty of the states. This bill takes that away. Like others, I have sworn an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of this state, and the United States. An oath, ‘So help me God.’ Many of you have taken such an oath. As long as I am governor, I will stand against those who seek to infringe or deny South Carolinians their Constitutional protections, freedom, and liberty.”
If that language tickles something deep, compare it to this 1956 article from The Asheville Citizen.
“South Carolina was today one step away from interposing its claimed constitutional sovereignty between its schools and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against their segregation. The general assembly ordered final action on the resolution which should reach Gov. Timmerman for his promised signature next Tuesday. Thus South Carolina becomes the third state to resort to this old, but never completely tested, doctrine that the federal government cannot enforce acts a state claims are unconstitutional.”
And it that doesn’t completely silence the “where have I heard that before” buzzer, how about this:
“In pursuance of this Declaration of Independence, each of the thirteen States proceeded to exercise its separate sovereignty; … expressly declaring, in the first Article ‘that each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence...”
That’s from the statement issued when South Carolina become the first state to officially secede from the United States on December 20, 1860. The language it cites isn’t actually from the Constitution, but the 1777 Articles of Confederation—a name that was soon to be recycled.
In 1956, Gov. Timmerman actually signed that “imposition” bill. He then joined the governors of Mississippi, Georgia, and Virginia to promote federal legislation that would prevent “federal encroachment” on state sovereignty. That included not just segregation of schools, but sustaining segregations in other public facilities. Timmerman also signed a law which barred members of the NAACP from holding any public job in South Carolina.
The language Gov. McMaster is using is a deliberate callback to those previous statements. South Carolina used the concept and language of “state sovereignty” to keep Black Americans in bondage. They used that same language to defend segregation. They’re using it now to deny voting rights. McMaster could not have been more clear in his racist intent had he made his speech while aiming a canon at Ft. Sumter.
It’s easy to believe that Donald Trump had no accomplishments in his four years, unless the needless death of hundreds of thousands of Americans and the shattering of trust around the world counts as an “accomplishment.” But for Republicans, Trump actually did provide them with a gift. His unabashed willingness to embrace racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia has provided them with a certain, noxious version of “freedom.” One in which they are free to drop their dog whistles for bullhorns and to say “the quiet things” out loud.
In response to the decision to secede, former South Carolina state Attorney General James Petigru famously said this of his state: “South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum." McMaster may not be quite at the point of testing the former, but his statements certainly come close to challenging the latter.
Behold: the all-important top-down keyboard view. [credit:
Dell
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This time last year, we covered one of the first Ryzen 9 gaming laptops—Asus' ROG Zephyrus G14. A year later, Dell is joining the Ryzen-powered gaming laptop party with its new Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition.
Last year, the Achilles heel of Ryzen-powered gaming laptops was mediocre GPU selection—for whatever reason, most manufacturers didn't spec RTX 3000-series GPUs along with Ryzen processors. That's thankfully no longer the case in 2021—the new Alienware m15 pairs Ryzen 7 5800H or Ryzen 9 5900HX with up to 32GiB RAM and a choice of RTX 3060 or RTX 3070 graphics. (Asus is also offering high-end GPUs this year—we're in the process of hands-on testing a ROG Zephyrus G15 with Ryzen 9 5900HS and RTX 3070 this week.)
You can get a quick peek at the Alienware m15 in this short hype video.
The new m15 offers three display choices—1080 p at 165 Hz or 360 Hz, or 1440 p at 240 Hz—and an optional keyboard upgrade to Cherry MX. There's a standard 2.5Gbps wired Ethernet adapter to go with the Killer AX1650 Wi-Fi 6—and unlike the ROG Zephyrus gaming laptops, the Alienware m15 has an integrated 720 p webcam.
LOL it's amazing how much contempt the GOP has for its base, and how much they just lap it up.
Congressional Republicans are growing more desperate by the day. On the heels of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threatening corporate America to shut their traps over the GOP's voter suppression laws, the House GOP campaign arm is scamming grassroots donors into making recurring monthly payments lest they be labeled a “DEFECTOR!" who "sided with Dems."
Naturally, the scam hinges on leveraging the cult following of the scammer-in-chief himself, Donald Trump. In fact, one might surmise the National Republican Congressional Committee is having a little trouble raising funds without Trump these days (remember Trump's nasty cease and desist letter ordering the GOP fundraising committees to stop using his name?).
The entire twisted NRCC grift is detailed nicely by Tim Miller over at The Bulwark. First, Trumpers get tricked into clicking through to a donation page with the lie that it's their last chance to opt in to a nonexistent Trump social network site that will also surely never exist since Trump himself promised he was creating one.
"Friend request expiring in 10 minutes!" reads an NRCC text solicitation that suggests it's being sent by Trump. "Trump needs to know if you're joining his new social media site."
Potential donors are then funneled into a page presenting a supposed "TRUMP SOCIAL MEDIA POLL" and asking, "Will you be the first to join?" In order to opt in to Trump's fictional social media site, people are offered two choices:
Yes, I stand with Trump!
No: I prefer Fake News!
Finally—and this is where the grift gets really lucrative—the NRCC page includes two pre-checked boxes. The first automatically makes one’s donation a recurring monthly donation, and the second ups one’s first donation by $50.
But it's not just the fact that the boxes are pre-checked, it's the verbiage in the boxes that really ups the ante. In the “recurring” box, donors would have to uncheck this: “We need your help to DRAFT Trump for President! Check this box if you want Trump to run again. Uncheck this box if you do NOT stand with Trump.” Below that, in smaller font, "Make this a monthly recurring donation" is included as sort of an afterthought.
The second box Trumpers must un-check reads: "Trump Patriot Status: Missing! As a TOP grassroots supporter, we were surprised to see you ABANDONED him. This is your LAST CHANCE to update your status to ACTIVE!" And, again, the afterthought: "Donate an additional $50 automatically on (X date)."
The NRCC fundraising page reprises the same recurring donation scam but instead warns donors, "If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you're a DEFECTOR & sided with the Dems." Naturally, leaving the pre-checked box alone forces one into becoming a monthly donor.
What's perhaps most amazing about this entire shady NRCC scam isn't the fact that it's modeled after a 2020 Trump campaign scam; it's the fact that Trump's scam was uncovered, publicized, and the implicated fundraising committees endured a rash of fraud complaints that forced them to return tens of millions of dollars.
"In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors,"TheNew York Times wrote on April 3. "Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020."
In total, the Trump campaign issued $122.7 million in refunds.
But the bigger takeaway might be this: House Republicans seem desperate to raise money by leaning on Trump's name. Trump was prominently featured in each step of the NRCC's fraudulent solicitation, and one has to wonder whether House Republicans—and maybe even congressional Republicans overall—stand any chance of raising money from grassroots donors without employing Trump's name.
In other words, without Trump, congressional Republicans have zero juice with the donors and voters they are relying on to notch big wins in 2022.
At least they have the sense to go with some AMD chips, though last-gen doesn't seem wise
Enlarge / We don't have any leaked images of the new Surface models, so you'll have to make do with this 2019 stock photo of Surface models at a Microsoft store in Guangzhou. (credit: SOPA Images via Getty Images)
Earlier today, Microsoft support placeholders briefly appeared for two upcoming Surface Laptop 4 models—one AMD, and one Intel. The placeholders were spotted by @walkingcat:
Surface Laptop 4 with AMD Processor Drivers and Firmware (placeholder) https://t.co/lJ7Opg9NHB
The placeholders are already gone, but German news site WinFuture provided more details last month. The AMD models will feature last-gen models Ryzen 5 4680U and Ryzen 7 4980U, while the Intel models feature the brand-new Core i5-1145G7 and Core i7-1185G7.
According to that WinFuture report, the AMD models will once again only be offered at lower specifications. Intel models will go up to 32GiB RAM and 1TB storage; the AMD models will be capped at maximums of 16GiB and 512GB, respectively. On the plus side, the AMD models are rumored to be available with 13.5-inch screens for the first time this year.
And the media continues to "both sides" everything it can find, even though only one party is brazenly chucking the first amendment while wrapping itself in the flag
Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) listens during a hearing before Senate Rules and Administration Committee at Russell Senate Office Building March 24, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
Cancel culture is alive and well in the GOP.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell leveled a very odd threat against corporate America for a senior lawmaker in a nation governed by the First Amendment.
Warning companies to “stay out of politics,” McConnell said that “corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs.” (McConnell, a longtime opponent of campaign finance laws, later clarified that he is “not talking about political contributions” when he tells corporations to stay out of politics.)
McConnell did not elaborate on how, exactly, he plans to cancel corporations that express left-leaning political views, but many of his fellow Republican lawmakers have. After Major League Baseball announced that it would move its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta because the state of Georgia enacted a law limiting voting access, several Republican lawmakers threatened to retaliate against the league by stripping it of an exemption from federal antitrust laws.
Why does @MLB still have antitrust immunity? It’s time for the federal government to stop granting special privileges to specific, favored corporations—especially those that punish their political opponents. https://t.co/k3GIZuGYHB
It’s not hard to understand the politics of these threats. Both MLB and Delta enjoy special exemptions from the law that aren’t enjoyed by many other companies or by individual Americans. So it’s not hard for these lawmakers to gin up resentment against them for receiving such privileged treatment.
But using the power to make laws to punish critics of a particular policy, especially if that policy is itself designed to restrict voting, is inconsistent with democratic values. And so the Constitution forbids this sort of behavior by lawmakers. It is unconstitutional for the government to retaliate against anyone for expressing a political view that members of the government do not share.
The Constitution permits Congress to impose antitrust regulation on a baseball league (although there are actually good policy reasons why sports leagues should enjoy some immunity from ordinary antitrust law). And the Constitution also permits Georgia to tax airlines.
Yet, as the Supreme Court explained in Perry v. Sindermann (1972), “even though a person has no ‘right’ to a valuable governmental benefit and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely.” Among other things, the government “may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests — especially, his interest in freedom of speech.”
It appears flatly unconstitutional, in other words, to strip a company of a “valuable governmental benefit” simply because lawmakers wish to silence that company.
The government cannot require anyone to give up their free speech rights in order to receive a benefit
The constitutional rule against stripping someone of a government benefit to control their speech stretches back many decades.
California law gave a property tax exemption to honorably discharged World War II veterans. Yet, in 1954, it revised the form that veterans use to claim this exemption to require those veterans to swear a loyalty oath: “I do not advocate the overthrow of the Government of the United States or of the State of California by force or violence or other unlawful means, nor advocate the support of a foreign government against the United States in event of hostilities.”
After some veterans refused to swear this oath, their refusal wound up in the Supreme Court, and the Court ruled in Speiser v. Randall (1958) that these taxpayers “could not be required to execute the declaration as a condition for obtaining a tax exemption or as a condition for the assessor proceeding further in determining whether they were entitled to such an exemption.”
Speiser was a fairly early articulation of what is known as the “Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine.” Both Congress and the states provide many benefits to individual citizens that are not required by the Constitution — California is not required to give tax breaks to veterans. But once a benefit is offered, the government may not strip someone of that benefit because they exercise their First Amendment rights.
This notion that government benefits may not be conditioned on either compelled silence or compelled speech has endured, even as the Supreme Court has grown more conservative. In United States Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc. (2013), for example, the Court struck down a requirement that organizations that receive certain federal grants intended to fight the global HIV epidemic must “have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.”
The Open Society International case drew a somewhat subtle line. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his majority opinion, “Congress can, without offending the Constitution, selectively fund certain programs to address an issue of public concern, without funding alternative ways of addressing the same problem.” So Congress was allowed to prohibit groups that receive federal anti-HIV grants from using those funds to “promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking.”
But Congress could not silence grant recipients with pro-sex work views, so long as those recipients did not use the government’s money to advance that viewpoint. The requirement that such grant recipients actively oppose sex work, according to Roberts, “compels as a condition of federal funding the affirmation of a belief that by its nature cannot be confined within the scope of the Government program.” For this reason, “it violates the First Amendment and cannot be sustained.”
A similar logic could be applied to a hypothetical bill stripping MLB of its antitrust exemption or stripping Delta of its tax benefits — provided that those benefits were stripped becausethe government wished to punish these companies for exercising their First Amendment rights. Again, the government is under no obligation to provide such benefits to these companies, but it cannot condition such a benefit on a company’s silence.
This Supreme Court might make it very difficult for Delta or MLB to prove its case
Having laid out why punishing a company for expressing a political opinion violates the First Amendment, it’s worth noting that this Supreme Court — with six of its nine seats held by Republican appointees — might impose a very high burden of proof on companies that are targeted by the GOP.
Speiser and Open Society International were fairly easy cases because the government was quite explicit about the fact that it was conditioning a federal benefit on certain behavior by the beneficiaries. In Speiser, a government form made it clear that veterans must swear a loyalty oath in order to get a tax benefit. In Open Society International, an act of Congress explicitly stated that only groups that oppose sex work could receive certain grants.
The fact that Republican lawmakers like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) have bragged openly about their plans to strip MLB of its antitrust exemption in order to punish it for exercising its First Amendment rights is powerful evidence that, if Congress were to pass such a law, it did so for unconstitutional reasons.
But the Court has looked the other way at even more powerful evidence in the past.
As a candidate for the presidency, for example, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” After he was attacked for promoting an unconstitutional policy, Trump even bragged about how he would try to obfuscate the real purpose of this policy.
“People were so upset when I used the word Muslim,” Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2016, “and I’m okay with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim.”
By “talking territory,” Trump meant that he would hide the real purpose of his travel ban by prohibiting people from certain nations from entering the country, rather than by explicitly banning Muslims. As Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted in 2017:
So when [Trump] first announced it he said, “Muslim ban.” He called me up and said, “Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.” . . . And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger. The areas of the world that create danger for us. Which is a factual basis. Not a religious basis.
And yet, the Supreme Court dismissed this evidence of unconstitutional intent and upheld the travel ban challenged in the Hawaii case.
That said, Roberts’s majority opinion in Hawaii focused on the extraordinary level of deference courts typically give to elected officials in national security cases. The Chief warned that “any rule of constitutional law that would inhibit” the president’s flexibility “to respond to changing world conditions should be adopted only with the greatest caution,” adding that “our inquiry into matters of entry and national security is highly constrained.”
There are few, if any, national security implications to a case about antitrust laws and baseball — or about state-level tax breaks for airlines. So the Court may be more open to evidence of invidious intent in a case involving GOP retaliation against corporations than it was in the Hawaii case.
Republicans are playing with fire by leveling threats against companies that disagree with their stance against democracy.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, mired in an ongoing federal sex trafficking investigation, is headed to former President Donald Trump’s resort in Doral this Friday where he will be a featured speaker at a summit hosted by a conservative pro-Trump women’s group.
Women for America First announced late Tuesday that Gaetz would be a speaker at the three-day “Save America Summit.” This is the same group that helped organize the “March for Trump” rally in Washington that took place just hours before the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead.
The organization praised Gaetz as one of the “few members of Congress” willing to “stand up & fight on behalf of President Trump & his America First agenda.” Women For America First says on its website that “We won’t be pushed around by bullies who tell us who we are ‘supposed’ to like. And we’re not going to keep quiet just because the Washington, D.C. power elites and mainstream media want us to!”
This marks one of the few public appearances by the northwest Florida congressman since news first surfaced of the probe into whether he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz did an interview last week on Fox News with Tucker Carlson where he denied any wrongdoing but which Carlson later called one of the “weirdest” in his career and which he said did little to clarify what is going on.
Gaetz has suggested the investigation is tied to a recent extortion plot aimed at his wealthy family, but federal authorities launched the probe last year. He also published an op-ed on Monday where he explained that he was “no monk” when it came to his personal life but added that he wasn’t resigning from his safe ruby-red district seat.
Gaetz earned national attention over the last four years as a tireless defender of Trump, as well as for his penchant for spotlight-grabbing events such as wearing a gas mask on the House floor during a debate over coronavirus. Along the way, he has clashed with Democrats and taken aim at other Republicans, such as Rep. Liz Cheney over her vote in favor of impeaching the president following the Jan. 6 riots.
So far, Trump and many other top Republicans have remained mum or stayed silent about Gaetz as details of the investigation have begun to dribble out. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been a top ally of Gaetz and tapped him to help with his transition team when he first took office, has declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
Despite the salacious nature of the investigation, many Republicans back home in Gaetz’s district are standing by him, contending that he may have been targeted by the media due to his defense of Trump.
The first major comprehensive study of those arrested for participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol strongly indicates that the true motivation of these rioters was not some quasi-patriotic reaction to Donald Trump’s fanciful assertions of election fraud. Rather, the root cause underlying that day of violence boils down to out-and-out racism by insecure whites, alarmed about the prevalence of darker-skinned Americans in their hometown environments.
In other words, this was certainly an attempt to overthrow a legitimate, democratic election. But it was an opportunistic insurrection, borne out of deep-seated resentments having nothing to with democracy but rather with preserving and maintaining white power in this country.
When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.
But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.
Pape, a security expert and political science professor at the University of Chicago, drew on comparative demographic and geographical data from those arrested at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and others arrested at two post-election, pro-Trump rallies last year. His preliminary findings, published Tuesday in theWashington Post, revealed one singular fact:
One fact stood out in Mr. Pape’s study, conducted with the help of researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, a think tank he runs at the University of Chicago. Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic white population arethe most likely to produce insurrectionists. This finding held true, Mr. Pape determined, even when controlling for population size, distance to Washington, unemployment rate and urban or rural location.
Pape’s research confirmed what seems patently obvious based on those arrested for the Jan. 6 riots to date: 95% were white and 85% were male. As Pape notes, the rioters were not all from “deep-red” counties or states: “Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won.” But as his Post op-ed describing the research findings explains, a consistent majority of the insurrectionists lived in counties that had rapidly diversified in recent years. Pape uses Texas, home to many of the rioters, as an example:
For example, Texas is the home of 36 of the 377 charged or arrested nationwide. The majority of the state’s alleged insurrectionists — 20 of 36 — live in six quickly diversifying blue counties such as Dallas and Harris (Houston). In fact, all 36 of Texas’s rioters come from just 17 counties, each of which lost White population over the past five years. Three of those arrested or charged hail from Collin County north of Dallas, which has lost White population at the very brisk rate of 4.3 percent since 2015.
The pattern described above also holds true with those arrested from the state of New York, and at a ratio that is mathematically implausible to attribute to mere chance. As Pape writes, “Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.”
Pape concludes that despite the fact that only 10% of those charged had direct ties to known right-wing, white supremacist organizations, it was nonetheless an act of racially motivated, political violence that we saw on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a uniquely homegrown American violence, the same strain that begat the Civil War and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. As his Post op-ed explains, Pape’s Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) conducted two independent surveys earlier this year in an effort to determine “the roots of this [white] rage:”
One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.
Interviewed for the Times article, Pape warns that none of this violence and white resentment is going away. These people will be back, perhaps summoned by someone other than Trump, but their fears and insecurities will continue to be stoked as the country assimilates more and more people whose skin color differs in shade from their own: “[W]e have to realize that it’s not going to be solved—or solved alone—by law enforcement agencies … This is political violence, not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both additional information and a strategic approach.”
Perhaps a good start to that “strategic approach” would be educating the American people what Jan. 6 was really all about.
Just a few months into 2021, we’ve already seen Republicans push dozens of anti-trans bills across the nation. Some bills, as Daily Kos has covered, center on keeping trans girls out of girls’ sports, even beginning as early as kindergarten. Other bills aim to prevent transgender and nonbinary folks from updating their birth certificates. And, in yet another area, some legislation seeks to bar transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming medical care.
Our latest example comes out of Louisiana, where Republican state Sen. Mike Fesi recently introduced Senate Bill 104, a measure that would require minors to get written consent from parents or guardians before receiving psychological or medical care related to gender identity, as reported by LGBTQ Nation. To be clear, this means that minors would need to receive parental approval to even receive something like talk therapy or psychotherapy. Obviously, this legislation could bring deep harm to transgender—and even questioning—youth. We look at details of the bill, including Fesi’s justification of the legislation, and why it’s particularly dangerous to force trans youth “out,” below.
This bill defines “gender therapy” as “counseling or psychotherapy treatment founded on the position that, regardless of a person possessing physical attributes of a certain gender at birth, no gender identity, expression or experience by that person is any more valid than any other.” If both parents or guardians are available, they must both give consent.
On a physical level, this bill would apply to both “nonsurgical and surgical procedures,” treatments like hormones, puberty blockers, and surgery. If physicians and therapists provided such care without prior informed consent from parents or guardians, they could face fines. And if a youth brought up issues related to gender identity while seeing professionals for an unrelated reason, the healthcare professional would have to basically operate under a gag order and not address it, as reported by Big Easy magazine.
In an interview with Houma Today, Fesi told the outlet that there’s “a lot of stuff” going on across the nation when it comes to giving “kids the ability to make their own decisions” at young ages. He told the outlet he wants to “put it in perspective that it's just like any other medical treatment.” Fesi continued by stating: “The parents have to sign off on it if a child has cancer and needs chemo treatment or needs some kind of surgery. I'm just putting this in the same position."
No one should ever feel forced or pressured to “come out” about their sexual orientation or gender identity. Especially not minors who are, generally speaking, still vulnerable and living at home with parents or guardians. If enacted into law, this legislation would leave questioning and trans youth in a precarious position: Risk coming out in order to even begin receiving gender-affirming care, and then have to face the consequences if your parent doesn’t support you—all while still not receiving the care you were seeking.
Studies show that transgender youth already report higher rates of bullying, harassment, depression, anxiety, and even suicidal ideation. Transgender youth are already more likely to experience homelessness and leave high school without a diploma. Forcing minors to out themselves is unethical, irresponsible, and frankly, disturbing. Gender-affirming care is life-saving medical care, and politicians should be doing their part to bring safe, affordable, accessible access to more people, not less.
The bill will be considered by the Senate Health and Welfare Committee after the legislature’s regular session opens on April 12. If enacted, this legislation would take effect in early August 2021.
Washington (AFP) – Arkansas became the first US state to ban gender-affirming medical treatment for transgender youth Tuesday when the state legislature overrode a veto of a new law by governor Asa Hutchinson. Rejecting Hutchinson’s argument on Monday that the measure gave the state too much power over the decisions made by trans youth, their families and their doctors, the state assembly voted 25-8 to make the vetoed bill law. The law bans medical and surgical treatments aiming to add, remove or alter a young person’s physical attributes for their “biological sex” as determined at birth. It t… Read More
The cruise industry is rather salty about the latest federal guidance for safe pandemic sailing, calling it “burdensome” and “unworkable.“
The new guidance is an updated phase of the Framework for Conditional Sailing Order (CSO), released April 2 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While it does not mandate vaccinations for all staff and cruisegoers, it does recommend the shots and requires added layers of health measures to try giving any onboard COVID-19 outbreaks the heave-ho—which is exceedingly difficult to do on the tightly packed, highly social vessels.
Among several changes, the guidance requires cruise operators to increase how frequently they report the number of COVID-19 cases onboard, upping reporting from weekly to daily. It also requires cruise lines to implement new routine testing for crew members. Additionally, the guidance requires that cruise lines have agreements set up with port authorities and local health authorities to ensure that, in the event of an outbreak, there will be coordination and infrastructure necessary to safely quarantine, isolate, and treat passengers and crew on land.
President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that all American adults will be eligible for Covid-19 vaccination by April 19. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The change comes two weeks earlier than previously scheduled.
President Joe Biden has announced that all adults will become eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine by April 19. The news came as confirmed coronavirus infections continue to rise throughout the US, intensifying pressure to quickly increase the number of vaccinated people to help counter the rise of more infectious coronavirus variants.
“Let me be deadly earnest with you,” Biden said Tuesday at the White House. “We aren’t at the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do. We’re still in a life-and-death race against this virus.”
The new pledge marks a change in Biden’s previous goal to ensure that vaccinations would be available for 90 percent of US adults by April 19, and it’s possible to achieve given the recent increase in vaccinations across the country.
According to CDC figures, more than 108 million Americans — including about 40 percent of all adults and 75 percent of seniors (65 and up) — had received at least one dose as of Tuesday morning. Nearly 63 million people are fully vaccinated. Overall, the country’s vaccination rate is almost five times greater than the world average, according to a CNN analysis, with over 3 million Americans receiving Covid-19 shots every day.
This rate positions the country to meet the administration’s goal of getting 200 million shots in arms by April 30, Biden’s 100th day in office. When the president announced that goal on March 25, 100 million shots had been given in less than two months. If doctors and nurses continue to administer at least 2.5 million shots per day — the seven-day average in late March — the administration would reach its 200-million-shot goal with days to spare.
The president’s pledge to open vaccinations to all adults is largely a symbolic one. All but one state, Hawaii, had already pledged to make vaccines available for all residents 18 and up either on or in advance of the new April 19 deadline. Most recently, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Tuesday morning that her state’s timeline would be moved up in accordance with the president’s.
But the announcement ensures that every state is held to the same vaccination rules as access opens up. And getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible is of growing importance: Covid-19 rates are rising in some parts of the country, particularly in the upper Midwest, and experts continue to warn of a new surge of Covid-19 infections fueled by the spread of variants and loosened restrictions in some states.
The US is facing an uptick in confirmed Covid-19 cases
While increased vaccination rates and eligibility is undisputedly good news, both developments coincide with an uptick in Covid-19 cases that experts worry may soon turn into a fourth wave. On March 14, the country reported a weekly average of less than 53,000 cases per day. That number reached 76,594 cases on April 5, a 20 percent increase from 14 days prior. Deaths are down and hospitalizations remain stagnant, though those numbers typically lag case counts for several weeks before they reflect those increases.
The uptick is believed to be fueled in part by the continued spread of variants that are often more infectious, and sometimes more deadly, than the initial strain of the coronavirus. And part of what drives the national vaccine effort is a race to inoculate the country before additional new variants emerge. Experts are particularly worried about the rise of potential variants with an Eek mutation, which allows a virus to better evade immune responses from vaccines.
According to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, variants have been found in every US state, although none have had the Eek mutation. Osterholm said on Sunday’s Meet the Press that the B.1.1.7 variant, one believed to be more infectious and deadly and thought to have originated in the United Kingdom, “is almost like having a whole new pandemic descend upon us.” The good news: Vaccines seem to stop its spread.
At the moment, scientists don’t know how widely the new variants are circulating. But as the weeks pass, they’ll likely constitute a higher share of US Covid-19 cases — and a key concern with the B.1.1.7 variant, according to Osterholm, is its impact on children.
“Unlike the previous strains of the virus, we didn’t see children under eighth grade get infected often, or they were not frequently very ill,” Osterholm said on Meet the Press. “They didn’t transmit to the rest of the community. That’s why I was one of those people very strongly supporting reopening in-class learning. B.1.1.7 turns that on its head.”
However, Anthony Fauci — the Biden administration’s chief medical adviser — has said the threat these variants pose, and the threat of a new wave of cases, can be minimized so long as vaccination rates continue to grow unabated.
“As long as we keep vaccinating people efficiently and effectively, I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” Fauci said on MSNBC on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to still see increases in cases. Whether it explodes into a real surge or not remains to be seen. I think that the vaccine is going to prevent that from happening.”
A strong 62% majority of self-described "avid" Major League Baseball fans said they supported the league's decision to move its All-Star Game out of Atlanta over Georgia's new voter suppression law. Just 28% of avid fans opposed the move, according to a new Morning Consult poll conducted over the weekend.
The MLB's decision to relocate the July 13 game was also supported by a 48% plurality of MLB fans overall, while 31% opposed it and 21% said they either didn't know or had no opinion on the matter.
A 39% plurality of all U.S. adults also backed the move, with 28% opposing it and 32% expressing no opinion.
Overall, the MLB seems to have won more supporters than detractors with its decision, particularly among its most loyal fan base. Democrats, however, have some work to do on educating people about the law. The April 2-4 survey found that people were slightly more likely to support the law than oppose it, 42%–36%.
While 59% of Democrats said they oppose the law, for instance, a 38% plurality of independents said they supported it while 29% opposed and fully 33% remained undecided.
So nice to have competent people at the podium instead of someone whose willingness to lie is her only qualification.
Even with Donald Trump out of office, his fervent lies and hysterias about voting fraud (and especially, mail-in voting fraud) live on. As Daily Kos has covered, the latest voter suppression effort propped up by these lies about voter fraud comes to us out of Georgia. As has now gone viral, a Black legislator, state Rep. Park Cannon, was arrested while trying to expose white Republicans celebrating the sweeping and extreme recent voter suppression law. In addition, the optics of the voter suppression bill signing are actually worse than you might have imagined. Georgia has faced blowback in the form of calls for boycotts already, and big corporations based in the state, like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola, have issued clarifying statements on where they stand on this legislation. The GOP has recently stepped up to battle Major League Baseball. And now? MLB has moved its 2021 All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado.
All of this background sets the stage for a question from Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy at Tuesday’s White House press conference. Doocy asks White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki: “Is the White House concerned that Major League Baseball is moving their All-Star Game to Colorado, where voting regulations are very similar to Georgia?” A misleading, inaccurate question at best, for reasons Psaki delves into in her response. Psaki’s swift correction is really a must-watch. Let’s check out her reply and the clip below.
Here’s what Psaki has to say in the clip below.
“Well, let me just refute the first point you made. First, let me say on Colorado. Colorado allows you to register on Election Day. Colorado has voting-by-mail where they send to 100% of people in the state who are eligible applications to vote-by-mail. 94% of people in Colorado voted by mail in the 2020 election. And they also allow for a range of materials to provide even if they vote on Election Day for the limited number of people who vote on Election day.”
Psaki continued: “I think it’s important to remember the context here. The Georgia legislation is built on a lie. There was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Georgia’s top Republican election officials have acknowledged that repeatedly in interviews. What there was, however, was record-setting turnout especially by voters of color.
So, instead, what we’re seeing here is for politicians who didn’t like the outcome… They’re not changing their policies to win more votes, they’re changing the rules to exclude more voters. And we certainly see the circumstances as different. But ultimately, it’s up to Major League Baseball to decide where they’re holding their All-Star game.”
Still need a little inspiration amid Republican efforts to curb voters? Watch Stacey Abrams sum up the long, long battle for voting access into context in just a few minutes.
