Photo shot from Sherman Oaks via Kathy Van Ness of Manhattan Beach, CA.
For those of you not following the victim-blaming on Fox News:
This is what Fox News chooses to speak about. Nitpicking at diversity & LGBTQ+ line items in the budget? Where the HELL is the information about how to help these people majorly impacted by the LA fires? Where’s the resources? Where are the emergency numbers? Any updated info? Absolutely sickening.🤬
Not that it’s up to me (it’s up to LA County voters–home rule is cool & all that), but LA County in 2024 had a $49.2 billion budget (https://ceo.lacounty.gov/budget/), and I don’t see anything wrong with spending these amounts on these ⬇️ activities.
The Supreme Court said Friday it will review the constitutionality of a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires health plans to provide no-cost preventive care, including cancer screenings, immunizations and contraception, to millions of Americans.
The case puts the law, commonly known as Obamacare, in the crosshairs once again and follows several challenges in recent years by conservatives hoping to overturn it, as well as a landmark 2012 ruling by the justices upholding its legality.
In Becerra v. Braidwood Management Inc., a Christian-owned business and six individuals challenged the preventive-care provision because it requires health-care plans to cover pre-exposure medications intended to prevent the spread of HIV among certain at-risk populations. The plaintiffs argue that the medications “encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior,” which conflicts with their religious beliefs.
Rude Pundit on that subject:
What this headline is not saying is that the case happened because some ultra Christian fucknuts didn't like that their insurance had to provide drugs that prevent HIV. That might "encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior." That's right. We might lose cancer screening because of homophobia.
Live and let live is not part of their faith model.
Meanwhile, out on the Interwebs, there is a conspiracy theory going around about House Resolution 7 introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Az.) and Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.). Summarized in brief:
House Resolution 7, Recognizing the importance of access to comprehensive, high-quality, life-affirming medical care for women of all ages, was referred to the Committee on Energy on Commerce. HR 7 states that women should feel empowered and equipped with the knowledge to listen to their body and advocate for their health.
The resolution emphasizes women having access to health care for the sake of their physical, mental, and spiritual wellness. It also states that women’s health care should address the needs of men, families, and communities. While focusing on women’s health care, the resolution, does not state, why or how men or families are related to the care of women’s health.
Additionally the resolution adds that the use of Pro Women’s Healthcare Centers, a group of centers that provide health care to women is a goal of the representatives sponsoring the bill in the 119th Congress.
No, what the resolution states is that the Pro Women’s Healthcare Centers model is one “worth implementing nationwide,” and that, again, women’s health care “should also address the needs of men, families, and communities,” including her “spiritual wellness.”
One fact check from MSN states that, contra online rumors, the resolution will not require women “to get permission from their husband, father or priest to obtain birth control, have their tubes tied, access IVF, get treated for a miscarriage or end a pregnancy for any reason.”
First, it’s a resolution, not a law. Second, it doesn’t state any of that expressly.
OTOH, you can read between the lines where Biggs and Higgins want to take women in this country and why these men introduced this resolution. You don’t need a weatherman….
“I love these mountains,” said the workman driving the pickup truck as he admired the ridgetops. Then he tossed his empty drink cup out the window. The wife retells that anecdote now and then. She was in the passenger seat.
For a time in the 1990s, New Agers called this area the Sedona of the East. Others call it the Paris of the South. People in certain circles toss around words like mindful and intentional, whatever they mean. That’s aging hippie lingo to a lot of people just trying to pay their bills each week as expenses rise and paychecks don’t. Some people need to be whacked upside of the head for concerns like climate change to sink in, even when notice arrives at the front door.
Helene whacked a lot of people upside of the head here on September 27. And still the broader patterns may remain invisible to people like the guy in the truck.
Los Angeles got its own whacking last week. The question is will residents spared and who lost homes see the bigger picture, or like here in WNC will they be too busy rebuilding the lives they had to rebuild them differently.
“[E]ven in this place where there is little dispute that the danger is only getting worse due to climate change, we don’t leave,” explains David Siders at Politico. Even in “fire-gutted, heavily Democratic Altadena … climate change was nowhere near top of mind,” he found:
“When the wind gets like that, I’m sure that’s been happening since the beginning of time,” said David Allen, a writer whose own home was spared, but who was surveying a less fortunate neighbor’s. In this neighborhood full of doctors and professors and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Allen said he suspected people here just might become more animated about climate change. He nodded to the darkened sky obscuring the daytime sun — a “toxic wasteland,” he said.
But everywhere else? The country had just elected Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, joked about rising seas creating “more oceanfront property” and promises to “drill, baby, drill.”
“We’re in a stage where half the country’s thinking magically about things,” Allen said. “They’ve allowed themselves that luxury to be anti-everything — the end of expertise.”
Another blast of wind. Another fire. Okay, this one was nastier than most. Apocalyptic, like the Helene winds and flooding that killed over 100 in Western North Carolina and altered the landscape. But were the Los Angeles fires apocalyptic enough to change minds?
“Blame?” said one resident Siders spoke with about the fire. “No,” he said, “We don’t know what started it.”
There’s an idea I’ve heard from many Democrats, especially in California, that more experience with natural disasters might spur more urgency around climate change. And in fact, polling suggests people affected by extreme weather do draw a link. California’s former governor, Jerry Brown, told me when we met last month in Sacramento that Trump might represent something of an opening for Democrats on the issue: “If the assault on the environment is as extreme as expected, then I believe the fervor for protecting the environment will increase far beyond what it is today.” Attitudes about climate might shift, he said, when “we get a big set of fires or floods, which we’re going to get.”
He was right, it turned out, about the set of fires. And the climate science was right there with it. The same day I visited Altadena, a group of researchers released a study describing how climate change had accelerated “hydroclimate whiplash” between wet and dry conditions, increasing the risk of fire. Its lead author, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s agriculture and natural resources division and UCLA, told me that one of the challenges when it comes to public opinion about climate change is that while people “correctly understand that climate change exists,” many “don’t feel it is viscerally or tangibly affecting them.”
Major catastrophes are relatively rare, and when they do happen, not everyone draws a connection to climate. He called it an “information crisis.”
When money goes to your head, what does it do there? In Brown’s case, convince you you can fly into a poor country unannounced and try to buy it. In Peter Thiel’s case, prompt you to send an essay packed with “just asking questions” conspiracy theories and get the august Financial Times to print it.
Kieran Healy, a Duke University Professor of Sociology, read Thiel’s offering and commented:
This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks.
It’s never clear just what Thiel’s point is. Something about the intersection of the internet and Donald Trump’s return to the White House representing the fall of the ancien regime (the reality-based community) and the revelation of dark secrets that for decades it’s concealed from truth suckers seekers.
This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks.
Free speech in Elon Musk’s conception must be free, free of grounding in fact. Let the internet decide what truth is. In the Digital Dispensation, the truth about the Kennedy assassination, Jeffrey Epstein’s death, and Covid-19’s origins shall be revealed:
Did [Dr. Fauci and his advisers] suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.
Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?
“Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum,” Thiel declares in breathless prose. There will be no return to the “pre-internet past.”
I SEE JESUS!
With the help of the tech-bros, Trump finally has overthrown the ancien regime. He will ignore America’s unrectified historical failings to concentrate on prosecuting the malefactors of identity politics who’ve rendered America Not-Great, Thiel promises.
“The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”
HALLELUJAH!
Blessed are the poor, for they are less prone to wealth-induced delusions.
In the District of Columbia this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s demand to delay his Friday sentencing in the New York hush money case. But in Raleigh, North Carolina, SCOTUS’s Mini-Me court accepted the demand by Judge Jefferson Griffin to delay certification of the race he lost in November. Griffin’s team hopes to have the state Supreme Court election overturned by the state Supreme’s Republican majority.
Basic fact: After multiple recounts, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs (D) defeated NC Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin (R) by 734 votes.
The New York Times contacted several citizens among the 60,000 whose votes the NC GOP proposes voiding in an “extraordinary effort“:
“Anyone who is trying to invalidate my personal vote as fraudulent — that’s a direct attack on the voters,” said Mr. Clay, who voted for Judge Griffin, who now sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “It’s inexcusable to contest these legal ballots. He’s a sore loser. It is what it is, whether it be by one vote, 100 votes or 1,000 votes. We have spoken.”
Griffin and his backers won’t hear it.
In mid-November, after a final vote count showed Justice Riggs winning, Judge Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections, which has a Democratic majority. Judge Griffin argued that the forms that tens of thousands of voters were given to fill out did not ask for some information that they should have under the law.
The board turned the protest down in a series of votes that went largely along party lines, noting that what were apparently clerical errors on the part of county election officials were not the fault of the voters.
NEW: Our mobile billboard is in downtown Raleigh today, passing by the NC Supreme Court and alerting the public about losing candidate Jefferson Griffin's shameful scheme to throw out votes of 60,000 North Carolinians. Learn more and add your voice: ccnc.me/griffin
The state Board of Elections asked a federal district judge to oversee the legal challenge Griffin launched based on the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). When that Trump-appointed judge pitched the case back to the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court, the State Board filed an appeal with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s still pending.
The DNC filed a brief urging the court to reject the Republicans’ request, arguing that they “seek to delete the votes of tens of thousands of voters in every state and municipal election not because those voters are ineligible or did anything wrong, but because of an alleged record keeping problem.” The Democrats added that all of these voters singled out by the GOP provided ID information at one point, like when they first voted.
Also, the DNC cited state and federal laws that establish that once an eligible voter is added to the voter rolls, a minor issue with their registration application is not grounds to nullify their vote.
[…]
The DNC explained that the Republicans are not only seeking to remove votes in the court race but in all state and local races, “including elections that were completely undisputed.”
Meaning, if this HAVA-based challenge succeeds in North Carolina, they will sue to reverse any race Republicans lose narrowly anywhere in the country based on this precedent.
People once said what starts in California eventually works its way east. But when it comes to euthanizing American self-governance, not so much. Here in one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy,” Griffin is still trying to steal an election the way Donald Trump and Team MAGA tried to steal the presidency in 2020.
Pay attention. If they succeed here, your name could be next on the list of voters whose ballots they throw out in your state.
My concern is that Democrats will throw all their efforts behind Defense rather than playing Offense via outside-the-box thinking (à la Spocko) that puts Griffin (and his team of attorneys) on his back foot. Beating the bullies in court is not enough. They need their noses bloodied.
Over at The American Prospect, Micah Sifry has assembled a list of DNC members ahead of the election of new party officers on Feb. 1. The New York Times reported on the two front runners in November. (I have a favorite for chair.) Your state’s members might want to hear from you about yours. March for our Lives co-founder and Parkland school shooting survivor, David Hogg, is running for 1st vice chair. I haven’t followed who else is running.
So, while some joke that the race for DNC chair is the ultimate high school class president election, whoever holds the office will have a significant role in how Democrats respond to Trump, how they rebuild, what changes they make to their media, technology, and fundraising practices, and how the 2028 presidential selection process plays out.
The problem is that the DNC member list is not publically available. Some state parties publish the list of their members (mine does), but others do not. Some you can figure out. Kinda.
Michael Kapp, a DNC member from California who was first elected to that position by his state party’s executive committee in 2016, told me the list isn’t public “because it’s the DNC—it’s a black box.” He told me that leadership holds tightly to the list to prevent any organizing beyond their control.
Kapp adds later:
“There are incentives for the DNC to keep us [members] apart,” Kapp added. “So we can’t organize, so we can’t talk to one another, so we can’t grow and learn.” Most crucially, “so we can’t organize against, or, if we wanted, in favor of whatever leadership wanted. By keeping us apart, they’re really able to organize and control these meetings from the top down.”
That sounds familiar. When years ago I assembled county chair contact lists by state for distributing For the Win, there appeared to be no public listing of county chairs on the New York state party’s website (which seemed to exist primarily for soliciting donations; that has since changed). A former member of New York’s City Council at the time told me the reason was that the old boys in Albany didn’t want any independent organizing among their members either. (Albany County, BTW, seemed to have two live websites, one an obvious draft, misspellings and all.)
Sifry and TAP are providing the list so people outside the party’s inner circle might weigh in with their state’s members on who leads the Democratic Party after Feb. 1.
The list we are publishing was leaked to me by a trusted source with long experience with the national party. Like Kapp, this person thinks it’s absurd that the party’s roster of voting members is secret. Indeed, since there is no official public list, each of the candidates running for chair and other positions has undoubtedly had to create their own tallies from scratch—making it very likely our list comes from a candidate’s whip operation.
To protect individuals’ privacy, we’ve removed everyone’s phone numbers and email addresses—though in some cases people do make that information public on their own. By drawing on that data along with publicly available information from state party websites, news reports, and other biographical information online, we’ve been able to confirm the accuracy of most of the names provided. (One note: There are 449 names on the list, but chair Jaime Harrison is technically not a voting member, leaving 448 who will select the next chair.)
It’s Friday. Allow me to geek out a bit. I worked for decades as a mechanical engineer, a P.E., specifically in piping departments of major consulting firms, even more specifically, in pipe stress analysis. (Here’s the Generative AI explanation.) The nonsense being spewed by Trump 2.0 and other RW hacks about the fires in Los Angeles and hydrants with no water gets under my skin. Especially Trump’s “little fish” idiocy.
Thursday night’s late-night shows were focused on the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, as well as incoming President Trump’s bizarre response to them.
“Daily Show” host Desi Lydic played a clip of Trump rambling on about smelt, continuing to spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the state’s water supply.
“I tried to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come — you’d have tremendous water out there — they send it out to the Pacific, because they’re trying to protect a tiny little fish — which is in other areas, by the way — called the smelt. For the sake of the smelt, they have no water,” Trump said.
Lydic offered a rebuttal, saying “And for the record, no, the L.A. fires have nothing to do with smelt. But in Trump’s defense, words are hard. And smelt only has one syllable, while climate change has three.”
In fact, “not in their own minds” experts tell the Washington Post that California’s reservoirs stand at historically high levels. Supply is not the problem. Demand is. Getting the water to where you need it is.
To provide reliable water pressure in hilly areas, cities install holding tanks like those at the top, positioned strategically at the top of local mountains, the way cities in flat areas pump water, slowly, to fill water towers standing high above the local terrain. In both cases, gravity does the rest. Keeping these tanks filled in a system under severe stress is a problem (emphasis mine):
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the fire made the water demand four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”
Ms Quiñones said hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts.
Refilling those tanks while the water system down below is under historic demand too is even tougher. In the case of the Pacific Palisades fire, like I said (Washington Post):
In order for water to be piped uphill to hydrants in Pacific Palisades, it is collected in a reservoir, pumped into three million-gallon, high-elevation storage tanks, then propelled by gravity into homes and fire hydrants.
DWP spokesman Bowen Xie said the agency had filled its 114 water storage tanks before the blaze, but after the Palisades Fire erupted on Tuesday, water demand quadrupled in the area, lowering the pressure required to refill the three local storage tanks.
By 4:45 p.m., the first of the three tanks ran out of water, said Janisse Quiñones, DWP’s chief executive and chief engineer. The second tank ran empty about 8:30 p.m., and the third at 3 a.m. Wednesday.
“We had a tremendous demand on our system in the Palisades,” she said at a Wednesday briefing. “We pushed the system to the extreme.”
Supply is not the problem.
Marty Adams, former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, echoed those concerns. He said the agency’s water pump-and-storage system, like others nationwide, was designed to meet fire protection standards based on the water needed to battle fires at several homes or businesses, not wildfires that consume whole neighborhoods.
“None of that’s ever been based on the entire neighborhood going up. If that’s the new norm, that’s something that’s got to be figured in,” he said. “Nobody designs a domestic water system for that. It would be so overbuilt and so expensive.”
My morning man on Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan lives in Asheville North Carolina and just went through an epic flood a couple of months ago. Now I'm going through a literal firestorm on the opposite coast in LA. This is all climate change, weird weather systems all over the planet.
Nobody would pay for that. Let’s get real. We heard similar complaints (from RW critics looking to score points) after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene hit my town.
Helene’s apocalyptic flooding at the end of September ripped out the major water mains supplying Asheville, leaving us without water pressure for weeks and without water certified drinkable until mid-November. Oh, but those lefties running Asheville who replaced the water mains that washed out in 2004 flooding were responsible/irresponsible because they buried the replacement lines ONLY 25 ft deep!
Donald Trump is not the only walking advertisement out there for the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Update: “I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” said Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA.
Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress he plans to release Jack Smith’s special counsel’s report on the Jan. 6 investigation. The secret documents case is the second volume of the two-volume report (CNN):
Garland, in a letter sent Wednesday to House and Senate Judiciary Committee chairs and ranking members, outlines how he wants to confidentially provide to them Smith’s volume on the classified documents case and how he wants to release to Congress and to the public the volume on Trump’s 2020 election interference criminal charges.
Garland specifies he would do so “when permitted to do so by the court.”
Both cases have been dismissed before any findings of guilt or innocence, and the defendants are currently challenging the release of all parts of Smith’s report, signaling a major shift in the approach to transparency from the Justice Department that is expected in Trump’s administration.
“Consistent with local court rules and Department policy, and to avoid any risk of prejudice to defendants Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, whose criminal cases remain pending, I have determined, at the recommendation of the Special Counsel, that Volume Two should not be made public so long as those defendants’ criminal proceedings are ongoing,” Garland wrote.
The “when permitted to do so by the court” language is a nod to Judge Eileen Cannon’s likely overstep when she issued an order to prevent their release:
After Cannon granted their request for an emergency order blocking the report’s release, Trump’s attorneys shifted gears and asked the Eleventh Circuit to remand the case back to Cannon.
But of course they (he) did. The matter may be decided by the Eleventh Circuit Court this morning.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance notes the problem Nauta and De Oliveira pose for Trump if he wants Smith’s report on the documents case kept from the public eye:
The Government told the court that its plan is to release the entire volume of the report that is related to the January 6 prosecution in Washington, D.C., but they do not plan to publicly release the volume about the classified documents because that case is still pending. They will, however, share a redacted version of that part of the report with House and Senate Judiciary Committee leaders, who must promise to keep it secret until the case concludes. That puts the new Trump administration on the horns of a dilemma: Let that case proceed, and the report stays behind the scenes (although the evidence would come out at trial or during guilty plea hearings). Or pardon the defendants or dismiss the prosecution, and Democrats in Congress no longer need to keep the report confidential.
Who knew being a criminal autocrat was so complicated? Not that the effort will make Trump’s bronzer run.
Our president-elect has named former U.S. Rep. Billy Long of Missouri, a former auctioneer, to run the Internal Revenue Service. He boasts experience as a tax adviser. Trump in December praised Long for “32 years of experience running his own businesses in Real Estate and, as one of the premier Auctioneers in the Country.” Long, attended the University of Missouri, per Ballotpedia, but never graduated.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) serves on the House Ways and Means Tax subcommittee. He calls Long a “terrible mistake.”
He advertises his credential as a certified tax and business advisor, and he adds CTBA to his name on his X profile. That profile encourages people to message him to “save 40% on your taxes.”
But tax experts told ProPublica that they have never heard of CTBA as a credential in the tax profession. The designation is offered by a small Florida firm, Excel Empire, which was established just two years ago and only requires attendance at a three-day seminar. That is in stark contrast to the 150 credit hours and the rigorous exams required to become a certified public accountant, a standard certification for tax accountants.
In most tax cases, only lawyers, CPAs and enrolled agents — federally authorized tax practitioners — can represent taxpayers at the IRS.
New Agers here in the 90s would print up business cards and hang out a shingle after receiving a laser-printed certificate from their $50 weekend workshop at the Airport Ramada. The incoming president thinks Long’s workshop qualifies him to run an agency with roughly 90,000 employees. (Long paid maybe $5,000 for his three-day training.) Students at Donald Trump’s one-time unlicensed “university” paid “between $1,495 and $35,000.“
Rachel Maddow offered her observations on Long’s qualifications.
The qualifications portion of a Rachel Maddow Public Servant Announcement is always fun. If you’ve missed any so far, we made a YouTube playlist at http://MSNBC.com/PublicServantAnnouncement More on the way! #fyp#news#politics#trump#irs#government#taxes @MSNBC
CBS reports that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has doubts about Long:
While serving as a representative, Long, a Republican from Missouri and a former auctioneer, co-sponsored legislation that aimed to wipe out much of the tax code. After leaving office, he served as a tax adviser to businesses seeking to employ a controversial tax credit, the Employee Retention Tax Credit, or ERTC.
In her Jan. 9 letter to Long, Warren raises questions about Long’s tax expertise as well as his promotion of the ERTC, which has been flagged by the IRS for its high rate of fraud. Unlike other recent IRS tax commissioners, Long doesn’t have a depth of experience in the tax industry, nor does he have a degree in accounting or tax law.
“[Y]our lack of significant management or tax experience — and your promotion of credits that have been “magnet[s] for fraud” — raise serious questions about your qualifications to lead the IRS,” Warren wrote in the letter, noting that the Senate Finance Committee will hold his confirmation hearing early this year.
During his time in Congress, ProPublica adds, “Long pursued legislation to abolish the IRS and establish a national sales tax.” Thirty percent, Maddow notes, an idea promoted since the 1990s by the Church of Scientology.
“Look at the size of this. It’s massive,” said Trump.
Donald Trump refuses to rule out taking military or economic actions against a NATO ally (Denmark) to take control of Greenland or to annex the Sudetenland Panama Canal.
Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson argues this morning that Trump is misunderstood (Raw Story):
“What Donald Trump is trying to argue is that there are many other conflicts around the world where it’s not in our interest to be involved,” said Republican strategist Kristen Soltis Anderson. “We’ve gotten too overextended, [Trump says] but this is in our interest. This is in our hemisphere, this is something that is important for us to do, and in a way, I think the reason why you see Donald Trump so animated about all of this is I think he views it as a really big real estate transaction. What does Donald Trump do? Big real estate transactions, branding – the Gulf of America. I mean, this is this is just Donald Trump taking the same playbook he’s been running for decades and now trying to apply it to the U.S. government yet again.”
C’mon, Gulf of America is hardly the first choice for the guy who gets a fee for slapping his name on buildings he doesn’t own. But I digress.
CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams agreed that Trump wasn’t fully serious about his imperialist ambitions, but he cautioned against dismissing his comments altogether.
“We were here four years ago where the former president, president-elect will make these claims that in many ways are kind of preposterous, but there’s an element of truth to them,” Williams said. “Like, yes, we technically could under the laws of the military annex another nation if we so chose. But here we are once again, assessing the seriousness of these kind of harebrained, almost schemes being cooked up by the former president. That could be the future of America, but it’s hard to know where we go from here.”
As everyone knows, Trump is obsessed with size. He famously assured voters his hands were not really small and indicated nothing about the size of his tool. Trump admires Russian President Vladmir Putin who is richer, smarter, more ruthless, and controls a much larger swath of territory than the U.S. president-elect.
Seriously? Trump desperately wants an invitation to the International Autocrats Club (Putin, Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orbán, et al.), that would never have a flaccid imbecile like him as a member. He imagines that grabbing a big hunk of land like Greenland would be his ticket to admission (plus his throwing millions out of the country and building concentration camps to hold them until he can). It’s a Charlie the Tuna move. Sorry, Donny.
MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Tuesday recounts that one of Trump’s billionaire friends first floated the idea to Trump of “acquiring” Greenland. He was so obsessed with the idea, reported Peter Baker that “Greenland was one issue that absorbed the National Security Council staff for months.”
“Part of Trump’s fixation with buying Greenland,” Wagner said, “may have stemmed from his failure to understand how maps work.” Wagner provided graphics to explain the Mercator projection to the size-obsessed, idiot president-elect who wasn’t watching.
The Mercator projection distorts the size of land masses near the poles and makes them unrealistically large. Greenland is not nearly as large as it looks on a flat map.
Trump once said, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’”
Little Donny pictures TRUMP plastered across Greenland being visible from outer space.
When Republicans win elections, they celebrate and move on. When they lose, they scream foul and launch lawsuits. And insurrections. Americans marked the fourth anniversary of the Trump insurrection on Monday. Donald Trump was impeached and indicted for trying to steal the presidential election he lost in 2020.
North Carolina Republicans now mean to steal 60,000 votes and an entire statewide election. In broad daylight. In court. For a Republican state Supreme Court candidate, a judge yet. Two recounts confirm that Jefferson Griffin lost his election to incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes. Griffin’s attorneys hired Republican political consulting firm Coldspark to identify potential votes for challenge.
Allison Riggs won and the recount confirmed it. Republicans want to toss thousands of legal votes in the trash because they don’t like the outcome. This shouldn't be about party politics-this should be about making sure every vote counts & that our elections still mean something.
Four people I know, friends, including the former local president of the NAACP, are among the 60,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents whose votes Judge Griffin wants vacated so he can sit on the state’s highest court. Griffin means to steal the election ecumenically.
Robert Orr, former associate justice on the state Supreme Court (a former Republican), told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night that the NCGOP likely had this challenge teed up in advance “in case Trump lost North Carolina” by a narrow margin. They’re using that playbook to overturn Riggs’s election instead.
On Tuesday morning, the state board of elections appealed to the 4th Circuit, just a few hours after a federal district court judge granted Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin’s motion to remand his election protest to the state Supreme Court.
The elections board’s federal appeal notwithstanding, the North Carolina Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a temporary stay blocking the state elections board from certifying Griffin’s electoral loss to Democrat Allison Riggs, the incumbent justice he’s trying to unseat.
The crisis of democracy didn't end with Trump's victory—it got worse. When North Carolina's state Supreme Court is blocking certification of a state Supreme Court election, the house is on fire.
Lawyers for Griffin use language echoing Donald Trump’s complaints about his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, the very complaints he used to launch that the infamous insurrection. The GOP playbook is familiar, Rolling Stonenoticed. Griffin held a sizable lead on Election Day but saw it evaporate after the counting of all absentee and provisional ballots. Fraud, clearly.
Most of the votes Griffin wants thrown out are those his campaign claims were cast by people who did not include a driver’s license or partial Social Security number on their voter registration applications. People who did not include those numbers on their applications are not legally registered, Republican lawyers have argued. Many of those voters have been voting regularly for years.
John Eastman-level skeevy
Griffin’s attorneys base their challenge on registration requirements added under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in 2002 (NC Newsline):
The state Board of Elections’ written order filed after it rejected Griffin’s protests says that just because driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers didn’t show up in the voter registration file doesn’t mean voters didn’t supply them.
A brief filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and individual voters emphasizes that point. Griffin’s target list is inaccurate, the brief says, because it fails to account for voters who did not have to supply the information or for data entry errors or database mismatches that resulted when women married and changed their last names.
Anne Tindall, one of the lawyers with the Protect Democracy Project representing the League and individual voters, said in an interview last week that the women and non-white voters were overrepresented on the list of 225,000 people Republicans originally wanted purged from the rolls. Those are voters who are more likely to have hyphenated names or names people misspell, she said.
Those aren’t the only votes at risk. Also under threat are nearly 300 ballots from voters living overseas, Rolling Stone reports, “including members of the military, a category of voter known as UOCAVA, short for the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a federal law.” These include voting-age citizens born to Americans living overseas (to parents from N.C.) but who’ve never actually lived in the state. Federal and state law provide for these Americans to vote in the state of their parents’ last residency. Republicans are challenging their votes as illegitimate anyway.
This is John Eastman-level, skeevy lawyering. The California State Bar Court recommended Eastman’s disbarrment (his license has been suspended). His license to practice law in the District of Columbia is suspended. He still faces criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona.
How this case impacts you
The (more) insane part of this affair is that Griffin’s election challenge is based on HAVA, a federal law. Throwing the case back to the state Supreme Court makes zero sense. Unless you’re a Trump judge like U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and U.S. District Judge Richard Myers II is.
Secondly, if Republicans succeed in stealing Riggs’s seat based on HAVA, they will deploy the same tactic wherever and whenever they lose elections going forward. They may gut HAVA protections they dislike through congressional action, but will be sure to preserve provisions that allow them to steal elections (and your votes) the way Trump and Eastman attempted to with their fake electors scheme.
Griffin and his legal team are going to fight his election loss all the way to the Supreme Court, and they don’t care if it’s the state’s or SCOTUS. They’re both majority GOP.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals may yet step in and wrest back jurisdiction in this case. The N.C. Supreme Court acknowledged that in its stay order. But unlike Trump whose go-to gambit is delay, delay, delay, “because it concerns certification of an election,” they’re in a hurry to wrap up the steal by the end of January.
Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, Republicans insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They make it personal. Under cover of that faux outrage they’ve launched a thousand efforts at vote suppression. Like this one. They’re coming for your vote next.
UPDATE: Perhaps feeling the heat, Republican justices on the state Supreme Court revised their previous order to include justice statements. What was a 5-1 opinion now stands at 4-2 with Republican Justice Richard Dietz joining Democrat Anita Earls in dissent.
In my view, the challenges raised in this petition strike at the very heart of our state’s Purcell principle. The petition is, in effect, post-election litigation that seeks to remove the legal right to vote from people who lawfully voted under the laws and regulations that existed during the voting process. The harm this type of post-election legal challenge could inflict on the integrity of our elections is precisely what the Purcell principle is designed to avoid.
Any issue Dietz may have with State Board rules in place long before the election, he writes, should have been litigated long before the election, not now. Voters bear no responsibility for that.
Permitting post-election litigation that seeks to rewrite our state’s election rules—and, as a result, remove the right to vote in an election from people who already lawfully voted under the existing rules—invites incredible mischief. It will lead to doubts about the finality of vote counts following an election, encourage novel legal challenges that greatly delay certification of the results, and fuel an already troubling decline in public faith in our elections. I therefore believe our state version of the Purcell principle precludes the relief sought in the petition and respectfully dissent from the Court’s decision not to deny it outright.
Also note that this Supreme Court contest is just one of hundreds held acrsoss the state (already certified), some of which were lost by Republicans by a mere handful of votes. What remedy could this GOP court order at this point if it permits the cancelling of any portion of the contested 60,000 votes?
