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Get Ready For More Chaos

Published by digby on February 5, 2024

The House is only getting started

As usual these days, the GOP congress is a burbling cauldron of chaos and dysfunction with wild hearings, inexplicable strategy and internal strife. They are all fighting among themselves trying to curry favor with their party’s leader, Donald Trump, and jockeying for power. And it’s an election year, which even in placid times turns politicians into preening posers desperate for money and attention. It is a combustible situation.

The budget is still not settled although they managed to extend the deadlines for a short while as they try to hammer out deals on taxes, national security and the border. And they have a lot of work to do on all the investigations they are currently pursuing, which to this point are utter embarrassments.

The big show was supposed to be the impeachment of Joe Biden, promised to Donald Trump as payback for the two impeachments he endured. That one’s not looking good at the moment. The House oversight committee chairman. James Comer, who is running the Hunter Biden investigation keeps punching holes in his own narrative every time he interviews another witness. Just last week, another presumed “whistle blower”, Eric Schwerin, a former business associate of the president’s son, was interviewed in closed door testimony and swore under penalty of perjury that the president was not involved at all in Hunter’s business dealings.

This is how Chairman Comer lamely explained all this:

CNN reported that the GOP is finally seeing the writing on the wall

[O]ne GOP lawmaker estimated there are around 20 House Republicans who are not convinced there is evidence for impeachment, and Republicans can only lose two votes in the current House margins…

“You’d be hard pressed to say it’s going well,” said a GOP source closely following that investigation. “It’s a jumbled mess.”

It appears that Biden’s impeachment is going nowhere fast but all is not lost. In the next few days we should see a vote in the House to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as part of their current election year border extravaganza. If they go through with it, it will be the second impeachment of a cabinet secretary in history, the last one happening 150 years ago. Why are they doing it? They are opposed to the administration’s immigration policies, something which has never before been the basis for impeachment which is defined as treason, bribery and high crimes or misdemeanors.

They know this is bogus, of course. It’s all for effect, much like the dozen or so different Benghazi hearings in the run-up to the 2016 election. Rather than have Judiciary Committee handle the matter as is usual, they opted for the Homeland Security Committee run the inquiry which opted to only hold two sham hearings before releasing the articles of impeachment last week. They charged him with two articles: “willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law” and a “breach of public trust” claiming that he failed to detain enough migrants and lying to congress and the American people. These are vague allegations that don’t even come close to meeting the constitutional definition of impeachable offenses.

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board, hardly a friend of the administration tried to wave them off:

House Republicans are marking up articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and the question is why? As much as we share the frustration with the Biden border mess, impeaching Mr. Mayorkas won’t change enforcement policy and is a bad precedent that will open the gates to more cabinet impeachments by both parties.

Perhaps most galling is the fact that DHS claims that if enough migrants are not being detained, it’s because the congress has failed to provide the funding to do so. And now, even with Democrats and the White House capitulating to most of their demands, they are refusing to take yes for an answer.

On Sunday night Senate negotiators released the details of their hard fought bipartisan border agreement which is harsher than we would have seen under any Democratic administration or congressional majority in the last 40 years. (There are some policy improvements as well as laid out here by Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy) They agreed to the terms as the price House Republicans demanded in order to fund other vital national security priorities. So naturally, the House Republicans immediately declared it dead on arrival. This was expected since they’ve been saying that for weeks despite not knowing what was in it.

Republican House leaders immediately launched into bad faith interpretations of the bill with the Speaker even lying to the media and suggesting that he wasn’t ever consulted on the negotiations (a contention refuted by the principal GOP negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Ok., who said that Speaker Johnson declined his invitation to participate.)

Now the larger bill, which also contains funding for Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian aid for Gaza, will have to pass the Senate which, according to some observers, is why the House is rejecting it outright in the hopes that it will influence the Senate to kill the bill:

I don’t know what those means are but it would be quite something to see Donald Trump’s howl at his orders being rejected. It’s hard to see exactly how that will come to pass but the House GOP is so dysfunctional and working with such a tiny majority that I suppose anything is possible.

We know that Trump and the Republicans don’t want to pass any border legislation because they have told us they want to use the “crisis” to beat up Democrats in the election. This is no secret. They also don’t want to pass any more Ukraine funding for reasons that are simply inexplicable unless their apparent attraction to Russian president Vladimir Putin is more than simply for show. Speaker Johnson said over the weekend that he plans to take care of Israel in a separate bill (so his evangelical buddies and the hard right Israeli leadership don’t need to worry about that.)

It would be nice to think that the American people will see through all this and realize how utterly craven and irresponsible the Republicans are being but with all the noise out there it’s impossible to know if they can hear it even if they’re paying attention. The one person we know for sure the Republicans have to fear is Donald Trump who is going to be very, very angry if they don’t follow through on the impeachment of his nemesis Joe Biden. He made himself crystal clear on that and I won’t be surprised if they go through with a perfunctory impeachment vote regardless, just to make him happy. If there’s one thing they are terrified of doing it’s pissing off Dear Leader.

Surviving The Pollercoaster

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 5, 2024

Choose not to ride

Silver Bullet roller coaster. Photo by KeithJ (2005) via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED).

Dan Pfeiffer of Crooked Media attempts to coax readers of presidential polls off the ledge. His team has dubbed the stomach-churn the Pollercoaster.

Biden is up. Biden is down. Biden is tied. Trump is ahead by three, Biden is by six. Take a breath, Pfeiffer advises:

1. Polling is an Educated Guess

There are two rules for riding the Pollercoaster. First, polls are not supposed to be predictive. They don’t tell us what WILL happen. They try to tell us what is happening right now — during the polling period. Second, every poll is based on an educated guess about who is going to vote. When the polls are wrong — like they were in 2016 and 2020 — it’s because pollsters were wrong about the makeup of the electorate.

In 2016, the New York Times’s Nate Cohn gave the raw data from a poll of Floridians to four different well-respected pollsters and asked them to estimate the results of the poll using their methodology and models. And lo and behold, the four pollsters (and Cohn) got widely different results.

I would encourage everyone to read Nate’s write-up of the experiment because it’s one of the best explanations of the least understood and most opaque parts of polling.

The process of weighting the results to match one’s model of the likely electorate is rarely explained to the public, so it’s hard to understand exactly why the results differ, but that’s one main reason they do.

The 2024 election will be unprecedented, Pfeiffer explains, as was the COVID-19 election of 2020.

“For the first time in the modern era, a former president is running to reclaim his job. There is a historic level of dissatisfaction with both candidates,” Pfeiffer explains. “A record number of voters are expressing interest in voting for a third-party candidate. Finally, one of the candidates is facing the prospect of being convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison before the election.”

Poll that one, pilgrim, and I’ll get you another!

Regarding those third-party efforts, Pfeiffer adds:

First, every pollster is treating the No Labels candidacy differently. Some use possible candidates like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin or former Republican Governor Larry Hogan. Others describe No Labels as a bipartisan organization. Secondly, we have no idea where these candidates will be on the ballot.

Ballot position makes a difference in the voting booth, and where the “thirds” land could be different in every state.

Finally, Pfeiffer gets to the factor that keeps me up at night: independents and young voters. When he sees two wildly divergent polls, Pfeiffer looks at the crosstabs for how those groups responded to poll questions:

In the Quinnipiac poll that has Biden winning by 6, he is beating Trump among Independents by 12. In the CNN poll, Biden is trailing Trump by 4 with Independents. In the Bloomberg/Morning Consult swing state poll, Biden is down 8 with Independents. In the NBC poll, Trump is winning Independents by 19 points!

The youth vote is a wild card even if the Harvard Youth Poll shows it leans Biden.

The bigger question is how many of them will turn out. The greatest untapped pool of eligible voters that lean blue are nonvoters under 45. They could run this joint if they truned out like their elders. We could lose it all if they don’t.

Right now, polls are a kind of “choose your own adventure” affair. People promote the ones that favor their favorites and downplay the rest. So Pfeiffer closes with some practical advice:

The broader trends of the recent polling tell me two things. First, Biden, at minimum, has stabilized, and things may be looking up as people’s views on the economy improve. Second, the polls are consistent with what we have long assumed — this is a very close and winnable race that will come down to less than 100,000 votes across a small handful of states. Our task is the same if the polls show Biden up by 2 or down by 5. We have to do the work of persuading voters, which is why you should immediately go to Vote Save America and sign up to do something other than worry about polls.

You can be a player or you can be a victim of politics. What’ll it be?

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

“Ya’ll got the secret sauce”

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 5, 2024

Leading horses to water again

“Ya’ll got the secret sauce,” the neighboring congressional district chair said in a call after the 2014 midterm elections. Could I bottle it and send her counties a case?

November 2014 was not as bad for Democrats as 2010, the REDMAP election in which Republicans flipped 20 state houses across the country. But 2014 wasn’t good either. Still, North Carolina was the only state across the South where Democrats picked up state legislative seats. We netted three, two in my county. Betsy wanted to know our secret.

Listen. Political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills. No matter how much people believe money, ideas and policies win them, at some point you have to play the game and put points on the scoreboard. Once polls close, we don’t count policies or ideologies. We count votes.

State parties are like little armies. Each year, veterans retire, and new volunteers arrive. Parties run recruits through basic training. This is a precinct; here’s how you organize it. Here are our charter and bylaws. This is the voter database; here’s how to pull a basic walk list and canvass your neighborhood. Etc.

Unlike the U.S. Army, what state parties lack is Officer Candidate School. Volunteers who might eventually lead a county’s worth of precincts pick up higher-level skills by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. If then. Democrats have gotten by on the assumption that they will for decades. Bad assumption.

Activists who live in more rural counties where big races don’t parachute in satellite campaign offices may never learn how a well-organized turnout operation works. Especially in a non-swing state. They don’t know what they don’t know.

Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
– attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley

“It’s like they give you a small box of parts with no assembly instructions,” one organizer observed of state trainings.

Seriously. I have county chair manuals from multiple states, some over 250 pages. They are heavy on administration and light on electing Democrats. That’s why I wrote For The Win. This is nuts-and-bolts, mechanics and logistics for maximizing your county’s down-ballot vote and for building enduring infrastructure with little money and modest computer skills. Theoretical Foundations of Campaign Craft this is not.

In 2011, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer wrote “State For Sale” about conservative millionaire Art Pope’s influence on North Carolins elections. She opens on the story of State Sen. John Snow, a likeable, moderate Democrat incumbent in the state’s western tip. Pope threw nearly a million dollars at Snow’s 2010 reelection campaign, including two dozen attack mailers that might have accused him of being a pedophile, except that was not yet a default Republican smear.

Snow lost by 161 votes spread over eight counties, less than the combined undervote in his down-ballot race in two of his smaller counties. I’m convinced to this day that if those rural counties were better organized, Snow would have held his seat.

In the 2020 elections, COVID was a big influence. North Carolina Chief Justice Cheri Beasley lost reelection in her statewide down-ballot race by 401 votes. That’s the undervote in just a couple of precincts.

It’s hell down-ballot. And while not marquee races, state legislative and judicial races mean more to your daily lives than the clown show under the U.S. Capitol dome. Ask state activists fighting to secure women’s bodily autonomy post Dobbs.

With the advent of early voting, most elections are no longer one-day, 14-hour turnout marathons for precinct captains. The county party plays a larger role. It coordinates a weeks-long turnout operation involving perhaps dozens of precincts and multiple early voting sites and campaigns. A big part of that job is education and ensuring voters know to not simply vote for president and walk away. But beyond gaining seat-of-the-pants experience, and with states’ training budgets and bandwidth limited, few are teaching less experienced and under-resourced county committee chairs how to step into that role. So I do it.

This free “cookbook” is on its way to over 2,500 county chairs this week. It’s still a lead-a-horse effort. You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. And if you do show up, you’d best have “game.”

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Elon Getting Crispy

Published by digby on February 4, 2024

You’ve read about how the Trump White House was basically a pill mill, dispensing uppers and downers like candy and even handing out fentanyl for reasons no one has been able to explain. Right. Perfectly normal.

Look what’s been happening at Tesla, the company owned by the other Very Stable Genius, Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Several current or former directors at Tesla and SpaceX attend parties with him, go on exotic vacations and hang out at Burning Man, the Nevada arts and music festival.

Musk and these directors, including venture capitalists Gracias and Ira Ehrenpreis, tech mogul Larry Ellison, former media executive James Murdoch, as well as Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, have invested tens of millions of dollars in each other’s companies—Ellison held billions of dollars in Tesla shares with about a 1.5% holding in 2022. Some also received career support and help from Elon Musk.

Most members of Tesla’s current eight-person board have amassed shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars from their seats over the years, significantly more than what board members at other companies make for their service. 

Tesla pays its directors mostly in stock options, and the current board, not including Musk himself, collectively has made more than $650 million selling shares from those options. They hold additional options valued at nearly $1 billion. Some directors agreed to return a portion of that compensation to Tesla to resolve a shareholder lawsuit about their compensation while denying any wrongdoing. A judge has yet to approve the settlement. 

Some current and former Tesla and SpaceX directors have knowledge of Musk’s illegal drug use but haven’t taken public action, according to people who have witnessed the drug use or were briefed on it.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Musk has used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and that leaders at Tesla and SpaceX were concerned about it, particularly his recreational use of ketamine, for which Musk has said he has a prescription. The illegal drugs violate strict antidrug policies at Musk’s companies and could put SpaceX’s federal contracts and Musk’s security clearance at risk. 

At the upscale Austin Proper Hotel, Musk has attended social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, the 

Airbnb co-founder and a friend of his, where Musk took ketamine recreationally through a nasal spray bottle multiple times, according to people familiar with the drug use and the parties. 

Other directors, Gracias, Jurvetson and Kimbal Musk, have consumed drugs with him, according to people who have witnessed the drug use and others with knowledge of it.

Musk and some people close to him, including Kimbal Musk, attend parties at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in San José del Cabo, Mexico, known for its art and music scene as well as drug-fueled events, according to people familiar with the parties.

The volume of drug use by Musk and with board members has become concerning, some of these people said.

In the culture Musk has created around him, some friends, including directors, feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him because they think refraining could upset the billionaire, who has made them a lot of money, some of the people said. More so, they don’t want to risk losing the social capital that comes from being close to Musk, which for ome feels akin to having proximity to a king.

Totally fine. Nothing to worry about.

Elon Musk already holds the world record for losing the most money, and the Tesla CEO has lost another $30.5 billion in the first month of 2024. At the same time, his rival in wealth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has gained $7.3 billion.

Now the gap between the tech moguls is just $15 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That might sound like a lot (a lot, a lot) to normal people, but it’s not much in the race to the top for the world’s richest, especially considering that Musk has already lost twice that sum in just a few weeks.

You’d think that Musk would be attending to business in light of that. Well, not so much. Get a load of what he spent the weekend doing around the clock:

It was a full blown bender, I’m afraid.

The man has issues. Big ones.

Moms For Liberty Losers

Published by digby on February 4, 2024

Another right wing outrage-fad runs its course

What if they held a book banning and nobody showed up?

In Florida, where the right-wing Moms for Liberty group was born in response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates, the first Brevard County School Board meeting of the new year considered whether two bestselling novels – “The Kite Runner” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” – should be banned from schools.

A lone Moms for Liberty supporter sat by herself at the January 23 meeting, where opponents of the book ban outnumbered her.

Nearly 20 speakers voiced opposition to removing the novels from school libraries. One compared the book-banning effort to Nazi Germany. Another accused Moms for Liberty of waging war on teachers. No one spoke in favor of the ban. About three hours into the meeting, the board voted quickly to keep the two books on the shelves of high schools.

“Why are we banning books?” asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group “pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”

“Why are we letting Moms for Liberty infiltrate our school system?”

Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021, expanded its mission to include efforts to ban certain books from schools, outlaw the teaching and discussion of gender and sexuality by teachers and halt the teaching of critical race theory.

Now the group is at a crossroads.

“One of their major challenges is the fact that most Americans are actually pretty positive about their own children’s schools,” Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said via email. “Although their message may have appeal in the abstract, at least to conservative voters, families aren’t clamoring for disruption in their own children’s schools.”

After effectively channeling conservative anger over cultural issues into action on the ground, from supporting candidates in school board races to spearheading campaigns against teachers, administrators and other political foes, Moms for Liberty’s burgeoning influence in Republican national politics may be faltering, observers say.

A sex scandal involving the husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, a Sarasota County school board member, has not helped the group’s cause.

Ziegler has been on the forefront of the cultural battles GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged in the public schools. DeSantis named her to the board now overseeing the Walt Disney Company’s special tax district in central Florida amid his clash with the entertainment giant over a state law that restricted how sexual orientation and gender identity could be taught in the classroom. Ziegler remains on the school board despite calls for her to step down.

(The latest on the sex-scandal has Ziegler deploying his wife to “hunt” for threesome candidates…and it just gets uglier.)

The right always has some kind of culture war “uprising” going and this one was a doozy. All those “hot moms” charging the citadel of public education to save the children from the gays and the pedos got everyone very excited. But, like all of these battles, it fizzled as the wingnuts moved on to the next outrage. We’re on the border now. Book banning is so 2023.

The big problem with these events is that the media takes them so very seriously while they are raging. This one really took off during the 2021 Virginia off year election when everyone in the beltway proclaimed Glenn Youngkin the Great Whitebread Hope because he supposedly rode the Moms for Liberty train to victory. (It wasn’t true, not that it mattered.) But if the media had shown a little more restraint this ridiculous culture war battle might have been avoided. They just can’t help themselves.

Speaking of crazy right wing fads going kerflooey:

Here’s some footage of the “invasion.” Very scary:

Waiting for Trumpie

Published by digby on February 4, 2024

In case you needed more evidence that Netanyahu and his boys are holding out for a Trump restoration, here it is:

Criticism of President Joe Biden by a far-right minister in Israel’s government who said Donald Trump would allow more freedom to fight Hamas sparked outrage there on Sunday, highlighting the sensitivity of relations as Washington provides key support for the offensive against the militants in Gaza.

The Biden administration has skirted Congress to rush weapons to Israel and shielded its ally from international calls for a cease-fire in the four months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. But the White House has also urged Israel to take greater measures to avoid harming civilians and to facilitate the delivery of more aid to besieged Gaza.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal said Biden was hindering Israel’s war effort.

“Instead of giving us his full backing, Biden is busy with giving humanitarian aid and fuel (to Gaza), which goes to Hamas,” Ben-Gvir said. “If Trump was in power, the U.S. conduct would be completely different.”

He’s not wrong.

Netanyahu didn’t exactly disagree although he didn’t overtly suck up to Donald Trump like Ben-Gvir. Other members of the “war cabinet” did speak out. They’re going to need to so more than this, however.

His remarks drew fire from Benny Gantz, a retired general and member of Netanyahu’s three-man War Cabinet, who said Ben-Gvir was “causing tremendous damage” to American-Israeli relations. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, also posting on X, said Ben-Gvir’s remarks prove that he “does not understand foreign relations.”

He understands the American right wing very well, though. There is no doubt that Trump will be a nightmare for Muslims in America and around the world. And the Palestinians will be especially targeted because the American left is their ally in this war. Does anyone really think that isn’t the way Trump makes his “policies?”

A typical Republican:

Totally 100% Delusional?

Published by digby on February 4, 2024

You betcha

That is a real post from Donald Trump. last night.

From Meidas who watches Trump’s rallies. All of them. So we don’t have to:

So it appears that Trump confusing Nikki Haley with his deranged conspiracy about Nancy Pelosi and Trump randomly posting that he looks like Elvis (he does not) has people finally seeing just how delusional, cognitively impaired, and utterly weird Trump’s campaign is. Well, I have been covering all of Donald Trump’s speeches for my reporting with the MeidasTouch Network and it’s just been mind boggling how the media has sought to normalize what can only be described as the strangest and weirdest thing ever. Here is what goes down at a typical Trump speech:

1. He comes out to the playing of the “January 6 Anthem” song which he recorded with some of the most dangerous J6 rioters in jail.

2. He brags how his song with the J6 rioters gets more downloads than Taylor Swift (it does not)

3. He spends a few minutes talking about passing cognitive exams, and how the audience would not pass the exam, but because he is really smart (he is not) he is able to ace the exam.

4. He praises Viktor Orban, the leader of Hungary, who Trump says is the most respected leader in Europe (he is not).

5. He praises President Xi and says he is very strong and rules over 1 billion people with an iron fist and Hollywood couldn’t find an actor as tough as President Xi.

6. He praises Putin and says people say it’s a bad thing he gets along with Putin but he thinks it’s a good thing.

7. He makes weird noises reenacting lifting weights with a trans woman and he says “mommy I can’t do it. Mommy. Ughhh, uhh, mommy help me.”

8. He says he doesn’t like seeing President Biden at the beach and says he has a better body than Biden (he does not)

9. He talks about his hatred of windmills and his hatred of electric cars. He says he would rather be electrocuted than eaten by sharks however.

10. He praises the J6 insurrectionists and calls them hostages.

11. He whines about his court cases, attacks prosecutors, judges, and witnesses, and then praises “the great Alphonse Capone” and brags he was indicted more than Capone.

12. He quotes Hitler and says immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.

13. He says he wants to be a dictator on day 1.

14. He plays QAnon music, audience members often make QAnon sign with their hands, and he talks about how America is a failing nation.

15. He does a weird dance and leaves.

It’s like watching an SNL sketch. The rallies have become parodies of themselves.

Antediluvian Obstinacy

Published by digby on February 4, 2024

When Real Americans cut off their noses to spite their faces:

Donna Knoche made her way up to the podium at the Johnson County Commission hearing on June 6, 2022, her new yellow shirt crisp and her voice steady. It wasn’t something she’d ever thought she’d have to do in her 93 years in the place her grandfather first homesteaded in the 1860s.

Calmly setting aside her walker, she looked at the county commissioners arrayed to her left and began to speak.

“I never in all my life thought I would stand up here to protect our property rights by being able to use our land legally for the best benefit of our family,” she said.

To her right, scores of people were in line behind her. Many of them had other ideas. 

Some implored the commissioners to vote to allow the so-called West Gardner plan, a utility-size array of solar panels, saying the county needed to commit to clean energy for their children’s future.

But others were just as passionately opposed. Many wore matching T-shirts that implored the council to “Stop INDUSTRIAL SOLAR,” testifying for more than three hours against the plan for Knoche’s farm and others across the county. 

To them, the solar plant  would “threaten health and well-being” and did not fit “the character of the land.” It would create “a landscape of black glass and towering windmills,” that would put lives at risk and cause “a mass exodus out of the area.”

The fight played out in front of one small county commission in one 613,000-person county. But at its heart, this fight – and hundreds of others like it across the country – was over the future of the whole nation’s energy supply and, perhaps, the future of the planet. 

As the country races to shift to carbon-free energy to forestall climate change, opposition movements have popped up nationwide to fight new solar and wind farms, hampering America’s chances of meeting its climate pledges.

A USA TODAY analysis of local rules and policies nationwide found that, as of December, 15% of counties in the United States had banned or otherwise blocked new utility-scale wind farms, solar installations or both.

In the past decade, 183 U.S. counties had their first wind projects start producing power, while nearly 375 blocked new wind turbines. In 2023, almost as many counties blocked new solar projects as added them.

The reasons for local opposition are varied and the motives behind them can be murky but often boil down to one essential idea: Renewables are fine, but we don’t want them here.

That’s a problem, said Grace Wu, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy systems and land use change. “If nowhere seems to be the right place, increasingly we’ll have a harder and harder time to site them.”

The land owned by the Knoche family is just one spot in a statewide fight in Kansas, which has both the nation’s fourth best wind resources and, as solar power technology has become more efficient, strong solar as well: the same sunlight that drives photosynthesis in large-scale crops like corn can generate energy in solar panels. 

Today, the state gets 47.13% of its electricity from wind and 0.33% from solar.

Yet now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind turbines and 12 block solar farms. These include outright bans, height restrictions, unworkable setbacks for turbines, size limitations for solar farms, caps on the amount of agricultural land that can be used and, in McPherson County, an “indefinite moratorium” on solar applications.

These efforts mirror those in hundreds of counties and townships across the nation, where the merest hint of a potential project quickly brings forth a Facebook group, yard signs, organized protests and – increasingly – zoning rules and laws that make new renewable energy impossible to build.

Seen as just one flare-up in a nationwide trend to oppose local green-energy projects, the fight in Johnson County shouldn’t be surprising. 

But to Donna Knoche, 93, and her husband Robert “Doc” Knoche, 95, it’s bewildering – and annoying.

For them, leasing acres to a solar farm would simplify their land’s care, keep it available for farming when the lease runs out and allow it to continue to be passed on through the generations.

“We figured it was just one of those sorts of things that you could do – like buying a house or leasing a car. You could just do it on your own and not have to deal with all this complexity,” Donna said.

You would have thought so. But that’s always been entirely self-serving. They are all about freedom — for themselves. When someone else does something they don’t like they are always ready to step in and tell them they can’t. What else is the so-called Religious Right all about if not that?

In a way, this is wingnut NIMBYism. Some of the locals are right wingers who don’t believe in climate change and think it’s all a big lib hoax. But they also don’t like the “look” of solar panels on the land. They’re not pretty like the amber waves of grain. So they are fighting something that could help save the planet, make use of fallow land and provide income for themselves and their neighbors.

Hopefully the younger generation will be smarter but I’m not holding out any hope. The people profiled in that piece are in their 90s so it’s not necessarily a generational thing. It’s a brainwashing thing.

Slick Psycho

Published by digby on February 4, 2024

JD Vance on This Week, calmly demonstrating his revolutionary MAGA zeal:

As you can see, this man is unhinged. But the confident glibness of the slick liar is always unnerving. He’s dangerous.

Lining Up To Be Sheared

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 4, 2024

Tell ya what I’m gonna do

Photo by Martin Pot (Martybugs at en.wikipedia) (CC BY 3.0 DEED
Attribution 3.0 Unported)

School voucher salesmen. This is getting to be like an old “I Love Lucy” episode. The facts don’t matter. Taxpayers are lining up to be sheared.

Friends like Jeff Byant (N.C.) and acquaintances like Jess Piper (Mo.) have hammered on efforts to privatize public schools for years. No matter what they’re called — school vouchers, charter schools, opportunity scholarships — they are schemes for separating public funding from public education and resegregating schools under the rubric of “choice.” For investors and wealthy parents, it’s about the money, either in profits or in tax breaks.

Piper is right, BTW:

So is Bryant. Charters that were once local and parent-organized are being squeezed out by the big-money boyz:

The aim is to bust school budgets and, in the words of Grover Norquist, drown public education in the bathtub so the mandated not-for-profit spending can wind up in the for-profit world.

This from Arizona in 2023:

Arizona’s universal school voucher program that was estimated to cost only $65 million is now poised to cost the state $900 million over the next year, exceeding its available funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. 

John Ward, chief auditor for the Arizona Department of Education, said Wednesday the skyrocketing price tag is due to a projected spike in applicants to the voucher program. Ward estimates that the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, as it’s officially known, will reach 100,000 applicants by July 2024, far outstripping initial estimates and surpassing the $500 million dollar cushion provided in the budget passed last month. 

Don’t believe this is not by design. The scheme is a scam, writes Thomas Mills at PoliticsNC:

When Moore says “ALL families,” he’s referring to wealthy families since the legislature eliminated the income cap for the vouchers. The site crashed because North Carolina has so many people already in private schools who now are eligible for state subsidized education. Rich folks who send their children to private schools are about to get a windfall while poor schools are going to lose funding. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.

The whole program is a scam, the epitome of a bait-and-switch. Republicans pushed through their voucher program as a way to level the playing field, offering poor families a way to send their children to private schools when public schools weren’t working for them. Now, they’re saying that families that don’t send their children to public schools shouldn’t have to pay for them. They have dropped any pretense of helping struggling families and moved straight to subsidizing rich people. According to Republicans, rich people have no community obligations.

Let’s be clear. The name “Opportunity Scholarship” is pure propaganda. There are two types of scholarships, need-based and merit-based. Giving vouchers to rich people just because they decide not to send their kids to public schools is a tax break, not a scholarship. And it’s a tax break designed for wealthy people at the expense of poor people.

Republicans are working hard to damage public schools. They fundamentally don’t believe in the responsibility of the state to provide a sound, basic education. They have cut per pupil spending, let teacher pay lag, and reduced support staff in schools. They’ve tried to dictate curriculum to indoctrinate students in a conservative philosophy, all while claiming public schools are brainwashing our kids with left wing ideas. They’ve left us with demoralized teachers and overworked staff and our children are paying the price.

And the GOP will subvert state constitutions to do it. You may have noticed that sort of thing is in fashion among MAGA Republicans.

If the Republicans win, they will have essentially reinterpreted the constitution. Article 9, Section 2 of the constitution reads, “The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students.” Traditionally, the court has interpreted the “uniform system” of “equal opportunities” to mean the quality of education should be as good in poor counties as it is in rich ones. The GOP would render the clause either aspirational or maybe just a suggestion, despite the word “shall.”

“Are you tired of paying high taxes, or any taxes? Tell ya what I’m gonna do.”