The right is relentless. The left needs to be.

Several small stories this morning worth attention.

Lin Wood retired to avoid being disbarred (NBC News):

Lin Wood, a high-profile Georgia lawyer who embraced and promoted former President Donald Trump’s bogus 2020 election claims, told the state bar he was retiring amid disciplinary probes.

“I understand that this request is unqualified, irreversible and permanent,” Wood, 70, said in a letter to the State Bar of Georgia seeking to be transferred to “Retired Status.”

“I further understand and acknowledge that if granted Retired Status I am prohibited from practicing law in this state and in any other state or jurisdiction and that I may not reapply for admission,” he wrote in the letter, which he posted on his Telegram account.

Jack Smith is looking closely at state-level efforts to muck about with 2020 electors (TPM):

Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed the Arizona secretary of state’s office as recently as May for information related to the unsuccessful lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party about supposed errors in the 2020 election. As you’ll recall, Arizona was a hotbed of conspiracy theories tied to the effort to overturn the election after President Biden flipped the longtime Republican stronghold state, leading to Trumpworld outrage, a phony and expensive state election “audit” and the lawsuits.

The previously unreported subpoenas were revealed in a new report by the Arizona Republic Wednesday, which found that Smith’s office also spoke with Republican state lawmakers this spring about events post-2020 election.

[…]

Smith is reportedly interested in documents “related to discovery, proposed exhibits and communications with opposing attorneys,” in the Republic’s words. An outside counsel for the secretary of state’s office reportedly complied with the request from Smith. As the Republic also notes, it’s unclear if Smith’s office has contacted former Republican Gov. Dough Ducey with similar requests. It was Ducey who reportedly silenced his phone when Donald Trump tried to call him while he was certifying the results in the state in 2020.

Florida seems to have a problem “governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” said a federal judge in a small victory against voter suppression (Democracy Docket):

On Monday, July 3, a federal judge temporarily blocked provisions of Florida voter suppression law, Senate Bill 7050, which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in late May. 

One of the blocked provisions bars noncitizen volunteers from conducting voter registration activities on behalf of third-party voter registration organizations (3PVROs) — groups that engage in community-based voter registration. The other blocked provision criminalizes routine retention of voter information for any purpose except voter registration, thus making it a felony to maintain voter information for other activities such as get-out-the-vote efforts.

[…]

“This case arises from Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote,” wrote Chief Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida at the onset of the order. Walker, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also struck down the most harmful provisions of Florida’s 2021 voter suppression law, Senate Bill 90, in March 2022.  “[T]he challenged provisions exemplify something Florida has struggled with in recent years; namely, governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” he continued.

[…]

Finally, Walker held that the voter information retention ban — which exposes 3PVRO volunteers to criminal prosecution if they violate the provision — is “unconstitutionally vague” because it fails to “provide notice of what is prohibited” and authorizes “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” Walker added: “The statute’s text is so devoid of meaning that it cannot possibly give people of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what information they are allowed to retain and for what purposes they may do so.” 

In a particularly symbolic victory, which came down on the eve of Independence Day, Florida voters prevailed. Walker concluded his order by acknowledging the backdrop against which this voting rights win transpired: “Tomorrow, Floridians across the state will commemorate our Nation’s birthday…And amid these patriotic festivities, some may feel moved, for the first time, to embrace their solemn privilege as citizens by registering to vote…In doing so, they would embody those democratic ideals that, for nearly two hundred forty-seven years, have made our system the envy of the world.”

Having to play Whac-A-Mole with these clowns is tedious. Sadly, the right seems to have endless resources for screwing with democracy. Their lack of faith in the red, white and blue should be disqualifying in the eyes of voters, but isn’t. Not when money is power, and money mixed with unquenchable thirst for more money and more power is a toxic brew that holds the right’s attention long term. Not so on the left.

A recent off-the-record conclave of high-dollar liberal donors a friend attended simply reinforced the impression. Lefty millionaires/billionaires would rather throw money at high-profile personalities than into building political infrastructure for the long term. They’d rather bask in the glow of political stardom so they can brag to their friends. Meantime, the right eats our lunch and we play defense.

I don’t know how many of you care about this but it really seems to have reached critical mass over this past weekend and I suspect the end is nigh. You will notice that my twitter feed on the sidebar is gone and I don’t have an explanation for it except that twitter is now so fubared that it isn’t picking up the feed.

I’m still there @digby56 but the writing is on the wall I’m afraid. I’m trying out all the new platforms, Mastadon, BlueSky, Post etc. I’ve kept my handle digby56 at all of them so you can probably find me (or possibly one of the imposters that have crept on some of them…) They all have their good and bad points but they just don’t have the scale. Supposedly Meta is rolling out its new twitter-like platform tomorrow (it’s somehow associated with Instagram) so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know if I land in a particular spot.

It’s a shame. I loved twitter and it was an important resource for my work. But Elon bought it as a toy and he’s smashed it to pieces as spoiled little bully boys tend to do.

Here’s Josh Marshall on the recent events:

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

This is all such transparent nonsense that it beggars belief that even a company as chaotic and mercurially managed as Twitter under Elon Musk would try to claim it with any kind of straight face. We don’t know the precise details of what happened under the hood at Twitter. But the big picture is pretty clear. And you don’t need to be too versed in tech to understand it at that level. Think of it this way: You have an amusement park with 10,000 visitors a day. You cut staffing and ride maintenance so you can only accommodate 5,000 visitors a day. What happens is elementary: Things start falling apart and you’re forced to limit how many people can come in the front gate. That’s your “rate limiting,” rationing tweets.

Most of the drama about Musk and Twitter over the eight months since he took over the site has focused on his antic involvement in the online culture wars, a kind of public midlife crisis played out on the stage of a $44 billion vanity purchase. Probably the best way to understand Musk is that he’s another rich middle-aged divorced guy whose hot new girlfriend is white nationalism. But there’s a whole other part of the drama. He also made draconian staffing cuts, dramatically reduced the core technical capacity to keep the site online and also simply refused to pay various bills, figuring that he and the site are big enough that vendors won’t have the nerve to cut off services. While this was going on Musk’s public antics have savaged the company’s advertising revenues. They come together in a self-reinforcing cycle of budget cuts and revenue shortfalls. Since Twitter is no longer a public company it’s hard to know precisely what mix of expedients led to this weekend’s drama. But that big picture is clear enough.

The ongoing drama since last December has spawned a number of Twitter clone sites offering a refuge to those who want to escape Musk’s Twitter. But each has come up against the same challenge. What makes Twitter Twitter is that everyone’s there. It’s a classic case of inertia and network effects, a basic problem of collective action. Even if most of the site’s users would like to be somewhere else, those network effects keep most of them locked in place. The increasing instability of the site’s infrastructure has that effect even on those who are indifferent to Musk’s politics and conspiracy theories -— which is certainly the bulk of the site’s users. Most of the sites also lack the vast sums of money required to succeed at it. Musk has clearly relied on this fact and mostly he’s been on firm ground doing so.

I frequently note the subject lists I curate on Twitter — resources I find immensely helpful for keeping up on the news topics that interest me most. You can’t reproduce these on the competitor sites because the people I put on the lists aren’t there. Or maybe one or two of them are on one site and a couple on another. But that’s the same difference. Everybody being there is what makes Twitter Twitter.

But now something’s different. In the background, clearly sensing the expanding opportunity, Meta (née Facebook) has been prepping a Twitter replacement. Just as this absurd chaos was enfolding over the weekend they announced that “Threads” will go live tomorrow, July 6. It’s hard to know just how this will play out. But if anyone has the cash and network power to put Twitter out of its misery, it’s Meta. Unsurprisingly, since Facebook is terminally uncool and now basically the social network of old people, Threads will be launched as a discussion app that is part of Instagram. It will be its own separate app but in brand and possible account terms it will be part of Instagram.

This opens a number of possibilities. Numerous celebrities have millions or tens of millions of followers on Instagram. If they can simply port that clout to Threads, or if that’s a quick and relatively simple transition, that really does make it a potentially existential, near-term threat to Twitter.

Your guess is as good as mine how it will pan out. I tend to side with the people who think there won’t be a Twitter replacement. Even Twitter also won’t be the Twitter replacement. It’s probably on a glide path to Friendsterization where Musk acolytes and alt-righters will continue to taunt and own an ever-dwindling number of normal people who keep logging in. You’ll have fragmentation without a single place where everyone is. But whatever … I’m not here to do any big think on that front. What’s notable to me is that Elon Musk is clearly the best thing that ever happened to Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg and Facebook became the symbol, if not always the reality, of everything bad about the platforms and social media: the threats to privacy, monopoly, hate speech, inequality, election subversion, society-wide short attention spans. But Musk — through his mix of billionaire grievance and adolescent rage — has managed to make Zuckerberg now appear to be a comparatively benign figure.

I mean, think about it: His big pitch in 2020 was personally cutting a check for various local governments to fund their pandemic emergency election work. That may have been PR to make up for the disaster of 2016. But in comparison to Elon Musk it looks visionary. And there are worse things than doing good things at least in part for the PR boost. There was never anything about Zuckerberg that made you think he set out to do bad things for the sake of it. That’s been Musk’s calling card with Twitter: transgressive behavior, owning the libs. After all the essence of the whole story, the root of everything that followed, is that he was motivated to purchase Twitter because of his enmity toward the site’s most prominent users. Like Trump, predation is his thing.

I’ve seen tons of people cheering on Threads and hoping it deals a death blow to Twitter because Musk is such a loathsome and dystopic figure. No shame: I’m cheering Zuckerberg too. This may be Musk’s greatest accomplishment — making people cheer on Mark Zuckerberg, in its own way a more improbable and challenging feat than creating Space X or developing Tesla.

Sigh. I hate this crap. I just want stuff that works and I don’t care about all the drama. But it’s caught up to me anyway and now I guess I’ll have to deal with it…

The once-liberal NYT editorial board is calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in a sad and misguided attempt to be seen as Serious. ⁦@AGSNYT⁩ is an elitist before anything else. https://t.co/7KjC4Vaatw

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) July 5, 2023

Is this about privatizing social security to further enrich Wall St? Or maybe they want Donald Trump to be president again? I can’t think of another reason why they wouldn’t just say, “raise taxes on rich people” and leave it at that. (That is the answer to this problem if, in fact, there is one.) After all, other countries are somehow able to provide universal health care and retirement benefits for their citizens. France is experiencing massive protest right now over a proposal to raise the full retirement age from 62 to 64. We should be so lucky. The usual suspects are talking about raising our retirement age to 72!

Maybe they should have a chat with Professor Paul Krugman, their own columnist, who exposed the Deficit Scolds just last May (for the hundredth time) during the debt ceiling negotiations. It’s all nonsense.

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman have the story. All these right wingers bellowing about free speech all the time are beyond hypocritical:

At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race, not gender.

This disconnect captures something essential about state laws and directives restricting classroom discussion across the country: They seem to be imprecisely drafted to encourage censorship. That invites parents and administrators to seek to apply bans to teachers haphazardly, forcing teachers to err on the side of muzzling themselves rather than risk unintentionally crossing fuzzy lines into illegality.

“Teachers are fearful,” Rinderle told us in an interview. “These vague laws are chilling and result in teachers self-censoring.”

In short, when it comes to all these anti-woke laws and the MAGA-fied frenzy they’ve unleashed, the vagueness is the point.

As CNN reported, the district sent Rinderle a letter in May signaling its intent to fire her for a lesson using “My Shadow Is Purple.” The book is written from the perspective of a child who likes both traditionally “boy” things like trains and “girl” things like glitter. Its conclusion is essentially that sometimes blue and pink don’t really capture kids’ full interests and personalities — and that everyone is unique and should just be themselves.

The district’s letter, which we have obtained, criticized Rinderle for teaching the “controversial subject” of “gender identity” without giving parents a chance to opt out. She was charged with violating standards of professional ethics, safeguards for parents’ rights and a policy governing treatment of “controversial issues.”

But Rinderle and her lawyer, Craig Goodmark, argue that the policy on “controversial issues” is extremely hazy. They point out that it prohibits “espousing” political “beliefs” in keeping with a 2022 state law that bans efforts to persuade students to agree with certain “divisive concepts” that don’t reasonably apply here.

After all, in that law, those “divisive concepts” are all about race. Among them are the ideas that the United States is “fundamentally racist” and that people should feel “guilt” or bear “responsibility” for past actions on account of their race. It’s not clear how this policy applies to Rinderle’s alleged transgression.

What’s more, we have learned that this action was initiated by a parent’s troubling email to the district, provided to us by Rinderle and her lawyer, in which the parent notes that teachers were told to avoid “divisive” concepts. The parent then writes, “I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”

That is a highly debatable point. Even if some might consider anything related to “LGBT” as divisive for students in fifth grade, should this really be treated as self-evident? And should it really lead to a teacher’s firing?

“This particular email initiating a termination is absurd,” Goodmark told us. “This is one parent’s view of what’s ‘divisive’ being adopted by a whole district.”

Asked for comment, the district declined to discuss specifics but said it’s “confident” that its action is “appropriate” given Rinderle’s history. The district’s letter to her says students and parents have previously complained about her choices of subject matter and class conduct.

We think it’s reasonable to debate whether parents of fifth-graders deserve a heads-up on a lesson about a book like this. And we understand that a parent might not want their fifth-grader to undergo such a lesson. These matters will be litigated during Rinderle’s hearing in August.

Nonetheless, it’s absurd that Rinderle is charged with flouting policy on “controversial issues” via such a ridiculous utilization of state law. Her predicament illustrates the danger teachers face in trying to navigate policies that seem designed to be hard to follow: The incentives strongly encourage some to avoid challenging topics (lest they face a fate such as Rinderle’s), and others to go searching for transgressions on absurd pretexts (as a parent did here).

“This is the shocking new normal in American public schooling,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, told us. “In many states, a widening circle of content can get someone in trouble. More and more educators are getting the message: There’s a target on their backs.”

Last weekend, at the national summit of the absurdly named right-wing group “Moms for Liberty,” GOP presidential contenders all raged against wokeness, demonstrating to the base how attuned they are to the hunger for more laws cracking down on open discussions in classrooms.

“We’re not going to have the sexualization of our children in our schools!” fumed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Former president Donald Trump outdid DeSantis, vowing to “liberate our children from the Marxists, lunatics and perverts.”

The essence of this mania is that it is forever hunting for new offenders on the flimsiest of pretexts. As GOP legislatures put the force of state power behind this push, they are creating an array of blunt weaponry, which in turn further encourages parents and local officials to sniff out new sexualizers of children, new Marxists, new lunatics and new perverts wherever they can be found. Whatever becomes of Rinderle, the scalps will assuredly continue piling higher.

This makes me so sad. They really want to go back to the creepy gender-conforming of the 1950s. It won’t work, of course. People aren’t going back to that. But a lot of people are going to suffer anyway as these fucked up people get their thrills torturing vulnerable people, especially their own kids. It’s just sick.

Of course keep in mind that they have always been hostile to teachers, a unionized group the majority of which are educated women and a pathway to the middle class for racial and ethnic minorities. They have been attacking them as public employees for decades, taking over school boards and starving public schools of funds. The war on knowledge and education is long running. This is just the latest battle and they are taking no prisoners.

Crazy state parties are on their own

Reuters reports that GOP donors are getting sick of throwing good money after bad to the Trump kooks who have taken over various state parties:

Real estate mogul Ron Weiser has been one of the biggest donors to the Michigan Republican Party, giving $4.5 million in the recent midterm election cycle. But no more.

Weiser, former chair of the party, has halted his funding, citing concerns about the organization’s stewardship. He says he doesn’t agree with Republicans who promote falsehoods about election results and insists it’s “ludicrous” to claim Donald Trump, who lost Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, carried the state.

“I question whether the state party has the necessary expertise to spend the money well,” he said.

The withdrawal of bankrollers like Weiser reflects the high price Republicans in the battleground states of Michigan and Arizona are paying for their full-throated support of former President Trump and his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The two parties have hemorrhaged money in recent years, undermining Republican efforts to win back the ultra-competitive states that could determine who wins the White House and control of the U.S. Congress in next November’s elections, according to a Reuters review of financial filings, plus interviews with six major donors and three election campaign experts.

Arizona’s Republican Party had less than $50,000 in cash reserves in its state and federal bank accounts as of March 31 to spend on overheads such as rent, payroll and political campaign operations, the filings show. At the same point four years ago, it had nearly $770,000.

The Michigan party’s federal account had about $116,000 on March 31, a drop from nearly $867,000 two years ago. It has yet to disclose updated financial information for its state account this year.

The two parties have “astonishingly low cash reserves,” said Seth Masket, director of the non-partisan Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, adding that state parties play a key election role, helping promote candidates, fund get-out-the-vote efforts, pay for ads and recruit volunteers.

“Their ability to help candidates is severely limited right now.”

The Arizona party spent more than $300,000 on “legal consulting” fees last year, according to its federal filings, which do not specify the type of legal work paid for.

In that period, legal fees were paid to a firm that had filed lawsuits seeking to overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona, according to separate campaign and legal disclosures. Money was also paid to attorneys who represented Kelli Ward, the former party chair when the Justice Department subpoenaed her over her involvement in a plan to falsely certify to Congress that Trump, and not Democratic President Joe Biden, had won Arizona, plus when a congressional committee subpoenaed her phone records.

More than $500,000 was also spent in Arizona on an election night party and a bus tour for statewide Trump-backed candidates last year, the financial filings show. All of those candidates, who supported the former president’s election-steal claims, lost in last November’s midterms.

It’s not just Weiser who’s had enough.

Five other Republican donors to the Arizona or Michigan parties, who have each donated tens of thousands of dollars over the past six years, told Reuters they had also ceased giving money, citing state leaders’ drives to overturn the 2020 election, their backing of losing candidates who support Trump’s election conspiracy and what they view as extreme positions on issues like abortion.

“It’s too bad we let the right wing of our party take over the operations,” said Jim Click, whose family has been a longtime major Republican donor in Arizona. He and other donors said they would give money directly to candidates or support them through other political fundraising groups.

Kristina Karamo, chair of the Michigan state party, didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. In the campaign for her position, she said that she wanted to break ties with established donors, accusing them of exploiting the party for their own gain, and wants to rely more on grassroots members.

Ward, who stepped down as Arizona party chair in January after four years at the helm, told Reuters that she and her team had always had revenues to cover outgoings and had left her successor at least three months’ operating expenses plus a “robust fundraising operation.”

Dajana Zlaticanin, a spokesperson for new chair Jeff DeWit, said that when he took over, “cash reserves were extremely low and previous bills kept coming in.” Contributions are on the uptick, she said, with over $40,000 raised in May.

The Republican National Committee, which oversees Republican political operations nationally, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the finances of the two state parties.

‘I SEE NO SUN COMING OUT’

Arizona and Michigan, both won by Biden in 2020, are among just a handful of swing states that will likely decide the race for the presidency in November 2024.

Not all Republican parties have fared as badly financially as Arizona and Michigan. For example, the swing state of North Carolina – where Republican leaders haven’t focused so heavily on Trump’s election-steal fight – ended 2022 with nearly $800,000 in its federal accounts, according to the filings.

It is difficult to get a complete picture of parties’ finances, though, given time lags in disclosures and because not all of their accounts are subject to reporting requirements.

Furthermore, state parties don’t rely solely on individual donors, they also receive money from national party organizations, outside groups and political action committees.

Michigan was a hotbed of conspiracy theories after Trump lost the 2020 election, and this month Karamo was fined by a county judge for filing a lawsuit that made unfounded claims about voting irregularities in Detroit.

Tensions over transparency have started to boil over.

Last week former state party budget chairman Matt Johnson launched a broadside against Karamo, two days after she removed him from his post, accusing her of keeping his committee in the dark about the party’s finances.

“As far as we could tell from the piecemeal information we received, the party’s fundraising had been extremely meager, and the spending was so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy,” he said.

Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said the financial figures disclosed so far by the party underscore the difficult task of supporting operations without the financial backing of big donors.

“They are effectively broke and I don’t see the clouds parting and the sun coming out on their fundraising abilities,” he said.

‘DETRIMENTAL TO CAMPAIGNS’

The review of the two Republican state parties’ filings shows that a near shut-off of the donor spigot is contributing to their financial woes.

The Michigan party’s federal account took in $51,000 in the fist three months of this year, putting it on pace to raise less than a quarter of its haul in the first half of 2019, the same period in the last presidential election cycle.

In March, Karamo told a gathering of local officials that the party had $460,000 in liabilities after the 2022 midterm elections. While not unusually large, the debt would normally be covered by fresh fundraising.

The Arizona party, meanwhile, raised roughly $139,000 in the first three months of this year, according to state and federal filings. In the comparable period in 2019, in the months after the 2018 midterm elections, it raised more than $330,000.

New Arizona chair DeWit, who was NASA’s chief financial officer in the Trump administration, is working to make the party attractive to donors again by focusing on winning elections, spokesperson Zlaticanin said.

Some donors in Michigan said they had started talking with each other about how best to bypass the state party and support individual Republican candidates. But the state party’s organizational heft will be hard to replicate, said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party.

“You have to have boots on the ground and you can’t build that kind of infrastructure quickly enough to win the 2024 election,” Timmer said.

Jonathan Lines, who preceded Ward as Arizona’s party chairman up to 2019, said he expected new donor money to mostly go to political action committees, and other groups who fund campaigns, rather than the state party.

“But not having the state party well funded is detrimental to many Republican campaigns next year,” he added.

Until Trump gets off the stage it’s hard to see how they can get their act together and the long term damage will be severe. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of weirdos.

TPM reports:

As Trump-appointed judges vie to see who can produce the most nakedly partisan rulings completely divorced from precedent and case law, a new contender has thrown his hat in the ring. 

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty on Tuesday barred Biden administration officials — everyone from Heath and Human Services to the Centers for Disease Control to the FBI — from flagging posts that spread misinformation to social media companies. Doughty ruled that such contact is a violation of the First Amendment. The companies include Facebook/Meta, Twitter, YouTube/Google, Instagram and many more. 

The judgment bans the named officials from meeting with the companies, flagging worrying content, emailing or calling the companies about content, following up with the companies or even collaborating with groups like the Election Integrity Partnership to identify troublesome posts. 

“Although this case is still relatively young, and at this stage the Court is only examining it in terms of Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the merits, the evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” Doughty writes. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The case now goes through the familiar gauntlet of right-wing-friendly venues: the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and, likely, the Supreme Court. Should Doughty’s ruling survive, it’d be a sea change in the interpretation of this area of law. His injunction, at least, will likely remain in place for months, given the conservative dominance of the 5th Circuit and the time it’ll take for the case to reach the Supreme Court.  

Many anti-Biden administration litigants have recently filed lawsuits in the same pipeline — Trumpy district judge to 5th Circuit to Supreme Court — on everything from abortion to the Affordable Care Act.

The high court, though, has overturned Doughty before; he made the initial ruling banning the Biden administration’s vaccine requirements for health care workers at facilities that receive funding from Medicare and Medicaid, which the Court ultimately let stand.

Doughty tosses in a few exceptions to the contact ban, including on matters of national security and “criminal efforts to suppress voting, to provide illegal campaign contributions, of cyber-attacks against election infrastructure, or foreign attempts to influence elections.” 

Doughty tipped his cards far earlier in the process, allowing the plaintiffs — a pair of red state attorneys general plus individuals including The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft — to extract extensive discovery from administration officials like far-right archenemy Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s said he wasn’t involved in online content moderation. 

This newest ruling also dribbled out of the right-wing media vortex of conspiracy theories, where “government censorship” of conservatives’ social media activity is a constant complaint.

Fury about supposed “shadow banning,” stifling of content and throttling of follower counts is not relegated to right-wing cranks on message boards or those who host Fox News shows: Republican elected officials consistently echo the conspiracy theory, occasionally hauling in tech CEOs before their committees to answer shouted questions on the topic.

The Republican-majority House Judiciary Committee, among the censorship-obsessed and which has already subpoenaed the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, interrupted its anodyne Fourth of July posts to gleefully retweet news of the judge’s ruling, festooned with American flag emojis. 

“HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!” the committee celebrated.

This is going to be a common occurrence going forward. The Federalist Society salted the judiciary with many of these MAGA fools and they are working hand in glove with the looney MAGA right conspiracy freaks. And some of this nonsense is going to make it all the way to the top and we’ll just have to see how far down the rabbit hole the Supremes are willing to go.

Last week in Philadelphia Moms for Liberty held a cattle call for presidential candidates at their “Joyful Warriors” conference and they got all the big names to show up. This was quite a get for a group that only started in 2021 by Sarasota Florida school board members Tiffany Justice, Tina Descovich and Bridget Ziegler to protest masking and vaccine mandates in public schools during COVID-19. They are big players now in Republican politics with big donors and major politicians competing for their favor.

And like so many others in the GOP they also have ties with the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group and have been designated antigovernment extremists by the Southern Poverty Law Center which they are wearing it with pride, as right wing groups tend to do:

Like for instance, when you actually quote Adolph Hitler in one of your newsletters.
Although, with this one, what kind of apology can there really be?

Sorry we got directly quoting Hitler? pic.twitter.com/OCGaomCV0a

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) July 2, 2023

Florida GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler, quoted above, also happens to be married to Bridget Ziegler, one of the founders of Mom’s for Liberty so for all its claims to being a grassroots organization, let’s just say they had friends in high places from the very beginning. (Their very first conference was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.) It’s not at all surprising that it very quickly grew into a national “parents rights” movement protesting the teaching of America’s racial history and LGBTQ issues, banning books, abridging free speech, ending tenure for teachers, militant anti-transgender activism and fervent opposition to the teachers unions among other things. They are soldiers in the culture war, fighting what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would call the “woke” agenda, the most animating issue among the hardcore GOP base. So of course, the presidential candidates showed up for their little confab.

Their origins being in Florida, they have a special affinity for DeSantis. He was the star of their first gathering last year where they presented him the “Sword of Liberty” which is kind of like a wingnut Oscar, for him apparently. This year he assured them he would keep fighting the woke wherever it appears:

Six ‘wokes’ in 19 seconds today at the Moms for Liberty conference. He’s really fighting the woke. pic.twitter.com/n4n58se4Ef

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Sadly for him, he was upstaged by the big man, Donald Trump who gave the keynote and was received with the usual MAGA ecstasy. The moms really loved him. (And why not? He’s been married to three different women and had kids with every one.) He called them ” the best thing that ever happened to America” and they swooned. He made them some explicit, if completely unworkable, promises like this one:

Trump tells Moms for Liberty that as President he will allow parents to elect the Principals of schools every year, so if they don’t like a school Principal they can vote them out of the job. pic.twitter.com/QEdpMYqR3E

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) June 30, 2023

Gadfly candidate  Vivek Ramaswamy told the gathered throng that he was”privileged to join my favorite hate group and extremist group today” and Nikki Haley called herself a terrorist in solidarity:

“When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said ‘Well then, count me as a mom for liberty because that’s what I am.”

People seem to be very impressed by these “joyful warriors” even those who are appalled by the extremism. They seem to believe that they have done something unprecedented by inspiring all these women to become involved in politics and form grassroots chapters all around the country. They claim to have over 100,000 members who are involved at the local level. But are they really that extraordinary?

One of the largest global protest marches in history took place on January 21st, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. The Women’s March that day spawned what was soon to become known as “the Resistance” which started out as a sort of worldwide support group made up of mostly women who felt, rightly, that the election over the unfit, sexually abusing, reality show host over the first woman nominee was a portent of very bad things to come. They bought t-shirts and books by the thousands, they created activist aps and online groups and came together wherever possible to commiserate and share their angst and anger over what had happened. But it wasn’t long before they began to organize.

Within a year, the Resistance had created dozens of grassroots electoral organizations like Indivisible, Run for Something and Swing Left mostly led and staffed by women, dedicated to electing Democrats to congress to put a check on Trump. It worked. The Democrats took back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms and the Resistance groups got much of the credit.

Now. as time went on some of these groups got funding from big donors. But they weren’t married to state chairmen of the Democratic party or throwing conferences sponsored by major Democratic think tanks in the first year. It was an authentic reaction to a cataclysmic event. These Moms for Liberty are a GOP front group fanning the flames of the culture war as a cynical political strategy.

And they have miscalculated. Like Twitter CEO Elon Musk who recently agreed that childless people probably shouldn’t have a right to vote because they “have little stake in the future,” their fetishization of “parents rights” as some kind of right wing monolith is just wrong. Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked at the numbers:

[I]t is not the case that parents are inherently politically conservative. When Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) suggested letting parents cast votes for their kids — a different flavor of this same discussion — The Washington Post looked at the effect that might have. But we can summarize the divides here more succinctly, using data from the biennial General Social Survey.

More than half of those without any kids identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. (From here on, I’ll just lump independents who lean toward a party in with the party itself.) More than a third of that group identify as liberal Democrats. Among those with children who are all under the age of 18, just under half identify as Democrats, nearly double the percentage that identifies as Republicans.

And that’s because people with young children are young themselves and young people are not flocking to the GOP these days. Republicans are older and while they may have kids they’re long out of school. There just isn’t a huge constituency for this crusade.

As Bump points out, while parents have always had lots of advice about how children should be raised, “schools and other institutions, meanwhile, hired professional educators and administrators who focused on understanding how to educate a diverse range of children generally with an eye toward creating well-rounded citizens.” Today everyone is an expert on everything because they “do their own research” on Facebook and it’s easily exploitable by savvy operators. Tell those people what they want to hear and they’ll believe it.

Moms for Liberty doesn’t speak for parents of schoolkids who aren’t onboard with book banning and bullying trans kids and second guessing every word that comes out of a teacher’s mouth and that’s most of them. If they are fooling themselves into believing that they do they are in for a rude awakening. But I doubt their leaders care one way or another about any of this. It’s just about getting the elderly Fox News voters riled up about the latest brouhaha. It’s infuriating that as with all these culture war battles, hardworking people and innocent kids are sacrificed so they can keep their base terrified and angry.

Salon

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play

Howie Klein this morning addresses why it’s important that Democrats recruit candidates (even “feckless” ones) and run everywhere. Run For Something is working on that. So is North Carolina Democrats’ new state chair, Anderson Clayton, 25. She’ll appear on a featured panel next week at Netroots Nation-Chicago with three other women state chairs: Lavora Barnes of Michigan, Shasti Conrad of Washington, and Jane Kleeb of Nebraska.

“In 2022, we left 44 seats uncontested last cycle,” Clayton told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi in May. That cannot happen again. “Democracy is not democracy without choices.”

Plus, you can’t win if you don’t show up to play.

Awesome.

Run. Everywhere. https://t.co/9STnEEasx4

— David Pepper (@DavidPepper) May 20, 2023

Democrats need to give voters a reason to show up, Klein writes. What matters to them is results. In Minnesota, for example, where Democrats in 2022 won a narrow trifecta. Democrats chose to show voters what they could do with their narrow governing majorities. They passed transformsational legislation to benefit constitutents (Down With Tyranny):

“The house speaker, Melissa Hortman, said state Democrats viewed the trifecta as a fleeting window to legislate aggressively. ‘Having Republicans in control of part of state government for the last 10 years and being prevented from doing really anything progressive at all created a lot of pent-up demand to chalk up some progressive victories,’ said Hortman.”

Working with grassroots community activists, Democrats passed laws protecting women’s Choice, unions, renters’ rights and voting rights. “During the same session that the felony re-enfranchisement bill passed, the state passed the Democracy for the People Act, which, among other reforms, allows 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote, establishes automatic voter registration in some state agencies, requires voting materials be available in the three most commonly spoken languages in the state, and penalizes voter intimidation and lies.”

That and a lot more.

Republicans, naturally, complain about “overreach” about which they’d have no qualms if it was them. Klein’s friend, Dorothy, a Democratic political operator from California, tells him:

“Democrats need to focus on where they are going– not how they are going to get there, on outcomes instead of process. For example– not getting your pay docked if you have to take time off to take your child to the doctor even if it’s for a well-baby checkup, being able to afford enough bedrooms to house your family, knowing that the foods you eat are safe to eat, knowing the water you drink is safe to drink, knowing the air you breathe is safe to breathe, knowing that that guy standing next to you is not carrying an AK-15, knowing that if you need an abortion you can get one. Democrats need to tell people what the outcomes will be if they vote for them. They don’t need lectures on history. They don’t need to know where we once were or how we got where we are today. They need to know what Democrats will do for them now.”

Dorothy is quoting the Gospel according to Anat Shenker-Osorio:

“Inspire through outcome, not process,” says progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio, citing an example from a pollster.

“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”

"When you go off to work you know that your kid is safe, loved & cared for. and you can afford it."@anatosaurus on @TheLastWord on how to talk about great policies in Build Back Better.
Watch @Lawrence smile when she says,"Stop selling the recipe, start selling the brownies." pic.twitter.com/iwURuFxEGe

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) October 13, 2021

Outcome, not process. “Paint the beautiful tomorrow.” Run everywhere. And once in office, fight like hell for the deliverables.

The ambulance’s red glare

“Make America Great Again” is Donald Trump’s freighted message to a conservative political base longing for “the good, old days.” You know, when men were men, women were women, white Christians were dominant, non-whites knew their place, and the biggest worry on the Fourth of July was fireworks injuries.

Somehow, I don’t think MAGAstan is fretting about that last bit.

From CNN’s daily “5 Things” news summary:

Independence Day celebrations were marred by violence over the holiday weekend after several mass shootings took place across the US. At least nine people were injured in a shooting early this morning in Washington, DC, as the victims were celebrating the Fourth of July in the nation’s capital. In Philadelphia, a shooting Monday left five people dead and two others wounded. On the same night in Fort Worth, Texas, a shooting killed three people and wounded eight others. Separately, block parties recently turned deadly in Indianapolis and Baltimore, leaving investigators scouring the crime scenes for answers. Data shows the Fourth of July has accounted for the most mass shootings of any other day of the year in nearly a decade, according to a CNN analysis.

If you missed the memo that shooting your neighbors is now how “patriots” celebrate the holiday, you’re not alone.

Hot August nights in July

Another factoid about yesterday’s July Fourth festivities (Washington Post):

Tuesday was the hottest day on Earth since at least 1979, with the global average temperature reaching 62.92 degrees Fahrenheit (17.18 degrees Celsius), according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

As a result, some scientists believe July 4 may have been one of the hottest days on Earth in around 125,000 years, due to a dangerous combination of climate change causing global temperatures to soar, the return of the El Niño pattern and the start of summer in the northern hemisphere.

In the United States, 57 million people were exposed to dangerous heat on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post’s extreme heat tracker. At the same time, China was gripped by a sizzling heat wave, the Antarctic is hotter than usual during its winter, and temperatures in the north of Africa reached 122F, Reuters reported.

The heat record has stood since … Monday.

A “triple whammy” is on its way in coming months, says Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University, “when so “when global warming, El Niño and the annual cycle all line up together.”

Meaning?

Meaning the world’s deadliest animal, the mosquito, is “on the move,” bringing with it malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases (Washington Post):

In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.

“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.

Not just northward but into higher elevations.

Different mosquitoes thrive under different temperatures. The Anopheles mosquito carries malaria; the Aedes aegypti and the Aedes albopictus mosquitoes carry diseases like dengue and chikungunya. But the A. aegypti thrives at higher temperatures than the A. albopictus. As different parts of the world warm at different rates, some mosquito-borne diseases will thrive while others will be put under stress.

According to a study published in 2019, both species are expected to spread northward in the United States over the next 30 years. By 2050, the A.aegypticould increase its range in the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest; the A. albopictus could make it as far north as Michigan and Minnesota.

We are sleepwalking into the end of our existence on this planet. https://t.co/ZeIxfBfFAZ

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) July 4, 2023

The good news? It might not be sea level rise or gunfire that gets you.

(h/t CT)

We live in hope…

Langston Hughes 

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!