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It could have been a lot worse

Published by digby on May 28, 2023

A debt ceiling fight ending with a whimper not a bang

It’s not over yet, because Kevin McCarthy still has to round up enough votes to get past the Hastert Rule (GOP can’t bring a bill to floor with a majority of Democratic votes) and he might still face a motion to vacate the chair when all is said and done (which is his problem, not ours) it appears that creaky old Joe got the best deal we could have expected, most importantly an agreement to extend the debt limit until after the next election. Donald Trump hasn’t said a word yet. Whether he whips against voting for it is unknown. But you can bet he is not happy about it.

Here’s Dave Dayen at the American Prospect with the view from the progressives:

With one potentially major exception, the relative harm and help was kept to a minimum in the final agreement. It will only be a little bit easier to commit wage theft, or to sell defective or poisoned products. It’ll only be a little harder to get rental assistance or tuition support. Only a few people will be freer to pollute the environment; only a few will find it more difficult to get food. The Internal Revenue Service will only be a little worse. A lot of things will stay the same. Almost nothing will get any better.

That’s the broad strokes of a deal that the White House and House Republicans are selling to their respective bases right now. (House Republicans held a meeting immediately after the agreement was made last night; the White House isn’t holding anything for Democrats until this afternoon, after the bill text is supposed to be posted.) It will dictate federal spending on domestic discretionary programs for two years, and it will raise the debt ceiling for two years. After that, depending on the composition of Congress, we’ll all be here again. The stakes for the 2024 election just got even higher.

Imagine a world where we were a normal country with no debt ceiling, but everything else was exactly the same. Thanks to gerrymandering and the malpractice of the New York Democratic Party, Republicans still have the House, and the budget for the current fiscal year still expires on September 30. Republicans and Democrats would still have to negotiate that budget, and one likely outcome of that would be that negotiations fall apart, that there’s just no way to reconcile what both sides want. In that case, either the government shuts down or a continuing resolution is struck, which means that the government would operate at the current funding levels for a period of time. Maybe we’d live under a CR for the entire two years of this Congress.

That’s approximately what happened in this agreement. The funding levels for fiscal year 2024 on the non-defense discretionary side are at FY2023 levels. House Republicans are saying they clawed things back to FY2022, but a number of funding shifts—most prominently the return of tens of billions of dollars in unspent COVID aid—backfill the non-defense discretionary budget to get it to around FY2023. (The IRS money from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act also adds to this backfill, but while some reports still list that as a $10 billion fund shift, others put it as low as $1.9 billion, which is a little more than 2 percent of the total $80 billion outlay). This cap then rises by one percent in FY2025.

The goal here was to allow both sides to say contradictory things to their members. Republicans can say they achieved the target of the Limit, Save, Grow Act to limit discretionary spending to FY2022; Democrats can say they only froze spending at current levels. And both are sort of right.

Meanwhile, military spending, which is magic and has no impact on the federal budget, actually rises in FY2024 to the level in the Biden budget. (House Republicans wanted it even higher.) Veterans spending has similar privilege, and rises as well. Mandatory spending, like Social Security and Medicare, isn’t touched as well.

The New York Times estimates that this will cut $650 billion in spending over ten years, but only if spending rises at the rate of inflation after the caps lift. That’s highly uncertain: a Democratic government could restore all the cuts, while a Republican government could cut further.

In other words, not great, but not catastrophic.

Here’s Dan Pfeiffer on the politics:

Biden Outplayed McCarthy

Everyone can debate about how we got to this moment until the end of time. I wanted Democrats to include a debt limit extension in the Inflation Reduction Act. Like many others, including the Biden White House, I wanted the Democrats to use the lame duck session to take this legislative weapon of mass destruction off the table. Others wanted the President to ignore the debt limit and cite the 14th Amendment . There is a good faith debate to be had about the wisdom of abandoning the White House’s no-negotiation stance. But this is where we are. Once the House Republicans took over with a looming debt limit expiration, all good options were off the table. There were only suboptimal outcomes on the menu.

The President made a judgment that this budget process was the best way to avoid default and the outcome is better than many thought possible a few days ago.

The spending numbers demonstrate what would have happened this fall if the parties were forced to negotiate a budget agreement to fund the government for next year. Those sorts of cuts were inevitable the moment the Republicans won the House. Our most pressing needs are already underfunded, so these cuts will hurt people. The cuts represent the worst kind of opportunity cost. But once again, they could have been worse.

Budget caps expire after 2025. This is a massive victory when you consider that McCarthy demanded ten years of budget caps.

Joe Biden always says “Compare me to the alternative, not the Almighty.” No Democrat would choose this deal, but the alternatives were default or the “Limit, Save, Grow Act” passed by House Republicans. McCarthy told his allies that his bill was the floor, not the ceiling, of what they could expect by holding the global economy hostage. His proposed bill included devastating cuts in veterans’ health care, cancer research, education, and food safety. The GOP approach would have destroyed thousands of manufacturing jobs by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act.

None of that is included here.

I want to hold out judgment on the work requirements until I see the details, but based on what we know, Biden limited the damage demanded by the GOP.

There’s not much to love in this deal for progressives, but Biden seems to have preserved all of the climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. If that’s the case, it’s a big win.

The deal is not great, but it’s a far cry from what the Republicans wanted. Notably, the Republicans played their best card, and all they got was a suboptimal budget deal.

For the next several days, the President and his team cannot toot their own horn. McCarthy, a notoriously bad vote counter, still needs to round up a majority of his Far Right caucus. The MAGA media and Trump loyalists will crap on the deal and pressure fellow Republicans to vote no. Every triumphant tweet and attempt to tout the decency of this deal will make it harder for McCarthy to round up the votes. Therefore, the White House will remain quiet while the Republicans obnoxiously crow about how they took Biden’s lunch money. But if the White House can’t say it, I will.

Joe Biden played a very tough hand well. He got a better deal than many thought possible, and he forced the Republicans to adopt a series of very unpopular positions that they will have to own on the campaign trail next year. 

There is nothing inspirational about “could’ve been much worse.” No one will run to the polls or volunteer to make phone calls because Democrats “limited the damage.” But the debt limit was President Biden’s first showdown with the MAGA Republican House. All things considered, he navigated it quite well.

Now, let’s hope McCarthy has learned to count votes since the last debt limit crisis.

I think Democrats should be careful about taking a victory lap because the wingnut snowflakes are very delicate and could balk. So, just between us: McCarthy told Fox News, “There’s not one thing in this bill for Democrats” but he is wrong. Biden got the biggest win of all although I’m not sure people realize how big it is. Agreeing to lift the debt ceiling past the election is huge. Trump wanted them to have this fight next spring so that he could fatuously claim that when he was president this chaos never happened (because Democrats aren’t terrorists) and throw the economy into turmoil before the election. That’s not going to happen. neither is a government shut down because they have agreed to fund the government for two years. All the arguments over the budget are over until after the 2024 election. That’s huge.

All that’s going to be happening until 2025 are idiotic culture war arguments and investigations, mostly criminal and mostly against Donald Trump and his cronies. I would say that gives Democrats the advantage. If the economy continues on its current path, they should be in pretty good shape to wage the battle.

A smattering of comments from this morning:

That’s what makes them truly happy. Making foreigners suffer and, in the process, make it easier for another pandemic to come and kill their own followers. Death cult.

What they’re saying about the vote:

That’s almost surely true. Matt Gaetz has been saying that publicly. The real question is whether six of them decide to flex their muscle and put McCarthy through another fraught speaker vote.

Oh my. Does Trump realize what McCarthy’s saying there????

Strawberry fields

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 28, 2023

Nothing is real

Strawberry Field gates, Liverpool. Photo via BBC.

AI tools are the hot new toys every kid wants for Christmas. Just like crypto was the hot, new, get-rich investment? We gave a sidelong glance at using AI in political campaigns just last week.

The Atlantic‘s Russell Berman offers another take beginning with the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, practically begging Congress (in Berman’s telling) to regulate his industry. 

Firms hyping the new tools name-drop candidates such as former Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman whose campaigns have used them already. But?

“I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me.

Promoters pitch generative-AI as a way for small-time candidates to campaigns like the big kids, using it “to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches.” And to increase the number of targeted ads and emails you spend time blocking and deleting.

What the robots won’t do is retail politics:

Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”

And the darker downside?

“We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told Berman:

Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. [Democratic Representative Yvette] Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.

But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.

This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”

Bah, say consultants. Me? I’ve seen this movie too many times to be so glib:

Dr. Ian Malcolm : Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.

Strawberry jam, Strawberry Fields. Nothing is real. It was more harmless in the 1960s.

Texas impeaches AG Ken Paxton

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 28, 2023

“Texas AGs have often been scoundrels”

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, 2021 (CC BY-SA 3.0). There are other Flickr photos of Paxton from the TX Attorney General’s office photostream: all classified “All rights reserved.”

Seems the blush is off the Texas rose (Texas Tribune):

For Angela Paxton, June 1 will always be “I love you day,” the anniversary of the first time a baby-faced Baylor undergrad named Ken told her he loved her.

This year, “I love you day” will have a dark cloud looming over it, as that young man, now the attorney general of Texas, faces removal from office by the state Senate — of which Angela Paxton is a member.

On Saturday, the Texas House voted 121-23 to impeach Ken Paxton on a range of charges, at least one of which involved his wife, and at least one of which related to an alleged extramarital affair. Ken Paxton is suspended while the Senate decides whether he should be removed from office.

Paxton’s reputation as a scoundrel did not stop him in Texas from becoming attorney general. He has been under indictment for felony securities fraud for nearly eight years. His lawyers have managed to redirect the case to friendly turf his home county and delay, delay, delay. If it wasn’t beneath him, presidential candidate Donald Trump might tap Paxton for pointers.

On Saturday, the Republican-led Texas House impeached Paxton “over a series of bribery and corruption allegations, including that he had given special treatment to a campaign donor who helped him remodel his house,” reports The New York Times.

“I am early in my ‘Ken Paxton, WTF’ lessons,” tweeted Jay Rosen, pointing to a backgrounder by Christopher Hooks in Texas Monthly from several days ago:

At the start of this week, the Texas Legislature was sliding toward the conclusion of yet another underwhelming, but basically normal, session. Lawmakers had wasted a lot of time and effort, and soon they would go home. But the calm was illusory. By the end of the week, everything was in flames: blood was sloshing down the Capitol’s marble halls like the building was the Overlook Hotel. Attorney General Ken Paxton called House Speaker Dade Phelan a drunk, urging him to resign and “get the help he needs”; later that afternoon, a House committee announced it had been investigating Paxton for months. The Texas House met Saturday, and after about four hours of debate, voted to impeach Paxton. To paraphrase Mao: everything under the dome is in chaos; the situation is excellent. There’s been a lot of news coverage of the events of the last week. But this being Texas, it’s all underlaid by decades of lore, animosities, and seemingly unaccountable behavior. So if you’re trying to get in on the fun, here’s a primer.

“Texas AGs have often been scoundrels,” the primer begins, letting the uninititated know Paxton follows in a long tradition. Except the term is too restrained to describe the expanse of Paxton’s behaviors.

What follows is another 2,600 words from Hooks outlining Paxton’s running interference for “Nate Paul, an allegedly corrupt Austin real estate kingpin—or former kingpin,” the aforementioned campaign donor and renovator, when the FBI came for Paul. Then Paxton covered up his interference with the investigation. Seven staffers wrote the U.S. Department of Justice accusing Paxton of bribery and corruption. Paxton fired the whistleblowers, Hooks writes, and the Legislature looked the other way.

What’s changed? Hooks offers a few possibilities:

The material facts of the case changed in the past few months. The whistleblowers had a slam-dunk case for illegal termination. Some of them sued. Partly in order to shut down the lawsuit quickly—and to prevent the plaintiffs from liberating AG documents via the discovery process—Paxton settled in February 2023, offering them $3.3 million in taxpayer money. He asked lawmakers to fund the settlement. Even though the dollar amount was trivial, this didn’t sit well with many in the Legislature. Paxton was asking them to eat a turd sandwich so he could protect himself from his own stupidity. It made them look bad. It made the party look bad.

In March, the House Committee on General Investigating opened an investigation into the settlement. The committee is most famous this session for laying the groundwork for the unanimous expulsion of Bryan Slaton, the Republican former representative from Royse City who had sex with a nineteen-year-old staffer after giving her alcohol. The Slaton case was known within the committee as “Matter B.” The Paxton inquiry was known as “Matter A.” The committee has been working on it for months, hiring five investigators. Though their work was clearly diligent and thorough, it couldn’t have been all that difficult: most of the material behind the twenty impeachment charges the committee gave to the House is publicly available. Some of it has been known for the better part of a decade.

And look, these guys all knew what Paxton was. There’s a famous story about Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott that has circulated in Lege circles for years but has never been addressed by either man. When Paxton was a lowly lawmaker and Abbott was the attorney general, the story goes, they ended up in a box together at a football game. Supposedly, Abbott unleashed on Paxton about his unethical and potentially illegal behavior, making his contempt clear. Within just a few years, Paxton was attorney general and Abbott was celebrating him on the campaign trail. Lawmakers and state leaders hadn’t learned to love Paxton, presumably. But taking him on would have eaten up political capital and alienated Paxton’s powerful right-wing backers. So they just . . . didn’t.

The reality is, there was no clear way for the Lege to get rid of Paxton other than by beating him in an election or impeaching him. The first has proven very difficult. Impeachment, which is so alien a process to the modern Legislature that it might as well have come from Mars, needed a hook. Nothing Paxton did before he became attorney general would work—that includes his Servergy escapades. It’s arguably not until this session that the Lege has had a clear case: Paxton asked for taxpayer money to pay off whistleblowers he had illegally fired to cover up other illegal activity. On Friday, the House committee conducting the investigation released a statement in which it underlined the connection. “We cannot over-emphasize the fact that, but for Paxton’s own request for a taxpayer-funded settlement . . . Paxton would not be facing impeachment.”

The Republican-led investigating committee on Thursday returned 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton, the Times reports, “charging him with a litany of abuses including taking bribes, disregarding his official duty, obstructing justice in a separate securities fraud case pending against him, making false statements on official documents and reports, and abusing the public trust.”

Welcome to Texas, where even the impeachments are bigger.

The first thing I ever read by Texas’ own Molly Ivins was titled (IIRC), “Inside the Austin Funhouse,” meaning the state capitol where legislators regularly went to “fist city.” On Saturday they suspended Paxton and went to impeachment for the first time in over a century.

Tinder for Anti-vaxxers?

Published by digby on May 27, 2023

It doesn’t get any more twisted than this:

Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, appears to be launching an online community for anti-vaxxers called 4thePURE.

For a lifetime founding membership of $2,500, users will be free to connect with unvaccinated singles and also gain access to a directory of “COVID-19 unvaccinated patriot businesses,” according to Insider. 

In a video promoting the site, which first made the rounds on Twitter on May 9, Flynn delivers a pitch saying, “I’m honored to announce an opportunity to support a new freedom movement sweeping across the nation. 4thePURE is an online community meant to connect likeminded individuals who courageously stood against the COVID-19 jab campaign.”

I hope most of them are under 60 (which I doubt) because otherwise a few of them are probably be going to be dating in the ICU.

And all the rich donors cheer

Published by digby on May 27, 2023

DeSantis comes out for de-funding the IRS

It makes my head hurt when I think of how the wingnuts capitalized on a few left wing activists saying “defund the police” whenever I hear these calls to “defund” everything from the FBI to DHS to the IRS. You’d think they’d at least be a tiny bit embarrassed by the raging hypocrisy:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he would be “welcoming” of a measure from Congress to defund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) if he’s elected president next year.

The comments from DeSantis, who officially announced this week that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, came during a conversation with radio host and Second Amendment advocate Dana Loesch on The Dana Show.

During the interview, DeSantis was asked whether he would sign a measure from Congress to abolish the IRS through funding means, as well as what he would replace the system with.

“Are you for a far tax, a flat tax, where do you stand on that?” Loesch asked DeSantis.

“So, the answer’s yes. I think the IRS is a corrupt organization and I think it’s not a friend to the average citizen or taxpayer,” DeSantis responded. “We need something totally different.”

“I’ve supported all of the single rate proposals, I think they would be a huge improvement over the current system and I would be welcoming to take this tax system, chunk it out the window and do something that’s more favorable to the average folks.”

He’s going full crack-pot on taxes too by endorsing a flat tax which, naturally, benefit the richest people at the expense of the poor and middle class. This guy never fails to take the fringiest right wing position on every subject.

Ron thanks Elon in the very best way

Published by digby on May 27, 2023

I’m sure you’ll recall that Elon Musk recently held a little event with Ron Desantis. It didn’t go well. But that doesn’t mean Ron isn’t grateful:

FLORIDA GOV. RON DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill regarding spaceflight on Thursday just one day after he announced his presidential run in a glitch-filled interview with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces.

DeSantis signed into law CS/SB 1318 – Spaceflight Entity Liability along with 27 other bills. The law exempts “spaceflight entity from liability for injury to or death of a crew resulting from spaceflight activities under certain circumstances.” The measure also requires “a spaceflight entity to have a crew sign a specified warning statement.”

Florida is a known launching point for SpaceX aircrafts, and the new law could potentially shield Musk and other space flight companies from being sued for accidents that injure or kill crew members.

The law specifies a “spaceflight entity” as a “public or private entity holding a United States Federal Aviation Administration launch, reentry, operator, or launch site license for spaceflight activities or which is otherwise authorized by the United States Government to conduct spaceflight activities.”

I’m so old I remember when Republicans were apoplectic that Hillary Clinton was running for president while her husband ran a global charity because of the “appearance of conflict of interest.” This, however, is completely fine. More than fine. It’s smart.

Paxton Primer

Published by digby on May 27, 2023

If you haven’t been following the story of the most corrupt, immoral wingnut AG in the country, here’s a rundown. Let’s see if Republicans can summon the will to do something about him:

The Republican-dominated Texas House has scheduled a vote on the impeachment of the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, for Saturday at 1 p.m.

The vote was set to take place just two days after a bipartisan but Republican-led committee of representatives recommended that Mr. Paxton should be impeached for a range of abuses that may have been crimes.

The attorney general has been handling various legal challenges for years, weathering multiple investigations with few political repercussions. On Friday, Mr. Paxton again denied any wrongdoing and invited supporters to “peacefully” make their voices heard during the impeachment vote at the State Capitol.

Here’s what to know.

Who is Ken Paxton?

Before he become the attorney general in 2015, Warren Kenneth Paxton Jr. worked as a lawyer and state legislator, serving in both the State House and Senate. His wife, Angela Paxton, became a political force of her own and won a seat in the State Senate in 2018.

As the state’s top law enforcement officer, Mr. Paxton has styled himself as a champion of the social issues that drive Texas conservatives, effectively becoming the state’s chief culture-war litigator. His hard-charging style has led some Republican allies to distance themselves, even as voters have remained loyal.

Mr. Paxton has closely aligned himself with — and been endorsed by — former president Donald J. Trump, and he has used his office to challenge the results of the 2020 election. He has also mounted frequent legal challenges to actions by the Biden administration, and has been at the forefront of Republican-led states’ attempts to challenge the president’s efforts to ease some restrictions on migration on the U.S. southern border.

Voters re-elected Mr. Paxton to a third term by a wide margin in November.

What accusations prompted the House investigation?

In 2020, several senior members of Mr. Paxton’s staff wrote a letter urging an investigation into the actions of their boss. The aides accused Mr. Paxton of using his office to serve the interests of Nate Paul, who was a friend of the attorney general and a political donor.

Mr. Paul, a wealthy real estate investor in Austin, had contacted Mr. Paxton after his home and offices were raided by federal agents in 2019. Mr. Paxton took the unusual step, against his staff’s vociferous objections, of authorizing a state investigation of the F.B.I.’s actions. He appointed an outside lawyer who referred to himself as a special prosecutor to do it, though investigators for the House committee said that he had no prosecutorial experience. F.B.I. officials have not commented on their investigation.

At the time, Mr. Paxton said in a statement that he had “never been motivated by a desire to protect a political donor or to abuse this office, nor will I ever.”

In their 2020 letter, Mr. Paxton’s aides said that he had committed bribery, abuse of office and other “potential criminal offenses.” Four of the aides also brought their concerns to the F.B.I. and Texas Rangers.

According to legal filings in the case, the four aides had also relayed their concerns to the attorney general’s office; several weeks later, they were all fired. The aides filed suit after that, accusing Mr. Paxton of retaliating against them.

As the case proceeded, Mr. Paxton’s office produced a 374-page report that concluded, “A.G. Paxton committed no crime.” He has also challenged the suit, but a Texas court of appeals has ruled against him. In February, Mr. Paxton agreed to pay $3.3 million in a settlement with the four former senior aides.

How did that lead to the possibility of impeachment?

Questions over how to pay the settlement prompted more investigation into the 2020 allegations.

Mr. Paxton asked the Texas Legislature for the funds to pay the $3.3 million. Dade Phelan, the Republican House speaker, who is seen as a traditional conservative, did not support that use of state money. A House investigation into the allegations was begun in order to gather information about the funding request, Mr. Phelan’s spokeswoman said.

Many of the investigators’ findings about Mr. Paxton were already known publicly, from the allegations made in the aides’ lawsuit. But the House committee vote on Thursday rendered the first official judgment on those allegations: They were, legislators said, enough to begin the process of removing Mr. Paxton from office.

What do the articles of impeachment say?

The committee filed 20 articles of impeachment against Mr. Paxton on Thursday. As they were being handed out around the House chamber, Andrew Murr, the chairman of the committee and a Republican, said that they described “grave offenses.”

The articles charge Mr. Paxton with a litany of abuses including taking bribes, disregarding his official duty, obstructing justice in a separate securities fraud case pending against him, making false statements on official documents and reports, and abusing the public trust.

Many of the charges related to the various ways that Mr. Paxton had used his office to benefit Mr. Paul, the committee said, and then fire those in the office who spoke up against his actions.

The articles also accuse Mr. Paxton of benefiting “from Nate Paul’s employment of a woman with whom Paxton was having an extramarital affair,” and of intervening in a lawsuit filed against Mr. Paul’s companies by the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Foundation, an Austin nonprofit group.

What other legal issues are confronting Mr. Paxton?

A federal investigation, opened as a result of the aides’ complaints about corruption and retaliation, has not yet resulted in any charges.

But Mr. Paxton has been under criminal indictment for most of his tenure as the state’s attorney general.

In 2015, his first year in that office, Mr. Paxton was charged with felonies related to securities fraud and booked in a county jail outside Dallas. The charges stemmed from accusations that Mr. Paxton had misled investors and clients — for example, by failing to tell investors that he would make a commission on their investment — while doing securities work in the years before he became attorney general.

He has denied wrongdoing in the case, which has yet to go to trial.

This week’s articles of impeachment accused the attorney general of obstruction of justice in that case, alleging that a lawsuit, which was filed by a donor to Mr. Paxton’s campaign, effectively delayed the trial.

What happens next?

The chairman of the committee investigating Mr. Paxton said he intended to introduce the impeachment resolution for a House vote on Saturday at 1 p.m.

An impeachment would mean that Mr. Paxton would be temporarily removed from office pending a trial on the charges in the State Senate, where some of his closest allies, including his wife, would serve as jurors. The Senate proceedings could well be delayed until after the regular legislative session, which ends on Monday. The Senate could reconvene to hold the trial afterward, though the timing remains highly uncertain.

A lawyer from Mr. Paxton’s office, Christopher Hilton, has said that the committee’s process in issuing the articles of impeachment had been “completely lacking,” and that the issues raised had been fully aired during Mr. Paxton’s successful re-election campaign last year.

In what appeared to be a preview of a possible legal challenge to the proceedings, Mr. Hilton also said that Texas law allowed impeachment only for conduct since the preceding election. Most of the allegations in the articles of impeachment involve conduct that occurred before then.

Update!


The Texas House of Representatives has voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, an unprecedented move following a legislative probe that faulted the third-term Republican for a yearslong pattern of corruption, including abusing his office’s powers, retaliating against whistleblowers and obstructing justice.

Under state law, Paxton is now temporarily suspended from his duties as attorney general and will await a Senate trial.

The vote was 121-23, with two members voting “present.”

“The evidence is substantial. It is alarming and unnerving,” said GOP Rep. Andrew Murr, chair of the General Investigating Committee, during his closing statement following hours of debate. The committee recommended 20 counts of impeachment against Paxton.

The internet is making some people stupid

Published by digby on May 27, 2023

Fergawdsakes:

“Murderers.” “Criminals.” “We are watching you.”

These are just a handful of the threats and abuse sent to meteorologists at AEMET, Spain’s national weather agency, in recent months. They come via social media, its website, letters, phone calls – even in the form of graffiti sprayed across one of its buildings.

Abuse and harassment “have always happened” against the agency’s scientists, Estrella Gutiérrez-Marco, spokesperson for AEMET, told CNN.

But there has been a rapid rise recently, coinciding with extreme weather in Spain. A severe drought has shrunk water levels to alarming lows, exacerbated by record-breaking April temperatures.

The abuse got so bad that in April, AEMET posted a video on Twitter calling for an end to the harassment, and asking for respect. Even the government intervened. Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for the ecological transition, posted on Twitter in support of the agency: “Lying, giving wings to conspiracy and fear, insulting … It is time to say enough.”

The harassment of meteorologists by conspiracy theorists and climate deniers is not a phenomenon confined to Spain.

National weather services, meteorologists and climate communicators in countries from the US to Australia say they’re experiencing an increase in threats and abuse, often around accusations they are overstating, lying about or even controlling the weather.

In Spain’s case, much of the trolling revolves around the rehashing of an old conspiracy theory: so-called “chemtrails.”

Under many of the agency’s Twitter posts, especially those that refer to more extreme weather, users have posted images of blue skies, crisscrossed with wispy, white trails. They falsely claim the trails contain a cocktail of chemicals to artificially manipulate the weather – keeping rain away and causing climate change.

It’s a theory roundly rejected by scientists.

Airplanes do release vapor trails called contrails, short for condensation trails, which form when water vapor condenses into ice crystals around the small particles emitted by jet engines.

But scientists have been clear: There is no evidence “chemtrails” exist.

In April, meteorologist Isabel Moreno wrote a tweet saying “rain skips Spain,” with an image of a band of rain stretching across Europe but missing Spain almost entirely. She was completely unprepared for the response.

“It was one of the hardest experiences in social media in my life,” said Moreno, who appears on the Spanish TV channel RTVE. “I received HUNDREDS of responses to an (apparently) inoffensive tweet,” she told CNN in an email.

Many accused her of covering up weather manipulation.

“Do not take us for idiots,” said one. “They dry us up, and you are the spokesperson for those who do it,” said another. And on, and on.

While there were plenty of supportive messages, too, it was scary, Moreno said. “I have never seen either that amount of responses nor that level of aggression.” It took days for her to be able to go onto Twitter again without feeling anxious or stressed.

This is happening all over the world apparently. The article cites similar problems in France, Australia and the US.

Why is this happening?

Some disinformation experts draw a straight line from the conspiracies that flourished during the Covid pandemic – when experts faced a slew of abuse – to the uptick in climate conspiracies.

People need “trending” topics on which to hang these theories, said Alexandre López-Borrull, a lecturer in the Information and Communication Sciences Department at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain.

As Covid-19 fades from the headlines, climate change has become a strong rallying point. There’s been a big increase in “insults directed at all organizations related to the weather,” he told CNN.

“It’s a logical evolution of the broader trend around pushback on institutions, and the erosion of trust,” said Jennie King, the head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on disinformation and extremism.

These kinds of conspiracies are usually grounded in the idea that a set of institutions is “using the pretext of climate change, or the pretext of solving public policy issues, to enact some insidious agenda,” she told CNN.

And the weather is an easy way in. Many aspects of climate science can feel very technical or abstract, but the weather is something people interact with frequently, said King.

“It’s a much more immediate way to bring a wider audience into that skepticism … planting seeds of doubt against the climate agenda writ large,” she said.

The role meteorologists have in explaining how climate change affects the weather, especially extreme weather, is a particular flashpoint.

Extreme weather can be alarming, especially when there are consequences and sacrifices, such as Spain’s water restrictions.

Conspiracy theories feed on this fear by offering a simple, enticing explanation, said López-Borrull. It’s easier to believe climate change is fake, or a manipulation by powerful people, than get your head around the complex problem and what it means for society.

“Change is hard and scary,” Francis said

There have always been conspiracy theories but the internet turbo charges them. And the rejection of science by tens of millions of people is very worrying.

Where freedom, innovation, and democratic values reign

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 27, 2023

(But not without struggle, it seems)

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, addressed the 2023 graduates of Johns Hopkins University:

The time is of the essence, and it is that essence that I would like to talk about today. One of the most common truisms on Earth is the advice to value or at least not waste time. Why has it become so widespread?

Every person eventually realizes that time is the most valuable resource on the planet, not oil or uranium, not lithium or anything else, but time. Time. The very flow of time convinces us of this. Some people realize this sooner, and these are the lucky ones. Others realize it too late when they lose someone or something. People cannot avoid it. This is just a matter of time.

Now, you can look back at the time you have spent here at the university studying—did you get everything you needed from it? You have even more time ahead of you, a whole lifetime. These are the careers you will build. This is your parents’ pride, which they have every right to, if they raised the children who graduate from Johns Hopkins. These are your families who, I wish you this, will bring you love. These are your children and grandchildren who will inherit a piece of your soul.

Will you be able not to waste this time of your life? This topic seems trivial, but these are very, very difficult questions for every person. How you answer them is how you live. And while it is still possible to find new deposits of oil or lithium, and if in the future humanity can start mining resources in space, it is still purely science fiction to live longer than has been given.

But why am I talking about this now? Recently I was on the frontline again in one of the most fiercely fought areas of the frontline against the Russian occupiers. I went to personally award the best fighters and to congratulate our marines on the Day of Marines of Ukraine. And you know, the front in Ukraine consists of very, very different people who are fighting for freedom and independence. These are people of all ages, and among them are exactly the same folks as you are now. Some of them have already passed their graduation ceremony and others are only dreaming about it.

“THIS CENTURY WILL BE OUR CENTURY, A CENTURY WHERE FREEDOM, INNOVATION, AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES REIGN. A CENTURY WHERE TYRANNIES THAT REPRESS THEIR OWN AND SEEK TO ENSLAVE THEIR NEIGHBORS WILL VANISH FROM US ONCE AND FOR ALL. BUT ALL OF OUR TOMORROWS, AND THE TOMORROWS OF OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN, DEPENDS ON EACH OF OUR TODAYS.”

They and you have similar hopes for life, similar expectations from life. But there is a fundamental difference that comes down to the question of time. The time of your life is under your control. The time of life of our folks on the frontline, the time of life of all Ukrainians who are forced to live through this terrible Russian aggression, unfortunately, is subject to many factors that are not all in their control. Where will the next Russian missile or another Iranian killer drone hit, which Russia is so fond of launching at Ukraine? Will our air defense systems be able to save all the lives at risk? What moment in the battle can be the most risky and which one could be decisive? And how long will this war last? We are trying, we are trying to get a grip on the time of our lives, what is happening to us.

And by the way, if anyone here is going to become a politician, remember that this is exactly what your job will be—to master time. To make the time of your people and country’s life under the control of your people and country under any circumstances, so that your people receive an answer to any question about what the time of their life will be like.

There may be calm times when it is a simple task for politicians. There may be very, very restless politicians who complicate seemingly simple tasks so that they create real crises. There may be different things, and unfortunately there may still be wars. Of course, I do not wish anyone to feel like they are in my shoes, and it’s impossible to give a manual on how to go through life so as not to waste its time.

However, one piece of advice always works. You have to know exactly why you need today and how you want your tomorrows to look like. You have to know this when you are a politician and have to achieve a certain goal for your country. You have to know this when you are a soldier and you have to defend your position so that the whole country is protected. You have to know this when you just have to go through life. Sometimes, however, when you are young and when you are a student, you still need to waste some time. What is life without it? But only sometimes, and when no one else depends on you.

I’m proud that Ukraine is not losing a single day in its defense against Russian terror. Every day we do everything, everything to become stronger, to give more protection to people, to save more lives. The United States has also not lost a single day in helping Ukraine repel the Russian aggression. President Biden, a strong bipartisan coalition in Congress, and most of all the American people have, like the generations before them risen to this occasion and are leading the free world to secure freedom in Europe. We Ukrainians believe a free and secure Ukraine is the final step in the struggle to liberate Europe from the evil of tyrannies. This struggle that brought your great-grandparents to the shores of northern France some 80 years ago.

And I have no doubt you will all soon become great doctors, lawyers, engineers, and titans of new technologies and new businesses. Also, I’m certain a few among you will heed the call to serve and become members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and yes, yes, maybe president one day. Of course after President Biden. Of course. And please somebody of you, please. We don’t need surprises.

And I’m certain you, as your forefathers, will continue to lead the free world. And this century will be our century, a century where freedom, innovation, and democratic values reign. A century where tyrannies that repress their own and seek to enslave their neighbors will vanish from us once and for all. But all of our tomorrows, and the tomorrows of our children and grandchildren, depend on each of our todays. On each of our todays.

Thank you, Johns Hopkins, for your attention. Thank you very much. Thank you America for your support. Slava Ukraini!

“Tyrannies that repress their own”? See post below. They are uncomfortably close.

And in “focusing on the wrong shit” news….

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 27, 2023

sto·​chas·​tic (stə-ˈka-stik) stō-

“[T]he actual threat to American freedom is coming from the states,” begins Jamelle Bouie’s NYT op-ed:

It is states that have stripped tens of millions of American women of their right to bodily autonomy, with disastrous consequences for their lives and health. It is states that have limited the right to travel freely if it means trying to obtain an abortion. It is states that have begun a crusade against the right to express one’s gender and sexuality, under the pretext of “protecting children.” It is states that are threatening to seize the children of parents who believe their kids need gender-affirming care. And it is states that have begun to renege on the promise of free and fair elections.

That it is states, and specifically state legislatures, that are the vanguard of a repressive turn in American life shouldn’t be a surprise. Americans have a long history with various forms of subnational authoritarianism: state and local tyrannies that sustained themselves through exclusion, violence and the political security provided by the federal structure of the American political system.

For anyone needing a refresher, Bouie means decades of pre-Civil War slavery and 100 years of post-Civil War Jim Crow among other national legacies.

For anyone needing a refresher, the struggle to “establish a universal and inviolable grant of political and civil rights, backed by the force of the national government” is ongoing. It’s summarized neatly in “in Order to form a more perfect Union,” etc.

The same people who resisted (successfully) that perfecting work for most of our country’s history are still resisting it even as they swear they love this country more than you do.

Viewed in this light, our time is one in which we face an organized political movement to undermine this grant of universal rights and elevate the rights of states over those of people, in order to protect and secure traditional patterns of domination and status. The only rights worth having, in this world, are those that serve this larger purpose of hierarchy.

The aspirations of our propertied, white-male framers to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” was, for some, always about securing their own class and privilege. “We the People,” like “freedom,” has been a contested idea since the founding of the republic.

Thus today, we see clockwork moral panics promoted by revanchists since the Civil Rights movement to divert attention from their treacherous — yes, treacherous — efforts to turn back the American clock and the work of perfection the framers envisioned to a time when universal rights were not universal, but closely proscribed by race, class, sex, and more.

Bouie concludes:

The plan, as we have seen with abortion, is to unspool and untether those rights from the Constitution. It is to shrink and degrade the very notion of national citizenship and to leave us, once again, at the total mercy of the states. It is to place fundamental questions of political freedom and bodily autonomy into the hands of our local bullies and petty tyrants, whose whims they call “freedom,” whose urge to dominate they call “liberty.”

What Bouie omits mentioning are the contemporary threats of and actual violence inspired and endorsed to “secure traditional patterns of domination and status.” Anything to distract public attention from authoritarian efforts to put “lessers” back in their places and to make freedom and liberty as exclusive they were when the U.S. Constitution went into effect.

The Wanda Sykes meme (above) references the calculated distraction. Mehdi Hasan retweets a few headlines from yesterday highlighting the predictable threats of violence: