Republicans are doing everything they can think of to block everything the Democrats are trying to get done for us.
Senate Republicans voted to continue their filibuster, blocking the House-passed bill expanding access to VA Healthcare and Disability Benefits for Veterans exposed to toxins during their military service (PACT Act) - the Republicans actively prevented the bill from advancing to final passage.
Our cousins across the pond are often just as screwy as we are.
It has to be good that they're showing signs of coming out of their own version of this weird 21st century political delirium, as Boris Johnson has submitted his resignation to parliament.
Jonathan Pie
The Atlantic - David Frum, asking a very pertinent question: (pay wall)
Why Won’t Republicans Act Like Britain’s Tories?
Boris Johnson’s party ditched its dysfunctional leader, yet the GOP remains in thrall to the much more dangerous Donald Trump.
The head of government is caught in a series of scandals. The scandals are not necessarily so important in themselves. Many of them involve purely personal misconduct. But if exposed, they would shock public opinion and threaten the leader’s hold on power. So he lies and lies and lies again. He mobilizes his cabinet and staff to lie for him. And when the truth does finally catch up with him, he tries to brazen things out. The people voted for him. He has a mandate. He won’t go willingly—and he threatens his colleagues that if they try to force him out, he will pull down his administration and his party with him.
The British media are very fond of comparisons between outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson and ex-President Donald Trump. But the political convulsion that toppled Johnson looks a lot more like the uproar that led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the late ’90s than anything in Trump’s record.
Johnson ignored ethics rules and even the law of the land. He disregarded the British value of shared sacrifice in times of hardship by attending parties prohibited by anti-COVID health orders. He was routinely unreliable and untruthful. But Johnson did not attack the constitutional structure of his country.
Johnson will leave office for much the same reason, and in much the same way, as his predecessors Theresa May, David Cameron, and Tony Blair left it: because he lost the confidence of his party. The Conservatives won an 80-seat majority in the general election of December 2019. Johnson claimed that majority as his own personal accomplishment. His resignation in July 2022 confirms the norm of British democracy: Any mandate conferred by the voters belongs to the majority party in Parliament, not to the party leader.
Britain faces many troubles post-Johnson: the accumulating economic harm wrought by the decision to quit the European Union; the threat of Scottish withdrawal from the United Kingdom; the challenge of maintaining peace and an open border between EU-member Ireland in the south and non-EU Ulster in the north. It faces those problems with its system of government in essentially the same working order as it was before Johnson gained the prime ministership.
This outlook is very different for the United States post-Trump. Like Johnson, Trump used every available legal means to hold power as long as he could. Unlike Johnson, Trump then turned to illegal means. He forbade his administration to cooperate in the transition to its elected successor. He pressured state governments to violate their own laws and void their election, replacing their democratically chosen presidential electors with stooges selected by state Republican parties.
When all else failed, Trump fomented a violent attack on the Capitol to interrupt the last formality of the presidential election. Trump hoped that he could intimidate his vice president into violating the law to overturn the election. And if the vice president failed to comply, Trump seemed willing either to put the vice president to flight or even to allow his supporters to kill him—presumably so that some replacement could overturn the election certification in the vice president’s place.
That was terrible, but what has happened since is, if possible, worse. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s attempted putsch, many leaders in Trump’s party voiced condemnation—though even then, most refused to hold him to account by the constitutional means available: impeachment and removal. In the months since January 6, 2021, Republican leaders have declined to enforce any accountability. Instead they have gradually submitted to his demand that their party protect him from the law and pretend to believe his excuses for his plot to seize the presidency by violence: that there was something defective about the election he lost by 8 million votes—even as his party in fact gained seats in the House and Senate.
Few Republican leaders actually believe Trump’s crazy claims. Many are making behind-the-scenes efforts to sabotage his renomination in 2024. But they won’t stand up and be counted—and if he beats them in party primaries, they have declared in advance that they will submit to his leadership and try their best to return him to the presidency he tried to steal after the 2020 election.
That’s a crisis of democracy.
The British face nothing like it. As severe as their national problems are, their institutions proved more than robust in the face of Johnson’s transgressions. Johnson, for his part, never fundamentally tested the British constitutional system: All he wanted from office was a good time and an easy job.
On this side of the Atlantic, things look much darker. The United States had mechanisms to deal with Trump’s attempted coup. He could have been removed from office that very night by the mechanism of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. He could have been convicted and disqualified from ever holding office again by conviction in an impeachment trial.
Unlike Johnson’s party, Trump’s party protected him to the end from accountability for his crimes against the Constitution. With rare exceptions, his party protects him still. The only president in U.S. history to attempt a violent seizure of power remains the front-runner for his party’s nomination in 2024.
The British today can expect a return to the normal problems of governance, albeit aggravated by the self-harm of Brexit but otherwise with their parliamentary democracy intact. For Americans post-Trump, democracy itself remains the question on every election ballot.
It seems to be something of a trend among "conservatives" and Republicans: If you've done something particularly heinous, get yourself involved in politics. That way, you can claim "persecution" when the law comes after you.
If you have some trouble finding the stuff you need at the store in the next several-days-to-weeks, let Greg Abbott know your opinion on the shit he's pulling at the border.
Madison Cawthorn (R-NC11) went too far when he spilled some (alleged) dirt on unnamed Republicans, and Kevin McCarthy just had to step in and have a word.
At first blush, it's the easy shot to call him an idiot and blow it off.
But he's not an idiot. At least, he's not the kind of idiot who doesn't know that legislation doesn't just fall out of the sky all neatly wrapped for him to peruse.
He's already had opportunity to know what's in the thing. It's been rattling around in various forms, in various committees for a while now, so he's not in the dark on this shit. He's got staffers who wrangle that kinda thing for him and they know what's in it even if he insists on staying willfully ignorant of it.
So what's the deal?
Here's the deal: Cawthorn knows his constituents are waiting to be the fools who get fooled into believing everyone but them is the fool. And a lot of those fools are at least partly aware that they've been fooled and are still going along with it because they need to be "on the inside" as they and their buddy Mr Cawthorn make fools of all those fools.
Confused? Me too - and that, ladies and germs - that's pretty much the whole fuckin' point.
If I can get you addled and frustrated enough, you'll eventually throw up your hands and leave me to my devices to "solve the problem" for you.
Of course the "solution" will be flashy, and probably expensive, but largely with no real substance or efficacy. It's just a win for our side - which, to Cawthorn and the Plutocrats, means little more than putting your dollars in their pockets.
Judge orders two lawyers who filed suit challenging 2020 election to pay hefty fees: ‘They need to take responsibility’
A federal judge has ordered two Colorado lawyers who filed a lawsuit late last year challenging the 2020 election results to pay nearly $187,000 to defray the legal fees of groups they sued, arguing that the hefty penalty was proper to deter others from using frivolous suits to undermine the democratic system.
“As officers of the Court, these attorneys have a higher duty and calling that requires meaningful investigation before prematurely repeating in court pleadings unverified and uninvestigated defamatory rumors that strike at the heart of our democratic system and were used by others to foment a violent insurrection that threatened our system of government,” wrote Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter.
“They are experienced lawyers who should have known better. They need to take responsibility for their misconduct,” he wrote.
Proving again that it seems the women are the only ones with balls these days.
Liz Cheney, last night - about 10 hours before the House GOP Conference voted her out of her leadership position:
(Another courageous Republican making a heart-felt declaration to an empty room - she at least has been a bit more consistent in her opposition. Not much, but more than most)
And then, from his safe space behind the microphone at CBS News, Jeff Flake jumps in pretending he actually has the balls to speak truth to power.
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” — George Orwell
Near the beginning of the document that made us free, our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
There you have it. From the very beginning of America, our freedom has been predicated on truth. For without a principled fidelity to truth and to shared facts, our democracy will not last.
On Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will most likely lose her leadership post within the House Republican Conference, not because she has been untruthful. Rather, she will lose her position because she is refusing to play her assigned role in propagating the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Cheney is more dedicated to the long-term health of our constitutional system than she is to assuaging the former president’s shattered ego, and for her integrity she may well pay with her career.
No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.
It seems a good time to examine how we got to a place where such a large swath of the electorate (70 percent of Republican voters, according to polling) became willing to reject a truth that is so self-evident.
This allergy to self-evident truth didn’t happen all at once, of course. This frog has been boiling for some time now. The Trump period in American life has been a celebration of the unwise and the untrue. From the ugly tolerance of the pernicious falsehood about President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the bizarre and fanatical fable about the size of inauguration crowds, to the introduction of the term “alternative facts” into the American lexicon, the party’s steady embrace of dishonesty as a central premise has brought us to this low and dangerous place.
I don’t know what will happen to Cheney politically after Wednesday. For me, I knew that I couldn’t support Trump’s election or reelection after his seminal falsehood about Obama’s birth certificate, to say nothing of the cascade of untruths, from the trivial to the consequential, that followed daily. I had hoped that, over time, my Republican constituents would feel differently about the former president, or at least value a Republican who pushed back, and that I could stand for reelection in 2018 with a reasonable chance of surviving a Republican primary. It soon became apparent that Republican voters wanted someone who was all in with a president that I increasingly saw as a danger to the republic. That could not be me, so I spoke out instead and didn’t stand for reelection.
When I became an unwitting dissident in my party by speaking in defense of self-evident truths, I assumed that more and more of my colleagues would follow me. I remain astonished that so few did. Congresswoman Cheney, I know how alone you must be feeling. But just know that history keeps the score, not Kevin McCarthy or Elise Stefanik.
In January 2018, three years before the Capitol insurrection, I said the following on the Senate floor:
“Mr. President, let us be clear. The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstated.”
Three years later, it’s clear that I didn’t know the half of it. The destructive effect of the president’s behavior — and the willingness of Republican elected officials to indulge, excuse, defend, justify and, in many cases, just roll with it — has taken a devastating toll.
It is elementary to have to say this, but we did not become a great nation by believing or espousing nonsense, or by embracing lunacy. And if my party continues down this path, we will not be fit to govern.
Cheney has proved her fitness, and today it seems that adherents to the “big lie” will cast her out. Hold your head high, congresswoman. Those of us who believe in American democracy and who live in objective reality are grateful that you have chosen to take a stand for truth — self-evident truth — regardless of the consequences.
Flake bailed on this mess, deciding not to stay and fight when his consultants showed him the numbers on his re-election chances for 2018.
And until his swan song parting remarks that he tries to ennoble by quoting his speech from the floor of The Senate (a speech he made to an empty room, btw), he kept his mouth shut, voting with McConnell and for everything Trump supported for way more than the last year of his tenure in the Senate.
Now he's hiding behind what's happening with Liz Cheney, seeing it as an opportunity to breathe life back into his justifiably moribund political career.
When you white-feather your ass out of harm's way, acting like you're just exercising a little discretion so you can live to fight another day - sorry not sorry, Jeffy - but you get no points here when you refuse to go down swingin' in a do-or-die fight.
The Roberts court isn't really a court anymore. It's a repository for political activists who've been rewarded for their fealty to a particular ideological slant, rather than to the ideals of justice for all.
Monday’s Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, preceded by a pell-mell scramble to seat her before next week’s election and followed by an unseemly campaign-style celebration at the White House, shreds whatever remained of the high court’s integrity and independence.
Whether the court regains its independence or cements itself as a third partisan branch of government is now largely up to Chief Justice John Roberts. If he does not act, and fast, to mitigate the court’s politicization, Democrats will be fully justified in expanding the court’s membership to restore balance — and indeed will face a public outcry if they don’t.
The Barrett spectacle could not have been uglier. It began with a superspreader event at the White House after which a dozen people, including President Trump, contracted covid-19. Trump insisted on naming a replacement even before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in her grave, and he belittled the late justice’s granddaughter for conveying the women’s rights icon’s dying wish that Trump not replace her. (Mercifully, the White House shelved a plan to have Vice President Pence, whose staff is having a covid-19 outbreak, preside over Monday evening’s confirmation vote.)
Senate Republicans rammed through Barrett eight days before an election Trump seems likely to lose, and even though Trump has made clear he’s counting on the Supreme Court to overturn the result. They did this in an extraordinary public display of hypocrisy, four years after refusing to seat an Obama nominee to the high court because, they said then, that doing so more than eight months before an election was too soon. And they did this after abolishing the minority’s right to filibuster.
Barrett, in her confirmation hearing, made a mockery of the supposed “originalism” and “textualism” she professes to practice. She conspicuously refused to say whether a president could unilaterally postpone an election and whether voter intimidation is illegal — matters unarguable under the clear words of the Constitution and statutes.
In the long, desultory debate before Barrett’s inevitable Senate confirmation Monday, few even pretended they were engaged in some historic or noble tradition. The debate sounded more like a medical conference as Democrats warned about the many conditions that might not be covered if Barrett strikes down the Affordable Care Act after it comes before the court in two weeks.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) spoke about “sleep apnea, asthma, pre-diabetes, complex post-traumatic stress disorder and hypothyroidism.”
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) spoke of “cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, behavioral health disorders, high cholesterol, asthma, chronic lung disease, heart disease.”
“Muscular dystrophy,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) contributed. “Endometriosis.”
“Cystic fibrosis,” added Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.).
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy (La.) countered with a speech about breast-cancer awareness. “The primary risk factor for breast cancer is being a woman,” he informed the chamber. He encouraged women to examine themselves for “the change in the look or feel of a breast, or possible discharge from the nipple, the presence of a lump, swelling, discoloration.”
Breast health is important, but for the matter immediately at hand — the health of the Supreme Court — this Senate and this president have administered only toxins.
If the chief justice wishes to restore dignity to the Roberts Court, it’s clear enough what needs to be done:
He can lean heavily on Barrett to recuse herself from any case arising from the presidential election next week.
He can use his influence to make sure the court upholds the Affordable Care Act after it hears arguments next month — not a legalistic punt on technical matters of “severability” but a ruling that puts an end to the constant assaults on Obamacare.
He can persuade his conservative colleagues to join him in upholding the rights of LGBTQ Americans as established in the 2015 Obergefell case, by rejecting a challenge to it by Catholic Social Services that will be argued the morning after the election next week.
He can forge a majority to reject Trump’s latest tired attempt to use the Supreme Court to further delay handing over his financial records to New York prosecutors.
And he and his colleagues can agree to hear one of the many challenges to Roe v. Wade now making their way through lower courts — and vote to uphold Roe for now. That would be the surest sign that the Roberts Court is not going to turn (immediately at least) into the reactionary caricature that most expect.
If Roberts and his conservative allies on the court don’t do at least some of this in the next few months, they can count on being joined next year by a whole batch of new colleagues. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court: Your move.
What Barrett revealed in her hearings was the very real truth about the big hole in our little experiment: that it runs on the honor system.
The founders assumed there would be bad actors and power-mad phonies who like to fuck with things - just because they think having the power to fuck with things gives them the right to fuck with things - so they tried to build in some safety features, not the least of which is that we all have to agree to abide by the spirit of the law as well as the letter.
But the Right Radicals have been very busy for 50 years dismantling those safety features, and putting people in positions of power who believe they have the right to rule instead of an obligation to serve. And here we are.
The other big reveal is that there's no such thing as "settled law". Everything is subject to review and revision, including everything we thought was enshrined in The Bill Of Rights.
For almost 250 years, we've been expanding the rights of Americans, and now there's a political party dead set on carving them back.
And when you have one political party that has embraced the notion that power is everything - to the point where there are no moral absolutes, and that right vs wrong and justice vs injustice come down to a simple political negotiation driven at least in part by market forces and financial transactions, then honor is out the window, animal instincts carry the day, and we're right back to a mid-18th century plutocracy.
We were enamored with docs and nurses for a while, and the other frontline working people taking risks to do good things for us, and the latest of these are the mail handlers and letter carriers and clerks at USPS, who show up and do the work we need them to do - with some going several extra miles for us - while Republicans fuck with them and try to kill off the service in favor of their big-money donors and their buddies on Wall Street.
Make whatever arguments you feel like making, but there's no denying the simple fact that politics has played a roll in this. Republicans have hated the Post Office for a very long time, and they've taken some pretty extreme measures to try to kill it off.
Maybe there's a real case to be made for efficiencies, but not when GOP fuckery seems so obvious.
The short version is: Republicans can't be trusted with these decisions when we know they've spent 40 years trying to privatize the whole fuckin' government.
This summer, as controversial new procedures at the U.S. Postal Service snarled the nation’s mail delivery and stirred fears of how the agency would handle the election, rank-and-file workers quietly began to resist.
Mechanics in New York drew out the dismantling and removal of mail-sorting machines until their supervisor gave up on the order. In Michigan, a group of letter carriers did an end run around a supervisor’s directive to leave election mail behind, starting their routes late to sift through it. In Ohio, postal clerks culled prescriptions and benefit checks from bins of stalled mail to make sure they were delivered, while some carriers ran late items out on their own time. In Pennsylvania, some postal workers looked for any excuse — a missed turn, heavy traffic, a rowdy dog — to buy enough time to finish their daily rounds.
“I can’t see any postal worker not bending those rules,” one Philadelphia staffer said in an interview.
With the Postal Service expected to play a historic role in this year’s election, some of the agency’s 630,000 workers say they feel a responsibility to counteract cost-cutting changes from their new boss, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, that they blame for the mail slowdowns. They question whether DeJoy — a top Republican fundraiser and booster of President Trump — is politicizing the institution in service to a president who has actively tried to sow distrust of mail-in voting, insisting without evidence that it will lead to massive fraud.
DeJoy insists the operational shifts were not politically motivated, emphasizing that he inherited an agency on the verge of financial collapse. At the time of his arrival in June, the Postal Service also was trying to fend off a takeover by Trump’s Treasury Department, according to internal Postal Service documents. Its workforce was getting flattened by the pandemic as a result of surging absences and package volumes, and its biggest customer, Amazon, was threatening to pull its multibillion-dollar business.
With a mandate to stabilize the Postal Service’s balance sheet, especially its $160.9 billion deficit, DeJoy imposed stricter dispatch schedules on transport trucks that prohibited late and extra trips, forcing workers to leave mail behind. Managers cracked down on overtime, though DeJoy contends they did so of their own accord. He also declined to reinstall hundreds of mail-sorting machines and blue collection boxes removed under his watch. Though he put some of these efforts on hold after public backlash, and four federal judges have since issued temporary injunctions on all operational changes, DeJoy has deeper cuts in store. He told lawmakers last month to expect “dramatic” changes after the November election, including reductions in service and price increases for Americans in rural areas.
DeJoy’s approach marks a fundamental shift, experts say, modeling the agency as more business enterprise than government service. But it also has profound implications for employees in the form of heavier workloads and lost overtime.
In interviews, 15 Postal Service workers and local union leaders in eight states described a deep decline in morale since DeJoy made clear his intent to retool the Postal Service — with little input from the heavily unionized workforce — that have fixed intense public and congressional scrutiny on the agency. They also say they are prepared to defy directives that would limit how they do their jobs.
Most of the workers interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were acting against agency guidance. Last month, an internalPostal Service memo warned employees not to speak to journalists and to be wary of customers who ask “a series of questions.”
The Postal Service’s dire financial situation, coupled with mounting political pressure, and worries about an election in which nearly 180 million Americans are eligible to vote by mail, has begun to overwhelm its workforce.
“People are burned out,” one New Jersey letter carrier said. “I haven’t been this burned out in a long time, and I’ve been doing this a long time. We’ve never had a summer like this. I tell my customers, ‘Call your congressman, because I’m being told not to deliver your mail.’
‘Every piece, every day’
New postal workers are introduced to the agency’s unofficial motto within their first days on the job: “Every piece, every day.” It’s referenced so frequently that “EPED” is shorthand to work faster, or longer, when mail piles up. Any conscious effort to delay mail is, under federal law, punishable by fine and as much as five years of imprisonment.
Many postal workers see the changes that have slowed mail as violating the spirit, if not the letter, of that law.
They view themselves as couriers of prescription medications, paychecks, bills and more, and also as neighbors to the people on their routes, checking in on elderly residents and delivering life’s necessities. The coronavirus pandemic has only magnified that sense of responsibility, they say.
“You look at the news and you get worried,” said one Philadelphia postal worker. “Are we going to be the end-all, be-all of election integrity and covid response for this country? Having your own personal problems, too, it all adds up. I think it’s really starting to get to people, both newer and seasoned veterans of the job.”
Since his June 15 start, DeJoy has focused on shoring up the Postal Service’s finances. Despite surging package volumes during the pandemic, the agency has been losing ground on first-class and marketing mail — its most profitable products — for years.
“The thing is, right now the size of their hole is so big and continuing to grow, there is no one silver bullet to fix this,” said Kenneth John, president of the Postal Policy Associates consultancy and a former senior analyst at the Government Accountability Office. “They’ve done a lot of the low-hanging fruit already, so you’re left with a set of really difficult choices. You’re left with really big changes.”
What’s more, he added, DeJoy’s efforts can close only a relatively small portion of the agency’s deficit. “You’re either left with these difficult choices and big changes, or ultimately, Congress is going to need to pay for it.”
Much of the Postal Service’s financial difficulty is structural: Congress reorganized the agency in 1970 and essentially ordered it to operate as both a public service and business. As such, it is supposed to be self-sustaining without benefit of taxpayer funding. But the passage of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act mandated that it prepay employees’ retirement and health-care benefits, an obligation held by few other government agencies, let alone private companies. Today, retiree costs account for nearly three-fourths, or $119.3 billion, of its deficit.
Because the Postal Service lacks revenue streams divorced from mail volumes, nearly any cost-cutting maneuver would almost certainly hurt service, an issue that draws heaps of congressional attention even as lawmakers have put off substantial postal reform. But some of DeJoy’s changes go right to the heart of the agency’s operations. Some flexibility in delivery schedules, such as allowing late or extra delivery trips, ensures that mail arrives on time, experts say, and prevents backlogs.
Postal leaders have long relied on overtime to keep the mail moving, as it is more cost efficient than expanding payroll. That supplemental income is a boon for many workers — comprising nearly 10 percent of all work hours within any given pay period — but an albatross for agency finances. Yet government watchdog groups, including the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General, have identified overtime as a potential source of cost savings.
“If it means you’re going to hire more workers, there are going to be more families that have a family-sustaining union job, that’s fine with us,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which represents more than 200,000 current and retired postal employees. “If it means you’re going to cut out overtime and, therefore, the people are not going to get the service that they need and deserve, then it’s horrible.”
The cost-cutting efforts have led to multiday delays in communities all over the country. As of the final week of August — five weeks after DeJoy’s changes took effect — on-time delivery rates for first-class mail had declined from more than 90 percent to roughly 85 percent, according to Postal Service data provided to Congress. For periodicals, they went from 80 percent to 75 percent.
John Barger, a Republican member of the Postal Service’s governing board, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this month that DeJoy’s changes were starting to “bear fruit” and that the board was pleased with his performance. “The board is tickled pink,” he said.
“Thanks to the great work and dedication of our employees, our service performance continues to improve,” a Postal Service spokesman said in an emailed statement to The Post.
But some workers vividly recalled scenes of mail and packages piling up, days at a time, this summer during the worst stretches of the transition. Postal workers in Michigan and Iowa described seeing entire pallets of boxes go unsorted and sit outdoors in the rain or summer heat. Sometimes the smell of rotting food attracted swarms of flies, they said.
At the Royal Palm Processing and Distribution Center in Opa-locka, Fla., massive stacks of marketing mail sat untouched for 43 days, according to local union officials.
“You know, it’s just disheartening,” said Dana Coletti, president of the American Postal Workers Union Local 230 in Manchester, N.H.
Four federal courts also took issue with DeJoy’s changes. Judges in Washington state, New York, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia all held that the Postal Service should have sought an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission — a process that would have allowed for public comment — before instituting the new cost-cutting measures. The judges blocked the agency from pursuing DeJoy’s plans, and lawyers representing 19 states and a group of voters who brought the suit are in negotiations with the Postal Service over a potential settlement.
‘The stakes definitely feel higher’
The long mail delays made some postal workers think more about the role they’d be playing come election season.
The Pennsylvania primary in early June provided a taste of what was to come, said the Philadelphia worker. Though the pandemic was the biggest worry at the time, “we had a lot of issues. There were people at the plant that weren’t coming in or were sick. We were seeing delays with that. So now we’re looking at this [general election] and going, ‘Oh, jeez, this is not going to be good.’ The stakes definitely feel higher, especially given what this election really means.”
In Michigan, one postal worker considered the removal of public mailboxes, which are subject to periodic checks to ensure they are being used, as disproportionately affecting people of color. When a collection box is removed in a wealthy suburb, residents have the time and resources to push back, said the carrier, who is Black. But when it’s removed in a racially diverse working-class neighborhood, it’s just another government service that’s been clawed back.
“It’s kind of like everything else. It wasn’t built for us,” the worker said of the Postal Service and its relationship with Black people.
DeJoy’s background — he’s donated more than $2 million to the Trump campaign and GOP causes since 2016 — doesn’t help matters, the postal worker said, and makes him feel as though the Republican Party has co-opted the Postal Service.
Taken together, Trump’s repeated attacks on mail-in voting, his connection with DeJoy, and DeJoy’s operational changes look too conspicuous to be coincidental, the carrier said, even if DeJoy has stated publicly that he’d stand up to the president when necessary. Some postal workers say the pushback has to start with them to show that DeJoy’s instructions go against the mail service’s operational and ethical mandates. Plus, they say, they are legally bound to ensure the timely delivery of mail.
In New York, one mechanic expressed dismay that he is surrounded by a “bunch of yes men” who are simply going to follow orders.
“It’s disheartening to hear from my boss that he wants me to do something that could very potentially cripple the system. It’s disheartening to hear that people think we’re going to fail. We handle this kind of volume all the time,” he said of the election. “But if they do these things with delivery times and we get high volume around holiday season and the election, it will fail. No question. It will fail. We should get the ballots out. We really should, but all it would take is one person in a nice shiny suit to say, ‘Leave those ballots, take the other mail.’ And everyone would say, ‘Yes sir.’
“There’s a point where I got angry. I’m not happy at all that I’m being politicized. I’m literally trying to do my job, and they’re telling me that I can’t.”
‘Don’t do anything illegal, unsafe, immoral’
DeJoy on Aug. 18 suspended parts of his cost-cutting program after congressional and public blowback — much of it on social media, where images of mailbox removals were met with suspicion and outrage. But it was too late for most of the 671 mail-sorting machines that had been tapped for dismantling and removal across 49 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.
The agency said that the massive machines, representing close to 10 percent of its inventory and capable of sorting 21.4 million pieces of paper mail per hour, had been earmarked long before DeJoy and that their decommissioning was simply a reflection of Americans’ diminishing use for letters and growing reliance on package delivery. But many workers saw it as further erosion of a finely calibrated infrastructure, one with real ramifications for customers who rely on the agency for their prescription medications and other crucial deliveries.
“It bothers me, because I like to do my job. Some of us do this for 20 years,” said the New Jersey letter carrier. “You see kids grow up from babies and watch them get married. They see you in Wawa, and they buy you a coffee. They say, ‘This is my mailman, he’s a great guy.’ Now they say, ‘Where’s my mail?’ ”
Postal workers’ responses varied from insubordination to small acts of neighborly heroism. In Florida, one manager told of instructing employees to meticulously document their hours and what happens to mail to uphold accountability standards. There are forms for reporting late or undeliverable mail and to record overtime, though several postal workers say supervisors have downplayed the need to complete them in recent weeks.
“What I try to tell people is this: Yes, if you get an instruction, you should follow the instructions of your supervisor,” the manager said. “But every manual says the same thing: Don’t do anything illegal, unsafe, immoral. Well, my manager knows that if he doesn’t want mail to be reported late, to keep the mail out of my building.”
Last month in New York, machinists were ordered to remove sorting machines and use spare parts to augment another, one of the workers said. The person told supervisors that such a move wouldn’t help; the enlarged sorter would be able to collate mail into more carriers’ routes, but it also would process letters more slowly than two machines doing the job simultaneously. When his supervisor told him to repeat the process for another set of machines, the machinist and colleagues balked and drew out the steps required to implement the change. Eventually, superiors gave up on the order.
By then, House and Senate committees had called emergency hearings to cross-examine DeJoy over his relationship with Trump and his operational changes. “I am not engaged in sabotaging the election,” DeJoy testified before the House Oversight Committee on Aug. 24. Days earlier, he told a Senate panel he planned to vote by mail.
In Toledo, mail is shipped to the Michigan Metroplex outside Detroit for processing. When items arrive too late for the trucks headed to Michigan, a manager not eligible for overtime will hop into a Postal Service van and transport that mail separately, said Martin Ramirez, president of the APWU Local 170. That way, the Toledo offices won’t log overtime hours, even though that worker still puts in extra time.
“This is the dancing between the raindrops,” Ramirez said.
As Toledo’s trucks arrive at distribution centers, clerks scan the wire racks carrying the mail to try to spot medications, checks and bills, said Jennifer Lemke, the clerk craft director at Local 170. Even if the day’s mail gets delayed, Lemke and other clerks will retrieve essential items and send them off with carriers.
When angry customers call the post office or come to the retail window, Lemke said, she apologizes for mail delays, then sends for the local postmaster.
“I will put it off on the people that are causing the damage,” she said.
“My message to [local union members] is: You do what you can to satisfy the customer,” Ramirez said. “Look, we’re going to fight from national on down. I don’t need you losing your job.”
This one's a real head-scratcher. Berman is widely seen as a Cult45 ally.
WaPo: The Trump administration announced late Friday that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, who has overseen a number of investigations involving the president and his political campaign, will be leaving that job, though Berman fired back that he had not resigned and intends to stay in the job to ensure the cases continue unimpeded.
But then:
The surreal standoff marks the latest battle over the administration’s management of the Justice Department. Democrats have decried what they charge has been the politicization of the agency under President Trump and his attorney general, William P. Barr.
Barr announced the personnel change in a statement, saying the president plans to nominate the current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, for the job.
Berman’s office has been conducting a criminal investigation of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in a campaign finance case that has already led to charges against two of Giuliani’s associates.
The Justice Department under Bill Barr is a wide-ranging and slow-moving Saturday Night Massacre, but without the people who have some honor and decency, and who act on sound ethical principles.
And since Preet Bharara got shit-canned in a kind of shady move 3 ½ years ago, eventually to be replaced by Berman, it's just too fuckin' bizarre to think Berman is the guy to stand up and defend the integrity and the independence of the SDNY in particular, and the DOJ in general.
I'm not going to jump up and down celebrating, thinking a smarmy slug like Tucker Carlson has finally had enough and is calling out the obviously rampant corruption of the GOP and blah blah blah. I think this is classic duplicity. It's more likely (IMO) that Carlson sees it as a good opportunity to make it look like he's "standing up for virtuous public service", while his condemnation is really all about pushing the "moderate" Richard Burr out of the way in order to make room for the far more radical Tom Cotton to step in. This shit is never about what they tell us it's about.
The Fresno Bee has to be considered a hometown paper for US Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA22). And the editors at the Bee aren't amused by some of Devin's antics. To wit:
Devin Nunes must stop suing fake cows and explain $60,000 Europe trip
Read more here: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/article237841409.html#storylink=cpy
Rep. Devin Nunes’ decision to sue anyone who dares to criticize him – including a fictitious cow on Twitter – backfired spectacularly this week. Again.
In a court filing, a lawyer for a former Democratic National Committee employee eviscerated the Tulare Republican’s argument that mockery from Twitter accounts like “Devin Nunes’ Cow” and “Devin Nunes’ mom” constitutes defamation.
“No reasonable person would believe that Devin Nunes’ cow actually has a Twitter account, or that the hyperbole, satire and cow-related jokes it posts are serious facts,” reads the filing in Virginia’s Henrico County Circuit Court, according to a Bee story by Hannah Wiley and Kate Irby. “It is self-evident that cows are domesticated livestock animals and do not have the intelligence, language, or opposable digits needed to operate a Twitter account. Defendant ‘Devin Nunes’ Mom’ likewise posts satirical patronizing, nagging, mothering comments which ostensibly treat Mr. Nunes as a misbehaving child.”
The court brief went viral on social media, increasing public awareness of Nunes’ critics in a way that likely never would have happened without his frivolous lawsuit. It sparked a trend on Twitter, with people desperate for attention begging Nunes to sue them so they might benefit from free press.
“Hey, @DevinNunes, what do I have to say to get you to sue me too,” tweeted former Clinton White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. “You’re corrupt? You met with a bunch of corrupt Ukrainians. You still wet the bed?”
The social media backlash mirrored Nunes’ experience earlier this year, when his decision to sue the Twitter cow increased the parody account’s reach exponentially. “Devin Nunes’ Cow” had 1,000 followers on the social media site before Nunes filed his lawsuit. It now has over 667,000 followers.
Nunes’ lawsuits likely don’t stand a chance in court. Parodying elected officials like Nunes is protected by the First Amendment, and satire as an art form has a long history dating back to ancient times.
But Nunes’ lawsuits are no laughing matter because he’s not just suing fake cows. He filed – and later dropped – a lawsuit against a Dinuba peach farmer for calling him a “fake farmer.”
His lawsuit strategy has also targeted the press. Nunes is suing Esquire Magazine and McClatchy, the parent company of The Fresno Bee, for simply reporting on him truthfully and accurately. He sued Esquire for reporting that Nunes’ family moved its farm to Iowa years ago. He sued The Fresno Bee for accurately reporting that he owned a stake in Alpha Omega winery in a story headlined “A yacht, cocaine, prostitutes: Winery partly owned by Nunes sued after fundraiser event.”
Given the frivolous nature of Nunes’ lawsuits, one can easily draw the conclusion that he’s trying to chill free speech by miring his critics in expensive legal proceedings. If that’s the idea, it’s not working. Twitter accounts continue to mock him and the press continues to report on his increasingly grim situation.
Last week, Nunes threatened to sue CNN and the Daily Beast for reporting that “A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani told CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.”
Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born man arrested while trying to leave the United States in October, said through a lawyer that he is willing to implicate Nunes, who was in Europe during the period in question.
“House travel records show Nunes traveled to Europe from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Three congressional aides who have worked for Nunes have matching travel receipts for the same dates, House records show,” according to a story by The Bee’s Andrew Sheeler. “The trip cost $63,525.”
Now, Nunes faces calls for an ethics investigation.
“If he was on a political errand for the president that was using taxpayer funds inappropriately then he should be investigated by the Ethics Committee and should be forced to repay the Treasury the money that was spent for a political activity,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee with Nunes.
Given the seriousness of these matters, perhaps it’s time for Nunes to abandon his frivolous lawsuit hobby and direct his lawyers’ attention elsewhere.
And some folks showed up at the courthouse in Virginia to voice their displeasure:
The Onion's reporting on Marianne Moonglow: SACRAMENTO, CA—After reviewing responses to her post, Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson deleted a tweet Wednesday that suggested people use their minds to turn Hurricane Dorian away from land, and later told reporters the nation was not yet ready to harness such awesome powers.
“I wholeheartedly apologize for implying that untrained minds should use mental energy blasts to deter any object, hurricane or otherwise,” said the self-help guru, noting that she had miscalculated the willingness and ability of average citizens to access the part of their brain that allows for weather manipulation, levitation of objects, and telekinesis. “If used with malicious intent, this type of power could, for example, cause the Earth’s rotation to reverse, taking us back in time and potentially ripping apart the space-time continuum. All life on the planet could be wiped out if someone tried to harness a psionic beam while holding a crystal. It is now clear to me that Americans will not be prepared to assume such responsibility for quite some time, perhaps not until my second term.”
Sources confirmed Williamson’s tweet was replaced by an ad for her latest seminar, “Your Mind, the Weather, and You,” and an offer to use the code “LOVE” at checkout for a discounted ticket price of $199.
Overheard:
Williamson is being forced out of the Democratic primary because liberals are saying mean things about her - which means we're gonna lose the Space Alien Vote.
Way to go, stoopid libtards. BTW, be sure to watch for Ms Williamson's next book - anticipated to be a mega-blockbuster - "How To Kick The Self-Help Habit". Pre-order now for only $69.99 at WaldenBooks.
Today we mark that fateful day in 2014 when Obama defiled all that is holy by wearing a tan suit at work.
Republicans - of course - lost their shit completely, railing about how how disrespectful he was being. And - of course again - they were completely full of shit, which is pretty neat trick when you think about it, but not really because the Republicans' supply of shit is unlimited, and so they can completely lose their shit while actually remaining full of shit at the same time.
Americans should be in much better physical condition considering how much we love jumping to conclusions.
And we're always willing to help each do exactly that.
Lawfare Blog: Leave it to President Trump to describe as “Total EXONERATION” a document that specifically quotes Special Counsel Robert Mueller as saying that one of his principal findings “does not exonerate” the president.
The brief letter sent by Attorney General William Barr to congressional leaders on Sunday afternoon summarizing Mueller’s findings is a complicated document. In key respects, it contains very good news for President Trump about a scandal that has dogged his presidency since before he even took office. The determination of just how good the news is - whether it amounts to the exoneration Trump claims on these points or whether we’re dealing with conduct just shy of prosecutable - will have to await the text of Mueller’s report itself. But for those who quite reasonably demanded a serious investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of cooperation and coordination with it on the part of the Trump campaign, it has to be significant that Mueller, after the better part of two years of investigating, has not found that anyone associated with the Trump campaign knowingly conspired with Russia’s efforts.
In other respects, however, Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report is ominous for the president. While Mueller did not find that Trump obstructed his investigation, he also made a point of not reaching the opposite conclusion: that Trump didn’t obstruct the investigation. Indeed, he appears to have created a substantial record of the president’s troubling interactions with law enforcement for adjudication in noncriminal proceedings—which is to say in congressional hearings that are surely the next step.
What makes the document more complicated still is the fact that it offers only a skeletal description of Mueller’s report. It only purports to convey Mueller’s top-line findings and does not include any of the evidence or legal analysis that underlies those findings. It doesn’t tell any of the stories that the Mueller report will tell. It only distills and announces two high-altitude legal conclusions from those stories. Assuming that Barr is characterizing Mueller’s findings reasonably, that leaves a whole raft of questions unanswered about what those stories will be - and what their impact will be.
We'll see what we see.
We don't know what's what yet. There are still 57 indictments under seal. There are numerous court transcripts that remain heavily redacted. There are 17 other investigations in process - some of which are beyond the reach of 45*'s Executive Branch Mafia. And there are no simple 10-word answers to any of the questions that we all still have. If there are signals for me to find in Barr's letter, they include:
We ain't seen nothin' yet
Keep your powder dry
Muddle through and stumble forward
If Barr is the plutocrat I think he is, we're going to see another iteration of The Great Smoothing-Over. ie: after every big fuckup, we have "cooler heads" who step in to calm us down and keep us from actually starting to shoot each other again.
(Ed Note: Not that we're particularly shy about gunning each down like rabid dogs - I'm talking about choosing up sides for a flat-out civil-fucking-war)
Anyway, I include only the big fuckups that I can remember from my own lifetime.
JFK assassination
Civil rights / Vietnam era riots
Watergate
Iran-Contra
Iraq war
The crash of 2008
Obviously, there are others, but the main feature of The Smoothing is that justice is largely denied. And that's what Mr Barr is good at.
I'll go out on a limb and say that 45* is not the one who picked Bill Barr, any more than 45* was the one who picked either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh.
But before I go full Howard Beale, I'll try to heed my own advice and just wait for whatever shoes are going to drop next.
I'd like to know how it's kosher for people to use pseudonyms on a binding contract.
Whoever got that one to square up with the courts is a fuckin' genius, and I'm just trying to decide whether I want him on retainer or a barbecue spit.
Anyway, 2 things:
1) Stormy Daniels used Peggy Peterson as her alias. PP - pee pee - whenever the subject is 45*'s sex preferences, it seems like everything keeps pointing back to water sports.
2) Like the man said: Who're you gonna believe, a porn star who has nothing to lose by telling the truth, or a Trump who has everything to lose by telling the truth?
Thanks to Daniels, her lawyer and an unforced error by Sanders, the story Trump has tried so hard to squelch is out. Take a minute and think about it.
The personal lawyer of Donald Trump, days before the election, paid $130,000 to apparently buy the silence of a porn star. Said porn star credibly describes an affair she had with the president and the ham-fisted attempts by his lawyer to keep her from talking about it. All of this unquestionably speaks volumes about the president’s character and morals. How many mulligans does this guy get?
