"I can't wait 'til this guy's dead" - or words to that effect.
Lot of that goin' around.
Millennials are waiting for Boomers to die
Liberals are waiting for DumFux News viewers to die
The world is waiting for a quarter billion Chinese to die
Ali Velshi reports
I can't think of anything more passive aggressive than somebody seeing a problem, and instead of doing something positive to address it and maybe start to get a solution for it, they decide just to wait and let The Reeper do his work.
Coupla things:
Who says he's not gonna fuck you up while you're patiently waiting?
If you're in elected office, part of your job is to address these problems - or confront, air out, get a handle on, deal with, or whatever. Do your fuckin' job
But, if you're content to wait, maybe you're OK with the damage being done by the guy you wanna see dead
A judge exposes DeSantis’s contempt for the First Amendment
Andrew Warren, the state prosecutor for Hillsborough County, Fla., spoke out against Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s forced-birth abortion plan and his persecution of LGBTQ youth. In August, DeSantis suspended him -- and falsely claimed it was because Warren had made a blanket promise not to prosecute certain cases. Warren sued. On Friday, a judge sided with him on the facts but did not give him the relief he sought.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle called DeSantis’s allegation against Warren “false.” “Mr. Warren’s well-established policy, followed in every case by every prosecutor in the office,” Hinkle wrote, "was to exercise prosecutorial discretion at every stage of every case. Any reasonable investigation would have confirmed this.”
Hinkle underscored that Warren had been carrying out his duties without a fault. “The record includes not a hint of misconduct by Mr. Warren. So far as this record reflects, he was diligently and competently performing the job he was elected to perform, very much in the way he told voters he would perform it.” Contrary to DeSantis’s claim, Warren “had no blanket nonprosecution policies.” The judge added, “Any minimally competent inquiry would have confirmed this. The assertion that Mr. Warren neglected his duty or was incompetent is incorrect. This factual issue is not close.”
In fact, the court determined based on uncontroverted evidence, “There it was, stripped of pretext: a motivating factor in Mr. Warren’s suspension was that he was a ‘progressive prosecutor,’” and “of all things,” supported by billionaire George Soros, who is also a contributor to the Democratic Party.
In the first 57 pages of the 59-page opinion, the court makes crystal clear that DeSantis went after Warren for his political affiliation and views, including his outspoken defense of his record as a reform prosecutor. However, the kicker lies in the last two pages: Warren still couldn’t obtain reinstatement.
Unfortunately for Warren, the court ruled that even if he was protected from being fired over his stated beliefs, DeSantis would still have suspended Warren for nonprotected reasons (e.g., his record as a reformer and his disinclination to prosecute people in their first encounter with the police for bicycle and pedestrian violations). In addition, Hinkle held that Warren could not obtain the relief under the Florida constitution because the 11th Amendment prohibits a federal court from ordering a state official to take action for a violation of state law.
Had Warren brought the case in state court, there would have been no 11th Amendment barrier. But Warren no doubt chose to bring the case in federal court on a First Amendment theory to sidestep right-wing state judges. He might still pursue that avenue for relief.
Warren told me on Monday, “The reaction has been overwhelming. People are excited that we won on the merits and proved DeSantis broke the law in suspending me, and they are eagerly awaiting my reinstatement.” He added, “We are still weighing our legal options going forward.”
Still, the end result is unsatisfying. When, as the judge indicated, someone breaks both federal and state law and gets away with it, the sense of injustice is palpable. But while Warren did not prevail in getting reinstated, he certainly pulled back the curtain on the authoritarian mind-set of a governor who crushes dissent to score political points. As Warren said in public remarks after the ruling, DeSantis’s conduct should send “shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about free speech, the integrity of elections and the rule of law.”
Put differently, Warren served as a canary in the coal mine with regard to a governor who remains a top presidential prospect for 2024, exposing DeSantis’s abuse of power and his contempt for the First Amendment. There have been other warnings about DeSantis, as well — from his retaliation against Disney for opposing the “don’t say gay” bill to his inhumane and deceptive practice of shipping asylum seekers from Texas to Massachusetts. Norm Eisen, former co-counsel for House impeachment managers, tells me: “The Eleventh Amendment obstacle should not detract from that truth and the danger it represents. Like [former president Donald] Trump, DeSantis is a serial violator of the rule of law with a shrewd (perhaps even shrewder) ability to dodge consequences.”
Let no one be confused: DeSantis is not a break with the MAGA anti-democratic movement. He is only a less buffoonish version of the defeated former president. And that makes him all the more dangerous.
There is something superficially true - and understandable - about the knee-jerk rejection of any affirmative action kind of effort.
No one should gain or lose advantage - social, political or economic - based solely on their ethnicity or anything else over which they have no control, and should never feel compelled to change even if they could.
But, like I said, that's a superficial viewpoint, based on "all things being equal".
Guess what - all things are not fucking equal. They've never been equal, and they never will be equal until we get our stupid white heads out of our stupid white asses and start making up for the shitty way we've treated POC for 500 years.
We take a few steps forward, and then some jagoff comes along with some warm-n-fuzzy nostalgia, mixed with a little contemporary grievance and manufactured resentment, and we're right back in the White Supremacy soup.
And the kicker - it's the same old shit that plutocrats have been pulling on us for as long as there's been anything that even looks like 'civilization'.
Tim Wise, on the creation of "whiteness":
... it was a trick - and it's worked brilliantly.
Along comes a jagoff - aka: Stephen Miller
How a Trump-allied group fighting ‘anti-white bigotry’ beats Biden in court
America First Legal was founded last year by Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigrant family separation policy
The deal in early 2021 was hailed by advocates for Black farmers as the most significant piece of legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — about $4 billion in President Biden’s massive pandemic stimulus package to rectify decades of discrimination. Minority farmers began investing in new machinery and other improvements, anticipating tens of thousands of dollars in government aid.
But today, the landmark deal on behalf of historically disadvantaged farmers is dead — successfully challenged in court by a fledgling conservative organization that argued the program racially discriminated against White farmers.
America First Legal is headed by Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. While AFL lacks the name recognition and financial heft of many conservative counterparts, it has racked up notable court victories over the Biden administration. Casting itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU,” AFL has weaponized the grievance politics embodied by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement through dozens of federal lawsuits, challenging efforts to remedy racial disparities, support LGBTQ students and expand the pool of early voters.
AFL-backed suits helped doom a $29 billion program that prioritized struggling female and minority-owned restaurants last year, and last week, a council created by the Department of Education that conservative parents groups viewed as partisan. AFL has won in part by consistently filing lawsuits in a conservative-friendly judicial district in Texas and taking advantage of a larger federal court system revamped by Trump’s predominantly conservative nominees.
The group’s success is alarming civil rights advocates, who fear Miller has figured out how to harness the courts to protect America’s declining White majority and unravel government policies intended to right historical wrongs against marginalized communities.
“Many of these lawsuits are centered on making sure that White people remain in control and continue to benefit from unearned privileges, and on maintaining the systemic discriminatory policies that have harmed Black people and other people of color for generations,” said David Hinojosa, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “To argue that White men are being pushed to the back of the line is unfounded and ridiculous. What they’re being asked to do is share a place in line with other people who do not look like them.”
In an interview, Miller said AFL is filling a void in the conservative legal movement by challenging what he termed “a hyper-racialization of American political and corporate life.” Programs seeking to remedy past injustices and boost historically disadvantaged groups are punishing people based on their skin color, he said.
“I believe that the equity agenda represents one of the single greatest threats to the survival of our constitutional system,” he said.
The group’s mission was fueled by more than $6.3 million in donations last year, recent tax filings show, including about $1.3 million from the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose leadership includes key figures in the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Steve Wynn, the casino magnate who resigned as finance chair of the Republican National Committee in 2018 amid allegations of sexual misconduct, is an AFL donor, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who were not authorized to speak publicly about its fundraising. Wynn, who has denied the allegations, declined to comment.
AFL is part of a constellation of groups led by Trump allies that represent an administration-in-waiting upon his potential return to the White House. AFL’s all-White, all-male board includes loyalists who recently trekked to Mar-a-Lago for Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement, including Miller, who helped write the speech, former Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought and former acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker. Miller, who is expected to work for the 2024 campaign, received $110,762 from AFL last year, about $134,000 from his Save America political committee since Trump left office, and is slated to be paid about $80,000 by the General Services Administration as part of Trump’s post-presidency funds, government documents show.
In the lead-up to the midterm election, AFL also bankrolled a multimillion dollar ad campaign that included inflammatory radio and TV spots demanding an end to “anti-white bigotry” and accusing the White House, businesses and universities of discriminating against White people.
Trump critics see AFL as the extension of a White House that frequently stoked racial division and a former president who last month dined at his Florida home with two well-known antisemites.
“The Trump administration didn’t care about people like me, it was for White men, and that’s what this group represents and is fighting for,” said John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, which intervened in the AFL-backed lawsuit challenging the aid to minority farmers. “It’s continuing the legacy of divisiveness.”
Miller, though, argues that AFL is fighting against “bigotry and insanity.”
“I think that it is inescapably true that there is insidious and explicit discrimination against White Americans, Asian Americans, Indian Americans and Jewish Americans based on their skin color and their ancestry,” he said.
According to Trump advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Miller stays in close touch with Trump, contributes to his speeches and gave significant input on his endorsements in the midterm election, where many Trump-backed candidates who rejected Biden’s 2020 victory and took other far-right positions were defeated. Miller repeatedly complained during the campaign that Republican candidates were not talking enough about culture war issues and immigration and focusing too heavily on an economic message, people who spoke to him said. America “is the apex of achievement of Western civilization,” Miller said, with “a heritage to be jealously guarded.”
Miller founded AFL in early 2021, as a newly elected President Biden issued a flurry of executive orders dismantling the former president’s nativist agenda. Miller was involved in policies fervidly challenged by civil rights groups that banned immigration from several Muslim-majority countries and separated immigrant children from their parents.
“During the four years of the Trump administration — especially in the arena of immigration — every single executive action, no matter how rigorously lawful, was subjected to a never-ending stream of activist litigation,” Miller said. “One of my goals when I left the administration was to try to help and inspire and coordinate a larger legal movement on the conservative side of the spectrum to do the same.”
AFL was among several groups incubated in the first year of the Biden administration by the Conservative Partnership Institute, a central hub of the GOP’s pro-Trump wing. CPI describes AFL as a “partner” on its website, and three AFL board members, including Mark Meadows, who served as a chief of staff to the former president, also have top CPI posts.
Neither of these tax-exempt groups are required to disclose their donors to the public, though federal campaign records show Trump’s political committee, Save America, donated $1 million to CPI last year. In its 2021 annual report, CPI called AFL “the sling that hardworking, patriotic Americans can use to fight back against the abusive Goliath of the Biden Administration’s Deep State.”
CPI’s revenue exploded last year to $45 million, up from about $7 million in 2020, according to its latest tax filing, obtained by Accountable.US and the Center for Media and Democracy. Its $1.3 million donation to AFL was the largest of eight grants that it made last year. Tax records also show AFL last year received $25,000 from DonorsTrust, a nonprofit that contributes to a number of right-wing causes, and $10,000 from Citizens for Self-Governance, which favors a convention of states to limit the power of the federal government.
Miller declined to answer questions about the group’s donors. “It’s best for your adversaries to have less rather than more information when they meet you in court,” he said.
A Washington Post review found at least four dozen AFL-backed lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country since April 2021, some of which have received little attention outside of right-wing media.
To attack Biden’s aid to disadvantaged, minority farmers, Miller’s group made a brash choice for lead plaintiff: Sid Miller, the Trump-endorsed agriculture commissioner of Texas, who has questioned Biden’s dire warnings about white supremacy and compared Syrian refugees to rattlesnakes in social media posts.
Sid Miller did not respond to interview requests. The lawsuit was later amended to include four White plaintiffs who, unlike Sid Miller, actually carried federal farming loans, according to court documents.
The suit argued that the debt relief approved by Congress was unconstitutional because it excluded “white ethnic groups that have unquestionably suffered ethnic prejudice,” referring to Irish, Italian, German and other European immigrants and Jews. Sid Miller is White, with primarily Scotch and Irish roots, but said in the lawsuit that he has 2 percent African American ancestry.
“Any person with a traceable amount of minority ancestry must be regarded as a member of a ‘socially disadvantaged group,’” the suit said.
Sid Miller earns a $140,938 annual salary as a statewide official. He reported owning about 145 acres of land, a nursery, landscaping business and a ranch, as well as stock in dozens of companies, according to public records. Known for his signature white cowboy hat, he was first elected agriculture commissioner in 2014 and previously served as a state lawmaker.
To Black farmers who say they have felt the sting of racial bias, making Sid Miller the face of the legal challenge was an insult.
“Here is this very powerful person in a huge state who instead of wanting to assist Black farmers filed a lawsuit to block aid?” asked Boyd, who farms soybeans and other crops in southern Virginia. “It’s really disheartening.”
Judge Reed O’Connor, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, ruled in July 2021 in favor of the White plaintiffs, the third of four federal court orders that summer against the program. Congress repealed the program in August.
Boyd and three other minority farmers represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump sued the federal government two months later, alleging breach of contract by doing away with the debt relief program. That case is ongoing. Black farmers have lost more than 12 million acres in the past century, which agricultural experts attribute in part to discrimination in government loan programs.
Three weeks after AFL challenged the aid to minority farmers, it turned to an even larger federal program: the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, which gave women, minorities and veterans a head start to submit applications for nearly $29 billion in pandemic relief. The suit argued that the fund was likely to run out of money before White restaurant owners got a chance to apply and thus discriminated against them.
A federal court in Texas agreed in late May of 2021, as did an appeals court in Tennessee that reviewed a similar lawsuit. At the same time, Gregory León, the son of a Venezuelan immigrant and the owner of Amilinda restaurant in Milwaukee, received notice that he would receive $285,000 from the fund to help him get through the pandemic-related downturn. Just two weeks later, as León struggled to pay vendors, he was among about 3,000 restaurant owners who got another government letter: The fund had been quashed by litigation.
León said he seriously considered closing down.
“I know the pandemic didn’t care what your race was, but it definitely affected certain people harder than others. This country was built on the backs of immigrants,” he said. “I find it quite shocking that people like Stephen Miller don’t see that ... The message is that if you’re not White you’re not welcome in this country and you do not deserve opportunity.”
AFL has notched some of its biggest successes in the Northern District of Texas, a popular venue for conservative plaintiffs because it includes divisions where one to three judges nominated by Republican presidents handle all civil cases. The lawsuits opposing federal aid for minority farmers and restaurant owners, among others, were all filed in that district.
Liberal organizations are also known for “forum shopping,” and frequently challenged Trump policies in the Northern District of California, where most judges were nominated by Democrats. But the small size of some divisions in the Northern District of Texas allows conservative plaintiffs to essentially handpick a particular judge by filing in certain courthouses.
That strategy was apparent in an AFL lawsuit filed in August 2021, which argued that the Affordable Care Act does not outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The case was filed in the Amarillo division, where Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee whose anti-LGBTQ views set off alarms, is assigned all civil cases. In response to questions from U.S. senators in 2017 about those views, Kacsmaryk promised to impartially apply the law.
Last month, Kacsmaryk ruled in favor of the AFL-backed plaintiffs, including two Texas doctors unwilling to prescribe hormone therapy to transgender minors. The judge had previously certified the case as a class-action lawsuit, extending its impact on health care providers nationwide.
“This is obviously a case that raises concerns about the most extreme form of judge shopping,” said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, counsel at Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ rights group. “This is also a case that ignores the reality and prevalence of health discrimination against the LGBTQ community in the health care context and the serious harm that causes.”
Miller called the ruling “epochal” and an “inflection point for what I believe is going to be the biggest legal battle for the next generation.”
The Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment.
Another ongoing AFL-backed lawsuit assigned to a judge nominated by Trump argues that the Texas A&M University’s hiring practices are unconstitutional “by giving discriminatory preferences to female or non-Asian minorities at the expense of white and Asian men,” leading to promotions for “inferior faculty.”
A Texas A&M spokesperson, Laylan Copelin, said the university is planning to recruit faculty whose research is focused on “underrepresented communities” but does not making hiring decisions based on gender or racial preferences that would hold back White or Asian men.
“It appears they were more interested in using Texas A&M to support their fundraising and publicity efforts, as opposed to addressing any actual misconduct,” Copelin said.
AFL partnered in this case and several others filed in Texas with the state’s former solicitor general, Jonathan Mitchell, who is credited with the novel legal strategy behind the state’s 2021 ban on most abortions after six weeks.
Most of the AFL-backed lawsuits are still pending and allege that federal agencies are withholding public records about a range of right-wing targets, including the prosecution of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, censorship by Big Tech, the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and a laptop used by President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. Many of the records requests echo allegations made by the far right and are treated as news stories by conservative media outlets. AFL has also demanded nearly every federal agency to produce documents related to Biden’s executive order promoting racial equity, which Miller has called “government sponsored and directed racism.”
In some of the requests, AFL claims “widely recognized status as a representative of the news media” to expedite its requests.
Federal court judges have ruled against AFL in lawsuits opposing admissions criteria to ensure racial diversity at Philadelphia magnet schools, a New York program that considered race in determining eligibility for covid-19 treatment, a vaccine mandate for civilian federal employees, and Biden’s removal of Sean Spicer, a White House press secretary under Trump, and Vought, an AFL board member, from the U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors. AFL is appealing most of those cases.
“They step forward,” Spicer said. “No one else on the right is doing what they are doing in terms of holding the administration accountable.”
As a nonprofit charity that receives tax-deductible contributions, AFL is precluded from participating in any activity that urges voters to support or oppose particular political candidates. Instead, the group spent on ads and mailers this fall that broadly attacked the Biden administration and the left wing in states with high-stakes races for governor and Senate.
The ads, which included misleading and false claims about Biden’s policies on racial and LGBTQ issues, were condemned by left-leaning civil rights groups. “They’re trying to create mass hysteria and fear,” said Joni Madison of the Human Rights Campaign.
AFL Vice President Gene Hamilton, who worked in Trump’s Justice and Homeland Security departments, defended the ads in a previous statement that speaks to the group’s broader mission.
“The Biden administration and left-wing officials in education, business, and governments across the country are imposing policies that systemically and routinely discriminate against American citizens based solely on the color of their skin. That is illegal,” he said. “Our advertisements make the point that racism is always wrong — regardless of who it is targeted against.”
Ed Note: I use the pronoun "they" in spite of it making me sound paranoid,
cuz hey - maybe I am paranoid, but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.
They've supported Trump, allowing him to operate freely, because he's been very effective at getting lots of rubes conditioned to accept all manner of horribleness, but he's become more of a liability than an asset, so they're going to cut him loose.
This fits the pattern very well - the now obligatory escape from the sinking GOP ship - it's time to load up the rebranding lifeboats and pretend Trump isn't exactly the kind of authoritarian figurehead Republicans love.
I'll say it again:
Trump did not remake the GOP in his image.
Trump is a perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for decades.
Trump goes to war against DeSantis
Trump and DeSantis are on a 2024 collision course as the Florida governor’s national stock has risen.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump publicly attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, releasing a rambling statement Thursday blasting the governor he helped make but who is now his chief rival to lead the Republican Party.
Just days before he’ll likely announce he’s running for president, Trump took credit for DeSantis’ success after endorsing him in 2018, belittled him as “average” and accused “Ron DeSanctimonious” of playing games by not announcing his 2024 presidential ambitions.
“He says, ‘I’m only focused on the Governor’s race, I’m not looking into the future.’ Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer,” Trump said in a statement and in a post on his social media platform Truth social.
Trump and DeSantis are on a 2024 collision course as the Florida governor’s national stock has risen, an ascent punctuated Tuesday night after DeSantis won reelection in Florida by nearly 20 points and Trump-backed candidates across the country largely underperformed.
DeSantis won Florida by historic margins in what was once the nation’s largest swing state. Conservative media institutions like Fox News have appeared to side with DeSantis, as has the New York Post, a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid that ran a front page headline calling DeSantis “DeFuture” the day after the election.
“NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post, is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious,” Trump said.
Trump also criticized DeSantis’ hands-off response to the pandemic, one of the governor’s top achievements among conservatives that boosted his national profile.
DeSantis is “an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations, who didn’t have to close up his state, but did, unlike other Republican Governors,” Trump wrote.
Trump has taken more subtle shots at DeSantis in recent weeks, including the new nickname. But Thursday night’s statement is a clear escalation of tension between Trump and a governor who increasingly poses a threat to the former president’s White House ambitions.
DeSantis, whose campaign did not return a request seeking comment, has so far not responded publicly to Trump’s chiding.
“I think that Ron is very clearly living rent free in the former president’s head,” said Stephen Lawson, a Georgia-based strategist who was communications director for DeSantis’ successful 2018 run for governor. “Ron has not said a single word and they think smartly that Tuesday’s huge win allows him to just keep talking about his record without having to acknowledge Trump.”
“It’s 1,000 percent the correct move,” Lawson said of DeSantis. “Trump just keeps throwing boomerangs.”
Trump’s most ardent supporters, however, are greeting the escalation with glee, saying that DeSantis deserves Trump’s ire because the governor hasn’t publicly announced his 2024 intentions.
“Sadly, everything President Trump says is true. Ron DeSantis owes his governorship to Donald Trump and challenging him in 2024 would be a treacherous act of disloyalty,” said Roger Stone, a long-time Trump adviser.
Trump’s endorsement played a huge role in DeSantis winning the 2018 GOP primary against former Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who was an early favorite. In his statement, the ex-president said he backed DeSantis because he “didn’t know” Putnam. On Thursday night, former Putnam advisers were caught off guard by being roped into the statement, but one said “even at the worst point Adam was not happy, but he never once said a bad thing about Trump.”
There are mixed responses to Trump’s escalation, according to a dozen people in Trump and DeSantis’ orbit. But even those who support the former president say the public criticism of a popular governor coming off a historic win seemed misguided.
“Obviously he is escalating. It is total shots fired,” said a Trump adviser who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “It is not what I would have done if it were totally up to me, but you can’t argue with Donald Trump’s tactics. They work. He is savage but effective. He was never going to stay restrained for long.”
Trump’s broadside comes after a crop of his hand-picked candidates had disappointing midterm showings, possibly upending Republican hopes to retake the Senate and giving the GOP, if they win the House, a much smaller majority than many anticipated. A key race in Georgia between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Trump-endorsed Republican challenger Herschel Walker is set to go to a runoff as Trump diverts attention with his feud with DeSantis.
And here we go again - the next empty vessel is on deck.
Besides DeSantis’ overwhelming win, Florida Republicans won supermajorities in both the House and Senate, giving the governor nearly unchecked power to build and pass a policy platform that will further his national profile ahead of an anticipated 2024 announcement in late spring or summer of 2023.
For Republicans in Florida, Trump’s statement speaks to one thing: desperation.
“He is obviously threatened by a DeSantis presidential run,” said a longtime Florida Republican consultant given anonymity to openly discuss the former president and DeSantis. “And by doing this, I think he will lose a lot of his base support.”
It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.
Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.
Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.
In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who acknowledges that President Biden won the election but says he is worried about the “sanctity of the voting system.” In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.
Whether Youngkin agrees with any of this himself is an open question. In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.
You can sense, in conversations about the present and future of the Republican Party, a hope that there is some way to force the party off its current, anti-democratic path. You could see it in the outrage over Democratic Party “meddling” in Republican primaries. As the conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote for The Washington Post in July, “True friends of democracy would seek to build new alliances that cross old partisan boundaries.”
What Youngkin — a more polished and ostensibly moderate Republican politician — aptly demonstrates is that this is false. The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.
There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful, not because the outcome of the struggle is instructive in this case, but because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.
In 1948, the mayor of Minneapolis — 37-year-old Hubert Humphrey — called on the hundreds of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to add a strong civil rights plank to the party’s national platform. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey said, “I say to them we are 172 years late.”
“The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey added.
As the historian Michael Kazin notes in “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” both “the speech and the ebullient, and quite spontaneous, floor demonstration that followed helped convince a majority of delegates — and President Truman, reluctantly — to include the civil rights pledge in the platform.”
But there were dissenters. A small number of Southern delegates left the convention in protest. Calling themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they organized a challenge to Truman with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the top of their ticket.
These “Dixiecrats” were anti-civil rights and, for good measure, anti-labor. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race, the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way,” reads the States’ Rights Democratic platform, unanimously adopted at their convention in Oklahoma City the next month. We favor, they continued, “home-rule, local self-government and a minimum of interference with individual rights.”
Of course, this meant the maintenance of Jim Crow, the subversion of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the continued domination of Black Americans by a tyrannical planter-industrial elite.
From its inception in the late 1820s as the movement to elect Andrew Jackson president, the Democratic Party relied on the Solid South to win national elections. Now it had a choice. Democrats could reject their new civil rights plank, accommodate the Dixiecrats and fight with a unified front against a hungry and energetic Republican Party, shut out of power since Herbert Hoover’s defeat in 1932. Or they could scorn the so-called States’ Rights Democrats and run as a liberal party committed to equal rights and opportunity for all Americans.
They chose the latter and changed American politics forever. And while much of this choice was born of sincere belief, we also should not ignore the powerful force of demographic change.
From 1915 to 1965, more than six million Black Americans left their homes in the agrarian South to settle in the cities of the industrial North, from New York and Chicago to Philadelphia and Detroit and beyond.
Their arrival marked the beginning of a tectonic shift in American political life. “The difference in laws between the North and the South created a political coming-of-age for Black migrants,” the political scientist Keneshia N. Grant writes in “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century.” “Seeing political participation as a badge of honor and hallmark of success in northern life, migrants registered to vote in large numbers. Northern parties and candidates worked to gain Black support through their election campaigns, and the parties expected Black voters to turn out to vote for their nominees on Election Day.”
For a Democratic Party whose national fortunes rested on control of urban machines, Black voters could mean the difference between four years in power and four years in the wilderness. With the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, who won an appreciable share of the Black vote in the 1932 presidential election, Northern Democratic politicians began to pay real attention to the interests of Black Americans in cities across the region.
By 1948, most Black Americans who could vote were reliable partners in the New Deal coalition, which gave liberals in the Democratic Party some of the political space they needed to buck Jim Crow. Yes, the Dixiecrats would withdraw their support. But for every white vote Harry Truman might lose in Alabama and Mississippi, there was a Black vote he might gain in Ohio and California, the two states that ultimately gave him his victory over the fearsome former prosecutor (and New York governor) Thomas Dewey.
Not only did the Dixiecrat rebellion fail; it also demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that Democrats could win national elections without the Solid South. The segregationists were weaker than they looked, and over the next 20 years the Democratic Party would cast them aside. (And even then, with the Dixiecrat exodus, Truman still won most of the states of the former Confederacy.)
There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could serve to apply that pressure.
In a normal, more majoritarian political system, this dynamic would eventually fix the issue of the MAGA Republican Party. Parties want to win, and they will almost always shift gears when it’s clear they can’t win with their existing platform, positions and leadership.
The problem is that the American political system, in its current configuration, gives much of its power to the party with the most supporters in all the right places. Republicans may have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but key features in the system — equal state representation in the Senate, malapportionment in the House of Representatives and winner-take-all distribution of votes in the Electoral College (Nebraska and Maine notwithstanding) — gives them a powerful advantage on the playing field of national politics.
To put it in simple terms, Joe Biden won the national popular vote by seven million ballots in the 2020 presidential election, but if not for roughly 120,000 votes across four states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Donald Trump would still be president.
Which is all to say that someone like Glenn Youngkin is only doing what makes sense. To make MAGA politics weak among Republican politicians, you have to make MAGA voters irrelevant in national elections. But that will take a different political system — or a vastly different political landscape — than the one we have now.
As I recall it, historically, this has been one of the main harbingers of some pretty bad shit headed our way.
When doctors won't take a job in your town because they can't afford housing, something is badly out of balance. And if you leave it to "natural market forces" it will definitely fix itself eventually, but when it does, it'll probably look a whole lot less like the ebb and flow of the tides, and a whole lot more like Mt St Hellens.
(pay wall)
In Martha’s Vineyard, even the doctors can’t afford housing anymore
Essential workers can’t afford to stay on the island, putting basic services in jeopardy
The stacks of chicken broth and shelf-stable milk were dwindling as the food pantry entered the last minutes of the day and a 63-year-old woman in a Boston Red Sox mask hurried through the door.
Sharon Brown, the pantry director, greeted the woman at the front desk. As Brown logged the details she needed to collect into her system, the woman’s story unspooled: After 18 years of living on the island, her rent had suddenly shot up.
“I couldn’t believe it. Doubled!” the woman said. “I’ve never seen things this bad.”
“This summer was the worst summer ever,” Brown agreed.
What Brown didn’t say out loud was that she knew this story well. That she and her 14-year-old son had moved three times since June. That in two weeks, when school began, she had no idea where they were going to live. Finding an affordable year-round rental on the Vineyard had become next to impossible.
“Well,” Brown began, “if you know anyone who has a year-round...” Her voice trailed off.
The Red Sox fan considered for a moment before shaking her head.
“I don’t,” she said. “But I’ll keep an ear out.”
This is the part of Martha’s Vineyard most people never see. An island known for its opulence and natural beauty, a playground for presidents and celebrities, it is kept afloat by workers for whom America’s housing crisis is not an eventuality. It’s here.
Even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) this week made a political statement by sending two planes full of asylum seekers to the summer haven, the dearth of affordable housing on the Vineyard had pushed its year-round community to a breaking point.
Schools have struggled to staff classrooms. Indigenous people whose families have lived on the island for centuries have been forced to leave their homeland. Firefighters and government workers can’t afford to stay in the communities they serve. People juggling two, three, even four service-industry jobs say they live each month knowing they are one rent hike away from moving into their cars or tents or onto a friend’s couch.
And then there’s Brown, who serves the island’s neediest, including its growing population of seniors.
This hollowing out is nothing new in cities like Los Angeles, New Orleans and Austin, where short-term rentals and investor home buyers have overtaken razor-thin housing markets and destabilized whole neighborhoods. But on an island where commuting means setting sail over temperamental waters, the Vineyard’s housing crisis is also an existential one.
“We’re hemorrhaging people who are our infrastructure, who hold this community up,” said Laura Silber, the coordinator of the Coalition to Create the Martha’s Vineyard Housing Bank, which led a successful effort this year to win support for a new fund for affordable housing. “If you don’t have municipal workers, if you don’t have teachers, if you don’t have emergency workers, if you don’t have someone to help families who are struggling and run the food bank, how does a community keep functioning?”
Nowhere to ‘shuffle’ to
In the winter, the 96-square-mile landmass of Martha’s Vineyard settles into stillness. The tourism industry’s grip on rental properties loosens, and the families who live here year-round rotate into more spacious winter homes for around six months. Only about half the island’s homes remain occupied all year, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.
As the Vineyard thaws, what locals refer to as the “island shuffle” kicks into high gear. They pack up and move from those winter homes into summer rentals, where payments are made by the week and housing can mean anything from a shack with no kitchen or flushable toilet to a camper van or a room in someone else’s home. Cars with license plates from places such as New York, New Jersey and D.C. jam the island’s two-lane roads. Bars fill with bodies, crowds clog the beaches, and the Vineyard’s lone airport becomes the third-busiest in New England.
“Because the island shuffle is so ingrained in the culture of the Vineyard, we didn’t recognize it for what it was — housing insecurity — because it was just part of life,” Silber said. “Now there’s nowhere left to shuffle to.”
Brown found a steady winter rental when she moved to the island five years ago. Summers were tougher, she said, but usually she could find someplace to last her and her son, Carron, through the busiest months. Now, they are moving every few weeks — sometimes staying in a house for only a few days.
A similar emergency has hit in resort towns, beach communities and rural destinations around the country, from the Hamptons to Aspen, Colo., and Jackson Hole, Wyo. The more remote the place, the deeper the crisis.
On Martha’s Vineyard, policymakers have chronically underinvested in affordable housing and allowed investment properties and short-term rentals to proliferate unchecked. The island, experts said, is more than 10 years late to confront its housing crisis, and it is not moving fast enough to narrow the gap.
Between 2010 and 2019, the amount of housing on the island grew by over 4 percent, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. But any progress was eaten up by the vacation-rental market. In the same period, the Commission found, the number of units occupied year-round dropped by more than 8 percent.
The arrival of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020 made things worse. Affluent remote workers flocked to the island’s salty air and tree-lined neighborhoods. Some who already owned property moved in full-time, depleting winter-housing options. Others bought up old homes and new builds, driving the median cost of houses up to $1.3 million as of April, according to the State House News Service. In the past year, home prices rose 33 percent.
“We can’t build our way out of this,” said Silber, from the housing bank coalition. Instead, the Vineyard, she said, must recapture housing that has been lost to the investment and short-term rental market rather than leaning exclusively on new development on the environmentally fragile island.
Even doctors can hardly afford to live here. Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, the largest employer on the island and home to its only emergency room, has for months been operating with a quarter of its staff jobs left unfilled. In January, CEO Denise Schepici offered 19 jobs to doctors, nurses and other workers ahead of the busy summer months, during which the island’s population swells from roughly 20,000 to 100,000 and emergency calls skyrocket.
Each was turned down.
“How do you recruit when rents are doubling from $3,000 a month to $6,000 a month, which is what happened to one of my nurses living in a one-bedroom apartment?” Schepici said.
None of the changes advocates have called for — zoning laws altered to protect year-round housing stock, long-term funding streams for affordable development and short-term-rental regulation — have been enacted island-wide. Earlier this year, the Vineyard’s six towns voted to approve a housing bank, a place to store money collected off of large real estate deals that would fund affordable housing. But the island can’t create such a fund until the state moves to give local municipalities the authority to impose real-estate transfer fees.
“How do you recruit when rents are doubling from $3,000 a month to $6,000 a month?”— Denise Schepici, CEO of Martha's Vineyard Hospital
Last session, the legislature failed to pass a measure to do so. But state lawmakers have vowed to push one through this year.
“We’re surrounded by water. There aren’t a lot of options for expanding outward,” said Jim Feiner, a real estate broker and chairman of the housing committee in the town of Chilmark who advocated for the adoption of the housing bank. “We need to start being proactive instead of reactive if we want our community to survive.”
Employers step in
To keep the lights on, many businesses on the Vineyard have been forced to confront the housing crisis directly.
“We’ve had to get creative,” Schepici said.
For the hospital, that has meant leasing about two dozen dormitory-style bedrooms at a cost of about $3 million a year to offer subsidized housing for workers. Much more, though, is needed. The hospital is in the process of purchasing property in Edgartown with room enough to house nearly 50 workers and their families, but it will be more than two years before anyone can move in.
“You know, I didn’t come here to build real estate,” Shepici said. “I came here to run the hospital.” Schepici said. But for a wide range of businesses on the island, the choice is stark: House workers, or there won’t be any left.
Island native Jeremiah Roberts, 28, lives in a loft owned by his employer, Larkin Stallings, who provides housing to several year-round workers at the Ritz, a dive in downtown Oak Bluffs.
Roberts, who has been working since he graduated from high school, juggles a side hustle and a fledgling music career with two full-time jobs running his own landscaping company and manning the bar at the Ritz. He works days and nights, he said, so he can stay on the island to help his aging mother. He wants to avoid the fate that has befallen so many of his peers: Those who left rarely returned. Those who stayed have struggled to move out of their parents’ homes and make a life of their own.
The loft costs him $1,400 a month, a nearly extinct price point during the high season, when rent can go for more than that per week.
While the arrangement helps sustain Stallings’s business, he acknowledged that the setup creates a power imbalance.
“If [Roberts] leaves the job, he loses his apartment. He doesn’t have the freedom to move around,” said Stallings, who also serves as the vice president of the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services board. “Even though I offer it, I really don’t think this employer-based housing is a good solution.”
Moving every few weeks
When Brown was recruited to work as a chef at a hotel on the Vineyard, she was also told the job came with a place to live. But she quickly realized the accommodations wouldn’t work for her and her then-10-year-old son.
“I was in there with these kids, 20-somethings, who were smoking and drinking and staying up until 2 a.m.,” Brown said. “I had to start looking for something else.”
Brown and Carron, now 14, have not lived in one place for more than 11 months. Asked how many times they have moved since arriving on the Vineyard, Carron needed two hands to count.
“After a while, the moving starts to get annoying,” he said recently, as he prepared to depart yet another house, bags lumpy with clothes at his feet. “But you get used it.”
In her lowest moments, Brown thinks about boarding the ferry to the mainland and never looking back. She tried it once, after losing her kitchen job during the pandemic. She and Carron felt miserable.
“After being on the island for three years and not hearing people shooting, not hearing police cars every day, when we went back to that, it was a nightmare,” she said.
Last year, Brown was asked to return to run the island’s food bank, combining her experience in kitchens and as a social worker in Delaware. Seeing it as divine intervention, she said yes.
The pantry serves roughly 2,000 people a month, many of them seniors, low-wage workers, immigrants and families with children. More than a third of the Vineyard’s full-time residents are 65 years or older, according to Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, well above the national average of one in six.
Brown sees her work as a calling. She shows up even on her days off, puts in produce orders from home while her son watches TV, and answers work calls well after dark. One elderly woman, a longtime client, calls Brown each night to pray together before bed.
On Brown’s weekly food deliveries, she has fed people living in tents in the state forest and in cars parked overnight in beachside lots. One senior client, Brown said, spends her summer months living in a chicken coop out back so she can rent out the main house and “make what she needs to tide her over for the rest of the year,” Brown said.
Yet Brown still sees the island as a sanctuary, a place where her son can run around with friends or bike on his own to the beach. A place where she doesn’t have to worry as much about the terrible things that happen to Black boys in America — street violence, state violence or worse. Here, her son is free to be who he is: a soft-spoken ninth-grader who helps seniors with their groceries and volunteers at the food bank after school, who loves video games and rolls his eyes when his mom tells him to stop watching YouTube videos with so much swearing, then quietly complies.
“I ask him every time we’re about to move again: Are you sure you want to stay here?” Brown said. “And he says yes.”
By the second week of August, it was time to move again. Brown had been subletting a small Victorian cottage at the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association in Oak Bluffs for a month and a half, the maximum allowed by the community’s board of directors. When she asked for an extension, the board said no.
Despite posting pleas on social media, putting her name on affordable-housing wait lists, and exhausting her network of friends, colleagues and even clients at the food bank, Brown’s only housing option was to accept a weeklong plant-sitting gig at a friend’s house. The week after, she planned to take Carron on a 10-day road trip. It was more than a vacation. It was a way to buy time: If they stayed, they might have nowhere to live.
As Brown planned their journey — a stop to visit family in Maryland, their trip to Universal Studios — their return date ricocheted in her mind.
“I have to pray that something will be ready by then,” she said.
Saved by an act of charity
The limited supply of available housing has pit islanders against islanders, individuals against businesses.
In the spring, Lori DiGiacomo, 61, discovered her landlord was putting his Vineyard Haven house and the detached in-law unit where she had lived for six years on the market. A company that intends to turn it into workforce housing scooped it up for more than $1.5 million.
"The first thought that went through my head was, ‘I’m going to lose my housing,’ " said DiGiacomo, a kindergarten teacher who has taught the Vineyard’s children for nearly 20 years. “Then I realized: I’m going to lose my people; I’m going to lose my tribe; I’m going to lose my sense of place.”
Vineyard Haven was where she raised her child and built a life, working as a house cleaner, artisan and waitress on top of her teaching job. It was where she fed the neighborhood cats, where she imagined herself being as she aged, where she planned to retire and welcome her adult daughter home for the holidays.
Instead, DiGiacomo began to apply for teaching licenses in other states. She took to Google, sending a query into the ether: “Where to move at 60?” But then, she said, her school’s principal reminded her that if she can hold on for five more years, her pension payout would increase by around 75 percent.
“I wasn’t really thinking practically until I sat down and did the math,” she said.
After DiGiacomo was featured in a June Martha’s Vineyard Times story on the island’s attrition of teachers, a concerned reader offered her a one-year lease on the 300-square-foot basement apartment attached to her house.
“The only reason I have housing right now is because of the charity of one person, as opposed to a system that’s actually working,” DiGiacomo said.
DiGiacomo spent the final weeks of summer shedding pieces of her life. She rehomed her cat, gave away her dining room table, sold her Tiffany-style lamp and a framed photo of chickens. All the while, she recited a George Carlin-inspired mantra — “It’s just stuff” — between steadying breaths.
“This is where I want to be. This is my home,” said DiGiacomo, whose lease expires next summer. "Hopefully, God willing, I might just be able to stay.”
A prayer and a reprieve
Brown was in Florida when her landlord called with news. The Camp Meeting Association had approved the appeal for a six-week extension.
Brown was awash with relief. This meant she and Carron could move back to the Oak Bluffs cottage and ride out the end of the season. It meant a steady place to live — until October.
As she and Carron loaded the car once more with clothes stuffed in trash bags and her set of purple suitcases filled to the zippers, she repeated a promise he had heard before. One Brown isn’t sure she can keep.
“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “We’ll find a year-round soon.”
IMHO, an awful lot of the shitty things happening around the world can be laid at the feet of anyone who's bought in to the bullshit notion that "government should work like a business."
Companies are dictatorships, and too many of the bean counters in charge of those companies care about little more than the monthly numbers and what color ink they see on a 12 column ledger.
Human rights and democracy eroding worldwide, U.S. finds
Respect for human rights and democratic norms eroded around the world in 2021, as repressive states increasingly detained opponents and struck out beyond their borders at those seen posing a threat, the Biden administration said on Tuesday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken described what he called a continued “recession” in basic rights and the rule of law over the past year as he unveiled the U.S. government’s annual assessment of the global human rights situation.
“Governments are growing more brazen, reaching across borders to threaten and attack critics,” Blinken said, citing an alleged effort by Iran’s government to abduct an Iranian American journalist from New York; efforts by the Assad regime to threaten Syrians cooperating with German steps to try former regime officials; and Belarus’s diversion of a commercial flight to seize a journalist.
Blinken said the jailing of political opponents had become more common in 2021, with more than a million political prisoners detained in more than 65 countries. He singled out the imprisonment of peaceful protesters in Cuba; activists and advocates in Russia and Egypt, including Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and Egyptian human rights lawyer Mohammed al-Baqr; and opposition presidential candidates in Benin.
The Biden administration has already said it believes Russian forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine. Last week, U.S. officials helped orchestrate an effort to suspend Russia from the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.“In few places have the human consequences of this decline been as stark as they are in the Russian government’s brutal war on Ukraine,” he said, pointing to apparent atrocities revealed by the recent withdrawal of Russian forces from some parts of the country. “We see what this receding tide is leaving in its wake — the bodies, hands bound, left on streets; the theaters, train stations, apartment buildings reduced to rubble with civilians inside.”
The report laid out a litany of alleged abuses by both allies and rivals, including forced disappearances in Saudi Arabia and what it characterized as ongoing acts of genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur Muslims in China. It also cited reprisals by Taliban authorities in Afghanistan against members of the former government and steps to limit freedoms of women and girls, as well as alleged abuses by all parties in the conflict in Ethiopia, including government troops from Eritrea.
Because the report is focused on trends in 2021, it did not explicitly address Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But Blinken, in remarks to reporters, said that Russian forces’ abuses had been numerous since its offensive began on Feb. 24, including alleged executions, rape and the deprivation of civilians’ access to food, water and medicine.
Here in USAmerica, we've had our fingers in some really bad shit over the years. We can't keep ducking the consequences of our own shitty behavior while expecting everybody else to be held to account.
So this next bit is kind of a big deal - and we'll see how long before the Republicans latch onto it and start screaming about how Biden hates America.
Blinken said the United States would not be spared scrutiny over its own human rights violations. Since taking office, administration officials have said they would openly acknowledge chronic problems at home, including police violence against Black Americans.
“We take seriously our responsibility to address these shortcomings, and we know that theway we do it matters,” he said.
Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, welcomed the report but said it failed to highlight the U.S. role in overseas conflicts where civilians have suffered widespread harm, including in Afghanistan and Yemen. The United States continues to provide arms and aircraft maintenance support to Saudi Arabia, which leads a coalition battling Houthi rebels in Yemen.
“Always a little odd to read about other’s human rights abuses as if US had nothing to do with them. e.g. no mention of US support to Saudi [Arabia] in Yemen but the #HumanRightsReport discusses Iran support to Houthis,” she said on Twitter. “No mention of US in Afghanistan or civilian harm caused in Kabul.”
Asked about how the Biden administration would balance human rights against other American interests, and how such acts would affect American partnerships with countries with poor human rights records, Blinken said that officials sometimes chose to press foreign governments in private, and sometimes in public, including in the annual rights report.
“It doesn’t distinguish between friend and foe. We apply the same standard everywhere,” he said.
Such strains have been particularly visible in recent months between the Biden administration and key Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia as U.S. officials seek to secure increased energy output amid the war in Ukraine and Gulf officials bristle at a host of issues, including what they see as overstated criticism on human rights.
If these truckers were a buncha black folks - or indigenous First Nations people - Ottawa would not be sitting and fretting, and the "conservatives" would not be kickin' back, enjoying Mr Trudeau's discomfort - they'd be screaming for blood.
"...could be arrested..."?
The minute you hear anything tagged "Freedom" this or "Freedom" that, you know it's ridiculously unlikely to be anything legit - that there's a very high probability for it to be nothing more than an Astro-Turfed play for shock value, or intimidation, or some other Daddy State bullshit aimed at bullying people into giving up on the rule of law.
I can all but guarantee there's an ulterior motive at work.
This is not legitimate civil disobedience. This is a mob of Bannon's Blackshirts showing the world their intention to do whatever they want with total impunity.
‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters who block streets could be ‘arrested without a warrant,’ Ottawa police warn
Police in Ottawa are warning that any protesters blocking streets for the self-described “Freedom Convoy” may be “arrested without a warrant,” as raucous protests against vaccine mandates and coronavirus restrictions continue with no end in sight.
The protests, which have led to at least 23 arrests and 80 criminal investigations in the capital, are now sparking vigorous debate among officials over how best to de-escalate the situation there and at U.S.-Canada border crossings, where blockades have disrupted the flow of goods and people. Some are warning that mass arrests could prove counterproductive or even lead to violence.
“It is a criminal offence to obstruct, interrupt or interfere with the lawful use, enjoyment, or operation of property,” Ottawa police said in a news release issued Wednesday, telling protesters: “You must immediately cease further unlawful activity or you may face charges.”
Police said those found to be taking part in criminal activity — which could include blocking streets or “assisting others in the blocking of streets” — could be arrested. Police are also giving notice that vehicles could be seized and possibly forfeited if people are convicted.
Law enforcement officials are under pressure to use tougher measures to disperse demonstrations, including those that continue to clog traffic arteries between the United States and Canada. So far, two major ports of entry — the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, and the Coutts crossing linking Montana to Alberta — have been closed or partially blocked.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been widely targeted by protesters denouncing his response to the pandemic, called the obstruction of border crossings an economic crisis. He tweeted that the blockades in Windsor and the capital, Ottawa, where a state of emergency was declared over the weekend, “must stop” — but he didn’t elaborate on how this could be achieved.
The blockades, he said, “are endangering jobs, impeding trade, threatening the economy, and obstructing our communities.” Business groups and experts reported that the bridge blockades were hurting supply chains. Goods worth approximately $300 million cross the Ambassador Bridge every day.
Despite the warning from Ottawa police, some local law enforcement officers seemed to acknowledge the fraught implications of mass arrests.
“You can’t arrest your way out of the choices that people are making. … The best thing is for them to make the decision to leave,” a Royal Canadian Mounted Police superintendent in Alberta, Roberta McKale, told reporters Wednesday at one of the protest sites near Coutts. “And they’ve got to go.”
Still, McKale said, asking the protesters to leave has so far not worked: “We’re going to have to use our enforcement options in order to have that happen.”
And Windsor’s mayor, Drew Dilkens, warned that arresting people could lead to violence, telling local outlets that Windsor police must be “calculated and appropriately balanced” in how they handle protesters. “At this time, our focus is on maintaining security and de-escalating the situation as much as possible,” he said during a news briefing.
Some protesters believe “they are fighting for a cause that is worth dying for,” Dilkens said. “That type of sentiment translates into different behaviors than any normal protests.”
In Ottawa, where more than 1,000 tickets for offenses including excessive noise and red-light violations have been issued, municipal authorities are stepping up enforcement. They can now issue fines up to nearly $800 for setting fires or creating noise, a steep increase for those types of offenses, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
The Ambassador Bridge is temporarily closed, while the delay at the Coutts land crossing is estimated at seven hours, according to Canada’s border service agency. Dilkens said in an interview Wednesday that local police have tried to keep at least one lane open in each direction on the Ambassador Bridge so that goods could be transported across the border while respecting people’s right to protest.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is also monitoring a campaign in which truckers in the United States are potentially planning to block roads in major metropolitan areas in protest of vaccine mandates. The Super Bowl in Los Angeles on Sunday and President Biden’s State of the Union address March 1 could be affected.
In New Zealand, an anti-vaccine rally outside Parliament in Wellington led to mass arrests, after crowds gathered to protest myriad reasons, including lockdown restrictions and alleged media corruption.
“We stand with Ottawa,” read the message on the side of one truck at the scene, while others held signs attacking the media and calling the global health crisis “a plandemic.”
The Wellington district commander, Superintendent Corrie Parnell, told reporters that 120 people were arrested Thursday as the protest there went into its third day.
Similar demonstrations — seemingly energized by Canada’s convoy — have also been held in Australia, France, Alaska and across Europe in recent days.
As the protests drag on, concerns are growing for the number of children who have been present.
About 25 percent of attendees inside some 400 trucks stationed at the scene are believed to be children, police say, which could complicate the ways in which officers respond to those protesting. Ottawa Police Deputy Steve Bell cited sanitation, noise levels and carbon monoxide fumes as some of the risks that children who are spending so much time inside the trucks could face.
“It’s something that greatly concerns us." Bell told reporters Tuesday, adding that the children could be “at risk during a police operation.”
The Ottawa Police Service said Wednesday that it was aware of the welfare concerns and working with the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa to “ensure the safety” of the children present. The force said it would be sharing information with the CASO and that the organization “has a duty to investigate whenever there are allegations of abuse or neglect that suggest a child or youth may be in need of protection.”
