Today's Brian

Brian Tyler Cohen - on Ron Johnson

A variation on The Sgt Schultz Defense.

"I don't know anything, and I didn't see anything, and if I did, I'm really just too dumb and clumsy to pull it off. Besides, what about Nancy Pelosi? Now excuse me, but I gotta go steal my paycheck and syphon off a few billion tax dollars for Mr Koch."

What's All This Q Stuff Anyway?

Brian Tyler Cohen - QAnon Anonymous

QAnon Anonymous podcast via Stitcher - The Rise Of Dark Brandon:

Let's Review

(hat tip = Walker Thornton)

“Conspiracy theories will always be popular, because they make you feel like you’re smart, important, and part of a community.”

Mike Rothschild Via Melville House

On the Ongoing Influence of QAnon and Its Self-Made Mythologies

A small crowd gathered on Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on a cool early November day in 2021, full of excitement and powered by secret knowledge. It was almost a year after the last Q drop, and three years into the COVID-19 pandemic. But the people assembled that morning, in the solemn place where John F. Kennedy was assassinated nearly 60 years prior, weren’t worrying about getting sick. They certainly weren’t wearing masks. Those were slaver muzzles designed to make you stupid. What they did have were a few red ties, a plethora of bedazzled homemade signs and shirts, and the certain knowledge that everything in the world was about to change—within minutes.

The 100 people who had come together that morning were mostly older and mostly women. They sang classic pop songs of their youth, often over the interminable and daily livestreams they were putting out on Telegram and Zoom. They shouted various numbers and slogans seemingly at random—inscrutable codes with hidden meaning that only they understood. They broadcast their arguments with the “comatose vertical meatsacks” who accosted them—their smug nickname for the normies who weren’t interested in the beautiful new world that was about to unveil itself.

More than anything, they waited.

They were waiting for John F. Kennedy’s son, JFK Jr., who, according to their self-made mythology, did not die in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999. He was alive, and had been waiting for the right moment to return to public life. And even more exciting, he would return alongside other “dead” celebrities who had gone underground for various reasons—Michael Jackson, Prince, even John John’s long-dead father. Never mind that JFK would be 104 years old in 2021 and had been so riddled with health problems that it’s likely he wouldn’t have lived to see the 1970s. He was coming back. They were all coming back.

And the people waiting in the increasingly intense rain that day knew not only that he was coming back, but exactly when—on November 2, 2021at 12:30 PM local time, if you want to be precise. The prophecy of JFK Jr. returning had been foretold not by Q—Q had simply answered “no” when asked whether JFK Jr. was alive—but by one of Q’s many acolytes who found meaning in the random noise.

The person who persuaded those people in Dealey Plaza to leave their families behind and wait for a dead Kennedy was a Seattle-area demolition contractor with a history of anti-Semitism and an ability to decode the future in random numbers, ironically using a simplified version of the Hebrew-language alphanumeric cipher known as gematria, to create a vast mythology of hidden events and secrets. “A” equaled “1”, “B” equaled “2”, etc. Like many basic concepts in the conspiracy theory world, gematria (pronounced with a hard “G”) is real. But it’s also been twisted and abused by pseudohistorical crankery, first with “The Bible Code,” and now this—100 middle-aged Trumpers singing “Beat It” in the rain, waiting for dead people to return and make America great again.

Calling himself “Negative48”—the “48” being the supposed gematria value of the letters in the word “evil”—Michael Protzman was once just another QAnon influencer with a few thousand followers on Telegram. He was neck-deep in all of Q’s subsidiary conspiracy theories, lecturing his small following about the evils of “Jewish leaders,” promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy films, and telling people to buy worthless Vietnamese currency that would make them rich when it revalued. It was a rap that was instantly familiar to both Q believers and those who studied the movement. But for the same reason we turn up the volume when “Beat It” plays on the radio, Q believers went for it—the familiar brings comfort. So within a few months, a small, devoted following built up around Protzman’s Negative48 character created an entirely new mythology through a combination of gematria, Q drops, and wishful thinking.

The rain poured down and John F. Kennedy Jr. stubbornly failed to emerge. But just as Q believers had been doing for years, the group which came to call itself Negative48 stuck around. (Just like QAnon, the cult often used Protzman’s nickname to refer to itself.) Members swamped a Rolling Stones concert that night, claiming that Mick Jagger would reveal himself to be JFK Jr. They stayed through Thanksgiving, as Protzman began to control even the movements of his followers, telling them when to go outside, when to look up or down, and what to eat. They stayed through Christmas. To keep themselves going, they cranked out dozens of crowd-funding efforts, starting another as soon as one was de-platformed. They were generally ignored by local authorities who couldn’t do anything about the group until it actually broke a law. And they stayed as winter turned to spring. They might still be there now.

In the post-Trump world, the QAnon movement split along two parallel tracks. Sometimes they happened to intersect, but many other times they went their own way. Most believers went down one, a few went down the other. But both are critical to understanding why this movement persisted long after any hope of “The Storm’s” arrival had passed.

One track was a mainstreaming of Q’s core tenets to the point where the basics of QAnon—the drops, the obscure “comms”—were no longer necessary, or even desirable. Q was no longer the cool, secret club that you had speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It was just “conservatism” now. The tenuous coalition of MAGA-devoted Q believers and more progressive pandemic truthers that lurched out of Facebook in 2020 had become one unified front in 2021. In countless school board meetings, city council sessions, protests, “health freedom” conferences, and segments on major right-wing media, the same story was being told, and it was a story that even the most casual Q believer would have no problem embracing.

The other track was much farther on the fringe than even most Trumpists were willing to travel. This was where Michael Protzman and his devoted cultists in Negative48 rode, along with other, even more outwardly racist and ant-Semitic new Q promoters. On this track, Q drops were still gospel and the “comms” still were being decoded for all their secrets. And there were a lot of secrets. Trump and JFK Jr. spoke in number codes with Prince and Elvis, quantum medical beds and NESARA would deliver permanent health and prosperity to all, and Trump was still actually the president of a “devolved” military government. Fewer people were in this part of Q’s big tent, but they got a lot of baffled media attention for their bizarre antics—gematria cultists waiting for JFK and drinking industrial bleach out of a communal bowl to fight COVID will get clicks.

This track, the Negative48 track, was quite possibly sending its members to their doom. The other track, the mainstream one, was possibly sending everyone else.

Local Action = National Impact

That slogan was coined by QAnon hero General Michael Flynn. Faced with crushing legal bills and no help from Trump, Flynn often could be found headlining an endless array of gatherings with names like “ReAwaken America” and “God & Country Patriot Revival,” meant to display a folksy middle finger to the COVID-fearful establishment. At these events, which often sold VIP tickets for thousands of dollars, a host of semi-well-known names from a variety of fringes spoke alongside Flynn. A typical conference would offer incendiary speeches from influencers in the stolen election universe, “constitutional sheriffs” claiming that the federal government is an illegal scheme, decodings from the last remaining QAnon promoters, independent media who had been “censored” by the mainstream for their views, and alternative medicine heavyweights spewing conspiracy theories about the government suppressing COVID cures. You even got the occasional serving Republican politician. All of them excelled at separating believers from their money.

When he wasn’t selling Flynn-branded women’s running tank-tops or spreading deranged COVID conspiracy theories on Telegram, Flynn’s apocalyptic ramblings often focused on what he deemed “local action” having a “national impact.” At one June 2021 conference, headlined by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Flynn raged against the school board machine, thundering, “We cannot allow school boards to dictate what is happening in our schools. We dictate that.”

Inspired by the desire of Q promoters that America be “taken back” from what they saw as the godless transgender vaccinator hordes of the left, Q believers began making spectacles of themselves at school board and city council meetings. Using public comment time, they blathered conspiracy theories and threatened baseless lawsuits. The majority didn’t even have kids in their local district.

Q’s encroachment into local politics was its biggest mainstream growth vector in the post-Trump era. The media headlines might have been about Negative48’s antics or the squabbles between major Q promoters fighting over pieces of the same grifting pie. But the story with far more importance was unfolding in the sparely attended and barely observed mechanics of local government. The roots of democracy were being hijacked by fringe activists and conspiracy theory cranks—and they had a message that came straight from figures like Mike Flynn.

In the summer and fall of 2021, “local action” meant rambling speeches spouting Q-approved moral panic about “woke ideology” and Critical Race Theory, vaccines being forced on unsuspecting toddlers, the pandemic being prolonged to enforce the controlling mandates of Dr. Fauci, and masks making it easier for sex traffickers to target kids. Some of these videos went viral, getting millions of views—inflated in some part by liberals passing them around to mock them. Some believers took Flynn’s call even further, as they ran for office at the state, local, and party level. Stolen election believers—many of whom had endorsed QAnon on social media—were running for critical secretary of state positions in swing states, trying to seize the power to overturn elections.

And dozens of candidates who publicly endorsed some part of the Q mythology won elections—for the Clark County School Board, encompassing Las Vegas; the City Council of Huntington Beach, CA; the San Luis Coastal Unified School District’s board in sleepy San Luis Obispo, CA; the mayor of tiny Sequim, WA; and many more. They even got their hands into the mechanisms that ran elections—Q believer Ben Johnson was appointed head of the Spalding County Board of Elections and Registration, helping to set election guidelines in a critical Georgia county. What could go wrong?

Even QAnon luminaries got in on the act, apparently tired of waiting for “The Storm” to usher in utopia. Tracy “Beanz” Diaz had been one of the earliest evangelists of the Q movement, and in 2021, she was elected to the South Carolina GOP’s executive committee. She received only 188 votes, but like so many other barely visible elections, it was enough. And the likeliest candidate to have been the last iteration of Q, Ron Watkins, ran a chaotic and barely-funded candidacy for the Arizona 2nd Congressional District, on a platform centered on defeating “communism” in local schools and slaying the Critical Race Theory beast. (Ron has no school-age children living in the United States.)

But as thick as the gloom is, there are glimmers of hope to be found. The national coverage of QAnon believers and conspiracy cranks running for local office inspired candidates to run expressly on anti-conspiracy platforms. One such slate actually won city council seats in Sequim, the same small Washington town roiled by a QAnon-aligned mayor. The grassroots progressive electoral organization Run For Something, which formed in the wake of Trump’s win in 2016, singled out QAnon candidates and publicly vowed to recruit liberal challengers to run against them. And many Q-aligned potential politicos struggled to have their candidacies taken seriously. Ron Watkins may have as much name recognition as anyone running in Arizona, but his campaign had raised just $30,000 as of February 2022—lagging hundreds of thousands of dollars behind the leading GOP candidate in his district.

As the world entered year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans responded to the continued upheaval by utterly losing their minds. “Unruly passenger incidents” on airplanes, a euphemism that almost always involved passengers becoming aggressive with airline staff over masks, were at their highest rate on record. Workers at vaccine clinics were attacked and called murderers by COVID deniers. Anti-mask parents physically assaulted teachers over school masking mandates. And in an incident with echoes of the “Grass Valley Charter School Fundraiser” fiasco, Q-driven MAGA diehards forced the National Butterfly Center, located just north of the US-Mexico border in McAllen, TX, to close—because they believed it was a hub of drug smuggling and sex trafficking, and were threatening to storm it, guns in hand.

The madness gripping America wasn’t all linked explicitly to QAnon. But even when there weren’t clear links, it was impossible to deny that the violent chaos touted as the aftermath of “The Storm” (remember Drop #1’s promise of “Marines and National Guard” called up to police the streets after Hillary’s arrest) had seeped into everyday life in COVID-weary, Biden-hating, cancel culture-fearing conservative communities. There never needed to be another Q drop, another decoding thread, or another Q T-shirt printed. The brain worms were loose, and they were hungry.

In particular, Q’s residue was all over the Republican malaise related to COVID. As the omicron variant sent case numbers skyrocketing around the world in the winter of 2021, QAnon promoters were among the most visible anti-vaccine advocates pushing out lies and conspiracy theories meant to dissuade people from getting vaccinated and boosted. Across countless Telegram posts and dozens of their “health freedom” tent revival events, the message was both clear and completely contradicted by the available evidence: they believed the pandemic was over, and any mandates related to vaccines or masks were totalitarian control mechanisms that were what was actually killing people. Only occasionally did reality creep in—as when a spate of virulently COVID-denying right-wing media personalities and conspiracy believers died of COVID, including conspiracy legend and QAnon promoter Robert David Steele.

The stolen election industry and the grift around it were also thriving. They lasted well beyond the shelf life of the actual election, which even Trump seemed to admit he los. Even as they feuded amongst themselves over money and credit, QAnon personalities like Mike Flynn, Lin Wood, and Sidney Powell still pumped out a relentless stream of conspiracy theories about Biden’s election win eventually being undone, promising they would “fix 2020” as a steady stream of donations rolled in. Other new conspiracy promoters found fame and fortune in the Biden-era landscape, using Q as a jumping off point for wherever they wanted to take their fans—and they didn’t all involve JFK Jr. ripping off his Mick Jagger mask.

One was the viral series of blog posts called “Devolution,” which posited that Trump was secretly running the country through a “devolved” military government while Joe Biden doddered away on a fake White House set. Unfolding over dozens of almost incomprehensible blog posts, videos, podcasts, and Telegram posts, “Devolution” was a comforting fiction that netted its creator, a North Dakota school employee who went by “Patel Patriot,” thousands of dollars per month in subscriptions from fans waiting to see what would happen next. Another sect believed that Trump’s election wasn’t legitimate—in fact, no election since 1871 held any validity—because Washington DC had quietly become a corporation that year. The details are vague and meaningless, but the upshot was always the same: The bad guys will get theirs; the good guys will deliver the blow—and the special people will be rewarded for their belief.

That’s what’s kept Q’s mythology alive even as the Q persona itself receded in importance. Because that’s what conspiracy theories have always been about—feeling special. You know the secrets “they” don’t want you to know, you know what “really” happened in some historical event, you know that Fauci and Biden and Gates and all the other liberal do-gooders are actually genocidal maniacs, you know that Q and Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson are patriots, and you know more than “the experts”.

Q is like every other conspiracy theory in that way. And whatever absorbs and replaces Q will be like that, too. Conspiracy theories will always be popular, because they make you feel like you’re smart, important, and part of a community.

And it’s that sense of community that kept that flock of believers in Dallas, long after the rest of the world had forgotten about them and moved on to the next freak show. These people, like Q’s faithful, were in it together and for the long haul. They were in it for each other. Where we go one, we go all.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Following up on a "Whooda Thunk It" post earlier today

It's The Water, Stupid

Lake Mead - Nevada

The Guardian:

US issues western water cuts as drought leaves Colorado River near ‘tipping point’

Arizona, Nevada and Mexico affected as federal government steps in after states failed to reach agreement

After western US states failed to reach agreements to reduce water use from the beleaguered Colorado River, the federal government stepped in on Tuesday, issuing cuts that will affect two states and Mexico.

Officials with the Bureau of Reclamation declared a “tier 2” shortage in the river basin as the drought continues to pummel the American west, pushing its largest reservoirs to new lows. The waning water levels, which have left dramatic "bathtub rings" in reservoirs and unearthed buried bodies and other artifacts, continue to threaten hydroelectric power production, drinking water, and agricultural production.

“The system is approaching a tipping point,” the Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, M Camille Calimlim Touton, said during a news conference on Tuesday, adding that urgent action was required. “Protecting the system means protecting the people of the American west.”

- more -

In the middle of that Tier 2 Water Shortage someone decided it'd be a good idea to let a foreign government - an extremely wealthy foreign government - exploit the single most valuable resource anywhere, for free.

When do we acknowledge that the "party of good business" is either incredibly bad at business, or simply too fucking corrupt for words?

Yahoo News:

Saudi firm has pumped Arizona groundwater for years without paying. Time to pony up

Bruce Babbitt and Robert Lane

The Butler Valley is an empty stretch of desert west of Phoenix, worthy of note for two reasons.

• It holds more than 6 million acre-feet of groundwater, strategically located near the Central Arizona Project canal.
• And more than 99% of Butler Valley is owned by the state of Arizona in trust for the support of public schools.

In 1982 as the Central Arizona Project canal neared completion, Wes Steiner, the renowned director of the Department of Water Resources, proposed that the state set aside Butler Valley as a groundwater reserve for future use in connection with the CAP.

Acting on his advice, we worked with the federal Bureau of Land Management to transfer the Valley into state ownership to be managed by the State Land Department.

How much water has Fodomonte pumped?

In June, The Arizona Republic uncovered the story of how the State Land Department had recently handed over thousands of acres to a Saudi corporation called Fondomonte, giving it permission to pump unlimited amounts of groundwater to grow alfalfa hay for export to Saudi Arabia.

This tale of official misfeasance began in 2015 when the State Land Department began leasing land to Fondomonte at an annual rental of just $25 per acre.

Sweet deal for Saudis: Arizona allows farm to use Phoenix's backup supply

However, the 2015 lease in addition allowed Fondomonte to pump unlimited amounts of groundwater at no cost whatever.

How much is Fondomonte pumping? The company refuses to disclose how much water it uses each year, and the State Land Department has never bothered to demand reports. That Fondomonte is growing alfalfa year round on approximately 3,500 acres can be verified from aerial photos.

And according to U.S. Geological Survey studies, alfalfa in Butler Valley requires 6.4 acre-feet of water per acre. That means the company has likely been pumping 22,400 acre-feet of water each year for the last 7 years.

Void its lease, charge for past rent

How much should the state be charging for this water? The Arizona Constitution, Article 10, Section 4, requires that land leases and “products of land” … “shall be appraised at their true value.”

The appropriate method for determining true value is hiding in plain sight. The Central Arizona Project sells water to customers throughout Maricopa County for $242 per acre foot delivered through the project canal that passes just south of Butler Valley.

Add these figures, and Fondomonte should have been paying $5.42 million per year for each of the last seven years.

What should be done to clean up this scandal? First, Gov. Doug Ducey should instruct the State Land Department to void the lease and restore Butler Valley to its intended use as a groundwater reserve for the future.

Second, Gov. Ducey should instruct the attorney general to collect past due rentals of about $38 million to be held in trust for the benefit of Arizona school children.

Bruce Babbitt served as governor of Arizona from 1978 to 1987. Robert Lane served as State Land commissioner from 1982 to 1987.

Reach them at bbabbittaz@gmail.com and robert.lane@me.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Ducey, AG must get Saudi firm to pay for groundwater use

Well Now - Whooda Thunk It?

I can do without Mitch McConnell.

Just wanted to make that one ridiculously obvious point - everybody would be better off without ol' Mitch.

Everybody except a few select Plutocrats, and Donald Trump from January 2017 thru January 2021.

But Trump is a fickle little shit who can't see anything but his own urgent desire to satisfy his own immediate appetites.

He lives his life episodically - like some weird upside down version of The Truman Show - where everybody is dealing with reality the best they can, but Trump insists on trying to turn the whole universe into a loosely-scripted Reality TV series with him in the central role - the hero who can do no wrong.

And every once in a while, the storyline has to change in order to fit whatever fantasy suits his whim - which always has everything to do with keeping his ego sufficiently puffed up, and casting whoever's conveniently at hand as the Villain du Jour, so Trump never has to deal with any of the consequences of the fucked up vanity project that is the entirety of his existence.

So Mitch McConnell shoves TaxScam2017® through, and he installs 3 Justices at SCOTUS, along with a coupla hundred other wingnut Judges on the federal bench, and he makes sure Trump is not removed from office in either of the 2 impeachment trials.

That's not to say McConnell did any of that because of a deep and abiding affection for Donald Trump, but the guy got quite a bit done that accrued to Trump's favor.

Anyway, Mitch criticizes Trump's picks for the midterms, and suddenly Mitch is the worst guy ever, according to the guy whose political ass Mitch saved more than a few times.

...but there's always the kicker at the end of it all.

Insider:

Donald Trump launched a furious attack on 'broken down hack' Mitch McConnell and his 'crazy wife' in bust-up over GOP Senate candidates

Former President Donald Trump has launched a furious attack on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a dispute over the GOP Senate mid-term campaign.

Trump said the senior senator from Kentucky should spend more time and money helping Republican Senate candidates get elected and "less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China."

"Why do Republicans Senators allow a broken down hack politician, Mitch McConnell, to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

McConnell has drawn ire from Trump after he said that Republicans will face a tough task in flipping the Senate majority, citing "candidate quality."

Recent polling has shown that GOP nominees in the nation's most closely contested states are struggling to keep up.

This includes Trump-backed candidates Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, JD Vance in Ohio, and Herschel Walker in Georgia.

Trump and McConnell, who were once firm allies, have been publicly feuding since Trump's 2020 election loss.

McConnell angered Trump after appearing to accept Joe Biden's victory and condemning the former president for being "practically and morally responsible" for the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that McConnell's comments about GOP Senate candidates were "an affront to honor and to leadership."

The former president also made a disparaging comment about McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, who served as Trump's Transportation Secretary and was one of the first Cabinet officials to resign after the Capitol riot. She is reported to have spoken to the House January 6 panel earlier this month.

Trump has previously drawn attention to Chao's business ties to China.

Chao's family owns a shipping company that transports material to and from China, and a government watchdog has previously alleged that she used her office's staff and resources to support the business.

Despite their fraught relationship, McConnell has said he would still support Trump as the party's 2024 nominee.

Today's Tweet

The Senate Republicans didn’t get the memo about Rick Scott, made him the chair of the NRSC and now most of their senate campaign funds are gone

That is fuckin hilarious

— THE SAD TRUTH (@SmnWeekly) August 20, 2022

Today's Government Crook

1. In 79 days, we're going to have an election that could be a deciding factor in determining whether or not our little experiment in democratic self-government will be allowed to continue
2. The outcomes in that election - maybe more than even the last one - could hinge on mail-in ballots getting out to the voters, and back in to the people who count the ballots
3. The guy Trump appointed to fuck up the Postal Service is still in charge of it, and he hasn't grown any more trustworthy

USPS is a service - says so right there in the name. We fund it with tax dollars and it's there to provide a vital service to Americans (again, it's right there in the name of the joint - United States Postal Service).

I want the Post Office to do it's thing the best it can, and to continue being a symbol of a civilized nation.

I don't need it to be a profit center any more than I need the FDA to be a profit center - or the prison system, or the FBI, or public schools, or any of the other services I pay for with my tax money.

The privatization of government is part of a plan to install plutocracy - it's strangling this country - and it has to stop.

WaPo: (pay wall)

DeJoy maintains financial ties to former company as USPS awards it new $120 million contract

XPO Logistics pays DeJoy and family businesses at least $2.1 million annually to lease four office buildings in North Carolina

The U.S. Postal Service will pay $120 million over the next five years to a major logistics contractor that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously helped lead and with which his family maintains financial ties, according to DeJoy’s financial disclosure statements and a federal contracting database.

The new contract will deepen the Postal Service’s relationship with XPO Logistics, where DeJoy served as supply chain chief executive from 2014 to 2015 after the company purchased New Breed Logistics, the trucking firm he owned for more than 30 years. Since he became postmaster general, DeJoy, DeJoy-controlled companies and his family foundation have divested between $65.4 million and $155.3 million worth of XPO shares, according to financial disclosures, foundation tax documents and securities filings.

But DeJoy’s family businesses continue to lease four North Carolina office buildings to XPO, according to his financial disclosures and state property records.

The leases could generate up to $23.7 million in rent payments for the DeJoy businesses over the next decade, according to a person who shared details of the agreements with The Washington Post but spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential financial arrangements. In 2018, when DeJoy sat on the company’s board, XPO reported similar figures with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The leases run until 2025 and can be extended until 2030, according to those filings.

Postal Service spokesman Jeffery Adams said that DeJoy did not participate in the procurement process for the XPO contract, which was competitively bid. The DeJoy company leases to XPO were cleared by ethics officials before DeJoy took office in June 2020, according to a previously unreported Postal Service inspector general investigation, because the properties were rented to a contractor and not the agency itself. DeJoy is recused from any matters involving XPO, Adams said.

DeJoy’s personal spokesman, Mark Corallo, referred most questions to the Postal Service.

DeJoy’s USPS slowdown plan will delay the mail. What’s it mean for your Zip code?

DeJoy’s leases have alarmed some ethics watchdogs.

“There’s no question he’s continuing to profit from a Postal Service contractor,” said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel at watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “He can comply with these technical legal requirements … but it does create an appearance issue about whether it’s in his financial interest to continue to make policy that would benefit contractors like XPO.”

The agreement will see XPO take over operations at two crucial sorting and distribution facilities in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The agency awarded the company the contract in April, but XPO is a longtime postal vendor with dozens of other active contracts with the Postal Service for trucking and logistics assistance.

DeJoy’s 14-month tenure at the Postal Service has faced controversy throughout. Congressional Democrats and independent postal experts accused him of slowing mail delivery ahead of the November 2020 presidential election — accusations he denied. He is under federal criminal investigation over alleged campaign finance abuses. A DeJoy spokesman in June said DeJoy “has always been scrupulous in his adherence to the campaign contribution laws and has never knowingly violated them.”

Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say

DeJoy has said repeatedly in congressional testimony that he would abide by all ethics requirements.

“LDJ Global Strategies, of which Mr. DeJoy is a majority shareholder, leases certain commercial buildings to XPO. Such leases were disclosed by Mr. DeJoy in his public financial disclosure report,” Adams said in a statement. “In addition, the Office of Government Ethics endorsed Mr. DeJoy’s recusal agreement concerning XPO as an appropriate remedy to resolve any issues concerning the possible appearance of a conflict of interest concerning this landlord/tenant relationship.”

XPO spokesman Joseph Checkler said the company’s contracts with the Postal Service were awarded through regular procurement mechanisms. The company bid for other postal facilities, but was not awarded those contracts.

“In some cases, we’ve won. In other cases, we’ve lost,” Checkler said.

DeJoy has deep connections to the logistics industry. He built his family’s trucking business into a shipping juggernaut after a breakthrough contract with the Postal Service in the early 1990s. He sold the business to XPO in 2014 for $615 million.

DeJoy generally held commercial properties leased to XPO and shares in the company through individual limited liability companies and his family foundation, according to his financial disclosures, his wife’s financial disclosures and SEC filings. (DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, was then-President Donald Trump’s ambassador-nominee to Canada, and filed separate ethics forms in 2019.)

Three limited liability companies — 4000 Piedmont Parkway Associates LLC, 4035 Piedmont Parkway Associates LLC and LMD Properties LLC — own the leased buildings, according to North Carolina property records. DeJoy lists himself as a “managing member” of all three businesses in his financial disclosures.

Another limited liability company, the Louis DeJoy Family Partnership LLC, held his XPO stock.

The three limited liability companies that lease buildings to XPO did not hold XPO shares. DeJoy’s family charitable foundation did hold XPO assets, according to the inspector general report, though the investigation did not include how many shares or their value.

The inspector general report said a Postal Service ethics lawyer recommended DeJoy divest of certain assets to avoid conflicts of interest — including stock in XPO, Amazon and UPS — or that he sign a recusal memorandum reassigning issues involving those companies to other agency leaders.

Within nine days of taking office, DeJoy sold between $565,000 and $1.2 million of stock in UPS and Amazon, two of the Postal Service’s top competitors, according to his financial disclosures. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

But the inspector general report stated that DeJoy initially explored alternatives to divesting XPO assets while remaining in compliance with ethics regulations. DeJoy assigned Michael Elston, secretary to the agency’s governing board, and Heather Clarke, DeJoy’s chief of staff who was previously employed at DeJoy’s former companies, to screen issues involving companies with which DeJoy held investments, including XPO, according to the inspector general investigation.

Those issues were to be directed to David E. Williams, the agency’s chief operating officer. Williams retired in January. The Postal Service declined to provide The Post with DeJoy’s updated screening processes.

On Aug. 13, 2020, though, DeJoy notified postal ethics officials that he would begin to divest from 14 companies in which he held assets and which officials said could present conflicts of interest, including XPO.

Over the ensuing four months, he sold between $27.7 million and $107.8 million in shares from those companies. The vast majority — between $26 million and $103.6 million — were of XPO assets.

Postal ethics officials initially determined that DeJoy did not need to disclose his family foundation’s assets because the organization held nonprofit tax status, according to the inspector general inquiry. But investigators found subsequently that the foundation held a previously unknown account primarily consisting of XPO assets.

The inspector general’s office informed postal ethics officials of this account, and those officials instructed DeJoy to hire an independent asset manager for the foundation, the report stated, which Corallo, DeJoy’s personal spokesman, said the foundation has since done.

When DeJoy left XPO’s board of directors in 2018, according to SEC filings, the foundation owned 484,340 XPO shares. Those shares would have been worth $38 million when DeJoy took office. With the approval of postal ethics officials, the foundation’s assets were not included on DeJoy’s ethics forms. Adams said the foundation has sold all of its XPO shares, though the Postal Service did not respond to questions about when those sales occurred.

What’s in Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the USPS

The divestiture process and the Postal Service’s growing relationship with XPO raise new concerns for some ethics experts about DeJoy’s long history with the logistics industry.

“He could, in fact, divest himself of those but he chooses not to. That’s a choice that he’s making,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research, a private ethics research firm, and former chief counsel for nominations to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). “That choice means that even if he himself is not the one making a decision affecting XPO, other people within the Postal Service know that it could benefit him, and that could curry favor with him.”

Others question whether DeJoy’s ties to the logistics industry make him more apt to see advantages in outsourcing.

“He comes from a company that made much of its fortune working as one of the places where the Postal Service had outsourced work,” said Steve Hutkins, the founder and editor of the Save the Post Office blog, which has tracked the agency since 2011. “He knows all about outsourcing postal work to private industry. He was one of them.”

Under the new Postal Service contract, XPO will take over two “surface transfer centers” that organize mail shipments and load them on trucks.

The Postal Service struck the deal with XPO in April, but did not publicly discuss the agreement until late June. The agency will contract out work in four more facilities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, western Massachusetts and New Jersey in the coming months.

In each case, according to a presentation agency executives made in June before a postal stakeholder group, the Postal Service will relocate operations to buildings that can accommodate more package-sorting machines.

Close to a dozen employees in each facility will move to the new buildings to manage the work of XPO contract workers, union officials involved in the moves said.

The plans have sparked renewed fears of privatization, long a boogeyman in postal policy debates. The Trump administration in 2018 recommended transitioning the Postal Service “from a government agency into a privately held corporation.”

What you should know about USPS — and how it descended into crisis

But those positions have mostly been rejected by congressional Republicans whose constituents in rural and suburban areas require postal services more than those in liberal-leaning urban ones.

Adams, the Postal Service spokesman, said that the Postal Service’s commitment to operating as a public entity was reinforced by DeJoy’s 10-year plan.

“The U.S. Postal Service does not believe in and has not advanced the idea that it should operate as a private entity. In fact, we have advanced the opposite idea,” he said. “To carry out our universal service mission, and given our role as a fundamental part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, we believe that we must remain an integral part of the United States government.”

Dena Briscoe, president of the American Postal Workers Union branch for Washington and Southern Maryland, said contracting out the work felt like a “slap in the face” to her union’s members.

“This is the work that they’ve been doing for years and years and years,” she said, “and you’re going to segregate it away from them, put in another building, give it to a company that previously had a [top executive] that is now our postmaster general. A lot of our members are taking offense to that.”

Le Scam du Jour

Aaron Michael Jones and Roy Cox Jr. Remember those names - for a while anyway.

Now This News - Robo Calls

COVID-19 Update

WaPo, Reaffirming a few points about Long COVID, with some new wrinkles: (pay wall)

New study suggests covid increases risks of brain disorders

A study published this week in the journal Lancet Psychiatry showed increased risks of some brain disorders two years after infection with the coronavirus, shedding new light on the long-term neurological and psychiatric aspects of the virus.

The analysis, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford and drawing on health records data from more than 1 million people around the world, found that while the risks of many common psychiatric disorders returned to normal within a couple of months, people remained at increased risk for dementia, epilepsy, psychosis and cognitive deficit (or brain fog) two years after contracting covid. Adults appeared to be at particular risk of lasting brain fog, a common complaint among coronavirus survivors.

The study’s findings were a mix of good and bad news, said Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford and the senior author of the study. Among the reassuring aspects was the quick resolution of symptoms such as depression and anxiety.

“I was surprised and relieved by how quickly the psychiatric sequelae subsided,” Harrison said.

David Putrino, director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York, who has been studying the lasting impacts of the coronavirus since early in the pandemic, said the study revealed some very troubling outcomes.

“It allows us to see without a doubt the emergence of significant neuropsychiatric sequelae in individuals that had covid and far more frequently than those who did not,” he said.

Because it focused only on the neurological and psychiatric effects of the coronavirus, the study authors and others emphasized that it is not strictly long-covid research.

How long covid could change the way we think about disability

“It would be overstepping and unscientific to make the immediate assumption that everybody in the [study] cohort had long covid,” Putrino said. But the study, he said, “does inform long-covid research.”

What we know about long covid, two years into the pandemic

Wellness reporter Allyson Chiu spoke to several experts to better understand what we know about long covid, two years into the pandemic. (Video: Casey Silvestri/The Washington Post)

Between 7 million and 23 million people in the United States, according to recent government estimates, have long covid — a catchall term for a wide range of symptoms including fatigue, breathlessness and anxiety that persist weeks and months after the acute infection has subsided. Those numbers are expected to rise as the coronavirus settles in as an endemic disease.

What is long covid?

The study was led by Maxime Taquet, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford who specializes in using big data to shed light on psychiatric disorders.

The researchers matched almost 1.3 million patients with a diagnosis of covid-19 between Jan. 20, 2020, and April 13, 2022, with an equal number of patients who had other respiratory diseases during the pandemic. The data, provided by electronic health records network TriNetX, came largely from the United States but also included data from Australia, Britain, Spain, Bulgaria, India, Malaysia and Taiwan.

The study group, which included 185,000 children and 242,000 older adults, revealed that risks differed according to age, with people 65 and older at greatest risk of lasting neuropsychiatric effects.

For people between the ages of 18 and 64, a particularly significant increased risk was of persistent brain fog, affecting 6.4 percent of people who had had covid compared with 5.5 percent in the control group.

Six months after infection, children were not found to be at increased risk of mood disorders, although they remained at greater risk of brain fog, insomnia, stroke and epilepsy. None of those effects were permanent for children. With epilepsy, which is extremely rare, the increased risk was larger.

The study found that 4.5 percent of older people developed dementia in the two years after infection, compared with 3.3 percent of the control group. That 1.2-point increase in a diagnosis as damaging as dementia is particularly worrisome, the researchers said.

The study’s reliance on a trove of de-identified electronic health data raised some cautions, particularly considering the tumultuous time of the pandemic. Tracking long-term outcomes may be hard when patients may have sought care through many different health systems, including some outside the TriNetX network.

“I personally find it impossible to judge the validity of the data or the conclusions when the data source is shrouded in mystery and the sources of the data are kept secret by legal agreement,” said Harlan Krumholz, a Yale scientist who has developed an online platform where patients can enter their own health data.

Taquet said the researchers used several means of assessing the data, including making sure it reflected what was already known about the pandemic, such as the drop in death rates during the omicron wave.

Also, Taquet said, “the validity of data is not going to be better than validity of diagnosis. If clinicians make mistakes, we will make the same mistakes.”

The study follows earlier research from the same group, which reported last year that a third of covid patients experienced mood disorders, strokes or dementia six months after infection.

While cautioning that it is impossible to make full comparisons among the effects of recent variants, including omicron and its subvariants, which are currently driving infections, and those that were prevalent a year or more ago, the researchers outlined some initial findings:

• Even though omicron caused less severe immediate symptoms, the longer-term neurological and psychiatric outcomes appeared similar to the delta waves, indicating that the burden on the world’s health-care systems might continue even with less-severe variants.
• Hannah Davis, a co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, which studies long covid, said that finding was meaningful. “It goes against the narrative that omicron is more mild for long covid, which is not based on science,” Davis said.
• “We see this all the time,” Putrino said. “The general conversation keeps leaving out long covid. The severity of initial infection doesn’t matter when we talk about long-term sequelae that ruin people’s lives.”