Hunter Biden's Laptop

The chain of custody is a problem, which leads to problems of file integrity and the fact that it's an open question on the possibility someone added files to the laptop at a time when the thing was not in Hunter Biden's possession.

Of course, none of that matters. What matters is the innuendo - the public negative you can attach to your opponent's image.

Remember, these Trump goons are always way more interested in cultivating the appearance of impropriety on the part of their opponents than they are in discovering what the truth is.

And also too:

Daddy State Awareness

Rule 1. Every accusation is a confession.

(pay wall)

Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop

Two experts confirm the veracity of thousands of emails, but say a thorough examination was stymied by missing data

Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post.

The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed.

The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess.

Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. The MacBook itself is now in the hands of the FBI, which is investigating whether Hunter Biden properly reported income from business dealings.


Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company

The contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer have sparked debate and controversy since the New York Post and other news organizations in the closing month of the 2020 presidential campaign reported stories based on data purportedly taken from it.

Many Republicans have portrayed this data as offering evidence of misbehavior by Hunter Biden that implicated his father in scandal, while Democrats have dismissed it as probable disinformation, perhaps pushed by Russian operatives acting in a well-documented effort to undermine the elder Biden. Facebook and Twitter in 2020 restricted distribution of stories about the drive’s contents out of concern that the revelations might have resulted from a nefarious hacking campaign intended to upend the election, much as Russian hacks of sensitive Democratic Party emails shaped the trajectory of the 2016 election.

The Washington Post’s forensic findings are unlikely to resolve that debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive.

At The Post’s request, Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University security researcher who specializes in cryptography, and Jake Williams, a forensics expert and former National Security Agency operative who once hacked the computers of foreign adversaries, separately examined two copies The Post made of the portable drive Maxey provided.

The portable drive provided to The Post contains 286,000 individual user files, including documents, photos, videos and chat logs. Of those, Green and Williams concluded that nearly 22,000 emails among those files carried cryptographic signatures that could be verified using technology that would be difficult for even the most sophisticated hackers to fake.

Such signatures are a way for the company that handles the email — in the case of most of these, Google — to provide proof that the message came from a verified account and has not been altered in some way. Alterations made to an email after it has been sent cause the cryptographic signatures to become unverifiable.

The verified emails cover a time period from 2009 to 2019, when Hunter Biden was acting as a consultant to companies from China and Ukraine, and exploring opportunities in several other countries. His father was vice president from 2009 to 2017.

Many of the nearly 22,000 verified emails were routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams. There was also a large number of bank notifications, with about 1,200 emails from Wells Fargo alone.

Other emails contained exchanges with Hunter Biden’s business partners, personal assistants or members of his family. Some of these emails appear to offer insights into deals he developed and money he was paid for business activities that opponents of his father’s bid for the presidency sought to make a campaign issue in 2020.

In particular, there are verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships. Those business dealings are the subject of a separate Washington Post story published at the same time as this one on the forensic examinations of the drive.

The drive also includes some verified emails from Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company for which he was a board member. President Donald Trump’s efforts to tie Joe Biden to the removal of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma led to Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ended in acquittal in February 2020.

The Post’s review of these emails found that most were routine communications that provided little new insight into Hunter Biden’s work for the company.

The laptop’s journey begins

John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of the Wilmington repair shop, has said he received the 13-inch MacBook Pro on April 12, 2019, when Hunter Biden asked him to recover data from the computer because it had been damaged by liquid.

According to Mac Isaac’s attorney, Brian Della Rocca, recovering the data was challenging for Mac Isaac.

“He would boot the computer and transfer as much as he could before the computer shut down. Then, he would boot up the computer again, verify what was copied, and then transfer more data until the computer shut down again. This process repeated several times,” Della Rocca said in a prepared statement.

When his work was completed, Della Rocca said, Mac Isaac repeatedly attempted to contact Hunter Biden, who had signed a repair authorization, to advise him the laptop was ready to be picked up, but Hunter never responded. Della Rocca added that Mac Isaac finally came to regard the MacBook as abandoned property.

In July 2019, when news of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine was gaining attention — largely because Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was making public allegations of wrongdoing — Mac Isaac contacted the FBI about the MacBook.

Hunter Biden confirms he is under federal investigation

Lemme say - if Hunter Biden is dirty, he should burn for it just like anybody else, but this looks more and more like it falls under the heading "Awful But Lawful" (at worst) - the typical nuthin' burger that the wingnuts are always cookin' up for the rubes.

On Dec. 9, 2019, FBI agents from the Wilmington field office served a subpoena on Mac Isaac for the laptop, the hard drive and all related paperwork.

“He willingly gave it to the FBI and was happy to see it go,” Della Rocca said.

He added that Mac Isaac, before turning over the computer, made a copy of its hard drive “in case he was ever thrown under the bus as a result of what he knew.”

By then, Trump’s first impeachment trial, which ran from Jan. 16 to Feb. 5, 2020, was underway and Mac Isaac attempted to contact several members of Congress, none of whom replied.

He later contacted Giuliani, whose attorney, Robert Costello, responded almost immediately.

In an email with the subject line “Why is it so difficult to be a whistleblower when you are on the right?” written on Aug. 26, 2020, Mac Isaac told Costello that he had copies of the hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“For my protection I made sevral copies and I have been trying quietly to bring it to peoples attention. I am reaching out to you for assistance and making sure the people that need to know about this do.”

Costello said he received a copy of the laptop’s hard drive from Mac Isaac. Giuliani has said he provided that data to the New York Post.

After the New York Post began publishing reports on the contents of the laptop in October 2020, The Washington Post repeatedly asked Giuliani and Republican strategist Stephen K. Bannon for a copy of the data to review, but the requests were rebuffed or ignored.

In June 2021, Maxey, who previously worked as a researcher for Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, delivered to The Washington Post a portable hard drive that he said contained the data. He said he had obtained it from Giuliani.

Responding to findings from news organizations that some material on the drive could be corroborated, Mac Isaac said in a statement: “I am relieved that finally, after 18 months of being persecuted and attacked for my actions, the rest of the country is starting to open their eyes.”

What the experts found

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

Maxey had alerted The Washington Post to this issue in advance, saying that others had accessed the data to examine its contents and make copies of files. But the lack of what experts call a “clean chain of custody” undermined Green’s and Williams’s ability to determine the authenticity of most of the drive’s contents.

“The drive is a mess,” Green said.

He compared the portable drive he received from The Post to a crime scene in which detectives arrive to find Big Mac wrappers carelessly left behind by police officers who were there before them, contaminating the evidence.

That assessment was echoed by Williams.

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

But both Green and Williams agreed on the authenticity of the emails that carried cryptographic signatures, though there was variation in which emails Green and Williams were able to verify using their forensic tools. The most reliable cryptographic signatures, they said, came from leading technology companies such as Google, which alone accounted for more than 16,000 of the verified emails.

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

The full Trump-Ukraine impeachment timeline

They also noted that while cryptographic signatures can verify that an email was sent from a particular account, they cannot verify who controlled that account when the email was sent. Hackers sometimes create fake email accounts or gain access to authentic ones as part of disinformation campaigns — a possibility that cannot be ruled out with regard to the email files on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Williams wrote in his technical report that timestamps on a sampling of documents and operating system indexes he examined were consistent with each other, suggesting the authenticity of at least some of the files that lacked cryptographic signatures. But he and Green agreed that sophisticated hackers could have altered the drive’s contents, including timestamps, in a way difficult and perhaps impossible to detect through forensic examination alone.

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

Among the emails verified by forensic analysis were a batch of messages from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden was a board member. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Some contents matched data from other sources

Out of the drive’s 217 gigabytes of data, there are 4.3 gigabytes of email files.

Green, working with two graduate students, verified 1,828 emails — less than 2 percent of the total — but struggled with others that had technical flaws they could not resolve. He said the most common problems resulted from alterations caused when the MacBook’s mail-handling software downloaded files with attachments in a way that made cryptographic verification of those messages difficult.

Williams verified a larger number of emails, nearly 22,000 in total — which included almost all of the ones Green had verified — after overcoming that problem by using software to correct alterations in the files. But he encountered obstacles with other emails that were only partially downloaded onto the drive, creating incomplete files that could not be verified cryptographically. Most of these files, he said, were probably just snippets of emails that would allow a user to preview the messages without downloading the full files.

The cryptographic verification techniques worked only on incoming emails, not ones that were sent from Hunter Biden’s accounts. Because the purpose of these signatures is to verify the identity of senders, only the records of an incoming email would contain signatures.

In addition to emails, the drive includes hundreds of thousands of other documents, including more than 36,000 images, more than 36,000 iMessage chat entries, more than 5,000 text files and more than 1,300 videos, according to tallies made by Williams, who, like Green, could not definitively verify any of them. In a small number of cases, The Post was able to establish the veracity of some of these files, such as bank documents, by obtaining copies from other sources.

Among the emails verified by Williams and Green were a batch of messages from Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which Hunter Biden was a board member. Most of these emails were reminders of board meetings, confirmation of travel, or notifications that his monthly payment had been sent.

Both Green and Williams said the Burisma emails they verified cryptographically were likely to be authentic, but they cautioned that if the company was hacked, it would be possible to fake cryptographic signatures — something much less likely to happen with Google.

One of the verified emails from Pozharskyi, which was the focus of one of the initial stories from the New York Post, was written on April 17, 2015. It thanked Hunter Biden “for inviting me to DC and giving me an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together.”

When the email first emerged in the New York Post about three weeks before the 2020 election, the Biden campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer both denied that Pozharskyi had ever met with Joe Biden. Asked recently about the email, the White House pointed to the previous denials, which The Post has examined in detail.

Some other emails on the drive that have been the foundation for previous news reports could not be verified because the messages lacked verifiable cryptographic signatures. One such email was widely described as referring to Joe Biden as “the big guy” and suggesting the elder Biden would receive a cut of a business deal. One of the recipients of that email has vouched publicly for its authenticity but President Biden has denied being involved in any business arrangements.

New folders created on drive given to The Post

The Post spent months reviewing the data on the portable drive in its entirety and seeking forensic verification of its contents. It made two new copies of the portable drive provided by Maxey so the experts could analyze them.

Green examined the drive first and, based on his initial findings, urged The Post to seek a second review to verify more of its contents. The Post then hired Williams, who has conducted forensic analyses for Fortune 100 financial services companies and also did similar work during his time at the NSA. He is now on the faculty of the information security research group IANS.

Many questions about the drive remained impossible to answer definitively. That includes what happened during a nearly year-long period of apparent inactivity from September 2019 — about five months after Hunter Biden reportedly dropped off the laptop at the repair shop — until August 2020, when the presidential campaign involving his father was entering its final months.

Soon after that period of inactivity — and months after the laptop itself had been taken into FBI custody — three new folders were created on the drive. Dated Sept. 1 and 2, 2020, they bore the names “Desktop Documents,” “Biden Burisma” and “Hunter. Burisma Documents.”

Williams also found records on the drive that indicated someone may have accessed the drive from a West Coast location in October 2020, little more than a week after the first New York Post stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop appeared.

Over the next few days, somebody created three additional folders on the drive, titled, “Mail,” “Salacious Pics Package” and “Big Guy File” — an apparent reference to Joe Biden.

Attempts to verify the emails relied mainly on a technology called DKIM, which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM is a cryptographic technology used by Google and some other email services to verify the identities of senders.

Williams also used a second cryptographic technology called ARC, for Authenticated Received Chain. It was created to make cryptographic verification possible even when email moves through multiple services.

Williams said ARC, though slightly less reliable than DKIM, was a worthy alternative for emails for which DKIM verification was not possible. Overall, his list of emails included 16,425 verified by DKIM and 5,521 verified by ARC.

There are limits to cryptographic verification of emails, both experts said. Not all email services provide cryptographic signatures, and among those that did, not all did so with the care of Google, which is regarded within the technology industry as having strong security protocols. Green and Williams said the only realistic way to fake Google’s DKIM signatures would be to hack the company’s own secure servers and steal private cryptographic keys — something they considered unlikely even for nation-state-level hackers using the most advanced techniques.

An Obit

Lookin' good in that hat, Gorby,

and you're welcome -

but ya got it on backwards

Gorbachev mourned as rare world leader but some still bitter

BERLIN (AP) — Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union and for many the man who restored democracy to then-communist-ruled European nations, was saluted Wednesday as a rare leader who changed the world and for a time brought hope for peace among the superpowers.

But the man who died Tuesday at 91 was also reviled by many countrymen who blamed him for the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union and its diminution as a superpower. The Russian nation that emerged from its Soviet past shrank in size as 15 new nations were created.

The loss of pride and power also eventually led to the rise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried for the past quarter-century to restore Russia to its former glory and beyond.

U.S. President Joe Biden praised Gorbachev for being open to democratic changes. Gorbachev won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War.

“After decades of brutal political repression, he embraced democratic reforms. He believed in glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation,” Biden said.

Biden added that “these were the acts of a rare leader – one with the imagination to see that a different future was possible and the courage to risk his entire career to achieve it. The result was a safer world and greater freedom for millions of people.”

Although Gorbachev was widely feted abroad, he was a pariah at home. Putin acknowledged that Gorbachev had “a deep impact on the course of world history.”

“He led the country during difficult and dramatic changes, amid large-scale foreign policy, economic and social challenges,” Putin said in a short telegram sending his condolences to Gorbachev’s family.

Gorbachev “realized that reforms were necessary and tried to offer his solutions to the acute problems,” Putin said.

Reactions from Russian officials and lawmakers were mixed. They applauded Gorbachev for his part in ending the Cold War but censured him for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Oleg Morozov, a member of the main Kremlin party, United Russia, said Gorbachev should have “repented” for mistakes that went against Russia’s interests.

“He was a willing or an unwilling co-author of the unfair world order that our soldiers are now fighting on the battlefield,” Morozov said, in a reference to Russia’s current war in Ukraine.

Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement in the 1980s and the country’s president from 1990-1995, had a more nuanced view of Gorbachev. He said he “admired, even liked him, but did not understand (him).”

“He believed to the last that communism could be reformed, but I, on the contrary, did not believe it was possible,” Walesa told the Wirtualna Polska media.

Walesa added: “He knew that the Soviet Union could not last much longer and he was doing everything he could to prevent the world from bringing Russia to account for communism. And he was successful there.”

World leaders paid tribute to a man some described as a great and brave leader.

In Germany, where Gorbachev is considered one of the fathers of the country’s reunification in 1990 and is popularly referred to as “Gorbi,” former Chancellor Angela Merkel saluted him as “a unique world politician.”

“Gorbachev wrote world history. He exemplified how a single statesman can change the world for the better,” she said, recalling how she had feared that Russian tanks might roll into East Germany, where she lived, as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz praised Gorbachev for paving the way for his country’s reunification, though he also pointed out that Gorbachev died at a time when many of his achievements have been destroyed.

“We know that he died at a time when not only democracy in Russia has failed — there is no other way to describe the current situation there — but also Russia and Russian President Putin are drawing new trenches in Europe and have started a horrible war against a neighboring country, Ukraine,” Scholz said.

Outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “in a time of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, (Gorbachev’s) tireless commitment to opening up Soviet society remains an example to us all.”

French President Emmanuel Macron described Gorbachev as “a man of peace whose choices opened up a path of liberty for Russians. His commitment to peace in Europe changed our shared history.”

Others in Europe challenged the positive recollections of Gorbachev.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s top diplomat who is also the son of Vytautas Landsbergis, who led Lithuania’s independence movement in the early 1990s, tweeted that “Lithuanians will not glorify Gorbachev.”

Memories are still fresh in the Baltic country of Jan. 13, 1991, when hundreds of Lithuanians headed to the television tower in Vilnius to oppose Soviet troops deployed to crush the country’s bid to restore its independence. In the clashes that followed, 14 civilians were killed and more than 140 others were injured. Moscow recognized Lithuania’s independence in August that year.

“We will never forget the simple fact that his army murdered civilians to prolong his regime’s occupation of our country. His soldiers fired on our unarmed protesters and crushed them under his tanks. That is how we will remember him,” Landsbergis wrote.

But another Baltic leader, Latvian President Egils Levits, noted that Gorbachev’s policies enabled the eventual independence of the three Baltic countries.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Gorbachev “a one-of-a kind statesman who changed the course of history” and “did more than any other individual to bring about the peaceful end of the Cold War.”

“The world has lost a towering global leader, committed multilateralist, and tireless advocate for peace,” the U.N. chief said.

Gorbachev’s contemporaries pointed to the end of the Cold War as one of his achievements.

“Mikhail Gorbachev played a critical role in the peaceful end to the Cold War. At home, he was a figure of historical importance, but not in the way he intended,” said Robert M. Gates, who headed the CIA from 1991 to 1993 and later became U.S. defense secretary.

Calling Gorbachev “a brave leader and great statesman,” Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said the last Soviet leader “opened the gates of the Soviet Union for the great wave of Jewish immigration to Israel in the 1990s.”

In Asia, Gorbachev was remembered as a leader with the courage to bring change.

China recognized Gorbachev’s role in healing relations between Moscow and Beijing. Gorbachev had been an inspiration to reformist thinkers in China during the late 1980s, and his visit to Beijing in 1989 marked a watershed in relations between the sides.

“Mr. Gorbachev made positive contributions to the normalization of relations between China and the Soviet Union. We mourn his passing and extend our sympathies to his family,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said.

However, China’s Communist Party leaders also regard Gorbachev’s liberal approach as a fatal display of weakness and his moves toward peaceful coexistence with the West as a form of surrender.

Givin' It Up

35 years ago, a billion Chinese were riding bikes. Now there are almost as many cars in China as there are people in USAmerica Inc.

The age of the ‘car is king’ is over. The sooner we accept that, the better

John Vidal

Accidents and pollution are making road vehicles untenable. With public transport and ride-sharing, their demise can’t come soon enough

In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.

“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”

He was nearly right. China’s breakneck development has been led by mass car ownership. It now has 300m cars – and what was once the kingdom of bikes is now the land of 20-lane motorways, more than 100,000 petrol stations and scrap metal yards. Beijing, Shanghai and most other cities are choked with traffic, their air is some of the worst in the world, and their hospitals are full of children with asthma and respiratory diseases. China, like every other country, is having to rethink the car.

The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay. With UK temperatures hitting highs of 40C this summer, this reality has become impossible to ignore. Instead of the prospect of speed and cheap mobility, consumers now get soaring costs, climate breakdown and air pollution, the devastation of nature, mounting debt, personal danger and ill health, and the most serious energy crisis in 30 years.

Now the World Health Organization is worried. Car accidents are the eighth highest cause of death for people of all ages, and the leading cause among young people aged 5-29 worldwide. At least 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year, with a further 20 to 50 million people sustaining injuries, often at phenomenal personal and financial cost.

Here in the UK, 24,530 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2020/21, which costs the country around £36bn a year, or around 20% of the current NHS budget, according to the legal firm Hugh James. In the US it is even worse: government figures show that traffic accidents and their knock-on impacts cost nearly $1tn (£800bn) a year, and that more than 624,000 people died in fatal crashes between 2000 and 2017. That compares with the 535,000 American military personnel estimated to have died in both world wars. In China, 250,000 people a year die in accidents.

But we may be reaching “peak car”, the point at which the world is so saturated with vehicles – and cities and individuals are so fed up or financially stretched by them – that they are banned or voluntarily given up. As UK petrol hits £2 a litre and it costs £100 to fill up a tank – on top of the thousands of pounds paid out in loans and taxes to own a car in the first place – it is unsurprising that young people especially are eschewing them and taking to other forms of transport.

The auto-magic that has entranced societies for a century has gone. When the cost of living crisis started to bite, Ireland, Italy and others (although not the UK) cut public transport fares by as much as 90% (in Germany). Spain has gone a step further, announcing that train travel on many routes will be free from September to the end of the year. Global car sales, already stuttering before the pandemic, are now declining in China, Russia and Germany. UK new car sales have fallen for five months in a row and the level of UK car ownership has now fallen for two consecutive years – the first successive drops in ownership in more than a century.

From here on, it looks like death by 1,000 breakdowns for the private car. Just as the coach and horse were pushed out by automobiles 120 years ago, so the car is being steadily evicted from world cities by the authorities or by public revulsion. As thousands of jubilee street parties showed, car-free streets are popular, and the surest and best way to save money, improve health and make cities quieter and more livable. A recent report from the Centre for London shows how low-traffic neighbourhoods, introduced widely during the pandemic to encourage walking and cycling, reduce car use and make roads safer. Wales has slashed the default speed limit on residential roads from 30mph to 20mph.

Countries may have little choice but to reduce car use. There is wide agreement that car mileage must be cut by at least 20% by 2030 just to meet climate targets. Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Copenhagen and most European cities are now either banning cars from their centres on a large scale or making it prohibitively expensive to drive in them. They are pushing at an open door. London car ownership is reducing – and recently, 50,000 Berliners asked the city to impose the world’s largest car ban, covering 34 sq miles.

In this urban century, where nearly 70% of people are expected to live in built-up areas within 30 years and the global population is expected to grow by another 3 billion by 2100, the private car makes little economic or social sense. Ride sharing apps, car sharing, e-bikes and scooters are all hastening the car’s demise. City leaders, as well as health, transport and environment groups, are now calling for it to be made easy and affordable for people to leave the car at home or get rid of it – and for cities to be reimagined so that people can access key things like food and health centres on foot or by bike.

It is time for cities to take advantage of lessons learned during the pandemic and the unfolding energy, environment and cost of living crises, and start to design themselves not around the car, but around the bicycle and the pedestrian. But it is also time for those who deify the car, and continue to aggressively assert its place in our social and economic hierarchy – and its untrammelled right to road space – to understand that a page has been turned. The sooner they accept that, the easier the future and their part in it will be.

The car as we know it is fast becoming extinct; it is a relic of a former age. Sitting in a traffic jam in a ton of metal that belches pollution and costs a fortune will surely be seen by future generations as not just stupid, but criminal.

They Don't Stop

Maybe they're just throwing the usual bullshit bone to "the base", in their usual bullshit attempt to get the rubes fired up for the midterms.

Or maybe they think they've got a legit chance to get back into power, and holy fuck, you won't believe what these assholes are gonna do - this is prob'ly just for starters.

House conservatives prep plans to impeach Biden

Republicans hoping to seize control of the House in November are already setting their sights on what is, for many of them, a top priority next year: impeaching President Biden.

A number of rank-and-file conservatives have already introduced impeachment articles in the current Congress against the president. They accuse Biden of committing “high crimes” in his approach to a range of issues touching on border enforcement, the coronavirus pandemic and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Those resolutions never had a chance of seeing the light of day, with Democrats holding a narrow control of the lower chamber. But with Republicans widely expected to win the House majority in the midterms, many of those same conservatives want to tap their new potential powers to oust a president they deem unfit. Some would like to make it a first order of business.

“I have consistently said President Biden should be impeached for intentionally opening our border and making Americans less safe,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). “Congress has a duty to hold the President accountable for this and any other failures of his Constitutional responsibilities, so a new Republican majority must be prepared to aggressively conduct oversight on day one.”

The conservative impeachment drive is reminiscent of that orchestrated by liberals four years ago, as Democrats took control of the House in 2019 under then-President Trump. At the time, a small handful of vocal progressives wanted to impeach Trump, largely over accusations that he’d obstructed a Justice Department probe into Russian ties to his 2016 campaign. The idea was repeatedly rejected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), not least out of fear that it would alienate voters in tough battleground districts.

The tide turned when a whistleblower accused Trump of pressuring a foreign power to find dirt on his political opponent — a charge that brought centrist Democrats onto the impeachment train. With moderates on board, Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry in September of 2019, eight months after taking the Speaker’s gavel. Three months later, the House impeached Trump on two counts related to abusing power.

The difference between then and now is that liberals, in early 2019, were fighting a lonely battle with scant support. This year, heading into the midterms, dozens of conservatives have either endorsed Biden’s impeachment formally, or have suggested they’re ready to support it.

At least eight resolutions to impeach Biden have been offered since he took office: Three related to his handling of the migrant surge at the southern border; three targeting his management of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year; one denouncing the eviction moratorium designed to help renters during the pandemic; and still another connected to the overseas business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

Those proposals will expire with the end of this Congress. But some of the sponsors are already vowing to revisit them quickly next year. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the lead sponsor of four of the impeachment resolutions, is among them.

“She believes Joe Biden should have been impeached as soon as he was sworn in, so of course she wants it to happen as soon as possible,” Nick Dyer, a Greene spokesman, said Monday in an email.

A noisy impeachment push from the GOP’s right flank could create headaches for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the Republican leader in line to be Speaker, and other party brass just as the 2024 presidential cycle heats up.

On the one hand, impeaching Biden could alienate moderate voters and hurt the GOP at the polls, as was the case in 1998 following the impeachment of President Clinton. Already, GOP leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are throwing cold water on the impeachment talk, suggesting it could damage Republicans politically in the midterms.

On the other hand, ignoring the conservatives’ impeachment entreaties might spark a revolt from a Republican base keen to avenge the Democrats’ two impeachments of Trump, who remains the most popular national figure in the GOP. McCarthy knows well the perils of angering the far right: The Freedom Caucus had nudged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) into an early retirement in 2015, deeming him insufficiently conservative, then prevented McCarthy from replacing him.

McCarthy’s office did not respond Monday to a request for comment.

The challenge facing Republican leaders in a GOP-controlled House will be to demonstrate an aggressive posture toward the administration, to appease conservatives, without alienating moderate voters in the process.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) appears to be walking that line. Last summer, she called Biden “unfit to serve as president,” but stopped short of endorsing his impeachment.

Stefanik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Another strategy GOP leaders may adopt is to impeach a high-ranking member of the administration, but not the president himself. Several resolutions have been introduced to do just that, separately targeting Vice President Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

McCarthy, during a visit to the southern border earlier in the year, had floated the idea of impeaching Mayorkas if he is found to be “derelict” in his job of securing the border. And the concept has plenty of support among conservatives.

“Mayorkas and Garland have purposefully made our country less safe, politicized their departments, and violated the rule of law. In some instances, they have instructed their subordinates to disobey our laws. That is unacceptable,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who has endorsed a number of impeachment resolutions this year, said in an email.

“Next January I expect the House to pursue my impeachment articles against Mayorkas as well as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment articles that I co-sponsored against Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Biggs added.

Still, conservatives like Biggs, the former head of the Freedom Caucus, also want to go straight to the top by impeaching Biden. And it remains unclear if anything less than that will appease the GOP’s restive right flank — one that’s expected to grow next year with the arrival of a number of pro-Trump conservatives vowing to take on anyone they consider to be part of Washington’s political establishment.

Some Republicans said the decision whether to endorse impeachment next year will simply hinge on events. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), for instance, has endorsed two impeachment resolutions this cycle related to the Afghanistan withdrawal, but “has made no decisions yet on supporting impeachment articles next year with Republicans in the majority,” according to spokesman Austin Livingston.

“He will wait to see what those efforts look like, specifically how they align with Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution,” Livingston said, referring to the section outlining Congress’s impeachment powers.

The Memo: Five reasons Democrats’ midterm chances are rising

But others are eager to use a GOP majority to hold Biden’s feet to the fire. And that energy doesn’t appear to be fleeting, particularly when it comes to the border crisis, which could very well remain a hot topic six months from now.

Rep. Mary Miller (R), a strong Trump supporter who recently won an Illinois primary over the more moderate Rep. Rodney Davis (R), said Biden should be removed “for purposely ignoring our immigration laws.”

“Biden and Harris have failed their most basic duty,” Miller said, “which is ensuring the safety of the American people through the security of our borders.”

Ukraine

Some items from NYT.

(pay wall)

Ukraine Steps Up Strikes Against Russia in the South

The Ukrainian military continued to pound targets across southern Ukraine on Tuesday as it sought to disrupt Russian supply lines, degrade Russia’s combat capabilities and isolate Russian forces, part of what analysts said could be the beginnings of a broad and coordinated counteroffensive.

The military said that its forces had broken through Russia’s first line of defense in multiple points along the front in the occupied Kherson region, but officials offered little detail and their claims could not be independently verified.

Western military analysts emphasized that Russian forces have had months to reinforce multiple lines of defense across the south, making any Ukrainian advance likely to be tough and bloody.

It remained unclear whether the strikes marked the start of a long-anticipated counteroffensive or were simply an intensification of weeks of Ukrainian counterattacks. The British military intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Ukrainian brigades had “increased the weight of artillery fires in frontline sectors across southern Ukraine” but noted that it was “not yet possible to confirm the extent of Ukrainian advances.”

snip

President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in his nightly address, said that while details of military operations must remain secret, Ukraine’s objective was clear.

“The occupiers should know: We will oust them to the border. To our border, the line of which has not changed,” he said. “If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian military to flee.”

Kyiv is seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines and isolate its forces, part of what analysts said could be the beginnings of a broad counteroffensive.

Soldiers find a way to get what they need. Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.

A Frontline Shadow Economy: Ukrainian Units Trade Tanks and Artillery

Most of the bartering involves items captured from Russian troops, which are exchanged for urgently needed supplies. “Let’s just call it a simplification of bureaucracy,” one soldier said.

DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — The Ukrainian sergeant slid the captured Russian rocket launcher into the center of a small room. He was pleased. The weapon was practically brand-new. It had been built in 2020, and its thermobaric warhead was deadly against troops and armored vehicles.

But the sergeant, nicknamed Zmei, had no plans to fire it at advancing Russian soldiers or at a tank trying to burst through his unit’s front line in eastern Ukraine.

Instead, he was going to use it as a bargaining chip.

Within the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, Zmei was not just a lowly sergeant. He was the brigade’s point man for a wartime bartering system among Ukrainian forces. Prevalent along the front line, the exchange operates like a kind of shadow economy, soldiers say, in which units acquire weapons or equipment and trade them for supplies they need urgently.

Most of the bartering involves items captured from Russian troops. Ukrainian soldiers refer to them as “trophies.”

“Usually, the trades are done really fast,” Zmei said last week during an interview in Ukraine’s mineral-rich Donbas region, where the 93rd is now stationed. “Let’s just call it a simplification of bureaucracy.”

Despite the influx of Western weapons and equipment in recent months, the Ukrainian military still relies heavily on arms and vehicles captured from their better-equipped Russian foe for the matériel needed to wage war; much of Ukraine’s aging Soviet-era arsenal is either destroyed, worn down or lacks ammunition.

That has left Ukrainian soldiers scrounging the battlefield for essentials as their own supply lines are strained. And the relatively small numbers of big-ticket foreign weapons, such as the American-made M777 howitzer, are thinly spread on the sprawling 1,500-mile front.

“We have hopes for Kyiv,” said Fedir, one of the brigade’s supply sergeants and an understudy of Zmei, referring to military commanders in the capital. “But we rely on ourselves. We aren’t trying to just sit and wait like idiots until Kyiv sends us something.”

To protect against reprisals, Zmei, Fedir and others interviewed for this article requested that only their given names or nicknames be used.

The Ukrainian military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the equipment exchanges.

Capturing Russian items has become increasingly difficult as the war moves into a more static phase, with Russia’s grinding artillery war forcing Ukrainians to slowly retreat in the east, while trying to regain territory in the south. That has created even higher demand for items traded in the soldiers’ underground exchange.

Such was the case in early May, when the 93rd — a renowned unit that had fought in almost every major battle of the war — was operating around the Russian-occupied city of Izium. Zmei, who before the war owned a small publishing house that specialized in dark fantasy novels, received an innocuous text message from a nearby Ukrainian commander.

“Hi,” the message read. “Listen, here’s the thing, we have a needless tank, a T-72 a bit damaged.”

“And we’d exchange it for something nice,” the commander added.

The series of text messages, sent over the messaging application Telegram and reviewed by The New York Times, is just one example of the type of equipment that is unofficially swapping hands.

The commander’s requests were modest: a transport truck and a couple of sniper rifles in return for the Russian trophy tank. But Zmei told his customer, “This is too few things for a tank, write down what else you need.” The commander responded that he had plenty of tanks and wanted only the items requested.

When the commander mentioned all the tanks in his unit’s possession, Zmei sensed an opportunity to expand the trade. He wanted more tanks, and noted that the 93rd had foreign-supplied anti-tank missiles and U.S. portable surface-to-air missile systems available for a swap.

“Can get the launchers for a Stinger, NLAWs, various large stuff for a trade — and a lot of that,” Zmei said, referring to some of the Western weapons, which cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

Of the more than half-dozen soldiers interviewed for this article, most said that this underground economy was driven by the need to survive. Sometimes, they said, that meant circumventing a clumsy bureaucracy.

Although soldiers said that they were supposed to send captured equipment up the supply chain back to Kyiv, they noted that there was little effort to investigate the underground exchanges, let alone punish anyone for doing it.

Western governments, having provided billions of dollars of military equipment, have pressed Ukraine to safeguard against possible corruption in the distribution process, but so far there have been no documented cases of weapons ending up in the hands of anyone apart from other Ukrainian units.

But even keeping the transfer of weapons unofficial can cause problems.

Matt Schroeder, an analyst at the Small Arms Survey, a research organization, said that informal transfers of matériel between units “could undermine stockpile management procedures,” but that “such transfers are not, in themselves, indicative of trafficking or leakage.”

Sitting near the turret of a captured Russian T-80 tank, a Ukrainian soldier named Alex explained that sending captured equipment back to Kyiv for official accounting was problematic.

“There is no guarantee that we’re going to get it back anytime soon,” he said. “We try to do it mostly ourselves.”

Inside a truck mounted with a captured Russian antiaircraft gun. Most Ukrainian soldiers said that the underground economy was driven by the need to survive.

A former software engineer from Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, Alex is a celebrity in the 93rd. His captured tank, nicknamed Bunny, with him in command, destroyed several Russian armored vehicles around Izium and the northeastern city of Sumy earlier in the war, Ukrainian commanders said.

But now the tank is far from the front and awaiting a turret repair. An important part for that work was recently acquired by trading a 120-millimeter mortar and a heavy machine gun with another unit, Alex said.

Just as he was speaking, a captured Russian armored personnel carrier rolled into the repair bay. It parked behind a barely running Ukrainian armored vehicle that one soldier joked had probably participated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Alex is waiting for his own kind of repairs. He was shot in the right leg during a patrol in May. The bullet shattered his femur.

He and several other Ukrainian soldiers had been on a reconnaissance patrol in the gray zone — the area between Russian and Ukrainian front lines — when he was hit. The mission had carried two objectives, he said: to find Russian positions and to find abandoned equipment.

“We are losing tanks,” Alex said. “If this war goes the distance, sooner or later we’ll be out of Soviet equipment and other Soviet tanks, so we will have to switch to something else.”

Near his subterranean headquarters not far from the front line, Alex’s battalion commander, Bogdan, described the severity of his unit’s situation. The sound of incoming and outgoing artillery echoed in the fields beyond.

“We’re fighting with whatever we captured from the enemy,” Bogdan said, noting that 80 percent of his current supplies was captured Russian equipment.

“It’s no better in other battalions,” he added.

Bogdan’s unit of around 700 troops had arrived to replace Ukrainian forces worn down by casualties and equipment loss. Now, after six months of acting like a “firefighter” by rushing from one frontline hot spot to the next, his troops were facing a similar fate.

“We are losing a lot of men,” Bogdan said. “We can’t cope with their artillery. This, and airstrikes, are big problems.”

Alex, a former software engineer, with his captured tank, nicknamed Bunny.

He said that sending equipment back to Kyiv was problematic:

“There is no guarantee that we’re going to get it back anytime soon.”

Asked about sophisticated, Western-supplied weapons that government officials say will be the big difference-maker, he said that in his brigade, “nobody has foreign equipment,” adding, “We have a great many questions as to where it goes.”

Those questions have fallen on a 28-year-old Ukrainian soldier who goes by the name of Michael. He lives in a small rundown single-story house several miles from the front line. An infantry soldier by trade, he is currently Bogdan’s supply officer.

In Michael’s squalid kitchen are printouts tacked to the wall listing the Western equipment his battalion desperately needs: encrypted radios, semiautomatic grenade launchers and Polish 155-millimeter howitzers, known as Krabs.

A Krab unit commander named Andriy said that his howitzers were not available for trade, though he might consider a swap if offered a French self-propelled artillery piece in exchange.

The 93rd currently only possesses old Soviet-era artillery pieces that have worn out barrels and are low on ammunition.

“I have to go and buy everything and trade things, and bring it all here,” Michael said.

“So what’s going on is a personal initiative,” he said. “You’re taking the risk, it’s criminal. Nobody will thank you. It’s a thankless job.”

Слава Україні 

🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦

To The Moon - Eventually

(pay wall)

NASA, and Space Fans, Await Decision on Next Chance to Launch Artemis Moon Rocket

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Thousands of people had come from near and far to pack the beaches, roadsides, rooftops and waterways. Some even camped overnight in hopes of seeing NASA’s giant new moon rocket launch for the first time, rising upward with a thunderous boom and jets of fire from its engines.

“We are going,” proclaimed NASA banners hung all around the space center. Even Vice President Kamala Harris was on hand to watch.

But on Monday, the rocket did not go, and NASA officials said it was too early to guess whether it might be able to launch Friday, the next potential opportunity, or later. Mission managers will meet on Tuesday to discuss their next steps.

Although there will be no astronauts on this test flight, this rocket — what NASA calls the Space Launch System — is to usher in a new era of human exploration including sending the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the moon.

The first mission, without astronauts, is to be a weekslong flight around the moon to test both the rocket and the Orion crew capsule where astronauts will sit on future missions. In particular, NASA wants to make sure that the heat shield on Orion can survive a fiery entry through Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, the speed of a spacecraft returning from the moon.

Monday’s scrubbed launch added another delay to the moon program, named Artemis, which has already cost more than $40 billion and is years behind schedule. The program, including the giant rocket, has nonetheless received steady support from Congress and NASA officials.

The issue that halted the launch on Monday was a liquid hydrogen line that did not adequately chill one of the rocket’s four core-stage engines, part of the preparations needed before ignition. Otherwise, sudden shrinkage from the temperature shock of supercold propellants crack the metal engine parts.

Troubleshooting efforts proved unsuccessful within the limited time, and at about 8:40 a.m. Eastern, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, decided that it was time to call it off and try again another day. Even if they had resolved the technical issues, weather conditions would likely have prevented a launch.

“This is a brand-new rocket,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference in the afternoon. “It’s not going to fly until it’s ready.”

If the launch cannot occur during the Labor Day weekend, the rocket will have to be rolled back to the giant Vehicle Assembly Building — essentially a garage for rockets. A trip there would most likely mean a delay of a month or more.

NASA officials said it was important to prudently tackle each problem as it arose and not to rush decisions that might lead to catastrophic failures.

“We are going to give the team time to rest, first of all, and then come back fresh tomorrow and reassess what we learned today and then develop a series of options,” said Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager. “It’s too early to say what the options are.”

Had it lifted off, the flight would have capped a strong summer for NASA, which lit up imaginations all over the world when it released the first views of the cosmos captured by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at the start of July.

Vice President Kamala Harris signed a piece of equipment

during a tour of the Kennedy Space Center.

Credit...Pool photo by Alex G. Perez

Instead, NASA’s engineers, V.I.P. spectators and the public at large were disappointed, but many were sympathetic.

That included Ms. Harris, who had been scheduled to deliver a speech after an Artemis I launch. Instead, she spoke to reporters on Monday after NASA scrubbed the flight.

“Innovation requires this kind of moment where you test out something that’s never been done and then you regroup,” she said. “And you figure out what the next step will be to get to the ultimate goal, which for us is going to the moon and showing how humans can live and work on the moon.”

Camille Calibeo, 25, who studied aerospace engineering in college, woke up at about 2 a.m. to board a boat to get a prime view of the launchpad. She said she was hoping the launch would still happen in the coming days. “There are so many people here and the excitement was crazy and definitely sad,” she said, “and hopefully I get to stick around.”

Kendal Van Dyke, 46, a senior program manager at Microsoft who lives in Orlando, and members of his family were set to watch the launch from the NASA Causeway. While disappointed, he emphasized that scrubbed launches were a standard risk in spaceflight.

“It’s not about wowing people. It’s about getting billions of dollars’ worth of hardware into space safely,” Mr. Van Dyke said. “Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t but that’s OK. We got a good experience and got to spend some time together.”

Six of his seven siblings traveled from around the region to watch the launch together and commemorate their father, who died in November and worked as a contractor on the Apollo program installing A.V. equipment to monitor astronauts on the launchpad. Several of his siblings now also work in the space industry.

“We thought it would be a great way to celebrate his passing and the accomplishments of the family” Mr. Van Dyke said.

It is not uncommon for technical problems to crop up during debut launch attempts. In 1981, the first space shuttle, Columbia, was on the launchpad with two astronauts strapped in for the first launch to orbit, but the countdown was halted by a computer glitch. Columbia successfully launched on the second try two days later.

For the Space Launch System rocket, the countdown started Saturday. Despite several lightning strikes on the launch site on Saturday afternoon, the countdown continued smoothly for the most part through the weekend. Then early Monday morning, the threat of nearby thunderstorms caused a 45-minute delay before liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could begin flowing into the rocket’s propellant tanks.

Another problem cropped up when a leak was detected in a hydrogen fuel line that attaches to the bottom of the rocket. That was a recurrence of a problem that occurred during a practice countdown in April.

Engineers were able to fix that problem, and the filling of the hydrogen tank resumed.

The engine issue that arose later in the countdown also involved hydrogen but in a different part of the rocket. In the last part of the launch countdown, some liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is diverted to flow around the four engines to cool them in preparation for ignition.

Three of the four engines were fine but, in the fourth, a hydrogen line did not appear to open properly, and one of the engines was not as cold as the others.

This was the first test of the engine chill-down, which usually occurs 4 minutes 40 seconds before launch. Dress rehearsals of countdown procedures earlier this year were designed to catch such issues but were cut short by technical problems. As a result, the engine chill-down was not tested. But mission managers believed the rocket had passed the critical test objectives, and they moved ahead with preparations for launch.

For Monday’s countdown, a chill-down test was added at an earlier point to allow troubleshooting in case a problem showed up. Mission managers recognized the risk.

“That is something that we’re going to demonstrate, end to end, for the first time on the day of launch,” Mr. Sarafin said last week after the mission team decided to go ahead with the launch attempt. “And if we do not successfully demonstrate that, we are not going to launch that day.”

Mr. Sarafin turned out to be correct.

Don't Sleep On This

Nancy MacLean

The plutocrats are very serious and very busy.

(pay wall)

Opinion
A $1.6 billion donation lays bare a broken campaign finance system

One man has donated $1.6 billion to a nonprofit group controlled by a conservative activist who has crusaded, with startling success, to transform the country’s politics. The only reason the public knows about it? An insider tip-off to the New York Times.

The Times reported this week that electronics mogul Barre Seid last year gave 100 percent of the shares of surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a group called Marble Freedom Trust. The group is led by Leonard Leo — who has helped bankroll right-wing advocacy on abortion rights, voting and climate change, among other things. His chief focus for a time was reshaping the judiciary as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, including by advising Republican presidents on Supreme Court nominees. The tale of how his group got such a lavish gift underscores the sad state of this country’s campaign finance system.

The Marble Freedom Trust donation, possibly the largest ever to such an advocacy group in U.S. history, manages to encapsulate in a single case the problems with the status quo. The issue isn’t merely the distortion of democracy enabled by 2010′s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision allowed for unlimited political spending by corporations and outside groups — to which, in turn, the ultra-wealthy can funnel unlimited funds of their own. The issue is also that the distortion remains, in most cases, invisible. Nonprofits groups registered as 501(c)(4)s, such as Marble Freedom Trust, don’t have to disclose their donors.

Adding insult to injury, donors can also use these nonprofits to reduce taxes — in this instance, to the tune of somewhere around $400 million. To sell his company on his own, Mr. Seid would have had to pay capital gains taxes, leaving him with less to bequeath to Marble Freedom Trust. But as supposed “social welfare organizations,” 501(c)(4)s are exempt from paying taxes. So instead he handed his shares over to the trust, which then itself sold Tripp Lite: for the $1.6 billion now in Mr. Leo’s coffers. As a result, dutiful everyday taxpayers essentially finance the extravagant expenditures of the privileged few, who use their know-how to avoid their obligations and twist the political landscape.

Congress should close the tax loophole these donors exploit. And the Disclose Act, some version of which has been languishing in Congress for more than a decade, blocked by GOP filibusters, would at least tell voters who’s trying to buy their votes. The Internal Revenue Service can improve things on its own by collecting donors’ information again, after it stopped in 2018. Unfortunately, without a change in Supreme Court precedent or a constitutional amendment, only marginal improvements are possible.

Mr. Leo defended his gambit by saying it is “high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.” Really, it’s not toe-to-toe but billions-to-billions — and neither side should be proud of that.

Overheard

The folks who call anything they don't like

"woke" or "socialistic" or "communist"

are complaining about being called "fascist"

- because that's divisive.

Today's Wingnut

Mark Robinson, North Carolina's Christian nationalist lieutenant governor, tells Christians to stop reading the news: "When Jesus Christ comes back and is swinging that double-edged sword and riding that white horse, ABC can write all the stories they want to, but their entity is going down in flames."

Jesus left the instructions for YOU.

YOU have to do this.

YOU have to do that.

These guys always invite the inference that they're special - they are one with god - and if you disagree with them, then you're going against god.

Never fails, and the devotees never get wise to the scam.

And what's really scary is that the relaxed-n-groovy-hippie-dude Jesus has morphed into a rage-fueled avenger, who's coming not with love and mercy and forgiveness, but with an iron rod. And it's a very short step from true believer, praying for deliverance, to radicalized terrorist, taking up the sword of a vengeful god against the infidel.

This is exactly what the founders told us to reject.