Can you say "Mini Me"?
Oct 22, 2022
Today's Keith
From a coupla days ago.
- The crime rate in Oklahoma is higher than it is in New York.
- Testifying to DC Grand Jury, Kash Patel prob'ly implicated Trump in the Mar-A-Lago Secrets Heist.
- And the tale of Pal Smurch
17 days til the election
The Smoking eMail
Add this to the mountainous pile of hard evidence that Trump is fucking crook. And then marvel in disgust at how little it seems to matter to way too many people in this currently really fucked up country.
Exclusive: Emails reveal warning to Trump team about fraud claims
A senior White House lawyer expressed concerns to President Trump's advisers and attorneys about the president signing a sworn court statement verifying inaccurate evidence of voter fraud, according to emails from December 2020 obtained by Axios.
Why it matters:
- The emails shed new light on a federal judge's explosive finding Wednesday that Trump knew specific instances of voter fraud in Georgia had been debunked, but continued to tout them both in public and under oath.While the judge's opinion stemmed from litigation related to the House's Jan. 6 committee, the Justice Department is also conducting a criminal investigation into Trump and his allies' scheme to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's Electoral College victory.
- Eric Herschmann, the former White House lawyer who cautioned Trump's outside attorneys about the inaccurate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia, was subpoenaed this summer to testify in the DOJ investigation.
- U.S. District Court Judge David Carter is presiding over the House Jan. 6 committee's attempt to subpoena communications from conservative lawyer John Eastman, one of the architects of the scheme to overturn the election.After a review of hundreds of emails that Eastman claimed were privileged, Judge Carter determined some should be turned over to the Jan. 6 committee — finding they were "sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States."
- In one email cited in Judge Carter's opinion, Eastman told Trump's team that the president had been made aware that some of the allegations and evidence of voter fraud used in a Georgia election lawsuit were inaccurate.
- That suit was later moved to federal court. "For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate," Eastman wrote, according to the judge's order.
- The lawsuit that was filed in federal court contained a footnote stating that Trump was only relying on voter data that was provided to him, and that it was subject to changes based on the outcome of government investigations."But, by his attorneys' own admissions, the information provided to him was that the alleged voter fraud numbers were inaccurate," Judge Carter wrote in his opinion, accusing Trump's lawyers of seeking to "disclaim his responsibility over the misleading allegations."
- The emails obtained by Axios — which have also come to the attention of the Jan. 6 committee and DOJ, according to a source with direct knowledge — show correspondence between Herschmann, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and conservative activist and outside attorney Cleta Mitchell. Trump's executive assistant Molly Michael is CC'ed.On Dec. 30, Mitchell emailed Meadows what she described as an "almost final version" of a lawsuit set to be filed in federal court against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. "Remember, we were talked into this by others," wrote Mitchell, a key player in Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
- The next day, Mitchell sent a draft of the lawsuit to Herschmann in response to apparent concerns he had raised, writing: "This is the version from John Eastman with your edits."
- Herschmann responded: "I will review now. I didn't send John edits, I explained that I was concerned about the President signing a verification about facts that may not be sustainable upon detailed scrutiny. I think that we should limit specific factual 'number' allegations to those that are necessary i.e., those allegations that demonstrate that the decision is outcome determinative."
- A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment. But in a post on Truth Social Thursday, the former president attacked Judge Carter as a "partisan hack" who "shouldn't be making statements about me until he understands the facts, which he doesn’t!"Herschmann said in a statement to Axios: "I am not discussing my conversations with the president or the surrounding circumstances."
- Charles Burnham, an attorney for John Eastman, told Axios: "We have extensive privileged communications regarding Mr. Herschmann's cooperation in securing the President's signed verification. If that privilege were ever to be waived we would be pleased to discuss the contents of those communications."
- George Terwilliger, an attorney for Meadows, declined to comment. Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment.
- One tactic used by the Trump campaign and White House lawyers — who were frequently at odds with the outside lawyers pushing the most expansive claims of election fraud — was to press the outside lawyers to show "outcome determinative" evidence of fraud.In this case it meant showing that they had evidence there were more fraudulent ballots than the margin of victory for Biden (which was 11,779 votes in Georgia).
- In a now infamous phone call first reported by the Washington Post, Trump asked Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, "to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have."
- With 30 minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve, 2020, Mitchell sent an email suggesting she was frustrated at Herschmann for slowing down the process and asking him to get on a call "ASAP" with other members of Trump's outside legal team.The relationship between Mitchell and Herschmann was already strained in the days leading up to the New Year's Eve email exchange, according to three sources familiar with the situation. It included a heated phone call between Herschmann and Mitchell, while Herschmann was sitting in the outer Oval.
- Trump's executive assistant had shown Herschmann a document that had come in from outside lawyers. It was a verification, in support of an election complaint, that the lawyers wanted Trump to sign in front of a notary. But there was no complaint attached to the verification, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the document.
- And the complaint, at that point, had not yet been finalized. The lawyers wanted to get the president's signature on the verification before the final draft was completed.
Axios has not yet established how Trump came to sign the verification or who presented him with the document to do so.
The big picture:
- Together, the emails obtained by Axios and those reviewed by Judge Carter show that at least two of Trump's attorneys — Herschmann and Eastman — explicitly raised concerns about having the president sign a sworn statement making specific claims about voter fraud that were inaccurate.
- In the final weeks of Trump's term, Herschmann grew exasperated by the conspiracy theorists and fringe legal activists that the president surrounded himself with as he sought to cling to power.In a taped deposition played during a Jan. 6 hearing this summer, Herschmann testified that he told Eastman the day after the Capitol riot: "I only want to hear two words coming out of your mouth from now on, 'orderly transition'."
- Herschmann told the committee Eastman eventually repeated the words back to him.
- "Now I'm going to give you the best free legal advice you're ever getting in your life," Herschmann testified he added. "Get a great f'ing criminal defense lawyer. You're gonna need it."
Brandon Strikes Again
Republicans are always squawking about "foreign powers taking our shit". One day they bitch about how Trump kept those rotten Chinese commies in line -
Biden Just Clobbered China’s Chip Industry
Semiconductors are among the most intricate tools that human beings have ever invented. They are also among the most expensive to make.
The latest chips — the sort that power supercomputers and high-end smartphones — are densely packed with transistors so small they’re measured in nanometers. Perhaps the only things more ingenious than the chips themselves are the machines that are used to build them. These devices are capable of working on almost unimaginably tiny scales, a fraction of the size of most viruses. Some of the chip-building machines take years to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars each; the Dutch company ASML, which makes the world’s only lithography machines capable of inscribing designs for the fastest chips, has produced just 140 such devices over the past decade.
Which brings us to another amazing detail about microchips: They are a triumph not just of technology but also of global trade and cooperation. In the recently published “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University, describes the geographic sprawl of the semiconductor supply chain:
A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, U.K.-based company called Arm, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultrapure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.
The fragility of this convoluted process became apparent in last year’s Covid-induced chip shortage, which the White House has estimated cost the United States a full percentage point of economic output, or hundreds of billions of dollars. But there is also something elegant and even comforting about the global diversity of the chip business. As with oil or aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons, the question of who controls the semiconductor industry carries geopolitical significance. Chips are crucial ingredients not just in smartphones and laptops but in just about everything in the modern world — including, importantly, weapons, surveillance technology and artificial intelligence systems. Dominance of the industry in the wrong hands could be disastrous.
That’s why I have been so impressed with the aggressive and creative way the Biden administration has gone about curtailing China’s alarming, decades-long effort to build a domestic semiconductor industry that’s independent from the rest of the world. This month, the Commerce Department announced a set of restrictions that prevent China from getting much of what it needs to establish a commanding position in the chip business. The government said the rules were meant to block “sensitive technologies with military applications” from being acquired by China’s military and security services. With few exceptions, the sanctions prohibit China from buying the best American chips and the machines to build them, and even from hiring Americans to work on them. Analysts I spoke to said the rules will devastate China’s domestic chip industry, potentially setting it back decades.
The rules “are an absolute historical landmark,” said Gregory Allen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former director of A.I. strategy at the Department of Defense. In a recent report, Allen writes that Biden’s restrictions “begin a new U.S. policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry — strangling with an intent to kill.” Considering the ways China might use the advanced chips — including in expanding its dystopian, A.I.-powered surveillance and repression regime — the strangulation is justified.
Semiconductors are one of the few sectors for which China still depends on the rest of the world; the country spends more money importing microchips each year than it does oil. The Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to “indigenize” the industry, but its progress has been slow. And in some of the most advanced areas of the business, Chinese semiconductor manufacturers lag far behind their international competitors.
Allen says that until now, most American restrictions on China’s access to the best semiconductors were aimed primarily at the Chinese military. But China’s corporations are closely allied with China’s military, enabling the military to easily evade restrictions. The new policy should make that substantially harder, as its restrictions apply to any entity in China, whether a branch of the military or a theoretically “civilian” corporation.
And the rules don’t bar just China from buying American semiconductor tech. Through the Foreign Direct Product Rule, parts of the regulations apply to any company in the world that uses American semiconductor technology. So if a non-American chip manufacturer agrees to make Chinese-designed chips, it could lose access to American chip-making machines that it can’t get anywhere else.
Finally, there are the restrictions on American personnel. China is desperately short on engineers and executives with expertise in the semiconductor business, and many of its companies in the sector employ Americans in high-ranking positions. The new restrictions prohibit all “U.S. persons” — both American citizens and green card holders — from continuing to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry. (The rules allow people to apply for waivers to the policy.)
How can China respond? One way is by evading the rules. The country has long been masterful at getting around sanctions, and microchips are small and potentially easy to smuggle. It’s also not clear how well the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce Department agency in charge of export controls, will be able to enforce the rules. “The B.I.S.’s to-do list has increased massively, and their budget hasn’t really increased at all,” Allen told me.
Allen also warned that we don’t know how grave a provocation China might consider these rules. He pointed out that in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was America’s refusal to sell oil to Imperial Japan that led the latter to conclude that it was “functionally at war” with the United States. The semiconductor rules are narrower than our oil restrictions on Japan were. “But will China see it that way?” Allen asked. “I kind of doubt it.”
On the other hand, what choice does the United States have?
“These technologies are going to be the foundation of economic strength over the next decades, and there are significant concerns about what the world would look like if China gained the upper hand,” Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me. “It wouldn’t be a world that I would want to live in, and I don’t think most Americans or most of our friends and allies would want to live in it either.”
BTW - if China is actually Communist, why are there Chinese billionaires?
- the next day it's something else. And it's always something that's either just imaginary shit they make up, or something they know the rubes will swallow whole, never looking at the reality of it.
A couple of days ago, Marsha Blackburn (R-Ignoramusville) tweeted:
President Xi has taken suvellience to a whole new level since the COVID pandemic.
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) October 20, 2022
This is why we never want Communist China to win the race in developing core technologies.
And then -
(pay wall)
Biden Just Clobbered China’s Chip Industry
Semiconductors are among the most intricate tools that human beings have ever invented. They are also among the most expensive to make.
The latest chips — the sort that power supercomputers and high-end smartphones — are densely packed with transistors so small they’re measured in nanometers. Perhaps the only things more ingenious than the chips themselves are the machines that are used to build them. These devices are capable of working on almost unimaginably tiny scales, a fraction of the size of most viruses. Some of the chip-building machines take years to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars each; the Dutch company ASML, which makes the world’s only lithography machines capable of inscribing designs for the fastest chips, has produced just 140 such devices over the past decade.
Which brings us to another amazing detail about microchips: They are a triumph not just of technology but also of global trade and cooperation. In the recently published “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University, describes the geographic sprawl of the semiconductor supply chain:
A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, U.K.-based company called Arm, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it’s sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultrapure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world’s most precise machinery, which can etch, deposit and measure layers of materials a few atoms thick. These tools are produced primarily by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese and three Californian, without which advanced chips are basically impossible to make. Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Southeast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.
The fragility of this convoluted process became apparent in last year’s Covid-induced chip shortage, which the White House has estimated cost the United States a full percentage point of economic output, or hundreds of billions of dollars. But there is also something elegant and even comforting about the global diversity of the chip business. As with oil or aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons, the question of who controls the semiconductor industry carries geopolitical significance. Chips are crucial ingredients not just in smartphones and laptops but in just about everything in the modern world — including, importantly, weapons, surveillance technology and artificial intelligence systems. Dominance of the industry in the wrong hands could be disastrous.
That’s why I have been so impressed with the aggressive and creative way the Biden administration has gone about curtailing China’s alarming, decades-long effort to build a domestic semiconductor industry that’s independent from the rest of the world. This month, the Commerce Department announced a set of restrictions that prevent China from getting much of what it needs to establish a commanding position in the chip business. The government said the rules were meant to block “sensitive technologies with military applications” from being acquired by China’s military and security services. With few exceptions, the sanctions prohibit China from buying the best American chips and the machines to build them, and even from hiring Americans to work on them. Analysts I spoke to said the rules will devastate China’s domestic chip industry, potentially setting it back decades.
The rules “are an absolute historical landmark,” said Gregory Allen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former director of A.I. strategy at the Department of Defense. In a recent report, Allen writes that Biden’s restrictions “begin a new U.S. policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry — strangling with an intent to kill.” Considering the ways China might use the advanced chips — including in expanding its dystopian, A.I.-powered surveillance and repression regime — the strangulation is justified.
Semiconductors are one of the few sectors for which China still depends on the rest of the world; the country spends more money importing microchips each year than it does oil. The Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to “indigenize” the industry, but its progress has been slow. And in some of the most advanced areas of the business, Chinese semiconductor manufacturers lag far behind their international competitors.
Allen says that until now, most American restrictions on China’s access to the best semiconductors were aimed primarily at the Chinese military. But China’s corporations are closely allied with China’s military, enabling the military to easily evade restrictions. The new policy should make that substantially harder, as its restrictions apply to any entity in China, whether a branch of the military or a theoretically “civilian” corporation.
And the rules don’t bar just China from buying American semiconductor tech. Through the Foreign Direct Product Rule, parts of the regulations apply to any company in the world that uses American semiconductor technology. So if a non-American chip manufacturer agrees to make Chinese-designed chips, it could lose access to American chip-making machines that it can’t get anywhere else.
Finally, there are the restrictions on American personnel. China is desperately short on engineers and executives with expertise in the semiconductor business, and many of its companies in the sector employ Americans in high-ranking positions. The new restrictions prohibit all “U.S. persons” — both American citizens and green card holders — from continuing to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry. (The rules allow people to apply for waivers to the policy.)
How can China respond? One way is by evading the rules. The country has long been masterful at getting around sanctions, and microchips are small and potentially easy to smuggle. It’s also not clear how well the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce Department agency in charge of export controls, will be able to enforce the rules. “The B.I.S.’s to-do list has increased massively, and their budget hasn’t really increased at all,” Allen told me.
Allen also warned that we don’t know how grave a provocation China might consider these rules. He pointed out that in the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was America’s refusal to sell oil to Imperial Japan that led the latter to conclude that it was “functionally at war” with the United States. The semiconductor rules are narrower than our oil restrictions on Japan were. “But will China see it that way?” Allen asked. “I kind of doubt it.”
On the other hand, what choice does the United States have?
“These technologies are going to be the foundation of economic strength over the next decades, and there are significant concerns about what the world would look like if China gained the upper hand,” Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me. “It wouldn’t be a world that I would want to live in, and I don’t think most Americans or most of our friends and allies would want to live in it either.”
Voting
Hopeful - as always - but not optimistic - as always - but looking for good omens - as always - but trying not to get happy - always.
American politics brings out the schizoid in me.
(pay wall)
More than 5.5 million people have cast ballots in person or by mail. Experts predict high turnout in the midterm elections.
Days into early voting in the 2022 midterm elections, states across the country have seen a surge of voters casting ballots at in-person voting sites and by mail, the latest sign that the 2020 election ushered in a transformation in the way Americans vote.
Through the first five days of early voting in Georgia, in-person turnout is up 70 percent compared with turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, according to the secretary of state’s office. In North Carolina, absentee ballot requests are up 114 percent compared with requests in 2018, according to the board of elections. And in Florida, the total early vote is up 50 percent compared with the early vote in 2018.
Election experts say the signs suggest overall turnout will be strong. But they are quick to caution that it is still early in the voting calendar — many states are less than a week in and some have not started. With voters’ behaviors so clearly changed by pandemic-era rules, it is unclear whether this rush to vote will lead to record-breaking totals after Election Day on Nov. 8.
Still, one significant shift in how American elections are conducted has become clear: Election Day has become, and will most likely always be, election month.
“There has been a sea change of voter attitudes that has not abated,” said John Couvillon, a pollster who has worked with Republican candidates. “When you do a culture shift like that, you never go 100 percent back to the way things were for the simple reason that people, who out of habit may have been happy voting on Election Day, said, ‘Wait a minute, I can vote from the convenience of my kitchen table? This is so much simpler.’”
States across the country have seen a surge in both early in-person voting and absentee voting this midterm election season.Credit...Hannah Beier, Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Nationally, 5.5 million voters had cast ballots as of Thursday, according to Mr. Couvillon’s count. Democrats make up 51 percent of those voters and Republicans 30 percent. Mr. Couvillon and other analysts did not have data to compare those numbers to 2018. But he noted it was a slight dip from Democrats’ advantage at this point in 2020 — a presidential election year, which always draws a much higher turnout. Then, 17.3 million votes had been cast and the partisan split was 55 percent Democrat and 26 percent Republican. Some states, such as Arizona, were following a similar trend, he said.
The State of the 2022 Midterm Elections
- Both parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.
- Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.
- What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.
- In Minnesota: The race for attorney general in the light-blue state offers a pure test of which issue is likely to be more politically decisive: abortion rights or crime.
“We’re seeing both sides being really energized this time around, which is pretty unique to a midterm cycle,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster. “Normally, the out party is just far more energized and enthused about voting.”
With elections less than three weeks away, voter turnout in Georgia is soaring, Bernie is back on the road and the No. 1 issue for many continues to be the economy.
Mr. Ruffini said he believed the Supreme Court decision eliminating federal abortion rights could drive Democrats out to vote against abortion opponents, although it was not yet clear how many.
Voters are requesting fewer absentee ballot than they did two years ago — an expected adjustment to a safer period in the pandemic and a turnout drop from a presidential election. But requests are still significantly above 2018 levels in many states.
The increase in absentee and mail voting could lead to a replay of 2020, when multiple states did not have final results in close elections for several days. Mail ballots take longer to tally because the envelopes must first be opened, inspected and prepared to be counted. Some states, including the battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, do not allow election officials to begin that process until Election Day, and Michigan allows just two days of processing before Election Day. Both Wisconsin and Michigan have seen nearly twice as many absentee ballots cast compared with during the 2018 election.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
In the 2020 election, Democrats were much more likely to vote absentee and early than Republicans were, leading to the false perception on Election Day — often labeled the “red mirage” — that former President Donald J. Trump was on track for re-election.
That partisan pattern appears to be holding this year, although some early-voting states show the gap narrowing slightly. In particular, young voters, who often lean Democratic, are showing a stronger inclination to vote on Election Day, said Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm.
“It’s the youngest voters who are shifting the most,” Mr. Bonier said.
Such shifts can make it difficult for analysts and campaigns to look at past patterns, party affiliation and demographics and assess which side is winning.
Mr. Bonier pointed to Florida as an example of a state whose early vote totals send mixed signals.
At this point in 2018, Republicans made up a larger share of the 567,000 early voters in Florida than Democrats — by about seven percentage points. In 2020, Democrats were up 21 percentage points at this point in early voting, when 1.9 million people had cast their ballots. This year, Democrats are leading in early voting in Florida by 3.5 points, and early vote totals are around 845,000 so far.
“A Democratic partisan could look at that and say, ‘Well, look, we’re running way ahead, we were down seven at this point in ’18 and we’re up three now; that’s a 10 point margin swing, good for us,” Mr. Bonier said. “Republicans will look at it and say, ‘At this point in 2020, we were down 21. Now we’re only down three. Good for us.’”
Michael McDonald, a voter turnout expert at the University of Florida, said his clearest takeaway so far was that there is high interest in the election.
“I think we need to get past this potential Black Friday rush of voting that you get at the very beginning when the doors open,” he said. “But the fact that you’re even seeing it, that tells you that this isn’t going to be a low-turnout election. It’s just the question is going to be how high of a turnout election we’ll get.”
Georgia has perhaps seen the largest early surge. Each day since early in-person voting began on Monday, the state has set daily early vote turnout records for a midterm election. As of Friday, 519,300 voters had cast a ballot early in-person, compared with 304,800 in the same period in 2018, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.
The state has also seen a surge in absentee ballot requests. The previous record, according to the secretary of state’s office, was roughly 223,000 requests made during the 2018 midterms. This cycle has already eclipsed 239,800 requests, and there are likely thousands more still to arrive.
Local election officials in the state have encouraged early voting in an effort to alleviate long lines on Election Day.
“The counties have worked tirelessly alongside our office to encourage Georgians to cast their vote early,” Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, said on Thursday in a statement promoting the early vote numbers. “County election directors are getting the job done and Georgians know it.”
Part of the surge in early voting — and specifically in mail-in voting — when compared with the 2018 midterms can be attributed to new voting laws passed by state legislatures after the 2018 elections. Both Michigan and Pennsylvania now allow people to vote absentee without an excuse, and the pandemic accelerated wide adoption of mail voting in both states.
As of Friday, Michigan election officials had received 1,765,000 ballot requests, and 641,800 ballots had already been returned. In 2018, just 346,000 voted by mail during the entire election.
Oct 21, 2022
Another (Smallish) Win
There's a kind of depravity that underlies everything the GOP does now. It seems like they object to it, and try to obstruct everything the Dems try to do - everything most of us think they should be doing.
I can see the point about expecting everyone to honor their word and pay their debts, but it rings exceedingly hollow when Republicans bitch about a few billion in student loan forgiveness while threatening to blow up the world if anyone suggests their TaxScam2017™ may have been a bit much, and maybe we should rethink that one.
Anyway, they challenged Biden - again - and they lost - again.
Six GOP-led states said the Biden administration overstepped its authority in its plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student-loan debt
A federal judge on Thursday denied a bid by six Republican-led states to block the Biden administration from moving forward with plans to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student-loan debt for more than 40 million people, days after borrowers began signing up for relief.
The states filed a lawsuit last month, saying that the administration has overstepped its authority by creating the forgiveness program without going through Congress. They also claimed the plan would threaten the revenue of state entities that profit from federal student loan, and they requested the court stop the federal government from canceling any debt as the case proceeds.
U.S. District Judge Henry E. Autrey of the Eastern District of Missouri issued a 19-page order concluding that the states lacked the standing to bring the lawsuit to stop one of the administration’s signature economic policies. “While plaintiffs present important and significant challenges to the debt relief plan, the current Plaintiffs are unable to proceed to the resolution of these challenges,” he wrote.
The ruling by Autrey, a George W. Bush appointee, was one of two victories Thursday for the administration’s plan. In a separate case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied a request by the conservative legal outfit Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, working on behalf of a taxpayer’s association, to pause the program.
Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson (R), one of the states’ officials who sued the administration, said the coalition would appeal. “The states continue to believe that they do in fact have standing to raise their important legal challenges,” he said in a statement. “As a result, the States will be appealing and seeking immediate relief.” The other states involved in the suit are Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and South Carolina.
An appeal would send the case to a conservative panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.
The lawsuit, one of several filed against the forgiveness plan, was widely considered to be one of the most serious legal challenges.
Who is eligible for student loan forgiveness?
- President Biden’s new plan will cancel some of the federal student debt held by millions of Americans.
- Borrowers can qualify for up to $10,000 in student loan forgiveness, and recipients of Pell Grants are eligible for an additional $10,000 in forgiveness.
- Want to calculate your eligibility? See how much of your loan debt can be forgiven.
The Education Department began accepting applications for relief last Friday. More than 12 million people have applied to date, according to the White House, while 8 million more have been notified of their eligibility for automatic cancellation because their information is already on file. The administration said people should complete the form by Nov. 15 to have them processed before federal student loan payments resume in January.
“The court made the right call in dismissing this ideological challenge to debt relief,” said Abby Shafroth, director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. “The six states failed to establish that student debt relief harms them — in fact, it promises over $46 billion in relief to working- and middle-class residents in their states. Their residents should cheer this decision along with families across the country.”
Biden’s loan relief plan will cancel up to $10,000 in federal student debt for borrowers who earn up to $125,000 annually, or up to $250,000 for married couples. Borrowers who received Pell Grants are eligible for an additional $10,000 in forgiveness.
The Biden administration has been adamant that its debt cancellation plan is legal. The Justice Department released a 25-page memo in August justifying the policy under a 2003 law authorizing the secretary of education “to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies.”
It is the same law, known as the Heroes Act, the Trump administration used at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic to pause payments on federal student loans as Americans faced the economic fallout of the national health crisis. Justice Department attorney Brian Netter recently reminded the court of that and noted there were no attempts to challenge the legality of the payment moratorium.
“This is a statute about emergencies,” Netter said during a recent court hearing on the injunction. “It seems hard to fathom that Congress wouldn’t have understood at the time that a larger national emergency is going to prompt and necessitate a larger action by the secretary of education.”
Judge Autrey at the hearing questioned whether the scale of loan cancellation, at a cost of roughly $300 billion, warranted explicit authorization from Congress because of the economic and political significance, a legal idea known as the “major questions” doctrine. The Supreme Court invoked that doctrine earlier this year to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to combat climate change. Higher education experts had expected the doctrine to be used to invalidate Biden’s debt relief program.
Netter said the debt relief program was designed to respond to the scale of the national emergency and avoid an anticipated wave of delinquencies when the pause on federal student-loan payments lifts. The pause was extended through Dec. 31.
“The way that this Supreme Court has analyzed agency action could pose a threat [to the administration] if this case got that far,” said Kate Elengold, assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina School of Law. “I think the department has a really strong argument, but that’s what I’m watching most closely.”
The coalition of states involved in the lawsuit argue that the administration has no right to take action on this scale without congressional approval. Moreover, they say, the policy would impose economic harm on state investment entities and student loan companies that own debt from the defunct Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program.
After Biden unveiled his cancellation plan in August, many commercial FFEL borrowers consolidated their loans into Direct Loans to qualify for relief. The states have said the plan enticed borrowers to consolidate, which deprives their related entities of interest income.
But hours before the case was filed, the Biden administration scaled back eligibility for the debt relief program, saying commercial FFEL borrowers could no longer consolidate to qualify for the one-time relief. Justice Department attorneys said the decision undercut the states’ claims.
Judge Autrey agreed. In Thursday’s ruling, he said, “the lack of the ongoing incentive to consolidate defeats the claims of Arkansas and Nebraska.”
He also questioned whether Missouri had the right to bring a lawsuit on behalf of the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, a quasi-state outfit that owns and services FFEL debt. Autrey said that while the governor does appoint five members of the company’s board, its revenue and liabilities are independent of the state.
Most of the states involved in the lawsuit say they will lose tax revenue because of Biden’s policy. They take their cue from the federal government, which will not count discharged student debt as taxable income through January 2026. Autrey shot down that claim, saying “the tenuous nature of future income tax revenue is insufficient to establish a cognizable injury to support standing to bring this action.”
The six states’ lawsuit is one of several legal challenges aiming to block Biden’s debt relief program.
Today's Trump Fuckery
Another day, another revelation that Trump is a scum-sucking pig who wouldn't bat an eye about fucking his own grandma out of her pension.
When does this prick see the inside of a jail cell?
Federal judge finds that Trump lied under oath about voter fraud in Georgia while trying to overturn the 2020 election results
A federal judge said Wednesday Trump lied under oath about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump knew the fraud figures were wrong but touted them in court and publicly, the judge said.
This came in a ruling saying a GOP lawyer must give his communications to the Capitol-riot panel.
A federal judge said Wednesday that former President Donald Trump lied under oath about voter fraud in Georgia while trying to get the state's 2020 election results overturned.
US District Judge David Carter made the determination in a ruling ordering the conservative lawyer John Eastman to turn over to the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, a batch of his communications related to Trump's and his allies' efforts to subvert the 2020 election results.
On December 4, 2020, Trump's legal team filed a lawsuit in Georgia state court alleging that Fulton County had miscounted thousands of votes. It also contested the state court's proceedings in federal court.
But later that month, according to Carter's ruling, Eastman said in an email that while Trump had "signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate."
Eastman added: "For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.'"
Trump and his lawyers still filed their complaint citing those numbers, and Trump signed a letter "swearing under oath that the incorporated, inaccurate numbers 'are true and correct' or 'believed to be true and correct' to the best of his knowledge and belief," Carter wrote.
He added: "The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public."
Wednesday wasn't the first time Carter suggested the former president committed a crime in connection to his crusade to undermine the 2020 election results.
In a March ruling, the judge said Trump likely obstructed Congress — a felony — when he tried to disrupt the election-certification process on January 6.
Carter pointed out the dozens of lawsuits Trump's campaign and his Republican allies filed in court contesting the election results in battleground states that now-President Joe Biden won.
After "filing and losing more than sixty suits, this plan was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means," the ruling said, adding that the "illegality of the plan was obvious."
Trump and Eastman "launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history," Carter wrote, adding: "Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory."
COVID-19 Update
Confirmation that we need to be careful.
A flurry of new Covid-19 variants appears to be gaining traction globally, raising fears of a winter surge.
In the United States, these are BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, BA.4.6, BA.2.75 and BA.2.75.2. In other countries, the recombinant variant XBB has been rising quickly and appears to be fueling a new wave of cases in Singapore. Cases are also rising in Europe and the UK, where these variants have taken hold.
Dr. Peter Hotez, who co-directs the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, says he thinks of them collectively as the Scrabble variants because they use letters that get high scores in the board game like Q, X and B.
As the US moves into the fall, Covid-19 cases are dropping. Normally, that would be a reason for hope that the nation could escape the surges of the past two pandemic winters. But virus experts fear that the downward trend may soon reverse itself, thanks to this gaggle of new variants.
Lumped together, the variants accounted for almost 1 in 3 new Covid-19 infections nationwide last week, according to the latest estimates from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The updated bivalent booster vaccines and antiviral drugs like Paxlovid are expected to continue to be protective against severe outcomes from Covid-19 infections caused by the new variants.
But the new variants are particularly devastating for millions of Americans who have weakened immune systems. New research suggests that changes in these variants make them impervious to the last lab-created antibodies available to help treat and prevent severe cases of Covid-19, and the US government has run out of money to incentivize the creation of new ones.
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