A series of natural gas projects are receiving support from mostly Republican officials in Virginia and North Carolina, who mainly signed off on the ghostwritten language of lobbyists and consultants working with pipeline firms to make their plans a reality. According to Huff Post, at least two Transco pipeline expansion projects and two pipeline replacement projects had the support of lawmakers who submitted letters to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission containing language proposed by Williams Companies Inc. and TC Energy Corporation. This information came to the Huff Post courtesy of a public records request filed by the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog organization dedicated to combatting fossil fuel misinformation.
In at least one instance, officials barely changed a thing when presented with a draft letter. Mecklenburg County, Virginia, Administrator Wayne Carter proposed “minor tweaks,” according to Huff Post, before signing off on and submitting a letter of support for Williams Companies’ Southside Reliability Enhancement Project, which would impact 117 acres of land and include the building of a new compression station in Mecklenburg County, pipeline replacements, and upgrades to an existing station in North Carolina. Carter received the letter from Advantus Strategies President Robert Crockett, who’s a lobbyist for Williams Companies. Republicans like Virginia state Sen. Frank Ruff and state Delegates Tommy Wright Jr. and Les Adams all submitted FERC letters with identical or similar language found in Carter’s letter.
As Huff Postnotes, Ruff and Wright “submitted nearly identical letters to FERC in March in support of Williams’ separate Commonwealth Energy Connector Project, another Transco expansion aimed at increasing natural gas supply to southeastern Virginia.” It’s worth noting that Williams Companies is one of a few dozen oil and gas companies that donated thousands of dollars to Ruff’s past political campaigns. The list is much shorter for Wright, though Williams Companies ranks as one of his top oil and gas industry campaign donors. The problem extends into North Carolina, where some of these pipeline expansions would be headed.
Lobbyist Wayne King, a former North Carolina Republican Party vice chairman, successfully got some of his talking points to be included verbatim in letters of support for the Transco pipeline projects from Republicans Tim Moore, who is state House Speaker, and Mooresville Mayor Miles Atkins. Republican state Sen. Bob Steinburg also piggybacked off those same Williams Companies talking points. Unsurprisingly, Moore received campaign donations from Williams Companies in the past and therefore was fairly sympathetic when approached by King. Perhaps Atkins and Steinburg are hoping for similar benefits. There’s plenty more similar corruption for similar projects to dig into in the Huff Post article, which is most certainly worth a read.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
●Primary Night: Strictly Come Vancing: After a two-month break, the 2022 primary season picks are back with a vengeance Tuesday in Ohio and Indiana, and we’ve put together our preview of the night’s key races in both states.
Polls close at 6 PM ET in the portion of Indiana located in the Eastern Time Zone, while the rest of the state follows an hour later. Voting concludes in Ohio at 7:30 PM ET, and our live coverage will begin then at Daily Kos Elections. You can also follow us on Twitter for blow-by-blow updates, and you’ll want to bookmark our primary calendar, which includes the dates for primaries in all 50 states. (Next week will bring us contests in Nebraska and West Virginia.)
The main event is Ohio’s massively expensive Republican primary for the state’s open Senate seat, where venture capitalist J.D. Vance is hoping that a late endorsement from Donald Trump will put him over the top (even if Trump himself hasn’t bothered to remember Vance’s name), but it’s far from the only primary on tap. Buckeye State Republicans are taking part in their race for governor as well, where a recent poll finds incumbent Mike DeWine beating former Rep. Jim Renacci with a plurality of the vote.
There’s also several big House contests to see. Over in Ohio’s 11th District, Rep. Shontel Brown faces a Democratic primary rematch against former state Sen. Nina Turner, a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter whom she defeated in last year’s special election in an upset.
In the Toledo-based 9th, meanwhile, two Republican state legislators are competing to go up against 20-term Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in a newly-gerrymandered constituency. And in south-central Indiana’s 9th, former Rep. Mike Sodrel is hoping to return to the House 16 years after he was ejected from it, but he has to get past several fellow Republicans first. You can find details on these contests, as well as a whole lot more, in our preview.
●NH-Sen: Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan is using her first TV ad of the campaign to tell the audience, “I am taking on members of my own party to push a gas tax holiday, and I am pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves. That’s how we lower costs and get through these times.”
●HI-Gov: Former Ultimate Fighting Championship champion B.J. Penn has declared that he’ll seek the Republican nomination to lead heavily Democratic Hawaii, an announcement that the mask and vaccine mandate foe naturally made to podcaster Joe Rogan. The UFC forbade Penn from fighting again in 2019 after videos showed him involved in a bar brawl, though he was not arrested or charged.
●ID-Gov, ID-AG: Idaho Dispatch last month released a mid-April survey from Zoldak Research, a firm we haven’t previously encountered, that shows incumbent Brad Little turning back Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin 60-29 in the May 17 Republican primary. We haven’t seen any other polls all year testing Little’s prospects against McGeachin, a far-right favorite who sports Trump’s endorsement.
But the news isn’t good for five-term Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, as Zoldak shows former Rep. Raúl Labrador narrowly leading him 36-33. The Club For Growth, which is running commercials attacking Wasden, publicized an internal back in March that had Labrador ahead by a large 35-14 in the GOP nomination contest.
●KY-Gov: State Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles said Saturday that he was entering next year’s Republican primary to take on Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. Quarles’ only notable intra-party foe so far is state Auditor Mike Harmon, who has struggled to raise money, but considerably more Bluegrass State Republicans are eyeing the contest: Secretary of State Michael Adams, who himself hasn’t quite ruled it out, mused, “I think we’re going to need more paper for the ballots.”
And while we hadn’t previously heard state Sen. Ralph Alvarado mentioned as a possibility, the Associated Press reports that he’s indeed considering. Alvarado became incumbent Matt Bevin’s running mate in 2019 after the then-governor ejected Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton from his ticket, but the duo narrowly lost to Beshear and Jacqueline Coleman.
●MA-Gov: Suffolk University, working on behalf of the Boston Globe, is out with the first survey we’ve seen of the general election to succeed retiring Republican incumbent Charlie Baker, and it finds Massachusetts Democrats well-positioned to retake the governorship after eight years. Attorney General Maura Healey leads both former state Rep. Geoff Diehl and wealthy businessman Chris Doughty 54-27 and 55-25, respectively, while state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz outpaces them 45-29 and 43-27.
The school also tests out an extremely hypothetical scenario where Baker runs for re-election as an independent and has him beating Healey 37-28, with 17% going to the Trump-endorsed Diehl. Baker, though, has shown no obvious interest in abandoning either his party or his retirement plans.
●WI-Gov: Democratic incumbent Tony Evers has launched a $3.5 million opening ad buy, and his first spot commends him for saving jobs, improving public schools and roads, and working “with Republicans and Democrats to pass middle class income-tax relief.”
House
●AL-05: The May 24 Republican primary for this safely red open seat was a pretty low-key affair until last week, but that all changed when former Department of Defense official Casey Wardynski’s allies at the nihilist House Freedom Caucus dropped $192,000 on TV spots, plus another $83,000 on digital ads, attacking Madison County Commission Chairman Dale Strong. Wardynski and Strong are the only candidates who have brought in a serious amount of money in the contest to succeed Senate candidate Mo Brooks.
The commercial accuses Strong of voting to put a tax increase on the ballot and having “stood with the radical woke left and supported relocating an historic Civil War statue in Madison County.” (Strong maintains that he took action to protect that Confederate monument from damage.) The Freedom Caucus then goes after the commissioner for daring to donate to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney but not Trump. The ad does not mention Wardynski, who recently made a remarkably stiff appearance in his own spot.
●CA-13: Financial advisor Phil Arballo’s first commercial for the June 7 top-two primary goes after his fellow Democrat, Assemblyman Adam Gray, from the left. The ad features several local people arguing that the assemblyman has aided oil companies while benefiting from their donations, and that he “even stood with Donald Trump when Trump let polluters put our water at risk.” The final third of the commercial praises Arballo, who was the 2020 nominee in the old 22nd District, as someone who “rejects corporate PAC money.”
●Colorado: The deadline to turn in petitions to make Colorado’s June 28 primary passed all the way back on March 15, but because the state takes several weeks to verify signatures, we only now have an official list. Several people also reached the primary ballot by competing at their party conventions (also known as the party assemblies), a process we explain here. We mentioned which major candidates were still in the running following the assemblies for Senate and governor, as well as for the 5th, 7th, and 8th Congressional Districts, though a few contenders were in limbo as they waited for their petitions to be verified.
We now know, however, that business owner Andrew Heaton will indeed be competing in the GOP primary for the safely red 5th in the Colorado Springs area, which is potentially good news for Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn. Both Heaton and Navy veteran Rebecca Keltie have brought in almost no money, but their presence could cost state Rep. Dave Williams some anti-incumbent votes. In the open 7th, by contrast, the GOP is set for a three-way race because both attorney Brad Dempsey and construction company owner Carl Andersen failed to turn in enough signatures, though both are challenging the secretary of state’s ruling in court.
Finally, the state’s list confirms that far-right Rep. Lauren Boebert’s only Republican primary opponent in the 3rd District will be state Sen. Don Coram, though it’s hard to see the moderate state legislator prevailing. Redistricting extended Trump’s margin of victory in this western Colorado constituency from 52-46 to 53-45, but three Democrats are hoping they’ll have an opening against Boebert: Former Aspen City Councilman Adam Frisch, social worker Sol Sandoval, and businessman Alex Walker.
●FL-04: State Rep. Jason Fischer announced Monday that he was joining the Republican primary for the open 4th District, a Jacksonville-area seat that Trump would have taken 53-46.
●FL-15, FL-07: Retired Navy Captain Mac McGovern, who launched a bid for the old 7th District in January before redistricting was completed, said Monday that he’d compete in the August Republican primary for the new 15th instead.
●FL-27, FL-Sen: Two local Democratic elected officials announced over the weekend that they’d take on freshman Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar in the new 27th District: Miami Commissioner Ken Russell and Miami-Dade County Commissioner Eileen Higgins. The new GOP gerrymander shifted this Miami-based seat from a 51-48 Biden constituency to one that Trump would have taken 50-49.
Russell, who serves on the local equivalent of the city council, had been waging a longshot campaign against Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, but he’d struggled to gain traction in the August primary against 10th District Rep. Val Demings. Russell, however, said Sunday he would run against Salazar instead: The commissioner ended March with $285,000 in the bank that he can use on his new House race, though the GOP congresswoman had $1 million available.
That same day, Higgins’ campaign manager also confirmed his boss would challenge Salazar. Higgins pulled off an upset victory in 2018 to claim her seat on the county commission in a special election, a victory that flipped the body to a Democratic majority. She went on to win a close race for a full four-year term in 2020, though she’ll need to step down to campaign for Congress under Florida’s resign-to-run law. (Russell, who is termed out next year, already said he’d resign to pursue his aborted Senate bid.)
●NC-13: The Club for Growth, which supports law student Bo Hines in the packed May 17 Republican primary, is running a negative ad here for the first time by targeting self-funding attorney Kelly Daughtry. The Club tells the audience that Daughtry donated to a Democrat, Mark Davis, running for the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2020 “when Republicans were fighting to take back the court.”
There actually weren’t enough seats on the ballot that year for Republicans to win a majority on the body even though they won all three of the 2020 contests, including the Davis race, though the Club doesn’t let that stop them from continuing to blame Daughtry for what happened next. The narrator instead continues, “The Democrats kept control, then used their Supreme Court majority to block Republican redistricting plans and draw districts benefiting the Democrats.”
●NE-02: Donald Trump used his Sunday rally for gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster to bash Rep. Don Bacon ahead of next week’s Republican primary for this competitive seat and to implore his audience to vote for roofer Steve Kuehl. “Now I don’t know Steve,” Trump continued, who he said was a nice guy he just met. “Good luck, Steve, whoever the hell you are.” Plenty of local GOP voters will be asking who the hell Kuehl is too, since he ended March with a negative balance in his campaign account.
Trump, naturally, said he wasn’t actually endorsing Kuehl, which is a good way for him to avoid a dreaded L on his precious win-loss primary record. Over in the real world, though, telling voters to vote for a candidate is an endorsement no matter what Trump and his minions actually insist on labeling it.
●OR-06: Protect Our Future PAC has thrown down another $735,000 to aid economic development adviser Carrick Flynn, which brings the crypto-aligned group’s total investment to $8.76 million with two more weeks to go before the Democratic primary.
●TX-34 (special): Republican Mayra Flores and the NRCC have released the first poll we’ve seen of the June 14 all-party special election primary, a Ragnar Research internal that shows Flores and Democrat Dan Sanchez advancing to an all-but-assured runoff in the current version of this 52-48 Biden seat. Flores outpaces Sanchez 24-19, with two other candidates, Democrat Rene Coronado and Republican Juana Cantu-Cabrera, taking 9% and 7%, respectively. A hefty 41% are undecided, which makes it especially hard to draw any conclusions from this survey.
●WV-02: Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin not only has endorsed Rep. David McKinley ahead of next week’s Republican primary against fellow incumbent Alex Mooney, he’s also starring in a commercial praising McKinley. The senator begins by telling the audience that, as someone who opposed the Biden administration’s Build Back Better program, he knows that Mooney “and his out of state supporters” are lying when they say McKinley supported the program. “David McKinley has always opposed reckless spending,” says Manchin, while “Alex Mooney has proven he’s all about Alex Mooney.”
It’s very rare for a high-profile politician, even a conservative Democrat like Manchin, to take sides in the other party’s primary, much less cut an ad for it, though McKinley’s camp is arguing he’ll be an asset with GOP voters. An unnamed source at the McKinley campaign told columnist Steven Allen Adams, “In our polling, Manchin has consistently been in the mid to high 60s favorables among Republican primary voters,” though they didn’t actually release any polls.
Mooney, by contrast, is only too happy to publicize his own internal from Public Opinion Strategies showing him defeating McKinley 50-30, which is nearly double his margin from just a few weeks ago. The last survey we saw giving McKinley the lead, by contrast, was a March poll for the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce that gave him a small 38-33 edge; the group went on to endorse McKinley after those numbers were released.
Obituaries
●Bob Krueger, whose brief tenure as an appointed senator in 1993 made him the last Texas Democrat to serve in the upper chamber, died Sunday at the age of 86. Krueger previously was elected to represent the 21st District, which at the time was a geographically vast seat covering much of West Texas, in 1974 and 1976, but he gave it up to challenge Republican Sen. John Tower in 1978.
Lone Star State Democrats were still the dominant faction in this conservative state at the time, but Krueger had a difficult task ahead of him unseating Tower, whose win in the 1961 special election to succeed Vice President Lyndon Johnson made him the first Republican to win a direct election to the Senate in any of the 11 former Confederate states since the passage of the 17th Amendment half a century earlier. The Washington Postwrote weeks before Election Day, “With Tower and Krueger agreeing on most economic and oil-and-gas issues, the glitter foreseen for this campaign has turned to ho-hum boredom, a far greater hazard for Krueger than Tower.”
Krueger’s team tried to go after the incumbent by mailing out a newspaper column that, while it didn’t name Tower directly, implied the senator was a womanizer; Tower’s camp, in turn, asked why the 43-year-old Democrat was unmarried. The result turned out to be tight, but Tower held off Krueger 50-49; that same evening, Bill Clements was pulling off a similarly narrow win to become Texas’ first GOP governor of the 20th century.
Krueger ran again in the 1984 race to succeed the retiring Tower only for future Rep. Lloyd Doggett to narrowly deny him a place in the runoff. Krueger, however, eventually returned to office in 1990 by winning a spot on the powerful Railroad Commission. He held that job in 1993 when Gov. Ann Richardson appointed him to succeed Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who resigned to become Bill Clinton’s first treasury secretary, after a long process where she would mention a name and see what the reaction was; one Democratic state representative explained Krueger was ultimately chosen because he “has statewide name ID, and no one has strong objections to him.”
The new senator, though, soon had to defend his seat in a special election that occurred as Clinton’s weak numbers were accelerating Texas Democrats’ decline in the state. Krueger and his allies argued the state needed to maintain a Democratic senator, while Republican state Treasurer Kay Bailey Hutchison used every chance she had to tie him to the administration: It was Hutchison’s strategy that resonated, and she scored a 67-33 victory. Krueger, who never sought elected office again, went on to serve as Clinton’s ambassador both to Burundi, where he survived a 1995 attack on his convoy that killed one person, and Botswana.
A shocking leak of a draft opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Tuesday night shows that, as widely expected, the court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Speculation flew about who leaked the draft and what their political intent in doing so, with many longtime court observers expressing horror at the breach of court secrecy. But the most important thing here is the loss of a right long guaranteed by the court, a loss of bodily autonomy not just for pregnant people but for anyone who might at any point become pregnant—a loss of a right that will lead to the loss of life. History shows us that women get abortions whether they’re legal or not. The question is how many will die.
The looming loss of reproductive rights is widespread, with 13 states having trigger laws that will ban abortion the moment the court allows it. But as of now, Roe v. Wade remains the law (except in Texas, which the Supreme Court allowed to implement a six-week abortion ban last fall), and it will do so until a final, non-draft, not-leaked, opinion is officially released.
Reproductive rights are not the only ones in danger from this court, packed by Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with three justices during Trump’s term. Alito’s draft opinion also takes aim at LGBT rights, criticizing Lawrence v. Texas, the case that legalized sodomy, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark marriage equality decision. Republicans have also been increasingly open about their desire to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the case that legalized contraception for married couples. “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” Alito wrote—and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with other rights he doesn’t think are deeply rooted enough to deserve protection.
But reproductive rights are the ones that will be struck down in the coming weeks, if this draft opinion holds. And when that happens, it will be already vulnerable people who suffer: ones without the money to get on an airplane and fly to a state where their rights will be protected—at least until Republicans take Congress and pass a national abortion ban, as they hope to do.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation – all at the expense of tens of millions of women who could soon be stripped of their bodily autonomy and the constitutional rights they’ve relied on for half a century,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement Tuesday night. “The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower has now completely devolved into the party of Trump. Every Republican Senator who supported Senator McConnell and voted for Trump Justices pretending that this day would never come will now have to explain themselves to the American people.”
What Pelosi and Schumer didn’t say is what they plan to do about it. Or even what they plan to say Democrats would do about it if they had a few more Senate seats.
Just as the imminent overthrow of 50 years of abortion rights challenges congressional Democrats to take action, not just talk, it highlights what the Supreme Court has become even as seasoned, serious political observers have insisted it remains a nonpartisan institution. If and when the draft opinion becomes an official one, “years of conventional wisdom about the Court and its concerns for its own legitimacy will be proven wrong,” Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate. “Every single court watcher who spoke in terms of baby steps, incrementalism, or ‘chipping away’ at one of the most vitally important precedents in modern history will have been wrong. Those who suggested that the Court would never do something so huge and so polarizing just before the November midterms will have been wrong. And the people who assured us that Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were moderate centrists who cared deeply about the appearance of a non-ideological and thoughtful court, well yeah. They will have been wrong too.”
There’s a reckoning due for all the pundits and political figures who cautioned against exaggerating the dangers of a Republican-controlled court. Unfortunately, those people never accept accountability for their lousy judgment and misleading pronouncements. Now, it’s likely that poor women, and especially women of color, living in Republican-controlled states, will pay for it with their health or their lives.
It’s been a couple of weeks since we checked in on the Daily Kos relief fund for Ukraine. As of this morning, you’ve generously donated a whopping…
$2,473,591.54
Nice! That’s approximately $2 million more than the Republicans have raised for the Russian generals’ victory tank parade in Red Square on May 9, which may not happen at all on account of Russia seems to be quickly running out of both generals and tanks.
If you’d like to add to the total for the five chosen groups—the World Central Kitchen, AmeriCares, the International Rescue Committee, Razom for Ukraine, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare—click here and ActBlue will help you take care of the rest. Many thanks.
We now return you to the T-72 flying-turret frisbee Olympics currently in progress.
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, May 3, 2022
Note: Today is Garden Meditation Day. Please zen your auras responsibly or I’m pulling out the pepper spray. —Mgr.
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By the Numbers:
4 days!!!
Days ’til the House Jan. 6 Committee starts its public hearings: 37
Total U.S. farmland in 2021, per the federal government: 895 million acres
Percent of U.S. voters, including 68% of Democrats and 55% of Trump cultists, who oppose politicians punishing companies over their stances on social issues, according to a new Reuters-Ipsos poll: 62%
Rank of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi among most-senior U.S. leaders to visit Ukraine and meet with President Zelenskyy (who awarded her the Order of Princess Olga for her support) so far: #1
Number of states suing the Postal Service for choosing to replace their fleet of trucks with gas-powered ones instead of electric: 16
Number of Alaska-bound honeybees that died because dumb dumb dumb dumb fucking idiot morons at DELTA AIRLINES you stupid fucking sacks of shit may you get stung 5 million times in retaliation you worthless shriveled brains:5 million
CHEERS to dimming the gaslighters. If Republicans ever tried to open up a government disinformation bureau, its mission would of course be to spread disinformation—something they excel at. But when Democrats do it, it’s a little different. Exhibit A: last week the Department of Homeland Security opened a new bureau—a Disinformation Governance Board—to shoot down propaganda and online harassment from Russia targeting migrants and the integrity of our midterm elections. And you’ll never guess who’s pounding the table and demanding we stop picking on poor, poor Putin:
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example, said DHS will be “policing Americans’ speech.” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio was even more outraged, releasing a video via social media in which the Floridian insisted that Homeland Security officials will be “focused on policing speech.”
Hi, Josh. Can I call you Adolf for short?
Rubio, whose home state allies have focused of late on banning books, restricting protests, and making it harder to vote, added that “people on the Marxist left are coming after your most basic constitutional rights.”
How do you know when the U.S. government is doing the right thing? When those two pudnockers say it’s doing the wrong thing. Carry on, DHS.
JEERS to Growing Pains—in the ass. Oh no! Kirk Cameron, famed actor and director of such classics as none of them, is sounding the alarm. Apparently our public education system is rotten to the core YES I SAID ROTTEN TO THE CORE ARE YOU PEOPLE EVEN LISTENING??? There’s “inaccurate and immoral things that the public school system has been teaching our children and our grandchildren, and it’s up to us as parents to cultivate the hearts and minds and souls of our children.” It’s a crisis of epic proportions, and there’s only one way out of this: I am going to wave my magic wand and make America’s public school system great again. [Wiggle Waggle Zing! SparkleSparkleSparkle!!!] There. All better:
Most parents around the country believe their kids’ schools are doing a good job communicating what is being taught, even where controversial subjects are concerned, a new poll has found.
Just add the numbers together and you get Kirk Cameron’s current IQ.
Slightly more than three-quarters, 76%, said they agreed that their kids’ school does a good job keeping them “informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics.” The vast majority of parents, 88%, also said their kids’ teachers have done the best they could given the pandemic’s many challenges.
Join me later today when I wave my magic wand again and turn Kirk Cameron into a brainwashed ignoramus named Kirk Cameron. (What can I say? Some tricks are easier than others.)
CHEERS to the shining city on a hill. Happy 220th Birthday to Washington, D.C., incorporated May 3, 1802. (These old maps are cool—I hear you can see Russia from the Capitol dome.)
1792 map of Washington, D.C. by surveyor Andrew Ellicott
I was going to send everyone who lives there a gift basket filled with representation to go with your taxation, but Congress—led by Democrat Joe Manchin—says it can’t deliver that item on certain days. Namely Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. So instead I’m sending you a lovely Lincoln Memorial snow globe. (When you shake it, a little plastic Marjorie Taylor-Greene falls down the steps and gets an owie.)
JEERS to HELLO URGENT MESSAGE KIND MADAM 7 PLEASE RLPY V&i*GR#A HOT SEXY LOVER NEED ASSISTANCE!! We can’t let today go by without acknowledging the 44th anniversary of spam. It had a fascinating beginning. Via Geekosystem, here’s how it started back in 1978:
Gary Thuerk, a marketer for the Digital Equipment Corporation, blasted out his message to 400 of the 2600 people on ARPAnet, the DARPA-funded so-called “first Internet.” Naturally: He was selling something. (Computers, or more specifically, information about open houses where people could check out the computers.)
He annoyed a lot of people. And he also had some success, with a few recipients interested in what he was pushing. And thus, spam was born.
CHEERS to seeing the light…and everything else. A rare bit of personal news from the C&J household. Three years ago I had surgery to replace the lenses in my eyes that had become all cataracty—a somewhat common result of chemotherapy that was used to kick my twin infestations of cancer to the curb. My vision was restored to normal, but I was told I’d need some follow-up treatment from the Jewish space laser to take care of some cloudiness that was forming.
Is this a dancing pickle? I can’t see.
Then—Pandemic!!! As Covid did its thing, my eyes slowly got worse right up until the time last February when they started quickly getting worse to the point where I had to wear a patch over one eye and barked my C&Js into a Dictaphone to be transcribed and published by my team at Cat, Dog, and Squirrels Who Have No Idea What They’re Doing, LLC. And since everyone else in Maine held off getting their eyes checked, the wait time is atrocious: a month to see the optometrist to get the referral to see the ophthalmologist (the competent kind, not the Rand Paul kind), who thankfully accepted my $10,000 cash bribe to get me in this morning.
So at 10:15 EDT, when they flick the switch, your lights will briefly dim, your car’s engine will briefly die, your dishes will briefly fall from your cabinets, and hot magma will briefly squirt out of all the fire hydrants. Afterward they’ll give me a complimentary house plant and choice of goodie from the snack basket, and everything in sight will be great again. Sorry about your dishes.
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Ten years ago in C&J: May 3, 2012
CHEERS to the man who bucked the trend. Newt Gingrich handily won the South Carolina primary. Whoever wins the South Carolina primary wins the presidential nomination. So it is written, so it shall be done. But not if you’re Newt Gingrich, I guess. Because today, the presidential aspirant who ran on a platform of moon colonies, child janitors, judge arrests, debtors prisons, and book and DVD sales, will officially run out of his magic mushroom power and revert back to his little huckster self. So tonight, after you say your prayers and tuck your Teddy bear into bed, take a moment to thank your lucky stars that he’ll never come within a hundred feet of the White House. And then whisper on the wind: “Night, Newt.” And sleep tight.
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And just one more…
JEERS to Wankerrific Moments in Self-importance. Sometimes an op-ed column is, not unlike an Ed Wood movie, so bad that it achieves a special place in the archive of eye rolling. That’s why May 3rd is officially designated “Richard Cohen Day.” On May 3, 2006, Cohen went into a tirade against Stephen Colbert’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—now considered a courageous and often gut-busting classic skewering a scowling George W. Bush as the president sat just a few feet away. Cohen defended his ability to gauge what’s funny and what’s not with perhaps the most wince-worthy opening paragraph of the decade:
First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy.
Funny guy.
This is well known in certain circles, which is why, even back in elementary school, I was sometimes asked by the teacher to “say something funny”—as if the deed could be done on demand.
Even elementary school kids know that if you have to convince us that you’re funny by telling us you’re funny…you’re not funny. Funny how that works.
P.S. Biden at this years dinner: “This is the first time the president has attended this dinner in six years. It’s understandable—we had a horrible plague, followed by two years of Covid,” Now that’s funny.
Have a tolerable Tuesday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
Pelosi Visits Cheers and Jeers: We’ll ‘Be There For You Until the Kiddie Pool Is Chlorinated’
POLITICO has obtained a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, an opinion which if released as is, would allow state abortion bans to immediately take effect across many states. We begin with an analysis from Daniel Victor at The New York Times, which is running live updates on the developments:
A leaked draft opinion indicating the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that guaranteed abortion access, sent immediate shock waves throughout the United States, as many Americans braced for a future without reproductive rights that had been established for nearly a half-century.
The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., was obtained by Politico Monday night in an unprecedented leak from the nation’s highest court, elevating a cultural issue that has long carried heavy emotional and personal weight to the forefront of American’s minds. The decision, which is not expected to be finalized for another month or more and could change in its final form, would shift the decision of abortion’s legality to individual states.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that fights abortion restrictions in court and closely tracks state laws, 24 states are likely to ban abortion if they are allowed. Those states are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
The Guttmacher Institute, a research group focused on reproductive health care, says a slightly different group of states is likely to substantially limit abortion access: Its list of 26 states excludes North Carolina and Pennsylvania, but includes Florida, Iowa, Montana and Wyoming.
Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws, which were passed to make abortion illegal as soon as the court allowed it. Some have old abortion laws on the books that were invalidated by the Roe decision but could be enforced again. Still other states, like Oklahoma, have abortion bans that were passed during this legislative session, despite the Roe precedent.
Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.
[…]
While a number of states have recently approved laws to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy — the limit established in the Mississippi legislation at the heart of the case pending before the high court — some activists and Republican lawmakers now say those laws are not ambitious enough for the next phase of the antiabortion movement. Instead, they now see the six-week limit — which they call “heartbeat” legislation — as the preferred strategy because it would prevent far more abortions.
Indeed, people should have expected exactly this outcome from the moment Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, the 52 percent of white women who voted for Trump, along with the 52 percent of all men and a whopping 62 percent of white men, should have expected this. Some of them clearly wanted abortion to be overturned. But 59 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases, including 57 percent of white Americans—so some of them clearly didn’t want it.
Did they think these conservative theocrats were joking? Conservatives have long promised to take away women’s rights. Now they are doing it. What did anyone think was going to happen when we let them control the Supreme Court? There won’t be a riot, because most people have accepted living with a Christian fundamentalist Supreme Court. The fight to save abortion rights was lost slowly, over a long time, and then all at once.
[I]f the Supreme Court clearly repudiates Roe, we may see a backlash that galvanizes people who haven’t typically taken a side in the abortion debate, including many who accept restrictions on abortion but not outright bans. This is unlikely to happen across the country, but it could make a key difference in a handful of states. Hints of such political mobilization are already apparent in places such as Virginia, which has historically restricted abortion but now has repealed some of those regulations following public outcry.
And, in case you’re wondering about the precedent the draft opinion would set for other rights:
In his draft, Alito doesn’t preclude a federal abortion ban, but “if we move away from abortion to other privacy-based rights such as contraception, rights like gay marriage, he does try to ring-fence this opinion and say all we’re talking about is abortion — he mentions that several times,” Gerstein noted. “That said, I’m old enough to know that the court many times has said, ‘Don’t try to apply our opinion on X to this situation Y,because it’s different,’ and yet it often does get applied that way.”
And a final note from Eleanor Clift at The Daily Beast on Republican Senator Susan Collins, who promised America that Brett Kavanaugh would defend Roe:
The one person most responsible for the looming loss of abortion rights—aside from the president who appointed three anti-Roe justices—is Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who in October of 2018 became the 50th and deciding vote in the Senate for Brett Kavanaugh. […]
Collins won a fifth term in the Senate in 2020, and her re-election wasn’t even a close call. She was too eager to believe all that fluff about stare decisis, and now a constitutional right that has been in place for 50 years is about to be shattered on the wing of a promise to her that predictably turned out to be a lie.
Susan Collins told the women of America that they could trust her to protect their reproductive freedom. She let us down.
I wrote an entire update earlier today on the possibility that Ukraine had taken a key city near Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast. Looks (indirectly) confirmed.
This appears to be confirmation from official US Defence sources that Ukrainian troops have retaken the strategic town of Staryi Saltiv. That town is 40km NE of the centre of Kharkiv (a circle showing 40km is mapped below) and had been rumoured recaptured by Ukraine today. https://t.co/t6ntAn726mpic.twitter.com/TZ7itgBl4y
While War Mapper is wisely still waiting for official confirmation before marking it on his maps, this activity means a lot of previously red and pink territory east of Kharkiv has been cleared:
Updates: 🇺🇦 carried out an offensive in the direction of Staryi Slativ. The extent of territory recaptured isn’t yet clear. pic.twitter.com/vHKOWJrKhu
Ukrainian forces pushing out from Chuhuiv southeast of Kharkiv can rest easier about their northern left flank, but the effort has come at great cost. Today, Ukraine admitted they took heavy losses in the liberation of Ruska Lozova, just north of Kharkiv. And a few days ago, Ukraine got smashed trying to take Kozacha Lopan up north, on the Russian border. Russia isn’t giving up this territory easily, and things might get even tougher the closer Ukraine gets to the international border.
In the Izyum axis, Russia made some incremental gains.
🇷🇺 entered the outskirts of Lyman from the East. 🇷🇺 have taken control of Yampil’ and have continued south towards the Siverskyi Donets river. pic.twitter.com/hHPcudyaJS
Lyman and Yampil are on the north side of the Donets river, so Ukraine has room to fall back to the next defensive layer, behind the river. As long as those towns are fully evacuated, Ukraine has plenty of ground to spare. It’s a miracle they’ve lasted this long on the Russian-separatist side of the Donets. Losing those cities isn’t catastrophic, it’s likely inevitable. It just means Ukraine gets to move behind the river, where the defenses are even stronger. Land for blood.
Incidentally, that river is the reason Izyum was so important—it finally gave Russia a river crossing, the only one thus far in this axis.
All other fronts were quiet, including the rest of the long Donbas front. People are already talking about a “strategic pause to resupply and reinforce positions,” but I bet Russia is already running out of steam. And whether Vladimir Putin calls a general mobilization or not will be irrelevant.
Say he does—something I explored in a previous update—then what? Russian logistics are stretched to the breaking point, unable to keep up with whatever they have in theater at this moment. They have a conscript class of 130,000 currently in progress. Are they going to throw them all into Ukraine at once? Draft even more? How will they feed 130,000 (or more) new soldiers, when they can’t even take care of what’s there now? What vehicles will they ride, when everything arriving at the front these days look like “Scooby vans”? What dusty and rusty old Soviet-era equipment will they dig up from pilfered reserve stocks to equip them?
I suspect is these new conscripts will be sent to existing units to replace combat losses, just like Russia has done all war. Ineffective units will become even more so, low morale will reach even deeper lows, and forget about any notion of unit cohesion. Or worse, they’ll be used in a “Zerg rush,” as suggested by Ukrainian Presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych. If you’ve played Starcraft, you know what he’s talking about.
It’s a computer game, it has a nation—Zergs, insect. And since earthlings and another people have advanced technology, these just throw in masses.
So what I’m thinking, judging by the people who are right now reinforcing infantry units of the Russian army, they are not specialists, not artillerists, not tank men. They are recruiting lumpens, they are given some old uniform, given boots from 1951, machine gun from 1947, and a helmet from 1943, and sent into combat. Heroically sent to battle […]
[But,] they do not pose a combat power, only representing live power, but it’s not for long either. 30% of those who entered Ukraine in two weeks, only 30% are still alive. A part ran away, a part was destroyed. I think that by mid-May they can recruit 10,000 people. And they will heroically go somewhere, the question is where? And this will look similar to invasion by Chinese volunteers in the Korean War.
Human waves. That’s the only way Russian volunteers and conscripts can be used in the war. They’re not going to learn combat skills. The original invading force lacked them, and they were supposedly trained.
These poor souls will be sacrificed en masse to Putin’s megalomania as Ukrainian artillery shreds them to pieces. This is a war crime, not on the Ukrainian people, but on Russia’s youth itself.
The forced birth movement is thinking big now, having secured the U.S. Supreme Court and set up at least a dozen states to completely ban abortion as soon as the court overturns 50 years of precedence in Roe v. Wade. That’s not nearly enough for them, because it would mean that dozens of other states would still allow the practice and pregnant people would be able to travel to them for the procedure.
No, what they are aiming to do now is ban abortion nationally. The Washington Post reports that the big “antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.” Because of course it isn’t about states’ rights when it comes to abortion. It’s not about anyone’s rights.
Republican senators are, apparently, ready to go. According to a Post source in the forced birth movement, Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is going to introduce a national ban on abortion at six weeks in the Senate, though she didn’t confirm that with the paper. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) was at the meeting in which GOP senators supposedly discussed this, and said he will support it. That’s the beginning. If Republicans regain Congress, it’s what they’ll push and, with the Supreme Court having already done its part and the power behind this movement solidified, GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell would just as likely end the filibuster to make it pass.
What’s more, according to the Post: Forced birther Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, has been speaking with 10 potential Republican presidential candidates to get them on board. “Most of them, she said in an interview, assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.”
Kelley Robinson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, is taking the “terrifying” threat of a national ban seriously. “By them saying out loud that their goal is to push a nationwide abortion ban, it makes it clear that we have to elect more pro-reproductive health champions on the national level and in the states,” she said.
Well, yes. But after the Democratic Party seemed to react to Texas’ six-week ban, the precursor to all of this, with a yawn, of course forced birthers are jacked and of course Republicans will fold to that small, extreme, horrifying base. All the way back in September 2021 the Supreme Court allowed the Texas ban to stand and all but end abortion in that state.
The response from Democrats has been underwhelming. There’s been little more than the usual platitudes from Democratic leadership about protecting the right to choose and absolutely no endorsement, or really even any talk, about the most important thing they could do right now to ensure that right: expand the courts.
Expand the district courts, the circuit courts and especially the Supreme Court to stop the radical right from imposing a right-wing evangelical dominionist hellscape across the land.
And while that’s not possible right now with an evenly divided Senate, run on it and work like hell to get a big enough majority in the Senate to make Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema irrelevant, get rid of the filibuster, and save the country.
At the very least, run on all of this so that the majority of Americans—including the all-important and all-too-often taken for granted base—that Democrats are going to fight like hell to protect us. Don’t tell us you’re going to fight like hell. Do it.
A middle-aged couple have gotten their 15 minutes of fame after being so obnoxious they were kicked off of a flight shortly after boarding in West Palm Beach, Florida. The flight, which was reportedly headed to Newark, New Jersey, was forced to deplane after an incident between the couple and other passengers boarding the plane. Whether or the couple was inebriated is not known.
The incident escalated as the couple unabashedly refused to get off the plane based on the misunderstanding that their First Amendment rights were being violated. Video of the incident begins around the time that the cabin crew asks the woman and man to get their things and leave the plane. The couple refuse and the police ended up being called. The fact that the couple, who are seemingly snowbirds leaving Florida to head back north after the winter, are avowed Trump supporters might add to one’s enjoyment of their comeuppance, but the real story here is their understanding of what exactly “free speech” is and is not.
A warning: There is general vulgarity and homophobic slurs spewed during the retelling of these freedom warriors’ adventures in ruining everyone’s day.
“You don’t like the words coming out of my mouth,” says the female half of the couple, using her hand as a to pantomime talking—like a hand puppet! She then throws up her hands and says, “Free speech is dead.” The clip jumps to her saying to whomever she thinks is her audience, “Do you guys see what’s happening in America? You didn’t like what he said, and now we’re getting kicked off of a plane.” But,she has a revenge planned at this point in her version of First Amendment protest: “And all of y’all are gonna have to wait.”
If you don’t realize why “this is fucking outrageous,” this snowbird connects the dots for you: “You guys, we’re gonna turn into China.” You get it? It’s going to be bad. Not white communism bad, Chinese communism bad. That’s like double-bad for a racist. From there she continues the slow realization that she isn’t winning jack shit in this nonexistent case for her special First Amendment right to make everybody, passengers and crew, feel frustrated and miserable about her current state. “Oh I love Elon Musk, he is the best. Elon!” which elicits some giggles from passengers as it is a truly new level of incoherence.
She proceeds to tell everyone that this is really bumming her out by saying that this isn’t bumming her out at all. “You know what, it’s a beautiful day, I am happy to stay one more night. I am suing you, what is your name, sir? I’m suing you, and I’m suing the airline.” At this point her husband, who has continued to wear his sunglasses the entire time, chimes in, “Hey buddy, I guarantee I have more money than you. You’re a fucking jerk-off” I guess the threat there is that he has the money to waste on frivolous litigation? Super free speech!
But to be clear, he proceeds, arms crossed, to repeatedly say mockingly, “Oh, I’m a fa@#$t, I’m a fa^%$t.” The part “free speech” MAGAvates like these don’t seem to get about stuff is that you just cannot sit 2 feet from someone else hurling invective at them and expect others to consider this a “safe” environment. I wonder if this America-loving patriot cursed at all of the TSA agents when they asked him to remove his shoes? They weren’t asking him to do that to look at his toenails, you know.
At a certain point, she films the passengers, trying to menace them. Then, the moment of truth! The husband, probably tired of sitting here knowing this isn’t going to end any other way than them getting off the plane, says, “Let’s go.” But, no. This First Amendment warrior reminds him: “You, me, free speech.” It’s like listening to the great oratory of Trump Jr.
The video then comes to a point where it seem that the man has gotten his seat belt off, is sort of just talking away about how he’s fine to get off, as there are “F@#$ts” and who knows what other half-concocted thoughts he has running around in his head. His wife seems to want to continue her sit-in for the rights of obnoxious homophobes everywhere, saying, “It’s our anniversary,” and then trying to get her husband’s seat belt back on.
“We’re going to get [kicked] off the plane because we’re Trump supporters!” she shouted. “Seriously, I really think that’s what it is!” It isn’t. If every Trump supporter was kicked off a plane, how would we continue to spread COVID-19?
There’s the rub” Everybody can sit there and take her and her husband’s shitty and obnoxious and bile-filled invective for three hours.
Here’s the same obnoxious couple at the airport in West Palm Beach, FL after being removed from the plane 🤡 pic.twitter.com/dw74lhPYTn
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) May 2, 2022
Being a young person today is far from easy—students are navigating life amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, considering higher education at a time when it’s devastatingly expensive, and watching rents and the housing market skyrocket. While LGBTQ+ youth are certainly not the only students experiencing hardships, research shows they do face disproportionate levels of bullying and harassment from their peers and are more likely to leave high school without a diploma. They are also more likely to become homeless.
In an ideal world, schools would be a safe haven for young people. Unfortunately, thanks to Republican hate, we’ve seen lawmakers push heinous policies that seek to separate trans youth from their peers, be it based on bathroom access or participating in sports teams. Research has shown teachers feel uniquely ill-equipped to step in on behalf of LGBTQ+ youth when it comes to bullying, for example, but a recent story out of South Dakota paints a very clear picture of a teacher as the one doing the bullying. At the time of writing, at least one student has already been pulled from the school.
South Dakota. Zero days without being a national embarrassment. Local teacher at the high school thought it was a good idea to hand this letter to several students. pic.twitter.com/BjnJx4dLdG
As reported by local outlet the Watertown Public Opinion, four high school students received a letter from their German teacher, Calvin Hillesland, in which he told the students that he felt it was “wrong” and a “lie” to call them by their chosen names but stressed he supports and respects them. The students, who are all openly trans, were told by their teacher via the letter that their biology is “female” and that “every cell in your body is female, feminine” as a “biological truth.” Hillesland allegedly offered to send the students in question candy (as a “symbol of the sweetness” he hopes they’ll discover) as well as a DVD that can explain the “spiritual” as well as the “scientific facts.”
Students received the letter on Monday and protested on Tuesday. Now, students and parents are asking the Watertown School District to take action against the teacher.
In a statement sent to parents in the school district, officials confirmed the letter was given to four students while at school on Monday. The statement, sent over text message, confirms that the teacher tried to discuss the students’ gender identity.
“The Watertown School District does not support this sort of action,” the statement reads in part. “And we respect the rights of our students to be who they are. We want to provide a safe learning environment for all students. We continue to work through the situation and ask for your support as we handle it.”
The outlet met with Superintendent Jeff Danielsen, who told the paper that Hillesland is still teaching while administrators are investigating the situation. The superintendent told the outlet they became aware of the situation after school ended on Monday, and the investigation is not yet complete. The outlet reports that Hillesland’s teaching certificate is currently active.
Several students told the outlet that they saw Hillesland pass out the letter to the four students in question during lunch, where Hillesland serves as a monitor.
How are the affected students feeling? According to their parents, they’re feeling pretty betrayed by a teacher they were fond of. Parent Heather Hoffman, for example, told the outlet that her son Kai Price was one of the young people to receive a letter. Hoffman said Price is upset because Hillesland was one of his favorite teachers before this happened. For herself, Hoffman said she’s still in “disbelief” and said that this typed-up letter was a “premeditated attack.” She added that she doesn’t understand why he’s still teaching.
“I’m just a 14-year-old kid trying to get through life,” Price told local outlet KELO about the situation, who added lately they’ve been struggling to feel confident and that receiving a letter like this from a trusted person really affected them.
Ashley Bakke, another parent of an impacted student, said her child, Alex Bryant, texted a copy of the letter to her right after receiving it. Bryant says she reached out to the school’s counselor and went to the school the same day to speak to Brad Brandsrud, who serves as principal of the high school. But according to Bakke, she felt like was “talking with a politician” who was “dancing around the issue.” She left feeling like the principal was defending a friend instead of addressing the issue.
At this point, Bakke made the call to pull her son from the district immediately. Bakke added that for her child, too, Hillesland was formerly a favorite teacher.
LGBTQ+ outlet them reached out to Danielson for clarification on the DVD in reference and the superintendent said he had no knowledge of the DVD or the content it contained.
It cannot be overstated the sort of impact teachers, coaches, and other administrators can have on the life of young people. It is a baseline minimum expectation to have adults in the room be equipped to recognize and combat hatred and bullying, and it shouldn’t even be a question of whether or not such behavior or expression should be permitted from the mouths of those in charge themselves.
School staff need and deserve well-rounded education and training on these issues—plus more, in terms of things like ableism, disability rights, microaggressions, and so on—and they also need to be held accountable for the things they do and say. It’s always more than a matter of opinion or exercising poor judgment when dealing with impressionable young people, especially when those young people are also disproportionately at-risk for mental health issues like depression and suicidal ideation.
