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On Tuesday, WSOC-TV Channel 9 reported that three sources tell them Rep. Madison Cawthorn “was cited for having a gun at Charlotte Douglas International Airport Tuesday morning.” The outlet says that they were given a photo that shows a “loaded Staccato C2,” a 9 mm handgun that was taken away from Cawthorn during a TSA check inside of Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

This would not be the first time Cawthorn has tried to board a plane with a firearm. Back in 2021, Asheville Regional Airport police took away an unloaded “Glock 9mm handgun” that Cawthorn was attempting to board a plane with. At the time, Cawthorn called it a “mistake,” and no charges were filed.

As TSA spokesman Mark Howell told the Citizen Times back in July, Georgia’s gun laws are pretty loosey-goosey compared to other places, and it is reflected in how airport police deal with such offenses. “In New York they perp walk you out of the airport in handcuffs. In Georgia, you can open carry anywhere. It’s different everywhere.”

Cawthorn is clearly fond of keeping weapons on his person. All the time. Every time he violates state or federal laws, Cawthorn seems to get away with less than a slap on the wrist. In September, when Cawthorn was drumming up money by attacking school mask mandates, he was photographed with what seemed to clearly be a dagger tucked into his wheelchair. This was at a school board meeting in Henderson County, North Carolina.

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In January 2021, Cawthorn’s strange retelling of events that day made it pretty apparent to most that he had likely carried a firearm, or more than a single firearm, illegally into the House chambers on Jan. 6. He has denied that specific claim but has also been unable to square the circle of how he claimed to possess more than a single firearm that day while not having a chance to return to his office, where elected officials are legally allowed to keep firearms.

RELATED STORY: Republican rep. remains quiet when asked whether he smuggled a firearm into House chamber on Jan. 6

Cawthorn’s strange obsession with guns has extended to not simply illegally carrying them around the Capitol building—he has also been filmed inappropriately cleaning his gun during important hearings on veterans’ affairs. Cawthorn has so many reasons to be kicked out of office, and he continues to violate laws across the country while suffering none of the consequences he demands others suffer.

There has been no comment from Cawthorn about this incident.

Here’s one of three Cawthorn videos of him being pulled over for driving 89 mph without a driver’s license, and being let off with a citation.

Here’s Madison being pulled out for speeding at 87 mph—with a gun in the car.

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Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed a bill that would automatically restore voting rights to those who lost them as a result of a constitutional provision penned to disenfranchise Black would-be voters in the Jim Crow era, according to Mississippi Today.

House Judiciary Chair Nick Bain, a Republican legislator, actually drafted the bill the Republican governor has refused to back. Bain told Mississippi Today that courts are already restoring voting rights to people who have had their criminal records expunged and that his bill just “clarified” that judges should be doing so.

That, however, is not how Reeves apparently sees the change. As he put it in a tweet on Friday: “I have vetoed two bills—automatically returning voting rights to criminals and weakening the state’s ethics commission.”

RELATED STORY: Jim Crow-era law to guard against ‘negro rule’ still making criminals of black N.C. voters

The second bill Reeves mentioned, Senate bill No. 2306, would give the Mississippi secretary of state the ability to assess fines to a politician or political committee that failed to make the proper campaign finance disclosure, according to the SuperTalk Mississippi radio network. That power currently rests with the Mississippi Ethics Commission.

“I believed then, as I believe now, that the assessment of penalties for violations of campaign finance disclosure laws should be made by an appointed public body not subject to such laws, as opposed to a single elected official who is subject to such laws,” Reeves reportedly stated in his veto message.

Regarding the proposed voting rights legislation, Senate bill No. 2536, he wrote:

Felony disenfranchisement is an animating principle of the social contract at the heart of every great republic dating back to the founding of ancient Greece and Rome.

In America, such laws date back to the colonies and the eventual founding of our Republic. Since statehood, in one form or another, Mississippi law has recognized felony disenfranchisement.

In filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, she portrayed the prison system in America as a natural continuation of slavery following the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional in 1865 for all people—except those convicted of crimes. “If you have that embedded in the structure, in this constitutional language, then it’s there to be used as a tool for whichever purposes one wants to use it,” author Kevin Gannon said in the documentary.

Disenfranchisement has certainly been a popular tool, especially targeting the formerly incarcerated.

People convicted of felonies lose the right to vote at least temporarily in every state except Maine and Vermont. Mississippi is one of 11 states that require additional actions after the completion of any jail time and added waiting periods for a formerly incarcerated person to have their right to vote restored, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The organization cited state law in explaining exactly how the rights of Mississippians are stripped from them when they are incarcerated:

A person convicted of murder, rape, bribery, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretense, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy is no longer considered a qualified elector” (Miss. Const. Art. 12, § 241). If an individual hasn’t committed one of these offenses, rights are automatically restored. If an individual has been convicted of one of these, he or she can still receive a pardon from the governor to restore voting rights (Miss. Code Ann. § 47-7-41) or by a two-thirds vote of both houses of the legislature (Miss. Const. Art. 12, § 253).

Mississippi Today writer Bobby Harrison wrote that Mississippi has never allowed the public to vote on a less convoluted process to restore voting rights, and the news service found in 2018 that Black Mississippians represent 61% of those who have been disenfranchised, although they only represent 38% of the state’s population that is of voting age.

“It will be up to the Senate leadership to decide whether to try to overturn the gubernatorial veto during the 2023 session,” Harrison wrote.

RELATED STORY: ‘Slavery, that wretched institution, shaped the Capitol,’ Booker says. It shaped the country

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The Biden administration’s attempt to end use of Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 order by the end of next month appears to have suffered a legal setback following a not unexpected ruling from a federal judge appointed by the insurrectionist president.

Louisiana Judge Robert Summerhays on Monday sided with a number of GOP states that had sued the administration earlier this month (not to be confused with Texas’ lawsuit from last Friday). CBS News reports that the judge intends to stop the administration from winding down the policy before the scheduled May 23 date.

“It’s not yet clear if the order will block the administration from ending Title 42 on May 23, or if it will only prohibit them from starting to wind down the policy before then,” the report said. There’s some confusion among advocates and experts because no actual order has been released as of yet, and CBS News reported the hearing was closed to press.

RELATED STORY: GOP states waste no time suing over Biden admin’s termination of anti-asylum Title 42 policy

But Arizona attorney Mark Brnovich, who sued alongside the noted border states of Louisiana and Missouri, wasted no time celebrating. “We applaud the Court for approving our request for a Temporary Restraining Order to keep Title 42 in place,” a release said. “The Biden administration cannot continue in flagrant disregard for existing laws and required administrative procedures.”

But in authorizing an end to the policy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gave officials the May 23 date so there would be “time to implement coronavirus mitigation measures,” CBS News reported at the beginning of the month. So the CDC is allowed to implement an unsound policy … but apparently can’t end the policy it implemented?

None of it makes sense because it’s not supposed to make sense, it’s just about using right-wing judges to implement an anti-immigrant (and anti-Biden) agenda. It’s why Arizona, Louisiana, and Missouri wasted no time suing. Brnovich has made his xenophobic credentials pretty clear all on his own, previously adopting white supremacist rhetoric to describe asylum-seeking families as an “invasion.”

Texas launched its own lawsuit against Title 42 last Friday, which very corrupt Attorney General Ken Paxton eagerly touted as the state’s 10th immigration-related lawsuit against the administration. While there is no decision on that at the moment, the Remain in Mexico policy was back in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday after it was forcibly reinstated under a lawsuit launched by Paxton and other Republicans. They know they can use the courts to sabotage the president, and they’re not afraid of using that power.

On the same day that Summerhays said he was siding with the GOP states, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with President Biden to discuss priorities for the Latino community, including the need to end Miller’s order.

The Hispanic Caucus “made it very clear that the Title 42 policy is a public health emergency policy that was instituted under the Trump administration during his hate and fear anti-immigrant agenda,” Chair Raul Ruiz said in a statement reported by CNN’s Eva McKend. We’ll keep you updated once we know more about Summerhays’ order.

RELATED STORIES: Texas’ corrupt attorney general hopes the courts can yet again help him sabotage Biden’s agenda

Border state advocates say they’re ready to welcome asylum-seekers following Title 42 announcement

LGBTQ advocates remind us that Stephen Miller was scheming policy ‘long before’ COVID ‘even existed’

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States like Florida and Texas are (rightfully) earning a deep amount of outrage over anti-queer and anti-trans legislation—some signed into law by Republican governors, some simply proposed, and some actually not law but based on legal analysis—a growing number of states are, and have been, pushing discriminatory and hateful legislation. One such state is Missouri, where efforts to demonize and discriminate against LGBTQ+ youth and adults are well underway and aren’t showing any signs of slowing down.

As of Tuesday, we’ve seen two separate efforts to legally exclude and disparage LGBTQ+ folks thrive with state lawmakers. These legislations include HB 1973, which bars trans youth from participating in public school sports teams that align with their gender identity, and an attempt to pass a version of the Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, which would ban discrimination in hiring and firing against LGBTQ+ public school teachers, as reported by the Springfield News-Leader.

RELATED STORY: Watch openly gay Democrat tell anti-trans Republican colleague exactly what he needs to hear

Some background on trans sports in Missouri: Right now, only two openly trans girls participated on girls’ sports teams in the entire state in the last decade, per local outlet KTLO. Yes, two. The current rules from the Missouri State High School Activities Association mandate that trans girls show consistent documentation of hormone therapy. Trans boys are allowed to participate on the boys’ teams. These rules apply for kindergarten through 12th grade in public schools. 

Republican Rep. Ron Copeland sponsored the latest amendment to this bill and said he personally doesn’t care if trans boys participate on boys’ sports teams, but his amendment actually bans that, too. His argument is the same transphobia that we’ve seen from countless Republicans in these discussions: He argues it’s about protecting fairness in girls’ sports and goes out of his way to misgender trans girls as boys. 

You might remember that openly gay Democratic Rep. Ian Mackey recently sizzled a Republican colleague, Rep. Chuck Basye, over Republicans’ stance on trans rights and LGBTQ+ allyship in general. On Monday, Mackey reminded conservatives that how they vote on trans issues will be on their records forever.

“Your vote on the record will last forever,” Mackey warned colleagues. “And I can guarantee you that while not all of you will regret it, I know that some of you looking at me right now, will. Do the right thing.”

Ultimately, the House voted 93-41 to mandate that students must participate in the sports team that aligns with the sex listed on their birth certificate.

In terms of giving LGBTQ+ teachers a shred of dignity in the state, that didn’t fly, either. Republican Rep. Shamed Dogan proposed an amendment that would prevent public schools in the state from hiring or firing a person because of their gender identity or sexual orientation, saying, “We shouldn’t be firing people because they’re gay in 2022.” They also pointed out that the state needs talented teachers regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. I am reluctant to give a Republican any credit in general, but they are correct here. 

Unfortunately, the amendment was voted down 60-77. Why? Among other hateful arguments, Republican Rep. Ben Baker argued it would essentially allow pedophiles to teach.

The amendment would have “prohibited firing someone for being a pedophile,” he claimed. Latent here is the same messaging we’re hearing from conservatives all over the country when it comes to Don’t Say Gay bills and book bans: the idea that LGBTQ+ adults (and especially teachers, counselors, and coaches) are just waiting to “groom” or “turn” young people LGBTQ+.

It’s also the idea that being LGBTQ+ is essentially sexual and inappropriate for young people to be exposed to in any way, including reading about it or learning about the identity in the classroom. We can actually see another example of this happening, also in Missouri, when it comes to “safe space” stickers.

Depending on your generation, these stickers might be very familiar to you. These stickers usually appear with a rainbow background or in a rainbow font and are hung on the doors of classrooms or offices to signal that the adult is a “safe” person for youth to come to for support or questions concerning LGBTQ+ issues or identity. It doesn’t necessarily signal the adult is actually LGBTQ+ (though they could be), but more that they’re not hateful. Basically, a minimum level of allyship.

According to local outlet KCTV 5, the Grain Valley School Board recently told administrators to get rid of these stickers and cards in high schools in the district, with the logic being that all classrooms should be a safe space, not just those with the sign or sticker hanging up. Now, on the one hand, that makes sense—students should be able to talk to trusted adults in their lives and be met with support and acceptance.

But the sad reality is that no matter where you live or where you attend school, not all adults are going to be allies or advocates for LGBTQ+ people. Not all adults will be educated on the subject and not all will have the skills (or choose to use the schools) that students deserve. Is this right? No. Do students deserve better? Yes. But students also deserve the chance to at least try and choose the best person who is actually willing and open to hearing them out rather than come out to someone who is actually hateful. 

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The Senate stalemate on, well, everything legislative received a bit of a shake up Monday when an anti-immigrant right-wing judge once again preempted the co-equal executive branch, temporarily blocking President Joe Biden from ending the Trump-imposed pandemic restriction on migrants, including asylum-seekers, from entering the country. That might help break a stalemate in the Senate on providing more COVID-19 funding. And Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) just ended the prospects for Biden and fellow Democrats to make headway on climate issues, or much else, before the midterm elections.

That’s the situation as the Senate resumes real, post-recess work Tuesday as the House trickles back in to do some late afternoon housekeeping. Before Easter recess, Republicans in the Senate derailed a $10 billion funding package for COVID-19 prevention and treatment measures, funding the Biden administration is increasingly anxious to get. The administration originally asked for $22.5 billion, but congressional Republicans nixed that one right off the bat and got it whittled down by more than half, then refused to pass even that unless they got a simple majority vote on an amendment to block Biden from lifting that immigration restriction.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer does not want that vote because there are five Democrats who would probably vote with Republicans, and he doesn’t want that embarrassment. Now that the courts have stepped in, Republicans might drop it. Or not.

Because they really, really want to embarrass Biden and divide Democrats. The White House is continuing the drumbeat for the COVID-19 funding, arguing that the delay in funding is causing the U.S. to lose out on securing both booster doses and the antiviral medications. Other places—including Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong—are ahead of the U.S. in line to get the supplies.

“We know companies are working on additional, promising life-saving treatments that could protect the American people, and without additional funding from Congress, we risk losing out on accessing these treatments, as well as tests and vaccines, while other countries get in front of us in line,” said White House spokesman Kevin Munoz. “Congress must act urgently upon return from recess to provide the funding needed to secure new treatments for the American people and to avoid this dangerous outcome.”

One of the issues is the long lead time it takes for these antiviral and antibody treatments to be produced by manufacturers. The U.S. stockpile is diminishing—the administration has already had to cut back free treatment for the uninsured and start rationing monoclonal antibody treatments. By the time the funding is actually passed, we could be behind the curve in securing the treatments. (Yay, us.) Schumer has talked about trying to tie this funding to the Ukraine aid package that’s coming up so that one can’t pass without the other, but how quickly that is going to happen is unclear.

Schumer promised “swift bipartisan cooperation” in getting the next package of Ukraine aid out, but the administration has not yet made the formal request. Sen. Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that the figure under discussion is around $5 billion in new funding on top of the $13.6 approved in March.

The administration is also considering attaching global food aid to its Ukraine ask because of the disruption in exports of wheat, corn, sunflower oil, and other products from both Ukraine—a major producer, particularly of wheat—and Russia. Aid organizations are warning of a “massive, immediate food crisis” because of ongoing effects of the pandemic and of the war.

While that’s being worked out in the immediate term (immediate being defined as before Congress leaves again for the Memorial Day recess at the end of May), slightly more long-term discussions are supposedly happening with Manchin on resurrecting something of Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Now Manchin has essentially scuttled any chance of that happening by declaring he’s going to do his own climate and energy package and it’s going to be bipartisan.

We’ve been here before. Remember when Manchin was the lone Democratic holdout on voting rights, and he promised that he could get it done with “10 good people” from the Republican side? And no Republicans helped? Here we go again.

“If I can find something bipartisan, we don’t need reconciliation,” Manchin said in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday. Democrats have been pursuing a budget reconciliation bill to pass Biden’s priorities because that process is filibuster-proof. It can pass with a simple majority vote provided by all Democratic senators and Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie.

Of course, what Manchin is looking at is not combatting climate change. It’s increasing oil production, including making companies use the public lands they’ve secured oil and gas leases for and penalizing them when they don’t. “You’re going to have to have a leasing program that works, O.K., and making sure that leases are fair, and people are not sitting on leases,” Manchin said. “We need to look at all that,” he said. “We haven’t done that.”

His theory is increasing production now will set up a system of incentives for protecting the climate later. For now, a person with knowledge of the talks Manchin has been having told Bloomberg that they’re also discussing “a potential package could include revisions to federal land policy, aid for domestic pipelines, efforts to bolster production of both liquefied natural gas at home and abroad and critical minerals.” That might come with new and expanded tax credits for renewables.

Not only would Manchin have to find 10 Republicans for this to work, it would also have to pass muster with enough House Democrats to pass. Those two things being simultaneously achieved seems pretty darned impossible.

The areas Manchin has talked about resurrecting from that larger package he killed last December were tax reform, lowering prescription drug costs, some health insurance affordability measures, and climate change and energy. Now he wants to take that big chunk out of the mix. Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has pretty much nixed anything happening to reform taxes and has been problematic on prescription drugs, too. So what Manchin might have just done by rejecting the reconciliation process on climate is to finally kill off the whole effort.

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On Monday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made it clear that the U.S. has a broader goal in assisting Ukraine against the invasion by Russian forces. “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” said Austin.

The secretary of defence’s words have generated a good deal of faux outrage and blustering from those who claim this represents some sort of change from the mission of seeing Ukraine preserve its nation against an illegal and brutal invasion. It’s not. This is that same goal, elevated. 

In 1987, historian Barbara Fields said this about of the importance of battles and tactics when discussing the American Civil War: “It’s not about soldiers except to the extent that weapons and soldiers at that crucial moment joined a discussion about something higher, about humanity, about human dignity, about human freedom.”

That’s where we are in Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is, as Fields said then, not about “battles and glory and carnage.” If that’s all there was to it, this would be a very ugly story, no matter which side we were on. For this story to mean something, for the cost of the war in both blood and money to be redeemed, requires a greater goal. The weakening of Russian power under Vladimir Putin might not have the same incalculable good as equality and freedom, but it is an almost unsullied good.

Decades ago, Putin turned his back on joining the family of nations and recreated Russia as an engine of destruction. He has used that engine in disrupting democracies and furthering authoritarian governments, not just in Russia, but around the world—including the United States. He’s used the Russian military to expand his own power by systematically attacking civilian populations in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere. He’s turned his own nation into a crime-driven and criminal-obsessed parody of what it could be.

Reducing Russia’s ability to conduct more invasions like the one underway in Ukraine isn’t just a side note, it’s a noble goal. It’s a goal that elevates both the contributions we are making to this cause, and the suffering and sacrifice by the Ukrainian people. 

Weapons and soldiers are once more in a discussion about something that can’t be measured in the number of tanks destroyed or the acres of land under control. We’re not just obligated to take part in that conversation, we are privileged to do so.

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The same conservative evangelical “churches” that decided habitual liar and lifelong sex predator Donald Trump was, at long last, the American savior they were looking for have not—and this should come as no surprise—dulled in their fascist support for ending democracy rather than abide Trump’s very real election shellacking. That’s the news from a New York Times piece checking in with the Colorado Springs crowd, where hard-right pastors are inviting in hard-right election conspiracy theorists who continue to declare that “fraud” cheated Trump out of a win because … well, because nothing, that’s why.

It’s the same nonsensical claims and the same known-crooked actors. Still, Republicans eat this stuff up because Republican media has been “grooming” the base to accept ridiculous lies about whatever needs to be lied about. Evangelical conservatism has more than flirted with fascism as a counter to American democracy, which hasn’t been going their way for a lot longer than that.

When you’ve got a movement already wedded to the notion that Americans should abide by hard-right evangelical beliefs by force of law, it’s not hard to sell them on theories that voting itself has become illegitimate. They don’t want to know the facts. They just want someone to tell them “facts” sufficient for smashing the place up and rebuilding America as a palace of their own personal prejudices.

The quote around which the Times builds up the rest of its story is from a “one-time Republican congressional candidate” presenting his PowerPoint slides about “Socialism.” William Federer announces that it’s the failure of the January coup to overturn the election that means “lo and behold, an anti-Christian spirit’s been released across the country and the world.”

Showing people a slide deck to explain why historic “socialism” means you need to erase our nation’s democracy is a niche approach. Most of the street thugs who want to end democracy, like the Proud Boys, aren’t about to sit through a slide show. Most of the rich financiers of such schemes have no interest in hearing somebody else’s opinions on why democracy should end—if you were rich enough to have opinions that matter, they already would have heard them.

Slap some references to an Antichrist in there, however, and the Colorado Springs church circuit will eat that up. These are people who already believe the devil controls animals they don’t like, weather patterns, and certain traffic lights—tell them that all of the Americans voting against them are merely demon-possessed puppets whose votes shouldn’t be counted to begin with, and you will get a lot of gray heads nodding along and posting your thoughts to their Facebook feeds.

Now comes the part where I’m supposed to come up with some pithy observation about this, and to be honest? I’m at a loss. You’ve got a whole movement here that would not exist if any of its participants could tell hucksters from huckleberries. Once you have decided to hoist the banner of a bunch of criminal weirdos (Michael Flynn; Tina Peters) because you are so convinced that a reality television host infamous for dishonesty, cruelty, perversions, and general maliciousness is your path to Jesus—and that all of this necessitates nullifying democracy and arresting all the “libs” who oppose you—then, at some point, the rest of the nation is allowed to give up on trying to understand you.

The televangelists who flocked to Trump early in his term were all of the most maudlin grifters, the gilded weirdos with private jets who never did a speck of genuine good for anyone in their whole damn sorry lives, and it made perfect sense because any American gullible enough to be drawn to one of them would be gullible enough to laud the other.

You want pithy? Yeah, you and me both.

I will continue to maintain, however, that humanity has long obsessed over its most brilliant members, devoting books to every physicist or mathematician or artist or researcher whose contributions upend the world and make it a better place. Still, hardly anyone is willing to point out that those people are such outliers because the majority of our species has always been sluggish, prone to delusions, and prone to worse than delusions. At least 80% of us are teetering on the edge of our evolutionary limits in learning how to use a toaster oven. Our technology has evolved around us, but we ourselves, as creatures of meat, are still wired with the same brains that see the outlines of human faces in tree bark and get frightened from it.

Fascism is an irrational movement that has contempt for reality, substituting whatever outlandish fictions are necessary in order for the paranoid to justify oppression or the outright murder of whoever is not them, and nobody involved here gives the slightest damn about whether there is evidence of election fraud. The “evidence” of the Republican conspiracy theorist is that they lost when they wanted to win, which means their enemies did something, which means it’s time for erasing everything and starting over with new rules to make sure such insults no longer happen.

Oh, and also, these assholes are almost certainly complete racists, just to throw that out there. As our Times kicker, we get the casual aside that one of the Colorado Springs pastors hosting these delusion-hoisting frauds is also anti-COVID-safety and anti-“gender identity,” but that “critical race theory” is “a hill for me to die on.”

Of all the paranoias that walk into these people’s heads, it’s the new far-right hoax supposing that “critical race theory” is now an omnipresent force working to oppress The White Folk that hits home the hardest, eh? How very intriguing.

There does seem to be quite the overlap between Americans who believe democracy needs to be overthrown so that conservatives can properly lead and Americans who believe that books by Black authors need to be removed from public schools and libraries, but the Times does not dwell on that. As is usual with these stories from middle America, someone being interviewed invariably pipes up with a clue that it is white nationalism that animates them, not the nuances of zoning laws or a genuine belief in election fraud by space laser, and as proper zoologists studying this ecosystem, we’re just going to write that down in the margins somewhere. Just a little tidbit, apropos of nothing else.

And yet it seems to come up every damn time.

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In a bold move, Washington state legislators passed a law to remove all references to the word “marijuana” in a favor of “cannabis.” Lawmakers say “marijuana” has left a trail of Black and brown bodies incarcerated across the nation with its storied racist history.

HB 1210 was signed into law by Gov. Jay Inslee on March 11, 2022. In June, the word “marijuana” will be gone from every aspect of the Revised Code of Washington, and “cannabis” will replace it.

“This House Bill 1210 to change terminology from using the word ‘marijuana’ to the scientific name ‘cannabis’ is extremely important … even though it seems simple because it’s just one word,” state Rep. Melanie Morgan said in a virtual meeting in January. “But the reality is we are healing the wrongs that were committed against black and brown people around cannabis, as it was used as a racist terminology to lock up black and brown people.” 

RELATED STORY: Report: 2020 marks first time guns were the leading cause of death for kids and teens

According to a 2020 report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Black Americans are “3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession despite comparable marijuana usage rates.” The report adds that even though arrest rates for cannabis are down, police “still made 6.1 million such arrests” from 2010 to 2018, and “the racial disparities in arrest rates remain in every state.”

Folks who work in the cannabis industry say the word “marijuana” comes with weighted significance.

“It had been talked about for a long time in our community about how that word demonizes the cannabis plant,” Joy Hollingsworth, owner of Hollingsworth Cannabis Company, tells KIRO-7.

Morgan, who sponsored the bill, said, “The term ‘marijuana’ itself is pejorative and racist.” She added, “As recreational marijuana use became more popular, it was negatively associated with Mexican immigrants.”

The word marijuana has its roots in xenophobia.

It began being used in the early 20th century as tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants began moving to the southwest region of the U.S. to escape the Mexican Civil War. The word was used to frighten white Americans—the “marijuana menace”—and paint a racist narrative of the new immigrants. But not just immigrants, as NPR reports.

“Sailors and West Indian immigrants brought the practice of smoking marijuana to port cities along the Gulf of Mexico,” according to Eric Schlosser’s 1994 Atlantic article, titled “Reefer Madness.” 

“In New Orleans newspaper articles associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes, and underworld whites. ‘The Marijuana Menace,’ as sketched by anti-drug campaigners, was personified by inferior races and social deviants,” Schlosser’s article adds.

But it was the first U.S. Narcotics Commissioner, Harry Anslinger, who was behind criminalizing the drug. He was able to convince Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, banning the sale and possession of cannabis.

In his testimony to Congress, Anslinger included statements of support for his argument against cannabis.

One statement at the time came from Dr. Frank R. Gomila, commissioner of public safety, and Miss Madeline C. Gomila, assistant city chemist, who offered a “paper” they had assembled chronicling claims about the “effects, physical and mental, of the marihuana weed.”

An example in Gomila’s “report” was the case of a high school student “now confined to an institution for the mentally diseased.” Gomila added that the student’s “experience is entirely the result of acquiring the habit of smoking marihuana cigarettes.”

The letter goes on to lay out the dangers of cannabis by citing a murder in New Orleans, blamed on the cannabis used by the assailant.

“In a downtown section a man under the influence of the weed became so frenzied and angered at his wife as to kill her out on the street in front of many witnesses.”

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A Michigan Republican Party endorsement convention at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan—complete with voting irregularities—ultimately yielded two of Donald Trump’s top 2020 election deniers as party nominees for two top statewide offices.

After thousands of votes were tabulated and a “partial human audit” ensued, Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo emerged as the GOP endorsees for attorney general and secretary of state, respectively, according to Bridge Michigan. The GOP gubernatorial nominee will be determined in August after 10 candidates compete to take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in November.

But DePerno and Karamo will ensure the Michigan Republican Party is consumed with relitigating the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden statewide by more than 150,000 votes, or roughly 3 points. Their candidacies might juice turnout among Trumpers but they could just as easily backfire in the suburbs. Either way, it’s a gamble.

Trump celebrated the elevation of his conspiracy-laden candidates, saying that Karamo and DePerno will “get to the bottom of the 2020 Election Fraud.”

That seems unlikely, since there was no fraud—except perhaps for that which may have been perpetrated by DePerno himself.

DePerno’s claim to fame is floating a bunch of unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machine data from Antrim County that became the epicenter of the state’s election fraud lies. DePerno filed a lawsuit challenging the results that was summarily dismissed last year by a GOP-appointed judge; a three-judge panel unanimously reaffirmed that decision last week on appeal.

An investigation conducted last year by the GOP-led state Senate concluded there was no evidence of widespread fraud and called such claims in Antrim County “indefensible.”

The Senate Oversight Committee’s final report on the matter also urged Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel to investigate “those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

DePerno reportedly raised some $400,000 through crowdfunding for an “Election Fraud Defense Fund.” The missing funds are now under investigation by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission. It’s not DePerno’s first brush with corruption claims; he was fired from a law firm in 2005 after colleagues said he had “padded” client billings.

Still, DePerno is now the pick of both Trump and the Republican Party to be the top law enforcement officer in Michigan. He had initially struggled to win a three-way race, but an election-night endorsement from Karamo, who handily won her own race, helped pull DePerno across the finish line.

They are two peas in a pod. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Karamo—now the GOP nominee to run statewide elections—has repeatedly insisted without evidence that Trump won the 2020 election. Karamo gained notoriety as a supposed “whistleblower” after she claimed on Fox News to have personally witnessed a ballot in Detroit be fraudulently counted for Biden. That didn’t happen, and the fine print in the “incident report” Karamo filled out after Biden had been declared the winner read: “Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc.”

In any case, the public speaking professor-turned-election denier is now the GOP nominee for secretary of state.

Perhaps that isn’t a surprise given that both candidates had Trump’s seal of approval, but it certainly divided the room last weekend at DeVos Place, where the nominating convention was held.

One of DePerno’s opponents, state House Speaker Ryan Berman, didn’t concede, predicting there was “a good chance” the nominee would lose his law license over twin investigations being conducted by the Grievance Commission and the Michigan State Police.  

“In that case, I’m going to be ready to step up and be the nominee,” Berman told Bridge Michigan.

But he wasn’t the only attendee who was disappointed by the outcome.

“The Michigan Republican Party used to be a model for how a state party should be run, but the process today is evidence that is no longer the case,” said former political director Jonathan Duke, who supported a DePerno rival. Duke added that Republicans had now elevated “the most unelectable candidate in the best political environment for Republicans in a generation.”

Similarly, a Karamo opponent, state Rep. Beau LaFave, said he was “disappointed that [Democratic Secretary of State] Jocelyn Benson will be the Secretary of State for the next four years.”

Aaron Miller, a former state representative and chair of the House Elections Committee, flat-out said he personally would not vote for either DePerno or Karamo.

“The theories on elections that have entered the mainstream are downright scary — in this room,” Miller said.

Just one more state where Trump has exquisitely threaded the needle of dividing the state Republican Party against itself while backing candidates with dubious election credentials.

This post was originally published on this site

There’s a new book from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns set to come out soon that will shed light on the nasty battle over the 2020 presidential election results. This means that serious information that probably should have been reported by the Times many months ago is now beginning to leak out in order to promote the book. The Washington Post has an early copy of the book for review and on Monday released an explosive tidbit concerning Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s conversations with Martin in the hours after Donald Trump and his MAGA friends tried to overthrow the government.

It has been no secret that McConnell has long been angling, the way many do in the delusional GOP, back toward a clearly defunct status quo in his party. That status quo was long ago abandoned when he and others became entirely complicit in the corruptions of the Donald Trump administration. Since then, McConnell—who had originally described the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as “thugs” and “mobs”—has retreated as far out of the public eye as possible while also trying to retain neoconservative control over the GOP.

According to the Post, the new Times reporters’ book details a conversation between McConnell and Martin that tells a story of a man who thinks he’s gotten everything he wants and is ready to dance on Donald Trump’s self-dug grave.

“I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell reportedly said after the events of Jan. 6, 2021 had unfolded. McConnell shared a macabre analogy with Martin: “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

Listen to Jennifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win explain how Democrats must message to win on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast with Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld

Martin writes that McConnell fished for rumors about whether or not Vice President Mike Pence or Trump’s Cabinet of con artists were making any moves to try and get Trump pushed out of office early under the 25th Amendment, and even said he had spoken with Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi about releasing a joint statement together urging Trump not to be anywhere near the inauguration.

Clearly none of those things happened, and now McConnell, like the turtle he resembles, has spent the past year and few months using his shell to keep from having any direct confrontations with The Donald, while also seeing if the constitutional provisions for enacting law against corrupt officials can function to keep him in control of his warring fascist political party. Sadly, these are the same provisions that he has personally worked to erode and defang.