Independent News
Utah Republican wants to stop using the 'ugly language' of rape and incest exceptions for abortion
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Utah Republicans may be about to change their official position on abortion to be extra punitive. Their official party platform currently reads, “We strongly oppose abortion, except to preserve the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest,” but at their state party convention, Utah Republicans will consider a measure to take out the rape, incest, and life of the mother exceptions in favor of, “and encourage adoption,” The Salt Lake Tribune reports.
Bob McEntee, the delegate who is proposing the change, offered up a stream of comments that strongly suggest he has never met a woman, let alone had a conversation with one.
RELATED STORY: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs 15-week abortion ban into law without exceptions for rape or incest
“I want people to understand that there’s a long line of people that want to adopt a baby. However hard it might be if they get through that pregnancy and give that child up for adoption, I think that would be a better solution,” McEntee said.
”However hard it might be,” he said of pregnancy and childbirth, which kill people in this country every single day. Utah’s pregnancy-related mortality ratio was 25.6 per 100,000 live births in 2019.
Of course, most pregnant women don’t die. But they all—every single one—experience a major and painful medical event. They all experience limitations on daily life for months at a stretch. Many find their ability to do their jobs and therefore pay their bills seriously compromised. And that’s not taking into account the major traumas of victims of rape or incest who Bob McEntee thinks should be required to live every day with pregnancies criminally forced on them. Or people who Bob McEntee thinks should be required to live every day with pregnancies that actively and predictably endanger their lives.
Bob McEntee doesn’t want to talk about any of that, though.
“It’s kind of ugly language. We don’t need to talk about rape or incest. That almost sounded like a permission slip to go get an abortion if this happens. We want to put in people’s minds adoption,” McEntee said.
It’s kind of ugly language? Gosh, imagine dealing with the ugly reality. McEntee apparently doesn’t expect he’ll have to deal with that reality, though, whereas the language is something he might just be able to ban from his life.
The Utah Republican platform in its current state, with the ugly language exceptions, reflects that of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which also has those exceptions. McEntee disapproves.
“I think the LDS Church has given kind of light value to the life of an unborn baby in this case, even though it could be distressing to the mother. We’re not asking lawmakers to outlaw abortion because of rape or incest. We just want to remind people not to forget about adoption as an alternative,” he told the Tribune.
Oh. You’re trying to put it in the official platform of the party that controls state government, but you’re not asking for abortion to be outlawed in those cases. While your party has outlawed it even in cases of rape or incest in state after state in recent months. This move to change the official Utah Republican platform is, what, entirely rhetorical? Despite the backdrop of Republican state after Republican state taking extremely concrete action on exactly this issue?
A 15-week abortion ban in Florida without exceptions for rape or incest. A ban in Oklahoma that not only doesn’t include rape or incest exceptions but threatens medical providers with jail. The six-week ban in Texas with copycats in Idaho, Missouri, and more. In this context, a state Republican Party eliminating exceptions from its platform is not just some reminder about adoption. (Which, news flash, everyone knows is an option. They don’t need the reminder.)
The degree of flippant waving-off of the reality of pregnancy, rape, and incest is staggering. Every single word out of this man’s mouth oozes disregard for women’s lives. But this is the mainstream Republican Party these days—the range of attitudes toward women’s bodily autonomy ranges from dismissive to actively hostile.
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Oklahoma governor signs bill banning abortions, threatens providers with prison time and fines
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Hawaii decides to prove that paying teachers more money helps end teacher shortages
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For decades now, state legislatures and local municipalities across the country have sought to find ways to retain teachers. They have done this by mostly blaming teachers for not wanting to teach in hostile, underpaid work environments. As you might imagine, this has not yielded positive results. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the country’s trends of inequality across the board. Every facet of our country has watched our purposefully neglected infrastructures deteriorate while the richest 1% of the population absorbs more and more wealth.
Every corner of the United States faces teacher shortages, and that has been no more acutely felt than in the special education world. Children with disabilities are guaranteed access to fully licensed special educators by our laws, but are facing a lack of qualified educators. As a result, many districts have opted to allow untrained and unqualified teachers to teach instead of figuring out ways to attract more qualified teachers back into the profession. The practice of handing out “provisional licenses” to unqualified special education teachers has gone on for years, and has always been criticized as a weak Band-Aid solution.
Recently, two states have decided to try something novel: Offer up meaningful salary raises that might bring up a special education teacher’s standard of living to moderately decent. Guess what?
NPR has been reporting on the issue of special education teachers and the shortages seen across the U.S. According to the report, 48 states have reported special education teacher shortages over the last year. However, in the last couple of years, Hawaii and Detroit have added meaningful salary bumps. Unlike most areas of the country, they have seen their losses contract. In 2020, Hawaii lifted special education teachers’ salaries by $10,000 a year.
Before the incentive, in October 2019, almost 30% of the state’s special education positions were vacant or staffed by teachers without appropriate licenses, district data shows. By October 2021, that number dropped by half, to about 15%.
Detroit recently added $15,000 more to special education salaries this past year, which “district leaders say it is already helping.” Shockingly, districts that have not significantly lifted salaries for teachers have not seen any reduction in their special education teacher shortages. It is almost as if paying highly qualified teachers something resembling what they are actually worth to our communities, and more importantly our children, has shown that it works.
RELATED STORY: Are you sick of highly-paid teachers?
The Republican Party has been waging a war on teachers for decades now. Sometimes supported by conservative Democrats, the war is one of attrition. To be a teacher is a calling, but after being underpaid, abused both emotionally and sometimes physically, all in the most hypocritical of ways, the final insult is always economic. Teachers have always been underpaid and undervalued in our economic system. The last few years of accelerating income inequality has simply made being a teacher economically untenable.
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According to the National Education Association (NEA), one of the issues states face is that the federal government, tasked with covering 40% of any extra cost incurred for providing special education services, doesn’t ever come close to that number.
Since 1981, the first year for which full funding was 40 percent of average per pupil expenditure, the federal share has remained less than half of the federal commitment based on regular appropriations. Each year the federal government fails to fully fund Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it shifts the costs for educating students with special needs to states and school districts.
Since 2020, the NEA says the federal government has only funded 13.2% of its promised 40% share. This is reportedly the lowest percentage since 2000. The funding gap—meaning the amount of millions of dollars the federal government has failed to cover for special education students—in Hawaii over the 2020-2021 school year? $95.1 million. Michigan? More than half a billion dollars.
Opponents of paying special education teachers more money say that everything gets more expensive. That’s the entire argument. But even that shitty argument, made while signing off on tens of billions of dollars more defense spending than even the military is asking for, isn’t really true. Special education teachers are not a large percentage of any district’s staff and, depending on the results for many students, can help lead to reductions in their costs going forward.
Some students with special needs will always need special education instruction. Others may only need it for a time. Either way, it requires qualified educators with experience and time spent learning about and developing entirely different sets of educational tools.
The cost of Hawaii’s pay increase this past year cost them $20 million—under 1% of their annual education budget. This isn’t nothing but it is nothing when it comes to protecting the children. You know, the children that right-wing shitbags are pretending are being groomed for sexual nefariousness and deviant behavior, by … teachers?
Atlanta’s Fulton County School system is now offering up to $7,500 in various incentives to get special education teachers signed up for the coming school year. Those incentives include not simply the teachers themselves, but also for paraprofessionals who assistant and help support full-time special education teachers. The need for support in shouldering the burden of teaching our children is something that we can all empathize with if we really search our souls for more than 10 seconds.
The moves by places like Hawaii have been predicated on using federal COVID-19 relief funding for now. It is hopefully something that other districts will get their legislatures and municipalities to work with—the hope being that legislators will be pressured later by voters to make these funds permanent in state budgets.
LGBTQ advocates remind us that Stephen Miller was scheming policy 'long before' COVID 'even existed'
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Organizations that advocate for LGBTQ migrant are celebrating the news that the Biden administration is set to end use of Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum policy by May 23. Title 42 is a purported public health order that’s used the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to block migrants from their U.S. asylum rights.
Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project Co-director Oluchi Omeoga called the order “a racist and harmful policy,” and called the administration’s decision “a right step for many asylum seekers,” the Los Angeles Blade reports. Immigration Equality Executive Director Aaron Morris told the outlet that “[i]t’s about time,” calling the policy “the brainchild of Stephen Miller long before COVID-19 even existed.”
That last part’s an important, and all too often forgotten, fact. A then-official with the previous administration “said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a ‘wish list’ of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration,” The New York Times reported nearly two years ago.
RELATED STORY: Border state advocates say they’re ready to welcome asylum-seekers following Title 42 announcement
The New York Times report, originally published in May 2020 and noted here at Daily Kos, detailed how Miller had been itching for a public health crisis as a pretext to block migrants at the southern border, throwing everything from a flu outbreak within border facilities to the so-called migrant caravan against the wall to see what would stick.
But Miller’s suggestions repeatedly failed to get support within the insurrectionist administration, reportedly even stooping to see how he could use the tragic deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody to his advantage (it must also be noted that U.S. border officials repeatedly refused to offer detained migrants flu shots even after these preventable deaths).
“That changed with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic,” The Times reported. It notes that Miller’s scheming was “in large part repurposed from old draft executive orders and policy discussions.” Miller had already decided that he would publicly use so-called health concerns as his excuse to deport vulnerable people back to danger. He just needed the virus. Title 42, implemented under pressure by the insurrectionist White House and against the wishes of public health experts, has now been in place since March 20, 2020.
The farcical nature and history of this policy are worth remembering as some Democrats are, disappointingly, giving in to bad-faith Republican attacks over the Biden administration’s decision to end the use of this order. Once again, ending this policy’s use simply returns us to how the asylum system worked on the day before March 20, 2020. Axios also claimed the White House itself was suddenly rethinking the May 23 date, which was rebutted by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday.
Responding to the numerous reports and statements, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) said there’s “no defense for the continuation of Title 42 expulsions,” noting the consistent opposition from public health experts.
“Backpedaling the rescission of Title 42 makes the Biden administration further complicit with a racist policy that was designed as an attack on the very foundations of refugee protection policy,” said Executive Director Mary Meg McCarthy. “Once again, we call on the Biden administration and members of Congress to resume asylum processing at the border. The United States has the obligation, capacity and resources to reopen ports of entry to people seeking protection.”
“Democrats have a choice,” said America’s Voice Executive Director Frank Sharry. “They can stand for an America that recognizes immigrants and refugees as foundational to the American experiment, defends a welcoming tradition that is critical to the American future, and works to build an immigration system that integrates order and justice.” Or, they can cede to the GOP, “and let the vacuum they create be filled by those intent on advancing their countermajoritarian project,” he continued.
RELATED STORIES: GOP states waste no time suing over Biden admin’s termination of anti-asylum Title 42 policy
Testimony confirms Title 42 was never about public health, it was about deporting asylum-seekers
Stephen Miller had been itching for a health crisis to usher in more of his agenda, report says
'These are children!' Witness tries to convince deputy to stop attacking teen boy
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While triggering outrage on some social media accounts, video footage of a sheriff’s deputy tackling a Black autistic teen to the floor of a Target store in upstate New York seems to have had a sadly different effect on others. Many of those who responded to a news release posted on Facebook by the office of Saratoga County Sheriff Michael Zurlo defended the unidentified sheriff deputy seen in the footage. “Parents teach your children to respect authority!” Facebook user Teresa Hammond commented.
“I’m not a cop, but I take that very seriously as well. Keep after them, Sheriff Zurlo!” local resident Loren Jenks wrote.
It’s almost as if they hadn’t seen the video—and to their credit, the sheriff’s office didn’t include the footage in its post. But for anyone who has seen the video, it’s difficult to miss that the teen being physically targeted on Monday isn’t the one who ended up being charged—it was his sister instead. It begs the question: What reason did the deputy have to put his hands on the child to begin with? That question was not answered in Zurlo’s release.
RELATED STORY: ‘They are not boys, they’re men’: Syracuse cops face intense scrutiny for encounter with 8-year-old
According to the sheriff’s office, deputies were responding to a disturbance call in Clifton Park, a city about 165 miles north of Manhattan that’s about 85% white and 3% Black.
The sheriff’s office release focused entirely on the sister of the teen who was brought to the ground. She can be seen in video footage cursing at deputies and demanding that they let her brother go. The 17-year-old girl was ultimately arrested and charged with felony assault and resisting arrest, a misdemeanor. The sheriff’s office alleged she hit a deputy in the face with a soap dish and injured him, although that alleged action was difficult to see in the footage.
“We take all allegations of assault against law enforcement seriously and they will be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law,” Zurlo said in the release. “It is my hope that the injuries to our deputy and the trooper were minor and that they suffer no lasting ill-effects.”
The deputy was treated and released from Ellis Medical Center, according to the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff failed to mention any lasting effects on the children who witnessed the deputy tackling the teenage boy.
The video, recorded by a bystander, begins with the boy screaming “ouch” and the sheriff’s deputy saying he was not “getting off” and to just come to the front. At the time, the boy was upright and pulling away from the deputy, who had the teen’s hands pulled behind his back. That’s when the child’s sister turned a corner and confronted the deputy. Someone could be heard sobbing in the footage. “Yo what the f—k are you doing,” the child’s sister asked. “Get the f—k off my brother [before] I spit on you.” She also told the deputy her brother has autism.
It didn’t take long before the deputy had wrestled the teen boy to the ground, with the other children watching and crying. “These are children,” someone could be heard saying. Another person could be heard explaining that they were just being asked to leave. “These are children! These are children!” the witness yelled.
The boy on the ground responded to the deputy’s attack with: “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.”
“I have money,” he also offered at another point in the encounter.
Warning: This video contains profanity and footage that may be triggering to some viewers.
The child is 14 years old, his mother, Chante Ware, told the Times Union. “I was in Walmart shopping and got a text message from my daughter,” she told the newspaper. “I called her and all I could hear was my oldest daughter screaming and crying, ‘He’s autistic, he’s autistic.’ I got to Target and there were nine or 10 squad cars there. … I was told my kids are suspects in a larceny.”
Ware said her children are traumatized. ”My daughter has a pulled muscle, my son has a head injury and he’s a little sore,” she told the Times Union. “He’s so confused right now. He keeps saying, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’ He doesn’t want to go out of the house and wants to move.”
Ware, who’s looking for an attorney to represent her daughter, said the child was only trying to defend her brother. “They just blatantly attacked my kids,” the mother said. “And then all they care about is the officer. The officer slapped her.”
It’s unclear how the incident started, but Tracy Sangare, the witness who took the videos, told the Times Union a manager informed her that he just wanted the children to leave the store.
“It felt so dangerous and out of control,” Sangare told the newspaper. “Everyone was standing around gawking, not knowing what to do. We were all trying to figure out, who do you call for help when the police are doing this stuff?”
McCarthy said he’d tell Trump to resign after Jan. 6. McConnell thought he’d be out, book reports
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What Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell said behind closed doors about President Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection and what they said to his face were in complete opposition, according to a book set to hit shelves next month.
This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future releases May 3, and with it will come a few surprises about the conversations key GOP members reportedly had about their leader.
The New York Times exclusively reports that not only did McCarthy and McConnell believe that Trump was directly responsible for the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, but they told other GOP lawmakers they intended to ask the president to resign. “I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy reportedly told a group of Republican leaders. Naturally, a spokesperson for McCarthy, Mark Bednar, denied to the Times that the congressman ever “said he’d call Trump to say he should resign.”
RELATED STORY: Can Kevin McCarthy be any more gutless? Yes, he can ‘forget’ what he said to Trump on Jan. 6
The book, co-written by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, two New York Times reporters, compiles interviews and records of hundreds of lawmakers and officials, according to the Times, and lays out a timeline where McCarthy and McConnell both lost their respective chutzpah—a great Yiddish word for nerve.
According to the Times, before McCarthy’s spine dissolved, he reportedly suggested that several GOP lawmakers should be banned from social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook following the insurrection.
“We can’t put up with that,” McCarthy reportedly said. “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?”
Again, Bednar denied to the Times that Rep. McCarthy ever suggested any GOP leaders be banned from social media.
However, we know that McCarthy did publicly say in mid-January 2021 that Trump was at least partially responsible for the riot. “He told me personally that he does have some responsibility. I think a lot of people do.”
McCarthy also blabbed about Trump to House Republicans during a private conference call on Jan. 11. CNN obtained a copy of a transcript of that call.
“Let me be clear to you, and I have been very clear to the President. He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No if, ands, or buts,” McCarthy said. “I asked him personally today if he holds responsibility for what happened. If he feels bad about what happened. He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened. But he needs to acknowledge that.”
But four days later, McCarthy conveniently forgot all that he’d said.
According to the Times, McCarthy was told by Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio that Trump supporters did not want their president challenged on Jan. 6 events.
“I’m just telling you that that’s the kind of thing that we’re dealing with, with our base,” Johnson said.
As a result, by the end of January and after seeing that a scant 10 House Republicans would support a Trump impeachment, McCarthy reversed course and stepped away from any condemnation of HerrTrump. He shut his mouth and kept his job as the House Minority Leader.
As for McConnell, theTimes reports that he initially believed Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 were so heinous that he was convinced his GOP colleagues would surely break with the president. He reportedly even predicted a conviction vote for Trump’s impeachment.
“The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” he reportedly said during a Jan. 11 meeting with Terry Carmack and Scott Jennings, two of his advisors. “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” he reportedly said.
McConnell was so convincing in his ire against Trump, the Times reports, that Senators John Thune and Rob Portman privately said they believed he’d vote to convict Trump.
But as we all know, McConnell eventually voted to acquit Trump, despite following it with a blistering speech against the president.
Then, he too, shut his mouth to keep his job and the support of a failed, twice-impeached president and his millions of supporters.
Greg Abbott's disastrous stunt cost his state more than $4 billion, economists say
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GOP Gov. Greg Abbott’s disastrous stunt targeting local and international businesses cost Texas more than $4 billion in damages, an economic consulting firm in the state has estimated. The Perryman Group estimates that Abbott’s now-rescinded policy forcing commercial vehicles to undergo redundant checks that actually didn’t do much of any checking “will cost the equivalent of 77,000 job years for the country and 36,300 for Texas’ economy,” The Dallas Morning News reports.
The city of Pharr is singled out in the article as the site of one of the busiest land crossings in the country. Abbott’s stunt cost the area roughly $200 million every single day in losses. The Perryman Group estimates that Abbott caused the nation roughly $9 billion in lost gross domestic product, the report said.
RELATED STORY: Greg Abbott ends disastrous stunt that cost fruit and vegetable producers an estimated $240 million
“The biggest losses were to the manufacturing sector, which took about 50% of the hit, followed by retail trade, wholesale trade and financial activities,” The Dallas Morning News reported. “Manufacturing and retail made up the bulk of the job losses. That doesn’t even account for the slowdown in shopping on the U.S. side of the border.”
Border businesses had last fall welcomed the easing of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, which severely hurt the region’s economy. El Paso Matters reported in October that dozens of small businesses in the El Paso that depend on international traffic had closed. “It’s been really hard,” one business owner told the outlet. “It’s been hard for a year and a half.” Now Abbott is single-handedly trying to out-COVID COVID.
The right-wing governor has also remained at the center of international ire over his failure of a policy, with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador calling it “a very despicable way to act.” He further questioned whether Abbott had any authority to engage in international agreements. “Instead of thinking—and I say this respectfully—‘How will I fix the problem of inflation?’ He is politicizing and even violating international rights,” the president said.
The truly shameless Abbott then responded to López Obrador’s remarks by threatening to reinstate his unpopular policy, claiming he has “the capability at any time” to resume his unnecessary secondary inspections, Houston Chronicle reported.
There’s are two possible outcomes here: all hat and no cattle, Abbott is bluffing. Recall his redundant checks were so unpopular he got attacks from state officials even more right-wing than him. GOP Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller complained to NPR that “[y]ou’re already seeing things like bananas, avocados, lemons and limes” go up in price because of this stunt.
The second possible outcome is he actually does it and then keeps trying to blame Joe Biden. When The Dallas Morning News questioned Abbott about his policy’s economic damage, he did exactly what we thought he’d do: falsely blame the president.
“A 5-hour average delay for enhanced vehicle inspections is hardly equivalent to President Biden’s 15-month delay to secure our border,” a spokesperson told the outlet. So many lies, though there is a grain of truth in there, which is Abbott’s office acknowledging his failed policy’s delays. But even that truth has been twisted, because commercial truckers caught in Abbott’s stunt saw delays of up to 30 hours.
But ending the policy isn’t like a light switch, because the Perryman Group said that it could take weeks for businesses to get back to normal. “Abbott just single-handedly cost us more than $4 billion as he jacked up inflation across this state,” tweeted Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. “Let’s make sure every Texan sees this.”
RELATED STORIES: Mexican president calls Abbott’s disastrous stunt ‘a very despicable way to act’
Abbott’s increased truck inspections in response to Biden admin leading to huge delays, rotting food
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The senator has two faces: Mike Lee and those pesky texts to the Trump White House
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In 2020, when a reporter asked Utah Senator Mike Lee about the extent of his involvement in then President Donald Trump’s push to overturn that year’s election results, Lee chalked up his own investment in the president’s scheme to a benign curiosity.
His recently published text messages to Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows at the time, however, tell a far different story. The texts appear to show Lee pledging himself to find every “legal and constitutional remedy” to assist Trump’s mission. He was quick with a suggestion—like an audit of ballots in swing states—and stumped for Trump to use conspiracy theory peddling lawyer Sidney Powell to take up the cause in court.
And when Lee received a copy of John Eastman’s memo laying out a scheme to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election just four days before the insurrection, he publicly derided it as “ridiculous.”
Yet in private, Lee appeared to strongly advocate for that strategy and lamented the hours he otherwise spent searching for ways to “unravel” a pathway to victory for a clearly defeated president.
RELATED STORY: Texts show they were all for Trump overturning the election—until a lack of key evidence got in the way
Samuel Benson over at Utah’s Deseret News published an article on Wednesday raising questions—and rightly so—over Lee’s track record of conflicting positions. Benson interviewed Lee at length before and after the assault on the Capitol.
And when CNN published the text messages, Benson followed up, asking for an interview. Where once Lee was willing to speak on the subject at length, he has now clammed up. Instead, he dispatched his spokesman, Lee Lonsberry, to do damage control.
Lonsberry told Benson:
“When Senator Lee reviewed evidence and legal arguments related to the 2020 presidential election, his principal concern was for the law, the Constitution, and especially the more than 150 million Americans who voted in that election. From the moment the electoral college cast its votes in mid-December, he made clear that Joe Biden had won, and would within weeks become the 46th president of the United States absent a court order or state legislative action invalidating electoral votes.”
Further, “once it became clear” to Lee that no states would be rescinding their electoral slates, he told Meadows any effort to reverse the election results would “end badly.”
Lee, Lonsberry said, just wanted to “let the country move on.”
Lee publicly acknowledged that Biden won the Electoral College on Dec. 14, the final deadline for states to send their slate of electors to the National Archives. But he also delicately couched his statement with a nod to Trump’s “fraud” claims.
There were still “concerns regarding fraud and irregularities in this election remain active in multiple states,” Lee said at the time.
Then-Attorney General Bill Barr had already declared two weeks earlier there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Trump too had been on a losing streak in various courts around the U.S. as his team of attorneys bumbled through lawsuits demanding election results be thrown out or electors decertified.
Nevertheless, in the two days after Lee proclaimed Biden was the rightful winner, in a text to Meadows, the Utah Republican was still exploring alternatives.
“Also, if you want senators to object, we need to hear from you on that ideally getting some guidance on what arguments to raise,” Lee wrote on Dec. 16.
Right up to Jan. 4, the senator was “calling state legislators for hours” and planning to do the same, or so he told Mark Meadows, on Jan. 5.
“We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote,” Lee fretted to Meadows just a day before.
In the end, but only after Trump incited a mob that stormed the Capitol and hundreds of police officers—including those sworn to protect Lee and others—were violently assaulted and one woman was killed, Lee voted to certify Biden as the winner.
In his remarks from the House floor on Jan. 6, Lee said his initial speech for proceedings had looked a little different. But, he said, he would keep his message mostly the same.
“Our job is open and then count. Open, then count. That’s it. That’s all there is to it,” Lee said of electoral college votes.
He noted how he spent “the last few weeks” meeting with lawyers representing “both sides of the issue” and representing the Trump campaign.
“I didn’t initially declare my position because I didn’t yet have one,” he added. “I wanted to get the facts first and I wanted to understand what was happening.”
However, when Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection, Lee voted against it. He could not “condone the horrific violence” of Jan. 6, he said. Lee also said he could not condone Trump’s “words, actions or commissions on that day.”
“But the fact is that the word incitement has a very specific meaning in the law, and Donald Trump’s words and actions on Jan. 6 fell short of that standard,” Lee remarked before also calling the impeachment a “politically suspicious process.”
Less than six months after the insurrection, Lee also opposed to the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack. He voted against a bill for a bipartisan commission that was equally divided between five Republicans and five Democrats. Both sides, according to the resolution he opposed, would have had equal subpoena power.
Lee opposed the bill 24 hours after meeting privately with U.S. Capitol Police officers who were attacked as well as Gladys Sicknick, the mother of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. Sicknick died one day after the insurrection. A coroner’s office said Sicknick, 42, experienced multiple strokes.
Alex Jones says he'll talk to prosecutors about Jan. 6. What are the chances he'd tell the truth?
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Alex Jones wants to talk to the Justice Department about Jan. 6, his lawyer says, but he’s seeking immunity in exchange. There are a lot of reasons to doubt his sincerity here.
On Jan. 6, Jones led a crowd to the U.S. Capitol, chanting things like, “We’ve only begun to fight,” and saying, “We’re not surrendering.” Owen Shroyer, a host on Infowars, the conspiracy theorist website owned by Jones, marched along with Jones and climbed up on stacks of chairs at the Capitol along with Jones to make speeches. Shroyer has been charged with four misdemeanors. Earlier this year when he appeared before the select committee investigating Jan. 6, Jones told his viewers he invoked the Fifth Amendment “almost 100 times.” If he now wants to cooperate, that’s quite a turnaround.
RELATED STORY: Alex Jones’ Infowars files for bankruptcy
Marcy Wheeler points to Shroyer’s case in cautioning against taking Jones’ sudden desire to talk to the police too seriously, noting that the Justice Department has already debunked Shroyer’s claims about his own actions that day, claims echoed by Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander. “If Jones were to proffer a DIFFERENT story, then Alexander would be on the hook for a not-true story he told Jan6, and Shroyer would be on the hook for the not-true claims that a judge already ruled against,” Wheeler tweeted. Additionally, Jones and Shroyer have the same lawyer, she noted, so “Jones’ ability to proffer with Pattis would be limited by Pattis’ representation with Shroyer, unless their interests coincided.”
So if Jones cooperated in good faith, he’d either be selling out his buddies or he would be joined by at least one of them. But mostly, “good faith” and “Alex Jones” do not go together.
Texts recently revealed in the seditious conspiracy trial of Oath Keepers related to Jan. 6 show that Jones was among the right-wing leaders the Oath Keepers and the First Amendment Praetorian, a militia, discussed providing security for.
Three of Jones’ companies, including Infowars, just filed for bankruptcy—but it looks less like a sign of legitimate financial distress than an attempt to evade paying damages in three lawsuits brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, families he called “crisis actors” after their children were murdered, families in some cases harassed by his followers. The bankruptcy filings also came after Jones was held in contempt of court and fined until he sat for a deposition. And they were despite his popular dietary supplement business that charges jacked-up prices for particularly low doses of common vitamins and other supplements.
In addition to his role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol and his vile harassment of the families of murdered children, Jones has claimed that the government uses both “weather weapons” and chemicals that turn people (and frogs) gay. He promoted the pizzagate conspiracy theory and called Robert Mueller a “demon.” He stopped a group of mothers and children being driven to a charity and screamed at them in the name of stopping child trafficking. Infowars shares a hosting service—and through it, technical staff—with sites owned by the white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes.
Granted, federal prosecutors sometimes have to work with terrible people to get evidence against even worse people. But Jones is a very special piece of work—and unless he can provide a lot of documentation, there’s never any reason to believe a word he says. If the Justice Department can use Jones to move up the Jan. 6 chain to get closer to people like Roger Stone and Donald Trump, that would be great. It’s just hard to believe that Jones is in earnest.
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A handy solar permitting app added 31 MW of renewable power to nine communities in less than a year
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Last May, the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory released its SolarAPP+ to assist installers with solar permits. The program, which is currently in use in nine communities in Arizona and California, has saved applicants invaluable time thanks to its error-catching system. As SolarAPP+ comes up on one year of use, more than 4,700 permits have been issued, amounting to more than 31 MW of approved power. Thousands of homes have been able to take advantage of renewables and many more households are looking to do the same. According to NREL data, four more communities are in various testing phases with SolarAPP+ and communities across the country have expressed interest in using the program.
Amber D’Ottavio, the vice president of product management for Accela, the software developer that created SolarAPP+, told Utility Drive recently that “this is just the beginning.” D’Ottavio envisions success stories like the more than 2,100 permits issued in Tucson will inspire other agencies, as will advancements within SolarAPP+ itself. At this juncture, SolarAPP+ is only available for residential use, but D’Ottavio told Utility Drive that Accela is already looking to expand its use to commercial and non-rooftop solar permits as well as expediting the overall permitting process so that applicants no longer have to print out their documents and can instead submit them digitally.
In addition to panels themselves, SolarAPP+ also allows for storage permits. More than 300 of the permits issued through the software have included battery storage. That number will likely increase as the California cities of Beaumont, Modesto, Oceanside, and Richmond move further along in their piloting and testing phases. Solar and battery storage are considered key renewable technologies in the quest to reach net-zero. The adoption of such innovations must escalate and scale considerably, according to the International Energy Agency. A report from last year from the IEA noted that, “for solar power, it is equivalent to installing the world’s current largest solar park roughly every day.” Luckily, there are regions in the U.S. that are forging a path forward, especially when it comes to solar adoption.
According to the industry magazine Solar Power World, April 3 saw California get 97% of its power from renewable energy—a new record for the state, albeit one that was achieved briefly at around 3:39 PM that day. Still, advocates believe it’s a sign of a fully renewable future that aligns with the state’s goal of providing carbon-free power by 2045. Additional solar projects in California will see millions of acres of desert land developed for solar projects, along with off-shore wind projects marking a first for the state, which has many wind farms in its interior but not along its coast.
Democratic PAC invests early in swing states to highlight Biden's record job growth
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A Democratic super PAC is launching a $3.5 million ad buy in several key battleground states designed promote President Joe Biden’s economic accomplishments ahead of the 2022 midterms.
According to Politico, American Bridge 21st Century is placing the TV, digital, and radio spots in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, all of which are host to key Senate battles that could determine who controls the upper chamber. The ad buy builds on a $5 million investment in the same states announced by American Bridge in March.
The ads feature swing voters and attempt to walk the line between highlighting Biden’s historic job creation and sympathizing with the effect of rising prices on consumers.
In one ad, Jodi, an Arizona retiree, says she hasn’t “always voted Democrat” but adds that “Joe Biden reflects my values.” As headlines flash across the screen noting that Arizona has fully recovered all the jobs lost to the pandemic, Jodi says Biden “deserves a lot of credit” for the turnaround in Tucson.
“Costs are still high,” she admits, “but Joe Biden knows that and he’s doing what he can to bring those costs down.”
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After touting Biden’s push to bolster “Buy American” manufacturing, Jodi says the policy would mean “more jobs, and less expensive goods to buy.”
While there’s more work to be done, “Joe Biden gets it,” she concludes.
In another ad, former Pennsylvania Republican Lindsey tells viewers the president is focused on creating “access to better jobs and lowering costs and getting this economy back on track.” An AP headline onscreen reads, “Pennsylvania Payrolls Up, Jobless Rate Down in February.”
Early efforts to set the record straight on Biden’s stewardship of the economy are a crucial piece of boosting Democratic chances this fall. Polling has shown that many (if not most) Americans don’t even realize the U.S. economy added jobs last year rather than lost them. In fact, Biden’s economy created a historic number of jobs last year—more than any other year on record—and it is continuing to thrive in 2022.
Yet a Navigator Research survey released this week found that a 35% plurality of Americans say the U.S. has lost more jobs over the past year than it created. Just 19% said the U.S. has seen job growth, and 33% said the country has seen about the same level of growth.
Not all advertising is created equal—both substance and timing help determine how effective ads can be at achieving their goals.
Early advertising will likely yield more bang for the buck for several reasons. For one, the airwaves aren’t entirely saturated yet. Two, setting a baseline level of understanding about the facts is foundational to allowing Democrats to focus on other messages down the road. Three, Democrats don’t have the Fox News propaganda bullhorn that Republicans enjoy, so early advertising is at least one way to attempt to level the playing field.