The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●VA-07: State Sen. Amanda Chase, the self-described “Trump in heels” who gave her fellow Republicans plenty of headaches even before her unsuccessful campaign for governor this year, announced Wednesday that she would take on Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger. Chase had said last week that she would wait until the redistricting process, which is being handled by the Virginia Supreme Court, was finished, but she changed her mind and decided to kick off a campaign now.
Chase joins a nomination battle that includes Bryce Reeves, a fellow state senator who joined with a majority of their colleagues in voting to censure her in January for spreading lies about the 2020 election and calling the Jan. 6 rioters “patriots.” The contest also features communications consultant Taylor Keeney and Tina Ramirez, while Del. John McGuire has filed with the FEC ahead of a possible campaign. However, these candidates don’t know yet if local Republicans will select their nominee using a traditional primary, a convention, or through a party-run firehouse primary.
It also remains to be seen how redistricting will impact this suburban Richmond seat. Joe Biden won the current 7th District by a 50-49 margin, while, according to Bloomberg’s Greg Giroux, Republican Glenn Youngkin took it 55-44 in this month’s race for governor.
Chase herself has spent years picking fights with just about everyone. In 2019, she swore at and berated a police officer at the state capitol who told her that she couldn’t park her car in a secure area, and Chase’s refusal to apologize led Chesterfield County Sheriff Karl Leonard to withdraw his endorsement of her re-election campaign. Chase responded to Leonard’s snub by backing his independent opponent’s unsuccessful campaign and falsely accusing the incumbent of making Chesterfield a “sanctuary city.” The Chesterfield County GOP in turn voted to eject her from the party.
Chase was still re-elected to her reliably red seat, but the Senate GOP found itself in the minority. After her Republican colleagues kept Tommy Norment on as their leader, though, Chase announced that she’d leave the party caucus in protest, a move that left her with just one minor committee assignment.
She drew far more attention when she campaigned for governor, including for her December 2020 Facebook post calling for Trump to “declare martial law” to stay in office. The state senator also said that month that she was bolting the party and running as an independent after the Virginia GOP opted to hold a convention instead of a primary, a move she framed as “the only way to bypass the political consultants and the Republican establishment elite who slow play the rules or even cheat.”
Chase backed down just a week later and went back to campaigning as a Republican, but she outright said months later she’d go back to running as an independent if Pete Snyder, a wealthy businessman she accused of trying to claim the nomination through underhanded means, prevailed at the convention.
Chase spent the final days of her campaign in the news when one of her aides brandished an AR-15 at another driver. Chase, who was in the vehicle participating in a virtual candidate event at the time, told the audience at the time, “Speaking of a Second Amendment moment, we just had to—oh, my goodness—we are exercising our Second Amendment rights right now [in] our car, where we had somebody road rage, trying to get in front of—get on us.” The state senator heavily promoted the story afterwards.
All of this wasn’t enough, however, for her to win over party delegates. Youngkin led Snyder 33-26 in the instant runoff contest while Chase took third with 21%, and she didn’t rise much further than that before she was eliminated from contention after the fifth round of tabulations. Chase soon disappointed Democrats by supporting Youngkin instead of abandoning the party again, and she characteristically spent the final days of the general election making evidence-free allegations that Democrats were “cheating.”
Redistricting
●GA Redistricting: Republicans in Georgia’s legislature have released a new draft congressional map that’s largely similar to a proposal they put out in September. As before, the chief aim of the new map is to make Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath’s blue-leaning 6th District in the Atlanta suburbs unwinnably red, principally by making the adjacent 7th District, held by Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, appreciably bluer. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that votes on the plan are “likely to follow later this week.”
●MA Redistricting: Both chambers in Massachusetts’ Democratic-run legislature passed a new congressional map by wide margins on Wednesday, though a number of Democrats voted against the plan and several Republicans voted for it. The new map is largely similar to the one it would replace and would likely keep the state’s nine-member House delegation all-Democratic. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker could conceivably veto the map, though Democrats enjoy wide supermajorities. (The Senate approved the map 26-13, which just meets the two-thirds threshold, though roll calls on overrides can often differ.)
●NH Redistricting: A committee in New Hampshire’s Republican-run state House passed new maps for Congress and its own chamber on a party-line vote on Wednesday. The congressional plan would make the 1st District considerably redder in order to target Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas; it would also represent the most radical revamp of the state’s two districts in 140 years.
The state House map, meanwhile, would likely preserve the GOP’s majorities, but it’s almost impossible to analyze because lawmakers have provided no data files for it—just 10 different PDFs, one for each county. It also appears to retain New Hampshire’s unique “floterial” districts, despite their unpopularity with many legislators and voters.
●OH Redistricting: A committee in Ohio’s Republican-run state House has advanced the GOP’s new congressional redistricting plan along party lines, but now it faces a fresh obstacle on the chamber floor: A band of Republican extremists are threatening that they won’t vote for the map unless party leaders take up an entirely unrelated bill they’re pushing to curb COVID vaccine mandates. House Speaker Bob Cupp nevertheless insists the map will pass and says a vote is scheduled for Thursday.
●OK Redistricting: Oklahoma’s Republican-run state House passed the GOP’s new congressional redistricting plan on Wednesday on a largely party-line vote, with all Democrats and one Republican voting against. The map would make the 5th District, which is the state’s only competitive seat, safely red by cracking the Oklahoma City area between three different districts.
●WA Redistricting: In a bizarre twist to an already bizarre story, Washington’s bipartisan redistricting commission released congressional and legislative maps late on Tuesday night local time—after admitting earlier in the day that it had missed the Monday deadline to complete its work and acknowledging that the state Supreme Court would take over the redistricting process. The commissioners once again did not offer any substantive explanation for why they failed to finish on time, saying only that they could “see no reason why the Court can’t” consider their maps.
Senate
●GA-Sen: Former state Rep. Josh Clark, a Republican who retired in 2014 after two terms in the legislature, announced this week that he would run for the U.S. Senate.
●PA-Sen: Former Ambassador to Denmark Carla Sands has announced a new $1 million TV and digital ad campaign well ahead of the May Republican primary. The self-funder tells the audience, “We need conservatives in Washington with the backbone to stand up to Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their radical, socialist agenda.”
●VT-Sen, VT-AL: VT Digger writes that a trio of Democrats, state Senate President Pro Tem Becca Balint, Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, and state Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, have each “indicated” that they wouldn’t go up against Rep. Peter Welch if he ran for Vermont’s open Senate seat but could instead campaign to succeed him in the lower chamber.
The only one who was quoted was Ram Hinsdale, who said, “I personally don’t have a fire in my belly to run against Congressman Welch if he pursues the Senate seat.” Gray, meanwhile, said she’d use the Thanksgiving holiday to think about her 2022 plans. Vermont is the only state that still hasn’t elected a woman to either chamber of Congress.
Governors
●AZ-Gov: Several prominent African American leaders in Arizona denounced Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs days after a federal jury awarded $2.75 million in damages to a state Senate staffer named Talonya Adams, a Black woman who claimed that she was fired in 2015 after complaining about being paid less than her white male colleagues.
Hobbs, who was the chamber’s minority leader at the time, was not a defendant in Adams’ lawsuit against the Senate, which was controlled by Republicans. However, she did testify that she had been part of a group that fired Adams, saying its members “agreed that we had lost trust and confidence in Ms. Adams, and that was why that decision [to fire her] was made.”
Hobbs apologized to Adams in 2019 after Adams won a $1 million verdict that was later tossed out by saying she “should have been a stronger ally in this instance.” Her campaign last week responded to the jury’s award in Adams’ second trial by saying that “the Republican majority chief of staff acted as her supervisor and the ultimate decision-maker regarding the termination of her employment.”
Adams, who was rehired in 2019 after a judicial order, didn’t agree. After the conclusion of the case, she said, “As it relates to Katie Hobbs, she’s had multiple opportunities to call out discrimination based on race and sex, she’s had multiple opportunities to support other women and women of color, even myself, and each time she’s failed.”
Six Black leaders also responded with a statement of their own, saying, “We ask that all persons, especially people of color, reconsider any support for Katie Hobbs to become the next governor of Arizona” due to her actions regarding Adams’ firing. The group includes NAACP state President Charles Fanniel; Sandra Kennedy, who is a Democratic member of the powerful Arizona Corporation Commission; and former state Rep. Art Hamilton, who in the 1980s was a leader in the high-profile fight to establish a Martin Luther King holiday over the opposition of Republican Gov. Evan Mecham.
Hobbs is the most prominent Democrat competing in next year’s primary for governor. The field also includes former state Rep. Aaron Lieberman and former homeland security official Marco López, who each were quick to criticize Hobbs following the jury’s decision.
●GA-Gov: Conservative radio host Martha Zoller on Wednesday asked former Sen. David Perdue about reports that he was considering challenging Gov. Brian Kemp in next May’s Republican primary, and Perdue very much did not rule anything out. “The fact that your phone is blowing up and my phone is blowing up, tells us something,” he argued, adding, “We have a divided party in Georgia right now.” CNN also reported that day that several unnamed Peach State Republicans expect Perdue to make up his mind “soon.”
●NE-Gov: Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Foley said last week that he’d run for his old job as state auditor next year rather than enter the open seat race for governor.
House
●CA-14: A few Democrats have already expressed interest in running in the June top-two primary to succeed Rep. Jackie Speier, who announced her retirement on Tuesday. The current configuration of this seat, which contains most of San Mateo County and some of San Francisco to the north, backed Joe Biden 78-20, and the new district will likely look very similar when redistricting is done. California’s filing deadline is in mid-March.
San Mateo County Board of Supervisors President David Canepa and Millbrae City Councilmember Gina Papan each quickly said they were considering, while Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, who worked as Speier’s district director when she was in the legislature, tweeted Wednesday that he was also thinking about it and would “have more to say about the race soon.”
State Sen. Josh Becker also didn’t rule out the idea when asked, while Redwood City Councilmember Giselle Hale, who is also an executive at the firm Political Data Inc., said she was waiting for redistricting to conclude before deciding. San Mateo County Supervisor Dave Pine, meanwhile, did not respond to Politico’s inquiry about his interest.
●ME-02: Republican Liz Caruso, a longtime opponent of the Central Maine Power hydropower corridor project who was a spokesperson in last month’s successful Question 1 campaign to block it, announced this week that she was joining the June GOP primary to take on Democratic Rep. Jared Golden. Caruso is also a selectman in Caratunk, a community with a population of about 70. (And you thought New Hampshire state representatives had tiny constituencies.)
Golden’s most prominent adversary is former Rep. Bruce Poliquin, a Republican who has never recognized his 2018 loss. Poliquin outraised Golden $880,000 to $635,000 during the opening quarter of their rematch, though the incumbent ended September with a $1.3 million to $870,000 cash-on-hand edge. State Rep. Mike Perkins is also running for Team Red, but he had a paltry $25,000 available at the end of the third quarter.
●NC-02: Spectrum News’ Reuben Jones reported Wednesday that Democratic Rep. G. K. Butterfield has decided to retire rather than seek re-election in the new version of North Carolina’s 2nd District, which supported Joe Biden just 51-48 under the new Republican gerrymander. Butterfield’s office didn’t confirm or deny anything and instead told Jones “the official announcement will be made later today or tomorrow.”
●NC-06, NC-Sen: State Sen. Valerie Foushee announced Wednesday that she was entering the race to succeed her fellow Democrat, retiring Rep. David Price, in the new version of this safely blue seat in the Chapel Hill-Durham area. Foushee, who back in 2004 became the first Black woman elected to the Orange County Board of Commissioners, kicked off her campaign with endorsements from state Sens. Natalie Murdock and Mike Woodard, who had previously shown some interest in running here themselves.
Virologist Richard Watkins also said Wednesday that he was dropping his campaign for the Senate in order to run for the 6th District. Watkins in 2018 took 6% in his long-shot primary campaign against Price, and he had just $60,000 on-hand in September for his latest campaign.
The pair joins a March primary that includes Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam and state Sen. Wiley Nickel. The filing deadline is Dec. 17.
●NC-14: Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise has confirmed that he’s interested in running for this open seat in western North Carolina. Hise is the author of the new GOP gerrymander that passed earlier this month, though he says he was caught by surprise along with everyone else when Rep. Madison Cawthorn announced days later that he’d run for the 13th District instead of here.
●PA-07: Republican state Rep. Ryan Mackenzie has filed FEC paperwork for a potential bid against Democratic Rep. Susan Wild. Mackenzie campaigned for Congress back in 2018 when GOP Rep. Charlie Dent retired, but he dropped out well before the primary.
●TX-34: Democratic state Rep. Alex Dominguez said Wednesday that he would run for an open seat in the state Senate instead of for Congress. Dominguez showed some interest last month in campaigning for the 34th Congressional District, but he started to back off after Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez decided to run here instead of in the 15th District.
Attorneys General
●SD-AG: Last week, South Dakota’s Republican-run state House voted overwhelmingly to begin an impeachment inquiry into state Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg, who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in August for striking and killing a man with his car last year. House Speaker Spencer Gosch indicated after the vote that the special committee investigating Ravnsborg might issue a report when lawmakers reconvene in January. It would take a simple majority in the House to impeach the attorney general, followed by a two-thirds vote in the state Senate to remove him.
Legislatures
●VA State House: As expected, Democrats have asked for recounts in two close races for seats they hold in the Virginia state House. Republicans won 50 seats in the chamber on Nov. 2 to 48 for Democrats; they also lead in the two elections headed to a recount: Republican A.C. Cordoza is up 94 votes on Democratic Del. Martha Mugler in District 91 in Hampton Roads, while Republican Karen Greenhalgh is currently beating Democratic Del. Alex Askew by 127 votes in District 85 in Virginia Beach.
Because the margin in both contests is under 0.5%, the state will pay for the recounts. There’s no telling how long they’ll take, though, and it could be a while: A 2017 recount in a House race didn’t start until Dec. 19 of that year (and because it ended—rather questionably—in a tie, it wasn’t resolved until early January). While it’s very unlikely either outcome will change, a vote tabulation error previously sliced Mugler’s deficit in half and in fact prompted her to rescind her earlier concession. If both races were to flip, the two parties would wind up in a 50-50 tie, necessitating a power-sharing agreement.
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❧ Now that the “shaman” traitor has been sentenced to over three years in prison, I’m dying to see video of the desk sergeant trying to fit his horns into one of those little plastic personal-belongings baggies.
❧ Thanks to President Biden, Americans are finally allowed to very strongly and beautifully say “Happy Holidays” again.
Continued…
❧ When Republicans defeat Democrats in an election, the media lecture Democrats to compromise with Republicans because “they have a mandate.” When Democrats defeat Republicans in an election, the media lecture Democrats to compromise with Republicans because “they’re hurting and need to be reached out to.”
❧ The main reason I enjoy the cold, dark time of year is it keeps the swarms of Airbnbers down.
❧ If you get your health insurance through healthcare.gov, you have 27 days left to enroll for coverage starting January 1.
❧ If you want to punish Congressman Paul Gosar for his actions in a way that really stings, take away his jackboots.
❧ Banning books only makes them more popular.
❧ To increase his reelection chances, Senator Mark Kelly should start delivering floor speeches in his astronaut suit.
❧ “Q” is just a self-perpetuating scavenger hunt of the insane. “Go find the child sacrifice room in the pizza parlor.” “Go find zombie JFK Jr.” “Go find the CIA director duct-taped to a chair in Germany.” “Go find critical race theory in a public school.” “Go find bamboo fibers in a ballot.” No one ever wins.
❧ And finally, sadly: Ben Carson never found his luggage.
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Thursday, November 18, 2021
Note: For those of you cooking Thanksgiving turkeys weighing over 250 pounds, today’s the day to pop ’em in the oven. And also the day to realize you’re going to need a bigger oven.
Decline in the number of containers sitting on docks at the port of Los Angeles over the last month: 29%
Value of the global cold and flu-related supplement market in 2019: $14 billion
Age of the Egg McMuffin as of this year: 50
Age of LSD, which makes Egg McMuffins come alive, as of last Tuesday: 83
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Your Thursday Molly Ivins Moment:
[W]ouldn’t it be really fun to make every pundit and pollster in America look like a complete idiot? I must confess, that’s my idea of a good time. Wouldn’t it be great to see every one of them whomper-jawed on Nov. 4? Sam, George, Cokie, Dan, Tom and Peter – all of them speechless. What joy! (I don’t actually know these people; I’m just adopting their habit of referring to people they’ve never met, such as “Monica,” as though they were close personal friends.)
Of course, in order to achieve these happy results, you [unlikely voters] would have to vote mostly Democratic, and let me warn you right now that voting for any obvious idiots you find on that side of the ballot is not a solution. This is a point I try to make every election, no matter what your party preference: Please don’t vote for drivel-heads, even if you do favor one party over the other. On the other hand, if the Democrats have managed to nominate someone who seems fairly rational and is concerned about the global economy, education and Social Security, don’t miss this chance to Send Them A Message, Avoid More Months of Monica and make every commentator in America look like a perfect fool. […]
Now is the time for all good unlikelies to come to the aid of their country. We really are in something of a dire pickle here. Setting aside this tawdry soap opera into which Clinton and Kenneth Starr have dragged us, both democracy and capitalism are at stake here.
—October 1998
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Puppy Pic of the Day: in Grand Ridge Florida—Saved!!!
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CHEERS to rollin’ up the ol’ sleeves and takin’ one for the team. To recap: getting vaccinated protects you and those around you. If you don’t get covid, you can’t spread covid. And what we know about the covid vaccine at this point is that its effectiveness can wane, so you need a booster shot. And today that advice may become official:
If you’re really good and eat all your vegetables, you can get your booster shot in this booster seat.
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 booster shot for all adults within days, according to a person familiar with the plans.
The FDA’s action could come as early as Thursday. The news was first reported by The New York Times. […]
Pfizer requested emergency use authorization for the booster last week, citing results from a Phase 3 clinical trial with more than 10,000 participants, which found that the third dose was safe and effective.
But the most important functions of the booster shot are to a) install a fresh AAAAAAAA battery in your government tracking chip from the first shot and b) update the socialist propaganda talking points in your cerebrum from the second shot. (Oh, science…is there nothing you can’t do?)
CHEERS to herding America’s worst cow into the pokey. A chapter of the Republican insurrection against the U.S. government came to an end yesterday as the most mocked figure during the treasonous event was handed his punishment. This oughtta shut him up for awhile:
Jacob Chansley, the self-described “QAnon Shaman” who infamously marched through the U.S. Capitol with a spear and horned helmet during the Jan. 6 riot, was sentenced Wednesday to 41 months in prison for his role in the attack.
One of the benefits that this asshole enjoys by living in the country whose system of government he tried to destroy: In other countries, he would’ve been hanged.
It matches the longest sentence handed down to any Jan. 6 participant, following the 41-month sentence handed down last week to Scott Fairlam, a former mixed martial arts fighter who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer during the riot.
“What you did here was horrific,” Judge Royce Lamberth said during the sentencing hearing. “It is the type of conduct that is so serious that I cannot justify downward departure [from sentencing recommendations].”
According to the ABC News account above, Captain Cattle Breath expressed contrition by citing—[checks notes]—Clarence Thomas. For that they shoulda put him away for 41 years.
CHEERS to headin’ down the home stretch. A sure sign of the impending and blessed demise of 2021. This week we noticed that the constellation Orion is hovering low on the horizon after dark:
Orion, which is located on the celestial equator, is one of the most prominent and recognizable constellations in the sky and can be seen throughout the world. […]
Alnilam, Mintaka and Alnitak, which form Orion’s belt, are the most prominent stars in the Orion constellation. Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in Orion, establishes the right shoulder of the hunter. Bellatrix serves as Orion’s left shoulder. […]
A rather mind-blowing graphic, courtesy of NASA.
With one exception, all of the main stars in Orion are bright young blue giants or super giants, ranging in distance from Bellatrix (243 light-years) to Alnilam (1,359 light-years). The Orion Nebula is farther away than any of the naked eye stars at a distance of about 1,600 light-years. One light-year is the distance light travels in a single year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).
For the rest of the fall and winter it will be our nightly companion when we take the dog out to go pee. If tradition holds—and it does or else it wouldn’t be a tradition—from here on out the rest of the year will be a blur and then…[Blink!]…welcome to 2022. Keep some aloe on hand for the windburn.
In the most recent four months with revisions, June through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported it underestimated job growth by a cumulative 626,000 jobs—that’s the largest underestimate of any other comparable period, going back to 1979.
If those revisions were themselves a jobs report, they’d be an absolute blockbuster.
This has been today’s edition of Oops.
JEERS to drinking the Kool-Aid (as in, really drinking the Kool-Aid, except perhaps not, which I’ll explain in a moment). There’s a paragraph in the late Randy Shilts’s brilliant book, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, that reveals the Rev. Jim Jones’ influence in San Francisco politics (Mayor Moscone actually made him chairman of the city Housing Authority, if you can believe that) during the mid-70s, before he moved his sheeple to Guyana:
“Make sure you’re always nice to the Peoples Temple,” [Milk] admonished [campaign volunteer Tory Hartmann].
“Weird and dangerous.”
“If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They’re weird and they’re dangerous, and you never want to be on their bad side.”
No shit. Today is the 43rd anniversary of the infamous Jonestown massacre. At least 900 followers drank grape Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid) laced with cyanide. Time’s cover said it all: Cult of Death. By the way, what’s the difference between the Jones cult and the Republican party? What Republicans want to force down our throat will kill all of us.
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Ten years ago in C&J: November 18, 2011
CHEERS to simple explanations of complicated issues. If you find yourself scratching your head over just what the hell is going on with the European economy, here’s good news! I’ve hired a crack team of economic experts to summarize the situation in plain language, so you can manage your international investment portfolio with confidence. Here’s what happened this week:
Relief, Panic, Relief, Panic, Double-panic, Panic, Relief, Relief, Panic, Panic…[Lunch from 12-3pm: Merkel eats a sausage, Sarkozy eats a baguette, Italy makes passionate love, followed by nappytime]…Tentative relief, Panic, Relief, Whoops no that was really panic, Panic, Relief, and Panic.
Join us next week for another update, which our C&J experts are now busily preparing for by picking fleas out of each other’s fur.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to letters from the C&J mailbag. Sent via Three-Toed-Sloth Mail to ensure it gets to the recipient faster than Louis DeJoy’s U.S. Postal Service:
Dear Santa,
Hi. How are you. I am fine. If the ice at the North Pole hasn’t completed swamped your workshop by the time you receive this, I would like the following for Christmas:
It is only 800 dollars.
I have been a good boy this year. Except that one time that you probably read about. But it was an accident, and besides the rebuilding is ahead of schedule.
Regards to the missus.
Billy
I’m listing you all as character references. Don’t disappoint me. I have videos.
Have a nice Thursday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
John Cassidy of The New Yorker writes that even though the interrelated issues with inflation and supply-chains are not President Joe Biden’s fault, Republicans will blame him anyway…just because.
With some economists predicting that the inflation rate could rise even further over the next few months, the Republican onslaught on Biden will only intensify, but it can’t stand unchallenged. Many of the factors contributing to the inflation surge are beyond the immediate control of any President. Sticker shock at the gas pump is primarily a result of a decision by the opec oil cartel to restrict production at a time of rising demand. Higher prices for new and used vehicles, which have been one of the biggest drivers of the rise in the C.P.I., stem largely from a shortage of new cars caused by a lack of computer chips imported from Asia. Higher rental costs, which contributed to the most recent jump, can be traced to spiking real-estate prices and rock-bottom interest rates.
The so-called supply-chain problem, which lies at the heart of the broader inflation surge, is a global phenomenon rooted in a faster rebound from the worldwide coronavirus shutdowns than many people had expected. “As the global recovery gains traction, demand for raw materials, intermediate inputs and logistical services has outstripped available supply leading to rising and volatile prices, and delivery delays,” the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (B.I.S.)—the central bank of central banks—notes in a new report. Shipping costs have soared, cargo vessels have been forced to queue for days to gain access to ports, and the situation has been made worse by “precautionary hoarding at different stages of the supply chain,” the report goes on.
This global logjam is leading to higher inflation in many countries. In Britain, in August, consumer prices recorded the biggest one-month jump on record. In Germany, the inflation rate topped four per cent, the highest figure since the nineteen-nineties. In the nineteen-country eurozone, the inflation rate in October was 4.1 per cent, according to a preliminary estimate. In Russia, inflation is running at more than eight per cent, while, in Brazil, it’s nearly eleven per cent. These figures bear further inspection. If the Biden Administration’s spending policies have been a major factor in driving prices higher—as Republicans claim—you would expect the inflation rate to have jumped a lot further in the United States than in Europe, say. That hasn’t happened. Between January, 2020, and October, 2021, the U.S. inflation rate increased by approximately 4.7 percentage points, and the eurozone’s inflation rate increased by 3.7 points. The U.S. jump is bigger, but the figures are roughly in the same ballpark.
Akshay Syal, MD writes for NBC News that COVID-19 hospitalizations are now rising for the fully vaccinated but non-boosted.
On Wednesday, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported a decline in vaccine effectiveness among the elderly and residents of long-term care facilities, many of whom were the first to be eligible to be vaccinated last winter.
“Although the highest risk are those people who are unvaccinated, we are seeing an increase in emergency department visits among adults 65 and older, which are now again higher than they are for younger age groups,” Walensky said Wednesday at a White House Covid briefing.
Walensky also pointed to new data on long-term care facilities from the agency’s National Healthcare Safety Network comparing rates of Covid disease between people who are vaccinated with two doses and those who have received extra doses.
“The rate of disease is markedly lower for those who received their booster shot, demonstrating our boosters are working,” she said.
Fauci and Walensky stressed that the majority of hospitalizations and deaths are still among unvaccinated people in the U.S.
Olga Khazan of The Atlantic reports out polling that indicates that for a majority of rural Americans, life is returning to “normal.”
According to a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, compared with people in urban or suburban areas, people in rural areas are most likely to feel like things are “back to normal” where they live—45 percent thought so, compared with 30 percent of urbanites and 36 percent of suburbanites. Rural Americans were also the least likely group to say they wished their neighbors would be more cautious about COVID-19.
People in rural areas are also significantly less likely than the other two groups to wear a mask indoors at restaurants and bars, or at work. They were the least likely group to say that their kids are required to wear masks to school or day care. They are also more likely to socialize with friends indoors without masks on: 68 percent said they now do this, compared with 54 percent of urbanites. A typical worker in D.C. might send his kid to preschool in a mask, ride to work on the Metro in a mask, and meet friends for drinks at an outdoor café, just in case. An hour and a half away, a typical worker in Culpeper, Virginia, might spend her day exactly as she would have in 2019.
Rural Americans are returning back to normal even though they are less likely to say that most adults they know are vaccinated: 48 percent of rural respondents answered “yes” to this question, compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 63 percent of urbanites. (To be fair, 24 percent of rural respondents said they weren’t sure, compared with about 15 percent of the other two groups.) This result mirrors the lower vaccination rate among rural adults found in other research.
Very little COVID-19 to see in rural America, I guess!
Elizabeth Wellington of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a group of black pastors now traveling to Georgia to hold a prayer vigil in defiance of defense attorney Kevin Gough, who said “we don’t want any more black pastors coming here” in open court.
Now, some African American pastors from this area and other states are traveling to Georgia for a prayer vigil Thursday on the steps of the Glynn County Courthouse. The Rev. Mark Tyler of the historic Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church left Wednesday morning on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Bishop Dwayne D. Royster, the executive director of Power, which represents 50 Pennsylvania congregations, was scheduled to fly out Wednesday evening.
“Not only did this happen once, it’s happened twice now because they also went after Rev. [Jesse] Jackson yesterday for being there. It’s deeply disturbing,” Royster told me. “You can’t call out the Black church for doing its work — and our work is to provide comfort for families in very difficult situations and to be present for them. We also need to bear witness to injustice.”
They follow in the rich tradition of Black ministers who not only minister to the souls of their congregants but other aspects of their lives as well. They have every right to be there.
“You can’t really find a moment in American history where Black folk moved the needle forward where the Black church and Black preachers were not a part of it,” Tyler said.
Sikivu Hutchinson of the Los Angeles Times says that California’s ethnic studies programs need to include a LGBTQ component.
Thus, simply requiring ethnic studies courses in schools will not redress institutional racism in classrooms or school communities, much as an LGBTQ education mandate didn’t erase heterosexism or transphobia. For ethnic studies to succeed, it must be part of a broader approach to teaching, learning and social-emotional support for students, taking into account the overlap of racial, gender and sexual identities.
Recently, for example, a Black student told me that their parent threatened to kick them out of the house because they identified as queer. Their experiences were virtually identical to those of another student who told me years earlier that she faced religious hostility and the threat of eviction from her mother when she came out. She was told that being bisexual was against God, Blackness and respectable womanhood. Both youth were victimized at the intersections of misogynoir (a term for anti-Black misogyny) and homophobia. These factors contribute to high rates of homelessness and incarceration among Black queer youth. According to a 2019 Human Rights Campaign report, only 26% of Black youth reported family involvement in LGBTQ issues or the LGBTQ community.
For Black queer youth, bigotry at home is compounded by in-school bullying and harassment and high rates of school discipline. A 2020 report by the National Black Justice Coalition and GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) concluded: “The majority of Black LGBTQ students experienced harassment in school…because of their sexual orientation, gender expression, or race/ethnicity.”
Mathew Ingram of the Columbia Journalism Review writes about a report that seeks to address and find solutions to society’s “information disorder.”
The Aspen report notes that “there is an incentive system in place that manufactures information disorder, and we will not address the problem if we do not take on that system.” Some of the major players in that incentive system, according to the group, are large tech platforms such as Facebook, which it says have “abused customers’ trust, obfuscated important data, and blocked research.” The commission mentions one example CJR has also highlighted: the decision by Facebook to shut down a research project run by scientists from New York University by turning off their access to the social network. “Critical research on disinformation—whether it be the efficacy of digital ads or the various online content moderation policies—is undercut by a lack of access to data and processes,” the report states. Several of its recommendations are aimed at solving this problem, including one that asks the government to require platforms to “disclose certain categories of private data to qualified academic researchers, so long as that research respects user privacy, does not endanger platform integrity, and remains in the public interest.”
The report recommends government support for local journalism, including the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which proposes that federal tax credits be provided as a way to subsidize local news subscriptions. The commissioners also argue that the industry needs to “adjust journalistic norms to avoid false equivalencies between lies and empirical fact in the pursuit of ‘both sides’ and ‘objectivity,’” a topic CJR has also covered in-depth both in the magazine and through our Galley discussion platform. In addition, the report notes that cable news, podcasts, YouTube, and talk radio “all play a unique role in inflaming disinformation and too often fail to hold accountable those who spread false statements on-air,” and that there continues to be a tension in the media between “the drive to maximize profit and the imperative to serve the public good.”
Mujtaba Rahman of POLITICO Europe reports that French president Emmanuel Macron seems to be taking a more “pragmatic approach” to the EU in the context of his reelection campaign by running away from it.
Macron believes that he can boast a reasonably good record in European affairs — especially after his success last year in persuading Germany to approve a €750 billion plan to rebuild the pandemic-weakened economies of its 27 members. He is also keen to point to the crises afflicting post-Brexit Britain as proof of the EU’s overlooked benefits that France and the bloc’s other 26 countries draw from achievements like the single market.
Complicating matters for Macron, however, is that earlier this month, the Polish constitutional court decided to reject the primacy of the Court of Justice of the European Union. This Brussels-Warsaw confrontation threatens to reopen an old argument in France, which recalls the debate over national “control” that helped to shape the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU in 2016.
Indeed, ever since the decision, a series of French presidential contenders — ranging from the far right and the center right to the euroskeptic left — have all sided, to various degrees, with Warsaw. They have called for France to assert the primacy of its own constitution, or even its own individual laws, over European legislation — something that would imperil the existence of the single market and even the EU itself.
Although opinion polls suggest that France is broadly tolerant of EU membership, much of the population only has a foggy notion of the union’s history, its legal basis and how it functions — something, officials say, Macron is aware of.
Leonid Ragozin of AlJazeera covers all of the angles of the border crisis affecting Poland, Belarus, and Russia with a little bit of Ukraine thrown in.
Belarus is the closest ally of Russia and officially a part of an entity known as the Union of Russia and Belarus. The latter exists largely on paper, but it does provide for a common defence policy and free movement between the two countries, which means the Belarusian border with Poland and the two Baltic states is effectively Russia’s external frontier separating its security zone from the realm of NATO. Therefore, any conflict at this border by extension becomes a conflict between Russia and NATO, which is exactly how the far-right government in Poland is now trying to frame it.
[…]
…many hawkish commentators in the West and Eastern Europe have pointed a finger at Moscow as the instigator of the border crisis and claimed that Lukashenko’s threats must have been sanctioned by the Kremlin. Simultaneously, senior US officials made radical claims about Russia building up troops with the view of invading Ukraine.
The logic of these accusations is hard to fathom. Russia finds itself in the middle of a four-month period, during which the German energy regulator should certify Nord Stream 2 – a pipeline that will deliver gas to the EU directly, bypassing Ukraine and Belarus. On Tuesday, news came in that Germany is suspending the certification process on technical grounds – a move that will further delay the project and will be interpreted by the Kremlin as a deliberately hostile act.
Finally today, Linda Geddes of the Guardian reports on a study indicating that grandmothers are more connected to their grandchildren than their own children.
Since the 1960s, researchers have posited that one reason women tend to live decades past their reproductive years is that it increases the chances of their grandchildren surviving, through the physical support they often provide – the grandmother hypothesis. More recent evidence has suggested that children’s wellbeing and educational performance is also boosted by the presence of engaged grandparents.
To better understand the biological underpinnings of this connection, Prof James Rilling, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues recruited 50 women with at least one biological grandchild aged between three and 12, and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan their brains as they looked at photos of that child, the child’s parents, and images of an unrelated child and adult.
“What really jumps out is the activation in areas of the brain associated with emotional empathy,” Rilling said. “That suggests that grandmothers are geared toward feeling what their grandchildren are feeling when they interact with them. If their grandchild is smiling, they’re feeling the child’s joy. And if their grandchild is crying, they’re feeling the child’s pain and distress.”
They really spent money on a study of this issue? Most grandchildren, I would think, would say this, right?
In the news today: Many months after Rep. Paul Gosar spoke at an event featuring white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, the Arizona Republican was censured and removed from his House committees today after his office released an animated video edited to depict Gosar killing an enemy with the face of a Democratic colleague. Despite this being an obviously fireable offense at any other job in America, Republicans were near-unanimous in voting against the censure. And no, there is no bottom. The party is a cesspool.
Elsewhere, the FBI raids the home of a (Republican) Colorado election clerk who not only promoted election conspiracies but is also currently under investigation for potential election fraud herself. And the Biden White House is taking new steps to make sure Americans know that it was Democrats who came through to provide huge new infrastructure investments—and that most of the Republicans now celebrating the new money tried to block it every step of the way.
In a way, it might have been fun to be a double-agent Trump adviser, but it would have been practically impossible to undermine him more than his own loyalists did. I mean, the guy retained Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer. Seriously, at this point in Rudy’s career you’d get better legal advice from two tweaking spider monkeys fighting over an Etch-a-Sketch—which proves that it actually is possible not to get your money’s worth from a guy you haven’t paid.
But Rudy’s not the only pea brain in the pod, apparently. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace interviewed ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl Tuesday, who’s been making the rounds with the latest in a long line of “oh, fuck me sideways on melba toast, Gertrude—can you believe this shit actually happened?!?!?” media tell-all books. And it’s called Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.
Judging by the wall-to-wall coverage Karl has garnered lately, there’s a lot of bonkers stuff in this latest shit-my-drawers-in-retroactive-panic account, and while the following story isn’t nearly as concerning as Trump’s attempts to, you know, end America, it speaks to the kind of incompetence and stupidity that permeated TrumpWorld throughout his misrule:
KARL: “There was a sense from most of the staffers that this was, at the very least, a political disaster. There was one big exception, though. Kayleigh McEnany was, as you know, the press secretary and Trump was having a meeting with this political team in the Oval Office and was being presented with numbers—this was in the spring—showing that his reelection chances were looking grim, primarily because of what was happening with COVID. And he said, ‘No, no, no, bring in Kayleigh! Bring in Kayleigh.’ And Kayleigh comes in, and he says, ‘Kayleigh, tell them what you were just telling me.’ And Kayleigh McEnany tells the president of the United States, ‘I think you’re going to win, sir, and I think you’re going to win because of COVID.’ And then she explained that the biggest weakness that they had in the midterms was health care, and now with COVID dominating the news, the Democrats wouldn’t be able to talk so much about health care. Health care would be less of an issue. So, I mean, you have to get your head around this, but she was saying was that because of the greatest public heath crisis of our time, of the last century, they wouldn’t have to talk so much about health care, and therefore he was going to win.”
WALLACE: “We made an editorial decision early in the Trump administration never to air whatever it is … that happened at the podium, and you just gave the best defense for a decision that was at times difficult to defend. Thank you for that.”
So it’s unclear whether McEnany was just telling Trump what he wanted to hear because there was a Hot Pocket with her name on it waiting in the microwave, or if she really is this callous. Does it matter? Telling your boss that he’s going to win because of COVID-19 is—well, I’d say malpractice if it was at all clear that McEnany was doing anything resembling a job.
But, yeah, Trump hires only the best people … who tell him not to sweat the biggest crisis he or, indeed, any president had been forced to confront in decades. How did that work out for him?
Of course, if Trump ever somehow finds his way back into the White House, it will get far, far worse. Expect the job of Diet Coke gofer to be elevated to a Cabinet position. And while the soda secretary is there with a Diet Coke, he might as well weigh in on planned drone strikes against Arby’s after they forgot the extra Horsey Sauce one too many times.
The northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the Sacramento sheriff’s department for colluding with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in violation of state law. The lawsuit states Sheriff Scott Jones’ “policy and practice of transferring immigrants to ICE” after they’ve already served their time violates “landmark” laws California Values Act and TRUST Act.
“The Sacramento Sheriff’s Office is inflicting this illegal practice upon people who are eligible to return to their home and communities under state law. If not for their country of origin, they would not be enduring this cruel double punishment,” ACLU Foundation of Northern California Senior Staff Attorney Sean Riordan said in a statement. “This lawsuit shows that California must outlaw all local cooperation with ICE. It’s still too easy for local officials with an anti-immigrant agenda to find ways to exploit the law and harm our communities.”
Under the California Values Act (also known as SB 54), local law enforcement agencies are “sharply” limited as to when they can transfer someone to federal immigration officials, the statement said. But the lawsuit states the sheriff’s department has violated law by conducting “shadow transfers” that try to go around law by handing immigrants over to ICE “mere steps outside the gates of its jails.”
“ICE knows when to wait outside [Rio Consumnes Correctional Center’s] gates to arrest people because sheriff’s officials notify ICE when they expect to release someone whom ICE wants to arrest,” the statement said.
The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, which filed the lawsuit alongside co-counsel Conrad, Metlitzky, and Kane LLP on behalf of Sacramento resident Misael Echeveste and nonprofit community groups United Latinos and NorCal Resist, said that the sheriff’s department “strategized ways to evade the law’s limitations on transfers” immediately after SB 54 went into effect. It was signed into law by former Gov. Jerry Brown in late 2017. The lawsuit states that at one point, Jones held a press conference with one of the previous president’s acting ICE directors to push against the legislation.
The sheriff’s department also “developed an illegal notification system reflected in internal documents such as an ‘ICE Log Book,’ which demonstrates that sheriff’s deputies regularly notify ICE of a person’s release date and time, in violation of California law,” the group continued. Among immigrants unlawfully handed over to ICE has been Echeveste, who should have been released after serving time for a misdemeanor offense. “Echeveste remembers that, a few days before his scheduled release from the RCCC, sheriff’s deputies told him he was getting released early,” the ACLU Foundation of Northern California said, noting that deputies even congratulated him.
But deputies instead handed him not his street clothes, but an ICE uniform. Echeveste said deputies laughed and mocked him. “As a result of the ICE transfer, he is now fighting deportation to Mexico—a country he does not know, and where he has no family or personal contacts,” the ACLU Foundation of Northern California said. Echeveste has lived in the U.S. for more than two decades now. He has not lived in Mexico since he was 4 years old.
“Through this lawsuit, I hope to give a voice to other people who are going through this situation, other people who might not know English as well as me, since I was raised out here in California,” he said in the statement. “Just because we weren’t born here doesn’t mean we’re not human and that we’re not deserving of rights. I’m very lucky to have a lot of help in fighting this, and I want other people to be able to fight for their rights too.”
”A number of California counties have stopped all ICE transfers from local jails—including San Francisco, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, San Joaquin, Santa Cruz, Humboldt, and Contra Costa—to come into compliance with these laws,” the ACLU Foundation of Northern California continued. Just this month, the San Mateo sheriff’s department said it would stop collaborating with ICE. Sheriff Carlos Bolanos in a statement directly credited the community’s fight. “It simply is not worth losing the trust of many members of the public by continuing to process these requests from ICE. Our policy is now consistent with other Bay Area counties.”
Alex Jones has always tried to frame his far-right conspiracist Infowars site as a nonracist operation that eschews overt antisemitism and bigotry, even though his conspiracy theories are common grist for the mills of explicit white nationalists like “Groyper” leader Nicholas Fuentes. The fact that both Jones and Fuentes frequently appear at the same pro-Donald Trump, COVID-denialist events seems a mere coincidence.
Except that it’s not. Stellar reportage from Michael Edison Hayden, Megan Squire, and Hannah Gais at Hatewatchthis week ripped the cover off that façade by revealing that Jones’ and Fuentes’ operations are fundamentally connected at the hip through the web-hosting company, Epik, that keeps both of them online after being deplatformed. They not only share employees and extremist strategizing, but appear to be jointly buying up web domains that reference far-right terrorist acts.
Hatewatchreports that among those domains purchased by Epik employees are several that reference the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre, including “tarrantmanifesto.com” and “sainttarrant.com.” Epik also now owns domains that reference “Right Wing Death Squads” as well as “shooterchan.com.”
The person who oversees all these connections and domain-name purchases is Michael Zimmerman, who currently is Epik’s director of enterprise services, and formerly was Infowars’ information technology director, though he apparently still does work for Jones. He also is a member of the development team for Fuentes’ America First organization. Zimmerman heads up a team of about 12 people at Epik who have been involved in the domain-name purchases.
Hatewatch found 12 different people working together in a technical capacity across America First, Infowars, Epik and a livestreaming platform called Vieo.com, recently purchased by Epik. Over a span of 25 months starting in 2019, these individuals cumulatively registered approximately 212 different domains with Epik and organized eight different limited liability companies (LLCs). Zimmermann registered most of the domains and LLCs and appears to have the longest-standing ties to this tech network supporting these far right media companies.
Epik, a hosting service and domain registrar based in Sammamish, Washington, has a long history of dalliances with the extremist right. In particular, it has become the website host for a number of far-right websites and pundits that were booted from mainstream platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as large service providers. These include Gab, which became a nesting ground for white nationalists even before one of its members massacred worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, went out of service shortly afterward, and then resurrected itself on Epik; as well as Parler, the far-right chat platform which hosted a growing mountain of violent-right rhetoric prior to Jan. 6, as well as a massive amount of material from the Capitol insurrection itself posted by users who participated, after which it lost its hosting services and moved to Epik.
Epik founder/CEO Rob Monster claims that he has no white-nationalist sympathies, and points to his company’s removal of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer from its platforms after buying the company that hosted it as proof. Instead, the company likes to boast that it is a “protector of responsible Free Speech.”
However, as Hayden reported earlier, Monster in fact has interacted on Gab, where he has an account, with Chris “Crying Nazi” Cantwell—currently appearing in a Charlottesville courtroom for his role in the lethal August 2017 “Unite the Right” riots—and a white nationalist podcaster named Eric Striker, who in addition to writing for the Stormeris known for his frequent collaborations with white supremacist David Duke.
In January, Monster appeared on “The People’s Square,” a livestream project run by Striker, and commented about how the internet can make people more open to controversial views: “You look at a guy like David Duke for example, and he has some far-right views and so forth. But he’s actually a pretty clever guy, he’s articulate. He knows history. And I don’t know the body of his work, but I have a feeling that many people grew up with this mindset that you shouldn’t listen to anything David Duke says.”
It’s unsurprising that Infowars snagged domain names related to the March 2019 massacre at two Christchurch mosques; Jones made his sympathy for the killer quite clear afterward. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes went on Jones’ program and told listeners that the terrorist’s motives were legitimate:
When a guy who’s worried about or concerned about mass immigration of Muslims into Europe goes crazy and kills people, then they’re gonna blame all the rest of us who have the same concern. That’s how it’s gonna be used. And this is why we have to just fight back and say, “You know what, that doesn’t erase the fact that this is a problem. This is what drove this guy over the edge.”
Jones and Rhodes also avidly promoted the right-wing discussion about declaring civil war against liberals, particularly during Trump’s 2019 impeachment, when Jones warned: “If Trump falls, you and your family are next.” The connection between the Infowars and America First operation has often involved these contiguous talking points and their conspiracy theories, but after the 2020 election, they began appearing together at the same events.
Notably, both of them had speaking roles at the Nov. 12, 2020, “Millon MAGA March” protesting Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the election, while Rhodes’ Oath Keepers showed up to provide security. Fuentes promoted the rally on Parler: “[W]e will rally in DC this weekend. GROYPERS ARE GOING TO STOP THIS COUP!,” he wrote. On Twitter, he called the event “MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE.” For Jones, Biden’s election—which he insists only occurred through fraud—was the final apocalyptic straw, who concluded: “We must not comply. This is the final assault. It’s the takeover. And it’s here.”
Both men appeared at the Dec. 12 “Stop the Steal” rally, denouncing the election results. Jones predicted that Biden would be removed from office “one way or another,” while Fuentes denounced Republicans for their supposed weakness in preventing Trump’s loss, saying, “We are going to destroy the GOP.” Having helped whip up a frenzy among their followers both men were present during the Jan. 6 Trump rally at the Ellipse and at the Capitol siege that followed.
David Kaye, an online speech expert at the University of California-Irvine, told NPR that while figures like Jones and Fuentes maintain an appearance of operating within their own spheres, Epik and Monster—who describes far-right extremists as mere “shock jocks” who shouldn’t be taken seriously—have real culpability for the violence that ensues from their speech, because it’s being platformed on their business.
“He can say they’re just ‘shock jocks,’ but what we actually see is real world harm coming from the platforms,” he said. “So how much is somebody who is allowing that content to be hosted operating in real good faith?”
Hayden told NPR that the extremist sites Epik hosts are especially noteworthy for the violence they help engender. “The difference is there are people with terroristic ambitions plotting out in the open, producing propaganda that they seek to use to kind of encourage violence,” he said. “And those are the kind of websites Rob Monster is willing to pick up.”
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) watchdog report last month said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was abusing detained immigrants through the use of solitary confinement, but we already knew that.
This same watchdog last year found that ICE had held immigrants in solitary, which is torture, for months at a time. The year before that, years’ worth of government records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) revealed officials had been intentionally punishing particularly vulnerable detained immigrants with solitary confinement. The use of solitary confinement needs to end now, a nonprofit whistleblower protection agency tells DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Government Accountability Project (GAP) said Monday that its client, former DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) Policy Adviser Ellen Gallagher, “sounded the alarm bells internally around solitary confinement numerous times starting in 2014.” GAP said that Mayorkas was then-deputy DHS secretary under the Obama administration. But her “pleas for oversight were largely met with silence until she made her whistleblowing public in 2019.”
“Now, seven years after the department was made aware of ICE’s systematic violation of segregation policies, the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) finally completed a systemic audit and on October 13, 2021, issued a report that validated Ms. Gallagher’s disclosures, finding failures by ICE to collect, retain and report data about its use of solitary confinement and calling for enhanced oversight of segregation used in ICE detention facilities,” GAP continued.
That report revealed that in 72% of detention files examined by investigators, “no evidence” was found that officials considered some other alternative for immigrants they threw into solitary confinement.
“Even more alarming, detention facilities failed to consider alternatives to solitary in two-thirds of cases involving individuals with special vulnerabilities, like members of the LGBTQ community and people who experience mental illness,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said last month. “For those individuals, ICE policy explicitly states that solitary confinement may be used only as a last resort.”
NBC News reported in 2019 that the thousands of FOIA records received by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists spanning 2012 to 2017 had also revealed officials targeted the most vulnerable, including transgender people and people with mental illness. The report said that thousands of immigrants overall were thrown into solitary for extended periods of time, many “for reasons that have nothing to do with violating any rules,” NBC News said at the time.
“While the OIG report revealed many of ICE’s shortcomings, there is no way of knowing how many and to what extent immigrants were subjected to solitary confinement over the past seven years in ICE detention,” GAP said. The group made the plea as Mayorkas appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday for a “Oversight of the Department of Homeland Security” hearing.
That hearing has been unfortunately but unsurprisingly rife with Republicans like Texas Sen. John Cornyn feigning faux concern over the U.S. treatment of migrants when they really don’t care at all, because I’m guessing zero is the number of times he’ll support an end to the abuses described by investigators and advocates. But feel free to prove us wrong, John.
“ICE and its contractors’ abuse of solitary confinement, especially against those with mental illness, has led to record levels of death by suicide in recent years,” the ACLU continued. The group noted the deaths of Jean Jimenez-Joseph and Efrain De La Rosa. “Both men had histories of severe schizophrenia and psychosis, which was known to ICE, but jail officials sent them to solitary confinement anyway.” They’d been held at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, “notorious for abuse, medical neglect, and in-custody deaths,” Prism’s Tina Vasquez reported earlier this year.
“We applaud the DHS Inspector General’s report which provides a necessary, though delayed, data-informed survey of the use of solitary confinement within the ICE detention system,” said Dana Gold, GAP senior counsel and attorney for Gallagher. “Secretary Mayorkas—then, as now—is on notice of the improper and excessive use of solitary confinement. What is needed at this moment is accountability for seven years of failed oversight that allowed torture to occur across the ICE detention system in literally unverifiable numbers.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger remains in a precarious spot in Republican Party politics. He has been singled out by Donald Trump and, indeed, the entire fascist wing of the party for his failure to comply with Trump’s post-election demands that he “find” enough votes to overturn Trump’s Georgia loss. To alter the vote totals of an American election would be both criminal and a betrayal of the country; Trump may yet face criminal charges for attempting to intimidate Georgia officials into doing so. Raffensperger is already facing a primary challenge from Republicans who are irate over his refusal to help topple the government. It’s looking unlikely, at this point, that his party will return him to the office next year.
It’s tempting to mark Raffensperger down as the courageous sort after he stood up for a principle as basic as: “No, I’m not going to fraudulently alter the votes in a United States election based on the say-so of a delusional, barking lump of self-regard.” But the man is still devoted to a Republican Party that backed, and continues to back, those treasonous demands. He was unwilling to go to prison to help the party cheat, but he has otherwise toed the party line; he very quickly endorsed state Republican moves to make voting more difficult, each premised on the same “election fraud” notions he previously swore did not happen.
If anything, this should cleanly demonstrate just what it is that his party now finds unforgivable. He’s fully on board when it comes to finding new ways to keep Americans from voting. But the Republican was unwilling to commit crimes to erase Joe Biden’s Georgia win, and for that his fellow Republicans consider him an enemy of the party.
That’s the background that Raffensperger now brings to television interviews. And while MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan wrote that he was “stunned” after Raffensperger dodged question after question on whether he would support Trump’s reelection after Trump unleashed the whole of fascist America on Raffensperger and his family, it’s not so stunning if you remember that (1) Raffensperger is desperately trying to get back in good standing with his Republican Party and (2) Raffensperger is willing to remain silent as his party becomes a hoax-promoting, violence-provoking enemy of American democracy if that’s what it takes to meet requirement.
It ain’t that subtle, Mehdi. What we have here is a man who needs to be on the winning side of whatever happens, and whatever happens to the rest of you doesn’t enter into it.
Watch Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has been verbally abused & threatened by Trump, whose family got death threats from Trump supporters, *refuse* to rule out voting for Trump again in 2024, in an interview with me. I was stunned.pic.twitter.com/AGAYD89aXC
In the interview, Hasan repeatedly asks Raffensperger if Raffensperger would vote for Donald Trump to retake the presidency if the Republican Party again nominates the extortionist thug for the position. Raffensperger isn’t willing to answer either way, only saying he’s focused on his own reelection instead.
An incredulous Hasan: “This is a guy who incited violence against you and your family and you’re considering maybe voting for him? You’re not saying, tonight, no way am I ever voting for that guy?”
Yep! That’s exactly what Raffensperger is saying. You’re trying to get him to say that the man who led an attempted coup, the man who pressured him into falsifying election totals, the one who became so furious when Raffensperger and others refused to topple democracy for the sake of his own personal ego that he publicly marked Raffensperger as an enemy and unleashed, on his family and others, that large chunk of America that has been absolutely itching for the erasure of current government and the creation of a new one that would put violence-seeking white conservative men at the undisputed top of the nation’s power structure—you’re trying to get Raffensperger to say that man is unfit to be president on national television.
If Raffensperger were the sort of patriot who could unflinchingly say that members of his party who rely on hoaxes, thuggery, extortion, and mob violence should absolutely be condemned and rejected, he would answer the question speedily. But Raffensperger just told you he’s focused on his own reelection, not whether the country should be governed by autocrats, so there you go.
The last thing he’s going to do is condemn his party’s Dear Leader figure during his fight to convince the party that he is not, in fact, their sworn enemy.
Raffensperger’s been willing to tolerate the death threats because, again, his alternative is abandoning the party. In his personal hierarchy of needs, maintaining his own position of authority is of more importance than whether the party that has given him that authority has devolved into one that defends criminality in service to party goals.
There are Republican pundits who have abandoned the party and condemned Trump rather than be associated with such evils. The number of elected Republicans willing to do the same—how many have appeared? How many have told voters, “I will not be a part of this”?
We have now heard all we need to hear from Raffensperger. Journalists, pundits, and Democrats all focused their eyes on him when it was learned that he had rejected the Trump White House’s insistence that he needed to recount the votes by whatever new standard he could invent that would give Trump a win; the state of the Republican Party is so rancid that the sight of a single named official refusing Trump—after the whole party rallied around him to protect him from a litany of corruptions, and for years—was a man-bites-dog moment. The not-crackpot parts of the nation have been looking for heroes willing to condemn the party’s corruption: Could this, finally, be one of them?
We soon learned that the answer was no. No, being unwilling to go to prison in a far-fetched scheme to erase vote totals and write in new ones, a scheme that would never survive even a cursory audit afterwards, would not extend to condemning the myriad party officials who were furious when it didn’t happen. Raffensperger has been attempting to make nice with his party ever since, and if that means suggesting to television viewers that this whole attempted crime thing, the attempted overthrow of democracy, the deaths, the death threats, and the rest have still not definitively disqualified Trump from being the great Dear Leader other party thugs consider him to be … so be it.
We’ve got it. Brad is a company man, and this is all we’ll be getting from him. We can stop inviting him to display courage now; it will only get more humiliating for him and for his interviewers from here on in.
