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On Wednesday, the Tennessee State Senate voted 22-10 to pass a bill that criminalizes homelessness in the the Volunteer State. The bill, sponsored by right-wing extremist state Sen. Paul Bailey, “expands punishments for unauthorized camping on state-owned property to all public property.” It will now be sent to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk for his signature. It is expected to be signed into law as Lee is the kind of guy who ignored children’s pleas to not allow “permitless” gun ownership in Tennessee.

The bill gives local authorities the discretion to bring more severe charges against unhoused Americans. Proponents of the bill say that they’ve tried nothing, and since nothing has worked, we need to allow police to scatter encampments of unhoused people, or threaten them with jail. Opponents of the bill say that instead of wasting resources on destroying campsites, we could apply that same energy and purpose towards building housing that people can afford, or even help subsidize homes and shelter for people.

During the state senate floor debate on Wednesday, Republican state Sen. Frank Nicely got up to talk about homelessness and the need to light a fire under homeless folks. Nicely is given to revisionist history lessons lauding treason and fascism, and Wednesday’s tedious folkism was no different. In fact, this was an inspirational story about Adolf Hitler.

Nicely began by saying: “I haven’t given y’all a history lesson in a while and I wanted to give a little history on homelessness.” Maybe one of the reasons Nicely hasn’t y’all’d up a history lesson for a few months is because the last time he did, he told the world that the South not only didn’t lose the Civil War in 1865 when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered—they’re actually “winning.”

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Nicely then launched in: “Nineteen and ten, Hitler decided to live on the streets. So for two years Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses. And then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. So, a lot of these people it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler’s case a very unproductive life.”

Let’s follow your logic: Hitler was homeless for a time and then became the historic monstrous antisemite who ruined a mustache and set of names for generations, and this means that homeless people can be important people to history—but don’t be Hitler. Or be like Hitler, but more “productive?”

Side note: The Tennessee blunderhead even got this history wrong: Hitler was fancying himself a struggling artist in Vienna, Austria, and went from being unhoused in 1909 to a men’s hostel set up exactly for the purpose of housing homeless Germans in 1910.*

Double side note: According to City-Date.com and bestplaces.com, the Strawberry Plains region of Tennessee that Nicely represents matches the financial demographics of the medians in income and housing costs of the rest of the state, but is also about 95% white. That’s pretty homogeneous for Tennessee. Guess that’s where that “we didn’t lose the Civil War” talk comes from?

Nicely’s comments were in opposition to Democratic state Sen. Brenda Gilmore of Nashville, who wondered how criminalizing being poor helped children. “It just breaks my heart that we are criminalizing people who have no where else to go. And if you take and incarcerate their parents, then I think that again only multiplies the issue of taking their parents away from these children simply because they are poor.”

RELATED STORY: Tennessee Republican stands in chamber, claims the Civil War isn’t over—and the ‘South is winning’

Open Table Nashville’s Paula Foster said the state senate’s vote filled her with “Sadness and disgust.” She went on to point out the obvious need for real solutions. “The answer to homelessness and we’ve said it over and over is more housing. We need to put the resources that we are spending making more laws that are clearly inhumane into the resources we need to build more housing units.”

Cathy Jennings, director of the local news paper sold by homeless people, The Contributor, told the Tennessean: “The only answer to homelessness is housing. Not fines. Fines just push people out of sight, further away from existing services, and make it harder for them to become housed.”

Director of Homeless and Supportive Housing in Chattanooga Sam Wolfe told News Channel 9: “If every single person experiencing homelessness in our community showed up to shelters and said, ‘Yes, please give me a place to sleep,’ the reality is that there’s not enough spaces for them.” Being diplomatic, Wolfe went on to try and appeal to the drip of humanity that may or may not be left in Tennessee GOP legislators. “I think that really underscores the importance for us to act sooner rather than later to create those options for folks. It doesn’t take an ordinance going through the Senate for anyone to look in our community and see that the problem of homelessness is far greater than it ever has been.”

Here is the American embarrassment that is Frank Nicely.

*The hostel was set up and funded by wealthy Jewish families, by the by.

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Right-wing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s political stunt that has forced commercial truckers to undergo unnecessary secondary inspections and resulted in massive delays and financial losses has been an absolute trainwreck—and he knows it.

That’s why he sat down for a photo opportunity on Wednesday to sign a supposed deal with the governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo León. The agreement purports to “ease commercial traffic at the Laredo-Colombia bridge,” The Texas Tribune reports. Patting himself on the back for claiming to nix a problem he created—gotta hand it to that guy.

But in reality, the agreement “provides little relief for the overall trade logjam” created by Abbott in retaliation for the Biden administration’s just decision to stop enforcing Stephen Miller’s anti-asylum Title 42 policy. A dozen other crossings remain impacted by Abbott’s stunt, including the Pharr Bridge, the busiest crossing in terms of getting Mexican produce to the U.S.

RELATED STORY: Greg Abbott’s own party slams his unnecessary secondary inspections as ‘political theater’

While he may have gotten one Mexican governor to sit for a photo op with him, Abbott is overall at the center of international ire. In the U.S., the White House has criticized the inspections as “unnecessary and redundant,” adding that food disruptions are “raising prices for families in Texas and across the country.” Customs and Border Protection also called the inspections “unnecessary,” noting they happen after commercial vehicles have been “comprehensively inspected and cleared to enter the United States by CBP.”

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Across the border, “Mexico’s government said in a statement it ‘rejects’ the inspections imposed by Texas,” Reuters reported, estimating “significant revenue” losses for both nations. The Texas Tribune reports that the governors of two Mexican states have also criticized Abbott’s stunt as “overzealous,” with Chihuahua’s governor “concerned over how the added inspections have affected both countries’ economies,” the report said.

Mexican truckers have also mounted protests over the stunt, recently telling The Texas Tribune that “no one has told us what the reason for this is or asked what solutions we can come up with together … All we know is that it’s an order from the governor of Texas.”

As previously noted, Abbott is also facing pressure from within his own party, after Texas Agriculture commissioner and fellow right-winger Sid Miller slammed the stunt as “political theater” and “economy killing action.” The policy forcing unnecessary secondary inspections “has been such a disaster that Abbott was even excoriated for it by the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page,” The Washington Post noted.

“Idled trucks are costing businesses millions of dollars a day and risk food spoilage,” that editorial said. “Supermarkets are scrambling to restock shelves.” It also pointed to a complaint from Miller, who said that Abbott’s political stunt would lead to $5 avocados. Hey, as a Mexican American, I’d be mad too.

“Texas food-growers say enhanced border inspections are threatening business,” KVUE reported. Little Bear Produce, a grower and shipper of green onions and melons, said it’s had trucks stuck for two to three days. 

“These fruits and vegetables that we’re bringing are perishable, they’re highly perishable, especially the greens,” Senior Vice President of Business Affairs Bret Erickson told the outlet. “So every hour, every day, that goes by, the quality of these products are diminishing. Once you harvest the commodity, it’s a race to get it to the grocery store shelf, so that you can get it to the final end use, consumer, as fresh as possible.”

Abbott knows he created a big fucking mess, which is why he’s tried really hard to make his grotesque bussing of asylum-seekers to Washington, D.C., the story everyone pays attention to. He’s already pledged to do it again.

“As a long-time DC resident, I hate seeing our town used again as a political prop,” American Immigration Council Senior Policy Counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted to Abbott. “Guess what, Greg Abbott. We’re not afraid of migrants. We are a vibrant immigrant community that has already welcomed tens of thousands of migrants in the last few years. We have heart—unlike you.”

RELATED STORIES: Abbott’s increased truck inspections in response to Biden admin leading to huge delays, rotting food

Local advocates say they’re ready to aid asylum-seekers sent to D.C. under Abbott’s despicable stunt

Escobar says Abbott’s plan to get asylum-seekers out of Texas is more ‘politics of hate and cruelty’

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Months after his initial subpoena, former President Donald Trump’s senior aide and speechwriter Stephen Miller is reportedly testifying before the Jan. 6 committee on Thursday.

The select committee is steadily rolling toward what will soon be weeks of public hearings beginning in late May or June. Private depositions, including this one with Miller, however, are still helping investigators tick off any final boxes in a probe that has collected more than 800 interviews behind closed doors. 

RELATED STORY: Stephen Miller sues to block cell phone records because he’s on his parents’ family plan

According to the Associated Press, sources were unclear on whether Miller would appear in person or virtually. A committee spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment to Daily Kos.

The New York Times reported just 24 hours ago that the committee met with two of Trump’s most trusted attorneys, Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin, on Wednesday. They were not formally subpoenaed. The attorneys were not under oath nor was their testimony transcribed. They are, however, likely to return, and on those visits, their engagement with the committee could be more formal. 

Why the attorneys would meet with the committee this week is also being kept under wraps, but the National Archives on Wednesday did notify the panel it would soon begin transmitting a completely new tranche of records from the Trump White House.  

National Archives Letter to Transmit Records Notice by Daily Kos on Scribd

Those documents are expected to be remitted to the committee within 15 days—barring a court order stopping the hand-off.

This February, Trump notified National Archivist David Ferriero that he would claim privilege over thousands of records in what will now be the seventh transmission. 

Trump to Archives Feb 2022 by Daily Kos on Scribd

Trump has been on a consistent losing streak, though, in trying to legally shroud Jan. 6 documents from Congress. President Joe Biden overruled Trump’s executive privilege assertions, and courts have reinforced that decision.

The Archives will soon hand off Philbin’s records to the probe and that includes correspondence about the lawsuits he launched on Trump’s behalf to challenge Biden’s electoral victory. As for Cipollone, he was present for many meetings of critical importance to the Jan. 6 committee’s probe. 

Cipollone was privy to meetings where Trump allegedly leaned on his other attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to call the Department of Homeland Security and demand that voting machines be seized because of widescale fraud. 

That fraud was non-existent, but nonetheless, Trump raised the prospect on more than one occasion.

Cipollone and Philbin were also in the room when Attorney General Bill Barr tendered his resignation to Trump. In his recent book, Barr described the scene as explosive with Trump’s face “quivering” in anger when Barr rejected his insistent claim that there was fraud in the 2020 election.

Miller’s appearance, meanwhile, signals a continued tightening of the committee’s focus on Trump’s innermost circle. Whether Trump asserted privilege over Miller’s testimony Thursday remains to be seen. He reportedly offered his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner a chance to invoke privilege during their appearance. 

Neither took him up on the offer.

RELATED STORY: It’s a family affair: Ivanka Trump appears before Jan. 6 probe

Investigators want to interview Miller about his role in Trump’s “alternate elector” scheme. In an interview with Fox in December 2020, Miller openly vowed that Trump’s so-called alternates would keep the president in power because they had the ability to stop or delay the certification of electoral votes.

Those electors, however, were unsanctioned and unrecognized in every state they formed in. The National Archives ultimately rejected all alternate slates for certification. The last hope for Trump to stay in power was to have then Vice President Mike Pence stop the proceedings. Pence did not.

There are also questions about Miller’s involvement in crafting Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. The ex-senior adviser has a penchant for inciteful rhetoric.

Trump’s onetime bodyman turned personnel director John McEntee met with investigators on Wednesday, too. It was revealed in November that McEntee played a critical role in having Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper ousted despite being a political neophyte with zero experience in the defense arena.

He was, however, one of Trump’s pets inside the administration because he took it upon himself to root out any and all anti-Trump sentiment in the White House’s ranks and report on his findings. 

RELATED STORY: Newly revealed memo firing former Defense Secretary reveals unsettling influence of Trump’s stooges

The Times reported that other Trump White House officials like Anthony Ornato and White House lawyer Eric Herschmann appeared this week. 

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Here’s a story that encompasses the total, flaming, corrupt disaster of U.S. politics and media all at once. In late 2020, Donald Trump told then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about his plans to overturn his election loss—and McConnell remained silent because saying publicly that Trump should stop trying to overturn the election would have jeopardized Republican chances in January 2021’s Georgia Senate runoffs. That’s the flaming corrupt disaster of U.S. politics part. The flaming corrupt disaster of U.S. media part is that we are learning this now, in 2022, because some New York Times reporters saved it for a book.

Yes, once again we are learning information that it would have been good to learn at the time it was happening, or at least as soon as reporters became aware of it, more than a year later so that people with regular salaried jobs as reporters can juice their book sales.

RELATED STORY: The way The New York Times reported the story of missing documents says more about them than Trump

The reporters this time are Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. Back in February, it was fellow New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who waited for her book to reveal that White House residence staff would find toilets clogged with paper and believed that Trump was trying to flush documents. In Nov. 2021, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl came out with a book revealing that, in the run-up to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had sent Mike Pence’s top aide a memo outlining a plan to overturn the election. In September 2020, Bob Woodward released a book revealing that in February and March of that year, Trump had repeatedly told him how dangerous the coronavirus was, in complete contradiction to his public message or his administration’s actions, and admitted that he “wanted to always play it down.”

I am almost certainly missing some.

Time after time, reporters get information that is genuinely important for the general public to learn about, important for the future of the democracy, and … they sit on it for months, the better to collect a big advance and rack up sales. In the past, these after-the-fact revelations were more likely to be gossip, details about internal blow-ups, and backstabbing. Thanks to Trump and the increasingly extremist, anti-democratic Republican Party, these days, the revelations are literally information about an attempted coup. That’s not something you save for the book, unless your sole concerns are money and a glitzy book roll-out with lots of high-profile coverage. Which, to be real about it, is how the entire New York Times politics desk operates these days, to a degree that shows it’s coming from the top.

So, yeah, it’s terrible that a Senate leader heard about plans to overturn an election that he knew to have been legal and fair and kept his mouth shut because he was worried about losing the next election. But it’s not the first time McConnell has done something like that, as when he blocked the Obama administration from blowing the whistle on Russian election interference in 2016. Mitch McConnell has one concern in the world, and that is Republican power. He will always act to get more of it.

But people like McConnell get the ability to act that way when no one holds them to account. When, for instance, the media doesn’t hold them to account. When the media reports brazen lies from one party as holding the same weight as largely truthful statement from the other party. And when the media simply does not report what’s going on until months after the fact because it benefits the careers of individual reporters to hold back information.

RELATED STORIES:

How much did Mitch McConnell know about Russian interference and when did he know it?

Woodward has Trump on tape admitting he deliberately underplayed the threat of COVID-19

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The longer the savagery of Russian President Vladimir Putin drags on in Ukraine, the more the conflict calls into question Donald Trump’s relentless fealty to a man who is increasingly viewed as perpetrating genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The headline of one of Wednesday’s lead stories on Politico read, “As Ukraine war intensifies, questions from first Trump impeachment linger.”

The story notes that Trump withholding military assistance from Ukraine in exchange for a political favor from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may seem distant, but it has “a direct tie-in to today’s war.”

In the piece, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump summarily ousted from the position, says she still harbors many unanswered questions about the entire episode.

But with so many books being written by key Trump administration figures, Yovanovitch expects the truth will out eventually.

“I expect … that there will be more details forthcoming,” she says.

Indeed, keep ’em coming.

But the basic fact that Trump tried to kneecap Ukraine and Zelenskyy must remain top of mind as Republicans try to blame some fallout from Putin’s war, such as higher gas prices, on President Joe Biden. In fact, by acquitting Trump during his first impeachment trial, Republicans blessed Trump’s role in weakening Ukraine and emboldening Putin.

But Trump’s first impeachment scandal is just one discrete part of an entire “litany of Trump-Russia intersections,” as The New York Times put it in a remarkable piece featuring Russia expert and former Trump national security aide Fiona Hill. In a single paragraph, the Times connected these dots:

1. Trump’s decades-long pursuit of business opportunities in Moscow.

2. Trump’s persistent Putin worship.

3. Trump campaign aide J.D. Gordon weakening support for Ukraine in the GOP’s 2016 platform.

4. Gordon dining with Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak that same week.

5. Longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone asking WikiLeaks through a third party to send along forthcoming Clinton campaign emails stolen by Russian hackers.

6. Trump announcing: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

7. The Seychelles islands getaway in which military contractor and Betsy DeVos sibling Erik Prince huddled with the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund to establish a pre-inaugural backchannel to Russia.

8. Former Trump 2016 Campaign Chief Paul Manafort sharing internal polling with Russian intelligence operative Konstantin V. Kilimnik.

9. Trump’s mysteriously undocumented two-hour meeting with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, after which Trump publicly sided with Putin over the U.S. intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

10. Trump & Co. spreading Russian disinformation in 2019 asserting that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election to help Clinton.

11. Trump’s pardoning of both Manafort and Stone in December 2020.

12. Trump more recently calling Putin a “genius” and soliciting him to release dirt on President Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

That’s a succinct dirty dozen, and it’s still just the tip of the iceberg. But all of these threads teased out over the course of the last handful of years is exactly why the phrase “Trump-Putin axis” is so resonant, particularly in light of Russia’s corrupt war and the unconscionable war crimes Putin is committing in Ukraine.

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Despite the instant birth of 1,000 hilarious memes, it turns out that Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva (“Moscow”), isn’t currently being harvested by Ukrainian tractors scouring the seafloor. It is, however, reportedly being towed back to port after suffering serious damage and a fire as a result of a strike from two Neptune missiles launched by a shore battery.

Earlier this week, the site Small Wars Journal, warned that: “… Ukraine can easily achieve a resounding victory that would combine massive substantive defeats for the Russians with tremendous symbolism and loss of prestige for Russia in addition to greatly affecting the way ground combat plays out in the south and east. I am talking about the near-annihilation of the Russian Navy presence in the Black Sea, including the entirety or almost the entirety of the substantive portion of the Black Sea Fleet.”

That sentiment echoed statements from Daily Kos community member Kokopelli2018 who wrote back on April 5 about the possibility of sinking the Moskva and the rest of the Black Sea fleet. 

On Thursday morning, it’s clear that removing “Russian warship” from the battlefield was accomplished with a plan that took practice and timing. Still, the ultimate cost of a couple of Neptunes vs. what was surely the hundreds of millions invested in the missile cruiser has elevated the question of “is the age of warships over?” just as Russia’s loss of 500+ tanks has raised the question of “is the age of tanks over?”

The answer to both is almost certainly “No.” But it’s a modified no.

Tanks—a device originally developed with idea of countering trenches and machinegun nests—have proven themselves to be effective means of projecting force on the battlefield in a way that, for the last century, was hard to counter with anything short of another tank. That value is still there, but now that a tank can be taken down with handheld weaponry that can be produced at a fraction of the cost, its worth as a piece that can take, defend, and decisively occupy territory is greatly diminished. In a battlefield of drones and missiles, a tank is a relatively slow-moving target, and despite the cleverness of alloys and ceramics and active explosive defensive systems, its armor no longer means it’s all but immune to anything but another member of its own species.

Ships have held that role at sea for far, far longer. From Actium to Trafalgar to Leyte Gulf, ships have been the ultimate form of power projection. In the modern age, they’ve been both mobile gun platforms capable of targeting sites far inland with massive shells, landing strips for planes that can range out thousands of miles, and the launching points of both short range and long range missiles. What does Russia … or China … or the United States want do when they want to show someone they mean business? They park a carrier group on their doorstep, putting an incredible nexus of power just seconds away.

But is that power now as questionable as that of land-based armor? In The Age of Missiles, where every nation with a coastline is capable of fielding low-cost weapons that punch out a hundred miles from shore, is a big ship sitting on the horizon anything but a target? The answer is … we don’t know.

There have been questions about the continued value of large ships for a long time. And there’s absolutely no doubt that the billions spent on ships ranging from cruisers to aircraft carriers are heavily swayed by feelings of tradition, national pride, and more than a little “hey, that’s a lot of jobs in my district.” Whether they are worth what they cost is an extremely good question.

But we really don’t know what the near-sinking of the Moskva says about naval power overall. Right now, we know that it says don’t build your missile cruisers with such a useless defensive system that if you’re directing your radar somewhere else, it can’t see an incoming missile. We don’t know a lot more than that. Both on land and at sea, Russia’s defensive systems have proved astoundingly flawed. However that could be just another example of Russia’s vast and public grift-driven incompetence.

Naval actions are so incredibly rare, that the only active service ship in the U.S. Navy which has ever sunk another ship in battle is the U.S.S. Constitution, which did its damage during the War of 1812. The Moskva is only the second cruiser-class ship taken down since World War II (Argentina lost one during the Falklands War). 

There’s a real danger in drawing a general example from a single incident. Even so, you can bet every admiral on the planet is sweating this morning. And when it comes to the Black Sea fleet, that sweat may be enough to raise the waterline.

It’s likely Moskva will be towed to Sevastopol, which is the home of Russia’s southern fleet. They even rented the spot from Ukraine before Putin decided to just take Crimea and save himself the monthly payments. Right now, the port at Sevastopol is about 140 miles from territory definitively controlled by Ukraine, making the ships in harbor safe from additional missile attacks. Probably. But every step that Ukraine takes in recapturing the territory north of Crimea, is also a step toward making Sevastopol a scrapyard for the Russian navy. 

And oh yeah, and idea that Russia ever had about a naval invasion of Odesa? That is long gone.

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As most LGBTQ+ people know, we can face queerphobia pretty much anywhere and from anyone. This is especially true if you live with multiple marginalized identities or are visibly “different” in some way. Sadly, likely due to increased hysteria and hatred from the right, it seems people are not only unleashing vitriol toward adults but on children.

For example, Twitter user Robbie Pierce tweeted a heartbreaking thread on Wednesday, April 13 detailing what he says occurred while he, his husband, and their two children were riding the Amtrak for a trip. Pierce said a stranger approached the family and shouted to their small children that Pierce and his husband were “pedophiles” who “stole” them and accused them of being “rapists” and an “abomination.” According to Pierce, this all unfolded in front of his children, who, unsurprisingly, began crying.

RELATED: The GOP loves to pretend to love the military. Will they love this move from the Air Force?

The full thread is ten posts long, and you can click through this first one to read the entire thing on Twitter.

In his thread, Pierce said it was no longer an “absurd, abstract” attack from a disembodied voice on the internet, but a real horror his children were forced to deal with. Pierce says he handled the situation by removing his children while his husband shouted at the stranger to leave them alone.

According to Pierce, a conductor eventually handled the situation, and the man was arrested after refusing to exit the train. Though Pierce’s thread has gone viral, and he spoke to The Daily Dot in an interview, his claims have not been independently verified.

Pierce told the outlet his children, who are five and six years old, woke up in tears several times the night after the confrontation. “We just talked to them and held them and slept with the light on,” Pierce told the outlet, adding that they know there is “nothing scary” about their family. He also shared he’s faced homophobic attacks before, but the accusations of pedophilia and rape are new to them. Pierce also noted his family lives in Los Angeles, California, so they feel it’s possible they’ve been somewhat sheltered from attacks like this one.

In his thread, Pierce thanks Fox, Rupert Murdoch, J. K. Rowling, and Qanon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for stirring up their “lucrative culture war,” in addition to “everyone else who harms kids” and thinks it’s “politically expedient” to project hate onto families like his.

While we obviously are missing some details for this particular story, it’s safe to say rhetoric from conservatives is downright dangerous. We’ve seen teachers attacked over mask mandates, AAPI folks attacked for simply existing, and we see police brutality against people of color—and especially Black men—on a disturbingly regular basis. And yet Republicans have no problem spewing anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant white supremacy if it means they get a few more votes.

Republicans like to defend their anti-choice stance by saying they’re protecting the vulnerable, but they actually love to attack the vulnerable if it allows them to distract their voter base from the real issues and their failures to lead.

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

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Elon Musk is a shady plutocrat who has historically benefited from good PR, but his current shenanigans with Twitter might put a little dent in that. After becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder—and violating securities law by failing to disclose it in a timely fashion—Musk was briefly poised to join the company’s board. Then that fell apart, with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal including the interesting detail that Musk’s entry onto the board would have been contingent on a background check. Now, Musk has announced an offer to buy Twitter and make it a private company, which he says would “unlock” the company’s “extraordinary potential.”

Musk’s signature company, Tesla, lost one racism discrimination lawsuit, with an initial judgment of $137 million recently reduced to $15 million. Other Black employees describe a horrifyingly, overtly racist environment at Tesla’s California plant, spurring a major discrimination lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. The idea of Musk being the last word on acceptable speech at a major social media platform is alarming, to say the least.

RELATED STORY: Man who climbed up government-funded ladder endorses burning ladder now that he’s safely at the top

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk said in a letter to the head of Twitter’s board.

“However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form,” he wrote. “Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

Again, there’s reason to worry about a societal imperative for free speech as determined by someone who oversees a company at which Black employees are assigned particularly difficult work in a section of the factory referred to as “the plantation,” a Black worker was fired after complaining that a supervisor called him and other Black workers “monkeys,” and use of the N-word was “the norm. It was Tesla’s tradition.” Musk may not be in that factory every day doing those things himself, but he owns it. Literally.

Musk’s takeover bid came with a threat (which he insisted, super believably, was “not a threat”): If he’s not successful, he would “need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” In other words, he would dump his stock, to the detriment of other shareholders. On the other hand, Twitter would not be owned by Elon freaking Musk.

Musk’s self-presentation is as a completely self-made billionaire (never mind his dad’s emerald mine lurking in the background), but even as he rails against taxing people like himself, he’s benefited significantly from government funding through his career, as Greg Sargent and others have pointed out. As of 2015, his companies had gotten $4.9 billion in government money. 

The $150 million or so Musk made by not complying with securities law and revealing his Twitter stock purchases in a timely fashion isn’t the only time he’s gotten in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, either. In 2018, he had to step down as Tesla’s chair and paid $40 million in penalties ($20 million from himself and $20 million from Tesla) after he … used tweets to claim he was taking Tesla private, causing “significant market disruption.” Sound familiar?

This is not a trustworthy or honest person.

In a brief statement, Twitter said its board “will carefully review the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the Company and all Twitter stockholders.”

RELATED STORIES: 

Don’t buy a Tesla unless you’re okay with Black workers being brutalized by racist managers

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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Daniel Donner, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

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Leading Off

● AL-Gov: While Alabama’s Republican Senate primary has attracted considerably more attention than any other race on the May 24 ballot, the expensive GOP contest for governor may beat it for sheer bigotry. Incumbent Kay Ivey’s latest spot attempts to rally the party’s xenophobic base, while a transphobic commercial from one of her challengers, businessman Tim James, forced a school to increase security. And former Ambassador to Slovenia Lindy Blanchard, who is the top spender in this race, made news earlier this month with a commercial of her own declaring, “Lindy believes the election was stolen from Trump. Kay Ivey thinks Biden’s victory was legitimate.”

Ivey has been running a series of ads trying to cultivate the far-right vote by embracing the Big Lie and attacking “[t]ransgender sports,” but now she’s hitting another topic. This time, the governor tells the audience, “If Joe Biden keeps shipping illegal immigrants into our states, we’re all going to have to learn Spanish.” She’s none too happy with that (delusional) prospect, continuing, “My message to Biden: no way, José. That’s why I sent national guard troops to protect the Southern border.” The head of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama blasted Ivey’s message, though unsurprisingly, she hasn’t backed off in the slightest.

Neither has James, who is continuing to focus almost completely on anti-trans bigotry in his advertising campaign. The challenger’s recent ad features him claiming that “right here in Alabama, millions of your tax dollars are paying for the first transgender public school in the South” as the on-screen text identifies the Magic City Acceptance Academy and features photos of its students.

The institution, which describes itself as an “LGBTQ-affirming learning environment,” said it had to boost its own security measures after someone showed up and attempted to film pupils while quoting Bible verses at them. The principal blamed James’ ad for the incident, as well as for “a carload or two” of people yelling at students. But when asked about what happened, James blithely responded, “The principal said that the TV ad scared the children. What should scare mothers and fathers of these children is what the faculty is doing by presenting this ungodly display through the drag show to which the children were subjected.”

So far, polls have found that Ivey, who earned the NRA’s endorsement this week, has largely been successful in outflanking both James and Blanchard on the far right. A mid-March survey for the local media put the governor at 46%, which is just shy of the majority she needs to avoid a runoff, with James and Blanchard far back at 12% and 10%, respectively; Ivey’s own internals from around that time, meanwhile, showed her taking about 60% of the vote.

However, we haven’t seen more recent numbers, and the governor’s opponents are hoping that their own heavy spending has helped them shift things. NBC reports that Blanchard, who has been self-funding her bid, has outspent Ivey $4.1 million to $3.2 million in ads, while James has deployed $2.2 million.

The Downballot

● This week on The Downballot, we nerd out with Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight, whose path from hobbyist to full-time election analyst closely mirrors the Daily Kos Elections story. Rakich discusses how gerrymandering might have made for a more equal congressional playing field but not necessarily a fair one; what kind of redistricting commissions have actually worked best; and some of the key bellwether districts he’ll be looking at to judge what sort of night Democrats can expect in November.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also dig into a hard-to-explain decision by a major Democratic super PAC to take sides in an Oregon House primary; what the 2022 version of a well-established prediction model says about the midterms; New York’s truly screwed-up system for electing and replacing lieutenant governors, and the results of the first round of France’s presidential election. You can listen to The Downballot on all major podcast platforms, and you’ll find a transcript right here by noon Eastern Time.

1Q Fundraising

• MN-Gov: Tim Walz (D-inc): $1 million raised, $4.1 million cash-on-hand
• AZ-04: Greg Stanton (D-inc): $980,000 raised, $2.4 million cash-on-hand
• CA-03: Kevin Kiley (R): $1.1 million raised, $814,000 cash-on-hand
• CO-07: Tim Reichert (R): $339,000 raised, additional $500,000 self-funded, $712,000 cash-on-hand
• IN-09: Erin Houchin (R): $375,000 raised
• MI-07: Elissa Slotkin (D-inc): $1.3 million raised, $5.5 million cash-on-hand; Tom Barrett (R): $458,000 raised
• NH-01: Chris Pappas (D-inc): $500,000 raised, $2 million cash-on-hand
• NV-04: Steven Horsford (D-inc): $500,000 raised, $1.94 million cash-on-hand
• NY-16: Vedat Gashi (D): $470,000 raised (in one month)

Senate

● AZ-Sen: Wealthy businessman Jim Lamon, who ran a commercial earlier this year that depicted him firing a gun at Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, is now embracing Easter hope and optimism in his new ad for the August GOP primary. “But we must never forget, even in our darkest days, Almighty God is in charge,” says Lamon, continuing, “With faith, he will show us the way. Easter—when darkness and despair were transformed into life and hope.” Lamon’s spot, which is also available in Spanish, doesn’t actually mention he’s even running for any office, much less Senate, except at the very end as he approves his message.

● NC-Sen: Cheri Beasley is spending six figures on her first TV spot for the May 17 Democratic primary, where she faces little opposition. Beasley emphasizes her past career as a public defender, saying, “I represented North Carolinians who couldn’t afford a lawyer—because everyone has a right to representation, no matter who you are or where you’re from.” She continues, “As a judge and chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, I led with a commitment to justice and integrity.”

● ND-Sen, ND-AL: Candidate filing closed Monday for North Dakota’s June 14 primary, and the secretary of state has a list of contenders here. There won’t be much to see, though, as Sen. John Hoeven faces only minor GOP primary opposition in this very red state while Rep. Kelly Armstrong, a fellow Republican, has no intra-party foe. Hoeven briefly faced a primary challenge from state Rep. Rick Becker, but Becker dropped out last month after he failed to win the state party endorsement.

● NH-Sen: A newly hired consultant for Republican Vikram Mansharamani, who is an author and investor, confirms that his client is considering entering the September primary to take on Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan. WMUR says that Mansharamani “is expected to make a decision about launching a campaign within the next two weeks.”

● OH-Sen: Former GOP chair Jane Timken avoids going after any of her many intra-party rivals in her new spot for the May 3 primary and instead blames Joe Biden for inflation.

Governors

● GA-Gov: Last week a group called Get Georgia Right began airing an ad that echoed Trump by using the Big Lie against Gov. Brian Kemp, and Politico’s Alex Isenstadt now reports that the organization received $500,000 from Trump’s super PAC last month. Kemp, though, maintains a massive financial edge heading into his May 24 Republican primary against Trump’s candidate, former Sen. David Perdue: Isenstadt writes that the incumbent and his allies so far have spent $11.4 million on TV compared to just $2.7 million for Perdue’s side.

Kemp is also continuing to make use of his financial edge by running new ads where he praises himself for lifting Georgia’s “lockdown” all the way back in April of 2020, a move even Trump said at the time was happening “too soon.”

● KS-Gov: Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s allies at the Kansas Values Institute have launched a new ad against state Attorney General Derek Schmidt that ties the likely Republican nominee to former GOP Gov. Sam Brownback, who left office deeply unpopular in 2018. The spot quotes Schmidt saying that Brownback “delivered time and again” for the state before reminding viewers that the former governor’s draconian budget policies resulted in “devastating cuts to our schools” and “dismal job growth.” The narrator further quotes Brownback praising Schmidt as “like minded” and argues that electing the latter would “take Kansas back to Brownback.”

● MD-Gov: Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich has endorsed former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez ahead of the crowded July Democratic primary for governor. Montgomery County, a jurisdiction in the D.C. suburbs where Perez also served on the County Council from 2002 to 2006, is the largest in the state at just over one million residents.

Meanwhile, former U.S. Education Secretary John King has launched his first ads in the Democratic primary, which the campaign says is backed by a six-figure buy. One of the spots opens with King noting that it took his family “three generations to travel 25 miles” from the Maryland farm where his great-grandparents were enslaved to Silver Spring, where his daughter goes to public school, simultaneously highlighting King’s deep roots in the state and links to education. The other commercial relays how both of King’s parents died when he was a child but his public school teachers helped him succeed and go on to become a teacher, principal, and education secretary under President Obama.

● NE-Gov: The Nebraska Examiner has collected fundraising numbers from the first quarter for all the GOP candidates competing in the May 10 primary:

• University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen: $2.4 million raised, $2.9 million cash-on-hand
• State Sen. Brett Lindstrom: $420,000 raised, $580,000 cash-on-hand
• Former State Sen. Theresa Thibodeau: $159,000 raised, additional $10,000 self-funded, $62,000
• Agribusinessman Charles Herbster: $113,000 raised, additional $4.2 million self-funded, $543,000 cash-on-hand

State Sen. Carol Blood, who has no serious opposition for the Democratic nod, took in $50,000 during this time and had $36,000 on hand.

● NM-Gov: Fundraising reports are in covering the period spanning Oct. 5 to April 4, and they give us our first look at the financial strength for the entire GOP primary field:

• 2020 Senate nominee Mark Ronchetti: $2.1 million raised, $1.56 million cash-on-hand
• State Rep. Rebecca Dow: $711,000 raised, additional $40,000 self-funded, $684,000 cash-on-hand
• Retired Army National Guard Brig. Gen. Greg Zanetti: $169,000 raised, $172,000 cash-on-hand
• Sandoval County Commissioner Jay Block: $119,000 raised, $20,000 cash-on-hand
• Anti-abortion activist Ethel Maharg: $13,000 raised, $800 cash-on-hand

The winner of the June nomination fight will take on Democratic incumbent Michelle Lujan Grisham, who raised $2.67 million and had $3.78 million on-hand.

● PA-Gov: A day after Donald Trump unloaded on former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain and told Republican primary voters not to vote for “a coward, who let our Country down,” McSwain’s allies at the Commonwealth Leaders Fund say they are “currently assessing what all this means for the primary election.” The group already spent roughly $6 million backing McSwain, who previously appeared to be a top contender in the crowded May 17 GOP primary until Trump issued his anti-endorsement of his one-time appointee over McSwain’s supposedly insufficient zeal in promoting the Big Lie.

House

● AK-AL: Anne Garland Young, who is the widow of Rep. Don Young, has endorsed state Sen. Josh Revak in the special June top-four primary to succeed the longtime congressman.

Meanwhile, the ANCSA Regional Association, which the Anchorage Daily News‘ Nathaniel Herz says is made up of the leaders of the “state’s 12 regional Native corporations,” has formed a super PAC called Alaskans for TARA to support another Republican, former state Interior Department official Tara Sweeney. (Sweeney, who is Iñupiaq, would be the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.) ANCSA’s members, writes Herz, represent six of the state’s eight largest companies by revenue.

● CO-07: At least three Republicans will be on the June primary ballot to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Ed Perlmutter following the results of the recent party convention, while two more are in limbo. (We explain Colorado’s ballot access rules here.) Former oil and gas executive Erik Aadland took first place with 63% of the vote while Laurel Imer, who badly lost a 2020 race for state House, also advanced by taking 34%.

Wealthy businessman Tim Reichert successfully collected enough signatures, so he was able to skip the event. Construction company owner Carl Andersen and attorney Brad Dempsey, though, are still waiting to see if they turned in enough valid petitions. Whoever wins the GOP nod will go up against state Sen. Brittany Pettersen, who faces no Democratic primary opposition, for a suburban Denver seat that Biden would have carried 56-42.

● NY-04: Former Hempstead Supervisor Laura Gillen has publicized an Impact Research internal that gives her a 40-11 lead over Nassau County Legislator Carrié Solages in the June Democratic primary. This is the first poll we’ve seen of the contest to replace retiring Rep. Kathleen Rice, who supports Gillen.

● OH-11: The crypto industry-aligned Protect Our Future PAC is spending at least $1 million to aid Rep. Shontel Brown in her May 3 Democratic primary rematch against former state Sen. Nina Turner.

● OR-05: Attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner’s opening ad for the May 17 Democratic primary begins with the candidate, who is shown working at a farm, asking what the difference is between her and moderate incumbent Kurt Schrader and answering, “He takes millions in corporate PAC money. I won’t take a dime.” McLeod-Skinner continues, “Oil and gas companies are bankrolling Kurt. I’m running for Congress to tackle climate change,” a statement that is accompanied by her shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow that contains a check from “Big Oil & Gas.”

After faulting Schrader for having “sold out to Big Pharma,” the challenger shreds a huge check with her vehicle as she exclaims, “Big Pharma can’t buy my vote!” Finally, McLeod-Skinner tosses a folder labeled “Congressional Stock Portfolio” into a flaming barrel before feeding a “Corporate PACs” check to a goat.  

● TX-28: An attorney for Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, in new comments provided exclusively to Fox News, says the congressman “is not a target” of a federal investigation that saw law enforcement officials raid Cuellar’s home and campaign headquarters in January. There’s no corroboration of this claim, however, as Fox says the FBI and Department of Justice “declined to comment” on the matter.

● WV-02: The Club for Growth and its affiliate School Freedom Fund have announced a new $1.1 million TV, digital, and radio buy aiding Rep. Alex Mooney in his May 10 Republican primary fight against fellow incumbent David McKinley.

Both TV ads (here and here) make sure the audience knows that Mooney is Trump’s man while McKinley supported the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill. The first one is a version of the generic spot that the Club has been running in other races, while the other opens with sirens blaring as the narrator informs the audience, “Stand by for a Trump alert: Trump has endorsed Alex Mooney for Congress.” That endorsement happened in November, so clearly the Club’s early warning system is badly in need of a refit.

Mayors

● Washington, D.C. Mayor: The Washington Teachers’ Union is backing Councilmember Robert White’s bid to deny renomination to Mayor Muriel Bowser in the June Democratic primary, a development that came days after AFSCME also endorsed White.