In Louisiana, the first US climate refugees find new safe haven

Agence France-Presse
September 02, 2022

An aerial view of the Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, which is rapidly falling victim to climate change

Joann Bourg stands in front of her new home, about an hour's drive from the low-lying Louisiana island where she grew up -- an area gradually sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.

"I'm very excited. I can't wait to just move on in," Bourg told AFP. "I've been waiting for this day forever."

Bourg is one of about a dozen Native Americans from the Isle de Jean Charles who have been relocated to Schriever, less than 40 miles (60 kilometers) to the northwest -- the maiden beneficiaries of a federal resettlement grant awarded in 2016.

They are the first so-called "climate refugees" in the United States, forced from their homes due to the consequences of climate change.

"The house we had back there on the island -- well, that has been home forever. Me and my siblings all grew up there, went to school down there," Bourg recalls. "It was peaceful."

But the family home -- as with many others on the island -- was destroyed.

There is only one road connecting Isle de Jean Charles to the mainland, and it is sometimes impassable due to high winds or tides.

Residents are mainly of Native American descent -- several tribes sought shelter on the island from rampant government persecution in the 1800s.

But climate change has transformed the island into a symbol of the scourge that plagues much of hurricane-prone Louisiana -- coastal erosion.

90 percent under water

Eventually, 37 new homes will be built in Schriever to accommodate about 100 current or former residents of Isle de Jean Charles, thanks to a $48 million federal grant initially allocated in 2016.

"This is the first project of its kind in our nation's history," state Governor John Bel Edwards, who was on site to see the residents close on their new properties, told AFP.

"We've had people over the years that we would buy their homes out and move them. But we've not done whole communities like this and moved them to one place before because of climate change."


Since the 1930s, Isle de Jean Charles has lost "about 90 percent" of its surface area to the encroaching bayou waters, explains Alex Kolker, an associate professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

The island was already fragile, but climate change heightens the risks, he says -- sea levels are rising, the ground is sinking and erosion is rampant. More frequent and fiercer storms intensify the problem.

"This community is one of the most vulnerable communities in Louisiana, and Louisiana is one of the most vulnerable places in the US," Kolker says.

Dead trees

The road to Isle de Jean Charles is lined with dozens of homes, many of which are stripped down to the pilings.

A year ago, Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana as a dangerous category 4 storm; it was the second most damaging hurricane on record in the state, after the devastation of Katrina in 2005.

The storm ripped part of Chris Brunet's roof off his home.

The 57-year-old placed a sign in front of his home: "Climate change sucks."

Seemingly indifferent to the voracious and omnipresent mosquitos, and occasionally speaking the old Acadian French associated with the area, Brunet says hurricanes are nothing compared to so-called "saltwater intrusion" destroying canals and other waterways.

A few years ago, he finally agreed to relocation, adopting the view of the leader of his Choctaw tribe that it was the only way to preserve the island's dwindling community.

But those whose homes remain upright do not want to completely abandon their ancestral land.

Bert Naquin, who is moving into one of the new federally funded houses in Schriever, hopes to repaint her family dwelling in Isle de Jean Charles, despite her joy at being a first-time full homeowner.


"I plan on being down there a lot, because it's still my home," the 64-year-old Naquin said.

"This house up here is my house. But the island is always going to be my home in my heart."

© Agence France-Presse

Deal partner for Trump's Truth Social fails to get backing for SPAC extension -sources

Reuters
September 05, 2022


By Svea Herbst-Bayliss

(Reuters) - The blank-check acquisition firm that agreed to merge with Donald Trump's social media company failed to secure enough shareholder support for a one-year extension to complete the deal, people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

At stake is a $1.3 billion cash infusion that Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which operates the former U.S. president's Truth Social app, stands to receive from Digital World Acquisition Corp, the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that inked a deal last October to take TMTG public.

The transaction has been on ice amid civil and criminal probes into the circumstances around the deal. Digital World had been hoping that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is reviewing its disclosures on the deal, would have given its blessing by now for the transaction to proceed.

Most of Digital World's shareholders are individual investors and getting them to vote through their brokers has been challenging, Digital World Chief Executive Patrick Orlando said last week.

Digital World needs 65% of its shareholders to vote in favor of the proposal to extend its life by 12 months for the move to become effective. By Monday evening, far fewer Digital World shareholders than those required had voted in favor, the sources said.

The outcome of the vote is set to be announced at a special meeting of Digital World shareholders on Tuesday. Digital World executives do not believe they will be able to muster enough shareholder support in time and have started to consider alternative options, according to the sources.

The sources requested anonymity because the vote tally figures have not been publicly announced. Representatives for Digital World and TMTG did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One option being considered by Digital World is to postpone the vote deadline in a final bid to boost more shareholder support, the sources said. Without further action, the SPAC is set to liquidate on Thursday and return the money it raised in its September 2021 initial public offering.

Were Digital World to fail in its bid to get its shareholders to back the one-year extension, its management has the right to extend its life without shareholder approval by up to six months. It is unclear whether Digital World will pursue this option and if it would provide enough time for regulators to reach a conclusion on whether to allow the deal to proceed.

Digital World has disclosed that the SEC, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and federal prosecutors have been investigating the deal with TMTG, though the exact scope of the probes is unclear.

Among the information sought by regulators are Digital World documents on due diligence of potential targets other than TMTG, relationships between Digital World and other entities, meetings of Digital World's board, policies and procedures relating to trading, and the identities of certain investors, Digital World has said.

INDEBTEDNESS CAPPED

Were the deal to be completed, TMTG would receive $293 million that Digital World has on hand plus $1 billion committed from a group of investors in the form of a private investment in public equity (PIPE).

The PIPE is scheduled to expire on Sept. 20 unless the deal is completed. Investment bankers for Digital World have been reaching out to investors in the last few weeks to gauge their interest in extending the PIPE, a person familiar with the matter said.

It is unclear how TMTG is getting by without having access to Digital World's funding. It raised $22.6 million through convertible promissory notes last year and an additional $15.4 million through bridge financing in the first quarter of this year. The agreement with Digital World caps the indebtedness that TMTG can assume prior to the deal closing at $50 million.

Digital World has said it believes TMTG will have "sufficient funds" until April 2023. TMTG said last week that Truth Social is "on strong financial footing" and would begin running advertisements soon.

Trump started using Truth Social in April, two months after it launched on Apple Inc's app store. He currently has more than 4 million followers - a fraction of the 89 million he had on Twitter Inc before he was banned over his role in the January 2021 U.S. Capitol riots by thousands of his supporters.

(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss in Rhode Island; Additional reporting by Echo Wang and Krystal Hu in New York; Editing by Greg Roumeliotis and Edwina Gibbs)

Opinion | What the Truth Social Flop Says About Trump

He’s a bad businessman who has worn out his meme.


Another inherent Truth Social liability that Trump and company should have considered was Truth Social’s unavoidable posturing as a Trumpian site for conservatives. | Leon Neal/Getty Images


Opinion by JACK SHAFER
09/10/2022 
Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

The slow-cooking financial disaster that has been simmering in Donald Trump’s business Crock-Pot is now coming to a boil. Truth Social — the Twitter knock-off the former president launched six months ago in reaction to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube’s decision to deplatform him — might reduce itself to the smoke and char of bankruptcy, according to recent business press reports.

The swill the site serves attracts only a fraction of what Twitter does. Google has yet to approve downloads of its app from the Play Store over moderation issues, blocking it from 40 percent of the smartphone market. It lost $6.5 million in the first year and seems unable to pay its bills. But worst of all, the merger plan that would give it a stock market listing and the $1.3 billion it hoped to raise has stalled.

Once upon a time, Trump fed his 89 million Twitter followers a several-times-a-day mash of insult, provocation and bombast. But he has attracted only an estimated 3.9 million to his Truth Social account, making him one of the biggest social media flops of the decade. Where did the magic go? Why have Trump’s followers forsaken him? Is Truth Social doomed?

Trump deserves credit for marketing his Twitter account to its Everestian heights. He’s always known how to play to the crowds, titillate them and leave them wanting more. During his first campaign and presidency, even a garden-variety Trump tweet could convulse newsrooms. But that was a function of his front-runner status and later his place in the Oval Office. He drew an enormous audience not because he was Donald Trump tweeting but because he was the tweeting president. The power of the office endowed his tweets with muscle that could move financial markets, bury political careers, inspire death threats against his enemies and make the press snap to attention. But exiled to Mar-a-Lago and denied his social media accounts rendered him just another celebrity squeaking noises from a tiny soapbox. When his profile shrank, he became easier to ignore.

Trump announces his own social media platform

Even so, why didn’t the tens of millions of the 89 million who followed him on Twitter or the 74 million who voted for him in 2020 make more of an effort to visit his new address? Blame it on the network effect. If you already have a Twitter account, it takes just a millisecond to click and add another person’s feed to your account. But downloading a new app just to follow a single somebody takes mental energy, especially if there aren’t many other accounts on the app you wish to follow. Trump out of office proved to be as boring as Trump in office was disruptive. Everything we’re learning about Trump’s inability to convene a large-scale audience on Truth Social we learned in miniature from the failure of his mid-2021 blog, which he killed after 29 days. Like most media figures, Trump needs the boost of the network effect provided by Twitter (or CNN or Fox News Channel) to build a mass audience. All by his lonesome, he’s just a political carny on a lightly trafficked midway shouting invitations to his freak show.

Plenty of Trump’s followers were either agnostic about his tweets or politically hostile to them. Many followed him just to stay in the know or for the hate clicks.

This is not to say you can’t build a good business serving mostly Trumpians or mostly conservatives or mostly liberals. But such narrowcasting comes at the expense of winning the largest potential customer base. Twitter wisely places no political litmus tests, real or implied, between aspiring account-holders and an account as long as they promise not to spew bilge from their perch. Everybody is accepted. By appearing exclusionary, Truth Social resigned itself to marginal appeal.

Nothing about Truth Social’s disastrous beginnings should surprise us. Donald Trump has proved himself again and again to be a wreck of an entrepreneur. Steaks, his university, water, an airline, casinos, the USFL, a mortgage company, vodka — the list reads like a guide on how not to succeed in business. Associating Trump with a new venture has become a business death wish.

Trump is still the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and could well wind up in the White House (assuming he’s not behind bars). But there’s also evidence that Trump has simply exhausted the Trump meme he invented. Trump’s deranged outrage style once contained real entertainment value — which explains why moderates and liberals followed him on Twitter even if they wouldn’t vote for him. But in his post-presidency and especially in the weeks following the Mar-a-Lago search and investigation, the show has gone stale. Vainly, he has sought to top himself by sharing QAnon-related material on Truth Social, denouncing the FBI like a madman trapped in a bunker, and calling for his reinstatement as the “rightful winner“ of the 2020 election. He’s become a carnival geek biting the heads off of snakes, which can be a fabulous show the first couple of times you see it, but after that, meh. Could today’s Trump devise enough fresh outrage to produce even a brief TikTok?

Louisiana Republican: I'm terrified of 'evil' Danny DeVito

Matthew Chapman
September 06, 2022

Satan

On Tuesday, The Huffington Post reported that a Republican congressman from Louisiana is going out of his way to condemn "Little Demon," an upcoming animated sitcom on the FX Network starring Danny DeVito and Aubrey Plaza, as "evil" for portraying Satan — and that he had to do his utmost to prevent his child from being corrupted by it.

"U.S. Rep Mike Johnson objected to the sitcom aired by FX Networks. Its website says the series is about a woman and her 13-year-old daughter who are trying to live normal lives even though Satan is the girl’s father and wants custody of her soul," reported Janet McConnaughey. "A trailer for the show, which airs its fourth episode late Thursday, played during Sunday night’s TV broadcast of Louisiana State University’s football opener against Florida State."

“I couldn’t get to the remote fast enough to shield my 11-year-old from the preview, and I wonder how many other children were exposed to it — and how many millions more will tune in to the new series, owned and marketed by DISNEY,” wrote Johnson on Facebook.

"FX Networks and Hulu, where the show is streamed, are among entertainment assets that Disney bought from Fox in a stock deal worth about $52.4 billion in late 2017," said the report. "On the show, DeVito voices the role of Satan and his daughter, Lucy DeVito, plays Satan’s daughter, Chrissy the Antichrist. Aubrey Plaza plays the mother. New episodes are broadcast at 10 p.m. Thursdays on FX."

Johnson is the vice chair of the House Republican Conference. He was known for making a list of Republicans who wanted to sign onto an amicus brief for a controversial, failed lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking the Supreme Court to throw out the 2020 election results.

A number of Republican lawmakers and candidates seriously believe in, and fear, the existence of Satan, and that certain aspects of pop culture are infused with his dark influence. Michigan Secretary of State candidate Kristina Karamo, for instance, has suggested that Cardi B, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, and Ariana Grande are all placing children "under a Satanic delusion" with their music.

COMPASSIONATE PROTESTANT

Kari Lake outlines 'compassionate' plan to ban homelessness by forcing people to 'move along'

David Edwards
September 07, 2022

Real America's Voice/screen grab

Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, said on Wednesday that homeless people will have to leave the state unless they stop sleeping in public if she wins

"There are tents along the side of the road and this is happening in Arizona now," Lake told conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk. "Our homeless population is nearly doubled in the past four or five years and that's why we put together a great plan to tackle the chronic street homelessness."

Lake said that she would "ban" camping in urban areas.

"We're actually going to build enough shelter beds to get people help," she continued. "We're going to tell them they've got to get help. They're no longer allowed to live and use drugs on the street. But we will get them help. We are compassionate people."

The candidate added: "And if they refuse that help, they're going to have to move along."

Lake said that she was "going to start going hard on these small crimes."

"Because we need to restore quality of life in Arizona," she insisted. "The hard-working, tax-paying citizens deserve a little bit of compassion. And they want their parks back and they want their streets back."

Watch the video below from Real America's Voice.

Trump ordered a nuclear reactor on the moon in his final days as president

Lynda Edwards, Staff Reporter
September 07, 2022

Donald Trump (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

In the final months of his presidency, Donald Trump ordered nuclear energy to be tested on the moon by 2027, as well as the development of nuclear-powered spacecraft that would orbit the Earth, the moon and outer space.

He also ordered the development of micro nuclear reactors small enough that they could fit inside a typical shipping truck that zips cargo along the highway.

During this period, the media was busy reporting on the Jan. 6 riots, insurrection and false accusations of voter fraud — and few paid attention.

However, these orders may offer clues about what was included in some of the ‘Top Secret’ folders squirreled away in Mar-a-Lago.

RELATED: Nuclear docs at Mar-a-Lago 'hugely important for prosecution of Espionage Act': expert

On Dec. 16, 2020, Trump signed the “Space Policy Directive-6,” which set the goal of testing nuclear energy on the moon by 2027.

Then on Jan. 5, 2021, — the day before the Jan. 6 insurrection — Trump signed Executive Order 13972, which directed NASA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to study the cost and technical feasibility of using nuclear-powered spacecraft and satellites.

Some of these spacecraft would orbit the Earth, but most of the nuclear-powered craft would be meant for deep space missions to Mars and further places that are light years away.

There are Trump supporters, including Tesla founder Elon Musk, who support the goal of using nuclear power to help humans set up mining operations on the moon and colonize Mars.

The Jan. 5 Executive Order also includes Trump’s direction to NASA and the Department of Defense to design and build micro nuclear reactors that could be transported on trains, planes or the typical trailer truck.

The Biden Administration has embraced a similar idea and is developing small reactors that could supply electricity for 1,000 to 10,000 soldiers in remote desert, jungle and mountain terrains. The microreactors could also be used to plug holes in America’s grid in transformers that fail due to terrorist attacks, wildfires or other natural disasters.

The new effort is called “Project Pele,” named after the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes. The DOD recently announced that it would review proposed designs for “Project Pele" and choose a winner before building and testing it in Idaho.

In folktales, Pele could destroy a city or a beach by hurling lava and ash. Micro-nuclear reactors pose potential dangers, too. It could be catastrophic if terrorists got ahold of them, for example.

Although saving the coal industry was a focal point for Trump’s Department of Energy, whistleblowers were alarmed by his nuclear negotiations in 2018.

They claimed Trump secretly authorized the sale of nuclear technology, made by a company called IP3, to Saudi Arabia. The deal was intensely negotiated by Trump’s fired and disgraced advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who had close ties to IP3.

The deal Flynn negotiated didn’t require the Saudis to agree they wouldn’t use the technology to make nuclear weapons.

These whistleblowers went to Congress — and the reaction there was a rare bipartisan alarm.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) teamed up with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) of New Jersey to request the GAO investigate. The GAO noted that Congress and the State Department were left out of the loop in the negotiations. State diplomats would have been savvier about how Saudi Arabia’s shifting, complicated and secret alliances might put America at risk.

Interestingly, conservative think tanks recently issued reports detailing how entrenched anti-American Wahhabi extremists were inside the enormous Saudi royal family.

Investigators discovered that IP3 simply wrote one executive order that Trump could sign so his aides could simply cut and paste it onto White House stationery.

Trump’s Jan. 5, 2021 order and his December 16, 2020 order both stress the importance of letting private industry, rather than the government, take a leadership role in achieving America’s nuclear goals.

BILLIONAIRES, MICRO NUCLEAR REACTORS

For years, NASA has debated nuclear-powered craft to carry explorers to Mars. Nuclear craft could achieve faster speeds, cutting down the time astronauts spent traveling through high levels of radiation that would bombard them in outer space.

There are potential wealthy investors who see mining on the moon as a cosmic jackpot. PayPal founder Rod Martin, former special counsel to conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, appeared on a 2021 Right Response Ministries podcast to explain how God is directing Martin’s hedge fund to invest in colonizing the moon and Mars.

One incentive is what Martin described as the vast wealth of “Helium 3” — a rare substance needed in nuclear energy production — waiting to be harvested from the moon’s surface.

In the podcast, Martin announced he had created a certification process for financial advisors, taught at evangelical Liberty University. He also expressed admiration for Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s efforts at space exploration.

But Martin promised listeners that his aerospace ventures would be guided by “Christian principles of liberty, security, values.”

He then urged listeners to tell their financial advisers to enroll in his certification courses and claimed his board of directors included retired Air Force and Space Force generals.

Colonizing The Moon & Mars From A Biblical Worldview |

ABORTION, GUNS, VOTING RIGHTS
The 2022 midterm elections — and what the data really says

Sarah K. Burris
September 07, 2022

(Shutterstock.com)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — MSNBC's Steve Kornacki spoke about a shift he was seeing in the electorate heading into November after the Aug. 23 primary and special elections in New York, when passionately pro-choice Democrat Pat Ryan trounced his opponent. Until very recently, the only real data that could illustrate the impact of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was a Kansas ballot measure that would amend the state’s constitution to make it easy to ban abortion outright in the state. On August 2, 2022, voters resoundingly rejected this amendment.

Weeks later, data is now starting to roll in showing two major trends for 2022 midterm elections that could prevent Republicans from getting the "red wave" they were banking on.

Republican Margaret Hoover told CNN's Jim Acosta on Sunday that the Supreme Court Dobbs decision would have a huge impact on the midterms.

"When this happened, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, I talked to Republican consultant after Republican consultant, who said, 'Meh, it's already baked in the cake. This isn't going to hurt the Republicans. This will not be an issue in the election,'" said Hoover. "I'm a pro-choice Republican. There are not many of us left. I sensed they were wrong and they pointed to data that didn't add up. You are seeing that now. You see how motivated suburban women are. This is an impact this is playing in November."

For decades, Republicans have relied on polling about voters’ personal beliefs about abortion. While many Americans consider themselves personally "pro-life," they also support the freedom for others to choose. That difference is what’s playing out in ways that, as Hoover indicated, Republicans appear to have neglected.

An analysis by Targetsmart Insights shows that more women than men are registering to vote ahead of the November midterm. And that women in Kansas, Wisconsin and Michigan are disproportionately registering as Democrats.

According to the numbers, "62 percent of women registering since Dobbs registered as Democrats, 15 percent as Republicans." Meanwhile, the most striking factor is that 54 percent of those registering as Democrats were younger than 25. Young voters are very rarely calculated in polling analysis ahead of elections because they have no track record of voting yet. Most polls consider "likely voters" based on those who have voted previously.

In Kansas, 40 percent more women were registered to vote than men in the summer primary, resulting in 70 percent of new registrants being women at a time when choice was on the ballot.

This trend is happening in Pennsylvania, too, where gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races are considered to be possible Democratic wins. The Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that of the women who have registered since the Supreme Court ruling, there are four Democrats for every Republican.

The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that most voters support choice, but it's a point that Republicans never thought people would vote on as a specific issue. The Journal explained, "more than half of voters said the issue made them more likely to cast ballots in the midterm elections; majorities oppose 6-week and 15-week abortion bans." Only 6 percent said abortion should be illegal in all cases, which is a decrease from 11 percent in March.

That's what Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) said she's finding, also. Speaking to MSNBC on Monday after a slew of Labor Day parades and events, she claimed her campaign recently got a poll back only to reveal that abortion was the top issue for voters in her district — and that the economy was the third most important issue.

While Americans appear to support abortion rights, and women are coming out in droves to register and vote, there are still a number of Americans who aren't accustomed to participating in elections.

Courier News is the parent company of The Gander, which tested the impact of boosting a single report to the least politically engaged people who don't read the news.

Raw Story spoke with Data for Progress, which partnered with Courier on the project, and the group explained that they began with a commercially purchased list of disengaged SMS respondents for an experiment. They then offered the group a survey to gauge their participation level. Data for Progress split the respondents into a control group and a second group, which was served a single story on The Gander.

"Given Michigan is one of the American states with what are known as trigger laws — laws that would criminalize abortion immediately upon an overturning of Roe—we conducted the initial wave of our survey specifically on the question of re-criminalizing abortion under the 1931 Michigan trigger law," the report explained. "The survey was conducted from June 14 to June 23. The Supreme Court handed down its official decision on June 24, 2022, which matched the wording and spirit of the leaked decision."

There's a kind of social dynamic revealed in past Data for Progress experiments that shows respondents tend to be more emphatic about their beliefs in a survey when they're shown others agree with them. What The Gander's experiment did was take it further, by pushing that information to people in the test group.

The ad appeared four to five times a week for three weeks boosting the story "Six in 10 Michiganders Oppose Re-Criminalizing Abortion. Here’s What One of Them Has to Say." After three weeks, the group was given the survey on abortion again. What they found is that people that were served the ad increased their opposition to criminalizing abortion. What was also found, however, is that the control group, which didn't see the ad and only heard the news organically from the rest of the world, also saw an increase in opposition to criminalizing abortion.

Both groups show the impact of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. Roughly half of the population of Michigan is comprised of low-turnout voters who aren't typically reading the news frequently, the Courier explained. Boosting one article confirming their beliefs could not only make people more strident in their beliefs, but it could move more of them to act.

While abortion is part of the midterms equation, it isn't the whole story.

The other piece of the 2022 election impact comes from controversial, far-right Republican candidates. The 2022 election should have been an opportunity for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to regain power and return to the GOP strategy of obstructionism he employed during former President Barack Obama's two terms. Now, even he admits GOP Senate control isn’t likely now.

Speaking to reporters last month, McConnell confessed there was a "candidate-quality problem." Candidates recruited or loyal to former President Donald Trump like Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, Herschel Walker, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Ted Budd are all anti-choice, MAGA Republicans with views far outside of the mainstream.

In the Dobbs opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas announced that issues like abortion are what he sees as the beginning of rolling back many other laws. The Aug. 2022 Ipsos poll showed that there is a supermajority when it comes to supporting birth control, IUDs, emergency contraception like Plan B and other protections. So, Republicans ready to outlaw abortion at conception or seeking to ban forms of birth control are forcing middle-of-the-road Americans away from the GOP.

Masters and Walker want to make abortion illegal across the country, though Masters has now scrubbed his website of any mention of abortion. Oz said that life begins at conception, which would make birth control like IUDs illegal because they prevent implantation. Johnson told pregnant people to suck it up and leave the state. Vance compared abortion to slavery, and went even further about women's rights, suggesting that women being abused should be forced to stay with their abuser "for the sake of their kids." Ted Budd sponsored legislation in Congress that would criminalize abortion and put doctors in jail.

But it isn't only about reproductive rights and freedoms. Not only are they far outside of mainstream American beliefs, but they're also unable to discuss other issues that matter to Americans in a way that connects to people. The candidates appear to be running on a MAGA platform saying that the 2020 election was "rigged" and saying "Joe Biden is evil."

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) have spent the year attempting to label LGBTQ people. The Washington Post used Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape data to calculate that 90 percent of congressional districts support marriage rights for same-sex couples. There were 45 districts in which fewer than half of the residents opposed same-sex marriage. It doesn't mean they want to make it illegal, however. Some of them simply had no opinion.

When Republicans began traveling their states and fighting in primaries the top issues involved inflation and gas prices. Republicans were so committed to those issues, it's all they've talked about for most of the year. The problem with choosing those issues to base a campaign on is that the second inflation is eased and gas prices go down, they've lost their issues.

The Fox network and Republicans like Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) have talked about inflation, but it has been a global problem since the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the supply chain and workforce. The Federal Reserve is making moves to increase interest rates in an effort to slow inflation. But at the same time, the job situation in the U.S. is booming. Economists feared a recession was on the horizon, but month after month the jobs report shows considerable growth.

Meanwhile, polls show "jobs and the economy" as a top issue, without splicing out which is important. During the COVID-19 crisis, Trump lost over 22 million jobs leaving office with a record not seen since Herbert Hoover, Fortune said at the time. Biden has been able to build back over 10 million with 3.7 percent unemployment. But Biden and Democrats haven't been great about taking victory laps in the election year.

As Labor Day passes, campaigns typically kick into high gear. After a series of legislative successes, Democrats are able to cite progress to help issues that Republicans have been using for reasons they should be elected. Many of them voted against bills passed. The economy is one of the few issues Republicans generally address.

Another top issue for Americans in the most recent surveys is "crime," which Republican candidates are using to promote the need for more police. Drilling down into the data, however, "crime" isn't what Republican candidates seem to think it is. Americans aren't scared of "the caravans" Fox News reports are coming just before the elections. The Aug. 2022 Ipsos poll showed that gun violence is the piece of the concern about crime that isn't being addressed by the GOP candidates.

64 percent of Republicans consider "crime" to be a problem, not including gun violence. That doesn't include 29 percent of Republicans who believe the "crime" that is a problem involves guns. This is in stark contrast to 79 percent of Democrats who see the crime problem to be related to gun violence. Independents similarly agree that guns are at fault for the crime problem, to the tune of 56 percent. Just 35 percent of Americans see non-gun-related crime to be the problem.

Americans continue to support stricter gun safety measures, but Republican candidates refuse to concede to assault weapons bans, stricter background checks and related issues. Campaigning on crime without addressing guns isn't going to help Republicans win over Independent voters — but their dedication to the gun industry puts them in a difficult position.

Republicans are also running up against a world in which their promotion of police and chants of "Blue Lives Matter" are fading away, thanks to both the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and the search warrant being executed at Donald Trump's resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump has spent the past month railing against the FBI and the Trump Republicans have dutifully followed suit calling for the elimination of the FBI. Republicans spent much of 2020 saying that Democrats wanted to "defund the police," only to now be advocating defunding the police. Trump-promoted candidates are also stuck between defending his supporters who rioted against Congress on Jan. 6 and the police they beat and attacked.

The other top issues for Americans are the environment, civil rights, democracy, political extremism and voting rights — which are all issues where Republicans fall far outside the mainstream.

So, while abortion is certainly one of the top issues in 2022, it remains one of many issues where Republicans are simply too far right of the American people.

It's time to enforce the Constitution and ban seditious Republicans from Congress

Thom Hartmann,

 Independent Media Institute
September 09, 2022

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene(R-GA) holds a press conference to call for the dismissal of Dr. Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on June 15, 2021. (Photo by JIM WATSON / AFP)

Before I even get into the guts of this argument, just ask yourself: if Democratic Members of Congress had engaged in a seditious conspiracy to overthrow our government to put or keep a Democratic president in power against both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and Republicans controlled Congress right now, what would those Republicans be doing?

It’s time to enforce the Constitution, and a judge in New Mexico just kicked off the process. Democrats need to jump on this with the vigor of Trump crashing a Miss Teen USA dressing room.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution clearly says that if an elected official “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States and the laws of the United States, “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” that elected official may not “hold any office, civil or military” including those who are “a member of Congress,” a member of “any State legislature” or “an executive or judicial office of any state.”

It was ratified on July 9, 1868, after the Civil War, so courts could prevent traitors from the Confederacy from serving in any political office, and expel those who may have made it through over the years. With a two-thirds vote of both the House and the Senate, the 14th amendment says, such former insurrectionists could be re-admitted, but that’s a pretty high bar.

The last time the Amendment was used was in May of 1869, when a Black man named Caesar Griffin was arrested and convicted of a crime and then appealed the conviction because, he claimed, the judge in the case — a former Confederate slave-holder and the Speaker of the Virginia House when that state seceded from the Union — was illegally a judge because, as a legislator, he had given “aid and comfort” to the Confederate “insurrection” against the United States.

The courts agreed and the Judge, Hugh W. Sheffey, was forced to resign his seat in the winter of 1869 when he refused to pledge allegiance to the US; he went back to practicing law in Staunton, Virginia until his death. The accused criminal, Caesar Griffin, was re-prosecuted by a different non-traitor judge for a slightly different charge (to avoid double jeopardy) and ended up back in prison.

This week a court in New Mexico revived the issue, kicking Couy Griffin out of his seat as an Otero County commissioner based on that provision of the 14th Amendment.

While he tried to defend himself by claiming that he’d not engaged in any violence while in the Capitol on January 6th and that he had a First Amendment “free speech” right to hold political office on the county commission, District Court Judge Francis Mathew was having none of it.

By simply being there on January 6th and offering encouragement to his more violent colleagues in the insurrection, the court determined, he more than met the criteria of “giving aid and comfort” to the people directly engaged in violent insurrection.

Five members of the current Congress have so far been charged under this provision of the 14th Amendment: Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, and Jim Banks.

The charges against Cawthorn were thrown out because, just four years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, President Ulysses Grant determined it wasn’t effective and was, in fact, aiding Klan recruiting: Congress granted a general amnesty to all but the most senior members of the Confederacy with the Amnesty Act of 1872.

That law decreed that:

“[A]ll political disabilities imposed by the third section of the fourteenth article of amendments of the Constitution of the United States are hereby removed from all persons whomsoever, except Senators and Representatives of the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh Congresses , officers in the judicial, military, and naval service of the United States, heads of departments, and foreign ministers of the United States.”

Cawthorn argued, and U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II — a Trump-appointed Federalist Society judge — agreed, that the Amnesty Act not only pardoned all the traitorous Confederates of that time but pre-pardoned all future traitors to the United States, even though the law says no such thing.

As Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech For People (who participated in the case), said of the Trump-appointed judge’s decision:

“According to this court ruling, the 1872 amnesty law, by a trick of wording that — although no one noticed it at the time, or in the 150 years since — completely undermined Congress’s careful decision to write the insurrectionist disqualification clause to apply to future insurrections. This is patently absurd.”

Marjorie Taylor Green’s case went to Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Christopher S. Brasher, who recently partially retired after being accused of verbally attacking a Black defendant before his court by “physically pointing at her, angrily raising his voice, and turning visibly red.”

Judge Brasher found that “there is no evidence to show that Rep. Greene participated in the invasion itself,” and refused to allow the parties arguing she should be kept off the ballot to engage in discovery, which, they argued, could have turned up both her alleged text messages to insurrection organizers and her open statements to the public in support of the insurrection.

“[P]re-hearing discovery is improper,” Judge Brasher ruled, while blocking access to evidence of her possible crimes and freeing Greene to run for re-election.

The challenge to Congressman Jim Banks, a major Trump supporter, was heard before the Indiana Elections Commission, which ruled 4-0 that he could remain on the ballot. Banks’ lawyer argued that “Congressman Banks has publicly commented that he did not support that conduct, nor did he engage in it, and he has also called for the prosecution of unlawful conduct that occurred that day.”

That argument — essentially that he didn’t participate in the insurrection and later disapproved of it — was apparently enough for the commissioners. After being confirmed on the ballot, Banks, who voted against certifying President Biden’s election, released a belligerent statement, saying:

“Many Democrats in Washington hope to weaponize the 14th amendment to disenfranchise President Trump’s 74 million voters. I hope they watched today’s unanimous decision.”

The case against Biggs and Gosar was shot down by an Arizona judge who argued that even though the Constitution outlaws such behavior through the 14th Amendment, Congress never passed implementing legislation. Because of this failure, he said, this was an issue for Congress to resolve rather than the courts.

“Therefore, given the current state of the law and in accordance with the United States Constitution,” wrote Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Christopher Coury, “plaintiffs have no private right of action to assert claims under the disqualification clause. … The text of the Constitution is mandatory,” Coury wrote. “It sets forth the single arbiter of the qualifications of members of Congress; that single arbiter is Congress.”

So, right now, the score is 5-1, although all the cases of members of Congress who were allowed to continue to run for office were, arguably, tainted by politics or brought in weak venues like Banks’ election commission or Coury’s “not my responsibility” courtroom.

But what about members of the House and Senate who, we’re finding, were actually in direct communication with the armed insurrectionists or Trump’s henchmen?

Multiple Senators and House members were texting and carrying on phone calls with Trump and Giuliani on and immediately before the attack, as the January 6th Select Committee has found. Some were even talking with Trump or his people during the peak of the January 6th attack.

Others, like Lauren Boebert, stand accused of tweeting the location (or absence thereof) of Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress as the Republican mob attacked with the clear intent to kill Pelosi and Pence.



The case of Couy Griffin was the easiest to prosecute under the 14th Amendment because he was caught in the act on January 6th and later convicted of it in court; the others were less directly involved or, if they were, apparently Trump-sympathetic judges refused to allow evidence to be entered in court.

But as more and more evidence becomes public of Republican members of the House and Senate being directly or closely involved in this first attack on Washington, DC since the War of 1812, the pressure to deprive them of their ability to stay in Congress will grow.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph of this article, if it had been Hillary Clinton who’d worked to seize the White House in 2016, you can bet that blocking her collaborators in Congress would be the least of the efforts Republicans would have undertaken. She’d more likely be facing the fate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, along with any Congressional co-conspirators.

President Biden has correctly identified these people as “semi-fascists” and called them out to their faces. Now Democrats in Congress — particularly as more information comes out through the January 6th Committee and the efforts of the FBI — need to take the gloves off and challenge the right of insurrectionists and those giving them “aid and comfort” to continue to serve in Congress.

Article 3 of the 14th Amendment:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Texas judge says Affordable Care Act's requirement of free HIV drugs violates religious freedom

2022/09/07
A federal judge has sided with a Fort Worth, Texas, orthodontist who argued that requiring health insurance to pay for HIV prevention drugs was a violation of his religious freedom. - Dreamstime/Dreamstime/TNS

FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal judge has sided with a Fort Worth orthodontist who argued that requiring health insurance to pay for HIV prevention drugs was a violation of his religious freedom.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, of the Northern District of Texas, issued a ruling in the case Wednesday.

Technically, O’Connor’s ruling focused on just one plaintiff: Braidwood Management Inc., a company based in Texas. But in principle, his decision supports the reasoning of multiple North Texas Christians, who challenged a key part of the Affordable Care Act when they sued the federal government in 2020. The plaintiffs include Fort Worth oral surgeon Gregory Scheideman, Fort Worth orthodontist John Kelley, and his company, Kelley Orthodontics.

Braidwood Management Inc., Kelley and the other plaintiffs opposed a core feature of the Affordable Care Act, often known as Obamacare. The law requires that private health insurance plans pay for preventive health care in full, with no charge to the insured patients. Kelley and his co-plaintiffs disagreed with the groups that determine what kind of health care is preventive, and also opposed insurance coverage of services like birth control, testing for sexually transmitted infections, and the HIV prevention drug PrEP on religious grounds.

Kelley is “a Christian, and he is therefore unwilling to purchase health insurance that subsidizes abortifacient contraception or PrEP drugs that encourage homosexual behavior and intravenous drug use,” according to the lawsuit.

In his ruling Wednesday, O’Connor focused on Braidwood Management Inc., a for-profit company owned by QAnon conspiracy theorist Dr. Steven Hotze. Because Braidwood employs more than 50 people, it is required by law to offer health insurance to all of its full-time employees. For his part, Hotze argued that offering his employees insurance plans that would pay for drugs like PrEP would violate “his religious beliefs by making him complicit in encouraging those behaviors,” O’Connor wrote in his ruling.

O’Connor agreed with Hotze and ruled that the requirement that insurance companies pay for PrEP violates Braidwood Management Inc.’s religious freedoms.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs did not respond to an email asking for comment.

The ruling does not have any immediate effect on people with private health insurance, or people who take drugs like Truvada to reduce their chances of contracting HIV.

O’Connor has scheduled a hearing in the case on Friday.



© Fort Worth Star-Telegram

SCOTUS SET LIST FALL 2022

Amy Coney-Barrett to rule on LGBTQ case whose anti-LGBTQ attorneys paid her 5 times for speaking engagements

Lynda Edwards, Staff Reporter
September 07, 2022

Amy Coney Barrett (AFP)

What does an oil rig supervisor earning $963 per day have in common with a diner’s head cook or a dollar store manager? Probably nothing, except this upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case. The justices’ decision could make it almost impossible for workers to get overtime pay from employers who insist the employees are salaried — not hourly workers.

It's one of several could-be landmark cases SCOTUS will hear this fall that could affect ordinary life for Americans.

Lawyers arguing Helix Energy Solutions Group Inc v Hewitt face the Supreme Court on October 12. Michael Hewitt was a Helix manager earning $963 per day, often more than $200,000 annually when he was terminated. He sued for thousands of dollars in overtime that he says Helix owes him.

There are federal laws and regulations protecting overtime. That’s thanks to low-wage managers who fought in court after their bosses promoted them to a “salaried manager” position. The problem was that many salaried managers of diners, dollar stores, dive bars and other service industry jobs would be given annual pay of $30,000 to $40,000, but were required to work 15-hour days, seven days a week and holidays, with no overtime.

Hewitt was not a low-wage Joe Six Pack. But as Law360 noted, to be a manager exempt from overtime, a circuit court ruled that weekly salary should be assured, not dependent on the number of days and hours the manager works, no matter how few.

“While Hewitt's day rate of $963 was well above the minimum weekly requirement for salaried professionals, which at the time was $455 and is now $684, the pay was tied to days worked and consequently failed to constitute a real salary,” Law360 noted.

CAN ARTISTS REFUSE THEIR SERVICES TO LGBTQ PATRONS?

The plaintiff in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis is a Christian website designer represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a 501c3 that donated financially to the Jan. 6, 2021 Trump rally that morphed into a riot. This is ADF’s second go at a Supreme Court in LGBTQ rights case.

They also represented the baker who didn’t want to make a cake for a gay wedding.

ADF paid Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for five speaking engagements since 2011, according to The 19th.

On her business site, the plaintiff says that “God gave me the creative gifts that are expressed through this business, I have always strived… to avoid communicating ideas or messages, or promoting events, products, services, or organizations, that are inconsistent with my religious beliefs.” No LGBTQ person has demanded a pro-gay website from the plaintiff. But apparently, SCOTUS will be asked to decide whether artists–designers, singers, photographers, chefs, bakers—have the right to refuse their interpretive and creative services to a community willing to pay for them.

The ADF has an arm devoted to legal action on behalf of conservative churches and asks congregations online if they would be willing to be plaintiffs in a court case preserving religious freedoms.

WILL COLLEGE CAMPUSES BE WHITER?

On Halloween, The University of North Carolina and Harvard will fight Virginia-based Students for Fair Admissions before the Supreme Court. At stake is whether colleges should be allowed to use race as a factor in who is admitted to a college.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice was one of the many social justice groups to write an amicus brief in favor of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process and affirmative action everywhere. It was an especially poignant show of solidarity since Students for Fair Admissions’ lawsuit accuses Harvard of discrimination against Asian-American applicants who, on average, outscored white and Black applicants academically. The suit against UNC accuses the university of discriminating against white and Asian applicants to favor Black people.

“I refuse to be weaponized against other students of color who face institutional barriers to higher education,” Harvard class of 2019 grad Sally Chen, who is Chinese American, testified for the amicus brief. “The full breadth of our identities cannot be captured in a race-blind application.”

Dozens of corporations have signed amicus briefs supporting affirmative action including Google, Hershey, Starbucks, Proctor & Gamble, Mattel, Levi Strauss, JetBlue, United Airlines and Salesforce.

But many longtime SCOTUS watchers think the odds are, that this court may kill affirmative action — and not just because there are five conservative judges making the decision.

The New York Times saw the recent failure of a California proposition supporting affirmative action as an ominous sign. Voters rejected it by a 57 to 43 margin. The New York Times noted that a high percentage of Latino and Asian American voters rejected the proposal. There was a sense among some voters who were people of color that race-conscious admissions tend to overlook obstacles encountered by working poor and working-class applicants.

Elliot Mincberg, People for the American Way senior fellow, is a Supreme Court scholar who also served as chief counsel for oversight and investigations of the House Judiciary Committee.

“It’s been an issue for years to figure out how to do a conglomeration of race and social class in the admissions process,” Mincberg told Raw Story. “It’s highly likely this Supreme Court will eliminate or severely restrict affirmative action.”

There are other more basic questions that affirmative action hasn’t completely resolved, such as: does affirmative action benefit Latinos since the federal government defines them as an ethnicity, not a race?

“That depends on the individual institution’s process,” Mincberg replied.

If affirmative action is struck down, universities can use what he calls “Constitutional workarounds,” to use some sort of method to ensure diversity.

DOES A JURY NEED TO KNOW WHEN A CONVICTED KILLER CAN NEVER BE PAROLED?

Death row inmate John Cruz was sentenced to death in 2005 for shooting a Tucson law enforcement officer five times, killing him. Cruz — and other death row inmates joined in this suit — argues that the court allegedly did not allow him to tell the jury that his sentencing did not allow him the option of parole so he could not pose a danger to the world outside prison ever again.

There is a 1994 Supreme Court case, Simmons v South Carolina, that Cruz’s lawyers cite as a precedent for this case. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy wrote in a concurring opinion agreeing that a prisoner facing the death penalty had the right to tell jurors when parole is off the table.

:"[W]here the State puts the defendant’s future dangerousness in issue, and the only available alternative sentence to death is life imprisonment without possibility of parole, due process entitles the defendant to inform the capital sentencing jury—by either argument or instruction—that he is parole ineligible," the justices wrote.

HILLBILLY OZ

Mehmet Oz said incest with 'more than a first cousin away' was 'not a big problem' in unearthed interview

Brandon Gage, Alternet
September 07, 2022

Dr. Mehmet Oz / Shutterstock.

Republican United States Senate candidate from Pennsylvania Mehmet Oz defended incest in a February 2014 interview with a morning radio show that was unearthed on Tuesday by Jezebel.

The Breakfast Club host Angela Yee had read Oz a question on the topic that was submitted by a listener:

I’m going to ask you this and you tell me if this is safe for this person, okay? Well, he said, ‘Yee, I can’t stop smashing my cousin.’ That means sleeping with. We hooked up at a young age and now in our 20s, she still wants it. No matter how much I want to stop, I always give it to her. Help me.’ What advice would you give that person?

Oz, whose struggling campaign was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, offered his medical opinion.

Oz:

If you’re more than a first cousin away, it’s not a big problem.

Yee:

Okay, so second cousin is fine to smash.

Yee's co-hosts also weighed in.

Charlamagne Tha God:

It’s so funny, cause I knew that.

DJ Envy:

How did you know that?

Charlamagne:

Cause I’m from the country! Third cousins?

Oz:

Yeah. It’s fine.

He explained the risks that incest poses to the health of offspring:

Every family has genetic strengths and weaknesses. And so the reason we naturally crave people who are not so like us is because you just mix the gene pool up a little bit so that if I had one gene for, let’s say, hemophilia, which is a classic example where you bleed a lot if you cut yourself, I don’t want to marry a cousin who has the same hemophilia gene, because the chance of our child having both those genes is much higher.

He continued:

You know, that’s why children, girls don’t like their fathers’ smell. Their pheromones will actually repel their daughters because they’re not supposed to be together. My daughters hate my smell.

Yee quipped to Oz that "maybe you just smell."

Oz replied that "my wife says she likes the smell.”

Not long after the video surfaced, Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman – Oz's Democratic opponent – tweeted, "yet another issue where Oz and I disagree."