Memorial Day 2023 Memories: Right-wing House, Country’s Mass Shootings

Debt Ceiling Dissension

Memorial Day weekend is over, and the agreement between President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to end the debt ceiling went to the Rules Committee on Tuesday to determine if the bill would have a vote on the House floor. Much to the dismay of far-right Freedom Caucus members, the measure passed 7-6—four Democrats and two Republicans, Ralph Norman (R-SC) and Chip Roy (R-TX), voting against the movement of the bill out of the committee.

Some representatives admitted their goal was to kill the economy through defeating the debt ceiling agreement which could put Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) into the White House. Looking forward to more crisis next year, they were furious about having no debt ceiling fight until 2025. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said that more debt ceiling economic chaos in a year could move a Republican into the Oval Office. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) also accused Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen of lying about the default deadline of June 5. Rep. Bryon Donalds (R-FL) echoed Perry and called the agreement “crap.”

The right-wingers probably won’t believe that U.S. Treasury cash levels are $38.8 billion, less than the assets of one of 31 billionaires. Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk are each worth $185 billion; Jeff Bezos has $144 billion.

Before the committee vote, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) hoped to nix the agreement by tweeting that McCarthy agreed to a backroom deal that nothing gets out of the Rules Committee without the approval of at seven least GOP members. This stipulation doesn’t appear in the “rules,” but McCarthy may have agreed to get his position, just as he put three right-wing GOP obstructionists on the committee. Seven Republicans voted in favor of moving the deal to the floor creating Roy’s statement moot.

About 25 representatives already said that they won’t vote for the bill, and Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT) plans to resign from the House next week.

After McCarthy’s debt ceiling bill, Bishop became the first House member to propose his ousting as Speaker. Bishop was one of 20 members initially refusing to support McCarthy for House leader, members who held out for 15 ballots until McCarthy made huge promises to them. One of these was restoration of the threshold for a “motion to vacate the chair” to just one member, down from a minimum of five put in place under former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). No Speaker has previously been removed with the rarely used motion, last filed by former Mark Meadows (R-NC) in 2015 against against former Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). It was defeated, but Boehner resigned the next year.

McCarthy has been trying to persuade Republicans that he made a good deal because of added work requirements. On Fox, he said:

“In this family we may have a child, able-bodied, not married, no kids, but he’s sitting on the couch collecting welfare. We’re gonna put work requirements on that individual, so he’s going to have work requirements, he’s gonna get a job, and he’s gonna make the life easier.”

The Lever reported that a group funded by conservative dark money pushing looser child labor laws was responsible for Republicans promotion of work requirements to receive government assistance:

“McCarthy’s work requirement proposal and his gripes about dependency come straight from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a conservative think tank that recently made headlines for helping secretly draft several state bills to roll back child labor laws.”

Investigations into Joe Biden and His Son Biden:

In a desperate move, James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, plans to bring contempt of Congress proceedings against FBI Director Christopher Wray because he refused the committee’s subpoena. Comer is searching for an unverified tip evidence about foreign countries’ bribing Biden. His committee will need to approve such a decision, and Comer can’t prosecute Wray. AG Merrick Garland is responsible for any legal action.

With no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden, Comer requested a 90-day extension for his investigation. His focus on some LLCs owned by Biden’s family members was questioned because he isn’t investigating DDT and his family who control over 500 LLCs in several different countries. Republicans also won’t tell Democrats any information about an FBI interview in 2020 with an accuser. Comer is depending on the falsehoods from Fox network, mentioning Biden and “bribe” or “bribery” over 100 times since Comer introduced his rumors, to keep the issue alive.

In its search to find damning information about Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, the Senate Finance Committee has lost its IRS “whistleblower” who plans to testify to a GOP-led House panel. The Senate committee had questions about the veracity of the witness’s claims who stated that the DOJ asked for the long-running probe, conducted by a DDT-appointed U.S. Attorney, into Hunter Biden to be “slow-walked.” The witness is newly represented by an attorney who worked for DDT, an involvement that raised “a big red flag” because of allegations that the lawyer’s two “whistleblower” clients lied to the House Judiciary Committee. Information traditionally kept secret was also leaked to right-wing media at the same time it was provided to congressional panels.

Tommy Tuberville’s Absurdity:

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is still responsible for endangering national security by single-handedly blocking over 200 Pentagon promotions since late February. The total will be 650 by the end of the year. After two months, he said the U.S. had too many generals and admirals. The only other time military promotions were held up was by a majority of senators after the 1991 Tailhook conference sexual assaults. On Memorial Day 2023, no senator of either party is supporting Tuberville. Fifteen months ago, Tuberville promised to be “a strong voice” for the military.

After other outrageous statements, he accused inner city teachers of being lazy and probably illiterate in a discussion with Donald Trump, Jr. History scholar Heather Cox Richardson responded:

“This is literally the language former Confederates used about Black Americans during Reconstruction to justify white supremacy.”

Last fall, Tuberville criticized Democrats during a Nevada campaign stop:

“They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

Tuberville also negatively reacted to removing white nationalists from the military. First, his office said he is “skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military” despite a report from DDT’s administration documenting the threat of white supremacist in the military. In a press conference, reporters asked him about his “white nationalist” support, and he asked them to define the term. When they explained white nationalists are white supremacists who support some Nazi views, Tuberville disagreed with them. He said, “I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican.” He also explained that white nationalism is comparable to a religion.  

About John Durham’s report that recorded nothing prosecutable, Tuberville commented:

“If people don’t go to jail for this, the American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough’s enough, let’s don’t have elections anymore.”

After a jury found DDT liable in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, the angry Tuberville said the verdict “makes me want to vote for him twice” in 2024. Tuberville is a member of the Senate Education Committee and the Armed Services Committee.

Mass Shootings:

U.S. lax gun laws with guns traveling across state lines meant at least 16 people dead and over 80 injured in at least 10 mass shootings to commemorate the weekend for Memorial Day 2023.

• Hollywood (FL): Nine people injured on the beach Monday evening after an altercation between two people.
• Chicago: Gunshots but no injuries on North Avenue Beach on Friday afternoon, but nine people killed and over 50 injured throughout the weekend.
• Baltimore: An argument between two men leading to five injured on Friday.
• Mesa (AZ): Four murdered people and one injured by one person at multiple locations on Friday and Saturday.
• Seattle: Shots at Roxbury Lanes Casino with three people injured on Saturday.
• Red River (NM): Three people killed and five others injured at a motorcycle rally Saturday evening.
• Garden Grove (CA): Three people injured in a restaurant after an argument on Saturday evening.
• Atlanta: A teenager killed and another injured at “an unauthorized gathering” at a high school.
• Washington, D.C.: One person killed after a fight on a Metro train on Sunday.
• Canal Winchester (OH): Seven people, including two juveniles, injured on Monday.
• Chester (PA): Eight people injured near a stadium on Sunday.
• Columbus (MS): One person killed and four other injured in a sports bar late Friday night.
• Columbus (OH): Seven people injured by a masked shooter where teenagers were spinning “donuts” in a residential area late Sunday night followed by another mass shooting where five people were injured. 
• Marianna (AR): One person killed and four others injured at a block party in the parking lot of an auto parts store on Saturday night.
• Dale City (VA): Three people killed and two others injured inside a home on Friday afternoon.
• Country Club Estates (GA): Five people injured on Friday.
• Milwaukee (WI): Four teenage girls injured on Friday.

At least another ten mass shootings over the past weekend are listed in the Gun Violence Archive.

The Florida shooting wounded children from ages 1 to 17, and critics pointed out to Gov. Ron DeSantis that a drag show was not responsible for it. The same goes for all the other shootings. As of yet, DeSantis has made no public statement about the shooting. More shootings across the U.S. included the ones in Cleveland (OH), killing two and wounding 23.

Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Day 460, Memorial Day 2023

The first “Memorial Day” may have been on May 1, 1865, when newly freed Black slaves gathered outside Charleston (SC) to put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers who helped liberate them. White Southerners attempted to erase the event’s memory, but some documentation remains. The soldiers were buried without coffins at the Washington Race Course turned into an outdoor prison for captured Northerners. White Southerners attempted to erase the event’s memory, but some documentation remains. A parade was led by about 2,800 Black schoolchildren newly enrolled in schools. Since then, the tradition of Memorial Day is the memory of those who died while fighting America’s wars in a country now beset by a movement toward oppression and loss of rights.

Some of the fallen U.S. soldiers to be remembered went to Ukraine as volunteers for their fight for democracy after Russia invaded the country over 15 months ago. Survivors of those fallen say the soldiers who fought in the Ukrainian cause was the same as in the U.S. military: love of liberty and opposition to tyranny. The brave people of Ukraine, fighting for their freedom just as Americans fought against the British in the Revolutionary War, should be commemorated on Memorial Day 2023.

On the last Sunday of May, the people of Kyiv celebrate the founding of their city, and Russians chose this day to launch its biggest drone attack on the city since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Yet Ukrainians shot down almost all the Iranian-made craft purchased by Russia—52 of 54 Shahed drones sent for several hours.   

The attack on Kyiv came after Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Chechen mercenaries Wagner Group, declared victory in the city of Bakhmut, which has been almost completely destroyed, and turned it over to the Russian soldiers. The mercenaries are responsible for the only two Russian victories in Ukraine since last summer, the other one Bakhmut’s nearby town of Soledar in January.

Throughout the invasion, Prigozhin denigrated Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the commander overseeing the war in Ukraine, Gen. Valery Gerasimov with profanity-laced rants, most recently the lack of ammunition for troops. Former convict Prigozhin, 61, has also talked about a revolution to overthrow Russia’s elitist power, possibly in a move for him to replace 70-year-old Putin who had hired him to cater meals at the Kremlin.

According to the Daily Beast, Ukrainian spies are trying to kill Putin: Russia is blaming Ukraine for an attempted assassination earlier this month after a drone attack on the Kremlin earlier this month. Putin wasn’t present at the time. Russia’s president is also afraid of being killed by his own people, according to Ukrainian intelligence. Ex-Moscow officials claim Putin and his Kremlin are running a “dystopian ‘comedy club’” because the ridicule for their constant mistakes, appearances “that they are just a bunch of ridiculous fools,” according to Putin’s former speech writer Abbas Galyamov.

Prigozhin piled on when he said the battle “was launched for the sake of denazification, and we made Ukraine a nation that is known throughout the whole world. They are like the Greeks or Romans in a period of prosperity.” He added:

“As for the ‘demilitarization,’ if they had 500 tanks at the beginning of the [war], they now have 5,000 of them. If 20,000 fighters skillfully fought then, now there are 400,000. How did we demilitarize it? It turns out that on the contrary, we, who the hell knows how, have militarized Ukraine. We came aggressively, walked all over the territory of Ukraine in our boots in search of Nazis. While we were searching for Nazis, we knocked out everyone we could. We approached Kyiv… screwed up and withdrew. Then on to Kherson, we screwed up and withdrew. And somehow it’s not shaping up for us.”

Criticism of Putin can be deadly; Russian minister Petr Kucherenko, who called the onslaught a “fascist invasion,” fell fatally ill on a flight to Moscow. He is the latest of over 40 high profile Russian elites strangely dying since Putin’s invasion.

Disasters have struck other Russians as paranoia runs rampant across the country with Russian regime crackdowns policing war critics and political dissenters. Parishioners denounce peace-advocating Russian priests. Teachers are fired after children tattle about their war opposition. Neighbors with trivial grudges turn in foes. Workers accuse other employees to bosses or law enforcement. Overheard private conversations and chat groups lead to arrests. All is reminiscent of Joseph Stalin’s repression.

One single women, aged 37, denounced 1,046 people to the FSB (Federal Security Service)—”scientists, teachers, doctors, human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and ordinary people,” according to her bragging. “I feel enormous moral satisfaction when a person is persecuted because of my denunciation: dismissed from work, subjected to an administrative fine, etc.”

Three Russian scientists working on hypersonic missile technology in a Siberia facility have been arrested for treason. One of them is accused of transferring secret data to China, and Ukraine’s air defenses exposed an “apparent vulnerability,” according to a UK intelligence update.

Ukraine claims that Russia plans a “massive” attack at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, currently under Russian control. Russians plan to have rioters simulate an accident at Zaporizhzhia. In early May, Russia evacuated 18 settlements in the area and caused a “mad panic” with traffic jams caused by thousands of people heading the city of Enerhodar. In Melitopol, shops are out of goods, and hospitals are discharging patients into the streets.

Europe’s largest nuclear power station and the surrounding region in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, the facility has been repeatedly hit by shelling from both sides, each sided blaming the other for the dangerous attacks. The plant once supplied 20 percent of Ukraine’s electricity before stopping power production last September. None of the country’s six Soviet-era reactors has since generated electricity, but Zaporizhzhia is connected to its power grid to cool the plant’s nuclear reactors.

Russian military forces are enhancing defensive positions in the area, causing fear from radiation contamination. To prepare, Russia disrupted the scheduled rotation of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who are based at the plant.

Another nuclear disaster could result from Russa moving nuclear weapons into Minsk, Belarus to give the country and other Russian allies access to them. Rumors have returned about the health of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, less than a week after he told state TV he was “not going to die.” His opposition leader claimed Lukashenko was in a Moscow hospital in “critical condition” after meeting with Putin.

At the Russian Victory Day celebrations on May 9, he had a bandage on his right hand, looked unsteady, and missed Putin’s lunch. Later that week, he failed to address the annual celebration of National Flag, Emblem, and Anthem Day, one of his traditions. Lukashenko may have been poisoned when he went to Russia. He is the only European leader to have held power longer than Putin.

A week ago, fighting along the Russia-Ukraine border may have been caused by anti-Kremlin militias seeking to liberate Russia from Putin. One of them claimed to be “the same Russians as you [who] no longer wanted to justify the actions of criminals in power.” Despite Russian blame, Ukrainians denied ties to the Russian partisan fighters, saying they act independently from military control. A militia leader said in March that the group conducts repeated attacks inside Russia and last week claimed the militia’s responsibility for major train derailments inside Russia on May 1-2.

President Joe Biden has consented to training pilots on U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets. Ukraine has started its months-long counteroffensive for months with operations including blowing up supply lines and depots. Officials now warn Putin of a revenge attack after the recent missile strikes. In the 16^th Russian air attack on Kyiv this month, all the Russian missiles fired at Kyiv on Monday were shot down.

Russian companies face a serious workforce shortage with population decline, wartime exodus, and military losses, the lowest employee availability since the beginning of record-keeping in 1998. Hardest hit were manufacturing, water supply, mining, storage, and transportation industries;  were hardest hit by the workforce shortage; car sales, wholesale trade, and service sectors were least affected.

According to UK intelligence, Russia has become “increasingly reliant on antiquated equipment” in Ukraine. Russian military is mostly comprised of “poorly trained mobilised reservists” and that many of its units are “severely under-strength,” significantly weaker since the invasion began in February 2022. On the other side, Ukraine formed eight new Ukrainian brigades of soldiers, comprising up to 40,000 soldiers. Troops are all volunteers—raw recruits, police, and veterans of previous fighting with Russia.

Owen Matthews pursues the reason behind Putin’s invasion in his book Overreach. He attributes the debacle to Putin’s belief “that Russian-speaking Ukrainians naturally considered themselves ethnically and politically Russian.” The idea was proved false when “millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians fled from Moscow’s forces, and tens of thousands volunteered to fight against their would be ‘liberators.’”

Putin also seriously underestimates the Ukrainian military, valiantly fighting for over 460 days, as well as the West strongly supporting Ukraine’s fight for democracy. He also overestimated the Russian military, a hollow shell as he now pays people to migrate to Russia as soldiers.

Russian links between ethnonationalism with intolerance and aggression should be a lesson the U.S. that suffers the same problem, resulting in the same extremism of racism and support for Russia over Ukraine.  

MAGA Approves of DDT’s Losses

In a right-wing rush, CNN gave Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) a 70-minute timeframe for a campaign rally, hoping it would raise ratings like Fox network has with its DDT support. The flow of lies and rude statements increased the ratings for that time slot by three times to 3.1 million viewers, but ensuing criticism took the network in a downward spiral. Since DDT’s appearance, the network’s ratings nosedived to its worst since June 2015. CNN averaged 429,000 daily viewers last week, Monday through Friday, under half of MSNBC and Fox. What is CNN’s solution? A “town hall” (aka campaign rally) with presidential wannabe Mick Pence on June 7. The old definition of insanity: expecting different results when doing the same thing over and over.

The town hall may have cost DDT more money. After he continued his defamatory comments against E. Jean Carroll, she said she would update her original lawsuit with a new claim, adding $10 million or more in the $5 million award of punitive damages to her case. A Washington appeals court returned the case to New York where it is pending before the original judge. 

Weeks ago, DDT may have been peaking with a large number of political endorsements, including Florida GOP congressional endorsements. The tide may be turning, however, in favor of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Some influential DeSantis supporters, likely because of DDT’s failures for the past two elections:

• Ken Cuccinelli: DDT’s DHS acting deputy secretary who turned from vocal DDT supporter to DeSantis, who “never backs down.”
• Steve Cortes: DDT’s senior adviser on his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
• Chip Roy: Texas representative, highly influential in the House Freedom Caucus.
• Thomas Massie: the Texas representative, angry because DDT supported the $2 trillion Covid relief package passed at the beginning of the pandemic and DDT interfered in the 2022 primary race.
• Bob Good: the Virginia representative who thinks that DDT can’t win the presidential election.

New discoveries regarding the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago in June 2022 reveal that two of DDT’s employees moved boxes into a storage area after a May 2022 subpoena to have them relinquished, likely an attempt to conceal them in violation of the subpoena. Even before the subpoena, DDT and his aides had moved sensitive papers that DDT wanted to illegally retain. He kept some of them visible in his office and showed them to visitors with no clearance.

The procedure for moving these documents prove that DDT knew he was breaking the law, according to his previous lawyer Ty Cobb. Proof of this information results in liability, a criminal offense, with showing them to others being a violation of the Espionage Act.

Conservatives have compared the discovery of classified documents in the possession of President Joe Biden and former VP Mike Pence, but both of them cooperated with the investigation, indicating they inadvertently had the materials. DDT has fought to keep classified documents by misleading the government and then, when they were found, falsely claimed that he had the right to have them.  The National Archives provided to special counsel Jack Smith “16 records that show Trump and his top advisers had knowledge of the correct declassification process while he was president.”

A 95-word letter from DDT’s lawyers to Merrick Garland, possibly dictated by DDT, appears to be an attempt to force the AG to order his special counsel to “stand down.” The letter was copied to “representatives of the Congress”:

“We represent Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, in the investigation currently being conducted by the Special Counsel’s Office. Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter, and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly. No President of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such an outrageous and unlawful fashion. We request a meeting at your earliest convenience to discuss the ongoing injustice that is being perpetrated by your Special Counsel and his prosecutors. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Garland has not yet responded.

In DDT’s Manhattan criminal trial, prosecutors gave a recording of DDT and an unidentified witness tied to the charges for the case. Prosecutors also have recordings of calls between witnesses and others. The judge issued a protective order banning DDT from publicizing, or even possessing, much of the evidence to be submitted. DDT cannot speak publicly about, or post on social media, any case material not made public. His access to information, such as “Limited Dissemination Materials,” is only in his attorney’s presence. The judge told DDT he can be sanctioned or fined “up to a finding of contempt, which is punishable” if he violates the orders.

DDT’s trial is scheduled for March 25, 2024, after next election’s primaries begin,  He remotely attended the hearing for the trial, earlier this month, and appeared to be angry about the date, three weeks after Super Tuesday, a vital day in the primary season. The announcement of the trial date was the day before Ron DeSantis announced his run for president against DDT. Never before has a person elected as U.S. president faced criminal charges.  

After the hearing, DDT used his personal social platform, Truth Social, to vent his rage, complaining that the “New York County Supreme Court [violated his] First Amendment Rights, ‘Freedom of Speech’” and calling it “ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” Pretrial motions are due by August 29 with October 10 the deadline for DDT’s lawyers to file their responses. The judge said he would rule on the motions on January 4, 2024. DDT will be required to appear in person at that hearing.

Another addition to Smith’s investigation is a subpoena for the Trump Organization regarding details about its real estate licensing and development since 2017 in seven countries: China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. DDT’s has been boosting the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour to help his golf courses’ losses with strong support for the Saudis despite their appalling human rights record.

The Supreme Court has permitted the Biden administration dispute about congressional Democrats attempt to obtain information from the General Services Administration on documents about DDT’s Washington hotel’s revenue and expenses related to his lease from the government. A district judge had dismissed the case declaring the Democrats lacked standing, but a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court reversed the opinion.

Not satisfied with all the lawsuits against him, DDT’s business behind his Truth Social platform filed a $3.78 billion defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post for alleging the company may have committed securities fraud was false and defamatory and posed an “existential threat.” The article described the company’s relationship to a “porn-friendly bank.” Other DDT cases such as his defamation suit against the Post over Robert Mueller’s investigation and the “insidious plot” to obtain his tax records were dismissed. DDT also sued CNN last October for defamation.

DDT begged Texas Republicans not to impeach AG Ken Paxton and praised the reelection of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, adding another four years to two former terms of his authoritarian reign. In addition, DDT accused Ron DeSantis of making Disney into a “Woke and Disgusting shadow of its former self.” Less than 24 hours after DeSantis’ disastrous launch as a presidential candidate, DDT reposted an AI-created video that parodied DeSantis’ Twitter presentation with faked conversations including billionaire George Soros, World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab, and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Adolf Hitler, the devil, and the FBI. And Elon Musk.

Every loss that DDT suffers appears to make him more popular with his base, much to the disappointment of Republicans who feel that he cannot win the 2024 election. Robert Tracinski writes that GOP voters’ investment in DDT requires they excuse all his faults as they have always done, starting from smaller failings up to criminal charges. More than that, his supporters want him to fight dirty; they approve of his constant losses. Older societies celebrated honor, but the current conservatives treasure dominant status and victimhood, a characteristic in which DDT delights. DDT’s brand:  

“The more Trump is embroiled in lawsuits, the more he is caught lying, the more seedy revelations emerge from his personal life—then the more he becomes the symbol of a right-wing persecution complex and the more Republicans rally around him.”

Last week, a 19-year-old Missouri man crashed a U-Haul truck into White House security barriers. The Nazi flag in his truck was photographed lying on the ground near the truck after the crash. Donald Trump, Jr. accused the federal government of “creating fake crimes and fake hate.” He said the same thing earlier this month on a podcast that the hundred members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marching in Washington were all federal employees. Claiming that all the violence from white supremacists is actually enacted by the federal government convinces MAGA folk that they should continue to support DDT. These supporters also claim that very few incidents of this violence occur, or they delude themselves with the belief that they don’t exist at all, thus protecting DDT.  

Possible Debt Ceiling Agreement, Paxton Impeached

With little fanfare, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced a tentative agreement to end the battle over raising the debt ceiling two weeks before the default would begin on June 5. McCarthy is trying to remain Speaker with his announcement:

“I just got off the phone with the president a bit ago. After he wasted time and refused to negotiate for months, we’ve come to an agreement in principle that is worthy of the American people.”

Far-right House members are disagreeing with his semi-positive view of the deal which will require Democratic votes to get the settlement through Congress.

Some of the provisions:

• Suspend the debt limit through January 2025, after the 2024 presidential election.
• Cap spending in the 2024 and 2025 budgets at the 2023 levels for one year and increase it by one percent in 2025.
• Claw back unused Covid funds.
• Pare back some of the $80 billion for the IRS in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act law. (The exact amount has not been published.)
• Speed up the permitting process for some energy projects. Changes in the landmark 1970s’ National Environmental Policy Act will designate “a single lead agency” to develop environmental reviews.
• Add work requirements for food aid programs by extending the age from 49 to 54. The provision exempts veterans and homeless people while sunsetting in 2030.
• Create no changes in Medicaid and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
• Include an administrative pay-as-you-go provision requiring Biden to find offsets for rules and regulations increasing federal spending.
• Slightly increase funding boosts for the military and veterans affairs in line with inflation.
• Exempt Medicaid from additional work requirements.

McCarthy is giving House members 72 hours to read the legislation, yet to be written, before asking them to vote on it on June 1. Although McCarthy said he has already sent out a fact sheet to House members, he added that more work needs to be done. He expects to post the legislative text on May 28. Ultra-conservative members in the House Freedom Caucus  such as Reps. Bob Good (VA) and Scott Perry (PA) are already complaining, but McCarthy hopes to cover himself by not agreeing to any higher taxes for the wealthy and big business. Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) tweeted a vomit emoji about McCarthy getting “almost zippo in exchange” for the debt ceiling hike.

The media of the next couple of weeks will be filled with more details about the “agreement” and the problems involved in passing it. For now, this is a rough summary.

Ken Paxton‘s Impeachment:

In landmark news today, the Texas House impeached AG Ken Paxton by a vote of 121-23 with two were present but not voting, and three who were absent from the chamber after hours of debate.   According to a Texas GOP legislator, Paxton personally called House members before the session to threaten them with political payback if they vote to impeach him. The Senate either remains in Austin after the regular session ends Monday for a trial or set a date in the future; the trial has no deadline.  

Before this vote, only two officials in Texas’s nearly 200-year history had been impeached, both for misuse of public funds: a state district judge in 1975 and the governor in 1917. After the impeachment vote, Paxton tweeted an accusation of House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) and the “corrupt politicians he controls” of colluding with Democrats, the Biden administration, “the abortion industry, anti-gun zealots, and woke corporations.”

Paxton ally Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will schedule and preside over the Senate trial. Members can request documents, witnesses, and testimony; meet privately for deliberations; and exercise “any other powers necessary.” The chamber’s 19 Republicans include Paxton’s wife and Sen. Bryan Hughes, mentioned in the House articles of impeachment for having helped Paxton. Twelve senators are Democrats.

Deposed Donald Trump (DDT), a strong supporter of Paxton, posted a video Paxton had used to show Phelan was drunk while presiding over the legislature last week. Phelan’s speech was slurred at the end of a 14-hour session.

Conservatives Making People Famous: Amanda Gorman, Ken Paxton

Amanda Gorman:

Grumbles about book banning across the nation finally erupted into a viral explosion after a Florida parent complained about The Hill We Climb, a book adaptation of Amanda Gorman’s poem which she read at the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021. The book was immediately removed from Miami-Dade schools. Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, wrote an assessment of the idiocy in the complaint and called people to donate to an Instagram fundraiser:

“So they ban my book from young readers, confuse me with @oprah, fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives…Unnecessary #bookbans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back.

“Often all it takes to remove these works from our libraries and schools is a single objection… One parent could get my poetry banned from classrooms. And yet one country can’t ban assault rifles from massacring them.”

The media has been investigating the parent, identified as Daily Salinas, a Cuban immigrant. Her Facebook page features right-wing posts supporting the Proud Boys, and she attended Moms for Liberty meetings, a conservative group behind many of the book bannings. One post, now deleted, summarized Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a century-old antisemitic conspiracy theory. Later she apologized for the post after Miami against Fascism found her page. She said she thought it was about communism and that English is not her first language.

In July 2022, security removed Salinas from a Miami-Dade school board meeting during a Moms for Liberty intervention. In protesting two approved sex education textbooks, the group disrupted the meeting; the board voted 5-4 to remove the books, leaving the district without sex education instruction materials. A year earlier, Salinas was photographed next to Enrique Tarrio, former leader of the Proud Boys, when she was protesting masks in the Miami-Dade schools. She also protested with a Christian nationalist group.

Salinas said she read only parts of the five books she had removed from a school with her complaints because someone had to read the books to her. Yet she said the books didn’t “support the curriculum.” Salinas reported the books for “CRT and gender idiology [sic],” and “indoctrination.” She wrote, “Is not educational and have indirectly hate messages.” A page she criticizes reads:

“Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed / A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”

Under author on the complaint form, Salinas listed 69-year-old Oprah Winfrey instead of the book’s author, 25-year-old Gorman. Both women are Black.

With unfettered banning, Republican-controlled states have caused almost nearly 1,500 book bans nationwide during the first half of the 2022-23 school year. This followed a record number of book bans last year, according to the American Library Association.

“Together this is a hill we won’t just climb, but a hill we will conquer,” Gorman asserted. She referred to a lawsuit filed last week claiming Escambia County School Board book bans are unconstitutional. After the lawsuit was filed, the board voted 3-2 to fire superintendent Tim Smith, citing staff shortages and book banning controversies among other issues. The suit from PEN America, publisher Penguin Random House, and authors maintains that books removed from the shelves were disproportionately by minority and LGBTQ authors and frequently have topics or themes related to race or LGBTQ orientation and identity.

An analysis of 153 school districts across 37 states, tracked by a researcher from PEN America, found 1,065 complaints, the vast majority filed by only 11 people. Six percent of complainants filed 60 percent of the 1,000-plus book challenges. Texas school districts received 32 percent of the challenges in the database, Florida had another 17 percent, and Missouri received 11 percent. Pennsylvania followed with 5 percent. Forty-two percent of challenged books had LGBTQ characters or themes; another 28 percent have characters of color or deal with race. Of the 499 challengers who gave an identification, 21 percent stated they were parents.

A Department of Education investigation of Forsyth County School in suburban Atlanta (GA) found that the school had violated students’ civil rights by removing books with both LGBTQ and BiPOC themes, characters, and stories. The probe also notified the school district:

“[The] District’s media center book screening process may have created a hostile environment for students… T]he District’s responsive steps related to the book screening process were not designed to, and were insufficient to, ameliorate any resultant racially and sexually hostile environment.”

In an April Fox poll, 77 percent of parents are extremely or very concerned about book banning by local school boards, up 11 points since last May, when 66 percent were troubled by the practice. The percentage of concern about book banning is ten percent higher than the 67 percent concerned about gun worries.

Ken Paxton:

Some Texas Republicans are tiring of their corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton. A House committee has unanimously voted to file 20 articles of impeachment against Paxton who has allegedly had a pattern of misconduct and lawbreaking for years. The next step to remove him from office is going to the full House. Charges include bribery, obstruction of justice, and retaliating against whistleblowers. Other articles of impeachment are unfitness for office and abuse of public trust.

Paxton is blaming the vote on “corrupt politicians in the Texas House.” Several allegations were previously known, but the collection of the charges indicates the wide scope of the committee’s investigation into Paxton.

Earlier this month, the House unanimously expelled former state Rep. Bryan Slaton for having sex with a 19-year-old aide after he gave her alcohol. He is the first Texas legislator to be removed from office since 1917. No state AG has been either impeached or expelled. Expulsion requires two-thirds approval of the membership. Previously a Southern Baptist youth pastor, Slaton ran on a “family values” and anti-LGBTQ+ rights campaign. He led the GOP in banning drag shows, called them “perverted adults.”

If two-thirds of the House votes for Paxton’s impeachment, the Senate will have a trial. He would be suspended from office pending its outcome, and the governor can appoint a provisional replacement. Paxton claims that he can’t be impeached for conduct before his most recent election “absent a felony conviction,” but statutes may apply only to local officials.

Investigators said Paxton may have committed at least three felonies to help his friend and political donor, Austin real estate investor Nate Paul. Paxton had a sexual affair with a woman he recommended for a job with Paul. Initially, Paul said he didn’t hire the woman and then claimed he didn’t know anything about her after he was proved wrong.

A question is whether Paxton’s wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton (R), will recuse herself from the trial or vote. Gov. Greg Abbott hasn’t defended Paxton, who accused House Speaker Dade Phelan of being drunk during meetings. Paxton called on Phelan to resign immediately before the committee investigation into the AG.

Paxton is also upset with Texas GOP legislators because they refuse to take the $3.3 million settlement money with whistleblowers from state funds. A legislative budget rider blocked not only the funds but also Paxton’s office from “using any appropriated funds for the purposes of a settlement or judgment relating to lawsuits or claims filed under Chapter 554 of the Government Code.” After whistleblowers reported Paxton’s alleged criminal conduct benefiting Paul, eight aides were either fired or forced to resign.

The AG has also been under state criminal indictment for securities fraud charges for most of his over eight years in office. In addition, the State Bar of Texas brought a misconduct lawsuit against him for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in four battleground states.

At least three Texas counties are suing Paxton to strike down his legal opinion from last year stating anyone can access voted ballots immediately after an election. The plaintiffs allege that this opinion violates state and federal law, contradicts his previous direction, and exposes local election administrators to possible criminal charges. For decades, the AG’s office ordered counties to keep voted ballots secure for 22 months after an election as required by federal law and Texas state election code.

In another case, Paxton faces an ethics lawsuit by state attorney regulators for his lawsuit before the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A complaint to the Texas State Bar a year ago declares he made “dishonest” statements in his lawsuit to keep Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) in the White House despite his election loss.

Paxton filed a federal lawsuit to block the $1.7 trillion spending law for most government expenditures through September 2023. He maintained that the proxy voting process, approved during the pandemic is unconstitutional. He has found a GOP appointee in Lubbock (TX) for the case.

A Texas judge gave Paxton permission to own a gun with his ruling that people under felony indictment may purchase guns.  

The Texas House vote for Paxton’s impeachment is scheduled for Saturday at 1:00 pm. The legislature is scheduled to adjourn on May 30 and not resume for a regular session until 2025.

Republicans’ Stand on Not Raising the Debt Ceiling: ‘Our Hostage’

A default by not increasing the debt ceiling will be good for the Republican party, according to the national chair, Ronna McDaniel. Maybe that’s why the GOP doesn’t feel any necessity in backing off their hardline demands, sometimes even increasing them. Wednesday, before the GOP House members left Washington on Thursday to celebrate nine days off going to barbeques and otherwise entertaining themselves, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said that it wasn’t his “responsibility to represent the socialist wing of the Democratic Party.”

The GOP, however, raised the debt ceiling three times during the reign of former Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) with no spending conditions and increased the national debt by 25 percent, $7.8 trillion. At his infamous CNN town hall, DDT found no problem with using the default as negotiating leverage “because I’m no longer president.”

Asked Tuesday if he was willing to make any concessions in budget talks with Democrats, McCarthy said, “We are going to raise the debt ceiling.” Wednesday, he said the standoff “was not my fault” five times during a 13-minute press conference. McCarthy and other Republicans echo then-House Majority Leader Eric Canto who said in 2011 that the GOP “concession” is “the fact that we are voting—the fact that we are even discussing voting for a debt ceiling increase.” House GOP leaders mean that compromise is out of the question; they will settle for nothing less than capitulation. Indifferent to disasters from their drastically cutting the safety net, GOP House members aren’t due back until June 5, two days after the federal deadline for a default from the bill that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) calls “our hostage.”  

Republican spending cuts will “Make America Worse Again.” For a decade, federal spending caps have caused worsening problems such as declining school performance, surging mental health issues, and levels of poverty and hunger. In a new analysis of 178 federal programs serving people with low incomes, the Coalition on Human Needs found that over two-thirds of people in this population lost ground from 2010 to 2023. Areas included job training, education, nutrition, mental health, and housing programs, all hindered by the 2011 debt ceiling agreement in effect from 2012 through 2021 with caps less draconian than those in the 2023 House GOP House bill.

The struggling labor force also hurts the nation’s economy because openings, especially those with adequate pay, require skills that the unemployed lack. According to the National Skills Coalition, spending on worker training dropped by over two-thirds over the past forty years, far less than other developed nations. Over the past decade, major federal job training programs lost more than a quarter of their funding. The new House bill requires cuts of over one-third with the military, Veterans Affairs, and mandatory programs not reduced, as Republicans want. Training programs, even one serving homeless veterans, would be slashed. By 2033, the House measure will result in across-the-board cuts of about 60 percent, far worsening the calamity.

The catastrophes resulting from the House bill will be repeated in other areas. Federal spending in the Children’s Mental Health Services program declined by nearly one-quarter over 10 years from the 2011 spending caps although emergency room treatment rose between one-fourth and one-third from 2019 to 2020. Again this area would be cut by one-third, and 60 percent by 2033.

When Republicans claim, as they did with the VA, that they won’t be cutting a specific area, other areas such as education, will be vastly increased. The one-third cut in K-12 education for low-income school districts serving 26 million children and for 7.5 million students with disabilities would eliminate 150,000 teachers for these students in just one year.

The Public Housing Operating Fund already lost 23 percent from the former cap, despite the severe housing shortage. About 800,000 more households will lose assistance with the proposed one-third cut. Republicans don’t want to be specific about the horrifying damage they plan to inflict on people in the United States to give themselves and their wealthy friends “welfare” they can stash in foreign countries.

Republicans have adamantly refused to create more income through a partial replacement of the 2017 massive tax cuts for the wealthy and big business. Instead, they are putting together another major tax cut package of $3 trillion for their wealthy friends soon after their return, against blowing up the national debt. The bill should be ready by June 16, two weeks after the Treasury Department runs out of money. According to Politico:

“Key parts of the [tax cut] package… will likely include a full restoration of research and development deductions, full bonus depreciation, removing caps on business interest expensing, and a doubling of the $1.08 million limitation on the section 179 deduction (which, like bonus depreciation, allows a company to deduct an asset’s cost up-front).”

The 2017 law already makes business tax cuts for businesses permanent, and the GOP plans to do the same for the wealthy. Known as the TCIA Permanency Act, the measure has almost 100 GOP co-sponsors. Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), originator of the bill, financially benefited from the 2017 tax law. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that just extending the 2017 law would add $2.5 trillion to the deficit in the next decade.  Only one percent of the benefits from the TCJA Permanency Act would go to the poorest fifth of U.S. taxpayers, and the richest fifth would get two-thirds of the tax benefits.

The GOP are united in not raising taxes for revenue, but research shows that the GOP tax cuts under George W. Bush and DDT have caused the rising debt. Spending is down, but the slashed taxes enacted by Republicans disproportionately for the wealthy and the profitable corporations during the 21^st century increased 57 percent of the debt ratio since 2001.

Republicans are willing to pay for the military, which pays highly inflated prices. The $1.1 trillion in annual militarized spending is almost double over the past two decades although the country is supposedly no longer in a war after George W. Bush’s debacle in the Middle East. Sixty-two percent of the budget’s $1.8 trillion discretionary funding goes to the Pentagon, nuclear weapons, law enforcement, prisons, and federal immigration enforcement as well as such perks for military members such as golf courses, private chefs, etc. Republicans have exempted any of this budget from spending cuts. Less than 40 percent of the discretionary budget after the government pays for mandatory Social Security, healthcare, and the nutrition (part of the Farm Bill), about $700 billion, is left for human needs such as education, disaster relief, environment, scientific research, housing, environment, etc.

While Republicans preen about benefiting from the default inflicted on the U.S., they overlook the benefit of their actions on China, supposedly their enemy. Currently, the U.S. dollar is the dominant global currency, accounting for 60 percent of official reserves and used widely for trade invoicing and financial transactions. Since GOP dominance for the past four decades, the Japanese yen has started to supplant the dollar as the top currency of the financial system, and the euro has also been rising in this century.

The GOP’s determination to destroy the U.S. economy has put China, the dominant trade partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Central Asia, on the rise. By 2015, one-fourth of Chinese trade was invoiced in Chinese renminbi (RMB), becoming the world’s second-most frequently used invoicing currency. Expanded use of the RMB in trade moves to its expansion in other areas. In addition, U.S. status in international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would be reduced, and U.S. ability to use financial sanctions on foreign countries would be weakened.

DDT made problems more serious when he pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. China became the dominant trade partner of Japan, Korea, and the Asia-Pacific region by negotiating new or expanded free trade agreements in Asia. As the U.S. falters, China can replace it as a benign stable leader.

• Coping with the grim possibility of a default, satirists ridicule the GOP approach toward spending cuts. Alexandra Petri has a few suggestions: 
• Buy secondhand jets.
• Tell the presidential motorcade to double as an UberPool for people heading in the same direction as the president.
• Rent runways on aircraft carriers for private planes to use.
• Pay defense contractors in “experiences”: take Lockheed Martin skydiving or spend time with the family.
• Offer China interest payments with Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards.
• Hire more women because they make only 82 percent of what men are paid.
• Rent out places such as the Jefferson Memorial.
• Sell more of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s chapstick; the last one brought $100,000.
• Start a GoFundMe.

As the default closes in, more people realize the seriousness of the issue. By a 52 percent-to-42 percent margin, respondents to a Marist poll said Congress should increase the debt ceiling first to avoid a default and discuss spending cuts separately rather than only increasing it if significant cuts are made at the same time, even if that means the U.S. defaults on its debt. A Monmouth poll has 51 percent in favor of dealing with the increase separate from the budget compared to 25 percent who want the two of them connected.

Uvalde, One Year Later

One year ago, on May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old male purchased two AR-15 rifles for his birthday and killed 19 elementary children inside a classroom in Uvalde (TX) along with two of their teachers, and many more were injured and traumatized.  About 375 law enforcement officers waited 77 minutes to stop him. Protocols developed after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 recommended that police move immediately to confront an active shooter. The delay in Uvalde undoubtedly increased the death toll. After the disaster, Texas law enforcement provided inaccurate information and stalled explanations to the media and public about the details of the event. State lawmakers tried to bury the finding that police officers wouldn’t confront the shooter because they were afraid.

According to a new revelation, at least one young person with extensive contact online heard about his deadly plans. In Frankfurt, Germany, a 15-year-old girl has been found guilty of “failing to report planned crimes”; she was issued a warning and required to undergo “educational measures.”The FBI and federal prosecutors found her on the social media platforms that the shooter used. The night before the shooting he told her that he had just received an online order of bullets that fragmented on impact. He also showed her a black bag appearing to hold many magazines of ammunition and at least one gun. The next morning, he texted her that he “just shot my grandma in the head” and followed up with “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.” The girl waited until after the news to ask a friend on Yubo to contact U.S. authorities.

An ongoing question is whether the school district followed their prevention protocols mandated by a 2019 Texas law. The Texas legislative investigation supposedly found that the district had adopted a “viable” policy for “responding to an active shooter emergency.” Yet a government official in Texas reported that neither the school nor the community had any threat assessment program.

As in other areas of the country, Texas GOP leaders are hostile to gun-violence prevention policies such as red flag laws and raising the legal age for gun buyers from 18 to 21 despite widespread bipartisan public support for these measures. In the year since the Uvalde shooting, 48 of the over 650 mass shootings have occurred in Texas.

Instead of solving the problem of gun violence, Republicans are worsening it. As a “school safety measure,” the Texas House passed a bill offering up to $25,000 to school staff who want to arm themselves and serve as “sentinels.” This solution supposedly replaces police officers too afraid to confront shooters. Gov. Greg Abbott decided to pardon one of two good guys with guns at a Black Lives Rally who was convicted of killing the other guy. Four weeks after the mass shooting in Uvalde, the U.S. Supreme Court greatly expanded gun “rights.” Its verdict in a 30-year-old law to keep guns from people under domestic violence restraining orders returned guns to a Texas man.

The first Texas legislative session since the Uvalde massacre failed to raise the age for a raise-the-age law to 21 that Uvalde families strongly pushed. Abbott said it was unconstitutional. Instead, legislators backed bills requiring schools to have active-shooter plans and use their budgets to put silent panic alert buttons in all classrooms. The legislature closed a loophole by requiring courts to report involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles ages 16 and older for the federal gun background check system. The House passed a bill to prevent modification of handguns into fully automatic firearms, but the Senate hasn’t given it a hearing. Prevention of straw purchases, one person buying a gun for someone else not permitted to have one, passed both chambers, but the House must decide whether to accept Senate changes.  The primary gun-safety wins in this year’s five-month session were hearings and committee votes. The session ends May 29 and won’t be back until 2025 unless Abbott wants to pass one of his pet projects.

Abbott enthusiastically stated he wants to “protect” children when he said he was signing the bill that “would block a minor’s access to gender reassignment surgeries, puberty-blocking medication, and hormone therapies, and providing this care to trans youth would lead to the revocation of a health care provider’s license.” Texas is the 18^th state to have this law with the excuse of children protection. As in all other states, Republicans believe the falsehoods that minors receive these surgeries and that puberty-blocking medication is permanent.

New laws in red states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Utah allows more people to own guns without permits or training and allow them to carry guns in far more public places, including schools. Laws passed in states attempting greater gun safety were usually challenged or immediately eliminated. Nevada’s Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed three gun-control bills this week, one to raise the age for owning semiautomatic shotguns and assault-style weapons from 18 to 21. The second tried to keep guns away from election sites, and the third would have blocked gun ownership within 10 years of a gross misdemeanor or felony hate-crime conviction. With the claim of constitutional rights, young men with AR-15-style rifles can continue to shoot anywhere they want at random.

At least seven senior and supervising law enforcement officers responsible for the delay at Uvalde have stayed at the same agencies despite their knowledge of the shooting inside the classroom and failure to stop the shooter. One was commended for his actions that day. Only four of the almost 200 officers responding from state and local agencies were fired when superiors discovered they made critical announcements, and two are still employed in law enforcement. Federal agencies have denied the release of records about the almost 190 federal officers, most of them from the U.S. Border Patrol.

Despite sounds of gunshots, the law enforcement communicated at least ten times that there was no active shooter. Initially, Gov. Greg Abbott praised the “quick response” by law enforcement that saved lives. The Texas Department of Public Safety investigated six officers for wrongdoing and officially cleared most of them. The chief originally said he would resign if the agency failed Uvalde but stayed on the job, insisting there was no failure.

Questions remain after the discoveries of the delay and the faulty medical response possibly causing some of the deaths. The Texas Department of Public Safety has a comprehensive set of records from 911 calls to ballistics reports to body-camera footage that might answer some questions and explain what went wrong, but officials won’t release them. The state claims disclosures would jeopardize criminal charges, but the investigation is complete.

In the last year, state legislatures have introduced over 1,700 gun-related bills; 93 were signed into law. Fifty-six percent of the laws expanded access to firearms or benefited the firearms industry. Arkansas passed seven of these laws, the most of any state. The remaining 44 percent restrict access to firearms or supported victims in gun-related cases, eight of these laws in Washington. In the 14 of 27 states enacting only looser gun restrictions, the GOP controls the legislature and governor’s office. The other three states have GOP legislatures but Democratic governors.

Some laws supposedly for “financial privacy” create difficulty in tracking gun sales: merchants are banned from using gun-specific codes in credit card billing. Other successful bills stopped government entities from doing business with companies boycotting the firearms industry or made state government funds divest of ESG funds. In an unusual move, New Mexico passed a bipartisan bill making the purchase of a firearm for those prohibited from possessing one a felony. Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the measure.

Schools are being pressured to purchase expensive and overrated AI gun-detecting technology. Guns and knives have bypassed the system with students stabbed in two separate cases while metallic objects trigger alerts. To make the system more efficient, it can send students around the machines. Evolv Technology, making the product, has hired former Tesla product leader Parag Vaish as chief digital product officer.

The GOP House has joined state legislatures in solving the increasing gun violence by trying to repeal the little gun safety reform recently passed. The first 144 days of 2023 have had at least 236 mass shootings, with 306 people dead, 938 injured, and millions terrified. Over 48,000 people died from gun-related injuries in 2021, a 23-percent increase from the 39,000 deaths two years earlier. Over 80 percent of adults take at least one precaution to protect themselves or their families such as avoiding large crowds and public transportation, and over 50 percent see gun-related crimes, injuries, and deaths a threat.  In those two years, murders with guns increased by 45 percent. At the same time, gun sales, from more and more lax gun safety laws, increased by 50 percent.

Shortly after the May 6 mass shooting in Allen (TX), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) introduced a bill to repeal all “gun control provisions” passed from early 2021 to early 2023 and signed by President Joe Biden. Her targeted laws included expanded background checks on gun buyers under 21 to include their mental health and juvenile justice records, required ten business days’ waiting time for completion of the review, and incentives for states to pass red flag laws. Boebert has 16 cosponsors, including Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has at least one neo-Nazi aide. Proposed legislation also endangers laws such as the Violence against Women and the National Defense Authorization.

Stories of Unbalanced Conservatives

When Fox fell for a hoax in the New York Hudson River Valley, even credible media such as the Washington Post reported the lie. The false story was about veterans thrown out of a hotel because and replaced with migrants. Seven homeless men of a group of 15 now say they were each offered $200 along with food and alcohol to pretend they were vets, but they never got paid. The New York Post first reported the story on its front page,and Fox stated that the network “confirmed” the story.

The small local Mid Hudson News uncovered the scam. Sharon Finch claimed her nonprofit, Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, paid to house veterans and had to scramble for other housing for them. She even said, “Last night, I was crying.” Brian Maher, a GOP assemblyman in New York, introduced legislation to block veterans’ housing displacement. The probe discovered a $37,000 credit card receipt from the foundation for the hotel had been doctored. The hotel said it had no payments on the credit card, no veterans stayed there, and vacant rooms were available.

Trying to cover her lies, Finch changed the date when veterans were displaced, the number of them, and names of hotels where veterans were being evicted in exchange for migrants. One homeless man hired for the hoax said Finch told him to answer any questions from reporters or politicians with “I am too traumatized to talk about it.” She finally confirmed that she arranged for a volunteer to pick up the men at the shelter and taken them to an event to present their plight as “veterans.” Maher is now investigating Finch.  

Another Republican, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), has led the crusade against drag shows, but her new boyfriend wore drag on his right-wing “news” program, available to children, to promote a theatrical production. Greene has “dated” Brian Glenn since her husband filed for divorce last September. He filed for divorce three days later. He evidently enjoyed wearing women’s clothing because he said:

“I may keep the pantyhose on. It does feel kind of good.”

Complaining about a Drag Queen Story Hour in Georgia, she wrote on Facebook:

“Trans does not mean gender change, it just means a gender refusal and gender pretending. Truth is truth, it is not a choice!!!”

Green confronted a library worker at the event and asked why they were hosting “an event that went against her personal beliefs as a taxpayer” before she posted a 90-minute video from the library attacking the drag queen. Filming youth and adults, she said:

“That’s the abomination that just read four children’s books to children in our public library here in Alpharetta, Georgia. I do not hate or have any ill will against that man. I just don’t like that gender confusion being put on young children.”

In 2021, she called on a drag queen to be “arrested and charged!” A year later, she compared drag queens to strippers although they didn’t take off their clothes. This year, she accused Antifa of defending “drag queens targeting our children with drag queen story time,” called them “domestic terrorists,” and tried to get them officially declared a terrorist organization. About Glenn, though, she tweeted that she “lol” (laughed out loud) at his drag performance and lambasted liberals for commenting on it. (Above right: Glenn in one of his drag performances.)

In another diversion from illegal activities by Deposed Donald Trump (DDT), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee and the weaponization subcommittee, considers “another investigation” into Hillary Clinton. Fox host Maria Bartiroma asked him if he wanted to see the probe, and he didn’t say no.

“[W]e’re going to talk with our lawyers. We’re going to talk with Speaker McCarthy on where we proceed from here. In fact, are there people that were highlighted in the Durham investigation and the Durham report that we need to talk to on the Judiciary Committee? We’re going to give that a good, hard look. But nothing is off the table.”

Actually, DDT is off the table for Republicans. Instead, congressional Republicans, including DDT, fixated on Clinton for almost a decade. Rep. Josh Hawley (R-MO) still wants to imprison her but doesn’t have any reasons. DDT accused the FBI of looking for Clinton’s emails when it followed up on a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. In 2015, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) bragged about the GOP’s Benghazi committees to damage Clinton’s presidential campaign instead of being a valid investigation. At that time, he told Fox:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee ― what are her numbers today…”

Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chair of the Oversight Committee, told Fox & Friends Ashley Strohmier, that the GOP was doing the same thing to President Joe Biden during his reelection when she asked about the probe into Biden. He claimed proof about Biden’s families receiving money from foreign nationals but presents no evidence:

“You look at the polling, and right now Donald Trump is 7 points ahead of Joe Biden and trending upward, Joe Biden’s trending downward. And I believe that the media is looking around, scratching their head, and they’re realizing that the American people are keeping up with our investigation.”

The 7-point edge he claimed on Fox was earlier this month; other surveys show Biden leading with an overall tight race between Biden and DDT. Polls have also shown no indication that Comer’s investigations have a major effect.

In opposition to an Illinois bill approving bathrooms open to all genders, a GOP state senator threatened violence if “a guy” walked into the same bathroom as his 10-year-old daughter. The bill passed the Senate by 35-20 and needs only a signature from Gov. J.B Pritzker (D). Bathrooms would require floor-to-ceiling stall dividers with locks and coverings preventing anyone from seeing through the space between the stall divider and the door. The senators might be more worried about his family and friends: over 90 percent of child abusers are people who children know, love, and trust. A “guy” coming into a bathroom is an unlikely perpetrator.

Republicans want to put librarians in prison if they let youth have books about racism or the LGBTQ+ community—aka “obscene” books to the GOP. At least seven states have passed these laws in the past two years, two of them in the last two months, although Idaho and North Dakota GOP governors vetoed the legislation. Another dozen states considered over 20 similar bills this year, half of them likely to come up in 2024.  An Arkansas measure imprisons school and public librarians as well as teachers for up to six years or fined $10,000. Keith Gambill, president of Indiana’s teachers union, said about the state’s new law:  

“It will make sure the only literature students are exposed to fits into a narrow scope of what some people want the world to look like. This is my 37th year in education. I’ve never seen anything like this. … We are entering a very frightening period.”

A Republican asserted that any librarian or teacher afraid of the law obviously has obscene material available for students. All 50 states, including the ones enacting new laws, have obscenity laws prohibiting the distribution of obscene material to minors with heavy fines and prison sentences for violations. The majority of the states, however, had exemptions to ensure educators could provide information to children on biology, health, and sex education without litigation. States enacting new laws to imprison librarians: Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

A conservative group taking over the Woodland Park (CO) school board has adopted the American Birthright social studies, created by a right-wing group warning of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” It promotes only “positive aspects” of the U.S., pushes patriotism, and does not encourage “social strife.” The program argues that teachers should not encourage civic engagement, such as registering to vote or petitioning local lawmakers on issues that interests students. David Randall, research director for the organization creating the standards for a district with 2,000 students said:

“It is terribly important to be a disengaged citizen, and indeed, a disengaged student.”

Far-right groups and activists providing input into the curriculum include the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council, and Moms for Liberty. The far-right agenda presents Bill Clinton’s impeachment but not those of DDT. The Colorado State Board of Education rejected American Birthright in October, and the National Council for the Social Studies issued a rare warning against using it. Forty percent of the high school’s teachers said they won’t be back next year, and at least four top administrators have already quit. Three of the five board members are up for a vote in November 2023.

Despite the emotional problems of students in the community, the new superintendent refused to apply for grants paying mental health professionals, losing $1.2 million covering the annual salaries of 15 positions.

Conservatives are furious with Biden for his statement at Howard University calling white supremacy the “most dangerous terrorist threat.” Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy called the U.S. “the least racist country in the world” in the same week that 150 white supremacist Patriot Front members marched in Washington, carrying swords and battle drums while wearing masks to conceal themselves as part of the “Reclaim America.” A March study from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) shows a 38 percent increase in white supremacist activity from 2021 to 2022, with more than 6,700 incidents reported throughout the year.

The Cult of DDT on May 21, 2023

As always, followers of Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) valiantly defend him, but even usually spineless Chuck Todd (Meet the Press) tired of their lies and avoidance. In 2019, DDT, when in the White House, said, “I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge.” Todd asked DDT sycophant Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) why he, an advocate of sending the U.S. into default, doesn’t agree with DDT. Donalds quoted DDT saying that he reversed his position because he’s no longer president. “Do you realize how absurd that sounds?” Todd asked Donalds who denied that DDT’s excuse for changing his position wasn’t absurd. Todd said:

“‘What is good for me is not for thee.’ He’s basically saying, ‘When I’m president, there’s no negotiating on this. But, hey, when somebody else is president, screw them.”

Donalds retorted that DDT is “what America needs.” Actually, DDT is what MAGA wishes: 

• Education: ranting against transgender people and burning woke books
• Military policy: retain insurrectionists.
• Healthcare: incite death threats against scientific methods.
• Campaigns: be as nasty and cruel as possible.
• Guns: promote deaths and injuries.

Mike Lofgren wrote about the new GOP: armed survivalists, psychopathic grifters, con artists, incels living in parents’ basements.

“Having been abused himself as a child, Trump now transmits abuse to others. The Trump base, disproportionately conservative and religious fundamentalist, is also likely to have been the subject of punitive and authoritarian upbringings; rather than making a clean break with the sickness, they keep replicating it in their lives. Their slave-like loyalty to Trump is a form of masochism towards the angry yet protective family patriarch…

“[Republicans] don’t want better health care, fiscal responsibility, better infrastructure, clean drinking water, or anything on a policy menu that serves rational ends… What they truly want is demons to wrestle with till the end of time. They want revenge… They crave contentiousness and conflict 24/7…

“Scholars studying the conspiracy theories these people fall for sometimes belabor the issue of whether they really “believe” such crackpot notions. Whether they believe is probably unknowable, but that is less important than the fact that loudly saying they believe it creates endless friction with relatives, co-workers, and neighbors. Being abrasive, if not actually threatening, gives them a sense of identity and attention they would otherwise lack.

“Other than tax cuts for the rich (and for himself), Trump hardly undertook any policies in his four years in office; instead he filled his time with giving his base a whole menagerie of demons to contend with. It is no coincidence that the people he verbally assaulted, be they politicians, the press or election workers, were soon besieged by death threats from his unhinged followers…

“The real glue between Trump and his devotees is his endless assurances that their lot in life is not the result of their own laziness, irresponsibility or failure to seek counseling. No, they are innocent victims, endlessly picked on by elitists, socialists and foreigners. These sinister groups are constantly changing according to expediency, but the point is to keep his acolytes in a constant state of agitation.

“He [demonized] Muslims … while going on to set up business deals (meaning bribes) between his family and the Persian Gulf despots. He even sided with the bloodthirsty Mohammed bin Salman over the Saudi-American journalist whom the Saudi princeling had murdered and dismembered…

“More than 80 years ago, George Orwell commented on the malleability of the endless hate propaganda of earlier charismatic dictatorships; it sounds eerily like the Trump technique: ‘As for the hate-campaigns in which totalitarian régimes ceaselessly indulge, they are real enough while they last, but are simply dictated by the needs of the moment. Jews, Poles, Trotskyists, English, French, Czechs, Democrats, Fascists, Marxists—almost anyone can figure as Public Enemy No. 1. Hatred can be turned in any direction at a moment’s notice, like a plumber’s blow-flame.’

“Trump’s hold over his base, a force that none of his Republican opponents can quite replicate, is ultimately predicated on the implied threat of violence. As armies, gangs and cults have demonstrated, violence is a tacit loyalty oath that bonds one member to another and above all the group to the leader. The simmering air of menace that characterizes Trump rallies is the sadomasochistic tie between Trump and his followers turned outward as hatred towards the rest of society…

“His pronouncements to his followers are functionally no different than an imam in a failed Middle Eastern state issuing fatwas to kill the infidel.”

Donalds also argued that DDT is the only person who can oppose Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russan President Vladimir Putin. Yet DDT fawned over both of them and gave Xi state secrets in front of a crowd of his followers at Mar-a-Lago. While in the White House, DDT also gave Putin anything he wanted.

Todd asked Donalds if January 6 was a “beautiful day,” as DDT claimed. Donalds disagreed it was “beautiful” but switched the topic to the southern boarder and the inflation he blamed on President Joe Biden—the inflation caused by big business that’s rapidly shrinking because of Biden’s actions. Also Donalds skipped over the progress that Biden is making, with the cooperation of the G7 summit, against China’s economic importance.

DDT led the Republicans to tie Biden to China. In 2019, while DDT was being investigated for his extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky, he publicly called on China to publish negative information about Biden, then his opponent for the presidency. DDT accused of “all that money from China” going into Biden’s “pockets” because he was in China’s employ.  

While in the White House, DDT collected at least $7 million from Chinese government-owned entities through just a lease agreement with a state-owned bank in Trump Tower. It was the second-largest tenant in the building. Two years after a five-year extension, the bank left Trump Tower at the same time that DDT left the White House.

As of 2017, DDT had at least 72 trademarks in China with another 45 pending. He also had a bank account in China, and his daughter Ivanka Trump received 41 Chinese trademarks while she was a White House adviser. Those trademarks were approved 40 percent faster than those she applied for before his inauguration. In the same year, a Chinese firm invested over $400 million in the Manhattan office tower owned by the family of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband. Kushner Companies received a cash payout, an equity stake in a new partnership, and a refinancing of $1.14 billion in existing mortgage debt. About 80 percent of a $250 million loan was forgiven. Kushner had supposedly sold his stake in the property, but it was a “sweetheart deal” for his family.

And that was just in China.

DDT has lost his legal team’s  lead lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, because of infighting, according to the attorney who will no longer participated in the special counsel investigations. He said he stepped down because of differences with another of DDT’s lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, and accused him of “misrepresenting” the classified documents that DDT illegally collected. Parlatore explained how Epshteyn blocked him and other lawyers from giving DDT information, creating a disadvantage in dealing with DOJ. Epshteyn tended to deliver good news to DDT, no matter the circumstances, according to Parlatore. He added:

“In my opinion, he was not very honest with us or with the client on certain things. Uh, there were certain things like the searches that he had attempted to interfere with.”

Parlatore also ridiculed Epshteyn’s limited legal experience of only 18 months as a corporate lawyer. In late April, DDT’s lawyers asked lawmakers to remove DOJ authority to run the investigation, moving the probe to the intelligence community. In the CNN town hall, DDT again admitted he took classified documents but repeated his false claim that he had the right to do it. Asked for the reason, he said:

“I was there and I took what I took. … I had every right to do it. I didn’t make a secret of it.”

By stating he took the classified materials when he moved out of the White House, DDT was confessing to a federal crime. The National Archives also found 16 records proving that DDT knew he broke the law by taking the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. In them, advisers directed him on how to declassify materials.

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has told her staff they will be working remotely for the first few weeks of August. It seems the hammer is about to drop in litigation regarding the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. DDT is trying to block the proceedings.

In the five-year lawsuit claiming DDT stole from Celebrity Apprentice viewers by pushing investments in an unsuccessful desktop videophone scam, his children have been removed to speed up the legal procedure.

The FBI raided an apartment owned by two Russian businessmen, partners in a shell company, in Miami’s Trump Tower. They have been evading trade sanctions with Russia caused by its invasion of Ukraine by sending Boeing and Airbus aircraft parts and electronics to Russia through an elaborate network.

Heather Cox Richardson’s “letter” for April 21 describes the way Putin has aligned himself with DDT in his list of 500+ people not permitted to enter Russia—both Republicans and Democrats who have opposed DDT. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/world/europe/russia-sanctions-trump.html She also explains how DDT’s loyalists in state legislatures are using the fear tactics of Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to fight democracy.

Default Nears, DeSantis Creates Prototype for U.S.

As of late afternoon on Friday, debt ceiling talks resumed after Republicans earlier walked out. Retirement accounts and other assets related to the stock market had taken another hit during the day after Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), assigned negotiator, walked out of talks in the morning, branding Democrats “unreasonable,” just 12 days before the default deadline. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) spokesperson had reported that talks are on “pause” hours after President Joe Biden cut short a dinner with UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and other G7 leaders to focus on saving the world’s economy and controlling China. The entire argument comes from the GOP unwillingness to pay the debts, one-fourth of them added while Deposed Donald Trump (DDT) was in the White House.

After a few hours, the talks broke off again with no future meeting scheduled and GOP “negotiators” reporting no progress. Republicans are adamant about sharp cuts without closing loopholes in taxation for the wealthy or any replacement of taxes for big business and the rich that Republicans put into effect in 2017.

Republicans, who want the U.S. to be dominant over China, are damaging U.S. supremacy in the world. Biden’s visit to Asia was to boost the message that the U.S. is a leader, but Biden was forced to pull out of two important stops and the Quad summit on his journey to the G7 summit in Japan, missing important diplomatic interactions. China and other anti-U.S. countries are delighted because a coalition against China’s military and economic aggression was a key agenda item at the summit.

A goal was to determine that the U.S. “is a reliable, stable, credible partner in this part of the world … and to give people alternatives to the coercion and intimidation that the Chinese tend to demonstrate.” Chinese media can describe the U.S. as an unreliable partner, suffering from serious domestic upheaval that leaves its allies without help. The trip cancellation appears to lessen the U.S. commitment to the Pacific, allowing China to defeat the U.S. in influence. Republicans demonstrate lack of commitment to the U.S. being superior to China.

Biden’s stop at Papua New Guinea would have been the first for a U.S. president. Chinese President Xi Jinping went to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in 2018, spending a week there for a state visit to met with leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum. Jinping has been expanding diplomatic, economic, and military relationships with Pacific Island nations while saving the U.S. from the GOP has distracted the U.S. for over two years.

McCarthy said the resolution is “easy”: Democrats just need to agree to across-the-board discretionary domestic cuts between 28 percent and 33 percent. McCarthy said that “we can’t be spending more money next year,” but the debt ceiling has nothing to do with future debts. That’s the purview of the budget, which House Republicans have been unable—or unwilling—to formulate.

On Thursday, McCarthy expressed optimism that the two sides could reach a deal to go to a vote next week, but the highly conservative Freedom Caucus told him to quit before a deal could be reached. Instead, McCarthy should work on the Senate to pass their bill. The conservative caucus stated on Thursday:

“There should be no further discussion until the Senate passes the legislation.”

The Freedom Caucus essentially wrote the extortion bill; McCarthy said he and his team “just picked up the House Freedom Caucus plan and helped us convert it into the legislative text.” The GOP House never intended to find an “agreement” and a “deal” to save U.S. from an economic catastrophe. On Twitter, the Freedom Caucus ordered:

“No more discussion on watering it down. Period.”

The MAGA House members are following the orders of their leader, DDT, issued last week in his CNN town hall and repeated on Truth Social on Friday:

“REPUBLICANS SHOULD NOT MAKE A DEAL ON THE DEBT CEILING UNLESS THEY GET EVERYTHING THEY WANT (Including the ‘kitchen sink’). THAT’S THE WAY THE DEMOCRATS HAVE ALWAYS DEALT WITH US. DO NOT FOLD!!!”

Previously, DDT had praised Democrats for not creating debt ceiling crises while he was in the White House. It appears that DDT and his followers all want a world disaster because they love chaos.

While DDT promotes devastation, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis uses his state as a prototype of the U.S. if her were elected president. Right now, however, he’s on a losing streak. Because of his petty personal retributions toward Disney, the company stopped plans for a $1 billion employee campus in Lake Nona (FL) and no longer require over 2,000 California-based employees to relocate to Florida. Employees who moved to Florida may be able to return to California. Average salary for those employees would be about $120,000—a total of $240 million coming into the state.

DeSantis tried to cover his new problem by blaming the loss on Disney’s poor finances and “declining stock price,” but he failed. GOP Miami mayor said the governor took a “winning issue [of] parental rights” and moved on to “potentially a personal vendetta” costing the state 2,000 jobs. Former VP Mike Pence slammed “woke Disney” but said “the business of America is business” with the cancellation “only going to harm people in the Orlando and Florida area.”

Latinx people, who comprise an important part of workers in the state, are thinking about moving away from Florida and Texas because of persecution in those states. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is also issuing a travel advisory in Florida, only the second time they have done this in a state after Arizona’s profiling law against migrants. Florida will no longer recognize driver’s licenses issued out of state to undocumented immigrants and prohibit Florida counties from issuing ID cards to them. A new law also requires the use of the inaccurate E-Verify for hirings; of 48 million job applicants, only 525,000 were listed as unauthorized with 60,000 of those proving a legal right to work in the U.S.

Florida criminalizes anyone associating with undocumented migrants, including giving them transportation. Even the Catholic Church rejected this law. Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski accused Florida Republicans of trying to “demonize” vulnerable people, making a good Christian’s actions illegal by preaching the gospel.

New Florida laws remove “parental rights.” DeSantis used the slogan to claim he gave parents rights when he banned any rules for wearing masks during the pandemic that would protect people from the health emergency, but he’s moved on to mandate what parents can and cannot do. A new law permits the government to take transgender children who receive gender-affirming are from their families even if the children live out of state with a custodial parent. Parents and doctors cannot provide any gender-affirming care for minors, as decreed by people with no medical training. DeSantis lied when he with his justification in preventing teachers from educating students in acceptance of their LGBTQ+ classmates and students with LGBTQ+ family members.

In another bizarre Florida law, the bathroom regulations go beyond requiring people over the age of 18 to use the facilities matching their sex at birth. Anyone can be charged if they don’t leave a bathroom when someone else asks them to do so—even if their sex matches the one from birth. Basically, it legalizes harassment in public bathrooms if a person considers another to not being feminine enough for women’s restrooms or masculine enough for the designative men’s facilities.  

Other DeSantis’ bans and restrictions for the U.S.:

• Control curriculum and books in libraries, keeping them from an well-rounded education. 
• Defund diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at Florida’s state colleges and universities.
• Ban state officials from making investment decisions based on “environmental, social, governance” goals.
• Allow healthcare providers and insurers to deny patients medical care on the basis of religious, moral, or ethical beliefs
• Execute child rapists.
• Allow only eight of 12 jurors to determine the death penalty.
• Let people carry concealed firearms with no permit or training.

DeSantis’ latest stunt is to probably to lose public employees retirement funds for his own benefit. He moved $1 billion from safe investments to high-fee, poor-performing hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and real estate firms managed by major GOP donors who promise to bankroll his campaign. DeSantis’ “investments” already lost about $10 billion retirement funds for teachers, police officers, and other state employees. A new bill could move another $18 billion from traditional stocks and bonds.

Florida public pensioners receive benefits well below the national norm, just $23,712 per year in 2020 compared to the national average of $29,132. Between 2019 and 2021, however, pension fees for investment managers increased by 11 percent, costing the pension $54 million in additional fees in 2022. 

DeSantis’ move is illegal according to anti-pay-to-play laws, but other governors have used the same tactic with donations to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) that move to indiviual gubernatorial campaigns. The RGA gave DeSantis over $21 million for his reelection campaign in 2022.  

Using this system to get presidential campaign funds would be more difficult. A decade ago, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Texas Gov. Rick Perry both considered the idea, but Christie’s top adviser admitted that “there is no way around it and there are no loopholes.” The rule proved so strict that it reportedly deterred Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney from putting Christie on the ticket in 2012, because Romney knew it would complicate his Wall Street fundraising. The GOP failed to overturn the rule in court.

People in Florida, like those in Russia, live in fear. Ridiculed for his claim that he makes Florida “free,” however, DeSantis now declares Florida the “citadel of normalcy.” This is the “normal” he wants to being to all 50 states.