Month: January 2023

Last week, I did a piece on why the House Republicans chose to make the Strategic Production Response Act one of their very top priorities in the 118th Congress. In the end, it passed 221-205. Only one Democrat voted for it, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, and there were no Republican dissenters. The messaging bill will go nowhere and I don’t see any particular reason to keep it on our radar.

But the debate on the bill was interesting because it happened under an open rule. This meant that any member of either party could introduce an amendment and get a vote. Plenty of Democrats took advantage of this new opportunity. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, actually got a couple amendments approved. I noticed Republican Lauren Boebert, too, was successful. Overall, 140 amendments were submitted, and dozens received a recorded vote.

For Democrats in the minority, a more open process gives them something to do beyond stomp their feet and raise money. They can be more effective in messaging or they can actually add something constructive to improve legislation, including on bills they will not in the end support.

“If I get some amendments passed then I’m gonna like it a lot,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who submitted five amendments, told The Hill on Thursday, adding that she is “absolutely for a transparent process.”

There could even be more bipartisan cooperation under this kind of system, at least in theory. But there’s a reason why the House doesn’t generally allow every Dick, Tom or Janet to introduce amendments. There are 435 members and there have to be rules about how many amendments will be allowed on a bill or the House would do nothing but vote on amendments.

That’s where the House Rules Committee comes in. That committee is basically an arm of the Speaker of the House, and it determines what goes on the House floor and under what circumstances. As Emily Brooks notes for The Hill, the price Kevin McCarthy paid to win the Speaker’s gavel was to hand effective control of the Rules Committee to the House Freedom Caucus.

The addition of Republican Reps. Chip Roy (Texas), Ralph Norman (S.C.), and Thomas Massie (Ky.) to the House Rules Committee — one of the concessions from Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that helped him secure the gavel — means that the frequent antagonists of leadership have the opportunity to create significant barriers to getting legislation to the House floor.

Precisely because the Speaker needs this committee to do his or her bidding, it has an unnaturally large partisan 9-6 split. This is why Chip Roy demanded three seats on the committee. If Roy, Norman and Massie join the Democrats in opposing a rule, then the rule cannot pass. McCarthy is cut off at the knees.

Of course, the Democrats could help McCarthy approve the rule but these Rules Committee votes are almost always strictly partisan. Democrats wouldn’t vote with McCarthy without some kind of major concessions. And if McCarthy makes concessions to the Democrats, a single member of the House can now call for a vote to vacate the Speaker’s chair. That was another concession McCarthy was forced to grant.

Keep all of this in mind when you’re making bets on whether the U.S. Government will default on its debts.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Sunday that he wants to reach a “reasonable and responsible” agreement on lifting the debt ceiling, but one that would include cuts to spending and put the United States on the path to a balanced budget.

McCarthy and President Biden are set to meet Wednesday at the White House, the speaker confirmed in an interview with “Face the Nation,” and the two are expected to discuss a range of issues including raising the debt limit and Republicans’ fiscal priorities.

“I want to find a reasonable and a responsible way that we can lift the debt ceiling but take control of this runaway spending,” McCarthy told “Face the Nation.”

Obviously, there is no “reasonable and responsible” way not to pay our bills, and the Biden administration is determined not to even negotiate over the matter.

In 2011, after faltering debt limit negotiations with House Republicans brought the U.S. to the brink of economic calamity, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden sat by the fireplace in the Oval Office, with their top aides on the couch. While relieved at having narrowly averted disaster, they were stunned by what had transpired.

Obama and Biden made a vow: Never again.

They agreed that going forward, “Nobody can use the threat of default or not increasing the debt limit as a negotiating tool,” said a former Obama official involved in the fiscal discussions, who recounted the Oval Office meeting and the “lesson of 2011” they all discussed.

When the Republicans tried the same stunt in 2013, the Obama administration held to their guns and won. The difference then was that Speaker John Boehner had the power to capitulate. McCarthy, it seems, may be too weak to do the same.

This is what happens when Republican bullshit comes up against reality. Things that might sound reasonable in theory, like having a completely open amendments process in the House, quickly discover that there’s a damn good reason why that is generally not allowed. In this case, we’re looking at a party that spends like drunken sailors when in power and then chooses to force cuts when a Democrat is in the White House. That makes political sense up to a point, since they don’t want their president to be responsible for unpopular cuts. But it doesn’t actually work because they don’t have the power to make it work.

What they can do, is to blunder their way into causing a global economic catastrophe and then hope to reap the political reward when voters get angry with Joe Biden. McCarthy has no choice but to play along with this game, and he (and we) may find out that he doesn’t have a way out that leaves him in the Speaker’s chair.

The presidency of the Czech Republic is a largely symbolic office, albeit one with significant symbolism. The first president, Václav Havel, was the preeminent leader of the Velvet Revolution which toppled the Communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1989. The office’s main responsibility is the appointment of judges to the Supreme and Constitutional Courts, subject to approval of the Senate. It also has limited legislative veto power, overruled by a simple majority. Since 2012, the position has been filled by direct election, so it’s a true representation of the will of the people at a given point in time.

The election in 2023 came down to a runoff between former prime minister Andrej Babiš and retired general Petr Pavel. Mr. Babiš is the leader of the ANO party which has a confusing reputation for both populism and centrism. In the context of this election, it was more important that Babiš is perceived as pro-Russia while his opponent is a former senior NATO commander. The results were telling.

With nearly all the votes counted, returns showed Pavel prevailing by the emphatic margin of 58.3% to 41.68%, the largest ever recorded in a Czech presidential poll and reflecting an advantage of more than 958,000 votes nationwide.

Pavel’s supporters immediately hailed the result as a victory for liberal democracy over oligarchic populism, which they believe Babiš represents…

…It also amounted to a humiliating rebuff for Slovak-born Babiš, 68, a billionaire tycoon who stood accused of running a shameless, scorched-earth campaign after portraying Pavel as a warmonger for his support of military aid to Ukraine. At one point, Babiš even appeared to question Nato’s collective security arrangements by saying he would never send Czech troops to Poland, a fellow member of the military alliance, if it was attacked by Russia.

Pavel will replace the outgoing incumbent Miloš Zeman who had an extreme pro-Russia position right up to the day that Vladimir Putin ordered the all-out invasion of Ukraine.

Quite unexpectedly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shifted the position of Moscow’s most influential supporter in the Czech Republic: President Miloš Zeman, who has just described Moscow’s actions as a “crime”.

…President Miloš Zeman has long made his unwavering support for Moscow very public. This…collapsed on February 24, the day marking the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Zeman, who is known for keeping a long silence on divisive issues, made statements in a video that completely contradict his former position, apologized for being wrong and described Russia’s decision as a crime.

“I love Russian culture and I value the Russian victims of World War Two, but this does not mean that I will agree with the invasion of a foreign army on the territory of a sovereign state. Russia has thus committed a crime against peace…A few days ago, I said that the Russians are not crazy and will not attack Ukraine. I admit I was wrong.”

Thus, you can see that the results of the Czech presidential election are a clear reversal of fortune for Putin’s influence there, and also a clear indication of how the Czech electorate feels about the conflict on the border in Ukraine.

This isn’t some giant victory for truth and justice or some massive setback for the Kremlin, but it’s a positive result at a time when we don’t enjoy good news too often. Take a moment to celebrate it.

It’s not easy to watch members of the Memphis, Tennessee police department beat Tyre Nichols to death while he  vainly cries out for his mother. Fortunately, the officers have all been charged with second-degree murder and other offenses, so we don’t have to argue about whether what they did was in some way warranted. Perhaps that will come in a future trial, but at least for now there’s a consensus that Mr. Nichols did nothing to provoke such a response. But the lack of obvious motive is one of the more troubling aspects of this tragedy.

It’s well known that running from the cops invites an illegal beat down, yet the confrontation was violent from the beginning. The first moment of the tape shows Nichols being angrily ripped from his car, yelled at and manhandled. Then he’s pepper sprayed and tased, prompting enough terror that Nichols decides to make a break for it. Perhaps the fact that the cops succeeded in pepper spraying themselves helps explain why their anger exploded from an unexplained rage to a murderous all-out assault.

Throughout the two confrontations, the cops seem much more interested in abusing Nichols than in actually restraining him and putting him in cuffs, yet there’s nothing on the tape to explain this. The first moments of the traffic stop are not captured, so the key clues could be missing, but if Nichols was initially disrespectful or uncooperative, there’s no sign of it in the video that was released.

The Memphis police department says the officers explained the stop as a response to “reckless driving,” but they also say that they’ve reviewed plenty of video footage along his route and cannot corroborate that Nichols was speeding, swerving or doing anything else reckless. Was he pulled over for no reason at all?

If so, it would be nice to know that.

You can see that people want to use this tragedy to bolster their preexisting beliefs. Some say that because both the officers and the victim were black, it proves that police violence isn’t always motivated by racism, while others say it proves that racism in police departments is so deep that it infects even officers of color. Some say it proves existing reforms have been counterproductive, while others say it proves that we have to completely rethink how we go about policing our roads and communities. Some are encouraged that the officers were quickly fired and charged with murder, while others wonder if either of those things would have happened to white officers.

With opinion so divided, I don’t know that learning the motive could possibly help answer these questions. For one thing, nothing Nichols might have done would justify the way he was treated, so the question comes down to why the police thought it was okay to use that level of violence under any scenario. I suppose if they explained it in their own words, it might help us get some valuable insight.

On the other hand, perhaps they don’t even really know themselves.

Something was obviously wrong with the culture these cops were operating within, and it’s doubtful that Nichols’ treatment was an aberration, even if it was an extreme case. I think it’s clear what a whole lot of things had to be wrong for an incident like this to take place. One was the methods of the specialized unit the cops belonged to:

The Memphis police officers charged with the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols were part of a specialized unit that had been formed a little more than a year ago to help halt a surge of violence in the city.

The unit — called SCORPION, or the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods unit — was designed as a 40-officer group that would deploy in neighborhoods, with a focus on crime hot spots. The officers have often operated in unmarked vehicles, making traffic stops, seizing weapons and conducting hundreds of arrests.

The unit was such a key part of the city’s crime-fighting strategy that Mayor Jim Strickland touted it in his State of the City address a year ago, at a time when the city was tallying record homicide numbers.

On the surface it makes perfect sense to develop a strategy to combat a rise in homicides by focusing on hot spots where crime rates are high. But if this means the cops are making high stakes risky traffic stops then perhaps they’re under an unhealthy amount of stress. If it means that they’re encouraged to make stops without probable cause, that’s another obvious problem. When stops are illegal from the outset, it encourages further illegality, and when every stop could turn deadly for the police, they may have a tendency to see threats that don’t exist, or to treat the drivers as less than human. These factors will affect black cops just as much as white cops, and better training can’t overcome a fundamentally flawed mission.

I hope we get more clarity on the facts of this case, but we should already be able to agree that it wasn’t a simple matter of a few bad apples. We need to look deeper.

The way black people are treated by police in this country is an ongoing tragedy and trauma, and the death of Tyre Nichols is just the latest proof of this.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the lakeside scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have revised the shadowed foliage in foreground and added some to the upper left side. The painting is now finished.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Democrats not only held onto their control of the U.S. Senate in the 2022 midterm elections but actually netted one additional seat to give them a 51-49 majority. Even better, the difference maker was from my home state of Pennsylvania where John Fetterman was elected to replace the odious Pat Toomey.

Not that he likely remembers me, but I met Fetterman in Pittsburgh during the Netroots Nation conference in 2009, and I was very impressed with him. I supported his successful bid for Lieutenant Governor, and I supported him in the Democratic primaries for U.S. Senate. I’ve been waiting eagerly to find what committees he’s going to serve on, and I finally found out today.

It turns out to be almost exactly what I expected. Gaming it out was partly about knowing the profile of Pennsylvania’s other senator, Bob Casey, because there’s usually not too much overlap in a state’s two senators’ committee assignments. The rest is related to knowing the particularities of a state, the background and strengths of the politician, and what kind of opportunities are generally open to a freshman senator.

Casey is the chairman of the Aging Committee, which is not much of a job because the committee has no legislative responsibilities. He’s now serving on the powerful Finance Committee and the Intelligence Committee, but he’s long served on the HELP Committee which gives him the profile of a labor Democrat.

Fetterman isn’t a lawyer so I didn’t expect him to serve on the Judiciary Committee, and he isn’t a veteran so I didn’t expect him to serve to fill the role of a national security Democrat. My guess was that he’s find a position on the Environment and Public Works Committee because he’s a reliable liberal, on the Agriculture Committee because it will help him build up support in the rural parts of the state, and the Banking Committee because he’ll blend well with chairman Sherrod Brown and members like Elizabeth Warren and Raphael Warnock, and also because it will help him raise money and Pennsylvania has a lot of influential banks. That’s exactly what happened, but he also landed a spot on the Joint Economic Committee and will serve on Casey’s Aging Committee.

The other new Democrat in the Senate is Peter Welsh of Vermont, a longtime veteran of the House of Representatives. Welsh actually is a lawyer, so that helps explain why he was placed on the Judiciary Committee. His assignment on the Commerce Committee jibes with his service on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. He’s also going on the Agriculture Committee, which makes sense because he’s replacing Patrick Leahy who served on that committee for decades. Finally, Welsh will serve on the Rules Committee, which is reserved for people Majority Leader Chuck Schumer trusts.

The other big news is that Michigan’s Gary Peters was rewarded for his successful service as the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee with a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee. His home state colleague, Agriculture Committee chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, has announced that she won’t seek reelection in 2024, so giving Peters more power will take some of the sting out losing her influence.

There was not a lot of churn in the Senate, especially on the Democratic side, as the incumbents up for reelection all won, and there weren’t a bunch of retirements. The Democrats did gain majorities on the committees, which created a minor game of musical chairs. As for Fetterman, he’ll have to bone up on farming issues, and he’s going to get very familiar with how banks operate. He’ll also have plenty of work on transportation and infrastructure issues, and some of housing and urban affairs. His profile closely resembles that of Sherrod Brown, which makes sense both ideologically and when you consider how a progressive Democrat can set themselves up to be successful in the states they represent.

I’m excited to see him get to work.

Josh Siegel of Politico has an article on one of the House Republicans’ top priority bills now that they’re in the majority. Sponsored by Rep. Cathey McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, it’s called the Strategic Production Response Act.

The House GOP is calling a vote this week on legislation, H.R. 21 (118), that would prohibit releases from the underground petroleum stockpile unless the government approves a corresponding increase in domestic gas and oil production on federal lands.

Even if H.R. 21 passes the House, it will not become law in the 118th Congress because the Democrats control the Senate. This is just a messaging bill, and I guess it’s supposed to be a “thank you” to Big Oil donors to the Republican Party.

Siegel notes, however, that most of the Big Oil lobbying world isn’t interested in the Strategic Production Response Act. They are instead “placing a priority on issues such as easing permit rules for pipelines and natural gas export terminals.”

If there’s a message that might actually resonate with voters, I suppose it’s highlighting the fact that the strategic petroleum reserve is at it’s lowest point since 1983 after Biden heavily tapped it to help drive down oil prices (40 cents per gallon, per the Treasury Department estimate) just prior to the midterm elections.

But reminding voters that Biden took action to successfully combat inflation is sure to offset any concerns about political use of the reserve or our present level of energy security. In other words, the bill isn’t very convincing as a message.

It does fit, however, into a more generalized grievance message for the Republican base, which ties in with anything the government might do to limit climate changing emissions. They oppose more efficient light bulbs, more efficient appliances, electric cars, wind, solar and geothermal power. They’ll talk about these issues as examples of governmental tyranny. They’ll say windmills cause cancer. They’ll say anything, no matter how ridiculous, if it in some way can poison their supporters against environmentally friendly action.

So, I guess that’s the main message of the Strategic Production Response Act. In that limited sense, it will be effective and worth their while as a first order of business in Congress this year.

I was without power as I was looking up possible videos for this post. That winter storm hitting my region Tuesday during the day and evening was something else. Heavy snow for my region. I’m sure that downed some tree limbs somewhere. Let’s just say I was glad I didn’t have to be on the road after my workplace flipped to remote early in the day. I’m sure if you’re on the east coast, it’s already hitting your area or about to. Stay safe.

In the meantime, here’s comedian Steven Wright’s first appearance on national television a bit over four decades ago. I’ve seen him perform live. He’s definitely unique.

I’ll check in to see if there are any comments.

Cheers!

There is still a week left in January and there have already been 39 mass shootings in America, defined as an incident where four or more people (not including the shooter) have been killed with a gun. The Washington Post reports that “less than a month into 2023, mass shootings have already killed 70 people and injured 167 this year in America.”

This is indeed a higher than normal number. It appears the rate of mass shootings shot up in 2020 and has not returned to the former baseline, which was already extremely high by global standards. Of course 2020 brought America the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic disruption, and it was also a presidential election year. Whatever the causes, things got worse in 2021 and remained at nearly the same number in 2022.

The Biden administration wants to reenact the now-expired 1994 assault weapons ban, but with the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, there’s no chance that Congress will attempt to address gun violence this year or next.

This is movement on the state level, however. But only in states with the Democratic governors and Democratic legislatures.

Illinois has become the ninth state in the United States to ban the sale of assault weapons, a move hailed by the administration of President Joe Biden, who called on other states to pass similar bans.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “commends the leadership” of Illinois’s governor and legislators. The ban was passed by the state Senate on Monday, with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signing the bill into law the next day.

Jean-Pierre said that Biden has “continued to press for more action to keep our homes, schools and communities safe, including federal laws requiring background checks for all gun sales and a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines”.

“In the meantime, the president continues to urge other states to join California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Delaware, Washington, DC and now Illinois to ban assault weapons at the state level to save lives.”

The conservative Supreme Court of the United States stands ready and willing to strike down this kind of legislation, which is already watered down in an effort to avoid such a fate.

The Biden administration has issued plenty of executive actions in an effort to combat gun violence, and signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gun safety bill in June 2022, when the Democrats still had complete control of Congress.

Hopefully these measures will begin to have a positive effect over time, but it’s clear that more needs to be done if we’re going to become a normal nation with a typical level of gun violence.

I honestly believe that we are rewarding people too much for causing division and hatred, especially through disinformation. Donald Trump is the absolute king of this and the role model and trend setter for a whole generation of grifters and operatives. If this trend slowed and began to reverse, I think we’d see the frequency of mass shootings slow and reverse, too. Not every safety measure necessarily has to address the weapons used. Lowering the heat of our political discourse could be even more effective. But that’s a very hard thing to tackle without coming up against business freedoms and constitutional rights.

It’s annoying when people offer nothing but “thoughts and prayers” after mass shootings, but there is something to be said for some kind of spiritual awakening on the issue. After all, when the status quo is locked in place for countless reasons and you can’t realistically expect any near-term political solution, then maybe trying to change people’s hearts is better than more of the same.

 

 

Over the weekend, the Justice Department announced that it has arrested Charles McGonigal for “violating and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”) and with conspiring to commit money laundering and money laundering.”

In plainer language, McGonigal ran afoul of the sanctions against Russia by entering into a contract to do work for infamous oligarch Oleg Derispaska (of Paul Manafort fame), and he broke other laws by taking steps to conceal the true identity of his client.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “As alleged, Charles McGonigal, a former high-level FBI official, and Sergey Shestakov, a Court interpreter, violated U.S. sanctions by agreeing to provide services to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch. They both previously worked with Deripaska to attempt to have his sanctions removed, and, as public servants, they should have known better. This Office will continue to prosecute those who violate U.S. sanctions enacted in response to Russian belligerence in Ukraine in order to line their own pockets.”

McGonigal is not just any “former high-level FBI official.” Prior to his retirement in 2018, he worked as the Section Chief of the Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section and also as the Special Agent in Charge (“SAC”) of the Counterintelligence Division in New York.

Counterintelligence officers are responsible for identifying and neutralizing spies and traitors operating in the United States. They specialize in understanding how people in sensitive positions can be compromised or otherwise enticed to give away American national security or business information. Even in retirement, McGonigal is in a position to provide very exclusive information about how the FBI performs these duties which could be very beneficial to foreign adversaries. By taking money from Deripaska he knowingly broke the law, which immediately made him vulnerable to blackmail. And very few people are more qualified to understand this than McGonigal.

It’s easy to see why Deripaska would see him as a valuable mark. Beyond the obvious, it probably pays to take a peek under the hood of how Washington DC actually functions. McGonigal has a bio at the Potomac Officer’s Club. The POC is part of Jim Garrettson’s Executive Mosaic company which was formed in 2001 “to build an exclusive forum and cross media platform exclusively for top-tier executives in the greater Washington D.C. market.”

POC provides its members an opportunity to learn from peer business executives and government thought leaders, while providing an outstanding forum to develop key business and partnering relationships. Government leaders enjoy the opportunity to hear collectively from the leadership of the companies that provide their mission critical services…

McGonigal is not a “top-tier executive.” His membership was based on his role as a “government thought leader” who had “worked extensively against Counterintelligence and Cyber threats, specifically working and managing Espionage, Economic Espionage and Insider Threat investigations.” He was in charge of the investigation that convicted Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger of secreting top secret documents out of the National Archives.

Ostensibly, McGonigal could benefit by networking with executives who might provide him with “mission critical services,” while the executives benefited by building a personal relationship with someone in a position to influence how the DOJ’s contracting decisions are made.

Needless to say, the Russians are keen to have influence over how America’s counterintelligence and cybersecurity agencies dole out private contracts because that can provide them a direct line behind our defenses. In an ideal world, McGonigal would have joined the Potomac Officer’s Club as a front to look for signs of foreign infiltration, but maybe he was just trying to line up more lucrative work for his post-government career.

This is all speculative, but it’s not a good sign when people in such sensitive positions go out into the private sector and start offering their services to Russian oligarchs.

Deripaska wanted some concrete things. The indictment mentions that McGonigal had previously tried to get sanctions specifically aimed at Deripaska lifted, but the offending contract was to “investigate a rival Russian oligarch.” Given his specific FBI experience, it made sense to hire McGonigal to investigate a rival oligarch, but it made even more sense to put him in a compromised position.

Lucky for us, the scheme was (hopefully) detected before it could be exploited. But this is how the world of espionage works in real life as opposed to in high budget Hollywood films. It’s dirty and grimy, requires a lot of planning and immense patience, has way more misses than hits, and every once in a while reaches paydirt.

Getting a compromised asset (Paul Manafort) put in charge of a successful presidential candidate’s campaign was Deripaska’s biggest coup. But it appears he’s also looking to compromise someone who can come in handy when needed.

It’s hard to protect against these methods. It’s hard enough to get talented people to serve on government salaries without restricting how easily they can reenter the private sector.  But we can’t have counterintelligence chiefs doing freelance work for sanctioned foreign adversaries either. We need to find a better balance in terms of policy.

 

 

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the lakeside scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now heavily revised the foreground. Note the light through the trees to the left and greenery close to the viewer.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.