U.S. Politics

[Rick Plant]

Gun-toting GOP extremists fail to grasp how pathetic they look



It’s not hard to find photos of each one of the three Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation posing with guns.

The images aren’t just out there on the internet — the members want you to see them. They released them as part of campaigns or policy statements. The discouraging implication is that they assume such posturing will resonate with a substantial portion of their base.

They’re hardly alone. Many conservatives suffer from a compulsion to be photographed shooting, brandishing or fondling firearms. It’s looney. But it also contributes, in ways that don’t get enough attention, to the epidemic of gun violence in America.

On Monday, five people were killed as a result of the latest paroxysm of gun violence in Colorado, a state where bullets have claimed so many lives it occupies a special place of shame in the national gun debate. A man went on a killing spree that started at Sol Tribe Custom Tattoo and Body Piercing in Denver and ended at the Belmar shopping district in Lakewood.

In a healthy society, such a heinous act of violence would be extraordinary. But our society is sick, and such violence is routine. The Monday shooting in Denver might have been the worst single act of gun violence in America that day, but it was nowhere near the only one — there were victims in more than 20 other cities. During a single week in November, nine high school students were shot in two incidents in Aurora. In March, a gunman killed 10 people in a Boulder grocery store.

There have been more than 20,000 non-suicide gun deaths throughout the country in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That’s the most in at least seven years.

A major incident of gun violence is often accompanied, along with thoughts-and-prayers pablum, by calls for new laws. While legislative reform will be central to any anti-gun violence solution — including repeal of the Second Amendment, which in modern times does much more harm than good — we must also recognize how gun glorification on the right whets the country’s appetite for slaughter.

Earlier this month, Rep. Lauren Boebert posted a Christmas-themed photo of herself with her four boys, who were brandishing assault weapons. The youngest is 8. Fetishization of guns is the main theme of Boebert’s political persona (not unrelated to sedition being the main theme of her political identity).

Boebert might take Second Amendment zeal to buffoonish extremes, but she typifies the childish proclivity of conservatives who are desperate for people to see them shooting things. The climax of a campaign ad that Rep. Ken Buck released last year, when he still doubled as the chairman of the Colorado GOP, shows the congressman firing a semi-automatic rifle at a target. Constituents can find pictures on Rep. Doug Lamborn’s official government website of the lawmaker squeezing off rounds at the Magnum Shooting Center in Colorado Springs. The election-denying state Rep. Ron Hanks launched his U.S. Senate campaign in October with a video of him firing a rifle at a fake voting machine, which explodes.

Around the country there is no shortage of elected gun nuts gun-nutting for the camera. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and many others have demonstrated an inability to resist the urge to strut with weapons.

What these extremists fail to grasp is how weak such posing makes them appear. People who are confident in their strength don’t need to peacock. An elected official posing with a weapon is a micro version of a military parade — if you’re tempted to be impressed when a member of Congress showboats with a firearm, just think of Kim Jong-Un.

But as silly as these leaders make themselves look, the message they send is dangerous. When elected officials extol instruments of death, they reinforce strains of violence in the country’s political culture and encourage lethal aggression. It’s easy for most Americans when they see gun cosplay from their leaders to laugh it off as the antics of children. But disturbed and aggrieved viewers will derive inspiration from such displays, with bloodshed too readily the result. It’s still unclear what motivated the shooter on Monday, but initial indications are that he espoused far-right political hatred, and it’s reasonable to suppose that right-wing celebration of firearms helped clear space for his murderous rampage.

If you feel you need it for personal protection, go ahead and carry a gun. If spraying bullets into a target makes you feel tough, no one’s stopping you. But if you prefer to live in a safe community, and want to appear strong — not playground strong, but actually strong — leave the camera at home.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence.

https://coloradonewsline.com/2021/12/30/stop-posing-with-guns/

[Rick Plant]

Gov. DeSantis seems hellbent on taking us back to the ’60s — only it’s the 1860s



And just like that, it’s 1861.

Gov. Ron DeSantis likes to call this the “Free State of Florida.” If he hasn’t yet wrapped himself in the Tenth Amendment or threatened secession, it’s only because he’s been too busy playing soldiers, organizing his private battalion, rewriting the past, and trying to destroy democracy.

Give him time. You have to lay some groundwork if you want to be the next Jefferson Davis.

Step one: that little militia. Yes, other states also have them. Other states, however, do not have a governor who acts like Victor Orban with a bad case of acid reflux.

DeSantis announced his new Praetorians flanked by sofa-sized gents in camo in front of a sign that read “Let Us Alone.”

(Note: that “Let Us Alone” thing does not apply to the $9 billion from the feds now plumping up Florida’s budget).

The governor probably likes the historical precedent of gubernatorial troopers. Three days before Florida officially left the Union, and three months before Fort Sumter kicked off the party in earnest, a local militia took St. Augustine’s Castillo de San Marcos from the feds.

Those boys answered to Gov. Madison Perry, not Washington, and certainly not that dangerous radical Abraham Lincoln who’d been elected in 1860.

Wonder what the Brigata DeSantis uniform will look like? Brown shirts? Helmets with kevlar Mickey Mouse ears?

Maybe the Brigata DeSantis will help enforce the governor’s determination to silence public school teachers who might sully the ears of precious white children with the dreaded Critical Race Theory.

Not that DeSantis would recognize Critical Race Theory if it knocked him upside the head.

Not that any public K-12 school in Florida teaches Critical Race Theory: It’s law school-level stuff, a means of exploring how race has shaped our legal, governmental, and social systems beginning with enslaving Africans and continuing through Jim Crow, criminal justice, school funding, redlining, and a whole slew of other demonstrably discriminatory practices feeding white supremacy throughout American history.

Certainly, this might be a bit much for 5th grade social studies — which is why you won’t find it there.

But why let reality get in the way of demagoguery? DeSantis’ gauchely named new Fox-bait proposal, Stop WOKE (“Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”) Act, will allow parents to sue schools if “pernicious ideologies” show up in the classroom.

He seems to think that examining the reality of historical racism will “scapegoat someone based on their race” and make people see themselves as “inherently racist, to say that they are an oppressor, or oppressed, or any of that, and that’s good and that’s important.”

His point, if you can pick though the word salad, is that you can’t go hurting white people’s feelings talking about racism, never mind that people of color experience racism every day.

DeSantis must long for those good old antebellum days when Southern states banned expressing disapproval of slavery and made disseminating abolitionist literature a felony.

White folks knew how to run a white folks’ country back then: A piece in the Richmond Enquirer from 1856 exhorts schools to make sure children learn that slavery “is the common, natural, rightful, and normal state of society.”

DeSantis’ updated version insists children learn that America is an exceptional nation founded on “universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” — “universal principles” that included slavery.

According to this spurious understanding of history, only individuals can be racist, not systems, not institutions.

The white men who have run the country since 1619 learned one really important thing during Reconstruction: Certain people have no business voting. They don’t do it right.

To that end, the governor’s new elections-crime office will help curb excessive democracy.

The plan is to hire 45 investigators to look into all those elections infractions that are not actually happening, unless you count the Republican woman in Lake County who falsified voter registration forms changing party affiliations from Democrats to Republicans, or those three Trumpers in the Villages who voted twice.

And how about those Republican-funded “ghost candidates” who stole elections from Democratic candidates?

But that’s not what DeSantis means by election crimes; he means “ballot harvesting,” taking your grandmama’s ballot along with the ballots of several of her friends and depositing them at the supervisor’s office.

He’d like the Legislature to make that a felony. He’s already signed the law that restricts the use of drop boxes and absentee voting.

We breathlessly await literacy tests and poll taxes.

Here, in the “Free State of Florida,” DeSantis is happy to take federal money while preaching distrust of the federal government, rather like the way South Carolina’s Sen. John C. Calhoun declared that states could ignore any federal law they deemed “unconstitutional” in 1832.

No doubt the Great Nullifier would agree that 62,000 Florida dead of COVID is a small price to pay for DeSantis’s heroic defiance of Washington on vaccines and masking.

DeSantis seems to think Florida should only tangentially belong to the United States.

The “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” says a state can choose to be “separate and independent” with “full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.”

That was Dec. 20, 1860. We all know what happened next.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence.

https://floridaphoenix.com/2021/12/27/gov-desantis-seems-hellbent-on-taking-us-back-to-the-60s-only-its-the-1860s/

[Rick Plant]

Trump's most rabid Qanon conspiracy theorist lunatics are running for election this year. These loons are violent radical extremists and they're even more radical than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Handpicked Trump cultists like this have no business holding a government position just so they can corrupt our government by doing whatever Trump wants. All of these far right Trump worshippers need to be soundly defeated so the GOP can return to a civil and conservative party like they used to be.     

Meet the scariest Republican candidates of 2022



The Trump era saw a far-right takeover of the Republican Party. But the Big Lie and the fallout from the Capitol riot last January threaten to move the party even further into the extremist fringe after the 2022 midterms.

Republicans have long inched toward extremist positions on issues like immigration, women's rights and gun rights but Donald Trump's election helped mainstream racist, xenophobic and white nationalist forces. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., arguably one of the most effective conservative political figures in recent history, has increasingly been cast as a RINO ("Republican in Name Only") while the once-fringe House Freedom Caucus has grown massively to become a leading force in Washington. Longtime conservatives like former House Speaker Paul Ryan and former Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., ran for the hills while conspiracy theorists like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., became the faces of the new MAGA wing of the GOP.

Though the majority of the House Republican caucus voted to back Trump's Big Lie and tried to block the certification of President Biden's victory after the deadly Capitol riot, Trump and his allies wasted no time in launching a revenge tour, with the explicit aim of purging lawmakers seen as insufficiently loyal, while his supporters in state legislatures around the country seek to make it easier to overturn the next election. With Democrats facing a difficult if not impossible task of keeping the House despite plummeting approval ratings, the next wave of Republican freshmen could be the scariest yet – and may pose a true threat to democracy as we know it.

Kari Lake — Arizona governor

After failing to convince outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to help him overturn his election loss, Trump is backing a largely unknown conspiracy theorist, who vowed she would not have certified Biden's win, to replace Ducey. Lake, a longtime Arizona news anchor with no political experience, has even demanded that election officials "decertify" the election results, which is not legally possible. Lake, who is also backed by election conspiracists Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn and Capitol riot-linked Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., has called for Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (who is also a gubernatorial candidate this year), to be imprisoned for unspecified election crimes. Trump has also praised Lake for opposing COVID restrictions, "cancel culture," and "woke" school curriculums, all issues likely to dominate the next cycle of Republican primaries and beyond. Trump's endorsement catapulted Lake atop the race, where she leads former Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., by more than a two-to-one margin.

Eric Greitens — Missouri governor

Greitens, once a rising star and considered a potential presidential contender, resigned as Missouri governor in 2018 after a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair accused him of sexual assault and revenge porn. A St. Louis grand jury indicted him that year on felony invasion of privacy charges, and although prosecutors dropped the charges, a special committee in the Republican-led state legislature released a report in April 2018 deeming the woman's allegations "credible." The legislature moved to start impeachment proceedings against Greitens in May 2018, leading him to resign in exchange for prosecutors dropping an unrelated felony charge for using a veterans' charity email list for his campaign.

There was a time when such scandals would end a political career but Greitens has rebranded himself as an election conspiracist in the wake of Trump's loss, calling for "audits" of the election results nationwide and "decertification" of the 2020 results, and is back for another run at the governor's mansion. Republicans worried that Greitens could cost them the race have pleaded for Trump not to endorse Greitens, but Trump World appears to be rallying behind the disgraced former governor with endorsements from Donald Trump Jr., his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Greitens is just one of numerous Republican candidates accused of violence against women, a list that also includes Trump-backed Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker and Trump-endorsed Ohio House candidate Max Miller, who was accused of assault by Trump's former press secretary Stephanie Grisham.

Joe Kent — Washington, 3rd congressional district

Kent is running to unseat Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., who voted to impeach Trump after the Capitol riot, and is the most prominent candidate backed by the "Insurrection Caucus," meaning Trump allies like Greene, Boebert, Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida. The Washington Post reported last week that the group has little appetite for direct battle with Democrats and instead aims to push House Republicans even further right.

Kent told the Post he wants to force the party to vote on articles of impeachment against Biden and a full congressional investigation into the 2020 election, which he has claimed (without evidence, of course) was stolen. "A lot of it will be shaming Republicans," he told the Post. "It's put up or shut up," he said.

Trump critics are particularly alarmed about the extremist pro-Trump wing gaining power.

"We're looking at a nihilistic Mad Max hellscape," former Republican strategist Rick Wilson, who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the Post. "It will be all about the show of 2024 to bring Donald Trump back into power. … They will impeach Biden, they will impeach Harris, they will kill everything."

Mark Finchem — Arizona secretary of state

While most eyes will be on prominent gubernatorial and congressional races, the 2022 slate of secretary of state races may be the most consequential. Secretaries of state, who oversee elections, certified the election results in all the states Trump sought to contest, regardless of party affiliation. Next time may be different.

Finchem, a state lawmaker who attended the "Stop the Steal" rally ahead of the Capitol riot and spoke at a similar protest the previous day, has earned Trump's endorsement — and has also espoused QAnon-linked conspiracy theories and been linked to extremist groups.

A Finchem win could prove consequential in a state that was decided in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes. But Trump is also backing Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., another election conspiracist, against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who pushed back on Trump's attempts to overturn his loss. The ex-president has also thrown his support behind Kristina Karamo, an election conspiracist who hopes to challenge Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat.

Democrats increasingly worry that prominent election conspirators may soon be in charge of overseeing the votes. "That is 'code red' for democracy," Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told Reuters.

David Perdue — Georgia governor

At the start of the COVID pandemic, there appeared to be no governor closer allied with Trump than Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. But Kemp's refusal to help Trump try to block Biden's win forever cost the governor Trump BFF status and put him squarely in the former president's crosshairs. Trump has made it a point to back primary challenges to his perceived enemies, throwing his support behind former Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga. — who lost to Democrat Jon Ossoff in a January 2021 runoff — even as the state's Republican lawmakers pleaded for him to stay out after many blamed him for costing the party both of its Georgia U.S. Senate seats.

Perdue was already out of the Senate last Jan. 6, but now says he would have voted to block Biden's win. After landing Trump's endorsement earlier this month, Perdue filed a dubious lawsuit calling for an investigation of absentee ballots in his Senate race over vote-rigging allegations against Democratic election officials, some 11 months after his defeat. He also said earlier this month that he would not have certified Biden's victory if he had been governor.

Ron Watkins — Arizona, 1st congressional district

Watkins has long been a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist and many believe he outed himself as the mythical "Q" in a recent HBO documentary. As former administrator of the far-right imageboard 8kun, for years he has pushed nonsensical conspiracy theories alleging that a cabal of liberal Satan-worshipping pedophiles are running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against Trump. Earlier this year, he filed paperwork to run for Congress in Arizona — in a Phoenix-area seat now held by Rep. Tom O'Halleran, a Democrat — after moving back to the U.S. from the Philippines.

But Watkins is just one of at least 49 federal candidates who have publicly expressed some support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to the watchdog group Media Matters.

Adam Laxalt — Nevada, U.S. Senate

While many Republicans cheered Trump's bogus voter fraud lawsuits from the sidelines, Laxalt, Nevada's former attorney general, filed multiple lawsuits contesting Biden's victory in the state. Though all of the challenges were rejected by the court, Laxalt has continued to stoke voter fraud conspiracies, leading the Las Vegas Sun editorial board to label him the "Nevada version of Rudy Giuliani." Laxalt, who is now running for the Senate seat held by Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, vowed to file lawsuits to "tighten up the election" more than 14 months before a single vote is cast. Democrats in the state say Laxalt is using Trump's "Big Lie playbook" for his campaign and seeking to "limit Nevadans' voting rights and potentially overturn the election when he loses."

Mellissa Carone — Michigan state House

Readers may remember Carone from her bizarre testimony to Michigan lawmakers alongside Giuliani last December or the subsequent mockery she received on "Saturday Night Live." Carone, a former IT contractor for Dominion Voting Systems who has continued to espouse debunked claims of election rigging, is now running for the Michigan state House as a Republican and pushing white nationalist talking points about liberals seeking to "eliminate white people in America" with so-called critical race theory and transgender rights.

Carone is one of hundreds of pro-Trump diehards running in state legislature races in 2022, a trend that could have severe implications. Republican-led state legislatures this year pushed hundreds of voting restrictions, measures undercutting COVID regulations, legislation barring the teaching of certain history in school, and bills cracking down on LGBTQ rights.

J.D. Vance — Ohio, U.S. Senate

Vance, a longtime venture capitalist and the best-selling author of "Hillbilly Elegy," is running for U.S. Senate in Ohio, where incumbent Republican Rob Portman is retiring. Vance and fellow Republican candidate Josh Mandel have desperately tried to rebrand themselves as Trump-style, anti-immigrant, anti-Big Tech zealots. Vance's politics appear to be closer to that of Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., than to the former president, but it's his financial backers who have raised the most concern.

Vance is backed by the Mercer family, who funded Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump adviser Steve Bannon and many of the key players involved in stoking election lies and the subsequent Capitol riot.

Vance's biggest benefactor is venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has increasingly thrown big money at Trump and other far-right Republicans. Thiel, who has worked with Vance for years, dropped $10 million to back his Senate bid and another $10 million to support his protégé Blake Masters' Senate bid in Arizona, along with maximum donations to several House campaigns. Though Thiel largely keeps a low public profile, he is "in many ways further to the right than Trump," author Max Chafkin, who profiled Thiel in a recent book, told Salon earlier this year, and "wants to be the patron of the Trump wing of the Republican Party."

Noah Malgeri — Nevada, 3rd congressional district

Trump has frequently drawn condemnation for calling for "locking up" political opponents but some Republicans have gone even further, calling for actual violence against their adversaries.

William Braddock, a Republican running for a Florida House seat vacated by outgoing Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla. (who is running for governor), threatened to send a "hit squad" to make his Republican primary opponent "disappear." His opponent was granted a restraining order.

Wyoming state Sen. Anthony Bouchard, who is running to unseat Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., earlier this year suggested executing White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the state's Democratic Party reported to the FBI.

Earlier this week, Noah Malgeri, who is running in the Republican primary to face Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., called for the execution of Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been targeted by Republicans for a call he made to a Chinese general to reassure him that the United States was not planning to attack.

"We don't need a congressional commission to investigate the crimes of Mark Milley, all the evidence is out there," Malgeri said in a Facebook Live interview this week. "What did they used to do to traitors if they were convicted by a court? They would execute them," he added. "That's still the law in the United States of America. I think, you know, if he's guilty of it by a court martial, they should hang him on CNN. I mean, they're not going to do it on CNN. But on C-SPAN or something."

https://www.rawstory.com/gop-2022-election/

[Rick Plant]

Marge is having a tough go of it lately. 

Pro-Trump pastor buries Marjorie Taylor Greene: She 'spouts racist sounding stuff and wants us to defend it'



Pro-Trump Pastor Darrell Scott on Monday hammered Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whom he accused of putting Black conservatives "in a bad position."

Writing on Twitter, Scott took Greene to task for criticizing GOP outreach efforts to Black voters as "pandering."

"I’m tired of White Conservatives LIKE MARJORIE TAYLOR GREEN putting Black Conservatives in a bad position by spouting racist sounding stuff and wanting us to defend it and/or her," he wrote. "She called outreach to Black voters 'pandering.' I’m not standing next to that drivel."

Scott followed this up by noting people like Greene "don’t think 'formulating strategy to attract white suburban women' is pandering."

Some of Scott's followers tried to defend Greene by asking him to point to racist things she's said, and Scott pointed to videos she made before being elected in which she said it was impossible for Muslims to be loyal to the United States, as well as infamous remarks she made comparing pandemic-related restrictions to the Holocaust.

Greene has been suspended from Twitter for repeatedly violating the platform's ban on spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read tweets in link
https://www.rawstory.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-2656211669/

[Rick Plant]

More madness in Wisconsin as Republican floats way to nullify elections



In the waning hours of 2021, a Republican legislator in Wisconsin named Timothy Ramthun wasn’t chilling champagne or relaxing with his family. No, he was still scheming to subvert our democracy.

Ramthun, who in November introduced a resolution to rescind Wisconsin’s Electoral Colleges votes that were certified on Jan. 6, introduced a bill on Dec. 30 that would permit the nullification of an election and the mandating of a do-over 30 days later in some circumstances.

Those circumstances include where the total number of absentee ballots exceeds the margin of victory, which, under his bill, would necessitate a forensic audit. (In the November 2020 elections, almost 2 million Wisconsinites voted by absentee ballot, and Biden won by about 21,000 votes.)

After such an audit, if the Wisconsin Elections Commission or the Attorney General or a district attorney “having jurisdiction over the matter determines that a violation of the laws relating to election threats, bribery, or fraud occurred,” then the election is null and void.

This is way off the charts. There’s no precedent for nullifying elections in Wisconsin.

And note that Ramthun has totally aced out the judiciary, which up to now has had the authority to resolve election disputes.

Ramthun sidelines the judges and would conveniently hand power over to partisan officials.

This is an assault not only on our right to vote but on the separation of powers and our very system of checks and balances.

The anti-democracy madness in Wisconsin has got to stop!

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/brief/wisconsin-republican-floats-way-to-nullify-elections/

[Rick Plant]

Biden debuts $1 billion meatpacking competition plan

President Joe Biden unveiled plans Monday to allocate $1 billion in federal money to increasing competition in the meatpacking industry.

“Without meaningful competition, farmers and ranchers don’t get to choose who they sell to,” Biden said. “Put another way, our farmers and ranchers have to pay whatever these four big companies say they have to pay.”

The top four companies in the pork, beef and poultry industries control more than half of their markets. Biden said the lack of competition allows those companies to drive up the prices of meat at the grocery store without paying more to farmers.

“This reflects the market being distorted by lack of competition… Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation,” Biden said in a livestreamed address.

Biden’s initiative to increase competition has four components, he explained:

- Investing $1 billion in new and expanded meat and poultry processing. The funding will come from the American Rescue Plan and is meant to give farmers more options than “giant processing conglomerates.”

- Strengthening federal rules to protect meat producers. Biden ordered the USDA to rewrite rules in the Packers and Stockyard Act, a 1921 law that regulates meatpackers.

- Enforcing existing competition laws “vigorously,” including launching a new program to make it easier for individuals to report violations of laws that restrict anti-competitive behavior. 

- Making the industry more transparent by requiring additional reporting on meat prices

Congress is also working to address competition in the industry. Iowa lawmakers have led an effort to increase price transparency between packers and producers. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst introduced the bill in the Senate, and all four of Iowa’s representatives introduced it in the House.

.@ChuckGrassley and I have been working across the aisle to return fairness to the cattle marketplace and improve market transparency for Iowa’s hardworking cattle producers.

Our bipartisan effort needs to be part of President Biden’s conversation with farmers today.

“I will continue to work with my colleagues from both sides of the aisle and the White House to pass the legislation to help level the playing field for family farmers,” Rep. Cindy Axne, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday.

Biden has led several initiatives in the past year to address meatpacking competition.

In July, Biden ordered the Department of Agriculture to write new rules that would give farmers more power in pricing their livestock. He pointed toward meatpacking monopolies as the cause of increased meat prices in the U.S.

“Four large meatpacking companies dominate over 80% of the beef market and, over the last five years, farmers’ share of the price of beef has dropped by more than a quarter — from 51.5% to 37.3% — while the price of beef has risen,” a July White House fact sheet read.

The USDA announced a $500 million grant program to establish new meat-processing facilities or support existing small operations.

The White House announced in September that the USDA would invest $1.4 billion in pandemic assistance to small producers and processes.

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/brief/biden-debuts-1-billion-meatpacking-competition-plan/

[Rick Plant]

Schumer says U.S. Senate to consider changing the filibuster if voting rights stalls

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned on Monday that the Senate is prepared to debate changes in the filibuster if Republicans continue to block the advancement of voting rights legislation.

In a sternly worded letter to other senators, the New York Democrat set a deadline of Jan. 17 for the chamber to consider revising the filibuster rules, which require a 60-vote threshold for legislation to move ahead in the evenly divided Senate.

Jan. 17 is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“We must ask ourselves: if the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can we in good conscience allow for a situation in which the Republican Party can debate and pass voter suppression laws at the State level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same?” Schumer wrote in the letter.

It’s unlikely that enough Senate Republicans will join Democrats to pass the current versions of voting rights legislation.

Another sticking point for Schumer is that not all Democrats are on board either with reforming or pushing for a carve out of filibuster rules.

With the midterm elections approaching, congressional Democrats have without success pushed for enactment of broad voter rights protections. Since the 2020 presidential election, Republicans at the state level have introduced hundreds of bills that would impose strict voting requirements, in response to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the presidential election.

Schumer argued that with the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol this week, Congress needs to understand that the attack “was a symptom of a broader illness — an effort to delegitimize our election process, and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration — they will be the new norm.”

“Given the urgency of the situation and imminence of the votes, we as Senate Democrats must urge the public in a variety of different ways to impress upon their Senators the importance of acting and reforming the Senate rules, if that becomes a perquisite for action to save our democracy,” he said.

Senate Republicans have repeatedly blocked debate on a voting rights bill. Only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said in November that she would back Senate Democrats in a compromise voting rights measure named after a civil rights icon, the late Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

In his letter, Schumer did not specify which voting rights bill the Senate aims to pass — Democrats have introduced several.

But Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has spent the last few months working on a package that has the support of West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin III, a Democrat who has expressed his opposition to changing the Senate’s rules.

The same stance is shared by Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who opposes any type of filibuster reform.

“As she has throughout her time in the U.S. House and Senate, Senator Sinema also continues to support the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, to protect the country from repeated radical reversals in federal policy which would cement uncertainty, deepen divisions, and further erode Americans’ confidence in our government,” her office wrote in a statement, the same one she made in December in response to questions about her position on the filibuster.

The bill backed by Klobuchar, known as the Freedom to Vote Act, has the support of every Senate Democrat, including Sinema.

The legislation would establish Election Day as a national holiday and set minimum standards that each state must have for elections, such as two weeks of early voting and an option for same-day voter registration. Manchin has vowed to get 10 Senate Republicans on board, but so far has not succeeded.

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/01/03/schumer-says-u-s-senate-to-consider-changing-the-filibuster-if-voting-rights-stalls/

[Rick Plant]

President Biden is creating a record number of jobs and the Biden Boom continues.

U.S. added 807,000 private jobs in December, more than twice the number expected

Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Private companies in the United States added more than 800,000 jobs during the month of December, an amount more than twice what analysts expected.

ADP and Moody's Analytics said in their monthly report on Wednesday that private employers made about 807,000 hires last month.

Most experts projected the report would show around 380,000 new jobs.

According to the report, larger businesses -- those with more than 500 employees -- made the most hires, about 389,000. Medium-sized businesses made 214,000 and smaller businesses about 204,000.

"December's job market strengthened as the fallout from the Delta [coronavirus] variant faded and Omicron's impact had yet to be seen," Nela Richardson, ADP chief economist, said in a statement.

"Job gains were broad-based, as goods producers added the strongest reading of the year, while service providers dominated growth."

The services sector was responsible for most of the growth, almost 670,000 jobs, particularly in leisure and hospitality. The goods-producing sector added close to 140,000, with manufacturing contributing more than half of that figure.

"December's job growth brought the fourth quarter average to 625,000, surpassing the 514,000 average for the year. While job gains eclipsed 6 million in 2021, private sector payrolls are still nearly 4 million jobs short of pre-COVID-19 levels."

The report from ADP and Moody's came two days before the Labor Department issues its official December jobs report. Most analysts expect that report, which includes the public sector, to show about 400,000 new jobs.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/01/05/adp-moodys-private-jobs-report-december/6931641388838/