Remember how we were saying Vlad the Bad's oligarchs don't mess with his political dealings because he leaves them alone in their financial dealings? Greg Palast, America's Last Journalist, goes deeper into that story, revealing how the billionaires picked Mr. Putin in the first place back in the 1990s. Incredibly, the Russian oligarchs actually went looking for a "Russian Pinochet" (this, while the actual Pinochet faced murder charges related to his nefarious rule!) to replace Boris Yeltsin, not just with Mr. Yeltsin's acquiescence, but with the actual help of Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, last seen telling America to fight inflation not by fighting monopolies (as the Biden Administration would do) but by pressing down even harder on the throats of working families.
Homeless folks and their advocates have begun an Occupy-style protest in none other than Boise, ID. Since the Ninth Circuit rules that Boise couldn't just criminalize homelessness, particularly if they weren't going to give homeless folks a place to stay, Boise police appear to be shaking down the homeless, often under the guise of "welfare checks" (which don't require warrants), hence the occupation of the state Capitol Mall. I wish them luck in persuading a state (and a nation) that they do matter and that our treatment of them matters, if we want to call ourselves civilized. Hell, Utah's as right-wing as Idaho is, and they do much better by their homeless.
Richard C. Gross at Counterpunch summarizes the right-wing stratagem in America about as succinctly as I've seen it done: "suppressing voting rights, restricting abortions, curbing teaching about race and identity, banning books in schools and libraries and picking on one of the most vulnerable in society – LGBTQ youths." After all, as he suggests, right-wingers not only can't win elections with superior ideas, they can't win arguments on the merits. Democrats would do well to use a similar summary in political ads -- in conjunction with their own accomplishments, which I expect to be more apparent by mid-summer -- though I doubt they have the guts. The Jesse Jackson epigraph -- "In politics, an organized minority is a political majority" -- is as stark as it is instructive.
Ho hum, Wisconsin Elections Commission won't do anything to the 10 Republicans who tried to pass themselves off as Presidential electors in 2020. I shudder to think the real reason they laid off was that one of the 10 was also one of the Commissioners, but you know what would be worse? If they actually believed the 10 fake electors' claim that they were just "keeping their options open" in case Mr. Trump won any of the 60-odd frivolous lawsuits he lost. And the Commission says Wisconsin state law doesn't prevent "alternative" electors from "meeting"; does it prevent them from pretending they're the real electors in a race their man obviously lost? Law and order!
When I hear that the Alaska legislature is contemplating a bill that would outlaw state IDs that comply with the national REAL ID system, all I can say is at last, the vaunted Alaska libertarian streak returns! The bill, HB 389, would give good Alaskans the option of using a driver's license photo that can't be read by facial recognition software, plus it would force Alaskan state government (namely the DMV; we'll get to them) to destroy all of its current drivers' license photos and prohibit "bulk sharing" of any of said photos -- a big deal since the Alaska DMV decided all by itself and in defiance of state law to upload all of its REAL-ID-compatible photos to the national database in 2017. I don't know if I've said this here, but folks who obsess over other people's papers are pretty much telling the world they don't know how to do anything about anything important.
Finally, recently-disgraced Andrew Cuomo says he not only might run for a fourth term as Governor of New York, but might create his own political party to do so. To which I must ask: why does he think people love him so much that he could create his own party? That man has always needed Democrats more than they have ever needed him. And boy do I wish he'd STFU about "cancel culture" already. He didn't "say" stuff so much as he did stuff, the First Amendment doesn't protect you from your employer, and we've accepted sexual harassment in the workplace is wrong for over three decades now. Hate to pile on, but I'm tired of hearing that "we have to reduce the anger in politics" from the people who stoke the anger with their wrongdoing.