Good morning and Happy Friday! Thanks for being here today.
Let’s start with some good news today. After its horrific Super Bowl Commercial, which was ostensibly about a neighborhood coming together to find a lost dog, but everyone immediately clocked as a handy tool for ICE, Amazon’s Ring has reportedly cancelled its contract with law enforcement surveillance company Flock. Proof, as ever, that bullying and public backlash work. At least we got a decent parody out of it.
“Definitely only for dogs.”
I wonder what else we could bully Bezos out of? His support yacht? Jacking up prices right before Prime Day? The Washington Post?
Alas, on to the bad news, which is pretty much everything else. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it’s deleting the finding that climate change is bad for … you know, humans. Why does that matter? That finding was the basis for the federal government's regulation of carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases.
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
Now that our EPA no longer believes in climate change, giant corporations are free to pollute as they wish.
For nearly 17 years, the E.P.A. had relied on the bedrock finding to justify regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane and other pollution from oil and gas wells, tailpipes, smokestacks and other sources that burn fossil fuels. The repeal of the endangerment finding is expected to increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent over the next 30 years, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group.
The added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055, the group said.
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Getting rid of the endangerment finding clears the way for the E.P.A. to repeal limits on greenhouse gases from stationary sources of pollution, such as power plants and oil and gas wells, a process that it has begun.
Luckily, both individual states and climate action groups have already announced plans to sue the Trump administration over the policy change. Trump, who was once called the “dumbest goddamn student I ever had” by a Wharton professor, wants you to know that those who back climate change are “very stupid people.” Ah, yes, scientists: the dumbest among us.
That’ll make us all feel better when we’re stuck inside because the air outside is a toxic soup of ash and pollutants, like some District 12 nightmare.
In other news: The Save Act is coming for your voting registration; The plot thickens on that whistleblower complaint Tulsi Gabbard was hiding from Congress; More reasons to hate Google; and The High Note.
Here we go.
Hey, clicking on the link below helps keep the lights on here. If you’d take 30 seconds out of your day to click through, I’d appreciate it!
Someone just spent $236,000,000 on a painting. Here’s why it matters for your wallet.
The WSJ just reported the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.
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The Save Act passes the House
The SAVE Act, which is intended to “save” a Congressional majority for Republicans by disenfranchising thousands, if not millions of American voters, passed the House on Wednesday by a vote of 218-213. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) was, predictably, the only Democrat to vote in favor of the bill. For the love of God, why can’t Hakeem Jeffries get his party to hang together on anything?
The bill, which was revised from an earlier version to include new demands from Trump, also requires voters to show photo identification in order to cast a ballot in person. And it slaps new rules for mail-in ballots, requiring voters to submit a copy of an eligible ID when requesting and casting an absentee ballot.
“It’s just common sense. Americans need an ID to drive, to open a bank account, to buy cold medicine, to file government assistance,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters. “So why would voting be any different than that?”
You might think, like Mike Johnson, that forcing people to show a valid ID in order to be able to vote is harmless, but there’s a reason the Supreme Court, up until recently, prohibited states from requiring voters to show their IDs. The League of Women Voters has a good explainer on why Voter ID laws are harmful to America.
Not only are voter photo ID laws ineffective as means of combating voter fraud, but their main impact is that they promote voter suppression.
The use of restrictive voting laws to disenfranchise minority voters can be traced back to the Jim Crow era, when many states employed various tactics — including literacy tests, poll taxes, and extralegal measures such as violence and intimidation — to prevent Black Americans from voting. Following the enactment of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965, many of these tactics were outlawed, but efforts to restrict voting access persisted, including implementing voter ID laws.
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The negative impact of strict voter ID laws is not limited to Black Americans; other marginalized populations also face disproportionate barriers to voting because of these laws. Native American communities, low-income, elderly, and rural voters are disproportionately affected by voter photo ID laws. This is partially because photo IDs aren’t as common as many people assume: 18% of all citizens over the age of 65, 16% of Latino voters, 25% of Black voters, and 15% of low-income Americans lack acceptable photo ID. Elderly and low-income voters may not have the availability, financial resources, or mobility to obtain the necessary identification, and rural voters may face significant barriers to obtaining the necessary documentation due to their geographic isolation. Further, many rural and Native Americans born at home or on reservations and tribal lands lack the mandated paperwork needed to obtain a government-issued ID that fits the legal requirements to vote.
The groups that will be hit hardest by the SAVE Act, should it pass, are married women who changed their names and college students who use their student IDs for validation. Of course, if you’re a Republican, people of color, women, and college students are exactly the people you want to keep from voting.
All of this, of course, is happening because Republicans have convinced the US that illegal voting is a huge problem, when it’s actually very rare. Sort of like they convinced everyone that ICE was only going to go after “the worst of the worst.”
The good news is that the GOP only has a three-seat majority in the Senate, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has already come out against the bill. Call your Senators, friends!
Well, well, well…
We’re getting new and very juicy information about the whistleblower complaint that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard kept hidden from Congress (in a locked safe, no less) for eight months. If you’ll recall, there were allegations that Gabbard’s office was classifying information along partisan lines, meaning she was hiding intelligence that was harmful to Republicans, even if doing so was not in the best interests of the United States.
Now, the Wall St. Journal (who broke the whistleblower complaint story to begin with) is reporting on the intelligence Gabbard was accused of improperly classifying. And you’ll never guess who it’s about.
WASHINGTON—The highly classified whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is related to a conversation intercepted last spring in which two foreign nationals discussed Jared Kushner, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
It couldn’t be determined which country the foreign nationals are from or what they discussed about Kushner. But the connection to Kushner sheds further light on the top-secret whistleblower complaint that bureaucratically stalled within Gabbard’s agency for eight months and was kept locked in a safe until it reached Congress in heavily redacted form last week.
Senior Trump administration officials said the claims about Kushner were demonstrably false, but declined to offer more specifics about the conversation on grounds that doing so could expose a highly sensitive surveillance method.
Well, that is certainly interesting, particularly in light of Saudi Crown Prince (and murderer of Jamal Khashoggi) Mohammed bin Salman bragging in 2018 that Kushner was “in his pocket.” Then there’s that pesky $2 billion that Kushner’s equity firm got from the Saudis after leaving the White House. Sure seems like it was payment for something, like maybe handing over the names of MBS’s critics.
What exactly Kushner and the Saudi royal talked about in Riyadh may be known only to them, but after the meeting, Crown Prince Mohammed told confidants that Kushner had discussed the names of Saudis disloyal to the crown prince, according to three sources who have been in contact with members of the Saudi and Emirati royal families since the crackdown. Kushner, through his attorney’s spokesperson, denies having done so.
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On November 4, a week after Kushner returned to the U.S., the crown prince, known in official Washington by his initials MBS, launched what he called an anti-corruption crackdown. The Saudi government arrested dozens of members of the Saudi royal family and imprisoned them in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, which was first reported in English by The Intercept. The Saudi figures named in the President’s Daily Brief were among those rounded up; at least one was reportedly tortured.
This whole family is chock full of traitorous assholes.
Another reason to hate Google
Yesterday, I wrote that Google has played a big role in destroying the news media in our country. In that story, I included news that Google is a) handing over user information to ICE without even challenging gov’t subpoenas — or notifying its users beforehand; and 2) Google is working with ICE. Now we know that Google is also censoring anti-ICE sentiment within its own company.
Last week, hundreds of Google workers, outraged by the federal government’s mass deportation campaign and the killings of Keith Porter, Alex Pretti and Rene Good, went public with a call for their leadership to cut ties with ICE. The employees are also demanding that Google acknowledge the violence, hold a town hall on the topic, and enact policy to protect vulnerable members of its workforce, including contractors and cafeteria and data center workers This week, the number of supporters has passed 1,200; the full petition is at Googlers-Against-Ice.com.
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Yet leadership has not acknowledged the petition, and has thus far dodged all requests to answer questions about ICE, CBP, or Google’s role in supporting the agencies. Like Amazon, Google operates cloud services for ICE and the DHS, and is a partner of Palantir, one of the biggest technology providers for those departments. But despite Google employees’ anger and unease regarding their company’s partnership with ICE, workers are wary of voicing criticism openly.
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According to Alex and other employees, Google is stifling and censoring speech critical of the federal government in its internal communication channels. “Recently, the moderation team started banning memes and comments about ICE on the internal meme platform,” Alex says.
Google’s heel-turn is the main reason I switched from Android to an iPhone, and they’re pushing me away from Chrome and toward something more secure, like DuckDuckGo or the Brave browser. For a company whose motto used to be “Don’t Be Evil,” they’re sure leaning hard into being the bad guys.
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
This made my whole day.
It’s the Dorf legs for me.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you after the holiday on Tuesday.
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