"An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy."
Mon, Feb. 15, 2021, 3PM (CT). POSSIBLE TOPICS: Voting info; Voting info; “Vote By Mail” applications; TX DMV announces end date for waiver of vehicle title, registration ; Sheriff Eric Fagan’s reversal of 2019 dispatch policy brings relief to Fort Bend County officials; Former top aides say TX AG Ken Paxton received assistance with home remodel, job for alleged girlfriend in return for helping political donor; Trump impeachment: Senate falls short of majority needed to convict; After impeachment, bipartisanship is dead — and so is the immoral Republican Party; 120 anti-Trump Republicans are in talks to form a center-right 3rd party that would run on ‘principled conservatism,’ “; Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt resigns from board amid group’s recent scandals; Insurrectionists are rushing to delete evidence of their participation in the Capitol riot, report says; CBO says U.S. federal debt to exceed size of economy even before Biden stimulus is approved; More. Guest: [AUDIO/VIDEO] #KPFTHouston 90.1FM
NOTE: This show post replaces the blank post from 2/15/2021, which is now deleted. The blank post published because of the Texas power crisis. I’m sending out a new post so that the various outlets that get auto posts will receive them. Thanks for understanding!
PRODUCED VERSION:
BROADCAST VERSION (GLITCHY):
This program was recorded on SUNDAY, February 14. Due to Covid-19, shows are being prerecorded beginning March 13, 2020 and until further notice. We miss our live call-in participants, and look forward to a time we can once again go live.Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig(@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show airing live every Monday from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My co-host and Editor is Andrew Ferguson.
Listen live on the radio, or on the internet from anywhere in the world! When the show is live, we take calls at 713-526-5738. (Long distance charges may apply.) Please take a moment to visit Pledge.KPFT.org and choose THINKWING RADIO from the drop-down list when you donate.
For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:
An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.
You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
“There’s a reason why you separate military and police. One fights the enemy of the State. The other serves and protects the People. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the State tend t become the People.” ~ Commander Adama, “Battlestar Galactica” (“WATER”, Season 1 episode 2, at the 28 minute mark.)
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Next Election: May 01, 2021 – Uniform Election. Early Voting: April 19th – April 27th
If you are denied your right to vote any place at any timeat any polling place for any reason, ask for (or demand) a provisional ballot rather than lose your vote.
Fill out a declaration at the polls describing a reasonable impediment to obtaining it, and show a copy or original of one of the following supporting forms of ID:
A government document that shows your name and an address, including your voter registration certificate
Current utility bill
Bank statement
Government check
Paycheck
A certified domestic (from a U.S. state or territory) birth certificate or (b) a document confirming birth admissible in a court of law which establishes your identity (which may include a foreign birth document)
Fort Bend County Sheriff Eric Fagan entered office Jan. 1 with several priorities in mind—including a mission to reverse a 2019 policy regarding emergency dispatch practices, which he accomplished in week one.
For decades, Fort Bend County dispatchers answering 911 calls for an unincorporated area would send the closest law enforcement official—whether from the sheriff’s office or a constable’s office—to the scene.
On Jan. 1, 2019, however, former Sheriff Troy Nehls changed the policy, directing dispatchers to send only sheriff deputies to calls even if a constable unit was closer and under contract to patrol a specific area.
Two years later, Fagan said his reversal of the policy has been met with positive feedback. Put simply, the new sheriff said he wanted to revert back to the old practices because a quick response from law enforcement when an emergency occurs is a priority.
“If someone was breaking into your home, would it matter to you if it was a constable that got there first or a sheriff’s deputy?” he said. “You just want the quickest law enforcement agency there to get to you.”
Echoing Fagan, Precinct 4 Commissioner Ken DeMerchant said he was in favor of the policy reversal.
“It makes sense to be a team and to work together,” he said.
MIKE: Essentially, this started as a prioritization turf war that has now been made more rational, again.
Late last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fired multiple senior aides who accused him of accepting a bribe. A court filing obtained by The Texas Tribune reveals for the first time what four of those aides believe Paxton received in exchange for helping a donor with his business affairs.
An updated version of a lawsuit filed by the four whistleblowers claims that Austin real estate developer Nate Paul helped Paxton remodel his house and gave a job to a woman with whom Paxton allegedly had an affair.
In return, the aides allege, Paxton used his office to help Paul’s business interests, investigate Paul’s adversaries and help settle a lawsuit. The claims in the filing provide even more details about what the former aides believe Paxton’s motivations were in what they describe as a “bizarre, obsessive use of power.” …
The US Senate has fallen short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict former President Donald Trump on a charge of incitement to insurrection over the Capitol riot on 6 January.
A majority of senators – 57 to 43, including seven Republicans – voted to convict Mr Trump, 10 votes short of the 67 required for conviction.
After his acquittal, Mr Trump released a statement denouncing the trial as “the greatest witch hunt in history”. …
After the vote, the senior Republican in Congress, Senator Mitch McConnell said Mr Trump had been “responsible” for the assault on the Capitol and called it a “disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty”.
Earlier, he voted against conviction, saying it was unconstitutional now that Mr Trump was no longer president. Mr McConnell was instrumental in delaying Mr Trump’s trial until after he left office, on 20 January.
However, Mr McConnell warned Mr Trump could still be held liable in court.
…“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,” McConnell said. “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
He then stated: “We have no power to convict and disqualify a former office holder who is now a private citizen.” …
Your story entitled, “Trump impeachment: Senate falls short of majority needed to convict” (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56056310 ) is technically inaccurate. It should be, “Trump impeachment: Senate falls short of super-majority needed to convict”.
In fact, a majority of senators voted to convict.
What actually occurred is that the Senate failed to convict by a SUPER majority of 2/3, or 67 senators.
A MAJORITY of 57 Senators voted to convict, but that fell short of the super majority required by the US Constitution.
The Republican Party was born on March 20, 1854, the green shoots of a political spring. Unlike America’s other parties that were often shotgun weddings of convenience, the Republicans burst forth around moral ideas that were so powerful — ending slavery and making America a world industrial power — that the tail of this supernova lasted for more than 166 years and inspired its eventual nickname, the Grand Old Party.
That GOP died — morally, if not officially — in the late afternoon gloaming of a grey and bitterly cold winter’s day, Feb. 13, 2021. After 43 Republican senators who’d been given a green light to “vote their conscience” on Donald Trump’s impeachment still managed to come up empty — thus enshrining the notion that an end-of-term president can foment a deadly insurrection to thwart a peaceful transition of power and not face any consequences — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell strolled to the well of the Senate. He was presumably holding the bloody knife with which he’d repeatedly stabbed American democracy for a dozen years hidden behind his back.
It turns out that McConnell’s past moments of political shamelessness — the years of hurting America’s recovery just to electorally thwart our first Black president, the theft of a Supreme Court pick from Barack Obama so it could be made by a dangerous demagogue whom the Kentuckian then helped pack the judiciary — were just an audition for Saturday’s GOP eulogy.
“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” said McConnell, referring to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol that had endangered McConnell’s colleagues, his staffers and himself. “No question about it.” But his faux moment of moral clarity was all a sham, as shown by leading the Feckless 43 in acquitting Trump as well as his pretzel logic to justify his vote, a lie-based misreading of the U.S. Constitution that he’d already shredded into 10,000 pieces as he turned the Party of Lincoln into an authoritarian cult with no moral standing and no ideology beyond realpolitick to protect white identity politics.
But McConnell’s effort to obfuscate was in fact one of the most revelatory moments in the long, muddled history of American politics. The unbearable nothingness of his failure — and that of most of his party — to hold Trump to account for a full-frontal assault on America’s core ideals was the final flatlining in the long slow death of a political party that is no longer grand, just old. On paper, the Republican Party may live on — but the GOP as an idea and a moral force is deader than a parrot in a Monty Python sketch, nailed to its perch in a gross caricature of what it once was. …
“I think our country needs a strong Republican party — it’s very important,” a visibly shaken House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Saturday, crashing a news conference of House impeachment managers to rebut McConnell and his intentionally misleading account of how the process went down. But Pelosi was only partially right. America will indeed need a vigorous two-party (if not multiparty) system to have real, honest debates about how to defend democracy and advance the interests of a forgotten working class. But today’s Republican Party jumped the guardrails of that highway a long time ago. …
. In the Nixon and Reagan eras, the GOP abandoned any and all former principles for a self-preservation ethos of tax breaks for a wealthy donor class and stirring up the social resentments of the white working class — an Ed Sullivan Show-level plate-spinning act called “the Southern strategy” that barely hid its white-supremacist roots. …
Ironically, one of the last nails in the GOP’s coffin came last week not from Trump or his weak-kneed enablers on Capitol Hill but from a Page 2 story about the implosion of the supposed anti-Trump elite of the Republican Party, the deep-pocketed Lincoln Project. This network of GOP consultants and higher-ups — who, after decades of implanting right-wing toxicity in the body politic, felt revulsion over the crudity of POTUS 45 — argued they were true conservatives with a conscience in raising $90 million to defeat Trump in 2020. Instead, revelations are showing the Lincoln Project was largely a grift of big-bucks self-dealing and covering up the sexual harassment of one of its founders. In hindsight, maybe the Lincoln Project embodied the actual Republican Party more than it realized. …
There is, arguably, a large opening for a completely new second political party — one that actually promotes the economic interests of a multiracial working class and some of its social conservatism, but embraces ethics and eschews racism — but the stench of the GOP’s corpse may have to get worse before that can happen. …
[I]n the wake of the Republicans’ blocking of accountability for Trump. Democrats must see the light and go even deeper. The failure to get 60 votes, let alone 67, in the open-and-shut case of the ex-president’s insurrection incitement, should not only be the death knell for the GOP but also for the filibuster. Without the ability to represent the 57% of Americans who believe in a morally good and progressive nation on a straight up-or-down vote, Republicans will block voting rights reforms — which is their best hope for gaming the elections of 2022 and 2024. …
Beyond Capitol Hill, Saturday’s vote — and McConnell’s acknowledgement of likely criminal conduct by the ex-president — should be a green light for incoming Attorney General Merrick Garland to finally bring Trump to justice in our criminal courts.
That truth may be a hard pill for the likes of President Biden, who was raised on the quasi-sacred altar of bipartisanship. But the only way to save the country from the American carnage of 2021 is for the Democrats to use their narrow majority to push for what is right — politically, economically, morally — and invite any principled Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney or Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler to join them. …
The anti-Trump group said the party would focus on “principled conservatism,” Reuters said.
The group includes former elected officials and people who worked for Trump and other Republicans.
The party would focus on “principled conservatism” and other ideals that the group thinks President Donald Trump dismissed, the report said. …
The call included former elected officials and people who served in the administrations of Trump, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, sources told Reuters.
The Republican Party is reckoning with a division between Trump loyalists and traditional Republicans.
Reports have said Trump has also considered starting a third party, possibly named the Patriot Party, as a rebuke of the Republican lawmakers who he feels have not been sufficiently loyal to him. …
Some names being considered for the new party are the Integrity Party and the Center Right Party, according to Reuters.
Steve Schmidt, one of the high-profile co-founders of The Lincoln Project, announced on Friday that he is resigning from the group’s board. Schmidt’s decision comes amid a series of scandals that have plagued the anti-Trump PAC run by longtime Republican operatives. …
Schmidt’s announcement comes after the Associated Press reported Thursday that the Lincoln Project’s leadership was informed in June 2020 of “at least 10 specific allegations of harassment against co-founder John Weaver, including two involving Lincoln Project employees.” New York Magazine also reported Thursday that leaders were aware of allegations against Weaver in June. In late January, the New York Times reported that 21 men accused Weaver of sending “unsolicited and sexually provocative messages online to young men.”
The Lincoln Project said in a statement on Thursday that the group’s board decided to hire an outside firm to conduct a review of Weaver’s tenure with the organization “and to establish both accountability and best practices going forward.” …
Schmidt also apologized to Lincoln Project co-founder Jennifer Horn, who is no longer with the organization.
In a recent statement to the New York Times, Horn said that she left the Project after she was “yelled at, demeaned and lied to” after raising objections about a statement the organization released after the Weaver news broke and that she disagreed with leaders on how to address the Weaver issue moving forward. …
“She deserved better from me. She deserved a leader who could restrain his anger. I’m sorry for my failure,” Schmidt wrote.
Schmidt also apologized for releasing Twitter messages between Horn and a reporter. “It is my job as the senior leader to accept responsibility for the tremendous misjudgement to release it,” he said.
“For me, it’s time to step back from the front – to get healthy mentally, physically and spiritually,” Schmidt said.
… Insurrectionists are scrambling to delete photos and social media posts proving their participation in the January 6 Capitol riot, according to CNN.
The outlet obtained and analyzed FBI affidavits and court documents that allegedly show about 30 riot attendees have actively taken steps to delete or remove any evidence of their participation.
Several broke their cellphones, scrubbed their social media accounts, and tried to wipe hard drives that might contain photos and other proof of their involvement, CNN reported. One man is even believed to have stolen body cam gear from a police officer who was reportedly present at the riot, CNN reported. …
On the day of the riot and in the weeks after, those who attended were eagerly posting selfies and other photos to their social media platforms, according to various analyses.
Vox, for example, noted that plenty of rioters posed for photos. Others bragged of their attempt to pull off a coup, the Washington Post One woman even identified herself by name in an interview with a reporter posted to Twitter. The woman, who referred to herself as Elizabeth, said she’s from Knoxville, Tennessee. Her face is fully visible in the tweet, posted by Yahoo! News correspondent Hunter Walker.
The federal government’s total debt is expected to exceed the size of the American economy this year, a figure that does not take into account President Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office [CBO] said Thursday.
Still, the CBO said that the annual federal deficit — the difference between what the government spends and what it collects in tax revenue every year — is set to decline from the year before, when the deficit surged due to the historic emergency measures authorized to support an economy pummeled by the coronavirus
In 2021, America’s federal debt will reach about 102 percent of its gross domestic product, a slight increase from the year before. Even without additional spending or tax cuts, that number is expected to grow to 107 percent of GDP by 2031 — which would be an all-time high in American history, the CBO said. …
America’s economic recovery from the coronavirus has sputtered as the pandemic rages across this country this winter. Alarmingly, job growth in the United States has all but stalled out, even as about half of the 22 million jobs lost during the crisis have returned. …
The CBO projects that higher levels of vaccinations will dramatically reduce the number of coronavirus cases. As a result, the budget office projects that economic growth will quickly return to its pre-pandemic level by as soon as the middle of 2021. The CBO projects that GDP will increase by close to 5 percent in 2021, after contracting by 3.5 percent in 2020, before leveling off at an annual rate of growth of above 2 percent.
The CBO also estimated the federal unemployment rate would return to its pre-pandemic level by 2024. Separately, the CBO also projects a steady rise in income and corporate tax receipts throughout the decade. …
The CBO said in July that its projections reflect an “average of possible outcomes,” noting the unusually high uncertainty surrounding the pandemic. …
The CBO’s projections suggest that debt levels will remain historically high even with a largely successful economic rebound. The federal deficit will average about $1.2 trillion annually from 2022 to 2031, according to the projections.
The annual deficit is expected to decline by nearly $900 billion compared with 2020. The U.S. budget gap breached $3.1 trillion in 2020 due primarily to the trillions in new spending approved by Congress in response to the pandemic. Another $1.9 trillion in deficit spending, as Democrats are pushing for, would likely push America’s fiscal imbalance above its 2020 levels.
Yet, the new CBO estimates do not incorporate Biden’s proposal to spend another $1.9 trillion to help get the recovery back on track and are sure to embolden Republicans who have been warning against more spending. …
Some economists say more deficit spending could be the help the economy needs. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, said a significant gap remains between the nation’s actual economic output and its potential economic output. Lawmakers should be focused on closing that gap to reduce unemployment and expand the economy, he said.
“Deficit spending expands output and employment, which can generate more tax revenue,” Stiglitz said. “If as the result of a little more deficit spending we get more growth and higher employment, that should not be too big a worry.”
Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which pushes for deficit reduction, said lawmakers face a long-term challenge in getting spending and deficit levels to balance. …
Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig 