Mandrake, have you ever hear of Central Bank Digital Currency? That CRT-killin’ Mouse-foe, Florida Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke, decided he was not fringy enough to appeal to the QAnon-fueled, pedophile-fightin’, MAGA primary voter. He’s rooted out another Deep State enemy with which to scare the bejeezus out of them. It got lost in the Trump indictment fallout this week until the other day. Catherine Rampell noticed it, though: In a speech this past weekend in Pennsylvania, DeSantis suggested that the real reason to fear the Fed is that central bankers are “colluding” with other (unnamed, presumably evil) communist-style elites to block your ability to buy gasoline and guns. “They want the Fed to control a digital dollar,” he said. “Guess what’ll happen? They’re going to try to impose an ESG agenda through that. You go and use too much gas, they’re going to stop it. They’re not going to honor the transaction because you’ve already bought more than what they think. You wanna go buy a rifle, they’re going to say no, you have too many, too many of those, you can’t do it.
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Notice a trend? Not that Real MAGAs™ vote their pocketbooks, but if they did Simon Rosenberg would provide, you know, facts: “With Democrats Things Get Better.” (BTW: Elon’s platform continues to decay. Twitter changes have disabled Thread Reader’s functioning. Who knows for how long?) Remind your MAGA relatives.
Wait. What??? When Republican megadonor Harlan Crow isn’t lavishing Justice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his private plane and yacht (in possible violation of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a quiet life in Dallas among his historical collections. These collections include Hitler artifacts—two of his paintings of European cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assorted Nazi memorabilia—plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots. Crow, the billionaire heir to a real estate fortune, has said that he’s filled his property with these mementoes because he hates communism and fascism. Nonetheless, his collections caused an uproar back in 2015 when Marco Rubio attended a fundraiser at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kippur. Rubio’s critics thought the timing was inappropriate given, you know, the Hitler stuff. “I still can’t get over the collection of Nazi memorabilia,” says one person who attended an event at Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anonymous.
Jessica Valenti channels the feelings of millions of women when they heard the news that that throwback cretin in Texas banned the abortion pill last night: Tonight, a judge ruled that a drug that’s safely ended pregnancies for over twenty years should no longer be available—not just in anti-abortion states, but everywhere. We knew the ruling was coming, just as we did when Roe was overturned. As was the case then, foreknowledge doesn’t make the moment any easier. There’s no real way to prepare for the feeling of despair that rises in your body as you’re reminded, once again, that you’re no longer a full citizen in your own country. I want to be useful, and smart. I could write about how this decision lays bare the lie of ‘states’ rights’, or how a singular activist judge being able to wave away decades of science and progress is a sign of our decaying democracy. I could write out the ways that the FDA could respond, or what the Biden administration should say and do. But others will do a better job of all that.
Clarence Thomas told a documentarian that he and Ginni are jes folks who like to vacation in an RV and hang around in Walmart parking lots. Lol: Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Stern have thoughts about this: ProPublica’s scrupulously reported new piece on Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong luxury travel on the dime of a single GOP megadonor will probably not shock you at all. Sure, the dollar amounts spent are astronomical, and of course the justice failed to report any of it, and of course the megadonor insists that he and Thomas are dear old friends, so of course the superyacht and the flights on the Bombardier Global 5000 jet and the resorts are all perfectly benign. So while the details are shocking, the pattern here is hardly a new one. This is a longstanding ethics loophole that has been exploited by parties with political interests in cases before the court to curry favor in exchange for astonishing junkets and perks. It is allowed to happen.
You can’t make this stuff up…
Sand kittens! Three sand cat kittens were born on Monday, February 6th, 2023 early in the morning at Binghamton, NY’s Ross Park Zoo. Kaya (mom) and Amal (dad) are a recommended breeding pair as per the sand cat Species Survival Plan. Kaya has been doing a great job taking care of the offspring! Here are some sand cats in their native habitat: It doesn’t look like a highly skilled killer, but that’s exactly what it is; the sand cat, which is the only felid found primarily in true desert. The sand cat (Felis margarita harrisoni) has a wide but apparently disjunct distribution through the deserts of northern Africa and southwest and central Asia. These gorgeous creatures are highly elusive and people rarely get to see them in the wild. If you’d like to meet them, though, go out in the desert when the temperature is between 11 and 28 °C — that’s an ideal range for the sand cat. These felines also prefer a very dry, arid habitat with little vegetation, as well as flat or rolling terrains. If it gets too hot outside, the sand cat will retreat to burrows.
You’re under attack. Get busy fighting. Gotta go do a thing this morning. Courage for America’s bus stop is up the road: Americans count on Social Security for retirement and rely on Medicare and Medicaid for prescription drugs and essential care. After a lifetime of hard work and paying in, these programs allow Americans to live and age with dignity and respect. Some in Congress want to end these guarantees by refusing to pay bills they already owe. They would rather default on our debt obligations or make extreme cuts to hard-earned benefits than protect the seniors, veterans, teachers, health care workers, small business owners, and millions of Americans they swore to serve. That’s why we’re on the road to demand Congress promises to back off our benefits. We started in Speaker McCarthy’s district and will finish up in D.C. to mark the MAGA House agenda’s 100th day. Join us on tour and add your name to the Back Off Our Benefits petition. My health care hero Laura Packard is on that bus. She’s alive today because the ACA was there for her. Is the ACA enough? No. But it’s something to build on.
Despite Tennessee saying, Hold my beer While the world’s attention focused on Tennessee yesterday, the NC GOP took advantage of its new House majority (that’s another story) to pull draft bills out of drawers meant to attack disfavored minorities the way Tennessee legislators expelled two Black members on Thursday. ABC 11 Raleigh: North Carolina Republican lawmakers filed several bills aimed at regulating transgender youth especially when it comes to participation in sports. These bills are similar to ones GOP lawmakers pushed a couple years ago. While those bills failed, Republicans are hopeful their new supermajority — achieved by getting Mecklenburg Democratic Rep. Tricia Cotham to switch parties — will be able to force the bills through. There are two bills in the legislatures that would ban transgender athletes in some way. Legislation in the house and senate would require all sports teams be designated as male, female or co-ed based on their biological sex at birth. It’s what the NC GOP does when attention is diverted or when SCOTUS lets them.
For as long as I can remember, Democrats have been on the defensive about enacting their agenda because it was assumed that it would engender a backlash among “the silent majority,” as former president Richard Nixon called it, or what modern Republicans call “Real America.” Reacting to the counter-culture of the 1960s and the massive social changes it engendered, the left wing of the Democratic Party was always admonished by the centrist and conservative wings not to go too far or too fast. The media even blithely asserted that “America is a conservative country” as if it were an act of God. This article of faith hobbled progress for a very long time and empowered the Reagan Revolution through the Tea Party and Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Nobody ever seemed to consider that enabling the right wing to become more and more extreme over the course of many years might engender a backlash of its own. It appears as if that time may have finally come — and it’s clear the Republican establishment doesn’t know what to do about it. The question is whether the Democratic establishment does either.