Crooked Media - What A Day: Tex crimes

Decades of gerrymandering have facilitated even more overt electoral power grabs in states where Republicans are afraid of losing their grip on power.

• Texas, home to some 30 million people, is currently under control of a GOP majority so drunk with power that it’s pushing the U.S. Constitution to the side and openly trying to extinguish the electoral power of the cities, which, wouldn’t you know, reliably vote for Democrats. As cities and their greater metro areas continue to swell, they pose a real threat to Republican hegemony, especially in Texas cities, which keep getting bigger and more Democratic. 

• In the Lone Star State’s major metro areas, Democrats have won elections for virtually all offices consistently for the past decade. Republican legislators in the state don’t like that! So now they’re advancing a bill that would block the state’s cities and counties from passing regulations in areas including labor, the environment, and finance. Ostensibly, it would all but eliminate home rule in the most populous areas in Texas like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. 

• Modern conservative authoritarianism certainly didn’t start with disgraced former president Donald Trump, but as expected, his brazen tactics and ability to commit crimes with impunity inspired thousands more antidemocratic officials like him at all levels of government. Electoral coups orchestrated by the GOP are most prominently on display in states just like Texas that are much more purple than successful GOP-backed voter suppression campaigns would have you believe. 

A series of bills passed in the Texas legislature on Monday that amount to such an obvious procedural coup we’re surprised Republicans didn’t sell merch to promote it.
 

• One such bill would allow the secretary of state, an appointee of Gov. Greg Abbot (R-TX), to remove any local election official for “good cause” (under the state’s statutes, something as simple as a minor voting-machine malfunction would count) and guess what? The bill only applies to “large urban areas” with populations in excess of four million people. Isn’t it convenient that only one county in the whole state—reliably-blue Harris County, home to Houston— falls into that category? 
   

• A second bill in this fun little authoritarian package abolishes(!) the position of election administrator in counties with a population exceeding 3.5 million people, and once again, only Harris County fits the bill. The fact that the Texas GOP is overtly targeting a single county (home to over 15 percent of the entire state population!) sets an incredibly dangerous precedent should it succeed. Republican lawmakers have repeatedly fabricated the scope of voting issues in Harris County (think the Big Lie, local edition), particularly after the 2022 midterm elections, as the basis for their campaign to eliminate Democratic election officials. I wonder why they would want to do that!! Probably a good reason. 

Undermining democracy is central to the Republicans’ playbook. They have nothing attractive in the way of policy to offer most people, and the base they do have is dwindling as the country continues to grow and change. It’s why they love the filibuster, the Electoral College, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy threatening to wreck the economy unless Republicans get their way. You know what they say: “If at first you don’t succeed, pass legislation to rig elections in perpetuity!”

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U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a 19-page advisory warning that social media poses a “profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents” and called on tech companies to enforce minimum-age limits and to create time settings for children with rigorous safety and privacy standards. Murthy also called on the government to create age-appropriate health-and-safety standards for social-media and tech platforms. In an interview on Monday, Murthy said that teenagers and adolescents “are not just smaller adults. They’re in a different phase of development, and they’re in a critical phase of brain development.” Technology has always outpaced regulation, but Big Tech has proven especially difficult because most state and federal lawmakers came of age before the internet even existed. A Pew Research survey found that up to 95 percent of teenagers use at least one social-media platform, with more than one-third reporting that they use social media “almost constantly.” Social media usage has risen in lock-step with rates of anxiety and depression among adolescents. A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, said that the Surgeon General’s advisory recommendations are “reasonable and, in large part, Meta has already implemented [them].” The Surgeon General lacks any real regulatory power, but similar reports from the bully pulpit of the position have been instrumental in shaping the national conversation on issues like smoking, obesity, and HIV/AIDS.

The Republican-controlled South Carolina state Senate passed a six-week abortion ban on Tuesday, sending it to Gov. Henry McMaster (R-SC) who is expected to sign it. Exceptions for fatal fetal anomalies, threat to the patient’s life, and rape or incest, only apply up to 12 weeks. 

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s creepy billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow has refused to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation. Crow’s lawyer argued in a letter to the panel that Congress does not have “the authority to investigate Mr. Crow’s personal friendship,” with Thomas or the judiciary itself, and can’t pass laws meant to prevent Thomas-Crow style corruption. Oh good, thanks! We forgot that Harlan Crow’s lawyer makes the rules in this country. 

A California judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Big Tech overlord Elon Musk alleging that he cheated Twitter shareholders last year in the course of buying the social-media company. 

In one of the most high-profile European Union antitrust cases in modern history, regulators appealed to the European Court of Justice on Tuesday to override a lower-court decision and force Apple to pay a record 13 billion euros in back taxes to the Republic of Ireland. 

A new report by the attorney general of Illinois uncovered more than 450 credibly accused child-sex abusers in the Catholic Church in the state since the 1950’s. Almost 2,000 children were abused in the state’s six dioceses. 

The Governor of Guam urged residents to stay home as the island braces for what could be a “Category 5” typhoon on Wednesday. 

A Missouri teenager has been arrested for allegedly intentionally crashing a U-Haul into the security barrier outside of the White House. 

The Biden campaign is spending big on digital advertising in an attempt to tamp down on disgraced former president Donald Trump’s apparent digital advantage in small-dollar donations.

UPS delivers millions more packages every day than it did even five years ago, and the company has seen record profits, but its 350,000 unionized workers have not seen any of the windfall (seems like this keeps happening! Huh!) and are threatening to strike.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, commingled customer funds with company revenue in 2020 and 2021. This is, in the technical terms of federal financial regulation, a big no-no. A Reuters source with direct knowledge of the company’s finances said that the sums of these pooled funds amounted to billions of dollars, and such commingling was an almost daily practice in accounts the exchange held at Silvergate Bank. The figures and frequency could not be verified, but Reuters reviewed bank records showing that, on just one day—February 10, 2021—Binance mixed $20 million from a corporate account with $15 million from an account that received money from customers. Commingling corporate and customer funds puts the latter at risk according to multiple former U.S. regulators. Commingling client funds was also (allegedly) a standard practice of disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried before the exchange collapsed last November. I, for one, am shocked that the decentralized, anti-regulation crypto world is not on the up-and-up with financial regulatory measures to protect customers!

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America’s manufacturing output increased to a 13-month high in May, the latest indication that the economy continues to rebound despite fears/vibes of a looming recession. 

Once again, a judge has rejected a lawsuit brought by Big Lie enthusiast and former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, affirming that Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) won the election.