Jan. 31, 2024 - Mayorkas impeachment passes committee

… Mayorkas impeachment … National Prayer Breakfast showdown … Iran threat … The future of brains …

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GOP Committee Approves Mayorkas Impeachment

Apparently it’s not enough to declare thousands of Latino people illegal for coming here to work and/or to escape violence, corruption, and/or oppression. So early this morning a panel of House Republicans voted to add just one more name to their list of illegal people: Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Homeland [sic] Security Department.

Following many hours of debate and Democratic attempts to gum up the works with bullshit amendments, on a party-line vote the House Homeland [sic] Security Committee voted shortly after midnight to impeach Mayorkas for “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “breach of public trust.”

The two articles of impeachment conclude that Mayorkas “has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national and border security, the safety of the American people, and to the Constitution if allowed to remain in office.” I dunno, if that’s true, shouldn’t they be nominating him for president?

Specifically, Mayorkas allegedly violated or refused to comply with federal immigration laws and, “In large part because of his unlawful conduct, millions of aliens have illegally entered the United States.”

See? That’s why illegal immigration suddenly became a problem when Pres. Joe Biden (also illegally!) crossed the border into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mayorkas breached the public trust, Republicans say, because he testified that the border is secure and that federal government has operational control. Meaning we should prosecute every mayor who says their cops maintain law and order and their city is safe. Liar!

The GOP will now try to whip every Republican vote to impeach this criminal, um, former prosecutor whose family brought him here as a child fleeing the Castro revolution in Cuba and who was endorsed as secretary by the Fraternal Order of Police and by past Republican secretaries of Homeland [sic] Security.

House Republicans can only afford to lose two votes. CNN calls Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) a holdout, and Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) a maybe. Ironically, Buck aided and abetted an allegedly illegal scheme to elect a Guatemalan president whose alleged corruption fueled their emigration, in a wild story I reported a couple years ago.

If House Republicans stick together on this perilous journey, the Mayorkas articles of impeachment will go to the Senate, where they will try to cross the threshold for conviction but will instead get stuck on metaphorical concertina wire and die.

Pocan Demands Answers from “The Family”

The Congressional Equality Caucus announced last night that its chair, Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), had written to the controversial Christian group behind the National Prayer Breakfast demanding secret information about its operations around the world.

Specifically, Pocan’s letter to the board chair of the Fellowship Foundation (aka The Family) gives them until Feb. 28 to release information about their National Prayer Breakfast spinoffs around the world, and where The Family money goes. (It’s worth noting that The Family only discloses about $10 million in revenue annually — most of its work is done not through spreading cash around but by introducing powerful people to The Family’s friends, most notably Jesus.)

Pocan also wants specific information about The Family’s ties to the ostensibly autonomous “new” National Prayer Breakfast being held tomorrow and about the Family ties to Uganda’s so-called “Kill the Gays” Law which is so called because it literally says to kill gays.

This is a big deal.

And if you’re wondering whether it makes a difference supporting my work — which isn’t just morning hot takes with a cup of rich, dark humor, but also regular servings of meaty, nutritious, original reporting — please know that Pocan cited my reporting along with reporting by others… who were linking to my reporting.

And this is not just about my reporting on 2023 NPB co-chair Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) taking money from The Family to fly to Uganda to steel their spines against international opposition to the “Kill the Gays” law. There’s also what I revealed about Guatemala’s prayer breakfast screwing up that country and leading to a good-effort, can’t-say-you-didn’t-try, almost-coup there. Not to mention how even prayer breakfast Democrats were helping beef up an anti-LGBTQ+ movement in Ukraine before it had to deal with the bigger problem of Russia’s movement in Ukraine.

Poca’s Equality Caucus has many, many members, including even last year’s NPB co-chair, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA). So either The Family is going to open its books in unprecedented fashion… or it’s going to risk an open revolt from a huge faction of Democrats.

TWO MORE THINGS Tomorrow, Pres. Joe Biden reportedly will once again attend the National Prayer Breakfast. We’ll see whether he repeats last year’s shoutout to The Family’s parallel event and its guests, some of whom are on board with this whole criminalizing orientation thing.

Also, the chair of the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation board is former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). She gave me a statement yesterday on some of this stuff, which I quote in my story last night on Pocan’s letter. But her statement was in response to my previous request for comment on another story I’m going to be revealing (hopefully today).

And here’s the real headline: Last night Heitkamp agreed to speak with me sometime after the breakfast for what sounds like it’ll be a full-on interview. Which is to her credit and speaks to a commitment to transparency. So stay tuned! (And please consider helping to make this work possible.)

Iran Threatens Response to Potential U.S. Response

Tensions in the Middle Easts ratcheted up considerably today… is something I could’ve said just about any time in the last 40 years…

But Iran this morning threatened to respond “decisively” if Pres. Joe Biden attacks Iran — with or without the constitutionally mandated approval of the U.S. Congress, natch.

Biden is weighing how to respond decisively in response to the weekend drone attack that killed three U.S. service members on the U.S. border between Syria and Jordan. The drone attack was carried out by militants backed by Iran. The militants cited Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Which were backed by the U.S.

Anyway, the point is, we’re preventing escalation.

The Evolution Will Be Telepathized

NB I wrote this for yesterday’s TFN but didn’t include it because (a) people are already saying TFNs is too long but also (b) I wanted to see if it got any play, which it didn’t, for the same reason it’s not my top story (even though it should be) — lack of perspective. But this is pretty much the most important story of the year and possibly our generation. Basically, we saw the first mutation emerge in what’s going to constitute, over the next century or so, the first genuinely technological branch of human evolution. Here’s what I wrote:

Elon Musk announced Monday that his company Neuralink on Sunday successfully implanted a neural link into a human brain, which will let that human communicate with computers purely by thinking.

Typically, Musk doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of what’s going on here, perhaps because his brain is only neurally linked to ego and privilege and Joe Rogan. Here’s Musk’s vision for this thing: “Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer,” he wrote. “That is the goal.”

Considering that the name of the link gizmo itself is Telepathy, Musk should understand that a comms upgrade for the world’s Hawkingses is barely the tip of where this is going. The end result is actually literal, actual telepathy. (I wrote a short story about exactly this technology in the ‘80s. #Nerd #Old.)

And it’s not just instant telepathy with anyone — or even potentially everyone — in the world, but telepathy with Wikipedia. Or The Blaze. Or the ChatGPT of 2068. 

I don’t know how many years it’ll take, but when this technology matures, when it expands beyond the physically impaired to the point where everyone has a brain chip that connects them to every thinking thing, human and otherwise, it’s going to constitute the realization of a human evolutionary revolution orders of magnitude beyond what’s happening to us as a species thanks to the internet/cell phones/social media.

The big question is which human brain will be running the neurally linked show: The reasoning, calculating human brain that has driven the slow, unsteady progress of civilization … or the “authentic,” intuitive human brain that storms Capitols and listens to Rogan? Because if we let the Invisible Hand choose which brain gets the upper hand, it won’t be just our metaphors that are fucked.

TCB

Shorter TFN today because I’m racing to get more reporting out before tomorrow’s National Prayer Breakfast. And because I’ve also gotta try to spread the TFN word — which you can help with! Please share my work — my Pocan story, or a TFN item that tickled your perverted fancy — with your socials broadly or directly with someone who shares your demented sense of humor and/or love for humanity.

Go get ‘em, kids…!