MAGA FAFO TTFN ROFL
MAGA county clerk gets nine years in prison for fucking with voting systems
Oct. 4: Judge rips MAGA convict … EXCLUSIVE info on the Impact Plastics flooding deaths … Dockworkers back to work after strike works … Biden says Israel may strike Iran …
Listen to the audio version of TFN here.
Tina Peters went from hero to zero and then back up to nine yesterday. The former clerk of Mesa County, CO, was sentenced to nine years in prison for fucking around with voting machines she was charged with protecting.
This kind of local case wouldn’t normally merit the fucking headline of your morning Fucking News, but coming one month before the 2024 presidential election, you bet your Electoral fucking College ass this is an important national story.
Because over the past four years, MAGA zealots incapable of processing unpleasant empirical reality have won positions on election boards and in the offices of county clerks and secretaries of state and any other position they first learned the existence of two months before running for it.
So let’s hope some significant portion of them hasn’t hardened their epistemological membranes so rigidly that Peters’s nine years in prison won’t register with them before Election Day. Let’s hope the demented fuckos writing mental fanfic about how they’re gonna take their semi-automatic man-sticks and go scare voters on Election Day give just a thought to the hundreds of people sentenced for Jan. 6. Let’s hope the “movement” is in sufficient disarray thanks to the judicial decapitation of multiple He-Man Women-Haters Clubs that we won’t have a repeat of Jan. 6 any time between now and Jan. 20, 2025.
But in watching the sentencing yesterday, I was struck by the fact that these national stories are also local stories. Taking it upon herself to rescue America from a threat that she decided was (a) real and (b) deserving of her heroism — Peters’s arrogance cost the county in time, money, and resources.
She lied and broke the law to get access to voting machines after the 2020 election to find that mythical smoking gun former Pres. Donald Trump promised them existed. A strand of Kamala Harris hair. Pete Buttigieg’s DNA. Joe Biden’s dentures.
That had real consequences for real people. The guy whose identity she stole testified at her sentencing yesterday. Real people get chewed up in the grinding teeth of MAGA hubris. They and they alone will rescue America from a non-existent threat they’re too dumb to realize is a lie they fell for.
But because every ethical system exalts mercy, and because the history of the left is the history of rejecting dehumanization, we’re all of us called upon to retain at least a sliver of empathy for these people, these victims of the greatest most successful con man in American history since Ronald Reagan and at least one Bush.
Most of us know people who succumbed to Trumpism thanks to a shallow, dimwitted sense of patriotism fused with shitty epistemological skills and fueled by Democratic Party indifference to poverty and systemic economic predation.
And some of these MAGA didn’t march off the sanity cliff. Some got a push.
Take Mike Lindell, the chief executive officer of MyPillow and former habitual user of crack cocaine. It was Lindell — unqualified, ignorant, arrogant Lindell — whose web caught Peters. But Lindell didn’t just happen, either. While that idiot served as a useful idiot for Trump and the Trump-adjacent, Trump didn’t make Lindell.
As I revealed a few years ago, Lindell transitioned to the opiate of the masses with help from rich evangelical Christians and their networks, who used the power of government — the National Prayer Breakfast — to break Lindell. They wielded his awe of the combined, unseparated power of Jesus+Uncle Sam, and a two-year program of classic love-bombing, finally getting him to his knees to do a full surrender to his personal savior Jesus and Jesus’s personal savior Donald Trump.
Like us, Peters is a victim of that. And we should remember that. And if you’re still devoid of compassion for her, one more thing.
Peters was first elected to the clerk’s position, her first public office, in 2018. She was driven by the most universal of American beliefs: That there had to be a better way to run the Department of Motor Vehicles.1
But something happened the year before, that armchair psychologists, and psychologists with standing desks, might wanna look at.
In 2017, Peters’s son was part of a U.S. Navy team known as “The Leap Frogs.” In May of that year, as part of Fleet Week in New York, Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Remington Peters and some of his fellow Leap Frogs parachuted over the Statue of Liberty.
His chute fucked up and landed on the ground in New Jersey. Peters went into the Hudson River and died.
So it should be easy to find some softness in ourselves for a 68-year-old woman who buried her child and then became a crusader for impossible causes in the name of patriotism and may be in prison so long she’ll emerge as a 77-year-old who’ll have missed the entire Harris presidency.
It should be easy to do that, to find that mercy.
But goddammit Peters couldn’t even give us that. She was unrepentant yesterday. Handcuffed, as she was led off to jail, she raised her shackled hands to her supporters and blew them a kiss.
For our national MAGA fever to break, it’s essential that we keep at least one road open out of Crazy Town. But the toll on that road is repentance.
Here’s Judge Matthew Barrett addressing Peters at yesterday’s sentencing, after she had her chance to make her case for probation:
“[Y]ou are no hero, you abused your position.”
“You are a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”
“You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”
“You’re as defiant a defendant as I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m convinced you would do it again if you could.”
Which is why now, Peters can’t.
How Capitalism Trickles Down and Drowns Us
For decades, U.S. oil companies pumped oil and gas and enriched their executives, knowing full well that their product was gradually but not that gradually degrading the atmosphere in a way that would make the planet warmer. The planet.
They did it because it made them money, and they hid what they knew because that was an easier, less unpleasant way to get money and still get to sit on the boards of charities and museums and colleges. When the reality of what they were doing became obvious, they kept lying about it, creating fraudulent institutions dedicated to muddying the scientific waters so that laypeople might still believe them, and ultimately argued that it would simply be too expensive to stop destroying the planet.
Overlapping with big oil, we had federal, state, and local officials making and unmaking rules that would determine how well their communities prepared for and responded to climate change and planet-boiling. That’s what we discussed in yesterday’s TFN, as attention-paying Newsfuckers might recall.
That story, from the New York Times, was about how North Carolina legislators, especially the GOP ones, blocked regulations that would have protected their state better from Hurricane Helene. And took donations from the construction industry — or were in the construction industry.
Well, today your diligent TFN has some new information you won’t see anywhere else, about just how cheaply these rich “business leaders” will sell our lives.
You may have heard about the impact that Impact Plastics had on Tennessee during Helene’s flooding.2 Tennessee has opened a criminal investigation of the company, Gov. Bill Lee (R-TN) confirmed on Wednesday. That’s because at least three workers there died after Impact Plastics waited till the place was flooded on Friday to let its workers go home. Which the workers no longer could, due to aforementioned flooding. Eleven were swept away.
Survivors say the bosses didn’t let them go in time. The company’s owner, Gerald O’Connor, said in a statement, “Those who are missing or deceased, and their families are in our thoughts and prayers.” And the fruits of their labors are in his investment portfolio.
It’s safe to assume O’Connor is genuinely grieved by the deaths of his employees. But O’Connor was also happy over the years to put the profits those workers made him into the pockets of politicians undoing rules to protect those workers. And Earth.
As you have not heard about Impact Plastics because TFN’s telling you first, O’Connor has been a longtime Republican donor.
Here’s the $4,000 he gave in 2018 to…what a coinkydink!...Governor Bill Lee, whose investigation of Impact Plastics will no doubt be rigorous!
And I didn’t even look for donations earlier than that, because, let’s just say, the Tennessee campaign-finance site is a ten, but only on a scale of one to Tennessee. Federal donations are a lot easier to find, though, and looky here…
O’Connor’s given tens of thousands of dollars to federal Republicans. You know, the kind who watered down wetland protections and other flood-mitigation rules! That’s quite an impact!
And because the contours of this whole sad saga are so thuddingly obvious, I only went back as far as July to find Lee — the governor who was in O’Connor’s thoughts and prayers and checkbook — deregulating construction shit. Specifically, by letting developers hire their own building-safety inspectors.
In a 2014 article, O’Connor bragged that “I see everything before everybody else sees it.” But apparently that doesn’t include a hurricane everyone else saw or the dangers of deregulation, which environmental scientists saw.
In fact, it was literally just yesterday that the state Senate met to consider a change to their wetland rules. How so? So that developers can build on 430,000 more acres of wetlands, which are vital natural defenses against flooding and also against developers.
If you don’t see other news outlets holding these people accountable by telling you about the wetlands vote or the Impact Plastics political donations, you can support TFN by making a donation or upgrading to a paid subscription…
To sum up, to get more money, rich guys fucked our atmosphere, knowing it would worsen floods, used that money to fuck our rules, knowing it would worsen floods and weaken our flood defenses, and then fucked workers by preventing them from escaping the flood, knowing the workers would be in their thoughts and prayers after drowning.
Now someone please tell me who in our politics is saying this, because I’m in serious need of vibes right now.
Hezbollah Leader Agreed to Cease-Fire…and Then Israel Killed Him
Slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah agreed to a cease-fire just days before the Israeli military killed him in an airstrike, a Lebanese official told CNN.
Nasrallah ceased breathing last Friday, after 30 years of leading Hezbollah to, um, its current status. (So, good job, everybody!)
The proposed cease-fire, backed by the U.S., had been released just one day before Israel released its bomb on Nasrallah.
Hezbollah, too, had signed off by then, U.S. officials told CNN. And the U.S. knew about the Hezbollah sign-off. Which definitively proves implies “suggests” that maybejustmaybe the Israelis knew Hezbollah was on board, too.
As any military analyst will tell you, of course, any possible cease-fire is typically preceded by last licks, followed by calling no tag-backs. And, as much as it’s easy and fun to just be pissed at Israel here, Hezbollah has been shelling Israel in solidarity with Hamas, which has been shelled by Israel, which a year ago next week was attacked by Hamas, which, etc., etc…
Anyway, Nasrallah died at the age of 64 years old and he had hoped to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris.
Hunky Dockworkers Are Back to Work…but They’re Still Striking!
No joke: Washington folks were shitting their pants about the dockworkers strike. Some Republicans were pressing Pres. Joe Biden to force the East and Gulf Coast members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) back to work.
And some Democrats were sure — in a way we’re not entitled to be sure about things — that the strike was a plot to tank the economy and cost Vice Pres. Kamala Harris the election.
And we’ve all still got a bit of amateur-league PTSD from the last time we faced empty shelves in the toilet paper section.
But without government intervening, the shipping companies had no option but to give more of the money the dockworkers make back to the dockworkers. The ILA announced last night they’d struck a tentative deal and they’re back at work today. On docks. Just like in the movies.
Here’s what dockworkers won earned because Uncle Sam said you do you.
Six-year contract with $4/hour raises every year
In the first year, that’s a 10% raise from the current top pay of $39/hour
Over the six years under contract, that’ll be a total of a 62% pay raise.
And if you’re irked that dockworkers are making too much money during their physically-limited careers working for people who make take hundreds of times as much money for doing a fraction of the “work,” well, you’ve come to the wrong fucking newsletter.
Here’s Warren Gunnells, majority staff director of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and longtime Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) guy:
“Can’t stop thinking about how we were told the port worker strike was a ploy to ruin the economy and elect Trump.
“In reality, by not invoking Taft-Hartley, the Biden Administration helped workers gain a 62% pay raise and the strike ended in 3-days.
“Strikes are good, actually.”
Which doesn’t mean the Biden administration sat on the sidelines. The White House, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and acting3 Labor Secretary Julie Su were pushing talks along. Biden publicly pressed maritime shippers to ship more of their profits to the people who work for them.
Sadly for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), he pretended the administration was sitting on the sidelines. DeSantis got all self-righteous about how he was safeguarding the ports and Uncle Sam and Mother Freedom…right before the collective-bargaining process yielded a positive result for nearly 50,000 workers. Florida Boy just can’t win these days.
Slate has a good writeup of the issues — and why it’s a bit more complicated than just wages and automation. And it’s always helpful to keep in mind that there’s no inherent reason political pressure should be applied to union workers instead of to the companies raking in obscene profits.
Whatever pain may come with these fights, that’s the only way (in our current system) to resist the oligarchic tide.
Three Quickies
The New York Times can’t believe that Pres. Joe Biden signaled the possibility that Israel might launch strikes at Iranian oil facilities, sending oil prices up 4% yesterday and giving Iran a heads-up what’s coming. Never mind that maybe we should know about possible Israeli escalation ahead of time and maybe gas prices would’ve shot higher if the strike came as a surprise? Media bias comes in lots of forms; the default preference for secrecy in the name of National Security™ is one of the more insidious.
We’re in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. Also it is Fall.
Some toxic industrial shit blew up in Georgia so of course the American Prospect looked under the rubble at the toxic private equity behind it all.
TCB
NICOLE SANDLER Don’t forget to join me and Nicole Sandler on Monday, at 5pm eastern, because Mondays are The Fucking News days at The Nicole Sandler Show!
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Go get ‘em, kids! And have a great, excessively hot Autumn weekend.
In my experience, the DMV is pretty good actually and although I indulge in government bashing for cheap laughs I’m also cognizant that the jokes are a way of getting us to surrender our collective power. Sorry, DMV! Thank you for your service!
Literally as I write this, U2 performing The Beatles’ “Rain” came on my playlist. “When the rain comes…”
And kicking ass, apparently, enough that Republicans and “Independents” like Joe Manchin have refused to confirm her, so Biden just kept her around anyway as “acting” secretary.
News to me the Tennessee story. Enraging, shameful, immoral. Thank you.
The Best