How Politico Pulled Off the Scoop

Well, if this wasn't an extraordinary scoop, there's no such thing then. 

Previously, "Majority Says Supreme Court Should Uphold Roe v. Wade ABC News Poll Finds."

At the New York Times, "Inside Politico’s Historic Scoop":

Politico’s top editors and executives spent Sunday morning sipping Bloody Marys and nibbling bite-size waffles and wienerschnitzel as they chatted with top Washington officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, at an annual brunch hosted at the opulent Georgetown home of Robert Allbritton, a Politico founder.

What wasn’t discussed: Politico was onto a giant scoop, one that would rattle the country fewer than 36 hours later.

By the time of the brunch, Politico was working on a story about a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court that would strike down Roe v. Wade, according to two people with knowledge of the process inside the newsroom. Awareness of the document and the article about it was contained to a very small group.

The article, published Monday night, immediately put Roe v. Wade and the direction of the court front and center in the nation’s political debate. But it also put a spotlight on Politico, an organization that has reshaped coverage of Washington with its blanket reporting on all things politics since it was founded 15 years ago.

Politico’s top editors and executives spent Sunday morning sipping Bloody Marys and nibbling bite-size waffles and wienerschnitzel as they chatted with top Washington officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, at an annual brunch hosted at the opulent Georgetown home of Robert Allbritton, a Politico founder.

What wasn’t discussed: Politico was onto a giant scoop, one that would rattle the country fewer than 36 hours later.

By the time of the brunch, Politico was working on a story about a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court that would strike down Roe v. Wade, according to two people with knowledge of the process inside the newsroom. Awareness of the document and the article about it was contained to a very small group.

The article, published Monday night, immediately put Roe v. Wade and the direction of the court front and center in the nation’s political debate. But it also put a spotlight on Politico, an organization that has reshaped coverage of Washington with its blanket reporting on all things politics since it was founded 15 years ago.

The news organization is now at the center of a debate about who leaked the document and why, including rampant speculation about the motives of Politico’s sources. It is extremely rare for an important draft opinion inside the Supreme Court to leak to the press.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the draft opinion was authentic. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a statement that he had directed the marshal of the court to investigate the leak, which he described as “a singular and egregious breach” of trust.

Politico has said little about the reporting behind the article, written by the reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, or deliberations before publication. Its spokesman declined to comment for this article. Politico’s editor in chief, Matthew Kaminski, has said that he would let the article speak for itself. The article said that the document was provided by “a person familiar with the court’s proceedings,” and that the person had provided additional details that helped authenticate the document, but it didn’t say what those details were.

In the hours before publishing the article, Mr. Kaminski and Politico’s executive editor, Dafna Linzer, called senior editors to let them know the article was coming and that a memo about it would go out to the newsroom, according to one of the people with knowledge of the process.

Moments after publishing the article, Mr. Kaminski and Ms. Linzer alerted the newsroom in an email, defending their decisions.

“After an extensive review process, we are confident of the authenticity of the draft,” they wrote. “This unprecedented view into the justices’ deliberations is plainly news of great public interest.”

News organizations around the world, including The New York Times and The Associated Press, quickly followed Politico’s reporting. In an interview with Mr. Gerstein on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday evening, Ms. Maddow told Mr. Gerstein that he would “always in your entire life be the reporter that broke this story.”

Although the views of individual justices have occasionally been disclosed publicly before the Supreme Court has announced a decision, the leak of an important draft opinion is unusual, said Lucas A. Powe Jr., a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, and a former Supreme Court law clerk who has been studying the high court for more than 50 years.

“Your loyalty is to your justice and to the court, and you just don’t leak things,” Mr. Powe said of the standard practice among employees of the Supreme Court.

Politico was justified in writing about the draft opinion, which is newsworthy and relates to a matter of national public concern, said Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Washington Post who oversaw the publication of several high-profile stories, including the documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

“This seems pretty simple,” Mr. Baron said. “They were provided a document. The document was authenticated to their satisfaction, and they published.”

The publication provoked swift reaction from supporters and opponents of abortion rights, who demonstrated at the Supreme Court in Washington.

On Tuesday, Traci Schweikert, Politico’s chief talent officer, sent an email to workers detailing safety measures the company “proactively” put in place for its offices, such as restricting access to certain floors, “given the heightened visibility to Politico following our reporting on the Supreme Court last night.”

“Be aware of anyone accessing our elevators with you and the possibility of ‘tailgating’ to our floor,” the email said. Employees were also advised to consider the privacy settings on their social media accounts to avoid potential online harassment.

“If you choose public settings, we strongly encourage you to consider removing any personal information if your social media accounts identify you as a Politico employee,” the email added...

 

Majority Says Supreme Court Should Uphold Roe v. Wade ABC News Poll Finds

At ABC News, "With Supreme Court poised to reverse Roe, most Americans support abortion rights: POLL":

Majorities also reject six- and 15- week abortion bans.

Amid reports of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that majorities of Americans support upholding Roe, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases and -- by a wide margin -- see abortion as a decision to be made by a woman and her doctor, not by lawmakers.

The national survey was completed last week, in advance of a report by Politico Monday night that a proposed first draft of an opinion, apparently by Justice Samuel Alito, called for reversing Roe in a case challenging Mississippi's ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

In this poll, by contrast, 57% of Americans oppose a ban after 15 weeks; 58% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases; and 54% say the court should uphold Roe, compared with 28% who say the ruling should be overturned.

Support for upholding Roe is 6 percentage points lower than it was in an ABC/Post poll last November. Preference for reversing it is essentially unchanged; instead, more in this survey express no opinion, 18%.

Moving the question outside a legal framework, 7 in 10 say the decision whether or not a woman can have an abortion should be left to the woman and her doctor; this also is down from November, by 5 points. Twenty-four percent instead say abortion should be regulated by law. Even among those who say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, a substantial share, 41%, also say it should be left to the woman and her doctor. Trends are not consistent. 

While support for abortion rights is down slightly in the two items noted above, it's higher than previously (up 12 points from 2011) "when the woman cannot afford to have a child," and unchanged in other measures. 

Legal or illegal?

Basic views on whether or not abortion should be legal have been more or less stable in polling going back 27 years. The 58% who say it should be legal in all or most cases is very near the average, 56%, in nearly three dozen ABC/Post polls since mid-1995, ranging from 49% to 60%. This includes 26% who now say it should be legal in all cases, exceeding the average, 21%; and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases.

Thirty-seven percent in this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates, instead say abortion should be illegal in most cases (21%) or all cases (16%). That's less than the long-term average, 42%, with a range from 36% to 48%. (Five percent have no opinion on this question.)

Circumstances

Considering specific circumstances, substantial majorities say abortion should be legal when the woman's physical health is endangered (82%), when the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest (79%) and when there's evidence of serious birth defects (67%).

The public divides on another circumstance: When the woman cannot afford to have a child, 48% say abortion should be legal, 45% illegal. Support for legal abortion in this case is its highest in six polls dating back to 1996.

On another front, the poll finds most Americans are unaware of new abortion restrictions in their states. In the 22 states that have passed abortion restrictions since 2020, just 30% of residents are aware that this has occurred; more, 44%, think not, with 26% unsure. An open question is how people who favor legal abortion may react if and when they learn their state has taken a different tack...

Still more.

 

Leaked Draft Overturning Roe v. Wade Plunges Supreme Court Into Disarray

Well, that was the plan along, right?

Previously, "Abortion Fight Takes Center Stage on Capitol Hill, Campaign Trail."

And at the New York Times, "A Supreme Court in Disarray After an Extraordinary Breach":

The leak of a draft majority opinion overruling Roe v. Wade raises questions about motives, methods and whether defections are still possible.

WASHINGTON — Sources have motives, and the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade raises a question as old as the Roman Empire. Cui bono? Who benefits?

Not the Supreme Court as an institution. Its reputation was in decline even before the extraordinary breach of its norms of confidentiality, with much of the nation persuaded that it is little different from the political branches of the government. The internal disarray the leak suggests, wholly at odds with the decorum prized by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was a blow to the legitimacy of the court.

Relations among the justices, too, on the evidence of questioning at arguments and statements in opinions, have turned fraught and frosty. “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked when the challenge to Roe was argued in December, as it became clear that five justices were ready to overrule the decision.

The fact of the leak cannot be separated from its substance. Only a move as extraordinary as eliminating a constitutional right in place for half a century could transform the court into an institution like any other in Washington, where rival factions disclose secrets in the hope of obtaining advantage.

“Until now, a leak of this kind would have been unthinkable,” said Peter G. Verniero, a former justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. “The protocol of our highest court has been seriously ruptured. The leaking itself reflects another sad step toward casting the court as a political body, which, whatever your preferred jurisprudence, is most unhealthy for the rule of law.”

The court sustained collateral damage in March, when it emerged that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent incendiary text messages to the Trump White House in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack and that Justice Thomas not only had failed to disqualify himself from a related case but also had cast the sole noted dissent.

The harm from the leak was more direct, raising questions about whether the court is capable of functioning in an orderly way.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft opinion is dated Feb. 10, or almost three months ago. Under the court’s ordinary practices, additional drafts have circulated since then, as Justice Alito refined his arguments, made changes to accommodate his allies, responded to criticisms in one or more draft concurrences or dissents — and, crucially, worked to make sure he did not lose his majority.

The draft was marked “opinion of the court,” meaning it was intended to reflect the views of at least five justices. Politico, which obtained the document, reported that five members of the court had voted to overrule Roe soon after the argument in December: Justices Alito and Thomas and the three members of the court appointed by President Donald J. Trump — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Those five votes were in keeping with the questions those justices asked at the argument. They were also consistent with Mr. Trump’s vow to appoint justices who would overrule Roe, which established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

That lineup remains unchanged as of this week,” Politico reported.

Still, Justice Alito was no doubt worried that Chief Justice Roberts, who sketched out a middle-ground position at the argument, might threaten his majority. The chief justice suggested that the court could uphold the Mississippi law at issue in the case, which bans abortions after 15 weeks, but stop short of overruling Roe outright...

Abortion Fight Takes Center Stage on Capitol Hill, Campaign Trail

Following-up, "BREAKING! Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey."

It's going to be an intense day, a busy and intense day.

Reap the whirlwind, people. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "Roe v. Wade Abortion Case Takes Center Stage on Capitol Hill, Campaign Trail":

After Supreme Court draft opinion leaks, Democrats see ‘five-alarm fire,’ seek federal legislation, while Republicans embrace news.

WASHINGTON—The publication of a draft opinion that suggested the Supreme Court may be preparing to throw out Roe v. Wade put the question of abortion rights at the center of the nation’s political debate, with Democrats calling for new legislation to enshrine existing protections and Republicans welcoming the news while criticizing the leak.

The draft opinion was published Monday evening by Politico, which said it was written by Justice Samuel Alito and was the opinion of the court, implying a majority supported it. The draft, dated from February, couldn’t be independently confirmed, but legal observers said it appeared authentic. The Supreme Court’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

The court is expected to issue its opinion by the end of June or early July, and if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned it would leave the question of access to abortions to individual states.

Democratic senators as well as Democratic candidates in closely watched races this year called for Congress to try again to pass a federal law codifying Roe v. Wade, after a previous effort failed and drew no Republican support. Democrats are aiming to use federal legislation to try to override GOP-backed laws in states, including Texas, that place limits on women’s ability to terminate their pregnancies.

“If this is true, this kind of outcome is exactly what I’ve been ringing alarm bells about—and this is a five-alarm fire,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.).

“We cannot sit back and allow the Supreme Court to gut Ohioans’ most fundamental rights,” said Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who is running for Senate in the Buckeye State.

In a statement, President Biden said that “basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that [Roe] not be overturned.” He said that the leaked draft underscored the need to elect more pro-abortion-rights senators and keep the House majority in order to pass legislation codifying Roe, which he said he would sign into law.

The Supreme Court is considering whether to allow a 15-week ban passed in Mississippi. The court has previously established the right to an abortion until a fetus is able to sustain meaningful life outside of the womb, which generally occurs at weeks 22 to 24 of pregnancy.

Many Republicans said they welcomed the prospect of Roe being overturned, as the draft opinion suggested, while also decrying the leak, which they blamed on liberals trying to pressure the court. Politico said it received a copy of the draft from a person familiar with the proceedings in the Mississippi case.

“If this report is true, this is nothing short of a massive victory for life and will save the lives of millions of innocent babies,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), while adding he was “appalled by the shocking breach of trust posed by this leak,” characterizing it as a “blatant attempt to intimidate the Court.”

“The next time you hear the far left preaching about how they are fighting to preserve our Republic’s institutions & norms remember how they leaked a Supreme Court opinion in an attempt to intimidate the justices on abortion,” tweeted Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.).

Access to abortion has been a central concern of both the political right and left for decades and has been the subject of partisan battles over high-court nominees. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in late 2020 allowed then-President Donald Trump to nominate a sixth conservative to the bench, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and prompted states to pass laws challenging the Roe precedent.

Now, abortion access is likely to figure prominently in November’s midterm elections, where Democrats are defending slender control of the Senate and House and face weak poll numbers both for President Biden and the party. Some political analysts have said a ruling striking down or restricting abortion rights could motivate Democratic turnout.

On Monday morning, ahead of the Politico report, abortion-rights backers Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Emily’s List said they planned to spend $150 million on the midterms.

After the Politico article published, some Democrats again called for ending the filibuster—the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation—to enable them to pass a federal abortion bill with just a simple majority. But even obtaining a majority may be difficult, as Senate Democrats failed to garner 50 votes for an abortion bill earlier this year and failed to get a majority to back ending the filibuster after their agenda of voting reforms stalled.

“Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW. If there aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not, we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats.

Among the Democratic Senate candidates who called for ending the filibuster Monday night were Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is running to be the Democratic nominee for Senate and challenge GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, and Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic candidate for an open Senate seat.

In a joint statement Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said any ruling overturning Roe “defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation.” But they didn’t immediately suggest a legislative plan...

 

BREAKING! Supreme Court to Overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey

As President Barack Obama once said, "elections have consequences," and boy was he right. Democrats and leftists everywhere are ruing the day Hillary Clinton was nominated as the party's 2016 standard bearer --- or at least they should be.

This is seriously explosive news, and if folks think the culture wars have been bad so far this year, well, buckle your seat belts. Elon Musk might as well have blasted the entire hardcore Democrat extremist-left abortion rights ayatollahs into upper orbit. 

At Politico, "Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows: 'We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,' Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court."

Needless to say, the forthcoming ruling will make President Trump one of the most consequential presidents in the last half-century, if he wasn't already, damn!

Leftist heads will be exploding for weeks and months, frankly right into the November midterm elections. Just wow.

*****

Even the New York Times has the story now. This is happening. See, "Leaked Supreme Court Draft Would Overturn Roe v. Wade."

Kathy Boudin, Weather Underground Terrorist of 1960s and 1970s, Dead at 78 (VIDEO)

She was the mother of Chesa Boudin, the radical San Francisco District Attorney who's up for recall on June 7. She pleaded guilty in 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the shooting death of Brink's security guard Peter Paige in the Weather Underground's 1981 armored truck robbery, in Rockland County, New York.

Chesa was raised by the notorious, violent Weather Underground militants Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Kathy Boudin, a "model prisoner," served 22 years behind bars at New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She was paroled in 2003.

As the New York Times reports, "Kathy Boudin, Radical Imprisoned in a Fatal Robbery, Dies at 78":

She had a role in the Brink’s heist by the Weather Underground that left two police officers dead. But she became a model prisoner and, after being freed, helped former inmates.

Kathy Boudin, who as a member of the radical Weather Underground of the 1960s and ’70s took part in the murderous 1981 holdup of a Brink’s armored truck and then, in prison and after being freed two decades later, helped inmates struggling to get their lives on track, died on Sunday in New York. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said Zayd Dohrn, whose family adopted Ms. Boudin’s son, Chesa Boudin.

On a March day in 1970, Ms. Boudin was showering at a townhouse on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village when an explosion collapsed the walls around her. She and fellow extremists had been making bombs there, the intended target believed to have been the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. Three of them were killed on the spot. A naked Ms. Boudin managed to scramble away with a colleague and found clothes and brief refuge at the home of a woman living down the block.

She then disappeared.

Within a few years, so did the Weather Underground. A breakaway faction of the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, it called itself Weatherman, borrowing from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a 1965 Bob Dylan song with the lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The name evolved into Weather Underground.

In that era of turbulence over civil rights and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the group set off bombs at the United States Capitol, New York City Police Headquarters and other buildings. If anything, it was more adept at issuing long manifestoes, laden and leaden with references to Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, and asserting the world’s “main struggle” as being that “between U.S. imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.”

With the Weather Underground fading by the mid-1970s as the war ended, its leaders, one by one, emerged from hiding to face the legal consequences of having been on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

Not Ms. Boudin (pronounced boo-DEEN). “The very status of being underground was an identity for me,” she recalled years later in interviews with The New Yorker at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, N.Y., where she came to be imprisoned. She continued: “I was making a difference in no way, so then I elevated to great importance the fact that I was underground.”

That ended in October 1981, when she teamed up with armed men from another radical group, the Black Liberation Army, to hold up a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, N.Y., making off with $1.6 million. During the stickup, the gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige. They transferred the cash to a U-Haul truck that was waiting roughly a mile away. Ms. Boudin was in the cab of the truck, a 38-year-old white woman serving as a decoy to confound police officers searching for Black men.

The U-Haul was stopped by the police at a roadblock. Ms. Boudin, who carried no weapon, immediately surrendered, hands in the air. But gunmen jumped from the back of the truck and opened fire, killing Sgt. Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown. Though some accused her of surrendering as a tactic to get the police to lower their weapons before being attacked, Ms. Boudin insisted that that was not the case.

At her sentencing, she turned to the victims’ relatives. “I know that anything I say now will sound hollow, but I extend to you my deepest sympathy,” she said. “I feel real pain.” As for her motives, “I was there out of my commitment to the Black liberation struggle and its underground movement. I am a white person who does not want the crimes committed against Black people to be carried in my name.”

She proved to be a model prisoner at Bedford Hills, mentoring other inmates, attending to those with AIDS, writing poetry and expressing remorse for her role in the Brink’s robbery deaths...

Shoot, she was *such* a model prisoner that even William F. Buckley, the august founder of National Review, wrote a letter to the parole board supporting her release. 

Still more here.

The video at top is a "Brave New Films" hagiography. 

Searching in vain, I found not a single television news report on her death by any of the so-called mainstream broadcast, cable, or streaming outlets. 

I did find, miraculously, an old "CBS Sunday Morning" segment (here) on the 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village, which killed three Weather Underground bomb-makers, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbin. As reported at the Times' story here, Kathy Boudin was on scene, escaped, and went to ground after her three comrades blew themselves up. 

This television news blackout is no surprise: President Barack Obama was a known associate of Bill Ayers during the latter's post-Weathermen university professor's life; and indeed, Obama launched his 1995 Illinois state senate campaign at a meet-and-greet at Ayers' house in Chicago.

Not a word of this will be brought up by our irretrievably corrupted legacy news outlets, lest the Democrats' chances in 2022 and 2024 be further deep-sixed by the "resurfacing" of "old news" reports on the party's most esteemed Democrat Party president in modern history, who was"palling around with terrorists."

Shoot, the current Democrat-Media-Disinformation-Complex beats Winston Smith's "memory hole" operations seen in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four --- and that's no joke.

ADDED: From Gail Heriot, at Instapundit, "THE BRINK’S ROBBERY/TRIPLE MURDER WAS ON THIS DAY IN [OCTOBER 20] 1981":

Please keep in your thoughts Brink’s guard Peter Paige and Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown (who was Nyack’s first African-American officer). All three were murdered in the course of the 1981 Brink’s heist. Also remember Brink’s guard Joseph Trombino, who was seriously wounded, but survived, only to be killed twenty years later on 9/11.

The perpetrators were six members of the Black Liberation Army and four former members of Weather Underground who had since formed the May 19th Communist Organization.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the trial of the first three defendants (one from the BLA and two from the M19CO)...

Still more at Instapundit. 

International Workers' Day

Yesterday, actually, May 1st.

According to Wikipedia,"the date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association."

Here's more, "Workers of the World Unite! May Day Celebrates Working-Class Solidarity":

The origins of a holiday celebrating workers can be traced back to labor and trade union movements in the late 19th century. As dreadful working conditions in factories became highly publicized during this period, particularly in meat packing plants, through works such as Upton Sinclar’s The Jungle, movements to improve working conditions (both for workers and for public health and safety) grew in size and intensity. On May 3, 1886, as workers rallied to demand an eight-hour workday in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, mass confusion erupted when a bomb exploded in the crowd and the police opened fire on the crowd. The Haymarket Affair, as this event is remembered, was used as pretext for widespread repression of workers and for the arrests of labor organizers, radicals and immigrants.

Not coincidentally, as progressive organizations and labor parties around the world began to celebrate International Workers Day on May 1 in commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, Labor Day was established in 1894 in the U.S. on the first Monday of September with the support of the American Federation of Labor, in part to distance the labor movement from its more radical elements. May Day continues to be celebrated around the world; and in the US, it has taken on special significance for immigrants’ rights activists. The convergence of the demands of workers for better wages and working conditions, and the demands of immigrants for dignity and freedom from the violence imposed by the immigration enforcement regime, is a fitting tribute to the role that immigrants have played in the labor movement in the United States.

The history of the labor movement is largely the history of human beings, living at the margins of mainstream society, uniting in solidarity, asserting their rights and fighting for a better, more fair world. It unfortunately remains true that racism, xenophobia and white supremacy redound to the benefit of those with economic and political power. From racist appeals to white supremacy that destroyed radical efforts during Reconstruction towards true multiracial democracy, to the xenophobic red scare that followed Haymarket and the repression of the Black Panther Party, racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric represent not only an existential threat of violence for marginalized people, but also a powerful weapon used by the ruling class to undermine solidarity among working people. Immigrants and marginalized people continue to be used as scapegoats for crime, poverty and other societal problems which can rightly be attributed to systems of exploitation that entrench privilege and power, and not those oppressed by these same systems.

It is, in many ways, the time of monsters. The Trump presidency ushered in a new era of domestic repression of Black and brown people and brought violent white supremacist rhetoric back into American mainstream political discourse. President Biden was elected with broad progressive support but has largely failed to roll back the worst Trump-era immigration policies. The COVID pandemic laid bare the harsh reality facing American workers, forced to risk their health and livelihood, often without adequate workplace protections, while America’s billionaires added nearly $2 trillion to their net worth. The United States continues to spend more on its military than the next nine countries combined while millions of its people are unhoused.

And yet, a new generation of the working class—union members and unorganized workers alike, students, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, Black, brown, and Indigenous people—stands ready to meet this political moment and organize to demand a better future. Workers at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island recently won the first union victory at any Amazon facility, led by a Black supervisor who was fired after organizing a walkout to protest unsafe working conditions at the start of the pandemic. Activists throughout the state are mobilizing to shut down the ICE Processing Center in Folkston in solidarity with detainees on hunger strike in the facility. And here in Athens, a coalition of organizations are demanding Community Benefits Agreements for large public projects, and United Campus Workers of Georgia are campaigning for a living wage for UGA workers. This May Day, let their struggles be our struggles. The only way forward is with solidarity among the multiracial working class of the United States and workers of the world.

Yes, because our pampered and privileged "students" and LGBTQIQ+ plus activists are taking all the assembly line-workers' jobs, low-skill manual laborers' jobs, fast-food and retail workers' jobs, and those in cleaning and janitorial services, the food industry, construction labor, longshoreman, parking lot attendants and car washers, truck drivers, and low-level white-collar worker positions, and more! 

Down with the colonialist, racist, multi-phobic finance capitalists of the world! 

Hey, hey! Ho ho! Late-stage capitalism's got to go! 

Yes, these "industrious" purple-haired campus proletarians have joined in working class solidarity with all the world's expropriated and oppressed! *Yawn.*

More here, "Workers around the world mark May Day with rallies for better working conditions."

Thirtieth Anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots (VIDEO)

I haven't been watching the news this week, but the Los Angeles Times published a front-page story yesterday, and it was weird. I was at Fresno State in May 1992, working at the Chevron station, pumping gas, not far from my dad's house. I'd be entering graduate school at U.C. Santa Barbara in the fall.

I remember being very distressed by what little news I was able to get at the time (mainly because of so much work and school, I had no time for it). I remember lots of people coming in and out of the gas station (located at one of the busiest intersections in Central Fresno) and nearly every night each and every person haunting the streets was shouting their commitments out loud, with white folks screaming the *n-word* at the black folks who were also out and about. 

It was scary being out there, even two hours away from L.A. 

Our social and political polarization is bad nowadays, but it ain't new, not by a long shot --- L.A. was a riot torn city decades before the officers' acquittal in the Rodney King trial (the Watts Riots come to mind). 

Now almost two years out from the murder of George Floyd --- and 2020's summer of riots --- it was a strange feeling being reminded of Los Angeles like that, seeing the newspaper at the AM/PM while out for gas, while my mind quickly raced with images of both Los Angeles and Minneapolis simultaneously. 

Sixty-four people were killed 1992, with at least $1 billion in property damage over a six-day period. 

Here's an hour-long NBC News video with graphic images, starting out with some random dude getting pulled out of his Ford Bronco, only to narrowly escape being stoned to death by rioters armed with slabs of bricks, broken curbstone, huge rocks, who knows what else. 

Here's another focusing on the "Rooftop Koreans," many of whom defended their businesses with handguns and rifles. 

More at ABC News 7 Los Angeles below.

And at the Los Angeles Times, "L.A. riots are remembered 30 years later with hope and pessimism."

Also, "Thirty years after it burned, Koreatown has transformed. But scars remain";

When the city started to burn, James An’s mother was driving her new BMW in South L.A.

An was 12 years old, but he knew the luxury car — and her Korean face — could make her a target. He called her car phone and urged her to “get the hell out.”

On the radio, he heard business owners pleading for police protection as their livelihoods vanished in front of their eyes.

On television, he saw much of Koreatown on fire, including an electronics store he loved, half a mile from his family’s Korean-Chinese restaurant.

His father soon left their Glendale house, gun in hand, to defend the restaurant. “Protect your family,” he told the boy.

“I remember thinking, what the hell am I going to do? I’m 12 years old,” An recalled. “How am I going to [respond], if people come to my house with guns?”

The restaurant was spared. But many of An’s favorite Koreatown haunts were in ruins: a CD warehouse, a Kinney shoe store, an ethnic grocery store with signs in English, Spanish, Korean and Japanese.

For 30 years, An has tried to understand what happened after the police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted on April 29, 1992, setting off days of looting and destruction.

As president of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles, he is in regular touch with politicians and community leaders of many backgrounds.

The days of armed Koreans on rooftops defending their businesses from rioters, with the LAPD nowhere in sight, sometimes seem a distant memory.

Black-Korean relations, once symbolized by the fatal shooting of Latasha Harlins by a Korean liquor store owner, have improved one interaction at a time, from the shopkeeper who smiles and offers warm greetings to leaders like An working to build cross-racial ties.

Latinos, who are 51% of Koreatown’s population, have successfully lobbied for a sign marking the “El Salvador Corridor.” They have teamed with Koreans on workers’ rights campaigns and school issues.

But An, 42, wonders what fissures still exist underneath.

“I haven’t been able to figure that out,” he said.

After the riots, called Saigu — 4/29 — in Korean, some business owners returned to South Korea, their immigrant dreams shattered. Others were unable to get government relief or insurance reimbursements. Some were too traumatized to keep working.

Yet, as the years passed, many Korean Americans rebuilt their businesses or started new ones. Wealthy South Koreans poured money into the neighborhood. Korean pop culture exploded globally.

At Hannam Supermarket on Olympic Boulevard, where Koreans with guns crouched behind cars in 1992, K-pop stars filmed a music video several years ago.

On the rooftop of California Market, where armed Koreans once patrolled, hipsters snack on spicy rice cakes and Korean corn dogs.

Korean Americans gradually built enough political clout to place all of Koreatown in a single city council district. A community that once felt abandoned by the police recently rallied to make sure that the LAPD’s Olympic station stayed open.

But 30 years later, everyone who experienced Saigu is scarred in some way, whether it is the unending grief of Jung Hui Lee, whose son was the only Korean American killed in the riots, or the questions still asked by a man who as a teenager saw the stores of fellow church members burned down.

“What did we do, or what did those church members do so wrong that caused this much retaliation?” said Joshua Song, 47, vice president of a company that helps businesses bridge the divide between Asia and North America. “If I try to rethink those events, there is still no resolution. Maybe that’s why it’s so traumatic.”

In some spots, the rebuilding began quickly. At 6th Street and Vermont Avenue, a strip mall that had gone up in flames was soon rising again.

Laura Park told the owner that she was interested in moving her Korean dress shop there...

Well, what did they do? For one thing, "A Korean-born merchant at the shop accused Latasha of stealing a bottle of orange juice. Latasha was shot in the back of the head, killing her instantly."

More, "Videotape Shows Teen Being Shot After Fight : Killing: Trial opens for Korean grocer who is accused in the slaying of a 15-year-old black girl at a South-Central store," and "25 years later, a vigil will honor a black teen killed over a bottle of orange juice."

There was a powder-keg waiting to explode, no doubt.  

Paige Spiranac Performs NFL Combine Drills (VIDEO)

She's really the consummate influencer. Not only is she smokin', she's active, does cosplay, makes videos, and of course promotes her sponsors.

Over a half-million on Twitter, and then 3.3 million on Twitter --- while nowhere near Addison's Rae's 40 million --- she's got a very large audience and huge reach for her promotions.

I just love watching do these combine drills, especially the sprint dash with all parts upstairs moving.

All I know is that @PaigeSpiranac would be drafted first overall 😤 pic.twitter.com/3gcgNWPCpl

— PointsBet Sportsbook (@PointsBetUSA) April 28, 2022

Trevor Noah at the White House Correspondents' Dinner (VIDEO)

He's good. Very funny and ripped everyone with no fear or favor.

Really, he's so good maybe I'll watch his show now, on Comedy Channel. Gotta be better than Stephen Colbert. Right?

From last night:

Democrats Hemorrhaging 'Black' America's Support in U.S. Cities

This is killer! 

At the New York Post, "Blacks might be on the cusp of a second Great Migration – this time in the voting booth":

“Black America is wising up to [Democrat failures] and the question now is whether or not it is too late,” said conservative commentator Candace Owens, noting that “every single metric is worse for black America under a Biden presidency than under a Trump presidency,”

There are 30 million voting-age African-Americans, and 92 percent of those who voted pulled the lever for Biden in 2020. But only 69 percent support him today, according to a recent CNN survey. A new Quinnipiac poll put black support for the president at just 58 percent, with 20 percent strongly disapproving of his leadership.

David “Shaman” Ortiz, 29, is among the growing list of disillusioned former Democrats. The bi-racial Brooklyn native, former City Council staffer and political activist marched with Black Lives Matter in 2020. This year he protested outside the US Capitol waving “F–k Biden,” “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Trump 2024” flags, sharing the images on social media.

“I’ve been the boots on the ground for the other side. So I know. It’s time to paint New York City red,” said Ortiz, who recently switched his voter registration from Democrat to Republican.

He said the public education system and left-leaning mainstream media leave black children “malnourished of the truth,” teaching them to believe only Democrats care about their issues, despite what he says is growing evidence that their policies are devastating minority communities.

Black urban communities across the nation beset by social ills have been run almost exclusively by Democrats for decades. Rising crime, failed schools, illegal immigration and anger over COVID mandates are all among issues forcing this constituency to reject the Democrat Party, political observers said. So too is the failure of the Biden Administration to live up to campaign pledges.

“You do realize … a lot of black people feel like Democrats have kept no promises since they’ve been in office,” radio host Charlamagne the God told Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this month.

Conservative commentator and Post contributor Deroy Murdock led a group that filed a lawsuit arguing that a new city law which will allow non-citizens to vote in local elections comes at the expense of African-American voters.

“Black voters finally are concluding that continuing to vote Democrat and expecting improved results is the quintessential definition of insanity,” said Murdock.

Crime continues to ravage the black community in almost all American cities, wildly out of proportion to population. African-Americans were the victims in 65 percent of all NYC murders in 2020, according to NYPD data, despite representing just 20 percent of the city’s population.

Black students, meanwhile, have underperformed their peers for decades in what school Chancellor David Banks called an “outrageous” failure of public education.

The burden of illegal immigration is also unfairly foisted upon African-American communities, pundits say. Illegals captured at the border and then secretly flown into the New York area by the Biden Administration are not placed in cushy Cobble Hill or the Upper East Side. They’re dumped instead on poor, mostly minority neighborhoods and schools.

“I think that the sharp decline in support [for Democrats] correlates directly with the administration’s effort to create a sharp incline in importing Hispanics over the border,” said Owens. “The black vote is being threatened.”

A new generation of black Republicans is hoping to capitalize on disaffected Democrats in November, including US Senate candidate and former NFL star Herschel Walker in Georgia, who raised $5.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2021; Congressional hopeful John James in Michigan; and Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Kendall Qualls.

“There is resentment over crime and education and there is resentment over BLM, all of it tied to the Democrat Party,” said Qualls, who lived as a child in Harlem where he said he watched his mom robbed on the street in broad daylight. Decades later, he added, life for black residents in Harlem is no better.

“The seismic shift is cultural, not political,” said Qualls. “Our cultural roots are faith, family and education, not this crap we see today.”

Walker told The Post: “Across the country, black Americans are realizing that policies from President Biden … are actively failing their communities. We are focused on reducing inflation, restoring public safety, securing our borders, increasing school choice, and addressing mental health — not on dividing people over race.” Democrat insiders agree minority voters are losing confidence in the party’s leadership...

 More.

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine

At Amazon, Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Washington's 'Forever Flu' Fleeced Americans (VIDEO)

I don't say this kind of thing often, but this man is fucking brilliant. 

Bill Maher last night on "Real Time":

Bamby Saturday

 On Twitter.

And Julia.

And Sara.

'Apocalyptic' American Nationalist Tucker Carlson (VIDEO)

I quit watching Tucker sometime last year --- and mind you, this was after months of watching his show religiously during the thick of the "pandemic spring" 2020.

First, I was just bored. But then I saw people freakin' out about how he'd become a "New Right" extremeist. Once he went to Hungary to air his program with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, all of my interest tanked. I can take a lot of populist nationalism, up to a point, but Tucker crossed the line.

So now, it turns out, the New York Times has published the first part of an investigative series on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," now trending at Memeorandum. 

Here, "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable":

Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.

Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.

The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.

When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.

“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.

In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.

His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.

Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.

“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”

That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”

A Fox spokeswoman rejected those characterizations of the network’s strategy, pointing to coverage of stories like President Biden’s inauguration and the war in Ukraine, where a Fox cameraman was killed in March while on assignment. In a statement, Justin Wells, a senior executive producer overseeing Mr. Carlson’s show, defended the host’s rhetoric and choice of topics: “Tucker Carlson programming embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored. Stories in ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ broadcasts and ‘Tucker Carlson Originals’ documentaries undergo a rigorous editorial process. We’re also proud of our ongoing original reporting at a time when most in the media amplify only one point of view.”

Mr. Carlson has led the network’s on-air transformation, becoming Fox’s most influential employee. Outside Fox, Mr. Carlson is bandied about as a potential candidate for president. Inside the network, he answers solely to the Murdochs themselves. With seeming impunity, Mr. Carlson has used his broadcast to attack Fox’s own news coverage, helping drive some journalists off the air and others, like the veteran Fox anchor Shepard Smith, to leave the network entirely. In Australia, the editors of some Murdoch-owned newspapers watch Mr. Carlson’s show religiously, believing it provides clues to Mr. Murdoch’s own views. According to former senior Fox employees, Mr. Carlson boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with Mr. Murdoch. And in an extraordinary departure from the old Fox code, Mr. Carlson is exempt from the network’s fearsome media relations department, which under Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder, served to both defend the channel’s image and keep its talent in line.

Mr. Carlson is powerful at Fox not merely because he is the network’s face but because he is also its future — a star whose intensity and paranoid style work to bind viewers more closely to the Fox brand, helping lead them through the fragmented post-cable landscape...

This is what the Times does, publish these lurid portraits of basically someone who is right now totally mainstream --- *the* mainstream. I mean, there's a reason he's the most popular cable host on T.V. 

And the Times will float off leftist conspiracy talking points and half-baked attacks that don't pass the most rudimentary fact checks. 

For instance, when asked during Senate testimony if there were chemical weapons biolabs in Ukraine, Victory Nuland --- the Biden administration's Undersecretary of State for Affairs --- confirmed Ukraine's research facilities, saying, "Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, ah, gain control of --- so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials to fall into the hands of, ah, Russia forces..."

You don't get more high-up confirmation on that unless it's coming out of the president's mouth himself. 

This woman is a State Department veteran going back two decades, and was Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She knows *exactly* what's going on over there, and in fact, she's been one of the most important U.S. governmental officials entangling U.S. foreign policy in the Ukraine-Russia crisis' long-running morass. 

All of this is fresh-baked propaganda for the politicos and party hacks of the Democratic Party left. It's all battlespace preparation ahead of November. Fuck 'em.

Whatever, there's more at the link.

Also, "Inside the Apocalyptic Worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’." 

#CatturdForTwitterCEO

Heh, @Catturd2 made to #8 trending today.

Kara Swisher on Elon Musk

Following-up, "Space-X Falcon 9 Launches 53 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit (VIDEO)."

Via Twitter (and with Kara Swisher here). 

Space-X Falcon 9 Launches 53 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit (VIDEO)

Hey, the guy bought Twitter, but as the owner of Space-X and other big properties, can he keep all his balls in the air?

WATCH:

Watch Falcon 9 launch 53 Starlink satellites to orbit → https://t.co/3Cr99l2Cre https://t.co/2SPtX3ketY

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 29, 2022

Stocks Skidded Friday, Dow Dropping More Than 900 Points in Broad Investor Selloff

Shoot, another week like this one and the Dow will be in correction territory. My funds squeaked out of the first quarter with a mild $500 loss, but if this keeps going, I'll be taken to the cleaners --- and imagine how everybody else feels! 

Oh boy this is going to be a rocky year, just in time for the November midterms!

At CNBC, "Dow plunges more than 900 points for its worst day since 2020, falls for a fourth straight week":

And at the Wall Street Journal, "Tech Rout Drags Nasdaq to Worst Month Since 2008":

Tech-heavy index slid more than 4% Friday, bringing its losses for month to 13%.

An April rout in technology stocks deepened Friday, dragging the Nasdaq Composite to its worst monthly performance in more than a decade, as soaring inflation and rising interest rates fanned worries of a recession.

The broad selloff has erased trillions of dollars in market value from the tech-heavy gauge, with investors souring on shares of everything from software and semiconductor companies to social-media giants.

The Nasdaq dropped 4.2% Friday, bringing its losses for the month to more than 13%, its worst showing since October 2008. The index is down 21% in 2022, its worst start to a year on record.

The broader S&P 500 has fallen for four consecutive weeks, shedding 8.8% in April and bringing its year-to-date losses to 13%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 4.9% this month and is down more than 9% this year. Both indexes logged their worst months since March 2020.

The punishing declines in tech and growth stocks mark a dramatic shift from recent years. Investors have ditched shares of some of the biggest tech companies, which had been stock-market darlings for much of the past decade and propelled the indexes’ gains from the pandemic lows.

Within just a few months, some of the most reliable winners morphed into losers. Netflix dropped 49% in April. Nvidia fell 32%. And PayPal Holdings declined 24%. All three stocks are down more than 35% in 2022.

Worries about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, soaring inflation and the path of the economy have brought stocks sharply lower from the record levels at which they started the year. Many pandemic-era winners also have come falling back to earth as consumer tastes have evolved since 2020. And recently, earnings season has been dotted with some high-profile disappointments, delivering head-spinning one-day stock moves following the reports.

“We’re going into a higher volatility regime, when fundamentals matter again,” said Aashish Vyas, investment director at Resonanz Capital. “It does seem like we are at a systemic shift.”

The FAANG stocks, consisting of the popular quintet of Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Apple, Amazon.com, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet, have collectively lost more than $1 trillion in market value this month, the most since Facebook started trading in May 2012.

Investors say they will be tracking the next batch of earnings results in coming days for signs of slowing growth from other companies. So far, corporate profits are on track to rise 7% for the quarter, according to FactSet, the lowest year-over-year earnings growth rate since the last quarter of 2020....

The latest gross domestic product data showed that the economy recently contracted for the first time since early in the pandemic. Meanwhile, inflation accelerated in March to its fastest pace since 1982, measured by the Federal Reserve’s preferred gauge.

Despite higher prices, U.S. consumer spending for March increased 1.1% from the prior month, showing that American households are absorbing high inflation. Some investors say shares of some tech companies look attractive after the recent selloff, and that they would consider stepping in to buy shares. The Nasdaq is now down 23% from its high and trading at levels not seen since 2020.

Friday’s losses in the stock market accelerated into the closing bell, which some traders attributed to technical factors such as hedging activity and trading by leveraged exchange-traded products. The Dow sank more than 900 points, or 2.8%, and the S&P declined 3.6%...

 

Congressional Midterms: Democrats Weak on Key Issues; Republicans Perceived as Party Better Able to Deal With Top Issues

At Marist, "NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll: The 2022 Midterms & Biden’s Job Performance, April 2022":

The big question at this point is how many seats Republicans will gain. They picked up 64 seats in the House in 2010, and 54 in 1994. I haven't paid attention to the Senate. Can they pick up 10 seats and get to a filibuster-proof majority? This year's the year if there was one.

And from a couple of weeks ago, Larry Sabato, "Are Democrats Headed for a Shellacking in the Midterm Election?":

There appears to be a growing consensus among pundits and political observers that Democrats are likely to experience a shellacking in the 2022 midterm elections, especially in the House of Representatives. According to observers such as Chuck Todd and Mark Murray of NBC News, a number of indicators are now pointing toward major losses for Democrats, especially President Biden’s poor approval rating and the large proportion of Americans who believe that the country is currently on the wrong track or headed in the wrong direction...

Still more.