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Both right and left mischaracterize the FBI for political gain

See if this sounds about right: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband’s stock picks routinely outperform those of smart investors such as Warren Buffett, which many suspect is because of inside information she possesses. Therefore, all of Congress makes insider trades, is corrupt through and through, and should be disbanded.  

Or, San Diego Padres shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. ingests banned substances. So, of course, the revered institution of Major League Baseball is juiced like a junkie and needs to be broken up and farmed out to several smaller leagues.

One more: U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan shoots and kills 13 people at Ft. Hood. The only logical presumption is that the Army is hopelessly staffed by murderous psychotics and should be defunded.

The absurdity of such conclusions is plain and laughable. Except, it appears, when applied to the FBI. It’s been shown that individual FBI employees have done miserable and harmful things.  But the headline typically is something like “The FBI manufactured a Russia collusion investigation,” “The FBI defrauded the FISA court,” or “The FBI stole the election from Hillary Clinton.” No, fired FBI executives Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe and James Comey were directly tied to those things.

And now Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has labeled the FBI “corrupted at its core” because of indications that two employees in the FBI’s Washington field office may have hampered an investigation into Hunter Biden. Continuing the hyperbole, various commentators and politicians, after the Aug. 8 Mar-a-Lago search, have characterized the FBI as “America’s Gestapo” deserving abolition or defunding. 

By the way, some thoroughly corrupted agents from America’s Gestapo just this past week led an investigation that freed over 200 people, including 84 children, from human traffickers who were selling them for sex.  

To be precise, the decision to open an investigation into a former president for possessing presidential records and other documents that may have had classification markings was made by specific FBI employees at the urging of specific individuals within the National Archives and possibly the Department of Justice (DOJ).  

The curious decision to escalate the investigation to an all-day search of a former president’s home by 30 armed agents was also made by specific individuals in the FBI and DOJ. All of these individuals are unknown except for Attorney General Merrick Garland, who publicly acknowledged approving at least the search warrant. 

If it is ultimately revealed that these individuals in the FBI and DOJ initiated the document retention investigation as an effort to politically damage Donald Trump, then they should be held to account for corruption.

Alternately, if it is ultimately revealed that these individuals launched an invasive search of Trump’s residence based simply on what looks like a document dispute without taking into consideration the massive political fallout and erosion of trust that it would trigger, then perhaps they are holding positions of responsibility beyond their native capabilities.

If, however, it is ultimately revealed that Trump was selling state secrets or taking bribes or some such serious equivalent, then no one will dispute the law enforcement actions that have been taken.

But the indicators so far don’t point in the latter direction. The DOJ has said the attorney general took “weeks” to deliberate whether a search should be authorized. A search for truly serious crimes or threats to the nation doesn’t have the luxury of weeks of deliberation — in fact, the opposite is true. Also, the search was conducted three days after being ordered by a magistrate, undercutting any argument of imminent danger to the country, evidence destruction concerns, or other perceived exigencies.

What we do know to be true is that both political parties are using the FBI “brand” to stir passion among their base supporters. That is why many politicians and cable news barkers front load comments and headlines with “The FBI did … (fill in the blank).”  

The acronym “FBI” evidently prompts online clicks that generate ad dollars or gets fundraising mailers opened by frightened senior citizens who then send in $25. If the outrage hucksters really cared about corruption in the FBI, those who have engaged in corrupt behaviors would not be walking around today collecting big bucks from book deals and lucrative “news contributor” contracts.    

The manipulation of the FBI brand is bipartisan, not just on the right. On the left, the FBI is now suddenly being portrayed as a hapless target of angry Trump supporters simply because agents did their job. Fundraising campaigns are being readied, urgently expressing concern that the Mar-a-Lago search is raising temperatures on the right and fomenting violence against law enforcement.

Here’s the reality of life in the FBI: On a daily basis agents are under threat. I experienced direct threats against me and my family, as have many, if not most, other agents. Agents who receive no threats during their careers can count themselves fortunate.  

Agents are given weapons and good training and are prudently reminded, as they were last week, to be aware of their environment. FBI agents are not victims; trying to paint them as such in order to advance political goals is absurd. The left’s hollow concern is not about agent safety — it’s about quieting opposition rhetoric. 

All of that said, the leadership of the FBI has a problem. Following the Mar-a-Lago search, half the country may be convinced, if they weren’t before, that the entire FBI is in the bag for the Democratic Party because of a string of FBI investigative actions against figures on the right and the absence of comparable actions against some on the left. Fair or not, that is a reality that FBI leadership must confront and fix. It is a direct threat to our democracy and an existential threat to the credibility and trustworthiness of the FBI.

Sen. Grassley is correct in this regard: Anyone in the FBI who witnesses decisions or orders driven by political considerations over objective justice must come forward and speak up immediately. It’s the right thing to do. 

This holds true, especially, for those at the FBI’s executive levels, to whom I say: If you are aware of political bias but concern about your career holds you back from exposing it, keep in mind that you will have no career left if you retire from the FBI as part of that generation in charge of the bureau that Americans believe closed ranks, rejected transparency, failed to confront specific wrongdoers, and persisted in the growing perception of partisanship. You can then expect that the FBI brand you list on your resume will net you nothing.   

Kevin R. Brock is a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He independently consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic mission technologies. 

Source: TEST FEED1

State ballot measures are new abortion battleground

State ballot measures are becoming the new battleground over abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

Abortion rights advocates are energized after voters in Kansas earlier this month rejected an attempt to strip abortion protections from the state constitution, the first statewide vote on abortion since the court’s decision in June.

Polls show most Americans support some form of abortion access, and reproductive rights advocates are eager to take the issue directly to the voters. 

“When abortion rights are on the line, people stand up and vote to protect them,” said Elizabeth Nash, principal policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research group.

An Ipsos poll released Aug. 10 found seven in 10 Americans, regardless of party affiliation, would support their state using a ballot measure to decide abortion rights at the state level. 

In such a hypothetical state-level ballot measure, 54 percent said they would vote in favor of abortion legality.

In Kansas, nearly 60 percent voted against the constitutional amendment, stunning anti-abortion activists who had been anticipating a win in the state former President Trump carried by nearly 20 percentage points over President Biden in the 2020 election. 

Next up in November are votes in Kentucky, Michigan, California, Vermont and Montana, the most abortion-related ballot initiatives ever to take place in a single year.

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a progressive group that helps organize ballot measures, said the increasing polarization of state and federal politics is leaving voters with no other options to get their voices heard.

“Ballot measures are not just a tool in the toolbox. I think they will be an increasingly central pathway for moving these conversations forward in states and not just in the abstract … but actually making policy,” Hall said.

Ballot measures are expensive and challenging undertakings, and Hall said they are normally a tool of last resort. 

But now, she said there is a major disconnect between extreme politicians and the voters.

“That opens up a space for ballot measures to be not just an option, but often the only option, where there’s no way to get middle-ground common sense policies through the usual mechanisms of lawmaking,” Hall said. 

Voters in Kentucky will vote on a measure that’s the most similar to Kansas. Vermont, California and Michigan are moving to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, while Montana would mandate medical care for children “born alive” after an abortion.

According to Nash, the anti-abortion movement had a string of successful ballot initiatives in recent years.  

In 2020, Louisiana voted to amend the state constitution so there would be no guarantee of abortion protections. Alabama and West Virginia passed similar constitutional amendments in 2018, and Tennessee did so in 2014.

In contrast, this is the first time abortion rights groups have sponsored state ballot measures since 1992. According to data from Ballotpedia, 85 percent of the abortion related measures on state ballots have been proposed by anti-abortion groups.

Still, groups on both sides of the issue pointed out that there’s only so much that can be gleaned from Kansas.

In a statement after the Kansas ballot measure failed, Kentucky Right to Life Executive Director Addia Wuchner made it clear “we’re not in Kansas!”

Wuchner said the wording of the amendments is similar, but noted Kentucky’s amendment is simpler. The state also already has a near-total abortion ban in place. 

“The wording of Kentucky’s Amendment 2 is very clear and concise. It is probably too soon to fully analyze the reason for the Kansas ballot outcome. The wording on the Kansas ballot was longer than our statement, and that may have been a factor,” Wuchner said. 

The Supreme Court’s ruling in June to overturn Roe v. Wade is leading to a patchwork of state laws across the country, some of which are being litigated on a constantly changing basis.

“The lack of legal clarity about abortion in Michigan has already caused far too much confusion for women who deserve certainty about their health care,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said in a statement Friday, after a judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the state’s 1931 abortion ban. 

“Once, over the course of a single day, abortion was legal in the morning, illegal around lunch time, and legal in the evening. We cannot have this kind of whiplash about something as fundamental as a woman’s right to control her own body,” Whitmer said. 

Michigan is one of the next key battleground states, where residents will vote on a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to protect the right to make choices on reproductive issues such as contraception and abortion.

Nicole Wells Stallworth, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, said the organization had been working on the ballot initiative since last fall, but the effort took on new urgency once a draft opinion leaked in May that showed the Court was going to overturn Roe.

“When the draft leaked opinion came out, we saw a surge in people and individuals coming to our campaign wanting to participate and help in some way,” Stallworth said. 

The group saw a similar outpouring of support in June once Roe was officially overturned. 

“I think that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has really sparked for people a desire to get involved in the process, and this opportunity in November gives them some form of hope that we can actually save access to abortion in Michigan,” Stallworth said. 

Stallworth said politicians have been unable to repeal the abortion ban, so passing a ballot measure would ensure abortion protections won’t be tampered with in the future.

Source: TEST FEED1

What’s Liz Cheney thinking about 2024?

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has said that her priority now will be “doing whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.” Here’s one way she could do that: become the Ralph Nader of the 2024 presidential election. She could run for president as an independent, split the Republican vote in key swing states and throw the election to the Democrat.

That’s what Nader did in 2000 when Florida cast the deciding vote in the presidential election. The official vote count in Florida showed Republican George W. Bush ahead of Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader, the Green Party candidate, got 97,488 votes in Florida. Asked to choose between Bush and Gore, about half of Nader voters in Florida said they wouldn’t vote for either major party candidate. Most of the rest said they would have voted for Gore — enough to give Gore Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency.

By voting for a third party or independent candidate who has no chance to win, you are actually taking away votes from your second-choice candidate and helping elect your least favorite contender (in 2000, that meant Nader voters electing Bush, which is exactly what they did).

Cheney, whose voting record is staunchly conservative, has become the leader of anti-Trump Republicans. She would presumably take more votes away from Trump than from the Democrat (likely President Joe Biden). She could do that by running only in a few large swing states like Florida and Wisconsin.

But she would have to give up any dream of actually winning the election by carrying enough states to get 270 electoral votes. Still, her avowed purpose, at least right now, is simply to keep Trump from winning.

Hers would be an unprecedented campaign: “Vote for me, even though I don’t have a real chance of winning, simply to make sure Trump doesn’t win.” That might work. Nearly 60 percent of voters say they don’t want Trump to run again.

The risk is that a Cheney-for-president campaign could take more votes from the Democrat than from Trump:  30 percent of Democrats say they don’t want Biden to run for re-election. The number one reason: his age (Biden will turn 82 in November 2024).

It is unlikely that Cheney could win either party’s nomination. Biden has disappointed a lot of progressives by failing to deliver on some of the things he promised in 2020 like immigration reform, child care, student loan debt and statutory protection for abortion rights. But that would not be likely to deliver many progressive votes to Cheney, who voted with President Trump more than 90 percent of the time during her congressional career.

An independent or third-party presidential campaign would cost a lot of money. It would be difficult just to get on the ballot in states where Republican officials would do everything possible to keep Cheney’s name off the ballot. Cheney raised a lot of money from Democrats in her Republican primary campaign this year, but there was no Democrat on the ballot to compete with her for contributions.

Independent candidates are highly dependent on polls.  Voters are usually reluctant to support a candidate who, according to the polls, has no real chance of winning. In the spring of 1992, independent Ross Perot was running ahead of both Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. Perot dropped out of the race in July 1992, but then got back in — in time to participate in the presidential debates and getting 19 percent of the November vote, the highest vote for a third party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt, a former president, in 1912.

One big thing Cheney would have going for her: the weakness of popular support for the two most likely major party candidates. Right now, Trump is rated 55 to 41 percent unfavorable by the voters. President Biden’s job approval numbers? Exactly the same – 55 to 41 percent negative.

If we end up with a race between two unpopular contenders, anything could happen. That’s what Liz Cheney may be counting on.

Bill Schneider is an emeritus professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable” (Simon & Schuster).

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Cheney says she'll work to keep election deniers out of office

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she will focus on keeping election deniers out of office following a loss in her reelection bid, noting that she is still focused on her role on the Jan. 6 committee as well as “tremendous work left to do as Wyoming’s representative in Congress.”

“I’m going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers,” she said during a discussion of her future on ABC’s “This Week.”

“We’ve got election deniers that have been nominated for really important positions all across the country,” she added. “And I’m going to work against those people, I’m going to work to support their opponents.”

Cheney said that she would get involved in campaigns against Republican candidates that are challenging or denying the results of the 2020 election, including her GOP colleagues in Congress.

The Wyoming lawmaker added that she will also aim to educate the nation about the events of Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capitol.

“I’m also going to spend a lot of time doing everything I can to help educate the American people about what happened. And I think our hearings have been a tremendous contribution to that,’ she said.

Cheney, the outspoken vice chair of the House panel investigating the attack on the Capitol who has criticized former President Trump, lost the Wyoming GOP primary to a Trump-backed challenger last week. One day later, she teased her possible prospects of a presidential bid in 2024, saying she planned to make a decision in the coming months.

Source: TEST FEED1

Scientists are considering how the SpaceX Starship can accelerate space exploration

As SpaceX continues ground tests of its Starship Superheavy rocket ship in preparation for its first orbital flight, the scientific community is starting to wake up to the possibilities that the company’s spaceship presents for science-oriented space exploration. The same rocket that will take humans back to the moon and, perhaps, to Mars will also revolutionize sending robotic space explorers to all corners of the solar system, according to a recent piece in Science.

When it’s operational, if one can believe the claims of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the Starship will be able to put 100 tons of anything in low-Earth orbit. With refueling, that payload could go anywhere in the solar system. The cost will be $10 million per launch. Even with the need for refueling, Starship represents a quantum leap in spaceflight. No wonder some scientists who design and manage robotic space missions are starting to take a look at Musk’s monster rocket.

One mission being considered by Jennifer Heldman, a scientist at NASA Ames, is a sample return from the moon. A Starship would land on the moon, fill its hold with lunar ice that would be kept chilled, and then return it to Earth for scientists to study. Researchers could discover much about how the ice was deposited over billions of years and where it is abundant and available for a future lunar base.

Daniel Baker, director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, suggests that Starship could carry a probe to Mercury, a tough planet to reach because of the need for extra fuel and shielding against the sun. Starship could also send a massive probe into interstellar space, perhaps passing by some of the outer planets along the way like the Voyager probes did. The massive rocket could also launch space-based telescopes that would dwarf both the Hubble and the James Webb.

The Starship could also launch a series of landers directed toward some of the more interesting moons of the outer planets. For example, NASA has been studying a Europa Lander as a follow up to the Europa Clipper. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, is thought to have a subsurface ocean covered by a layer of ice that might be warm enough to contain extraterrestrial life. Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus are also possible targets for landers. Enceladus is an ice-covered world similar to Europa. Titan is a weird world with liquid methane seas. NASA is studying a mission that would put a submarine into one of those seas, the Kraken Mare.

The humans-versus-robots argument has been raging among space policy experts since the beginning of the space age. As Scientific American notes, robots can explore the moons and planets far more cheaply than astronauts, who need expensive life support systems to sustain them. However, astronauts are far more capable than robots in running experiments and doing field exploration using the “advantage of human flexibility, experience and judgment.”

The SpaceX Starship may provide a solution to the humans-versus-robots problem by enabling both, Humans will return to the lunar surface on a Human Landing System Starship. Musk dreams of using the Starship to build a colony on Mars. The Starship will also enable a number of planetary missions that have so far been too expansive and too big to fit into existing rockets. Everyone wins.

The advent of the SpaceX Starship proves an old truism that often the answer to a policy controversy resides in technology.

SpaceX has already proven the virtues of reusable rockets with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which have taken the lion’s share of the launch market. The Starship will follow the principle that reusability plus quick turnaround leads to cheap access to space and therefore more space missions, but on a much larger scale. If (or when) Starship becomes operational, it will help to fulfill the promise of the space age that has been over a century in the making.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of space exploration studies “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.

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The stabbing of Salman Rushdie: A fellow author’s personal reflection

The horrific, near-fatal stabbing of celebrated author Salman Rushdie on a lecture stage in Chautauqua, N.Y., provoked a small but not unrelated memory; I — someone who has also measured out a life putting one sentence after another — needed to find some clarity in all that had happened.

A lifetime ago, as a restless, ambitious 20-year-old with a year of graduate school under my belt, I found myself dismayingly marooned at my parents’ Bronx home for a few weeks before my real summer could start. 

And so it was that on a stifling hot June afternoon, hoping to ease the monotony of this brief interregnum between school and a looming adventure with friends, I sat down at the pale-green Hermes typewriter I had lugged back from Palo Alto. Something I had seen previously on an evening stroll with my younger sister had started me thinking.

The geographic anchor — at least that’s how it’d always seemed to me — of the north Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale, where I grew up, was a weathered stone bell tower. It had been erected long ago to commemorate the soldiers who fought in World War I. “The Monument,” everyone called it. 

But when I accompanied Missy (these days, under her more adult name of Marcy, she is arguably the nation’s most sought-after wedding planner) as she set out to rendezvous with her barely-teenage crew, the crowd of kids on the stone portico that surrounded The Monument was a revelation. They looked like they had assembled for a casting call for “Hair.” It was a defiant sea of wild locks, bell bottoms and love beads. And, of course, the pungent, mischievous smell of pot wafted through the still Bronx evening — a siren call, I imagined, to those high school kids still uncomfortably moored to their parents’ dinner tables.  

I took it all in with some astonishment. This was, after all, starchy and sedate Riverdale, not the fountain in Washington Square Park. The times, as the poet had promised, were indeed a changin’. No doubt about it — the Riverdale burghers’ sons and daughters were “beyond their command.”

So, with a particularly heavy and gleeful hand, I wrote up what I had seen, as well as all that I intuited was brewing. Consider, for malicious example, my apocalyptic description of the kids’ blatant use of psychedelics, and how “little girls who had never been kissed had their minds raped.” Then, after typing a professional “-30-” at the end of my account, as I had been taught to do on the college newspaper, I put the pages in a manila envelope and mailed it to “Editor, The Village Voice.”

It was a real kick (and certainly a surprise) when the piece ran in the Voice — heady stuff for a young man lugging around lots of adult dreams. But it was pretty much forgotten once the summer was in full swing and I was up on Martha’s Vineyard with a couple of friends, running a decidedly makeshift operation we’d christened “Martha’s Mid-Summer Film Festival.”

Then came the call from my father. “Do you know what you have done?” he challenged ominously.

I could only wonder; there were lots of possibilities. But this one I hadn’t expected: The Riverdale Press, the neighborhood’s weekly paper, had taken indignant aim at my Village Voice piece in a fuming editorial whose banner headline ran across an entire page. Rather than confront the myriad implications of the wild scene I had described, the editorial made nasty work of me, the Voice and, in a particularly apoplectic tirade, compared the green pastures of the north Bronx with the garbage-strewn streets of Greenwich Village. It was all-out generational warfare and to my reading, at least, I was portrayed as the ring-leader of some sort of hippie cabal that was poised to run wild through the neighborhood.

It was an awakening to me, a first-hand lesson in the high-voltage power of the written word. You sit quietly at your desk putting sentences together, but once they go off into the world, the words can shake people up and have unanticipated consequences. Take my father, as a besieged example. He was put on the defensive, the butt of some remarkably snide comments, as a result of his wayward son’s unrestrained pen. It shook him up; he wasn’t used to this sort of thing. And I felt tremendously guilty about the predicament into which I had shoved my unsuspecting, embarrassed dad.

Now, I am not comparing my being the subject of a mean-spirited editorial to a vicious, steely fatwa decreeing a death sentence in 1989 on the author of “The Satanic Verses” and on “all involved in its publication.” Nor am I placing my scribblings on a plane with Rushdie’s magisterial, imaginative, and so very carefully wrought novel; his talent is remarkable and wondrous.

My point is about the freedom of the press, and about its power, too. 

The Riverdale Press, the neighborhood newspaper that came out swinging against 20-year-old me, also had its say about Salman Rushdie. After several national-chain bookstores cowered to the ayatollahs’ threats and refused to sell “The Satanic Verses,” the Press took them to task and, in addition, gave a shout-out to a courageous local bookstore that defiantly continued to sell the novel. 

What was the reaction to this editorial? Days later, the paper’s offices went up in smoke; a firebomb had been hurled into it by some terrorist. But the gutsy local newspaper patched itself up, kept on publishing and, nine years later, a new editor — the son of the man who had torn into me — wrote an impassioned editorial decrying Penguin’s decision not to publish a paperback of Rushdie’s novel. “The need to defend our fragile civilization remains undiminished,” Bernard Stein wrote in the piece’s penultimate sentence. It was an editorial that was cited, among others, when Stein won the 1998 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing.

That’s what is brought so searingly home to me in the aftermath of the barbaric attack on Rushdie: the need to keep civilization and an open society flourishing with the sweet discord of a multitude of voices. Let the 20-year-old preening upstarts have their say. Let the visionary novelists spin their provocative tales. Let the storefront neighborhood newspapers continue to call them as they see them. It’s all part of the same gushing force of ideas that feeds and energizes the life of our times. It’s the cacophony that keeps civilization singing.

– 30 –

Howard Blum is a former reporter for The New York Times and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He is the author of several bestselling books, most recently “The Spy Who Knew Too Much: An Ex-CIA Officer’s Quest Through a Legacy of Betrayal” (HarperCollins). His non-fiction book, “Night of the Assassins,” is being developed by Sony as a limited series.

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Why is Ruth's Chris Steak House called 'Ruth's Chris Steak House'?

(NEXSTAR) – It’s not just you: Even the founder of Ruth’s Chris Steak House was perturbed by its name.

Ruth’s Chris Steak House — the somewhat confusingly named restaurant chain that apparently both “Ruth” and “Chris” have something to do with — has managed to open nearly 150 locations across the globe with relatively few people questioning who “Ruth’s Chris” is.

Perhaps not surprisingly, “Ruth’s Chris” is a real person. But he doesn’t belong to “Ruth,” and he has little to do with the chain’s success.

The story of Ruth’s Chris Steak House begins in 1927, when Chris Matulich opened up a restaurant called Chris Steak House on Broad Street in New Orleans. He ended up selling the business six times over the next several decades, buying it back after each new owner’s failed attempt to run the place, according to “Eat Dat,” a guide to New Orleans’ culinary history written by Michael Murphy.

Matulich likely didn’t have high hopes for the next entrepreneur who expressed interest in the place: a young woman named Ruth Fertel (nee Udstad), who had no experience running a restaurant. So he sold it for the seventh — and perhaps unbeknownst to him — the final time.

Fertel, a 38-year-old single mom working as a lab technician at Tulane University, had been looking for a way to pay for her sons’ college tuition. Her friends, family, lawyer and even the bank reportedly advised her against buying the steakhouse, but she ignored their warnings and mortgaged her home to purchase the business for $18,000.

“They told me I was absolutely crazy,” she said in a 1998 interview with Louisiana Public Broadcasting’s “Louisiana Legends” series.

She found success over the next 11 years, and even helped give back to the community by feeding relief workers and victims of Hurricane Betsy, and by hiring an all-female waitstaff made up of single moms like herself.

Fertel also went to work designing a special broiler to help cook the steaks to her specifications — a broiler which is still in use at Ruth’s Chris Steak House locations today, according to Ruth’s Hospitality Group.

In 1976, however, Chris Steak House burned down, forcing Fertel to find another space. But due to a clause in her purchase agreement with Matulich, she couldn’t use the name “Chris Steak House” unless she was running it out of the original building. Fearing that anything too different from “Chris Steak House” name would hurt her restaurant’s name recognition, she simply tacked “Ruth’s” to the front.

And she regretted it almost immediately.

“I’ve always hated the name,” Fertel told Fortune in the ‘90s. “But we’ve always managed to work around it.”

The somewhat hard-to-enunciate name didn’t stop Ruth from enjoying her work, either. A few years before she died in 2002, Fertel told Louisiana Public Broadcasting that she believed she found her calling in the hospitality business, despite coming from a background in chemistry and physics.  

“I was so lucky that I fell into something that I really, really love,” she said. “And I think that if you ever go into business, you better find something you really love because you spend so many hours with it, it almost becomes your life.”

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Jan. 6 witness Rusty Bowers says Constitution 'hanging by a thread' after election loss

Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), who testified before the select House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, said that the U.S. Constitution is “hanging by a thread” after he lost his reelection bid. 

Bowers in an interview with The Guardian described his phone conversations with former President Trump and Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath of the 2020 election, adding that the Republican Party has embraced “emotional violence.” 

“The Constitution is hanging by a thread,” Bowers told The Guardian. “The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”

Bowers also noted that he had to confront Trump supporters protesting in front of his home just days before the Capitol insurrection, referring to those individuals as “bullies.” 

“I never had the thought of giving up,” Bowers added. “No way. I don’t like bullies. That’s one constant in my life: I. Do. Not. Like. Bullies.”

Bowers told the Jan. 6 panel in June that Giuliani never produced hard evidence of election fraud in Arizona and refuted Trump’s claims that he told him that Trump had won the state and the election was rigged. 

He lost his reelection bid for his seat earlier this month, falling to State Sen. David Farnsworth (R-Ariz.), who was publicly backed by Trump. 

Bowers also told The Guardian that the Republican Party in Arizona has lost its way, saying the party is now all “emotional” and “revenge.” 

“They’ve invented a new way. It’s a party that doesn’t have any thought. It’s all emotional, it’s all revenge,” Bowers said. “It’s all anger. That’s all it is.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Why Democrats are regaining momentum

This summer, high temperature records were shattered across the United States; wildfires burned millions of acres from Oklahoma to Alaska; droughts ravaged Western states, and floods devastated Appalachia. These disasters contributed to a sense of urgency that helped Democrats pass a boatload of bills, including the most sweeping climate change legislation in American history. In the run up to the midterm elections they have regained some momentum.

And the contrast with Congressional Republicans on policies and priorities could not be more stark.

Republicans have blocked consideration of voting rights, childcare tax credits and restrictions on purchases of assault weapons. They have offered no proposals to spur economic growth or reduce inflation. Republicans have made irresponsible and inflammatory claims that the legally authorized search for top secret and classified documents at Mar-a-Lago was a “military occupation,” conducted by “rogue” FBI agents, who “planted” evidence. They have advocated the impeachment of Attorney General Merrick Garland and defunding the FBI. They continue to undermine our democracy by spreading the lie of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Meanwhile, despite a 50-50 split in the Senate and a slim majority in the House, Democrats are enacting legislation Americans want and need:

The Chips and Science Act allocates more than $50 billion for research and production of semi-conductors, which are essential to (among many other products) cars, weapons, washing machines and video games. This investment will reduce America’s dependence on China and increase the U.S. share of the world market from 2 to 10 percent. The Chips Act complements the $1 trillion Infrastructure Bill, signed by President Biden in November 2021, which allocates funds to repair or replace roads, bridges, rail systems, airports, and hazardous water pipes, increase access to broadband internet, and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act is the largest expansion of health care and disability benefits for veterans of the armed services (deployed in Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan) in more than 50 years. PACT grants preemptive benefits to claims of respiratory illness and cancers related to exposure to burn pits and other toxins, 70 percent of which were denied between 2007 and 2020. The legislation, which was held up by Republicans, could affect millions of veterans.

Passed without a single Republican vote in the Senate or the House, the Inflation Reduction Act is a massive climate, health, and tax bill. The legislation’s energy initiatives (including subsidies for electric cars) are expected to reduce carbon emissions in the United States by 40 percent in 2030. The bill reduces insurance costs in the Affordable Care Act; empowers Medicare to negotiate the prices of 100 prescription drugs over the next ten years; and caps out-of-pocket prescription drug costs at $2,000 a year for each Medicare recipient. The legislation levies a 15 percent minimum tax on the nation’s largest corporations and a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks. The whole package will reduce the deficit by about $300 billion.

This summer Democrats also discovered the political potency of support for reproductive rights. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Donald Trump declared (with uncharacteristic modesty), “God made the decision.” The ruling “will work out for everybody,” the former president added. Mike Pence said, “We must not rest and will not relent until abortion is banned through the United States.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters he would support a nationwide ban on abortion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), had already indicated that Congress “certainly could legislate in that area;” nor was it a “secret where Senate Republicans stand.”

House Democrats quickly passed bills ensuring the right of pregnant women to travel across state lines to get abortions and protecting health care professionals who provide abortions and patients who obtain them from civil or criminal penalties. Not surprisingly, given the filibuster, the Senate did not even consider the House bills.

That said, the turnout and landslide vote of Kansans against amending the state constitution to allow their legislature to ban abortions strongly suggests that Democrats are energized on an issue that previously brought conservative, evangelical Republicans to the polls.

In the 2022 midterms, the issues and the legislative record seem to favor the Democrats. That said, as long as a large percentage of Americans do not approve of the president’s performance in office, remain deeply concerned about inflation, and give credence to culture war canards about immigration, race, and sexual identity, retaining control of the House and Senate is unlikely.

But the odds are better, maybe even a lot better, than they were a few months ago.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Russian authorities investigating blast that killed daughter of Putin ally

Russian authorities are investigating a blast in the outskirts of Moscow on Sunday that killed the daughter of a close ally to Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation said in a statement that Daria Dugina, a journalist and political scientist, was killed after an explosive device that was planted under her Toyota Land Cruiser went off. 

Dugina was the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a political philosopher and an outspoken supporter of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Dugin, who pushed a vision of Russia becoming more “powerful” and “aggressive,” has been featured on Russian state television and is described as “Putin’s brain” by many. 

U.S. officials hit Dugin with sanctions in March for his support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Dugina was sanctioned for her work at a media outlet that the U.S. has said spreads disinformation. 

Dugina appeared on Russian nationalist network Tsargrad as a radio commentator and news anchor.

British officials imposed sanctions on Dugina last month, calling her a prominent “contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms,” The New York Times noted. 

Authorities said that both Dugin and his daughter were in attendance at a Russian nationalist festival called “Traditions” on Saturday before the blast. 

Officials in Ukraine have denied any responsibility for the blast.

“Ukraine certainly had nothing to do with yesterday’s explosion,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in a televised address on Sunday. “We are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, much less a terrorist one.”

Source: TEST FEED1