90 Percent of Californians (One in 10 Americans) Are Under Flood Watch

A relentless onslaught of winter storms have pummeled California, leaving 16 people dead—more than the number of people who have died from California wildfires in the past two years. Now, as more rain looms, some 34 million Californians are under flood watches, or about 90 percent of the state’s total population and 10 percent of the country’s.

“These floods are deadly and have now turned to be more deadly than even the wildfires here in the state of California,” said Governor Gavin Newsom during a press conference Sunday, where he requested a state of emergency from the White House.

The weeks-long storming has left thousands of people without power as dangerous mudslides and flooding have plagued much of the state.

On Monday alone, between five and 10 inches of rain fell across areas facing flood warnings—with some rain levels peaking as high as 15.5 inches. The National Weather Service says that even six inches of water can reach the bottom of most passenger cars, while 12 would float many vehicles.

Hundreds of thousands have had their power knocked out over the course of the ongoing storms. As of writing, Poweroutage.us tracks just under 180,000 customers currently without power.

In a vacuum, such amounts of rain may superficially sound like a welcome interruption in a region blighted by drought. After all, the massive rainfall is part of what are known as “atmospheric rivers,” systems operating as rivers in the sky, which provide the region with much-needed water. But outside of the vacuum, this series is dropping too much precipitation too quickly. This is largely due to the ever-worsening impacts of climate change.

Warmer and drier conditions have led to more punishing drought in the region; such conditions have helped spark even more damaging wildfires and left the land less able to soak up precipitation. The conditions also lead to less staying annual snowpack, precipitation coming instead in the form of rainwater. All that combines in a recipe for disaster, as is on display now.

Terrifyingly, an August study warned the risk of once-in-a-lifetime megafloods is increasing and will become more damaging, particularly if human-caused climate change patterns continue. The study suggests that storms like the one in California will happen more often, and the “ceiling” for megafloods will increase in both likelihood and potential damage.

So California demands our attention on multiple fronts: the people who need help now and the dire need to improve our systems of life so these crises don’t get even worse.

Serial fabulist George Santos maintained Tuesday that he has done “nothing unethical,” even after being hit with two ethics complaints in as many days.

On Tuesday, two of his fellow New York representatives filed an ethics complaint against him. Ritchie Torres and Daniel Goldman, both Democrats, filed a formal complaint asking the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether Santos broke the Ethics in Government Act by failing to file “timely, accurate, and complete financial disclosure reports.” They then personally hand-delivered the complaint to Santos.

The two say that his reports for 2020 and 2022 lack sufficient information and that Santos has contradicted what is in the 2022 reports in his public statements.

“They’re free to do whatever they want,” Santos told reporters in response. “I have done nothing unethical.”

Santos, who was sworn in Saturday, has admitted he fabricated parts of his professional background. But it appears he also made up details of his educational history, his ethnicity and religion, and even his mother’s death.

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center also filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, accusing Santos of masking the real source of campaign’s funds, misrepresenting his campaign’s spending, and using campaign funds to pay for personal expenses. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors and prosecutors in Nassau County, New York, are investigating Santos’s finances and financial disclosures.

Santos has faced multiple calls to resign from Democrats, but Republican leadership seems unsure of what exactly to do with him. With the party holding onto the House majority by only a few seats, every vote counts—and Santos proved his loyalty by voting for Kevin McCarthy in every round of votes for speaker.

As Politico put it, “House Republicans know George Santos is a problem. They’re just not sure what to do about him yet.” One option includes not seating him on any committees, but the final consequences of his fabrications are still unclear.

After a handful of classified documents were found at President Biden’s former private office, Donald Trump, his allies, and even some of the mainstream media are stumbling over themselves to equate it with Trump’s hoarding of hundreds of classified documents after he left office. But the two cases are nowhere near the same.

The classified documents were discovered by Biden’s personal attorneys in his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. Fewer than a dozen documents were found, with CBS reporting the number at roughly 10. It is unclear what the documents contain and how sensitive they are. CBS News reported the documents do not contain nuclear secrets.

On the same day the attorneys found the documents, the White House counsel’s office notified the National Archives. The documents were handed over the next morning.

Meanwhile, recall that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago came after numerous attempts by the government to retrieve documents from Trump. The raid uncovered droves of documents that included documents from the CIA, NSA, FBI, and materials that described a foreign government’s nuclear defense capability. Overall, the government has recovered at least 300 classified documents since Trump left office; again, Biden’s team themselves actively returned the roughly 10 such documents that they found.

Of course, the difference isn’t stopping Trump or other Republicans from reacting in bad faith.

“When is the FBI going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Trump asked on Truth Social Monday night. “These documents were definitely not declassified.”

“We want to know exactly what documents were taken by both President Trump and now President Biden and want to know if they’re gonna treat President Biden any differently than they treated President Trump,” said GOP Representative James Comer.

Based on what we know so far, the number of the documents in question and the responses by the pair are radically different—so both cases indeed warrant different treatment. But it seems some mainstream media sources are not interested in laying out that plain fact:

Here—though the clip is not as bad as Froomkin’s tweet implies—the pair of commentators discuss how much of a “political gift” the situation is to Trump and pessimistically assert that nuance that could accurately communicate the differences in the two cases just won’t “cut through.” The duo speak as if they themselves aren’t also how thousands of people take in information, and aren’t ones who can help communicate that nuance. So, sure, they and we can agree that the right wing might operate in bad faith. But the mainstream media can’t haplessly stand in the middle of it all, shrugging their shoulders and saying it’s all just a darn shame.

Representative Katie Porter announced Tuesday that she is running for California senator in 2024.

The progressive star will run to replace long-serving Senator Dianne Feinstein. In her announcement video, the representative highlighted threats to democracy and socioeconomic inequality. She called out the Senate as a place where “rights get revoked and special interests get rewarded,” name-dropping Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in particular.

A former law school professor, Porter has made a name for herself as a tough interrogator and a progressive who can still appeal to swing voters. She is often seen on the House floor with whiteboards breaking down complex numbers and has achieved name recognition in a body of 435 members based on merit, not controversy—no small feat. Recently, she went viral for reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck during Kevin McCarthy’s interminable run for House speaker (and even coordinated her outfit to the dust jacket).

The California representative is also a strong fundraiser, raising more than $25 million during the November midterms and finishing with $7 million still in her coffers. She won her third term after a tight race that ended with days of vote counting. Although the Senate seat is expected to remain solidly blue, Porter is well positioned to run a competitive campaign.

Porter’s announcement comes before Feinstein has given any indication that she will retire. Feinstein, 89, has served in the Senate for 30 years and accomplished major achievements, such as chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee and assembling the 2014 CIA torture report, which found the agency had misled the government and American public about its use of torture in interrogating terrorist suspects. But in the past year, there have been concerns that she is losing the mental ability to continue serving.

Porter’s Senate bid would give Feinstein an opening to retire gracefully, passing the baton to the next generation as Nancy Pelosi did to Hakeem Jeffries.

“Everyone is of course welcome to throw their hat in the ring, and I will make an announcement concerning my plans for 2024 at the appropriate time,” Feinstein said in a statement after Porter’s announcement.

“Right now I’m focused on ensuring California has all the resources it needs to cope with the devastating storms slamming the state.”

This post has been updated.

Lynette Hardaway, better known as “Diamond” in the ultra-pro-Trump duo Diamond and Silk, passed away Monday night, the pair’s official Twitter account said. She was 51.

Hardaway and her sister Rochelle Richardson (“Silk”) have been some of Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015.

Trump announced Hardaway’s death on Truth Social before the official Diamond and Silk tweet, calling it “really bad news for Republicans and frankly, ALL Americans.” Both posts said her death was unexpected, but neither shared the cause of her death.

Diamond and Silk gained notoriety during Trump’s 2016 campaign through their political commentary videos on YouTube, in which they embraced his MAGA ideology. They said they had switched their political affiliation from Democrats to Republicans after Trump announced he was running.

Trump was quick to latch on to them, hyping up the fact that they were two Black women, thus supposedly proving that he was not racist. Diamond and Silk spoke at his rallies for the 2016 campaign, attended his inauguration, and testified in Congress multiple times in 2018 about Facebook supposedly suppressing their content.

Their fame and close relationship with the then president helped them get contributor jobs at Fox News, which at the time was aggressively pro-Trump. Diamond and Silk held multiple commentator roles at Fox News from 2016 to 2020, when the network cut ties with them for actively pushing Covid-19 conspiracy theories on air.

The women said that Covid-19 death numbers were being inflated to make Trump look bad. They also said they would refuse to get a Covid vaccine if Bill Gates had been involved in its production, accusing him of trying to control the global population, and suggested that 5G technology was being used to infect people with the coronavirus. All of these claims are untrue.

Diamond and Silk then landed their own show on far-right network Newsmax, calling themselves Trump’s “most loyal supporters.”

On Monday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a pseudo-hype video celebrating herself and the GOP House majority after the caucus made history in hosting the longest House speaker election since before the Civil War.

The video, posted with the caption “It’s time to begin … and they can’t stop what’s coming,” was set to Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.,” with a smattering of clips showing Greene dramatically striding through the halls of Congress, apparently to showcase her prowess as a political operator greasing the wheels of the House voting 15 times before Representative Kevin McCarthy finally won the speakership.

Garnering over four million views and some 14,000 likes (just 0.35 percent of viewers actually liking the video), the clip was removed after Dr. Dre himself requested Twitter remove the video. “I don’t license my music to politicians, especially someone as divisive and hateful as this one,” he told TMZ.

Dr. Dre’s lawyer, Howard King, had a few more words to share with Greene. “One might expect that, as a member of Congress, you would have a passing familiarity with the laws of our country. It’s possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on,” King wrote in a cease and desist letter addressed to Greene. King also sent a separate letter to Twitter requesting the company block her post.

Greene had told TMZ she was locked out of her account for using the copyrighted music without permission. And after so gleefully using Dr. Dre’s music in her engagement-snatching video, she snapped back at the eminent musician. “While I appreciate the creative chord progression, I would never play your words of violence against women and police officers, and your glorification of the thug life and drugs,” she told TMZ.

Perhaps such a 180 can be best left with the words of another classic Dril tweet that always seems relevant to the right wing in America:

Supporters of former far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro attacked the nation’s Supreme Court, Congress, and presidential palace in hordes on Sunday. And Brazil’s government—led by new President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—has minced no words on the attack.

Lula excoriated the “barbarism in Brasília,” calling the rioters “fascists, the most abominable thing in politics.” He then signed an edict mobilizing federal forces to intervene in the havoc.

“I wanted to tell you that all the people who did this will be found and punished,” Lula said as he signed the decree. “These people have to be punished, and we are going to find out who financed these vandals that went to Brasília, and they will all pay with the force of the law for this irresponsible gesture, this anti-democratic gesture, this gesture of vandals and fascists.”

And the decree is already in motion.

While the January 8 riot has drawn comparisons to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, one clear distinction is that the former has prompted both clear-eyed identification of who the culprits were—not just protesters or rioters but fascists—and an immediate effort to bring said fascists to justice. While hundreds have already been apprehended in Brazil in less than 24 hours, it took twice as long for the United States to charge 53 people.

It’s barely been a day, so it’s too early to completely evaluate Brazil’s efforts to hold the fascist rioters accountable. But the response thus far appears promising, and it is not just directed at individual rioters but also the systems that have directed them.

“We are going to find out who the financiers of these vandals who went to Brasília are, and they will all pay with the force of law,” Lula said, suggesting that the rioters were linked to the illegal logging, mining, and cattle ranching interests that pushed for the rampant deforestation that occurred under Bolsonaro’s reign.

The attackers acted on a fascist impulse to defend who they falsely see as their rightful ruler: a man who said he was committed to the transfer of power but refused to explicitly concede the election. Lula called it as it was, vigorously shutting down the fascist impulse and holding fast to the alternative politics he was duly elected to carry out.

A Brazilian lawmaker requested Monday that the Foreign Ministry begin the extradition of Jair Bolsonaro from the United States over the attack on Brazil’s government.

Supporters of the far-right former leader invaded and trashed several government buildings in Brasília over the weekend, in an attack that felt frighteningly reminiscent of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Bolsonaro, who spent New Year’s Eve at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, is still in Florida. He checked into a hospital earlier Monday with severe abdominal pain.

Erika Hilton, one of the first two openly transgender people elected to the National Congress of Brazil, formally requested that Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira begin the extradition process for Bolsonaro due to “serious events and attacks on the powers of the Federative Republic of Brazil.”

She slammed the riot as the work of “extremist groups” supporting the former president.

Several Democratic officials have also called for Bolsonaro to be extradited, including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Joaquin Castro.

Bolsonaro is already at the center of four criminal probes in Brazil for accusations of fraud and abuse of power. The allegations include using the federal police to protect his sons and spreading baseless claims that the October election—which he lost to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—was fraudulent.

A veteran, Bolsonaro has often been dubbed the “Tropical Trump” and is an outspoken admirer of the former U.S. leader. The similarities between the two men, particularly in the run-up to Brazil’s election, have been overwhelming. In addition to spreading disinformation and now the attack by his supporters, Bolsonaro also has not formally conceded and skipped his successor’s inauguration.

The House of Representatives votes later Monday on a new package of operating rules that includes chilling changes that could seriously damage the United States.

Kevin McCarthy was elected speaker of the House after 15 hellish votes, during which he made concession after concession to the farthest-right members of the chamber. The rules package for 2023 looks very different because of that.

Some moderate Republicans have already said they plan to oppose the package, such as Representative Tony Gonzales, who said he is against proposed potential defense budget cuts. Representative Nancy Mace expressed concerns over the lack of information about the “backroom deals” McCarthy made to win.

Here’s a look at some of the most dangerous proposals:

1. Motion to “vacate the chair”

Not only did McCarthy give all his dignity to his most extreme colleagues, he also apparently ceded all his actual power to them too. The California Republican agreed to restore the motion to vacate, which would allow any single member of the House to call for a vote to remove him.

Considering at one point 21 Republicans had blocked his bid for the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy will have the threat of removal hanging over his head throughout his entire tenure as speaker. He will spend his speakership rushing to please the people who finally agreed to put him there, rather than governing. And if he is removed, the House could be stuck in an endless loop of speaker votes, preventing the chamber from accomplishing anything.

2. Rules Committee assignments for the Freedom Caucus

McCarthy also agreed to give three seats on the powerful House Rules Committee to the Freedom Caucus, the far-right coalition. The House Rules Committee has a lot of influence over what bills and amendments make it to the floor. Freedom Caucus members could now block or stall actually useful legislation from ever reaching a vote. Politico called this “the single most significant surrender of leadership power that we’ve seen in decades.”

3. Slashed spending

The new rules will cap the debt ceiling, or the maximum amount of money the U.S. can borrow, to its level from two years ago. If the U.S. government reaches its soon-to-be-lower borrowing limit, it could default on its debt or fail to make a repayment. If that happens, already high prices and inflation could skyrocket, sending the U.S. into a recession.

Defaulting means the government will also be unable to pay military salaries and Social Security benefits. A lower debt ceiling would also mean less funding for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, SNAP or food stamps, and meal programs for low-income students.

4. The Holman rule

McCarthy also agreed to reinstate the Holman rule, which lets lawmakers propose reductions in federal salaries, in the number of employees at federal agencies, and in the budget for certain programs. Federal pay or budgets can be slashed to $1, effectively defunding programs. Already on the chopping block is the Internal Revenue Service. The agency is chronically understaffed but has also come under fire for its apparent failure to audit former President Donald Trump’s taxes in a timely manner.

5. Gutting federal investigators’ power

McCarthy also agreed to two proposals that would hugely undermine Congress’s credibility. First, one proposal will gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent federal watchdog, just as it was considering investigations into lawmakers who defied the January 6 investigative committee and serial fabulist George Santos.

The new rules would reimpose term limits on the OCE’s board members and restrict the window for hiring new staff to the first 30 days of the new congressional session (a week of which has already been wasted by McCarthy’s endless speaker votes). The changes would force out three of four Democratic-appointed board members and would run out the clock on hiring while new ones are approved, leaving the OCE unable to investigate anything.

But McCarthy is on board with investigating the FBI and the Department of Justice. He agreed to a proposed House Judiciary subcommittee to investigate the so-called “weaponization” of the federal government. The group will have access to any information shared with the House Intelligence Committee, which is usually the highest level of classified intelligence.

The subcommittee will supposedly act as a watchdog for ongoing criminal investigations, but an earlier version of the proposal limited the probe’s scope to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice.

Two ongoing investigations are into rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and into Trump over his removal of classified documents after losing the 2020 election.

Over 7,000 New York City nurses went on strike Monday, protesting poor pay and tough working conditions due to chronic understaffing.

The strikes at the Bronx’s Montefiore Medical Center and one of Manhattan’s Mount Sinai hospitals come after negotiations broke down Sunday evening.

The New York State Nurses Association had warned that workers at all 12 city hospitals with union contracts would go on strike if agreements could not be struck. After the announcement, seven hospitals struck tentative deals, including two late Sunday—but no agreement has been made yet at the two giant hospitals with nurses on strike Monday.

Nurses are disgruntled by staffing shortages, leading to long hours in tough conditions and not enough pay to match such circumstances, in which they are stretched thin trying to care for all their patients.

“Nurses don’t want to strike. Bosses have pushed us to strike by refusing to seriously consider our proposals to address the desperate crisis of unsafe staffing that harms our patients,” the New York State Nurses Association union said in a statement.

“The decision to go on strike is never an easy one, particularly for workers who care so deeply about the patients and communities they serve,” said New York City Central Labor Council AFL-CIO President Vincent Alvarez. “But hospital executives created this crisis by failing to hire, train, and retain nurses while at the same time treating themselves to extravagant compensation packages. Now it’s time for them to fix what they’ve broken.”

About 3,600 U.S. health care workers died in the first year of the pandemic alone. Now, some two and a half years after thousands drummed their pots and pans in support of the essential workers in one of the epicenters of the Covid-19 pandemic, nurses are left striking for better working conditions.