One Journalist Explains The Link Between Rethugs And Manufactured Outrage Over ‘Anti-Semitism’. I was thinking it, should’ve written it:
In early December, the House Education Committee held a hearing considering antisemitic incidents on college campuses. This was the hearing in which the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania offered fumbling responses to a question about antisemitic rhetoric, earning national headlines.
That result was a bonanza for the Republicans running the hearing and for Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) personally. As Politico wrote at the time, the situation helped drive a wedge between factions of the political left — widening a divide still obvious in Democratic politics.
But this was a fortunate (if not lucky) effect of the hearing. It was intended not to catch university presidents making tone-deaf comments about antisemitism but, instead, to present those presidents as out of touch and hopelessly liberal, echoing a line of argument that’s become increasingly common on the right.
Consider how committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) described the reason for the hearing as it began.
“After the events of the past two months,” Foxx said, “it’s clear that rabid antisemitism [and] the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another. A prime example of this ideology at work is at Harvard, where classes are taught such as DP 385, ‘Race and racism in the making of the United States as a global power.’”
The point was to use incidents of antisemitism as a criticism of elite institutions’ approach to education, in keeping with Republican rhetoric on the subject. As the debate over colleges has shifted to student protests in opposition to Israel’s military response to Oct. 7, the idea that colleges are incubators for left-wing ideology remains a subtext to the response on the right.
It’s the Sixties all over again. I know. I was there.
By The Time They Get To Phoenix, They’re Indicted. Yep, the usual suspects, with Le Grand Orange as an unindicted co-conspirator.
An Arizona grand jury has indicted former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyer Rudy Giuliani along with 16 others in an election interference case.
The indictment released Wednesday names 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election. It shows seven other defendants whose names were not immediately released because they had not yet been served with the charges.
The Associated Press was able to determine the identities of the unnamed defendants based on their descriptions in the indictment.
One is described as an attorney “who was often identified as the Mayor” and spread false allegations of election fraud, a description that clearly describes Giuliani. Another is described as Trump’s “ chief of staff in 2020,” which describes Meadows.
Your electric bills are about to go down in Delaware, but not by as much as some state officials think is fair.
A settlement agreement with utility company Delmarva Power — approved last week after an often-contentious, hourslong meeting — will offer a small rebate to Delawareans who’ve been paying higher rates on electricity since July of last year. Ratepayers will also pay slightly lower rates going forward.
The settlement was approved this month after more than a year of legal wrangling among Delmarva Power and a disparate gallery of players who challenged the utility’s rate increase plan.
Here’s why regulatory staff think the agreement was insufficient:
But the staff of the state Public Service Commission, which oversees utilities, vociferously opposed the deal. Their lawyers argued that small businesses were poorly represented and will suffer for it, that the state has disrupted precedent in damaging ways, and that, as a result, we’re all overpaying by about $6 million.
DPC staff argued that the “black-boxed” figure of $42 million was too high and against commission precedent, and that calculating the appropriate rate increase was a matter of previously established procedure and simple math.
“The proposed revenue requirement in the Settlement Agreement represents 79% of what the Company was seeking in rates ($53.7 million),” wrote DPC staff in a firmly worded rebuttal to the settlement agreement. “When compared to other recent settlements before this Commission, as well as litigated decisions involving this utility, the settlement amount presented is abnormally high with no justification or basis in fact.”
The figure should instead be $36 million, according to DPC staff, about $6 million less than the settlement agreement. DPC staff also argued that small business owners were ill-represented by the Delaware Public Advocate, and received rates that are too high under the agreement.