DL Open Thread: Tuesday, April 2, 2024

The Billionaires Who Prop Up Trump:  We already know about Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania’s richest man, who has bankrolled the Trump pump-and-dump shell company housing Truth Social.  We also know that Trump has not invested one penny in the shell company.  We know that the company literally has no chance to make money, meaning the only purpose for the company is to hand Trump a financial lifeline.  And to ensure that Yass will benefit greatly from a Trump presidency.  It is beyond my understanding how this stock was allowed to go public.

Enter the billionaire who gave Trump that $175 mill bond.  One Don Hankey, chair of Knight Specialty Insurance.  He’s bailed out Trump before:

Hankey told Forbes that his company had initiated the deal, reaching out to Trump just a few days before an appeals court lowered the amount Trump would have to pay while his appeal was heard. “This is what we do at Knight insurance,” said Hankey, who confirmed he had supported Trump’s political campaigns in the past. “I’d never met Donald Trump. I’d never talked to him on the phone. I heard that he needed a loan or a bond, and this is what we do. So, we reached out, and he responded.” The deal, Hankey said, came together in just a few days.

Hankey, a billionaire who presides over an auto-services empire, may never have met Trump, but he was the largest individual owner of Axos Financial, the lender that bailed out Trump by refinancing his mortgages at Trump Tower and his Miami resort in 2022. Axos also previously had done business with the family of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

When billionaires bail out Trump, they don’t do so out of public spiritedness.  They expect serious considerations in return.  They’re betting on him winning the election.

Is Florida In Play?  I don’t think so–for Biden.  However, the US Senate incumbent Rick Scott is unpopular, and the D’s have a competitive candidate in Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.  Ultimately, though, I expect D’s to make gains at the statewide and local levels.  BTW, it’s not just the abortion issue that will be on the ballot:

The Florida Supreme Court issued rulings Monday allowing the state’s voters to decide whether to protect abortion rights and legalize recreational use of marijuana, rejecting the state attorney general’s arguments that the measures should be kept off the November ballot.

At the least, we’re likely to see whether D’s have any short-term future in Florida.  BTW, not gonna be easy to pass the ballot initiatives.  Why?  Because a 60% vote in favor is the law in Florida:

First, in Florida ballot initiatives have to get 60% rather than 50% of the vote. That’s a particularly big deal for abortion rights because 60% is where support tends to top out. Most of the states which have held these referendums have tended to be fairly red states. That makes sense. If they weren’t fairly red they wouldn’t have banned abortion rights or drastically limited them in the first place. So for instance, the big vote in Kansas in 2022 which kept abortion legal got 59% of the vote. The recent one in Ohio got 56.6%.

One Of My Fave Black Roots Musicians On Beyonce’s ‘Country’ Album.  Yasmin Williams is as authentic as you can get.  That’s why I place more value in her opinion than on the raft of (mixed) reviews that have accompanied the release of the album:

I’m an internationally touring acoustic guitarist from Virginia who has studied American vernacular music. The promise of Beyoncé’s country album was exciting to me, as were the personnel on its two lead singles: the musician-scholar Rhiannon Giddens playing banjo and viola on Texas Hold ’Em and pedal steel player Robert Randolph – of the Sacred Steel tradition, the southern Black Pentecostal church music dating back to the 1930s – appears on 16 Carriages. These are Black country and folk artists who work within Black traditional lineages that deserve to be highlighted and celebrated for their specificity. However, on hearing Cowboy Carter this weekend, I felt as though little work had been done to utilise the breadth of knowledge of Beyoncé’s collaborators or the Black country/traditional music community at large. Beyoncé settled for using Giddens’ banjo and Randolph’s pedal steel as props to back up the overall production on the record, instead of boosting these traditions to the forefront on an album with an artificial sheen. Moreover, it felt in greater conversation with an exclusionary mainstream – and like a capitalist gesture to insert itself into that world.

Even as an album fusing genres, Cowboy Carter lacks the execution of a record such as Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Modern Sounds reworks country standards into pop, jazz, and R&B song forms by fusing the older traditions of country western music with the more modern popular music at that time. Perhaps if Cowboy Carter had featured more working-class Black country artists, or leaned on the scholarship of the likes of Dom Flemons, formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, or collectives such as Black Opry, which represents Black artists, fans and industry workers, or the now-defunct Black Country Music Association of the 1990s, it might have been as thrilling as Modern Sounds.

What do you want to talk about?