#richard uihlein

[vague-humanoid]

A far-right activist group that is doxxing college students who engage in pro-Palestinian protests revealed that it is funded by top Republican political donors and nonprofits backed by wealthy business leaders, a tax return reviewed by CNBC shows.

The group, Accuracy in Media, publicly disclosed on its federal tax return a list of donors who combined to contribute nearly $1.9 million to the tax-exempt nonprofit between May 2022 and April of last year.

The contributors listed on the tax return include billionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, who Accuracy in Media said gave it $1 million.

The family foundation of shipping supply magnate Richard Uihlein is also identified on the tax return, which says the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation gave $10,000. The Milstein Family Foundation, which is run by real estate executive and Republican donor Adam Milstein, gave another $10,000, the group reported to the IRS.

According to its tax return, Accuracy in Media said it received $15,000 from the Coors brewing family’s charitable foundation. The Adolph Coors Foundation is chaired by former Molson Coors executive Peter H. Coors, according to the foundation’s latest tax records.

Yass, Uihlein, Milstein and Coors have all donated regularly to Republican campaigns over the past decade.

But Yass stands apart from the others. The co-founder of options trading powerhouse Susquehanna International Group and his wife Janine are the biggest political donors of the 2024 election. So far, Yass and his wife have contributed $70 million to dozens of Republican candidates and committees, according to the nonpartisan campaign finance database OpenSecrets.

Much of the cardboard and paper goods strewn about our homes — the mail-order boxes and grocery store bags — are sold by a single private company, with its name, Uline, stamped on the bottom. Few Americans know that a multibillion-dollar fortune made on those ubiquitous products is now fueling election deniers and other far-right candidates across the country.

Dick and Liz Uihlein of Illinois are the largest contributors to Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and was linked to a prominent antisemite, and have given to Jim Marchant, the Nevada Secretary of State nominee who says he opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. They are major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica, aims to “get on God’s side of the issues and stay there” and “punish leftists.”

[tomorrowusa]

Trump promised billionaires at his Florida fundraiser that he will keep their taxes way low.

Keep in mind that Republicans endlessly whine about the national debt and use the debt as an excuse to cut healthcare. In fact, the debt has skyrocketed thanks to GOP tax breaks for the filthy rich this century.

Income inequality will only get worse under a Trump "dicataorship on day one" second term.

Donald Trump promised to keep billionaires’ taxes low at a fundraising dinner Saturday night in Palm Beach, Fla., held at the home of billionaire John Paulson. A Trump campaign official told NBC News that the former president “spoke on the need to win back the White House so we can turn our country around, focusing on key issues including unleashing energy production, securing our southern border, reducing inflation, extending the Trump Tax Cuts, eliminating Joe Biden’s insane [electric vehicle] mandate, protecting Israel, and avoiding global war.” NBC News requested to have a reporter present at the fundraiser, but the campaign refused.

Wanton greed is what motivates billionaires who are willing to toss freedom and democracy out of their yacht window.

Some billionaires who abandoned Trump in the wake of Jan. 6 and who supported his opponents in the primary have come crawling back to the former president in hopes of keeping their tax burden low. Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz — who apologized after Jan. 6 for supporting Trump, telling CNBC, “I’m sorry I did that” — recently hosted a breakfast at his Palm Beach mansion attended by Trump and several other billionaires, including Steve Wynn and Elon Musk, according to The Washington Post. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is also considering cutting Trump’s campaign a check, while billionaire heirs Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein told the Financial Times that they intend to donate to the former president’s campaign.

Essentially, Trump and the billionaires want to Make America Russia. An autocrat running the country who funnels wealth to the already filthy rich oligarchs.

This is not an election any of us can quietly sit out. It's necessary to become more active, make more donations, and be more outspoken than previously anticipated.

Re-elect Biden and the Trump tax cuts for billionaires expire on schedule. It's really that simple.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Countervailing power

It’s hard not to feel powerless. The rich are getting richer, the middle class is disappearing, and poor people are evermore exposed to labor abuses, predatory finance, police violence, and food-, fuel- and housing-insecurity. Our cities are increasingly segregated into the haves and have-nots, and the haves hoard the parks, schools and clean air:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/us/economic-segregation-income.html

The rich don’t just own all the good stuff, they also own the political process. The now-classic 2014 paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” finds that “ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

How do material wealth and political power relate to each other? Well, on the one hand, it’s obvious that if you have more wealth, you have more to spend on lobbying, both to the public and to lawmakers. As the leaks in Propublica’s IRS Files show, just having a lot of money can scare off regulators and legal enforcers, who know you’ll be able to hire more lawyers than they can.

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent

But the secret to oligarchy isn’t (just) outspending the rest of us. Oligarchs wield a far more important weapon: class solidarity. There is so much solidarity among billionaires, centimillionaires, decimillionaires and even ordinary millionaires, who may jockey with one another for the right to financialize your rent and suppress your wages, but come together with admirable discipline when their collective interests are at stake.

Take taxes. In a major new Propublica IRS Files story, Paul Kiel and Mick Dumke document the behind-the-scenes spending that defeated Illinois’s state referendum on a progressive state tax comparable to the system in 32 other states:

https://www.propublica.org/article/ken-griffin-illinois-graduated-income-tax

Led by the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin of Citadel (the richest man in the state) the ultra-rich of Illinois unleashed a blizzard of money on deceptive ads that ultimately defeated the measure. That spending was a bargain! Propublica calculates that Griffin’s $54,000,000 contribution saved him $51,000,000 per year thereafter (the IRS Files show Griffin’s average income to be about $2.9 billion per year).

Griffin led the “investment” in starving Illinois’s tax coffers, but he had a lot of co-investors: there’s Richard Uihlein, the billionaire behind Iline, who kicked in $100k. Uihlein’s a shrewd investor in political corruption, having spent $20m on Ron Johnson’s campaign, only to have Johnson insert a last-minute amendment to the Trump tax cuts that saved him $215m in the first year alone:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory

Sam Zell, whose leveraged buyout of the Chicago Tribune led the newspaper into bankruptcy, kicked in $1.1m and got $1.6m/year in savings every year thereafter. The Tribune now operates out of a windowless cinderblock bunker the size of a Chipotle:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Patrick Ryan gave $1m to realize a return of $2.1m/year. Richard Colburn’s $500k nets him $5.5m/year. He told Propublica that the spending was an investment “to limit the temptation on me to relocate.” Donald Wilson gave $250k to get back $3.5m/year.

Richard Stephenson, who made his nut with a chain of for-profit cancer hospitals and was executive producer on two Ayn Rand film adaptations (you literally can’t make this shit up), gave $300k through his trust.

Another trust spend came from Philip M Friedmann, who cashed out his family’s greeting card business by selling to private equity looters. Friedmann’s trust is a “personal” one, which makes his $25k investment illegal, according to three tax experts that Propublica consulted.

The campaign to raise Illinois’ 5% flat tax to an 8% tax for the richest people in the state was a rare example of billionaire-on-billionaire violence. Democrat Governor JB Pritzker — scion of the Hyatt Hotel fortune — won office by promising to raise taxes on the rich. This sparked a political bidding war, pitting former GOP governor Bruce Rauner (another private equity looter) in a race that ultimately cost more than $250m.

Though the billionaire low-tax coalition lost the battle for the governor’s mansion, they won the war, thanks to $63m in ads that convinced the people of Illinois that they would see higher taxes as a result (the vast majority of Illinoisians would not have seen their tax bills go up).

While Pritzker is a rare class traitor, he still maintained some loyalty to his cohort, continuing to milk his grandfather’s fortune through a system of secret trusts typical of dynastic wealth, which seeks to ensure that merely emerging from a very lucky orifice guarantees you the power to impact the lives of millions of people who lost the orifice lottery:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

When even the “good” billionaires favor the eugenic proposition that being descended from someone who made a lot of money makes you suited to leadership and influence, it’s no wonder that this proposition is so durable in our political system.

Now, it’s obvious why rich people would favor a system that increased and perpetuated their wealth and power, but self-interest alone doesn’t explain the rock-solid solidarity of the oligarchs. The other crucial element is in their numbers: when your bloc is small, it’s easier to come to agreement on how it should mobilize.

This is how monopolies rot our society and politics. When an industry is composed of hundreds of companies, they’ll struggle to agree on the catering for their annual meeting. Reduce the number of firms until all their CEOs will fit around a board-room table, and they’ll be able to agree on far more ambitious issues, like whether to raise prices in unison and blame “inflation”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

Collective action problems are some of the hardest challenges we face as a species. Solving collective action problems are why we build institutions: from the Mafia to the Catholic Church, from trade unions to federal governments, from the UN to the Cali cartel, organizations exist to find ways to let groups of people coordinate their activities to do more than any individual could do on their own:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Oligarchs benefit from having a lot of money to spend, but even more important is that their numbers are so low that they can agree on how to spend it. Every time the rich figure out how to coordinate better, they clean up. Take this NBER working paper that shows that when giant funds become company shareholders, worker wages go down:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30203/w30203.pdf

Once the power of the wealthy is gathered into the hands of a few fund managers, they’re able to direct that power to pick managers who’ll endure the internal strife from slashing wages, benefits and staffing levels. Workers, by contrast, are atomized and can be divided and pitted against one another.

Now, obviously if real wages are declining, then there must have been a time when forces drove them up, when workers were able to hold the line against the power of the owning class. The most familiar tool workers used to exercise this power was unionization, which is why oligarchs hate unions and spend millions to keep their workers from organizing.

Though unions are having a renaissance, they are still far weaker than they were during the period in which workers built and expanded power — and oligarchs are far stronger (richer, more coordinated). Oligarchs have built a flywheel, where more power gives them more money which gives them more power.

To brake the flywheel, we have to come up with our own virtuous cycle of systems, laws and tactics that build one atop another. “Countervailing Power” is a new series from The American Prospect and The Forge that systematically explores how to build that system:

https://prospect.org/topics/countervailing-power/

The debut article is “Laws That Create Countervailing Power,” a discussion between ACORN’s Steve Kest and Benjamin Sachs and Kate Andrias, facilitated by Robert Kuttner:

https://prospect.org/power/laws-that-create-countervailing-power/

The discussion is framed by “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” a Yale Law Review article by Sachs and Andrias about laws that can be used to build, fortify and expand worker power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/constructing-countervailing-power-law-and-organizing-in-an-era-of-political-inequality

They propose that there are six categories of law that build countervailing power:

Laws that “grant collective rights in an explicit and direct way to create a frame that encourages organizing”

Laws that “provide for financial, human, and other resources,” including money, but also “information that helps direct the work of the organization and inform its leadership”

Laws that create ��free spaces in which movement organizing can occur, free from surveillance and control,” both physical and digital

Laws that “remove barriers to participation both by protecting people involved in organizing efforts from retaliation and also by removing material obstacles that make it difficult for people to organize”

Laws that “provide organizations with ways to make material change in their members’ lives” by “creating ways to engage in bargaining with private and public actors that actually correspond to the way political and economic power is organized”

Laws that “enable contestation and disruptive collective action” including “strikes and protests and other kinds of disruptive activity”

The article and the discussion give good examples of all six, but I’m more interested in how they play into one another — like how the New Deal electrification co-ops created enduring institutions that organized people, incubated leaders, and turned into telephone co-ops. Some of these are around today, providing blazing-fast co-op internet (AKA, the “free spaces” mentioned above) to poor people:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

I was recently on an organizing tactics call about the housing crisis, and we got to talking about the wicked panoply of problems that drive people to oppose affordable housing. With the elimination of unions — and thus work — as a path to social mobility, we’ve told working people that everything depends on their house appreciating.

Unless their family home goes up in value, they will not be able to afford retirement, their kids’ college education or emergency medical bills. They certainly won’t be able to put down a deposit for their own kids’ homes.

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

All of this drives people to want to limit the supply of housing, and also to hoard the benefits of housing, supporting nakedly inequitable policies like funding schools through local taxes, so richer neighborhoods get better schools.

It also drives people to with homes to favor policies that make life worse for people without homes. The worse things are for tenants, the more landlords can extract from them, and the more all houses are worth, because everyone is bidding against landlords who can raise rents, evict, and pass on maintenance costs.

On the one hand, this is dismal, because maybe it means that we can’t improve our housing system until we fix pensions, student debt, for-profit healthcare, and tenants’ rights.

But on the other hand, you can think of each of these issues as a loose end in the gnarly knot of housing dysfunction, a place where we can start unpicking the problem. Like, if we fix student debt, a major part of the reason to favor anti-tenancy policies will disappear (the parents who want to use home equity to send their kids to college also realized that their kids will be tenants, after all).

In other words, the entanglement of all our social problems means that any battle where we can eke out a victory produces tactical benefits for all the other fronts in the war. It means we can build victory upon victory. It means we can tear apart the countersolidaristic coalitions (say, homeowners) by addressing the material conditions that lead people to fight against the human right to shelter.

Uncoupling a dignified retirement, or a decent education, or lifesaving medical treatment, from the need to immiserate others is a powerful tool to build up countervailing power — to create coalitions like the ones that suppressed oligarchy from the New Deal until the Reagan Revolution.

[Image ID: A mountain village that is being trampled under the feet of a tailcoat-wearing giant. The giant is about to be felled by a giant fist made out of the combined raised arms of hundreds of ordinary workers and farmers. The meta-fist is haloed with an aura of red light.]

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 8.25

Beer Birthdays

George F. Klotter Jr. (1835)

August Uihlein (1842)

Hans Adolf Krebs; biochemist (1900)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Leonard Bernstein; composer, orchestra conductor (1918)

Tim Burton; film director (1958)

Sean Connery; Scottish actor (1930)

Elvis Costello; rock musician, songwriter (1954)

Walt Kelly; cartoonist (1913)

Famous Birthdays

Martin Amis; British writer (1949)

John Badham; film director (1939)

Rachel Bilson; actor (1981)

Billy Ray Cyrus; country singer (1961)

Don DeFore; actor (1913)

Mel Ferrer; actor (1917)

Rollie Fingers; Oakland A's P (1946)

Frederick Forsyth; English writer (1938)

Althea Gibson; tennis player (1927)

Richard Greene; actor (1918)

Rob Halford; English rock singer (1951)

Monty Hall; television host (1923)

Bret Harte; writer (1836)

Ivan the Terrible; Russian leader (1530)

Van Johnson; actor (1916)

Ruby Keeler; dancer, actor (1910)

Emil Kocher; surgeon (1841)

Hans Adolf Krebs; biochemist (1900)

Blake Lively; actor (1987)

Bill Nye; humorist (1850)

Regis Philbin; television host (1934)

Allan Pinkerton; detective (1819)

Michael Rennie; actor (1909)

Charles Richet; physiologist (1850)

Frederick Chapman Robbins; microbiologist (1916)

David Russell; Scottish rock guitarist (1942)

John Savage; actor (1949)

Claudia Schiffer; German model (1970)

Wayne Shorter; jazz saxophonist, composer (1933)

Gene Simmons; rock bassist, singer (1949)

Tom Skerritt; actor (1933)

Whitney Stevens; porn actor (1987)

George Stubbs; English artist (1724)

Blair Underwood; actor (1964)

Johann Gottfried von Herder; German philosopher (1744)

George Wallace; racist politician (1919)

Joanne Whalley; actor (1964)

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Ken Griffin, the CEO of investment firm Citadel and a Republican mega-donor, called former President Donald Trump a "three-time loser" and said he hoped Trump wouldn't run for the White House again.

"I'd like to think that the Republican party is ready to move on from somebody who has been for this party a three-time loser," Griffin said on Wednesday at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore.

While Griffin praised Trump for his rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, he referenced Trump's failed presidential bid in 2020, the results of this year's midterms, and the Republican party's loss of two Georgia Senate seats in 2021.

"I really hope that President Trump sees the writing on the wall," Griffin said. His remarks came before Trump announced his 2024 bid at Mar-a-Lago.

Griffin voiced support for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has yet to announce a presidential campaign for 2024.

"DeSantis is going to run on a record of just unbelievable accomplishment," Griffin said, noting that the governor won reelection by 20 percentage points in a once-hotly contested state.

Griffin donated $5 million to DeSantis' reelection campaign in 2018, according to data from the transparency website OpenSecrets. He gave another $5 million to DeSantis in April 2021, per NBC.

Trump and DeSantis are anticipated to clash for the Republican presidential nomination, with Trump deriding the Florida Governor with a mocking nickname, "Ron DeSanctimonious." DeSantis on Wednesday dodged questions about a brewing GOP civil war with the former president, saying people need to "chill out" after the midterms.

Trump has been blamed by some Republicans for the GOP's bad performance this election after the party failed to take the Senate but won the House.

Griffin, however, said he was happy with the midterm results, saying the split votes showed that people came out to cast their ballots. "It was a triumph of democracy," he said.

In 2018, Griffin donated $1 million to Trump's Future45 PAC, per OpenSecrets data.

In total, the CEO has put nearly $60 million into Republican campaigns this election cycle, becoming the second-largest current GOP donor, according to Politico. The only Republican donor who's spent more this cycle is Schlitz Beer heir Richard Uihlein, who has donated around $62 million, per the outlet.

Zia Ahmed, a spokesperson for Griffin, told Insider he had nothing to add to the billionaire's comments.

Representatives for Trump and DeSantis did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

[pashterlengkap]

Moms for Liberty plotting election season comeback after threesome scandal & rape allegations

As the 2024 election cycle heats up, the scowls at Moms for Liberty (M4L) are leveraging their outsized right-wing influence to finger-point and scold their way into what they hope will be mainstream relevance — with the help of more than $3 million dollars from online true believers and shadowy far-right organizations. The group made a name for themselves as a close ally of failed Republican presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, promoting “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and hunting down LGBTQ+ content in local school libraries when they weren’t busy hijacking local school board meetings. Related Explosive police report reveals how Moms for Liberty co-founder arranged bisexual threesomes “Don’t come home until your d–k is wet,” the anti-LGBTQ+ activist told her husband while encouraging him to secretly photograph women at a bar. Freed, they think, from the libertine scandals of their co-founder Bridget Ziegler —whose bisexual contretemps last year saw her husband fired from his job as Florida GOP chair after rape allegations and her own influence on Sarasota’s school board evaporate like a puddle of hypocrisy under a Florida noonday sun — the angry Moms are now plotting a comeback directed at two targets. Your LGBTQ+ guide to Election 2024 Stay ahead of the 2024 Election with our newsletter that covers candidates, issues, and perspectives that matter. Subscribe to our Newsletter today First, according to Tina Descovich, one of the surviving M4L co-founders, the group is aiming resources at members — 20% of whom are not registered to vote — to “wake them up and activate them to take action, not just in these local elections that we endorse in, but at all levels of government,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press. Second, Descovich says she wants to go national with the help of “investors” who approached the group to “grow in specific states.” Those include four battleground states where the group plans a major TV ad buy to rile up the conservative base over culture war issues, including Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Plans to expand that campaign into Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are also underway.  While declining to identify its far-right funders, Federal Election Commission records show the group’s affiliated PAC, Moms for Liberty Action, has taken $161,000 from Restoration PAC, which is funded by the conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, since October. Descovich’s AP outreach is part of a coordinated effort to clean up the Moms’ sullied reputation. In addition to the ongoing Ziegler scandal, local M4L chapters and their leaders have been spinning out of control around the country. Leadership removed two Kentucky chapter chairs last fall when the women posed with members of the Proud Boys in a frightening demonstration of far-right fraternity. Last summer, an Indiana chapter of the group was forced to apologize and condemn Adolf Hitler after quoting the Nazi leader with enthusiasm in their inaugural newsletter. And in January, a Moms for Liberty school board member was caught red-handed shoplifting from a notorious M4L boycott target — wait for it — Target. It’s the Ziegler scandal, however, that’s the dark gift that keeps on giving. Newly released documents from Christian Ziegler’s rape investigation reveal the couple went “on the prowl” in Sarasota bars to find women to have sex with. A Sarasota Police Department memo quotes text messages from Bridget Ziegler to her husband directing him to send photos of possible three-way partners. According to the memo, Ziegler told her husband to pretend to take pictures of the beer he was drinking to help cover his photographing of the women. Said the Moms for Liberty co-founder in one text quoted in the memo, “Don’t come home until your dick is wet.” http://dlvr.it/T7MVVR

[blinkaholik1]

Reliquary Continued

Recent Acquisition As the foremost Italian cabinetmaker of the 18th century, Pietro Piffeti was in the service of the royal House of Savory for over 40 years. Piffetti’s works are remarkable for their technical skill; the intricate marquetry decoration on this prie-dieu is all the more impressive when one considers the difficulty of veneering curved surfaces. Thes prie-dieu-a kneeling bench used at home for personal devotion - was most likely made for the youngest son of Carl Emmanuel III, King of Sardinia, for use in the Palace of Venaria, the family’s hunting lodge outside Turin. A door in the center of the prie-dieu conceals a small cabinet for a rosary and prayer books, and the drawer at the base would have held a padded kneeler. The interiors of the cabinet retains its original pink paint; popular in the mid-18th century, the color pink did not yet have the feminine associations it does today. Door About 1750 Design attributed to Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (Italian, 1727-1804) Venice Wood, gessoed and lacquered with polychrome decoration and gilding Bessie Bennett Endowment, 1953.461 Side Chair About 1740 Giles Grendey (English, 1693-1780) London Walnut and 18th-century, replaced upholstery Gift of the Antiquarian Society, through the Mrs. Edgar J. Uihlein Fund, 1983.718 Desk and Bookcase 1732 John Kirkhoffer (Irish, born Germany, active 1730s) Dublin Walnut, holly, mirror glaze, and brass Gift of Robert Allerton, 1957.200 When this walnut desk and bookcase was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957, it was described by the dealer as “English, about 1710.” Only recently have the name of the maker and date, “John Kirkhoffer Facit [sic] 1732,” been found inscribed in pencil on the bottom of the lower right drawer. As the oldest known piece of signed and dated Irish furniture, it has become a Rosetta Stone for attributing other closely related examples of Dublin cabinetary, especially those notable for their use of similar marquetry inlay. Candelabra, 1700/20 England Glass Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John H. Bryan, 2012.866 Seated Buddist Cult Figure and Potpourri Vase, c. 1740 France Chantilly Porcelain Factory (founded c. 1725) Soft-paste porcelain Gift of Mrs. Hareold C. Smith and the Antiuarian Society, 1969.225 The Louis Smith Bross Gallery (206-234B) Coffer 1700/20 Attributed to Andres-Charles Boulle (French, 1642-1732) Paris Oak, tortoiseshell, brass, gilt copper, pewter, ebony, and gilt-bronze mounts Michael A. Bradshaw and Kenneth S. Harris, Eloise W. Martin, Richard T. Crane. Jr., Memorial, and European Decorative Arts Purchase funds; through prior acquisitions of Mrs. C. H. Boissevain in memory of Henry C. Dangler, Kate S. Buckingham Endowment, David Dangler, Harold T. Martin, and Katherine Field-Rodman, 2001.54 Looking Glass About 1700 Probably London Gessoedand gilt pine, verre eglomise (reverse-pained glass), gilding, and mirror glass Gift of Mr. and Mrs. L. W. Colburn, 1968.424

[msclaritea]

GOP megadonor pours millions into effort to hinder Ohio abortion amendment - CBS News

"New campaign finance records show Illinois Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein is funding the bulk of the campaign aimed at thwarting a constitutional amendment on abortion in Ohio. 

Ohio is likely the only state this year to have a measure on the ballot to enshrine abortion access into the state constitution, setting up a test case for how the issue may drive voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election. A USA TODAY Network/Suffolk University poll released this week found 58% of Ohioans support a constitutional amendment.

That support may not be enough to pass. Currently, such amendments require support from a simple majority — 50% + 1 vote. But the GOP-led state legislature set up a special election for Aug. 8 to raise the threshold to 60%. That measure is known as Ohio Issue One.

Uihlein, an Illinois shipping supplies magnate with a history of donations to anti-abortion groups, was the top funder of Protect our Constitution, the main group supporting Issue One. Uihlein gave $4 million to the group, the bulk of the $4.85 million raised. 

Last month, a CBS News investigation found Uihlein had an outsized role in getting Issue One on the ballot. In April, he gave $1.1 million to a political committee pressuring Republican lawmakers to approve the August special election. Financial disclosures show a foundation controlled by Uihlein has given nearly $18 million to a Florida-based organization pushing similar changes to the constitutional amendment process in states across the country. 

Uihlein didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ohio Republicans pushing to change the rules over constitutional amendments originally billed the effort as one that would prevent outside interests from influencing the state constitution. But supporters, including Secretary of State Frank LaRose, have since acknowledged the change would make it harder for a constitutional amendment on abortion to pass. 

Last year, voters in Kansas and Michigan chose to preserve abortion access in their state constitutions with just under 60% approval.

Once the August special election was approved, money began to flow in on both sides. The central group opposed to raising the threshold for passing an amendment to 60%, One Person One Vote, raised a total of $14.4 million. The Sixteen Thirty Fund gave $2.5 million to the effort, campaign finance records show. The group, based in Washington D.C., has spent millions on left-leaning causes, including the campaign against the confirmation of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."

[karen-anti-r-cml]

Don't Trust Republican-Confederate MAGA Loyalist, Billionaires Are Paying Them More Than "We The People" Can Afford.

Dick Uihlein Gave $1 Million + to an Ohio R-CML PAC to Support This Resolution

2022: Dick and Liz Uihlein gave $40 Million + to Support Campaigns for... Ron Johnson, Herschel Walker and others.

2023: The Uihlein's Are Reportedly the 4th Biggest Campaign Donors in the U.S., giving $190 million +

"Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut”

"Ohio House R-CML votes to send amendment to special election in August"

"Richard/Liz Uihlein"

[wisconsinprelawland-blog]

Janet Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly Advance to Wisconsin Supreme Court General Election

By Iyanu Osunmo, Lawrence University Class of 2023

March 6, 2023

Wisconsin State Supreme Court candidates Janet Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly have advanced through the primaries to the general election, which will be held on April 4, 2023. Upon winning the race, either Protasiewicz or Kelly will serve on the court for a 10-year term [2]. The court has a conservative 4-3 majority, therefore, the victor of this race will determine whether the court has a liberal or conservative majority [2]. While Kelly secured roughly 24% of the votes, Protasiewicz acquired 46%. This race is among the most important this year, as it will determine the fate of Wisconsin’s abortion ban, redistricting, schools, and voting rights [4].

Notably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race is already the most expensive judicial race in United States history [5]. In under a week into the general election, candidates spent $18 million [5]. Protasiewicz’s campaign has received millions from Democrats, while Republican groups have invested $1 million in advertisements to bolster Kelly’s campaign [5]. This election also saw high voter turnout: 960,000 voters headed to the polls [6].

According to Wisconsin state Democratic party chair Ben Wikler, this election “is the hinge on which Wisconsin’s political future will swing. And Wisconsin is the hinge on which national politics swings” [6].

Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Judge, has shattered fundraising records, raising four times more money than her competitors in the primary and more than all other candidates combined [3]. Furthermore, she has received an endorsement from Emily’s List, a pro-choice political action committee [2]. If Protasiewicz emerges victorious, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will have a liberal majority for the first time since 2008 [4]. If the court has a liberal majority, then numerous republican-backed policies could be jeopardized, including Wisconsin’s private-school voucher program [5].

Protasiewicz spoke candidly about her stance on divisive issues and emphasized her values when reaching out to voters [4]. Seemingly, she has also chosen to use Kelly’s stance on abortion and his previous career as a defense attorney against him [6].

Protasiewicz has asserted that she “values a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive healthcare decisions with her doctor, family, and faith” [4]. She has also expressed that she values democracy and reaffirmed the right of every Wisconsinite to be represented [4].

During his primary campaign, Daniel Kelly raised $470,000–a fraction of what his competitor earned [4]. However, Kelly has benefited greatly from CEO and GOP mega-donor Richard Uihlein’s $1.5 million donation to Fair Courts America, which is a group that has backed his campaign [4]. Thus far, Fair Courts America has purchased over $2.4 million in ad buys [4]. While he has not stated how he would rule on Attorney General Josh Kaul’s lawsuit asserting that Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion law is unenforceable, Kelly has also received the support of certain grassroots organizations, including Wisconsin Right to Life and Wisconsin Family Action [4].

Daniel Kelly is also a Donald Trump supporter who advised Republicans on legal avenues for overturning the 2020 presidential election results [7]. Consequently, Kelly was involved with Trump allies’ endeavor to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in Wisconsin using “fake electors” [7]. Even so, Jim Dick–Daniel Kelly’s campaign spokesperson–has stated that Kelly "believes Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the United States" [7].

Kelly has asserted, “If we do not resist this assault on our Constitution and our liberties, we will lose the Rule of Law, and will find ourselves saddled with the Rule of Janet…We must not allow this to come to pass" [4].

According to the senior adviser to Kelly’s campaign Ben Voelkel, Democrats’ strategy of rendering the election a “single-issue” contest on abortion was shortsighted because conservatives are likely to oppose Protasiewicz by targeting her stances on gun rights and charter schools [6]. Voelkel also indicated that the Kelly campaign would use her judicial record against her.

“She had very, very lenient sentences for some people who committed very heinous crimes,” Voelkel asserted [6].

This election, which is the largest of 2023, has undoubtedly captured the attention of political stakeholders across the nation because of the implications that it will have on numerous crucial issues, such as abortion, in Wisconsin and across the country.

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[1]Bauer, S. (2023, February 21). Protasiewicz, Kelly Advance in 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court Primary. PBS Wisconsin. https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/protasiewicz-kelly-advance-in-2023-wisconsin-supreme-court-primary/

[2]Edelman, A. (2023, February 22). Trump Ally Advances in Wisconsin State Supreme Court Race. NBCNews.com. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/daniel-kelly-wisconsin-supreme-court-trump-fake-electors-rcna71276

[3]Henry Redman, W. E. F. 13. (2023, February 13). Protasiewicz' fundraising advantage continues. Wisconsin Examiner. https://wisconsinexaminer.com/brief/protasiewicz-fundraising-advantage-continues/

[4]Johnson, S. (2023, February 23). Janet Protasiewicz, Dan Kelly to face off in high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court Election. Wisconsin Public Radio. https://www.wpr.org/janet-protasiewicz-wisconsin-supreme-court-primary-election-results-dan-kelly-jennifer-dorow-everett-mitchell

[5]Beck, M. (2023, March 1). Wisconsin's Supreme Court race is already the most expensive in U.S. history, and there are still 5 weeks to go. Journal Sentinel. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2023/02/28/wisconsin-supreme-court-race-already-most-expensive-in-u-s-history/69955195007/

[6]Montellaro, Z., & Messerly, M. (2023, February 27). The biggest election of 2023 reaches final sprint. POLITICO. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/27/wisconsin-supreme-court-election-00084406

[7]Edelman, A. (2023, February 21). Trump ally advances in Wisconsin State Supreme Court Race. NBCNews.com. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/daniel-kelly-wisconsin-supreme-court-trump-fake-electors-rcna71276