Red Wing Daily: December 27, 2024
"the more you know..."
State
Yep, there’s no grounds for it (except maybe spite?): The state’s Ethics Commission dismissed the complaint filed by Stephanie Johnson against Public Service Commission Chair Doyle Webb alleging that he solicited donations from Entergy for his wife’s Supreme Court Chief Justice campaign in exchange for settling a utility overcharge lawsuit for what some saw as a low-ball amount of $142 million. In its report, the panel noted that Entergy has contributed over $1.2 million to various unrelated political campaigns since 2023. Johnson, a Republican JP-elect from Saline County, is visibly critical on social media of Saline County Republicans and former Republican Party of Arkansas chair Doyle Webb (who’s from Saline County). Yep, this was the topic of the ill-fated press release Johnson sent back in August when she put her name on the ethics complaint against Webb; the mainstream press initially thought the Ethics Commission had leaked the story before they yanked it from their websites.
USDA’s eye on Tyson: “A 2022 Congressional Select Subcommittee report found that Tyson’s legal department drafted” President Trump’s executive order Trump signed requiring meatpacking plants to stay open during COVID. Now, under the Biden administration, USDA’s Packers and Stockyard Division is probing “Tyson’s sudden closure of several meatpacking plants last year, which left many poultry farmers in debt and facing bankruptcy.” USDA won’t confirm the effort; however, farmers say they’re talking with federal investigators and a class action lawsuit is also in play. Some industry insiders now question whether President Trump will support the inquiry against Arkansas-based Tyson.
Arkansas is tops, for once: “Arkansas’ third quarter real gross domestic product (GDP) of $149.105 billion grew at an annual rate of 6.9%, the most of any U.S. state, according to Friday’s (Dec. 20) report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).”
Arkansas 2024 election integrity: Seth Keshel, former Army Captain of Military Intelligence/Afghanistan veteran and election analyst, has released his “Ozarks 2024 Election Compendium” that digs deep into election trends in Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma and rates each state on its “election integrity quality.” (On his Substack click “No thanks” to read beyond the paywall.)
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says “no”: The state-wide newspaper says it’s dropping its X account because X’s new terms of service allows the company to harvest user posts to train its large language-learning models.
LEARNS ruling delay: Federal Judge Lee Rudofsky has postponed his decision on the state’s move to dismiss the LEARNS Act/critical race theory lawsuit, and instead asked for further briefs about whether the LEARNS Act violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment while the Court awaits a related Eighth Circuit appeal ruling.
You knew this would happen: On December 23, federal Judge Timothy Brooks ruled that Sections 1 and 5 of Act 372 are unconstitutional; he permanently blocked the library books law from taking effect after upholding a temporary injunction against these same provisions last year. Of course, AG Tim Griffin vows an appeal. In his ruling, Brooks says Section 1 is
overbroad because it regulates substantially more speech than the Constitution allows and therefore violates the First Amendment rights of Arkansans. Second, its terms are so vague that they fail to provide librarians and booksellers with adequate notice of what conduct is prohibited, thus violating their due process rights.
Not so fast: After Craighead County successfully voted in 2022 to cut library funding in half, Republican efforts to do the same in three other counties have tried and failed.
National
How could this be real? In Texas, constituents of Representative Kay Granger — the first Republican woman to represent Texas in Congress who’s served in significant positions, including Chair of the House Appropriations Committee — wanted to know her position on that 1,500-page spending omnibus monstrosity right before Christmas. But, her office was closed, she was nowhere to be found, and further investigation showed a series of missed votes in Congress. Where was Granger? Welp, she’s been found. She’s been living in a dementia facility for over six months after being found wandering in her neighborhood!
More commutations from Biden: “Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my administration has imposed on federal executions…” To date, Biden has commuted the sentence of more convicted criminals than any other President at this point in their first terms.
“2000 Mules” was wrong: Conservative film-maker Dinesh D’Souza has published an apology over the allegations in the “2000 Mules” film about ballot harvesting in the 2022 election, after learning that True the Vote had not actually correlated surveillance videos in the film with geolocation data, after they had been assured that “each video depicted an individual who had made at least 10 visits to drop boxes.” One of the individuals in the film is suing D’Souza, True the Vote and Salem Media, who published “2000 Mules,” for defamation.
Things that make you go “hmnnn”: Have you noticed how, all of a sudden, those seemingly inescapable videos of drone sightings have all but disappeared from mainstream media? But the “reporters” are still talking. Where are all the drones? Are people still seeing them everywhere? Is the media going to memory hole this story, too?
Sixty-three human rights organizations have asked House Speaker Mike Johnson and minority leader Hakeem Jeffries to reestablish the “Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the CCP” (“House Select Committee on China” ) going forward for the 119th Congress. Their December 17 request was partly to “counter a previous letter” from over 50 nonprofit advocacy organizations — the majority of them representing the interests of Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders — to not renew the Committee that Speaker Kevin McCarthy first initiated in 2023.
Tech
Do you know where your data is? Now it’s five million unencrypted U.S. credit/debit cards and personal details, left available to anyone in what’s called an Amazon S3 bucket — a “virtual file folder in the cloud.” While they aren’t able to determine who hacked the data and stored it on the Amazon cloud, investigators say
the leaked information contains 5 terabytes of screenshots where victims filled out their details on websites that offered “free iPhones” and heavily discounted holiday gifts.
With all these hacks and data leaks — and there’s much more of it going around than you may know — here’s what Malwarebytes Labs recommends for safety:
Regularly check account and card statements and notify your bank about any suspicious activity.
Where possible, set up fraud alerts with your bank or payment card provider.
Change the password and enable multi-factor authentication if you haven’t already.
Freeze your credit so nobody can open new accounts in your name.
Speaking of “the cloud”: While it may be convenient, its probably not a good idea to store any of these items in the cloud:
— financial documents
— private memento/video or other files
— intellectual property / business information
— passwords
— legal documents
— government-issued IDs (passports, social security cards, drivers licenses, etc.)
Charlie Brown says “Merry Christmas!”