John Hanno – Page 126 – The Tarbabys Blog

CEOs will finally admit next year that return-to-office mandates didn’t move the productivity needle, future of work experts predict

Fortune

CEOs will finally admit next year that return-to-office mandates didn’t move the productivity needle, future of work experts predict

Jane Thier – December 26, 2023

Happy holidays, remote workers. In software firm Scoop’s 2024 Flex Report, which includes flexible work predictions from an array of industry experts, one idea bubbled to prominence: CEOs might finally give up the effort on making mandated in-office days happen.

“By the end of 2024, executives will be forced to admit their RTO mandates did not improve productivity,” read the top-line prediction from Annie Dean, longtime flexible work evangelist and head of Team Anywhere at software firm Atlassian.

For years now, experts like Dean have said flexibility is key, and employees have made that priority clear on their own terms, too—often with their feet. So why do so many bosses nonetheless hold out?

“There are two camps on RTO mandates: Small companies and large companies,” Robert Sadow, Scoop’s CEO and co-founder, tells Fortune. Small companies, those with under 500 employees, “overwhelmingly” let workers choose whether or not to go in. It’s the bigger companies, especially those with over 25,000 employees, that tend to set mandates.

Dean went on to cite a recent Atlassian survey of Fortune 500 executives, which concluded that low productivity is expected to be a prime challenge for most of them in the coming year—as it’s been in years past. That’s despite the fact that nearly all (91%) of the leaders surveyed currently mandate some amount of in-office presence per week.

“It seems like many already know that these mandates aren’t the answer,” Dean commented. “Only one in three executives with an in-office mandate are convinced that their in-office policies have had a positive effect on productivity.” Rather than where work happens being of significance next year, how work gets done will become the “key cultural touchpoint.”

Dean’s held this line for over a decade, even before the pandemic forced everyone to be a remote work proponent, if only temporarily. Another leader featured in the report, Cara Allamano, who heads up people operations at management software firm Lattice—which, like Atlassian, is remote-first—agreed with her.

Return to office mandates will not provide a “quick fix” to productivity and engagement issues, Allamano wrote, despite how badly bosses want that to be true. Amid continued uncertainty in the larger economy and workforce, she added, company leaders will remain focused on productivity and performance next year. To that end, many bosses will, as they did in 2023, continue to default to dragging employees back into the office to “solve” what they see as engagement problems.

It will be a wasted effort. “RTO will not solve challenges in engagement,” Allamano wrote plainly. Instead, companies should extend that effort diving deep into their business needs, evaluating their overall approach to gauging performance and engagement, and then come to an agreement on the strategies that will align those two. Their RTO policy, she advised, “should follow from there.”

Innovative organizations are defined by how their people work—and what, if anything, keeps them from succeeding. Dean posited that efficient processes, leaders who are willing to disrupt the norms with new tools and AI, and well-run meetings will define companies instead. Leaders who actively seek out more effective tech will undoubtedly attract and retain the best talent. Any other way will be a non-starter.

Who needs an office anyway?

As in Dean’s prediction, Allamano said the real draw for workers will be companies who clearly prioritize flexibility wherever it’s possible. “Organizations with best-in-class management practices, led by HR teams who have centered their programs around what’s best for the business and managed towards that, will be able to navigate flexible work changes just fine,” she said.

She also noted that a recent Lattice report found that nearly half (48%) of employees said they’d consider quitting an otherwise great job if it doesn’t offer a satisfying flexible work policy. That dovetails with recent FlexJobs data finding that most companies would even take a pay cut to work a remote job.

For his part, Sadow doesn’t expect mandates to totally disappear among those big, insistently pro-office companies in 2024. Rather, he anticipates that they’ll give workers more flexibility on how to implement mandates. That may mean shifting away from requiring specific days or weeks to be in-person in favor of outlining a minimum amount of in-person time which each team can decide how to use for themselves. (Which experts say is the best approach to hybrid plans anyway.)

“It’s like bumpers on a bowling lane,” Sadow says. “Big companies may set bumpers, but they’ll let teams decide where they want to deliver the ball.”

Here’s hoping everyone bowls a spare in 2024.

Alexei Navalny says he is ‘doing fine’ in special regime Arctic prison

Euro News

Alexei Navalny says he is ‘doing fine’ in special regime Arctic prison

Euronews – December 26, 2023

The imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, whose fate is causing concern in the West, said on Tuesday that he was “doing well” after a long and “tiring” transfer to a remote prison colony in the Russian Arctic.

His family, who had had no news of him for nearly three weeks, announced on Monday that they had traced him to a penal colony in Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenets region, beyond the Arctic Circle.

They claim that the Russian authorities are seeking to isolate him even further, a few months before the March 2024 presidential election in which Vladimir Putin‘s victory appears to be a foregone conclusion.

In his first message on social networks since his disappearance, Alexei Navalny said that the 20-day journey to his new place of detention had been “quite tiring”.

“But I’m in good spirits, like Father Christmas”, he added, referring to his “beard” which had grown during the long journey and his new winter clothes suitable for polar temperatures.

“Whatever happens, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m relieved to have finally arrived”, he said.

Alexei Navalny, 47, a charismatic anti-corruption campaigner and Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy, is serving a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism”.

He was arrested in January 2021 on his return from convalescing in Germany for poisoning, which he blames on the Kremlin.

He disappeared at the beginning of December from the prison colony in the Vladimir region, 250 kilometers east of Moscow, where he had been held until then, which meant that he was likely to be transferred to another establishment.

‘Special regime’ colony

According to the verdict for “extremism” against Mr Navalny, the opponent must serve his sentence in a “special regime” colony, the category of establishments where conditions of detention are the harshest and which are usually reserved for lifers and the most dangerous prisoners.

He said he had arrived at his new prison colony on Saturday evening, after a discreet journey and “such a strange itinerary” that he did not expect to be found by his family until mid-January.

“That’s why I was surprised when the cell door opened yesterday and I was told: ‘A lawyer is here for you'”, he said, expressing his gratitude for the “support” he had received.

One of his close associates, Ivan Jdanov, accused the Russian authorities of trying to “isolate” him in the run-up to the presidential election.

a group of officers walk inside a prison colony in the town of Kharp, in the Yamalo-Nenetsk region. – AP/Human rights ombudsman of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District

According to him, Alexei Navalny is being held in “one of the northernmost and most remote settlements” in Russia, where conditions are “difficult”.

In the West, his disappearance caused concern that was not entirely allayed by his reappearance in a very remote region.

On Monday, the United States said it was “deeply concerned” about Alexei Navalny’s “conditions of detention” and demanded his release.

Mr Navalny’s movement has been methodically eradicated by the authorities in recent years, driving his collaborators and allies into exile or prison.

In early December, the Russian authorities brought new charges of “vandalism” against the anti-corruption activist, which could add another three years to his sentence.

Vladimir Putin is aiming for a new six-year term in the Kremlin in the March presidential election, a term that would take him until 2030, when he turns 78.

Russia’s Navalny describes harsh reality at ‘Polar Wolf’ Arctic prison

Reuters

Russia’s Navalny describes harsh reality at ‘Polar Wolf’ Arctic prison

Andrew Osborn and Olzhas Auyezov – December 26, 2023

FILE PHOTO: Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny at a court hearing via video link

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny on Tuesday confirmed his arrival at what he described as a snow-swept prison above the Arctic Circle and said he was in excellent spirits despite a tiring 20-day journey to get there.

Navalny posted an update on X via his lawyers after his allies lost touch with him for more than two weeks while he was in transit with no information about where he was being taken, prompting expressions of concern from Western politicians.

His spokeswoman said on Monday that Navalny, 47, had been tracked down to the IK-3 penal colony north of the Arctic Circle located in Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets region about 1,900 km (1200 miles) northeast of Moscow.

“I am your new Father Frost,” Navalny wrote jokingly in his first post from his new prison, a reference to the harsh weather conditions there.

“Well, I now have a sheepskin coat, an ushanka hat (a fur hat with ear-covering flaps), and soon I will get valenki (traditional Russian winter footwear).

“The 20 days of the transfer were quite tiring, but I’m still in an excellent mood, as Father Frost should be.”

Navalny’s new home, known as “the Polar Wolf” colony, is considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia. Most prisoners there have been convicted of grave crimes. Winters are harsh – and temperatures are due to drop to around minus 28 Celsius (minus 18.4 Fahrenheit) there over the next week.

About 60 km (40 miles) north of the Arctic Circle, the prison was founded in the 1960s as part of what was once the GULAG system of forced Soviet labour camps, according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper.

Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman, has said she believes the decision to move him to such a remote and inhospitable location was designed to isolate him, make his life harder, and render it more difficult for his lawyers and allies to access him.

Navalny, who thanked his supporters for their concern about his welfare during his long transfer, said he had seen guards with machineguns and guard dogs and had gone for a walk in the exercise yard which he said was located in a neighbouring cell, the floor of which he said was covered with snow.

Otherwise, he said he had just seen the perimeter fence out of a cell window. He said he had also seen one of his lawyers.

Navalny, who denies all the charges he has been convicted of, says he has been imprisoned because he is viewed as a threat by the Russian political elite.

The Kremlin says he is a convicted criminal and has portrayed him and his supporters as extremists with links to the CIA intelligence agency who they say is seeking to destabilise Russia.

Navalny earned admiration from Russia’s disparate opposition for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent.

In his social media post, he told supporters he was unfazed by what he was facing.

“Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m awfully glad I finally made it here,” said Navalny.

(Reporting by Andrew Osborn and Olzhas AuyezovEditing by Angus MacSwan, William Maclean)

Trump’s Christmas post screams “intervention”: “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL”: Trump blasted for hitting “new low” in Christmas Truth Social meltdown

Salon

“MAY THEY ROT IN HELL”: Trump blasted for hitting “new low” in Christmas Truth Social meltdown

Gabriella Ferrigine – December 26, 2023

Donald Trump KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump spent much of the holiday weekend firing off posts from his Truth Social platform, haranguing President Joe Biden and special counsel Jack Smith, and bemoaning a perceived fall from grace of “our once great U.S.A.”

Trump on Christmas Eve shared a series of messages targeting the committee investigating the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection and the “DERANGED” Smith.

“JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH, ARE COMING AFTER ME,” Trump wrote. “AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY???”

“WHY DID THE UNSELECT JANUARY 6th COMMITTEE OF POLITICAL HACKS & THUGS ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY ALL OF THE EVIDENCE THEY USED TO WRITE THEIR FAKE REPORT,” the ex-president fumed on Sunday evening. “WHY DO THEY NOT SHOW THAT I USED THE WORDS ‘PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY’ IN MY SPEECH? THEY ACTUALLY PRETENDED THAT THESE WORDS WERE NEVER UTTERED. CROOKED POLITICS!!!”

“THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN,” Trump continued, “LIED TO CONGRESS, CHEATED ON FISA, RIGGED A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ALLOWED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, MANY FROM PRISONS & MENTAL INSTITUTIONS, TO INVADE OUR COUNTRY, SCREWED UP IN AFGHANISTAN, & JOE BIDEN’S MISFITS & THUGS, LIKE DERANGED JACK SMITH, ARE COMING AFTER ME, AT LEVELS OF PERSECUTION NEVER SEEN BEFORE IN OUR COUNTRY??? IT’S CALLED ELECTION INTERFERENCE. MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

Trump’s Christmas Eve invective followed a major blow to the special counsel’s team, in which the Supreme Court rejected a request to hasten arguments on whether Trump had presidential immunity from federal prosecution for crimes he is accused of commuting while in the White House in election subversion case.

On Monday, the ex-president continued his tirade.

“Merry Christmas to all, including Crooked Joe Biden’s ONLY HOPE, Deranged Jack Smith, the out of control Lunatic who just hired outside attorneys, fresh from the SWAMP (unprecedented!), to help him with his poorly executed WITCH HUNT against ‘TRUMP’ and ‘MAGA,’” he wrote.

“Included also are World Leaders,” Trump added, “both good and bad, but none of which are as evil and ‘sick’ as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Surrender, Green New Scam, High Taxes, No Energy Independence, Woke Military, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!”

As noted by the Daily Beast, Trump’s Christmas post included a reference to Smith’s addition of attorney Michael Dreeben — a former member of special counsel Bob Mueller’s team who has argued before SCOTUS more than one hundred times — to his legal team.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” panel on Tuesday sharply criticized Trump’s “anger” and “bad faith attacks” to close out the year.

“I think it shows that these indictments and the civil case, despite his pretense otherwise, has gotten to him, because he’s reacting and responding in a way of no one projecting self-confidence or like this is nothing,” panelist Al Sharpton said.

“I also think it shows an inner kind of anger and displacement that he has, because who spends the holiday with this kind of venom, particularly when he is a guy that claims to be this self-confident, self-made guy with this kind of darkness, unless you are just that kind of dark person,” he continued.

“We’ve certainly gotten used to Trump’s unorthodox holiday messages, ‘the haters,’ but this one hit a new low, even for him,” host Jonathan Lemire agreed.

Dictator On Day One: The Executive Orders That Trump Would Issue From The Start

TPM

Dictator On Day One: The Executive Orders That Trump Would Issue From The Start

Josh Kovensky – December 26, 2023

Donald Trump has said that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.

And a review of his campaign’s plans and messaging shows part of what that may mean: a sweeping range of day-one executive orders aimed at remaking the Constitution and the federal government as we know it.

On his first days in office, Trump is planning on issuing orders which would end birthright citizenship, give himself the authority to fire tens of thousands of federal civil servants, and force federal bureaucrats to obey culture war dictates.

Through executive action, Trump plans to proclaim extreme new interpretations of baseline provisions of the Constitution, dramatically expanding the reach of presidential authority while upturning principles of law and American society, like birthright citizenship, that for decades have been taken for granted. Many of the proposed orders are likely to spark court fights, setting up legal battles over bedrock issues destined for a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court.

Other proposed day-one orders lean into the culture wars with real-world consequences, like one which would bar federal agencies from running programs supporting gender-transition education. Another, less seriously, would reinstate Trump’s vaunted “National Garden of American Heroes,” a park which would feature sculptures of Irving Berlin, William F. Buckley, Abraham Lincoln, Alex Trebek, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shirley Temple, and others.

There isn’t anything new about presidents issuing rafts of executive orders on their first day in office. But while new administrations typically issue orders which set new policy and proclaim the values of the new presidency, what distinguishes the Trump plans is the ambition of what he’s proposing.

“The substance and content of some of these proposals go far beyond what presidents have done with executive orders,” Blake Emerson, a law professor at UCLA who studies executive power, told TPM.

The proposed orders come in several buckets:

Executive orders which strike at key constitutional questions
Reissuing and expanding executive orders from his first term
Culture war proclamations
Rescinding Biden-era executive orders

A Trump campaign spokesman did not return TPM’s request for comment.

Trump’s campaign, along with a cottage industry of MAGA think tanks, have laid out what they believe his day-one agenda should be in part through what they call Agenda47, the closest thing the Trump campaign has to a platform.

At the center is the most extreme measure: an executive order aimed at rescinding birthright citizenship.

The Trump campaign describes the proposal in conclusive language, saying that they’ve already arrived at the “correct interpretation” of the 14th Amendment. Under that interpretation, to be described in a day-one executive order, the children of undocumented immigrants and tourists would no longer receive citizenship. Federal agencies, like the Social Security Administration, would be ordered to stop issuing passports, social security numbers, and other markers of citizenship under the order.

“They must go back,” Trump said in a statement accompanying the announcement, referring to the children of illegal immigrants.

The order would likely be met with near-instantaneous legal challenges, but, Emerson said, would be “unprecedented” in its use of executive power: having the White House proclaim, literally by fiat, a new interpretation of the Constitution.

“He can’t change the Constitution with an exec order,” John Woolley, a professor at UC-Santa Barbara who studies executive orders, told TPM. “But he can make things difficult.”

Trump has committed to a number of culture war executive orders as well. One would ban gender transition education in federal agencies, another would ban “ESG investments,” yet another would reverse a Biden executive order promoting diversity. One proposal from the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 envisions an order banning government programs from supporting the teaching of “critical race theory.”

These may seem like ill-defined values statements, but Trump has said that he would issue another order on day one: a broadened version of his Schedule F proclamation from late 2020. In non-legalese, that’s an executive order which would empower him to fire any federal civil servant with policymaking responsibilities for any reason; a category of people which reaches into the tens of thousands.

Trump has framed it as a plan to “shatter the deep state” on the first day, an explicitly political undertaking.

The result, some civil service experts say, could be the mass exodus of professionals. That would lead to some politicization, but, more swiftly, a decapitation of the functioning of several government agencies.

It’s genuinely unclear from the plans that the Trump campaign has released which government functions they want preserved, in order to use for their own ends, and which they want incapacitated.

One promised day-one executive order, for example, calls for a reinterpretation of the 1974 Congressional Budget Control and Impoundment Act, a bedrock law to the modern budgeting system which, among other things, mandates that the executive branch use funding allocated by the legislative.

Trump himself ran afoul of this law in 2019, when he withheld money that Congress allocated to Ukraine as part of a political extortion scheme to coerce Kyiv into damaging Trump’s then-opponent, Joe Biden. Now, he’s proposing to order federal agencies to use the law to identify where programs can be cut, and push to “overturn the limits” that the law places on the executive.

Other plans, including one put out by the Heritage Foundation, would see Trump issue a day-one executive order gutting the Environmental Protection Administration. That would include “explicit language requiring reconsideration of the agency’s structure with reference to fulfilling its mission to create a better environmental tomorrow with clean air, safe water, healthy soil, and thriving communities.”

Many of these proposals would likely run into a buzzsaw of litigation. Federal employees, their unions, and good government groups would sue to block some of them from going into effect.

But in the meantime, Trump would likely be able to unleash massive shifts in policy. One proposal, for example, would ban the federal government from supporting efforts to fight “dis” or “mis” information; another would bring back the travel ban on Muslim countries.

Emerson, the UCLA professor, said that many of them appear to work in tandem. He described the civil service firing order, for example, to TPM as a one-two punch: executive orders which lay out bans on right-wing culture war hobbyhorses, and an executive order with the muscle to fire people who disobey.

“You have a really potent combination where people could be getting fired from civil service posts because they’re not toeing the line on critical race theory, or what have you,” Emerson said.

Kremlin confirms Russian warship hit by Ukrainian strike

AFP

Kremlin confirms Russian warship hit by Ukrainian strike

AFP – December 26, 2023

This photograph posted on the Telegram channel @VentdeCrimee shows a warship damaged in a Ukrainian attack in Russian-controlled Crimea (Handout)

The Kremlin on Tuesday acknowledged a Ukrainian attack had damaged a warship in the occupied Crimean port of Feodosia in what Ukraine and its Western allies called a major setback for the Russian navy.

Ukraine said its air force destroyed the Novocherkassk landing ship, with President Volodymyr Zelensky joking on social media that the vessel had now joined “the Russian underwater Black Sea fleet”.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu informed “about the damage to our large landing ship” to President Vladimir Putin in “a very detailed report”, the president’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

Russia’s defence ministry said that the ship was damaged by guided aerial missiles.

Ukraine’s military said its air force destroyed the Russian naval ship in a missile attack on the eastern Crimean port.

The Ukrainian defence ministry wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the “Novocherkassk landing ship was destroyed in Feodosia tonight”.

It published an unattributed photo showing flames and smoke in a port at night.

– Black Sea dominance –

“Ukraine’s aviation did an excellent job. Crimea is Ukraine. There is no place for the occupier’s fleet here,” the ministry wrote.

In his post on social media, Zelensky wrote: “The occupiers will not have a single peaceful place in Ukraine”.

The attack comes after Ukraine struck the Black Sea fleet’s headquarters in Sevastopol in September, forcing Moscow to move warships to ports further east.

British defence minister Grant Shapps wrote on Twitter that “this latest destruction of Putin’s navy demonstrates that those who believe there’s a stalemate in the Ukraine war are wrong!”

“Russia’s dominance in the Black Sea is now challenged,” he added.

Ukraine nevertheless announced a setback on the eastern front Tuesday.

Commander-in-chief Valeriy Zaluzhny said that troops had pulled back in the town of Maryinka, which is close to the key Russian-held city of Donetsk.

He said troops were still present on the outskirts, after Russia on Monday claimed to fully control the town.

– Ship ‘transported Shaheds’ –

Ukraine’s air force said that its tactical aviation attacked the Novocherkassk with cruise missiles at around 0030 GMT in the area of Feodosia.

Videos posted on social media showed a fire on the horizon in a port area, followed by a loud explosion that sent up a ball of fire and was apparently followed by multiple explosions.

Ukraine’s armed forces said that “on board of the ship were Shahed drones that Russia uses for attacks on Ukrainian cities”.

Ukraine frequently carries out strikes in Crimea, particularly targeting the Russian military.

In April 2022, it sank the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea fleet.

The Novocherkassk was previously used by Russia for its military intervention in Syria.

The governor of the Russian-annexed peninsula, Sergei Aksyonov, wrote on Telegram: “Sadly, one person was killed and two others were wounded in an enemy attack on Feodosia.”

Crimea’s Krym 24 television reported that two had been hospitalised in a moderately severe condition.

Aksyonov said earlier that the city’s port was cordoned off following “an enemy attack” that caused a “detonation” and fire.

Six buildings were damaged, mostly with broken windows, the governor said, and some local residents have been evacuated.

Instead of $32,000, crippled Russian soldier given two buckets of carrots, onions

The New Voice of Ukraine

Instead of $32,000, crippled Russian soldier given two buckets of carrots, onions — photo

The New Voice of Ukraine – December 26, 2023

A Russian soldier, who was seriously injured in the war against Ukraine, was compensated by local authorities in the form of vegetables

A Russian soldier from Volgograd Oblast, who was seriously injured fighting against Ukraine, has been compensated by local authorities with kilograms of vegetables, the Telegram news channel iStories reported on Dec. 26.

Oleg Rybkin, 45-years-old, was mobilized on Sept. 25, 2022 and found himself near the village of Robotyne, Zaporizhzhya Oblast, just as the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated the settlement.

He sustained injuries to his abdomen, liver, kidneys, and legs during the following battle.

“He has severe pain, his knee does not bend, and he cannot walk without crutches. He is on painkillers and sleeping pills,” his wife said.

<span class="copyright">pointmedia.io</span> — pointmedia.io

Rybkin reportedly needs to have his knee joint replaced but the authorities are not interested in helping him.

Indeed, Rybkin was supposed to be entitled to compensation worth 3 million rubles (approximately $32,000) and receive a life pension.

However the only “help” that he and his family received was two buckets of carrots and a bag of onions.

“I was at work, they brought it to my mother-in-law,” Rybak’s wide said.

“Local farmers — those who grow it here — are obliged by the administration to ‘help’ (in quotation marks).”

However, she was actually lucky, as the residents of Rostov Oblast only received a brick with an ante-mortem message instead of their son, who died in Ukraine.

That New Trump Phone-Call Recording Sounds Pretty Bad, Huh?

Slate

That New Trump Phone-Call Recording Sounds Pretty Bad, Huh?

Shirin Ali – December 26, 2023

“If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.” —Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, on a Nov. 17, 2020, phone call with two Republican officials about not certifying their county’s presidential election results

It seems there’s a sequel to Trump’s infamous “perfect phone call.” Last week, the Detroit News published a recording of a November 2020 phone call Trump made to local Michigan Republican officials, pressuring them not to certify their county’s election results.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was also on the line, pushing Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, two GOP canvassers for Michigan’s Wayne County—which includes Detroit—to reject the certification minutes after they attended a canvassers meeting. Both Palmer and Hartmann did not sign the official statement of votes for Wayne County and later tried to rescind their votes in favor of certification but failed. In the end, Wayne County overwhelmingly voted in Joe Biden, with 68 percent of the vote.

While we did already know about this call—the basic facts of it came to light when Palmer testified to the Jan. 6 committee in 2021—the details of what exactly Trump and McDaniel said weren’t known until now.

In Palmer’s testimony to the House Select Committee, she said she didn’t remember exactly what Trump told her or if he had mentioned anything about Michigan’s election. In the newly published recording, however, Trump claims there were more votes in those counties than people, and that “everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.” Michigan’s election director, Jonathan Brater, said that was categorically false in a December 2020 affidavit, that in fact there were “fewer ballots tabulated than names in the poll books.”

The new details raise questions about whether Jack Smith could use this to strengthen his federal election interference case, or whether Trump could face state charges in Michigan, where officials have been conducting their own election interference investigation, similar to what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did in Georgia.

Former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb told Politico the phone call shows “the depths to which Trump personally participated in fraudulently pimping the ‘Big Lie.’ ”

Michigan did ultimately send a fake certificate to the National Archives and Congress claiming that Trump won the state’s 2020 election—and 16 Republicans face felony charges for signing on to it.

This phone call echoes the infamous conversation in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find “11,779” votes to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory—the one he’s defended as “an absolutely PERFECT phone call.” (Trump now faces 13 state felony charges for allegedly trying to overturn Georgia’s election results.) Then there’s the phone call Trump had with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, in which he also pressured the governor to claim there had been voter fraud so Arizona’s election results could be overturned in his favor.

Karl Rove, a former adviser for the George W. Bush administration, told Fox News that Trump’s actions on this Michigan phone call are “what we would call election interference” and that the former president could face a situation that is similar to what he’s currently dealing with in Georgia. Rove also speculated that McDaniel might face legal ramifications. “I think that was highly inappropriate.”

Step by step, Florida Guard inches toward becoming DeSantis’ personal army

Miami Herald – Opinion

Step by step, Florida Guard inches toward becoming DeSantis’ personal army | Opinion

The Miami Herald Editorial Board – December 25, 2023

The creeping threat of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new State Guard has increased again, this time with the news that a special unit within the organization recently took lessons at a Panhandle combat training center on things like “aerial gunnery” and treating “massive hemorrhages.”

Gun training? “Massive hemorrhages”? That sounds ominous.

This is the same guard that was supposed to be a civilian disaster response organization but has become increasingly militarized, according critics, including some former guard members. As we have said before, the big danger is that DeSantis will turn the State Guard into his personal militia. In a state that is already trying to squelch dissent and target vulnerable groups, that’s a scary prospect. This latest information only bolsters that fear.

Fleeing strongmen

That holds especially true in Miami. The push to give the governor what amounts to a personal law enforcement unit should ring some terrifying bells of recognition: Too many people here have had to flee countries run by authoritarians or strongmen who keep power through force.

The reason for the special training, which was reported by the Miami Herald, apparently is to allow DeSantis to use the guard, which reports only to him — a recipe for abuse — to stop migrants at sea. That’s a far cry from using the group to distribute hurricane relief supplies or help out an overworked National Guard.

That this is happening, though, can’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Florida’s governor has gone ever more extreme as he has watched his GOP presidential nomination hopes slipping away as Donald Trump’s have grown. His language has grown increasingly incendiary. He has described his plan to shoot and kill drug smugglers at the U.S. southern border using in bloodthirsty, B-movie terms: “We’re gonna shoot them stone cold dead.”

And yet his poll numbers keep going down. According to one recent Quinnipiac University poll, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has now pulled even with him for second place in the primary — both at a mere 11%. In February, DeSantis polled at 36%. Trump, despite his betrayal of the country that many Republicans once spoke against, now has about 67% support, with less than a month before the first primary votes will be cast.

Political points?

With the State Guard, Florida’s governor is no doubt hoping for a wave of people fleeing their country on the high seas so he can unleash his soldiers on them for political purposes. When the State Guard was revived last year by the Legislature at DeSantis’ behest, there was an actual surge of migrants in the Florida Keys, mostly from Cuba and Haiti. But since then, the surge has mostly dried up.

That makes no difference to the governor. Clearly, DeSantis wants to use the State Guard as a pawn in his fight to stay relevant in the primary by focusing on a sure-fire hit with Republicans: the evils of immigration.

It’ll be hard to go any lower than Trump has, though. He recently launched a particularly horrendous attack, saying that migrants crossing the southern border are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Afterward, he insisted — in his usual attempt at manipulation — that any similarity between his words and those in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” manifesto — “All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning” — was simply all in our heads.

DeSantis’ push to revive the State Guard during his presidential run was political from the start and has only become more so. This latest weapons and wounds training is part of the progression toward a potential abuse of power in Florida that he has created with the full-on support of the Legislature. And we’re the ones who will be stuck with the results after he’s gone from office.

DeSantis delivers a political smackdown as Miami teachers union struggles to survive

Miami Herald – Opinion

DeSantis delivers a political smackdown as Miami teachers union struggles to survive | Opinion

The Miami Herald Editorial Board – December 25, 2023

Trashing labor unions, in particular teachers unions, has become a talking point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the presidential trail. He told California Gov. Gavin Newsom during their Fox News debate that Democrats are “owned lock, stock and barrel, by the teachers union.”

What does that look on the ground, when laws DeSantis signed singling out some types of public-sector unions start to take effect?

The results may be upwards of 30,000 school employees being left without representation to bargain for better pay and working conditions.

The state’s largest teachers union, United Teachers of Dade, is close to decertification thanks to a new law that requires unions have at least 60% of union members pay dues, the Herald reported. The law — Senate Bill 256 — was a union-busting one-two-punch that not only raised the threshold for certification from 50%, but also prohibited unions from deducting dues directly from members’ paychecks. UTD, which represents teachers in the state’s biggest school district in Miami-Dade County, has gained 800 new members, but still failed to meet the state’s stringent requirements. In November, the Herald reported union membership was at 58.4%.

‘Right to work’

The Republican anti-union spiel usually leaves out the fact that Florida, unlike many blue states, is among 26 states that have “right to work” laws. That means workers cannot be forced to join a union and pay dues as a condition of employment. In other words, teachers and school staff do not have to be part of United Teachers of Dade to benefit from the 7% to 10% pay raise the union negotiated with the school district this year,

Teacher unions became a preferred target of DeSantis during his fight to reopen schools during the pandemic and to eliminate anything he deems “woke” indoctrination in schools. The governor has gone even further by demonizing teachers, who have been muzzled on what they say about race and LGBTQ issues in the classroom.

Unions, like all organizations, have had very public shortcomings, such as protecting bad employees from accountability. But if we’re talking about unions that are too powerful, we cannot leave out police and firefighter unions, whose endorsements DeSantis and other Republican gladly accept. It turns out SB 256 exempted those unions — along with those representing corrections officers — from that 60% threshold requirement.

Union pushed back

In other words, the law affects organizations that have directly clashed with DeSantis and the Republican-led Legislature. United Teachers of Dade was among the most vocal groups pushing back against the parental-rights law critics call “Don’t say gay,” laws that made it easier for organizations like Moms for Liberty to push schools to ban books, and DeSantis’ infamous “Stop Woke Act,” which bans instructions that some may interpret as making students feel guilty about being white. UTD President Karla Hernandez-Mats ran against DeSantis in 2022 as Charlie Crist’s running mate.

Meanwhile, groups like the Police Benevolent Association, the largest police union in the state, have been in lockstep with Republicans. In June, the PBA endorsed DeSantis for president, despite supporting Donald Trump in 2020.

Masked as a measure to hold unions accountable, SB 256 was a version of the same kind of political payback Disney received when it opposed the “Don’t say gay” law.

United Teachers of Dade will not face decertification immediately. It must now prove to the state that it has support from at least 30% of its bargaining unit. After that, the union must hold a vote seeking recertification and show at least 50% support. Next year, UTD must try again to meet that 60% threshold, the Herald reported, which could put it in a potentially never-ending cycle.

This is exactly the type of pain the new state law appears to seek to inflict. In Florida, opposition to the party in power comes with a high cost.