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Questions about jail wristbands in Georgia. Your weekly non-Beltway political stories.
Fulton County, Ga., commissioners question the usefulness and cost of wristbands meant to track inmate health. A Florida “foreclosure spree” makes some rich, many homeless. Another veteran health-care scandal in Colorado. A “union-buster” leak about nurses.
These are your weekly non-Beltway political stories.
The Daily 202 generally focuses on national politics and foreign policy. But as passionate believers in local news, and in redefining “politics” as something that hits closer to home than strictly inside-the-Beltway stories, we try to bring you a weekly mix of pieces with significant local, national or international importance.
But we need your help to know what we’re missing! Please keep sending your links to news coverage of political stories that are getting overlooked. (They don’t have to be from this week, and the submission link is right under this column.) Make sure to say whether we can use your first name, last initial and location. Anonymous is okay, too, as long as you give a location.
Questions about jail wristbands
Caroline flagged this intriguing report from Chelsea Beimfohr at Atlanta News First about Fulton County commissioners expressing concerns about a $2.1 million deal to buy high-tech wristbands supposed to track inmate health at a troubled jail.
The commissioners authorized the money in April for 1,000 new Talitrix wristbands to be deployed by July, Beimfohr reported. As of the last week in September, just 13 were up and running, “which has commissioners wondering where the rest are.”
“[Talitrix CEO Justin] Hawkins says installation of the wristband technology has been repeatedly delayed over the last six months due to inmate deaths and a lack of available deputies to monitor his construction crews. He hopes to have the rest of the bands online by the end of the year,” according to Beimfohr.
The politics: Between public procurement and private profits from the carceral state, there’s a lot here that falls to local/regional news outlets, front-line guarantors of accountability. Also can we unpack “due to inmate deaths” a little bit more?
Making bank on foreclosures
The Miami Herald’s Ben Wieder flagged his piece with Shirsho Dasgupta and Sheridan Wall about a foreclosure bonanza in Florida that is making some cities and at least one lawyer a bundle of money — at the cost of families losing their homes.
“The foreclosures have brought in millions for the cities, but have taken away homes that have been in families for generations, particularly in heavily Black and lower income neighborhoods. And the lawyer who has aggressively pursued the practice is trying to make cities in South Florida next,” they reported.
The lawyer in question, Matt Weidner, has “turbocharged” the number of foreclosure lawsuits filed by cities with which he has deals. “Fort Pierce had filed one such lawsuit in the five years before hiring Weidner in late 2021. Last year, the city filed 57,” Ben and his colleagues wrote. When The Miami Herald was reporting the story, Weidner told the outlet that his “crusade here is the fact that there are billions of dollars that’s owed to the taxpayers of these municipalities that’s not being collected.” He didn’t respond to the outlet’s questions before publication.
The politics: In the aftermath of the Great Recession, Florida has been a battleground for foreclosure politics, pitting individuals and families against far more powerful interests. That’s not to say none of the homes should be foreclosed upon. Just that the deck is stacked.
Another veterans’ health-care scandal
Back in July, we featured a Denver Gazette piece by Jenny Deam about preventable deaths at assisted-living centers in Colorado. Jenny reached out to flag her latest, this one about the death of veteran Ernest Griffiths Jr. in a private-sector nursing home. (She gets the first-name treatment now because she reached out.)
The Veterans Health Administration referred him there for dementia care. He ultimately died of sepsis from an untreated foot wound. “No one has been held accountable,” Jenny reported.
“His death offers a disturbing look at the lack of consequences for nursing homes after deaths due to alleged negligence or substandard care. It also raises questions about how the Department of Veterans Affairs awards contracts to nursing homes in order to meet the rising need of aging veterans,” per the piece.
“A Gazette investigation found that 13 of the 28 privately owned or community-based nursing homes in Colorado with VA contracts are rated substandard by another branch of the federal government. One in four have the lowest possible low rating,” Jenny reported.
The politics: Veterans served their country. Their country could stand to do a better job returning the favor. But accountability in sprawling bureaucracy can be hard to come by. The paywall is down for this story. Read the whole thing.
There are high-profile labor disputes — Hollywood and UAW strikes — and then there are many smaller ones, like the one at Montana’s St. Peter’s Health, which has apologized to nurses after a “union consultant” collected personal information in a document that leaked.
The document “listed intimate details of nurses’ home lives, incentives at work, notes about disciplinary records, personality types and likeliness to join a union,” Nicole Girten reported for the Daily Montanan.
The politics: I don’t have enough room to excerpt more. But the U.S. is having a labor moment, and it’s worth tracking how management is responding, notably away from the national spotlight.
See an important political story that doesn’t quite fit traditional politics coverage? Flag it for us here.
Economy adds 336,000 jobs in September, in a stunning gain
“The U.S. economy churned out 336,000 jobs in September, soaring past economists’ expectations after months of cooling. The unemployment rate held 3.8 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday,” Lauren Kaori Gurley reports.
- “The September jobs report, which showed the largest number of gains since January, had been expected to show continued moderation in the labor market — with forecasts of around 170,000 jobs created. Instead, it came in at nearly twice that amount.”
Trump endorses Jim Jordan for House speaker after Kevin McCarthy ouster
“Former president Donald Trump is throwing his support behind Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to become House speaker after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted in a rebellion by far-right Republicans,” Adela Suliman reports.
2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner is Narges Mohammadi, Iranian activist
“The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Narges Mohammadi, an imprisoned Iranian human rights activist and the fifth person to receive the prize while incarcerated,” Susannah George, Paul Schemm and Adela Suliman report.
Lunchtime reads from The Post
Biden border plan faces breakdown amid record influx of families
“The border plan President Biden put in place nearly five months ago is at risk of collapse amid a new wave of illegal crossings, intensifying strains on U.S. cities and leaving authorities struggling to care for record numbers of families arriving with children,” Maria Sacchetti and Nick Miroff report.
- “U.S. agents along the southern border are making more than 9,000 arrests a day, a near record, including a fast-rising number of families, a group that is far more difficult for the government to manage than adults traveling solo.”
The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash
“A Washington Post analysis of federal data found that vehicles guided by Autopilot have been involved in more than 700 crashes, at least 19 of them fatal, since its introduction in 2014, including the Banner crash. In Banner’s case, the technology failed repeatedly, his family’s lawyers argue, from when it didn’t brake to when it didn’t issue a warning about the semi-truck in the car’s path,” Trisha Thadani, Rachel Lerman, Imogen Piper, Faiz Siddiqui and Irfan Uraizee report.
ICE, CBP, Secret Service all illegally used smartphone location data
“In a bombshell report, an oversight body for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP), and the Secret Service all broke the law while using location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones. In one instance, a CBP official also inappropriately used the technology to track the location of coworkers with no investigative purpose,” Joseph Cox reports for 404 Media.
Army plans major cuts to Special Operations forces, including Green Berets
“The Pentagon is poised to make controversial cuts to the Army’s storied special-operations forces, amid recruiting struggles and a shift in focus from Middle East counterterrorism operations to a threat from China,” the Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold reports.
- “The Army is cutting about 3,000 troops, or about 10% from its special-operations ranks, which could include so-called trigger-pullers from the Green Beret commando units who have conducted some of the nation’s most dangerous and sensitive missions around the world, from the jungles of Vietnam to the back alleys of Baghdad.”
Biden officials will resume Venezuela deportations, extend border wall
“U.S. officials said Thursday that they will resume direct deportation flights to Venezuela and fast-track construction of new barriers along the southern border, moves aimed at curbing the record number of illegal crossings into the United States under President Biden,” Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti report.
White House planning face-to-face meeting with Xi Jinping in California
“The White House has begun making plans for a November meeting in San Francisco between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — an attempt to stabilize the relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries, according to senior administration officials,” Ellen Nakashima reports.
Biden team weighs using State Department grants to fund weapons for Ukraine
“The Biden administration is considering using a State Department grant program to send additional military aid to Ukraine as Congress continues to battle over weapons funding, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions,” Politico’s Lara Seligman, Paul McLeary and Connor O’Brien report.
The FPV war drone, visualized
“First-person view, or FPV, drones — fast, highly maneuverable and relatively cheap craft flown by an operator wearing a headset receiving the drone’s video feed in real time — are now the predominant attack drone in Ukraine,” Alex Horton and Serhii Korolchuk report.
- “They are filling a gap left by a shortage of Western artillery rounds and precision weapons, soldiers said, and their ability to carry heavier explosives has made them the preferred tool for destroying tanks in some units, allowing a pilot to strike weak points like engines and tracks with rapier precision.”
Court picks Alabama congressional map likely to mean Democratic gain
“A panel of three federal judges on Thursday chose a new Alabama congressional map that maintains a Black-majority district in the state and establishes another near-Black-majority district that could flip a House seat for Democrats in 2024,” Maegan Vazquez and Amy B Wang report.
- “Thursday’s decision is the latest in a long legal battle that pitted Alabama’s GOP-led legislature against Democrats and civil rights groups that argued that Republicans were illegally diluting the power of Black voters in the state. About 27 percent of the state’s voting population is Black.”
Moderates could unite amid House speaker chaos. Why don’t they?
“The failure of the last-ditch effort by the self-styled ‘problem solvers’ underscores how unlikely it will be for the House to solve its leadership vacuum in the coming days through some kind of unity government that might otherwise seem the most obvious path forward,” Jacqueline Alemany, Marianna Sotomayor and Leigh Ann Caldwell report.
- “Even with government funding set to lapse in less than 45 days, aid to Ukraine in limbo and America’s reputation as a functioning democracy on the line, there was little sign this week of interest in cobbling together a bipartisan coalition that could be the fastest way to collect the 217 votes necessary to elect a speaker.”
At 4:05 p.m., German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will join Biden at the White House for German-American Day.
Patrick McHenry is part of a long, bipartisan history of bow ties in politics
“For McHenry, the bow tie has become part of a signature look, a shrewd way to be just a little more recognizable in an environment where guys who look like him are, let’s be honest, abundant. (He declined to comment, citing his current responsibilities.) But the particular tie style, especially when divorced from the tuxedo, has a long history in American politics. It has at times become the subject of some mild sartorial infighting — and an emblem of nostalgia, invoked across the political spectrum,” Ashley Fetters Maloy reports.
Thanks for reading. See you next week.
