Why do Republicans push the trans issue as if it is earth-moving in scope and effect? What other issue outlooks of more major imporatance are they hiding from? The war, inflation, Trump grift, and hold that a minute, some woman looks a bit masculine and what not?

ESPN broadcast addresses ‘incredibly thoughtful’ Cheryl Reeve comments on transgender athletes

 https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/espn-broadcast-addresses-incredibly-thoughtful-234841820.html 

During Sunday's WNBA game between the Indiana Fever and Minnesota Lynx, the ESPN on ABC broadcast addressed recent comments made by Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve regarding transgender athletes. The broadcast also showed video of Reeve meeting with Indiana's Sophie Cunningham on the court pregame about the topic, and noted Reeve wearing a"Trans Kids Belong" shirt during the game.

"Well, we see Cheryl Reeve wearing a shirt today in support of trans kids," ESPN on ABC play-by-play announcer Ryan Ruocco said. "'Trans Kids Belong' on the shirt. This in the aftermath of Sophie Cunningham's recent comments. We actually saw Cheryl and Sophie speaking at center court pregame. And yesterday, Cheryl Reeve spent a lot of time talking at length with the media about this topic."

"I would encourage anyone to go and listen to Cheryl Reeve's comments," color commentator Rebecca Lobo said. "Incredibly thoughtful. Easy to find online. I would just encourage anyone to go and listen."

Cunningham told ESPN in a profile that was published on July 21, "I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans. And I'm like, 'I never once said that.' I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men."

Since then, anti-trans rallies have appeared outside of arenas ahead of WNBA games in support of Cunningham's comments.

Reeve met with the media on Saturday and was asked about another rally that proceeded to happen on Sunday around Target Center in support of Cunningham's comments about transgender participation in women's sports.

"I don't think we should feel like our safe space is being threatened," Reeve told the media. "That's what I enjoy about the WNBA. And I think we have to continue to safeguard that I don't think these demonstrators are not being peaceful, or not that I've seen. I haven't seen all of it. I haven't heard everything that's happening, but everyone has a right to peacefully assemble, right?"

"I think the commissioner and the league have a responsibility to ensure that any topic that could be problematic for players- what they perceive to be unsafe or threatened in any way or discriminated against- I think that's something that's fair for our leadership. And I'm quite sure that they have eyes on and ears on to make sure that it's a safe space for everyone. And that's what makes our league beautiful.

"I come from a space of inclusion. And the narrative that I think that is problematic is to suggest that, number one, that transgender athletes are the biggest problem in women's sports. And I think this is what's bothersome is that there's a faction of people in our country that are making this a massive issue."

"We have some issues," Reeve added. "Number one, we need to protect trans kids. Every kid— to me, it's a human rights issue. Every kid has a right to sports regardless of gender diversity, transgender. Every kid has the right to access.

 That should not even need to have to be said. Protect the kids. Quell bullying of any behavior deemed questionable by a fraction of people, gays, progressives, whoever, but trans is a phony issue. Easy to emote to a level well beyond any actual number of affected individuals as a fraction of the general divers U.S. of A. total polpulation. It is not even thought of as a relevant census item, or am I wrong. I believe not. It might be. But don't overload shade onto vulnerable young people who are wrestling with identity issues - that as an absolute general observation. Help don't demonize. Understand before judging.

That seems a fair context to report: https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/micheletafoya-wnba-transgenderathletes/2026/08/10/id/1265633/ titled, Michele Tafoya to Newsmax: WNBA 'Wishy-Washy' on Trans Athletes Read it. Think it over.

Beyond saying Crabgrass regards that as an outlook lacking charitable views of fellow humans, and not a well thought-out and defensible position on a marginal issue when much larger national needs should be honestly faced and discussed.

The item is there, the earlier item from those within women's athletics is background. Readers decide, which side of that minor though elevated personal decision making issue you feel most solid. 

But do be aware of the poisonous reporting out there trying to gin up hate against a near miniscule part of national population, for the point that hate might get votes. This and this, one citing the other, are both abominable. The very choice of lead imaging shows a bias which any sensitive person can see without reading a line of the garbage. The stridency is insufferable. Badly done propaganda is worse than no propaganda, and these two hate screeds are bad.

And Crabgrass bias toward Flanagan as the clearly better progressive capable of going to the Senate and pushing for reform, is known already among readers, but stated again in fairness.

Why the fuck can't Tafoya address money in politics, as more important than a person's surgical decisions?. Because she depends upon money in politics, possibly, but voters should ask and expect her to honestly answer that one instead of beating up on trans people, who have enough other suffering in life.

Beating up on any minority is Steven Millerish, and should be avoided in civil disucssion. And, yes, opinions do differ. 

That noted, ICE shooting an Austin Hispanic attempting to flee, is that bigger an issue than trans people? You decide.

UPDATE: It is worth mention, that Newsmax bit, Tafoya again lies about "nine billion in fraud" while the report is about her flogging the trans issue, they insert that "fraud" business into their lead video. Then they flog the urban-rural divide cliche. She talks cleanly, as a style she is well spoken and practiced, but says shit.

Opinions differ. "Lefeward lurch with socialism" she says; come on, socialism is a subjective thing, so examine it on relative merits of income distribution leveling vs status quo, and choose in your mind which, Tafoya or Flanagan will have the better motivation to level the playing field. Tafoya the millionaire, or Flanagan, the experienced governing person of the two - and a self defined progressive saying unambiguouly she'd level the playing field as much as possible, as soon as possible. Is it unclear?

Has Tafoya ever faced "paycheck to paycheck" with a solution? It's not even in her vocabulatory.

FURTHER: What Tafoya is doing is following completly the national Republican script of false hot button issue-focus and avoiding reality, which suggests most strongly that if elected she'd be a total rubber stamp for Trump. 

If that's considered desirable in your world view, support the lady. 

That might be the most direct response to her well-spoken basically content-free $9 billion lie campaigning style. Style over truth in scale and substance. She does it fairly well.

HOWEVER -- Fraud and trans and misdirect with glib style, and become a United States Senator? 

Please no. Require more. Vote informed and smart. And early.

And any reader outside of the U.S., consider this a poster child situation of politics of a nation under Trump, and wait to see what happens, and what that tells you. There are some reading Crabgrass in other nations, and you observe and conclude as best as you read before and after. Which we do here also. 

Minnesota Senate race is favoring Peggy Flanagan as Tafoya seemingly fades.

https://www.pollsmax.com/senate/minnesota/ 

Polling with around 40 days left, if trending, is not good news for the former sideline football personality. However, trust in polling should be leveraged with some sense of how GOTV will be, both parties.

GOTV is now being door knocked and in mailings, with apparent TV advertising also at play

The early voting period has begun, and AJ reports: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/18/early-in-person-voting-begins-in-the-2026-us-midterm-elections-in-virginia  -- trust in going to early voting sites gaining over choosing mail-in balloting. Given how Trump is doing all he can to poison post office protocol to discourage trust in his mail management pre-election, it's an expected outcome. 

 Crabgrass did not attempt to research any polling or other subjective indicia of early voting vs mail balloting preference,  (or waiting to see election day weather), and the AJ item was encountered off an earlier site homepage rather than being researched.

 

Timmer posts again about Lisa Demuth voicing chapter and verse of Republican erroroneous views of what an education is, and how education policy should differ from what the educated professionals in the field. teachers mainly, say about "what's it is all about."

 https://left.mn/2026/09/no-tears-for-lisa/ with a right sidebar of links to earlier posting at left.mn related to this item.

 Of interest, Timmer writes -

It is also a serious misapprehension of the role of a public education, which is not to merely to create worker bees, but to make thinking citizens. It apparently made a thinking citizen out of Lisa Démuth’s daughter. Thank goodness.

The Minnesota Constitution does not require that the state build roads or protect public safety, or do anything else, other than this:

The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it is the duty of the legislature to establish a general and uniform system of public schools. The legislature shall make such provisions by taxation or otherwise as will secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.

That’s Article XIII, Section 1 of the Minnesota Constitution. “Republican” here, by the way, is derived from res publica, or “of the people.”

In other words, the state must educate people to be active participants in their democratic republic. It is our Constitution’s Prime Directive.

That worker bees vs thinking citizens (the activists - active educated participants - in the representative government Minnesota functions under, even if their only activism is filling out a ballot after informing themselves of the issues and people on the ballot). AND - for the context of that above quote, Timmer earlier mentioned facts about Demuth -

In a recent presser, Démuth said she wanted to trim the state’s free school meal plan to means-test it but adopt a voucher and private school aid plan. She said well-off kids shouldn’t get free lunches. She apparently wants to return to the thrilling days of yesteryear when poor kids got a special funny-colored lunch ticket and got a peanut butter sandwich instead of what everybody else was eating. And their parents got dunned for a deficit in the school lunch account. It was an early lesson in second class citizenship, a concept that Lisa apparently champions.

In spite of her hard scrabble childhood.

Her means-tested sorting inevitably leads to ostracizing the poor kids. I know this from observation sixty-five years ago.

On the other hand, voucher and private school subsidies go mostly to students and parents who already send their kids to private schools. Rich kids. Not benefiting public schools, but harming them.

This transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the wealthy dwarfs the transfer of wealth from the school lunch program, but it’s great optics for the Lisas and Ryans of the world. It is also a great diversion.

In the same presser, Démuth remarks:

Demuth’s plan also includes changes to the state’s teacher licensing board to ensure the board is working to “prepare the next generation of workers and not the next generation of activists,” referring to conservative assertions that the schools are being used to indoctrinate Minnesota students in progressive politics.

This echoes an often misunderstood reason there is public education, which is to uniformly prepare youth for citizenship participation beyond rote nonsense. It is not to condition youth for an adult life punching a time clock, showing up, doing the job, and obeying the boss. That they learn from their parents or the real world in entering it, and shitty jobs like that are prevalent but often come with a health plan and living wage, (often not).

It is as if the Demuth mind is "Education" is to condition maleable clay into show up every day, do the job (including homework), and obey the boss (a/k/a teacher) in the Demuth model.

That's psychological conditioning not learning, a human equivalent to Pavlov's dogs hearing a bell while being fed, and often enough, they are conditioned to salivate when the bell rings, food or not.

Demuth, in whatever family business she's in, would like the worker bees to be diligent and timid about seeking a raise or organizing into a union, or it seems that may be the case. It is not the ends public education is Constitutionally thought to serve best. It is to encourage skeptical regard for authoritarian figures who might wrongly represent themselves and have ideas of power in their hands which might threaten liberties the founders valued in the electorate choosing leadership people. The ability to spot misdirection and bad policy, in favor of cleaner direction and sounder policy. And to participate rather than ignore how they are governed.

The misunderstanding is common among those who may have been Pavloved during their grade school years and later, by bad educator personnel. Or at home by misunderstanding parents, early in life before any schooling at all.

In a trenchent description, worker bees and thinking citizens being at issue, Timmer sums it all up very tightly, exposing a faulty premise underlying Demuth's misunderstanding of aims. 

She touts being on a school board, while thinking as she does, and there is danger there.

Musically, this.  

 

 

After ICE wounds a Door Dash driver making a delivery, in Austin TX, an official press conference was held, the Austin mayor speaking first, with the video speaking for itself in terms of ICE being unwelcome in the community.

 [UPDATE: Per AP carried by PiPress, "Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a Democrat, said Sunday he wants local police to have a role in investigating the shooting. Watson said it wouldn’t be appropriate for ICE to investigate on its own." Identifying the mayor who led a press conference by name and party.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIaZNGpF66g  -- the actual press conference begins at 5:35 in the item. The mayor speaking first. In this video the mayor's name is not identified, and Crabgrass lets it go at that. We have his position representing the city.

The U.S. House Rep for the area, Greg Casar, head of the House Progressive Caucus also speaks.

ICE is very unwelcome in the place and the press conference indicates the city would like a prompt exit.

It is the same situation Minneapolis faced, except here two Minnesotans werre gunned down dead in two separate incidents, a third one shot through the house door, and one ICE thug being prosecuted for lying about shooting through the door of a house in that third incident, saying he was attacked with a snow shovel while that was untrue, and he wounding a person who'd been chased into the home by ICE. All three had video evidence.

In Austin, details are as yet unavailable. But the community wants the assholes out. That's crystal clear.

It appears no definitive citizen recorded video of the Austin TX incident exists, although body cam footage, if any, has not been released by ICE.

There are online outlets broadcasting about resulting citizen protest and outrage against ICE as a result of the wounding. The person wounded was treated at a hospital then released to ICE custody.

There is some video online of immediately after the wounding, the victim being taken into ICE custody. On the ground just outside the delivery vehicle, in a handcuffing position. The link was not saved by Crabgrass, however.

 

 

It all fits together, when explained to you by those who know.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiuQhD27Cfc

After that, any questions?

I have a kind of question, it relates to "change." In particular, how this evolved into that. Explain it please. 

Besides a change event, there is Chomsky and writing of manufacturing consent. Which matters? I think so.

 

Six Dollar Diesel. [UPDATED - better ways exist, smarter leadership chooses better paths]

Link. Beginning -

Cue another milestone in your favorite president’s forever war-you’re-not-allowed-to-call-a-war in Iran! The average price of diesel across the country is now $6 a gallon, with no end to the trend in sight.

This is the third time this week diesel has set a record. At least five gas stations in California surpassed $9.999 a gallon for diesel on Thursday, GasBuddy analyst Patrick de Haan tweeted. That’s the maximum price their signs can display. Crude oil futures are now in the $102.48 a barrel to $107.63 a barrel range, according to Reuters.

Nearly everything gets more expensive when diesel does—food, consumer goods, cars, electronics, you name it. According to a Brown University tracker, increased diesel prices alone have cost U.S. households a cumulative $46.61 billion, or around $355. That’s not much less than gasoline, which is $56.42 billion.

“In a span of five months, we’ve seen diesel prices more than double. It has rocked our cash flows,” Oasis Energy’s Alex Ryan told Reuters. “There’s gotta be a tipping point, I just don’t know when or where it’s going to be.”

The ongoing war with Iran and U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that Donald Trump kicked off in late February 2026 has put a stranglehold on oil prices. Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, recently offered the plausible theory that it’s taken so long for oil prices to rise in part because markets adopted an “optimism bias” that Trump would reach a deal sooner rather than later.

Regular readers already know Crabgrass reads the tealeaves as Trump serving the interests of his fossil fuel 2024 donors, in dragging things out while they profit like bandits, but saying otherwise as his intent being a quick resolution, that, gee, did not happen. Iran's fault, he'd tell you.

It is a best guess from how things have dragged out, and other circumstantial inferences are possible.

________________________UPDATE________________________

Better than blowing shit up to inflate world oil prices so Trump cronies can make record profits while having the Military Industrial Complex making new munitions on government money to replace munitions used to blow shit up -- instead, do something useful. The Aussies are doing that, but we've got an Asshole in Chief. And it's the old Econ 101 Guns and Butter story which we all know too well.

https://electrek.co/2026/09/18/tesla-megapack-australia-first-8-hour-battery-rwe-limondale/#more-484745 

Australia just switched on its longest-duration grid battery, and it runs on 144 Tesla Megapacks.

RWE’s Limondale battery in New South Wales can discharge for a full eight hours — four times longer than the two-hour batteries that dominate the Australian grid. It’s the first project of its kind in the country.

The battery sits at 50 MW / 400 MWh, near Balranald in the state’s south-west, right next to RWE’s existing Limondale solar farm. It’s now registered and operating on the National Electricity Market after getting its final operational sign-off from grid operator AEMO earlier this year.

Charging twice as fast as it discharges

Limondale is built to charge at roughly 100 MW but discharge at only 50 MW. Most grid batteries charge and discharge at the same rate. This one doesn’t.

That asymmetry is the whole point. The battery can fill up in about four hours — soaking up the midday solar glut when NSW is drowning in cheap renewable power — then stretch that energy back out over eight hours to cover the evening peak and into the night. Charge fast, discharge slow.

It’s a neat answer to the “duck curve” problem that every solar-heavy grid runs into: too much power at noon, not enough at 7 PM. Pairing the battery directly with a solar farm makes the arbitrage even cleaner.

Why 8-hour storage is the new frontier

Australia has plenty of big batteries. What it hasn’t had is long ones.

The first wave of grid storage, including Tesla’s landmark Hornsdale project, was built for fast response and one-to-two hours of duration, great for grid stability, useless for shifting bulk solar into the evening. Four-hour batteries are now becoming the norm. Eight hours is the next step up, and Limondale is the proof of concept.

RWE didn’t build it on spec. Limondale was the only winning bid in NSW’s first long-duration storage tender under the state’s Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, backed by a Long-Term Energy Service Agreement, essentially a government revenue floor that makes financing a long battery bankable. Two more LTESA-backed 8-hour batteries are moving through the NSW pipeline behind it.

“RWE’s investment decision and signing of supplier contracts for the Limondale BESS project is an exciting step forward,” RWE Renewables Europe & Australia CEO Katja Wünschel said when the project was greenlit. Tesla supplied the Megapacks; Beon Energy Solutions handled the balance of plant.

Top comment by Stephen Wilcox

Liked by 7 people

So… if the inverter was upgraded to export 100 MW to the grid instead of 50, this project would be downgraded to just another 4 hour battery? Is that the right way to think about grid-scale batteries?

View all comments

For Tesla, it’s another flagship win in a market it helped create. The company has been stacking up grid deals worldwide, from a 500 MWh Megapack battery that just went live in Texas to a 1 GWh project in the UK, and its Megapack energy business is now one of its fastest-growing segments.

Electrek’s Take

Two-hour batteries proved storage could stabilize a grid. Eight-hour batteries are what actually let you retire coal, because they can carry solar generation through the entire evening ramp instead of tapping out at dinnertime. [...]

Now, we just need a lot more of them.

Home batteries are quietly changing the economics of residential energy the same way grid batteries are reshaping the wholesale market, and pairing one with rooftop solar is the best way to squeeze the most value out of both. With electricity rates up almost 10% last year and expected to keep climbing, going solar is one of the best ways to protect yourself against rising costs. [...]  If you want to find the best deal, check out EnergySage. It’s a free service with hundreds of pre-vetted installers competing for your business, so you save 20 to 30% compared to going it alone. No sales calls until you pick an installer. Get your free quotes here.

Ramsey has recently added solar on unbuildable land adjacent to a closed landfill. The landfill cap is off limits, but the nearby land can carry solar but not structures. Whether it includes battery is not known to Crabgrass. Already Ramsey's co-op power provider offers off peak overnight discounted rates so that hybrid or electric vehicle owners can charge at a discount when existing grid sources and loads in the energy market allow more operating of gen-co resources via the discounted charging operation.

The Aussies are pioneering solar - battery 8hr via this reported item. It seems better than murdering Iranians, sanctioning them because Bibi wants it, and popping Caribbean boats because we can.

Hegseth is Hegseth, Trump is Trump, and the Aussies are plain sensible. Bless them. Palentir is flush enough in earnings and engineering talent that it needs no growth. In fact less is more, in a sense at least the Aussies understand. Blowing shit up is just kind or really stupid.  Giving Bibi free stuff to blow up stuff is about the only thing stupider. Trump/Hegseth, both paths, dumb and dumber.

FURTHER: The question of maintaining a standing army, pro or con, was alive at the start of the Republic, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._24

The question of how big is too big remains preeminent,  especially when maintaining worldwide garrisons leveraged via deficit spending while at the same time giving the rich the tax cuts they lust after and which they buy by buying the politicians we hate and distrust, but suffer because the Constitution gave us what it did, and the Supremes said money talks. That spending it for political purposes is "speech." 

Roberts and chhorts went a step furtner saying corporations are people, just like human people entitled to "speak" with the pocletbook. Small wonder after that crap came out that the rich took over and are fucking everyone else.

U.S. Politics 101, as practiced, explained in a single illustration  -

 

Can you say "Schumer?" Can you say "Jeffries?" Need you say more? 

Perhaps add "Pelosi?" Surely "Gottheimer."

 

U.S. Senate tanks Emmer Cryoto bill on cloture vote. At least for now.

 Using search = Digital Asset Market Clarity Act tom emmer -- you get an early return list item:

https://emmer.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/emmer-reintroduces-legislation-to-provide-regulatory-clarity-for-digital-assets  -- dated March 2025 followed by https://emmer.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-emmer-voices-support-for-the-clarity-act -- dated June  2025

Emmer being a very active cryoto booster in the U.S. House.

In session, he reads, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skj0tK_gk7M wherein he argues against certain liability exposure as bad policy.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr3633/text/ih is an online bill trcker.

search = clarity act cloture vote -- provides links reporting the recent cloture vote. Readers can find links to read there. 

Quoting Gizmodo - the source Crabgrass first read of the cloture vote:

The Crypto Industry Wasn’t Able to Buy Congress After All

The crypto industry’s top legislative priority fell short of the 60 votes needed to even reach the Senate floor.

 By Kyle Torpey Published September 16, 2026, 12:30 pm ET

The Senate voted 49-50 on Tuesday against cloture on the motion to proceed to the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, better known as the CLARITY Act. The bill needed 60 votes to reach the floor for debate and a later vote on passage, but it couldn’t even get that.

That outcome is a setback for an industry that has become one of the largest lobbying forces in Washington. Crypto groups spent the past two years pushing for a federal market-structure law, and the Trump administration made digital assets a policy priority from the very start of the president’s second term in office. However, the bill still stalled, and many closely tracking or involved with the legislation argued that ethics concerns around the president’s own crypto businesses were a major reason it failed.

As a quick review, the CLARITY Act is mostly a framework for how crypto assets and tokens would be treated. It would split oversight between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, largely based on how decentralized an asset is perceived to be. Protections for non-custodial developers in the bill would also matter to those who mostly just care about Bitcoin; however, the non-profit crypto public policy research and advocacy center Coin Center indicated those protections were weakened at the last minute. The revised Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act language “would still provide important protections for non-controlling blockchain developers under the Bank Secrecy Act,” the group wrote, “but it removes the BRCA’s explicit protection against criminal liability.”

How CLARITY Fell Apart

Passage looked close to guaranteed at the start of the year. The House had already approved the bill, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced it 15-9 in May. But the coalition did not hold. Banks spent months fighting over how stablecoin rewards might pull deposits out of the traditional system. Democrats, and even some Republicans, spent those same months circling ethics language tied to the billions of dollars the Trump family has made from crypto during the president’s second term.

[...]That said, Trump signed off on last-minute ethics provisions before the vote. A GOP aide told Crypto In America’s Eleanor Terrett that the president had agreed to “80%” of a Tillis-Gallego ethics proposal, [...] The same revised text also stripped explicit criminal-law protections for developers and added a “circuit breaker” that would let Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intervene if banks faced widespread deposit flight to stablecoins (as they feared).

On the Senate floor, Democrat Elizabeth Warren argued the bill would put the country “at risk of a crypto-fueled economic crash.” She said it would “blow a massive hole in our nearly century-old securities laws” and “drain billions of dollars out of our stock market that families depend on to fund their retirement savings.”

Republican Tim Scott made the opposite case. “If you want everyday, hardworking Americans to have more access to their resources, more options on the table, and you want America to be the leading financial country on the planet, you vote yes,” the South Carolina Republican told Fox Business. Without market structure written into law, he said, “you have the wild, wild West.”

When the roll was called, every participating Democrat voted no, and so did Republicans Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran, and Thom Tillis. The 18 Democrats who had backed last year’s GENIUS Act stablecoin bill, including original Senate CLARITY co-sponsor Kirsten Gillibrand, voted against this one. Gillibrand had reportedly been gathering yes votes hours before she flipped to no.

Curious behavior from one seemingly image conscious New York Dem Senator (Schumer being the other). That detail about Gillibrand is indicative of something readers can chew on.

 The report continuing:

According to Terrett, Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks, who helped negotiate both GENIUS and CLARITY, also accused Republican leadership of “playing a game” by forcing the vote while refusing to hold Trump accountable for crypto “corruption.”

Senator Mark Warner pointed to the same problem: “The president should not be able to use the power and influence of his office to benefit his own crypto holdings while his administration makes decisions that could directly affect their value,” the Virginia Democrat said.

Self-described progressive Bitcoiner Trey Walsh put the politics more bluntly. “Dems are laser focused on Trump corruption. And they know it resonates with voters,” he wrote on X. “So they are a hell no on Clarity as written — there is no ‘crypto voter’ in their minds for the midterms. There is the American voter pissed about affordability, corruption, and AI.”

NYU Stern professor Austin Campbell made a similar point. “I’ve been predicting Clarity would fail for a long time because all of the issues inside of the bill were solvable, but the ethics issue and Trump vs. Democrats were not.”

There is much more to the report, and Crabgrass urges readers to use the source to read it all. Breifly, there is this skeleton outline - 

Crypto Industry Will Still Be Happy for Now

To be clear, the bill is not formally dead. It remains on the Senate calendar, and Tillis switched his vote to no so he could move to reconsider. “This is not the end for the Clarity Act,” Tillis said. “We’ve made substantial bipartisan progress in large part because of the White House. This procedural motion allows us to continue working towards a positive outcome.” Ted Cruz used a similar line. [...]

For now, the calendar is the problem. Congress is heading into midterm recess, and another cloture attempt may wait until a lame-duck session or the next Congress. If Democrats do well in November, they will have even more leverage [...]

[...] Crypto companies have already poured $189 million into the 2026 midterm elections, and crypto-industry affiliated PACs like Fairshake won 48 of 48 races they backed in the last election. [...]

[...] It’s clear the industry will still get favorable treatment for the next couple of years under the Trump administration’s rule. [...]

So Tillis was influential in allowing things "to continue working toward a positive outcome." But Trump and offspring's grift tanked things for now.

Ethics and legal liability considerations clearly exist and the Crypto Industrial Complex wants free rein if it can lobby successfully. 

Emmer's reaction? Not covered in this report. Crabgrass expects he will not be too loud in opining.

Readers are urged to use the earlier mentioned search to find other reporting.

UPDATE: Know that a nonprofit watchdog exists: https://coincenter.org/  They have posted a detailed analysis https://coincenter.org/the-proposed-brca-changes-are-a-tough-pill-to-swallow/ noting early -

The Senate is scheduled for a pivotal vote on the Clarity Act tomorrow, and in an effort to secure the 60 votes needed for passage, the drafters have made last-minute revisions to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA). The revised language would still provide important protections for non-controlling blockchain developers under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), but it removes the BRCA’s explicit protection against criminal liability under 18 U.S.C. § 1960.

That is an important change to a provision Coin Center has championed for years and that has now, incredibly, reached the point of potential passage into law.

As a reminder, the BRCA would proactively protect developers and service providers like validators against being treated as “money transmitters” when they do not take control of user funds.

In fairness to Emmer, that seemed to echo his concerns in the above linked video segment.