Democrat News

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Since my wife forbade me throwing my Carhart cap and the lovely hand-knit hat she made for me into the ring, the field is now wide open. I have my own local favorites, but Illinois is a big state with a deep Democratic bench, so let the irresponsible speculation begin!

Also too, some memories…

Editor’s note [Frances Langum]: Damn right Driftglass ain’t running.

Republished with permission from Driftglass.

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The HHS under the Trump administration and RFK Jr are gutting medical research, testing, vaccines, and other vital services, yet RFK Jr ranted about teenage sperm counts on Fox News.

As usual Kennedy uses any unverified information to make wild claims about the state of health.

RFK: 74 percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service.

We have fertility rates that are just spiraling.

A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man.

Sperm counts are down 50 percent.

WATTERS: Wait, wait, wait. An American teenager has less testosterone than a 60-year-old man?

RFK:That’s right. Because testosterone levels have dropped 50 percent from historic levels.

And you know, and that is a problem.

And it’s an existential problem.

The sicker you are, the more qualified you become to join the Trump administration.

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With the stock markets crashing on Monday, Trump reversed course and claimed he never would’ve fired Jerome Powell from the Fed after days of berating and blaming him for the markets collapse.

Wall Street has been plummeting since Trump rolled out his lamebrain tariff ideas. but he wasn’t finished throwing them further into chaos after his idiotic move of attacking the Fed chair.

On Tuesday, Trump began singing a different song.

REPORTER: You have no intention of firing Jerome Powell because, here, I think on the brink of passing, a few days ago it was said that you and people in the White House were studying this idea possibly before his term ends. Do you have any plans on doing that?

TRUMP: None whatsoever.

Never did.

The press runs away with things.

No, I have no intention of firing him.

I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates. This is a perfect time to lower interest rates.

If he doesn’t, is it the end? No, it’s not.

But it would be good timing. It could have taken place earlier.

But no, I have no intention to fire him.

Hahahaha.

Trump tried to bully a rate cut, hoping it would ease the markets from declining from his addled brain. He always berates people in hopes they will wilt in the face of his commands, but Powell refused, making Trump crawl.

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Sarah Palin’s libel loss was her second attempt to claim she had been damaged by a 2017 New York Times editorial that was amended less than 14 hours after it was published. “During the trial, Ms. Palin told the jury that the editorial ‘kicked the oomph’ right out of her, damaging her reputation,” The Times reported. “She said it had ignited another round of criticism of her years after the map was first distributed.”

Poor widdle snowflake.

The AP explains the legal case:

Her lawsuit stemmed from an editorial about gun control published after U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, was wounded in 2017 when a man with a history of anti-GOP activity opened fire on a Congressional baseball team practice in Washington.

In the editorial, the Times wrote that before the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona that severely wounded former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others, Palin’s political action committee had contributed to an atmosphere of violence by circulating a map of electoral districts that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.

The Times corrected the article less than 14 hours after it was published, saying it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting” and that it had “incorrectly described” the map.

The AP further noted that the Times’ then-editorial page editor “tearfully apologized to Palin,” during the trial, “saying he was tormented by the error and worked urgently to correct it after readers complained to the newspaper.”

Personally, I think the editorial pales in comparison to the hideous rhetoric that routinely comes from MAGA world. That includes putting out a map with crosshairs over Democratic districts. Or Palin, herself, accusing Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” e.g.

But Palin’s suit is not really about the harm she allegedly suffered from a 14-hour insult from The Times. It’s “widely understood” that the real goal has been to get the case to the Trumpy Supreme Court where Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have already “shown an openness to altering U.S. libel law to make it easier to sue media outlets,” Ja’han Jones wrote in an MSNBC.com blog post.

“Palin declined to say whether she would appeal the verdict,” The Times also reported. “Outside the court after the verdict, Ms. Palin said she was going to ‘go home to a beautiful family’ and ‘get on with life.’

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Well, here is the logical result of decades of media consolidation, where corporate greed slams into journalistic independence. CBS News entered a new period of turmoil yesterday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said that he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence. Via the New York Times:

In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“60 Minutes” has faced mounting pressure in recent months from both President Trump, who sued CBS for $10 billion and has accused the program of “unlawful and illegal behavior,” and its own corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS News.

Now, you knew this had something to do with Trump, right?

Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on “60 Minutes.”

Legal experts have dismissed that suit as baseless and far-fetched. Many journalists at CBS News — the former home of Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace — believe that a settlement would amount to a capitulation to Mr. Trump over what they consider standard-issue gripes about editorial judgment.

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Bob Kennedy announced he will be using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States. Seems like the surveillance state is here! Is this legal? Via The New Republic:

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases to give to the secretary of health and human services, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said Monday. The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.

The NIH is also working on an agreement to secure Medicare and Medicaid data, according to Bhattacharya, who said that select outside researchers will be able to access and study, but not download, the collected data from the registry.

Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals under his tenure. The department’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a study to examine links between autism and vaccines, even though medical experts have long debunked any such connection.

The news that HHS is putting together a registry and accessing Americans’ private medical records raises all kinds of privacy concerns. HHS and its departments, including the NIH and CDC, have laid off thousands of employees in the past few months, possibly giving Kennedy and Bhattacharya, also an anti-vaxxer, more compliant employees to push their agenda.

Exactly how are they planning to define autism? Because a lot of people on the spectrum have had no medical treatment. They even write poetry and go on dates! So how will they know? It’s a puzzle.

And that’s assuming the entire thing isn’t overturned by a judge.

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It never fails – Republicans vote against a social service program (food, healthcare, disaster relief) because they think it’s only greedy blue states that ask for “handouts” when in actuality it is the blue states that subsidize the red states disproportionately and red states (ie, Trump voters) that rely on these programs almost entirely.

In today’s FAFO: Tom Cotton, blowhard Senator from Arkansas, who voted against disaster relief five times is now begging Donald Trump to “reconsider” his denial of disaster relief for Arkansas after his very red Trump-supporting state was hit with damaging tornados.

You know who would not have cut off FEMA funding? Kamala Harris. Even for deep red states.

But I digress.

Cotton joined the rest of the Arkansas elected officials in writing a groveling letter to Trump begging for that sweet, sweet gubmint money.

Trump has refused to budge. The letter from the government said:

“Based on our review of all of the information available, it has been determined that the damage from this event was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies. Accordingly, we have determined that supplemental federal assistance is not necessary.”

Something something bootstraps.

Sorry, guys. This is what you wanted, and now you’re getting it, just like the rest of us. I’m sure you thought he’d only stick it to blue states.

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Poor Chuck Grassley. The man survived The Spanish American War, The Palmer Raids, trench warfare, Prohibition, the Dust Bowl and the invention of indoor plumbing—but he may not survive the MAGA mob he helped create. Feels like all these once-sorta-respectable Republicans who whored out for MAGA should have re-read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in recent years.

At a town hall that looked less civic engagement and more an exorcism gone haywire, Grassley got torched by at-least-some-formerly-Trump-loving constituents furious over the kidnapping of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man dumped in El Salvador, thanks to Trump’s no-due-process death pact with the local tyrant, President Bukele. Turns out, even red-hat loyalists don’t love it when innocent Americans get shipped to concentration camps to live among murderous gangs. Especially when it’s just b/c Chuck bows to Trump, who’s playing footsie with autocrats for fake “immigration policy.”

As Grassley stood there blinking like someone just asked him to explain TikTok, it all became painfully clear. The MAGA beast Chuck fed, housed and protected is now eating him–and many other soulless sellouts of the GOP–alive. Not even that folksy Iowa drawl or the fact he’s a barely sentient being at this point can save him from the blowback of backing a fascist.

So check out the video–and a reminder: Please Subscribe to Cliff’s Edge–we are independent media fighting the fight against home-grown fascism every day.

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Fox business analyst Charles Gasparino said that JD Vance is now going to be an executor, (with a gun?) negotiating trade deals with our foreign partners after the markets crashed again on Monday.

The White House is doing damage control to curtail the stock market collapse for at least for a few days. The A.I. Press bot claimed a deal with China may be imminent and “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he expects “there will be a de-escalation” in President Donald Trump’s trade war with China in the “very near future.”
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The inclusion of JD Vance is beyond the pale in this disgusting MAGA soup of dreck.

Gasparino admitted Trump is scrambling to put together deals.

Any deal to stop the destruction of the US economy.

GASPARINO: Here’s what we know, and this is from my sources close to the White House, people inside the White House.

What they’re saying is simply this. They are scrambling to do deals.

They would like to do a deal with China, OK? However, those talks are, you know, I think some of the press on this that it’s a deal is imminent.

You saw some of that way overblown. This has to do with China, from what I understand, coming to the table and negotiating as well. So there’s a lot riding on China’s participation.

What is interesting is that I heard that V.P. Vance, now we know he’s in India right now. He’s become, and this is how they described it to me, people close to Vance, a major executor in the trade negotiations.

I don’t know what that exactly means.

It means he has a gun.

Does he have a gun in his hand?

I doubt it.

But apparently he’s going to be part of, he’s part and parcel of these things with Scott Bessent, with Howard Lutnick to make this work.

And they are scrambling to do deals.

Hopefully, JD Vance will have better luck with our trade partners than he did with The Pope.

Including the unlikable Vance into these trade talks shows how frantic and worried the Trump administration is.

It won’t be long before the Treasury Secretary yells Eureka! and declares multiple trade deals have been struck.

These deals have no effect on the US economy or people’s lives. The economy was growing before Trump became obsessed and has caused devastation among the working class. It’s shameful.

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