Democrat News

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This is, in a word, insane. More anticipatory compliance, or is something larger going on? We already see signs of a bad flu season, and Louisiana just announced the first serious case of human bird flu. WTF? Via NPR:

A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.

Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — and at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.

[…] According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.

Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department’s work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department’s clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.

WTF? Is the Musk-Trump administration already making these insane demands?
Is this part of a plan to kill off the poor, who depend on the country nation’s public health infrastructure? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Remember how Jared Kushner steered covid assistance away from blue cities because “they don’t vote for us”?

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El Cheato’s death grip on the Republican Party got a lot looser last night after 38 of his House minions voted to defy his command to support a spending and debt deal. Via the New York Times:

Writing on social media, Mr. Trump had told Republicans to “vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” He said it was vital to pass a bill that extended spending until early next year and suspended the nation’s debt limit until 2027, well into his next term.

For the better part of a decade, that kind of dictate has usually been enough for Mr. Trump, who has methodically seized control of the Republican Party at all levels. But with just a month left before he returns to office, Mr. Trump found out that at least some of his followers were willing to buck his leadership in the right circumstances. The rebel Republicans, combined with most House Democrats, sank that legislation, leaving the nation about a day away from a government shutdown.

The defiance came not from the handful of moderate Republicans who have previously earned the president-elect’s ire. This time, it was conservatives who would normally align themselves with Mr. Trump’s philosophy who voted against his wishes.

You don’t say!

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Elon Musk, the likely illegal immigrant disqualified from being an elected president because he was not born in the U.S., has now found a way to become president anyway: Give Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans $277 million so that he can be the puppet master.

If the failed bipartisan bill to keep the government open past Friday is any indication, Musk’s plan to be President-Never-Elected is working.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a senior whip of the Democratic caucus and chair of the Congressional Progressional Caucus, nailed it in her Blue Sky Post: “Here’s the situation: There was a bipartisan deal to stop a government shutdown. But now, shadow President Elon Musk is calling the shots and Mike Johnson, Trump, and Republicans are falling in line. It’s clear who’s in charge.”

Yes, it’s very clear. (But do check out Karoli’s post about how VP Trump gave the Dems a roadmap to keep the government open.)

Jayapal also told CNN that House “Speaker” Mike Johnson negotiated a deal with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, as well as Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. Now, Johnson is “reneging on the deal because the shadow-president, Elon Musk, said that we shouldn’t be doing this deal. So, this is on them.”

President Musk seems eager to shut down the government until Jan. 20, 2025. Because why should the world’s richest man care about federal workers and our troops not getting their paychecks over the holidays? Or flight delays at a time when millions of Americans travel? Or national parks closing?

And why shouldn’t VP Trump and fellow-puppet Johnson go along with a Musk shutdown, since Trump has also agreed to put his Sugar Daddy boss in charge of cutting services and whole departments so that Musk can allow Trump to hand out fat tax cuts to their billionaire buddies?

Did you really think that the Musk-Trump administration would be looking out for anyone but themselves?

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Unsurprisingly, a panel of GOP-appointed judges on Thursday stripped Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from the last remaining criminal case against incoming vice-president Donald Trump. Incoming President Leon Musk could not be reached for comment.

The panel concluded that Willis’ one-time romantic relationship with former special prosecutor Nathan Wade constituted a conflict of interest that merited her dismissal from the case. Another prosecutor will have to be appointed, probably a man. If they choose a woman, she’d better not have ever had sexy-time with a man before, dadgummit. Them’s the rules in Gilead.

The Associated Press reports:

A state appeals court on Thursday removed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump and others but did not dismiss the indictment, leaving the future of the prosecution uncertain.

Citing an “appearance of impropriety” by Willis that might not typically warrant such a removal, the court said in a 2-1 ruling that “this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.”

The case against Trump and more than a dozen others had already been largely stalled for months while the Georgia Court of Appeals considered the pretrial appeal.

The 2-1 ruling by an appeals court panel means it will be up to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia to find another prosecutor to take over the case and to decide whether to continue to pursue it, though that could be delayed if Willis decides to appeal to the state Supreme Court and that court agrees to take the case. A trial judge in March had allowed Willis to stay on the case.

Vice-President-elect Donald took a victory lap, declaring the case “dead.”

“The case has to be thrown out because it was started corruptly by an incompetent prosecutor who received millions of dollars through her boyfriend — who received it from her — and then they went on cruises all the time,” Trump told Fox News Digital, according to The Hill.

“Therefore, the case is entirely dead,” Trump added. “Everybody should receive an apology, including those wonderful patriots who have been caught up in this for years.”

Maybe, just maybe, Earth is a penal colony for the rest of the galaxy, and that’s why a criminal has been elevated to the highest seat in the land — again.

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On Fox Business (yeah), Rep. Dan Meuser whined about the amount of disaster relief funds included in the funding bill.

This is crazy: we’ve seen the devastation natural disasters have brought throughout the country. But clueless MAGA Republicans are willfully ignorant as to how government works, unless they are voting themselves a pay raise.

First, this jackass says the funds are necessary, then in the same breath, asks if it is necessary.

MEUSER: You know, even this $100 billion for, crying out loud, for disaster relief, okay, necessary.

But, I mean, is it all necessary?

You know, when I see numbers like $100 billion, why not 98.2?

I mean, it should be based upon need, not based upon a number.

And you know what?

Doge swept in.

Doge did a job.

Joe alerted the American people.

Hey, look what’s going on here.

Money must be allocated beforehand. That’s how spending bills and continuing resolutions work. The country isn’t run by line-by-line items and then passed when funds are needed.

If something were to happen in Pennsylvania, this scumbag would be the first to attack FEMA and claim there wasn’t enough funding because they hate Republicans.

DOGE is a cancer on the well-being of our country.

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With Putin’s order that the Kursk region of Russia must be taken back by Russian forces, at any cost, by Christmas, the Ukrainians have injected some dark humor into the situation just in time for the holidays. To that end, they’ve also enlisted the help of 12,000 North Korean soldiers whose main ability seems to be following any order, no matter how ludicrous. More than a few videos have shown the North Koreans attacking in human waves through open snow-covered fields in their dark military fatigues, making them obvious to spot, and easily eliminated. Ukraine claims that upwards of 200 North Koreans were dispatched in this fashion last weekend.

Source: Forbes

According to the latest official estimate from Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation in Kyiv, the North Korean 11th Army Corps lost around 200 troops killed and wounded in a series of assaults targeting Ukrainian positions in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast last weekend.

At least a few of those casualties were inflicted by explosive first-person-view drones wearing Christmas ornaments. A reindeer. A Santa. An elf. A bird.

Videos of the festive drone strikes, conducted by the Ukrainian 8th Special Purpose Regiment deployed to the southwestern edge of the 250-square-mile salient the Ukrainians carved out of Kursk back in August, appeared online on Tuesday.

The Ukrainian drone operators’ dark humor belies the deadly seriousness of their task. North Korean manpower significantly stiffened Russian assaults in Kursk, allowing the combined Russian-North Korean force to recapture the village of Plekhove, on the eastern edge of the salient, after three costly infantry attacks last weekend.

Altogether, the Russians and North Koreans have around 60,000 troops in and around Kursk. The Ukrainians have just 20,000. But attacking across open ground is always more dangerous than defending from dug-in positions, so the manpower imbalance only confers a slight advantage to the Russians and North Koreans.

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Trump and Musk blew up the bipartisan deal to prevent a government shutdown before Christmas, now we’ve got Republicans eating their own and Hannity trying to tell us a government shutdown isn’t really that bad.

GOP Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley made an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox this Wednesday, and here’s the spin they’re tying to put on this debacle and the damage Trump, Musk and Republicans are going to inflict on our economy before Trump even takes office.

They know full well Trump plans to blow up the deficit with more massive tax cuts as soon as he takes office, which will mean the debt ceiling will need to be raised, and they’re trying to pin the need to raise it next year. on Biden.

Hawley also attacked GOP leadership for negotiating in good faith with Democrats, pretending that’s not how government is supposed to work when you’ve got a divided Congress and narrow margins in the House.

HANNITY: You know, I’m looking at this monstrosity. I went through all a lot of these provisions, you know, 1550 pages. Nobody had time to read it. It’s all because they don’t want to do their job and pass budgets by October 1st, which is the deadline, and it’s no surprise.

We find ourselves in this position, and if I’m Donald Trump, I don’t want that debt ceiling during my term. This is Joe Biden’s debt ceiling raise. It, it shouldn’t be Donald Trump’s.

If Hakeem Jeffries doesn’t want to come to a consensus, then shut it down. You know what, I think it’s a misnomer that a government shutdown is the worst thing in the world. We survived a 30 plus days shutdown in 2019.

Note to Sean Hannity. They came to a consensus, and Trump, once again, blew it up.

HAWLEY: You know, Sean, this continuing resolution, whatever it’s a total joke. You’re right, it is 1500 pages of pork barrel spending, and worse than that, it’s all the woke garbage.

It’s the censorship boards. They’re getting funded in this. There’s hundreds of millions of dollars for a recycling access center in this bill.

I mean, it is a total offense and you pointed out there’s also the pay raise for members of Congress. There’s the Obamacare carve out for members of Congress.

Here’s the thing that really gets me. Republicans negotiated this. The Speaker of the House negotiated this bill. It is a total travesty.

This has got to change, Sean. I mean, we cannot go on like this, and I hope the Republican leadership gets the message here, the message of this election, which is that people want change. They don’t want this garbage.

I’m a hard no on this thing. It is a joke. It is a travesty, and they need to go back to square one.

HANNITY: Well, it’s the old swampy way of doing things. There’s going to be a new sheriff in town, and when Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to cut $2 trillion in spending, I think they’re serious about it, and I think Donald Trump is serious about that as well.

There’s going to be a lot of cuts and the The old way of doing things has to go away if you want to return and be transformational to constitutional order, limited government, greater freedom.

Do we achieve that, or is this evidence that that’s not going to be achievable, especially with the tight margins we have both in the House and Senate?

HAWLEY: Well, you can’t do it by doing business this way. I mean, this is, this is the same old, same old.

You talk about needing to cut all of that spending, Sean, this bill right here would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit, and the worst part is, it’s all for dim priorities.

Why would you saddle Donald Trump with this terrible spending bill before he even gets into office? And Sean, the worst part is it dumps it right back in his lap in March, in March.

Under this bill, they’d shut the government down again, have to do this all over again, have to raise the debt ceiling again later the same year. It’s ridiculous. It’s a horrible plan.

I can’t believe that Republican leadership ever cooked it up. Clearly they didn’t talk to Trump about it, and I tell you what, we need to have a serious look at who’s leading this Congress, because if this is the best they can do, I mean, it’s just, it’s total incompetence. This is a disaster.

HANNITY: The, the, the, the best worst case scenario considering they didn’t do their job would be a clean CR. Democrats say they won’t support that. So we, we’re at a standoff, right?

I don’t see any way out of that.

HAWLEY: I think that’s right. I mean, unless, the government is going to shut down on Friday, and by the way, that was also the choice of Republican leadership.

They could very well have done this and extended it longer, which is what Donald Trump wanted. They said, Oh no, no, no, we’ll come back and do it in December.

Why did they want to do it in December, Sean, so that they could force us up against the wall and try to get through all of their special projects and their pet projects and spending.

And now they’ve been caught red handed and now they don’t have a plan. Well, that’s their fault.

Mike Johnson and his crew need to figure this out. They need to do the right thing, and I tell you this is not right. What they’re trying to do is a disaster. They own this, and they need to fix it.

HANNITY: Well, it’s already dead on arrival.

We’ll see what happens by Friday and how badly Johnson wants to hang onto his job as Speaker. I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to put up with this nonsense, not that I feel sorry for Johnson.

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Now that President (non-elect) Musk has blown up the carefully negotiated continuing resolution to keep the government open, VP-Elect Trump is doing is best to preserve what little power he has by imploring Democrats to get rid of the debt ceiling entirely.

Writing on his money laundering site Truth Social site, Trump called for Democrats to end the “mess of the debt limit” entirely for his four years.

If Republicans try to pass a clean Continuing Resolution without all of the Democrat “bells and whistles” that will be so destructive to our Country, all it will do, after January 20th, is bring the mess of the Debt Limit into the Trump Administration, rather than allowing it to take place in the Biden Administration. Any Republican that would be so stupid as to do this should, and will, be Primaried. Everything should be done, and fully negotiated, prior to my taking Office on January 20th, 2025.

So to be clear, nothing can be done in the House without some Democrats. And even Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez aren’t going to raise the debt limit for 4 years because Trump said so.

There is absolutely no way to negotiate a four-year budget anyway, so that’s just stupid. But if Trump truly doesn’t want to deal with the debt limit, which is an artificial construct Republicans use as a cudgel to beat Democrats into submission over their shitty poison pill budget items, then by all means, let’s accommodate that.

Democrats should, with one strong voice, agree to Trump’s terms and just eliminate the debt ceiling entirely forever and ever. No president ever again will be plagued with the Republican reindeer games to shut down government over stupid riders in a budget bill.

President Musk will not like this, which is why our current President (who has remained weirdly silent about Musk usurping the presidency) should absolutely grant Trump’s request.

It would be a little Christmas miracle.

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Neil Cavuto, the first anchor hired by Fox News in 1996, is leaving the network, another casualty of cost-cutting in the TV news business.

Cavuto, 66, will make his final appearance on the network Thursday on “Your World,” his long-running daily business-oriented program. His current deal is up at the end of the month.

Cavuto chose to leave the company after being offered a new contract – likely at a lower salary – according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

“Neil Cavuto’s illustrious career has been a master class in journalism and we’re extremely proud of his 28-year run with Fox News Media,” the company said in a statement confirming the anchor’s departure. “His programs have defined business news and set the standard in the entire industry.”

Big-name anchors across the TV news business are being asked to take lower salaries as ratings and revenues are shrinking. Hoda Kotb of NBC’s “Today” and Chris Wallace of CNN both chose to leave their roles rather than take new deals at lower pay.

Cavuto anchored 12 hours of programming a week on Fox News and its sister channel the Fox Business Network, where he also served as managing editor. He was a popular figure among colleagues.

Cavuto is one of the few Fox News anchors who frequently criticized President-elect Donald Trump, which did not always please the conservative viewers who make up much of the network’s audience.

The anchor had a sense of humor about the audience’s love-hate relationship with him. When he returned after one of his long medical leaves, he read messages from viewers who were disappointed that he was back.

Throughout his career, Cavuto has battled a number of health issues over the years. He has multiple sclerosis, underwent open heart surgery in 2016 and is a cancer survivor.

He was an original anchor at CNBC when it launched in 1989. He developed a bond with Roger Ailes when he ran the NBCUniversal-owned business news network and followed the executive to Fox News when it launched in 1996.

Cavuto became the lead anchor of Fox Business Network when it was launched in 2007. He helmed a midday program, “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” on the network in addition to his daily and weekend shows on Fox News.

No successor was named for Cavuto, whose programs will continue. A permanent replacement is likely to come from within the ranks of the network.

Cavuto served as a moderator for the second Republican presidential primary debate in 2015, which delivered the largest audience in the history of Fox Business Network.

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It is a Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa miracle, friends! We WILL get to see the House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz and his perverted dealings with (possibly) underage girls.

CNN is reporting that the committee secretly voted earlier this month to release the report before the new Congress is sworn in. It is expected to be publicly released right before the holidays, maybe as early as this Friday.

Just last month, the committee voted along party lines to keep the report secret, probably related to Gaetz’s nomination to be Attorney General. Things changed as soon as he removed himself from contention after he realized that Senate Republicans hate him as much as many House Republicans do. Womp womp.

The investigation focuses on whether he “engaged in sexual misconduct, used illicit drugs, “shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gifts.”

Gaetz put out a statement shortly after the news broke of the impending release:

What an odd statement. He isn’t denying anything. Rather, he is trying to make excuses for everything that he knows is going to come out.