Democrat News

This post was originally published on this site

The year was 2010. Donald Trump starred in Season 3 of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Obamacare squeaked through Congress. Justin Bieber — with help from Ludacris — scored his breakout hit, “Baby.”

And in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger was winding down his second and final term as governor.

Three days into 2011, the Hollywood celebrity left office, marking the last time a Republican held Sacramento’s top job.

Could that change next year?

Jumping into the gubernatorial race this week, conservative commentator Steve Hilton gave the GOP its second major candidate — alongside Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — signaling a heightened sense of opportunity for a party that hasn’t wielded significant power in the state Capitol since “Avatar” reigned at the box office.

Not that a GOP takeover is likely. Only the most punch-drunk partisan would give Republicans as much as a 50-50 chance of succeeding Gavin Newsom.

Some would say there’s a greater likelihood of JD Vance being elected the next pope.

Kevin Spillane, a Republican strategist who’s not involved in the GOP contest, believes the party would “need a lot of breaks” to elect a governor in 2026. He put the odds at no better than 35% to 40% — though, as Spillane noted, that’s “still higher than we’ve had in a long time.”

What’s buoying Republican prospects?

“It’s homelessness,” Spillane said. “It’s public safety. It’s affordability. It’s taxes. It’s gas prices. It’s energy policy. I mean, these are just bread-and-butter issues.”

If Kamala Harris decides to run, Spillane thinks that would only enhance the GOP’s chances of seizing the governorship.

“You’ll be able to tap into national Republican fundraising,” he said. Small donors. Big contributors. “There’s obviously a lot of animosity on the Republican side toward her. She, along with Gavin Newsom, are sort of seen as symbols of California’s multiple policy failures.”

But Garry South, a Democratic strategist who twice helped elect Gray Davis governor, is highly skeptical.

“No chance,” he said of Hilton, Bianco or any other Republican assuming the governorship in January 2027. “Zilch. Zero.”

South pointed to the state’s political profile: Just 25% of registered voters are Republicans. Democrats make up 45% and most of those who are unaffiliated — just about another quarter of the electorate — tend to lean Democratic.

“The numbers don’t add up,” South said. “Just get a calculator and do the math.”

He conceded that Democrats running for governor aren’t campaigning in the best of times, or benefiting from a whole lot of goodwill. After nearly a decade and a half of one-party rule in Sacramento, there’s no escaping responsibility for California’s deep-seated problems.

“There’s clearly unease about the homeless situation, which seems to be continually spiraling out of control. There’s concern about crime,” South said. “But [voters] don’t look at Republicans and see any potential solutions there.”

At least not since 2006, the last time the GOP won any statewide office.

That said, stranger things have happened. Witness the convicted felon and twice-impeached scofflaw now occupying the White House.

Matt Shupe is communications director for the California Republican Party, meaning his job is seeing that partisan hopes spring eternal. He said he doesn’t have to crane his neck too hard to envision a viable GOP path to the governorship.

While Republicans lag behind in voter registration, he noted that it’s not unusual for candidates to win 40% or more of the statewide vote. In 2022, Lanhee Chen — one of the younger, more attractive Republican candidates of recent years — received nearly 45% of the vote in an unsuccessful bid for state controller. Given unhappiness with Sacramento’s status quo, Shupe suggested, it’s not impossible to see a Republican making up that last bit of ground and winning a majority.

“Things like gay marriage and abortion” — which Democrats used for years as a bludgeon against Republicans — “are enshrined in our state Constitution and aren’t going anywhere,” Shupe said. “And assuming a Republican was elected governor, they still have the checks and balance of a majority or super-majority Democratic Legislature.

“So I think it opens people’s willingness to vote Republican just to try something new, which is desperately needed.”

With Trump back in the White House and the economy on the skids, Democrats will surely brush off their familiar playbook and seek to turn the governor’s race into a referendum on the unpopular president. (Important disclaimer: No one knows what kind of shape the economy will be in come November 2026.)

Regardless, Shupe maintained those attacks will fall flat.

The average California voter, he said, “is tired of this war on Trump. That’s not to say they’re all MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters. But they want the state government to focus on infrastructure, homelessness, the cost of living and all these things that affect people every single day in their pocketbooks.”

Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who worked in Schwarzenegger’s administration, is less optimistic than Shupe.

“That’s not to say that Republicans can’t become more competitive,” Stutzman said, or improve their overall standing in California. A credible gubernatorial candidate could help the party by boosting turnout — potentially lifting up candidates for Congress and the statehouse — and laying the groundwork for a successful run at the governor’s mansion sometime in the next decade.

Asked the likelihood of a Republican winning in 2026, Stutzman offered about a 1% chance — “for the same reason that a Democrat won’t be the governor of [ruby-red] Idaho next year.”

Which — if you’re looking on the Republican bright side — is not zero.

This post was originally published on this site

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.

This post was originally published on this site

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.

This post was originally published on this site

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.’

This post was originally published on this site

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.

This post was originally published on this site

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.

This post was originally published on this site

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.

This post was originally published on this site

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.

This post was originally published on this site

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.”
.
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.

This post was originally published on this site

The FBI had been following Richard W. Miller for weeks, waiting for him to slip. He was one of them, a veteran bureau man, and now he was suspected of betraying his oath and his country. A small army of agents surveilled him day and night, trying to catch him transmitting secrets to the Soviets. They tapped his car. They tapped his phones. They tapped his desk at the bureau’s Wilshire Boulevard office.

At 48, Miller had floundered and bumbled through a 20-year career, to the dismay of his superiors, who could not muster the will to fire him. Instead, they had dumped him at the so-called Russia Squad in L.A., a counterespionage unit meant to combat Soviet spying. He did not speak Russian. It was 1984, the year Moscow boycotted the L.A. Olympics, but Southern California — which did not have a Russian Consulate — was considered a backwater in the Cold War spy game.

In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.

Still, the KGB was watching, and Miller, shambling, bitter and broke, made a tempting target. He had eight children. He had debts. He sold Amway nylons to FBI secretaries while other agents sneered. He took bribes and skimmed cash from informants. He had a weakness for women not his wife, which had led to his excommunication from the Mormon Church.

He had been suspended for flouting weight regulations, stripped of his informants and demoted to monitoring wiretaps. And, lately, he’d been having clandestine trysts with a Russian emigre with KGB ties, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, in cars and cheap hotels around Los Angeles.

An FBI surveillance photo of FBI agent Richard W. Miller, in white shirt and dark pants, with Russian emigre Svetlana Ogorodnikov. Federal agents hoped to prove he was giving her state secrets.

(Bettmann Archive)

“Lonely, friendless, despised at his office, estranged from his family, alienated even from his God,” is how Paula Hill, his ex-wife, described Miller in a memoir. “A moral man who led an immoral life, an idealist who had betrayed his ideals. No one despised Richard as much as Richard himself.”

The code name for the massive operation to catch Miller, in the summer and fall of 1984, was “Whipworm,” a reference to an intestinal parasite. The case against him seemed damning when a wiretap captured a KGB officer instructing Ogorodnikova to lure Miller to Warsaw, which was part of the Soviet Bloc.

But in late September, Miller did something that surprised everyone: He walked into his supervisor’s office and told on himself.

Yes, Miller explained, he’d been secretly seeing Ogorodnikova, but only as part of a bold, self-styled plan to infiltrate Soviet intelligence. He would be the first FBI agent to do it. He would be a hero. He would redeem his misbegotten career and go out “in a blaze of glory,” as he would put it.

The story struck the FBI as asinine — agents just did not act that way — but could it be disproved? The bureau brass doubted prosecution was possible without a confession. At one point during five days of questioning, Miller received a lecture from Richard T. Bretzing, who ran the FBI’s L.A. office and was a bishop in the Mormon Church. He told Miller to consider the “spiritual ramifications” of his behavior under church doctrines, to repent and make restitution.

“I reminded him that he had a wife and eight children who needed someone in his position to respect, and that it was his responsibility to find the courage and the decency within himself to once again develop those attributes which would earn their respect,” Bretzing wrote in a memo.

A July 1986 photo of former FBI agent Richard Miller after his second trial.

(Larry Davis / Los Angeles Times)

Miller wept, and soon after admitted that he had given Ogorodnikova a 50-page FBI document called the Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide, an internal inventory of the intelligence community’s goals.

Charged with passing secrets for $65,000 in cash and gold, Miller became the first FBI agent to be tried for espionage. His attorneys tried to exclude his confession on the grounds that he made it involuntarily, tortured by religious guilt. Testifying in January 1985, Miller claimed that his supervisor’s “spiritual lecture” chilled him with the specter of eternal separation from his loved ones.

“What first came to my mind was that I am losing my family,” Miller said. “I’m not going to the Celestial Kingdom … the equivalent of going to hell.”

Robert Bonner, the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Miller, told The Times in a recent interview that the “spiritual lecture” may have had an effect, but the effect was to induce Miller to tell the truth.

“The question is, ‘Was that a coerced confession?’” Bonner said. “I’d say baloney. This isn’t the rubber hose.”

Bonner said that Miller’s myriad flaws made him vulnerable to enemy overtures: “He had financial problems. He had zipper problems. His issues were known to the KGB, and he was targeted. He was interested in having sex with Svetlana.”

In subsequent spy scandals, FBI agent Robert Hanssen and CIA officer Aldrich Ames did much greater damage to American interests by betraying the identity of Russians spying for America. The document Miller admitted to leaking was relatively unimportant.

“It wasn’t going to bring down the republic,” Bonner said. “It wasn’t earth-shaking as a classified document.” The KGB’s strategy was to compromise him. “One classified document, and he’s done. They have him. He’s gonna work for them.”

Hanging over the case was the question of why an agent widely regarded as incompetent was allowed to keep his job. An FBI official would testify that he tried to fire the “unkempt” Miller, but that a Mormon supervisor had protected him. Bonner’s view is that the FBI was hoping to let Miller complete his career in a position where he would not do harm.

“The easy route is not to fire them, because you’re gonna get sued,” Bonner said. L.A. was considered a small stage for spycraft, and members of the counterespionage squad “weren’t superstars like the agents in San Francisco and New York and Washington.”

So the Russia Squad seemed like a safe place to dump an agent en route to retirement. “They were trying to bury the guy,” Bonner said, “and it really came back to bite them.”

Miller’s attorney, Joel Levine, told The Times that the FBI threw the book at his client as an overreaction to its mistake in keeping him employed. “They were embarrassed,” Levine said. “The reaction to their embarrassment was to come down on him as hard as they could, to compensate for the fact that they weren’t watching him.”

Levine added: “What he was trying to do was ultimately go to his bosses and say, ‘Guess what? I was able to turn this lady around and get information from her, and now I’ll be a big hero in the bureau.’ It was a cockamamie plan, but he maintained he was serious about it. A lot of things that Richard did in his life were not well thought-out.”

Miller’s first trial ended in a mistrial, and his second trial resulted in a conviction that was overturned. The government went to court a third time, with Adam Schiff — then an assistant U.S. attorney, now a California senator — serving as lead prosecutor. Miller was convicted of espionage and received a 20-year prison term. He served about half that time and was granted early release in 1994. He moved to Utah, remarried and died a free man in his 70s.

His ex-wife, Hill, now 83, is a retired junior high school teacher living in Saratoga Springs, Utah. She said she believes that Miller was innocent of espionage, and that he really was trying to infiltrate the KGB.

In a recent interview, she described him as “a lousy agent,” “a terrible husband” and “a mediocre father,” but said she did not harbor bitterness toward him.

“He was a weak man, but he wasn’t a bad man, and he certainly wasn’t a spy,” she said. She added: “I knew he was unhappy at home. I wasn’t the little sweet coffee-tea-or-me wife. We quarreled a lot.” She was raising eight kids. “Nine, if you count Richard.”

And the Russian spy who seduced Miller? Ogorodnikova, along with her then-husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, pleaded guilty to espionage and received prison sentences of 18 and eight years, respectively.

Even so, she told “60 Minutes,” “I’m not a spy. I’m not Mata Hari. I’m not sexual maniac like people say about me. Do I look like I’m a sexual maniac?”

Locked up at a federal prison in Alameda County that at the time housed men and women, she met Bruce Perlowin, a convicted drug smuggler, and romance blossomed. He adored her high cheekbones and broken English. He said she was an unreconstructed communist who loved Josef Stalin and drank heavily.

“She said she was lieutenant colonel in the GRU,” Perlowin, now 74, told The Times, referring to the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency. He said she also claimed to be the daughter of former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. “This all could be alcoholic made-up stories. But in prison she wasn’t drinking. It was very consistent, and it never changed…. She was very mad that she got caught. She hated to lose.”

At the same time, she denied being a spy. “She would say, ‘I’m not spy.’ That was part of her adorable accent.”

Still, when they snuck off to a room to have sex for the first time in prison, he recounted, she inserted a pair of toothbrushes in the door to prevent guards from getting in. “She knew all these little tricks,” he said. “She’s saying, ‘I’m not spy,’ but how do you know this?”

They married in prison, and she went free in 1995, after 11 years in custody. They traveled the country and ultimately divorced. But Perlowin said he took care of her in her last years in Arizona, where she died of what he called an alcohol-related illness. “She was cute as a button,” he said.