Independent News

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Rudy Giuliani hasn’t been in the news much over the last few weeks. On the one hand, it’s a relief to be spared his spittle-producing histrionics, his endless repetitions of the Big Lie, and contemplation of just what kind of liquid is dripping down his face. On the other hand, Giuliani’s absence from the headlines is honestly a shame. Because for some months now, there’s been the expectation that his name would next appear in association with the word “indicted.”

It’s been over six months since Giuliani’s home and office were raided by federal officers. From the information available at the time, it seemed that Giuliani was being investigated in connection with his actions in Ukraine. The list of potential crimes is … not short, including dozens of instances in which Giuliani appears to have engaged in unregistered foreign lobbying, his efforts to remove a trusted U.S. ambassador because she inconveniently told the truth, and his connections to multiple unsavory oligarchs. There is absolutely no doubt that Giuliani engaged in a multiyear effort to deceive, defame, and manipulate on behalf of Donald Trump, but it’s less clear how much of that plan was actually illegal.

On Thursday, The Guardian revealed new information about the investigation into Giuliani’s scheme, how it extends back months before Trump’s arm-twisting called to the Ukrainian president, and how it included additional members of Trump’s legal team—Fox favorites Victoria Toensing and Joe DiGenova. What all of this seems to show is not just that Giuliani sold out two nations, suborned lies from foreign nationals, and created an elaborate scheme to smear Joe Biden … but he did it all for money.

For most people, Giuliani’s scheme became visible on May 1, 2019 when The New York Times* devoted sizable chunks of both the front page and the interior to transcribing the disgraced former mayor’s claims about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Six days later, Bloomberg did what the Times did not and actually checked into Giuliani’s claims. What they found was that the whole basis of Giuliani’s assertions—that Ukraine was launching an investigation into the Bidens—had absolutely no basis in fact. In fact, almost everything in the story the Times had printed had been a total fiction.

What the article in The Guardian makes clear is that the May 1 article came after months of work on the part of Giuliani, Toensing, and DiGenova. Not work in the sense of investigating the truth of the situation in Ukraine—work in terms of lining up people who were willing to lie in order to create a controversy designed to help Donald Trump.

While Toensing and DiGenova may also be facing federal charges, Giuliani’s real partner in crime appears to be Ukrainian prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko. According to The Guardian, federal investigators have unearthed “extensive, detailed plans” that were devised by Lutsenko and executed by Giuliani. Those plans called for Giuliani to feed the U.S. press on the idea that Biden was corrupt, which Lutsenko would then support by announcing an investigation in Ukraine.

The problem for Giuliani and crew was that before Lutsenko could follow through on his end of the deal, Ukraine had an election in which Volodymyr Zelensky was the surprise winner. Under Zelensky, Lutsenko didn’t have the influence necessary to give Giuliani the fake announcement that he wanted. That didn’t please Trump, who insisted that Giuliani and Lutsenko follow through. 

Which is how Trump ended up on the telephone with President Zelensky, threatening to withhold $400 million in U.S. assistance unless someone in Zelensky’s government would back Giuliani’s play. Which, in turn, led to Trump’s first impeachment.

It wasn’t just Lutsenko who Guiliani worked to get in Trump’s corner. Two other former prosecutors —including the very justifiably fired Viktor Shokin—agreed to fill in the details according to the script that Giuliani provided to The New York Times. The full scheme would go like this:

• Lutsenko would announce he was “reopening” an investigation of Burisma that included an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden.
• One of Lutsenko’s assistants, Konstantin Kulyk, would officially be in charge of investigating the Bidens, and would make a public announcement that they had committed a crime.
• Former prosecutor Shokin would claim that he had been investigating Burisma after all, and that Biden fired him to shut him up.

In exchange for all this, a cadre of Ukrainians would get preferred treatment from the Trump White House, with expectations that they could tap a nearly unlimited stream of both business opportunities and U.S. assistance payments. Trump would, of course, get the scandal he wanted. And Giuliani … well, Giuliani’s needs were even simpler.

Giuliani and Lutsenko reached a preliminary agreement in March 2019… Various drafts of the contract called for Giuliani to receive either $300,000 or $500,000 for his work.

Toensing and DiGenova were to get “at least $250,000.” That started with a $125,000 “retainer” bill that Toensing and DiGenova sent to Lutsenko a month before Giuliani’s first Times article ran.  But Zelensky’s election came just one week later, throwing a wrench into the plan—and the billing cycle of Giuliani and friends. 

What happens to Giuliani, Toensing, and DeGenova from here is still unclear. While all three clearly attempted to solicit lies from foreign officials in support of generating a scandal in the U.S., it’s not clear whether or not that action was technically illegal. Slimy, yes. Destructive, certainly. But illegal? Unclear.

It’s more likely the trio will face charges of illegal lobbying for assistance they provided to Lutsenko, Shokin, and others. Even though the contracts don’t appear to have been executed in the end, lobbying for foreign interests requires registration, even if it’s done for free. 

Speaking of which …

Even though Giuliani was engaged by then president Trump as his personal attorney, Trump did not pay him, a frustration that Giuliani expressed to the Ukrainians.

Why Giuliani signed up to be kicked by Trump over and over and over says something deep—and ugly—about both men.

*The story currently in place at the Times site contains significant revisions to the one that originally appeared on May 1, including an altered headline. But that story still contains claims such as this:

Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.

That statement is utterly untrue. The prosecutor was not investigating Biden, the company Burisma, or its owner. In fact, he was dismissed because he refused to engage in that investigation. But the Times, both then and now, represents this fabrication from Giuliani as if it is fact.

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On Wednesday, at a campaign rally event which was billed as a “press conference” (sans the press), speaking to an audience filled with people that chanted “Let’s Go Brandon,” Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he wants to create a statewide law enforcement apparatus whose only job would be to enforce “election integrity.” This would mean going after “election crimes.” The man best known as the architect of a public health policy that has led to the deaths of nearly 60,000 Floridians and counting, who deprived predominantly Black districts of representation for almost a year, would entrust creating an office of election crimes and security to “legal experts” and others tasked with ways of uncovering and investigating election fraud.

Burping out drivel like, “People know that Florida stands for freedom,” DeSantis unveiled his (and the rest of his political party’s) only policy idea: voter suppression laws and activities. DeSantis, who has already signed draconian anti-democratic elections legislation cutting down the number of drop boxes available to citizens for voting, along with disallowing people to bring water to Floridians standing in long lines waiting to vote, is promising even more oppressive voting restrictions. Considering that DeSantis is up for reelection and has no policies to run on other than being one of the more popular death cult leaders in the GOP, adding more targeted restrictions to voting against Ron DeSantis is clearly his best chance at remaining in power.

“We are going to create a separate office at the state level solely dedicated to investigating and prosecuting election crimes in the state of Florida. We’ll [have] sworn law enforcement officers as part of this, we’ll have investigators, we’ll have the statewide prosecutor that’s able to bring the cases,” DeSantis told the deluded audience. DeSantis, making sure to truly walk in the dog-pooped footsteps of his master Donald Trump, really topped himself, explaining that “Personally, I don’t like drop boxes,” and saying the practice of “ballot harvesting” (collecting a bunch of ballots to drop off at the same time) would be made a felony.

As Politico reporter Gary Fineout points out, Gov. DeSantis signed the bill that first authorized the use of drop boxes in his state two years ago. DeSantis’ call for wasting taxpayer money on creating what would amount to a secret police force to investigate elections comes after he fought against GOP operatives and other Big Lie proponents like Roger Stone, saying that there was no reason to audit the state’s elections as they were secure and safe and free of election fraud. In fact, DeSantis had told reporters that Florida had finally “vanquished the ghost” of the 2000 Bush v. Gore elections.

The idea that DeSantis would supply experts in election law to investigate and prosecute election “crimes” would be laughable if it wasn’t such a transparent display of fascism. Most recently, three University of Florida professors were muzzled in their attempts to testify about issues of voter integrity (real voter integrity) via a new state Senate bill.

The Sunshine State’s worst elected official also did a few laps on the reality-defying claims that he has handled COVID-19 super bigly great, as well as the crowd-pleasing promise to fight public health measures that have been proven to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. What this means is that Florida will likely see more machinations on the part of DeSantis and his administration to hide the number of deaths and the rate of infection his terrible policies have wrought on the people of his state, all while still having some of the worst COVID-19 numbers in the country.

If you would like to, you can watch this disaster unfold in the video below.

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There are good ways to cover how supply chain problems accompanied by inflation lead to rising prices on many products. CNN took another path with a human interest story on a middle-class family’s grocery budget. They took the fearmongering, sensationalist, we’re-not-gonna-offer-context-or-reliable-information path.

The Stotler family is pure media-bait. They’re white (because of course they are), they live in Texas (again, of course), and they have a whole bunch of kids, most of them adopted. CNN’s Evan McMorris-Santoro interviewed them about their grocery budget, accompanied by lots of footage of the family—including five or six kids who I am so sure are included on every supermarket run—going shopping. 

The week’s grocery total: $310. Krista Stotler estimates that they would have spent only $150 to $200 on a week’s groceries in March. That’s an astonishing amount! It’s also way out of line with data on rising grocery prices. It’s absolutely true that grocery prices have risen in recent months, but meat has risen the most—by 15.7% between August 2019 and September 2021. Dairy had gone up by 5.2% in that time. It’s a significant amount, but it’s hard to see how it’s doubling anyone’s grocery bills based on the available data. It would have been nice to see CNN dig into that.

One specific offered: “A gallon of milk was $1.99,” according to Krista Stotler, in a line tweeted by CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “Now it’s $2.79. Well, when you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that’s a lot of money.”

Okay, first of all, hold up now. TWELVE GALLONS of milk every week? This is a large family but that is more than a gallon of milk per person. At that rate, maybe they should look into just buying a cow.

But there are issues more serious than this family’s milk-guzzling preferences. There are big questions about the numbers here. Nationally, even if you do not adjust for inflation, the average price of a gallon of milk has not been as low as $1.99 in more than 25 years. Milk prices may be well below the national average in the specific part of Texas where the Stotlers live, but even so, in January 2021, the average milk price in Dallas was $2.86 a gallon, and has now risen to $3.22. In Wichita, Kansas, the lowest average price for a gallon of milk across the cities the USDA tracks was $2.52. The average price for a gallon of milk in Wichita is $2.79. So Wichita went to the $2.79 a gallon Krista Stotler lamented—but it was an increase of just about one-third the increase she cited. Whatever the milk prices the Stotlers were paying in March, the increase they are claiming to have seen is well above the increases being seen most places.

CNN could also have gotten into the question of how milk prices are set. Milk pricing is highly regulated. Dairy farming is heavily subsidized by the government. Milk prices don’t just happen, and in general, in recent years, the “problem” for dairy farmers has been too much milk. If milk prices are rising, the question of why would be an interesting one, and people might learn a lot about how food gets to their tables and about how the economy works. Apparently that’s not as interesting as a family walking around a supermarket.

So, you know, choices were made here by CNN to uncritically air the Stotlers’ reported increases in pricing even though those were much, much higher than the available market data would suggest, and to leave off any context about pricing. And by talking about the price increase across 12 gallons per week for four weeks, it’s inflated yet again.

But choices were also made here by CNN to feature this family, a family that, sure, is looking for deals, but looking for deals at a Kroger, not at a discount store. They appear to drive a very large SUV and live in a house with a kitchen large enough to accommodate their large family, with a patio and a big old gas grill. It is relevant that middle-class families are feeling the pinch, but the fact that CNN presents this particular family’s struggles as a major story reflects so many heavily racialized assumptions about who deserves our sympathy and about whose grocery budgeting woes are evidence of a serious problem in the economy.

The federal minimum wage—which is the minimum wage in Texas—has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for more than a decade. I’m going to go ahead and guess that CNN could have found people in Texas for whom grocery price increases (even if they’re not actually 80 cents per gallon of milk) would be significantly more of a hardship. But those people are not seen as the ones whose stories are the relatable family-being-squeezed stories. When the media tells their stories, it’s more likely to be about policies like the minimum wage or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or about charity. The pure “this is our relatable struggle” reporting goes to families like the Stotlers, who are presumed to speak directly to CNN’s audience and to be generally above reproach (a large Black family, even with adopted children, would be much more likely to draw “if you can’t afford that many kids you shouldn’t have them” type of criticism).

CNN took just about the shallowest possible approach to the issue of grocery prices and the economic squeeze on families. It’s nothing against the Stotlers (however questionable their characterizations of price increases may be), but this story does not increase our knowledge or understanding of what’s going on in the U.S. economy today.

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While the judge presiding over the case of vigilante and little buddy of white supremacists Kyle Rittenhouse should be focused on the trial, he appears to be more interested in what CNN’s Jeffery Toobin has to say. 

Let’s get to the important thing here: Rittenhouse is a teenage wanna-be cop who drove himself from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an AR-15-style .223 rifle in his car, wearing a backward baseball cap and harboring an intention to act as citizen police.

Videos from the night of the shooting show that several protesters attempted to disarm Rittenhouse, who fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, then Anthony Huber, 26, and seconds later Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, who was wounded.

]During a sidebar Wednesday, Judge Bruce Schroeder told the prosecution and defense he was concerned about the characterization of the trial by the media—particularly Toobin. 

“There are people on the media, on reputable sites, that are saying things that are totally bizarre,” the judge said Wednesday.

It’s presumed that Schroeder is referring to the media’s outrage and confusion over his ruling that the prosecution could not use the word “victim” in describing the three men Rittenhouse shot on the night of a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The judge also ruled the defense could use the words “arsonists,” “looters,” or “rioters.” 

“It is a very weird … ruling,” Toobin said. “What’s very weird is allowing this extremely pejorative, assuming the conclusion, words of ‘rioters’ and ‘looters,’ which all in all should help Rittenhouse’s defense a great deal.”

He added, “And, remember, it is not the — it is not the victims who are on trial here, it is Rittenhouse. So you can see why a lot of people are upset about this preliminary ruling, and we’ll see if the judge revisits it as the trial progresses.” 

Whether or not the word “victim” can be used varies from “from courtroom to courtroom at the judge’s discretion,” University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Keith Findley told CBS. But, Schroeder wasn’t happy about Toobin’s coverage of his decision, and instead of focusing on the task at hand and helping the jury do their jobs and hear testimony, Schoeder instead spent his time bashing the media. 

The judge erupted after prosecutors tried to play a video for the jury. The video was recorded by someone from The Rundown Live, who narrated the events the night of the Rittenhouse shooting. Rittenhouse’s attorney, Mark Richards, the same man who claimed self-defense for his client because one of the victims had a skateboard that could be used to decapitate someone and that Rittenhouse’s gun charge should be thrown out because he had a hunting license, objected to the narration of the video. 

Schroeder agreed with Richards and framed the issue as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s confrontation clause. Then he went on a rampage about CNN’s Toobin. 

“This was on CNN, Jeffrey Toobin and another attorney there, and a comment was made that the ruling was incomprehensible, and I think they obviously are not familiar with this rule,” the judge said.

“I’m going to comment about the media again because there was a gentleman on TV night before last who said this is the most divisive case in the country to date. So anything that undermines public confidence in what happens here is very important.”

“It’s important for this town,” Schroeder said, “it’s important for this country, to have people have confidence in the result of this trial, whatever it is. And I don’t care what it is.”

Schroeder went on to defend his ruling by bringing the bible into the issue, discussing St. Paul and the Romans. Not sure how any of these bizarre rantings are connected to this trial, but I’m sure the defense attornies are thrilled by the distraction and diversions. 

You can hear the arguments in Rittenhouse’s trial in the video below. 

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It’s been weird enough to see anti-mask, anti-vax Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis attempting to copy Donald Trump’s mannerisms during his speeches—evidently because just praising Trump’s every word just wasn’t doing the trick—but the man’s obsession with getting involved with seemingly every new trend the deplorables stumble into is getting downright ridiculous.

In a press conference ostensibly about “election integrity,” aka how do we stop all these people from voting nowadays, Desantis tongue-in-cheekily referred to the Joe Biden administration as “the Brandon administration.” Yeah, that’s a news event now.

Get it? Get it? He was “playing into the popular meme that has liberals in a tizzy,” reports the Fox News website. And the crowd evidently went a bit nuts, because duh.

For those of you who don’t get hourly updates on each new “conservative” invention meant to “stick it to the libs,” whether it be retooling your truck to pollute more visibly to own the libs or dying horribly with a tube down your throat to own the libs, a NASCAR crowd at one point was chanting “fuck Joe Biden” and a broadcaster misheard it as “let’s go Brandon” because he was interviewing Brandon, um, Sportsguy, and the goofiness of the moment turned it into a meme, and conservatives adopted it because their mommies don’t like it when they swear but if you say that then mom will never know, tee-hee, look at us we’re all naughty and stickin’ it to the man or whatever. There, you’re caught up.

Okay, with that all out of the way: Fuck Ron DeSantis. We are all grownups here, and we get to use the rude words if we feel like it and don’t need to do these weird pubescent tics of pretendin’ we’re gonna swear but coding it in a way so nearby authority figures won’t find out. Go nuts with that.

Also, I swear I will never understand the Fox and/or deplorable obsession with thinking that oh, we’ve got the libs this time, they’re gonna be in a real “tizzy” now. Huh? Over swear words? Maybe down in the bowels of Team Bullshit they’re real convinced that fake-swearing at a president is going to cause decent people to have all the vapors but buddy, liberals invented swearing at presidents. Or at least we invented not giving a damn about people swearing at presidents. We probably invented both, and I strongly suspect Ben Franklin was neck-deep in all of it.

You want to say “fuck Joe Biden,” go for it! You’ll have to do a lot better than that to even get anyone’s attention. In a movement in which the ostensible conservative punditry calls insufficiently conservative Supreme Court justices “goat-fucking child molesters,” you’re going to have to do better than that just to get attention from your fellow conservatives.

Calling someone Brandon won’t put anyone in a “tizzy.” You want to put someone in a tizzy, say “happy holidays” when they were expecting a “merry Christmas.” That shit will end up with someone writing a 1,000-word Facebook post ranting about the collapse of society, a post that manages to find six new euphemisms for “the Jews” when attempting to assign proper blame. Tell a conservative gun owner that they should put a trigger lock on their damn gun so their possibly inbred toddler offspring doesn’t paint the bedroom ceiling with their good Christian brains, and by the end of the week several thousand Fox News viewers will have purchased new flag-sized banners sporting a new, spur-of-the-moment catchphrase declaring that any government official who tries to keep their kids alive is gonna find themselves riddled with bullets from one of the other 30 guns kept down in the basement.

Buddy, suggesting that a prominent political figure commit a reproductive act isn’t going to do it.

Here, let me give a demonstration: Ron DeSantis? Fuck Ron DeSantis. Seriously, fuck that guy, fuck everyone who’s ever shaken his hand, fuck everyone who voted for the shitheaded syphilis infection turned Real Boy, and fuck every voter who would have voted for him but were too busy sucking a shit-brand beer pulled out of their shit-brand minifridge to get off their ass and bother. Ron DeSantis is a shitbrained fuckweasel. The Trump-parroting virusfucker is a fuckmurderous iguanaplower and he looks like the offspring between Rick Perry’s third favorite necktie and a Bill O’Reilly paternity lawsuit. He can go fuck himself with a 55-centimeter fuckstick calibrated at 37.5 kilofucks, and he’s not allowed to convert any of that into American fucking units because he doesn’t fucking deserve it.

There, go nuts with that, you weird-headed outrage-scraping cultureklowns. Tizzy. Who the hell cares if someone fake-swears at a politician? Are you, like, 8? This isn’t the damn Vatican, and I can all but promise you worse words have rattled Vatican hallways at various points anyway. If it’ll take valuable time away from you paint-licking assholes inventing new ways to be racist, I’ll help you lobby Hallmark to get it put on greeting cards so that you can send them to your moms and your moms can put them up on the mantle next to an old clock, a plastic Jesus, and that clay “pencil holder” you made in Mrs. Hilliwiggins’ class. Then when you visit mom you can remember that you’ve accomplished something in your life twice now.

Sigh. Even the lib-owning has degraded to pathetic levels. Maybe the real lib-owning is backed up at the Port of Los Angeles, another victim of supply-chain woes as America dips and dives through each new not-gonna-wear-masks pandemic surge. Maybe Fox and Ron have been waiting for months for their new lib-owning campaign to come in from China and this is them attempting cobble something together while they wait.

Seriously, though? Fuck Ron DeSantis. The guy saw Donald Trump bumblefuck his way through murdering a half a million Americans and said to himself, “Wow, the base is really loving this stuff.” Can’t possibly emphasize enough how much that guy needs to fuck all the way off and then some.

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This month’s Daily Kos/Civiqs poll was another deliberate effort to home in on why voters seem generally dissatisfied with President Joe Biden and Democrats right now. Not only are Biden’s approval ratings eight points underwater, but Democrats took a political hit Tuesday with heavy losses in Virginia and an uncomfortably close win in New Jersey.

Readers of this site often fill my comment section with questions about why people are unhappy with President Biden. Everyone has their own suspicions, but here’s some data that can help get us closer to the truth of what is leaving voters most disgruntled.

What emerged overall was a lot of dissatisfaction on both sides of the aisle. Asked whether their quality of life now is better than it was at the beginning of this year (when Biden took office), just 20% of registered voters said it was better now while 44% said it was worse now and 33% said it’s about the same. Additionally, of the 16 policy issues Civiqs asked about, voters expressed dissatisfaction of 50% or higher on fully 10 items.

Perhaps surprisingly, issues that often resonate—such as housing, employment, and crime—were relatively low on the list of concerns. The same was true of how voters felt about the state of the COVID-19 pandemic in their local area: Just 36% counted themselves dissatisfied with the situation while 38% said they were satisfied and 22% said they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. 

What jumped out on the dissatisfaction scale were financial and inflationary issues related to the price of gas and household goods, personal savings, and the wealth gap “between the rich and everyone else.” Race relations and the quality of local education also registered high on voters’ list of concerns.

But the single biggest concern was the state of democracy in America, with 88% saying they were dissatisfied with it.

Below is the top 10 list of voters’ grievances, followed by partisan crosstabs. For each item, voters were asked whether they were satisfied, dissatisfied, neither, or not affected by it.

Places of real partisan agreement included dissatisfaction with the state of democracy, personal savings, and the price of health care. (Note: This is not to say that Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree on what’s ailing our democracy, just that it’s a key area of dissatisfaction for all three groups.)

Republicans top three concerns were gas prices, the price of household goods, and the state of American democracy—all registering at 90% dissatisfaction or above.

Democrats top three concerns were the wealth gap (91%), the state of democracy (86%), and race relations (79%).

Independents’ top concerns were the state of democracy (89%), gas prices (80%), and the price of household goods (78%).

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On Wednesday, Nov. 3, many progressives are feeling a mix of frustration and stress about election results. It’s good, normal, and important to process and accept where things didn’t go our way—and it’s also good, normal, and important to celebrate some good news where we can.

As reported by LGBTQ Nation, the Biden administration has allowed LGBTQ+ seniors to access Social Security survivor benefits, just like folks in heterosexual relationships. To give you some context of how much this payout tends to be, the average is more than $1,000 per month. So, not something to sneer at, especially if you’re older, retired, or live with disabilities. 

As some background, the Trump administration filed not one but two legal appeals to stop widows from getting the payout they were rightfully entitled to after the death of their loved ones, like spouses and partners. As of Monday, Nov. 1, the Biden administration dismissed both appeals. To understand why this victory is so major—and such a long time coming—let’s look at the two lead plaintiffs below. 

To contextualize the full impact of this win, we have to look at the fight for marriage equality on both the state and federal levels. Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, represented the two widows in the case, ultimately arguing that same-sex couples either couldn’t be married, or couldn’t be married the “right” amount of time, because their partners or spouses died before their unions could be legally recognized.

First, let’s take widow Michael Ely (Ely v. Saul) as an example of how complicated (and unfair) this whole process has been for queer couples. Ely, an openly gay man, married his spouse as soon as legally possible in 2014 (per their state of Arizona), but because Ely’s spouse died six months later—before their marriage lasted the length of the time needed to qualify for benefits (nine months)—Ely didn’t qualify. They had been together for more than 40 years. If they were a heterosexual couple, they theoretically could have been married long before 2014 and qualified for the benefits. Confusing, yes. Unfair? Absolutely.

The other plaintiff, Helen Thorton (Thorton v. Saul), was denied benefits after her partner of more than 25 years died in 2006. At that point, Washington state did not recognize marriage equality, and thus she was told she wasn’t eligible. Again, deeply unfair. 

How did the Trump administration become involved in these cases? In Thorton’s case, a district judge ordered the SSA to give Thorton the benefits she was entitled to, arguing that the SSA couldn’t fairly use the state’s former ban on same-sex marriage to deny folks benefits as the ban itself was discriminatory. In Ely’s case, a federal judge argued that the nine-month qualifying time was unconstitutional in the state of Arizona. So, both victories that the Trump administration tried to stomp out.

The Trump administration argued that maintaining the refusal of benefits for same-sex couples who weren’t legally married (or weren’t legally married for long enough, like in Ely’s case) was important because it helped to reduce the risk of fraudulent marriages. The Trump administration filed appeals in both Thorton and Ely’s cases. 

And now, the Biden administration has dismissed both appeals, letting the rulings stand. 

Per a press release from Lambda Legal, Thorton said she’s “relieved” that the government will finally respect her relationship with her late partner, Margie. “Marriage equality came too late for many of us, but it was not too late to fix this problem involving survivor’s benefits,” she stated. “I hope everyone who has been harmed by this problem, but never dared to apply for benefits, understands that this development is a game-changer. The pathway is now finally open to everyone.”

Ely expressed similar gratitude and relief, noting that one of his husband’s last hopes was that Ely would be able to access benefits. “I can finally breathe a sigh of relief that these benefits are now finally secure,” he said. “Not only for me, but for everyone else who found themselves in the same boat.”

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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Note: Please see our Uncalled Races and Election Recaps sections below for a summary of all of Tuesday’s action.

Leading Off

● Atlanta, GA Mayor: City Council President Felicia Moore took a decisive first place in Tuesday’s nonpartisan primary to lead the loyally blue city of Atlanta, but, to the surprise of many political observers, it appears that her rival in the Nov. 30 runoff won’t be former Mayor Kasim Reed after all. Moore is out in front with 41% of the vote with 96,000 votes counted, while City Councilman Andre Dickens holds a 23.0-22.4 lead over Reed—a margin of just over 600 votes—for the second spot in the runoff.

The math looks daunting for Reed. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Greg Bluestein noted on Wednesday that there were only 970 uncounted provisional ballots cast in the two counties Atlanta’s based in (Fulton and DeKalb), and some were from voters outside city limits. Bluestein adds that those ballots could conceivably narrow Reed’s deficit enough to place him within the 0.5% margin needed for a recount, but he’d need to overwhelmingly win them to actually outpace Dickens.

The election night results rolled in as the Atlanta Braves were winning their first World Series since 1995, and even the three leading candidates’ supporters were distracted at their parties. Bluestein writes that at one point, a “deafening roar” convinced some of Reed’s backers that he had outpaced Dickens, but in fact “the crowd was cheering a Freddie Freeman home run.”

Campaign Action

However, at least a few Reed supporters seem to have since decided that, unlike the Braves, he won’t be emerging with the win. While the AP has not called the second runoff berth and Reed has yet to concede, Bluestein tweets that some of the former mayor’s allies admit that his comeback has failed.

Moore’s wide lead in the first round makes her the favorite to win the contest to succeed Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who shocked Atlanta in May when she announced she wouldn’t seek a second term, but she’s likely to square off against a very different opponent than she may have expected to. Reed, who spent years as a rising star in Georgia Democratic politics, easily won a second term in 2013, and he’d amassed a huge war chest for his campaign to retake the post he was termed-out of in 2017.

The former mayor, though, spent the campaign dealing with questions about a federal corruption probe that resulted in the convictions of three former officials in his administration and the indictment of others. The candidate’s attorneys said weeks before Election Day that federal prosecutors told them their client was no longer a target of their investigations, but that did nothing to deter Moore and Dickens from arguing that Reed still bore responsibility for what happened under his watch.

Reed was again at the center of headlines in late October when Richard Rose, the head of the local NAACP, released what he called “a rare repudiation” blasting Reed’s eight years in office. Rose argued that well-off residents and well-connected interests benefited from policies that brought affordable housing “to a screeching halt.” He further took Reed to task for accepting the backing of the city’s police union.

Rose apologized days later after the national NAACP leadership publicly told him that he could face removal for violating the organization’s rules against making a “public partisan statement,” though he didn’t actually back down from his criticism of Reed. Instead, Rose said only that he’d erred when he decided “to issue the repudiation of Kasim Reed on NAACP letterhead, in my position as president of the NAACP Atlanta Branch.”

Dickens, for his part, looked like an underdog going into Election Day. Most polls showed Bottoms and Reed advancing, while just a lone late survey showed the city councilman beating out Reed for second.

Dickens may have benefited from the support of former Mayor Shirley Franklin, whose 2001 victory made her the first Black woman to lead a major Southern city. Franklin had once been allied with Reed, who was even her campaign manager during that history-making bid 20 years ago, and she backed him in the hotly competitive 2009 race to succeed her. The two have since had a very public falling out, though, and Franklin in June made news when she responded to Reed’s comeback launch by saying she was “embarrassed by his lack of ethical leadership.” Franklin went on to endorse Dickens and even starred in a commercial for him.

Bottoms, who is the second woman to ever lead Atlanta, said Wednesday she would be endorsing a candidate in the runoff herself, though she didn’t indicate which one. She may not be inclined to support Moore, however, as the city council president launched a campaign to unseat her months before the incumbent announced her retirement. Dickens, by contrast, didn’t enter the race until Bottoms had already left it.

Redistricting

● GA Redistricting: GOP leaders in Georgia’s Republican-run legislature have unveiled draft maps for both chambers that would lock in wide majorities for their party despite the fast-moving demographic and political trends that led to Joe Biden’s victory in the state last year. Lawmakers convened for a special legislative session on Wednesday to take up these plans, as well as a congressional proposal that Republicans released in September.

● NC Redistricting: North Carolina’s Republican-drawn congressional and legislative maps are making their way through both chambers and could become law this week. On party-line votes, the Senate passed the congressional plan on Tuesday and a map for its own districts on Wednesday. The House, meanwhile, passed a map for itself on Tuesday, again on a party-line vote. Once the maps pass both chambers, they’ll immediately become law, because the state constitution explicitly removes the governor from the redistricting process.

● OH Redistricting: Republicans in Ohio’s Senate and House have each released a draft congressional map, both equally extreme. The House version would likely send 13 Republicans and just two Democrats to Congress, while the Senate plan would do the same, albeit with districts configured differently.

Republicans have also made proper assessment of these proposals especially difficult: The Senate only released a tiny image of its map and none of the normal data files that would make any sort of detailed analysis possible. The House did little better, providing a data file that would normally be in spreadsheet format as a 5,882-page PDF instead. Fortunately we were able to convert the House’s PDF and obtain proper data files for the Senate.

House

● CO-08: Weld County Commissioner Lori Saine, who made a name for herself as one of the Colorado GOP’s most extreme members during her eight years in the state House, just became the first notable Republican to enter the race for the state’s new 8th Congressional District, a swingy seat in the Denver suburbs. A somewhat less incendiary Republican, state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, also says she’s considering a bid and last month promised an announcement “soon” after the state Supreme Court gave its approval to Colorado’s new districts (it did so earlier this week).

● MI-03: Conservative commentator John Gibbs, whose nomination to head the Office of Personnel Management under Donald Trump failed because of his conspiratorial ravings, has filed paperwork ahead of a possible primary challenge to Rep. Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump earlier this year. Among other things, Gibbs repeatedly amplified the batshit conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, John Podesta, had partaken in some sort of satanic ritual, based on personal emails stolen by Russian hackers. Trump named Gibbs to run the OPM in 2020, but the Senate never acted on the nomination.

Meijer already faces intra-party opposition from Army National Guard veteran Tom Norton, who ran for the GOP nomination last year, and so-called “MAGA bride” Audra Johnson (quite the cast of characters, huh?). It takes only a simple plurality to win a primary in Michigan, so Meijer might benefit from a split field.

● OH-01: Former healthcare executive Kate Schroder, who was the Democrats’ nominee against Republican Rep. Steve Chabot last year, has announced that she won’t seek a rematch. Schroder ran a competitive campaign but lost to Chabot 52-45 in Ohio’s badly gerrymandered 1st District, which voted for Donald Trump 51-48. Republicans are likely to try to shore up Chabot further in redistricting (see our separate OH Redistricting item above).

● TX-08: Republican state Rep. Steve Toth, who hadn’t ruled out a bid for Texas’ open 8th Congressional District, has said he’ll seek re-election to the legislature instead.

Legislatures

● Special Elections: Here’s a recap of Tuesday’s key legislative special elections. For a full rundown of Tuesday’s action, along with a look at other special elections from earlier this cycle, check out our big board here.

ME-HD-86: Democrat Raegan LaRochelle defeated Republican James Orr 56-44 to flip this seat for Team Blue. Democrats now control this chamber 80-65 with five independent/third party members and one other seat vacant.

MI-SD-28: Republican Mark Huizenga defeated Democrat Keith Courtade 61-37 to hold this seat for his party. This chamber is now at full strength with Republicans in control 22-16.

TX-HD-118: Republican John Lujan defeated Democrat Frank Ramirez 51-49 to flip this seat for Team Red. This was the runoff from a September all-party primary where Lujan led Ramirez 42-20 and the GOP candidates narrowly outpaced the Democratic candidates 50.3-49.7.

This is a heavily Hispanic district, a group that Democrats have recently lost some ground with in Texas. However, there hadn’t previously been many signs of slippage for Democrats in this particular district, as Joe Biden won it 56-42 last year, similar to Hillary Clinton’s 56-40 win in 2016, and former Rep. Leo Pacheco easily carried it 57-40 last year as well.

Republicans now control this chamber 84-66 with no other seats vacant.

Uncalled Races

Items in this section and the one following it are organized alphabetically by state.

● FL-20: It’s going to be some time before we know who has won the Democratic nomination to succeed the late Rep. Alcee Hastings in this safely blue South Florida seat. With 49,000 ballots counted, Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness holds a 9 vote lead—a margin of 23.76-23.74—over businesswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who badly lost primary challenges to Hastings in both 2018 and 2020. Another member of the Broward County Commission, Barbara Sharief, is in third with 18%.

Florida requires an automatic machine recount in races where the margin between the top two candidates is within 0.5%, and this contest definitely qualifies. The vote totals could also shift before the recount takes place: Politico’s Gary Fineout wrote Wednesday that military and overseas ballots could be received for another 10 days, while voters had two days to fix any signature issues that caused their mail-in ballots to be rejected.

The eventual Democratic nominee will have no trouble in the Jan. 11 special election, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis scheduled to take place nine months after Hastings’ death, effectively doubling the length the seat will remain vacant compared to other recent Florida specials.

● NJ Legislature: There’s no question that Democrats will keep control of both the New Jersey state Senate and Assembly, where they went into Election Day with majorities of 25-15 and 52-28, respectively, but the GOP has netted seats in both chambers. And in a true surprise, state Senate President Steve Sweeney trails Republican Edward Durr, a truck driver who spent all of $153 on his campaign, 52-48 with 63,000 votes counted.

Donald Trump carried the 3rd Legislative District in South Jersey 50-48 last year, which made Sweeney the one Democrat to represent Trump turf in the upper chamber. But Republicans, as evidenced by Durr’s tiny expenditures, had little confidence in beating him until the results began to roll in on Tuesday. Durr himself unsuccessfully ran as an independent for the Assembly in 2017 (in New Jersey, Senate and Assembly districts are coterminous) before trying again as a Republican two years later.

However, the likely fall of the conservative Sweeney, who has run the Senate since early 2010, may leave plenty of powerful Democrats less than upset. In 2017, the last time he was on the ballot, the New Jersey Education Association took the unusual step of backing his Republican opponent, though that didn’t stop Sweeney from winning a very expensive campaign 59-41.

The Senate president has often come into conflict with Gov. Phil Murphy, and he didn’t rule out launching a primary campaign against the governor when asked back in 2019. Politico adds that Sweeney “was until recently talked up in Democratic circles as a likely 2025 candidate for governor.” Barring a big vote shift back in his direction, that chatter probably won’t pick up again anytime soon.

● Nassau County, NY Executive: With 257,000 votes tabulated, Republican Bruce Blakeman holds a 52-48 lead, a margin of close to 12,000 ballots, over Democratic incumbent Laura Curran in the race to lead this large Long Island county. Curran said early Wednesday that she wasn’t conceding, declaring, “There are many thousands of absentee ballots that still must be counted, with more coming in.” Newsday reports that the Nassau Board of Elections had received close to 20,000 uncounted absentees as of Monday.

● VA State House: Republicans, as of Wednesday evening, lead in 52 of the 100 seats in the Virginia state House, which Democrats had held with a 55-45 majority going into the election. The Virginia Public Access Project reports that there are three contests where the margin between the candidates is less than 1%: HD-21, where Democratic incumbent Kelly Fowler holds a 234-vote edge, and HD-85 and HD-91, where Republicans Karen Greenhalgh and A.C. Cordoza have advantages of 202 and 272 votes, respectively.

VPAP adds that on Friday, local election officials will tally any provisional votes as well as ballots received through noon Friday that were postmarked by Election Day; VPAP continues that “it’s hard to say how many mail ballots might come in by Friday.”

Election Recaps

● Hialeah, FL Mayor: Steve Bovo, a former Miami-Dade County commissioner who lost last year’s general election for county mayor, decisively beat his fellow Republican, ex-City Council President Isis Garcia-Martinez, 59-22 in the race to lead this conservative Miami-area community. Bovo had the backing of Donald Trump and other Florida Republican bigwigs like Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Marco Rubio, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.

● St. Petersburg, FL Mayor: Former Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch defeated Republican City Councilman Robert Blackmon 60-40 in the nonpartisan contest to succeed his fellow Democrat, termed-out Mayor Rick Kriseman. Welch will be the first African American to lead a city that was run by GOP mayors for decades until Kriseman’s 2013 win.

● Boston, MA Mayor: City Councilor Michelle Wu defeated her more moderate colleague, Annissa Essaibi George, 64-36 in this officially nonpartisan race in a campaign that made history in one of America’s oldest cities.

Either of these candidates, who each identify as Democrats, would have been both the first woman and person of color elected to this post; acting Mayor Kim Janey became the first woman of color to hold this office when she ascended to the job in March, but she lost the September nonpartisan primary to keep it. The Chicago-raised Wu also marks the first time in over a century that Boston will be led by a mayor born outside the city.

● Minneapolis, MN Mayor: City election authorities announced Wednesday that Mayor Jacob Frey won a second term after a second and final round of ranked-choice tabulations.

Frey led activist Sheila Nezhad 43-21 among voter’s first-choice preferences, while a third Democrat, former state Rep. Kate Knuth, was in third with 18%. Enough of the other 16 candidates’ supporters listed Knuth as their second and third choice for her to edge out Nezhad and reach the second round, but Frey ultimately defeated her 56-44. We also learned Wednesday that, for the first time in Minneapolis history, people of color will hold a majority of the 13 seats on the City Council.

● Minneapolis, MN Ballot: Minneapolis voters approved Question 1, which will greatly strengthen the mayor’s executive powers by, among other things, “consolidating administrative authority over all operating departments,” by a 52-48 margin. At the same time, though, they rejected the far more high-profile Question 2, which would have replaced the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety and shifted more control of the department to the City Council, 56-44.

● Manchester, NH Mayor: Democratic incumbent Joyce Craig won a third two-year term as mayor of this swing state’s largest city by defeating former Republican state Rep. Victoria Sullivan 53-47 in the nonpartisan general election. Back in 2019, Craig beat Sullivan by a larger 57-43 spread.

● NJ-Gov: The Associated Press has called this contest for Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a shockingly tight race. Counties can receive ballots through Nov. 8 as long as they were postmarked by Election Day so we won’t know the final margin for some time, but Murphy, who began Wednesday narrowly trailing, leads 50.0-49.2 with 2.4 million votes counted.

● Albuquerque, NM Mayor: Democratic incumbent Tim Keller scored 56% of the vote in the nonpartisan race, which was above the majority he needed to avoid a runoff. Bernalillo County Sheriff Manny Gonzales, a self-described “strong fiscal conservative” who remains a nominal Democrat, was a distant second with 26%.

● NY Ballot: Three statewide election-related ballot measures have all lost by double digits. Proposal 1, which would reduce the threshold for lawmakers to approve a redistricting plan, failed by a 56-44 margin. It’s a similar story for Proposals 3 and 4, which would respectively allow the legislature to create a same-day voter registration law and remove the excuse requirement to vote absentee. Proposal 3 lost 58-42, while Proposal 4 lost 56-44. It’s unclear how many absentee ballots, which are likely heavily Democratic, remain left to count and could thus narrow the margins, but the Associated Press already called all three contests.

● Buffalo, NY Mayor: Mayor Byron Brown looks to have won a fifth term as a write-in candidate months after losing the June Democratic primary to India Walton, an outcome that Walton acknowledged on Wednesday was likely. Walton, who was the only candidate on the general election ballot, secured just 41% of the vote, while a 59% majority selected a write-in option. Election officials won’t actually start to examine the write-in votes until Nov. 17, but there’s little question that the vast majority of them were cast for Brown in a race without any other serious write-in candidates.

Walton herself said on election night that she wasn’t conceding because it wasn’t clear whom the write-ins were going to, but she admitted the next day that “it seems unlikely that we will end up with enough votes to inaugurate a Walton administration in January.” Brown’s apparent victory makes him, along with Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the rare incumbents to win a write-in campaign after losing a primary.

● Nassau County, NY District Attorney: Republican prosecutor Anne Donnelly flipped this post 60-40 by defeating Democratic state Sen. Todd Kaminsky in a special election to succeed Democrat Madeline Singas, who resigned in June to join the state’s highest judicial body, the Court of Appeals.

Donnelly, who campaigned almost exclusively on her opposition to ending cash bail and other criminal justice reforms, is the first Republican to hold the D.A.’s office since Denis Dillon lost to now-Democratic Rep. Kathleen Rice in 2005; she will be up for a full four-year term in 2023.

● Staten Island, NY Borough President: Former Rep. Vito Fossella, a Republican who retired from Congress after the public learned about his secret second family in 2008, completed his comeback by defeating Democrat Mark Murphy 62-30. Fossella’s victory extends GOP control of an office they’ve held since the 1989 elections.

● Suffolk County, NY District Attorney: Despite being badly outspent, Republican prosecutor Ray Tierney unseated first-term Democratic incumbent Timothy Sini 57-43. Tierney, like his counterpart in neighboring Nassau County, campaigned on his opposition to bail reform, which Sini also said he opposed.

Republicans also took control of the Suffolk County Legislature for the first time since the historic 2005 Democratic victory in this swingy Long Island community.

● Syracuse, NY Mayor: Independent Mayor Ben Walsh overwhelmingly won a second term in this very blue city by defeating Democratic nominee Khalid Bey, a longtime member of the Syracuse Common Council, 61-27.

● OH-11, OH-15: Ohio’s two special House elections unfolded exactly as expected, with Democrat Shontel Brown easily dispensing with her Republican opponent 79-21 in the safely blue 11th District, while Republican lobbyist Mike Carey defeated Democratic state Rep. Allison Russo 58-42 in the solidly red 15th. According to Daily Kos Elections’ calculations, the 11th went for Joe Biden 80-19 and the 15th voted for Donald Trump 56-42. Once Brown and Carey are sworn in, the only vacant seat in the House will be Florida’s 20th.

● Cincinnati, OH Mayor: Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Aftab Pureval defeated his fellow Democrat, City Councilman David Mann, 66-34 in the race to succeed termed-out Mayor John Cranley, an accomplishment that makes him the first Asian American to lead the Queen City. Pureval was the 2018 Democratic nominee against Republican Rep. Steve Chabot in the 1st Congressional District, while Mann lost his 1994 bid for re-election to Congress to none other than Chabot.

● Cleveland, OH Mayor: Nonprofit head Justin Bibb beat City Council President Kevin Kelley, a fellow Democrat who had the backing of retiring four-term incumbent Frank Jackson, 63-37. Bibb, who is 34, will be the second-youngest mayor in the city’s history.

● PA Supreme Court: Republican Kevin Brobson defeated Democrat Maria McLaughlin 52-48 to hold an open seat on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court for the GOP. Democrats, however, still retain their 5-2 advantage on the bench, and barring unexpected vacancies, the soonest Republicans could retake the majority would be 2025.

● Bucks County, PA District Attorney & Sheriff: Republicans bounced back from their 2017 drubbing in this competitive suburban Philadelphia county by sweeping all of the so-called “row offices,” the local name for the countywide offices other than the commissioner.

District Attorney Matt Weintraub, who was the one Republican row officer to prevail four years ago, turned back Democratic rival Antonetta Stancu 59-41. Fred Harran, the Republican who is Bensalem Township’s director of public safety, retook the sheriff’s post by scoring a 53-46 victory over Warrington Township Board of Supervisors member Mark Lomax, who unseated incumbent Milt Warrell in the May Democratic primary. Team Red also picked up lower-profile offices like prothonotary, a post that administers civil court documents.

● Erie County, PA Executive: Republican Brenton Davis won the race to succeed retiring Democratic incumbent Kathy Dahlkemper by defeating Democrat Tyler Titus 52-48 in this swingy northwest Pennsylvania county. Titus, who would have been the first trans county executive in American history, conceded Wednesday afternoon.

● King County, WA Executive: Incumbent Dow Constantine won a fourth term as head of Washington’s largest county by defeating his fellow Democrat, state Sen. Joe Nguyen, 58-42.

● Seattle, WA Mayor: Former City Council President Bruce Harrell defeated his successor, Lorena González, 65-35 in the nonpartisan contest to succeed retiring Mayor Jenny Durkin in this very blue city. Harrell, who is the first Asian American elected to this post as well as Seattle’s second Black mayor, was close to business interests, while most labor endorsements went to González.

Grab Bag

● Where Are They Now?: Two former one-term congressmen were on Tuesday’s ballot, but we so far only know the electoral fate of one.

Former Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi, who last year lost New York’s 22nd District to Republican Claudia Tenney by 109 votes, ran for a 14-year term in a New York State Supreme Court seat that had backed Donald Trump 49.2-48.7 and was defeated 54-43 by Republican Danielle Fogel. (Despite its name, the body is not the Empire State’s highest court: That honor goes to the Court of Appeals.)

We also saw a comeback attempt in New Jersey from ex-Republican Rep. Mike Pappas, who earned his brief moment in the political spotlight in 1998 when he took to the House floor to deliver an ode to the special prosecutor probing the Clinton White House that began, “Twinkle, twinkle, Kenneth Starr / Now we see how brave you are.” Pappas is running in an open state Senate seat, but, with 72,000 votes tabulated, he trails Democrat Andrew Zwicker 52-48. The Associated Press has not yet called the race for the 16th Legislative District, which supported Joe Biden 60-38.