Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department (DOJ) official once ready to risk it all to promote former President Donald Trump’s lies about the results of the 2020 election, has reportedly parted ways with his attorney just 24 hours ahead of a meeting with investigators on the Jan. 6 committee.

Clark, the former acting attorney general of the DOJ’s civil division under Trump, was represented by Robert Driscoll until Thursday, but according to a report first issued by Politico, Clark and Driscoll have since split. The reasons for the break are unclear, and Driscoll—an attorney for the Washington, D.C., firm McGlinchey Stafford and member of the conservative Federalist Society—did not return a request for comment.

It is unlikely, however, that the longtime attorney would step foot before lawmakers without counsel present. Clark’s position has been fraught in the weeks since the Senate Judiciary Committee released its extensive 394-page report unraveling how Trump and Clark, among others, allegedly worked in tandem to overturn the 2020 election.

Clark was subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee on Oct. 13. Investigators specifically demanded he provide testimony and records regarding his proposal, according to the Senate report, to deliver a letter to legislators in Georgia requesting they delay certification of election results over the administration’s concerns that they were invalid.

No proof of widespread fraud was ever found in Georgia or elsewhere in the United States; even Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, concluded there was no evidence of fraud in the election.

“Moreover, he recommended holding a press conference announcing that the Department was investigating allegations of voter fraud despite the lack of evidence that such fraud was present,” a statement from the committee highlighted earlier this month.

Indicated in a sweeping number of emails and other records comprising the Senate Judiciary Committee’s report, Clark was also ready to replace then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen at Trump’s alleged behest. When Rosen balked at Clark’s “proof of concept” claiming election fraud, Clark, the Senate report said, told Rosen he could replace him at the ready.

As Clark’s appointment with the Jan. 6 committee looms, so too might a contempt charge for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. According to reports on Thursday, Meadows has yet to fully comply with a subpoena issued by the committee in September.

Trump crony Steve Bannon has flatly refused cooperation with the committee’s subpoena. The House of Representatives has since found him in contempt; a decision on whether the Justice Department will prosecute is expected soon.

This post was originally published on this site

At the end of the day, it appears a 74-year-old white male millionaire killed the paid family leave provision in President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill.

Whatever his reasons, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia certainly didn’t do it for America’s families—neither for the kids, nor for the moms and dads. But he also didn’t do it for the Democratic Party or the real “moderates” who are facing tough reelections next year.

In fact, House Democratic moderates in vulnerable seats have a message for Manchin and the equally destructive Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona: Don’t do me any more favors.

The dastardly duo are each singlehandedly responsible for likely cutting out some of the most popular provisions in Biden’s family and jobs bill, including paid family leave, expanding Medicare coverage to include dental and vision, and allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug pricing. Though nothing is set in stone yet, that’s what seemed most plausible Thursday evening.   

“No normal person can understand why we can’t negotiate for drug prices,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told The Washington Post. “So what they see when we can’t pass that year after year is greed, and I have no problem saying I’m frustrated with the other side of the aisle, but in this case, my own party because that one is just a simple thing we could do.”

Slotkin is one of 32 members in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “front-line” program, designed to give an extra boost to Democrats in the most hotly contested seats.

In any normal one-party negotiation, the needs of front-liners like Slotkin would be paramount. But instead, Democrats have been running around tending to the every whim of Sinema and Manchin, who have apparently taken zero interest in whether they tank the chances of their own party holding its own in the midterms next year.

“I don’t think there’s a damn thing that we can do about certain people in the Senate,” said Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, another front-liner.

And not for lack of trying. Over the summer, Wild headed up an effort to write a letter to leadership advocating for inclusion of the prescription drug provision in the Democrats-only bill. All 15 members who signed on were front-liners.

Now, instead of focusing their campaigns on delivering certain policies that many of these Democrats ran on, many of them are already preparing to emphasize other provisions that appear to have survived the Manchinema machete, including universal pre-K, child care subsidies, and a one-year extension of the child tax credit.

One possible silver lining of certain provisions sunsetting sooner than Democrats had originally hoped will be the ability of Democrats to run on extending those programs, like the child tax credit.

“I’ve long said that as long as we can get some of this good stuff in for a year, two years, three years, I’m okay with that because I really do believe they’re going to prove to be so popular as programs that the American people are going to demand that,” Wild noted.

As for something like paid family leave, which appears to have been left on the cutting room floor, front-line Democrats hope they have at least initiated a national conversation that they can campaign on in the future.  

One other silver lining of the trimmed down bill: a narrower menu of options to campaign on may also work to Democrats’ advantage. Earlier this month, a CBS News/YouGov poll found that just 10% of Americans described themselves as knowing a lot of specifics about Biden’s Build Back Better plan; 33% said they had a general sense and knew some specifics; 28% said they had a general sense but knew no specifics; and 29% said they simply don’t know what’s in it. That’s a lot of education awaiting Democrats on the other side of this bill. 

In fact, when President Biden visited Slotkin’s district earlier this month, he was greeted by some 500 protesters, some of whom said they objected to the size of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better plan.

“We have not put a strong foot forward on messaging,” Slotkin said. “People need to know what they’re getting for all this money and that means reversing the paradigm and talking about what we are going to do instead of what we’re not going to do.”

So while getting major priorities like paid leave and prescription drug pricing in the bill surely would be preferable, there’s still plenty for Democrats to work with in terms of selling the package to constituents. Just like there’s still plenty of work for Democrats to do.

This post was originally published on this site

As of Thursday morning, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running yet another victory lap. According to a release from DeSantis’ office, Florida now has one of the lowest rates of COVID-19 per capita. Which is true—at the moment. This comes, says the press release, because of DeSantis’ “leadership and a data-driven approach free of mandates.” This is at least the fourth time that DeSantis has declared himself a winner. That includes once in the spring of 2020 when he pushed businesses and schools to reopen even though the pandemic was just warming up, and another that fall when he stripped power from local officials and removed mask mandates from cities and counties, and another this spring when, as the Sun Sentinel reports, the Harvard- and Yale-educated Desantis bragged that he had scored a victory over the “elites” who warned that his polices could lead to disaster.

At the time, just under 33,000 Floridians had died from COVID-19. Six months later, the number is 59,000. Every victory lap DeSantis turns in seems to feature a higher body count.

Over the past six months, Florida spent weeks at the top of the charts when it came to COVID-19 cases per day. It rarely topped the charts for deaths, not because of DeSantis’ extremely limited program on monoclonal antibodies, but because Florida altered the way it reported those deaths, dribbling them out weeks late so that they didn’t appear in the day-by-day totals.

That last lap around DeSantis’ Ego Stadium didn’t just take the lives of at least 26,000 Floridians: It brought more than 1.6 million new cases to the state, leaving tens of thousands suffering the long-term effects of COVID-19.

That’s more deaths than all the hurricanes that have hit Florida in recorded history.  

DeSantis has repeatedly bragged about his monoclonal antibody clinics, touting them as the solution to not only pressing vaccine mandates, but issuing executive orders that prevent any organization—from public schools to private companies—from requiring vaccination. But DeSantis bragging about the state administering “45,000 monoclonal antibody treatments to patients statewide at the 21 state treatment sites” is laughable.

Monoclonal antibodies are not designed for patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19. To be effective, they have to be given to patients in the early days, soon after testing positive or showing mild symptoms. In fact, the FDA Emergency Use Authorization for these antibodies prevents their use with patients who are either hospitalized or need breathing assistance of any kind. The treatments are also expensive, require hours to complete, and must be administered by medical personnel. 

By DeSantis’ own numbers, the state has provided monoclonal antibody treatments to less than 3% of the Floridians who tested positive since the clinics were opened. Any effect that they’ve had on the overall number of hospitalizations or deaths in the state is negligible.

What may be the most darkly humorous statement in DeSantis’ latest self-congratulatory note is his insistence that “Without mandates or lockdowns, COVID-19 cases in Florida have decreased 90% since August.” They have. But only because Florida hit absolutely staggering numbers of new disease cases in August. In fact, Florida passed its all-time record, approaching 28,000 cases in a single day on Aug. 27. In that single month, there were 600,000 cases of COVID-19 in the state and 9,500 people died.

What DeSantis managed to do “without mandates or lockdowns” over the past six months is really staggering. He managed to take Florida into the top 10 states when it comes to deaths by population. In doing so, Florida became by far the largest state in the top 10 and reached the No. 3 position in overall deaths, racing past states which had suffered in the first days of the pandemic. 

That means that, in a period when vaccines are available, treatment is much better understood, and ventilators were available, Ron DeSantis still managed to get Floridians killed at a rate over twice that of New York in the worst days of the first wave in the spring of 2020. That is … an accomplishment.

Oh, and along the way, DeSantis also managed to appoint a pandemic-skeptic surgeon general who, as the Tallahassee Democrat notes, “has history of being anti-science, anti-vaccine.” When that surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, went to meet with state Sen. Tina Polsky, she requested he wear a mask. That’s not just because wearing a mask is good practice at all times, especially in a state that is just coming down from the top of the national charts when it comes to COVID-19, but also because Sen. Polsky is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and is immunologically compromised by that treatment. Sen. Polsky had not made public her diagnoses before this incident, but was forced to do so in the wake of Ladapo’s refusal to put on a mask.

Following this incident, Black Republican minister R.B. Holmes said he was changing his registration from Republican to independent. “We are extremely alarmed and saddened that the surgeon general would not meet with the elected state senator from Broward County when she asked respectfully, ‘Will you please, sir, wear a mask,’ ” said Holmes. “For that top doctor to not wear a mask is disrespectful and dishonorable.” 

Holmes went on to slam Ladapo, DeSantis, and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, who has joined DeSantis in punishing schools that tried to protect students by requiring either masks or vaccination.

But not to worry: DeSantis has Ladapo’s back.

This post was originally published on this site

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.

Leading Off

● GA-Gov: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that former Sen. David Perdue is “seriously considering” launching a Republican primary bid against Gov. Brian Kemp, an idea that seemed very unlikely just a few weeks ago. Perdue’s allies also, in the words of reporter Greg Bluestein, say that “Trump is expected to quickly endorse him” if he gets in.

Perdue has not said anything publicly, but Bluestein writes that several sources say he’s “conflicted” about the idea, though “others say he’s leaning toward a challenge.” One unnamed ally also said that Perdue was factoring in Kemp’s strength against 2018 Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams in their widely-expected rematch, with Bluestein relaying that “Perdue would only run if he felt Kemp was so politically damaged that he couldn’t defeat Abrams in November.”

Until August, there was no serious talk of Perdue, who lost re-election to Democrat Jon Ossoff in the January runoff, going up against Kemp. While the governor infuriated Trump last year when he refused to go along with his plan to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, Perdue stuck by him in June when he ​​introduced Kemp at June’s party convention; the AJC also reported that Perdue privately told the incumbent earlier this year that he’d be supporting his re-election.

Campaign Action

Things began to change two months ago, though, when Trump’s Save America PAC unsubtly released a Fabrizio Lee poll arguing that, with Trump’s support, the former senator would be favored to defeat Kemp. The idea initially still seemed unlikely: The conservative Washington Examiner published a story days later saying that, while Perdue’s fellow Republicans believed he could run for the Senate if NFL player Herschel Walker “implode[d],” they doubted he’d go up against Kemp. Around that time his cousin, former Gov. Sonny Perdue, also backed the governor.

The ex-senator, however, never took the chance to publicly dismiss any talk of a gubernatorial run. Trump himself was hardly dissuaded either, and he used a late September rally to single Perdue out in the crowd and ask, “​​Are you running for governor, David? Did I hear he’s running?” And while Perdue showed no public indication he was really thinking about it, Bluestein now writes that he’s spent “recent weeks” talking to his allies about a potential campaign against Kemp.

Redistricting

● IA Redistricting: Iowa’s Republican-run state Senate and House approved the second set of congressional and legislative maps proposed by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency in almost unanimous votes on Thursday, sending the plans to Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds for her signature.

● MA Redistricting: Massachusetts’ Democratic-run state Senate has passed new legislative maps, about a week after the state House did the same thing. The plans now go to Republican Gov. Charlie Baker for his signature. While Baker could veto the maps, they passed both chambers almost unanimously. Lawmakers have yet to introduce any congressional redistricting proposals.

Senate

● NC-Sen: While the Justice Department reportedly told retiring Sen. Richard Burr on Jan. 19 that it would drop an investigation into allegations that he engaged in insider trading last year after receiving classified briefings about the coronavirus as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Securities and Exchange Commission confirmed this week that it was probing the Republican.

On Thursday, the SEC said in a court filing that in February of 2020, just weeks before the emerging pandemic tanked the stock market, Burr dumped $1.6 million in stocks and quickly called his brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth. The minute after that 50-second call was complete, says the SEC, Fauth called his own broker and ultimately sold between $97,000 and $280,000 in shares that day. The SEC further said it was investigating both men for insider trading.

Burr announced in 2016 that his third term would be his last, and both parties have competitive primaries to succeed him. Should Burr vacate his seat before his term ends in January of 2023, though, a fellow Republican would replace him for the rest of the term because state law requires ​​Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to appoint a new senator from a list of three names provided by the state GOP.

Governors

● AR-Gov: The Republican firm Remington Research Group has dropped a survey of next year’s GOP primary that shows Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate, former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, steamrolling state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge 73-16.

● MD-Gov: Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez this week earned endorsements from AFSCME Council 3 and AFSCME Council 67, which Maryland Matters says together represent “more than 50,000 state, county, municipal, school board, and higher education employees” in the state, ahead of next year’s Democratic primary.

● NJ-Gov: Stockton University’s new poll shows Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy with a 50-41 lead against Republican Jack Ciattarelli, which is exactly what the school found last month as well.

● VA-Gov: Republican Glenn Youngkin earned plenty of coverage (much of it unflattering) when he ran a commercial starring a parent who in 2012 tried to get Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic “Beloved” banned from Fairfax County Public Schools, and Democrat Terry McAuliffe quickly went up with a response commercial. His spot is centered around an African American mother who tells the audience, “Nothing is more important than my children’s education. So when I heard about Glenn Youngkin wanting to ban books by prominent Black authors, it scared me.”

House

● NH-01: 2020 Republican nominee ​​Matt Mowers has released a Cygnal poll of the current 1st District to argue he’s the heavy favorite to again win the nomination to take on Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas. The survey gives Mowers the lead with 34% of the vote, while former TV reporter Gail Huff Brown was a distant second with 7%.

● OR-05: Attorney Jamie McLeod-Skinner announced Thursday that she would challenge moderate Rep. Kurt Schrader in the primary for this redrawn seat.

McLeod-Skinner entered the race with an endorsement from Milwaukie Mayor Mark Gamba, who had originally said he’d run again following his 69-23 primary defeat last year. Schrader, for his part, has yet to say if he’ll run for re-election in the 5th District, which contains his hometown of Canby, or the new 6th, which includes more of his current constituents. The 5th District, which includes southern Portland suburbs and central Oregon, supported Joe Biden 53-44.

McLeod-Skinner, who says she would be Oregon’s first LGBTQ member of Congress, served as Team Blue’s 2018 nominee in the safely red 2nd District. McLeod-Skinner raised $1.3 million for her campaign against veteran Republican Rep. Greg Walden but lost 56-39, which still was the closest general election of the congressman’s long career. (Walden retired the following cycle.)

McLeod-Skinner then ran for secretary of state last year and took last in the three-way primary with 28%; the winner, with 36%, was Shemia Fagan, who went on to prevail in the general election. Afterwards, McLeod-Skinner served a stint as interim city manager of the small community of Talent.

McLeod-Skinner didn’t mention Schrader in her announcement but said earlier this month, “Normally I wouldn’t consider challenging an incumbent Democrat. However, with Kurt Schrader, I don’t have to make much of an argument to persuade a lot of people.” Schrader himself made national headlines in January when he comparing the idea of impeaching Donald Trump to a “lynching,” a statement he ended up apologizing for. The congressman since then has shown skepticism towards Biden’s infrastructure bill, saying in September, “It would have to be way under $1 trillion for me to get remotely interested.”

● WV-02: National Research, working on behalf of GOPAC, has released the first poll we’ve seen of the incumbent vs. incumbent Republican primary for this redrawn northern West Virginia seat, and it shows David McKinley leading Alex Mooney 44-29. GOPAC doesn’t appear to have taken sides, though Politico’s Ally Mutnick notes it has donated to ​​McKinley in the past.

Mayors

● Los Angeles, CA Mayor: Businessman Ramit Varma announced Wednesday that he was joining next year’s crowded open seat race. Varma, who pledged to self-fund at least $1 million, seems most interested in appealing to conservatives in this very blue municipality, as he argued that the city government was spending money on healing centers in order to be “woke.”

Grab Bag

● Where Are They Now?: An investigator with the Albany County Sheriff’s Office filed a criminal complaint in state court on Thursday accusing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of forcibly touching an unnamed woman at the governor’s mansion last December, a misdemeanor. However, Albany County District Attorney David Soares said in a statement that he was “surprised to learn” of the complaint and would not issue any further comment. The Albany Times Union reported that the complaint had been filed “prematurely” and said that law enforcement officials had not yet decided whether to charge Cuomo, according to unnamed sources.

This post was originally published on this site

(You can help support my work by joining me over on Patreon🙂

Mark Zuckerberg is all fired up about the “metaverse,” which is basically a virtual reality version of Facebook on steroids. Never mind the fact that the $1 trillion (give or take) company is already under scrutiny for everything from helping launch an insurrection in the United States to human trafficking abroad.

Scores of respected media outlets are collaborating on the “Facebook Papers,” which offer a disturbing look at the tech giant from the inside. The short version is that Facebook is in much more trouble than we thought . . . and is much more dangerous than we thought.

Zuckerberg has been saying everything is fine, not to worry, moderation and artificial intelligence will make everything better. Thanks to whistleblower Frances Haugen, we now know pretty much the opposite is true.

Enjoy the cartoon, share it on Facebook and Instagram (heheh) and be sure to visit me on Patreon — where you can go behind the scenes and help support my work!

This post was originally published on this site

Jennifer C Berkshire/The Nation:

The GOP’s Grievance Industrial Complex Invades the Classroom

When parents become a posse of vigilantes, outrage is in the saddle instead of teaching or learning.

“It’s really chilling,” says Jennifer Hough, a parent and member of the Southlake chapter of Dignity for All Texas Students. “The message that’s being sent to the teachers in this school district is that nobody’s safe.”

Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:

A Gladwyne mom, a ‘whiteness’ book, and the GOP’s scheme to rock the 2021 vote 

Suburban school board races used to be about taxes, not charges of “indoctrination.” Inside the GOP scheme to retake power through the schools.

For many years, school board elections in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania’s most affluent suburb, have been genteel, predictable affairs. Republican challengers would raise a fuss about high school taxes, and they would lose in a diverse, highly educated community that reflects the 21st century Democratic Party.

So it’s jarring in 2021 to see signs sprouting from Lower Merion’s fine-trimmed lawns: “Education Not Indoctrination” — that same slogan that well-funded GOP candidates in Virginia and elsewhere are also using in a strategy to make hay in an “off-year” election by riling up already angst-ridden parents about the way racism is taught in public schools.

Lee Drutman and Meredith Conroy/FiveThirtyEight:

Democrats Worry A Lot About Policies That Win Elections. That’s Short-Sighted.

Democratic leaders, activists and strategists spend a lot of time discussing — and arguing about — policy under the assumption that the policies the party prioritizes affect whether they will win the next election. It’s been a big part of President Biden’s governing strategy so far, and one need look no further than Democrats blaming talk of defunding the police for losses in the House in 2020 or, conversely, citing health care in the 2018 midterm elections as the reason they did so well to understand the role they think policy plays in their electoral success.

But the research on whether choosing the right policy actually helps parties win elections is far less clear. How Democrats talk in 2021 and 2022 and what they prioritize may — or may not — help them win the 2022 midterm elections, but it will shape the policy and political landscape for the future in potentially profound ways. And that, perhaps, is what Democrats should be more worried about.

Joan Walsh/Nation:

These Two Virginia Democratic Women Have a Real Shot at Flipping GOP Seats

Although the national narrative is “Virginia Dems are in disarray,” there are some bright spots for progressives.

Target Smart estimates that Democrats have cast 55 percent of early votes as of Monday, compared with 30 percent by Republicans. And according to Blue Virginia, Tuesday was the biggest early voting day yet, with more than 53,000 voters casting ballots. (Two wonky provisos: Virginia voters don’t have to register by party, so estimates of partisan voting rely on “modeling” that looks at prior results and demography by district. Also: comparisons with earlier years are difficult to make; Virginia’s Democrat-powered early voting changes only fully kicked in this year.) Even so, the hand-wringing over lack of Democratic enthusiasm is starting to look unfounded.

Helaine Olen/WaPo:

This is the real reason Americans distrust the child tax credit and other government benefits

Although some support for government aid waned as the pandemic wore on, the relief legislation President Biden signed in March included a significant one-year child tax credit. The benefit, paid as a monthly allowance, is on track to cut child poverty by 40 percent.

Popularity seemed inevitable. In many European countries, after all, child allowances are embraced not only on the left but also by many on the right, who see them as promoting “family values.”

Not so in the United States, where the credit has become mired in historical distrust of government aid and arguments over work requirements. These negative perceptions reflect the limited possibilities for government benefits of the sort that other nations take for granted — and how unlikely our status quo is to change.

John Stoehr/Editorial Board:

With new anti-CRT laws, the Republicans give the impression they stand against brainwashing. But their goal is brainwashing

“Critical race theory” is 21st-century McCarthyism.

Three things need saying. One, that “critical race theory” is becoming the most destructive political boogeyman since Joseph McCarthy fear-mongered about Communists hiding behind every bush and tree.

Two, that this political boogeyman is being used by Republican state lawmakers to achieve what they have wanted — to use the power of the state to censor information and to police thought. We are close to updating the old Cold War pursuit of “un-American activities.”

Three, that by censoring information and policing thought, the Republicans can replace knowledge and understanding with lies and propaganda advancing a preferred way of seeing America, to wit: In America, everyone gets a fair shake in life. Social ills like poverty and racism are individual failings, not societal ones. Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about. Except “those people” making trouble.

Philip Bump/WaPo:

Tucker Carlson made a movie to prove he’s not a white nationalist

Right-Wing Grievance: The Film

On top of this scene, large block text a la Wes Anderson: “The War on Terror,” it reads, and then, over Babbitt’s falling body, “2.0.”

So begins the trailer for what Fox News’s Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night described as a “three-part series” he produced that will be released next month that will run on Fox Nation, the right-wing broadcaster’s streaming service. But it does seem clear what the intent is. Carlson wants to elevate the idea — the surreal idea, the deranged idea — that the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was fomented in whole or in part by the government so that it could crack down on the political right.

Politico:

A fear grows in Trumpworld: Have we gone too conspiratorial?

There is growing worry that talk of stolen elections, machine rigging and foreign plots will hurt election reform efforts and sap turnout.

For months, conspiracies about the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump have fueled Republican efforts nationwide to rewrite election laws. But now, some GOP operatives and Trumpworld luminaries are worried that the truly wild conspiracists may be mucking it all up.

Hogan Gidley, one of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants, took a subtle dig at some Trump allies and put some distance between their efforts and his group’s work on election reform. Other Republicans have expressed fears that talk of “audits,” machine rigging and foreign plots will depress voter turnout and discourage some people from seeking office.

This post was originally published on this site

In the news today: As Democrats continue to negotiate with holdout Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to support some version of an infrastructure bill that will not send the state of Florida underwater due to rising seas, the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection has lost patience with another subpoenaed Trump ally. Former House Republican and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows is still holding out, and the reasons why aren’t mysterious: Meadows has been directly implicated in multiple of Trump’s plans to browbeat elections officials into “finding” new votes to overturn his loss, in pushing various hoaxes intended to discredit the elections process, and in sending a mob of militia members and other far-right figures to the Capitol in a (successful) attempt to halt the counting of votes that would verify Trump’s loss.

Elsewhere, a new SEC filing raises new legal questions over Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s stock trades (sound familiar?) and The Wall Street Journal is getting dinged for shamelessly publishing a Donald Trump diatribe riddled with known-false propaganda claims—without so much as a note to readers informing them of the numerous lies. It sure makes you wonder what else the paper that claims to have the pulse of Wall Street lies to their readers about. Whatever an important enough person wants them to lie about, apparently?

Here’s some of what you may have missed:

• House select committee considers holding Trump chief of staff Meadows in contempt

• New SEC filing uncovers call made from Sen. Burr to brother-in-law minutes before stocks dumped

• The Wall Street Journal published letter from Trump: No facts, just no facts, and only no facts

• Charlottesville neo-Nazi gets legal advice from white supremacists and news from … Tucker Carlson

• QAnon streamer convinced Democrats are pedophiles turns out to be registered sex offender

Community Spotlight:

• The business of academia

Also trending from the community:

• Lies about history in Texas can be traced to the Lone Star State’s own Big Lie: The Alamo

• In Trump Country Georgia 500k people went to a fair with free Covid vaccines—guess how many got one!

This post was originally published on this site

I half expected Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to show up on the Senate floor today dressed as Ramses II, arriving on a pink, three-legged Shetland pony before airily plucking imaginary Skittles from Rand Paul’s leonine mane of laissez-faire locks. Turns out I should have bet the over.

Watching Sinema “legislate” is a little like watching H.R. PufnStuf on acid, only orders of magnitude more maddening. She and Sen. Joe Manchin are doing their utmost to make the world a sadder place for everyone but a handful of obscenely wealthy plutocrats. Manchin’s fig leaf is that he represents a ruby-red state (granted, it’s a state whose residents overwhelmingly back President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda). I don’t know what the hell Sinema—who launched her political career as a member of the left-wing Green Party candidate—is thinking.

The already denuded Build Back Better framework appears to be close to the finish line, but we’re still waiting on the final word from Manchin and Sinema. Unfortunately, no one is quite sure where Sinema stands because she’s too busy cosplaying Ted Lasso scenes with Mitt Romney to tell us.

Grab your favorite barf receptacle, folks. And be warned. This is a double-bagger:

You’re singlehandedly nuking the dreams of millions of children, working women, and impoverished Americans while fucking the planet with a titanium dildo and making the return of Donald Trump, a proven fascist, far more likely. Here, have a biscuit!

Actually, Mitt’s gift is perfect, because I suspect Sinema could be bought off for even less. Do we know there are actual biscuits in that box, or is it the secret password to Mitch McConnell’s volcano lair?

Needless to say, Twitter was hardly amused:

It appears Mitt Romney finally has his binder full of women—er, woman. 

Of course, after Donald Trump establishes his long-sought-after thousand-year reich, I doubt this will be quite as cute as these sulfuric popcorn farts seem to think it is. I hope my forced-labor camp has Wi-Fi because I really want to see the look on both of their faces when America finally gurgles its last breath.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

This post was originally published on this site

President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda may be the largest and most substantive social legislation since the New Deal and Great Society.

Passing it will make transformative investments in jobs, the care economy (including child care and pre-K, the child tax credit, home care, and more), combating climate change, delivering relief for millions of immigrants, and much more. That’s why Daily Kos has put all of our resources to help make it pass.

Since March, Daily Kos has generated 1.81 million constituent letters to House and Senate Democrats, over half a million petition signatures, and more than 35,000 constituent phone calls — all in support of a big, bold, and green measure that can reshape our country.

Throughout it all, we have focused on the issues and how this legislation will benefit millions of people. And it’s why we need you to keep contacting your members of Congress.

After it passes, the Build Back Better Act will aggressively fight climate change, cut child poverty, expand health care access, offer education opportunities, build affordable housing, provide for our child and elder care workers and help immigrants who work hard every day.

In a perfect world, Congress would pass each of these priorities in about 10 different bills that we could separately celebrate each passage. But because the Senate filibuster requires an impossible hurdle of 60 votes on anything, we had to stuff as much of the policy agenda into one budget reconciliation bill that can bypass Republican obstruction and become law.

Even before we knew any details of what would be included in the package (and before it was split into a physical infrastructure bill and human infrastructure legislation), we knew the most crucial thing was to keep it big and all-encompassing. Our first petition we did back in March was to generate constituent letters to members of Congress—urging them to keep the package BIG, BOLD, AND GREEN.

Once we started to know what would be in the Build Back Better Act, the media inevitably began to focus on the dollar amount. That was a trap we did not want to fall into.

Whether it’s $6 trillion in essential funding that Bernie Sanders and other progressives originally urged, or a $3.5 trillion framework that President Biden and 48 Senate Democrats signed off on, or the newest $1.85 trillion framework, we refused to let the Build Back Better Act be defined by a dollar amount: what the bill accomplishes is what matters.

That’s why we set up four different Letter Campaigns that focused on the four big issue areas that would make up the Build Back Better Act: climate, care, health, and citizenship. And we sent out regular emails that focused on each of these separate issues, telling real stories about real people and why Congress must fight hard to keep these priorities in the bill.

We wrote about our grandparents needing expanded Medicare coverage or elder care. We talked about immigrant families living under fear of deportation while they did so much of the essential work that helped us survive the pandemic. We talked about the terrifying heat waves and hurricanes that happened this summer, and how climate change requires major action.

When the media focused on the shifting dollar amounts in Build Back Better, that was not a helpful metric to know if it’s an acceptable compromise—or an outrageous concession. What mattered most was what would be in the bill on a substantive policy level that helps people.

Granted, we can’t ignore the price tag entirely due to Senate rules. But the Build Back Better Act can be fully paid for if the rich and corporations who greatly benefited from the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts (and then made out like bandits during the pandemic) paid their fair share. That’s why we also had a Letter Campaign urging them to tax the rich.

And when it became clear that allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices (which can save the government $500 billion) was in jeopardy, we mobilized to demand that, too.

All the while, conservative Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema gave us headaches. We mobilized our West Virginia and Arizona readers to put pressure on them, balancing palatable frustration with the fact that we need their votes to pass this.

But we didn’t hold back when it came to the multimillion-dollar corporate lobbying blitz. A lot of money is at stake in the Build Back Better Act, and wealthy interests are hell-bent on defeating it. Whether it’s ExxonMobil trying to kill the climate provisions, Big Pharma pushing back on prescription drug access, or just the rich and powerful who liked their Trump tax cuts.

Our message to all Democrats was: You represent us, not the big business lobbyists. And if you remove key portions of the Build Back Better Act, you are doing their bidding.

Congress may vote any day now on both the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act. We will fight hard to the bitter end to keep it as big, bold, and green as possible to deliver for the American people. And whatever we don’t get into the bill, we will fight to elect more Democrats in 2022—and repeal the filibuster in the Senate.

This level of sustained advocacy costs real money. If you can, help us keep fighting by chipping in $5 today.

This post was originally published on this site

If she were running in any other state, I might be tempted to take Republican Rachel Hamm seriously, but she’s running for secretary of state in California. Her goal is to align with other Republicans to fill the top elected positions in states throughout the country so they can avenge their beloved former President Donald Trump by flipping his 2020 defeat into a win. That’s her goal, and like many a Republican before her, Hamm is using God to achieve it.

In a video tweeted on Tuesday by the progressive advocacy nonprofit Right Wing Watch, Hamm urged a seemingly already convinced crowd of what she dubbed divine workings behind Trump’s election defeat. Hamm said at the For God and Country Patriot Double Down conference in Las Vegas last weekend that as she repeatedly prayed, it became “overwhelmingly clear that God was anointing Donald J. Trump to continue being our president.”

“I had no doubt that he was going to continue being our president, so the day after the inauguration I was furious,” Hamm added, “because we’d been stolen from and we knew it.” Some might call it losing an election, but for the purposes of moving this ridiculous sermon of sorts ahead, let’s ignore the alleged and unsubstantiated claim for now. It’s actually not Hamm’s larger point.

She told her audience she was mad at Trump for “not fighting harder … Why did he leave? This doesn’t make sense to me,” she said, recounting her alleged conversation with God. “You told me that you were anointing him to be our president, and he’s a fighter, and he doesn’t quit. This doesn’t make sense.”

Hamm continued: “I’m one of those weird people that believes God speaks back, and he said very, very clearly ‘because he’s a good father.'” She said she asked God how Trump’s parenting was relevant to him leaving office. “And he said because good fathers know that sometimes unfortunately, as much as they do not want to have to do it this way, sometimes their children do not learn lessons unless they learn it the hard way.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you cannot go to everybody’s church. This woman has practically created an entire religion out of losing an election. If she calmed herself enough to actually learn from those hated Democrats—who, let me remind you, had to not only deal with a Republican in office but had to deal with a remarkably unqualified Republican reality star leading the nation for four years— she might learn something about how to recover. 

The words of one Democrat specifically stand out, and they are from former President Barack Obama as he hit the campaign trail over the weekend for Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who is up for reelection. Obama paused his remarks on the gubernatorial election to comment on this Republican embrace of an alternate reality. 

“I lost a congressional election back in Chicago,” Obama said. “I didn’t know I could just like after I got beat, I could just get up and say, ‘no I didn’t get beat. Nah, nah, nah, nah. The machines were broken.’ What? No. You know what I did was I said, ‘you know what, let me think about how I can be better, so that I can win the next time. That’s what I did.”

God help us all if Trump can manage to put his ego aside and actually learn from his past political mistakes. I’d actually rather he keep shouting he was robbed for the next three years.

RELATED: ‘Brother, come on!’: Obama’s not buying Jack’s claim he didn’t know he was at ‘Stop the Steal’ rally

RELATED: ‘I am a prophetic dreamer’: California GOP candidate claims she can kill witches through prayer