With any luck, this one won’t fly This was not unexpected. When North Carolina Republicans are not creating secret police forces, they are conjuring new ways to make it harder for non-Republicans to vote. They’re creative that way. So when they passed SB 747 and their supremajorities (thanks, Tricia Cotham!) overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, I expected state Democrats and Marc Elias to jump right on that. I warned the GOP, I don’t bluff. Now, we will win.https://t.co/Q2dWScgaMu https://t.co/y4bS5I3INB — Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) October 11, 2023 Democracy Docket provides the outlines: On Tuesday, Oct. 10, Voto Latino, the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force, Down Home North Carolina and two individual voters filed a federal lawsuit challenging part of North Carolina’s newly enacted voter suppression law, Senate Bill 747. The new lawsuit ensued just minutes after the Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) veto of S.B. 747. The lawsuit specifically challenges S.B.
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And it doesn’t look as if they are getting any closer to pulling themselves together As the whole world watches the events unfolding in Israel in slack jawed horror, I think most people are vastly relieved that the person who won the 2022 American presidential election was not Donald Trump. As Israel’s most powerful ally, President Joe Biden has been a steady hand at the wheel trying to ensure that the war doesn’t spread beyond Israel’s borders and reassuring everyone that the US is not going off the rails despite its ongoing political turmoil. You can’t say the same for the putative Republican nominee for president in 2024, Donald Trump whose only contribution to the discourse has been to repeatedly assert on his Truth Social feed that this never would have happened if he were still president and proclaim “I KEPT ISRAEL SAFE!
The congressman who was seen cursing out Capitol pages had another outburst It’s hard to know if this person is mentally unstable or if he’s just another infantile Republican trying to get attention: Democrats are furious at GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden for a curse-laden outburst that interrupted a White House briefing on the Israel terrorist attack. Multiple attendees described Van Orden (R-Wis.) as acting belligerent towards the Biden administration briefers when he asked questions. Several people said Van Orden cursed directly at the briefers, prompting loud boos in the room. One person in the room said Van Orden shouted that the briefers’ presentation was “pathetic.” Another attendee described it as “offensive and inappropriate.” One member, Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), shouted “shame on you” in response to Van Orden’s verbal affront — prompting Van Orden to drop an f-bomb toward the Minnesota Democrat, who is Jewish. “He was rude and attacked the presenters. I thought they had very substantive things to say.
That’s the point. And it’s grotesque. There are so many horrifying accounbts about last Saturday’s terrorist attack coming out of Israel that I’m starting to feel numb in spite of my efforts not to look away. And I’m equally horrified as I contemplate what’s to come. There’s so much carnage that it’s overwhelming. There are some stories that are so poignant and speak so clearly to the total insanity of terrorism and war that they just break my heart. This is one of them: On the Israeli side of the Gaza border lie a number of residential collectives whose members tend to be left of center and supportive of peace initiatives and Palestinian rights. Many of those residents were among the missing or dead after Hamas’s assault on Saturday. Vivian Silver, 74, a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, near the northern end of Gaza, was still missing on Monday night and presumed to have been taken hostage. Ms. Silver, a native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, was among the leaders of Women Wage Peace, a large grass-roots movement founded in the aftermath of the Gaza War of 2014 to promote a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Now that Bobby Jr has decided to run as an independent the Republicans don’t like him so much Philip Bump reports on RFK Jr’s latest interview with Hannity now that he’s announced he’s running thrid party. It looks like the Trumpers have some regret about the monster they’ve helped nurture over the past several months: Once upon a time, it seemed that Sean Hannity was excited about no presidential candidate more than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In June, the Fox News host marveled that Kennedy was “surging in the Democratic primary,” potentially meaning that President Biden’s bid for renomination was in jeopardy. Kennedy wasn’t surging in the polls — at least not among Democrats — but Hannity seemed perfectly happy to try to will such a surge into existence. In late July, he turned over a full hour of his program to Kennedy, the sort of campaign contribution that he normally reserved for Republican candidates (as he did so often before last year’s midterm elections). Kennedy was running against a Democrat, and that was good enough for Hannity.
But Biden 🤣 https://t.co/iFE4LdYBrn — Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) October 11, 2023 That looks painful.
The left must hang on to its moral authority This piece by Eric Levitz brilliantly examines all the complexities I imagine many of you are feeling about the war in Israel. I know I am. It’s very difficult and social media has made it almost impossible to express any nuance about any of it. (I’m reeling from being buffeting in all directions.) Anyway, this is the most honest, most mature analysis of how we should be thinking about this if we have a conscience: This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage. Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before.
After an Israeli reserve soldier named David Ben Zion told a reporter Palestinian militants “cut [off] heads of babies,” Biden, Netanyahu, and the international media amplified the dubious claim. The Grayzone has identified Ben Zion as a fanatical settler leader who incited riots by demanding a Palestinian town be “wiped out.” An international outcry erupted when Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced that Palestinian militants from the besieged Gaza Strip had killed 40 “babies,” and beheaded several of them during an incursion […]
The post Source of dubious ‘beheaded babies’ claim is Israeli settler leader who incited riots to ‘wipe out’ Palestinian village first appeared on The Grayzone.
Americans can imagine themselves there Accounts of the killings and kidnappings from the Israeli border with Gaza are horrific. Especially from the attack on unarmed civilians at a music festival. Americans can easily imagine themselves in a similar situation. Americans were in a similar situation in October six years ago in Las Vegas when a lone gunman murdered 60 concertgoers and wounded over 400. The New York Times has video shot as the attacks began. One striking image from TV accounts shows a destroyed car shot full of holes like Swiss cheese. Israeli retaliatory airstrikes on the Gaza side of the border are killing and wounding unarmed civilians there, don’t forget. With the district locked down and out of power, Palestinian victims’ stories are trickling out more slowly. Their stories will likely never be told. I’m not qualified to do more than react. But this clip of retired United States Navy rear admiral John Kirby of the National Security Council choking up on live television is arresting. It’s a sobering image. Why, given daily events in this country, is hard to express.
With apologies to J. R. “Bob” Dobbs Donald Trump must be really pissed that the Hamas attack on Israel over the weekend knocked him off the front pages. Of course, The Gray Lady had seen fit the day before to bury on Page A13 news of Trump blabbering U.S. submarine secrets to his Mar-a-Lago guests. Remarkable that this story is buried on Page A13 in today’s New York Times. pic.twitter.com/U0F5Ra33Td — Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) October 6, 2023 Digby’s comment on this mental midget is so good you should see it again: We are in the midst of an international crisis and the putative nominee for the Republican nomination is whining about Forbes Magazine, Stormy Daniels and Rosie O’Donnell. That’s the man Republicans want to put back in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal (which he is blabbing about to his Mar-a-Lago customers.) The point can’t be made strongly enough. (See what I did?) Thank heavens, Joe Biden is president at a time like this. Donald “very stable genius” Trump lugs around a visceral fear that somebody, somewhere is laughing at him.