He screwed the pooch. Again. TPM reports: After days of pushback, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally broke his silence on the exclusive internal Jan. 6 footage access he gave to Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who spent months airing conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections and the Capitol attack itself. Responding to staunch criticism from Democrats, McCarthy told reporters on Tuesday that none of the footage will be released to Carlson’s team or be broadcasted publicly before it is screened by Capitol police to make sure it doesn’t compromise the security of the Capitol building. “It’s many more hours of tape than we were ever told. They said at the beginning it was like 14,000 hours. There’s roughly almost 42,000 hours. We’re working through that. We work with the Capitol Police as well, so we’ll make sure security is taken care of,” McCarthy told reporters. Carlson has had what he described on his show as “unfettered” exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of unreleased surveillance tape for days now.
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Speaking to the No2Nato meeting on Saturday, I had the challenge of telling a packed and highly motivated audience some things that they very much instinctively disagreed with, from a very different viewpoint to much of what they had heard from some excellent speakers all day. I had to follow a really effective rabble rousing […]
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He’s Nixon There is some new polling out this week on the nascent Republican primary which shows that former president Donald Trump has gotten a little bump in the last month or so. An Emerson poll shows Trump leading Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 55% to 25%, while the Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows him over DeSantis, 47%-39%. DeSantis had been leading Trump by 4 points last month. The GOP polling firm Echelon Insights, meanwhile, has Trump at 46% and DeSantis 31% and the big kahuna, Fox News, has Trump over the Florida governor, 43%-28%. It would appear that at the moment that despite all the DeSantis hype, Trump is still the favorite among GOP primary voters. To further illustrate that point, here’s a classic moment this week from Fox News, which is clearly trying to push DeSantis’ candidacy: It’s still not obvious to the GOP establishment, which includes the right-wing media, even after all this time that their voters really do like Donald Trump. Some obviously like him more than others. The “Always Trumpers” appear to make up about 30% of the party, a substantial bloc.
Say it ain’t so The Washington Post reports that FBI agents argued with prosecutors over the Mar-a-Lago search saying that there was no need for a warrant after the president assured the DOJ that all the classified documents had been found back in June. Yeah, how did that turn out? Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation. Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug.
Adam Serwer FTW : The way conservatives tell it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a hive of anti-Trump villainy, filled with agents looking for any excuse to hound the former president with investigative witch hunts. But the thing to understand about Donald Trump’s legal troubles is that they exist not because federal agents are out to get him, but despite the fact that the FBI is full of Trump supporters who would really like to leave him alone. This morning, The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators clashed with federal prosecutors over the decision to search the former president’s residence, where highly classified documents were found despite Trump’s insistence that he had none.
Election deniers are embedded all over the place We’ve stopped talking about this. That’s a mistake. From TPM: Since losing their midterm elections, several election deniers have sought leadership positions within their state Republican parties, all part of a national play by Trump supporters and Big Lie enthusiasts to keep election denialism alive and well, while they seek more control over local elections. Two-thirds of the 345 election deniers who ran for office in 2022 won their races, according to a Brookings Institution study. But many, like former community college teacher Kristina Karamo, still lost, particularly in battleground states. Karamo was running to become Michigan’s secretary of state during last fall’s midterm elections. The Trump-endorsed nominee argued as part of her campaign platform that the state’s election systems were vulnerable to fraud. True to form, Karamo even filed a lawsuit ahead of the election to try to force Detroit voters to either show up to polls or pick up absentee ballots in person, a legal challenge inspired by claims from Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked propaganda film.
Here’s an interesting new wrinkle in the American First populism of the Republican Party. Some MAGA oxes are potentially being gored and they don’t like it: Donald Trump’s latest salvo in his trade war with China is raising hackles among fellow Republicans from farm states, a crucial voting bloc in the 2024 GOP primary. The former and would-be future president pitched a new proposal Monday to overhaul the U.S. trading relationship with Beijing, part of a wave of anti-China rhetoric surging through Washington in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon flap earlier this month. But while there is consensus within the GOP on taking a tough line, many rural Republicans were quick to reject Trump’s calls to slap new tariffs on Chinese goods — since Beijing targeted the U.S. farm economy during the former president’s last trade war with China. The rare pushback, in public and private, presents an early break with some representatives for one of his key constituencies: rural Americans.
Say it ain’t so! It looks like the hard right ideologue is making some big bucks for destroying America. nice work if you can get it. Heidi Pyzbla in Politico has an article entitled Dark money and special deals: How Leonard Leo and his friends benefited from his judicial activism: The Federalist Society co-chairman’s lifestyle took a lavish turn after he became Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations. It should be shocking but really, at this point, it’s not. They’re all a bunch of crooks. These people aren’t getting rich from writing books or giving speeches or even sinecures on corporate boards. They’re getting rich because they have corrupted government in favor of the wealthy and their special causes: A network of political non-profits formed by judicial activist Leonard Leo moved at least $43 million to a new firm he is leading, raising questions about how his conservative legal movement is funded.
They did not They got Roe repealed. It took 50 years but they did it. Don’t think they’re any more ok with marriage equality: Nearly eight years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage and several months after Congress codified gay nuptials, Iowa lawmakers proposed banning such unions in their state constitution. “In accordance with the laws of nature and nature’s God, the state of Iowa recognizes the definition of marriage to be the solemnized union between one human biological male and one human biological female,” the joint resolution, introduced Tuesday by eight Republican members of the Iowa House of Representatives, states. If the measure becomes law, it would conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges, coupled with Congress’ bipartisan passage of the Respect for Marriage Act late last year. Therefore, it is unclear that such a law could be enforceable, as federal law and the federal Constitution take precedence over state law. Iowa Rep.
It’s a silent COVID spring Fewer people at my grocery stores are wearing masks of any kind these days. The widely debated Cochrane review on masks made its brief ripple and faded. Except for the Chinese lab theory, the right largely has moved on to another set of culture war rants. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather blather about fentanyl. And the 2020 election? Greene should be on a license plate. Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke has moved on to … you know. But COVID has not moved on, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. It has just gotten quieter. It’s still adapting: Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point?