This is very good news: The Biden administration Tuesday willannounce rules to block medical debt from being used to evaluate borrowers’ fitness for mortgages and other types of loans, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. The proposed rules from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau arrive less than five months before Election Day and are poised to be part of President Biden’s closing argument that he is addressing pocketbook issues as voters rank the economy as their top concern.The White House has repeatedly focused on the issue of medical debt, saying it disproportionately harms low-income Americans and communities of color. “This is going to be an enormous relief for so many people battling bills when it comes to medical visits,” CPFB director Rohit Chopra said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” teasing the forthcoming rules. The rules set to be announced Tuesday would ban credit reporting agencies from incorporating medical debt when calculating credit scores, said the people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
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I can’t say that I’m surprised the Republicans are working hard to undermine and rig the vote in every swing state. I am a little bit surprised they are openly admitting it: THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION this year will come down to seven states — but there’s one that Donald Trump and his most committed lieutenants see as a blueprint for corrupting future local and national elections: Georgia. The Peach State is unique — it’s the sole battleground state in which the Republican Party has total control over the levers of power: a trifecta in the state House, Senate, and governorship. Over the past four years, Trump-loving elements of the Georgia GOP have wielded that advantage in a crusade to convert discredited election-conspiracy theories into policies well ahead of Election Day 2024. It is an alarmingly anti-democratic experiment that Trumpland and much of the GOP hope to take national. “Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to the former president tells Rolling Stone.
Time for the NCGOP to rewrite the rules again Digby has a post prepped for later today on Republican sore-loserism in Georgia (based on a Rolling Stone piece). It’s the sort of tactic with which we are well familiar next door in North Carolina. It’s simply this: If Republicans lose under established election rules, change the rules. Judd Legum spotlights the latest Republican effort in North Carolina to tip the governor’s race in favor of Lt. Gov. Mark “Choking on my own blood” Robinson, the freaky Christian nationalist and conspiracy theorist. He’s trailing in fundraising behind the state’s Attorney General Josh Stein (D). “The most recent campaign finance reports show that Stein has raised over $19 million, with $12.7 million cash on hand,” Legum begins.
After all that he now figures he has them in the bag and doesn’t have to brag about it anymore. They love him more than Jesus, after all: Hours before Donald Trump was expected to make a virtual address to a Christian advocacy organization that wants to ban all abortions and calls the procedure “child sacrifice,” the former president’s campaign said Monday that he would only give a pre-recorded welcome message lasting less than two minutes — in which he does not say the word “abortion” at all. Trump was scheduled to make a virtual “address” Monday at an event hosted by the Danbury Institute, an organization that also seeks to ban same-sex marriage and use the Bible to guide public policy, according to its website. The organizers, who promoted Trump as a speaker, noted on X the event sold out.
Later that day: Fascist scum John Kelly on the record: “What can I add that has not already been said?A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France. “A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.
And the Declaration is not even the New Testament Steve Benen offers this recollection. I’d already forgotten: In 2017, on the 4th of July, NPR published a series of tweets with the text of the Declaration of Independence. It seemed like a simple, patriotic gesture to help celebrate our Independence Day. A surprising number of Republicans didn’t quite see it that way. The more NPR published portions of the Declaration of Independence, the more rank-and-file conservatives — who apparently didn’t recognize the words of the document — assumed that the media outlet was publishing anti-Trump “propaganda.” “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” one tweet read, sparking particular outrage from the right, who assumed the missive was directed at the then-Republican president. It was an early reminder, just six months into Donald Trump’s term, that many of his followers, when confronted with core American principles, would simply assume they were anti-Trump criticisms.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) warned that the “progressive movement is undermined” when criticism of the Israeli government turns to antisemitism. Ocasio-Cortez, along with other members of the progressive congressional “Squad,” has called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict amid thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza. Israel has said strikes will continue until Hamas is eliminated following the terror group killing more than 1,0000 and kidnapping hundreds in an Oct. 7 attack. Ocasio-Cortez hosted a talk on Monday with Jewish Council for Public Affairs CEO Amy Spitalnick and public policy strategist and activist Stacy Burdett centered on rising reports of antisemitism in the United States amid college campus protests condemning Israel’s government.
Trump fails to learn from it or to learn anything President Joe Biden will return to Washington, D.C. after a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. About 2,000 Americans who died in WWI lie buried there. Donald Trump refused to pay his respects during his presidency because a) rain might mess up his hair, and b) he viewed the dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers” (Associated Press): It’s a fitting end to five days in which Trump was an unspoken yet unavoidable presence. On the surface, the trip marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day and celebrated the alliance between the United States and France. But during an election year when Trump has called into question fundamental understandings about America’s global role, Biden has embraced his Republican predecessor — and would-be successor — as a latent foil. Every ode to the transatlantic partnership was a reminder that Trump could upend those relationships. Each reference to democracy stood a counterpoint to his rival’s efforts to overturn a presidential election.
Don’t nominate a criminal Here is where that framing has inevitably led. From Jonathan Chait: John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer (who himself escaped prosecution for his role in constructing legal justifications to torture detainees, many of whom turned out to be held wrongfully in the first place), has an essay in National Review arguing for revenge prosecutions. The imprimatur of Yoo, a Berkeley law professor and fellow at two of the conservative movement’s least-insane think tanks (the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution), underscores the progression of “lock her up” from wild seriously-not-literally Trump-campaign demagoguery in 2016 to party doctrine in 2024. “Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you,” urges Yoo.
This podcast with the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer and former GOP strategist Sarah Longwell was quite fascinating. Longwell is all over the media sharing the information about the focus groups she holds with swing voters. In this, though, she shares her advice for the Democrats about how to reach them and I thought it was excellent. The one piece of advice that really sounds smart to me is the idea that if Biden’s big weakness is his age, they should roll out all the surrogates from around the country, like Governors Whitmer, Newsom, Shapiro etc to show there is a strong Democratic bench that’s young and vital. It reflects on the party rather than Biden but its useful in any case. And she says they should go to lengths to show that he has young an vital people all around him. She didn’t advise it, but I wondered if they should show some cabinet meetings. Obviously, they don’t have to do it like Trump did with all the sycophants making fools of themselves over Dear Leader. But it might be useful for the public to see the people in the administration who back Biden up day to day.