The MAGA minority means to impose its will ICYMI, the effort in Nebraska to change the state’s electoral vote allocation to winner-take-all failed last night. It is more evidence that the GOP is pulling out all the stops in seeking ways to tip the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor, even for a single electoral vote. But do not lose sight of other places (and other 2024 races) where the MAGA GOP is hoping to place heavy thumbs on the scales. Pay attention (Bolts): The Texas supreme court closed out 2023 by blocking an abortion during a medical emergency, forcing a woman to flee the state. Just days before Christmas, Wisconsin justices struck down the state’s GOP-drawn gerrymanders. So far this year, Montana’s supreme court has stepped in to protect voting rights, while a decision in Alabama threatened in vitro fertilization treatments. In each of these states, unlike at the federal level, voters chose who sits on the bench and which judges get to dictate such profound consequences. And the 2024 elections may now reshape who holds power on supreme courts across the country.
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These people are just plain nuts SOLAR ECLIPSES, LIKE the upcoming one on April 8, are a well-documented scientific phenomenon. As early as 763 BCE, ancient Assyrians were charting the process by which the path of the moon temporarily obstructs the sun, and astronomers have continued to do so for thousands of years since. Our knowledge of eclipses predates our knowledge of gravity, algebra, and toilet paper. We are well aware of their existence, and we are well aware of what causes them. (I mean, I personally am not, but other people ostensibly are.) What the ancient Assyrians could not have possibly predicted, however, was the singular stupidity of the current incarnation of the American right. Unconvinced by thousands of years of scientific inquiry, as well as driven by a general sense of apocalyptic bloodlust, many on the right are trading conspiracy theories about the upcoming eclipse, ranging from the belief that it signals the End Times to the idea that the Biden administration is using it as an opportunity to shut down cell phone service or bring in the National Guard in an effort to make beautiful blond children who play sports transgender.
They are not meeting the moment Dan Froomkin is back from vacation and he’s not happy: The nation stands on the edge of a precipice, and our political media is so addicted to neutrality that it is casting both choices — survival or cataclysm — as equally plausible. It’s sickening. We are one election away from becoming a Christian nationalist state, losing our democracy as we know it, and putting the fate of our country in the hands of a corrupt madman filled with fever dreams of retribution. And yet political journalists seem to think this is just fine. Fun, even. I barely surfed the web while I was gone, but I did open a few emails here and there. And there was one I found particularly enlightening – in a very troubling way.
Is this really ok? I guess there’s no law against a private citizen having discussions with foreign leaders. But doing that while he’s running for president, is under indictment, has big financial problems and has proven he’s willing to sell out the country for personal gain (and was impeached for it)… well, it seems just a bit problematic: Former President Donald J. Trump spoke recently with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, their first publicly disclosed conversation since Mr. Trump left office in January 2021, according to two people briefed on the discussion who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. It was unclear what the two men discussed and whether it was their only conversation since Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House. Neither representatives for Mr. Trump nor an official of the Saudi government responded to requests for comment.
Speaking of Steve Bannon: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”. “Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga. “Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.” Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.
“And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol, in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history. And every one of those sons a bitches who did that, we oughta find them, try them, and send them to jail.” “And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up,” Rove continued, describing the ensuing chaos as the rioters ransacked Congress, hunted Nancy Pelosi, and chanted “kill them all.” “And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘You know what?
Marge Greene appeared with Tucker Carlson on his twitter podcast thingy yesterday and speculated that Mike Johnson is being blackmailed because he has suggested that a deal might be possible to fund military assistance to Ukraine including the idea that the U.S. scould eize and sell Russian assets to help cover costs. This has her hoping mad: GREENE: But now Mike Johnson has has made a complete departure of who he is, and what he stands for, and to the point where people are literally asking, is he blackmailed? What is wrong with him because he’s completely disconnected with what we want? CARLSON: Do you think he is being blackmailed? GREENE: I have no idea. I can’t comprehend, Tucker, what radically changes a man. I mean, if we break down the the second part of basically an omnibus. Let’s break that down. So Mike Johnson is pro-life. And the second part of the omnibus, just less than two weeks ago, he funded full term abortion clinics, full term abortion clinics. He funded the trans agenda on children. I mean, how does that even happen from a Christian conservative Republican speaker? He did nothing for the southern border, did nothing to secure the border.
No Labels throws in the towel It’s over, finally: The bipartisan group No Labels won’t put forward a third-party presidential ticket after failing to find a candidate. “Today, No Labels is ending our effort to put forth a Unity ticket in the 2024 presidential election,” the group said in a release on Thursday. “No Labels has always said we would only offer our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House. No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down.” The Wall Street Journal first broke the news of No Labels’ plans on Thursday.
More “stranger danger” After terrorist and mass-casualty attacks like the El Paso Walmart mass shooting (target: Latino immigrants), the Tree of Life shootings in Pittsburgh (target: Jews), the Charleston and Buffalo shootings (target: Blacks), and others, police investigate how the killers got radicalized. What made them snap? Except lately authorities simply document common features instead. ABC News from January: A toxic brew of ideological extremism, blended with rage, anger and violent tendencies is making it increasingly difficult for authorities to identify motivations behind mass casualty attacks in America, according to a new assessment by the Department of Homeland Security. The confidential analysis, distributed to law enforcement on Jan.
This loon is taking votes from Biden? Seriously??? He might as well be QAnon.