Elections are about choices It’s said that Republicans don’t build anything. Except detention camps. They’re hell at detention camps. Joe Biden is running for president of the United States again to invest in this country. Infrastructure week was not a joke on his watch (Mike Lux): Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away.
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“We just want the government to function… we’re just tired of it” On the Sunday shows they’re still drooling over the polls showing that Biden is old and Trump is a vital young man with boundless energy sharp intelligence so they didn’t have much time to look at what happened on Tuesday. It’s too bad because there is a very interesting story that American who don’t follow the news closely but might tune in to Meet the Press would be interested to hear: Meghan Budden’s family was considering moving if their Pennsylvania school district didn’t change course. She normally isn’t politically active, she said, but felt compelled to volunteer when a slate of Democrats launched bids to take back their school board in Central Bucks School District, just north of Philadelphia.
Trump’s defense starts its case this week The Washington Post has an excellent write up today about where the Trump trial stands and what we can expect in the next couple of weeks: Former Trump Organization insider Michael Cohen testified in state court that his ex-boss Donald Trump instructed him to fudge numbers on annual financial statements so that they would show his desired net worth. Patrick Birney, a Trump Organization employee, said in court that a top executive told him Trump wanted a bigger bottom line on his annual statements, which were given to banks and insurance companies. An insurance underwriter, Claudia Mouradian, whose deposition was played at the trial, said she relied on the Trump Organization’s claim that a statement reporting roughly $6 billion in combined golf and real estate assets had beenverified by professional appraisers. These were among the assertionspresented during six weeks of trial and testimony in a lawsuit brought against Trump and his business by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).
Of, by, and for the most power-hungry Ed Walker blogs at emptywheel. His message this Veterans Day: “Is it too much to ask Republicans to accept majority rule?” Apparently, yes. Ohio Republicans wasted no time in announcing their defiance of the constitutional amendment passed Tuesday that secured reproductive freedoms. The amendment passed 57-43: COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Four Ohio Republican state lawmakers are seeking to strip judges of their power to interpret an abortion rights amendment after voters opted to enshrine those rights in the state’s constitution this week. Republican state Reps. Jennifer Gross, Bill Dean, Melanie Miller and Beth Lear said in a news release Thursday that they’ll push to have the Legislature, not the courts, make any decisions about the amendment passed Tuesday. “To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative,” said the mix of fairly new and veteran lawmakers who are all vice-chairs of various House committees.
I don’t think the media’s focusing on the right candidate This is what his people are hearing from him: In case you were wondering, it’s all lies. I post this stuff here because I know most people don’t look at what he’s saying because they have lives and they already know that Trump is a narcissistic monster. But it’s easy to forget just how deranged he really is and I think it’s important to have this stuff out there from time to time to remind ourselves of it.
Rep. Stefanik does some more dirty work for Dear Leader. It must be exhausting. Trump’s lawyers in his NY Fraud trial said they planned to call for a mistrial based upon evidence they saw on Breitbart.com that the judge and his clerk are biased and have broken the campaign finance laws. I’m not kidding. MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin filled us in on what happened: Indeed, a Breitbart story published a day earlier aired new allegations about Engoron’s principal law clerk, who has been the subject of multiple attacks by Donald Trump and his legal team that led Engoron to impose a gag order on all of them. Specifically, Breitbart alleged, based on a review of New York State campaign finance data, that the law clerk has made contributions to individual candidates, local Democratic clubs, PACs and the New York County Democrats in amounts and at times that would appear to violate the rule Kise cited.
It was everywhere at the January 6th insurrection You know by now that Mike Johnson is a far right theocrat who should not be let anywhere near power in our constitutional republic. His beliefs are way beyond the pale even for most evangelicals. But it gets worse. Keen eyes spotted a flag outside his office last week that tells a much more disturbing story: The flag — which Rolling Stone has confirmed hangs outside his district office in the Cannon House Office Building — is white with a simple evergreen tree in the center and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top. Historically, this flag was a Revolutionary War banner, commissioned by George Washington as a naval flag for the colony turned state of Massachusetts. The quote “An Appeal to Heaven” was a slogan from that war, taken from a treatise by the philosopher John Locke. But in the past decade it has come to symbolize a die-hard vision of a hegemonically Christian America.
Voters gonna vote Brett Meiselas at Meidas Touch: As Republicans try to cope with their crushing losses suffered during Tuesday’s elections, multiple MAGA firebrands have taken aim at one particular target – Taylor Swift. But Swift’s fervent fanbase, known as Swifties, are ready to fight back. On Tuesday, the iconic superstar encouraged her fans to vote, writing on Instagram, “Voters gonna vote!” and sharing a link to Vote.org. Last month, following a similar call to action, Swift was reportedly responsible for registering more than 35,000 people to vote. That kind of muscular power-flexing by women seriously gets under the skin of pasty male misogynists (and worse). Right-wing extremist and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec seethed in an unhinged post on X about “THE CHILDLESS, UNMARRIED ABORTION ARMY MOBILIZED BY BARBIE, TAYLOR SWIFT, AND TIKTOK THAT IS CRUSHING REPUBLICANS AT THE BALLOT BOX.” In the words of Taylor Swift, you need to calm down.
I suspect it will when all is said and done. The union movement’s ascendance in the last couple of years is extremely important and I just hope that the union members who benefit from it will remember who their enemies are — and their friends.
Maybe, maybe not. I’m not happy about No Labels. for obvious reasons. First, they are nothing but a sabotage operation designed to stop the Democrats from winning the presidency in 2024. Joe Lieberman is one of their leaders. They aren’t trying to hide it. The question is whether or not it would turn out the way they think it will. Since Manchin is (nominally) a Democrat I think most of us assume it would hurt Biden. But Michael Tomasky has a different idea: Everybody is in a tizzy about Joe Manchin’s retirement announcement. And maybe they should be. The conventional wisdom for months, or even for a couple years, has been that a presidential candidacy by the West Virginia senator under the “centrist” No Labels banner would mean the end for Joe Biden, and that’s the take in most of the insta-analyses I’ve read over the last 24 hours. It’s also what I’ve always thought, and it stands to reason. Not because Manchin is a Democrat. But because it has been assumed that he splits the anti-Trump vote.