March 3 isn’t just Super Tuesday for the presidential candidates, it is also the big day for many congressional candidates all over the country.
One of the best candidates Blue America has endorsed, Mike Siegel— who has the best chance to replace a toxic Trump enabler (Michael McCaul)– needs some help with his field campaign.
Blue America wants to help him raise some money for that and we’re going to offer this double-platinum Green Day Insomniac award.
This is an RIAA-certified award for 2 million albums sold and it was awarded to their label president Howie Klein, who we hope by now you know– is the treasurer of the Blue America PAC.
The simple version of the rules: donate any amount to Mike Siegel’s campaign on this page between today and 9pm (PT) on Valentine’s Day (February 14) or, send a check, made out to Mike Siegel for Congress, to Blue America, P.O. Box 27201, Los Angeles, CA 90027.
Any amount… whatever you want to contribute. We will randomly select one winner regardless of the amount of the contribution.
The much longer, FEC-demanded rules in legalese are here for any masochists. Mike grew up in Oakland, California in the 1980s and 90s, and he told us that Green Day was part of the soundtrack for his crew in high school. “Their album art and videos,” said Mike, “acknowledged life in the East Bay, from walking the streets of Berkeley to riding BART. And their energy gave expression to our rebellious spirit!” And now he’s a Texas civil rights attorney and a married man with two children… and a great congressional candidate.
Mike told us he and his team “have built the coalition to carry us to victory, and now the last piece is the gather the resources we need to communicate with every voter between now and Election Day.
This is a campaign that is running hard on labor issues and the Green New Deal, which has not only earned me the support of folks like the Sunrise Movement and 350 Action, but also the Texas AFL-CIO, even though many of the workers in the Texas 10th are a part of the fossil fuel industry. We are taking a strong stand on climate change and voting rights, on justice for Rodney Reed (a Texas death row prisoner who grew up in TX-10), on Medicare for All in a region with closing rural hospitals, on a living wage and a retirement with dignity.”
Early voting in Texas starts on February 18, four days after the contest ends. The money we raise for him will help his campaign bring voters to the polls and help keep getting his message out to voters. Please consider kicking in by CLICKING HERE and help make sure TX-10 replaces a reactionary Republican with a progressive Democrat.
Thanks for always doing what you can to help make a better world,
The New York Times visits Waukesha county in Wisconsin to take the temperature of Republicans only to find — surprise — that they have decided that Trump may be a little bit icky but they like what he’s done with the place:
Matthew Sama, 27, a mortgage loan officer who grew up in the Milwaukee suburbs, said he disliked Mr. Trump so much that he voted for a third-party candidate in 2016.
“The more he started to talk, the more I became repulsed by what he was turning the Republican Party into,” Mr. Sama said. Since then, he has shifted. He likes the deregulation, the tax cut and the fact that Mr. Trump has not started a war. He is still apprehensive about Mr. Trump, but he has decided to vote for him for these policies — and as a way to stop the Democratic Party.
“I was like, ‘Come on, this is ridiculous, he’s not smart enough to be able to collude with another country!’” he said. “The Democrats have gone so far from reality, and they are coming across as so unreasonable, that it makes it look like they are out to get him.”
“He’s not smart enough to collude with another country!” That’s quite an endorsement He definitely deserves four more years.
Jeremy Carpenter, 31, who works for a Republican state lawmaker, said he was so turned off by Mr. Trump at first that he voted for Evan McMullin, an independent, in 2016.
He said he was still “not a fan” of Mr. Trump’s style, but he has gradually decided that many of his policies — his nomination of conservative judges, his support of the anti-abortion movement, his stance on trade and foreign policy — outweigh the negatives.
“Those things were wrong — they do not match up to what I believe about my Christian faith,” Mr. Carpenter said of Mr. Trump’s divorces and language about women. “But on the other hand, he has done some very good things as president. If you can balance those, then you can accept who Donald Trump is without selling your soul down the river.”
Uhm. No. You’ve sold your soul down the river. The man is a monster.
Basically, these alleged moderate Republicans are following the advice of Grover Norquist:
Trump actually brings added value. He treats everyone they hate with such utter contempt that he’s made the party neo-fascist which they’ve discovered they don’t mind at all.
I’m sorry, you can’t split this big orange baby. If you vote for him you are buying the whole program.
Here’s a perfect example of the propaganda people who watch Fox News are being fed every day:
Sen Lindsey Graham: "The Russian investigation, what happened? Half the people behind the Russian investigation are going to go to jail and Trump was cleared." pic.twitter.com/9GhAfCj0rN
A U.S, Senator is spreading blatant lies on national television.
The people who went to jail in the Russia investigation are all Trump associates.
And Trump was anything but cleared.
There really isn’t much hope for changing right-wing media. All their incentives go in the wrong direction. We are going to have to rely on the common sense of a majority of Americans to get past this.
The war of attrition against an imperial presidency has voters worn down.
“It’s been three years,” Gayle Easterly of Derry, New Hampshire tells the New York Times. “I’m trying to motivate and not to throw up my hands. But I’m emotionally exhausted.”
Join the club. But will it matter in November?
Turnout for the Iowa caucuses fell short of both expectations and hopes. Less than three percent more attended than in 2016. The historic “blue wave” of voting in 2018 gave Democrats control of the House of Representatives and helped them cinch two races for governors in red states. Could that surge be receding?
Well, 2018 was the first mid-term election after Trump’s unlikely 2016 win, and Iowa is a Byzantine, one-night affair in the middle of winter in the 31st most populous state. The two are not remotely comparable. While Democrats have congratulated themselves that their presidential field is an embarrassment of riches, it may also represent the paradox of choice: offer too many and decision-making gets harder.
“I’m going to lay it at the feet of this arcane caucus process,” former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe explained. “People just don’t have the time to do what needs to be done.” Or that embarrassment of riches could itself be a drag:
Others cited the large number of undecided voters in Iowa, saying that as the race narrowed, larger numbers of Democrats would get engaged. In the run-up to the caucuses, polling showed that as many as 40 percent of voters said they had not made a final decision on a candidate. At primary events, voters frequently say they’d support any of the candidates over Mr. Trump, underscoring that their attention is far more focused on the president than on their own options for a nominee.
Or the truly undecided might simply stay home until their vote is a civic duty and carries legal weight.
Megan Suhr, former chair of the Marion County Democrats, wasn’t surprised by the turnout. She told Iowa Starting Line:
“There were a lot of different reasons and explanations,” Suhr said. “There were also a lot of people who said they’d been watching all the hearings and they were watching the trial, and to them, whoever the caucus-goers decided, whoever came out of the primaries, was who they were going to support in the fall.”
Ed Kilgore is still worried. New Hampshire has lowered turnout predictions for it primary from 500,000 to 425,000:
That would still represent the highest turnout level ever in an election involving an incumbent president. But it does not reflect the vision many once had of Democrats and independents and ex-Republicans mobbing the polls to choose a champion to drive the evil king from the throne in Washington. Given how excited the MAGA hordes seem to be, that needs to change — if not during the primaries, then in November.
Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of Virginia’s Christopher Newport University believes politics has moved on while conventional wisdom has not. Bitecofer’s prediction for Democrats’ pickups in 2018 were dead on and made in the summer: 42. As polls shifted, her model did not. Bitecofer believes Democrats have a lock on the presidency in 2020, are likely to pick up House seats, and have a shot at winning a Senate majority in November. The old assumptions about wooing swing voters has not held since at least 2010:
According to any conventional theory of politics, that wave made no sense. Two years prior the GOP had run the economy into the ground; under a Democratic president and a fully Democratic Congress, the economy had stopped its slide and begun to recover. How could the Democrats lose 63 seats in a brutal shellacking two years after totally routing the Republicans?
The prevailing analysis was that Democrats had overreached on policy: After Obamacare, the stimulus, the bank and auto bailouts, the center just revolted. But when Americans picked a president in 2012, they didn’t seem so appalled; Obama won again. The 2014 midterms confounded the polls; the generic ballot heading into Election Day had the two parties basically tied in the national generic ballot, but when the votes came in, the Republicans added seats to their House majority and routed the Democrats in the Senate, picking up nine seats.
[…]
When 2018 rolled around, she saw what was coming: “College educated white men, and especially college educated white women,” she said, “were going to be on fucking fire.”
It didn’t matter who was running; it mattered who was voting.
I’ve been saying about the Democratic primary, don’t pick a candidate based on whom you think your neighbors might accept. Ask for whom you would knock doors in the heat of August. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the turnout.
For down-ballot races, especially for local ones, winning is not simply which top-of-ticket candidate has the longest coattails. It is which campaign organization has the chops to deliver votes for down-ballot races many voters simply skip. (It’s why Republicans have worked to eliminate straight-ticket voting.) Political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. Nor are they limited to candidates’ curb-appeal. They are contests of skills.
While Democrats across the country got their clocks cleaned in 2014 and spent months licking their wounds, Democrats here celebrated. Why?
One answer lies below.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
The above Tweets were posted in the wake of President Trump’s State of the Union address last Tuesday. The gentleman who posted them was Fred Guttenberg, who was commenting on the incident that got him handcuffed and escorted out of the chamber.
Mr. Guttenberg is an outspoken gun reform activist. His daughter Jamie was one of the students who was killed in a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018.
Clad in his trademark orange tie and ribbon, the guest of honor had reached his breaking point.
Fred Guttenberg, the father of slain Parkland student Jaime Guttenberg, simmered with anger during President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. Trump discussed immigrants who committed crimes and declared that “human life is a sacred gift from God.”
Guttenberg thought something was missing. What about people killed by gun violence like his daughter, killed in a massacre at her high school in Florida? He leaned over to a fellow guest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and said he was on the verge of losing it.
And when Trump said gun rights were “under siege all across our country,” Guttenberg did lose it, he said, and shouted about victims like Jamie.
“My emotions were stewing,” Guttenberg, 54, told The Washington Post on Wednesday, hours after he says he was handcuffed and detained by Capitol Police. “I was so upset.”
He roared at the tail end of an applause line from Trump, who said, “So long as I am president, I will always protect your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”
In a 2018 post that I wrote in the wake of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, I opened with this excerpt from a previous 2016 post that I had written in the wake of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida:
But there is something about [Orlando] that screams “Last call for sane discourse and positive action!” on multiple fronts. This incident is akin to a perfect Hollywood pitch, writ large by fate and circumstance; incorporating nearly every sociopolitical causality that has been quantified and/or debated over by criminologists, psychologists, legal analysts, legislators, anti-gun activists, pro-gun activists, left-wingers, right-wingers, centrists, clerics, journalists and pundits in the wake of every such incident since Charles Whitman perched atop the clock tower at the University of Texas and picked off nearly 50 victims (14 dead and 32 wounded) over a 90-minute period. That incident occurred in 1966; 50 years ago, this August. Not an auspicious golden anniversary for our country. 50 years of this madness. And it’s still not the appropriate time to discuss? What…too soon?
All I can say is, if this “worst mass shooting in U.S. history” (which is saying a lot) isn’t the perfect catalyst for prompting meaningful public dialogue and positive action steps once and for all regarding homophobia, Islamophobia, domestic violence, the proliferation of hate crimes, legal assault weapons, universal background checks, mental health care (did I leave anything out?), then WTF will it take?
It was déjà vu all over again.
Further down in the piece, I wrote:
You know what “they” say-we all have a breaking point. When it comes to this particular topic, I have to say, I think that I may have finally reached mine. I’ve written about this so many times, in the wake of so many horrible mass shootings, that I’ve lost count. I’m out of words. There are no Scrabble tiles left in the bag, and I’m stuck with a “Q” and a “Z”. Game over. Oh waiter-check, please. The end. Finis. I have no mouth, and I must scream.
So where are we at today, in the two years since a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Stoneman Douglas High, killing 17 people and wounding 17 others in just 6 minutes? According to a 2019 AP story, a report issued in February of last year by a student journalism project “…concluded that 1,149 children and teenagers died from a shooting in the year since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,” citing that the stats cover “school shootings, domestic violence cases, drug homicides and by stray bullets”. Mind you, nearly another year has passed since that report was released.
And that’s just children and teenagers. The mass shootings and other incidents
involving gun violence occur with such frequency in the U.S. that it’s no
wonder the “adults” who make the laws and run the country can’t seem to block
out the time to actually “do” anything about it, what with all the “thoughts
and prayers” that must be attended to first.
Perhaps that explains why it’s
“the children” (for whom legislators always claim they’re “doing this for”) who
have taken the lead, like Parkland survivors-turned activists Emma Gonzalez and
David Hogg. Hogg and fellow survivor-activist Samuel Zeif are among those
profiled in the new documentary After Parkland (on Hulu beginning February
19).
Directed by Emily Taguchi and
Jake Lefferman, the film also spotlights activist parents of Parkland victims,
like Manuel Oliver (who lost his son Joaquin) and Andrew Pollack (who lost his
daughter Meadow). The parents may not be in lockstep on legislative priorities
(e.g. Pollack has become a “go-to” guest on Fox due to his more reactionary
take on the mass shooting epidemic) but share an anguish no parent should have
to suffer.
Politics take a back seat; this could be a deal-breaker for some on either “side” who may go in with expectations of polemical reinforcement. Instead, Taguchi and Lefferman (who filmed in the spring, summer and fall of 2018) have aimed for a candid yet still mindfully respectful portrait of how each family navigates all the inevitable stages of grief, culminating in the impassioned activism that we’ve all seen in the media coverage.
While After Parkland succeeds in conveying the emotional fallout left in the aftermath of tragedy, it becomes a bit repetitious; I think the directors’ decision to remain apolitical ultimately neuters the impact. The most powerful moments are in the beginning, which contains a collage of real-time cell phone audio of the Parkland incident. The chilling sounds of automatic gunfire and students screaming in pain and terror made me think of the Martin Luther King quote ” Wait has always meant Never ”. If every lawmaker was locked in chambers and forced to listen to that audio on a continuous loop until they passed sensible gun reform, perhaps they would all finally reach their breaking point.
# # # #
Special note: On February 12th, there will be hosted screenings of “After Parkland” in over 100 cities in the U.S. to commemorate the 2nd anniversary of the Parkland shootings. The screenings are part of a nationwide “Day of Conversation” about gun reform, sponsored by organizations like March for Our Lives, Moms Demand Action, and The League of Women Voters. To locate a February 12th screening near you, or to learn more about the Demand Film project and how you can organize screenings in your city, click here.—DH
The New York Times reports that the Trump campaign is feeling its oats after surviving the impeachment that nobody ever thought would result in his removal. I guess it’s the little things …
The challenge facing Mr. Trump’s advisers remains the same as it has been since 2017: The president is among the most deeply divisive leaders in the nation’s history, whose conduct has helped accelerate a realignment of moderate suburban voters toward Democrats. These voters have been the cornerstone of Democrats’ electoral revival since 2016, helping them flip governorships and propelling their capture of the House.
Mr. Trump cannot win a second term without winning back suburban voters and independents in a handful of states he carried in 2016. But he is highly averse to staying on script and delivering a consistent message aimed at moderate voters rather than his hard-core admirers, or his own need to get things off his chest.
Mr. Trump’s advisers argue that the suburban voters who eschewed Republicans in the 2018 midterms will vote differently when the president’s name is on the ballot. And they are lacing the strong economy into much of their messaging and policy plans: Mr. Trump himself sees the economy as his calling card and is monitoring fluctuations in stock market closely, and his team thinks the economy is one of their best selling points in the suburbs.
“Suburban women is where he has a challenge,” said Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican from North Dakota. “I think the biggest problem that he has with suburban women is the part that so many in his base like about him,” Mr. Cramer said. “His rhetoric, his punching down at his opponents. It’s so different than anything they’ve seen.”…
Republican National Committee officials are tracking the suburban problem. In 2016, about 100,000 Michigan residents who voted in state legislative races left the box for president empty. Many of those voters were men in the suburbs, R.N.C. officials said, and were people who didn’t believe Mr. Trump was truly a conservative, but who have come back after seeing him deliver on conservative judicial appointments and a tax-cut bill.
But suburban women remain difficult to sway, Trump advisers acknowledge. Some messages have moved the dial, if only temporarily: When Mr. Trump talks about Democrats wanting to provide government health care benefits to undocumented immigrants, for instance, Republican officials have seen an uptick of support in their own surveys of the suburbs of Pennsylvania. When Mr. Trump paints the entire Democratic field, falsely, as supporting ending private health insurance, his advisers see room for him to grow. But they admit that it’s a difficult line to walk.
The G.O.P. strategy ultimately depends on who his Democratic opponent turns out to be. And Mr. Trump faces an unknown in Michael R. Bloomberg, a billionaire former New York City mayor running a general election strategy, who is spending so much money that Mr. Trump’s advisers acknowledged that he cannot be ignored even if Mr. Bloomberg loses the Democratic nomination.
With the Democrats enmeshed in the start of their primary season, Mr. Trump is beginning his own new phase: He has reasons to feel reassured about his prospects as he turns more fully to his re-election effort, and the apparatus of the White House and the Republican Party are more able to focus on winning him a second term.
The problem they have with all that is … him. And he’s not going to change. If anything he’s going to get worse as the pressure increases.
The real question is whether or not the Democrats can get their shit together and smartly go after his voluminous weaknesses instead of destroying themselves.
There is just no end to this stuff in the Trump administration.
According to the Washington Post, via Pro-Publica, the Secretary of the VA Robert Wilkie tried to smear Congressman Mark Takano’s senior policy adviser Andrea Goldstein for reporting that she was sexually assaulted at the VA’s Washington hospital. He claimed she had filed numerous reports of sexual harassment and assault when she was a Naval officer and wanted people to dig up dirt on her personal life:
Over several months, Wilkie shared his findings with his senior staff at morning meetings on at least six occasions, three current or former senior VA officials confirmed. Wilkie said his inquiry found that the Navy veteran, who currently serves as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, had filed multiple complaints while in the service, according to three people with knowledge of what Wilkie said. Wilkie also served as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.
The information shared with Takano’s committee and with The Post said Wilkie was concerned with Goldstein’s “credibility and military record.” The VA official who shared it said Wilkie described Goldstein to his staff as a “serial sexual assault/harassment complainant in the Navy who made baseless allegations, for example, when she was not satisfied with a fitness evaluation.”
“The strong inference was made that all were false allegations,” the VA official wrote. A fitness evaluation in the military is the equivalent of a civilian performance review. The information was shared anonymously with the committee, but The Post has determined it was sent by a senior VA official. The allegations were first reported by ProPublica.
In an interview with The Post, Goldstein said she filed a formal complaint with the Navy just once before her experience at the VA hospital. The Post typically does not name people who report a sexual assault but Goldstein has spoken publicly about her experiences.
He apparently wanted his staff to spread dirt on Goldstein and they refused. He even enlisted a MAGA congressman:
As Wilkie delved deeper into Goldstein’s military service, he also told his staff he had invited Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) a former Navy SEAL officer, to his office, according to the current and former VA officials. Crenshaw and Goldstein had once deployed on the same Middle East mission.AD
After Crenshaw’s visit, Wilkie said the congressman agreed with his findings that Goldstein had filed multiple complaints of harassment and assault, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.
Crenshaw denies it. I don’t believe him.
Wilkie’s search for damaging information on Goldstein, according to the sources, took place as the inspector general was conducting a formal investigation into her sexual assault complaint. After that case was closed, Wilkie issued a public letter to Takano referring to “unsubstantiated claims raised by you and your staff” that “could deter our veterans from seeking the care they need and deserve.”
The wording of the letter seemed to disparage Goldstein. Several senior VA officials had urged Wilkie to use more neutral language, fearing it would look like he was blaming a victim of sexual misconduct, according to current and former agency officials. Wilkie overruled them.
Wilkie’s letter prompted an angry rebuttal from Takano, and from Missal, who disputed Wilkie’s characterization of Goldstein’s allegations. Missal said just because no charges were filed did not mean her claims were unsubstantiated. The man in the incident was a hospital vendor.
Hutton, the spokesman, on Friday said Wilkie regretted the language he used in the letter.
Yeah well, fuck him. He’s a disgrace. In a normal world, he’d be fired.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump give him the Medal of Freedom.
You can read the whole story at Pro-Publica, here.
President Donald Trump turned a Philadelphia fourth grader into a poster child for the school-choice movement Tuesday when he told the nation that thousands of students were “trapped in failing government schools” and announced that the girl was at last getting a scholarship to attend the school of her choice.
But Janiyah Davis already attends one of the city’s most sought-after charter schools, The Inquirer has learned. In September, months before she was an honored guest at Trump’s State of the Union address, she entered Math, Science and Technology Community Charter School III.
MaST III opened in the fall in a gleaming facility on the site of the former Crown Cork & Seal headquarters in Northeast Philadelphia, part of a charter network so popular that the school received 6,500 applications for 100 seats next year. Like all charters, it’s independently run but funded by taxpayers — meaning that Janiyah and the other 900 students at the school do not pay tuition.
How she landed in the audience during Trump’s prime-time speech Tuesday remains a bit of a mystery even to Janiyah’s mother, Stephanie Davis.
It appears that when the White House went looking for a black student to use as their token at the State of the Union people from the former private Christian school Janiyah attended gave them her name. The White House didn’t look any further and Janiyah’s mom didn’t know what was going on and she went along with it.
“For too long, countless American children have been trapped in failing government schools,” Trump said. “To rescue these students,” he said, 18 states had created scholarship programs — ”so popular that tens of thousands of students remain on a waiting list.”
“One of those students is Janiyah Davis, a fourth grader from Philadelphia,” Trump said. “Janiyah’s mom, Stephanie, is a single parent. She would do anything to give her daughter a better future.”
That was a lie, obviously. She was already attending a top-flight Charter School of her choice.
When Trump said their names, Davis said she was “really surprised” and “honored.” She was also surprised that Janiyah was chosen to receive a scholarship.“I don’t view MaST as a school you want to get out of at all. I view it as a great opportunity,” Davis said.
It’s impossible to believe they couldn’t have found a student who really needed that scholarship. They just don’t care. I’m sure Trump asked for their pictures and decided they came out of central casting and that was the only thing that mattered.
It never fails to stun me, even now, just how thoroughly dishonest and also inept they are. They are literally incapable of doing anything right.
In this piece in the Washington Post, Greg Sargent writes about all the ways Trump’s impunity from accountability has already resulted in more abuse of power. But this example is one I hadn’t thought of and it’s very disturbing:
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has called on the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, to undertake a review of whether the administration is over-classifying government information to keep it hidden from public view to protect Trump.
We already have examples of this. Democrats on the House impeachment inquiry demanded declassification of closed-door testimony by a top aide to Vice President Pence about his Sept. 18 call with the Ukrainian president.Opinion | U.S. foreign policy is now Trump’s foreign policy. That’s bad for the world.President Trump’s attempt to extort Ukraine for personal gain signals a dangerous turn for American foreign policy, says Global Opinions editor Christian Caryl. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)
The administration refused. Democrats continued to insist it showed Pence had deeper knowledge of Trump’s Ukraine shakedown than publicly known. But this information was kept classified and was never aired at Trump’s Senate trial. “What we know is that the president sees classification as a way to advance his political interests,” Murphy told me in an interview. “He sees that he can use classification to keep embarrassing information from the public.”AD
Now Murphy wants GAO to conduct a systematic review of classified information currently held by the Office of Senate Security, which guards such info, to determine two things. First, whether information that should be classified is being over-classified, unduly limiting how many lawmakers see it. Second, whether information is being classified that shouldn’t be at all, in violation of the law.
Both are bad. The first severely cramps congressional oversight. The second could be illegally constraining members of Congress from publicly discussing information that would illuminate the administration’s conduct and policies.
Murphy wants GAO to compare classification designations that information received when it was held by the administration alone, with designations it got when it was transmitted to the Senate. This would show whether additional classifications were larded on before the info was given to lawmakers.AD
Murphy claims he has already seen a pattern of this. GAO could flesh this out.
Murphy suggested a hypothetical, in which the intelligence community documents another extensive Russian effort to sabotage the 2020 election to help reelect Trump — which intelligence officials themselves have warned is happening. Congress would gather information on this effort. But if Trump over-classified it, lawmakers couldn’t discuss it publicly.
“The information we will gather about Russian interference will likely come through clandestine methods,” Murphy told me. “It is possible the president will be able to keep classified all the information the U.S. gathers about Russian attempts to support his election. That’s the nightmare scenario.” This would put members of Congress in the “awful and unacceptable position” of possessing information about outside interference in the election, without being able to legally share it with the public, Murphy added.AD
Would these members of Congress allow Trump to steal the election rather than reveal classified reports that he’s stealing the election?
CIA Director Gina Haspel’s attendance at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday—and her decision to stand and clap at certain lines—has surprised former senior intelligence officials who say the agency director should consistently appear nonpartisan.
Haspel entered the House chamber for Trump’s speech on Tuesday—for the second year in a row—with other members of the president’s Cabinet, including political appointees like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. And she stood, as they did, at Trump’s comments about Medicare and Social Security, abortion, paid family leave and immigration. She clapped at his line about rebuilding infrastructure.
As a career agency official, Haspel is generally held to the same standard as military leaders, who usually clap sparingly, if at all, during the State of the Union to avoid any appearance of partisanship, the former officials said.
The article suggests she was just trying to curry favor with Trump so he wouldn’t mess with the CIA. This seems a little bit extreme for that, don’t you think? She could have just followed the lead of the Joint Chiefs and clapped quietly for certain discrete comments such as the one celebrating the parents of the woman killed by ISIS. But no. She went full MAGA.
I can’t say it would surprise me. She was, after all, heavily involved in the torture regime and nobody loves torture more than Trump. She may just really, really like him, as so many others apparently do.
Cold but sunny temperatures are in store for the thousands of marchers headed for the annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street march and rally (HKonJ) in Raleigh this morning. Long-simmering issues that get crowded out by the daily drama in Washington, D.C. and the coronavirus outbreak in China are voiced here each year.
The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and over 200 social justice groups will gather in Raleigh as they have since 2007 to promote issues affecting poor and marginalized people in America. Lately, that feels like most of us. And that is the Rev. William Barber’s point:
This year’s celebration … comes after a series of successful legal challenges and political pressure campaigns in recent years by the NAACP and others. Those efforts helped roll back voting restrictions and race-based gerrymandering of voting districts in North Carolina, Barber said.
[…]
“It’s a critical year,” Barber said in a telephone interview with The News & Observer this week, after addressing the Congressional Black Caucus’s 2020 National Black Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Barber, a co-founder of the National Poor People’s Campaign, said his message at the summit was similar to one he has often preached: that America could be transformed if it addresses the needs of the poor.
The coalition came together over a platform of 14 points ranging from public school funding to living wages, prison reform, immigrant rights, environmental justice, and voting rights. The theme of this year’s march is “When We Vote, We Win.” The Rev. Anthony Spearman, state NAACP chapter president, said the goal is a rallying cry to encourage voter participation in this year’s elections.
Disappointing turnout in the Iowa caucuses this week could be an early warning sign of “Trump fatigue” the American left cannot afford to let settle in.
The Battle for the Bible: Christian Nationalism and the Movement to End Poverty was a one-day conference Barber headlined in late January along with Wendsler Nosie Sr., former chairman of the San Carlos Apaches. Frederick Clarkson wrote this week at Religion Dispatches about the conference to combat the ascendancy of the religious right:
Toward the end of the evening, the panelists sought to transcend the ways that race has been used to divide people against one another, and to recognize and grapple with our often multiple racial identities. Rev. Barber noted that he’s White, Tuscarora (a Native American tribe) and African American, and has had to “recover from some deep hatred” from the time the Klan burned a cross in front of the home of his uncle—who provided him with a shotgun in case they came in through the back door.
Nosie added that it’s vital to stay on “the spiritual path” to avoid becoming like what we oppose, but he warned that it won’t be easy. “By fighting these fights and standing for these issues… its coming two, three four times strong against you, to keep you from being a part of the healing.”
“We are all in this together” he continued, emphasizing that everybody needs to be decolonized—“its not just us!” Everyone, he said, needs to understand those forces “that are keeping you where you are at.” Referring to those he encounters across the nation as he rallies support for Oak Flat, he told his people: “I don’t think the people who call these places towns and cities understand that they are living like us: on reservations.”
That certainly puts a different spin on things.
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