Pfizer is expected to seek authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration for its vaccine booster shot for those who are ages 16 and 17, a source familiar with the plan told CNN on Monday.
Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota spoke on the phone, the two members of Congress confirmed Monday, amid criticism of Boebert’s anti-Muslim remarks aimed at Omar.
The House January 6 select committee is preparing to advance a contempt of congress charge against a former Trump administration official, the panel announced Monday.
The select committee investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol plans to meet Wednesday to vote on whether to recommend if the full House should hold Trump ally Jeffrey Clark, in contempt of Congress. He would be the second Trump ally to be found in contempt of congress for failing to comply with a subpoena from the panel.
President Biden on Monday urged Americans to remain calm as scientists work to determine the strength and the transmissibility of the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus, saying the U.S. has the ability to deal with the new strain that is circulating the globe.
The president, flanked by chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and Vice President Kamala Harris, told the nation the variant is a “cause for concern, not a cause for panic.” He said the U.S. has more tools to fight COVID-19 than ever before, and is in a much better position to fight the virus than it was in March 2020, or even December 2020. The president said he’ll release a more detailed strategy on Thursday for fighting COVID-19 and the Omicron variant in the weeks ahead.
Once the good people of America completely convert this old republic into a Dollar Store dictatorship, I am still going to be astonished at how baffled the January 6 insurrectionists apparently are by the concept of covert operations. Yes, the person who left the pipe bombs in front of the two national party headquarters remains at large, but that person is a tiny exception to a massive rule. On the day of the insurrection, the lot of them behaved like grandmothers on their first trip to Vegas. Between Instagram videos, Tweets, and Facebook extravaganzas, these people simply don’t know when to shut…the…fck…up. They can’t even do it while talking to law enforcement officers who are committed to throwing them into the sneezer for several seasons. Take, for example, this Mark Andrew Mazza cat, who pretty plainly is not the smartest person ever to come out of Shelbyville, Indiana.
Matthew McConaughey will not run for governor of Texas “at this moment”, the Oscar-winning actor said Sunday, after months of speculation that he would make the leap into politics.
The 52-year-old’s political ambitions had caused excitement in liberal circles, and particularly among Texans appalled by Governor Greg Abbott, who signed a highly restrictive law banning most abortions.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) issued an apology on Friday for remarks she made that used anti-Muslim tropes to refer to Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota and one of only three Muslim members of Congress.
Later on Friday, Omar sent a tweet calling for House leadership to take “appropriate action.”
Omar added that “normalizing this bigotry not only endangers my life but the lives of all Muslims.”
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection will make a decision “this week” on whether it will refer Mark Meadows for criminal contempt charges for defying a subpoena before the Thanksgiving recess, California Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the panel, said Sunday.
Cases of the omicron variant of the coronaviruspopped up in countries on opposite sides of the world Sunday and many governments rushed to close their borders even as scientists cautioned that it’s not clear if the new variant is more alarming than other versions of the virus.
The variant was identified days ago by researchers in South Africa, and much is still not known about it, including whether it is more contagious, more likely to cause serious illness or more able to evade the protection of vaccines. But many countries rushed to act, reflecting anxiety about anything that could prolong the pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people.
By any traditional measure, Vice President Kamala Harris has enjoyed a productive November:
• While President Biden went under anesthesia on Friday for the routine medical procedure, she became the first woman to assume the powers of commander in chief.
• She traveled to France and helped smooth over relations with a longtime U.S. ally.
• She took part in the public signing ceremony for the recently-passed infrastructure bill, a centerpiece of Biden’s agenda.
• She announced an historic $1.5 billion investment to help grow and diversify the nation’s health care workforce.
So why is she getting buried in bad press by the Beltway media, as they gleefully pile on? Unloading breathless, the gossip-heavy coverage is not only detached from reality, the press has gone sideways portraying Harris as lost and ineffective — in over her head.
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun
Last year, the country was filthy with tributes to health care workers – doctors, nurses, hospital staff – who had to deal with the coronavirus-driven near apocalypse of our medical system. The number of patients was overwhelming, a tsunami of death and suffering that tested the limits of available equipment and the strength and nerve of those who had signed up for jobs where they tried to save lives and ease suffering. And, oh, how we appreciated it. Goddamn, how we put out signs and clanged pots and cheered and applauded. We knew we owed them for their sacrifices, so clearly visible in videos and photos, for their own pain and isolation from their loved ones.
Well, it was a helluva weekend in the greatest country there absolutely ever was. Leaving aside that Kyle Rittenhouse, a killer if not a murderer, now seems to have recovered nicely from his extended trauma, and is well on his way to a correspondent’s gig with the Fox News network, there was the guy at Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta who tried to get his firearm onto an airplane, lunged for it when it was discovered, only to have it discharge, at which point he took off. This led me, anyway, to learn that almost 4,500 firearms have been confiscated by airport security this year, and 391 of them in Atlanta alone. This strikes me as evidence that we are a nation gone insane.
A sentence uttered by a defense attorney in the trial of those accused in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery brought an audible gasp from people in the courtroom Monday — and elicited outrage from his family and legal experts.
A senior White House official confirmed Monday night to CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell that President Biden will announce on Tuesday a plan to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in coordination with other countries.
The administration has been pushing China, India, Japan and South Korea to join in a coordinated effort to release reserves of crude oil. An agreement would come as Americans face high gas prices before the busy Thanksgiving holiday and travel season.
Milwaukee prosecutors admitted Monday that they had requested “inappropriately” low bail for a man facing homicide charges who is accused of plowing an SUV into holiday revelers in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
At least five people were killed Sunday when the vehicle tore through a Christmas parade in the Milwaukee suburb, leading to the arrest of the man, Darrell Edward Brooks, 39.
Brooks has a decades-long criminal record that includes arrests for sexual abuse, drugs, battery and domestic abuse, records showed.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed five more associates of former President Donald Trump and organizers of rallies challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election on Monday.
The House issued subpoenas for Dustin Stockton and his fiancé, Jennifer Lawrence, who were reportedly involved in organizing rallies disputing the election before the Jan. 6 riot; Taylor Budowich, who organized attendance at the rallies; Roger Stone, a prominent Trump backer who spoke at such events; and Alex Jones, who was also reportedly deeply involved in the planning of the events.
Now that Stephen K. Bannon has surrendered, snarling and vengeful, to face charges of criminal contempt of Congress, the attention of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee turns to President Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who followed in Bannon’s footsteps last week in refusing even to show up for a scheduled deposition or turn over subpoenaed documents.
Judging from the current war of words, Meadows and the committee are at loggerheads and another criminal contempt referral is in the works.
Committee member Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Meadows’ recalcitrance “pretty much forces our hand…. I’m confident we’ll move very quickly against Mr. Meadows.”
Read the rest of Harry Litman’s piece at The Los Angeles Times
The New York Times recently ran an important piece about the rising specter of violence within mainstream Republican Party circles. The article was noteworthy not only because it spotlighted the frightening instances of violent rhetoric and actions the conservative movement is eagerly unleashing in America, but because the Times used clear and concise language to tell the story.
Temporarily shedding the lazy Both Sides blanket that so many newsrooms use when forced to acknowledge how reckless today’s GOP has become, the Timespiece didn’t waste time trying to camouflage the trend. “From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party,” the daily reported unequivocally. “The most animated Republican voters increasingly see themselves as participants in a struggle, if not a kind of holy war, to preserve their idea of American culture and their place in society.”
Pete Buttigieg insists things are good with Kamala Harris.
Asked Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about recent headlines speculating a rivalry with the vice president, the Transportation secretary emphasized the two make a strong team.
Buttigieg denied any strains on his dealings with the vice president and dismissed developing narratives on a rivalry between the two Cabinet members, who both unsuccessfully sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination that eventually went to Joe Biden.
Americans who have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus should get booster shots ahead of a winter spike that could potentially be “dangerous” due to the rampant spread of the virus among the unvaccinated, said Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
“Get vaccinated if you’re not vaccinated and boostered if you have been vaccinated,” Fauci said, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. He addressed the recent rise in cases in the United States, explaining that as the weather cools and people spend more time indoors, an increase in infections is “not unexpected.” But, he said, the large portion of Americans who have yet to be vaccinated creates a “dynamic of virus in the community” that is dangerous, makes the unvaccinated vulnerable and “spills over into the vaccinated people.”
The lockdown in the Alpine nation comes as average daily deaths have tripled in recent weeks and some hospitals have warned that their intensive care units are reaching capacity. The lockdown will last at least 10 days but could extend to 20, officials said. People will be able to leave their homes only for specific reasons, including buying groceries, going to the doctor or exercising.
At least five people were killed and more than 40 were injured when an SUV plowed into a holiday parade in downtown Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Sunday afternoon, the city tweeted.
Area hospitals reported treating at least 28 people from the parade, including 15 who were taken to Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee and 13 at Aurora Medical Center in Summit. Aurora said in a statement that three of those patients were in critical condition.
A vile undercurrent has always existed whenever bullshit arguments erupt over What My Precious Angels Are Learning in School: that parents know better than educators what should be taught in the classroom. The presumption is that, for some reason, the expertise of educators is worthless and only the gut feelings and rank prejudices of the gibbering crowd of parents and political charlatans should guide the curriculum. They devalue educators, who have been trained and often continue to be trained in what experts in the field believe is best, and they act as they have the same level of training and expertise when, for the vast majority of them, they clearly fucking well don’t.
The defense has rested its case in the murder trial of the three men charged with killing Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, last year. The judge told the jury they were free to go until Monday morning, when closing arguments are expected to begin.
Travis McMichael, the man who fired the fatal shots, spent several hours on the stand Thursday testifying in his own defense and answering questions from prosecutors.
The jury at Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial deliberated for a third day without reaching a verdict Thursday, while the judge banned MSNBC from the courthouse after a freelancer for the network was accused of following the jurors in their bus.
The jury members will return on Friday morning to resume their work. Unlike on previous days, they had no questions and no requests to review any evidence Thursday in the politically and racially fraught case.
The two top leaders in the Senate have opened discussions to find a way out of a looming debt crisis, a sharp departure from the standoff a month ago that took the United States to the brink of a first-ever default.
House Democrats postponed a much-anticipated vote on President Joe Biden’s social safety net and climate package early Friday morning after Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy delayed a final vote with a record-long, wide-ranging and often angry speech.
The House is now slated to meet at 8 a.m. on Friday to finish consideration of the Build Back Better bill.
McCarthy, who began speaking at 8:38 p.m., brought his marathon speech to an end at around 5:04 a.m. to cheers and applause from House Republicans. He had long since crossed the eight-hour mark and broken a record set by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for the longest speech on the House floor.
A major Democratic donor is funding a new media outlet that launched Thursday, aimed at covering state and local races in the Midwest as the latest entrant into the growing partisan-media landscape.
The outfit combines Heartland Signal, a new digital news site that will focus on midterm coverage, and WCPT, an existing progressive talk radio station with a large footprint in Midwestern states. It’s all backed by Fred Eychaner, a Democratic donor based in Chicago, who has given approximately $100 million to Democratic causes over the last two decades, according to federal campaign finance records.
President Joe Biden visited Detroit on Wednesday to promote the recently enacted infrastructure law and made the case for a social safety net and climate package that the House could vote on as soon as this week.
Speaking from a General Motors plant that was renovated to build electric trucks and SUVs, Biden said his legislative agenda would not add to inflationary pressures and argued that his $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan would make a “gigantic difference” for households by lowering the costs of child and health care.
The House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and to strip him of his committee seats after he posted an anime video depicting him killing Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and threatening President Joe Biden.
The vote passed mostly along party lines, with only two Republicans — Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), who is retiring — seeing it necessary to condemn Gosar for sharing a video that depicted him slicing the throat of one of their Democratic colleagues.
Read the rest of the story at HuffPost
Dr. Anthony Fauci warned in an interview Wednesday that hospitalizations are increasing among fully vaccinated Americans who get breakthrough cases of COVID-19, but he stressed that unvaccinated people are still by far the most vulnerable to the disease.
“What we’re starting to see now is an uptick in hospitalizations among people who’ve been vaccinated but not boosted,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC News. “It’s a significant proportion, but not the majority by any means.”
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 booster shot for all adults within days, according to a person familiar with the plans.
The FDA’s action could come as early as Thursday. The news was first reported by The New York Times.
The Centers for Disease Control and Preventon’s vaccine advisory committee is scheduled to meet Friday to discuss boosters.
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump argued Tuesday that a federal judge should not dismiss a lawsuit seeking to block the Treasury Department and the IRS from giving his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Trump’s attorneys said during more than three hours of courtroom arguments that the reason given by committee Chair Richard Neal, D-Mass., for seeking the returns — to examine how the IRS audits presidents — is simply a pretext for searching for something embarrassing.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday visited an 82-year-old steel bridge in rural New Hampshire that he pointed to as an example of how one of his biggest legislative victories will benefit communities across the country.
Biden said the bridge, which crosses the Pemigewasset River in the town of Woodstock, is just one of hundreds in urgent need of repair. The newly enacted infrastructure law, he said, will give states the funding to tackle those projects.
The House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on whether to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) over an anime video he posted online last week that depicted him killing or threatening monsters with the faces of Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and President Joe Biden.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday that she would allow a censure resolution to come to a vote on the House floor. She made the decision, she said, because Gosar’s video not only caused “endangerment” to a fellow member of Congress but was “an insult to the institution” of the House.
The Wyoming Republican Party will no longer recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the GOP in its second formal rebuke for her criticism of former President Donald Trump.
The 31-29 vote Saturday in Buffalo, Wyoming, by the state party central committee followed votes by local GOP officials in about one-third of Wyoming’s 23 counties to no longer recognize Cheney as a Republican.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon surrendered to federal authorities Monday in Washington, where he’s facing two charges of contempt of Congress.
“We’re taking down the Biden regime,” a defiant Bannon said on his way into the FBI field office to have his arrest processed. He appeared in court later in the day, and was released on his own recognizance after surrendering his passport. He’s due back in court on Thursday, when he’s expected to be arraigned and enter a plea.
The fate of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down two men and injured another during a 2020 protest, is in the hands of Wisconsin jurors, who are set to begin deliberations Tuesday morning.
His trial concluded Monday after Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney James Kraus had the last word in a rebuttal of the defense’s closing arguments just before 7 p.m.
President Joe Biden on Monday signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill into law, his second major legislative accomplishment as president following the coronavirus relief package earlier this year, and one Democrats are hoping will lift his shaky political standing ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Biden hailed the bill as “proof that despite the cynics, Democrats and Republicans can come together and deliver results.”
There was only one story worth coverage in our politics as the week began. The story was that, for four years, the United States of America, the world’s oldest democracy, was governed by monsters, and that a substantial portion of the population seems to want some of the monsters back. These were death-dealing scum who dealt their death on their own people and then, having dealt death far and wide for their own cheap political purposes, they covered up what they did, also for their own cheap political purposes. I have no illusions about what other American administrations have done. Nobody my age does. But there’s an element of penny-ante nihilism behind the events of 2017-2021 that make the death dealt by that administration* look more casual and, therefore, infinitely more cruel.
Read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s piece at Esquire Politics.
I wonder what CNN host Don Lemon thinks about the network’s inexplicable decision to schedule a Chris Christie primetime special for Monday night. Christie still holds the dishonor of being the most unpopular governor in American history while he ran New Jersey, and he famously flamed out as a presidential candidate in 2016, surviving only one primary contestwhere he finished in sixth place. Despite his record as an established loser who voters now have an allergic reaction to, the mainstream media continue to love Christie and hold him up as an important voice in our political conversation.
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun
While the first history textbooks in postwar Germany were light on the subject of the Nazis, by the early 1960s, less than two decades after the fall of the Third Reich, things changed. In textbooks that were used at different levels comparable to middle and high school in the United States, authors began confronting the real history of recent past. They “engaged the most contentious issues of the recent past: Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, German support for the Nazi Party, concentration camps, and the extermination of the Jews. For most of them, the traumas suffered by Germans were part of a larger story of suffering and sacrifice brought about by National Socialism and the war,” as an article by Brian Puaca, a scholar of German education history, put it. While at first, textbooks portrayed the German people as victims, as the 1960s progressed, the position changed to one of culpability, too, in the atrocities committed.
Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, was indicted Friday on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress after he defied a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The Justice Department said Bannon, 67, was indicted on one count for refusing to appear for a deposition last month and the other for refusing to provide documents in response to the committee’s subpoena. He is expected to surrender to authorities on Monday and will appear in court that afternoon, a law enforcement official told the AP. The person was granted anonymity to discuss the case.
In his latest journey to the edge of extreme, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and felon Michael Flynn called for a single religion in America.
“If we are going to have one nation under God — which we must — we have to have one religion,” Flynn said in San Antonio at a stop for the far-right “ReAwaken America” tour. “One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
On Monday, President Joe Biden is set to sign into law a sweeping bipartisan infrastructure package, an integral component of his domestic agenda and the largest investment in the country’s infrastructure in decades.
The bill, priced at $1.2 trillion, will tackle nearly every facet of American infrastructure, including public transportation, roads, bridges, ports, railways, power grids, broadband internet, as well as water and sewage systems.
All California adults who received their original COVID-19 shots six months ago and think they would benefit from a booster should get one, California’s top health official Dr. Mark Ghaly said Wednesday. Speaking at a press conference in Los Angeles, Ghaly said that guidance is in line with the federal government’s eligibility rules for booster shots, which say anyone over 18 who got their vaccines at least six months ago and has an underlying medical condition or works or lives in a high-risk setting may get one.
The defense wrapped up its case Thursday at the homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 18-year-old charged with killing two people and wounding a third last summer. Closing arguments are expected to begin on Monday — both parties will have two and a half hours each for arguments and rebuttals.
Defense lawyers tried to drive home the point that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense when he killed two protesters and wounded another at a police brutality protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020.
The House select committee investigating January 6 is demanding former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appear for a deposition and turn over documents Friday or risk a criminal contempt referral, according to a letter Thursday from panel Chairman Bennie Thompson.
A federal appeals court Thursday granted former President Donald Trump’s request to temporarily block the National Archives from turning over his White House records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The committee had been set to receive the first batch of documents, which lawmakers say is key to their investigation, on Friday. In papers filed Thursday, lawyers for Trump asked the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to temporarily delay the turnover and to “maintain the status quo” while they push ahead with an expedited appeal.
A federal judge said Wednesday that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on mask mandates in schools violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, bringing a major victory to advocates who filed suit over the Republican governor’s aggressive efforts to limit COVID-19 protections.
U.S. District Court Judge Lee Yeakel’s ruling will renew school districts’ authority to impose mask mandates amid the spread of the coronavirus, and it bars state Attorney General Ken Paxton from enforcing Abbott’s controversial executive order, which he issued in July.
Ten House Democrats said Wednesday they will introduce a resolution to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) for posting an altered anime video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and attacking President Joe Biden.
“As the events of January 6 have shown, such vicious and vulgar messaging can and does foment actual violence,” the joint statement said.
Kyle Rittenhouse told Wisconsin jurors Wednesday he had no choice but to fatally shoot two men and seriously wound a third, saying he was stopping “the person who was attacking me.”
Testifying in his own defense, Rittenhouse said he was protecting private property in Kenosha and providing first aid on Aug. 25, 2020, when his fatal confrontations with Anthony Huber, 26, and Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, unfolded.
Rittenhouse, facing two counts of homicide, described Rosenbaum as “the person who attacked me first and threatened to kill me twice.”
President Joe Biden will sign the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law on Monday, joined by a bipartisan group of members of Congress during a ceremony at the White House, according to a White House official.
A bipartisan group of governors and mayors, as well as labor union and business leaders, would also join Biden at the ceremony, according to the official. The members of Congress who will attend will include those who helped write the legislation, the official said.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) is claiming the reaction to a violent video he posted depicting him killing Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is all due to a misunderstanding.
The far-right Republican posted a video Monday that altered the opening credits of the Japanese animated series “Attack on Titan” to show Gosar slashing the neck of a foe with Ocasio-Cortez’s face.
Not surprisingly, scores of critics condemned Gosar and called for action to be taken against him.
President Joe Biden plans to kick off the public promotion of his recently-passed $555 billion infrastructure bill with a visit to the Port of Baltimore on Wednesday as the White House tries to capitalize on the legislative win.
While the bill has yet to be signed and many projects are years away from being completed, the Biden administration is looking to make the spending more tangible to voters. Biden is expected to use the Baltimore port, which has avoided the shipping bottlenecks seen at other other ports, as an example of what is to come with further investment in the country’s shipping infrastructure.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued a new round of subpoenas Tuesday to 10 former officials who worked in the Trump administration, including Kayleigh McEnany and Stephen Miller.
McEnany was White House press secretary on the day of the riot, a position she held from April 2020 until former President Donald Trump left office. Miller, who was a senior adviser to Trump, spread erroneous information about voter fraud in the 2020 election and was involved in efforts to encourage state legislatures to alter the outcome, according to the committee.
A federal judge on Tuesday sided with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot by refusing to block the release of scores of White House documents from the Trump administration.
The ruling from Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia means the first batch of disputed documents is set to be turned over to the House select committee by Friday.
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar was facing criticism after he tweeted a video that included altered animation showing him striking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a sword.
In a tweet Monday night, Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., referred to Gosar as “a creepy member I work with” and said he “shared a fantasy video of him killing me.” She added that Gosar would face no consequences because Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy “cheers him on with excuses.” She also said that institutions “don’t protect” women of color.
Pfizer is likely to seek authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for a coronavirus vaccine booster shot for people 18 and older as soon as this week, a government official with knowledge of the situation told ABC News.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the Pfizer booster shot for certain groups of patients six months after their second dose.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol incited by former President Donald Trump has issued subpoenas to another half-dozen of his associates, including top Trump campaign aides and the author of the now-infamous memo advising then-Vice President Mike Pence to simply declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.
John Eastman, who wrote that Pence had the unilateral authority to give Trump a second term despite Trump’s loss, former campaign manager Bill Stepien and former campaign strategist Jason Miller have all been subpoenaed, as has former national security adviser and pardoned felon Michael Flynn, who advised Trump to declare martial law and force states to rerun their elections.
Because I am a man of Christian charity whose heart is forever bursting with concern for my fellow man, I would like to begin the week by saying that I have grown concerned about Tailgunner Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from the great state of Texas. Frankly, on its way off the rails, I think his trolley has gone around the bend.
He had quite a weekend. First, he picked a fight with Big Bird…and lost. Le grand oiseau proclaimed that he had received his COVID vaccination.
President Joe Biden touted the progress the US is making in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, and cited his policies as the reason, after the jobs recovery gathered some steam last month and employers added 531,000 positions in October.
Congress passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package Friday, approving a signature part of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda.
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday denounced Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Republicans over the passage of President Joe Biden‘s infrastructure bill through the lower chamber.
The U.S. House passed Biden’s infrastructure bill late Friday in a 228-206 vote largely along party lines. 13 Republican representatives broke with the party to vote in favor of the bill.
The U.S. lifted restrictions Monday on travel from a long list of countries including Mexico, Canada and most of Europe, allowing tourists to make long-delayed trips and family members to reconnect with loved ones after more than a year and a half apart because of the pandemic.
Starting Monday, the U.S. is accepting fully vaccinated travelers at airports and land borders, doing away with a COVID-19 restriction that dates back to the Trump administration. The new rules allow air travel from previously restricted countries as long as the traveler has proof of vaccination and a negative COVID-19 test. Land travel from Mexico and Canada will require proof of vaccination but no test
After triumphant election cycles in 2018 and 2020, Democrats suffered stinging setbacks on Tuesday when they lost the Virginia’s governor’s race, and barely held on to win the same contest in New Jersey, a state Joe Biden won by 16 points last year.
Democrats have been down this rocky road before. In November, 2009, just one year after Barack Obama’s landslide victory, Democrats lost both the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races. But that didn’t end the Obama presidency. The following year he signed Obamacare into law and in 2012 he won re-election with relative ease.
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun
Yesterday morning, Joe Manchin, Democratic senator from West Virginia and cockblocker extraordinaire, was on CNN’s New Day (which would be far more entertaining if it was a Canadian show called “Nude, Eh?”). As we all know, Manchin, along with Arizona’s most dickish dress-up doll, Kyrsten Sinema, has been the biggest asshole on the stupidly-named Build Back Better bill that will transform people’s lives through funding of social programs and more, at first saying he was willing to go as much as $4 trillion and then $3.5 trillion and now $1.5 trillion, but he’ll settle for $1.75 trillion, but don’t you dare touch his coal.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, told reporters that he has signed about 20 subpoenas and that they are going out “soon,” possibly by Friday.
The Department of Justice sued the state of Texas on Thursday, alleging that the package of voting restrictions Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in September violates federal law.
The Texas law violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by restricting the ability of voters with disabilities to receive certain types of assistance at the polls, the department said. The state law also violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by requiring Texas election officials to reject absentee ballots based on minor paperwork errors that are “immaterial” to determining whether a voter is eligible to cast such a ballot.
New York prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump’s business dealings have convened a new grand jury to hear evidence in the probe as the previous panel’s term was set to run out, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press Thursday.
The development comes as the Manhattan district attorney’s office is weighing whether to seek more indictments in a case that has already resulted in tax fraud charges against Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg.
President Joe Biden called numerous House lawmakers on Thursday to help rally support for his legislative agenda, four sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, as Democratic leaders laid the groundwork for Friday votes on both a social safety net bill and an infrastructure package that would cap months of internal party negotiations.
A Democratic leadership source said the House plans to vote on the two pieces of legislation Friday, and that leaders are feeling confident they will finish them in one day, a move that would hand Biden a major legislative victory at a time when his poll numbers are falling.
WASHINGTON ― House Democrats are including four weeks of paid family and medical leave in their version of the Build Back Better Act, as leaders negotiate their way to a vote on the spending and tax bill as well as a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
The House Rules Committee would start the process Wednesday for an eventual floor vote on the newly amended legislation, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced in a letter to colleagues, though it wasn’t clear how soon the House would consider the bill.
The policy would guarantee workers have at least four weeks of paid leave for illness, the birth of a new child, or to take care of a sick family member. Currently, more than 75% of the private sector workforce doesn’t have access to paid family leave, and roughly 60% doesn’t have paid medical leave. The United States is one of the only countries that doesn’t provide any paid leave for workers.
While House lawmakers are adding four weeks of paid leave to their bill — cut down from the original 12-week proposal — the policy is still on shaky ground, as it does not have the support of 50 senators. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has been in extensive negotiations over the plan as Democrats try to court his much-needed vote for the legislation, came out opposed to the policy late in negotiations last week, expressing concerns about the program’s cost and the potential for fraud. He reiterated his opposition Wednesday, after the House announced it would be added into its bill.
(CNN) — Senate Republicans blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Act from advancing on Wednesday when the Senate took a procedural vote on whether to open debate on the legislation.
The final tally was 50 to 49 with GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voting with Democrats in favor.
At least 10 Republicans would have needed to join with all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus for the legislation to advance. That was not expected to happen as most Republicans have decried any Democratic attempts to enact new voting legislation in the current Congress as partisan and unnecessary.
At least eight Republicans who attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that turned into a deadly insurrection were elected to office Tuesday.
Three were elected to state legislatures, and five won positions at the local level.
Although most have claimed they didn’t breach the U.S. Capitol on that day, all were participants in the demonstration leading up to the attack, standing alongside extremists to take part in the finale of a months-long anti-democratic campaign to falsely claim that then-President Donald Trump hadn’t really lost the 2020 election.
Their victories on Tuesday are a possible sign of things to come: HuffPost previously identified at 57 state and local GOP officials who attended the Jan. 6 rally, many of whom will be up for reelection — and will likely keep office — next year.
That these candidates enjoy the support of the wider Republican Party and are winning elections does not bode well for American democracy, showing that one of the country’s major political parties, despite some initial gestures at being horrified by the events of Jan. 6, is almost completely unrepentant over its role in fomenting the historic attack on the Capitol.
President Biden urged Democrats on Wednesday to swiftly pass his domestic agenda after an off-year electoral wipeout highlighted the fragile state of the party’s electoral majorities in the House and Senate. But a new round of bitter recriminations threatened to dash Democratic hopes of quickly moving past the stinging defeats.
Scrambling to make sense of the election results, White House officials and Democratic congressional leaders said they concluded that voters were unhappy with their incomplete push to spend trillions of dollars on public works, the social safety net and combating climate change. These Democrats said there is now a clear incentive to accelerate their work.
Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Biden effectively argued that the party’s problems boil down to its execution, not its vision. He did not accept blame for the election results, even as some in his party held him culpable.
“People are upset and uncertain about a lot of things, from covid to school, to jobs to a whole range of things,” Biden said at the White House. “If I’m able to pass and sign into law my Build Back Better initiative, I’m in a position where you’re going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly.”
The president said he had hoped his agenda would have made it through Congress before the election, but expressed uncertainty whether that would have been enough to overcome the high turnout in conservative strongholds in Virginia.
RICHMOND — Virginia voters chose Republican Glenn Youngkin as their next governor, dramatic reversal for a state that had appeared solidly Democratic in recent years and a significant loss for President Biden and the party’s establishment.
Former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe came up short in his bid to become only the second Virginia governor since the Civil War to win a second term, with key suburban districts joining rural parts of the state in favoring Youngkin by a narrow margin.
Republicans appeared to sweep the other statewide races, with Winsome Sears projected to win lieutenant governor and Del. Jason Miyares (Virginia Beach) declaring a win for attorney general. Sears is the first Black woman elected statewide in Virginia and Miyares would be the first Latino. A red wave also washed through the House of Delegates, turning a 55-45 Democratic majority into what could become a 51-49 Republican majority.
The victories, projected by the Associated Press and Edison Research, come only a year after Biden carried Virginia over Donald Trump by 10 points, a wild swing that casts doubt on Democrats’ agenda in Richmond and Washington alike.
Scientific advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday unanimously endorsed the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for use in children aged 5 through 11 in the United States, a move that will buttress defenses against a possible surge as winter arrives and ease the worries of tens of millions of pandemic-weary parents.
If Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, formally accepts the recommendation, as expected, inoculations for children aged 5 to 11 could begin as soon as this week. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the vaccine for emergency use in younger children following a near-unanimous recommendation from its own advisers last week.
Dr. Walensky made a brief appearance as the meeting began, noting that the day was “one that many of us have been very eager to see.”
Still, she cautioned that vaccinating children is just one important piece to the puzzle. “It is important that we also continue to vaccinate as many adults as possible to provide protection to children in the community,” she said, including those children younger than age 5 who are not yet eligible for vaccination.
Anticipating the agency’s decision, the Biden administration has enlisted more than 20,000 pediatricians, family doctors and pharmacies to administer the vaccines.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said Tuesday she would join Senate Democrats in backing a compromise voting rights bill, marking the first time this year a Republican has signed on to a measure that likely still lacks enough GOP support to become law.Murkowski, of Alaska, joined Democrats Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to introduce a new version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after the late Georgia civil rights icon.The compromise version is more permissive of state voter ID laws. It also includes a provision to expand Native American voting access.The senators said the changes were the product of “months of bipartisan negotiations,” but Murkowski was the only Republican senator to endorse the legislation Tuesday.
Under Senate rules, the measure would have to receive 60 votes to advance to debate, meaning nine more Republicans beyond Murkowski would have to vote for it.
Chutkan has called a hearing in the matter on Thursday. The National Archives has filed its own brief, authored by Justice Department attorneys, detailing the documents that Trump wants to withhold from investigators. They include records pulled from senior aides like former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former adviser Stephen Miller and former counsel Patrick Philbin. They also include speech drafts, as well as call and visitor logs.
In supporting release of the records to Congress, Biden has said he declined to assert privilege for Trump because of the unprecedented nature of the attacks and questions about the White House’s involvement under Trump.
Binnall says many of these documents are precisely those intended to be protected from release and that many are irrelevant to the House investigation, or any potential legislation that might arise from it.
“The documents at issue include legal documents, call logs, schedules, and briefing materials that are plainly privileged and irrelevant for purposes of legislating regarding anti-terrorism laws, presidential transitions, or other legislation,” he writes. ”The Committee has never explained how the President’s schedule, call logs, legal documents, or other briefing materials will assist it in developing legislation to protect the United States or to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.”
The House, National Archives and other executive privilege experts, however, have argued that this argument fails because executive privilege only applies to the sitting president, who is charged with making decisions intended to protect the office. While a former president may have an interest in asserting privilege over records, there’s no supporting case law that would allow a former president to override his successor on such matters. Doing so would create a “shadow presidency” those experts say.
Binnall said those arguments fail to account for the need to protect candid advice given to presidents well after their terms end — or else risk eroding candor in future presidencies.
“True, executive privilege is qualified, not absolute,” he writes. “For that matter, neither is any other privilege. But the rights of former presidents are not as easily tossed aside as Defendants contend.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said on Monday that members will vote for a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill despite no assurance from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) that he will vote for a separate $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill.
“The president says he can get 51 votes for the bill,” Jayapal told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC Monday. “We are going to trust him.”
Earlier in the day, Manchin held a press conference in which he accused House progressives of playing “political games” and said, “Holding this bill hostage is not going to work in getting my support for this reconciliation bill.”
The House was scheduled to vote last week on the $1.2 trillion bill, which passed the Senate 69 to 30 in August as 19 Republicans joined all Democrats in voting for it. It was supposed to be one of two large spending packages that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) saidthe Senate would pass, with the other being via the budget reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority to pass legislation, as opposed to 60 votes through regular order. Jayapal had said her caucus would not vote for the bipartisan deal until the Senate also passed a reconciliation bill.
On Thursday the union representing 50,000 current and former New York City Police Dept. officers claimed Mayor de Blasio’s vaccine mandate would force “10,000” officers off the streets. According to the NYPD Police Commissioner, that number is actually just 34.
“NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea noted that only 34 police officers have been placed on unpaid leave,” AM NY reports, noting across all NYC employees, there are “12,000 unvaccinated city workers” who “have applied for medical or religious exemption, which will be worked on in the coming days.”
That vaccine mandate required proof of just one shot, and provided in return a $500 bonus for getting vaccinated. “The total of New York City workers that have been vaccinated is currently at 91%.”
In total, “9,000 city employees,” including the 34 police officers and 40 civilian members of the NYPD, “have not yet been vaccinated and have been placed on leave without [pay] as of Nov. 1, which is less than 6% of the entire city workforce at 378,000.”
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Monday over Texas’ hotly debated abortion ban, and although it could be days or weeks before the court issues a ruling, justices who will cast key votes on the issue signaled apprehension over the law’s wider implications.
Conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who both tend to favor abortion restrictions, hinted at some skepticism over the Texas law while hearing from abortion providers and the U.S. Justice Department. The arguments did not concern the legality of a six-week abortion ban but rather the unique structure of the law and whether its opponents can mount federal court challenges against it.
The legislation deputizes citizens, not the state, to enforce the ban and offers a $10,000 bounty to anyone who successfully sues someone for “aiding or abetting” patients seeking abortions in Texas. It’s that unusual design, one that has little historical precedent, that has made it so difficult to wage legal battles in federal court.
Tous les ‘Toobz were abuzz this weekend over the massive Washington Post investigation into the January 6 insurrection. It is indeed a vast and impressive performance by the newspaper. It pretty much closes down dozens of alibis and soft explanations. No, this wasn’t a spontaneous event. Yes, it was carefully orchestrated by people close to the former president*. The only question is how close it all comes to El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago his own self, but the Post’s work leaves him only two possible options: either he was criminally negligent during the insurrection, or he was simply, you know, criminal. FBI Director Christopher Wray doesn’t come out of this smelling like a rose, either. The Bureau either missed, or failed to take seriously, a great number of flags that were spelling out, in semaphore, “DANGER IS COMING SOON” prior to the events of January 6.
Of course, the Post left no doubt where the breadcrumbs ultimately lead.
[Trump was] the driving force at every turn as he orchestrated what would become an attempted political coup in the months leading up to Jan. 6, calling his supporters to Washington, encouraging the mob to march on the Capitol and freezing in place key federal agencies whose job it was to investigate and stop threats to national security.
There also are dozens of delectable little side-tidbits. For example, John Eastman, the administration* lawyer whose boat presently is taking on water by the gallon, comes out blaming the bunkered-down Mike Pence for inciting the mob that came to the Capitol to hang him. Or there’s a terrified Senator Lindsey Graham, demanding that the Capitol Police re-stage the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin on the Capitol steps. (As we have seen, the senator has made peace with at least some of the rioters’ demands.) The series is too extensive and detailed to be adequately summarized here. Suffice it to say that any explanation downplaying the danger posed by the participants is inadequate. These were serious people with serious intent.
One of the most striking flares came when a tipster called the FBI on the afternoon of Dec. 20: Trump supporters were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to ‘overrun’ police and arrest members of Congress in January, according to internal bureau documents obtained by The Post. The tipster offered specifics: Those planning violence believed they had ‘orders from the President,’ used code words such as ‘pickaxe’ to describe guns and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session. On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a target.
As Vice President Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, an attorney for President Donald Trump emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.
The attorney, John C. Eastman, also continued to press for Pence to act even after Trump’s supporters had trampled through the Capitol — an attack the Pence aide, Greg Jacob, had described as a “siege” in their email exchange.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Eastman sent the email as Pence, who had been presiding in the Senate, was under guard with Jacob and other advisers in a secure area. Rioters were tearing through the Capitol complex, some of them calling for Pence to be executed.
Chutkan is slated to hold a hearing on Trump’s bid to block access to his records on Thursday. She’s been among the most outspoken judges on the federal bench in Washington, D.C., to call the Jan. 6 attack a fundamental assault on democracy — driven by rioters loyal to Trump. In the chaos that day, multiple rioters died, and more than 140 police officers were injured.
Ferriero has indicated he intends to turn over a first tranche of documents by Nov. 12 unless a court orders otherwise.
In his lawsuit, Trump argues that the committee’s effort to investigate the attack is political, and efforts to obtain his documents would erode all future presidents’ ability to have candid conversations with advisers and allies.
But in its new filing, the committee sharply rejects these claims, noting that Biden had already judged the inquiry to be meritorious and that Trump’s unique role promoting false claims about the election warrants an intensive recounting of his actions.
“Mr. Trump is—as of now—a case of one,” the committee argues. “He is—as of now—the only failed Presidential candidate not to concede, to spend months spreading lies about the election, to encourage a self-coup that would illegally keep him in office, or to inspire a mob to attack the Capitol. There is no one more important to study to determine how legislation can prevent the repetition of such acts.”
The Food and Drug Administration has approved Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 shot for children ages 5 to 11, paving the way for 28 million children to get vaccinated in the U.S.
The federal agency announced its approval on an emergency use basis on Friday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee will next meet to review the FDA’s decision on Nov. 2-3. It’s expected to recommend it shortly after.
The FDA’s decision comes after an advisory panel for the agency decided unanimously that the vaccine’s benefits for children outweigh any potential risks.
“Vaccinating younger children against COVID-19 will bring us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy,” said acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock in a press release. “Our comprehensive and rigorous evaluation of the data pertaining to the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness should help assure parents and guardians that this vaccine meets our high standards.”
His promise to voters has produced nonstop media coverage, as the political press eagerly hypes the possibility of a Democratic loss.
What the media have uniformly failed to do in Virginia, and nationwide as deep-pocketed, right-wing activists march on with their manufactured outrage over CRT, is forcefully point out that it’s not taught in schools. Period. When pressed, most Republican parents, politicians and activists aren’t able to explain what CRT is. (It’s an academic framework taught at the college level that examines how systemic racism is ingrained in America’s history.)
Claiming it’s an attempt to “indoctrinate the kids,” Republicans are using CRT as a battering ram to not only take over local school boards, but to try to win the Virginia governorship in what is clearly a GOP dress rehearsal for the 2022 midterms. The media remain widely impressed by the strategy, while refusing to note that the entire enterprise is a con.
The whole thing represents a stunning failure of American journalism as news outlets defy common sense. It’s the latest example of the media working hand-in-hand with Republicans to spread nonstop misinformation.
What’s happening is that right-wing dark money groups are pumping millions into creating an army of activists who rally around lies about public education in hopes that that hysteria will get people out to vote more Republicans into office, who in turn then will vote to keep the tax rate low for corporations and the wealthy. CRT is being used as a Trojan Horse by big-money donors with Koch ties who likely couldn’t care less about the state of public education in America. Instead, they’re fueling the made-up controversy about teaching race in the classroom in order to build a Republican majority in Congress.
At yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland, it became clear that for the Republican Party, threats of death and violence against elected officials at every level of government are not only acceptable, but that to speak out in even the mildest way deserves hysterical over-reaction calculated to cause officials to receive even more threats of death and violence. It’s the cynical cycle of democratic (and Democratic) doom, and GOP senators were more than willing to aid and abet all the violent motherfuckers using intimidation to chase public servants out of office.
The basis for this is a relatively milquetoast memorandum from Garland titled, “Partnership Among Federal, State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Law Enforcement to Address Threats against School Administrators, Board Members, Teachers, and Staff.” After expressing concern about real violence and threats of violence happening at school board meetings and at schools, Garland says, “I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district within 30 days of the issuance of this memorandum. These meetings will facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
Now, you, being a rational, at least semi-compassionate human being, might think that that sounds just fine. After all, it’s pretty fucking hard to argue against the fact that school board meetings have become shit shows of MAGA freaks bellowing about “critical race theory” and antivaxx fucknuts yowling about masks and vaccines. I honestly don’t know how some school board members haven’t just started screaming, “Shut the fuck up!” repeatedly at the freak parade they have to deal with. But mixed in with bellows and yowls are often threats of knowing where people live or more direct threats about murdering or beating people. It’s using fear and intimidation to force government to act in their favor. Generally, we call that shit “terrorism,” as in “I’ll fucking kill your whole family if you make my child wear a mask in class.” Again, you and I would think that law enforcement might want to be involved here, and that local authorities might wanna get some tips from the agency that deals with, you know, terrorists.
But not the modern GOP. Oh, no. That’s akin to rounding up parents and sending them to reeducation camps. As Chuck Grassley, the Senate’s crabbiest piss elf, put it, Garland created “a task force that includes the department’s criminal division and national security division to potentially weaponize against parents.” Except “parents” aren’t mentioned in the memo at all. That didn’t stop the next few hours of performative fuckery by Republicans in making this memo seem like it was an attack on the very foundations of Uhmerkan freedom. Think that’s an overstatement? Grassley cranked on, “This kind of looks like something that would come out of some communist country expansive definition of national security.” Yeah, that level of shitting themselves hysteria.
On it went. John Cornyn, who always looks like he’s wondering if anyone will find out where he buried that Mexican boy, sputtered, “Can you imagine the sort of intimidation, the sort of bullying impact, that a memorandum from the Department of Justice would have and how that would chill the willingness of parents to exercise their rights under threat of federal prosecution?” Because the rule of law is something that the MAGA right really seems to give a shit about when they’re threatening to overthrow the government. And, by the way, Cornyn repeatedly asked Garland that question and got all red-faced that Garland wouldn’t play on the field Cornyn wanted him to play on.
And still on it fucking went.
President Joe Biden says he has struck a deal with the most conservative members of the Senate to move forward with a $1.75 trillion spending and tax bill — a legislative package meant to reflect the biggest pillars of his agenda.
When Biden says he wants to Build Back Better, this is the bill he’s talking about.
But what the White House is now proposing isn’t what Biden wanted. Over the course of the last month, the White House whittled down its dreams of a $3.5 trillion spending bill over 10 years to appease two key Democratic votes: Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.).
What they’ve come up with is about half the size of what the majority of congressional Democratic lawmakers had hoped for. That meant leaving out a lot of key ― and extremely popular — proposals, like instituting the nation’s first paid family and medical leave program, or lowering pharmaceutical drug prices.
That said, there’s still a lot of policy packed into this proposal. The proposal’s biggest investments are in climate policies ($555 billion), child care and universal pre-kindergarten ($400 billion) and a temporary extension of the expanded child tax credit ($200 billion), which has already gone a long way toward cutting down child poverty in the United States. It increases taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
Biden spent Thursday morning on Capitol Hill trying to convince Democrats to support this compromise. But nothing is for certain; a lot of lawmakers saw their policy priorities cut down, or even cut out all together, because of Manchin and Sinema.
“The company name is Meta.”
“In what way?”
“No, that’s the name!”
“What is?”
“Meta.”
“How?”
“Listen, the name is Meta.”
“You still haven’t told me what’s Meta about it!!!”
(Apologies to Abbott and Costello.)
Facebook is under a whirlwind of controversy, so they are going with a company-wide rebrand.
And the new name they have settled on is…
Meta.
Yes, Meta. It’s derived from Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of going all in on the “metaverse.”
What is the metaverse? Well, as Zuckerberg himself explained, “We’ve gone from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this isn’t the end of the line. The next platform and medium will be even more immersive and embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it, and we call this the metaverse.”
The Wall Street Journal faced backlash Wednesday for publishing a letter to the editor from former President Donald Trump filled with demonstrably false claims about the 2020 election.
Responding to a Sunday Wall Street Journal editorial titled “The Election for Pennsylvania’s High Court,” the former president wrote, “Well actually, the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out.”
He then provided a bulleted list of “examples” of voter fraud in Pennsylvania to support his claims, relying repeatedly on data from Audit the Vote PA, an organization that has no real experience in assessing elections and has promoted unsubstantiated claims of fraud.
Multiple audits into the state’s 2020 election results affirmed the vote count, and numerous lawsuits challenging the results failed in court. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania or any other state’s election.
The Wall Street Journal published Trump’s letter without noting these facts. The former president was deplatformed from Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites earlier this year after spreading disinformation about the election for months and inciting a mob of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol to try and overturn the results.
Oh, all the chickens, Kiev and otherwise, are coming home to roost, it seems. First, the FBI raids the home of Oleg Deripaska, Paul Manafort’s old 2016 running buddy. Then, on Friday, Rudy Giuliani’s good tovarich, Lev Parnas, gets convicted in federal court of violating a whole truckload of campaign finance laws on behalf of…well, you know.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg intervened to reinstate a false anti-abortion video to assuage conservative Republican politicians, according to internal company documents Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen provided to Congress that The Financial Times examined.
The incident was reportedly one of several instances of Facebook senior executives countermanding company policy to allow American politicians and celebrities to post whatever they wanted despite pleas from employees to moderate the content, according to the documents.
COVID-19 vaccines for kids aged 5 to 11 could be available by early next month amid promising study data released by Pfizer and BioNTech, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, made the comments in an interview with ABC’s This Week, shortly after regulators at the Food and Drug Administration said the benefits of the Pfizer-BioNTech jab for kids largely outweighed the risks of potential side effects, a key finding that may foreshadow an emergency use authorization in the coming days.
The White House is rejecting more claims of executive privilege from former President Trump over documents requested by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, directing the National Archives to turn over the Trump-era documents to the committee.
In a new letter obtained by The Hill, White House counsel Dana Remuswrote that Biden consulted with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and determined that the former president’s privilege assertion “is not justified.”
Paid family leave, one of the hallmarks of President Joe Biden’s social safety net agenda, is in jeopardy of being pared once again or even cut from a major spending bill over a lack of support from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.
Manchin, one of two Senate Democrats who have chipped away at Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, is against including four weeks of paid family and medical leave, said two sources familiar with the negotiations. The provision was recently presented as a compromise to the 12 weeks Biden initially proposed.
When Republicans launched a frontal assault on American workers earlier this year, the press was right there to help them echo their bogus claims. Both should now apologize for smearing the U.S. workforce.
Belittling would-be employees for being “lazy” and living off the government dole as generous unemployment payments swelled during the pandemic, conservatives invented a bogus economic theory that President Joe Biden had created a nationwide worker shortage. (Some members of Congress are still making the hollow claim.)
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday Democrats are planning to have an “agreement” on a framework for President Joe Biden’s sweeping social safety net plan and a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in the next week.
The shot that killed a cinematographer on a New Mexico film set last week was fired as actor Alec Baldwin was practicing drawing his gun, according to the director who was injured in the shooting, an affidavit for a search warrant shows.
President Joe Biden hosted critical moderate Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at his home in Delaware on Sunday in a push to finalize an agreement on a sweeping economic and climate package, a White House official told CNN.
The day of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Facebook noticed a rise in social media posts calling for violence and incitement around the certification of the U.S. presidential election result and the storming of the Capitol.
How the social media giant prepared for that day, and how it responded to the sudden onslaught of misleading information and violent rhetoric on both Facebook and Instagram is detailed in internal documents obtained by ABC News and a group of news organizations.
One person was killed and another was wounded after Alec Baldwin’s prop firearm discharged on the set of the movie “Rust” on Thursday, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office. Baldwin is starring in and co-producing the Western film.
“The sheriff’s office confirms that two individuals were shot on the set of Rust,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release late Thursday. “Halyna Hutchins, 42, director of photography and Joel Souza, 48, director, were shot when a prop firearm was discharged by Alec Baldwin, 68, producer and actor.”
President Joe Biden on Thursday confirmed that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) stood in the way of raising taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans as a way to pay for his programs to expand the social safety net and fight climate change.
“She’s smart as the devil,” Biden said at a CNN town hall in Maryland. “She’s very supportive of the environmental agenda in my legislation…. Where she’s not supportive is she says she will not raise a single penny on taxes for the corporate side and/or on wealthy people, period. And that’s where it sort of breaks down.”
President Joe Biden spoke confidently Thursday night about reaching a deal soon with lawmakers to enact his massive social safety net agenda.
“I do think I’ll get a deal,” Biden told CNN’s Anderson Cooper during a town hall in Baltimore.
Democrats hope to reach an agreement by the end of the week — though lawmakers have blown past previous deadlines and there was still doubt they would meet their self-imposed goal.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) confirmed on Wednesday to a House panel that he had spoken with then-President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol but contradicted a previous answer about the timeline of calls that day.
The House Rules Committee grilled Jordan, a potential witness in the House investigation of the attack, about his communications with Trump while he was testifying against a resolution to hold former Trump aide Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress.
House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D- Mass.) asked Jordan about interviews he gave over the summer admitting he had spoken with Trump on Jan. 6.
The vast majority of House Republicans are expected to oppose an effort to hold Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena, brushing aside concerns about weakening the institution’s future oversight authority and rejecting accusations that they’re trying to block Democrats from getting to the bottom of the January 6 insurrection.
U.S. regulators on Wednesday signed off on extending COVID-19 boosters to Americans who got the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine and said anyone eligible for an extra dose can get a brand different from the one they received initially.
The Food and Drug Administration’s decisions mark a big step toward expanding the U.S. booster campaign, which began with extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine last month. But before more people roll up their sleeves, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will consult an expert panel later this week before finalizing official recommendations for who should get boosters and when.
Booster protection in the US could soon expand to a much broader population, as a source says the US government likely will soon recommend them to people as young as 40 who received either Moderna or Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine.
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President Joe Biden told progressive lawmakers Tuesday that the final social spending bill is expected to drop tuition-free community college and curtail the child tax credit program, two sources familiar with the meeting said.
The sources said the popular child tax credit is likely to be extended for an additional year. Many Democrats had pushed the proposals to reduce poverty and remove financial barriers to higher education and vocational training.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol voted Tuesday evening to hold Steve Bannon, a former aide to President Donald Trump, in contempt of Congress ― a move that could lead to federal criminal charges.
The vote was unanimous among the committee’s nine members.
“When you think about what we’re investigating, a violent attack on the seat of our democracy … it’s shocking to me, shocking that anyone would not do anything in their power to assist our investigation,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said Tuesday. “It’s a shame that Mr. Bannon has put us in this position, but we won’t take no for an answer.”
Former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, died Monday morning due to complications from multiple myeloma, Parkinson’s disease, and COVID-19, his family said in a statement.
“He was fully vaccinated. We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment,” the family said. “We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American.”
Powell was 84 years old.
Democrats in the House of Representatives will consider getting rid of the arbitrary limit on how much money the U.S. government can borrow to fund operations.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in a letter to fellow lawmakers over the weekend that “the House will explore options to remove the threat that the debt limit poses over the long term, now that Republicans have demonstrated a willingness to weaponize it for partisan purposes.”
Democrats have resisted abolishing the debt limit, insisting instead that Republicans join them in voting to temporarily suspend the borrowing ceiling or to increase it by an incremental amount, necessitating more voting and potential partisan clashes down the line.
Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, an attempt to block lawmakers from accessing archived presidential documents.
In the Monday complaint that also addressed the National Archives, the former president called the committee’s probe into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol an “illegal fishing expedition.” Violent Trump supporters attempted to infiltrate the Capitol with the intent of overturning the election.
Hey all you Sexy Liberals! This year’s ONLY Sexy Liberal Show is THIS SATURDAY NIGHT!
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There are actual journalistic solutions to the crises of Both Siderism and Horserace coverage, both of which have completely screwed up the story of how the president is trying to shove an overwhelmingly popular economic agenda through the rathole that is the United States Congress. One of the more conspicuous clogs in the process is, obviously, the senior senator from West Virginia. There is a way to illustrate the cost of Joe Manchin’s obstructionism without resorting to either of those two hoary dodges—or without jumping up and down, red-faced and howling, for that matter. The New York Times demonstrates the best way to do that.
Former British spy Christopher Steele is stepping out of the shadows to “set the record straight” about his bombshell dossier for the first time since his name splashed across headlines in early 2017, defending his work, his name, and the decision to include some of its most controversial elements.
“I stand by the work we did, the sources that we had, and the professionalism which we applied to it,” Steele told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in the forthcoming documentary, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier” — an exclusive preview of which aired Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
The Clean Energy Performance Program, the linchpin of President Biden’s proposed climate change legislation, is likely to be dropped from the Democrats’ spending bill because of opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., multiple sources have told NBC News.
The sources say that the program will most likely be removed from the massive spending package known as the “reconciliation bill” that Democrats plan without Republican support, but that negotiations are ongoing and that no final decision has been made.
This week could be the last dance for federal voting rights legislation.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is moving Monday to set up a vote on the Freedom to Vote Act, which is likely to take placeWednesday.
Schumer, D-N.Y., who said it has the support of all 50 Democratic-voting senators, said the bill is necessary to “right the ship of our democracy and establish common sense national standards to give fair access to our democracy to all Americans.”
Former President Donald Trump has been ordered to give testimony under oath Monday in a lawsuit brought by a group of demonstrators who say his security guards roughed them up outside Trump Tower in New York.
The suit is one of at least 10 civil cases pending against Trump. The videotaped deposition — which will be played as Trump’s testimony when the case goes to trial — will be his first since he was elected president in 2016.
Leaning into the doomsday narrative that President Joe Biden’s agenda and presidency is slipping away as Democrats work to pass both a huge infrastructure bill and even bigger social spending bill, dubbed Build Back Better, the Beltway press continues to do a great job ignoring the contents of the historic effort. Focusing instead on its cost and obsessively documenting the vote-counting process, the press has walked away from its job of explaining legislation.
A new CBS poll confirms how little information voters are getting about the Democrats’ hallmark domestic bill, which has been in the news for most of this year. “The public is more likely to have heard about what it would cost than about the specific policies that would be in it,” according to the network. Worse for Democrats, “some of the very popular [programs] —expanded Medicare coverage, family leave, lowered prescription costs — are among the least heard about.”
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun
We have come to a familiar crossroads of American politics. Democrats, who cannot win national office without the overwhelming support of Black people, are facing rejection from perpetually aggrieved, poorly educated whites. These whites are poised to vote to defeat Democrats in upcoming elections. In response, a chorus of powerful Democrats has risen up inside the Beltway to tell Democrats that abandoning Black people—the very people who put them in power in the first place—and making performative efforts to win the support of racists, is the only way to stay in power.
Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe won back his pension Thursday after the Justice Department settled rather than face a federal lawsuit asserting he was illegally fired for political reasons in March 2018 for overseeing the FBI’s Russia investigation after becoming the target of a leak investigation himself.
The longtime FBI official approved the decision in May 2017 to investigate then-President Donald Trump over possible obstruction of justice and briefly led the bureau after Trump fired Director James B. Comey in 2017. But McCabe was fired hours before his retirement by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The most restrictive abortion law in the country will remain in effect, after a federal appeals court sided with Texas on Thursday in an ongoing legal battle with the Department of Justice.
The law, known as SB8, bans physicians from providing abortions once they detect a so-called fetal heartbeat — which can be seen on an ultrasound as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.
The law, which went into effect on Sept. 1, was briefly paused after a federal judge issued a temporary injunction last week barring its enforcement. Days later, the law was reinstated after a panel of judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary administrative stay.
U.S. health advisers said Thursday that some Americans who received Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine should get a half-dose booster to bolster protection against the virus.
The panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously to recommend a booster shot for seniors, adults with other health problems, jobs or living situations that put them at increased risk for COVID-19.
Former President Bill Clinton has been hospitalized in California for several days with a non-COVID-related infection, his spokesperson said Thursday night.
Clinton is being treated at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center.
“He is on the mend, in good spirits, and is incredibly thankful to the doctors, nurses and staff providing him with excellent care,” the spokesperson, Angel Ureña, said on Twitter.
President Biden announced Wednesday that the Port of Los Angeles will operate around the clock and major companies including Walmart, UPS and FedEx would expand their working hours as his administration struggles to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.
Product shortages have frustrated American consumers and businesses and contributed to inflation, which threatens to hurt the president politically. And the problems appear poised to worsen, enduring into late next year or beyond and disrupting shipments of necessities like medications as well as holiday purchases.
Approximately 90,000 covid-19 deaths could have been avoided over four months of this year if more U.S. adults had chosen to be vaccinated, a new study finds, as the disease caused by the coronavirus became the second-leading cause of death in the United States.
The estimate from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation focused on deaths of U.S. adults from June 2021 — when the report says coronavirus vaccines became widely available to the general public — through September.
The White House formally rejected the request by former President Donald Trump to assert executive privilege to shield from lawmakers a subset of documents that has been requested by the House committee investigating January 6, and set an aggressive timeline for their release.
The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has slapped another ally of former President Donald Trump with a subpoena ― and this time, it’s Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who helped push Trump’s election fraud lies.
Clark’s name came up repeatedly in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 400-page report on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that was released last week.
He had served in the Trump administration as assistant attorney general of the environment and natural resources division; Trump also named him acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division last fall.
Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth announced on Tuesday that he will not be seeking reelection after serving thirteen years in Congress and becoming one of the most powerful liberals in Washington DC.
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The White House is set to announce Wednesday that three of the largest U.S. goods carriers, Walmart, FedEx and UPS, will be upping their efforts to address supply chain shortagesresulting from the coronavirus pandemic.
The carriers “will make commitments towards moving to 24/7 working during off-peak hours,” senior administration officials said on a call Tuesday evening.
President Joe Biden will meet Wednesday with leaders of the Port of Los Angeles, the Port of Long Beach, California, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to discuss congestion at the ports. The White House will also meet with executives from Walmart, UPS and Home Depot about supply chain issues.
Texas-based Southwest and American Airlines both said Tuesday they would move forward with mandates that employees get vaccinated against COVID-19, despite the state’s governor attempting to ban such requirements across Texas this week.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed an executive order on Monday barring vaccine mandates for any business, government office or other entity across the state, despite the ongoing threat of the coronavirus and its highly transmissible delta variant.
The Biden administration announced on Tuesday that the U.S. will lift restrictions at the country’s land borders with Canada and Mexico next month, allowing fully-vaccinated foreign nationals to enter the country at the crossings for the first time in 19 months.
The Department of Homeland Security said it will reopen travel across the ports of entry in November for non-essential purposes, like visiting friends or for tourism. Travelers will need to show proof of vaccination against the coronavirus.
President Joe Biden made the case for Covid vaccination mandates and urged more companies to require their employees to get vaccinated as the White House tries to get back on the offense over Biden’s handling of the pandemic.
“I’m calling more employers to act,” Biden said. “My message is require your employees to get vaccinated. With vaccinations we’re going to beat this pandemic finally. Without them we face endless months of chaos in our hospitals, damage to our economy and anxiety in our schools and empty restaurants and much less commerce.”
A U.S. Capitol Police whistleblower sent a letter to congressional leaders late last month accusing the agency’s two senior leaders of mishandling intelligence surrounding the Jan. 6 riotat the Capitol.
In the letter, obtained by NBC News, the whistleblower accused Sean Gallagher, the acting chief of uniformed operations, and Yogananda Pittman, the assistant chief for protective and intelligence operations, of significant “failures” in the lead-up to and aftermath ofthe attack.
Jon Gruden has resigned as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders after emails he sent before being hired in 2018 contained racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments.
Gruden released a statement Monday night, saying: “I have resigned as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. I love the Raiders and do not want to be a distraction. Thank you to all the players, coaches, staff, and fans of Raider Nation. I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt anyone.”
He stepped down after The New York Times reported that Gruden frequently used misogynistic and homophobic language directed at Commissioner Roger Goodell and others in the NFL.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order on Monday banning “any entity” in the state from enforcing a vaccine mandate. Abbott had previously issued orders banning government officials and entities from instating mask mandates.
“No entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including an employee or a consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19,” the order reads. “I hereby suspend all relevant statutes to the extent necessary to enforce this prohibition.”
One of the most vexing questions in political journalism right now is how to cover former President Donald Trump as he holds rallies for a 2024 presidential campaign that is all but official.
My unvarnished and unequivocal coverage of Trump — perhaps especially his rallies — is one of the reasons I have the audience that I do and am in position to launch this newsletter. But when I started watching every Trump rally back in 2017, he was president. What he said inherently had news value. That dynamic has changed now that he’s out of power.
At one end of the spectrum of opinions about how to cover the 2021 version of Trump is the view that his public statements and rallies serve little purpose beyond spreading hate and misinformation, and aren’t really worthy of attention. Sure, journalists generally improved at calling out Trump’s lies by the end of his presidency, but with so many other important things going on right now, there’s no reason to give Trump and his tired schtick oxygen.
Read the rest of Aaron Rupar’s piece at his new newsletter Public Notice
What say we begin the weekend by looking straight on at a straight-up crime? It’s a very clarifying thing. From Politico:
The committee has subpoenaed documents and testimony from four Trump administration alumni: former social media czar Dan Scavino, former Defense Department official Kash Patel, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former White House adviser Steve Bannon. The four men were ordered to turn over documents related to Jan. 6 by Thursday and to sit for interviews with investigators next week. The letter stated the committee is seeking materials that are covered by executive privilege, as well as other privileges. “President Trump is prepared to defend these fundamental privileges in court,” the letter said.
Foreign affairs and national security expert Fiona Hill warned that the U.S. is in a “dangerous moment” and has already reached a constitutional crisis as political actors try to undermine elections and call for violence.
“I think the moment is incredibly dangerous. I mean we are in a dangerous moment,” Hill said on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning.
Hill, a former National Security Council official who served as a key witness in the 2019 Trump impeachment hearings as a Trump administration official, pointed to serious threats as former President Trump is “clearly prepping for his return to the presidency,” which he says is still rightfully his. The main threats to democracy, Hill said, aren’t coming from the left end of the political spectrum.
The White House has informed the National Archives that it is not asserting executive privilege on an initial batch of documents related to the January 6 violence at the US Capitol, paving the way for the Archives to share documents with the House committee investigating the attempted insurrection.
Southwest Airlines canceled hundreds of flights over the weekend, blaming the woes on air traffic control issues and weather.
The airline canceled more than 1,000 flights in total, or 29% of its schedule, as of 7 p.m. ET Sunday, according to flight tracker FlightAware. That was the highest rate by far of the major U.S. airlines. Next in line was Allegiant, which canceled 6% of its flights. American Airlines canceled 5% of its flights, while Spirit canceled 4% on Sunday, according to the flight tracker. On Saturday, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 800 flights.
Rep. Steve Scalise, the House’s second-ranking Republican, still refuses to acknowledge the 2020 presidential election’s legitimacy, nearly a year after the majority of states and Congress elected President Joe Biden.
The Louisiana congressman spoke on Sunday with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, repeating a false claim widely spread by GOP members that some states ― especially those where election results favored Biden over incumbent Donald Trump ― did not follow the Constitution when certifying their votes.
The clarion calls of democratic doom are out there, but are newsrooms listening? Trump Republicans are methodically and unapologetically out to derail American democracy, yet there remains a working media assumption that it can’t happen here.
“I’m astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis,” Hillary Clinton warned this week. She fears “our democracy will [soon] be broken and taken over and minority rule will be what we live under. The norm.”
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It was as simple as it was obvious. I’m over here in the UK. In Manchester right now, to be precise, and, sure, I’m having a bit of a rough time with the Mancunian accent. When I was buying a concert t-shirt last night, the guy selling it asked if I wanted it “with tits or without tits.” Or at least that’s what I heard, and I thought he was making a joke about wanting a men’s or women’s shirt. So I laughed. It wasn’t funny, but, you know, fuck it, maybe he’d knock five pounds off the price. He did not. “No,” he said. “Tits. Do you want it with tits?” I must have looked utterly confused because another man gestured at the shirt’s back on the display and said, “Tits,” when I realized what he was saying was “dits,” not tits, and that “dits” were “dates,” as in the dates of the band’s tour, and, yes, I did want the shirt with the dits.
Pfizer and BioNTech said Thursday they are seeking US Food and Drug Administration emergency use authorization from for their Covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.
The House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol issued a new round of subpoenas on Thursday, targeting two leaders of the “Stop the Steal” group, Ali Alexander and Nathan Martin, who are also affiliated with the planning of the Washington, DC, rally that was a precursor to the attack.
After weeks of brinkmanship, the Senate voted Thursday night to temporarily raise the debt limit by $480 billion until Dec. 3.
The procedural move to break the GOP filibuster, which required 60 votes, was the first hurdle cleared, with a final count of 61-38. At least 10 Republicans needed to side with all Democrats to clear the hurdle to move forward to a final vote; 11 ultimately voted to advance the vote.
Democrats then raised the debt limit with a simple majority — 50-48. No Republican voted with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling.
A Senate committee report released Thursday detailed new instances where former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to use the Justice Department to over turn the 2020 election.
With new testimony from officials who served in the highest echelons of DOJ at the time, the report by Senate Judiciary Democrats offers the most comprehensive look to date at both new and previously reported details of Trump’s maneuvering in advance of the Jan. 6 insurrection to manufacture doubts about his loss to Joe Biden.
It’s about to get faster, easier and cheaper to get an at-home Covid-19 test, the Biden administration says. The administration is set to boost Covid-19 testing in the US by announcing an additional investment in at-home rapid tests.
Los Angeles will soon require that people show proof of full vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test to enter many indoor establishments.
It will be one of the strictest vaccine rules in the country when it goes into effect next month.
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved the ordinance, which will apply to indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, shopping malls, entertainment venues (such as the Staples Center and movie theaters) and personal care establishments (including nail salons, spas and hair salons) starting Nov. 4.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that Republicans are willing to agree to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit high enough to avert a debt default crisis for two months, a short-term extension Democrats appeared ready to accept on Wednesday.
The offer represented the first flinch in a game of chicken that threatened to result in the U.S. failing to pay its debt sometime this month, with potentially catastrophic effects on the global economy. A vote on the short-term extension could come as early as Wednesday or Thursday, pending a final agreement between Senate leaders.
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which since September has banned most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state.
The order by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman is the first legal blow to the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges. In the weeks since the restrictions took effect, Texas abortion providers say the impact has been “exactly what we feared.”
Johnson & Johnson asked the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday to allow extra shots of its COVID-19 vaccine as the U.S. government moves toward expanding its booster campaign to millions more vaccinated Americans.
J&J said it filed a request with the FDA to authorize boosters for people who previously received the company’s one-shot vaccine. While the company said it submitted data on several different booster intervals, ranging from two to six months, it did not formally recommend one to regulators.
President Joe Biden traveled to mid-Michigan on Tuesday as he looks to regain momentum on his twin economic packages, which remain stalled on Capitol Hill because of sharp divisions within his own party about the size and scope of the plans.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress on Tuesday, telling a Senate subcommittee that the social media giant is putting “profits before people.”
Haugen’s claims are supported by tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook research, which she previously provided to The Wall Street Journal.
The paper used the documents to publish a series of highly damaging articles about Facebook, alleging that, among other things, the company knew Instagram was “toxic” for teenagers even as it pursued strategies to sign up younger and younger children.
President Joe Biden said Tuesday there was a “real possibility” that Senate Democrats would move to change the body’s filibuster rules in order to overcome Republicans’ refusal to raise the debt ceiling and stave off a potential economic collapse if the federal government doesn’t pay its bills.
When asked at the White House if the party was considering the “nuclear option,” as a change in the filibuster has been called, Biden said it was in the cards. “I think that’s a real possibility.”
The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has begun hearing from witnesses and expects to continue doing so in the days ahead, a committee aide confirmed to CBS News. The aide would not disclose the identities of those who are being questioned by the committee.
The committee said on September 22 that it had subpoenaed close allies of former President Trump: former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior counselor Steve Bannon, communications director Dan Scavino and Pentagon chief of staff Kashyap Patel. Depositions are scheduled for October 14 and 15.
The Biden administration on Monday formally reversed a Trump-era rule that barred reproductive health care clinics that provide abortion referrals and services from receiving federal funds.
The new rule, which will go into effect Nov. 8, paves the way for major providers like Planned Parenthood to rejoin Title X, the federal family planning program created nearly 50 years ago to fill in gaps in health care access and affordability, particularly for those living in rural or otherwise underserved areas.
Facebook said it, Instagram and WhatsApp were “coming back online” after a massive outage Monday knocked out service to the social media giants for users around the world for more than six hours.
All three platforms, owned and operated by Facebook Inc., based in Menlo Park, California, went out of service at 11:39 a.m. ET. By around 6 p.m. ET, users of all three platforms reported that some service had been restored, but full functionality remained elusive well into Monday evening.
President Joe Biden urged Republican senators to “get out of the way” and let Democrats suspend the nation’s debt limit, hoping to keep the U.S. government from bumping dangerously close to a credit default as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell refuses to lend his party’s help.
Biden’s criticism on Monday came with Congress facing an Oct. 18 deadline to allow for more borrowing to keep the government operating after having accrued a total public debt of $28.4 trillion. The House has passed a measure to suspend the debt limit, but McConnell is forcing Senate Democrats into a cumbersome process that could drag on and approach the deadline with little margin for error.
The money power is rarely visible. At its strongest, it operates unseen and largely unheard. Often, we see only what it produces: an unqualified dumbass gets elected to Congress, a national economy “mysteriously” collapses, a village is destroyed by a chemical spill or a town finds out that its drinking water is a chemistry set. And after we discover that the dumbass is fronting for some Kansas billionaire, or that a congressional committee has allowed the financial-services industry to engage in a crime spree, or that some autocrat prime minister or grasping mayor has been sublet by God knows who. Nothing much happens, and the money power grinds on, unseen and largely unheard.
A Facebook whistleblower who brought internal documents detailing the company’s research to The Wall Street Journal and the U.S. Congress unmasked herself ahead of an interview she gave to “60 Minutes,” which aired Sunday night.
Frances Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, according to her website, revealed herself as the source behind a trove of leaked documents. On her personal website, she shared that during her time at the company, she “became increasingly alarmed by the choices the company makes prioritizing their own profits over public safety — putting people’s lives at risk. As a last resort and at great personal risk, Frances made the courageous act to blow the whistle on Facebook.”
White House senior adviser Cedric Richmond said Sunday that White House officials do not have a set timeline for passage of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda after a House vote on a bipartisan infrastructure bill was delayed last week.
“We don’t have a time frame on it. This is just about delivering and making sure that we deliver both bills to the American people because it meets their needs,” Richmond told “Fox News Sunday” in an interview. Richmond was referring to both the infrastructure bill as well as a $3.5 trillion spending plan Democrats are seeking to pass.
Facing an onslaught of political pressure tactics and plunging public approval, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sails into a new term set to decide some of the most divisive cases in decades on abortion, gun rights, the death penalty and religious freedom.
By the end of June 2022, the court’s conservative majority has the potential to roll back 50 years of abortion rights precedent; declare a right to carry a handgun outside the home; bolster the death penalty; and, allow some American parents to use taxpayer funds for religious schools.
A major oil spill off the coast of Southern California has forced Huntington Beach and activities scheduled to take place in the region to shut down.
A leak from an offshore oil production facility leaked 3,000 barrels of oil, which is about 126,000 gallons, on Saturday, Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr said. The leak is expected to have occurred about 4.5 miles offshore, officials said.
The U.S. Coast Guard was notified of the spill around 9 a.m. Saturday, Carr said. By early Sunday morning, the oil had reached the shore. It had entered the Talbert Marshlands and the Santa Ana River Trail, fanning out over an area of about 5.8 nautical miles, the city of Huntington Beach announced in a press release Sunday morning.
The United States during Trump’s final year in office posted the largest year-to-date increase in murders since the FBI first began tabulating the statistics more than six decade ago. The nation suffered a stunning 30% jump last year, the Bureau recently confirmed. There were an additional 4,901 homicides in 2020 compared with the year before. The crime spree story received lots of media coverage this week, most of which politely disappeared Trump.
That’s convenient for the GOP and for Trump, who’s eyeing a re-election run in 2024.
Republicans controlled the federal government while the United States suffered an historic, unheard-of one-year murder rate increase, yet much of the coverage in terms of who was to blame focused on Democratic allies on the left, and specifically the Black Lives Matter movement.
Read the rest of Eric Boehert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun…
One of the most fulfilling aspects of self-pleasure done right is how deeply individual, totally personal it is. Your masturbatory preferences are completely yours, and you don’t have to tell anyone whatever you need to get off on your own. No one needs to know that what really gets your rocks rolling is, say, a Seaside Woods Yankee Candle scenting up the joint, some Esperanza Spalding on the speakers, and a well-lubed, fully-charged Duke vibrating prostate massager on high jacked all the way up your rectum, taking full advantage of its taint-shaking action until you’re jizzing so hard you might rip a hole in time. You can keep all that to yourself, if you choose. Or, you know, you can share it with the world. But it’s your call. It doesn’t hurt anyone either way.
Moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia made clear Thursday that $1.5 trillion was the price tag he was willing to settle on for his party’s plan to expand the social safety net, putting him $2 trillion away from the lowest number progressive Democrats have said they would accept.
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Days before the start of a tumultuous term, and after the Supreme Court justices divided bitterly over a Texas law that bars most abortions after six weeks, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned an audience of law students about the frustration of having to write dissents.
President Joe Biden on Thursday evening signed a deal the House and Senate passed earlier in the day to avert a government shutdown that would have affected hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slammed an economy still struggling to recover from the pandemic, all with just hours left to stave off a crisis.
“It meets critical and urgent needs of the nation,” the president said in a statement Thursday night, but he also noted, “There’s so much more to do.”
House Democrats delayed a planned vote Thursday on a major infrastructure package, heading home for the night after intraparty fighting hamstrung their ability to pass the legislation.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., announced after a series of late-night negotiations that the vote had been postponed indefinitely as Democrats battle over the way forward on President Joe Biden’s agenda.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued another batch of subpoenas to Trump allies and several organizers of the rally that preceded the assault.
Women for America First, a conservative group, helped organize the Jan. 6 rally, as well as rallies on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12, the panel said. The group also planned a rally on Jan. 5 and two “March for Trump” nationwide bus tours to promote the Washington rallies, the committee said.
A judge in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday that Britney Spears’ father should be suspended as her conservator, a change that the singer requested and that her attorney hopes will set her on the path to freedom for the first time since 2008.
Spears’ father, James “Jamie” Spears, filed the petition to dissolve the conservatorship last month after she filed to replace him with a professional conservator. Britney Spears, 39, described her situation as “abusive” in public testimony over the summer, telling the court that she has been prevented from getting married, having more children and living a full life.
The House is bracing for a much-anticipated vote on a major infrastructure bill that doesn’t appear to have the support it needs to pass.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters Wednesday that she wants it to pass Thursday, but she left wiggle room to delay the vote. The legislation, which passed the Senate last month, is opposed by scores of progressive Democratic lawmakers, who say they want progress on legislation to bolster the social safety net, called Build Back Better, to come first.
“If it happens before the Build Back Better Act, I think it will be voted down. I know it will be voted down,” said progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., counting himself among the “no” votes.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that senators have reached a deal on a stopgap government funding measure to prevent a shutdown.
“We are ready to move forward,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor. “We have an agreement on … the continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown, and we should be voting on that tomorrow morning.”
If the bill is not enacted, the federal government would face a shutdown after the calendar turns to Friday. The deal announced by Schumer would keep the government open through Dec. 3.
Pfizer has submitted research to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine in children but the shots may not be available until November.
The company said Tuesday it provided health regulators with data from a recent study of its vaccine in children 5 to 11 years old. Officials had said previously they would file an application with the FDA to authorize use in the coming weeks.
Once the company files its application, U.S. regulators and public health officials will review the evidence and consult with their advisory committees in public meetings to determine if the shots are safe and effective enough to recommend use.
Moderate Democrats Senator Joe Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema held separate meetings with President Biden at the White House Tuesday, as the White House and most Democrats push an up-to $3.5 trillion bill to expand the social safety net.
Mr. Biden’s first-term domestic agenda is packed into the massive bill, which has no Republican support and will have to be passed by using a budgetary process called reconciliation. This will enable it to pass with 50 votes, rather than the 60 votes that are normally required to pass Senate measures. Its fate is largely in the hands of the two moderates, Sinema and Manchin, because the Senate is evenly divided, 50-50.
In their first appearance before Congress since the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the nation’s top military leaders candidly admitted to lawmakers that they had recommended to President Joe Bidenthat the U.S. should keep a troop presence there, appearing to contradict his assertions.
The testimony by Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, was at odds with Biden’s comments earlier this year to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that his military commanders did not recommend keeping a residual force.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Tuesday that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling by the deadline it would be a “calamity.”
Testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs alongside Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Yellen said the U.S. could hit its debt limit in less than three weeks, as early as Oct. 18.
“This would be a manufactured crisis we had imposed on this country, which has been going through a very difficult period and is on the road to recovery,” she said. “This would be a self-inflicted wound of enormous proportions.”
President Biden received his COVID-19 vaccine booster shot on Monday, after public health officials recommended boosters for many Americans, including those 65 and older. Mr. Biden, 78, got his third shot on camera, and delivered brief remarks before his jab.
The Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization last week for booster doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine six months after the completion of the two-dose course for those 65 and older, those with some underlying conditions and those who work in high-risk environments. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommended a booster shot for these groups of people.
R. Kelly, the R&B superstar who has long been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse, was found guilty in New York on Monday on all counts in a high profile sex-trafficking case, capping a trial that featured hours of graphic testimony from his accusers.
Kelly, who has been in custody for much of the time since he was formally charged in 2019, was convicted on one count of racketeering and eight counts of violating the Mann Act, the law that bars transporting people across state lines “for any immoral purpose.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats on Monday that passage of the $550 billion infrastructure bill must not wait for President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar safety net bill, saying the larger package is not yet ready for a vote.
In a private caucus meeting, Pelosi, D-Calif., said the party must “make difficult choices,” because the dynamics have changed and Democrats have not yet agreed to a spending level, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
The Senate failed on Monday to pass a key procedural vote to advance the House-passed short-term government funding bill as the deadline to avert a shutdown looms at the end of the week.
The Senate voted 48 to 50 on the procedural motion, with Republicans opposing the stopgap measure because it included an extension of a debt ceiling. Republicans said they were unwilling to support the debt limit increase and are demanding that Democrats take the political heat for the vote.
Everybody is suited up down in Washington, D.C. for The Most Important Week in Joe Biden’s Life or at Least His Presidency or Maybe Just His Next 10 Days. The drumbeat from the elite political press that the events this week are primarily a matter of Democratic Party infighting is, as you might expect, more than a little bunkum. Certainly, the wrangling between progressive and conservative Democrats is a contributing factor to the general tangle, but there is one, massive block of dark granite at the center of everything, and this story from NBC News makes, a bit inadvertently, the only point that matters. It concerns the fact that the Democratic factions in the House seem to have come to an agreement on voting-rights legislation to bring forward.
President Joe Biden talked with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House Sunday after traveling on Marine One back from a weekend trip to Camp David, sharing his plans to get a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot and his thoughts on the ongoing negotiations for the infrastructure bill.
CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta introduced the video of the president, saying that this would be “a major week for the trillion dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill, the larger $3.5 trillion spending package,” as Biden hopes negotiations can successfully avoid a government shutdown.
President Joe Biden generally does not expect to assert executive privilege to shield Trump-era records from being seen by a congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection attempt, the White House said on Friday.
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Rep. Liz Cheney says she was wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past, a stand that once split her family.
Cheney, R-Wyo., a fierce critic of fellow Republican Donald Trump, also tells CBS News’ “60 Minutes” that she views her reelection campaign as the most important House race in the nation as forces aligned with the former president try to unseat her. She voted to impeach Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Sunday said she may not bring the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill to the House floor on Monday as previously planned, saying she’d rather wait to ensure it has all of the votes needed after fellow Democrats continued to tie demands to its passage.
“I’ll never bring a bill to the floor that doesn’t have the votes,” she told ABC News “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “You cannot choose the date, you have to go when you have the votes, in a reasonable time, and we will.”
National Public Radio relayed more shocking Covid news on Monday: “In 2020, for the first time in recorded history, more people died in Alabama than were born in the state.” The pandemic has shrunk the red state. Yet local Republican leaders still oppose mask and vaccine mandates, leaving the Trump outpost exposed to more fatalities.
But like so many news outlets, NPR missed the real story. The pile of Alabama deaths continue to mount not simply because of Covid. But because so many people in the Trump-friendly state have been brainwashed by bad-faith partisan actors and they refuse to get inoculated. Anti-science Republicans seem determined to spread the virus among their own voters, which seems inconceivable.
Millions of conservative Americans are being brainwashed about the pandemic, and thousands are killing themselves in the process. Yet the media downplay the huge story, framing it simply as “vaccine hesitancy.”
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Yeah, there’s a whole lot of shit that needs to get done, but right now Democrats should be freaking the fuck out over voting rights. They should be losing their fucking minds and screaming nonstop on every outlet they can find. Get your gravest, most serious senators, like Leahy or Bennett or Shaheen, and have them shitting themselves at Jake Tapper’s scowl or George Stephanopoulos’s hair. Because if we don’t have a freak out now, then any freak out later will be useless.
Democratic House and Senate leaders on Thursday announced they and the White House have reached agreement on a “framework” that will pay for most, if not all, of the massive $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill — a move meant to mitigate concerns from moderate and centrist Democrats opposed to the hefty price tag.
But the leaders provided very little details on the framework a day after President Joe Biden met with Democratic leaders, moderates and progressives at the White House in an effort to save his agenda from Democratic infighting.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also did not provide a clear outline about when the reconciliation bill will be ready for a vote.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot issued its first subpoenas Thursday to four former senior Trump administration officials, including former President Donald Trump‘s longest-serving aide and last chief of staff.
The committee is seeking documents and depositions from Dan Scavino — Trump’s caddy-turned-social media guru and senior White House aide — former chief of staff Mark Meadows, conservative activist Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, who was the chief of staff for the acting defense secretary on Jan. 6.
Maricopa County, Arizona, said Thursday that a draft report from a company in a contentious, partisan review of November’s election has confirmed the winners.
The “draft report from Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” Maricopa County tweeted Thursday night.
Cyber Ninjas is the Florida-based cybersecurity company leading an effort by Republicans to audit the 2020 presidential election in the Arizona.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director early Friday endorsed recommendations for a third dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine for certain at-risk groups, clearing the way for millions of Americans to get a booster.
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky signed off on the recommendations for a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after advisers on Thursday approved them.
She endorsed the recommendations but went further — also recommending a third dose for workers in high-risk settings and those in institutional settings.
House Democrats on Tuesday released a new package of measures to limit presidential power, a rebuke of former President Donald Trump and designed with the Biden White House to prevent future presidents from breaking traditional ethics and governing norms.
“Donald Trump made this legislation a necessity, but this is bigger than any one president,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said in a news conference. “It’s about our values, our ideals and our future.”
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol could issue its first subpoenas in the coming days, possibly targeting several former high-level aides to President Donald Trump for records and information, sources tell ABC News.
Former GOP congressman and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and White House aides Dan Scavino and Stephen Miller are among those of interest to the committee, sources familiar with the matter have told ABC News.
Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who, like the other aides, remains close to the former president, could also be subpoenaed by the panel, sources said.
President Joe Biden successfully brought his party together to unilaterally pass the American Rescue Plan, their $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, earlier this year.
Now, he must reconcile their differences on an even more ambitious and controversial domestic spending measure, the Build Back Better Act, which seeks to address health care, child care, the changing climate, education, housing and more.
With Democrats beset by divisions in both the House and Senate and Republicans plotting how to scuttle the massive proposal with separate demands over the debt limit, Biden’s agenda faces a do-or-die moment on Capitol Hill.
The US Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday it would grant emergency use authorization for a booster dose of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in people 65 and older, people at high risk of severe disease and people whose jobs put them at risk of infection.
Officials working for then-President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign were aware that the voting machine claims being pushed by pro-Trump attorneys were baseless, court documents obtained by The New York Times show.
President Biden called on world leaders to work together on a range of global issues during his debut address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Mr. Biden said the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the end of “a period of relentless war” and started “a new era of relentless diplomacy.”
A rush of new and shocking behind-the-scenes disclosures about how then-President Donald Trump sought to thwart the Constitution and the will of voters makes a clear case that America came closer to a coup earlier this year than previously known.
The House voted along party lines to pass a short-term funding bill to avert a government shutdown next week.
The final vote was 220-211.
The bill would fund the government through Dec. 3 and it also includes billions in emergency disaster relief and aid for Afghan evacuees. It also suspends the debt limit through December 2022.
Pfizer and BioNTech said Monday that the companies’ two-dose Covid-19 vaccine was safe and showed a “robust” antibody response in children ages 5 to 11.
Based on data collected in a trial that included more than 2,000 children, Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, said in a press release that the vaccine was “safe, well tolerated, and showed robust neutralizing antibody responses” for this age group. No Covid vaccines have yet been authorized or approved for use in childrenunder 12.
A San Antonio doctor who said he performed an abortion in defiance of a new Texas law all but dared supporters of the state’s near-total ban on the procedure to try making an early example of him by filing a lawsuit — and by Monday, two people obliged.
Former attorneys in Arkansas and Illinois filed separate state lawsuits Monday against Dr. Alan Braid, who in a weekend Washington Post opinion column became the first Texas abortion provider to publicly reveal he violated the law that took effect on Sept. 1.
Two longtime Republican operatives have been charged with illegally contributing to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign by funneling cash from a Russian national.
According to a press release put out by the DOJ Monday, the operatives — Jesse Benton and Doug Wead — have been indicted on conspiracy to solicit and cause an illegal campaign contribution by a foreign national, effect a conduit contribution and cause false records to be filed with the Federal Election Commission, among other offenses. The newly unsealed indictment from the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. accused Benton and Wead of having “conspired together to solicit a political contribution from a Russian foreign national.”
COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did — approximately 675,000.
The U.S. population a century ago was just one-third of what it is today, meaning the flu cut a much bigger, more lethal swath through the country. But the COVID-19 crisis is by any measure a colossal tragedy in its own right, especially given the incredible advances in scientific knowledge since then and the failure to take maximum advantage of the vaccines available this time.
“Big pockets of American society — and, worse, their leaders — have thrown this away,” medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan said of the opportunity to vaccinate everyone eligible by now.
The stakes on what the new conservative majority might do to existing law and precedent got immeasurably higher over the weekend. In the middle of the very strange We Are Not Hacks Over America Tour that has featured both Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Justice Clarence Thomas protesting far too much about what a clear and objective institution the Supreme Court is, an amicus brief in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization landed in the news with a deafening thud, and with an impact that blew away a giant sequoia of conservative fig leafs that had been accumulating for four decades.
The most anticipated visit by right-wing activists to the nation’s capital since a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 ended with a whimper Saturday, as demonstrators supporting the rioters found themselves far outnumbered by police, journalists and counterprotesters.
Although the protesters returned to the scene of a historically grievous attack on American democracy, it was immediately obvious that much had changed. The Capitol grounds — where poorly prepared police fought a losing, hand-to-hand battle against President Donald Trump’s supporters just over eight months ago — were secured Saturday with metal fences and hundreds of officers. The halls of Congress were all but deserted. No president, or former president, delivered a bellicose speech urging that his election loss be overturned.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said Sunday that there is a “possibility” the vote on a bipartisan infrastructure package will be delayed, despite Democratic House leaders promising moderate members a vote by September 27.
A Texas doctor is publicly revealing that he violated a state law that bans abortions after six weeks and says he is inviting legal challenges under the controversial law, which has so far withstood efforts by pro-abortion rights supporters to block it.
Democrats’ push to give young undocumented Dreamers a path to citizenship violates Senate rules, according to the Senate’s parliamentarian, who dealt yet another blow on Sunday to long-stalled immigration reform efforts in Congress.
“Changing the law to clear the way to [legal permanent resident] status is tremendous and enduring policy change that dwarfs its budgetary impact,” Elizabeth MacDonough wrote in her memo to lawmakers.
Top Senate Democrats had argued that certain immigration provisions directly affect the federal budget, and therefore could be included in the budget reconciliation process ― the legislative maneuver that will allow the party to pass President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda with a simple majority.
Amid breathless reports of a political “free fall” and reeling from the White House’s “summer from hell,” the Beltway press has leaned into the idea that Joe Biden’s presidency is unraveling — that his approval rating is in a state of collapse.
Except it’s not true. Instead, it’s the media falling in love with their favorite Dems In Disarray storyline. The same media that shrugged at Trump’s chronically awful approval rating.
In a typical, overheated dispatch, a CNBC report recently announced, “Biden’s Approval Ratings Have Plummeted, and That Could Spell trouble for Democrats in Congress.” First off, the idea that Biden’s approval rating in September 2021, is going to impact the outcome of November 2022, midterms makes no sense. Secondly, Biden’s approval rating has fallen a grand total of four points in the past month, according to the polling average tabulated at FiveThirtyEight. So much for the “plummet.”
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I get the uproar over Bob Woodward’s latest luridly compelling book on the administration of Donald Trump. Woodward is like a filthy tabloid version of Robert Caro, and he always squeezes every anecdote for maximum salaciousness. So in his telling, Gen. Mike Milley, Trump’s (and now Biden’s) Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so alarmed at Trump’s behavior before the election and after the January 6 riot that he felt compelled to call his counterpart in China and say, more or less, “Don’t listen to this president. We’re not going to attack you.”
What you’re hearing mostly about Milley’s two phone calls is that he was “treasonous,” that he should be “court martialed,” and that he should face “immediate dismissal” for undermining civilian leadership of the military. On the other side, Milley himself has defended what he did as proper and that it was “within the duties and responsibilities” of his position to tell other countries that the United States is not going to war with them. He’s backed by other generals and President Biden. Chances are that this is really a big nothing sandwich that Woodward oversold and overhyped, as is his way.
On the verge of a new term in which the Supreme Court will wade back into the culture wars, Justice Clarence Thomas reflected Thursday on the role of the judiciary and warned against judges weighing in on controversial issues that he said are better left to other areas of government.
Fencing outside the U.S. Capitol was reinstalled late Wednesday ahead of the “Justice for J6” rally this weekend.
“Justice for J6” is being billed by organizers as a protest for defendants who are being detained by the government in connection to the January insurrection at the Capitol. The fencing is just the latest security measure for a rally that has some in law enforcement on high alert.
Federal law enforcement agencies have become concerned that far-right extremists, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys could come to Washington for the protest.
The Food and Drug Administration’s independent advisory committee will convene in open session Friday to review the latest data submitted by Pfizer and discuss whether a booster dose is safe enough for widespread use and whether it’s necessary and effective at improving protection levels against COVID-19.
Their vote will be non-binding — the FDA is not required to follow the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee’s (VRBPAC) recommendations — but they generally do so.
Rep. Anthony Gonzalez — one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 riot on the Capitol — will not seek re-election to his northern Ohio seat in 2022.
“Since entering politics, I have always said that I will do this job for as long as the voters will have me and it still works for my family,” Gonzalez said in a statement he tweeted late Thursday. “As Elizabeth and I consider the realities of continuing in public service while juggling the increasing responsibilities of being parents to our two beautiful children, it is clear that the best path for our family is to not seek re-election next fall.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took steps to prevent then-President Donald Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency, according to a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa obtained by NBC News.
Their book, “Peril,” said that in the days before the 2020 election, Milley also acted to prevent a potential conflict with China. The book said Milley received intelligence that Chinese officials believed the U.S. was getting ready to attack them. To defuse tensions, Milley called the head of China’s military, Gen. Li Zuocheng, and told him the “American government is stable” and “we are not going to attack.”
COVID-19 deaths and cases in the U.S. have climbed back to levels not seen since last winter, erasing months of progress and potentially bolstering President Joe Biden’s argument for his sweeping new vaccination requirements.
The cases — driven by the delta variant combined with resistance among some Americans to getting the vaccine — are concentrated mostly in the South.
The Department of Justice asked a federal judge on Tuesday to immediately block Texas’ restrictive ban on abortions past six weeks of pregnancy while the case makes its way through the court system.
The Justice Department asked the judge to issue a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction, both of which would put the law on hold and prohibit enforcement until the case is resolved.
“Texas devised an unprecedented scheme that seeks to deny women and providers the ability to challenge S.B. 8 in federal court. This attempt to shield a plainly unconstitutional law from review cannot stand,” the agency said in a brief filed late Tuesday. “This relief is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of women in Texas and the sovereign interest of the United States.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has prevailed in the state’s recall election, projections show, securing a victory in the biggest fight of his political career thus far and protecting the Democratic Party from a perilous ripple effect.
In a speech to supporters Tuesday night, Newsom thanked Californians for rejecting the recall attempt.
“I want to focus on what we said yes to as a state,” Newsom said of the election’s results. “We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear of fake fraud or voter suppression. We said yes to women’s fundamental, constitutional right to decide for herself what she does with her body and her fate and future. We said yes to diversity. We said yes to inclusion.”
In his first appearance on Capitol Hill since the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken faced more than five hours of questions from members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
He faces more questions from the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
Here are some key takeaways from Monday’s hearing in the House.
Covid-19 infections have risen “exponentially” among children in the US since July, according to data published Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
Senate Democrats are proposing new legislation to overhaul voting laws after months of discussions to get all 50 of their members behind a single bill, allowing their caucus to speak with one voice on the issue even though it stands virtually no chance of becoming law.
With polls now showing Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom ahead by double-digit margins on the eve of California’s much-hyped recall election, voters here seem ready to reject the laissez-faire COVID-19 policies that have failed to contain huge summer surges in Republican-led states such as Florida — and vindicate the Golden State’s more careful approach to the hypercontagious Delta variant.
Their verdict could have national implications for both Democrats and Republicans heading into the 2022 midterm elections.
onsidering that she owes her present (lifetime) position to a process that McConnell personally corrupted, that she is the product of an utterly politicized vetting process, and that she was appointed by the most singularly corrupt president in the history of the republic, I’d say that Barrett is a little bit tardy in her obviously sincere concern for the Court’s credibility. After all, she is merely the most recent, high-profile product of a federal judicial system that McConnell and the conservative intellectual chop-shops have turned into something approximately as non-partisan as McConnell’s own frontal lobes. She’s ascended to her current eminence under a dark and lucky star. She should be grateful for that and stop talking obvious nonsense of which she is a walking refutation.
Like other Republican governors around the country, Tate Reeves of Mississippi reacted angrily to the coronavirus vaccine mandates President Biden imposed on private businesses. Declaring the move “terrifying,” he wrote on Twitter: “This is still America, and we still believe in freedom from tyrants.”
There is a deep inconsistency in that argument. Mississippi has some of the strictest vaccine mandates in the nation, which have not drawn opposition from most of its elected officials. Not only does it require children to be vaccinated against measles, mumps and seven other diseases to attend school, but it goes a step further than most states by barring parents from claiming “religious, philosophical or conscientious” exemptions.
There are still two days to go before California’s gubernatorial recall election, but the current governor’s team and his leading opponent, Larry Elder, have each already indicated they’re ready for legal challenges.
In a sit-down interview with ABC News’ Zohreen Shah on Saturday, Elder was asked repeatedly if he would accept the results of Tuesday’s election, but he avoided answering, suggesting that as long as the governor is recalled, the election is legitimate.
“So many people are going to vote to have [Newsom] recalled, I’m not worried about fraud,” he said.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., reiterated his call on Sunday for a strategic pause on the $3.5 trillion budget resolution, while Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., doubled down on the need to pass both the bipartisan infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills.
“The urgency — I can’t understand why we can’t take time to deliberate on this and work,” Manchin told ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Disciplinary action has been recommended for six U.S. Capitol Police officers following an internal investigation into the deadly Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol, the U.S. Capitol Police said.
An investigation by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) found three cases of unbecoming conduct, one case of failure to comply with directives, one case of improper remarks, and one case of improper dissemination of information related to the attack, the Capitol Police announced Saturday.
Delivering this Sunday’s morning update like a disappointed dad, Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd conveyed distressing news about how America is split down the middle over Covid, causing cultural and political fissures.
“The U.S. enters this Labor Day weekend suffering from two viruses: Covid and polarization,” the host lamented. “Covid has become an MRI of America’s soul. Who would have imagined that masks — wearing or refusing them — would become such a political statement?”
This week’s MTP episode was built around the “divided” theme, with Covid being a prism used to view it. “It is not an exaggeration to say that we are more divided than at any time perhaps since the 1960s, and frankly, maybe since the Civil War,” Todd announced.
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9/11 hates these years the most. Every half-decade, the annual commemoration is amped up, as if some magic exists in numbers that end in 5 or 0. Every time, the same speeches, the same images, the same patriotic fervor in some places, the same performative sense of loss in others, the same, the same. The only part she feels still has any power is the reading of names. It has an incantatory quality, like a Buddhist prayer, with the timed striking of a sonorous bell. She feels something then. 9/11 is accustomed to feeling nothing anymore. She has been used and brutalized and caressed and beaten and loved and raped and paraded on high and dragged through the streets.
