COVID-19 deaths and cases are on the rise again globally in a dispiriting setback that is triggering another round of restrictions and dampening hopes for a return to normal life.
The World Health Organization reported Wednesday that deaths climbed last week after nine straight weeks of decline. It recorded more than 55,000 lives lost, a 3% increase from the week before.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) reportedly called out Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to his face on Jan. 6 as the insurrection unfolded and lawmakers were forced to flee as supporters of then-President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol.
“You fucking did this,” she told him, according to an upcoming book, “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” by Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker.
The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the book in advance of its release next week.
In it, Gen. Mark Milley ― who is chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ― recounted a conversation with Cheney the day after the insurrection.
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was deeply worried that then-President Donald Trump would refuse to leave the White House and warned colleagues he was afraid the man would try to use the military to stay in office, according to book excerpts published Wednesday.
Milley, the nation’s top military officer, also compared Trump’s actions to the rise of Adolf Hitler, saying he viewed the president as a “classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose” after Democratic rival Joe Biden won the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes, CNN and The Washington Post reported.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “The gospel of the Führer.”
Most eligible families in the U.S. will get their first monthly payments of the expanded child tax credit Thursday.
The payments, which were included in the American Rescue Plan, change an existing tax credit by expanding the eligibility pool and increasing the money families get. Under the expanded credit, the IRS, also for the first time, offers the option to receive the payments monthly, rather than in a lump sum as a tax refund.
The expanded payments are expected to dramatically decrease the number of children living in poverty; the White House estimates that child poverty could be reduced by as much as 50 percent.
More than 50 Democrats flew to Washington DC on Monday, in a move intended to paralyse the state’s House of Representatives ahead of the vote.
At least two-thirds of the chamber’s 150 members must be present for a vote.
On Tuesday, Republican Governor Greg Abbott threatened the missing politicians with arrest.
He said they would be detained “as soon as they come back” to Texas.
For the first time in Senate history, Democrats on Wednesday will move toward ending the federal prohibition on cannabis, removing it from the federal list of controlled substances. It’s a move sponsors hope will also end the disproportionate harm that has been done to communities of color.
To date, some 18 states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana and 37 states, along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, now allow the medical use of the drug.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday decried Republican efforts to limit ballot access across the country as a “21st century Jim Crow assault,” while warning Americans that the GOP push to restrict voting and “selfish” challenge of the 2020 election results were “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
“There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are as Americans,” Biden said at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Senate Democratic leaders announced an agreement Tuesday evening to advance a $3.5 trillion spending plan to finance a major expansion of the economic safety net.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the $3.5 trillion would be in addition to the $579 billion in new spending in the bipartisan infrastructure agreement.
He said the deal would include a “robust expansion of Medicare” that would include new benefits like dental, vision and hearing coverage, along with major funding for clean energy. “If we pass this, this is the most profound change to help American families in generations,” he said.
Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell and her legal team clashed repeatedly with a federal judge Monday during a hearing to determine if sanctions are warranted against her and other attorneys who filed a lawsuit in Michigan based on false claims of election fraud in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the City of Detroit have requested that Federal Judge Linda V. Parker sanction Powell, attorney Lin Wood, and other members of the legal team that were involved in the efforts to have Michigan’s presidential election returns decertified due to unsubstantiated claims of voting irregularities.
U.S. health officials, after meeting with vaccine maker Pfizer, reiterated on Monday that Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need to get a booster shot, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department said.
Pfizer said last week it planned to ask U.S. regulators to authorize a booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine, based on evidence of greater risk of infection six months after inoculation and the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant.
HHS officials had a briefing from Pfizer on Monday regarding their latest, preliminary data on vaccinations and will continue to discuss when and if booster shots will be needed in the future, the spokesperson said.
Democratic lawmakers from Texas declared Monday night that they were “determined to kill this bill” after they left the state earlier in the day to prevent a vote in the state Legislature on Republican election bills.
By leaving the state, lawmakers are preventing a quorum during the special legislative session that is being held because they scuttled the May legislative session — also by leaving — to block a sweeping elections bill.
Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization chief financial officer indicted on tax fraud charges this month, has quietly been removed from top positions at more than two dozen Trump subsidiaries, NBC News has confirmed.
Weisselberg, 73, was removed from positions with at least 28 Trump subsidiaries, according to filings with the Florida State Department that were first reported Monday by The Wall Street Journal.
A person familiar with the matter told NBC News that the Trump Organization took a “prudent corporate governance approach” for the time being to avoid any potential issues in Florida but added that Weisselberg’s overall role with the Trump Organization remains unchanged.
I am not a lawyer, and I play one here in the shebeen only occasionally, but there is one thing about the law that I know. If you are an attorney before the bar, representing your client, it is far better to piss off the judge than to piss off the court reporter, and this is true even if you’ve already pissed off the judge from hell until breakfast.
I spent a lot of Monday midday sitting in on the hearing in a federal court in Michigan held to consider professional sanctions against the Kraken Krewe, the crack legal team assembled by the former president*’s campaign to overturn the election results in that state. Judge Linda Parker was already on her last nerve with the Krewe’s nonsense when their lawyer, Donald Campbell, interrupted the closing remarks of David Fink, who was there representing the city of Detroit—and, by extension, anyone with a functional cerebral cortex. Fink just had pointed out that all of the insane lawsuits brought by the Trump forces played a part in the drama that ended up in the Capitol on January 6. Campbell interrupted Fink, and the court reporter had had enough.
Texas Republicans advanced bills Sunday that would make voting harder in a state that already has some of the nation’s toughest restrictions after hundreds spoke against the proposals — with some waiting to speak for almost 24 hours.
Republicans made clear they intended to advance a new election bill — which would prohibit 24-hour polling places, ban drop boxes and stop drive-thru voting — this weekend, with a first major vote on the proposals expected this week. That timeline is pushing some Democratic lawmakers toward calling for a second walkout to again stop the restrictions from moving forward like they did in May when they broke quorum.
A tip from a housekeeper led police to uncover a large arsenal of weapons at a hotel in downtown Denver about a block from Coors Field, where Major League Baseball‘s All-Star Game is set to be played on Tuesday.
Three men and a woman were arrested and 16 long guns, body armor, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and narcotics were seized from two rooms at the Maven Hotel in downtown Denver.
Former President Donald Trump handily won the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday as attendees said they would overwhelmingly like to see him run for another term in the White House in 2024.
The poll, a hypothetical survey asking respondents who they would vote for in the Republican primary if it were held today, saw Trump win 70% of the votes. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) came in second with 21% of the votes. A smattering of other contenders all garnered about 1% each, including Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
Former Vice President Mike Pence received zero percent of the votes.
The nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Sunday he was horrified to see attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference cheering that the U.S. hadn’t reached its vaccination goals.
“It’s horrifying. I mean, they are cheering about someone saying that it’s a good thing for people not to try and save their lives,” Fauci told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“I mean, if you just unpack that for a second, Jake, it’s almost frightening to say, ‘Hey, guess what, we don’t want you to do something to save your life. Yay!’ Everybody starts screaming and clapping. I just don’t get that,” he said. “And I don’t think that anybody who’s thinking clearly can get that.”
Spinning his way through an incoherent, headline-grabbing allegation that the U.S. Intelligence Community has been “spying” on him and releasing his emails to journalists in an effort to get his show cancelled, Tucker Carlson detailed this week how “the Biden administration” had big plans to take him down.
Conceding that he’s been in contact with US-based Kremlin intermediaries while trying to secure an interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Carlson on Wednesday claimed the National Security Agency found out about that, captured his emails and planned to leak them to journalists, “which they did.” But why would anybody care that Carlson was trying to secure a Putin interview? In Carlson’s telling, the government was going to try, “to paint me as a disloyal American” a Russian operative, “a stooge of the Kremlin, a traitor,” for seeking the interview.
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun
When I was applying for jobs in academia years ago, I figured that, depending where I was applying, my whiteness and maleness would work against me or in my favor. It never occurred to me to resent the idea that I might lose out to an equally qualified non-white person or a woman because I believe that diversity in education is an imperative to maybe, perhaps one day overcoming or at least ameliorating the effects of racism and sexism. On more than one occasion, some other white guy would ask me if I was upset that I might lose out on a dream job because of affirmative action or diversity hiring.
Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Thursday that the Democratic National Committee is investing an additional $25 million in its voting rights initiative, underscoring the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to a cause that has become a rallying cry for the party.
“This campaign is grounded in the firm belief that everyone’s vote matters — that your vote matters,” Harris said, flanked by two American flags.
President Biden said the withdrawal from Afghanistan of U.S troops after 20 years of war will conclude on August 31, ahead of the September 11 deadline he announced in mid-April.
“We are ending the nation’s longest war,” the president said in remarks at the White House Thursday.
At the time he announced the September deadline, about 3,500 troops remained. Earlier this week, the Pentagon said that the withdrawal was 90% complete. It proceeded quickly for a reason.
People who are fully vaccinated do not need Covid-19 boosters, health and drug officials said Thursday.
“We are prepared for booster doses if and when the science demonstrates that they are needed,” the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a joint statement.
The agencies said those who are vaccinated are protected from variants, including the surging delta variant. But they urged Americans 12 and older who have not yet been vaccinated to get their shots.
The deadly building collapse in South Florida is a searing reminder that fragile infrastructure can have tragic public health consequences.
Although exceptions can and have occurred, 72 hours is considered the essential rescue window for people trapped in rubble following the collapse of a building. After that, without an ongoing source of oxygen and water, especially in the presence of severe injuries, survival becomes increasingly unlikely. In the case of last Thursday’s early morning collapse of the 13-story Champlain Towers South condo in Surfside, Fla., that deadline came and passed at 1:30 a.m. last Sunday. Hope now rapidly dims for the 126 people still unaccounted for.
In a dig at former president Donald Trump, Biden said, “We’re not going to have 40 weeks of ‘This is infrastructure.’ ”
Officials announced Wednesday evening that the search and rescue efforts at the collapsed Miami Beach-area condo building would shift to a recovery operation, signaling the formal end of the search for survivors.
With 86 people still unaccounted for, crews have not found anyone alive since shortly after half of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, crumbled into a pile of rubble in less than a minute early June 24.
For two weeks, officials called the grueling, nearly-nonstop dig a search and rescue mission.
Lawyers, reporters and other people who still have access to social media went to town Wednesday on former President Donald Trump’s moonshot lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google.
Trump announced he’s seeking class-action lawsuits against the tech giants for what he claims is an infringement of his First Amendment rights. He says the companies violated his right to freedom of speech by disabling his social media accounts in January.
Trump was banned from Twitter and suspended from YouTube and Facebook for violating each of the platforms’ policies after he incited his supporters to attempt a violent overthrow of the government on Jan. 6.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday called for a renewed urgency to get more Americans vaccinated against Covid-19as a variant of the virus is contributing to case surges in parts of the country.
“We can’t get complacent now,” Biden said. “You can do this. Let’s finish the job.”
In a brief speech at the White House, Biden said that his administration would shift focus from mass vaccination sites to a smaller, more community-based approach to try to reach those still holding out on getting the shots.
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where if you go down in the flood, it’s going to be your fault.
We begin in the state of Washington, where a state representative did his Dennis The Peasant routine in about the foulest way you can. From the Washington Post:
Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh has decried “vaccine segregation” and likenedhis state’s lottery encouraging immunization against the coronavirus to the “The Hunger Games.” Then, last weekend, the Republican lawmaker wore a yellow Star of David. “It’s an echo from history,” Walsh wrote of the star in the comments below a live stream of his talk Saturday in Lacey, Wash. “ … In the current context, we’re all Jews.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced Republican Rep. Liz Cheney will serve on the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“We are very honored and proud she has agreed to serve on the committee,” Pelosi said Thursday.
At her press conference on Capitol Hill, Pelosi also announced House Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., will serve as the chair of the committee, which was widely expected.
One week after a 12-story residential building partially collapsed in South Florida‘s Miami-Dade County, at least 18 people have been confirmed deadwhile 145 others remain unaccounted for, officials said.
The massive search and rescue operation, now in its eighth day, was halted for much of Thursday due to structural concerns, as officials worried about the remaining condo building also collapsing. Crews continue to carefully comb through the pancaked pile of debris in hopes of finding survivors. The partial collapse occurred around 1:15 a.m. on June 24 at the Champlain Towers South condominium in the small, beachside town of Surfside, about 6 miles north of Miami Beach. Approximately 55 of the oceanfront complex’s 136 units were destroyed, according to Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Raide Jadallah.
The Supreme Court dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act on Thursday, ruling in favor of Republicans that Arizona can maintain restrictions that critics say discriminate against nonwhite voters.
The ruling was a 6-3 vote and written by Justice Samuel Alito. Alito’s opinion was joined by the five other conservative justices. Justice Elena Kagan penned a dissent and was joined by the other two liberal justices.
The ruling will have sweeping implications, opening the door for similar restrictions in other states by saying they are acceptable under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. However, the ruling stopped short of fully gutting Section 2.
The Trump Organization, the real estate business that catapulted Donald J. Trump to tabloid fame, television riches and ultimately the White House, was charged Thursday with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from the authorities.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which has been conducting the investigation alongside the New York attorney general, also accused a top executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that should have been reported as income. Mr. Weisselberg, Mr. Trump’s long-serving and trusted chief financial officer, faced grand larceny, tax fraud and other charges.
President Joe Biden will visit Surfside, Fla., on Thursday following the collapse of a condo building in the coastal suburb, a departure from the White House’s position a day earlier that the president had no immediate plans to visit the site of the disaster.
The president told reporters of his plans to visit South Florida “hopefully as early as Thursday” as he left the White House on Tuesday to head to Wisconsin. The White House later confirmed that the president will travel to Surfside with the first lady on Thursday.
Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense for Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George W. Bush, who presided over America’s Cold War strategies in the 1970s and, in the new world of terrorism decades later, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Tuesday at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 88.
The cause was multiple myeloma, said Keith Urbahn, a spokesman for the family.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the indecent assault conviction of Bill Cosby on Wednesday and ordered his release from prison after finding that he was denied protection against self-incrimination.
The court said that a prosecutor’s decision not to charge Cosby, 83, in an earlier case opened the door for him to speak freely in a lawsuit against him, thinking he would not incriminate himself criminally. A second prosecutor later used the lawsuit testimony in a criminal trial, and that testimony was key in his conviction years later.
Charges are expected to be unsealed Thursday against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, related to a criminal tax investigation in connection with an array of perks and benefits awarded to employees.
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A new report indicates that the Trump Organization, as well as its chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg are about to be charged with tax-related crimes.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Manhattan district attorney’s office will charge Weisselberg and the Trump Organization at large on Thursday. This corroborates previous reports suggesting criminal charges would be leveled against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization by the end of this week.
Read the rest of the story at Mediaite
If Donald Trump is to hold his “Save America” rally in Alabama on Fourth of July weekend, he’ll need to find a different venue. Citing “partisan” concerns, Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile has nixed the event, which was to be held on Saturday. The U.S.S. Alabama memorial and museum is docked in Mobile Bay.
“After the request was made, then there was contact with the Republican Party,” park commissioner Bill Tunnell told NBC 15 News. “They contacted us and then it became apparent that it was going to be a partisan political event, rather than just a patriotic event planned for that evening.”
Trump is holding a series of “Save America” rallies, having staged the first one on Saturday in Ohio. If that event is any indication, these rallies will feature Trump playing his greatest hits, including, “Sleepy Joe,” “Lock Her Up!” and “Witch Hunt!”
The House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to remove statues and busts of Confederate leaders, white supremacists and supporters of slavery from the Capitol. Only Republicans voted against the measure, which passed 285 to 120.
Even though opposition to the bill came from within their own party, Republicans took it as an opportunity to attack Democrats in speeches that conveniently skipped over decades of American political history and bashed efforts to educate students about racism.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson made an explosive claim on his show Monday night: That he had learned through a whistleblower that the National Security Agency is spying on him and planning to leak his communications in a bid to take him off the air.
A letter sent in April to residents of the Miami Beach-area condo that collapsed last week said the building’s “concrete deterioration is accelerating” and warned that damage “would begin to multiply exponentially.”
The letter, sent by Champlain Towers South Board President Jean Wodnicki, explained to residents why a renovation that had originally been estimated to cost about $9 million had jumped to $16 million in about three years.
Engineering consultant Frank Morabito had been hired in 2018 to get a start on a 40-year recertification process, as is required under the Miami-Dade County building code. His report indicated that there was “abundant cracking” and crumbling in the underground parking garage of the 12-story building.
“It is almost as if the agency expects the Court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist,” Boasberg wrote.
A transgender man from Virginia has won a years-long legal battle against his former high school over its refusal to let him use boys bathrooms when he was a student.
The U.S. Supreme Court Monday rejected the Gloucester County School Board’s appeal of a lower court decision that found its transgender bathroom ban is unconstitutional.
The decision is a major victory for former student Gavin Grimm and transgender advocates nationwide.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) introduced legislation Monday to establish a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“January 6th was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history. It is imperative that we establish the truth of that day and ensure such an attack cannot again happen,” Pelosi said in a statement. “The Select Committee will investigate and report upon the facts and causes of the attack and report recommendations for preventing any future assault.”
Officials assured residents of the Miami Beach-area condo that collapsed last week that their building was safe, despite a report that strongly indicated otherwise, while also disregarding residents’ concerns that nearby construction might compromise the stability of the beachside high-rise.
The revelations come as the official death toll in the collapse climbed to 11 and the number of unaccounted for only fell to 150 on Monday.
Champlain Towers South resident Susana Alvarez repeated to NBC News that Surfside town officials told residents in a 2018 meeting “that the building was not in bad shape.”
This is the upside of Garland’s “institutionalism” that has driven so many of his progressive supporters so batty. He may believe that the ethics of his job require him to, say, fight the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, or even defend the previous administration* against any lawsuit emanating from the January 6 insurrection. But he also knows that ensuring the voting rights of minority citizens is the reason we have a Justice Department in the first place, and that the DOJ’s always had obligations in that particular fight, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to our present day, when the work of the past five decades is under revanchist assault from state legislators who simply don’t give a damn about the country’s founding ideals.
The road to passing the bipartisan infrastructure deal negotiated by senators and agreed to by the White House this week is already proving to be a rough one.
On Saturday, President Joe Biden issued a statement seeking to walk back his perceived ultimatum that his support for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal was dependent on his American Families Plan also reaching his desk through reconciliation.
“I indicated that I would refuse to sign the infrastructure bill if it was sent to me without my Families Plan and other priorities, including clean energy. That statement understandably upset some Republicans, who do not see the two plans as linked,” Biden said in a lengthy statement.
The death toll has climbed to nine from the partial collapse of a 12-story condominium building in Surfside, Florida, as a massive search and rescue mission continued into its fourth day on Sunday, officials said.
Four more bodies were recovered overnight from the rubble of the Champlain Towers South condominium that buckled and gave way into a pancaking catastrophe around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday as many residents were asleep, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference Sunday morning. More than 150 people remain unaccounted for.
Earlier this year, Vance convened a grand jury in Manhattan to consider indictments in the investigation. No entity or individual has been charged in the investigations thus far, and it remains possible that no charges will be filed.
U.S. military forces carried out what a Pentagon official called “defensive” airstrikes in Iraq and Syria on Sunday against Iran-backed militia groups that were behind drone attacks on American personnel.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said in a statement that the airstrikes targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one in Iraq. The facilities were used by at least two militias, Kata’ib Hezbollah and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Kirby said.
After yesterday’s 50-50 vote killing the For the People Act because a Republican filibuster prevented it from even being debated, let alone voted on, I was ready to write another piece raging about feckless Democrats and their inability to get things done, even when they have both houses of Congress and the presidency. But every time I thought it through, I came up against one pretty solid wall built by Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia and their declarations that they will not vote to do away with the filibuster, which will affect every bill from now until Republicans take back over the Senate and almost definitely ditch the filibuster when a Republican is president. Sure, sure, we can say that President Joe Biden could try some kind of LBJ-like threats and/or cajoling to get them to change. But that’s not going to happen. Screaming against that wall is kind of useless.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that she will create a House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack after Senate Republicans blocked legislation to create a 9/11-style bipartisan commission last month.
The announcement comes with “great solemnity and sadness,” Pelosi told reporters. Investigators will have “as long as it takes.”
“Again, January 6 was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history,” she said. “It is imperative that we establish the truth of that day and ensure that an attack of that kind cannot happen [again] and that we root out the causes of it all.”
After weeks of talks, a bipartisan group of 10 Senators, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Susan Collins (R-ME), have come to an agreement about a historic infrastructure package. In a press conference outside the White House, President Joe Biden announced that there were “serious compromises on both ends” and that he had signed on to this new package.
This comes after Biden has faced pressure from many in his own party for letting the infrastructure talks “drag on.”
On Thursday, CNN reported that an upcoming book on former President Donald Trump by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender alleges he demanded that military and law enforcement groups “crack skulls” during efforts to control the George Floyd protests last summer.
“Titled “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” the book reveals new details about how Trump’s language became increasingly violent during Oval Office meetings as protests in Seattle and Portland began to receive attention from cable new outlets,” reported Zachary Cohen. “The President would highlight videos that showed law enforcement getting physical with protesters and tell his administration he wanted to see more of that behavior, the excerpts show.”
“That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump is quoted as telling officials. “Crack their skulls!” He added that he wanted them to “beat the f**k” out of the civil rights demonstrators — although when military officials and then-Attorney General William Barr pushed back, he said, “Well, shoot them in the leg — or maybe the foot.”
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland backed away on Tuesday from doing a broad review of Justice Department politicization during the Trump administration, noting that the department’s independent inspector general was already investigating related issues, including aggressive leak hunts and attempts to overturn the election.
Democrats and some former Justice Department employees have pressed Mr. Garland to uncover any efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to wield the power of federal law enforcement to advance his personal agenda. Their calls for a full investigation grew louder after recent revelations that Mr. Trump pushed department officials to help him undo his election loss and that prosecutors took aggressive steps to root out leakers.
A Florida man who went into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as part of a group of Oath Keepers pleaded guilty on Wednesday in a large criminal conspiracy involving more than a dozen other defendants charged in connection with the Capitol attack.
Graydon Young is the first Oath Keeper charged in the large conspiracy to enter a public guilty plea. Judge Amit P. Mehta accepted Young’s guilty plea at a hearing in D.C. federal court, within eyesight of the U.S. Capitol.
Young pleaded guilty to two charges: one criminal conspiracy charge and a second count of obstruction of an official proceeding. As part of the plea agreement, Young will fully cooperate with the government and testify before a grand jury if called upon.
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Wednesday will lay out his plan for addressing the surge in gun violence that has impacted cities around the country in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The president’s strategy will address five key areas: stemming the flow of firearms used to commit violence; providing law enforcement with more resources; investing in community violence interventions; expanding summer programs and employment opportunities, especially for young people; and helping formerly incarcerated people re-enter their communities.
“I do think it’s important for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read,” Milley said, responding to a request from Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) to comment on the issue. “I want to understand White rage. And I’m White, and I want to understand it.”
Adult deaths from COVID-19 are “at this point entirely preventable” thanks to vaccines, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said during a White House coronavirus briefing on Tuesday.
Why it matters: Deaths from the virus have dramatically decreased since their peak in early 2021, but the U.S. is still currently reporting an average of more than 200 deaths every day, though the numbers could increase as the B.1.617.2 (or Delta) variant of the virus becomes the dominant strain in the country.
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The big picture: NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said the Delta variant, which was first detected in India, is currently the greatest threat to the elimination of the coronavirus in the U.S. because it’s more transmissible and associated with increased disease severity than the most common variant of the virus.
Vice President Harris will preside over the Senate when the chamber votes Tuesday on whether to proceed with a sweeping voting rights bill that is guaranteed to fail to advance, a White House official said.
The Senate will vote Tuesday night on the For the People Act, which would overhaul federal elections and comes as GOP-led state legislatures have passed new laws that make it more difficult for certain groups to vote.
The legislation on Tuesday is guaranteed to fail to get the 60 votes needed to advance past a GOP filibuster, with Republicans united in opposition. Democrats have turned their attention to securing the support of all 50 members of their conference in hopes that it showcases how Republicans are standing in the way of voting rights.
WASHINGTON, June 22 (Reuters) – Former U.S. President Donald Trump may have an unlikely ally to defend him against lawsuits alleging he incited the U.S. Capitol insurrection: President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.
The Biden administration paved the way for that possibility, say constitutional scholars and lawyers in the cases, by arguing in an unrelated defamation case against Trump that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity for their comments while in office – and the right to a defense by government lawyers. Biden’s Justice Department used that rationale in a surprise decision this month to continue defending Trump in a case filed by E. Jean Carroll, who contends Trump raped her 25 years ago and then lied about it while in office, defaming her.
Senate Republicans banded together Tuesday to block a sweeping Democratic bill that would revamp the architecture of American democracy, dealing a grave blow to efforts to federally override dozens of GOP-passed state voting laws.
The test vote, which would have cleared the way to start debate on voting legislation, failed 50-50 on straight party lines — 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to advance legislation in the Senate.
It came after Democrat after Democrat delivered warnings about the dire state of American democracy, blaming former president Donald Trump for undermining its foundations by challenging the 2020 election results, which, in turn, prompted his supporters in numerous state legislatures to pass new laws rolling back ballot access.
“Are we going to let reactionary state legislatures drag us back into the muck of voter suppression? Are we going to let the most dishonest president in history continue to poison our democracy from the inside?” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said before the vote. “Or will we stand up to defend what generations of Americans have organized, marched, fought and died for — the sacred, sacred right to vote?”
New York prosecutors are investigating whether a top Trump Organization executive, Matthew Calamari, received tax-free fringe benefits, as part of their probe into whether former President Donald Trump’s company and its employees illegally avoided paying taxes on such perks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Prosecutors’ interest in Mr. Calamari, once Mr. Trump’s bodyguard, indicates that their probe into the Trump Organization’s alleged practice of providing some employees with cars and apartments extends beyond Allen Weisselberg, the company’s chief financial officer, and his family. Neither Messrs. Calamari and Weisselberg, nor anyone else connected to the company, has been accused of wrongdoing.
WASHINGTON — The FBI director and other senior officials have consistently downplayed the intelligence value of social media posts by Trump supporters prior to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, suggesting the bureau had no “actionable” warning that the Capitol would be targeted by a mob.
But according to a document entered into court records last week, an FBI agent acknowledged in a February investigative report that angry Trump supporters were talking openly in the days before the riot about bringing guns to the Capitol to start a “revolution.”
“A review of open source and social media posts leading up to and during the event indicates that individuals participating on the ‘Stop the Steal,’ rally were angered about the results of the 2020 presidential election and felt that Joseph Biden had unlawfully been declared ‘President-Elect,'” said the report by FBI Special Agent Patricia Norden. “Users in multiple online groups and platforms discussed traveling to the Capitol armed or making plans to start a ‘revolution’ on that day.”
The problem with running a successful freak show is that your customers continually ask for more, and you end up slouching toward human sacrifice or gluing horns onto the heads of ponies and calling them unicorns. American conservatism has been on an extended trip to Bedlam for decades now and, given the antics of the previous administration, the envelope of krayzee has been pushed close to the limits of its tolerance. And the crowd calls out for more.
As the Washington Post demonstrated over the weekend, American conservatism has a vast supply of that peculiar element upon which to draw. Last week, the New York Times revealed that, while White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows pressed the Department of Justice to investigate phony claims of “voter fraud,” including one exotic example that had eluded my notice.
If you asked Donald Trump what he thinks the next several months will hold for him, he’d likely tell you that he’ll be holding some rallies, playing some golf, and getting ready to head back to the White House. He’d tell you that because he’s a disturbed man who apparently thinks that a president who loses an election can simply be “reinstated” to the presidency, like one can have their cable reinstated after canceling it and then panicking about how they’re going to be able to watch Vanderpump Rules. In reality, what the next several months, and potentially years, hold for the ex-president are a lot of meetings with attorneys about how he’s legally in the bad place—that is, assuming they’re still keeping him apprised of the situation and aren’t yet at a point where they just park him in front of the TV “while the grown-ups talk.”
Oregon Democrats had finally secured total control of redistricting for the first time in decades.
Then, just months before they were set to draw new maps, they gave it away.
In a surprise that left Democrats from Salem to Washington baffled and angry, the state House speaker handed the GOP an effective veto over the districts in exchange for a pledge to stop stymieing her legislative agenda with delay tactics. The reaction from some of Oregon’s Democratic House delegation was unsparing: “That was like shooting yourself in the head,” Rep. Kurt Schrader told POLITICO. Rep. Peter DeFazio seethed: “It was just an abysmally stupid move on her part.”
Yet what happened this spring in Oregon is just one example, though perhaps the most extreme one, of a larger trend vexing Democratic strategists and lawmakers focused on maximizing the party’s gains in redistricting. In key states over the past decade, Democrats have gained control of state legislatures and governorships that have long been in charge of drawing new maps — only to cede that authority, often to independent commissions tasked with drawing political boundaries free of partisan interference.
The White House Saturday announced the passing of their dog Champ.
“He was our constant, cherished companion during the last 13 years and was adored by the entire Biden family,” the Biden family said in a statement.
“He loved nothing more than curling up at our feet in front of a fire at the end of the day, joining us as a comforting presence in meetings, or sunning himself in the White House garden.”
Champ was a German Shepherd, and was one of two dogs the Biden’s brought to the White House with them.
“We love our sweet, good boy and will miss him always.”
Republicans want to make it harder for people to vote and easier for the GOP to invalidate election results. That’s the distressing, historic truth as the party fully embraces an anti-democratic agenda.
Hiding behind Both Sides journalism, which portrays all political skirmishes as being the product of each party, the D.C. press continues to struggle to be honest about the GOP’s radical turn. Recently the New York Times, as if trying to create a Both Sides archetype, including flawless examples of everything that’s wrong and dangerous about the faulty form of journalism, published a painfully bad piece about GOP voter suppression. “Museum quality,” was how New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen dubbed the Times’ pitch-perfect Both Sides entry.
Forbes political reporter Andrew Solender posted a video of Pence’s summit speech to Twitter, in which audience members can be heard booing and chanting “traitor” at the former vice president.
Rep. Matt Gaetz — banned from Fox News — headed straight to Newsmax Thursday night with a conspiracy theory that’s unhinged even by his standards, and that of the network.
“The FBI might have had a role in “organizing and participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot,” Newsmax quoted Gaetz as spewing on air to Steve Cortes and Jenn Pellegrino. “The FBI clearly doesn’t have objections to selected releases of video and images from these days, but it begs the question: Why is there not more transparency?
“What did the FBI know? And when did they know it?”
The COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly becoming an arms race among the emerging variants of the virus, and at the moment, there’s no question which one is winning: the Delta variant—formally known as B.1.617.2—one of four strains to have emerged originally in India. It was just last month that the World Health Organization labeled Delta a “variant of concern”—joining with the Alpha strain, which emerged in the U.K.; the Beta strain, from South Africa; and the Gamma strain, first seen in Brazil. But Delta is fast becoming the most worrisome of the bunch.
One person is dead and a dozen people injured after an apparent drive-by shooting spree near Phoenix, authorities said.
Police are investigating at least eight different shooting incidents that occurred over the course of a 90-minute period Thursday morning throughout the West Valley, according to Sgt. Brandon Sheffert, a spokesperson for the Peoria Police Department, which is leading the investigation.
“This is an extremely complex investigation,” Sheffert said during a press briefing, noting that multiple agencies are involved, including several police departments and the FBI. The number of shooting sites “could obviously grow,” he said.
The House voted to repeal the 2002 authorization for the use of military force in Iraq on Thursday, a rare and historic effort by lawmakers to rein in presidential war powers.
Thursday’s vote brings the U.S. one step closer to ending the so-called Forever Wars in the Middle East that have defined the post-9/11 presidential administrations. And while the Iraq War ended nearly a decade ago, lawmakers saw an opportunity — with Democratic control of Congress — to reassert their Article I authority to declare and authorize foreign wars and military operations.
The Supreme Court has rejected the latest constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which means that 31 million Americans won’t lose their health insurance and protections for people with preexisting conditions won’t go away.
Yes, Obamacare has survived again.
This time, the threat was a lawsuit that 20 state Republican officials originally filed in 2018 and that the Trump administration officially supported in court, even though the federal government almost always defends statutes in such litigation.
President Joe Biden signed a rare piece of legislation on Thursday: a bill creating the first new federal holiday since 1983, when Ronald Reagan signed Martin Luther King Jr. Day into law.
Juneteenth Independence Day commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., institutionalizing a holiday that most states already recognize and that African Americans have celebrated for more than 150 years.
“I think this will go down, for me, as one of the greatest honors I’ve had as president,” Biden said before adding his signature.
Bipartisan support for an infrastructure deal grew Wednesday, as 21 senators — including 11 Republicans — publicly backed the proposal, a signal that talks have progressed as the White House-imposed deadline looms.
“We support this bipartisan framework that provides an historic investment in our nation’s core infrastructure needs without raising taxes,” the group said in a statement. “We look forward to working with our Republican and Democratic colleagues to develop legislation based on this framework to address America’s critical infrastructure challenges.”
Michael Fanone, a D.C. police officer who was repeatedly beaten and electroshocked by the insurrectionist mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, called Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) a “coward” on CNN Wednesday for refusing to face him about the ordeal.
Clyde famously tried to characterize the deadly riot as “a normal tourist visit,” even though he was pictured on Jan. 6 trying to barricade a door to the House gallery. He was one of 21 House Republicans who on Tuesday voted against awarding a Congressional Gold Medal to all police officers who responded to the insurrection.
After tight smiles and a firm handshake that made for an image both men wanted the world to see, followed by a chaotic photo op and about three-and-a-half hours of tense talks, U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged to spin their summit at dueling news conferences Wednesday.
Both men called their meeting positive, but while Biden said he raised serious concerns and warned of consequences, he did not claim he got Putin to commit to changing his behavior and the Russian leader accepted no responsibility for cyberattacks on the U.S. or for anything else.
For the first time in nearly 40 years, Congress has moved to establish a new national holiday, this time for Juneteenth, and just in time for Saturday’s156th anniversary of the day which marks the last African American slaves being freed in Texas in the wake of the Civil War.
The House voted Wednesday night to pass the legislation. It heads next to President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature. When Biden signs it, as he’s expected to at 3:30 p.m. ET Thursday, according to the White House, Juneteenth will officially become a federal holiday — the first since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983.
Democrats set a timeline Tuesday to move ahead with a sweeping infrastructure and jobs bill that wouldn’t require Republican support, making it clear that they believe a bipartisan deal wouldn’t sufficiently deliver on President Joe Biden’s top legislative priorities.
The process would allow Democrats to avoid the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, but it wouldn’t guarantee that they will be able to pass the $4 trillion proposal Biden asked for. Still, it could pave the way for them to send a major piece of legislation to his desk.
The No. 3 Senate Republican, John Barrasso of Wyoming, told a group of voters that he wants to make President Joe Biden a “one-half-term president.”
“Mitch McConnell’s come under a lot of criticism for saying, at one point, he wanted to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president,” Barrasso said last Thursday at an event hosted by the Ripon Society, a centrist Republican think tank, which posted the remarks Tuesday.
“I want to make Joe Biden a one-half-term president. And I want to do that by making sure they no longer have House, Senate, White House,” he said.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office appears to have entered the final stages of a criminal tax investigation into Donald J. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, setting up the possibility he could face charges this summer, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
In recent weeks, a grand jury has been hearing evidence about Mr. Weisselberg, who is facing intense scrutiny from prosecutors as they seek his cooperation with a broader investigation into Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization, the people with knowledge of the matter said. The prosecutors have obtained Mr. Weisselberg’s personal tax returns, the people said, providing the fullest picture yet of his finances.
President Joe Biden convenes the highest-stakes talks of his long career Wednesday when he joins Russia’s Vladimir Putin for a summit, an encounter set to test his decades of experience on the world stage and lay down an early marker of his diplomatic skills.
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Something interesting happened on Hugh Hewitt’s electric radio program. (I know, if you need to sit down, feel free.) Mitch McConnell fired on Fort Sumter, shot the Archduke, and bombed Pearl Harbor. In the figurative political sense, of course. From MSN:
“I think it’s highly unlikely – in fact, no, I don’t think either party, if it were different from the president, would confirm a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of an election,” McConnell told radio host Hugh Hewitt.McConnell was asked if a GOP-controlled Senate would take the same tack in 2024 that it did in 2016, when they refused to give Merrick Garland, former President Obama’s final Supreme Court pick, a hearing or a vote on his nomination to fill the vacancy created by the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made clear Monday that he would block a Supreme Court nominee in 2024 if Republicans take back the chamber — a comment certain to increase liberal pressure on Justice Stephen Breyer to step down before next fall.
In an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, McConnell vowed that he would not view a high court pick made by President Joe Biden any differently than how he viewed now-Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2016. McConnell blocked Garland’s Supreme Court nomination from consideration that year, citing divided government ahead of a presidential election.
President Biden wouldn’t say much about his upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though it was the topic of several questions posed by reporters at his news conference Monday after meetings with NATO leaders in Brussels.
The president’s meeting Wednesday is perhaps the most-anticipated aspect of his week-long foreign trip to the United Kingdom, Belgium and Switzerland.
“I’ll tell you that when it’s over,” Mr. Biden deflected, replying to a correspondent’s question about his expectations of the Russian president and concessions he hoped to get. He said he wouldn’t negotiate in the press.
A cashier was killed and three others injured following a dispute over face masks at a Georgia supermarket, according to authorities.
The shooting took place on Monday afternoon at the Big Bear Supermarket in Decatur, a suburb east of Atlanta, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) said in a news release.
Authorities said a man identified as Victor Lee Tucker Jr., 30, got into an argument with a cashier about his face mask. He left the store without making a purchase but then immediately returned, pulled out a handgun and shot the woman, according to the statement.
The House Judiciary Committee will immediately open an investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to obtain the phone and email records of journalists and Democratic lawmakers during his administration, the panel’s chairman announced Monday.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said recent reports detailing the Justice Department’s aggressive use of subpoenas under the former president suggested they were used “as a pretext to spy on President Trump’s perceived political enemies.”
President Joe Biden said Sunday he agreed with Russian President Vladimir Putin that relations between the US and Russia are at a “low point,” days before the two leaders are scheduled to hold a highly anticipated summit in Geneva.
Apple informed former White House counsel Don McGahn and his wife last month that their records were sought by the Justice Department in February 2018 while McGahn was still serving as then-President Donald Trump’s top lawyer, The New York Times and CNN reported Sunday.
The U.S. government barred Apple from telling McGahn about the move at the time, two people briefed on the matter told the Times. The Justice Department’s move to subpoena information about McGahn and his wife was under a nondisclosure order until May, CNN reported.
Apple’s reported disclosure exposes an extraordinary move by the Justice Department to subpoena records of a then-current White House counsel.
President Joe Biden makes his entrance at a NATO summit aiming to consult European allies on efforts to counter provocative actions by China and Russia while highlighting the U.S. commitment to the 30-country alliance that was frequently maligned by predecessor Donald Trump.
The summit Monday comes as Biden tries to rally allies for greater coordination in checking China and Russia, two adversaries whose actions on economic and national security fronts have become the chief foreign policy concerns in the early going of the Biden presidency.
President Biden on Sunday declared that “America is back to the table” after leaving his first Group of Seven summit, where world leaders vowed to confront China, boost global infrastructure and donate 1 billion vaccine doses to the rest of the world.
“I conveyed to each of my G-7 counterparts the U.S. is going to do our part. America is back to the table,” the president said in a press conference at the conclusion of the meeting with U.S. allies. “The lack of participation in the past and full engagement was noticed significantly, not only by the leaders of those countries but by the people in the G-7 countries.”
Now in its seventh week, the pointless review of two million ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous outpost, has not only emerged as a dishonest, partisan circus, it’s also a blueprint for how right-wing conspiracists want to treat future GOP election losses. Along the way, they’re deliberately destroying faith in the democratic process.
As the “fraudits” spread to other states, and as it becomes clear that hard-core Republican fanatics will stop at nothing in their pursuit of overturning the 2020 election, it’s imperative the press undertake a course correction and stop calling these partisan sham events “audits.” They’re not going away and the press needs a better, more exact way to describe them. By adopting GOP “audit” language, journalists are doing the right wing’s bidding and undermining confidence in U.S. elections.
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Today, Thursday, in Florida (motto: “America’s laboratory of backwards ass fucknuttery”), the state Board of Education voted that, when it comes to American history, “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement and the contributions of women, African American and Hispanic people to our country.” Now that doesn’t sound unreasonable. In fact, it sounds downright progressive.
Read the rest of The Rude Pundit’s piece at his blog.
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President Joe Biden on Thursday formally announced U.S. plans to procure and donate 500 million Covid-19 vaccine doses while making his first overseas trip, as part of a speech steeped in the imagery of World War II and other eras defined by their need for urgent collective action.
“This is a monumental commitment by the American people,” Biden said in St. Ives, England. “We’re a nation full of people who step up in times of need to help our fellow human beings, both at home and abroad. We’re not perfect, but we step up.”
President Joe Biden and other world leaders are expected to focus on the global response to the coronavirus pandemic Friday, the first day of the G-7 meeting in Cornwall, England, while making the case for democratic institutions’ unique ability to respond to economic crises and disparities, senior administration officials said.
The Group of Seven, an organization of the world’s leading industrial countries — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S. — will also endorse a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent for companies, the White House said.
Bipartisan Senate negotiators have reached an agreement on an infrastructure deal that would spend hundreds of billions in new federal dollars while also not increasing taxes, a key GOP red line. But lawmakers face an uphill struggle as they work to sell this to the White House and their fellow lawmakers.
Conservatives previously opposed the more than roughly $300 billion in new spending and many Democrats are demanding more than double the price tag for traditional infrastructure and climate-related investments.
As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.
All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had subpoenaed.
The Biden administration is purchasing 500 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to donate to the global supply, the White House said Thursday. That will provide enough shots to fully vaccinate 250 million people.
The U.S. is donating 200 million doses this year and 300 million doses in the first half of 2022, the White House said. All of the doses will be distributed through COVAX — the global entity that is working to ensure equitable access to COVID testing and vaccines — and will be given to 92 low- and middle-income countries and the African Union.
President Joe Biden arrived Wednesday in Britain for a series of meetings with world leaders intent on stressing the message of his first foreign trip as president: “The United States is back.”
“We’re going to make it clear that the United States is back and democracies of the world are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges and the issues that matter most to our future,” Biden said, speaking to U.S. Air Force personnel and their families stationed at Royal Air Force Mildenhall shortly after he landed.
“Our alliances weren’t built by coercion or maintained by threats. They’re grounded in democratic ideals, a shared vision of the future, where every voice matters,” he said.
JBS, the largest beef supplier in the world, paid the ransomware hackers who breached its computer networks about $11 million, the company said Wednesday.
The company was hacked in May by REvil, one of a number of Russian-speaking hacker gangs, leading meat plants across the U.S. and Australia to shut down for at least a day. News of the payment was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Like many other ransomware groups, REvil has made millions in recent years by hacking organizations, encrypting their files and demanding fees, often large bitcoin payments, in exchange for a decryptor program and a promise not to leak the files to the public.
The highly transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19 is quickly spreading throughout the United States, the Biden administration said on Tuesday in a renewed effort to persuade Americans to get vaccinated.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told reporters that the Delta strain, which was first identified in India, now accounts for about 6% of new infections in the U.S.
(The World Health Organization shifted how it names coronavirus variants earlier this month, opting to refer to them by letters of the Greek alphabet rather than the regions they were first seen. The change was made to reduce the stigma associated with country-affiliated nomenclature.)
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure talks with Republicans collapsed Tuesday, the lead GOP negotiator said.
“I spoke with the president this afternoon, and he ended our infrastructure negotiations,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said in a statement.
The end of the talks will increase pressure on Democrats to pass a sweeping package using a special process that doesn’t require any Republican votes in the Senate.
The 25 richest Americans paid little to no federal income taxes, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, a claim that has reignited debate about the tax code and sparked an investigation by the IRS into the leak of private tax documents.
NBC News has not independently verified the documents, and ProPublica declined to disclose how it had gained access to what it called a “vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.”
President Joe Biden will touch down in Europe on Wednesday looking to repair relations with America’s closest allies in an effort to counter growing threats from China and Russia in his first big moment on the world stage since taking office.
In many ways, it will be familiar turf for Biden. Few presidents have had his level of foreign policy experience, from decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to his time as vice president. But the world has experienced dramatic changes in the more than four years since Biden was last on the front lines of American foreign policy.
Vice President Kamala Harris offered an optimistic outlook for improved cooperation with Guatemala on addressing the spike in migration to the U.S. after her meeting with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei on Monday. She also delivered a direct warning to migrants considering making the trek: “Do not come. Do not come.”
Her comments, during a press conference after she met privately with Giammattei, underscored the challenge that remains even as Harris engages in substantive talks with the Guatemalan and Mexican presidents during a three-day visit to the region this week, her first foreign trip as vice president.
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has made the surprising decision to continue the previous administration’s efforts to defend Donald Trump against a defamation suit brought by woman he’d accused of lying about being raped by him. As a presidential candidate, Biden had criticized the agency’s involvement in the case.
In its latest brief on Monday, Justice Department lawyers continued to argue that Trump was just another employee of the federal government when he accused columnist E. Jean Carroll of lying — a move that led Carroll to file a defamation lawsuit against the then-president. Carroll wrote in a June 2019 New York Magazine article and reiterated in her lawsuit that Trump raped her in a Manhattan department store’s dressing room in the 1990s.
Newly released audio shows how Rudy Giuliani repeatedly suggested Ukraine could have a “better relationship” with the United States if the country’s president opened an investigation into Joe Biden and his son in 2019.
CNN said Monday it obtained audio of the July 2019 phone call between Giuliani and U.S. diplomat Kurt Volker, and Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The audio shows how aggressive Giuliani, who was serving as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, was in trying to secure the Ukrainian leader’s support for a bogus investigation into then-Democratic presidential candidate Biden.
A Senate investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has uncovered broad government, military and law enforcement missteps before the violent attack, including a breakdown within multiple intelligence agencies and a lack of training and preparation for Capitol Police officers who were quickly overwhelmed by the rioters.
The Senate report released Tuesday is the first — and could be the last — bipartisan review of how hundreds of former President Donald Trump’s supporters were able to violently push past security lines and break into the Capitol that day, interrupting the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
It is said that, immediately before the ax fell, Sir Thomas More told the headsman not “to fear your office, you send me to God.” I always thought that was just a tad too generous, but hey, different strokes for different martyrs. Anyway, up in New Hampshire on Thursday, former Vice President Mike Pence took the opportunity to tell the mob that attacked the Capitol chanting that he should be hung that it was very impolite to have done so, and that he and his former boss disagree on whether the crowd should have been chanting for Mike Pence to be hung, but hey, what about that tax cut, huh?
Vice President Harris will depart Sunday for Guatemala and Mexico, a two-day trip crafted to highlight the Biden administration’s efforts to remedy what it calls the “root causes” of mass migration from Central America to the United States.
Traveling abroad for her first time as vice president, Harris will arrive Sunday evening in Guatemala bearing gifts: pledges for hundreds of thousands of coronavirus vaccine doses, $310 million in regional humanitarian aid, and a $4 billion long-term plan to boost development and security across Central America. Those sweeteners may be used to offset what are expected to be tougher messages about battling corruption and upholding democratic norms.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Sunday warned in stark terms that the US power grid is vulnerable to attacks.
Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney accused former President Donald Trump of having committed the worst violation of a president’s oath of office by inciting the January 6 Capitol insurrection — and taking a jab at House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy over his subsequent visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who holds the key Democratic vote in the evenly divided Senate, said Sunday he will oppose a sweeping election and campaign finance reform bill and instead encouraged his colleagues to pass voting rights legislation that can garner bipartisan backing.
In an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette-Mail published Sunday, Manchin said he plans to vote against the House-passed For the People Act, which is set to be taken up by the Senate at the end of June, because it is too partisan. Manchin’s decision not to support the bill effectively dooms its passage in the Senate, where Democrats and Republicans hold 50 seats each, and Vice President Kamala Harris casts tie-breaking votes.
After less than a month of postings, Trump’s blog was officially taken offline this week, after drawing an embarrassingly small audience. Loyalists will no longer be able to check on “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” to read his latest, bitter musings.
The sudden move to unplug the aging Florida blogger comes as Trump continues to struggle to attract an online audience after getting de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the wake of the January 6, mob attack on the U.S. Capitol. The social media giants rightly accused Trump of inciting violence and of depicting the mob vigilantes as patriots. Once accustomed to seeing his tweets and Facebook posts garnering millions of likes and responses, Trump now finds himself lost in the online wilderness, ignored and rejected.
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Observation 1: Most religions have a great tautological scam going: Faith means believing in God, Jesus, Allah, or another invisible sky wizard even in the absence of evidence. Oh, sure, you can say that your book of faith that was written centuries ago by drunk monks proves some things, but it doesn’t, any more than comic books prove the existence of superheroes. And maybe you can point to a miracle or two, but even those are mostly easily debunked. Despite there being no tangible, demonstrative proof that the aforementioned sky wizard is real, people are still willing to fight each other over which sky wizard is bigger and more magical or to use their sky wizard to justify barbaric cruelties.
President Joe Biden made a key concession on corporate taxes during a meeting this week with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the top Republican negotiator on a legislative package aimed at overhauling national infrastructure.
Instead of raising the corporate tax to 28%, from its current 21%, to pay for new infrastructure projects, Biden proposed doing so by instituting a minimum corporate rate of 15% to address the fact that many of the largest corporations in America are able to avoid paying federal corporate income taxes entirely.
The news, first reported by The Washington Post, was confirmed by White House press secretary Jen Psaki during a Thursday press briefing.
A conservative writer has confirmed a report that former President Donald Trump is telling associates that he expects to be reinstalled as president this summer.
“The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling,” National Review senior writer Charles C.W. Cooke wrote on the magazine’s website.
Cooke said “an array of different sources” confirmed a report earlier this week by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who said on Twitter that Trump has been sharing the popular new QAnon talking point.
The Department of Justice is investigating Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in connection with campaign contributions of former employees who worked for him when he was in the private sector, NBC News confirmed Thursday.
DeJoy’s spokesman, Mark Corallo, said in a statement to NBC that DeJoy, who has been a major Republican fundraiser and donor, has always been “scrupulous” in following campaign finance laws “and never knowingly violated them.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence delivered his strongest comments yet about the Jan. 6 pro-Trump riot attack on the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, saying he and former President Donald Trump may never see “eye to eye” on the event.
“January 6 was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,” Pence said at the Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, Republican Committee’s Lincoln-Reagan Dinner. “But thanks to the swift action of the Capitol Police and federal law enforcement, violence was quelled, the Capitol was secured. And that same day we reconvened the Congress and did our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
President Joe Biden has finalized his plan to distribute millions of coronavirus vaccinesworldwide after months of deliberation, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.
President Joe Biden will reconnect with Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito on Friday to further discuss a possible bipartisan compromise on an infrastructure bill.
The two met in the Oval Office for just over an hour Wednesday afternoon to talk about the $928 billion GOP infrastructure proposal unveiled last week, but announced no major breakthroughs on how they plan to bridge their still substantive differences.
Kelley Moore, a spokeswoman for Capito, said the senator — who is leading negotiations on infrastructure — intends to connect with other Republicans working on the package before resuming talks with the administration.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is reportedly being investigated to see if he engaged in obstruction of justice during a phone call with a witness in an ongoing probe, Politico reported late Wednesday.
Citing two sources, Politico said Gaetz took part in a call with an ex-girlfriend and the witness. That witness later spoke with prosecutors, who are now exploring whether Gaetz suggested that the person lie or mislead investigators, which would be a crime.
Gaetz has not been charged and has denied all allegations.
The Trump administration secretly obtained the phone records of four New York Times reporters shortly after Donald Trump assumed office in 2017, the Justice Department, now under President Joe Biden, told the newspaper Wednesday.
Justice Department officials said the agency had seized phone records for Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael Schmidt for more than four months, from Jan. 14 to April 30, 2017. The Times noted the Justice Department did not say which articles the seizures were related to but added the reporters were focused at the time on then-FBI Director James Comey and his handling of the bureau’s investigations during the 2016 presidential election.
The world’s largest meat processing company is getting back online after production around the world was disrupted by a cyberattack just weeks after a similar incident shut down a U.S. oil pipeline.
Brazil’s JBS SA said late Tuesday that it had made “significant progress” in dealing with the cyberattack and expected the “vast majority” of its plants to be operating on Wednesday.
“Our systems are coming back online and we are not sparing any resources to fight this threat,” Andre Nogueira, CEO of JBS USA, said in a statement.
Democrats are planning to press forward ― potentially on their own ― to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol after Senate Republicans voted Friday to block a bipartisan independent commission.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) held a call Tuesday with her fellow House Democrats in their first meeting since the Senate vote. The speaker said she is prepared to launch a House-led investigation despite Republican resistance and would continue to push toward finding the truth behind what happened on Jan. 6.
Pelosi proposed four options to launch an investigation after Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) asked about next steps, according to a source on the call. She said Democrats can give the Senate another chance to vote on an independent commission, create a select committee in the House, allow existing House committees to continue investigating the attack, or assign a specific committee, such as Homeland Security, to “take charge of investigation.”
President Joe Biden delivered remarks from Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre on Tuesday, making him the first U.S. president to participate in the remembrance of one of the darkest days in America’s racist history.
“For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness,” Biden said, speaking from Tulsa’s Greenwood Cultural Center. “But just because history is silent, it doesn’t mean that it did not take place. And while darkness can hide much, it erases nothing.”
“My fellow Americans, this was not a riot; this was a massacre,” he added, rejecting the “race riot” narrative long used to describe the events.
Democratic state Rep. Melanie Stansbury won the New Mexico special congressional election Tuesday, beating back Republican challenger Mark Moores to fill the seat of Deb Haaland, President Joe Biden’s interior secretary.
The race to represent New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District, which includes Albuquerque, was called by The Associated Press after polls closed at 9 p.m. ET. Stansbury prevailed in a four-way contest after campaigning in support of major initiatives of the Biden administration. Her victory shores up the Democrats’ narrow 219-211 majority in Congress ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Senate Republicans’ potential embrace of a $1 trillion infrastructure package is an encouraging sign a bipartisan deal could be reached, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
“They seem to be embracing the idea that about a trillion is appropriate. So there’s movement in the right direction,” he told “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “But a lot of concerns — about things that are not in their counteroffer — they’re really important.”
The White House recently presented a reduced infrastructure package totaling $1.7 trillion, slashing about $550 billion from President Joe Biden’s initial infrastructure proposal. Senate Republicans countered that new offer on Thursday with a $928 billion proposal.
President Joe Biden issued a proclamation on Monday marking 100 years since a “violent white supremacist mob” descended on the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31, 1921, wrecking businesses, destroying homes and killing hundreds of Black people.
In the proclamation, Biden pointed to the racist mob that “raided, firebombed and destroyed … the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood.”
“Families and children were murdered in cold blood. Homes, businesses, and churches were burned. In all, as many as 300 Black Americans were killed,” the proclamation reads. “Today, on this solemn centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I call on the American people to reflect on the deep roots of racial terror in our Nation and recommit to the work of rooting out systemic racism across our country.”
With more than 40% of the country fully vaccinated, and the seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases falling to about 12,000 per day — numbers not seen since March 2020 — Americans are revving up for post-pandemic life.
The Indianapolis 500 became the largest sporting event since the pandemic began, with 135,000 fans in the stands on Sunday.
But as America starts to return to normal, there are reminders the pandemic isn’t over. Vietnam’s health ministry says it has detected a new variant that appears to be a hybrid of the India and U.K. COVID-19 mutations.
Democrats vowed to continue to fight a Texas bill that would add restrictions on voting as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to cut off funding for the Legislature if they do so.
“I will veto Article 10 of the budget passed by the legislature. Article 10 funds the legislative branch,” Abbott tweeted Monday. “No pay for those who abandon their responsibilities. Stay tuned.”
Texas Democrats used every parliamentary tool at their disposal Sunday night to stop the bill, ultimately walking out to prevent a vote before the midnight deadline. Abbott said the bill would be added to a special session agenda to pass it. He did not announce a date for the special session.
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where they sing “Amazing Grace” all the way to the Swiss banks.
Audit Fever Sweeps Nation!
From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
[State Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who is currently the subject of a Justice Department investigation into whether he had sex with a 17-year-old girl and transported her across state lines in violation of sex trafficking laws, is considering a run for president in 2024.
Gaetz made that disclosure Wednesday in a text message to the New York Post.
“I support Donald Trump for president. I’ve directly encouraged him to run and he gives me every indication he will,” Gaetz told the paper. “If Trump doesn’t run, I’m sure I could defeat whatever remains of Joe Biden by 2024.”
President Joe Biden’s instructions to the US intelligence community to redouble its efforts in investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic came on the heels of intelligence officials informing the White House that they possessed unreviewed evidence necessitating greater computer analysis that could potentially provide answers, The New York Times reportedThursday.
During Thursday’s Senate Republican lunch, Sen. Susan Collins made one last plea to her colleagues to advance a proposed independent commission to probe the Capitol riot, with changes she fought for. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke right after her.
And the GOP leader is set to win the day, much to the consternation of a handful of his members who fear the party is making a mistake in voting down the House-passed commission bill sometime Friday. After an increasingly hard public and private push from McConnell, Senate Republicans are ready to make the independent investigation into the Capitol attack their first filibuster of the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden isn’t giving a pass to Republicans in Congress who voted against his pandemic relief package but are now touting its benefits to their constituents.
During remarks at a community college in Cleveland on Thursday, Biden held up a list of those lawmakers, calling them out for their hypocrisy around the American Rescue Plan.
“My Republican friends in Congress, not a single one of them voted for the rescue plan. I’m not going to embarrass anyone, but I have here a list,” the president said as he held up a piece of paper, prompting laughter from the audience. “Back in their districts, they’re bragging about the rescue plan. They touted the restaurant revitalization fund. … They touted grants to community health care centers.”
Senate Republicans are poised to quash an effort Thursday to establish a bipartisan, independent commission to study the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol that that left five people dead.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced his opposition last week — along with his House GOP counterpart, Kevin McCarthy — ahead of the House vote approving the measure with 35 Republicans joining Democrats. The high-profile GOP move has provided political cover for most Republicans in both chambers to reject the legislation.
Manhattan prosecutors pursuing a criminal case against former President Donald Trump, his company and its executives have told at least one witness to prepare for grand jury testimony, according to a person familiar with the matter — a signal that the lengthy investigation is moving into an advanced stage.
The death toll rose late Wednesday night from the morning shooting at a San Jose, California light rail yard.
Authorities initially said an employee killed eight co-workers and wounded several others when he opened fire, but later said a ninth victim had succumbed to his wounds after being hospitalized in critical condition.
Officials said the suspect, 57-year-old Sam Cassidy, shot himself to death as officers closed in.
President Biden said Wednesday he has ordered the U.S. intelligence community to “redouble” its efforts to investigate the origins of COVID-19 after a new report fueled questions about whether the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
Mr. Biden said in a statement he is giving the intelligence community 90 days to “collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about where COVID-19 started and report back to him. As part of the requested report, the president asked for areas of additional inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China. Mr. Biden said the effort will include work by Department of Energy’s National Labs and other government agencies to supplement the intelligence community in its investigation.
Last week’s guidance from the CDC that face masks and social distancing are no longer required for fully vaccinated people in most indoor and outdoor settings is based on multiple studies that confirm what we have long hoped for: the new vaccines offer robust protection against COVID-19. That is precisely the kind of science that Biden’s team rightly asserts must drive policies designed to control the pandemic.
But it turns out that public communications around these new policies have been confusing and challenging—leaving the public, businesses and organizations uncertain about where they stand. Fully vaccinated individuals, for instance, must still wear face masks and observe social distancing while in health-care facilities, at transportation hubs, or on public transportation, but not in crowded restaurants or in “filled to capacity” arenas or theaters.
Read the rest of Dr. Irwin Redlener’s piece at The Daily Beast
The Senate will vote Thursday on legislation creating a special commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday moved to open debate on the bill despite uncertainty over the outcome, with only a few Republicans signaling their support.
“We all know the commission is an urgent, necessary idea to safeguard our democracy,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “What happened on Jan. 6 was a travesty, a travesty. It risked America in ways we haven’t seen in decades, maybe even our history altogether.”
Half of U.S. adults are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday.
The country crosses this milestone just five months after it first began distributing doses. Some 61% of American adults have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, putting the U.S. on track to meet President Joe Biden’s goal of that figure hitting 70% by July 4.
“Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all declining because of the millions of people who have stepped forward and done their part to protect their health and the health of their communities, to move us out of this pandemic,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at Tuesday’s White House COVID-19 briefing.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined a quick chorus of outrage at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on Tuesday after she double-down on her comparison of Covid-19-related rules to the Holocaust.
“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said in a statement, after larging trying to ignore the controversial lawmakers. “The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”
Prosecutors in New York have convened a special grand jury that may hear evidence against former President Donald Trump and potentially decide whether he will face charges, The Washington Post first reported Tuesday.
Trump and his businesses have been under investigation in the state for more than two years by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Jurors were convened “recently,” the Post said, citing two people familiar with the probe, and will be expected to sit three days a week for six months.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel on Tuesday, beginning a tour of the Middle East aimed at solidifying the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. At least 253 Palestinians, including 70 children, and 14 people in Israel were killed during the 11-day conflict that was halted early on Friday by a tenuous truce agreement.
Blinken, the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the region since President Joe Biden took office, told journalists after meeting Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu that Mr. Biden had sent him to reinforce America’s commitment to Israel’s security, to work for greater peace and stability in the region, and to address the urgent humanitarian needs and reconstruction in the Gaza Strip.
It’s been one year since George Floyd was killed at the hands of police in Minneapolis, sparking a wave of protests around the world and a reckoning over systemic racism and law enforcement’s mistreatment of Black people in America.
Floyd’s family attended one of many remembrances on Sunday, gathering with activists, citizens and others who have lost loved ones to police brutality at a rally in Minneapolis.
“It has been a long year. It has been a painful year,” Floyd’s sister Bridgett said at the event, which took place in front of the courthouse in Minneapolis where ex-officer Derek Chauvin was convicted in Floyd’s death in May. “It has been very frustrating for me and my family for our lives to change in the blink of an eye. I still don’t know why.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci is skeptical of the theory that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, escaped from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Nevertheless, Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told CBS’ Weijia Jiang that he would support a more thorough investigation into the origins of the virus, just as he always has.
“Dr. Fauci tells me that his opinion about the origins of COVID-19 have not changed: He believes that it is ‘highly likely’ that it first occurred naturally before spreading from animal to human,” Jiang, CBS’ senior White House correspondent, tweeted Monday. “Since no one is 100% sure, he’s open to a thorough investigation.”
The Justice Department intends to appeal an order requiring the government to disclose a memo that was cited as a reason not to pursue obstruction of justice charges against former President Donald Trump, it said Monday.
William Barr, then the attorney general, cited the memo, written by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, as one reason he did not intend to pursue obstruction charges after he received the report of special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated interference in the 2016 presidential election and other matters.
A page and a half of the 2019 memo was released in a subsequent filing Monday night. The Justice Department is appealing a judge’s order over the rest of it.
The legal stakes have just skyrocketed for former President Donald Trump and his business.
New York Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation into the Trump Organization has suddenly evolved in two important ways: It is no longer “purely civil” but is also being conducted in “a criminal capacity,” and she is now working along with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.
Wait a minute. What’s that I see? Is it the Liz Cheney bandwagon going over the cliff? Jonathan Swan of Axios was there at the brink to wave as the bandwagon plunged toward the rocks below.
“I think you have to look at the specifics of each one of those efforts. If you look at the Georgia laws, for example, there’s been a lot that’s been said nationally about the Georgia voter laws that turns out not to be true…Everybody should want a situation and a system where people who ought to be able to vote and have the right to vote can vote, and people who, you know, don’t, shouldn’t.”
Glorioski, you mean Liz Cheney is still…a Republican? Whatever will we tell the cable bookers.
Read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s piece at Esquire Politics.
For the first time since June of last year, there are fewer than 30,000 new daily coronavirus cases in the United States, and deaths are as low as they’ve been since last summer. In much of the country, the virus outlook is improving.
Nearly 50 percent of Americans have received at least one vaccine shot, and though the pace has slowed, the share is still growing by about two percentage points per week.
Bipartisan negotiations on infrastructure hit a new snag Friday after Republicans flatly rejected a counterproposal on the multi-trillion dollar bill advanced by the White House.
The White House’s $1.7 trillion dollar offer on Friday was a pared down version of President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, initially valued at $2.2 trillion.
Within moments of receiving the deal, Republican aides rejected it, telling ABC News that the price tag is too high for the GOP to stomach.
President Joe Biden will mark the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death on Tuesday by meeting with members of the Floyd family at the White House as Congress is poised to miss the president’s deadline for passing police reform legislation named in Floyd’s memory.
Floyd died a year ago Tuesday after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes, which Biden called “a wake up call to the country” and sparked protests around the world calling for police reform and an end to systemic racism.
Rudy Giuliani called an Arizona county official after the presidential election last year to discuss getting challenges to Joe Biden’s win “fixed up,” the Arizona Republic revealed on Sunday.
Giuliani introduced himself in the Christmas Eve call to Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates as then-President Donald Trump’s attorney.
“Bill, it’s Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer,” Giuliani said in a message left on Gates’ phone that was obtained by the newspaper. “If you get a chance, would you please give me a call? I have a few things I’d like to talk over with you. Maybe we can get this thing fixed up. You know, I really think it’s a shame that Republicans sort of are both in this, kind of, situation. And I think there may be a nice way to resolve this for everybody.”
President Joe Biden is getting trashed by Democrats over the Middle East!
Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t acknowledging her Asian heritage!
Those were two breathless dispatches
Read the rest of The Rude Pundit’s piece at and subscribe to PressRun.
I want to see things through other people’s eyes. I really do. I want to understand why they believe the fucked-up things they do. Those of us who truly understand the MAGA crowd, who have attempted to put their barbarism and belligerence in some kind of context that makes sense, who have considered their “economic anxiety” and their manipulation by nutzoid media and mad evangelicalism, we know that it all comes down to racism, whether they wanna admit it or not. And in moments of empathy, I get that they are victims as much as they are perpetrators, that decades of GOP fuckery in gutting and dumbing down the education system, not to mention an unending stream of lies spit at them from politicians and alleged “news” outlets, not to mention generations of ignorance being passed down as wisdom, the ultimate in bullshit taking the place of rational thought, that all of this has an effect on their brains, contorting them into a grotesque version of an engaged citizen, one that couldn’t give a fuck about the society as a whole, just themselves and their group of fellow racists.
Arizona’s secretary of state informed Maricopa County officials Thursday that hundreds of the state’s vote-tabulating machines should no longer be used because of their handling by the inept, partisan company hired by Senate Republicans to recount ballots cast in November’s presidential election.
The machines should not be used again because there is no way of knowing whether they were tampered with while out of the county’s custody and under the control of Senate Republicans and the controversial Cyber Ninjas company conducting the recount, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, she said in a letter to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
New machines reportedly could cost the state millions of dollars.
The Trump administration secretly obtained the phone and email records of CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, the news network reported Thursday, the latest evidence of the former president’s efforts to target journalists who reported government leaks during his tenure.
CNN said Thursday that the Justice Department sought and obtained the records of Barbara Starr for a two-month period between June 1, 2017, and July 31, 2017. The DOJ informed Starr earlier this month that it had targeted her Pentagon extension, the CNN phone booth in the building and her home and cellphones, as well as her personal and professional email accounts.
The Senate could vote as early as next week on House-passed legislation to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
But it’s unclear whether at least 10 Republican senators will support the bill, the threshold needed to move it forward. It could be the first bill this year to be blocked by a filibuster.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., began taking steps Wednesday to speed the bill to the floor, saying he intends to hold a vote after the House voted 252-175 to pass the legislation.
A bilateral cease-fire took hold on Friday as Israel and Hamas agreed to halt nearly two weeks of fighting that has left hundreds dead and parts of the impoverished Gaza Strip reduced to rubble.
In the countdown to the 2 a.m. (7 p.m. ET Thursday) truce, rocket attacks from the Palestinian militant group continued and Israel carried out at least one airstrike.
There were no reports of violations early Friday, though each side said it stood ready to retaliate for any attacks by the other. Egypt, which mediated the agreement, said it would send two delegations to monitor the cease-fire.
A statement released Wednesday on Capitol Police letterhead, said to be authored by multiple officers on the force, delivered a rare public rebuke of top Republicans for opposing a proposed bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that injured scores on their force.
The unsigned missive was sent to the offices of every member of Congress hours before the House was set to vote on legislation creating the commission. Both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week they oppose the proposed panel, which they dismissed as an attempt by Democrats to politicize the investigation into the Capitol siege.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) has had it with the Republican members of the House who attacked a proposed bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that was carried out by pro-Trump insurrectionists.
After thanking those in the GOP who supported the measure ― 35 Republicans ultimately broke ranks and voted in favor of the commission ― Ryan lit into those who voted against it.
“Holy cow! Incoherence! No idea what you’re talking about,” Ryan said, his voice rising in anger as he pointed to the most obvious and glaring hypocrisy: the endless Republican-led investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ decision to join forces with the Manhattan district attorney to investigate the Trump Organization “in a criminal capacity” doesn’t mean her office has found a smoking gun, legal experts said Wednesday.
But it doesn’t bode well for former President Donald Trump’s company, either.
“This is not a positive development for the lawyers representing the Trump Organization,” Dennis Vacco, a former New York attorney general, said in an interview Wednesday.
A sharply divided House voted on Wednesday to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, overcoming opposition from Republicans determined to stop a high-profile accounting of the deadly pro-Trump riot.
But even as the legislation passed the House, top Republicans locked arms in an effort to doom it in the Senate and shield former President Donald J. Trump and their party from new scrutiny of their roles in the events of that day.
The 252-to-175 vote in the House, with four-fifths of Republicans opposed, pointed to the difficult path for the proposal in the Senate. Thirty-five Republicans bucked their leadership to back the bill.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowed Tuesday to hold a vote on legislation forming a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, daring Republicans to oppose an effort that has bipartisan support in both houses of Congress.
“Republicans can let their constituents know, are they on the side of truth [or] want to cover up for the insurrectionists and for Donald Trump?” Schumer asked at a weekly press conference.
Last week, lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal in the House to form a 9/11-style bipartisan panel made up of unelected experts to probe the deadly attack on the Capitol by hundreds of supporters of the former president. Each party would choose an equal number of members, and any subpoena issued would need approval from both the chair and vice chair of the commission — a major concession by Democrats.
The House approved a bill Tuesday to address the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic.
The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act passed by a vote of 364 to 62, with all 62 “no” votes coming from Republicans. It was overwhelmingly approved last month by the Senate by a vote of 94 to 1. President Biden has previously expressed support for the bill, and is expected to sign it when it comes to his desk.
No charges will be filed against North Carolina sheriff’s deputies who shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr., a 42-year-old Black man whose family claims he was “executed” as he sat in his car.
Elizabeth City, North Carolina, District Attorney Andrew Womble said at a news conference Tuesday morning that the three deputies who opened fire on Brown, a father of seven, were justified in their use of deadly force because Brown drove his vehicle toward them and allegedly made contact with one deputy twice before officers fired their weapons.
The New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it is pursuing a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization, in addition to the ongoing civil probe.
“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement.
Attorney General Letitia James has been at the forefront of legal action against former President Donald Trump’s family business.
The current constitutional rule regarding abortion holds that women have the right to choose whether to continue with their pregnancy before a fetus becomes viable. Fetal viability is the point after which a fetus is thought to have a chance of surviving outside a woman’s body, thus giving the government a legitimate state interest in the health and well-being of the fetus separate and apart from the parent. Fetal viability is believed to take place around 23 to 24 weeks.
Forced-birth activists have been incredibly successful at whittling away a pregnant woman’s right to bodily autonomy before fetal viability. And they’ve been incredibly successful at making it hard for women to access their rights—with the help of abortion providers and drugs—during the brief window many states will still allow them to have any. But fetal viability is more or less the legal line in the sand and has been since the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Before her fetus reaches viability, a pregnant woman is to be treated as a fully formed human being. After viability, Republican-controlled states are allowed to treat her as a malfunctioning incubator who can be forced to serve the state’s alleged interests against her free will.
The Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Monday called for an end to the audit of the election results. The Republican-led Arizona state Senate has ordered a full hand recount and audit of the ballots and voting machines in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county, despite that it will not change the outcome of the presidential election.
They also unanimously agreed to send a forceful response to claims made last week by Arizona’s Republican Senate President Karen Fann, who wrote to the board of supervisors last week alleging the county was not complying with legislative subpoenas, didn’t properly secure the chain of custody of ballots and deleted data.
A Florida politician who emerged as a central figure in the Justice Department’s sex trafficking investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetzpleaded guilty Monday to six federal charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors as part of a plea deal.
Joel Greenberg, a longtime associate of Gaetz’s, appeared in federal court in Orlando. He pleaded guilty to six of the nearly three dozen charges he faced, including sex trafficking of a minor, and he admitted that he had paid at least one underage girl to have sex with him and other men.
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to take up a key abortion case next termconcerning a controversial Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, rekindling a potentially major challenge to Roe v. Wade at the majority conservative court.
President Joe Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday afternoon, but made no direct call for an immediate end to violence as the deadly conflictbetween Israel and Hamas entered a second week with no signs of a nearing resolution.
The White House said that Biden “expressed his support for a cease-fire and discussed U.S. engagement with Egypt and other partners towards that end.”
It was a very big day at the United States Supreme Court on Monday. The justices decided to turn the months before the 2022 midterm elections into the world’s largest minefield. And, in their decisions, they decided that you can indeed strain the quality of mercy. The last bit first.
When House Republicans ousted Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post, it spoke to the direction of the Republican Party in at least one specific way: what should happen to those who publicly break with former President Donald Trump? So, we surveyed the nation’s self-identified Republicans to learn what they thought of the week’s events. They still very much want their party to show loyalty to Mr. Trump and adhere to the idea that President Biden didn’t legitimately win.
Their views on Cheney, in turn, now reflect those wishes.
Eighty percent of Republicans who’d heard about the vote agree with Cheney’s removal — they feel she was off-message, unsupportive of Mr. Trump, and that she’s wrong about the 2020 presidential election. To a third of them, and most particularly for those who place the highest importance on loyalty, Cheney’s removal also shows “disloyalty will be punished.”
The Republican official who heads up the Arizona county elections department that is subject to an ongoing audit of the results from the 2020 presidential election has publicly lashed out against former President Donald Trump for spreading lies. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer didn’t just criticize Trump, he also pointed the finger at other fellow Republicans who allow the misinformation to continue. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer took to Twitter on Saturday to call a Trump statement that claimed the county had deleted an elections database as “unhinged,” assuring absolutely nothing had happened to the archive. “We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don’t call this out…” Richer wrote on Twitter.
Richer sent the tweet after Trump issued a statement in which he said there had been a “DELETION of an entire Database and critical Election files,” which he characterized as “unprecedented.” Richer said Trump’s statement amounted a “plain-as-day lie.”
Claiming that what transpired that day really wasn’t a riot but instead a collection of misguided enthusiasts voicing their concerns, Republicans made clear not only would they not assign blame to Trump for stoking the deadly assault, but they were going to defend the rioters and rewrite history about that ugly day on Capitol Hill.
Read the rest of Eric Boehlert’s piece at and subscribe to Press Run
Ever since I heard about the Opelousas massacre of 1868, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Also called the St. Landry or St. Landry Parish massacre, I asked friends of mine who, like me, grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana and were educated by public schools there. None of them had heard of it, including one who is a historian, although not of that particular subject. And that ignorance disturbs me on a very deep and personal level.
The first time I became aware of it was when I clicked on a tweet from the Equal Justice Initiative, an amazing civil rights organization based in Alabama. It featured a film by Jim Batt and Kim Boekbinder on the history of Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War, when Blacks, mostly freed slaves, were terrorized in the South even as the U.S. government attempted to secure their rights and safety before abandoning them in 1877. The short film, narrated by Tera DuVernay (Ava’s sister) and with illustrations by Molly Crabapple, was focusing on the rampant violence against Blacks when it brought up how, in Opelousas, Louisiana, in September 1868, an estimated 200 Black people were killed by white mobs over the course of a couple of weeks.
Federal health officials’ decision Thursday to rescind almost all masking and distancing recommendations for fully vaccinated Americans created as much confusion as it did celebration, sending states, businesses and individuals scrambling to figure out what rules, if any, are still appropriate and when.
Many, including President Biden, hailed the relaxation of restrictions by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a milestone in the nation’s return to normal. But with a majority of Americans unvaccinated, others questioned the sudden and blanket recommendation, worrying that the onus is now heavier on state and local governments, businesses and individuals to determine whether precautions are necessary.
The proposed 10-member commission, which emulates the panel that investigated the causes and lessons of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, would be vested with subpoena authority and charged with studying the events and run-up to Jan. 6 — with a focus on why an estimated 10,000 supporters of former president Donald Trump swarmed the Capitol grounds and, more important, what factors instigated about 800 of them to break inside. Trump’s critics in both political parties view it as a means to bring further public scrutiny to his role in inspiring the violence.
Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, agreed to plead guilty to six criminal charges — including sex trafficking of a child, aggravated identity theft and wire fraud — which come with a mandatory minimum sentence of 12 years and a statutory maximum potentially decades longer.
House Republicans are expected to choose Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) on Friday to fill the leadership post recently occupied by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), replacing a harsh critic of former president Donald Trump with a lawmaker who has become one of his staunchest defenders.
The Friday morning vote will cap a tumultuous week for the party, which has established support for Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election as a defining issue, and those who challenge his falsehoods have found themselves exiled.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Thursday the House Ethics Committee should look into Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for her alleged “verbal assault” of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Washington Post first reported the conservative lawmaker from Georgia confronted Ocasio-Cortez and falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists” as the New York congresswoman was exiting the House Chamber on Wednesday. Pelosi called Greene’s alleged behavior “egregious” and “not in keeping with the behavior of a member of Congress.”‘
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can forgo their masks and social distancing in many indoor situations.
“Today, CDC is updating our guidance for fully vaccinated people,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday at a White House COVID-19 briefing. “Anyone who is fully vaccinated, can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing. If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”
Anyone who is vaccinated but develops symptoms should mask up and get tested, she warned. Walensky also warned that there’s always a chance the pandemic situation could worsen, and the nation may need to return to pieces of the earlier guidance.
The owner of the Colonial Pipeline paid hackers about $5 million in bitcoin to regain access to its data and end a standoff that forced one of the country’s largest energy pipelines offline, multiple media outlets reported Thursday.
Details of the payments were first reported by Bloomberg News and The New York Times, and cited sources familiar with the ransom. The ransom amounted to about 75 bitcoin, a hard-to-trace cryptocurrency.
The 5,500-mile pipeline was forced to temporarily shut down late last week after a cybersecurity attack that investigators said was launched by the international criminal gang known as DarkSide. Hackers from the group infiltrated the company’s network and infected it with ransomware, which demands a company pay to unlock the files or they will be released to the public.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene aggressively confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday and falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists,” leading the New York congresswoman’s office to call on leadership to ensure that Congress remains “a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.”
Two Washington Post reporters witnessed Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) exit the House chamber late Wednesday afternoon ahead of Greene (Ga.), who shouted “Hey Alexandria” twice in an effort to get her attention. When Ocasio-Cortez did not stop walking, Greene picked up her pace and began shouting at her and asking why she supports antifa, a loosely knit group of far-left activists, and Black Lives Matter, falsely labeling them “terrorist” groups. Greene also shouted that Ocasio-Cortez was failing to defend her “radical socialist” beliefs by declining to publicly debate the freshman from Georgia.
In the end, the vote to remove Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership position Wednesday morning was swift and relatively unceremonious, taking about as long as it would to order a morning cup of coffee, around 15 minutes. But it’s far from certain that Republicans will be able to dispense with Cheney entirely as they look toward 2022, set on winning back control in Washington.
Cheney has repeatedly made it clear that while she lost the battle, she is not surrendering the larger fight and will seek public ways to push her message. To that end, she welcomed the chance to talk with reporters right after the vote to remove her.
Multiple Republican members of Congress on Wednesday offered a false retelling of the devastating events that occurred during the Capitol riot, with one calling the entire event a “bold faced lie” that more closely resembled a “normal tourist visit” than a deadly attack.
During a House Oversight Committee hearing on the Jan. 6 riot, Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., said the House floor was not breached and that the supporters of former President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol behaved “in an orderly fashion.”
Colonial Pipeline, operator of the largest U.S. fuel pipeline, said Wednesday it is restarting operations after being shut down for five days due to a cyberattack.
The company shut down its entire operation Friday after its financial computer networks were infected by a Russia-tied hacker gang known as DarkSide, fearing that the hackers could spread to its industrial operations as well.
The shutdown led to widespread gasoline shortages and caused temporary price spikes. The U.S. saw the problem as serious enough to issue an emergency order that relaxed restrictions for drivers carrying fuel in affected states.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was forced to defend her agency’s guidance and even its integrity on Tuesday as Senate Republicans grilled her over CDC messaging on masks and other restrictions, arguing it’s frustrating and unreasonable as more Americans get vaccinated.
More rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel on Wednesday, and Israel’s military said it was striking more targets as the violence that has so far killed at least 40 people continued, officials said.
Gaza’s health ministry said Wednesday that 35 people had been killed. An Israeli police spokesman said Wednesday that two people died in a rocket strike overnight, bringing their death toll to five.
The fighting between Hamas, a militant group that controls Gaza, and Israel has involved hundreds of rockets and airstrikes in the most intense exchange of fire since 2014.
More than 1,000 gas stations in the Southeast reported running out of fuel, primarily because of what analysts say is unwarranted panic-buying among drivers, as the shutdown of a major pipeline by a gang of hackers entered its fifth day Tuesday.
Government officials acted swiftly to waive safety and environmental rules to speed the delivery of fuel by truck, ship or rail to motorists and airports, even as they sought to assure the public that there was no cause for alarm.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., remained defiant Tuesday just hours before Republicans are expected to remove her from House GOP leadership, warning that former President Donald Trump‘s continued attacks against the 2020 election threaten American democracy and risk inciting more violence.
Taking to the House floor in a near-empty chamber after several conservative colleagues railed against “cancel culture,” Cheney delivered a searing indictment of House GOP leaders seeking to expel her from their ranks after she voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and her continued denunciations of the former president.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told House Republicans on Monday that there would be a vote to recall Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney as chairwoman of the GOP conference on Wednesday, saying it’s “clear” there needs to be a change in the ranks of House Republican leadership.
“If we are to succeed in stopping the radical Democrat agenda from destroying our country, these internal conflicts need to be resolved so as to not detract from the efforts of our collective team,” he said in a letter to House Republicans obtained by CBS News. “Having heard from so many of you in recent days, it’s clear that we need to make a change.”
President Joe Biden is plunging into the next phase of his administration with the steady approval of a majority of Americans, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The survey shows Biden is buoyed in particular by the public’s broad backing for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the fourth month of his presidency, Biden’s overall approval rating sits at 63%. When it comes to the new Democratic president’s handling of the pandemic, 71% of Americans approve, including 47% of Republicans.
While there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for the stricken Colonial Pipeline, as the company said Monday that it expects the outage to be resolved by the end of the week, oil analysts say drivers in the Southeast, from roughly Alabama to potentially as far north as the nation’s capital, could see brief supply disruptions.
Exactly where those sporadic shortages could occur are hard to predict, experts say, but they agree about what could make it much worse: panicking.
The Colonial Pipeline, which typically moves 2.5 million barrels of fuel per day, including gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, has been shut down since Friday, when the company’s technology infrastructure was targeted in a ransomware cyberattack.
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday lowered the age that people can receive Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in the United States to 12 — a move that is expected to make millions of more shots available.
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was authorized for use in people ages 16 and up in December. The FDA has now amended the authorization to include children ages 12 to 15.
Last week, President Joe Biden said in remarks at the White House that the administration was “ready to move immediately to make about 20,000 pharmacy sites across the country ready to vaccinate those adolescents as soon as the FDA grants its OK.”
Six people dead in Colorado Springs. At a birthday party. On Mother’s Day.
One dead and seven wounded in Phoenix. At a young people’s party. On Mother’s Day.
Three dead in a neighborhood in Baltimore.
Three different incidents in California.
Four people wounded in Newark, four more wounded in Milwaukee, two dead and three wounded in Missouri at a “neighborhood celebration.”
These unfortunate exercises of our Second Amendment freedoms were all different, but they also were all the same. The Baltimore incident was by far the most spectacularly violent.
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said he has “no doubt” that the number of Americans killed by COVID-19 is much higher than what has been officially reported, after a recent study counted nearly double the amount recorded by federal health officials.
“We’ve been saying — and the CDC has been saying all along — that it is very likely that we’re undercounting,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has placed the number of deaths in the U.S. at around 577,800. In comparison, a study from the University of Washington released Thursday tallied around 905,000 deaths.
Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, on Sunday officially endorsed Representative Elise Stefanik in her bid to oust the No. 3 House Republican, Representative Liz Cheney, who has hemorrhaged support over her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about election fraud.
“Yes, I do,” Mr. McCarthy told the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo when she asked whether he supported Ms. Stefanik’s push to become the Republican conference chairwoman.
“We need to be united, and that starts with leadership,” Mr. McCarthy said. “That’s why we will have a vote next week.”
The operator of the largest petroleum pipeline between Texas and New York, which was shut down after a ransomware attack, declined on Sunday to say when it would reopen, raising concerns about a critical piece of infrastructure that carries nearly half of the East Coast’s fuel supplies.
While the shutdown has so far had little impact on supplies of gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, some energy analysts warned that a prolonged suspension could raise prices at the pump along the East Coast and leave some smaller airports scrambling for jet fuel.
Dr. Anthony Fauci says federal guidance on wearing face coverings indoors may change soon.
That’s how the New York Times in March 2019 famously described Attorney General William Barr’s supposed exoneration of Trump following Barr’s reading of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Refusing to release the sprawling report, Barr instead put out a thin, four-page press release where he brazenly lied about Mueller’s contents, and claimed Trump was in the clear.
It was an audacious move by Barr, and it worked because the Beltway press eagerly played along, reporting that Trump’s Russia worries were not only over, but that Mueller’s unseen conclusions had given Trump’s re-election a “powerful boost.”
This week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington confirmed Barr lied about the Mueller report
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Among the lies that Republicans tell themselves to justify their continued deranged, perhaps even traitorous behavior in refusing to back down from the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, one of the most persistent is that Democrats were always trying to “overturn” the 2016 election. You remember that one, right? Where Trump lost by 3 million votes but, because our democracy is a bullshit vestige of a time when our oh-so-wise founders decided to coddle slaveowners through the creation of the Electoral College, he still won? Sure, sure, when it was time for Congress to certify the electoral vote, a few Democrats in the House objected, but no senators signed on and there was never a question that then-Vice President Joe Biden was going to do the constitutional thing.
California could reach herd immunity by June 15, according to projections by doctors at UCSF.
“I am predicting that Gov. Newsom was actually right,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician with UCSF. “June 15th is when we’re going to be done…get to herd immunity.”
June 15 is about six weeks away. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced plans last month to fully reopen the economy on that date.
Moderna says early trial results show increased immunity against COVID-19 variants first found in Brazil and South Africa among people who took a booster shot or an experimental new vaccine. And a new study shows Pfizer’s original vaccine has proven highly effective against the variant first spotted in the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile Moderna said Thursday it will start seeking full approval of its vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration by the end of the month. It’s currently in use under an emergency authorization. Pfizer had already said it would begin trying for that full FDA approval by month’s end.
Both vaccines currently involve getting two shots.
Standing before an aging bridge in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden once again said he’s ready to work across the aisle with Republicans to pass his $2.3 trillion infrastructure-focused American Jobs Plan.
“I’m willing to hear ideas from both sides,” Biden said. “I’m ready to compromise. What I’m not ready to do, I’m not ready to do nothing. I’m not ready to have another period where America has another infrastructure month and doesn’t change a damn thing.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in an interview she plans to serve in her administration role for about a year before moving on to spend more time with her family.
Psaki made the comments during an hourlong interview with David Axelrod, her former colleague when they served under President Barack Obama, saying after a year of service, “I think it’s going to be time for somebody else to have this job. It’s not uncommon for the press secretary role to experience a high level of turnover: Former President Donald Trump had four, Obama had three and former President George W. Bush had four as well.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) wrote Wednesday that she believed the Republican Party was at “a turning point” amid a growing call from her colleagues that she be removed from her leadership post for rejecting former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election.
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Cheney, the third-highest-ranking House GOP member, said efforts to punish her for telling the truth amounted to an attack on “truth and fidelity to the Constitution.” Cheney was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and she has continued to reject his false claims that the election was “stolen” from him. President Joe Biden won that race by more than 7 million votes.
The Biden administration plans to support a temporary waiver on patents and other intellectual property rules preventing developing countries from mass-producing generic COVID-19 vaccines, United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced on Wednesday.
A group of developing countries led by India and South Africa was pushing for the move, which comes as a relief for global public health advocates.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that his biggest priority is stopping President Joe Biden’s proposed legislative agenda in Congress.
McConnell made the comment while side-stepping a question about GOP infighting over Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and her imperiled future as the leader of the House Republican Conference.
“One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” McConnell said during an appearance in Georgetown, Kentucky. “I think the best way to look at what this new administration is: The president may have won the nomination, but Bernie Sanders won the argument.”
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday lashed out at three of the biggest tech giants after Facebook’s quasi-independent Oversight Board upheld the social media platform’s ban on him.
“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country,” Trump said in a statement.
“Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before,” he continued. “The People of our Country will not stand for it! These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our Electoral Process.”
The Facebook Oversight Board will announce its decision Wednesday morning whether to allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform, nearly five months after he was suspended following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
If the board decides to let him on the platform, Facebook has seven days to unlock Mr. Trump’s account and turn it back over to him. The decision cannot be appealed.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Tuesday a growing number of Republicans in the conference are taking issue with Rep. Liz Cheney and he signaled that her days as GOP Conference chair — the third-ranking Republican in the House — could be numbered.
“I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message. We all need to be working as one if we’re able to win the majority,” McCarthy said on Fox News.
While he did not explicitly state what her future will be within the party, all signals point to another possible vote to oust her from her position as conference chair.
The legal team for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd last month, has filed a motion in a Minneapolis court requesting a new trial on multiple grounds, including jury misconduct.
In the filing, Chauvin’s attorney says the former officer should have a new trial in the “interests of justice; abuse of discretion that deprived the Defendant of a fair trial; prosecutorial and jury misconduct; errors of law at trial; and a verdict that is contrary to law.”
“The jury committed misconduct, felt threatened or intimidated, felt race-based pressure during the proceedings, and/or failed to adhere to instructions during deliberations, in violation of Mr. Chauvin’s constitutional rights to due process and a fair trial,” attorney Eric Nelson writes in the filing.
President Joe Biden set a new goal for vaccinations in America, calling for 70% of the U.S. adult population to have at least one shot and 160 million Americans to be fully vaccinated by July 4 in remarks on Tuesday afternoon.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, as of Tuesday, 105 million Americans are fully vaccinated, while 147 million have had at least one dose.
“That means giving close to 100 million shots — some first shots, others’ second shots — over the next 60 days,” Biden said.
Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday escalated her feud with former President Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress, issuing a less-than-subtle swipe at the former president’s latest attempt to claim the 2020 election was stolen from him.
On Monday morning, Trump issued a statement from his Save America PAC proclaiming that the presidential election “will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” — an attempt to appropriate the label given to the false claim by Trump and his Republican allies that last November’s election was in fact won by the former president.
The Food and Drug Administration is expected to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine for administration to adolescents by early next week, according to a federal health official with knowledge of the agency’s plans.
The move would allow many American middle- and high-school students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 well before the start of the next school year, using a shot Pfizer claims demonstrated “100% efficacy” in children as young as 12 years old with side effects similar to those that have been appearing in young adults.
President Joe Biden has signed a memo to raise the maximum number of refugees allowed into the United States this fiscal year to 62,500.
His administration had first said in February it wanted the cap at that number, but in mid April, Biden backtracked and decided to leave a Trump-era cap of 15,000 in place.
Last month, when the president said he was going to leave the historically low cap in place, he faced fierce criticism from Democratic allies on Capitol Hill and refugee resettlement agencies across the country.
Bill and Melinda Gates, the chairs and founders of their eponymous research foundation, announced Monday they are ending their marriage.
The Microsoft co-founder and his wife, the company’s former general manager, have been married for 27 years.
“Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives,” the pair said in a joint statement. “We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.”
It appears that the cult driving modern conservatism—and the Republican Party, which is its outward manifestation—has finally developed its infallible litmus test for its initiates. The cult is still based on monomaniacal loyalty to a vulgar talking yam, but now it has an article of faith through which that loyalty can be demonstrated. The Washington Post has a helpful survey of how the rites of initiation are being celebrated all over the country.
Cindy McCain, widow of the late Senator John McCain, bashed Arizona Republicans for their ongoing attempts to legally dispute the state’s 2020 election results.
The Arizona state Senate recently hired a Florida-based cybersecurity company, Cyber Ninjas, to conduct an audit of votes in Maricopa County. The county is the largest in the state, and President Joe Biden turned Arizona blue when he won there back in November.
Previous audits on the state’s election results have yielded no evidence of election fraud, and reports on the new audit suggest that its largely colored by conspiracy theories of widespread corruption. When Tapper spoke to McCain on State of the Union, he asked for her thoughts on the bizarre elements surrounding the audit.
“So what do you think about President Biden’s first 100 days?” Romney begins to say, as the jeers intensify.
President Joe Biden completes his first hundred days in office with a country that is more optimistic about the coming year, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) are optimistic about the direction of the country in the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.
The last time the country came close to that level of optimism about the coming year was in December 2006, when 61% said they were optimistic about where the country was headed, according to previous ABC News/Washington Post polls. Shortly before the 2016 election catapulted Donald Trump to the Oval Office, only 42% of Americans were optimistic about the future, compared to 52% who were pessimistic.
The Biden administration is returning to the Pentagon billions in funds diverted by President Donald Trump to build the wall at the southwestern border, and plans to cancel all related construction contracts, an administration official told ABC News on Friday.
“Border wall construction under the previous administration tied up more than $14 billion in taxpayer funds, shortchanged our military, and diverted attention away from genuine security challenges, like human traffickers. Rushed and haphazard wall construction also resulted in serious life, safety, and environmental issues,” the official said.
That is some tortured logic. Especially considering that people who watched Biden’s First 100 Days speech loved it, as he outlined new initiatives for cheaper childcare, smoother roads, faster internet, and promised to combat climate change.
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Dear Tucker,
Can I call you “Tucker”? I don’t really care because I’m sure as hell not calling you “Mr. Carlson,” like you’re the dad of someone I’m fucking back when I was in high school.
Anyways, I don’t watch your goddamn show because you’re an obnoxious, privileged, powdered pair of ass cheeks whose face veers between “serial killer who ejaculates while he stabs people” to “high school boy feeling a wet pussy for the first time.” Mostly, though, I don’t watch you because you’re a fucking liar. Sure, sure, you fool the Fox “news” rubes: all those shut-ins and elderly people who can be scammed by the crazed pillow dickhead and gun-fellating men who can’t get a hard-on to save their pathetic lives. Or marriages.
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday denounced the raids by federal investigators on the Manhattan home and office of his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, defending the former New York mayor as the victim of a politically biased Justice Department.
“Rudy Giuliani is a great patriot. He does these things — he just loves this country, and they raid his apartment,” Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo in an interview. “It’s, like, so unfair and such a double — it’s like a double standard like I don’t think anybody’s ever seen before.”
Andrew Giuliani, son of Rudy Giuliani, tried to take a page out of his father’s book during a CNN interview on Thursday night.
When asked by Erin Burnett about the FBI raid on his father’s apartment this week, Giuliani fired back with deflections and conspiracy theories ― including an accusation against the judge who signed the search warrant.
“Who appointed the judge? President Barack Obama!” he declared. “You have an Obama-appointed judge who has signed this warrant where no other judge would sign this warrant.”
