#Elections cycles or new bills or major events

[sattarehi]

so. rn NYT projects 222-213 Republican controlled house. a few of those seats are highly contentious imo, and I'd say 219-222 are all very possible, and there's still a slim chance for a Dem controlled house.

but even if there isn't? this means Dems only need to convince a handful of Republicans to agree on major bills. progressive measures might not be possible for 2 years, but it's entirely possible that we can still some stuff done--which would have been out of the question if it was anything like 226R or above.

even worst case, 222, that means only 5 Republicans need to be convinced to pass something. and importantly, many of the far-right Republicans bombed while the centrist ones did better, meaning there are more that will be willing to break party ties to prove to their voters they can advance actual, effective policies.

frankly, this election cycle has been amazing. considering history and the fact that the economy became a more central issue (primarily via prices), I am more than happy with how this went.

[bllsbailey]

Top Biden Aide Knows Tanked Joe's 2024 Re-election Effort...And It's Not Obama

Joe Biden’s presidency is no more. It was four years of failure and chaos. It was also an exercise in inflated egos—Biden thinks he’s one of the most accomplished presidents in history but can’t list anything when asked in interviews. When your go-to talking point for policies that helped America’s middle class is a bill that made it easier to break up monopolies, you’ve done nothing. 

No one cares that when credit card debt has exploded to historic highs and inflation remains unacceptable, eating away at working families. As the dust settles from the melee that forced the president to exit the race, one senior aide knows who’s to blame, and it’s not Barack Obama. Though the former president did play a part in drumming up the pressure on his former vice president (via NY Post): 

A top adviser to President Biden is “absolutely” blaming House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi for tanking his re-election campaign — and accusing Democratic donors of ignoring the will of their party’s primary voters in swapping him out for Vice President Kamala Harris.  Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser on communications who has since departed for a Harris super PAC, inveighed against Biden’s doubters in Congress and elsewhere in her first interview since the 81-year-old president dropped out of the 2024 race.  “You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public,” Dunn told Politico of the growing chorus of Democrats calling on Biden to abandon his run after his debate flop June 27.  Asked whether she was referring to “senators and House members” as well as “when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate,” Dunn shot back, “Absolutely.” 

Pelosi and Biden haven’t spoken in weeks—is anyone shocked? 

Biden’s huffy and slurred farewell address was a mini-State of the Union where the lame-duck president listed things he planned to accomplish. None of them will get done this deep in an election cycle and a House Republican majority. The president made the case for a second term—the country didn’t want it. It’s why he quit; he was veering quickly toward a 1980-style defeat. His June 27 debate with Donald Trump was a disaster, an election-killing event that led to the Democratic Party rebellion that became too widespread to quell. 

The president is said to have especially sour feelings toward Obama, who he felt was the true puppet master; maybe he was. Obama certainly was aware of the damning op-ed penned by George Clooney, which increased the pressure on Biden to quit. The former president didn’t order the hit piece but didn’t do anything to dissuade the Hollywood star from sending it to The New York Times. 

If Biden had hit grand slams in the three interviews post-debate on ABC, NBC, and BET, he might still be the 2024 Democratic candidate. Instead, they were middling trainwrecks, with the BET interview being especially brutal, forgetting the name of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who Biden referred to as the “black man.” Then, his Nevada trip, where he caught COVID and possibly had a mini-stroke or transient ischemic attack, put the final nail in the coffin. The president had also met with his top money man, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who said the fundraising operation was bleeding to death. 

Pelosi has maintained she wasn’t behind the effort to force out Biden, saying she never called anyone. Every reporter who has covered the former House speaker knows that’s a lie. Frankly, I think Pelosi, Obama, and Schumer formed a triumvirate in this effort to dump Joe. You know this already. It only exposes how weak this presidency was since this office is supposed to squash uprisings like this, given the built-in institutional power and advantages. It goes back to Pelosi’s trashing of Biden’s political operation. When she saw they could easily be outflanked—she pounced: 

“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she told The New Yorker in an interview published Thursday. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen.”  […] While Pelosi privately voiced concerns to Biden about the dire polling of June and July which suggested a widening battleground map, she has only just begun to publicly reflect on her view that the Biden campaign was not in a winning position. The San Francisco Democrat was still hesitant to admit playing a singular role in the push to bring Biden down.  “I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening,” Pelosi said after praising Biden’s accomplishments. “We couldn’t see it go down the drain, because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw.” 

She’s ruthless, always has been, despite her moments where she blows up at the media.

Trending on Townhall Videos

[ledenews]

Storch: It's the Home Stretch to the W.Va. Primary

The West Virginia Primary Election is Tuesday, May 14, 2024, thirty days from today. With the filing deadline of January 27, some call this last month, the home stretch. This week there were several opportunities to hear from candidates. Several forums were hosted to allow the voters, who were present, to interact with the candidates and to hear their ideas. At some events, candidates faced questions about their thoughts on the issues and in some cases, on their votes. Issues were discussed in round-table formats and also with allotted podium time. If nothing else, these events provide residents the opportunity to meet those hoping to earn their votes and to share their concerns with them. So, if these candidates, incumbents included, are successfully elected, they know where their constituents stand on the issues. Many conclude their remarks with asking the crowds for their vote. Will they get it? It will be interesting to see who is successful in their election bids in May. There are several more opportunities to hear where candidates stand on the issues. Hopefully, with so many major offices on the ballot and at the crossroads we find Wheeling, many will take advantage of the opportunities presented to learn more about the candidates for several races. Debates are a great way to learn more about candidates. Reading and regurgitating prepared remarks may help one keep on point, but what does it really tell about a candidate other than they can read? Does the audience really even know who prepared the remarks? Not really. While this columnist was growing up, her dad, Jack Kerr always stressed the importance of separating the fly doo-doo from the pepper. Having candidates participate in debates can really shine light on the doo-doo. It is so important to be transparent, especially for candidates, even those who believe they have the benefit of incumbency. The Northern Panhandle has some great senatorial representation in our legislative body. Two on the leadership team are up for re-election this cycle. This region benefits from having Senator Ryan Weld as the Majority Whip in the Senate. He is a highly-respected Whip, telling Senators it is his job to count votes. All he asks is they tell him where they will be on controversial issues, so as to know how the majority caucus will stand on issues. It would also be a prudent bet; he is a likely candidate to be the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman. Similarly, Senator Mike Maroney’s formal education in medicine and as a practicing physician brings a needed view to the bills seen in the Senate Health Committee, which he chairs. Several House candidates will not face a primary opponent during the May election cycle, but there are two who will in the Northern Panhandle. Delegate Mark Zatezalo will face Michele Slates in the second delegate district, as will the fourth district’s appointed Delegate Diana Winzenreid, who will face challenger, former delegate Bill Flanigan, who was encouraged to run following some questionable votes. Flanigan’s story is pretty cool for all those hoping to have residents choose to call Wheeling home. He is an attorney, who with his wife, an anesthesiologist, moved their family from Morgantown to allow their daughter to pursue an incredible soccer opportunity in Florida. The hills of West Virginia called them back home, as their daughter now plays in Spain. Seeking out and becoming members of the Wheeling Country Day School family because WCDS offered their son a “safe place to try a new skill that could become a life’s passion, to connect with an adult who will forever believe in you unconditionally, to balance the vulnerability, to lead with the empowerment of being part of a team and something greater than yourself,” taken from Wheeling Country Day’s website. Winzenreid stated several times at this week’s events, “That is a policy decision,” and that explanation led many to realize that’s what members of a Legislature do – make policy decisions with every vote. There are three branches of government, and if the legislative branch is always concerned with what the executive will do or what will happen in the judicial, what is their role? This 13-year former member was – and still is – confused by this statement. Additionally, the role of legislators is to prepare and offer amendments to gauge the will of the policy-making direction of the legislative body. If they agree, the amendment will be adopted; if not, the amendment will fail and the original bill will stand on its merits. Hopefully, all legislators are reading all the amendments, bills, and resolutions that come before them. Many get together in small groups to read and discuss the bills prior to each day’s session. Concerned, involved constituents at these forums this week, commented their belief this is a cop-out to rationalize votes to which no amendments were offered. It will be interesting to see what resonates with the voters who make themselves present to actively participate in events planned. Certainly, minds will be made up and some will change as residents learn about issues and candidates’ stances on those issues. As more and more events are planned, hopefully, citizens will take advantage of the opportunities presented in the home stretch.  Read the full article

[citizen-v2pt1]

Camp David Accords II

Camp David, Maryland

Transcript of President Carroll's opening remarks at yesterday's press conference

"Good afternoon.

In his farewell address, our first President warned us that political parties, in their lust for absolute dominance, will inevitably misrepresent the intentions of their opponents, sow dissention among the People, and threaten the democracy. Too often in the brief history of America, this prophecy has proven true. This past decade, however, has seen a disturbing escalation of this destructive competition as the parties have employed new weapons and allowed their disdain for each other to infect institutions both inside and outside of government.

Last week, an event occurred which so shocked the sensibilities of the American People that they used every means of communications available to send a message to their nation's capital. The message was "Enough - Fix This!"

In response, I invited the leadership of these entities to a long weekend here at Camp David with the intent not just of calling a truce and of putting safeguards in place to ensure that hostilities never again escalate to current levels, but to see what measures we could jointly agree upon to restore the People's trust in their government - their trust in our ability to lead.

Our discussions these last three days have been far ranging, occasionally heated but mostly civil, often going well into the evening, but insightful and enlightening for all of us.

Camp David Accords I

My colleagues will elaborate on the results of our endeavor, but I will provide a summary.

1. We concluded that unchecked partisanship can indeed tear at the fabric of society, but that political parties do have a role in the maintenance of a healthy democracy. Nevertheless, both parties have agreed to dismantle political mechanisms they have put in place to prevent third-party candidates for office from competing successfully. We will open the game and level the playing field.

2. Even those serving in Congress abhor their dependence upon corporate funding, political action committees, and wealthy donors to run for election or re-election. We are all in agreement that this system fosters corruption and must be replaced by some form of equitable public funding available to all eligible candidates. Real campaign finance reform is coming at long last.

3. We have also agreed to put an end to gerrymandering before the next federal election cycle. Henceforth, political district boundaries will follow established county lines or the equivalent thereof.

4. Congress has agreed that it can no longer claim any exemptions of any sort from the laws it has imposed, or will impose, upon others.

5. Congress has also agreed to end the practice of attaching riders to bills that are unrelated to the core legislation. This has too often been used to hide pork-barrel spending from public review and debate. Enough!

6. A further major change in the way the two houses of the Legislative Branch do business is that the prerogatives of the leadership will be curtailed. For too long we have tolerated a system that sets a few members of Congress as more equal than others. New equitable mechanisms will be designed for controlling the scheduling of debate on proposed legislation, for making committee assignments, and especially for making changes to the standing rules of the body.

7. To further encourage cooperation and communication between all members of Congress, seating arrangements will be changed to alphabetical by state.

8. Finally, we have agreed that there must be much harsher penalties for members of Congress who publicly defame their colleagues to gain political advantage. I am hopeful that from this point forward, all our elected representatives will set the standard for civil discourse in America.

The parties are turning over a new leaf. I trust the national media, state and local governments, and all responsible Citizens will follow their lead."

For more information on President Carroll's ascession to office and his administration, read "The Democracy Saga" by B. Thomas Marking.

[cyarskj1899]

2022 midterm elections live updates: Trump teases announcement after Election Day

The 2022 midterm elections are shaping up to be some of the most consequential in the nation's history, with control of Congress at stake.

All 435 seats in the House and 35 of 100 seats in the Senate are on the ballot, as well as several influential gubernatorial elections in battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Democrats are defending their narrow majorities in both chambers. Republican control of either the House or Senate would be enough to curtail most of President Joe Biden's agenda, and would likely result in investigations against his administration and even his family.

Latest Developments

Nov 7, 11:02 pm

Trump teases ‘very big’ announcement for next week

On the eve of Election Day, former President Donald Trump teased Monday night that he will make a “very big” announcement on Nov. 15 at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump was speaking at a final rally in Dayton, Ohio, for Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance.

While the former president did not specify the nature of the upcoming announcement, sources told ABC News last week that he could announce a 2024 presidential run as early as next week -- though the sources cautioned that discussions about the specifics, including a date, were still fluid.

Nov 7, 8:14 pm

Biden makes closing midterms pitch: 'We'll meet this moment'

Biden made one last campaign pitch to voters Monday night from a rally at Bowie State University in Maryland. This cycle, he warned, will shape "what the next couple of decades look like."

"Let's be clear, this election isn't a referendum, it's a choice," he said at the event in support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore. "It's a choice between two very different visions of America.”

Biden listed legislative accomplishments from Democrats during his first two years -- including low unemployment, job creation, infrastructure investments and more -- before turning to criticism of "MAGA Republicans."

"The hypocrisy is unbelievable," he said, slamming GOP lawmakers who oppose student loan relief despite receiving business loans and debt cancellation during the coronavirus pandemic, or who touted aspects of the American Rescue Plan despite not voting in favor of the bill.

Biden also called out election deniers within the Republican Party, saying they only see two outcomes: “Either they win, or they were cheated.”

"Today, we face an inflection point," Biden said as he closed his remarks. "One of those moments that comes around every three or four generations. We know in our bones that our democracy is at risk, and we know that this is your moment to defend it, preserve and protect it, choose it. We'll meet this moment."

Nov 7, 6:32 pm

Georgia officials overnighting absentee ballots to 1,000 voters who never received them

Voters who were never mailed their absentee ballot in Cobb County, Georgia, will still be able to vote, according to a new court ruling.

Approximately 1,036 voters in the county had requested a ballot but never received them. Ballots are supposed to be mailed within three days after election officials receive ballot requests. However, election workers in the county failed to upload absentee voting information to a ballot mailing system on Oct. 13 and Oct. 22.

Now, the Cobb County Board of Elections will send ballots to those voters Monday by overnight delivery, according to the court ruling. Those voters can mail their ballots provided they are postmarked by 7 p.m. on Nov. 8 and returned by Nov. 14. Email and text updates will be provided to those affected voters so they are able to track their ballot.

Voters affected by the error will also be able to vote in person Tuesday or by a federal write-in absentee ballot.

One of the main criticisms from Democrats regarding SB 202 -- the sweeping elections bill signed by Gov. Brian Kemp last year -- has been focused on mail-in ballots. Previously, voters were able to request absentee ballots 180 days before an election and the county could start mailing them out 49 days before Election Day. Now, voters can only request ballots within 78 days of an election and they can't be mailed until 29 days before.

-ABC News' Lalee Ibssa

Nov 7, 5:10 pm

Biden says Dems will ‘surprise the living devil out of a lot of people’

President Joe Biden said Monday he thinks Democrats will “surprise the living devil out of a lot of people" in the midterm elections.

“Imagine what we can do in a second term if we maintain control,” Biden said during a virtual Democratic reception.

“I know that sounds like a very high expectation,” Biden said, adding, “I’m optimistic.”

At a second Democratic reception Monday, the president said, “We’re going up against some of the darkest forces we’ve ever seen in our history. These MAGA Republicans are a different breed … this is not your father’s Republican Party. It’s a different deal."

Biden added, “We have a shot at keeping the Senate, increase in it, and I am optimistic about the House, as well.”

-ABC News’ Jordyn Phelps

Nov 7, 4:51 pm

Unofficial Pennsylvania results not expected for ‘at least a few days,’ official said last month

Unofficial results for the midterm elections in Pennsylvania are not expected for “at least a few days,” Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman told reporters on Oct. 24.

"We need to set realistic expectations," Chapman said, stressing that the public and media should "not expect complete results on election night."

Pennsylvania is one of nine states that by law cannot begin processing mail-in and absentee ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

Voters with mistakes on their mail ballots have until Nov. 14 to cure them and military and overseas residents have until 5 p.m. on Nov. 15 to get their ballots in.

Chapman said fully certified results won't come until the Nov. 28 deadline under law.

"We prioritize accuracy over speed," Chapman said. "The delay doesn't mean anything bad is happening.”

-ABC News’ Devin Dwyer

Nov 7, 3:08 pm

White House says Trump is not 'our focus' amid reports of 2024 bid

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday pushed back on questions about former President Donald Trump's expected 2024 bid.

"I was asked this question the other day, and that's not our focus," she said.

Trump is leaning toward announcing a third run for the White House, possibly as early as the week of Nov. 14, sources with direct knowledge of the matter previously told ABC News.

At Monday's briefing, Jean-Pierre also wouldn't give any insight into whether Trump's pending announcement will force Biden's hand on making his own reelection decision. Biden has said he intends to run for a second term, though hasn't made a formal decision.

"Again, I'm going to say what he has said many times and what I have said from here many times is that the president intends to run and I will just leave those words there," Jean-Pierre told reporters.

-ABC News' Cheyenne Haslett

Nov 7, 3:02 pm

WH urges patience with results, says Biden will address midterms on Wednesday

President Joe Biden will address the midterms on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing on Monday, but she did not give specifics of how he will do so -- at least in part because she said the full results of the elections will likely not be known by then.

Urging patience, Jean-Pierre said it’s important for people to understand that a days-long counting process is a sign that that the system is working as it should.

Jean-Piere also declined to offer any specifics on how the president will spend his Election Day but said he “will have a full schedule here at the White House.”

-ABC News’ Jordyn Phelps

Nov 7, 3:01 pm

White House says it's 'safe' to go to the polls, doesn't foresee threats

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday there were no "specific credible threats" about a possible uprising this election cycle. "The president has been briefed on the threat environment and directed that all appropriate steps be taken to ensure safe and secure voting occurs right in this process," Jean-Pierre said.

She cited a speech President Joe Biden gave last week against "political violence and voter intimidation."

"You heard him say this last week, in his speech, and many times before: You can't love your country only when you win," Jean-Pierre said.

"But I want to be clear: Americans should feel safe going to the polls," she said.

"It is important for Americans to do so. The administration has taken the issue of threats to the safety of voters and election officials seriously from day one," she said.

Late last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland was asked about reports of possible voter intimidation in Arizona and said, "The Justice Department has an obligation to guarantee a free and fair vote by everyone whose qualified to vote and will not permit voters to be intimidated."

-- ABC News' Cheyenne Haslett

Nov 7, 2:51 pm

Warnock says Walker ‘neither ready nor fit’ for Senate

One day before Election Day, Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock slammed his opponent, Herschel Walker, who he said "is neither ready nor fit to represent the people of Georgia in the United States Senate."

"He's pretty good at making up things. And now he wants to get the rest of us to imagine with him that he is of the timber to be a United States senator,” Warnock said.

Warnock said Walker's decision to campaign with divisive figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another Georgia Republican, should show Georgians the former football player will not be a unifier.

“Herschel Walker is demonstrating to you what kind of Senator he would be based on the company he's keeping,” Warnock said.

Split ticket voters will be key for Warnock's pathway to victory and he made a point to talk about reaching across the aisle.

"Let's bring this thing over the finish line. And let us not demonize those who do not share our political point of view,” he said. "We've got to find a way to pull this country together, to pull the state together, because the problems are too big and the stakes are too high.”

-ABC News’ Lalee Ibssa

Nov 7, 12:23 pm

Tom Cotton will not run for president in 2024

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said Monday he will not seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Cotton said a potential run would take him away from his two sons. The news was first reported by Politico and confirmed to ABC News by a source.

Over the past year, Cotton has traveled to several battleground states, campaigning for candidates. He's been to Iowa and New Hampshire, which host the party's first two presidential nominating contests.

Cotton's announcement was made days afterABC News reported that former President Donald Trump could announce a presidential bid as early as the week of Nov. 14.

Nov 7, 11:24 am

**Katie Hobbs said she’ll remain Arizona’s secretary of state despite GOP calls for her to step down

**

Arizona’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Katie Hobbs, said she would not recuse herself from her current position as secretary of state despite assertions from Republican candidates that her role as the state’s top election official is a conflict of interest as she runs for higher office.

“I took an oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution and laws of the state of Arizona. I have upheld that oath and I will continue to do so until I leave office on Jan. 2,” she told the Arizona Republic.

There is no legal requirement for Hobbs to step aside. A number of incumbent secretaries of state in Arizona have certified their own reelections.

"I don't see a problem with her being secretary of state and running for governor and recording the votes," former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer told the Arizona Republic about Hobbs. Brewer certified her own reelection as secretary of state in 2006. She became governor in 2009 when Democrat Janet Napolitano resigned to work in the Obama administration.

Hobbs’ race remains tight against her Republican opponent Kari Lake, a staunch proprietor of debunked allegations that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. Lake told ABC News’ chief Washington correspondentJon Karl that she would accept the results of the election if they were “fair, honest and transparent.”

Nov 7, 11:16 am

Trump says DeSantis should be reelected as governor

Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis should be reelected amid a mushrooming intraparty rivalry.

"The people of Florida are going to reelect the wonderful, the great friend of mine, Marco Rubio, to the United States Senate, and you’re going to reelect Ron DeSantis as your governor," Trump said at a rally in Florida Sunday to boost Rubio's reelection bid. DeSantis was notably absent from the event.

Trump's remark about DeSantis came a day after he branded the Florida governor with a less-than-flattering nickname while rattling off results from a poll of possible 2024 GOP presidential contenders.

"We’re winning big, big, big in the Republican Party for the nomination like nobody’s ever seen before," Trump said on Saturday. "Let’s see, there it is: Trump at 71. Ron 'DeSanctimonious' at 10%. Mike Pence at 7 — oh, Mike’s doing better than I thought."

Rumors about tension between the two GOP leaders had swirled for months as both eye possible White House campaigns.

Trump remains the GOP's de facto leader, keeping a stranglehold on the party's base even after leaving the White House. DeSantis has shot to conservative stardom during the coronavirus pandemic by rebuffing pleas for broader restrictions and leaning into a spate of culture wars embraced by Republican voters.

Neither has formally declared their 2024 ambitions and DeSantis still has to win his reelection bid on Tuesday. Sources have told ABC News that Trump could launch a presidential campaign later this month.

Nov 7, 11:02 am

Where Biden, Harris and Trump are spending election eve

Political heavyweights are hitting the trail for one final day of campaigning before voters head to the polls Tuesday.

President Joe Biden will join a virtual reception Monday afternoon for the Democratic National Committee before heading to Maryland with first lady Jill Biden to stump for gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore and the Democratic Party. The rally at Bowie State University will kick off at 7 p.m. ET.

Jill Biden’s also headlining a rally for Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton in Virginia at 11:45 a.m. ET.

Vice President Kamala Harris will spend the day in her home state of California. She and second gentleman Doug Emhoff are delivering remarks at a political event at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Former President Donald Trump is going to Dayton, Ohio, to rally GOP voters. Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who faces Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan in tomorrow’s race, will speak ahead of Trump. Trump will take the stage at 8 p.m. ET.

Nov 7, 10:34 am

NASED urges patience

The National Association of State Election Directors is urging patience ahead of the midterms, saying officials have been working nonstop to ensure the election is secure.

"State and local election officials have contingency plans in place so voters can have confidence in our elections and that the results will be tabulated accurately," the National Association of State Election Directors said in a statement Monday. "As with any election, it is important to note that operational challenges may arise."

The group says it’s normal for ballots to be counted in the days following the election.

"While the focus on election night is on who won and who lost, election night results are always unofficial. In the days and weeks to come, election officials will count every eligible ballot within the bounds of state laws, including provisional ballots, mail ballots, and ballots cast by military and overseas voters,” the statement said. “This critical process is normal, as it takes time to accurately tabulate millions of ballots. Some races will be close and may require a recount or a recanvass, depending on the state, but every eligible ballot will be counted as cast.”

-ABC News’ Luke Barr

Nov 7, 7:31 am

When we will know the results

Americans may not know the results of each race on Election Day, or even the following day.

"It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner," President Joe Biden advised last week.

Elections in the U.S. are decentralized, and each state has different systems for regulating races. Some, such as Arizona and Colorado, allow officials to start processing mail-in ballots before Election Day. Others, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, can’t begin counting these ballots until Election Day.

FiveThirtyEight has created a sliding scale estimating how long it may take each state to count ballots based on when each state reported results in its primary elections earlier this year.

More information can be found here.

Nov 5, 5:15 pm

Election denialism is on the ballot

Nearly 200 candidates running on Tuesday have rejected President Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. These candidates have either stated the election was stolen or took action themselves to try to usurp the results.

According to FiveThirtyEight, 60% of Americans will have an election denier on their ballot.

Not all Republicans on the ballot, however, are embracing former President Donald Trump’s lies about the race. A total of 77 have fully accepted the results while another 93 have accepted the outcome, with some reservations.

Read more here about election denialism on the ballot.

Nov 5, 5:08 pm

What the midterms mean for U.S. foreign policy

Domestic issues like abortion rights and the economy have taken center stage this cycle, but the elections could also have a big impact on foreign policy.

Experts told ABC News that the outcome of the races will drive the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as Republicans in Congress have hinted at curbing the steady stream of financial assistance to Ukraine. They also said the elections could also impact efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal, as Republicans have generally opposed a return to the agreement all along.

"If there is a change in control of Congress, because of how partisan unfortunately a lot of Iran policy has become, there would be more pressure--given that the current administration and many Democrats in general campaigned on resurrecting a deal and engaging with Iran," Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told ABC News. "There certainly will be desire for more scrutiny and oversight."

Read more here.

Nov 5, 5:01 pm

Biden implores voters to save democracy

President Joe Biden is casting the midterms not as a referendum on his leadership, but an inflection point for the nation amid threats to democracy.

"We must with an overwhelming voice stand against political violence and voter intimidation, period," he said at a Democratic National Committee event the week before Election Day. "Stand up and speak against it. We don't settle our differences in America with a riot, a mob, or a bullet or a hammer. We settle them peacefully at the ballot box."

In the speech, Biden specifically referenced the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband and the swath of candidates running this cycle who've embraced Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

"American democracy is under attack because the defeated former president of the United States refuses to accept the results of the 2020 election," Biden said. "He refuses to accept the will of the people, he refuses to accept the fact that he lost."

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ABC News Political Director Rick Klein looks at the Senate races to watch in the 2022 midterm election.

Catch up on the developing stories making headlines.

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

[thekillerssluts]

Will Butler explains how his Harvard degree developed into his second solo album

“Yeah, it’s terrifying,” Will Butler says, pondering how it feels to be releasing music away from the umbrella of Arcade Fire.

“It’s the classic thing about all writers,” he continues. “The creative process makes them wanna puke the whole time they’re writing something, then they read something back and it makes them feel worse, then a year later they read it and think ‘yeah, it’s okay’. It’s a glorious experience, but it really makes your stomach hurt.”

On the one hand Will Butler is well accustomed to this writing process, being a multi-instrumentalist in the Canadian indie-rock band fronted by brother Win - Arcade Fire. But on his own terms, it’s an entirely new process. Butler’s second solo album Generations arrives five years after his debut Policy, a collection that rattled with a ramshackle charm and what he describes now as a ‘consciously very unproduced’ sound. Arcade Fire wound down from their Everything Now tour in September 2018, leaving Butler with the last two years of playtime. Most musicians, particularly those accustomed to big album cycles, set aside their downtime for family or other musical projects. Somehow Butler’s managed to do both while also completing a masters degree in Public Policy at Harvard.

“I went to school for a variety of reasons but there was an artistic side to it too,” he says. “I have always tried to let music and lyrics emerge from the world that I’m in; you fertilise the soil and see what grows. It was a way to better understand where we are, how we got here and what's going on. You know, ‘where am I from? What's going to happen?’” Both of these questions explored in his degree are used as fuel for Generations.

It’s easy to imagine an album by somebody who’s just pursued a Public Policy MSt to form in reams of political commentary, probably set to an acoustic guitar. However, Butler instead engages character portraits soundtracked by a broad range of thrilling sonics. Opener “Outta Here” is shrouded by a monstrous bass that lurks beneath the depths of the instrumentation before bursting out midway through. “Got enough things on my plate without you talking about my salvation,” he screams.

While the cage-rattling “Bethlehem” is mania underpinned by a thrashing guitar and bubbling synths that help lift the track to boiling point.While there’s no current world leaders namechecked or any on-the-nose political commentary across the LP, the angst of its contents is instantly tangible, backed by the intellect of somebody who’s spent the past few years studying the ins and outs of government processes. A perfect combination, you could say.

This fuel was partly discovered through Butler reconnecting with the music that defined his teenage years: namely Bjork, The Clash and Eurythmics. While these influences certainly slip into frame across Generations, they were paired with something of an unlikely muse: “I got into this habit of listening to every single song on the Spotify Top 50 every six weeks,” Butler explains. “So many of them are horrible, terrifying and just awful but there’s something inspiring about how god damn avant garde the shittiest pop music is now. Just completely divorced from any sense of reality - it’s just layers upon layers upon layers - it’s amazing. It’s like Marcel Duchamp making a pop hit every single song.”

We turn from current music to current events. Navigating Covid-19 with his wife and three kids in their home of Brooklyn, a majority of 2020 has been caught up in family time for Butler. “The summer’s been easier because everybody’s outside, whereas in spring it was like ‘it’s family time because we have to lock our doors as there's a plague outside.’” While being surrounded by the trappings of lockdown since his second solo album Generations was completed in March, the album itself wriggles with the spirit of live instrumentation, which at this point seems like some sort of relic from a bygone era."I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people."

The source of this energy can be traced back to the way the songs came together; they were forged and finessed at a series of shows in the early stages of the project. “It just raises the stakes. You can tell how good or how dumb a lyric is when you sing it in front of a hundred people,” he reflects. “It’s like ‘are you embarrassed because what you’re saying is true?’ or ‘is it just embarrassing?’ It’s a good refiner for that stuff. I think eventually rediscovering this album back in the live setting would be amazing - we’re a really great live band, it’s a shame to not be in front of people.”

Like his day job in Arcade Fire, Butler’s solo live group is something of a family affair - both his wife and sister-in-law feature in the band, alongside Broadway's West Side Story star, and the student of the legendary Fela Kuti drummer, Tony Allen. Together this eclectic mix of musicians conjures an infectious spirit through the raw combination of thundering synths and pedal-to-the-metal instrumentation; an apt concoction indeed for lyrics that are attempting to unhatch the bamboozling questions that surround our current times.

The timing for Butler’s decision to study Public Policy couldn’t have been more perfect, with his course starting in the Fall of 2016. “I was at Harvard for the election which was a really bizarre time to be in a government school, but it was great to be in a space for unpacking questions like ‘my god, how did we get here?!’” he reflects, with a note of mockery in the bright voice.

“I had a course taught by a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur. The class was essentially on race in America but with an eye towards policy. The class explored what was going to happen in terms of race under the next president. The second to last week was about Hilary Clinton and the last week was about Donald Trump. We read riot reports - Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, the Detroit uprisings in the ‘60s and Chicago in 1919 - it's certainly helping me understand the last 5 years, you know. Just to be in that context was very lucky.”

As we’ve seen with statues being toppled, privileges being checked and lyrics of national anthems being interrogated in recent months, history is a complex, labyrinthine subject to navigate requiring both ruthless self-scrutiny and a commitment to the long-haul in order to correct things. The concept of Generations shoots from the same hip employing character portraits to engage in the broader picture.

The writing, at times, is beamed from a place of disconnect (“had enough of bad news / had enough of your generation”), from a place of conscious disengagement (“I’m not talking because I don’t feel like lying / if you stay silent you can walk on in silence”) and from a place of honest self-assessment (“I was born rich / three quarters protestant / connections at Harvard and a wonderful work ethic”).

“I’m rooted in history to a fault,” he says. “My great grandfather was the last son of a Mormon pioneer who’d gone West after being kicked out of America by mob violence. He wanted to be a musician which was crazy - he got 6 months in a conservatory in Chicago before his first child was born. He always felt like he could have been a genius, he could of been writing operas but he was teaching music in like tiny western towns and he had all these kids and he made them be a family band and they were driving around the American west before there were roads in the deserts - literally just driving through the desert! He would go to these small towns and get arrested for trying to skip bills and just live this wild existence.”

Butler’s grandma, meanwhile, was just a child at this point. She went on to become a jazz singer with her sisters and married the guitar player Alvino Rey. “The fact that me and my brother are musicians is no coincidence,” he smiles. “It’s not like I decided to be a musician, it’s down to decisions that were made at the end of the 19th century that have very clearly impacted where I am today. The musical side of it is very beautiful, it is super uncomplicated and a total joy to have a tradition of music in our family...but also in the American context - which is the only context I know - it's also these very thorny inheritances from the 19th century and beyond that influence why my life is like it is.

“For me it’s like, ‘I made my money because my grandpa was a small business owner’ or ‘my grandpa was a boat builder and got a pretty good contract in WW2 and was able to send his kids to college’. Both of which are so unpoetic and unromantic but it is an important thing to talk about, that's a personal political thing to talk about; there's horrifying and beautiful aspects there.”

The lament of “I’m gonna die in a hospital surrounded by strangers who keep saying they’re my kids” on “Not Gonna Die” could well be croaked by somebody on the tail end of a life lived on the American Dream. At times, Butler plays the characters off against each other, like on “Surrender,” which chronicles two flawed characters going back and forth played by Butler’s lead vocals and his female backing singers that undermine his memory; “I remember we were walking” is cut up with the shrug of “I dunno” and “maybe so”. “I found having the backing voices there gave me something to play with,” he explains. “Either something threatening to the main character or something affirming to the main character, just providing another point of view.”

Elsewhere, “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know” explores the feeling of being unsuitably equipped to unravel the complexities that surrounds us day-to-day. “The basic emotion of that song is very much ‘I don’t know what I can do’ which is an emotion we all have,” he ponders. “There’s also the notion that follows that, like ‘maybe don’t even tell me what to do because it’s going to be too overwhelming to even do anything’.”

Some of these portraits materialised in the aftershows Butler began hosting while on Arcade Fire’s Everything Now tour which found him instigating conversations and talks by local councilman, politicians and activists on local issues. “On some of the good nights of the aftershow town halls, you’d feel that switch away from despair and into action,” he says smiling. “The step between despair and action is possible, that sentiment isn’t spelled out lyrically on the record but it’s definitely there spiritually.”

“I learned anew what a treasure it is to have people in a room. Getting humans in a room can be absurd. And we were having from 5,000 to 15,000 people in a room every night, most of them local. I’m very comfortable with art for art’s sake; I think art is super important and it’s great people can like music that's not political. It was sort of like ‘well we’re here and I know a lot of you are thinking about the world and you’re thinking about what a shit show everything is. You want to know what we can do and I also want to know what we can do!’ So I put on these after shows.”"The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change."

Butler would find a suitable location near the Arcade Fire gig through venue owners who were often connected to the local music and comedy scenes to host these events. “The dream lineup would be to have a local activist and a local politician talking about a local issue because that’s the easiest way to make concrete change. Arguably, the most important way is through the city council and state government. The New York state government is in Albany, New York. The shit that happens in Albany is all super important so I wanted to highlight that and equip people with some concrete levers to pull.

“In Tampa we had people who were organizing against felon disenfranchisement, like if you’ve been convicted of a felon you couldn’t vote in Florida, and something absurd like 22% of black men in Florida couldn’t vote and there were people organising to change that - this was in 2018 - and you could just see people being like ‘holy shit, I didn't even know this was happening!’

“These were not topics I’m an expert in - it’s like these are things that are happening. The thought was trying to engage, I’m sad to not be doing something similar this Fall, I mean what a time it would have been to go around America.”

Understandably the looming 2020 election is on Butler’s radar. “It doesn't feel good,” he sighs. “I’ve never had any ability to predict, like 2 weeks from now the world could be completely different from what it is today. There was always a one-in-a-billion chance of the apocalypse and now it's like a one-in-a-million chance which is a thousand times more likely but also unlikely. It’s going to be a real slog in the next couple of years on a policy side, like getting to a place where people don’t die for stupid reasons, I’m not even talking about the coronavirus necessarily just like policy in general. Who knows, it could be great but it seems like it's going to be a slog.”

There’s a moment on the closing track “Fine”, a stream-of-consciousness, Randy Newman-style saloon waltz, where Butler hits the nail on the head. “George [Washington], he turned to camera 3, he looked right at me and said...I know that freedom falters when it’s built with human hands”. It’s one of the many lyrical gems that surface throughout the record but one that chimes with an undeniable truth. It’s the same eloquence that breaks through as he touches on the broad ranging subjects in our conversation, always with a bright cadence despite the gloom that hangs over some of the topics.

The live show is without a doubt Arcade Fire’s bread and butter. While Butler questions how realistic the notion of getting people in packed rooms in the near future is, he reveals the group are making movements on LP6. “Arcade Fire is constantly thinking about things and demoing, it's hard to work across the internet but at some point we’ll get together. It probably won’t be much longer than our usual album cycle,” he says.

You only have to pick out one random Arcade Fire performance on YouTube to see Butler’s innate passion bursting out, whether it’s early performances that found him and Richard Reed Parry adorning motorbike helmets annihilating each other with drumsticks to the 1-2-3 beat of “Neighbourhood #2 (Laika)” or the roaring “woah-ohs” that ascend in the anthem of “Wake Up” every night on tour. It’s an energy that burns bright throughout our conversation and across Generations.

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/arcade-fires-will-butler-new-solo-record-generations

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

It’s no secret that Republicans are anti-intellectual, but it makes you wonder what their end goal is?  Why do they keep electing dumber and dumber presidents?  Is it just to own the libs?  Do they just not care?  They’ll get what they want regardless of how smart their presidents are, so why always pick the low hanging fruit?

The only smart Republican of the last 60 years was Bush Sr, and he was a one-term wonder who rode Reagan’s coattails into office.

Nixon was notoriously incompetent as VP, almost beat Kennedy in 1960, threw what should have been a career ending shit fit in 1962 after losing the California governor’s race, but not only came back in 68 and win because Goldwater was so unpopular in 64, but won 72 in the greatest landslide in history up to that point.  Corrupt to the bone, he resigned before he could be impeached for hiring burglars to steal dirt on a political opponent, covering it up, and lying about it.

Ford was appointed VP to replace scandal stricken Spiro Agnew, specifically chosen because he was known as an honest politician.  His reputation evaporated the second he became president because his first act was to pardon the guiltiest man in the country; he lost handily in 76.

Reagan was an actor who wanted to play politician so he could hurt the people he didn’t like; blacks people, poor people, gay people, women.  It was a power trip for him, and because he was good at reading cue cards and delivering jokes written by other people, everyone let him get away with murder.  He committed treason by selling weapons to Iran; this isn’t hyperbole, the actual definition of treason includes giving aid to out enemies, and after the oil and hostage crises of the 70s, Iran was an enemy first and foremost.  Oliver North took the blame and had his secretary shred the evidence, the President Bush pardoned everyone involved.  Reagan won in an even bigger landslide than 72 in 84, and Bush won in a major upset against Dukakis in 88.

Bush lost in 92 in no small part because of Ross Perot splitting the ticket; no third party candidate has ever done better nationwide than Perot in 92, with 19% of the vote (though he didn’t win a single state, which some minor candidates have done).  Clinton won with 43% of the popular vote.  Forty-three percent!  57% of people voted against him, and he won.  92 was a farce, as was 96 with less than 50% voter turnout, the lowest in modern history.  Perot ran again and got 8.4% of the vote, Republican Bob Dole only got 40.7%, and Clinton got 49.2%.  This means that less than a quarter of eligible voters voted for Bill Clinton, and he still won.  FARCE!

Al Gore rightfully won in 2000, but the conservative majority Supreme Court stole it from him.  Florida was too close to call; whichever candidate won it would become president.  George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was governor, and he ordered the federally mandated recount be stopped, breaking the law.  The Supreme Court decided not to restart the recount for no discernible reason besides they wanted Bush to win.  He was notoriously dumb, stereotypically dumb, so dumb a lot of people thought it was an act and voted for him because they thought he was a secret genius who was just pretending to be a cowboy running for president off his daddy’s legacy.  He was the stupidest president we had ever had up to that point, and hired a lot of smart people to do horrible things so he could claim plausible deniability.  That Obama didn’t send Dick Cheney to the Hague was a deafening silence.  Bush only won re-election in 2004 because he started a war in Iraq in 2003 and the country didn’t want to change horses midstream; same exact tactic his daddy used, only this war lasted longer than the Gulf and “worked” as planned.

2008 was a ceremonial race; McCain didn’t stand a chance.  He was not incompetent, but his running mate was.  Sarah Palin was even dumber than Bush, and like Gingrich in the 90s was responsible for a conservative revolution we’re still feeling today.  Barack Obama wasn’t an amazing president, but he was an AMAZING candidate.  Everybody loved Obama in 2008, he won more votes than any candidate in history until 2020.  McCain was a career moderate, and after the last 8 years of failure both parties were running on a platform of “I am not George W. Bush.”  Turns out a young charismatic smart black man is less like Bush than another old white guy.

Obama lost a ton of momentum going into 2012 because he didn’t really DO anything his first term.  His only major accomplishment was the Affordable Care Act, which was an act of the Democratic congress than anything else, and it still wasn’t nearly as progressive as it needed to be (the US is still the only developed nation without universal healthcare).  Romney, a Republican governor from the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts, could have beaten him were he not a classist piece of shit.  Romney hated poor people more than Reagan, and once wore brown face to a campaign event to make himself look more like Obama (they didn’t paint his hands or neck, just his face).  Obama made a lot of promises he didn’t keep, in no small part because of the Tea Party and the devastating losses in 2014 (we suffer under Mitch McConnell because of that).

2016 was a dumpster fire that shouldn’t have happened, and if either party had run a different candidate, it wouldn’t have.  Sanders would have beaten Trump, Clinton would have beaten Cruz.  It was a perfect storm of a very unpopular and insincere grandma running against a cartoon supervillain.  You couldn’t repeat that with what we know now.  Your vote in 2016 came to represent who you were as a person; people took it to the extremes, and the sunk cost fallacy made the entire Republican party shift so far rightward that we have actual concentration camps now and NOBODY GIVES A SHIT!  Trump was a game show host, a used car salesman famous for being tacky and dumb and offensive.  He was KNOWN for running his companies into the ground, that was his MO, he made a career out of bankruptcy, and Republicans still can’t believe that he drove us into the worst economic depression since the last Republican (history repeat itself, whoop-dee-doo).  Biden won in 2020 because of record turnout, though 2020 was closer to the intentional walk of 2012 than the home run of 2008 in terms of enthusiasm for the candidates.

If we’ve learned anything its that Republicans just keep getting worse and worse, so it’s getting hard for me to imagine what 2024 has in store.  Will Trump risk losing the popular vote 3 times in a row for a second term?  i think he’ll pretend to so he can scam millions of dollars out of his base, but he’ll either lost the primaries and tank the Republicans by running third-party, or he’ll drop out and endorse one of his spawn.  If Biden decides not to run in 2024, the nomination will almost certainly go to Kamala Harris, at which point I expect the Republicans to run a woman as well, so that we’re guaranteed the first woman president; she’ll be young, and white, and blonde.  My money’s on Ivanka.  Kamala vs. Ivanka will be a repeat of the 2016 dumpster fire, only worse because then everyone would be acting like both candidates are feminist icons, #GirlPower #SheRunsTheWorld #WarCrimesAreBetterWithTwoXChromosomes  If Biden DOES run again, then I suspect the Republican pool will be wide early on (Prick Scott, Ron DeathSantis, Uncle Tom Cotton, Nikkki Haley, you name it), only to shrink before the primaries as they all coordinate to get behind someone strong enough to defeat an incumbent.

Republicans are very good at coordinating; they are the party of “Follow the Leader.”  Whoever is in charge has 100% authority, no ifs, ands, or buts, no questions asked, just follow orders.  It would be easy to call them lemmings, but it’s more insidious than this.  They run dumb candidates for president, but have very smart people working behind the scenes to do horrible things.  They’re willing to follow orders blindly to ensure that the party prospers, whereas Democrats are chicken running around with their heads cut off.  There are no Democratic leaders.  Pelosi?  Schumer?  Nobody likes those dinosaurs!  The only really popular Democrats are progressives, and they will never have power as long as the moderates have a majority of the caucus.  AOC could be a senator someday; she could replace Schumer whenever he retires, but that would hinge on her not having any moderate primary challengers.  Moderates are still very popular because they are seen as “electable,” even though they never DO anything once elected.  Progressives have big ideas and the concrete plans to get them done, but the moderate establishment is afraid of losing power, and would rather placate the other side doing nothing, changing nothing, making no waves.  The party needs to shift leftward, or the country is doomed.

I would suggest the progressives splitting off to form a third party, but that would almost certainly destroy left-wing politics in this country as every safe seat would become split.  In an ideal world, it would be a nominal change; they would be the Progressive Democratic Party, they would continue to run in blue districts and caucus with Democrats on votes, but would advertise themselves as anti-establishment.  They would be like the New Democrats in Canada, which now that I think about it is a very bad idea because the New Democrats have no power and end up giving more votes to the Liberals and Conservatives instead.  The Progressive solution is intended to show the caucus that the moderates don’t have total control, but it would end up with the moderate Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, running against Progressives in every seat, handing them to the Republicans.  Every election cycle people act like a loss would spell “the end of the _____ party,” but this would actually be it for the Democrats.  It would be a turning point, like the 1960s, with millions of people changing parties out of principle, a major shift.  A Red Scare

I just want to crawl in a hole and die.  I hate politics.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

2022 midterms and 2024 general

2022 is an important year because the House of Representatives is reapportioning itself; following the 2020 census, the states have been tasked with redrawing district maps to “reflect” the new population.  Partisan gerrymandering has been a problem for decades, but it has become a thoroughly entrenched problem following the 2019 Supreme Court decision that gerrymandering is outside the scope of federal courts; the 5-4 conservative majority decided that they can not and will not rule on the matter again, leaving it up to Congress and the states to figure it out.  Congress can’t get anything done, so a gerrymandering ban is all but impossible, meaning the states have total control over their new maps.  A majority of the states are controlled by Republicans, despite representing less than half the country; there are more smaller states than bigger states, so even though more people live in urban areas, the rural areas get the majority voice in the redistricting process.

This means that 2022 is going to be probably the worst gerrymandered year in American history; given that the Supreme Court has since changed to a 6-3 conservative majority, I don’t see them overturning their previous decision any time soon, meaning Republicans have an inordinate advantage going forward.

Let’s look at the 20th century as a guide to see if we can make any predictions.

1902: Republican Teddy Roosevelt is president, and the Republicans control both the House and Senate.  Following the election, they maintain control.

1912: Republican William Howard Taft is president, Republicans control the Senate, Democrats control the House.  At this time, both parties had liberal and conservative wings, and the Republicans were having a civil war between the liberal Roosevelt faction and the conservative Taft faction.  Roosevelt ran against his own party’s incumbent as a Progressive, a third party spoiler, giving the White House to the Democrats for the first time since the 1880s (and to a southerner for the first time since the Civil War).  Democrats kept the House and took back the White House and Senate, giving Woodrow Wilson the trifecta.

1922: Republican Warren G. Harding is president, Republicans control both the House and Senate.  This year is special because it is the first time in American history that the House was unable to reapportion itself after a census; there was a major battle across the country between rural and urban state legislatures, so Congress eventually passed a law in 1929 to set the number of House seats permanently at 435, the level it had reached by that time.  Before this, the House grew ever ten years, inflating with population; it has been stagnant ever since, making each Congress less representative than the one before it.  Republicans maintained control of the House and Senate.

1932: Republican Herbert Hoover is president, Republicans control the Senate, Democrats control the House.  Hoover was more or less single-handedly responsible for the Great Depression, refusing to give aid to the people, forever ranking him as one of the worst presidents in American history; he was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt who dragged us out of the depression and jump started the economy during World War II, becoming one of the greatest presidents in American history.  Democrats won super-majorities in both the House and Senate, giving Roosevelt all but unlimited power (the only thing keeping him from literally becoming a king was that Democrats were still split between the more liberal north and the conservative south).

1942: Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt is still president, on his third term, and Democrats still control the House and Senate.  They maintain control after the election.

1952: Democrat Harry S. Truman is president, but the recently passed 22nd Amendment forbid him from running for a third term.  This is the first reapportionment year of the century without an incumbent president running for re-election; Democrats still control the House and Senate.  After 20 years of Democratic rule, the country elects Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower a war hero and basically America Incarnate. He was everything they wanted in a president; he was manly, intelligent, anti-communist, super Christian, and racially tolerant.  Republicans took back the White House, the House and Senate, giving Eisenhower the trifecta.

1962: Democrat John F. Kennedy is president, and Democrats control both the House and Senate.  They maintain control after the election.

1972: Republican Richard Nixon is president, but Democrats maintain control of both the House and Senate.  Nixon stole this election by hiring goons to break into the Democratic headquarters and steal dirt on his political opponent (Watergate Scandal).  His campaign forged a letter from his strongest rival Edmund Muskie of Maine, in which they made it look like he was insulting the French-Canadian population, which would be like someone from Florida insulting Cubans, or someone from California insulting Mexicans.  Muskie cried giving a speech denouncing the letter, imploding his campaign.  The Democrats instead went with the unpopular George McGovern of South Dakota, a political nobody; Nixon hurt HIS campaign by revealing that his running mate Thomas Eagleton had depression and previously underwent electro-shock therapy, runing his career and forcing McGovern to replace him at the last minute with Sargent Shriver, whose main claim to fame was being married to John F. Kennedy’s sister.  Nixon won in a landslide, winning 49 states including South Dakota.  Nixon failed to cover up his crimes and resigned in 1974 before he could be impeached.  Democrats kept both the House and Senate.

1982: Republican Ronald Reagan is president.  Republicans control the Senate, but Democrats control the House.  Both parties keep their respective chambers following the election.

1992: Republican George H.W. Bush is president, and Democrats control both the House and Senate.  Bush is nowhere near as popular as Reagan was, riding his coattails into office and then stumbling through his first term.  During his campaign he said “read my lips: no new taxes.”  During his term he created new taxes.  Whoops.  He cared more about foreign policy than domestic, but still fumbled the Gulf War; we pushed Saddam out of Kuwait (yay), but then overthrew the Kuwaiti government (boo).  The war had so much buildup; it was the only thing reported on TV for weeks and months, and it was over in days, so everyone was like “what was the point?”  He may still have won re-election were it not for Ross Perot; a businessman from Bush’s own Texas, he ran the most successful third party campaign in modern history.  He didn’t win any states, but he had national appeal where former third-partiers only had regional appeal; he split the ticket in all 50 states, meaning that Bush and Democratic rival Bill Clinton won multiple states with less than 50% of the vote.  Clinton was a charismatic young southern Democrat in direct opposition to old pretender Bush (he was a new Englander pretending to be a Texan).  Democrats won the White House, and kept both chambers of Congress, giving Clinton the trifecta.

2002: Republican George W. Bush is president (the H.W.’s son), and while the Republicans control the House, the Senate is split 50-50 for the first time in history.  This should mean that Republican control the Senate because Dick Cheney was VP, but midway through 2001, Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords left the party to become an independent and caucus with the Democrats, giving them an effective 51-49 majority (fun fact: Jeffords was eventually succeeded by none other than Bernie Sanders).  Bush Jr. was a warmonger who wanted to “redeem” the Bush family legacy by finishing what his daddy started; he used the tragedy of 9/11 as a pretense to go to war with Iraq so he could topple Saddam, even though Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks, had no ties to al-Qaeda, and possessed no WMDs.  Republicans kept the House and narrowly won back the Senate after the election.

2012: Democrat Barack Obama is president.  Democrats control the Senate, but Republicans control the House.  Both parties keep their respective chambers, but Democrats win a handful of new House seats despite the re-districting.

2022: Democrat Joe Biden is president (in the event of an unforeseen tragedy, it might be Kamala Harris).  Democrats control the House and Senate by razor-thin margins, meaning single-digit rebels could deadlock Congress entirely.  It is very likely the Republicans will take back the House, and I give both parties a dead even chance of winning the Senate.  Democrats are certainly going to lose Georgia and possibly Arizona, but could pick up Pennsylvania and maybe even Wisconsin; Pennsylvania is open because the Republican incumbent is retiring, but the Wisconsin incumbent is running for re-election, so that one will be an uphill battle.  Those two are their best shots; maybe North Carolina (no incumbent), maybe Florida (yes incumbent), but I wouldn’t hold my breath.  There’s a non-zero percent chance Congress could remain deadlocked 50-50.  It depends on if Biden/Harris get anything substantive done this year.

It appears that the majority party in the House has the advantage going into the next re-districting cycle, but it has never been this close before and it fails to account for the Republican Revolution in the 80s and 90s.  The Democrats maintained control of the House for 60 years, then Bill Clinton took office and the Republicans reorganized themselves in opposition to everything he stood for (even in the areas where he stood with them).  Newt Gingrich took the Republican party from defense to offense, changing the playbook so they cared less about policy and more about culture; since then, instead of running for stuff, Republicans run against stuff.  Their entire platform became “oppose Democrats,” with no real plan besides doing the opposite of what the other party wants to do; remind you, in 2016 Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court because he was a politically neutral choice who Republicans had no qualms against, they just refused to seat him because they hated Obama.  Trump was a symptom of this backpedaling, he helped narrow the Republican platform even more, to the point that they didn’t change a thing between 2016 and 2020.  That’s unheard of; a lot changed between then and now, and they didn’t feel the need to update ANYTHING, no new ideas, no new promises, just more of the same.  It worked in 2016, and they thought it would work again in 2020, but then the pandemic hit and unemployment spiked to Great Depression levels and we entered a recession, turning Trump from Ronald Reagan to Herbert Hoover.  It is historically difficult to defeat incumbent presidents, Trump was just a wildly unpopular idiot, and Biden was inoffensive and pretty close to politically neutral (he’s a moderate Democrat who is convinced he can work with Republicans even though their MO is still to oppose him on principle; they will NEVER work with him).

2024 seems so far away, but we’re already getting a taste at what it may look like.  If Trump decides to run again, he will absolutely win the Republican nomination; if he runs again, no other candidate will even try to throw their hat in the ring, they worship at his feet, they’d never dare oppose him.  In that case, it will be a rematch between Biden and Trump, which hasn’t gone to the challenger since Grover Cleveland won a nonconsecutive second term in 1892.  Trump will lose the popular vote for the third time, but could eke by with a slim Electoral College victory if Republicans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia implement their anti-voting laws.  If Biden doesn’t run for a second term, the Democratic nomination will absolutely go to Kamala Harris, meaning it’ll be Harris v Trump, a repeat of Clinton v Trump in 2016.  A competent but politically moderate woman pretending to be a left-wing progressive will be torn apart by the media, third party candidates will be treated like real challengers, and the republicans will take the White House with a minority vote for the third time in a row (the last time a Republican won the presidency with a majority vote was George H.W. Bush in 1988.  Bush Jr was re-elected with a majority vote in 2004, but he lost his initial race in 2000 and was given the victory by the Supreme Court.  Democrats have won 7 of the last 8 elections, but have only seated 3 presidents).

Biden v Trump is up in the air

Harris v Trump will probably go to Trump

If Trump doesn’t run, then the Republican race may be as crowded as it was in 2016, only this time the dozen or so candidates will be vying for an endorsement from Trump.  Whoever he picks will become the nominee, so over the next year or two we can expect a ton of right-wing nutjobs to try and position themselves as his heir apparent.  Some people think it will be one of his adult children, Don Jr or Eric or maybe Ivanka, but they’re not quite as popular as their dear old dad, and he hates them anyway (he hates Don Jr because he has the same name as him, he hates Eric because he’s a bigger idiot than he is, and he wants to fuck Ivanka’s brains out).  More likely, the nomination will go to a far-right sycophant like Ted Cruz who came in second behind Trump in 2016, or Ron DeSantis who is positioning himself as Trump’s #2 guy in Florida.  Rick Scott is also vying for that position, so he could give DeSantis a run for his money, and senators generally perform better than governors, so I’d watch them closely.  It won’t be a moderate Republican; that will never happen again.  They ran moderates in 2008 and 2012 and they got their asses handed to them by Obama, their wing of the party has all but evaporated, there are no viable moderate Republicans anymore, so blue-state Republican governors like Hogan (MD), Scott (VT, no relation), and Baker (MA) don’t stand a chance.  Trump IS the Republican party, so what he says goes.  It’ll be a competition to see who can suck up to him the hardest and win over his base, but it’s not a race Trump will leave quietly.  He could be a kingmaker, but that would mean giving up his spot as leader of the party, something he doesn’t want to do.  If he doesn’t run, he’ll still basically be running vicariously through whichever candidate gets the nomination; it’ll be a Trump puppet, Diet Trump, store brand Trump “sorry we’re out of Coke, is Pepsi okay?”  They’ll never be as popular as the real thing, and Biden will have the incumbency advantage after rescuing the country from the pandemic and the recession, so 2024 is the Democrats’ to lose.

I predict that Biden will be re-elected in 2024, but Republicans will take back both chambers of Congress.  He will resign halfway through his second term due to declining health, making Harris the first female president, who will then lose handily in 2028 against a Republican woman (both will face misogyny, but the Republican will be white, so she’ll have it easier).  Biden and Harris will seat no Supreme Court justices after 2022, so Breyer needs to retire RIGHT THE FUCK NOW or else he’ll become the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  When the Republicans take back the White House, Clarence Thomas will probably retire and be replaced by a young black woman who is even more conservative than he is, just to stick it to the Democrats.  Roberts and Alito (conservative), and Kagan and Sotomayor (liberal) are relatively young, so they won’t be leaving anytime soon, and Trump’s 3 appointees are stuck for decades, so Breyer will be the only liberal vacancy in the foreseeable future; if Democrats replace him, the court remains 6-3 conservative, but it will put them in a better position going forward.  If Republicans replace him, they’ll get 7-2 conservative, which would be bad for women (especially trans women), the rest of the LGBT community, black people, immigrants, poor people, and everyone else who isn’t explicitly a Republican demographic.

If Democrats want to swing the country away from fascism, they need to act decisively and soon!  Nuke the filibuster, pus through electoral reform, expand the Supreme Court, get rid of the Electoral College, ensure that no party can rule without majority support ever again.  This would almost certainly lead to a civil war as conservative shit their pants with fear over having to campaign on popular ideas for once; the states would push back hard, the courts would push back hard (McConnell and the Republicans packed the courts by refusing to let Obama seat anyone after 2015, accruing hundreds of vacancies for Trump to fill), and Trump’s base would fight back hardest of all.  They would make January 6th look like child’s play, it would be a total bloodbath, all out revolution!  We need a constitutional convention to overhaul the system, but that would create more questions than answers, and the conservative minority would still weasel their way into power through compromises just as they’ve always done.  The senate is disproportional to appease conservatives, black people counted as 3/5 of a person to appease conservatives, free and slave states were admitted in equal number to appease conservatives, reconstruction was ended to appease conservatives, appeasement is the only way conservatives prosper!

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Elena Mejia Lutz

Poll after poll showed a high level of enthusiasm for voting in the general election in 2020, and in the beginning of the year, voter registration surged to match that excitement. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. New registrations have fallen off a cliff.

The spring of a presidential election year is often a busy time for adding new voters to the rolls, and a recent report from the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve voter turnout and election security, shows registration numbers were even stronger in early 2020 than early 2016. But things changed dramatically in March, at least in the 12 places where FiveThirtyEight or CEIR were able to obtain data on new voters, a category that includes first-time voters, voters who recently moved to the state and, in some states (Texas, for example) even voters who moved between counties in the state.1

Consider Florida, for example, where 109,859 new voters registered in February of this year, compared to 87,351 registrants in February of 2016. But in April 2020, only 21,031 new voters registered, compared with 52,508 in 2016. The same pattern holds in 10 other states, plus Washington, D.C.: Each one registered fewer new voters in April 2020 than in April 2016, including in states where online voter registration is available.

Currently, 39 states plus Washington, D.C., offer the ability to register to vote online, and a 40th (Oklahoma) is expected to implement it this year.2 However, in the three places for which we have the relevant data (Florida, Maryland and Washington), online voter registration has not taken off during the pandemic — certainly not enough to make up for the lost in-person registrations. Even in Washington, where online registrations have ticked up since the beginning of the year, the pace is comparable to 2016: 2,956 people registered online in April and May 2020, similar to the 2,771 people who registered online in April and May 2016.

The fact that new voter registrations were outpacing the 2016 numbers in January and February was predictable, according to David Becker, the executive director and founder of CEIR. For one thing, population growth means that voter registration always climbs a bit, he said. The expansion of automatic voter registration makes getting on the rolls more convenient than ever in many states, too. Voters were also clearly interested in registering, Becker said.

“Every piece of data we had looked at with regard to enthusiasm about engaging in this presidential election cycle indicated that we had to be prepared for the highest-turnout presidential election that almost anyone living had ever seen,” Becker said, “which makes the decline in March and especially April all the more striking.”

Based on the timing, it seems safe to assume that COVID-19 had something to do with the drop-off, but there’s data to back that assumption up, too. In addition to how many new voters register, some states track how these new voters get their name on the books. In 2016 and in the pre-pandemic months of 2020, in-person registration at places like departments of motor vehicles made up a large plurality, or even a majority, of new registrants in the four places3 for which we have data on how new voters are registering. But after the pandemic caused most states to shutter many government offices, those registrations dwindled. By contrast, remote registrations (e.g., online or by mail) held relatively steady.4

“This is completely expected, but very concerning,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “The coronavirus shut down most of the primary avenues through which Americans register to vote: government offices, and all the malls, theaters and public places where voter registration drives operate.”

Indeed, the closing of schools and public events like festivals has hindered in-person voter registration drives run by third-party organizations. “We had planned to go to 850 high schools leading up to graduation, but as schools closed, that work was clearly disrupted,” said Jeanette Senecal, a senior director for the League of Women Voters who focuses on voter education.

For example, in Florida, third-party organizations registered 14,144 voters in January 2020 — a huge increase from the 1,196 they registered in January 2016. But in April 2020, they registered only 133 voters — down from 3,806 in April 2016.

States and third-party groups can still get around social distancing restrictions to get more voters on the poll books, though. Voto Latino, an organization that works to register and encourage Latino Americans to vote, has been operating digitally almost since its inception and was well prepared to continue its work during a pandemic. It uses digital campaigns to help voters register, which can even work in states like Texas, which does not have online voter registration — Voto Latino created an app that makes it easy to fill out the required form, which is then emailed to the voter to print off and mail in.

Danny Turkel, the communications manager for Voto Latino, said the group has actually seen a surge in voter registration, especially since protests in response to the killing of George Floyd began. “Our original goal entering 2020 was to register 500,000 voters,” said Turkel. “As the numbers have come in and surged, we are now thinking that we could surpass 500,000.”

So what kind of people might have registered if the coronavirus hadn’t struck? Well for one thing, they’re probably disproportionately young. “In any given year, far more young people register than older people, just because 18-year-olds age in [to being able to vote] and young people are more likely to move” and need to register at a new address, said Kevin Morris, a quantitative researcher focusing on voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center. According to Morris’s data, 57 percent of new registrants in Florida in the first four months of 2016 were under the age of 40, as were 65 percent of new registrants in Georgia. While the proportions were similar in the beginning of 2020, the total number was much lower than in the past, which means that lots of young people aren’t registering as usual in at least two key 2020 swing states.

Some of these delayed registrants may never end up registering at all. Though we don’t have data for how a pandemic has affected registration in the past (since the U.S. hasn’t faced a similar situation for a good century), Weiser cited another instance when voter registration dipped due to extenuating circumstances. In May of 2011, Florida passed a new bill that placed tough restrictions on third-party voter registration organizations, prompting many of them, such as the League of Women Voters, to stop operating in the state. The restrictions were suspended by a judge in May 20125 but the damage had been done; a subsequent study found that about 14 percent fewer voters registered in 2011 compared to the same period in 2007, with a notable drop following the introduction of the bill — and those registrations never completely caught up. In 2008, more than 1 million new voters registered in Florida. In 2012, fewer than 900,000 did, according to the state’s voter registration data.

Of course, one unusual law in Florida isn’t exactly analogous to a pandemic, and it’s possible that the high level of enthusiasm for this election will be enough to close the gap that COVID-19 created, especially as states begin to reopen and voters return to registration sites like the DMV. So it’s difficult to know whether this drop in registrations is permanent. But it is clear that despite voters’ intense interest in this election, the coronavirus has already made it harder for new voters to participate in it.

[the-more-you-kn0w]

Georgia, HB481 And The Mother of All Evil

Trigger Warning: This post is concerned with the issue of reproductive rights, specifically abortion and also contains mention of rape and incest.

Disclaimer: I’m not American nor do I live in America so it’s currently unlikely this law would affect me but as someone who is passionate about reproductive rights, I had to say something.

Today, my heart, broke sank and cracked a little more for the women of the world. To be clear, this happens on a regular basis and is not a phenomenon simply reserved for travesties and issues that affect the Western world. But today, it  sank to the pit of my stomach because Georgia, a state of the so-called “land of the free” that promotes the American dream and is part of the self-proclaimed ‘greatest country in the world’ passed a bill that makes me so angry, there isn’t a word strong enough. 

That bill will be referenced as House Bill 481 (HB481) and seeks to criminalise abortion, after the 6 week mark  Abortion beyond this point would see women treated as murderers, under the law, subject to imprisonment and even capital punishment. This will also apply to women who miscarry if a court can find they could have done something to prevent it from happening.

Yes, you just read all of that right. I know. We’ve entered a dimension of hell. To understand the many layers of why this is a new evil, we need to break it down a bit...

The Biology of A Baby And A Women’s Body:

Technically, if a woman’s body is to follow the textbook definition of a menstrual cycle, she will have a period every 28 days or four weeks. Under the new law, this gives her only a two-week window to discover she is pregnant, from the time of her last period. Typically, many women will pass this marker of time without even realising they’re pregnant because guess what? Menstrual cycles are weird. Sometimes you wait 6 weeks between periods. Sometimes you wait 3.If you have a naturally irregular cycle, you’re honestly lucky if you know what the heck is going on down there at all.  It is also worth noting that 6 weeks would only just indicate the first pulsing of cells that will later specialise in and become the heart. At this point in pregnancy, a foetus has not yet developed a brain or face, yet they have been granted personhood under this bill.

There are many women and girls around the world who do not have rights or agency over their bodies. They are abused and grossly sexually violated on a daily basis. If they become pregnant, they’re forced to risk their lives because they don’t have decent enough medical technology to stop them from dying in childbirth. They’re also adding yet another mouth to feed when starvation, malnutrition and sickness are wolves at the door. That’s a harsh reality and one I sadly can’t fix from here. It doesn’t mean I won’t try in the future but for now, I can campaign loudly to tear down these ‘heartbeat bills’ in the US that would see in the age of #MeToo, a women denied rights over her own body.

The Power of Choice

A woman does not have to have a baby. There is no contractual obligation that our bodies and our lives must be devoted to housing, feeding and nurturing another. If that’s the life you choose, all the power to you and equal power if it’s the life you don’t want.  This is not the Handmaid’s Tale. A woman should not have to justify her reproductive choices but for the sake of creating allies and conversation, here are some reasons why a woman might decide to have an abortion.

1) Her pregnancy is the result of rape or incest - At the moment Georgia’s bill and others allow this as an exception but there are anti-choice groups actively campaigning for the removal of this exception which they’re also doing for

2) Women whose health would be endangered by pregnancy - which can be the case if you have certain chronic illnesses such as lupus etc. or you’re at risk of passing on a genetic disease such as Huntington’s which has a 50% chance of hiding its genes in your DNA if your family is already susceptible. 

3) They just might not be ready for or in circumstances where having a baby is advisable/feasible/what they want.And this looks different for a lot of people. It could be down to financial struggle, being too young/having kids already and adding another just being complicated or a million other things. Some people aren’t meant to be parents and that’s OK. You gotta remember, in the majority of cases, you can’t cut ties with a baby after 9 months. It’s at the bare minimum, if you’re really sure, an 18-year-long process. Babies need a home and food and clothes and eventually an education. Raising a baby costs $$$. This might come off as a horribly harsh thing to say, but trust me, from personal experience there’s nothing more scary and heartbreaking than a baby being born into a situation where they’re not wanted or where parents can’t be bothered or where they shouldn’t have even really had a baby at all. 

Under The Law

So, 1973 in the case of Roe vs. Wade, the US Supreme Court makes a decision to allow women safe and legal access to abortion. You can read more about the case here. 73% of Americans don’t want to see this law overturned. Before its arrival, abortion was the cause of 1 in 6 pregnancy related deaths. Since that day, the 22nd of January, 1973, it has of course been under attack and protest from those who don’t believe in abortion. The attacks have gotten stronger over the last year or so with the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court who was chosen by Donald Trump, for a number of reasons, one specifically being his strong opposition to Roe vs. Wade. 

Shockingly it’s not just Georgia that has the ‘heartbeat bill’. Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa, and North Dakota also have these bills. But wait... it gets worse! There are also a number of states who have these ‘trigger laws’ that in the event of Roe vs. Wade being overturned, would immediately criminalise abortion, allowing women to face the death penalty and any found to be helping them charged with conspiracy to murder, with a sentence of up to 10 years. This also includes travel for abortion. Those states with ‘trigger laws’ are Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, Missouri, Texas and South Carolina.

So What Can We Do?

There’s not much, but we can keep campaigning. We can support Planned Parenthood. We can refuse to let the Dark Ages crawl up out of the hole we pushed them into for destroying. We can continue to talk about reproductive health. They can’t take our voices away. We can join the campaign the people of Hollywood are behind right now to remove the film industry from Georgia in light of their passing the bill. When it comes to next year’s election, you can vote Donald Trump and his Republican bigots out of the White House. But if we’re going to fix the world as you know, from its many complicated problems, we have to be together and unflinching in our goal. Whatever it takes  Hannah 💛

[adawadi20ahsgov-blog]

Political Intrest Groups, and PACs Assesment

1. National Interest Group

a. Battle For The Net

b. This group wants a free internet that doesn’t limit the possibilities of all Americans. It seeks equity for all Americans.

c. Five facts

-This group supports free speech and free markets online.

-Everyone from across the political spectrum

-Small business owners, startups, tech giants, and grassroots organizations.

- Big Companies have been controlling internet traffic for far too long.

-It wants the executive branch to be able to enforce the laws that have been passed.

d. Save the Internet Act of 2019- This act seeks to classify telecommunications services to common carrier laws so that it can be regulated by the government. This bill has passed the House and is waiting to pass the Senate.

e. Located in Boston, Massachusetts. There are events in California and other states.

f. There are lots of opportunities around the country and the website has multiple links to Facebook groups around the country.

g. The FCC changes leaders during every election cycle and the group says we can’t rely on them to enforce the internet we want.

2. National Interest Group (California didn’t have any other state interest groups)

a. ITI (Information Technology Information Council)

b.  This organization is an advocate for technology worldwide. It wants technology to be available to everyone.

c. Interesting facts

-Interacting with governments worldwide to provide technology to all.

-Technology is being used to redefine what is possible for citizens of other countries.

-Technology teaches new skills, develops closer relationships, helps businesses thrive.

-Having access to technology helps transport individuals into the 21st century.

-Innovative technology is at the heart of getting technology around the world

d. This organization seeks to promote bills by endorsing them and giving the bills a chance to become an issue valued by all Americans.

e. They have two main offices: One in Belgium and one in Washington D.C. The ways someone can get involved is by contacting the organization and getting a membership.

f. Volunteer opportunities are limited as they are located in DC the main purpose of that is to be in direct contact with lawmakers to make sure the organization can influence politics.

g. This is the first group that I have seen is expanding to the world because technology equity is a worldwide problem.

3. Compare the two interest groups:

Generally, I liked ITI more because of its international reach and broader vision. From a net neutrality perspective, Battle for the Net is the group that specializes in pushing for legislation on internet equity for in the US.  ITI definitely has a larger audience because it is so huge, but Battle for the Net seems like an organization where the public can get more involved. Both of these organization’s target audiences are citizens that care about having equity in the world.

4. PACs and SuperPACs

a. amazon.com

b. This PAC is under the Internet tab of the website but is a company PAC. It donates money to candidates of both major parties. It wishes to have an influence on both sides of the aisle by donating to both which in turn makes sure this influence leads to legislation.

c. Raised: $491,364  Spent: $681,391 Cash on Hand: $999,421

d. Democrats: $275,000 Republicans: $296,000

e. The donors are mostly amazon services inc. which further hints that this PAC was created to influence technology-related legislation.

[lundsgaardlundsgaard78-blog]

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[thegrasshoppers-blog]

MIDTERM ELECTION: AN ANALYSIS

Part 1: An Overview, by Nguyen Anh Duc, alumni of Hanoi - Amsterdam High School for the Gifted

Image by Student News Daily

America has been one of the great Republics in the world. For it to be well-functioned, each of its three branches of government (the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary) must perform well under the principle of “check and balances”. Every election year, the American people voice their opinions by casting their ballots, either for a presidential candidate, a Congress candidate, a gubernatorial candidate or for all of them.

The President and the Vice President of the United States serve on the Executive branch, and their seats are up for election every four years. Meanwhile, in the Legislative branch, all 435 seats of the House of Representatives (the lower chamber) and approximately one-third (one class) of the Senate (the upper chamber) are up for election every two years. That means in one full presidential term, one mid-term election must happen, and it occurs in the second year of that term. This year, 33 class-one seats of the Senate will be contested, along with two special elections for two class-two seats due to vacancies. Meanwhile, in the governor race, 39 state governorships will be up for grab.

Since World War I, the mid-term election has not only been about members of Congress and their ability but also indirectly about the President and his ability to take charge of one of the most powerful positions on Earth. Sometimes, the ability of a President decides the whole mid-term election, and along with that, either a Democrat or a Republican wave would be sweeping the House, the Senate, or both chambers. It is usual for the party of the President to lose seats in this mid-term election (first in the House, then in the Senate during his second term, due to the fact that only one-third of the Senate is contested every election cycle).

The first memorable control switch occurred exactly 100 years ago, in 1918, after the ratification of the seventeenth amendment. President Woodrow Wilson had led America into World War I, the deadliest war in the history of the world up to that moment. After the victory of the Allies, President Wilson brought up the idea of creating the League of Nations, an organization that maintained world peace and push forward the United States' involvement as the leader of that organization. But he had mistimed his proposal. The American people were tired after the war, and they were not in the mood for a big change. It is also interesting to remember that President Wilson has campaigned in 1916 that he would "keep [the United States] out of the war," and for that promise, he won the 1916 election in both the Electoral College and the popular vote by a very close margin. Those reasons led to a Republican wave into the Legislative branch (with twenty-four seats gained in the House and seven seats gained in the Senate, giving the Republicans a slim two-vote majority in the Senate), and furthermore, a twelve-year period of Republican presidents.

Another Republican wave happened in 1946, in the midst of the first term of Harry Truman, the man replacing Franklin Roosevelt, whom untimely died in April 1944. His decision to drop two atomic bombs in Japan to end the war made people cast doubt on his ability to be President. The Republicans, therefore, gained back control of both houses of Congress in 1946. But Truman proved his title, "The Comeback Kid," before Bill Clinton did in 1996. Although he faced tough challenges in the primaries and in the election of 1948, he became the ultimate winner of the presidential race and earned the right to serve his full term. Democrats took back seventy-five seats in the House and nine seats in the Senate, enough for them to regain control of the Congress.

In 1958, almost six years into his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower proved to be an effective leader, not only of the Army but also of the United States. He won two back-to-back elections in 1952 and 1956, both with a landslide in the Electoral College, ending twenty consecutive years of Democratic control of the Executive branch. Yet, the economic recession was hitting hard on the American people, unemployment was soaring, and the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race with the launching of Sputnik. This hurt the popularity of Eisenhower, and allowed Democrats to increase their control of Congress to a commanding level: a twelve-seat gain in the Senate (only a few moments where more than ten seats changed hands in the mid-term election), and a seventy-five-seat swing in the House.

The year 1980 is a special year when for the first time in almost thirty years, Republican gained control of the Senate and created a working majority in the House. This was mainly due to a very popular (and charismatic) Ronald Reagan, whose conservative agenda called for a big tax cut, less spending, less regulation, and limited government for the American people, had reduced unemployment, inflation, interest rates, as well as increased jobs, savings, and spendings. He was able to make America believe they "are better off [in 1984] than they were four years ago." However, in 1986, there was a huge deficit in the budget, and the national debt was almost tripled since 1980. Having no choice, Reagan was forced to increase the tax burden of the American people. Along with the scandalous Iran – Contra affair, which revealed that American was selling a weapon to its arch-enemy, and the fact that many Senate seats, which were held by Republican because of the coattail of the 1980 election, was contested, a blue wave in the United States Senate was inevitable. The Senate of the 100th Congress was memorable for rejecting the nomination of Judge Robert Bork—a conservative who was nominated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court—by a vote almost on the party line.

The 1994 mid-term election was another remarkable one. After defeating incumbent George H. W. Bush in 1992 to become President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton ended a twelve-year streak of Republican controlling the White House, which allowed him to enact his new, liberal agenda with a Democratic majority in both Houses. However, after having spent too much time enacting one major piece of his agenda—universal healthcare reform—without getting any result, Bill Clinton became one of the most unpopular presidents in the 20th history. Newt Gingrich, along with his "Gang of Seven", promised a "Contract with America", a series of conservative legislation. With "Contract", Republicans made history when they took back control of both Houses of Congress, ending sixty years of Democratic dominance in the Legislative branch.

The most recent "change hands" in the House occurred in 2010, at the beginning of the Obama administration. President Obama had been successful in doing what Bill Clinton was not able to do in 1994—passing the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare", his trademark piece of legislation, by a very slim vote in the House, along with the 700-billion-dollar stimulation package to rescue the economy from the disastrous 2008 recession. But it might be the fact that the American people had misunderstood the essence of "Obamacare" that cost the Democratic Party the majority in the House and led to a very close 52-48 majority in the Senate. Although Democrats were able to pick up seats in both Houses in the 2012 election, with Republicans' all-out effort to block the agenda and create a gridlock in the Congress at the beginning of President Obama's second term, Democrats lost enough seats in both the House and the Senate in 2014 to revert them to be the minors in both chambers.

It can be said that the mid-term election is the "referendum" of what the President has accomplished at the beginning of his term. Although in many cases, the incumbent party lost seats, the opposite, which is rare, had been observed. The President might be able to accomplish something extraordinary that could actually maintain his party in the majority.

In 1932, after defeating Herbert Hoover with his "do-nothing" agenda, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to save an endangered American economy. However, his "New Deal" program had not been proven great success yet. For this reason, FDR once worried that his programs might take away votes from the Democratic Party in 1934. Nevertheless, "New Deal" had regain confidence in the American people about their president, and they decided to keep Democratic in the supermajority in the House until 1938, and in the Senate until 1942, during which FDR and the Democratic Party were able to continue rescuing the economy and get America ready for the Second World War. FDR became the first (and only) President to be elected to an unprecedented four terms, due to the popularity of his economic plans and his decisive actions in WWII.

In 2001, the world suffered the first large-scale terrorist act: the 9/11 event, from which the United States was vulnerated the most. America, however, under a strong command of then-Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, was able to rise after the terrorist act by al-Queda. His speech before Congress only nine days after the disastrous event ensured the American people that he would try anything to do justice to the terrorists. He announced war with Iraq, initially getting strong support from both sides of the aisle in the Congress and the American people. His image in 2001 was different from his "wimpy" image after the bitter 2000 presidential election. Therefore, in 2002, the Republicans had done what the Democrats did almost seventy years ago: gaining seats in the House and retaining control of the Senate after a brief moment of Democratic control in 2001. However, the escalation of the Iraq War was strongly opposed by Congress and by the American people in 2006—people were getting tired when they saw American troops entering the war without getting anything accomplished. That is why Republicans were not able to maintain control of both chambers in 2006, which led to a big Democratic wave and a Democratic presidency in 2008.

Right now, with an unprecedented presidency in the United States and a very polarized America, anything can still happen in this mid-term election. Will Democrats be able to flip back enough "swing" seats to gain control in the House? Will Republicans be able to defend "toss-up" seats to protect their slim majority in the Senate? The answer lies on each cast vote.

The fate of the new 116th Congress will be decided on November 6, 2018.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: It’s more than doors between government and the businesses that they supposedly regulate that go round and round.  One of the other swinging doors is between the Democratic and Republican Parties. A second door Perhaps the best known case is when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate.  Then, in 2008, Lieberman showed up at the Republican national convention to endorse John McCain for president.  Between those two campaigns, John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was rumored to be leaning to ask Republican John McCain to be his running mate. Had Al Gore won, Lieberman would most likely have been the subsequent Democratic nominee for president.  Had John Kerry won with McCain on the ticket, McCain would have been the heir apparent to the “Democratic Party” crown.  Whether Lieberman or McCain, Democrats across the country would have been told to bow in reverence to their party’s red-blue nominee for president. This was hardly the first time such a switcheroo blossomed in American politics.  In 1864, Republican Abraham Lincoln dumped his sitting vice-president to ask Democrat Andrew Johnson to be his running mate.  After Lincoln’s murder, US voters, who had selected a Republican to be their president, found him replaced by a Democrat. Though such examples at the presidential level may be enshrined in history books, they happen all the time at the local level.  In 1963, the Texas Young Democrats allowed high school chapters for the first time.  I was 15 years old then and organized the state’s first Young Democrats chapter at Lamar High School in Houston.  We invited a teacher who had been elected to the Texas Legislature to speak to our chapter on “Why Am I a Democrat?”  His answer was simple.  He was a Democrat because that was the only way to get elected in Texas of the early 1960s. The next year, he came out as a Republican.  That was the time of the exodus of southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Fast forward half a century and I was the 2016 Green Party nominee for governor of Missouri.  I participated in the debate with Democrat Chris Koster and Republican Eric Greitens.  Greitens, riding the election on Trump’s wave, has since become internationally infamous for an affair in which he allegedly tied his victim to his basement exercise equipment, hit her, took nude photos of her, threatened to publicize the photos if she ever told anyone what he did, and continued various sex acts without her consent. During the campaign, both the Democrat and Repubican made TV ads showing themselves with automatic weapons.  Besides being partial to gun violence, they had something else in common.  Both had switched parties.  The Republican Greitens was a former Democrat and the Democrat Koster was a former Republican.  Like most others greedy for power, they decided which way the winds were blowing, calculated where they could most effectively hustle votes, and adjusted their public images and party affiliation accordingly.  (Greitens resigned as governor in May 2018.) Flip-flops between the corporate parties are hardly peculiar to Missouri.  Evan Jenkins was the runner-up in the May 2018 Republican primary for the West Virginia US senate seat.  Jenkins had been elected as a Democrat to the West Virginia legislature, but hopped to the Republican side to win the third district US house seat in 2014. During the 2018 race, the former Democrat boasted a perfect rating from the National Rifle Association as well as a 100% “pro-life” record saying, “I am a West Virginia conservative who is working with President Trump each and every day for our shared conservative values.” That was nothing new for the state.  Its billionaire governor Jim Justice started out as a Republican, became a Democrat in 2015 to win the governor’s race and switched again to the Republicans in 2017 to bask in Trump’s glow.  These people are as dedicated to the colors of their party as a chameleon is to staying green when it’s opportune to turn yellow. The original door Do you remember when the “revolving door” was first noticed?  It was due to people like Michael R. Taylor who rotated between regulatory agencies and the corporations they were supposedly regulating.  Taylor began as a Monsanto lawyer.  Then he became a staff lawyer for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and helped it to hassle Amish farmers for selling whole milk while giving companies like Monsanto the green light to sell genetically contaminated products without labeling them.  Then, he cycled back to Monsanto, becoming its Vice President for Public Policy.  In 2010, he flipped back to being the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods. The scenario was quite a bit different for Richard Gephardt, former speaker of the US House and darling child of business unions and anti-NAFTA coalitions in the early 1990s.  When I was working with Public Citizen to oppose NAFTA, a friend who had just been to Mexico told me that Gephardt had spoken in Monterrey promising to get NAFTA through the US House.  So I spent several afternoons at the Washington University library until I found the Mexican paper Excelsior recording his comments. I documented Gephardt’s statements in an Op-Ed piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of June 1, 1993 and reported his two faces during the next Public Citizen conference call.  There was stony silence for several seconds.  Then Lori Wallach let everyone know “Dick Gephardt is the best ally in Washington that we have.” Though Gephardt gave clear warnings of his true colors, leftists paid to lobby politicians had a devout faith that an ally scheming to stab you in the back is better than no ally at all.  A few years later, the left did turn on Gephardt – but only after he publicly displayed his contempt for progressives.  In 2005, he abandoned his distinguished career as public servant and formed Gephardt Government Affairs which allowed him to pocket almost $7 million lobbying on behalf of clients such as Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Visa Inc and Waste Management Inc. Of course, Gephardt was not the typical revolving door guy.  Instead of being an agency bureaucrat      he was elected to public office.  And he did not wait to resign from his governmental post to serve industry because he was apparently working both sides regarding NAFTA at the same time. A third door This brings us to a third way the door revolves  – the way that policies and practices get tossed from one corporate party to the other.  When I was a kid, the saying went “The Democrats bring war and the Republicans bring recession.”  But no more.  With rapacious Wall Street increasing its appetite for expansion as its human host decays, the Democrats and Republicans shadow box to see which can simultaneously be more violent and make the quality of life deteriorate faster. Perhaps the old saying stemmed from the way Woodrow Wilson won the presidency with the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then proceeded to take the US into WWI.  A few decades later Lyndon Johnson ridiculed Barry Goldwater’s threat to bomb Viet Nam back into the stone age.  After LBJ won the election, he did his best to carry out Goldwater’s plan. For about half a century, the Republicans won the reputation of being the most anti-Communist.  Yet, it was John and Bobby Kennedy who tried to invade Cuba, went off their chain to pit bull Fidel Castro, and began the very long series of attempts to assassinate him. Years later, the rapidly anti-Communist Richard Nixon ascended the throne, recognized China, and visited Beijing.  In case you missed it, the right-wing Nixon reversed course and realized a progressive idea.  It was hardly the only positive event that happened during the reign of one of the most degenerate presidents of all time.  The following occurred during his presidency: end to the Viet Nam war, beginning of the Food Stamp Program, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, passage of the Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of the FBI’s COINTEL program, decriminalization of abortion, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, a format ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act. One of the crowning achievements during the Nixon era was the April 28, 1971 founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  Shaun Richman describes in The Unionist how OSHA “has the authority to promulgate industry-specific workplace safety rules and to fine companies that violate them. The law also provides for workplace safety inspectors, whistleblower protections for workers who report potentially unsafe conditions and legal protections for workers who go on wildcat strikes to put an end to a dangerous situation.” Do Democrats in power provide some sort of assurance because they “call for” more environmental protection than do Republicans?  During the 1990s, St. Louis environmentalists were trying to block the construction of a dioxin incinerator.  There was a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Governor of Missouri, and a Democratic County Executive.   We persuaded the Democratic majority on the County Council to pass an ordinance requiring dioxin incinerators to operate according to EPA standards, which seemed like a victory since no incinerator can meet those standards. We stopped going to County Council meetings because we thought we had “won.”  Then the Council repealed the ordinance we had lobbied for.  Bill Clinton got his Missouri dioxin incinerator.  When do Democrats stab you in the back?  Whenever your back is turned. In 2018, Donald Trump is justly despised because of his racist hate campaign against people of color, especially his ripping immigrant children apart from their parents and putting them in cages.  But let’s not forget the continuity between Obama and Trump.  As Tina Vasquez writes in Rewire News: When he first announced DACA in 2012, President Obama boasted of ‘putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history.’ Obama sought to ‘centralize border security’ on the pretext of deporting violent criminals and gang members—now Trump’s cause … The anti-immigrant zeal that Trump used to get elected is in many ways closely aligned with the history of America’s immigration system, which gave priority to white immigrants and sought to limit entry by other groups. Every administration, Republican or Democrat, has maintained this system’s injustices. A major difference between the two presidents is that press outlets like MSNBC tended to ignore actions by Obama but shrieked in horror when Trump followed suit.  Clearly, the outrage against Trump positively lessens the attacks, but it makes one wonder: If a Democrat replaces Trump and commits the same atrocities against immigrant children, will media again muffle its anger? These examples of Democrats and Republicans swapping platforms and policies do not even scratch the surface.  Their views are so interchangeable that one could write a 10 volume collection of the way they imitate each other and still barely cover the tip of all the stories out there. Progressive Democrats? Does this mean that there is no one running for office as a Democrat who sincerely wishes to move in a more progressive direction?  Of course not.  There are many, many candidates who start out running for local office as a Democrat and stay at the bottom of the Party’s hierarchy because it is structured to keep them there and use them as bait to lure and defang other progressives. Progressive Democrats at the base level do not script the Party’s major directions, which is as firmly controlled by big business as is the direction of the Republican Party.  While they may propose reforms in their communities, they must march in line with candidates for national office if they are to get funding to run at a higher level.  Those higher-up Dems are the ones most skilled at collaborating with Repubs, echoing their policies, and even fluttering over to the GOP side if the time is right. While the Republicans and Democrats are able to twist and turn on any dime lying in the street, there is at least one item for which they have a mind-meld.  The top concern of their corporate benefactors is “How do we reverse the gains of the New Deal?”  Bosses of both parties seek to undo the New Deal – the biggest difference between them is how to pull it off. The Dems generally use finesse with a stiletto, carving out gains one-by-one, weeping and sobbing as they do so.  The public face of the Repubs screams in delight as it whacks off gains with a meat cleaver.  The difference in rhetoric is vastly greater than any difference in the end result.  So many politicians can alternate policies and, at times, party affiliation because they see elections as a thermometer measuring if it is the hour for the delicate blade or the butcher knife. The great virtue of the Democrats is creating hope.  The great virtue of the Republicans is being a bit more honest about their long term goals.  The perception of vice or virtue in either depends on the mood of the observer. Do Democrats and Republicans quarrel with each other in front of TV cameras?  Obviously yes – but it’s merely a mock lovers’ spat crafted for public consumption.  Once the cameras are off, they embrace in excited passion while collapsing onto the bed of cash provided by corporate donations to both parties. In our darkest hour Understanding that the unified goal of both parties is to turn back New Deal gains leads us to ask how those victories were won.  It was because of the massive strikes, exploding labor movement, and unprecedented growth of the Socialist and Communist Parties that made a New Deal necessary.  Key corporate players decided that it was more discreet to allow some demanded changes than to suppress mushrooming mass movements. Hop forward to the Nixon years.  The many accomplishments won during his term were not because that vicious anti-communist fell on his knees, beheld a shining light, and vowed to tread the path of righteousness.  It was due to a strong labor movement, a massive anti-war movement following on the heels of the civil rights movement, and a growing women’s movement demanding reproductive freedom (along with many other more radical movements). Hop forward again to the depravity of the Trump administration.  As humanity faces extermination from increased production of fossil fuels, opposition bubbles up at an equal rate.  Even though Republican state legislatures agreed to continue undermining public schools, in Spring 2018 teachers decided that they had had enough. West Virginia had a Republican governor and a Republican majority in both houses of the legislature.  But West Virginia teachers went on strike anyway and were followed by teachers from Oklahoma and other states likewise dominated by anti-labor Republicans.  Even though illegal, the strike won because teachers stood together with janitors, bus drivers, food service workers and other state employees. As Bruce Dixon laid it out in Black Agenda Report: …successful strikes are possible wherever an overwhelming majority of the workforce is committed to it, whether or not those workers are in a ‘right to work’ state, and whether or not the strike is endorsed by their union if they have a union at all. Neither of West Virginia’s two teachers unions endorsed the strike, and the leaders of both unions initially and repeatedly attempted to ‘settle’ it for far less than the striking workers demanded. The three revolving doors are just other ways that big business manages government while pulling the wool over people’s eyes.  Corporate flunkies transfer between their bosses and agencies to ensure agencies do their bidding.  Professional politicians go back and forth between parties according to their career opportunities.  Parties grab policies from each other to see who can hoodwink the most voters. The Democrats and Republicans are parts of a single gestalt that creates the illusion of meaningful difference when there is none.  If you are part of an organization that gets caught up in the revolving door, don’t keep going around in circles – find another way out.  In times of the darkest despair, solidarity is still the road to victory. http://clubof.info/

[thisdaynews]

2023: If you don’t bid, you can’t win, Osinbajo tells youths

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/2023-if-you-dont-bid-you-cant-win-osinbajo-tells-youths/

2023: If you don’t bid, you can’t win, Osinbajo tells youths

VP Yemi Osinbajo says if youthful Nigerians neglect to offer for elective workplaces at the 2023 general races, they can’t win.

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Osinbajo mentioned the objective fact through President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Sen. Babajide Omoworare.

Omoworare addressed Osinbajo at the launch of a two-day retreat for youthful administrators at the government and state levels hung on Monday in Lagos.

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He said government had been planning and preparing the limit of young people as future pioneers.

As per him, President Buhari’s consent to the “Not very Young-To-Run” Bill, was to guarantee more prominent support of adolescents in parliament and in government for the most part.

“In anticipation of 2023 general races, we should understand that more prominent support of our adolescents ought not be simple manner of speaking.

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“Force is never given over on a platter. In the event that you don’t offer, you can’t win. We should likewise enlist to cast a ballot.

“The entire substance is to guarantee that young people engage during the time spent majority rules system and furthermore in parliamentary interaction,” Omoworare said.

He encouraged adolescents, who were prepared to give it a shot in 2023, to join ideological groups or structure new ones, adding that the quintessence of the “Not very – Young To Run” Bill would be crushed if the adolescent neglected to run.

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He said that young qualified elector populace was still extremely low, focusing on that their turnout on political decision days had consistently been wretchedly low.

As indicated by him, youthful people in other clime volunteer to prepare qualified citizens for enlistment measure for ideological groups; they peddle for votes and they take an interest in ideological groups’ congresses and shows.

Omoworare encouraged public, state and neighborhood government parliamentarians to teach the way of life of temporary position and mentorship for youth so as to cultivate a suffering authoritative practice.

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He said that such would make vote based system, administration, administration, harmony building and authoritative reinforcing a continuum.

Osinbajo said that support of young people in fair cycles would infuse new thoughts, construct public interest, guarantee productivity just as induce great administration.

As per him, since young people are accompanying new thoughts, it will animate the economy, advance majority rule government and fortify the administrative cycle.

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“The inclusion of youthful people in the vote based and authoritative cycles will offer us a superior majority rule government and chance to make Nigeria a more noteworthy country,” he added.

Prior in his location of welcome, Dr Vladimir Kreck, Resident Representative of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German Foundation subsidized by the German government, said that its command was to advance vote based cycles and great administration.

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“Following our command, there was no wavering to go into an organization with the Young Parliamentarians Forum of the National Assembly and the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) to put together this class.

“Youngsters are the larger part in Nigeria. There is no question that youngsters are and will stay a significant political factor in Nigeria.

“It’s anything but a mysterious that today, numerous youngsters are disappointed with the decision elites in Nigeria,” Kreck said.

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As indicated by him, the young, being the greatest gathering of people of individuals in Nigeria, is inconceivably under-addressed in parliaments, government, and councils of ideological groups.

Kreck, who noticed that adolescent had next to zero voice in political dynamic, in Nigeria said that the 2023 decisions should give youngsters a political voice.

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The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the retreat has in participation youthful serving officials from the nation over.

The retreat was coordinated by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) in organization with NILDS and the Young Parliamentarians Forum (YPF) of the National Assembly.

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It has “Youth Alliance – Towards 2023 General Elections” as its topic.

[coochiequeens]

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom could have women to thank if he fends off the recall on Tuesday.

A striking gender divide has crystalized in the lead-up to the election, with a new poll showing 66 percent of women voters plan to reject Newsom’s ouster. Meanwhile, a razor-thin majority of men say they’d vote to recall him.

Newsom, a self-proclaimed feminist and father of four, has made a habit of speaking directly to women — particularly mothers — as he embraces policies from mask mandates in schools to expanded family leave.

Now, it seems women are returning the favor — cementing their status as a key voting bloc for Newsom and Democrats heading into the 2022 election cycle.“This polling is not a surprise. This is a huge thank you and a vote of confidence in Gavin Newsom for all the ways he stood up for women,” Ann O’Leary, Newsom’s former chief of staff who also served as a top aide to Hillary Clinton, said in an interview.

Soon after he took office in 2019, Newsom stood alongside his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the first partner — not the first lady — and highlighted the role of mothers as part of his “parents’ agenda.” He has since signed bills expanding family leave benefits and child care programs, promoting gender pay equity, and eliminating sales tax on diapers and menstrual products — policies long sought by women’s advocates.

On the campaign trail, Newsom holds up red states like Texas, which has all but stripped abortion rights, and Florida, where schools do not require masks, as cautionary tales of what could happen if he is replaced by Republican frontrunner Larry Elder, a conservative talk-radio host who is against mask mandates and called Roe v. Wade “one of the worst decisions that the Supreme Court ever handed down.”

And those “what ifs” appear to be resonating with California women.

“The idea that Larry Elder would be granted the ability to control decisions about women, whether it’s about our bodies or our kids’ mental health or schooling, it’s unconscionable,” O’Leary said. “I think women really get that.”

Elder has only helped Newsom make his case.

The GOP candidate’s talking points on women, which include suggesting that employers have a right to ask women if they intend to have children as a way to protect their “investment,” have been so inflammatory that his Republican rivals have seized the opportunity to juxtapose themselves against him.

At an event in Sacramento last month, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer called Elder’s comments about women “shocking and concerning” and vowed to fight against workplace discrimination if elected governor — something that is already illegal.

When pressed for examples of how he had championed women’s rights, Faulconer, a pro-choice Republican, said he started “recognizing our female employees, shining that light on them for the first time” as San Diego mayor.

After being pushed to detail his policy plans that would benefit women, Faulconer proposed creating the nation’s first fully paid parental leave program.

Women, particularly women of color, have suffered the most from thepandemic’s economic fallout — some reporting to in-person jobs like child care and others struggling to work from home while juggling distance learning duties.

That means many California women are already on high alert about what they stand to lose in the face of a political shakeup, said Melissa Michelson, a political science professor at Menlo College in Atherton.

For many California women, she said, the recall election represents “a direct perceived threat.”

“What would happen to my reproductive rights? What’s going to happen to the safety of my kids in schools?” she said of women’s considerations. “Both women and men have kids, obviously, but women are more likely to make political decisions based on how they care for their families or their community. In this case, that’s helping Gavin because he’s the one saying he’s going to ensure those things stay.”

Just 27 percent of the women surveyed in recent polls said they thought the recall would make life in California better; 47 percent said it would make things worse.

Like any voting bloc, though, women are not a monolith.

So-called mad moms, frustrated by prolonged school closures last year on Newsom’s watch, helped to ignite the recall effort as other states moved faster to return to in-person instruction. The fact that Newsom’s own children attended private school as he suggested they were at home in “Zoom school”like most families fueled a common criticism of the governor: that he is out of touch with the average Californian.

Schools are now open with some of the strictest safety protocols in place, but some parents, particularly mothers of school-age children, remain frustrated.

Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican national committee member and San Francisco-based attorney who has sued Newsom for some of his pandemic school policies, said the governor’s focus on Republican threats to abortion rights and public health is “dishonest” and does not focus enough on real issues facing California women.

“The big women’s issues I’ve heard from day one of this recall is how shutdowns and forced remote schooling has affected women as primary caretakers. It’s been devastating for women’s careers and their satisfaction for life,” she said. “That’s certainly motivated every single mom I know who’s working on the recall.”

In deep blue California, however, women are much more likely to vote Democrat than men.

Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California — which released the recall polling this month — said women here have long skewed blue, but that the recall gender gaps are still stark.

“However you look at the makeup of the electorate, it emphasizes the importance of women voters in Democratic causes,” Baldassare said. “I think that’s why there's been a big emphasis in this election around the importance of women. When you're talking about getting out the vote among Democrats, you’re talking about more women than men.”

Newsom successfully warded off any viable Democrats from entering the race, and the GOP failed to offer a top-polling female candidate. Olympian-turned-TV-star Caitlyn Jenner, a Republican candidate, is polling at just 1 percent.

The recall election itself has at times felt like a toxic masculinity contest.

Republican candidate John Cox paraded out a live bear as a campaign prop. In a campaign ad, he labeled himself “the beast,” and called Newsom “the beauty” and a “pretty boy.”

On Wednesday, Elder’s campaign released a spot that compared Newsom to “the guy in high school who took my girlfriend, then went on to the next girl.”

“It really feeds into stereotypes and reinforces this idea that you need a strong man to lead the state, which has always held women back,” Michelson said. “In this case, the message is you want a man that can tame a bear.”