#the president elect said in an earlier interview

[tramontane-fire]

It's a federal holiday (presidents' day) and so there are hardly any new jobs, like a weekend amount, and the recruiter has not Gotten Back To Me, no have any of the other jobs I applied to (because of the holiday, not because they don't want to hire me or anything. no one in their right mind wouldn't want to hire me).

Anyway what's so great about presidents anyway? the old ones were slave owners and war criminals and the new ones are tax felons and war criminals. when can we actually get a president worthy of a whole ass holiday?

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Months before a provincial election, Saskatchewan is urging the federal government to ban the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for voice cloning.

Justice Minister and Attorney General Bronwyn Eyre said having rules to ban AI-generated voice cloning is in the best interest of protecting democracy and electoral integrity.

"Those would become the communications rules for robocalls and any voice-cloned AI-generated calls across the country," Eyre said in an interview.

"We've seen voice cloning of other politicians around the world ... and I think the risks are obviously fakery of messaging in an election, and impersonation of a voice could lead to all sorts of risk in an election," Eyre said.

The call comes after an AI-generated voice of U.S. President Joe Biden was sent to people in New Hampshire earlier this year. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission ruled that robocalls using AI-generated voices were illegal and proposed a $6-million fine.

Continue Reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Interesting. Very Interesting. 🤔

"Get your news from people who have a track record of telling the truth, people who do so at significant personal cost like whistleblowers."-Bill Ackman, Democrat Billionaire Hedgefund Manager

"Billionaire hedge fund manager and longtime Democratic Party donor Bill Ackman has blasted the Democrat party and fake news mainstream media outlets for lying and misleading the country about Joe Biden’s health and mental acuity. The White House, mainstream media, and even Biden’s personal physician have continually defended the Biden, insisting he is in good health and fit to serve. DEI White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lashed out at conservative media outlets for circulating what she described as “cheap fake videos” of Joe Biden looking old, feeble, and senile. Joe Biden and Barack Obama appeared on stage together earlier this month at a fundraiser in Los Angeles, California. After the fundraiser wrapped up, Obama had to grab Joe Biden’s hand to lead him off stage. Biden was frozen. Barack Obama treated Biden like a nursing home patient and walked him off stage. Earlier this year, during a routine physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Biden joked about his health status. When asked about his physical examination and what his doctors had to say, he responded, “They think I look too young,” adding that “Everything’s great” regarding his health. Dr. Kevin O’Connor, responsible for evaluating the 81-year-old President, concluded that despite any perceived physical struggles, Biden is “fit for duty and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.” Notably, the examination did NOT include a cognitive assessment test. The White House was probably scared of the results, knowing they would doom Biden’s re-election bid for good. However, big-time lefty and longtime Democratic donor Bill Ackman, who previously said he was open to voting for Trump, has publicly blasted the Democratic party and mainstream media for misleading the country about Joe Biden’s mental acuity and health."

@BillAckman

As much as last night was an indictment of the Democratic Party for misleading party members and the country about the mental acuity and health of the president, the media deserve far more derision and scorn. I and others were repeatedly criticized by the media for questioning the competency of the president. Among other false accusations, I was accused of spreading misleading videos which clearly showed Biden’s deterioration.

Do you remember the heavily excerpted and edited @POTUS Biden @60Minutes interview where the interviewer covered for the president by saying he was ‘very tired?’ @60Minutes knew. The @nytimes knew. @CNN knew. @MSNBC knew. Left wing media have had total and complete access to the president, his staff, and his administration. They all knew, but they told you otherwise. They outright lied to you. When Robert Hur, the special counsel who deposed the president, said that the president was not fit to stand trial and therefore chose not to bring charges, the media described him as a tool of the Republican Party and character assassinated him. When the @WSJ recently published a several-thousand-word, carefully researched, front page piece on the president’s mental and physical health, it was described by left wing media as outright propaganda. Now consider who has been feeding you propaganda. A favored technique of some of the most evil leaders in history was to mislead the people by constantly repeating the Big Lie. The Big Lie is so audacious that people accept it as truth because it is repeated so often that how can it be that something so important and material could be an outright falsehood? In this case the Big Lie was our president’s fitness for office, let alone a second term. A media organization is not supposed to be a branch of the Democratic Party. The media have a profound obligation to tell the truth to the American people, particularly about something as critical for the country as the president’s mental and physical health. People very close to me, my closest family and friends, trusted the media on Biden until the @CNN commentators finally owned up to the truth about Biden last night. For months I have been accused by many friends and family of being misled by an @X -based ‘right wing echo chamber.’ The sad reality is that one of our most important institutions, the so-called ‘Fourth Estate,’ fourth only after the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners, has destroyed any remaining credibility it has. Consider how your perception of @POTUS Biden and @realDonaldTrump has been manipulated. The media can no longer save itself. A suggestion. Rely on empirical data as much as possible. Listen to what someone actually said, rather than a headline summary or article about what someone said. Get your news from people who have a track record of telling the truth, people who do so at significant personal cost like whistleblowers. I follow broad constituencies on @X on multiple issues. That has led me closer to the truth. Citizen journalism has been a much more accurate representation of reality. Thank you @elonmusk for saving this platform. It gives us a fighting chance to save our democracy.

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Trump tells Christians ‘you won’t have to vote anymore’ if he’s elected.

2024/07/27: Former President Donald J. Trump at the Turning Point USA Believers Summit in West Palm Beach, Fla., in the closing minutes of his speech to a gathering of religious conservatives on Friday night, former President Donald J. Trump told Christians that if they voted him into office in November, they would never need to vote again.

“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” he said at The Believers’ Summit, an event hosted by the conservative advocacy group Turning Point Action, in West Palm Beach, Fla. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Mr. Trump, who never made a particular display of religious observance before entering politics, continued: “I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you, you got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Mr. Trump’s comments came at the end of a nearly hourlong speech in which he appealed to religious conservatives by promising to defend them from perceived threats from the left. Earlier in his remarks, he lamented that conservative Christians do not vote in large numbers, a complaint he had made repeatedly on the trail.

“They don’t vote like they should,” Mr. Trump said of Christians. “They’re not big voters.”

Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Christians would not have to vote again if he is elected quickly spread across social media. Some argued that it was a threat that the 2024 election could be the nation’s last if he were to win and claimed it was further evidence of an authoritarian, anti-democratic bent he has displayed throughout his political candidacy.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment to clarify Mr. Trump’s intent.

The former president — who continues to falsely insist the 2020 election was rigged, a claim that inspired some of his supporters to storm the Capitol in a bid to keep him in power in 2021 — has raised alarm from Democrats and some Republicans. He has compared his political opponents to “vermin,” said he would have a prosecutor investigate President Biden and his family and framed his campaign as one of retribution.

James Singer, a Harris campaign spokesman, criticized Mr. Trump in a statement for lying about the 2020 election, among other things, during his Friday remarks. Mr. Trump “went on and on and on, and generally sounded like someone you wouldn’t want to sit near at a restaurant — let alone be president of the United States,” Mr. Singer said.

Since his 2020 loss, Mr. Trump, who often praises strongmen leaders on the trail, has further embraced a brand of conservatism that experts on autocracy have said veers toward totalitarian.

Mr. Trump provoked further outcry when, in an interview with Sean Hannity, he said he would not categorically dismiss concerns that he might abuse presidential power but instead said he would not be a dictator “other than Day 1.”

Mr. Trump added: “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have long dismissed the criticism as alarmist political attacks from liberals. They argue that Democrats have been anti-democratic, labeling the criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump as an effort to weaponize the justice system.

The Harris campaign — and the Biden campaign before that — have consistently attacked Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy. More recently, Democrats and their allies have highlighted Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals developed by a group that includes former Trump advisers and that would bring about a radical shift to the federal government.

Mr. Trump himself was not behind Project 2025, and he has repeatedly tried to distance himself from it. But The New York Times has reported on his plans for a second term, which would include casting aside the norm that gives the Justice Department independence from the White House, appointing ideologically aligned lawyers who would be less resistant to Mr. Trump’s policies and a vastly expanded crackdown on immigration that would involve scouring the country for undocumented immigrants and deporting millions of people annually.

by Michael Gold, NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/27/us/harris-trump-biden-election

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jonathan Allen, Carol E. Lee, Monica Alba, Mike Memoli, and Natasha Korecki at NBC News:

Surrounded by a handful of trusted advisers and first lady Jill Biden at his vacation home on the Delaware coast Saturday evening, President Joe Biden reflected on a political career that spanned more than half a century and began to conclude that it would reach its end earlier than planned, according to people familiar with his decision. Isolated, frustrated and angry, he felt betrayed by allies who turned on him in his hour of need.  “He’s really pissed off,” said a person in touch with Biden’s inner circle.

Mad as he was — and still is — Biden came grudgingly to accept that he could not sustain his campaign with poll numbers slipping, donors fleeing and party luminaries pushing him to exit. He may have been slower than other Democratic insiders to make that calculation, but he fully understood it by Saturday night.  The account of this critical weekend, and what led to Biden’s stunning announcement, came from interviews with two dozen Democrats familiar with what transpired. In separate phone calls Sunday, Biden told his vice president, Kamala Harris, his White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients, and his campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, that he would abandon his re-election bid. The fact that he had to inform them in such a manner underscored the degree to which his circle had tightened in recent days to family members and a few longtime aides and advisers — Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini.

[...] The outcome may not have surprised White House and campaign officials, but the timing did. Most found out, along with the rest of the world, when Biden published his post on X. The same was true for Democratic National Committee officials and state party chairs. Senior Biden aides scrambled to set up separate meetings to talk to staff members for the White House and the campaign, reassuring the political aides that their jobs were safe.  As it always is, the end was abrupt. But it came after a hellish 25-day stretch sparked by the most disastrous debate performance in modern American political history on June 27. Biden failed to reassure fellow Democrats — or enough of them — in follow-up public appearances. Major donors cut off money to his campaign and the party. In drip-drip-drip fashion, elected officials started to call for him to drop his bid. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, the godmother of the Democratic Party, said he still had a decision to make — after he insisted he had chosen to stay in the race. 

[...] Biden also met with Donilon and Ricchetti on Saturday. They went through “literally everything” — including bleak polling in battleground states — about his possible path forward, according to sources, but the two trusted aides did not make any recommendation about what he should do. Their sense was that Biden had already made up his mind to withdraw and that that discussion cemented it. Still, they all decided to sleep on it. [...]

Friends had told him that he was risking his legacy — as the man who defeated Donald Trump and enacted a series of major laws — and could end up becoming a scapegoat if Democrats get clobbered in November. He still believed, up until this weekend at least, that he could win again. In 2020, he had promised to be a bridge candidate. In the end, he did not want to be a bridge between two Trump terms.  “It became a no-win situation, a self-fulfilling prophecy,” former White House official Cedric Richmond, who was a co-chair of Biden’s 2020 campaign, said Sunday. Once money dries up and elected officials pull their support, “it’s impossible to win, and he’s always put country and party first.”

By the time Biden convened a call with his full complement of senior advisers at 1:45 p.m. Sunday, an official statement announcing his decision had already been written. One minute later, his X account posted that statement, telling the public that he would remain in office but cede his party’s nomination — making him the first eligible incumbent president to do that since Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Less than 30 minutes after that, he endorsed Harris, blessing her as the best choice to beat Trump in a four-month sprint to Election Day. After his announcement, Biden made 40 to 50 phone calls about his decision Sunday night, according to sources. In recent days, as calls for him to step down mounted, Biden asked to see polling his campaign had solicited on how Harris would fare in a hypothetical matchup against Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter. They said he also reviewed public polling as he wanted to know more about her standing against Trump. The Harris polling was very tightly held, and it circulated to only a handful of top campaign aides, including Donilon and O’Malley Dillon, the two people familiar with the matter said. Biden’s call appeared to hinge entirely on political factors, rather than concerns about his health or his ability to do his job. A senior administration official said that there was no new medical information informing Biden’s decision, though he had said himself recently that he might reconsider his candidacy if “some medical condition” emerged.

NBC News has a detailed report on how President Joe Biden came to the decision of exiting the 2024 Presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris to succeed him.

The disastrous debate performance on June 27th began the process of Biden’s departure, and over the next few weeks, several elected Democrats called for him to drop out. Once Nancy Pelosi said it was time for him to go, it felt like the end was near for him.

Alas, yesterday at 1:46PM EDT/12:46PM CDT, the announcement was made that Biden dropped out occurred.

See Also:

The Guardian: The 48 hours that consigned Joe Biden’s 2024 candidacy to history

[tomorrowusa]

If digging oneself into a bigger hole were an Olympic sport, Donald Trump would get multiple gold medals.

Weird Donald doesn't understand when it's time to move on from a failed line of attack. That's one readon why it's so easy to goad him.

Harris campaign mocks Trump after his ‘I hate Taylor Swift’ post

Vice President Harris’s campaign mocked former President Trump in a release Sunday after he expressed his dislike for pop superstar Taylor Swift on Truth Social. “We’re pretty sure it’s Safe (& Sound) to say Donald Trump’s week has him Down Bad,” Harris’s campaign said Sunday in a release from spokesperson Sarafina Chitika on the social platform X, referencing multiple Swift songs. “Mr. Not-at-all Fine has spent this week working through his feelings, whining about his Champagne Problems, and spending exactly none of his time addressing the issues facing the American people,” Harris’s campaign continued. “His rambling, yelling, and constant conspiracy theories have many asking if The Man is ‘too emotional’ to be president.” The release included a Sunday post from Trump about the “Is It Over Now?” singer in which he said “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Swift endorsed Vice President Harris earlier this week following a debate between her and Trump, saying on Instagram that she believes the vice president “is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” “Donald Trump’s week of whining and spouting conspiracy theories has voters on both sides of the aisle ready to Forget That He Existed,” Chitika said, again referencing multiple Swift songs. “The American people want to be Out of the Woods of the chaos and division of the Trump era, leave behind the Blank Space of Trump’s broken promises, and Begin Again by electing Vice President Harris to ensure America’s future of opportunity is Long Lived.” On Wednesday, Trump brushed off Swift’s endorsement of Harris in an interview on “Fox & Friends.” “I was not a Taylor Swift fan,” Trump said.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The conservative “parents’ rights” group will spend more than $3 million on ads in swing states ahead of the election, according to a Wednesday report in the Associated Press.

Known for stirring the panic about pronoun usage in schools and pioneering book bans across the country, Moms for Liberty plans to target voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. They hope to expand to Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania later this year, according to the AP.

Tina Descovich, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, said that their goal is to “activate” their members who do not vote. The group doesn’t endorse specific presidential candidates, but their preferences—for electing right-wing representatives—are clear: The latest ad campaign, the AP reports, will attack President Biden for his recently-enacted Title IX rules that extend safeguards to LGBTQ students.

The group refused to divulge their funding source for the new campaign to the AP, with Descovich only saying “investors” want to see the group “grow in specific states.” (As my colleague Kiera Butler has reported, Moms for Liberty has acknowledged that they have worked with the well-funded conservative groups the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute.)

A spokesperson for the group did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.

The announcement comes as Moms for Liberty’s latest effort to soften their image and make inroads in blue and purple states. As Kiera has reported, the group has recently shifted its focus from book bans and pronoun panic to literacy issues, essentially alleging that schools are too “woke” to teach reading correctly. Earlier this year, I attended Moms for Liberty’s town hall in New York City, where they trotted out their new talking points about literacy issues, along with their go-to culture war screeds against alleged indoctrination of students by social justice-oriented teachers and mandatory masking in schools during the pandemic. Backlash to that event was swift, from both local politicians and protesters. Last year, they held their national conference—which Kiera attended—in Philadelphia, where several of the then-Republican candidates for president attended; a few hundred protesters were also present.

The Moms have recently attracted a swell of bad press, thanks to a disastrous 60 Minutes interview in which the co-founders struggled to defend their stances; a chapter leading quoting Hitler in a newsletter last year; some members’ close ties to the Proud Boys; and, perhaps most notably, the group’s national co-founder Bridget Ziegler becoming embroiled in a sex scandal after it came out that she and her husband, Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler, were involved in a three-way sexual relationship with a woman—even though Bridget Ziegler played a key role in the passage of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which forbade discussion of LGBTQ issues in many school settings. (Christian Ziegler was accused of rape by the other woman in the encounter—an allegation he denied, and which authorities ultimately declined to prosecute—and was booted from his post within the state Republican party earlier this year.)

Descovich insisted to the AP that the negative press has not hurt the group: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘We’re not going to donate to you anymore because of these stories,’” she said. “Everybody understands that the work we’re doing is going to be under intense attacks and scrutiny.”

An unanswered question, though, remains: Who is the deep-pocketed donor, or donors, paying for their election-year ad buys in swing states?

As the group’s arch nemesis, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the AP, there’s likely a few reasons they’re not revealing that.

“Given the timing of their new push and given that they will not reveal their investors, they’re telling you two things,” Weingarten said. “One, they’re telling you it’s not grassroots. And two, they’re telling you that they’re operatives for somebody else.”

[mariacallous]

Two days before the January 6 insurrection, the Trump campaign’s plan to use fake electors to block President-elect Joe Biden from taking office faced a potentially crippling hiccup: The fake elector certificates from two critical battleground states were stuck in the mail.

So, Trump campaign operatives scrambled to fly copies of the phony certificates from Michigan and Wisconsin to the nation’s capital, relying on a haphazard chain of couriers, as well as help from two Republicans in Congress, to try to get the documents to then-Vice President Mike Pence while he presided over the Electoral College certification.

The operatives even considered chartering a jet to ensure the files reached Washington, DC, in time for the January 6, 2021, proceeding, according to emails and recordings obtained by CNN.

The new details provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the chaotic last-minute effort to keep Donald Trump in office. The fake electors scheme features prominently in special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal indictment against the former president, and some of the officials who were involved have spoken to Smith’s investigators.

The emails and recordings also indicate that a top Trump campaign lawyer was part of 11th-hour discussions about delivering the fake elector certificates to Pence, potentially undercutting his testimony to the House select committee that investigated January 6 that he had passed off responsibility and didn’t want to put the former vice president in a difficult spot.

These details largely come from pro-Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who was an architect of the fake electors plot and is now a key cooperator in several state probes into the scheme. Chesebro pleaded guilty in October to a felony conspiracy charge in Georgia in connection with the electors’ plan, and has met with prosecutors in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, who are investigating the sham GOP electors in their own states.

Chesebro is an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal election interference indictment against Trump.

CNN has obtained audio of Chesebro’s recent interview with Michigan investigators, and exclusively reported earlier this month that he also told them about a December 2020 Oval Office meeting where he briefed Trump about the fake electors plan and how it ties into January 6.

An attorney for Chesebro declined to comment. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office did not reply to a request for comment for this story.

‘A high-level decision’

Emails obtained by CNN corroborate what Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors: He communicated with the top Trump campaign lawyer, Matt Morgan, and another campaign official, Mike Roman, to ferry the documents to Washington on January 5.

From there, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and a Pennsylvania congressman assisted in the effort to get the documents into Pence’s hands.

“This is a high-level decision to get the Michigan and Wisconsin votes there,” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors. “And they had to enlist, you know, a US senator to try to expedite it, to get it to Pence in time.”

Chesebro also discussed the episode with Wisconsin investigators last week when he sat for an interview with the attorney general’s office as part of a separate state probe into the fake electors plot, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Wisconsin prosecutors asked about the episode “extensively,” the source said, noting Chesebro discussed how a Wisconsin GOP staffer flew the certificate from Milwaukee to Washington and then handed it off to Chesebro.

The firsthand account from Chesebro’s perspective helps fill in the narrative behind the effort to hand-deliver elector slates to Pence, which is vaguely referenced in Smith’s federal indictment.

Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiring with Chesebro and others to obstruct the January 6 certification proceeding. Before Chesebro’s guilty plea in Georgia, his attorneys reached out to Smith’s team. As of this week, he has not heard back from federal prosecutors, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

Federal investigators have spoken with several individuals involved in the scramble with the phony elector certificates, according to a source familiar with the matter. This includes interviews with Trump staffers who were tapped to fly the papers to DC, and some fake electors who knew of the planning.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not reply to a request for comment.

Asked about the episode, a spokesperson for Johnson pointed to his previous comments, where he said, “my involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple seconds,” and that, “in the end, those electors were not delivered.”

‘Day-by-day’ coordination

According to the recordings of Chesebro’s sit-down with Michigan prosecutors, he explained how a legal memo he wrote for Wisconsin transformed into a nationwide operation, where Trump lawyers were “day-by-day coordinating the efforts of more than a dozen people with the GOP and with the Trump campaign.”

On January 4, 2021, Morgan sent an email to Chesebro and Roman asking for confirmation that all of the Trump elector slates had been received by Congress, according to the documents obtained by CNN.

Roman responded that the Michigan certificate had been mailed on December 15 but was still “in transit” at a US Postal Service facility in DC. Wisconsin’s certificate also had apparently not arrived.

Chesebro told prosecutors that Morgan was “freaked out” when the campaign realized the phony certificates from Michiganwere still in the mail.

That same day, Morgan weighed in over email asking Chesebro and Roman to rethink how they would deliver the certificates to Pence.

“As I thought about this more, a courier will not be able to access the Capitol to deliver a sealed package,” Morgan wrote on January 4, according to emails obtained by CNN “You will probably need to enlist the help of a legislator who can deliver to the appropriate place(s). I strongly recommend you guys discuss a revised delivery plan with Rudy (Giuliani) to make sure this gets done the way he wants.”

‘Can we charter a flight?’

Roman was concerned the Wisconsin documents wouldn’t reach Washington in time.

“Can we charter a flight? The only available commercial from MKE (Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport) to DCA (Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport) arrives at 2130 tomorrow night,” Roman wrote to Chesebro on January 4 at 11:24 p.m.

The job of physically flying the elector documents to Washington fell to two people: A Trump campaign staffer and a Wisconsin GOP official, according to the emails and what Chesebro told prosecutors.

The Wisconsin GOP official who had that state’s elector documents landed after 10 a.m. on January 5 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, according to the emails.

Trump campaign aide Michael Brown flew with the Michigan certificates to Washington National Airport with a scheduled arrival around 1 p.m., according to emails obtained by CNN.  A source familiar with the matter told CNN that Brown flew to DC from Atlanta, because the Trump staffers who had custody of the Michigan ballots were in Georgia for the Senate runoffs.

The campaign booked and paid for Brown’s flight on Southwest Airlines, the source said. Federal campaign finance records indicate that a pro-Trump super PAC paid the airline on the day of Brown’s flight for travel related to election “recount” efforts.

Trump Hotel meetup

The emails show that Brown and the Wisconsin GOP official were instructed to meet Chesebro at the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington to hand off the fake elector certificates. Chesebro said in an email that he’d keep the ballots in his hotel room safe until it was time to pass them along.

Wisconsin Republican Party officials were annoyed at the request to courier the fake elector certificates to Washington. “Freaking trump idiots want someone to fly original elector papers to the senate President,” a Wisconsin GOP official wrote to then-state party chairman Andrew Hitt on January 4, according to the January 6 committee report.

Hitt – who has provided information to federal investigators about the efforts to get the fake elector certificates to Washington, according to a source familiar with the matter – told the January 6 committee that the couriering ended up being overkill, because the original documents that the state party had mailed to Washington actually made it in time.

Getting the certificates inside the Capitol

The documents still had to be hand-delivered to Pence’s Senate office in the Capitol.

The electors plot – as envisioned by Chesebro and other Trump allies – was that Pence could reject Biden’s legitimate electors and recognize Trump’s “alternate electors” on January 6, while lawmakers tallied the electoral votes from each state. Per federal law, the certificates need to be physically presented on the floor of Congress during the joint session, while lawmakers tally the electoral votes.

Chesebro told investigators that Roman connected him with an aide for a Pennsylvania GOP lawmaker that he believed was Rep. Scott Perry to turn over the documents. Chesebro wasn’t certain which congressman the staffer worked for – and the January 6 report says a staffer for a different Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Mike Kelly, helped shuttle the documents that day.

“I had the Wisconsin stuff. [Trump campaign aide] Mike Brown had the Michigan stuff. We walked to the Longworth Office Building, and the guy with Perry, or whatever his name is, and some other fellow, that were like staff members of the House, took them and said, ‘We’re going to walk them over to the Senate and give it to a Senate staffer,’” Chesebro told Michigan prosecutors, according to the audio obtained by CNN.

“I don’t know why logistically we didn’t take it directly to Johnson. But that’s how we did it,” he added.

Kelly and Perry’s offices did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Brown did not comment for this story. CNN previously reported that he testified in June to Smith’s grand jury in the Trump election subversion probe.

CNN previously reported that Roman sat for a proffer interview with Smith’s team before Trump was indicted.  He was also indicted in the sweeping Georgia election racketeering case, in connection with the fake electors scheme, and has pleaded not guilty.

Roman’s attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The details from Chesebro put a finer point on how members of Congress, including a sitting US senator, were involved in making sure the electoral certificates for Trump ended up in Pence’s hands.

The January 6 committee first revealed last year Johnson’s involvement in trying unsuccessfully to deliver the fake elector certificates to Pence, who announced on the morning of the joint session that it would be unconstitutional to do what Trump wanted and unilaterally overturn the election results.

The committee revealed text messages during their hearings last year that Johnson aide Sean Riley sent to Pence aide Chris Hodgson, saying that Johnson “needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise.”

“What is it?” Hodgson asked.

“Alternate slates of electors for MI and WI because archivist didn’t receive them,” Riley responded.

“Do not give that to him,” Hodgson said.

‘F**k these guys’

In his Michigan interview, Chesebro also dished on some of the internal disagreements among the Trump lawyers, campaign officials and other allies, who clashed over the purpose of the electors’ plan and how far to take things on January 6.

Chesebro has maintained – then, and now – that the plan was a lawful move to preserve Trump’s legal rights.

Even before the Trump electors met in their state capitals on December 14, 2020, to cast their fake ballots and sign the certificates, Chesebro heard about concerns from some of the electors about possible legal jeopardy, according to emails and text messages reported by the Detroit News and obtained by CNN.

Chesebro added hedging language for the faux certificates from Pennsylvania and New Mexico in response to those concerns. He proposed to Roman and Morgan that they add the contingency caveats to the paperwork for all seven states in the plan. But Roman rejected the idea, according to the emails.

“F**k these guys,” Roman texted Chesebro on December 12, 2020.

By this time, the Trump campaign had essentially cleaved in two. Top officials who had managed day-to-day activity for Trump up to the election, including in court, say they ceded responsibility to Rudy Giuliani and others, such as Chesebro, according to congressional testimony transcripts. Roman effectively switched teams to work under Giuliani’s structure, according to the testimony from Morgan and others.

A spokesperson for Giuliani did not reply to a request for comment.

‘It really went south on me’

Chesebro told Michigan investigators that his own emails show that Morgan remained deeply involved, including in the final hours before January 6, to ensure that the certificates reached DC.

“I don’t have a really warm feeling toward, at least, the top Trump lawyers that did this, hid from me what they were doing and then lied to Congress about me. So, it’s been really difficult,” Chesebro said.

In his congressional testimony, Morgan said he knew of the elector plan but wanted to distance himself from the effort, delegating the work to others, including those under Giuliani.

Morgan told the January 6 committee last year that he initially believed the electors were only meant to be used as a contingency. The electors, he believed, should meet in their state capitals and cast their electoral votes but “not necessarily submit” the certificates to Congress unless “we prevailed” in court.

Morgan told the committee that the plan changed in December, saying it morphed from a “cast-and-hold” operation and had “shifted to cast-and-send.” And that’s when Morgan told the committee that he backed out, testifying that he directed an aide to “email Mr. Chesebro politely to say, ‘this is your task. You are responsible for the Electoral College issues moving forward.’”

“This was my way of taking that responsibility to zero,” Morgan told the committee, later adding that he “moved on” after that email was sent.

Morgan explained that he was concerned that the new plan to try to count the fake electors on January 6 “would make the Vice President’s life harder, and I didn’t want to be a part of that.”

“Mr. Morgan stands by his congressional testimony,” his defense attorneys told CNN in response to his emails and Chesebro’s statements to investigators.

Ultimately, on the eve of the joint session of Congress, Morgan helped get the ballots in place, according to the emails and according to Chesebro, who blamed his legal troubles squarely on the Trump campaign’s legal team.

“I could have avoided all this,” Chesebro vented to Michigan prosecutors. “It’s been a real lesson in not working with people that you don’t know and are not sure you can trust, because it really went south on me.”

[beardedmrbean]

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — State and local election officials from across the country on Wednesday warned that problems with the nation’s mail delivery system threaten to disenfranchise voters in the upcoming presidential election, telling the head of the U.S. Postal Service that it hasn’t fixed persistent deficiencies.

In an alarming letter, the officials said that over the past year, including the just-concluded primary season, mailed ballots that were postmarked on time were received by local election offices days after the deadline to be counted. They also noted that properly addressed election mail was being returned to them as undeliverable, a problem that could automatically send voters to inactive status through no fault of their own, potentially creating chaos when those voters show up to cast a ballot.

The officials also said that repeated outreach to the Postal Service to resolve the issues had failed and that the widespread nature of the problems made it clear these were “not one-off mistakes or a problem with specific facilities. Instead, it demonstrates a pervasive lack of understanding and enforcement of USPS policies among its employees.”

The letter to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy came from two groups that represent top election administrators in all 50 states. They told DeJoy, “We have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns.”

“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” they added. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”

A message seeking a response from the U.S. Postal Service was not immediately returned.

The two groups, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, said local election officials “in nearly every state” are receiving timely postmarked ballots after Election Day and outside the three to five business days USPS claims as the standard for first-class mail.

The letter comes less than two weeks after DeJoy said in an interview that the Postal Service was ready to handle a flood of mail ballots expected as part of this November’s presidential election and as former President Donald Trump continues to sow doubts about U.S. elections by falsely claiming he won in 2020.

That year, amid the global pandemic, election officials reported sending just over 69 million ballots in the mail, a substantial increase from four years earlier.

While it’s likely that number will be smaller now, many voters have embraced mail voting and come to rely on it. And both Democrats and Republicans have launched efforts to push supporters to vote early, either in person or by mail to “bank” their votes before Election Day on Nov. 5.

The letter went out on the day the first mailed ballots of this year’s general election were being sent, to absentee voters in Alabama.

Postal Service officials told reporters last month that almost 98% of ballots were returned to election officials within three days in 2020, and in 2022, the figure was nearly 99%. DeJoy said he would like to inch closer to 100% this election cycle and that the Postal Service is better positioned to handle ballots than four years ago.

But officials in rural states have been critical of the Postal Service for years as it has consolidated mail-processing centers to cut its costs and financial losses. _________________________

Submitted by @thejdog2000

This does come off a little odd you are right, not sure what to think of all of it especially given that the postal service union backed biden in 2020.

The rural state thing would likely impact GOP voters more I would think, but maybe not on the mail in side, folks from both sides of the aisle seem to be registering concerns here too, which I think is a good sign that it's not part of some kind of scam at least.

There is a really easy way around this, that's voting in person or dropping your mail in ballot off at the local registrar of voters.

In addition to being signed by the current and incoming presidents for both groups of election officials, the leaders of groups that represent local election officials in 25 states were listed.

The election officials warned that any election mail returned to an election office as undeliverable could trigger a process outlined in federal law for maintaining accurate lists of registered voters. That means a voter could be moved to “inactive” status and be required to take additional action to verify their address to participate in the election, the officials said in the letter.

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, the recent past president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, sent his own letter in recent days to DeJoy. He said nearly 1,000 ballots from his state’s Aug. 6 primary election couldn’t be counted because they arrived too late or without postmarks — and more continue to come in.

“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point,” Schwab posted on the social media platform X in late August.

Schwab and other Kansas election officials also have said some ballots arrive on time but without postmarks, which keeps them from being counted under Kansas law. What’s more, Schwab told DeJoy, local postal clerks have told election officials that they can’t add postmarks later even if it’s clear that the Postal Service handled the ballot ahead of the mail-in deadline.

Kansas will count ballots postmarked on or before Election Day if they arrive within three days. The Republican-controlled Legislature created that grace period in 2017 over concerns that mail delivery had slowed after the Postal Service shut down seven mail-processing centers in the state. That left much of the state’s mail handled through larger centers in Denver, Amarillo, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri.

Schwab has promoted the use of local ballot drop boxes for voting in advance, breaking with other Republicans who have suggested without evidence that they can be sources of fraud. Schwab has long said the boxes are more secure than the U.S. mail.

“Keep your ballot out of the hands of the federal government!” he advised voters in a post on X after the August primary.

In their letter Wednesday, election officials said colleagues across the U.S. have reported that Postal Service staff, from managers to mail carriers, are uninformed about the service’s policies for handling election-related mail, give them inconsistent guidance and misdeliver ballots.

“There is no amount of proactive communication election officials can do to account for USPS’s inability to meet their own service delivery timelines,” the officials wrote. “State and local election officials need a committed partner in USPS.”

____ Cassidy reported from Detroit.

[mightyflamethrower]

After last Thursday’s debate, Biden himself laid to rest the Democratic lie that he was robust and in control of his faculties. In truth, he demonstrated to the nation that he is a sad, failing octogenarian who could not perform any job in America other than apparently the easy task of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief in charge of our nuclear codes.

In 2019, Democratic primary candidates often hit rival Joe Biden for his apparent senior moments and incoherence. During the 2020 campaign, Biden often became in bizarre fashion animated and nasty (“you ain’t black”/“fat”/“lying dog-faced pony soldier”/“junkie”).

His “corn pop” stories were grotesque and had a senile accentuation of his earlier “super-predator” and “clean” black riffs. As president, his mental decline progressed geometrically, in the sense that every three months, Biden became far, far worse than during the prior 90 days. His handlers long ago had determined that masking his feebleness at the expense of the security and safety of the nation was a small price to pay to retain power.

What followed was the most comprehensive deceit in presidential history, analogous to insisting that frail and dying FDR in 1944 was just fine as the November election approached or that Woodrow Wilson was expertly running the country as he lay bedridden and near comatose.

Any who questioned the vigorous Biden narrative was trashed as “ageist.” Special counsel Robert Hur was dubbed a “hack” for accurately describing Biden as so amnesiac he would win nullification acquittal from a sympathetic jury.

An array of court sycophants periodically gave interviews, insisting that the robust Biden was smarter and wiser than ever. His press secretary, Karin Jean-Pierre, helped coin a new slur, “cheap fake,” for any who collated video and audio clips demonstrating that Biden was obviously non compos mentis. Would she say the same today after the about-face CNN panelists reviewed Biden’s serial debate lapses to support their now-opportune advocacy that he not run for reelection? Would she wish to be a passenger in a car driven by Biden?

In sum, the “dynamic Biden” farce was finally laid to rest by a debate, but not before it had served the original leftist Faustian bargain. Under the guise of COVID, an enfeebled and stationary Biden outsourced his entire 2020 campaign to toady journalists and surrogate politicians.

His task was to pose from his basement as the uniter, ‘good ol’ Joe from Scranton,’ serving as the pseudo-moderate veneer for the most far left agenda in recent history. In the bargain, Joe and Jill enjoyed the privileges of power and status, while they farmed out the presidency to an array of former Obama subordinates and the hard left of what is left of the old Democratic Party.

The useful lie continued throughout his presidency, escalating in direct proportion to Joe’s mounting stumbles, brain freezes, rambling, and incomprehensible speech. When our president said something either outrageous or unfathomable, the public was to assume that it was intemperate to attribute his failures to senility.

So, the nation became acculturated to deciphering about 60 percent of what he said and writing off the rest to his never-to-be-spoken-of disability. It was the cognitive bookend to the ruse that FDR was able to stand and walk—although far worse because being wheel-chair bound is not a limitation for a president, whereas cognitive incapacity of Biden’s magnitude most certainly is.

The Biden lie was the crown jewel of a number of other left-wing/media fabrications. The more they spread, the more they seemed absurd, and the more they were refuted—so all the more others took their place and the more their promulgators never apologized but simply moved on to their next one. The common denominator was that all the lies, during their existence, were useful to the progressive project.

The Russian collusion hoax helped lose Trump the 2016 popular vote. Its resumption during his presidency ate up 22 months of his administration during the Special Counsel Robert Mueller farce.

The October surprise laptop disinformation lie may have cost Trump the 2020 election. But it was concocted so that Joe Biden could stare at the debate camera and swear to the American people that Trump was a liar, citing “51 intelligence authorities” who insisted Hunter Biden’s laptop was a likely hallmark of Russian disinformation.

We were asked to believe that clever Russian disinformationists fabricated all the sick photos and selfies of poor Hunter, knew the Biden family’s intimate tensions and fault lines as evidenced in the computer’s texts and emails, and were able to package and deposit the computer to either a Russian operative masquerading as a computer repairment or have it delivered to the supposedly useful idiot. The truth was, the FBI had the laptop during the debate and had long verified its authenticity—and thus kept mum as its brethren intelligence apparatchiks lied to the nation.

What the untruth did not fully reveal was that Biden’s campaign foreign policy guru, Antony Blinken (the current Secretary of State), cooked up the entire ruse. He enlisted former CIA grandee Mike Morell, who then rounded up on spec the confessed lying duo of John Brennan and James Clapper, who in turn drafted still more deceivers, among them the once esteemed Leon Panetta.

And the lie worked perfectly as envisioned, far better than even Russian “collusion.” The nation was deceived into believing that the “asset” Trump was reduced once again to colluding with Putin to enlist his former KGB soldiers to smear the upright Biden family and thus warp yet another election.

Note that all these lies were never retracted. No one ever apologizes. No one is ever punished, even when the lie is given under oath. No one ever has any regrets. And no one ever has any hesitation to lie again, given the utility of the prior untruth.

We were told by the deceitful Alejandro Mayorkas that the border was “secure” as he deliberately destroyed it and welcomed in over 10 million illegal aliens. That lie survived even the absurdity of years of nightly news clips (“cheap fakes?”) of thousands swarming an open border. And it died only when the 2024 election approached and the Biden administration read polls showing that a vast majority wanted the border closed and illegal entrants deported. Then suddenly, the lie that the border was secure transmogrified into the back-up lie that “Republicans would not help us close the now-insecure border.” Translated into Orwellian terms, the border that was crossed by 10 million was always secure but could have been made even more secure had Republicans joined Democrats to secure what was already “secure.”

We live in an era of lies. Sometimes they are purely political, like the Charlottesville “both sides” yarn. And sometimes they change history, like the fabrications that bats and pangolins, not the communist Chinese Wuhan virology lab, birthed the COVID-19 virus, or the Anthony Fauci contortion that his offices did not fund and help out, stealthily and in circumvention of U.S. law, deadly gain-of-function virology research in communist China.

Yet another lie was institutionalized: the January 6 riot was a full-fledged, carefully planned armed insurrection to overthrow the government. In contrast, the four months in 2020 of killing, assault, arson, and looting that saw over 35 dead, 1,500 injured law enforcement officers, $2 billion in damage, and a federal courthouse, a police precinct and a historic church torched were “cries of the heart” from the oppressed and victimized.

Those untruths ensured that hundreds of mostly naïve protestors who showed up in the capitol soon became convicted felons serving long sentences, while the 14,000 arrested for the 2020 mayhem were mostly released as overzealous but otherwise sympathetic activists.

These lies changed the course of the nation. They are birthed by the incestuous marriage of a Washington-New York political culture and a corrupt media.

The purveyors are Juvenal’s “who will police the police.” They are the administrative overseers in the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and the various cabinets and agencies. They feel they are exempt from any consequences for the damage they do, given that in their day jobs they operate as judges, jury and executioners.

Finally, while all governments lie, the left is far more adroit at it because, in their any-means-necessary/the-ends-justify-the-means credo, they spread supposedly good “lies” that stop the Hitlerian Trump, neuter the creepy deplorables/irredeemables/chumps/clingers or save the good people from the MAGA anti-vaxers and assorted yahoos.

Will the lies continue?

Indeed, they will thrive until the people slash the administrative state of its unaccountable and unelected “experts”; until they indict those in the future like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, John Brennan and their brethren who lie under oath or to federal investigators; until they ostracize and utterly discredit those like Mayorkas, Fauci, and the Bidens whose deceptions took hostage an entire nation; and until they tune out a bankrupt media, the power cord of the entire Pravda enterprise.

[mitchipedia]

Trump threatens to jail adversaries in escalating rhetoric ahead of pivotal debate.

The Associated Press, via the Las Vegas Sun:

Trump’s message represents his latest threat to use the office of the presidency to exact retribution if he wins a second term. There is no evidence of the kind of fraud he continues to insist marred the 2020 election; in fact, dozens of courts, Republican state officials and his own administration have said he lost fairly.

Just days ago, Trump himself acknowledged in a podcast interview that he had indeed “lost by a whisker.”

While Trump’s campaign aides and allies have urged him to keep his focus on Harris and make the election a referendum on issues like inflation and border security, Trump in recent days has veered far off course.

On Friday, he delivered a stunning statement to news cameras in which he brought up a string of past allegations of sexual misconduct, describing several in graphic detail, even as he denied his accusers’ allegations. Earlier, he had voluntarily appeared in court for a hearing on the appeal of a decision that found him liable for sexual abuse, turning focus to his legal woes in the campaign’s final stretch.

Earlier Saturday, Trump had leaned into familiar grievances about everything from his indictments to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election as he campaigned in one of the most deeply Republican swaths of battleground Wisconsin.

“The Harris-Biden DOJ is trying to throw me in jail — they want me in jail — for the crime of exposing their corruption,” Trump claimed at an outdoor rally at Central Wisconsin Airport, where he spoke behind a wall of bulletproof glass due to new security protocols following his July assassination attempt.

There’s no evidence that President Joe Biden or Harris have had any influence over decisions by the Justice Department or state prosecutors to indict the former president.

…

Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika responded to his comments with a statement warning that, if Trump is reelected, he will “use his unchecked power to prosecute his enemies and pardon insurrectionists who violently attacked our Capitol on January 6."

…

As Trump was campaigning, Harris took a short break from debate prep to visit Penzeys Spices in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where she bought several seasoning mixes. One customer saw the Democratic nominee and began openly weeping as Harris hugged her and said, “We’re going to be fine. We’re all in this together.”

Harris said she was honored to have endorsements from two major Republicans: former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman.

“People are exhausted, about the division and the attempts to kind of divide us as Americans,” she said, adding that her main message at the debate would be that the country wants to be united.

“It’s time to turn the page on the divisiveness,” she said. “It’s time to bring our country together, to chart a new way forward.”

Trump held his rally in the central Wisconsin city of Mosinee, with a population of about 4,500 people. It is within Wisconsin’s mostly rural 7th Congressional District, a reliably Republican area in a purple state.

During his speech, he railed against Harris in dark and ominous language, claiming that if the woman he calls “Comrade Kamala Harris gets four more years, you will be living (in) a full-blown Banana Republic" ruled by “anarchy” and “tyranny.”

Trump also railed against the administration’s border policies, calling the Democrats’ approach “suicidal" and accusing them of having “imported murderers, child predators and serial rapists from all over the planet."

Many studies have found immigrants, including those in the country illegally, commit fewer violent crimes than native-born citizens. Violent crime in the U.S. dropped again last year, continuing a downward trend after a pandemic-era spike.

[magickfromscratch]

According to the article (3/18/2024):

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to send a team of Israeli officials to Washington.

Each side is looking to make “clear to the other its perspective,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.

The disagreement between Biden and Netanyahu is over the food crisis in Gaza and Israel’s conduct during the war, according to the White House.

The White House is skeptical of Netanyahu’s plan to carry out an operation in the southern city of Rafah, where about 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

Biden has once again urged Netanyahu not to carry out a Rafah operation.

U.S. officials will lay out “an alternative approach that would target key Hamas elements in Rafah and secure the Egypt-Gaza border without a major ground invasion.”

“The president has rejected, and did again today, the straw man that raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas,” Sullivan said. “That’s just nonsense. Our position is that Hamas should not be allowed a safe haven in Rafah or anywhere else, but a major ground operation there would be a mistake. It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza and further isolate Israel internationally.”

Israel has yet to present a credible plan to ensure the safety of innocent Palestinian civilians., according to White House officials.

Biden administration officials have warned that they would not support the operation in Rafah as presently constituted.

A new report warned that “famine is imminent” in northern Gaza, where 70% of the remaining population is experiencing catastrophic hunger, and that a further escalation of the war could push around half of Gaza’s population to the brink of starvation. The report came from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a partnership of more than a dozen governments, U.N. aid and other agencies that determines the severity of food crises.

Netanyahu lashed out against the American criticism on Sunday, describing calls for a new election as “wholly inappropriate.”

Biden after his State of the Union address earlier this month was caught on a hot mic telling a Democratic ally that he has told Netanyahu they would have a “come to Jesus” meeting over the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. His frustration with Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war was also on display in a recent MSNBC interview, in which he asserted Netanyahu was “hurting Israel.”

Israel's actions in Gaza have been described as one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history. The war has killed over 31,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Around 80% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes, and a quarter of the population faces starvation.

[warningsine]

Georgian lawmakers on Tuesday voted down a presidential veto of the controversial "foreign agents" legislation, clearing the way for the bill to come into force. 

The law, which has led to weeks of mass protests, would require media outlets and NGOs that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as "pursuing the interests of a foreign power."

Lawmakers voted 84 to 4 to override a veto by President Salome Zourabichvili and pass the bill. Most opposition MPs walked out of the chamber ahead of the vote.

The legislation was put forward by the ruling Georgian Dream party in April and approved by the parliament earlier this month.

The bill has been widely criticized by the EU, UN, NATO and the US. Washington has announced travel sanctions over the measure.

The EU said that it "deeply regrets" the law's adoption. EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said the bloc was "considering all options to react to these developments."

Why did the president veto the bill?

President Zourabichvili, a fierce critic of the governing party, vetoed the bill on May 18.

In an interview with DW ahead of the veto, she accused Georgian Dream of jeopardizing the country's future and said the law had become a "symbol of a number of laws and measures and rhetoric that is taking Georgia away from its European path."

"What I think is important is that the country continues on its path towards Europe," she said. 

The government has defended the legislation, saying it is needed to ensure transparency and to keep a lid on harmful foreign actors seeking to detabilize the South Caucasus country.

Meanwhile, opponents have labeled the bill "the Russian law" because it is similar to measures pushed through by Moscow to crack down on independent media and dissent. Critics also say the bill aims to appease the Kremlin and restrict media freedoms in the leadup to Georgia's parliamentaly elections in October.

Protests again erupt in Tbilisi

Large crowds gathered outside parliament throughout the day on Tuesday, with a rally planned for the evening. 

There have been repeated clashes between demonstrators and police since the law was first proposed several weeks ago. 

Speaking from Tbilisi, DW correspondent Maria Katamadze described the situation as "very fragile, very volatile."

"This comes after the unprecedented domestic backlash from the streets of Tbilisi where mainly youth, Gen Z and grassroot movements have been protesting for over a month now," she said. "They say this is a national resistance to the government's actions that many critics say is going to damage the reputation of Georgia across the world and damage the relationship with the West."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

John Deering, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 24, 2024 (Sunday)

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 25, 2024

The Senate passed the appropriations bill shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, and President Joe Biden signed it Saturday afternoon. In his statement after he signed the bill, Biden was clear: “Congress’s work isn’t finished,” he said. “The House must pass the bipartisan national security supplemental to advance our national security interests. And Congress must pass the bipartisan border security agreement—the toughest and fairest reforms in decades—to ensure we have the policies and funding needed to secure the border. It’s time to get this done.”

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to bring forward the national security supplemental bill to fund Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. He has also refused to bring forward the border security measure hammered out in the Senate after House Republicans demanded it and passed there on February 13. Johnson is doing the bidding of former president Trump, who opposes aid to Ukraine and border security measures. 

Congress is on break and will not return to Washington, D.C., until the second week in April. 

By then, political calculations may well have changed. 

MAGA Republicans appear to be in trouble.  

The House recessed on Friday for two weeks in utter disarray. On ABC News’s This Week, former representative Ken Buck (R-CO), who left Congress Friday, complained that House Republicans were focusing “on messaging bills that get us nowhere” rather than addressing the country’s problems. He called Congress “dysfunctional.” 

On Friday, NBC announced it was hiring former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. Today the main political story in the U.S. was the ferocious backlash to that decision. McDaniel not only defended Trump, attacked the press, and gaslit reporters, she also participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

In an interview with Kristen Welker this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press—Welker was quick to point out that the interview had been arranged long before she learned of the hiring— McDaniel explained away her support for Trump’s promise to pardon those convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by saying, “When you’re the RNC Chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”

That statement encapsulated Trump Republicans. In a democracy, the “team” is supposed to be the whole country. But Trump Republicans like McDaniel were willing to overthrow American democracy so long as it kept them in power.  

That position is increasingly unpopular. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote on social media: “Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure [Michigan] officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies & called 1/6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ That’s not ‘taking one for the team.’ It’s enabling criminality & depravity.”

McDaniel wants to be welcomed back into mainstream political discourse, but it appears that the window for such a makeover might have closed. 

In the wake of Trump’s takeover of the RNC, mainstream Republicans are backing away from the party. Today, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she could not “get behind Donald Trump” and expressed “regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” She did not rule out leaving the Republican Party.

In Politico today, a piece on Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, by Adam Wren also isolated Trump from the pre-2016 Republican Party. Pence appears to be trying to reclaim the mantle of that earlier incarnation of the party, backed as he is by right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow (who has funded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over the years) and the Koch network. Wren’s piece says Pence is focusing these days on “a nonprofit policy shop aimed at advancing conservative ideals.” Wren suggested that Pence’s public split from Trump is “the latest sign that Trumpism is now permanently and irrevocably divorced from its initial marriage of convenience with…Reaganism.” 

Trump appears to believe his power over his base means he doesn’t need the established Republicans. But that power came from Trump’s aura of invincibility, which is now in very real crisis thanks to Trump’s growing money troubles. Tomorrow is the deadline for him to produce either the cash or a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York in fines and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains for fraud. 

Trump does not appear to have the necessary cash and has been unable to get a bond. He claims a bond of such size is “unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine," and that "[t]he Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to.” But Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact corrected the record: it is not uncommon for companies in civil litigation cases to post bonds of more than $1 billion.

Trump made his political career on his image as a successful and fabulously wealthy businessman. Today, “Don Poorleone” trended on X (formerly Twitter). 

The backlash to McDaniel’s hiring at NBC also suggests a media shift against news designed to grab eyeballs, the sort of media that has fed the MAGA movement. According to Mike Allen of Axios, NBC executives unanimously supported hiring McDaniel. A memo from Carrie Budoff Brown, who is in charge of the political coverage at NBC News, said McDaniel would help the outlet examine “the diverse perspectives of American voters.” This appears to mean she would appeal to Trump voters, bringing more viewers to the platform.  

But former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd took a strong stand against adding McDaniel to a news organization, noting her “credibility issues” and that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting [and] character assassination.” 

This pushback against news media as entertainment recalls the 1890s, when American newspapers were highly partisan and gravitated toward more and more sensational headlines and exaggerated stories to increase sales. That publication model led to a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal that is widely—and almost certainly inaccurately—blamed for pushing the United States into war with Spain in 1898. 

More accurate, though, is that the sensationalism of what was known as “yellow journalism” created a backlash that gave rise to new investigative journalism designed to move away from partisanship and explain clearly to readers what was happening in American politics and economics. In 1893, McClure’s Magazine appeared, offering in-depth examinations of the workings of corporations and city governments and launching a new era of reform. 

Three years later, publisher Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times and put up New York City’s first electric sign to advertise, in nearly 2,700 individual lights of red, white, blue, and green, that it would push back against yellow journalism by publishing “ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT.” Ochs added that motto to the masthead. With his determination to provide nonpartisan news without sensationalism, in just under 40 years, Ochs took over the paper from just over 20,000 readers to more than 465,000, and turned the New York Times into a newspaper of record.

In that era that looks so much like our own, the national mood had changed.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[popolitiko]

NBC News on Friday announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chair who has repeatedly attacked the network and its journalists, assailed the news media as “fake news” and promoted false claims around the 2020 vote, as an on-air commentator ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

“It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics at NBC News, said in a memo to staff.

McDaniel exited the RNC earlier this month after leading the organization since 2016.

During her time as chair, McDaniel repeatedly attacked the press, which has become increasingly popular in Republican circles over the last several years as Donald Trump demonizes journalists and news institutions.

McDaniel echoed many such attacks, labeling the press as “fake news” and calling the media “corrupt.” At times, she even targeted NBC News and MSNBC with dishonest attacks.

In 2019, for instance, McDaniel accused Richard Engel, NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent, of “actively cheering for an economic downturn.”

“How can NBC let him keep his job when he’s made his bias so clear?” McDaniel asked.

McDaniel has a lengthier history attacking the progressive cable news channel MSNBC, which she will appear on in her new role. In recent years, she has repeatedly attacked the channel for “spreading lies” and blasted those she described as the network’s “primetime propagandists.”

An NBC spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about her attacks on the news media and NBC.

In her role as RNC chief, McDaniel also fanned the flames of election denialism after the 2020 presidential contest.

McDaniel was involved in a phone call in 2020 to pressure Michigan county officials not to certify the vote from the Detroit area, where Joe Biden had a commanding lead. McDaniel told the officials, regarding the certification: “Do not sign it. … We will get you attorneys.”

The Michigan Department of State’s office condemned her claims of supposed voter fraud in the wake of the election, stating they had “no merit.” The state’s “elections were conducted fairly, effectively and transparently and are an accurate reflection of the will of Michigan voters,” it said in a detailed fact check posted online.

NBC’s hiring of McDaniel, however, plays into a recent trend at the network’s outlets, which has seemingly softened its stance on Trump as he inches toward the Republican nomination for president.

Earlier this month, CNBC hosted Trump for a lengthy phone interview in which the network’s anchors allowed him to peddle lies and conspiracy theories on air without scrutiny.

MSNBC has even started carrying Trump’s remarks live on television, a practice that the network boasted for years it would not do. Star host Rachel Maddow, who has said carrying Trump’s lies on the air is dangerous, even objected to the network broadcasting a recent speech from the presumptive Republican nominee, calling it “irresponsible.”

MSNBC has no plans to have former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on the cable network, its president told employees following the news of her hiring at NBC News.

Rashida Jones, the cable network’s president, has been seeking to address internal backlash in the wake of an internal Friday announcement by NBC News regarding McDaniel’s hiring as an on-air contributor.

In that internal memo, the political chief, Carrie Budoff Brown, said McDaniel would contribute “across all NBC News platforms,” causing turmoil among several of the network’s on-air hosts and staffers, people familiar with the matter said. MSNBC is part of the NBC News division.

Rashida Jones daughter of Quincy Jones & Peggy Lipton

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/msnbc-has-no-plans-to-have-ex-rnc-chief-on-network-0d88e70c

In February, Ms. McDaniel urged Republicans to unite behind Mr. Trump after his victory in the New Hampshire primary, irking Nikki Haley, his rival who had not yet dropped out of the race. Mr. Trump has since installed his daughter-in-law and a close adviser to lead the R.N.C., tightening his hold over the party.

Other prominent Republican commentators at NBC News include Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, and Brendan Buck, a former top aide to Paul Ryan and John Boehner. NBC’s Democratic commentators include former Senator Claire McCaskill and David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign manager.

Ms. McDaniel’s NBC debut will be on this Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Susan Rinkunas at Jezebel:

Donald Trump’s new interview with Time magazine underscores the bleak consequences of what it really means to “leave abortion to the states.” Faced with questions about whether he’d enact a nationwide abortion ban, Trump has been running around claiming that he thinks abortion should be left to the states—but also criticizing state bans he considers too extreme, like those in Florida and Arizona. It’s a totally incoherent stance: Does he support states’ rights or not? He’s likely triangulating because he doesn’t want political blowback for laws that voters think are too extreme. But in a new interview, Trump blessed the most extreme effort states could take: Arresting women and pregnant people who have abortions in violation of state law.

Time magazine’s Eric Cortellessa spoke to Trump earlier this month and asked him how he’d govern if he wins the presidency in November. The reporter pressed Trump on abortion laws at both the state and federal level, given Trump’s Truth Social video where he seemed to suggest that he wouldn’t support federal legislation banning abortion, but also didn’t say he would veto such bills. Cortellessa wrote that Trump “decline[d] to commit to vetoing any additional federal restrictions if they came to his desk.” So there’s that! Then Cortellessa asked Trump specifically about whether states could monitor pregnancies and prosecute women who they believe have gotten abortions despite state bans, rather than just doctors who might provide them. Trump said states might arrest women and it’s their prerogative—but he’s staying out of it.

[...] Back to Trump’s interview, a reporter with access finally asked Trump about the Comstock Act, a dormant 19th-century law that conservative activists want him to enforce that would ban the mailing of abortion pills, and potentially all supplies to abortion clinics. Trump said he would make a statement on abortion pills and the Comstock Act within one to two weeks, but these interviews were done more than two weeks ago. (In a follow-up call on April 27, Trump told Cortellessa: “I’ll be doing it over the next week or two. But I don’t think it will be shocking, frankly.”) I guess we get to wait and see.

In a pair of interviews with Time recently, Donald Trump said that he'll permit states to surveil pregnancies and prosecute pregnant people for violating abortion bans. He also said that he's going to make a statement on the Comstock Act soon.

Trump's interview with Time in which he basically supports state laws punishing people who have abortions is why we must re-elect Joe Biden. He would support a federal ban on abortion if given the chance, despite claiming to have a "leave it to the states" stance.

See Also:

HuffPost: Trump Is Fine With States Monitoring Pregnant Women So They Don't Get Abortions