Michael Fanone makes candid and profane remarks about Republicans in Rolling Stone interview as he promotes memoir
In an extraordinarily candid and profane interview with Rolling Stone, Michael Fanone – the former Washington police officer who was seriously hurt at the US Capitol during the January 6 attack – called the Republican House leader, potentially the next speaker, a “fucking weasel bitch”.
Fanone said past Republican giants would be unimpressed with Kevin McCarthy.
Continue reading...Families of those killed in May school shooting support Democrat in race against Texas governor Greg Abbott
A small photo of Jacklyn Casarez, one of the children killed during the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May, graced the front of a greeting card held by Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, who visited a Rio Grande Valley park Friday morning before the one and only staged debate with incumbent governor Greg Abbott.
“Maybe you don’t consider yourself a political person,” Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was also killed in the 24 May shooting at Robb elementary, said Friday during a pre-debate news conference.
Continue reading...For all the supreme court’s pomp and ceremony, a new poll finds Americans increasingly are holding it in low regard.
According to Monmouth University, a majority of Americans find it out of touch with their beliefs:
Continue reading...Top Democrat says he hopes to finalize deal to fund government until mid-December by the end of today
With a speech on the Capitol steps, top House Republican Kevin McCarthy was stumping again today for his party’s Commitment to America platform and plans for “firing Nancy Pelosi”.
McCarthy last week debuted the plan, which offered a broad if vague outline of what the party would do should they take Congress’s lower chamber in the 8 November midterms:
Kevin McCarthy’s pitiful display this morning is only further proof that the MAGA cult in his conference has him in a chokehold. House Republican Leaders spent their morning detached from reality: bragging about their dangerous, extreme, unpopular agenda to ban abortion in all fifty states, send prescription drug costs soaring and steal your right to choose your leaders. Truthfully, a desperate press conference is about par for the course for an uninspiring and incoherent politician like the Minority Leader, whose only real accomplishment to date is typing up a radical right-wing wish list that sends a clear message to the American people that House Republicans have gone off the deep end.
Continue reading...Biden releases national hunger and nutrition strategy, which includes a slate of goals to help end food insecurity
Biden is going into the main pillars of the national hunger and nutrition strategy released on Tuesday, which includes a slew of goals to help end food insecurity, give people more information and options to eat more healthily, and help folks take up regular physical activity.
Unfortunately, the goals are more a call to action, as Congress has ended Covid-era policies like the universal free school meals program and the expanded child tax credits which had massively reduced food insecurity and child poverty in the US.
Continue reading...Pennsylvania governor hopeful Doug Mastriano made comments in 2019 while discussing abortion bill he proposed as state senator
Asked in 2019 if he was saying women should be charged with murder for violating an abortion ban he proposed, Doug Mastriano, now the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, said: “Yes, I am.”
Mastriano was talking to WITF, a radio station, about a bill he sponsored as a state senator.
Continue reading...Legislation would clarify and expand parts of 1887 Electoral Count Act and aim to avoid repeat of January 6 insurrection
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Tuesday he would “proudly support” legislation to overhaul rules for certifying presidential elections, bolstering a bipartisan effort to revise a 19th-century law and avoid any repeat of the January 6 insurrection.
The legislation would clarify and expand parts of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which, along with the constitution, governs how states and Congress certify electors and declare presidential winners.
Continue reading...Panel cites threat of Hurricane Ian bearing down on parts of Florida, and says the ‘investigation goes forward’
As the January 6 committee enters what is likely to be the home stretch of its investigation, a new poll has found it hasn’t meaningfully shifted beliefs about what happened that day.
Monmouth University finds that around four in 10 Americans hold Donald Trump responsible for the insurrection at the Capitol, slightly less than in late June, while three in 10 believe the election was stolen from him, a figure that’s moved little since November 2020.
Continue reading...Both parties opposed the measure on energy permits, which critics said would gut environmental protections
The US Senate has voted to advance a funding bill to avert a federal government shutdown, after a tense standoff over a controversial energy-permitting provision proposed by the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin ended with its withdrawal.
A procedural vote on Tuesday to move forward with the funding bill succeeded easily, 72-23, after Democrats announced that the West Virginia senator’s proposal, which faced opposition from both parties, would be stripped from the final legislation. It was clear that, with Manchin’s plan included, Democrats were falling far short of the 60 votes needed to proceed, as most Republicans objected to it.
Continue reading...Paul Gosar and Louie Gohmert were eager to believe ‘wild, dramatic fantasies’, claims Denver Riggleman in new book
The Republican congressmen Louis Gohmert and Paul Gosar adopted such extreme, conspiracy-tinged positions, even before the US Capitol attack, that a fellow member of the rightwing Freedom Caucus thought they “may have had serious cognitive issues”.
Denver Riggleman, once a US representative from Virginia, reports his impression of his former colleagues from Texas and Arizona in a new book.
Continue reading...Denver Riggleman tells 60 Minutes that texts from Mark Meadows amounted to a ‘roadmap to an attempted coup’
The supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade allowed states to curtail abortion rights completely, potentially transformed the midterms and, as Maya Yang reports, complicated access to other medicines in unexpected ways:
A few weeks after the supreme court’s 24 June decision to overturn the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, the pharmacy chain Walgreens sent Annie England Noblin a message, informing her that her monthly prescription of methotrexate was held up.
Continue reading...County prosecutor will decide whether Republican Kristi Noem broke an untested law to rein in questionable use of state plane
South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, was returning from an official appearance in Rapid City in 2019 when she faced a decision: overnight in the capital of Pierre, where another trip would start the next day, or head home and see her son attend his high school prom?
The Republican governor chose the latter, a decision that eventually cost taxpayers about $3,700 when the state airplane dropped her off near her home and then returned the next day to pick her up.
Continue reading...Ruling brings back law blocked for nearly 50 years, and means clinics offering the procedure would face criminal charges
Arizona can enforce a near-total ban on abortions that has been blocked for nearly 50 years, a judge ruled Friday, meaning that clinics statewide will have to stop providing the procedures to avoid criminal charges against doctors and other medical workers.
The judge lifted a decades-old injunction that blocked enforcement of the law on the books since before Arizona became a state. The only exemption to the ban is if the woman’s life is in jeopardy.
Continue reading...Joe Biden says attacks Republicans’ midterms agenda, saying real goal is to ban abortion nationwide
The Trump-appointed World Bank president David Malpass is under fire for deflecting on the question of humans causing climate change, and Axios reports the Biden administration is mulling an effort to remove him.
Appointed in 2019, Malpass, a Republican, worked in the Treasury under Trump and also at global financial crisis-casualty Bear Stearns. While Axios reports Biden officials have long been suspicious of him, the uproar began when Malpass replied, “I don’t even know -- I’m not a scientist and that is not a question,” when asked at an event on Tuesday if he believed climate change is manmade.
Continue reading...The House minority leader introduced the Republicans’ ‘Commitment to America’, focusing on Biden and not on Trump
Republicans have unveiled a midterm election agenda heavy on critiques of Joe Biden but light on specific policies – and with a throwback theme to the mid-1990s.
After a primary season dominated by extremist “Make America great again” (Maga) candidates and deniers of the 2020 election result, Friday’s launch also represented an effort to tone down rhetoric and win back independent voters.
Continue reading...Special master also gives series of deadlines after judges overturn ruling that temporarily blocked DoJ from the material
The judge who had initially blocked the justice department from reviewing the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago and ordered a special master to weed out privileged materials has revised her ruling, Politico reports.
Federal judge Aileen Cannon’s changes come after an appeals court overturned the part of her opinion that had halted the government’s review of the documents taken from Donald Trump’s resort, hampering the investigation into whether the former president took government secrets with him when he left the White House.
Continue reading...Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian’s Unchecked reports the Senate Republican leader vowed never to speak to Trump again
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said Donald Trump was “crazy” and vowed never to speak to him again after the Capitol attack – then voted both to call Trump’s impeachment unconstitutional and to acquit the former president in his second Senate trial.
McConnell’s deliberations are reported in a forthcoming book, Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, by Rachael Bade of Politico and Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post. An extract was published on Wednesday.
Continue reading...News of ‘stunning’ attempt to rescind dramatic election night call contained in The Divider, by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser
Fox News anchor Bret Baier wanted the network to withdraw its famous call of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020, citing pressure from Donald Trump’s campaign and saying the swing state should be “put back in his column”, a new book says.
News of Baier’s email is contained in The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, published in the US on Tuesday.
Continue reading...National security adviser makes remark while Biden will ‘rebuke Russia’ at UN summit
Joined by his fellow New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, majority leader Chuck Schumer is continuing to call for aid to Puerto Rico at a press conference outside the Capitol.
Here’s the latest from Nexstar media:
Continue reading...Judge appoints special master to weed out documents under legal privilege rules but DoJ is expected to appeal the decision
Speaking of conservative media, Ramon Antonio Vargas tuned into conservative stalwart Fox News to see what their political coverage looks like ahead of the midterms:
With most US voters indicating that the preservation of abortion rights is their chief focus as midterm elections loom, the face of Fox News and Republican politicians appear to be trying to shift attention to crime, a progressive media watchdog has warned.
As a kid, he always knew he wanted to be a doctor (“Fisher Price play kit,” he muses). But it wasn’t until he was an undergraduate at Columbia University that he experienced an epiphany.
He was working on a big display of the AIDS memorial quilt, he says, and was tasked with flying to San Francisco to bring back a “roll of carpet that looked like a body in a shroud.” On the day the exhibit opened for the finished quilt, he watched as men his age — people who should have been enjoying their 20s — walked in, coughing and raging with a disease very likely to kill them.
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