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Found 9 results

  1. Liz Cheney Is Saving Pelosi, the GOP, and Maybe America from Themselves Matt Lewis Fri, July 23, 2021, 4:27 AM Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast Queen Liz Cheney continued to cement her image as the Iron Lady of the Republican Party this week, with a bold endorsement of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to veto two Trump allies—Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks—from the Jan. 6 select committee. Pelosi objected to these picks by Minority “Leader” Kevin McCarthy because, as Cheney explained, Jordan “may well be a material witness to events that led to that day–that led to January 6th,” and Banks “disqualified himself by his comments in particular over the last 24 hours demonstrating that he is not taking this seriously.” In so doing, Cheney preserved the seriousness and credibility of the committee. To borrow a phrase from Rush Limbaugh, Cheney is equal time. This is a testament to the power of one individual’s integrity-based decisions. Cheney, by her very existence as a Republican, makes this select committee bipartisan—and not solely in the “fig leaf” manner that McCarthy, who’s determined to cut off any real look at the role Republican elected officials, up to the commander in chief himself, played in the events of that disgraceful day—wants you to believe. The GOP’s Suicide Squad Isn’t Going to Stop With Liz Cheney In the case of an investigation, there are two reasons for bipartisanship. The first is legitimacy. Ideally, you want everyone to feel represented so that there is buy-in. The second reason is that, as the cliché goes, diversity makes us stronger. This is the same reason why any leader should listen to a variety of viewpoints before making a decision. However, it’s important to distinguish between hearing different perspectives and entertaining conspiracy theories. For example, let’s take the current question over the Afghanistan withdrawal. There’s one argument (Cheney’s) that keeping a residual force is a small price to pay for preventing the Taliban from taking over. The opposing argument is that 20 years is too long for any war to drag on. A leader (Biden) might want to table his biases and fully explore both arguments before making a final decision. What is not worthy of contemplating, though, is the notion that we should have never invaded Afghanistan because 9-11 was an inside job. In applying this analogy to Jan. 6, Cheney represents one legitimate political worldview and Democrats represent the other. If Pelosi should name Rep. Adam Kinzinger—a Republican, Air Force veteran and member of the Air Force National Guard—to the select committee, as she is reportedly considering doing, she would be reinforcing this function and adding an additional check on Democrats who might be tempted to exploit the situation for their own political agenda. (And if you think **** Cheney’s daughter is some sort of RINO now, that probably says a lot more about you than it does about her.) Conversely, Jim Jordan, who sought to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election) personifies the “truther” category of the analogy, which is to say that he doesn’t so much bring different opinions as he does different facts. The GOP Isn’t Sending Their Best, and Pelosi Isn’t Having It House Republicans are predictably outraged at Cheney, who called B.S. on the game they were playing and single-handedly exposed and undermined their argument. It is increasingly rare to see someone take a stand like this, and I can’t help thinking it is brave and bold and romantic and rebellious—especially for someone who was once considered conservative royalty, but was recently kicked to the curb for failing to walk the party line. Speaking of walking the line, I’m reminded of a famous full-page ad in Billboard magazine with a picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird and the words, “American Recordings and Johnny Cash would like to acknowledge the Nashville music establishment and country radio for your support.” The photo was taken in 1969 at California’s San Quentin prison, but resurfaced in the late 1990s after country radio had shunned Cash and he’d hooked up with producer Rick Rubin for what turned out to be a late career renaissance. Today’s Republican Party is like what country radio had become: lame, hackneyed, superficial, inauthentic, lacking any historical appreciation for the people who laid the foundation for it yet stubbornly and snobbishly parochial and hostile to independent thought. If Cheney were to take out a full-page ad in Roll Call today, she might acknowledge Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the Republican establishment and thank them for their support. When it comes to the Republican establishment more concerned with pleasing Trump than with any of its alleged principles, she has gone rogue. The truth is that Cheney is doing exactly what you would want a congressperson whose judgment is that the attack on Jan. 6 “was the worst attack on this Capitol since 1814” and “an attack on our Constitution” to do. She believes there “must be an investigation that is nonpartisan, that is sober, that is serious, that gets to the facts wherever they may lead.” This strikes me as an entirely reasonable stand to take. And though today’s Republicans would deny it, future Republicans may reflect on this moment and find that there was at least one courageous member of their party worth (retroactively) celebrating. According to no less an authority on conservative governance than Edmund Burke, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Liz Cheney isn’t sacrificing anything to your opinion. https://www.yahoo.com/news/liz-cheney-saving-pelosi-gop-082752858.html GO RV, then BV
  2. The Matt Gaetz-Marjorie Taylor Greene Fundraising Tour Is Actually a Cash Fire Roger Sollenberger Thu, July 22, 2021, 5:05 AM·5 min read Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty At the height of the controversy surrounding Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and the revelations that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bet big on a nationwide joint fundraising tour with her embattled colleague. But new campaign filings show that not only did the gamble not pay off, but that the much-maligned Republicans actually spent four times as much as they raised. Greene, the House GOP’s top fundraiser, is now faced with a decision: She can continue to join forces with her beleaguered ally at the expense of her campaign war chest, or she can cut bait and let Gaetz fend for himself. Since Gaetz and Greene kicked off their joint fundraising committee with a May 7 event at The Villages in central Florida, their campaigns and joint fundraising committee have posted a combined loss of $342,000. And according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, that joint fundraising effort, “Put America First,” reported only $59,345.54 in contributions. That sort of meager haul would be fine for a dinner or one-time event, but Gaetz and Greene have repeatedly held high-profile events and spent a whopping $287,036.19 to hold them—meaning they’re in the hole by more than $225,000. Bombshell Letter: Gaetz Paid for Sex With Minor, Wingman Says Both Gaetz and Greene contributed $150,000 apiece from their own campaigns to the joint fundraising committee. And they’ve raised money almost entirely from small-dollar donors. Only four people gave $500 or more to the shared committee. But their campaign tour of some of the most Trump-friendly areas in the nation has been inordinately expensive. In fact, the big winner from the Gaetz and Greene barnstorming appears to be Gaetz’s PR firm. The Logan Circle Group, which the campaign hired in early April, made off with more than a million dollars in the second quarter of 2021. While the majority of that money came from Gaetz—$825,000 over the course of one month—the firm nudged past the million-dollar mark with the $250,000 it received from Put America First. Those payments, nearly 90 percent of the committee’s total budget, were for “event production and management,” according to FEC filings. A Gaetz campaign spokesperson told The Daily Beast that all donations raised on the tour had gone to Put America First. Asked again if that was correct, the spokesperson said it was. Upon double-checking with the campaign’s finance team, the spokesperson would only say that, “Our filings speak for themselves.” But if the filings speak for themselves, then they’re not saying many good things. Individually, Gaetz and Greene raised $1.34 million and $1.31 million in the second quarter of 2021, respectively. Those totals are certainly impressive, and Gaetz and Greene could argue that the publicity from their circuit is helping them fundraise individually. Except, they’re not making that argument, and both candidates have actually raised less in this most recent quarter than they did in the first. Matt Gaetz’s Wingman Paid Dozens of Young Women—and a 17-Year-Old Gaetz slipped from $1.82 million in the first months of the year, his personal best. He also spent $1.95 million along the way, the majority of it on fundraising and a pricey public relations scramble to push back against reports about the investigation. But Greene—whose campaign is easily the biggest money draw among the House GOP—plummeted, coming $1.9 million short of her eye-popping $3.2 million first-quarter haul. After expenses, including travel and fundraising costs, she closed the second quarter with only a $300,000 net gain. She had ended the first quarter up $1.8 million. A Gaetz spokesperson—who was not affiliated with the Logan Circle Group—defended the three-term congressman’s fundraising performance. “Despite an endless stream of lies from the media, Congressman Gaetz continues to be among the most prodigious fundraisers in Congress and is the only Republican who doesn’t accept donations from federal lobbyists or PACs,” the spokesperson said in a text message. Gaetz, a three-term congressman representing a deep-red district in the Florida panhandle, hadn’t raised more than a million dollars in a quarter until October 2020. “He thanks his tens of thousands of donors and promises to always fight for them,” this spokesperson added. New Docs Show Matt Gaetz Campaign in Full Damage-Control Mode Greene and Gaetz, arguably the two most controversial House Republicans, were united this spring by scandals that had not only alienated them from the mainstream, but left them isolated within their own party. At the time, Gaetz was the focus of a string of media reports revealing details about his role in a federal sex crimes investigation, which in addition to the trafficking allegations reportedly extends to a sweeping public corruption probe. Soon after The New York Times broke the news of the investigation, Gaetz—a self-identifying “Florida man” who wears his loneliness among D.C. colleagues as a badge of courage—found himself even further marooned politically. Only Greene and longtime ally Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) were willing to speak up in his defense. “When I first got to Washington, the party leaders said ‘Gaetz, it seems to us you’re not really a team player,’ and I said ‘I am, but you’re not my team,’” Gaetz told supporters in his district the day before the Times story ran. Greene, for her part, had just been bitten twice by her GOP colleagues. In February, House Republicans stripped the conspiracy theorist of her committees, and in April, she was forced to cancel her proposed “America First” caucus amid criticism for its white nationalist rhetoric. Gaetz had signed on to the caucus, and the pair later applied the same moniker to their tour. Two months in, however, their joint effort appears primarily concerned with fighting gravity. Venues have canceled events in response to public outcry, and after the launch at The Villages the media has largely ignored their whistle-stops. But Greene, who has shown GOP leadership her value as a fundraising powerhouse, still apparently sees reason to go forward, at least according to the Gaetz campaign. A spokesperson for the Florida Republican told The Daily Beast that Greene had personally committed to future events benefiting the joint committee. “Congressman Gaetz and Congresswoman Greene look forward to announcing new stops on the America First tour in the coming weeks,” the spokesperson said. The Greene campaign did not reply to The Daily Beast’s request for comment. https://news.yahoo.com/matt-gaetz-marjorie-taylor-greene-090547750.html GO RV, then BV
  3. Biden Just Gave NASA the Green Light for a Cool New Moon Base David Axe Mon, June 21, 2021, 3:41 AM Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty President Joe Biden’s plan to spend a couple trillion dollars on infrastructure here on Earth is still working its way through a fractious Congress. In the meantime the Biden administration is going all in on infrastructure in space. That is to say, space stations. In a rebuke of one of ex-president Donald Trump’s less popular space proposals, the Biden administration is working to extend the service life of the International Space Station. At the same time, the administration is clarifying plans for a new station that would orbit the moon. The twin initiatives couldn’t have come at a better time for proponents of a slowly emerging orbital economy. On Wednesday, the Chinese space agency launched the first long-term crew to China’s own new space station. If the United States were to falter in its efforts to keep people in space year-round, authoritarian China would be more than happy to become humanity’s main off-world host, experts said. That’s a chilling proposition for advocates of a free and democratic orbital community. The International Space Station isn’t the world’s first space station. But the low-orbit habitat, circling Earth at an altitude of 250 miles, is the first enduring one. NASA’s three-person Skylab launched in 1973 and burned up in the atmosphere, as planned, in 1979. The Soviet Mir, also big enough to house three crew, lasted from 1986 to ’96. A NASA-led international alliance, with Russia as a key member, started assembling the ISS back in 1998. More than 200 spacewalks later, the 310-foot, solar-powered station includes living quarters, science labs, engineering facilities, an observatory and attachments for several visiting spacecraft. The ISS usually has six or seven people aboard. Two are Russian. In addition to several Americans, the crew usually includes a specialist or two from the European, Japanese or Canadian space agencies. For more than 20 years, the ISS has supported humanity’s only long-term, off-world population. It’s a multi-billion-dollar anchor for what space boosters hope will eventually expand into a substantial, and self-sustaining orbital economy. The station is also the main venue for the United States and Russia to cooperate in a high-profile way on, well, anything. Back on Earth, Russia hacks American infrastructure, interferes with American elections and threatens American allies. Relations are fraught. Longstanding U.S.-Russian treaties are collapsing at a record pace. But in space, Americans and Russians don’t just get along. They rely on each other for mutual survival. While U.S. astronauts traditionally lead ISS crews, the Russian cosmonauts handle the station’s upkeep. They fix the wiring and plumbing. They dispose of the trash. More significantly, Russian Soyuz space capsules were, for a critical nine-year period, the only vehicles capable of transporting crew to and from the station. NASA’s Space Shuttles helped to handle that mission until they were decommissioned in 2011. The U.S. space agency finally resumed its own crew-transport missions late last year using SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule. Dismantling the ISS before the United States and its allies have prepared alternative orbital habitats could be a serious blow to American leadership in space—as well as to what’s left of American-Russian goodwill. But that’s exactly what the Trump administration proposed to do back in 2018. Trump was enamored of most things with the word “space” in the name. He did, after all, spend billions of dollars setting up a new military space bureaucracy—a.k.a., “Space Force”—even after his own defense secretary and many lawmakers dismissed the idea as duplicative and wasteful. Space stations, however, seemed to leave Trump cold. His administration wanted to stop paying the ISS’s $4-billion-a-year operating costs by 2025. The plan, which died with Trump’s presidency, anticipated NASA handing off the station to private companies that would then use it for research, zero-gravity manufacturing, tourism, filmmaking—whatever. At the same time, Trump’s determination to—some might say “obsession with”—returning astronauts to the moon by 2024, before the end of what he imagined would be his second term as president, warped NASA’s intricate plans for establishing a second space station, this one orbiting the moon. As the space agency originally envisioned it, the Lunar Gateway station would function as a sort of pit stop for astronauts bound for the moon. Instead of flying directly to the moon the way the Apollo astronauts did back in the late 1960s and early ’70s (the first and last time anyone stepped foot on the moon), they would travel from Earth to the Lunar Gateway station. The station would then adjust its orbit and deposit explorers onto the lunar surface aboard back-and-forth landers. The problem was, there was no way the Lunar Gateway was going to be ready in time for Trump’s 2024 deadline for a new moon landing. That left the lunar station in a kind of planning limbo. Biden just yanked the Lunar Gateway out of this bureaucratic purgatory. New NASA administrator Bill Nelson endorsed the return to the moon but hedged on the deadline. “I think we have to put a dose of sobering reality into our analysis,” Nelson told the Associated Press last month. Delaying the next moon landing by even a few months should allow NASA to return to the original plan of stopping over at the Lunar Gateway. “The Lunar Gateway is now a key part of NASA strategy,” Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, told The Daily Beast. Not coincidentally, the bipartisan U.S. Innovation and Competition Act—Biden’s $250-billion science bill, which passed the Senate in early June and now awaits a vote in the House of Representatives—includes a NASA authorization provision that sets aside $10 billion for the Lunar Gateway’s landers. In a separate interview with The Verge, Nelson also threw the ISS a lifeline. “I want to expand the life of the station to 2030,” he said, “and the idea would eventually be that you let private industry build the space station thereafter.” As part of that extension, NASA has begun negotiating with the Russian space agency to continue its own role on the ISS. NASA did not respond to a request for comment. Pavel Luzin, an independent space expert, told The Daily Beast Moscow is likely to sign on through the station’s eventual handover to private industry. “The most significant fact here is that the successful space program in cooperation with the West gives the Russian political system a domestic legitimacy as a great power status in international relations,” Luzin said. If the goal is to get more people living and working in space, and paying their own way, timing is critical—and five years could make a huge difference. There was no way private industry was going to be ready to take over the ISS in 2025, experts said. But considering the pace at which the commercial space industry is expanding, it just might be ready by 2030. Tourism companies could lead the way. “We’ve seen significant interest in orbital private spaceflight in the past couple of years,” Laura Forczyk, owner of Atlanta space consulting firm Astralytical, told The Daily Beast. NASA has invited private firms to bid on two opportunities to bring paying customers to the ISS between late 2022 and late 2023. Each trip would involve four visitors and last two weeks—and could cost up to $200 million apiece. So far, the only company to express firm interest in the ISS visits is Houston-based Axiom Space. Besides shepherding rich tourists to the ISS, Axiom is also developing its own habitat module—a kind of orbital spare room—that it hopes to eventually plug onto the ISS. Handing over the ISS to viable private operators could be a boon to NASA, its partner space agencies and humanity in general. Companies could convert the ISS into a gravity-free orbital factory for producing highly specialized products—perfect crystals, for example—that could benefit NASA’s other projects. But taxpayers would be off the hook. And NASA could spend the tens of billions of dollars it saves building up the Lunar Gateway before eventually handing it off to private industry, as well. Think of NASA as a developer of space real estate. Like any developer in a free market, the agency has competition. China began working on its three-person Tiangong station—which in scale and design is more like Skylab and Mir than it is the ISS—way back in 2000. After extension preparation, the Chinese station is finally ready to support people. Tiangong’s first long-term crew blasted off on Wednesday night and, a few hours later, arrived safely at the station in low Earth orbit. U.S. law specifically bars China from participating in ISS. But it’s not clear Beijing would even want to be part of that international effort. The ISS is a strictly scientific—and, increasingly, commercial—platform. By contrast, it’s possible Tiangong has a military mission, perhaps surveilling Earth’s surface or keeping tabs on U.S. and allied satellites. No one outside of the Chinese Communist Party knows for sure, because unlike the ISS, the Tiangong project is top secret and, for outsiders, unauditable. It’s not hard to imagine that Chinese leaders hoped NASA’s own space station efforts would fail. If Trump had won re-election and turned off the lights on the ISS by the end of his second term while also sidelining the Lunar Gateway, there’s a scenario where, by the mid-2020s, humanity’s only available off-world real-estate would have been Chinese. “The Chinese are very conservative regarding keeping things ‘Chinese only’ in space until they feel confident about success, but they certainly realize the prestige—and hence strategic value—and publicity accorded with issuing invitations to non-Chinese at some point,” Joan Johnson-Freese, a space expert at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island, told The Daily Beast. “This will be especially true when the West doesn’t have invitations to the ISS to offer.” In that scenario, Beijing would have been in a strong position to dictate the terms as humanity, and the world economy, slowly expanded off Earth’s surface. With strong support for not one but two space stations, Biden has forestalled that takeover. https://news.yahoo.com/biden-just-gave-nasa-green-074126011.html GO RV, then BV
  4. 35 Republicans Defy Trump and GOP Leaders to Push Capitol Riots Probe Sam Brodey, Matt Fuller Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:53 PM Alex Wong Over the objections of GOP leaders, the House passed a bill Wednesday that would create a bipartisan and independent commission to examine the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The House voted 252-175, with 35 Republicans joining all Democrats in support of the bill. With 35 House Republicans voting for the commission, there’s a possibility Democrats in the Senate can find enough Republicans there to support the panel, but the odds are long. While the number of GOP defections is a bit of an embarrassment for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his leadership team, it’s probably not quite the jailbreak that Democrats needed to convince their Senate colleagues to go against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Democrats would need 10 Republicans to overcome a GOP filibuster for 60 votes in the Senate, otherwise the bill establishing the commission won’t make it to President Joe Biden’s desk. Still, Democrats found themselves surprised at the number of GOP defections. “That’s a good showing,” Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) told The Daily Beast. “It should be everyone. But given the death grip Donald Trump has on his party, I think it’s encouraging.” Debate in the House on Wednesday was mostly one-sided. More Republicans spoke in support of the commission than those who spoke against it. But the GOP arguments against the legislation were particularly divorced from reality. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) implored Democrats to start being bipartisan and stop using “every tool as a partisan stick to beat Republicans.” “Look, things have changed a lot since the 9/11 commission,” Gohmert said, “because back then, we did not have a problem on both—either side of the aisle condemning anti-semitic remarks.” Fellow Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy argued that an independent commission was unnecessary because Congress already has committees that could subpoena people and investigate Jan. 6. “Let's use the powers that we have and the powers of this body and the committees we have to seek the truth to the information wherever it may lead,” Roy said. But Democrats and some Republicans contended that an independent and high-profile commission—like the one Congress created after 9/11—was an important step toward accountability and future safety. Schiff invoked that example to justify the Jan. 6 commission. He told The Daily Beast that Congress did important work to probe 9/11 but that the commission brought “tremendous added value” because it was outside the political process and was staffed with trusted figures. “That's what we need here, so that the recommendations that come out of the commission will be broadly accepted by the public,” Schiff said. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) particularly took offense to the GOP contention that the commission ought to broaden its scope to all sorts of political violence, not just the violence that occurred on Jan. 6. “It's vital that Congress establish a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate January 6. Not some other date,” Hoyer said. “That does not absolve any wrongdoing anywhere, any time. But it says that this unique insurrection is a danger to our democracy. Not to Republicans and Democrats. To our democracy. To our Congress. To the people's House and the United States Senate, which was occupied." Rep. John Katko (R-NY)—the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee who brokered the deal—also spoke in support of the bill, saying an independent commission was “critical for removing the politics around January 6.” “The American people and the Capitol Police deserve answers and action as soon as possible to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again,” Katko said. “We must find answers to the many questions surrounding that day.” All of this drama to create a bipartisan commission comes after four months of negotiations and a flurry of recent opposition from GOP leaders. After Katko finalized a deal with Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) last week to create the commission, McCarthy promptly blew it up on Tuesday. And although McConnell said later in the day on Tuesday that he was undecided, he woke up on Wednesday and himself called the proposal “slanted and unbalanced.” The only thing that had seemed to change was that former President Donald Trump issued a statement Tuesday night calling the commission “partisan unfairness.” While McConnell and Republican allies tried to come up with reasons on Wednesday why that was the case, their rationales didn’t seem to match up with the legislation. The bill that the House passed Wednesday would create an independent commission composed of 10 people outside of government—five to be picked by Democratic leaders, and five to be picked by Republican leaders. The commission would have subpoena power, but only if the Democratic chair and GOP vice chair agreed, or absent that agreement, if a majority of the commission approved. The one item of imbalance Republicans focused on Wednesday was the composition of the staff, which also seemed to be a mostly imagined complaint. The language for hiring staff was almost identical to the bipartisan 9/11 commission, as well as a bill from January establishing an independent commission that had more than 30 GOP cosponsors. But not long after McConnell’s speech against the legislation Wednesday, those senators who had been undecided, or even supportive, changed their tune. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who said on Tuesday that the insurrection could not be “swept under any rug,” said on Wednesday that he’d changed his mind after hearing directly from McCarthy. “Leadership in the House says it’s not bipartisan in nature,” Rounds said, even though the bill was the product of negotiations between Katko and Thompson—with McCarthy’s backing. After Trump, McCarthy, and McConnell all came out in opposition to the commission, GOP leaders began explicitly laying out a key concern that’s percolated for weeks: that such a commission would damage them politically. “A lot of our members, and I think this is true of a lot of House Republicans, want to be moving forward and not looking backward,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections I think is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda.” The 10 Republican votes needed to pass the bill in the Senate, then, will now be much tougher for Democrats to win. Even senators who would be the building blocks of any bipartisan vote, like Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), have said they want to see changes to the commission as it is structured. The Senate GOP’s widespread opposition potentially sets up something momentous: the minority’s first use of the legislative filibuster since Democrats took power in January. The symbolism in such a move is not lost on Democrats. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told The Daily Beast such a move would be in line with the GOP’s intent to filibuster voting rights legislation. “They’re just interested in blocking,” he said. Democrats on both sides of the Capitol say they will plow ahead though, even if the path to establishing the commission is unclear. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed on Wednesday to put the House’s bill to a vote, no matter what. And Hoyer told reporters that Democrats would find a lane for the review somehow—even if it meant creating a special committee in the House. That would be a far more diminished version of the commission outlined in the bill, however. Republicans have pointed to ongoing reviews of the Jan. 6 attack being conducted by congressional committees and various agencies from the federal government, saying their work would be more than sufficient in uncovering what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. But Rep. Tim Ryan (R-OH), who chairs the House committee that oversees the Capitol Police, said Wednesday that would not be enough. “We're trying to govern the country, so we're trying to set this up,” Ryan said. “If there’s something better, be a part of it.” “If we can’t get Republican votes on this,” Ryan added, “it’s indicative of what’s to come.” https://news.yahoo.com/house-passes-bill-creating-jan-225356416.html GO RV, then BV
  5. Ivanka Trump Gets the Pfizer Jab. Her Anti-Vax Fans Are Not Happy. Alaina Demopoulos Wed, April 14, 2021, 6:07 PM via Twitter Ivanka Trump broke her post-inaugural social media silence with some personal news: she’s vaccinated. The former presidential advisor announced via Instagram, Twitter, and a statement sent to the AP that she had received her first Pfizer jab. “Today, I got the shot!!! I hope that you do too! Thank you Nurse Torres!!!” Ivanka captioned a photo. In the snap, she wears a tie-dye face mask, white t-shirt and jeans while a nurse in pink scrubs administers the dose. Per the AP, Ivanka received the vaccine in her adopted home state of Florida, where she moved with Jared Kushner and her children after leaving DC. Two sources said that she had the option to get her shot when her father was still in office, but chose to hold off. Ivanka Trump, Miami Beach Bum, Plots Her Next Move Unsurprisingly, not all fans of the woman whose father consistently downplayed the pandemic and scoffed at basic COVID safety precautions are happy with this news. Her Instagram post has devolved into a deluge of complaints regarding her choice to get the shot. “Bummer. I was hoping you were above this kind of virtue signaling,” one person wrote on Instagram. “Hell no. Quit telling perfectly healthy people to take this so called vaccine,” another added. The resounding agreement in Ivanka’s comments section, per a few more Instagram users: “Disappointing.” There were similar musings on Ivanka’s Facebook and Twitter announcements. “Love you! But going to decline,” a person wrote on Facebook. Former vice president Mike Pence got his shot back in December via a televised press conference, for which he wore a rather unfortunate short sleeved shirt. Donald and Melania Trump received theirs, too, before leaving office in January—though they did not publicize the event and news broke after President Biden’s inauguration. https://www.yahoo.com/news/ivanka-trump-gets-pfizer-jab-220724150.html GO RV, then BV
  6. Dominion Voting Systems Sues Fox News for $1.6 Billion for Pushing Trump’s Big Lie Jamie Ross Fri, March 26, 2021, 7:18 AM Reuters/ Shannon Stapleton Dominion Voting Systems has filed a staggering $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging the cable network pushed false claims that the voting-machine company rigged the 2020 election. It’s the latest in a string of massive lawsuits from Dominion, which was the target of a baseless and frankly bizarre Trumpist conspiracy theory that it switched millions of votes in order to help Joe Biden win the White House. Fox News joins Trump allies Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in being chased for damages for spreading the claim. In its suit against Fox News, Dominion alleges the network “sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” Attorney Justin Nelson accuses Fox News of taking a “conscious, knowing business decision to endorse and repeat and broadcast these lies in order to keep its viewership.” While some of Fox News’ more legitimate anchors pushed back on the relentless flow of Trumpist election conspiracies, others were perfectly happy to throw their weight behind them. For example, in the week after the election, Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer mulled that the Dominion theory being put forward by Powell and others “sounded convincing.” According to the Associated Press, the Fox lawsuit could be followed by more against specific media personalities at the network, but Dominion wanted to target the entire network first. “The buck stops with Fox on this,” said attorney Stephen Shackelford. “Fox chose to put this on all of its many platforms. They rebroadcast, republished it on social media.” The Trump campaign and its allies became fixated on voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems in the days after the election. The crackpot theory included the claim that Dominion voting machines were created in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013. Powell—the pro-Trump lawyer and one of the main proponents of the conspiracy theory—effectively abandoned it earlier this week in the face of her own billion-dollar lawsuit. Her lawyers argue that “no reasonable person” would believe that her election-fraud claims were “statements of fact,” and that they relied upon “exaggeration and hyperbole.” Fox News is yet to comment on the Dominion lawsuit. Dominion concluded in its lawsuit: “If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.” https://news.yahoo.com/dominion-voting-systems-sues-fox-111809361.html GO RV, then BV
  7. Aides Warned Trump About Anti-Vax MAGA Fans. He Did Nothing. Asawin Suebsaeng Thu, March 25, 2021, 5:04 AM Doug Mills/Getty In the final months of Donald Trump’s term in office, several of the then-president’s top advisers were monitoring a growing concern: that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, particularly among Republicans and Trump supporters, was going to pose a major problem as the United States embarked on its mission to vaccinate millions. According to three people familiar with the matter, then-President Trump was repeatedly warned by some of his closest advisers and administration officials about this MAGA-specific issue during his closing weeks as leader of the free world. But in the two months since President Joe Biden took over at the White House, polls show that aversion to the new coronavirus vaccines remains markedly higher among Trump fans and GOP voters than it is among liberals and Biden supporters. That reality has stoked grave concern among public health officials and experts, and has left some of the ex-president’s friends and allies frustrated over the fact that Trump, from his new home in Florida, isn’t doing more to reach his base and combat the problem. “I have practically begged him to get out there constantly [during his post-presidency] and make videos calling on his supporters who are hesitant to get their shots,” one person close to Trump said. “Last time I checked in, I hadn’t heard of any positive movement in that direction.” In a small number of public appearances and TV interviews lately, the former president has encouraged—at times as mere asides—his true believers to get vaccinated, but has yet to embark on anything close to a vigorous campaign to leverage his sizable megaphone on the subject. Further, it was not publicly revealed he and then-first lady Melania Trump had been vaccinated until nearly a month and a half after he was no longer president. Trump Would Rather You Die Than Aid Biden’s Vaccine Rollout Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser who served as the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, told The Daily Beast that in September, shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer and departed the administration, he too talked to the president about the anti-vaccine sentiment rapidly emerging among the MAGA faithful. “Donald Trump and I had a conversation about broader issues, and I mentioned it briefly,” he recounted. “It was a glancing conversation in the Oval Office in September, in between meetings, and I mentioned how vaccine hesitancy was likely going to be a big problem, especially among Republicans and Trump supporters. And he said, ‘Yes, I understand, and it’s a problem.’ I’ve been told there were other conversations on this after I left, and that the conversations with the president continued…We started getting more and more suspicious of [anti-vaccine sentiment on the right] as I left. We were talking amongst ourselves in HHS in August, saying that it was ironic that the most vaccine-hesitant among us were our friends, our allies. And we still face that question.” By November, Trump’s focus had largely shifted—not to his management of the global pandemic that had torpedoed the U.S. economy and left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead, but to his and Republican’ court battles and anti-democratic crusade to overturn Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 presidential contest. In the weeks following Biden’s inauguration, Trump has only sporadically called on his supporters to get their COVID vaccines, including at his headlining speech during last month’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and has yet to mount anything resembling a sustained campaign or effort. Just last week, Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida, had to partially shut down due to a new coronavirus outbreak. Recent polling has consistently found that Trump fans and Republican men are some of the demographics most likely to decline, or be skeptical of, getting a coronavirus vaccine. Ever since settling into his post-presidency, Trump has at times casually discussed with certain confidants the prospect of starring in his own videos or ads to promote the vaccines, and also to tout the successes of his administration’s Operation Warp Speed, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversations. However, when asked if any such videos had been produced yet, a Trump adviser said last week that there was “nothing scheduled” at the moment in terms of release. Trump Tells Fox News He ‘Would Recommend’ Getting COVID Jab: ‘It’s a Safe Vaccine’ Earlier this month, former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter all starred in a public service announcement aimed at convincing more Americans to get vaccinated against the virus. Trump, the two sources relayed, has privately said that he doesn’t wish to star in PSAs with the other former presidents, most of whom he openly despises. And for some prominent Trump allies, the 45th U.S. president’s latest entreaties simply have not sunk in. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an on-again-off-again Trump adviser who also served as the Trump re-election campaign’s Minnesota co-chair, claimed in a recent interview that the ex-president’s CPAC speech didn’t actually implore fans to get vaccinated (even though it did), and added that his upcoming planned social media website will be a “free speech” haven that will permit users to post as much anti-vaccine content as they wish, for instance. “I will never take it… and it's against my religion,” Lindell insisted. This type of talk among MAGA mega-fans sounds abundantly familiar to other former Trump lieutenants, some of whom find themselves clashing with fellow supporters of the ex-president who are refusing to get vaccinated during the ongoing push by the Biden administration and local and state governments. Caputo said that in his time out of government and battling cancer, he’s made it a priority to reach out to as many Trump supporters online and in his community as possible to try to convince them to get their shots. “I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve attended Republican committee meetings, I’ve done Zoom meetings, there’s this biker hangout near me called Kipp’s that has life-size cutouts of President Trump and Melania where you can take your picture there—it’s top to bottom Johnny Cash memorabilia and Donald Trump memorabilia. I’d go there and have discussions with people about it,” he said. “Some of my closest friends are anti-vaccine or anti-mask, or even COVID deniers who believe it’s just like the flu. One of my friends is anti-mask and believes COVID was a plot hatched to bring down Donald Trump—now he has COVID. And these are the people I talk to.” Asked what his former boss could be doing right now to get more Republicans to get on board with COVID-19 vaccination, Caputo replied, “In my opinion, the former president could do a PSA campaign with Melania Trump. And the national television networks need to be airing this now, in their primetime programming.” For the time being, Trump has remained almost entirely M.I.A. on the matter. And when he has poked his head up publicly to urge his anti-vaccine followers to change their minds, he has at times veered in the direction of both-sides-ism. "I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don't want to get it. And a lot of those people voted for me, frankly,” Trump said during a phone interview on Fox News earlier this month. “But, you know, again, we have our freedoms, and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also," the ex-president continued, before adding, “But it's a great vaccine, it's a safe vaccine, and it's something that works.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-knew-maga-fans-wouldn-090405636.html GO RV, then BV
  8. ‘Resist Becoming Numb’: Biden Pays Tribute to the 500,000 Who Died—and Those They Left Behind Scott Bixby, Erin Banco Mon, February 22, 2021, 7:23 PM Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty For the second time in 33 days, President Joe Biden gathered the nation on Monday to mourn a loss it can no longer fathom, to collectively grieve after a year of grief beyond imagining, as the nation’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic officially crossed half a million people. “We often hear people described as ‘ordinary Americans,’ but there’s no such thing,” Biden said, standing in the Cross Hall of the White House. “The people we lost were extraordinary.” The pandemic year has seen more deaths, as the president noted in a proclamation commanding all U.S. flags be flown at half-mast until sundown on Friday, than the number of Americans who perished “in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined.” “That’s more lives lost to this virus than any other nation on earth,” Biden said. “They’re people we knew. They’re people we feel like we knew… The son who called his mom every night, just to check in. The father’s daughter who lit up his world. The best friend who was always there. The nurse—the nurses—the nurse who made her patients want to live.” Biden, whose life and public service has been defined by moments of deep grief, urged Americans to learn from his losses, to “resist becoming numb to the sorrow” of an empty seat at the dinner table. “I know all too well,” Biden said, appearing to keep back tears as he spoke. “I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens. I know what it’s like when you are there, holding their hands, as you look in their eye as they slip away.” Biden concluded his remarks by asking Americans to “find purpose” in their grief, a purpose worthy of the lives lost in a terrible year. “This nation will know joy again,” Biden said, before making his way to the candlelit South Portico, where the U.S. Marine Corps Band played “Amazing Grace.” The National Cathedral, 15 minutes away, had just finished tolling its 12-ton Bourdon Bell 500 times, once for every thousand lives lost in the United States. “We will get through this, I promise you.” With the first lady, the vice president and the second gentleman at his side, each wearing a black face mask, Biden then led the country in a moment of silence to reflect on the darkest moment of the “dark winter” he’d warned would come. It was 100,000 more deaths since he last told the nation in January, on the eve of his inauguration, that “to heal we must remember,” and 200,000 more than when he told Americans in December that his heart went out to those about to enter the new year “with a black hole in your hearts—without the ones you loved at your side.” The ceremony was, of course, largely symbolic. The nation’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic almost certainly crossed the 500,000 mark weeks ago—excess deaths remain roughly 20 percent higher than the official death toll—and the total number of lives lost to the virus will probably continue to rise long even after the pandemic has finally receded, given the upwards revision of estimated death tolls for past pandemics. What the moment did mark, however, is the cementing of the pandemic—and the government’s response to it—as Biden’s responsibility. Yes, he was left a national response that was in worse shape than he could have imagined, with millions of missing vaccine doses and an anti-inoculation movement that has run rampant on social media. His predecessor had lost interest in addressing the pandemic months before his term ended, turning attention to an unsuccessful coup attempt that his own task force warned would cost American lives. But no president, alone in his thoughts during a moment of silence remembering 500,000 dead citizens, can plausibly go back to repeating the White House’s line from earlier days that he’s “only been here three and a half weeks,” or “only been here three weeks,” or “only been here two and a half weeks,” as White House press secretary Jen Psaki had told reporters in the last week. It took weeks for the Biden COVID-19 task force to get its footing. For the first several days, the administration struggled to explain exactly how it would get vaccinations moving and why states across the country were canceling appointments en masse. Officials offered various answers, including that the administration was still trying to locate millions of doses and that the Trump administration had left them with a broken distribution playbook. In that time, thousands of people died, many of whom were infected before Biden took office. Still, the talking points at most press conferences on COVID-19 over the last several weeks have focused on the fact that case and death numbers across the country are steadily decreasing. While the nation’s vaccination rate is improving and the administration has inked new deals with pharmaceutical companies to ensure doses flow throughout the next several months, health officials are still concerned about the emergence of new variants. Officials say while data suggests that the vaccines available to Americans work well against the United Kingdom and South African mutations, other, potentially more deadly variants could cause another surge this spring—and further delay any semblance of normalcy in American life. Back to normal—children attending school in an actual school, adults making face-to-face small talk with colleagues, families eating at restaurants and celebrating weddings and gathering for funerals, and a White House where visitors aren’t tested for a virus as thoroughly as they are for firearms—has never seemed so far away. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the lone holdover from the Trump administration’s beleaguered COVID-19 firmament, appears perpetually on the verge of telling Americans that we’ll never have true “normal” again. “It really depends on what you mean by ‘normality,’” Fauci said in an interview last weekend. “If ‘normality’ means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us, I can’t predict that.” Biden, too, has been cautious not to overpromise on timelines for vaccinations or school reopenings, lest he under-deliver or be thwarted by any number of the many factors beyond his control. It remains a giant question whether vaccinations stop the spread of the virus, or whether children can be effectively vaccinated, which means that “normal” for families will be delayed even longer. A third of people say they won’t get a vaccine, for reasons either understandable and moronic. Other once-in-a-century disasters, like the Texas deep freeze that delayed the delivery of tens of thousands of vaccinations, could further move “normal” out of reach. The reality of that possibility comes as the nation’s grieving process has moved on from shock and denial and depression to, increasingly, anger. Violence against Asian Americans is increasing across the country. Voters are increasingly desperate that Congress won’t be able to send additional COVID relief to Biden’s desk until mid-March, even as he went the fast route rather than sacrifice, as one Biden insider put it, “two or three months of negotiation” that would have led to “only two or three Republican votes.” Biden’s focus, Psaki told reporters ahead of Monday’s ceremony, is on passing the American Rescue Plan and ensuring that the nation has enough vaccines to inoculate 300 million Americans against the virus. “But the American people have a role to play here as well,” Psaki said. “Wearing masks, social distancing. Everybody wants to get back to normal, but the president, the federal government can’t do that alone. It is going to take everybody participating in that process to get closer to normalcy.” https://news.yahoo.com/resist-becoming-biden-pays-tribute-002336148.html GO RV, then BV
  9. Mike Pence Backs Away From the Trump Election ‘Fraud’ Train Wreck Asawin Suebsaeng, Lachlan Markay, Sam Stein Wed, December 2, 2020, 8:00 PM EST Alex Wong/Getty Vice President Mike Pence has been a go-to fundraising draw for the president’s campaign, and since October, no more than a day passed without his name emblazoning a fundraising email for the Trump re-elect. But that changed late last month. Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence’s name in the “from” field. And this week, that Republican National Committee joint fundraising committee, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president’s name. Trump Make America Great Again Committee At first blush, those may seem like minor tweaks to gimmicky portions of Team Trump’s fundraising strategy. A source familiar with the process said the fundraising emails do not go to Vice President Pence’s team for clearance and an RNC official said the digital team was merely testing a new logo around the end-of-the-month deadline. Indeed, some of the joint fundraising committee’s emails this week have included the original campaign logo with Pence’s name below Trump’s. But several high-level sources say that the graphics change, along with Pence’s disappearance from the headers of President Donald Trump’s increasingly frantic and conspiratorial pleas, are not actually coincidental. According to four people with knowledge of the matter, they reflect an effort by the vice president and his team to distance Pence from some of the president’s more outlandish claims about a conspiracy to undermine the election and illegally deny him a second term in office. “It is an open secret [in Trumpworld] that Vice President Pence absolutely does not feel the same way about the legal effort as President Trump does,” said a senior administration official. “The vice president doesn’t want to go down with this ship… and believes much of the legal work has been unhelpful.” The Trump campaign declined to comment on this story. Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Pence, said Wednesday night, “As he has for the last four years, the vice president is proud to stand with the president—in this case to ensure every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is rejected. The Daily Beast’s anonymous sources have no real insight into what the vice president thinks on these matters.” Trump Campaign Has Raised $150M Off Voter-Fraud Fiction Since Election The political marriage between Trump and Pence was always based on simple tradeoff: Pence gave Trump credibility among establishment and religious types and, in exchange, shared the spoils of Trump’s far larger and more unorthodox coalition of voters. But in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, that deal has come under intense strain. As Trump has tended to his own future, Pence has preferred to place his energies on the critical Senate runoff elections in Georgia. Pence, sources say, privately views the Rudy Giuliani-led legal operation to overturn the 2020 election through the mass disenfranchisement of votes as counterproductive and doomed. And, as a former governor himself, he has been particularly uncomfortable with Trump’s attacks on Republican governors in some of the key battleground states that he lost. The president has accused several GOP leaders of incompetence or negligence in their inability or unwillingness to stop the certification of their state’s election results. “Pence deeply understands the position that [Ohio Gov. Mike] DeWine, [Arizona Gov. Dave] Ducey and [Georgia Gov. Brian] Kemp are in. He has tried to be an effective mediator and communicator between those parties and the president back and forth,” said one Pence ally. “Any time he’s played that role, it’s gone well. The president is satisfied with the facts they’ve provided. And then somehow, without hours or days, the president is publicly attacking them by being fed inaccurate information from other White House sources, which frustrates the VP. It’s not a good look for the president. And it’s only created division in the party at a time when unity is very important.” The result has been a subtle but clear effort at creating political space. Rudy’s Phony Fraud Hearing in Gettysburg Debuts Trump’s Shadow Government Since Election Day, Pence has walked a rhetorical tightrope as he tries to publicly back Trump’s position in general terms while avoiding the more outlandish allegations that the president frequently floats on Twitter and in his few post-election public remarks. Pence has repeatedly demanded that “every legal vote” be counted and that alleged voter fraud be rooted out. But he has studiously avoided backing Trump’s more conspiratorial allegations about election malfeasance, and declined to answer questions about his views on specific Trump statements. For example, a pool report from a Nov. 20 rally in Georgia, where Pence campaigned on behalf of Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, noted that the vice president “did not echo the president’s rhetoric on the election being ‘rigged.’” The disconnect is also evident on Pence’s Twitter feed. While the president has fervently tweeted about the supposed conspiracy against him, Pence’s tweets on the matter have been far fewer and more muted. He’s devoted far more social-media space to the White House’s efforts to get a coronavirus vaccine out the door and to last month’s NASA rocket launch, which sent U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station. Since Nov. 15, Pence has tweeted just three times about supposed election irregularities. Two of those tweets were links to news stories, shared without comment, about recount and vote audit efforts in Georgia, and one simply retweeted a reporter’s quotation of Pence’s comments at that Nov. 20 rally, where Pence declared that Trump would “keep fighting until every legal vote is counted” and “every illegal vote is thrown out.” Pence made other similarly anodyne comments in his remarks that tiptoed around the president’s allegations of widespread voter fraud. But he also repeatedly called on Georgia Republicans to “defend the majority” in the U.S. Senate—a tacit acknowledgement that, if Democrats win both Georgia Senate seats, a Vice President Kamala Harris would break the upper chamber’s 50-50 split and give her party a majority. That unspoken premise is a reality that Republican operatives and the party’s top donors have acknowledged even as the president remains obstinate. “I have not seen any evidence yet that would convince me that [the Trump legal team] will be successful in getting this to the Supreme Court or even anything to an appeals court,” Ed Rollins, a veteran GOP strategist who chairs the pro-Trump group Great America PAC, said on Wednesday. “I’m disappointed in the effort, as someone who has been around the game for a long time. I’ve seen a lot of ranting and raving from them, but not any really good legal challenges. Neither Rudy nor Sidney [Powell] nor anybody else on the team is considered a first-rate election lawyer and I don’t see any on this team.” On Wednesday, Pence went to Capitol Hill to participate in the swearing-in of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ)—an act that implicitly conceded the validity of the elections in Arizona. Hours later, Trump put out a 46-minute-long speech in which he called for the results in six battleground states, including Arizona, to be overturned and for him to remain president. Pence was not by his side. https://news.yahoo.com/mike-pence-backs-away-trump-010049218.html GO RV, then BV
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