Hey folks. I just want to check in with the community about a post that was recently removed. My intention is absolutely not to create drama or stir anything up, but I'd like to make sure you all understand my reasoning for removing the post. Also, I'm aware that I'm not as good at articulating these kinds of things as some of our folks, so don't expect a classic Beehaw philosophy post here.

The post in questions was a link to a twitter thread providing evidence of the IRL identity of "comic" "artist" stonetoss, who is unquestionably a huge piece of shit and a neo-nazi, or at least something so indistinguishable from one that the difference is meaningless.

The post provoked some discussion in the Mod chat and several of us, myself included, were on the fence about it. I understand that there are arguments both for and against naming and calling out people like stonetoss. I find arguments in both directions somewhat convincing, but ultimately the thing that a number of us expressed was that the act of calling someone like this out and potentially exposing them to harassment or real-world consequences for their views might be morally defensible, it didn't feel like Beehaw was the right place for it. We really want Beehaw to be a place that is constructive and kind, and that this type of doxxing/callout didn't seem to fit our vision what what we want Beehaw to be. At the same time, we're all very conscious that it would be easy for this kind of thinking to lead to tone policing and respectability politics, and that is also something we want to be careful to avoid. All this to say that I made what I think was the best decision in the moment for the overall health of !politics as a community, as I saw it.

On a personal note, I find that our Politics community is one of the communities that is most prone to falling into some of the traps that Beehaw was created to avoid. That's very understandable - politics are something that cause real and immediate harm and stress in a lot of folks' lives; they're complicated, contentious, and often make us feel powerless. I'd like to remind folks as we move into the general election season in the US, though, to remember the founding principles of Beehaw when discussing these topics, no matter how stressful they may be: remember the human, assume good faith in others, and above all, be(e) nice.

Thanks,

TheRtRevKaiser

What if citizens were called to policymaking duty the way they are called to jury duty?

All over the world, ordinary people are finding out what that’s like when they’re selected by civic lottery to participate in a citizens’ assembly, a democracy innovation that may just be the antidote to the polarization of the world we need.

[...]

According to the OECD database, environment and other long-term policy issues are the most popular topics addressed by citizens’ assemblies, and local governments are the most frequent users of these methods.

[...]

In citizens’ assemblies, there are teenagers and octogenarians, business people and activists, people of all genders, races and abilities, individuals who have been regulars at city council and those who have never engaged in local democracy before. Inevitably there is a wide range of political leanings, lots of passion and some trepidation.

[...]

The challenges range from giving everyone a base of technical knowledge to effectively participate in discussions — a component often missing in public consultations — to ensuring complex accessibility needs are met, something required to address the gap in effective involvement of people with disabilities in decision-making.

[...]

The OECD estimates that roughly half of the recommendations of deliberative processes are implemented. We’ve also found that the side benefits of citizens’ assemblies, such as increased community cohesion and a sense of hope, are substantial.

[...]

Building trust with government may be another important outcome. Research shows trust in government is significantly higher among Canadians who feel they have a say in what the government does (79 per cent compared to 21 per cent who do not).

[...]

> Rather than fearing polarization, organizers should seek to understand how they can use it most effectively. This involves recognizing that, while collective action undertaken in pursuit of a good cause typically results in positive outcomes, not all protests have identical effects or produce equal benefits. > > Central to harnessing the power of polarization is appreciating that, by its nature, it cuts both ways: the same actions that create positive polarization — drawing more active supporters into movements and convincing previously neutral or undecided observers to at least passively sympathize with the cause — will also have negative effects, turning off some people and firing up the opposition. The goal of movement participants is therefore to make sure that the beneficial results of their actions outweigh the counterproductive ones, and that they are shifting the overall spectrum of support in their favor.

> So how, then, can movement participants predict how a given protest will polarize? And how can they work to improve their skills in designing effective actions?

Fig. 1 gives an example of a conversation where the user goes from 100% belief down to 40% after getting their questions explained by the AI.

Looking at the conclusions, the impact is not so big for all the interactions.

Anyway, this is a great tool. Sure, when people are doomscrolling 24/7 they’re not fact-checking. So, the intervention might not be there. Yet, I choose to remain optimistic. More recent generations might get easier access and be better than our current trend :)

Archived version

> "As young people, we’re poised to inherit a world that needs thoughtful, informed leadership more than ever. But if we’re not even willing to watch a debate, how can we expect to take on that responsibility? We owe it to ourselves — and to one another — to do better, to look beyond influencers and viral videos, and to engage deeply with the issues that truly matter. Even Taylor Swift, in her endorsement, urged us to “do your research.” If we don’t, we risk becoming not just uninformed voters, but a generation that’s lost sight of what it truly means to be part of a democracy."

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas jury will soon decide whether a convoy of supporters of then-President Donald Trump violently intimidated former Democratic lawmaker Wendy Davis and two others on a Biden-Harris campaign bus when a so-called “Trump Train” boxed them in for more than an hour on a Texas highway days before the 2020 election.

The trial, which began on Sept. 9, resumes Monday and is expected to last another week.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that six of the Trump Train drivers violated state and federal law. Lawyers for the defendants said they did not conspire against the Democrats on the bus and that their actions are protected speech.

Here’s what else to know:

Archived version

U.S.: A Project 2025 adviser mockingly asked someone to ‘track down’ victims of abortion bans — his social media post received response from 17,000 women who have suffered since end of Roe v Wade

A former Trump administration staffer, now a senior adviser in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 team, accidentally made a case for abortion rights in a failed attempt to undermine an answer by Kamala Harris during Tuesday’s presidential debate.

John McEntee, who served as Donald Trump’s director of White House personnel, is one of the founders of The Right Stuff, a right-wing dating site, and has a large following on TikTok.

His posts feature him sitting at a table, eating, across from the camera, presumably to mimic a date-like setting, while he makes a glib and offensive right-wing talking point, often misogynistic or racist.

In a post this week, which has 1.8 million views on TikTok, he says: “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v Wade was overturned?”

“Don’t hold your breath,” he adds, flippantly.

Well, he could have held his breath because the replies came in thick and fast.

The post now has more than 17,000 comments and they are almost all women sharing their stories of being turned away from emergency rooms in agony, bleeding out in parking lots, at home, in public bathrooms, and sometimes for months afterward.

Others talk about miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, losing their ability to have children, and driving across multiple states to get treatment where it was still legal — often while hemorrhaging. Most of the stories appear to involve wanted or planned pregnancies.

[...]

Archived version

Donald Trump could rightly be seen as a Russian asset, according to a former FBI director the ex-president fired in his first term.

Andrew McCabe appeared on the One Decision podcast co-hosted by former British intelligence agency chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who asked whether he thought it possible that Trump was a Russian asset, and he said, "I do, I do," reported The Guardian.

“I don’t know that I would characterize it as [an] active, recruited, knowing asset in the way that people in the intelligence community think of that term," McCabe said. "But I do think that Donald Trump has given us many reasons to question his approach to the Russia problem in the United States, and I think his approach to interacting with Vladimir Putin, be it phone calls, face-to-face meetings, the things that he has said in public about Putin, all raise significant questions

McCabe raised suspicions about Trump's attitude toward Ukraine and NATO in the face of Russian aggression and said he's had concerns about his admiration for Vladimir Putin

[...]

“You have to have some very serious questions about, why is it that Donald Trump … has this fawning sort of admiration for Vladimir Putin in a way that no other American president, Republican or Democrat, ever has," McCabe said.

[...]

McCabe expressed “very serious concerns about a second Trump presidency and said that Russia had long desired to interfere with U.S. democracy.

alt-text for thumbnail: text saying “blocking fascists is self-care” next to an antifascist flag on a 2d digital art wooden background

Archived version

The rapid spread of baseless claims about Haitian immigrants reveals the need for long-term accountability in political reporting.

[...]

Liars must pay a price

Given this landscape of rampant misinformation, journalists have an important role to play — one that goes beyond fact-checking. It's time for the media to make politicians pay a real price for spreading outrageous lies.

When a politician like J.D. Vance amplifies a baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets, or when Trump asserts that schools are secretly performing gender transition surgeries, these lies shouldn't be treated as isolated incidents. They should become part of the narrative about these politicians moving forward.

Journalists have a responsibility to consistently remind the public of these lies in future coverage. Every article about Vance should mention his willingness to spread xenophobic misinformation. Every piece on Trump should reference his history of transgender fearmongering. These lies should color all future coverage of these candidates, becoming an integral part of their political identity.

By doing this, journalists are accomplishing several things at once. It holds politicians accountable for their words, creating a lasting consequence for spreading misinformation. It provides important context for readers, helping them evaluate the credibility of these figures on an ongoing basis. It may deter politicians from spreading future lies, knowing that doing so could tarnish their reputation long-term. Perhaps most importantly, it helps combat the normalization of misinformation in political discourse.

Some may argue that this approach compromises journalistic objectivity. However, consistently reporting on a politician's documented history of spreading lies isn't a form of bias — it's responsible journalism. Facts aren't partisan, and the public deserves to know when their leaders have a track record of dishonesty.

Moreover, this strategy could help break the cycle of misinformation we're currently trapped in. If politicians know that spreading lies will damage their credibility long-term, they may think twice before amplifying unverified claims for short-term political gain.

Of course, this approach requires courage from news organizations. They must be willing to withstand accusations of bias and potential loss of access to these political figures. But the alternative – allowing politicians to spread harmful lies without consequence — is far more damaging to our democratic discourse.

Archived version

Project 2025, the 900-page conservative playbook for the next Republican president, issues an ultimatum for California: track and report abortion data to the federal government or risk losing billions in Medicaid funding for reproductive health.

California is one of only three states that do not report abortion data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Project 2025’s proposed federal mandate directly conflicts with the state’s strong protections for patient privacy and could dismantle the legal and ethical foundations that have made California a refuge for those seeking reproductive care.

The blueprint, crafted by Donald Trump allies and leaders in his first administration, clearly targets states with abortion protections like California, seeking the kind of data that could be used to target abortion-seekers or even criminally punish out-of-staters who come to the state for reproductive health services.

Archived version

The DC-based Heritage Foundation has long spread disinformation about elections, claiming there is widespread voter fraud despite ample evidence to the contrary. More recently, it has gained attention for its authoritarian and antidemocratic Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration.

Ahead of this fall’s election, Heritage has been at the forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers, laying the groundwork for election deniers to use in case the results don’t go their way.

Now its efforts to undermine trust in elections have taken a dangerous new turn — a boots-on-the-ground approach to fish for voter fraud where there is none. In July, men working with Heritage knocked on the doors of suspected noncitizens in an apartment complex outside Atlanta, asking about the residents’ citizenship status and whether they are registered to vote. The pair mispresented themselves as being with a company that assists Latinos navigate the election system and secretly videotaped their interactions.

[...]

Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation used its social media presence to amplify similar deceptive behavior, which led to online harassment and death threats for the leader of a nonprofit assisting asylum-seekers. In April, Anthony Rubin — the founder of Muckraker, an online media website with “very, very powerful” ties to Heritage — and his brother misrepresented themselves as staff members of an immigrants rights organization seeking to volunteer at a nonprofit providing services to asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. Rubin kept trying to get staff at the nonprofit to state they would help migrants vote for Biden. In a multi-part thread on social media, Heritage posted a snippet of a conversation between Rubin and the head of the nonprofit, in which she is misconstrued as encouraging noncitizens to vote.

[...]

While these methods may be new to the organization, we’ve seen them before from others. [...]

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, long used unverified, undercover, and deceptively edited recordings to misconstrue the truth, including about supposed voter fraud. In 2020, the group published an unverified video that the campaign of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MI) had collected ballots illegally, as well as videos falsely alleging voter fraud in one Pennsylvania city. In the Pennsylvania incident, the group ended up settling a lawsuit brought by the local postmaster and publicly apologized, noting that it was not aware of any evidence of fraud in the that city during the 2020 election.

[...]

2016, a Project Veritas member infiltrated a democratic consulting firm and secretly recorded conversations. The firm claimed the footage was then “heavily edited” to suggest that the firm conspired to incite violence at Trump rallies and promote voter fraud. In a civil lawsuit, Project Veritas was found liable for misrepresentation and violating wiretapping laws, and was required to pay $120,000 in damages.

And in 2009, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe secretly recorded conversations with staff at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN was a network of community-based organizations advocating for low and moderate-income families. The deceptively edited videos construed ACORN employees as advising O’Keefe on tax evasion. But the videos set off a political firestorm that led to public funding for ACORN to be cut off, effectively shuttering the organization. Later, O’Keefe faced a civil lawsuit from a former-ACORN staff member and settled for $100,000.

[...]

As for the issue of noncitizen voting — it’s a myth. Noncitizens voting does not occur in any significant manner, and it’s already illegal under federal and state law. The Heritage Foundation’s actions are hurting our democracy, not helping it.

Archived version

Tuesday night’s debate devoted little time to foreign policy, but a few key moments revealed—more dramatically than half an hour of dedicated discussion might have—just how much a renewed Donald Trump presidency could weaken the United States and make the world a more dangerous place.

Many noted, after the debate, how readily Vice President Kamala Harris lured the ex-president into traps. All she had to do was push one of his buttons—to remark that the crowds at his rallies are bored, or that he inherited all of his wealth (then blew it in successive bankruptcies), or that world leaders laugh at him—and he exploded in paroxysms of fury, ranting over grievances, rambling down ratholes of conspiracy theories, thrown off course from the issues at hand.

What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands.

“I like people who like me,” Trump has publicly said in several contexts, and the heads of every intelligence agency on Earth no doubt took careful note. “He respects me,” Trump once said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He famously sighed that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un sent each other “love letters,” and, even now, years after the bloom faded, still beams, “He likes me.” At the recent Republican convention, he boasted—boasted—that the head of the Taliban called him “Your Excellency,” and added, “I wonder if he calls the other guy”—meaning Biden—“ ‘Your Excellency.’ I doubt it!”

[Edit typo.]

Archived version

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has issued a lengthy warning in the Washington Post (9/5/24) on the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to a “free and independent press.”

Sulzberger details Trump’s many efforts to suppress and undermine critical media outlets during his previous presidential tenure, as well as the more recent open declarations by Trump and his allies of their plans to continue to “come after” the press, “whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

[...]

You might expect this to be a prelude to an announcement that the New York Times would work tirelessly to defend democracy. Instead, Sulzberger heartily defends his own miserably inadequate strategy of “neutrality”—which, in practice, is both-sidesing—making plain his greater concern for the survival of his own newspaper than the survival of US democracy.

[...]

"As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence,” Sulzberger writes, “I have no interest in wading into politics.”

[...]

Neutrality could mean, as he suggests, independent or free from the influence of the powerful in our society.

[...]

This strategy didn’t work particularly well when Republicans and Democrats played by the same set of rules, as both parties took the same anti-equality, pro-oligarchy positions on many issues.

But it’s particularly ill-suited to the current moment, when Republicans have discarded any notion that facts, truth or democracy have any meaning. If one team ceases to play by any rules, should the ref continue to try to call roughly similar numbers of violations on each side in order to appear unbiased? It would obviously be absurd and unfair. But that’s Sulzberger’s notion of “neutrality.”

[...]

A “full, fair and accurate picture” of the election and its stakes are exactly what the Times‘ critics are asking for. Instead, the Times offers a topsy-turvy world in which crime is still a top concern (it’s at its lowest level since the 1960s—FAIR.org, 7/25/24)); inflation has been brought down to near the Fed’s ideal rate of 2%, but it’s still “a problem for Harris” (7/23/24); the nation’s “commitment to the peaceful resolution of political difference” is primarily threatened by neither party in particular (FAIR.org, 7/16/24); and Biden’s age merits more headlines as a danger to the country than Trump’s increasing incoherence–or his refusal to commit to accepting the results of the election.

[...]

Does Sulzberger actually think that by writing a several-thousand-word warning against Trump’s threat to press freedom, but simultaneously announcing that he will resolutely oppose “taking sides” in this election, he is somehow inoculating himself against right-wing populist hatred of the Times, and any future retribution from a Trump presidency?

The far right has learned how to exploit this central weakness of corporate media, its adherence to “balance” at all costs. Sulzberger might think he’s working to fend off Trump’s attack on an independent press corps; in fact, he’s playing right into Trump’s hands, and working to speed along his own paper’s irrelevance.

> "In the end, we all knew what we knew before, that ABC's goal tonight was to help Kamala Harris, and ABC did help Kamala Harris," Laura Ingraham said on Fox News. That's one way of putting it. Van Jones on CNN found another. > >"She whupped him," Jone said. "She just whupped him. ... Kamala Harris did something great for every parent in America. She put the bully in his place." > >A certain super gigantic galactic pop star seemed to agree. Moments after the debate, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, signing her Instagram post "Childless Cat Lady," a reference to a comment made by Trump's running mate, JD Vance.

For more details on the 4chan nature, head over to the Daily Beast for pieces like these:

• "...they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
• meandering rant on abortion rights also included multiple false claims
• recap of daily beast debate tweet/commentary

Debate Transcript: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-trump-presidential-debate-transcript/story?id=113560542

PBS (no longer live) updates: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/live-updates-trump-and-harris-debate-in-philadelphia

The first 10 minutes in the linked video shows the undercover meeting, the rest is a Q&A with one of the investigative journalists by media outlet Democracy Now.

As Donald Trump tries to distance his campaign from Project 2025, those behind the right-wing policy blueprint to remake the U.S. government continue to brag in private about their close ties to the Republican presidential nominee and how they intend to push a radical right-wing agenda in a second Trump administration.

In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video.

Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump's disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more.

The secret plans are "designed to ensure that this kind of radical agenda that the conservative movement has in the U.S. can be implemented from day one," says Lawrence Carter, founder and director of the Centre for Climate Reporting and one of the reporters who spoke with Vought. "They want to make sure that the mistakes from the first Trump administration, as they see them, where not much got done, are avoided this time around."

[Edit typo.]

alt-text: [yellow words saying “abolish cis puberty” next to a trans flag on a digital art wooden background]

How we treat puberty relates heavily to the systems of transphobia, sexism, and quite a lot of other hierarchies. How we treat it is a large component of systematic oppression and must be taken seriously.

Fred Trump III’s new memoir, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, shares fresh insights into the Trump family and acts as a platform to advocate for individuals with developmental disabilities.

Fred Trump’s own son William has a rare genetic disorder that causes severe developmental and intellectual disabilities. He says Donald Trump once told him to abandon William, saying, “He doesn’t recognize you. Let him die, and move down to Florida.” After a meeting in the Oval Office about dedicating more resources to people with disabilities, Fred Trump says his uncle said, “Those people, the costs. They should just die.”

“How could one human being say that about any other human being, least of all your grandnephew?” says Fred Trump, who calls on the next president to support disabled Americans. “The Harris campaign and her positions are ones that I believe. Now, that being said, I have yet to hear anything regarding disability actions … and I will put their feet to the fire on this.”

Archived version

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued two of the state’s largest counties to block efforts to register voters ahead of the November general election, drawing claims of voter suppression from state Democrats.

Paxton announced Friday a lawsuit to block Travis County, which includes the state capital of Austin, from using taxpayer money to hire a third-party vendor to identify and contact eligible but unregistered voters to try to get them registered before the Oct. 7 deadline.

That followed a lawsuit earlier in the week against Bexar County, which includes San Antonio; that county hired the same company for a similar registration effort. Paxton has also threatened legal action against Houston’s Harris County if it engages in a similar voter registration effort.

Paxton’s lawsuits are the latest round in an ongoing fight between Texas Republicans, who have long dominated state government and insist they are taking measures to bolster election integrity, and Democrats, who have strongholds in Texas’s largest urban areas and complain the GOP-led efforts amount to voter suppression, particularly of Latinos.

In the lawsuits, Paxton claimed the contracts went to a partisan vendor and argued they go beyond the local government’s legal authority. Paxton said Texas law does not explicitly allow counties to mail out unsolicited registration forms.

The extreme right-wing blueprints of Project 2025 [by the Heritage Foundation] and Agenda 47 [by Donald Trump campaign team] call for radical changes to gun control laws-- making it harder to track illegal weapons, overturning state restrictions on deadly firearms, and even arming teachers.

These proposals check off the gun lobby’s wish list at the expense of public safety, despite most Americans supporting sound gun control measures, according to Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence.

Together, Agenda 47 and Project 2025 aim "to sell as many guns to as many people as possible, and to remove every public safety measure to allow that to happen-- it's profit-seeking," Brown says, adding that Trump and the gun lobby "could care less" that gun violence is now the leading killer of American youth.

[Edit typo.]

Archived version

Yesterday, at the Economic Club of New York, one member asked Donald Trump a very specific question about his policy priorities:

“If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Trump’s reply was not only not specific; it was incoherent. After a little throat-clearing about how “important” an issue child care is, he seemed to turn to a discussion of his nebulous idea to increase tariffs on foreign imports, although even that is hard to ascertain.

Trump said:

> But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, there’s something … You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

> But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

> Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have—I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country—because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.

> But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

> We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.

Archived version

Here is the CBPP report

If Republicans were to win the White House and Congress, their fiscal agenda would increase poverty and hardship nationwide in order to provide deep tax breaks for corporations and wealthy families, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal-leaning think tank.

In a new report, the group analyzes the House GOP’s legislative wish list alongside Project 2025, the policy blueprint for another Trump administration written in part by former White House officials and published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Taken together, the documents reveal a conservative vision for policies that would exacerbate existing inequities in life expectancy and generational wealth, with millions of people facing higher costs for health care, child care, food and housing.

[...]

Taking aim at a longtime bugaboo on the right, Project 2025 proposes the elimination of Head Start, the federal program that provides early education support for low-income families and benefits 800,000 children aged 3 to 5 years old. This would reduce access to child care and other services that allow parents to go to work and pay the bills.

The United States would be a “harsher” place to live with more inequality and less opportunity under these GOP policies, the report warns. Behind these budget numbers are millions of real people who will lose health coverage, food assistance, and other supports as the nation grapples with interconnected crises of affordability, addiction and homelessness.

> “Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said of her father, who served as vice president under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. “If you think about the moment we’re in, and you think about how serious this moment is, my dad believes — and he said publicly — there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is.”

-----------

> “One of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people,” Liz Cheney said. “Here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous, serious candidate running for U.S. Senate.” > >The audience erupted in applause cutting Liz Cheney off. > >“It’s not Ted Cruz," she said. > >She blamed Cruz for leading the effort in the Senate for trying to overturn the election. > >"That is not somebody to put in a position to be able to do that again," Cheney said.

Archived version

Donald Trump’s latest attack on American rule of law and the U.S. Dept. of Justice is facing condemnation. The GOP presidential nominee and convicted felon awaiting sentencing, while speaking at a courthouse press conference on his efforts to appeal a $5 million judgment in a New York sexual abuse and defamation civil case, called the DOJ’s bombshell indictments in the Kremlin cash and Russian disinformation case a “scam.”

It’s always the same,” observed foreign policy, national security, and political affairs analyst and commentator David Rothkopf. “Defend Putin. Defend Russia. Defend corruption. Accuse those who are enforcing the law of being engaged in a scam. Why does he sound this way? Because he is a traitor and a criminal.”

Trump told reporters Friday, “This is a long and complicated web and story, but it all goes back to the DOJ and Kamala and sleepy Joe and all the rest of them.”

[...]

“Nobody’s ever seen anything like what’s happening now. I understand yesterday, they’re bringing up Russia, Russia, Russia again, that they’ve done for years. Never found anything,” Trump falsely claimed. “But they should be looking at China, China, China, Iran, Iran, Iran, lots of other places.”

“I haven’t spoken to anybody from Russia in years. They know that, but it’s a scam,” he claimed. “But, it all goes back to the DOJ because we had a trial today. It’s an appeal of a ridiculous –.”

Trump was referring to this week’s indictments that reveal a U.S. media outlet that platformed several far-right pro-Trump influencers was funded with millions of dollars from Russia in a scheme to help Trump.

[...]

The liberal super PAC American Bridge responded to Trump’s comments by pointing to an Associated Press article and writing: “YESTERDAY Trump’s former senior campaign aide was charged for accepting $1 million to spew Kremlin talking points.”

[...]

Archived version

For many months, media critics and liberal Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency is—or should be treated as—a big and important news story in and of itself. If President Biden’s age merited extensive, focused coverage because his fitness for the job was naturally of interest to voters, goes this critique, then surely Trump’s visible incoherence, cognitive impairment, inability to cogently discuss the simplest public matters, and increasingly strange flights of fantasy deserve equivalent treatment.

This argument has never received an even remotely serious hearing from newsroom leaders at big media organizations. But it might have just become a bit harder to ignore, now that a well-respected veteran journalist has—in a moment of striking candor—called out his colleagues for failing to take Trump’s mental state seriously as a story in its own right.

“We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States,” Mike Barnicle, who served as a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe and other newspapers, said on [TV ]Morning Joe early Wednesday. Barnicle continued that Trump frequently says “deranged” things in public that “you wouldn’t repeat” on “American television” or “in front of your children.”

[...]

The judgment that Trump is “out of his mind” might strike some newsroom denizens as loaded, opinionated language. And surely some of them would reject Barnicle’s critique by noting that they do often cover Trump’s wild-eyed utterances.

But we should pause to appreciate Barnicle’s deeper, underlying point here. It’s that merely covering each of Trump’s hallucinatory claims as news items, even if that includes aggressively fact-checking them, doesn’t do justice to the much bigger story that’s unfolding right at the end of all of our noses.

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Archived version

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.

Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

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Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”

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Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)

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This is not the first time that a spouse of a Supreme Court justice injected themselves into controversial political matters. Ginni Thomas sent dozens of messages after the 2020 election that echoed then-President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. In messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Thomas said “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History” and urged Trump to not concede the election. In emails to Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers, she pleaded with them to fight back against supposed fraud and send a “clean slate of Electors.” She later wrote, “The nation’s eyes are on you now. … Please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.”

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Martha-Ann Alito, the wife of Justice Samuel Alito, faced scrutiny for flying an upside-down American flag at the family’s Virginia home — a symbol used by the Stop the Steal movement that claimed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. The flag flew outside the Alito home as the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a case related to the 2020 election. (Samuel Alito told The New York Times he had no role in flying the flag. He said his wife did it in response to “a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”)

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Near the start of the Biden presidency, [Shackelford] said, First Liberty raised $3 million to run a campaign that sought to block efforts to add more justices to the high court and to reform or eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Getting rid of the filibuster then would’ve removed the 60-vote procedural hurdle that currently exists for most types of legislation.

According to Shackelford, First Liberty conducted polling, ran advertisements, worked with social media influencers and urged Congress to oppose these changes. In particular, Shackelford said, his group focused its activities on convincing Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose filibuster reform.

In the end, both senators did just that. “We stopped this from happening,” Shackelford said. (Spokespeople for Manchin and Sinema did not respond to requests for comment.)

But now, he went on, First Liberty needed more money if it wanted to mount a similar campaign to stop Supreme Court reform. He mentioned the Brennan Center’s recent $30 million gift and then asked, “Where’s our, you know, $10 million guy or gal?”

Archived version

The Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance said that school shootings were simply a “fact of life” after a shooting at a Georgia high school left four dead — the 45th school shooting in the United States so far this year.

The comments, made at an Arizona rally on Thursday, come after Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz called for enhanced gun control measures in their own campaign rallies following the shooting.

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said, bucking a question asked on gun control measures and instead championing efforts to spend more on school security, per the Associated Press. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”

The New York Times Climate Forward event will align with the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and one its speakers will be Kevin D. Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America.

Project 2025 is a [Republican] presidential playbook to dismantle democracy, spearheaded and organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and with 100 coalition partner organizations, many of which are well-known for pushing anti-LGBTQ policy, climate change denials, anti-abortion views, and harmful rhetoric, accompanied by Christian nationalism.

You may find this useful: https://www.25and.me

Archived version

As Republican politicians in the U.S. push anti-transgender rhetoric ahead of a historic election, transgender and nonbinary Americans are facing new laws and rules that effectively prohibit them and others from obtaining documentation like birth certificates and driver’s licenses that align with their gender identities.

Advocates are fighting back. They’ve been mobilizing communities and organizing resources to help transgender Americans, an effort aimed at safeguarding their civic rights. Some trans voters have expressed confusion and fear of discrimination at the ballot box that could discourage them from participating in public life.

“There is a chilling effect,” said Lauren Kunis, CEO and executive director of VoteRiders, which helps voters obtain identification. “There is an unsafe and intimidating environment around existing as trans in society, and definitely in being able to go to the polls safely and cast a ballot.”

UPDATE: Chinese Consulate says envoy was not removed after Hochul remark

Archived version

China's consul general New York in the U.S. left his post as scheduled after completing his posting last month, the State Department said on Wednesday, hours after New York’s governor said she asked for his expulsion in the aftermath of an aide’s arrest for secretly acting as a Chinese agent.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that Consul General Huang Ping “was not expelled.”

“Our understanding is that the consul general reached the end of a regular scheduled rotation in August, and so rotated out of the position, but was not expelled,” Miller said.

“But of course, when it comes to the status of particular employees of a foreign mission, I would refer you to the foreign country to speak to it. But there was no expulsion action.”

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Huang Ping’s status.

Earlier on Wednesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul told an event that she spoke by phone at the request of Secretary of State Antony Blinken to a high-ranking State Department official “and I had conveyed my desire to have the consul general from the People’s Republic of China in the New York mission expelled.”

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