Tomcotton2 Bak

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NOW TWO

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crazy? useful idiot?

see violence macho ? strict fr?

TPG a donor?! cf directv

some new here

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NYT

AUG 2

An agency that scrutinizes the conduct of federal employees has opened an investigation into Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump before he returned to office, following a request by a Republican senator.

The Office of Special Counsel confirmed on Saturday that it had opened an investigation into Mr. Smith for a possible violation of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits federal workers from using their government jobs to engage in political activity.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, had asked the agency to investigate on the premise that some of Mr. Smith’s actions, such as seeking quick trial dates in the two criminal cases against Mr. Trump, were designed to influence the 2024 election.

The investigation, which was first reported by The New York Post, is unusual in several respects. First, the most severe penalty possible for a Hatch Act violation is dismissal from federal employment, and Mr. Smith left the government at the start of the year. Second, the type of prosecutorial decisions criticized by Mr. Cotton, Mr. Trump and others are far different from the type of cases the O.S.C. typically handles. The office traditionally investigates and addresses violations of federal rules about the civil service.

The investigation comes at a time when lawyers representing fired or demoted federal employees have complained that under Mr. Trump, the O.S.C. is not fulfilling its traditional role.

In February, the president dismissed the agency’s head, Hampton Dellinger, despite a federal law saying that person can only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

At the time, Mr. Dellinger had been arguing for the reinstatement of thousands of probationary workers who had been fired by the new administration.

Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.

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an 2 25

Officials in President Donald Trump's administration are reportedly "scrambling" in an all-hands-on-deck operation this weekend to gin up support for Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard.

Axios reported recently (https://www.axios.com/2025/02/01/trump-tulsi-gabbard-senate-intelligence) that Senate Republican Conference chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has turned the conference's official X account (https://x.com/SenateGOP/status/1885328247740596480) into an unofficial Tulsi Gabbard "war room," in an effort to get her across the crucial first hurdle in her confirmation battle. Gabbard will need every Republican vote in the Senate Intelligence Committee to advance her nomination to the full Senate, and more than one Republican has indicated hesitancy in their support of Trump's pick to lead the United States' 18 spy agencies.

According to the outlet, the Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) administration is focusing particularly on convincing Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) to back the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and military veteran. During Gabbard's confirmation hearing this week, Young and other senators confronted her on her refusal to call National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden a "traitor."

READ MORE:'She lied to us': Ex-Gabbard staffers speak out about 'insane' meeting with Syrian dictator (https://www.alternet.org/gabbard-assad-meeting/#)

Trump is reportedly considering reaching out to Republicans on the Intelligence Committee to assure them that he would not pardon Snowden — who was granted political asylum in Russia by President Vladimir Putin — in order to ensure they vote for Gabbard's confirmation. One unnamed Trump advisor told Axios that "the president will have those conversations" if necessary.

"We feel OK about Tulsi's chances," an anonymous senior White House official told the outlet. "But we want to feel better."

Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) are among the other senators that could vote with Democrats against Gabbard's confirmation. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) already suggested that he wouldn't bring Gabbard's nomination before the full Senate (https://www.alternet.org/senate-gop-leader-gabbard/) if she failed to win over all nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee. But MAGA activists are already promising to back primary challenges against any Senate Republican who votes against Gabbard.

"We are 100% serious," said Andrew Kolvet, who is a spokesperson for Turning Point Action. "GOP senators in red states will open themselves up to well-funded, well-organized primary challenges if they stand in the way of confirming the Cabinet the president wants and the American people voted for."

READ MORE:'Email Putin all our war plans': Experts blast Trump for picking 'Russian spy' Gabbard as intel chief (https://www.alternet.org/tulsi-gabbard-trump/#)

Click here (https://www.axios.com/2025/02/01/trump-tulsi-gabbard-senate-intelligence) to read Axios' report in full.

an 12 24

Tom Cotton demands West Point explain why it 'cooperated' with ProPublica on Hegseth story (https://www.alternet.org/trump-hegseth-2670444391/)

an 12 24

Tom Cotton blocks bill to shield journalists from betraying sources (https://www.alternet.org/tom-cotton-2670433779/)

// TPM

Reporters are used to the two-facedness, particularly in the Trump era: Republicans interact with them in the Capitol hallways, leak them information or spin behind closed doors, then go to the floor or a rally and whip up listeners against these “enemies within.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) did the two-step Tuesday, blocking a federal shield bill that would protect journalists from being forced to reveal confidential sources due, in part, to reporters’ supposed “long record of endangering our troops.”

“Passage of this bill would turn the United Senate into the active accomplice of deep state leakers, traitors and criminals, along with the America-hating and fame-hungry journalists who help them out,” he said on the Senate floor.

He mused that it should be called “The Alexander Vindman Protection Act,” referring to the former NSC employee who testified against Donald Trump during his first impeachment.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the bill’s primary sponsor, posted (https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov/post/3lcybrga5pk2r) on Bluesky: “I’m not taking my foot off the gas. I’ll keep trying to get this bill across the finish line to write much-needed protections for journalists and their sources into black letter law.”

Wyden also introduced the Free Speech Protection Act last week, a parallel press protection bill that would have shielded journalists from frivolous lawsuits. TPM broke the news (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/raskin-wyden-kiley-anti-slapp-trump) of the legislation earlier this month.

Both bills face long odds without robust Republican support. But some advocacy groups are calling for creativity — and persistence — in the face of a looming Trump presidency.

“We need more than speeches about the PRESS Act’s importance. We need action,” Freedom of the Press Foundation Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said in a statement after Cotton objected to Wyden’s request to pass the bill via unanimous consent Tuesday. “Senate Democrats had all year to move this bipartisan bill and now time is running out. Leader Schumer needs to get the PRESS Act into law — whether by attaching it to a year-end legislative package or bringing it to the floor on its own — even if it means shortening lawmakers’ holiday break.”

npr

...TED CRUZ: Do you condemn the atrocities of the Hamas terrorists?

ADEEL MANGI: Yes, that's what I was about to address, Senator.

FADEL: And then there was that famous TikTok questioning where Tom Cotton is asking the CEO of TikTok if he was ever a citizen of China.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TOM COTTON: Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?

SHOU ZI CHEW: Senator, I'm Singaporean. No.

FADEL: So I guess my larger question is, between what happened to you and these other examples, what does that say about the point of these hearings?

RESEARCH/STUDY

Republican convention features speakers who have called for and downplayed political violence

Media outlets should not buy Trumpist spin when many figures who are speaking have advocated violence

WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/zachary-pleat)

PUBLISHED 07/16/24

Media outlets covering the RNC convention should not (https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/07/13/trump-republican-national-convention/) buy the MAGA narrative (https://fortune.com/2016/07/18/donald-trump-aims-to-soften-image-at-convention/) that messaging has “softened” or that there is any sort of “unity” pivot (https://newrepublic.com/article/183860/trumps-post-shooting-rant-wrecks-unity-pivot).

Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for president, reportedly (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/republican-convention-aims-unity-keeps-old-red-meat-rcna162020) reframed the Republican National Convention on the fly around the theme of “unity” after a shooter targeted him during a rally a few days previously, grazing his ear and killing a bystander. But many of the featured RNC speakers, including Trump himself (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/10/trump-often-passively-encourages-violence-actively-rationalizes-it/), have a history of encouraging political violence or downplaying it when it happens to Democrats.

Key among these speakers is former Fox News host Tucker Carlson (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/convention-preaching-unity-cant-feature-tucker-carlson), who is currently scheduled (https://x.com/jonathanvswan/status/1812111997317632322?s=46&t=3eycblEqf4aQdYYBSeb9PQ) for a prime-time speaking slot before Trump’s speech and has a long history of encouraging conspiracy theories that reportedly inspired multiple mass shootings throughout the country. He was also a primary validator (https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-validation-insurrectionist-mob-makes-it-more-likely-it-will-strike-again) of the lies that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol as Trump supporters sought to prevent Congress from confirming Joe Biden’s victory, and also aired a campaign of lies (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/debunking-tucker-carlsons-dishonest-january-6-expose) about its aftermath.

But Carlson is far from the only scheduled convention speaker (https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/13/politics/rnc-milwaukee-trump-full-list-speakers/index.html) who has validated political violence. Many others, including Republican elected officials and candidates, downplayed the violence of the January 6 insurrection, called for violence against protesters, and in at least one case called for violence against Democrats.

Case in point, during his speech during the first night of the convention, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) strayed from the supposedly unifying themes by directly accosting the Democratic Party, whose policies he labeled (https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/07/15/ron-johnsons-rnc-speech-hits-a-teleprompter-snafu/74418551007/) "a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values and our people.”

Ohio Sen. and Trump VP pick J.D. Vance

Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, downplayed the violence directed at then-VP Mike Pence during the January 6 insurrection. The Hill reported that in a CNN interview, Vance said: “I’m truly skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger” during the January 6 insurrection. During the attack, some people chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and Pence was evacuated by the Secret Service to a secure location. Vance continued: “I think politics and politics people like to really exaggerate things from time to time.” The Hill, \5/1/24 (https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4637715-jd-vance-skeptical-mike-pences-life-in-danger-jan-6/), [7/15/24 (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4773262-vance-trump-running-mate-front-runner/)]

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton

Cotton called for military force to be used against protesters of police brutality during the George Floyd protests: “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” In social media posts, Cotton recommended that U.S. Army units be deployed to end protests: “We need to have zero tolerance.” Merriam-Webster’s Trend Watch explained Cotton’s use of the phrase “no quarter,” saying that it defines the terms “as ‘no pity or mercy —used to say that an enemy, opponent, etc., is treated in a very harsh way.’ … This particular sense of quarter may be defined as ‘merciful consideration of an opponent’ (often specifically refers to ‘the clemency of not killing a defeated enemy’).” Twitter/X, \6/1/20 (https://x.com/jamiedupree/status/1267456995017318401), 6/1/20 (https://x.com/TomCottonAR/status/1267459561675468800); Merriam-Webster, Trend Watch, [6/1/20 (https://www.merriam-webster.com/news-trend-watch/cotton-no-quarter-20200601)]

Cotton in New York Times op-ed: “Send in the troops.” Cotton wrote that then-President Trump should use the Insurrection Act and send military forces to ensure protesters against police brutality are “subdued,” stating: “One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. … In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military ‘or any other means’ in ‘cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.’” The New York Times, [6/3/20 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html)]

Cotton encouraged vigilante violence, saying he “would encourage most people anywhere that get stuck” by protesters “to take matters in their own hands.” Cotton, specifically talking about people protesting Israeli military strikes against civilians in Gaza by blocking roads, continued: “If something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there – let’s just say I think there’d be a lot of very wet criminals that have been tossed overboard, not by law enforcement, but by the people whose road they’re blocking. If they glued their hands to a car or the pavement, well, \it would be] probably pretty painful to have their skin ripped off. But I think that’s the way we’d handle it in Arkansas.” [The Guardian, [4/16/24 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/16/tom-cotton-gaza-protesters)]

Cotton: Police should have been called in to pro-Palestinian protests “the very first day they set up their tents.” He added, “Where were the liberal administrators and liberal politicians sending in the police on the very first day? We should not have tolerated this for a moment.” Many of the police activities against campus protests featured violence against the protesters. ABC News, \5/5/24 (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tom-cotton-attacks-campus-protests-argues-police-day/story?id=109928210); CBS News, 5/4/24 (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/violence-erupts-at-some-pro-palestinian-campus-protests/); Rolling Stone, [4/30/24 (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/gaza-protests-colleges-violent-cops-1235012276/)]

Cotton called for presidential pardons for many convicted of January 6 insurrection charges. Mother Jones reported that “Cotton said people ‘who did not attack a law enforcement officer, \and] who did not damage public property’ on Jan. 6 should be ‘considered’ for a pardon.” [Mother Jones, [6/2/24 (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/tom-cotton-trump-vp-january-6-pardon-elections/)]

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz

Cruz portrayed elected Democrats as “barbarians” and military targets to be fought. Rolling Stone reported that during a Conservative Political Action Conference speech in August 2022, Cruz railed against the “power hungry, abusive totalitarian nitwits” of the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, and said: “It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians.” Cruz continued: “As they say in the military world, it is a target-rich environment.” Rolling Stone, [8/6/22 (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-2022-ted-cruz-militant-rhetoric-1393449/)]

Cruz shared a conspiracy theory downplaying the political motivations of Paul Pelosi’s attacker. The Washington Post reported: “When a right-wing provocateur wagered Sunday that it was ‘absurd’ to ‘paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right winger,’ the junior senator from Texas responded Monday, simply: ‘truth.’” The Post explained that Cruz was wrong: “Even when Cruz tweeted, it was clear that David DePape had an extensive online trail indicating he subscribed to views that were in line with the far right.” The Washington Post, [11/1/22 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/01/paul-pelosi-conspiracy-theories-debunked/)]

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson

Johnson downplayed the violence of January 6, repeatedly denying that it was an “armed insurrection.” PolitiFact explained that “within a week of the attack, a dozen guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition were found. In other words, the crowd was armed.” Johnson repeatedly ignored these facts in an effort to downplay the violence that day, saying just weeks after the insurrection: “The fact of the matter is this didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.” And in October 2022, Johnson said: “To call what happened on January 6 an armed insurrection, I just think is not accurate.” PolitiFact, [10/10/22 (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/10/ron-johnson/wisconsin-sen-ron-johnson-wrong-claim-jan-6-was-no/)]

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt

In 2020, Schmitt defended a gun-toting St. Louis couple who menaced Black Lives Matter protesters. In a Fox News interview, then-Missouri Attorney General Schmitt said that charges against the McCloskeys, who waved guns at protesters passing by their property, were “nothing more than \a] political prosecution” and declared that he would work to get them dismissed. (The couple, who appeared as guest speakers at the 2020 Republican National Convention, pleaded guilty to assault and harassment charges but were later pardoned by Gov. Mike Parson.) FoxNews.com, [7/21/20 (https://www.foxnews.com/media/eric-schmitt-charges-st-louis-couple-mccloskeys); ABC News, [8/3/21 (https://abcnews.go.com/US/governor-pardons-st-louis-couple-pointed-guns-black/story?id=79250990)]

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz

Gaetz had a social media post restricted for glorifying violence after he wrote: “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” The New York Times, [6/1/20 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/technology/twitter-matt-gaetz-warning.html)]

While next to Trump at the Iowa State Fair, Gaetz said, “We know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, DC.” Mediaite, [8/12/23 (https://www.mediaite.com/politics/matt-gaetz-shouts-that-only-through-force-do-we-make-any-change-while-standing-beside-trump-in-iowa/)]

Gaetz referenced violent far-right gang the Proud Boys when he posted that he was “standing back and standing by” at the courthouse where Trump’s New York criminal trial was being held. The Associated Press reported: “The Proud Boys — whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — have used that verbiage since Trump, during a 2020 campaign debate, said: ‘Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.’” The Associated Press, [5/16/24 (https://apnews.com/article/matt-gaetz-donald-trump-proud-boys-daed52f145929eefc8deaf2bfee32e47)]

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

Greene repeatedly endorsed using violence against Democrats. CNN reported that “Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress. … In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said ‘a bullet to the head would be quicker’ to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the ‘deep state’ working against Trump.” Media Matters, [2/2/21 (https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/guide-rep-marjorie-taylor-greenes-conspiracy-theories-and-toxic-rhetoric#violence)]

Greene praised militia members as people who can protect the country from “a tyrannical government.” In 2018, Greene gave a speech after various militia members appeared on stage at a rally in Washington, D.C. She praised the militia members as “the very definition of our Second Amendment. Because when our government gets to a place where it’s a tyrannical government, we’re guaranteed the right to bear arms and make a state militia so that they do not run us over.” Media Matters, [2/2/21 (https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/guide-rep-marjorie-taylor-greenes-conspiracy-theories-and-toxic-rhetoric#violence)]

Greene called for vigilante violence against trans people. On conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ radio show, Greene said that if she had a daughter and she had a trans camp counselor, “my husband would’ve beat him into the ground, and then he’d be in jail. But this is exactly how we need to stand up against this stuff.” Greene continued: “We have to draw the line in the sand and say we are not willing to cross it. This is such perversion.” Media Matters, [2/23/22 (https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/conspiracy-theorist-alex-jones-show-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-calls-violent-physical)]

Greene said that “the only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.” Mother Jones reported that in an October 2020 video, Greene “warned ominously about fending off ‘socialists’ like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, claiming they would confiscate Americans’ guns. ‘If this generation doesn’t stand up and defend freedom, it’s gone,’ Greene said, addressing viewers. ‘And once it’s gone, freedom doesn’t come back by itself. The only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood.’” Media Matters, [2/2/21 (https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/guide-rep-marjorie-taylor-greenes-conspiracy-theories-and-toxic-rhetoric#violence)]

Greene said if she had organized the January 6 insurrection, “we would have won” and “it would’ve been armed.” Many of the insurrectionists were, in fact, armed. Greene later said she was making a “sarcastic joke.” ABC News, [12/12/22 (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-jan-6-capitol-attack-wouldve/story?id=95065444)]

Greene defended conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi’s attacker. After then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked and David DePape charged in the incident, The Washington Post reported: “The Georgia Republican defended the Paul Pelosi conspiracy theories Monday morning while citing Pelosi’s supposedly having referred to DePape as his ‘friend.’” It continued: “There remains no evidence Pelosi actually knew DePape, much less that they were friends, and there is plenty to dispute it.” The Washington Post, [11/1/22 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/01/paul-pelosi-conspiracy-theories-debunked/)]

New York Rep. and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik

Stefanik defended the January 6 insurrectionists who have been charged and/or convicted of crimes, labeling them “January 6th hostages.” The Hill reported: “‘I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages,’ Stefanik told NBC when asked if those who stormed the Capitol should be held responsible to the full extent of the law. ‘We have a rule in Congress of oversight over our treatment of prisoners. And I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.’” The Hill, [1/7/24 (https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/4393986-stefanik-slams-nbc-as-biased-calls-jan-6-prisoners-hostages/)]

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

In a tacit endorsement of vigilante killings, Abbott pardoned a far-right killer who murdered a Black Lives Matter protester. Following a campaign by right-wing media, the Texas governor pardoned Daniel Perry, who had been convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester after fantasizing about killing such protesters. Vox, \5/17/24 (https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/5/17/24159084/daniel-perry-pardon-greg-abbott-samuel-alito-flag); Media Matters, [4/12/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/fox-news-defends-texas-man-convicted-murdering-black-lives-matter-protester-and)]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

While he was campaigning for president, DeSantis said he would “slit the throats” of federal employees. When asked if he regretted that language, DeSantis said he did not, and claimed “people knew it was a figure of speech.” The Hill, [11/2/23 (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4289921-ron-desantis-slitting-throats-federal-bureaucrats-stands-by-promise/)]

DeSantis repeatedly called for killing people crossing the southern border without authorization. NBC News reported that DeSantis said “you absolutely can use deadly force” against people crossing the border who “have hostile intent, because you’re obviously running drugs.” He also said: “If the cartels are cutting through the border wall, trying to run product into this country, they’re going to end up stone-cold dead as a result of that bad decision. And if you do that one time, you are not going to see them mess with our wall ever again.” As NBC News explained, “it’s not clear exactly how officers would be able to tell exactly who was a drug smuggler and who was not.” NBC News, [6/26/23 (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-vows-send-military-block-drugs-reaching-mexican-ports-rcna91121)]

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson

Robinson said mass shootings were “karma” due to the legality of abortion and belittled mass shooting survivors. Following an August 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, Robinson said mass shootings were “karma” due to the legality of abortion, adding: “When you spill that innocent blood, that blood is going to come back as a stain on you and it's going to come home to roost.” He then said that progressive activists “have nobody to blame but themselves and the policies that they've been pushing that devalue human life across the country.” Following the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Robinson called the survivors “spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN,” “spoiled little bastards,” and “media prosti-tots.” Media Matters, \5/12/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/crime-and-criminal-justice/north-carolina-lt-gov-mark-robinson-said-mass-shootings-are-karma); CNN, [5/9/23 (https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/04/politics/kfile-nc-lt-gov-mark-robinson-mocked-school-shooting-survivors/index.html)]

Robinson called for violence to settle political issues: “Some folks need killing!” The New Republic reported that during a speech at a church in June of this year, Robinson “appeared to endorse lethal violence against these unnamed enemies, particularly on the left” when he ranted: “Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity! When you have wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green and go have them handled. Or those boys in blue and have them go handle it.” The New Republic, [7/5/24 (https://newrepublic.com/article/183443/mark-robinson-north-carolina-gov-candidate-hateful-rant-killing)]

Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake

Lake mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi during a campaign event. NBC News reported that Lake “made light of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband in remarks at a campaign event Monday, drawing laughter from the audience.” During the event, she remarked: “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.” NBC News, [10/31/22 (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/arizona-gop-nominee-kari-lake-mocks-attack-paul-pelosi-campaign-event-rcna54960)]

Lake repeatedly defended January 6 insurrectionists during her political campaigns. The Arizona Republic reported that Lake “has issued a flurry of congratulations and sympathy towards participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.” It also reported that she “has suggested that prosecution of Jan. 6 participants is politically motivated,” and that “she struck a similar tone while running for governor in 2022, telling one participant he did nothing wrong. That man was sentenced to three years of probation after he encouraged others to ‘go, go, go’ into the Capitol building and take a police officer’s shield.” The Arizona Republic, [12/17/23 (https://x.com/azcentral/status/1736665869818716541)]

Lake repeatedly encouraged supporters to arm themselves to settle political issues. In June 2023, Lake responded to one of Trump’s multiple indictments by saying, “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat – that’s a public service announcement.” In April 2024, Lake told her supporters: “The next six months is going to be intense. We’re going to strap on our seatbelt. We’re going to put on our helmet — or your Kari Lake ball cap. We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.” The Guardian, \6/12/23 (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/12/kari-lake-trump-nra-threat-threatens-democracy-arizona-democrat-ruben-gallego); USA Today, [4/17/24 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/04/17/kari-lake-strap-on-a-glock/73354547007/)]

Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno

Moreno downplayed the violence of the January 6 insurrection. The Daily Beast reported that Moreno “has called Jan. 6 defendants ‘political prisoners,’ once said ‘don’t ever use the word insurrection,’ and shared a post from a right-wing Twitter account that condemned the Department of Justice for prosecuting people who were inside the Capitol for ‘two minutes.’” The Daily Beast, [8/17/23 (https://www.thedailybeast.com/pro-trump-senate-candidate-bernie-moreno-didnt-scrub-all-of-his-anti-trump-tweets)]

Vivek Ramaswamy, former presidential candidate

Ramaswamy repeatedly downplayed the January 6 insurrection and dismissed political violence against Democrats. During his campaign for the GOP nomination, Ramaswamy claimed that the January 6 insurrection was an “inside job” and a case of “government entrapment,” and he suggested that insurrectionists were “targets of politicized federal prosecutions.” Ramaswamy also downplayed the kidnapping plot against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, claiming that the Trump supporters arrested in that case were also entrapped. CNN, \12/13/23 (https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/fact-check-vivek-ramaswamy-cnn-town-hall-iowa/index.html); The Dispatch, [9/15/23 (https://thedispatch.com/article/fact-checking-vivek-ramaswamys-claims-about-january-6-defendants/)]

Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA

Kirk has repeatedly claimed that conservatives are being provoked into violence. During a 2021 event in Idaho, an audience member asked Kirk: “When do we get to use the guns? … I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” Kirk replied that it would be “playing into all their plans” because they “are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties.”

In a 2023 interview with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Kirk said: “If we, as the figures in the media, the people that have audiences, aren't clear about the proper course of action, that this is gonna get wildly out of control. In a way that people will act you know, I don't want them to act violently. I don't. I'm trying to preach peace as much as possible. But … it's almost like they're being provoked, and I don’t like that.” In another 2023 instance, Kirk said to his audience: “They would love nothing more than for people to act uncharacteristic. They need to try to incite you to right-wing violence to justify their mass takeover of the country.” And in July 2023, Kirk said “the left” wants “another January 6,” and “they have been preempting us and preconditioning us with domestic violent extremism and right-wing violence.” Media Matters, \10/27/21 (https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirks-venues-and-sponsors-need-know-what-theyre-getting-involved), 8/17/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-suggests-conservatives-are-being-provoked-violence-democrats), 4/3/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirks-conspiratorial-fearmongering-and-retaliatory-fantasies-reach-dangerous), [7/28/23 (https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-tells-his-audience-left-setting-them-another-january-6-trump-indictments)]

GOP senators Hawley and Cotton call for 'National Guard' deployment against student protestors - Alternet.org (https://www.alternet.org/tom-cotton-hawley-biden/)

an 4 24

just normal gop macho strict fr bs?

tensions in the Middle East escalated during the April 13-14 weekend when Iran attacked Israel with drones and missiles (https://www.axios.com/2024/04/15/israel-iran-attack-missiles-retaliation), many of which were shot down by U.S. forces.

President Joe Biden has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Gaza policy as the death toll in Gaza continues to soar. However, Biden has also made it clear that the U.S. remains a major ally of Israel.

Protests against Netanyahu's policies have been plentiful in the United States. And Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is drawing vehement criticism after promoting violence against protesters.

READ MORE:[Michael Cohen warns of bombshell evidence during Trump trial: report

In an April 15 post on X (https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1780039918737121502), formerly Twitter, the GOP senator wrote, "I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It's time to put an end to this nonsense."

Politico's Niall Stanage (https://twitter.com/NiallStanage/status/1780041867372982578) noted that Cotton edited his tweet, replacing "take matters into your own hands" with the longer "take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way."

New York Daily News columnist Brandon Friedman tweeted (https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1780066211138589170), "Cotton should be expelled from the Senate over this."

On X, journalist Brian Beutler commented (https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1780059765479006469), "Remember when people insisted that Cotton simply meant for troops to discern with perfect accuracy between protesters and rioters and intended no harm to the former?"

READ MORE:[The Big Picture: Donald J. Trump's attempted coup

In response to Cotton, Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude Jr. (https://twitter.com/esglaude/status/1780152232777810240) — a frequent guest on MSNBC — tweeted, "What is wrong with you?"

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann (https://twitter.com/KeithOlbermann/status/1780197802108137546) said of Cotton, "What? He wants to kill Americans. That makes him a Republican."

Activist Charlotte Clymer (https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1780066081698165104), a former press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, told Cotton, "Why is violence your answer to every problem? Why are you so weak?"

Wade Lentz (https://twitter.com/wadelentz/status/1780042085027955016), co-host of "The Patriot Pastor's Podcast," tweeted, "It's sad that an Arkansas Senator asks that American citizens put their lives in danger when he has done not one thing to address this in DC. Do something besides posting about it, and then show us how you have addressed it in Washington."

an 12 23

after presidential candidate and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley failed to condemn slavery when answering a question about the cause of the Civil War, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) decided to weigh in with a comment of his own.

"The Civil War started because the American people elected an anti-slavery Republican as president and Democrats revolted rather than accept minor restrictions on the expansion of slavery to the western territories," Cotton posted to X (https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1740423719108178006) (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.

Cotton's tweet was met with almost universal scorn on the social media platform, with journalists and pundits pointing out the Arkansas Republican's false equivalency of antebellum-era politics with today's very different political environment.

"MAGA propagandists like Tom Cotton don't want you to understand that Southern racists used to be Democrats but are Republicans now. This partisan sea change happened through the 1960s, '70s and '80s," former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob tweeted (https://twitter.com/MarkJacob16/status/1740452537386328143). "It's explained in those history books that Republicans don't want you to read."

Liberal social media personality Ron Filipowski piled on in a similar fashion, calling Cotton's tweet "another ignorant and stupid analogy."

"This Republican Party doesn’t even resemble the one from 2015 much less 1860," Filipowski tweeted (https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1740447671972991441). "And the white southern Dixiecrats all switched to Republicans in the 1970-80s, so the Democratic Party today also in no way resembles that of 1860."

Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali went even further (https://twitter.com/WajahatAli/status/1740445965629469092), reminding his followers that it isn't Democrats but Republicans that today are defending the preservation of Confederate monuments.

READ MORE: 'I'll vote for Biden': Top Koch group official rebels against Nikki Haley endorsement (https://www.alternet.org/koch-rebels-nikki-haley/)

"Democrats today aren't waving or defending the Confederate flag or lamenting about the 'lost cause.' That's Tom Cotton's GOP," Ali tweeted. "If Lincoln was a Republican today, the MAGA extremists would probably try to assassinate him."

And in response to Cotton's follow-up tweet (https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1740423721586929719) in which he wrote that "Democrats would sooner tear the country apart than treat all citizens equally before the law, regardless of color," Ali fired back (https://twitter.com/WajahatAli/status/1740446203395924420).

"Tom Cotton will support Trump for President who cited Hitler and said immigrants poison the blood of this country and incited a failed insurrection, but go on about equality and tearing the country apart," he wrote.

South Carolina-based pediatrician Dr. Michael O'Brien was simple in his criticism, tweeting (https://twitter.com/DrOBrienMD/status/1740446737121354184), "Tom Cotton is a prime example of why we should never ban books."

READ MORE:Tom Cotton slammed for boosting conspiracy theories about journalists (https://www.alternet.org/tom-cotton-journalists/)

an 11 23

the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved subpoenas for conservative billionaire Harlan Crow and the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo despite loud objections from the committee's Republican members.

Axios reported that during the roll call for the subpoenas, Republicans repeatedly "shouted objections." (https://www.axios.com/2023/11/30/senate-tensions-erupt-ahead-of-hotly-disputed-subpoena-vote) Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) was quoted yelling "come on, man" as chairman Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) conducted the vote. Punchbowl News reporter Heather Caygle tweeted (https://twitter.com/heatherscope/status/1730271825429516634?s=20) that Republicans then "left the room during the vote."

The chaos started after Durbin moved to suspend rule IV, which allows for debate, in order to move directly to the subpoena vote. Republicans were upset, claiming debate over the confirmation of judicial nominees was being prematurely stifled. Durbin responded that the committee had already debated the nominees "at great length" during a prior hearing before moving ahead with the rule IV motion.

"You're going to have a lot of consequences coming if you go down this road," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) told the committee. "Listen to me, I've cautioned a lot of you."

"So you're telling us to shut up? You want us to shut up? That's what you're saying," Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) said to Durbin.

Even though the uproar in the committee was ostensibly over the process of debating judicial nominees, a Senate Republican aide speaking anonymously to Axios told the publication that senators' anger was more in relation to the subpoenas of Crow and Leo.

:{:{The Senate Judiciary Committee ordered the subpoenas for both Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo in relation to Crow's numerous undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Leo's facilitation of those gifts. Currently, all federal judges — including members of the Supreme Court – are banned from receiving gifts and compensation for speeches and public appearances under the Ethics Reform Act of 1989.}:

READ MORE:Ex-judge: Clarence Thomas RV loan another example of justice 'doing an end run' around ethics rules (https://www.alternet.org/clarence-thomas-rv-loan/)

"Leo’s efforts to keep Thomas happy meant 38 destination vacations, a voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas, 26 private jet flights (plus eight by helicopter), a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events (typically sitting in a box), two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica, and a standing invitation to an exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast," Gertner wrote. "Most of these were arranged by Leo and paid for by conservative billionaires."

Tom Cotton slammed for boosting conspiracy theories about journalists - Alternet.org (https://www.alternet.org/tom-cotton-journalists/)

mma 2 23 even wsj...

If you’ve been paying attention to this asinine saga (https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/timeline-gop-threatens-directv-defense-newsmax) at all – and let’s hope for your sanity that’s not the case – you know that Newsmax, with its prior contract with DirecTV having run out, is suddenly demanding a massive pay-out from DirecTV. Newsmax is still providing the channel for free to the likes of YouTube, Roku, and more. Given that the contract had expired and a new agreement could not be reached, DirecTV pulled Newsmax from the air. It began airing The First, another right-wing cable network.

Despite all the indications that the end of the contract was a content-neutral decision by a company under siege from rising cord cutting (https://deadline.com/2023/01/newsmax-directv-the-first-1235241951/) among its customer base (not to mention having lost the NFL Sunday Ticket) (https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/22/media/youtube-nfl-sunday-ticket/index.html#::text=The%20popular%20NFL%20Sunday%20Ticket,owned%20by%20Google%2C%20on%20Thursday.), Republican politicians have joined in (https://www.newsmax.com/denniskneale/newsmax-direct-tv-att/2023/02/15/id/1108834/) with right-wing pundits to call this censorship. There have been talks of congressional hearings. Presidential candidates have weighed in. It’s one of the silliest big right-wing media stories since Breitbart broke the news of Obama giving a hug (https://www.mediamatters.org/breitbart-news/its-always-conspiracy-derrick-bell-edition) to one of his law school professors.

Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy played the hits in an interview with Mike Huckabee. If you don’t want to watch – and again, I do not recommend it – it starts with Huckabee endorsing a congressional investigation into DirecTV and Ruddy in turn saying that Mike Huckabee’s daughter – current Arkansas governor and former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders – will be president in the future [vid]

the interview carries on with Ruddy saying that he was just asking for $1 per subscriber per year. That would be on the upper range of subscriber fees (https://variety.com/vip/pay-tv-true-cost-free-1234810682/) overall (above the likes of CNBC, FX, and Nickelodeon according to 2020 data) and would result in a higher bill for consumers, all of whom could right now access Newsmax content at no cost elsewhere.

Notably, DirecTV is not standing idly by. The company pushed back in a letter to Republican senators (https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/D8File/2023/02/16/directv-response-to-senate-letter-of-feb-1-2023.pdf?VersionId=iYhzZNm.Xgg_2uLg4FizlNQ4eXRmECEu) who have echoed Newsmax’s disingenuous “censorship” angle. The letter reads in part:

• When DIRECTV’s prior agreement with Newsmax was set to expire, Newsmax advised us that it would extend our right to distribute the channel only if we agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars in new licensing fees – a cost we would have to pass along to all of our customers. We did not agree. No other major pay TV operator in the market currently pays per subscriber fees to carry the channel.

• Newsmax seeks to change the model by which it commercializes its channel. To date, Newsmax has been an advertising-supported channel. To maximize ad sales it distributes the channel free of charge to the approximately 75 million US households that have a pay TV service as well as to the approximately 55 million US households that don’t and instead view the channel on Newsmax’s website or through services like Roku and Amazon Fire. Under its proposed new model, Newsmax plans to make its channel available exclusively in pay TV, to the detriment of the 55 million households that don’t have a pay TV service, and to start charging pay TV operators a per subscriber fee to distribute the channel.

• Newsmax insisted on its terms – as is its right to do – and we insisted on ours. Lacking continued authorization to distribute Newsmax, DIRECTV was forced to remove the channel from our lineup.

• Although not currently available on DIRECTV, Newsmax continues to be available on most other major pay TV operators and is also available free of charge (including to DIRECTV’s customers) on Newsmax’s website and on platforms like Roku and Amazon Fire.

• Newsmax’s claims that DIRECTV is biased against conservative voices is untrue. Importantly, DIRECTV recently launched The First, a conservative news and commentary channel featuring Bill O’Reilly, Jesse Kelly, Liz Wheeler, and Dana Loesch, among others.

• DIRECTV carries five channels that most people would consider to be predominately news: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, The First and NewsNation. By most people’s measure, two lean conservative (Fox News and The First), two lean liberal (CNN and MSNBC) and one is a new channel that is advertising that it is news focused and in the center (NewsNation). Fox News is by far the leader in terms of audience and household penetration. Newsmax, when we distributed it, was a distant fourth among news channels to Fox, MSNBC and CNN.

• The amounts DIRECTV pays for conservative channels, in the aggregate, is roughly similar to what we pay for liberal channels, in the aggregate.

The company makes clear that its decision was made from a content-neutral perspective. (It is darkly hilarious that the only structural discrimination that right-wing figures can see is a far-right election-denying (https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmax-airs-mike-lindells-cyber-symposium-ad-over-170-times-single-week) media company run by a friend of Donald Trump not getting a massive handout from another private company, but that’s a story for another time.)

Newsmax has repeatedly (https://www.mediamatters.org/eric-bolling/after-directv-removes-newsmax-newsmax-host-eric-bolling-lashes-out-fox-where-are-you) whined (https://www.newsmax.com/bernardkerik/cnn-laptop-oan/2023/02/14/id/1108585/) that Fox News was being silent about the matter. Now, even the opinion page of the Murdoch-owned WSJ is taking pot shots (https://www.wsj.com/articles/newsmax-directv-conservatives-censorship-chris-ruddy-congress-democrats-republicans-ab7480e9) at Republican politicians falling for the charade:

We take no side in this business dispute, and it’s bewildering why many Republicans are getting involved. Forty-two House Republicans last month wrote a letter to DirecTV executives and its joint owners, AT&T and TPG, threatening to investigate the TV provider for colluding with the government to suppress conservative voices.

Sens. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee and Tom Cotton piled on this month with a letter suggesting DirecTV may have dropped Newsmax because of “pressure from administration officials or Democrats in Congress” and “may be the latest example of big business suppressing politically disfavored speech at the behest of liberal Democrats.”

Their evidence? A letter from Democratic Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney to AT&T CEO John Stankey last February calling for the company to combat misinformation spread by conservative news networks. A letter from two Democratic Congress Members, which was also sent to other TV providers, doesn’t add up to a vast leftwing conspiracy. The Fox News channel, where these pages have a news program, is also a Democratic target.

DirecTV notes that it helped launch Newsmax in 2014 and recently launched the new conservative channel called “The First,” which will increase diversity and competition among conservative voices. Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy doesn’t want that. Instead, he is trying to bring political and government pressure to bear on DirecTV to force the satellite operator to carry the channel on Newsmax’s terms.

(First, a footnote about cable providers and Fox News: Fox News Channel has (https://unfoxmycablebox.com/) one (https://www.nofoxfee.com/) of the highest carriage fees in the business, way out of line for what cable providers pay other networks. It’s so high thatFox News would remain profitable even with no advertising.)

It’s unclear where this story will go from here. There’s nothing that goes viral on the right like victimhood, and they simply cannot start examining those claims too closely given how many of them are snake oil. In the meantime, there’s no evidence that either consumers or DirecTV itself are the least bit intimidated by any of this. After all, it’s just another grift (https://www.mediamatters.org/newsmax/newsmaxs-sordid-history-scams-grifts-and-cons).

https://www.alternet.org/tom-cotton-press-freedom-bill/

did he think this wd work b/c of rw echo and reflexive trump is macho?

During her appearance on MSNBC"s "The Sunday Show," former Republican Party campaign consultant Tara Seymater went off on an epic rant attacking Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) for trying to blame President Joe Biden for Vladimir Putin's saber-rattling as he reportedly prepares to invade Ukraine.

During his own rant, Cotton claimed, "For four years when we had a Republican president who Democrats like Joe Biden accused of being in Vladimir Putin's pocket, and for some reason Vladimir Putin didn't invade Ukraine. It's because the only way to confront an aggressive autocrat like Putin or Xi Jinping is to show strength from the very beginning. That's the way to deter the kind of conflict that is likely about to happen in Ukraine."

"Tara, what's he talking about? " host Jonathan Capehart asked.

"Let's go back to the videotape, shall we?" Setmayer replied. "If it really means showing strength means kissing the ass of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, well, then I guess that Donald Trump put America first."

"It's asinine for him to even imply that. Do we need to go over all the dozens upon dozens of examples of Donald Trump acquiescing to Vladimir Putin? Remember he wouldn't call Putin a killer during the Super Bowl in 2017?," she stated before quoting the ex-president remarking, " 'There's lots of killers, are we so innocent?'"

"What about Helsinki where Donald Trump stood on the world stage and gave more credibility to Vladimir Putin than our own intelligence agencies?" she continued. "What about how when Trump said, we don't care about those sanctions, he can keep Crimea. What about the time where Donald Trump, with open arms, embraced Sergei Lavrov to come into the Oval Office of the United States and passed off intelligence information to the Russians? I could keep going, there are so many examples that are so egregious that the cold warriors of the Republican Party who know better freaked out over, and Ronald Reagan would be spinning in his grave over it."

"I say to Tom Cotton, and the rest of them, get out the hell of here. We saw the video for four years, we lived through it," she concluded.

Watch below:

Cotton Hammers Biden Admin, Left-Wing Activists' Climate Agenda: 'A ... (https://grabien.com/file.php?id=1596243)

4 days agoJoe Biden, left-wing politics, Tom Cotton, Harris Faulkner, global warming/climate change, Biden Administration Source Fox News Channel (FNC) Show The Faulkner Focus Persons Tom Cotton, Harris Faulkner Event Interview Event location - Link - Uploaded 07/19/2022 08:50 pm Owner dpatterson@hughhewitt.com Type Video Format

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, now 80, joined the National Institutes of Health back in 1968 and has worked with a long list of Republican presidents — from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Gerald Ford. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has become an object of irrational hatred in the far-right MAGA movement. And journalist Alexander Bolton, in an article published by The Hill (https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/583716-gop-anger-with-fauci-rises) on December 1, explains why that hatred has recently become even worse.

Fauci considers his work with the federal government apolitical, often stressing that his top priority is public health regardless of whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican — and he typically dodges overtly political questions during his frequent appearances on MSNBC and CNN. But Fauci deeply offended thin-skinned MAGA Republicans when, during a Sunday, November 28 appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” he told host Margaret Brennan that his detractors are “really criticizing science because I represent science.”

One of those Republicans was Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who claimed, “Tony Fauci is nothing more than a Democratic operative.” Cotton would do well to research his party’s pre-MAGA history; Fauci got along fine with President Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush.

In fact, a June 19, 2008 press release (https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/06/20080619-9.html) from the George W. Bush White House stated, “Three decades ago, a mysterious and terrifying plague began to take the lives of people across the world. Before this malady even had a name, it had a fierce opponent in Dr. Anthony Fauci. As the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for more than 23 years, Tony Fauci has led the fight against HIV and AIDS. He was also a leading architect and champion of the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which over the past five years, has reached millions of people — preventing HIV infections in infants and easing suffering and bringing dying communities back to life.”

That press release went on to say, “Those who know Tony do admit one flaw: sometimes, he forgets to stop working…. For his determined and aggressive efforts to help others live longer and healthier lives, I'm proud to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.”

Regardless, Cotton and other Republicans view attacking Fauci as a way to score cheap political points with the MAGA crowd, and no one is better at such pandering than former Donald Trump critic turned obsequious Trump sycophant Ted Cruz. The far-right Texas senator has slammed Fauci as “the most dangerous bureaucrat in the history of America” and made the ludicrous comment that Fauci should serve prison time for denying that the NIH funded virus research at a lab in Wuhan, China — which is where COVID-19 was first reported in December 2019.

Fox News’ Lara Logan, according to Bolton, has even compared Fauci to the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele of Nazi Germany infamy.

But one Republican who is calling out the far right’s anti-Fauci nonsense is Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. Bolton quotes the 2012 GOP presidential nominee as saying, “A lot of politics today is performance politics, which is saying things which excite the bases of our respective parties. I look at Dr. Fauci as an expert in disease and viruses (and) respect his point of view. He’s not perfect; like all humans, he will make mistakes. Politicizing him is just par for the course these days in our highly politicized environment, but I respect him as a scientist.”

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the men's fellowship was told to bring guns. "They call it Shootin' with the Savior," my friend said. "I'm 70 years old! And I am not going to march into the woods with a Bible and a gun, and line up for target practice. It's pure nonsense is what it is."

I've stopped in the parking lot to chat with Bob. Bob belongs to one of the biggest churches in town. This last year, he has been attending services remotely on Facebook. Though he has been an active member for decades, he's unsure whether he will go back. His pastor, he said, never took the covid seriously. "Remember that church shooting they had down in Texas a few years back?" Bob said as we stepped aside for two women to pass. "It wasn't two weeks 'til we had the whole church strung up with security cameras and men carrying guns inside and outside Sunday service. But the virus? The one that could actually kill me and my wife? Our pastor hardly mentions it."

Bob is an anti-Trump conservative and I am an outspoken liberal, both political outcasts here in rural Anderson County, Kentucky, population 23,000, where the disgraced former president won more than (https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/kentucky/%C2%A0%C2%A0) 70 percent of the vote in 2016 and 2020.

It is normal for us to see men carrying guns of all sizes whether at Walmart or the State Capitol 15 miles up the road. It is normal to see armed Three Percenters guarding the confederate statue on the courthouse lawn or standing outside the Judge Executive's office before a public meeting, having a laugh with the locals. And it is normal to see and hear the constant, unwavering refusal, in person and online, of these men refusing to wear masks or take the vaccine. Is that a diaper on your face?! Don't be a sheep! Fauci is a phony!Whether it is the national obsession with guns or the refusal of a free, lifesaving vaccine, either way, performative masculinity is literally killing us.

My own brother remains unvaccinated. In one of his Facebook profile photos, he appears fully decked out in his National Guard gear with AR-15 style rifles stacked on the ground in a circle around him. Photo title: "Me and my bitches." When I asked our (vaccinated) dad why my brother is not vaccinated, he told me that in the beginning it was politics. Now it's just chest-thumping stubbornness.

"He can't get vaccinated now," he said, "because then you'll be right."

"If I'm right that makes him a pussy?" I said.

"Exactly."

United States Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas—where the over-12 vaccination rate is 41.45 percent—recently spoke at the Third Annual Machine Gun Shoot in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire. Cotton can be seen on camera, smiling and chatting with a crowd of men at the range while shooting large, heavy, rapid-fire guns (https://www.c-span.org/video/?513412-1/sen-cotton-r-ar-visits-hampshire-shooting-range%C2%A0).

Does anyone believe these men are vaccinated? And why is a senator from Arkansas wasting his time on a shooting range in New Hampshire? Because it is no longer enough to prove your presidential manhood by riding a horse (Ronald Reagan) or clearing brush (George W. Bush). You have to be filmed firing the biggest, loudest firearm you can. That or getting on Fox primetime to rant about how masks and vaccine requirements, like proposed gun laws, infringe on American freedoms.

United States Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote in her 2014 book, A Fighting Chance,that the country loses eight kids and teens to gun violence every day. "If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials," the Democrat wrote. "We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children."

We did not move heaven and earth, nor will we.

We can't get 30 percent to take a free vaccine.

The population of Kentucky is about the same as the population of Los Angeles, yet we rank 15th in the nation in gun suicides. Our junior United States Senator Rand Paul touts gun rights anytime someone hands him a microphone. Mass, preventable death does not move him. So it was no surprise this past year, as Americans were dying daily by the thousands, when Paul made himself infamous for publicly berating Dr. Anthony Fauci and for being on the Senate floor sans-mask throughout the covid pandemic.

What does it matter if 610,000 Americans are dead from a virus. Is that a diaper on your face?! Don't be a sheep! Fauci is a phony!Like Tom Cotton on the shooting range, performative masculinity is the drug Rand Paul's voting base is jonesing for. And who has time to move heaven and earth when there are elections to think about?

Like Bob, I missed Shootin' with the Savior, but I did go to an outdoor range during the pandemic where, with the help of firearms experts, I learned to shoot nine guns ranging in size from the AR-15 to a pistol I can fit in my pocket. I hadn't shot a gun in 40 years and wanted to see what all the Proud Boy hoopla was about. What I learned is the AR-15 is easy to shoot. Too easy. I did not mug for a camera crew to prove it.

Our health director here in Anderson County tells me that he's booking around 40 vaccine appointments a week, of which 30 might show up. Because school starts next week, on Saturday, he held a special clinic. Only 37 people came. Today, I asked him, "What's it going to take to get people's attention? The death of someone's child?"

He did not answer, nor did I expect him to.

Men have been gunning down children at schools since Columbine. Their stories are a blip in the news cycle. School kids dying from the virus will be one more blip.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/tom-cotton/ corps fascist? voter suppress

// cawthorne stolen honor, going for seal team 6 macho?

Cotton has claimed he was an 'Army Ranger.' That's just not true (https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/tom-cotton-army-ranger/)

competes w/ cruz for maga love? 2024?

You used MAGA!': Trump supporters turn on Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton for breaking with GOP election challenge (https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/tom-cotton/)

Igor Derysh (https://www.alternet.org/author/igor-derysh) Salon (https://www.alternet.org/author/salon)

January 04, 2021

Two of President Donald Trump's closest Senate allies pushed back on their colleagues' futile plans to challenge the Electoral College results (https://www.salon.com/2020/12/30/why-are-republicans-suing-mike-pence-heres-what-the-vice-president-can--and-cant--do-on-jan-6/) on Wednesday, quickly drawing attacks from the president's supporters.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/qanon-trump

amanda

Trump's attempts to steal the election are fruitless. His legal theater is going nowhere, and it's becoming apparent that this is more about shaking down credulous supporters for cash (https://www.salon.com/2020/11/17/giulianis-disgraceful-courtroom-election-fraud-arguments-are-from-a-fantasy-world-defense-says/) than about actually overturning the election results. Michigan pounded another nail in Trump's coffin Tuesday (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/us/politics/michigan-certify-election-results.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage), when two Republicans who were blocking the vote certification in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, relented in the face of public outrage. It's all over but the grifting, which will likely continue as long as Trump keeps getting people to give him money for his "legal defense" — money that is being funneled through a PAC and likely straight into Trump's pocket (https://www.salon.com/2020/11/10/trump-is-already-using-his-electoral-loss-to-raise-money-for-his-new-leadership-pac/).

Yet the Republican establishment is still tiptoeing around Trump, coddling his fragile ego by refusing to admit he lost the election. Some are going a step further, such as South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been exerting pressure on state officials to toss out legally-cast ballots (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/us/politics/lindsey-graham-georgia-trump-biden.html). Why are all these Republicans so afraid of Trump, who will no longer be president in 63 days?

The main reason appears to be that Republicans really are worried about their electoral prospects after Trump. The record Democratic turnout in the 2020 election — President-elect Joe Biden turned out 14 million more voters than Hillary Clinton in 2016 — caused many Republicans down-ballot from Trump to sweat their re-election prospects. Luckily for them, however, Trump also turned out an eye-popping 10 million new voters (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/16/us/politics/election-turnout.html), which was enough to save the skins of many GOP candidates, even as Trump lost by slender margins in swing states.

Trump is a turnout machine for Republicans, who have been desperately casting around for years now for a way to save their party despite demographic changes that make the Democrats more popular among voters. The question of whether there will be Trumpism after Trump now dogs both Republicans who want to replicate their electoral successes under the reality TV president and Democrats who dearly hope this whole disaster was an anomaly.

"\S]ome conservative opinion leaders are already looking forward to a post-Trump future where the viable things about the 45th president can be neatly separated from his troublesome persona," [Ed Kilgore writes for New York (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/who-could-lead-trumpism-without-trump.html).

He cites "a representative fantasy" by right-wing writer Kristin Tate at The Hill (https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/526166-why-trumpism-is-here-to-stay), who longs for a "Republican with the political positions of Trump, but without decades of tabloid fodder," proposing that candidate might avoid "the bandwagon effect of suburban voters eager to show their public disapproval of his latest action."

Kilgore explores the various hopes that Republicans have for a "new Trump." Will it be Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Bible-thumper straight out of "The Handmaid's Tale" who has some crossover appeal for his occasional swipes at corporate America (though mostly for its perceived degeneracy)? Or Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who brings the racism and militant neofascism of Trump, but without the gleeful sleaze of a shameless sexual assailant?

These choices expose why Republicans fear that there may be no way to have Trumpism without Trump. Those guys and other contenders are all missing the secret sauce that helped Trump recruit so heavily among non-voters and infrequent voters. And no, it's not his so-called charisma.

What Trump really has going for him is what I call the "crackpot factor." Trump speaks to voters who share the racism and sexism of typical GOP voters, but who often don't vote because they think politics is boring and are awash in conspiracy theories about how the system is "rigged." Those voters saw a kindred spirit in Trump, a man who speaks fluent conspiracy theory and who got his start in politics by promoting claims that Barack Obama wasn't a native-born U.S. citizen.

Before the 2020 election, the team at FiveThirtyEight took a deep dive on the views of people who vote infrequently or not at all (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/non-voters-poll-2020-election/). There's a lot of reasons for non-voting, such as a belief it doesn't matter or the obstacles that make voting difficult, but one important factor was a lack of trust in the system. For some voters, especially nonwhite voters or liberal-leaning voters, this is unfortunately a realistic assessment of the situation, where social progress often feels glacial and voting doesn't seem to make much difference....

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/27/tom-cotton-slavery-necessary-evil/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/tom-cotton-actually-called-slavery-a-necessary-evil-in-push-to-ban-schools-from-teaching-the-1619-project/

no lnx

Laura Clawson / Daily Kos July 27, 2020

The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones continues to live rent-free in Republican heads, with Sen. Tom Cotton pushing Senate legislation to penalize schools for using a curriculum based on the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones spearheaded the project, which “seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution,” as the project was described when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her essay.

”The 1619 Project is left-wing propaganda. It’s revisionist history at its worst,” Cotton toldthe Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Cotton’s view? “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

So … it’s left-wing propaganda for Hannah-Jones to put slavery and its legacy at the center of U.S. history, but the Founding Fathers saw slavery as “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.” If it was a necessary evil according to the people who defined the basis of the nation, then yeah, it’s necessary to put slavery at the center of our history.

Cotton said he rejects, “root and branch,” the idea “that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable.” But again, he really took that “necessary evil” thing and ran with it.

Hannah-Jones challenged Cotton, asking “Were the Founders right or wrong, @TomCottonAR, when they called slavery a ‘necessary evil upon which the Union was built’? Because either you agree with their assessment of slavery as necessary or you admit they were lying and it was just an evil and dishonorable choice. Which?”

Cotton’s is an attempt to counter a status quo history curriculum that has its own politics.

“The way that history is taught in American schools is highly politicized and it really has a nationalistic agenda,” Hannah-Jones recently told WBUR. “What that has meant is that it has necessarily downplayed the role of slavery.”

School districts including Chicago, Washington, and Buffalo are adopting the 1619 Project curriculum, and Cotton sees this as his chance to elevate himself in the Trumpian culture wars, sending a strong message that he intends to continue sidelining Black people in U.S. history—and, onlookers can infer, in other ways.

an 720

Why Tom Cotton hates a moral press (https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/why-tom-cotton-hates-a-moral-press/)John Stoehr (https://www.alternet.org/author/john-stoehr/), The Editorial bd (https://www.alternet.org/author/the-editorial-board/)

barr trump need bogeyman/threat to justify cop violence

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-and-trump-desperately-want-to-blame-antifa-for-violence-but-theyre-coming-up-dry-so-far/

no lnx alex h

President Donald Trump has turned his wrath on Antifa during the George Floyd protests, demanding Antifa be labeled a terrorist organization and accusing the movement of committing acts of violence at demonstrations. But journalists William Bredderman and Spencer Ackerman, in the Daily Beast, threw cold this week on efforts to blame the leftist group.

They found that “none of the 22 criminal complaints representing the first wave of protest charges mention Antifa in any way.”

Calling Antifa a “terrorist organization” is problematic in more than one respect. First, Antifa doesn’t begin to fit the traditional definition of terrorism and doesn’t target innocent bystanders the way that actual terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan have done. Second, Antifa isn’t an organization, but a decentralized movement and collection of tactics.

Bredderman and Ackerman discuss the ideologies of defendants in the protest cases, noting that they range from “anarchism” to the far-right Boogaloo movement — and that none of the charges mention anti-fascism (which is what Antifa stands for). According to retired FBI special agent Mike German, “What it definitely demonstrates is that anti-fascism is not a driving force in the current protest violence.”

Nonetheless, Attorney General William Barr has joined Trump in blaming Antifa for violence at demonstrations. At a press conference on Thursday, Barr told reporters, “We have evidence that Antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”

Bredderman and Ackerman note some reasons why Trump and Barr’s claims about Antifa are so misleading.

“Despite Trump’s rhetoric about designating Antifa a terrorist organization, Antifa is an ethic rather than an actual group — and even if it were a group, there is no domestic terrorism statute for designating a non-foreign entity as a banned terrorist organization,” Bredderman and Ackerman note. “That’s not stopped a chorus of right-wing voices from fantasizing about state violence against ant-fascist Americans.”

For example, the Beast journalists point out, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted, “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.”

Tom Cotton

@TomCottonAR

US Senate candidate, AR

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.

If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.

We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.

137K

6:29 AM - Jun 1, 2020

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69.9K people are talking about this

cody f

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/gop-senator-horrifies-readers-with-a-new-authoritarian-call-in-the-new-york-times/

it's a simple headline: “Send in the troops.” But its meaning is clear, and it’s deeply disturbing.

That’s the title the New York Times gave to a new op-ed written by Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html), one of the most militaristic and hawkish members of Congress. He had previously caused a stir this week by calling (https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/two-gop-lawmakers-advocate-extraordinarily-dangerous-military-escalation-in-response-to-george-floyd-protests/) for the military to be unleashed on protesters with a “no quarter” order — meaning that they would take no prisoners and simply kill at will. Cotton later said he had been speaking metaphorically.

But his new op-ed isn’t about symbolism. He painted a grim picture of the violence that has accompanied some of the peaceful protests calling for justice in the name of George Floyd, a man who was recently heinously killed by police.

“\N]ihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/attorney-general-william-p-barrs-statement-riots-and-domestic-terrorism) infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes,” he wrote. “These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. Many poor communities that [still bear scars (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/dc-riots-1968/) from past upheavals will be set back still further.”

Cotton didn’t mention the fact that a recent FBI report, as uncovered by The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/antifa-trump-fbi/), warned of potential protest violence with links to the right-wing. And he completely ignored the ongoing violence from law enforcement itself, frequently directed at peaceful protesters and journalists with no justification (https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-police-are-the-rioters-and-the-president-is-the-looter/). It’s exactly this violence that is fueling the ongoing unrest, but Cotton and his ilk ignore it completely or excuse it. There should be no excuse for unjustified and unprovoked violence by protesters or police, but the government bears special responsibility for making sure agents of the state are accountable and remaining strictly within the limits of the law and morality.

Instead — as always — Cotton wants to ratchet up the level of confrontation, echoing the president’s instincts, by bringing in the military:

One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.

The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

He didn’t consider that escalating the stakes of the clashes, rather than moving for de-escalation, could make the situation worse, not better. And he dismissed the possibility that giving President Donald Trump this power would place us on a glide path to authoritarianism, something many Republicans claimed to fear with Barack Obama was in the White House.

But oppressive acts of force are always Cotton’s solution. He once said war with Iran (https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/gops-tom-cotton-blasted-as-delusional-for-claiming-that-war-with-iran-could-be-won-in-only-two-strikes/) would be over quickly, a crystal clear display of the hawk’s fallacy that violence is an easy answer. And conveniently, Cotton seems to like being seen to side with Trump; two of his other recent Times op-eds were defenses of killing Qassim Suleimani and of buying Greenland.

There’s no shred of an indication of nuance or thoughtfulness in his argument. There’s no fear of unintended consequences, or a warning about taking things too far. It’s pure authoritarian propaganda. And it’s a disturbing sign of what the GOP is becoming.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-is-on-the-verge-of-repeating-a-historic-disaster-by-pushing-the-wuhan-lab-hoax/

There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”

That’s funny. What’s not is that the Trump administration and its coterie of China-bashers, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and aided by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have recently been dusting off the fake-intelligence playbook Vice President Dick Cheney used in 2002 and 2003 to justify war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. At that time, the administration of President George W. Bush put enormous pressure on the U.S. intelligence community to ratify spurious allegations that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda and that his regime had assembled an arsenal of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fantasy claims they may have been, but they did help to convince many skeptical conservatives and spooked liberals that a unilateral, illegal invasion of Iraq was urgently needed.

This time around, it’s the Trump administration’s reckless charge that Covid-19 — maybe manmade, maybe not, advocates of this conspiracy theory argue — was released perhaps deliberately, perhaps by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city that was the epicenter of the outbreak late last year. It’s a story that has ricocheted around the echo chambers of the far right, from conspiracy-oriented Internet kooks like Infowars’ Alex Jones (https://youtu.be/EfCd-LrQb7A) to semi-respectable media tribunes and radio talk-show hosts to the very highest reaches of the administration itself, including President Trump.

Unlike with Iraq in 2003, the U.S. isn’t planning on going to war with China, at least not yet (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/opinion/china-coronavirus-trump.html). But the Trump administration’s zeal in shifting attention from its own bungling of the Covid-19 crisis to China’s alleged culpability in creating a global pandemic only raises tensions precipitously between the planet’s two great powers at a terrible moment. In the process, it essentially ensures that the two countries will be far less likely to cooperate in managing the long-term pandemic or collaboratively working on vaccines and cures. That makes it, as in 2002-2003, a matter of life and death.

Iraq Redux?

Back in 2002, the Bush administration launched an unending campaign of pressure on the CIA and other intelligence agencies to falsify, distort, and cherry-pick intelligence factoids that could be collated into a package linking al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. At the Pentagon, neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up an ad hoc team that eventually took on the name of Office of Special Plans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans). It was dedicated tofabricating intelligence on Iraq.

Just in case the message didn’t get across, Vice President Cheney made repeated visits (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/06/05/some-iraq-analysts-felt-pressure-from-cheney-visits/4afb2009-20e7-4619-b40f-669c9d94dcf3/) to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to badger analysts to come up with something useful. In 2003, in “The Lie Factory (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory/),” which I co-authored with Jason Vest for Mother Jones, we reported on how Wolfowitz, Feith, allied Defense Department officials like Harold Rhode, and neoconservative apparatchiks like David Wurmser, then a senior adviser to Iraq-war-touting State Department Undersecretary John Bolton (and now an unofficial advisor (https://theintercept.com/2020/01/16/david-wurmser-iran-suleimani-iraq-war/) to Donald Trump on Iran), actively worked to purge Pentagon and CIA officials who resisted the push to shape or exaggerate intelligence. A year later, veteran spy-watcher James Bamford described the whole episode in excruciating detail in his 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pretext_for_War) book, A Pretext for War.

In 2020, however, President Trump is not just pressuring the intelligence community, or IC. He’s at war (https://www.justsecurity.org/66035/the-pattern-and-practice-of-trumps-assaults-on-the-intelligence-community/) with it and has been busy installing unprofessional know-nothings and sycophants in top positions there. His bitter antipathy began even before he was sworn into office, when he repeatedly refused to believe a sober analysis from the IC, including the CIA and FBI, that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had aided and abetted his election. Since then, he’s continually railed (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/trump-vs-the-deep-state?source=search_google_dsa_paid&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIztmyt7Ks6QIVre7jBx2SSQyYEAMYASAAEgLrr_D_BwE) and tweeted against what he calls “the deep state (https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176650/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_one_cheer_for_the_deep_state/).” And he’s assigned his authoritarian attorney general, Bill Barr, to conduct a scorched-earth offensive (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/08/next-administration-must-investigate-barr-his-henchmen/) against the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/barr-mueller-investigation.html), the FBI, and the Justice Department itself, most recently by dropping charges (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/opinion/sunday/michael-flynn-william-barr-justice-department.html) against admitted liar Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s first national security advisor.

To make sure that the IC doesn’t challenge his wishes and does his bidding, Trump has moved to put his own political operatives in charge at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, created as part of an intelligence reorganization scheme after 9/11. The effort began in February when Trump named U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Grenell) as acting DNI. A highly partisan, sharp-elbowed politico and spokesman for former National Security Advisor John Bolton, he harbors far-right views and is a Trump loyalist, as well as an acolyte of former Trump aide Steve Bannon. On arriving in Bonn as ambassador, Grenell soon endorsed (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/04/new-us-ambassador-to-germany-under-fire-for-rightwing-support) the rise of Europe’s anti-establishment ultra-right in an interview (https://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/06/03/trumps-right-hand-man-in-europe-wants-to-empower-european-anti-establishment-conservatives/) with Bannon’s Breitbart News.

To bolster Grenell, the administration has called on another ultra-right crusader, Kash Patel (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/kash-patel-odni-post-116546). He has served as Republican Congressman Devin Nunes’s aide in the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation and reportedly (https://www.axios.com/national-security-council-staffer-denies-secret-ukraine-conversations-trump-e850964a-a743-4a81-94f4-6630f7f8cc77.html) acted as a White House backchannel to Ukraine during the effort to stir up an inquiry in Kiev aimed at tarring former Vice President Joe Biden.

Following that, the president re-named (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/the-senates-abdication-of-advise-and-consent/611368/) Congressman John Ratcliffe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_%28American_politician%29) of Texas, one of the president’s most enthusiastic defenders (https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/11/13/ratcliffe-bill-taylor-testimony-trump-zelensky-pressure-impeachment-hearing-vpx.cnn) during the debate over impeachment, to serve as Grenell’s permanent replacement at ODNI. In 2019, Trump first floated (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/29/dem-senators-ratcliffe-nomination-intel-chief-1439110) Ratcliffe’s name for the post, but it was shot down (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/02/trump-rep-ratcliffe-out-of-the-running-to-be-national-intelligence-director-1445150) days later, thanks to opposition from even Republican members of Congress, not to speak of intelligence professionals and various pundits. Now, he’s back (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/05/john-ratcliffe-us-senate-national-intelligence), awaiting likely confirmation.

It remains to be seen whether the Grenell-Ratcliffe tag-team, combined with Trump’s three-year campaign to disparage the intelligence community and intimidate its functionaries, has softened them up enough for the administration’s push to finger China and its labs for creating and spreading Covid-19.

The Wuhan Lab Lies

As is often the case, that campaign began rather quietly and unobtrusively in conservative and right-wing media outlets.

On January 24th, the right-wing Washington Times ran a story (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/) entitled “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” It, in turn, was playing off of a piece (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-lab-studying-SARS-Ebola-Wuhan-outbreaks-center.html) that had appeared inLondon’sDaily Mailthe previous day. Written like a science-fiction thriller, that story drew nearly all its (unverified) information from a single source, an Israeli military intelligence China specialist. Soon, it moved from the Washington Times to other American right-wing outlets. Steve Bannon picked it up the next day on his podcast, “War Room: Pandemic (https://pandemic.warroom.org/),” calling the piece “amazing.” A few days later, the unreliable, gossipy website ZeroHedge (https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117663/twitter-zero-hedge-suspended-platform-manipulation-policy-doxxing-coronavirus) ran a (later much-debunked) piece saying that a Chinese scientist bioengineered the virus, purporting even to name the scientist.

A couple of weeks later, Fox News weighed in (https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/dean-koontz-book-predicted-coronavirus), laughably citing a Dean Koontz novel, The Eyes of Darkness, about “a Chinese military lab that creates a new virus to potentially use as a biological weapon during wartime.” The day after that, Senator Tom Cotton — appearing on Fox, of course — agreed that China might indeed have created the virus.Then the idea began to go… well, viral (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic). (Soon Cotton was even tweeting (https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126) that Beijing might possibly have deliberately released the virus.) By late February, the right’s loudest voice, Rush Limbaugh, was on the case, claiming (https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/02/24/overhyped-coronavirus-weaponized-against-trump/) that the virus “is probably a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized.” (A vivid account of how this conspiracy theory spread can be found at the Global Disinformation Index (https://disinformationindex.org/2020/04/evolution-of-the-wuhan-lab-conspiracy-the-ad-funded-sites-spreading-it/).)

Starting in March, even as they were dismissing the seriousness of Covid-19, both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeatedly insisted (https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/trump-china-coronavirus/index.html) on referring to it as the “China virus” or the “Wuhan virus,” ignoring criticism that terminology like that was both racist and inflammatory. In late March, Pompeo even managed to scuttle a communiqué (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/g-7-failed-to-agree-on-statement-after-us-insisted-on-calling-coronavirus-outbreak-wuhan-virus/2020/03/25/f2bc7a02-6ed3-11ea-96a0-df4c5d9284af_story.html) from America’s allies in the Group of Seven, or G7, by demanding that they agree to use the term “Wuhan virus.” It didn’t take the president long to start threatening (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/30/trump-china-coronavirus-retaliation/) retaliatory action against China for its alleged role in spreading Covid-19, whilehe began comparing the pandemic to the 1941 Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52568405).

And all of that was but a prelude to the White House ramping up of pressure on the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to prove that the virus had indeed emerged, whether by design or accident, from either the Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology) or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Center_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention), a branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An April 30th article in the New York Times broke the story (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/us/politics/trump-administration-intelligence-coronavirus-china.html) that administration officials “have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak,” and that Grenell had made it a “priority.”

Both Trump and Pompeo would, in the meantime, repeatedly assert that they had seen actual “evidence (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/495571-trump-says-he-has-seen-evidence-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab)” that the virus had indeed come from a Chinese lab, though Trump pretended that the information was so secret he couldn’t say anything more (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-community-china-coronavirus-origins/index.html) about it. “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Asked during an appearance (https://www.state.gov/secretary-michael-r-pompeo-with-martha-raddatz-of-abcs-this-week-with-george-stephanopoulos/) on ABC’s This Week if the virus had popped out of a lab in Wuhan, Pompeo answered: “There is enormous evidence that that’s where this began.”

On April 30th, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a terse statement (https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/item/2112-intelligence-community-statement-on-origins-of-covid-19), saying that so far it had concluded Covid-19 is “not manmade or genetically modified,” but that they were looking into whether or not it was “the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” There is, however, no evidence of such an accident, nor did the ODNI cite any.

A Finger on the Scale

The run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003 should be on all our minds today. Then, top officials simply repeated again and again that they believed both Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda and his nonexistent active nuclear, chemical, andbioweapon programs were realities and assigned intelligence community collectors and analysts to look into them (while paying no attention to their conclusions). Now, Trump and his people are similarly putting their fat fingers on the scale of reality, while making it clear to hopefully intimidated intelligence professionals just what conclusions they want to hear.

Because those professionals know that their careers, salaries, and pensions depend on the continued favor of the politicians who pay them, there is, of course, a tremendous incentive to go along with such demands, shade what IC officials call the “estimate” in the direction the White House wants, or at least keep their mouths shut. That is exactly what happened in 2002 and, given that Grenell, Patel, and Ratcliffe are essentially Trump toadies, the IC officials lower on the totem pole have to be grimly aware of what their latest bosses expect from them.

There was near-instant pushback from scientists, intelligence officials, and China experts about the Trump-Pompeo campaign to finger the Wuhan lab. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the preeminent American scientist and Covid-19 expert, promptly shot it down (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/fauci-dismisses-trump-claim-coronavirus-started-wuhan-lab-200505170558959.html), saying that the virus had “evolved in nature and then jumped species.” That’s because actual scientists, who study the genome of the virus and its mutations, unanimously agree (https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-the-coronavirus-made-in-a-wuhan-lab-heres-what-the-genetic-evidence-shows) that it was not generated in a lab.

Among America’s allies — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — in what’s called the Five Eyes group, there was an unambiguous conclusion (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intelligence/index.html) that the virus had been a “naturally occurring” one and had mutated in the course of “human and animal interaction.” Australia (https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intelligence-knocks-back-us-government-s-wuhan-lab-virus-claim-20200504-p54pk3.html), in particular (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-australia-china/australia-annoyed-as-u-s-pushes-wuhan-lab-covid-19-theory-idUSKBN22K118), rejected (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/australia-hits-back-at-us-claim-linking-coronavirus-to-wuhan-lab) what appeared to be a fake-intelligence dossier about the Wuhan lab, while German officials in an internal document ridiculed (https://www.courthousenews.com/germany-doubts-us-claim-of-wuhan-virus-lab-leak/) the lab rumors as “a calculated attempt to distract” attention from the Trump administration’s own inept handling of the virus.

Finally, according to (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/trump-pushes-virus-from-china-lab-theory-that-divides-u-s-spies) Bloomberg News, those studying the issue inside the intelligence community now say that suspicions it emerged from a lab are “largely circumstantial since the U.S. has very little information from the ground to back up the lab-escape theory or any other.” In the end, however, that doesn’t mean top IC officials beholden to the White House won’t tailor their conclusions to fit the Trump-Pompeo narrative.

John McLaughlin, who served as deputy director and then acting director of the CIA during the Bush administration, believes that we are indeed seeing a replay of what happened in Iraq nearly two decades ago. “What it reminds me of is the dispute between the CIA and parts of the Bush administration over whether there was an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda,” he said (https://news.wjct.org/post/trump-pushes-theory-virus-origins-some-see-parallels-lead-iraq-war). “They kept asking the CIA, and we kept coming back and saying, ‘You know, it’s just not there.’”

Whether the tug-of-war between Trump, Pompeo, and the IC is just another passing battle in a more than three-year-old war between the president and the “Deep State” or whether it’s something that could lead to a serious crisis between Washington and Beijing remains to be seen. Ironically enough, in January and February of this year, the IC provided (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence-reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely-pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html) President Trump with more than a dozen clear warnings (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html) about the dangers to the United States and national security posed by the coronavirus, following (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf) clarion calls from China (https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/) and the World Health Organization (https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/01/30/coronavirus-1st-us-human-to-human-transmission-confirmed-right-before-who-emergency-meeting/#44e30d07fcac) that what was happening in Wuhan could spread (https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200121-sitrep-1-2019-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=20a99c10_4) worldwide — warnings that Trump either failed to notice, disregarded, or downplayed through March.

Were Donald Trump not so predisposed to see the intelligence community as his enemy, he might have paid more attention back then. Had he done so, there would undoubtedly be many less dead Americans right now and he wouldn’t have had to spend his time in his own lab concocting what might be thought of as batshit excuses for his dereliction of duty.

By the time this affair is over, the invasion of Iraq could look like the good old days.

Bob Dreyfuss, an investigative journalist and TomDispatch regular (https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176671/tomgram%3A_bob_dreyfuss%2C_a_giuliani-trump_foreign_policy/), is a contributing editor at the Nation and has written for Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, the American Prospect, the New Republic, and many other magazines. He is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805081372/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20).

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tom Cotton: Ban Chinese students from learning science so they can’t ‘steal’ coronavirus vaccine (https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/tom-cotton-ban-chinese-students-from-learning-science-so-they-cant-steal-coronavirus-vaccine/)

David Edwards (https://www.alternet.org/author/david-edwards/) / Raw Story (https://www.alternet.org/author/raw-story/)

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Sunday argued that the United States should ban Chinese students from learning about science while they are in the United States.

new smart or racist?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/panicked-republicans-now-want-to-blame-impeachment-for-bungling-the-coronavirus-response-report/

no lnx

Panicked Republicans now want to blame impeachment for bungling the coronavirus response: report

Written by Travis Gettys / Raw Story March 30, 2020

Congress was slow to understand the threat from coronavirus, and now Republicans want to blame impeachment.

Back in January, as Democrats presented their evidence in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, only a few lawmakers from both parties were urging action against the highly contagious virus that had shut down parts of China and recently arrived in the United States, reported Politico.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) became alarmed over Martin Luther King Day weekend reading reports about the coronavirus in China, which he noticed a disconnect between China’s rosy statements about the outbreak and the drastic steps it was taking to contain it.

The Arkansas Republican started pressing the White House to ban travel from China, and he called Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner and privately warned them about the coronavirus, and he also urged action from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other top officials.

Publicly, however, Trump said Jan. 22 that his team had the U.S. outbreak “totally under control,” and only 14 senators showed up for an all-Senate briefing requested by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and held on Jan. 24, which was the deadline for senators to turn in their impeachment questions.

“The initial thought from the Dems, I think, is that we were trying to distract from impeachment,” a Republican Senate aide said.

However, Democrats started stepping up their warnings shortly afterward, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urged the Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 26 to declare coronavirus a public health emergency, which would free up $85 million in funding to control the outbreak.

Both of Washington state’s senators — Democrats Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell — demanded Jan. 28 that Azar keep them up to date on his agency’s efforts to fight the outbreak, and the White House did heed Cotton’s advice and banned most travel from China on Jan. 31.

The impeachment trial ended Feb. 5 with Trump’s acquittal, and Cotton and other Republicans insist the process distracted lawmakers and the president — but Democrats disagree, saying the House wasn’t even briefed on the virus until the Senate trial was over.

Democrats started asking for emergency funding for the outbreak on Feb. 5, the last day of the impeachment trial, after Azar held a closed-door briefing, and they also point out that Trump and most other Republicans continued to downplay the threat well into March.

“Senate Republicans were not using February to pressure the president to get serious about an early supplemental [appropriations] request,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who tweeted out a complaint after that briefing that the administration wasn’t taking the threat seriously enough.

Democrats say, even if impeachment had never happened, they doubt Republicans would have been willing to take dramatic steps to fight a viral outbreak they mocked and downplayed until it had wrecked the economy and forced the shutdown of schools and businesses.

“In an alternate world in which impeachment wasn’t happening, I don’t think the replacement would have been an earlier bill on coronavirus,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA). “Even as we were passing our Phase 1 coronavirus bill many House Republicans were not taking coronavirus seriously, even mocking the issue.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/yale-psychiatrist-explains-why-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and-donald-trumps-irrational-cult-is-a-deadly-combination/

wacko

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It's Time to Stop Televising Trump's Briefings]

Fox News Is Still Peddling Coronavirus Misinformation to Its Extremely At-Risk Viewers

The network's audience skews older. When will it stop doubling down on the propaganda that could put viewers in mortal danger?

image

BY JACK HOLMES

MAR 13, 2020

The people most at risk in the novel coronavirus pandemic are the elderly and those with immunodeficiency. That's why we all have a duty to practice social distancing, even if we are younger and unlikely to bear the brunt of all this. We owe it to people in gravest danger. In America, many of those at-risk older folks watch a lot of Fox News. In some cases, it's their main or only source of information. But even over the last day or so, the network has scarcely changed the tune on its opinion shows, even as Fox employees are now starting to work from home.

The morning and primetime shows are still downplaying the threat of the virus, occasionally suggesting it's some sort of plot orchestrated against the president. (By the Deep State? In coordination with, uh, 60 million Italians? And the first lady of Canada?) The network is offering people misinformation or even outright conspiracies, often by booking guests who have zero expertise in any field beyond kissing Donald Trump's ass. In short, the Fox News Channel is an enterprise that seems determined to place its core customer base in mortal danger. Beyond the sociopathy, this seems bad for business.

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President Trump Addresses Nation From White House On Coronavirus

It's Not 'Politicizing the Crisis,' It's Your Duty]

We had one example last night on the television program hosted by Sean Hannity, just the man you want serving up fact-like objects regarding a global pandemic. The superstar peddler of resentment and paranoia hosted a succession of people who know nothing about pandemic disease to yell at each other about who's peddling "Chinese propaganda." Then he had on Tom Cotton, United States Senator from Arkansas, and one of the most brazenly irresponsible people in elected office today.

.@SenTomCotton on the Bidens' coziness w/ China: "In light of how China's unleashed this plague on the entire world ... it's even more urgent that we examine Joe Biden's decade long record of being wrong on China" and Hunter's biz dealings. pic.twitter.com/PZZVZ4GYaJ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 13, 2020

They are conspiracizing about Hunter Biden after weeks of completely failing their viewers on the actual defining issue of the day. Not only that, Cotton was determined to hit every insane note. He had a fair-enough critique of Joe Biden's comments on China—they were, indeed, stupid—but then it was on to vague insinuation of Biden corruption; unproven claims about the effectiveness of Trump's travel ban on China; framing the pandemic, without evidence, as an attack on America by "the Chinese Communist Party." Using smoke and mirrors that fans of The Emails (2016) will recognize, Cotton attempted to tie Hunter Biden's overseas business connections to coronavirus.

Then Hannity jumped in with some (nonsense) Ukraine talk before a brief discussion of how hard he, Sean Hannity, has worked for his money.

Then Cotton was back on, suggesting there are "fishy circumstances" and calling for an investigation into the Bidens. Again, this is amid a global pandemic Fox has downplayed for weeks. (Cotton, for his part, has been making a lot of noise about it.) Then Cotton reiterated the notion, citing zero evidence, that this is some sort of bioweapon attack orchestrated by China on the whole world. If there is an elected official hornier for international conflict than Tom Cotton, his first name is Lindsey.

Cotton: China is "not going to get away with infecting the world with this Chinese Coronavirus” pic.twitter.com/DbFN48h5H9

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 13, 2020

Yes, the Chinese government lied and distorted the issue for months and punished whistleblowers in totalitarian fashion. We still had months to prepare and did nothing. The President of the United States himself distorted and downplayed the threat constantly. He said people were going to work while sick, no big deal. He said it would go away miraculously. He said we were on the brink of having a vaccine available. All of this was complete bullshit, excavated from his ass and served up to the public at a juncture when we actually could have done something.

And just last night, we learned via NPR this public posture completely reflected what was going on behind the scenes. Trump rejected pleas from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that coronavirus represented a serious threat that required action in January. Up until this week, the president has resisted widespread testing—one of the keys to South Korea's success in mitigating the problem—for a simple reason: "The president had made clear—the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall."

Throughout all this, the president and his allies have believed they can will this thing away like every other scandal that has struck his presidency. If they just keep doubling down on unreality, eventually enough people will believe it that it will be true, just like all their other scams. Except the virus is impervious to bullshit. Cotton's deployment of the term "Chinese coronavirus" is a signal they are going to try to racism their way out of this now, but it's not going to work when Fox News viewers start contracting the virus in large numbers. Which, as it stands, is going to happen. Earlier this week, a congressional doctor estimated 75 to 150 million Americans will get this thing. But this is what Fox served up to viewers this morning.

On Fox & Friends, Jerry Falwell Jr claims people are "overreacting" to coronavirus, the national response is "their next attempt to get Trump," and the virus itself is a North Korean bioweapon. pic.twitter.com/2JPuNBW7C3

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) March 13, 2020

What the fuck, man? Why are you hosting Trump's pastor-adjacent amigo—who has intricate ties to former Trump fixer Michael Cohen—to talk about a public-health threat? What value does Jerry Falwell offer if you actually want to inform your viewers, who again are often in the most at-risk demographic group, about the situation with COVID-19? (Later, he called for various counties to secede from Virginia. To reiterate: what the fuck?) Falwell even took Cotton's bioweapon conspiracy-mongering to a new level, suggesting this was the result of North Korea's (??) work in cahoots with China. Also, he said it's an impeachment hoax. Again: 60 million Italians are quarantined in their homes, singing together out their windows to feel they're not alone for days on end, as part of a plan to remove the American president from office?

This is just more doubling down, even as these people surely know that some of the people watching are going to die from this thing. That is just a fact. Fox News viewers who've been told for weeks that this thing is not a big deal, that the media is blowing it out of proportion to hurt the president, that it's some bioweapon-slash-hoax, are going to die. Eventually, everyone will agree that this was not some Liberal Fake News Anti-Trump Hoax. Eventually, it will surely be clear, even to Fox News viewers, that Fox News has been lying about it in conjunction with the president. Will this change how people evaluate what constitutes a good source of information? Don't hold your breath.

JACK HOLMES Politics Editor

Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

primary 5/18 on haspell booster

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mercer

GOP’s Tom Cotton calls for unauthorized ‘retaliatory strike’ on Iran with ‘the fire and fury of the military’ (https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/gops-tom-cotton-calls-for-unauthorized-retaliatory-strike-on-iran-with-the-fire-and-fury-of-the-military/)

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/dont-fall-for-it-arizona-congressman-and-former-marine-who-gets-the-same-intel-as-tom-cotton-warns-some-gopers-are-exaggerating-the-iran-threat/

Before Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona pursued a career in politics, he served in the United States military: Gallego was a Marine infantryman in Iraq in 2005. And the 39-year-old Democratic congressman is warning that the push for a military confrontation with Iran in 2019 is full of misleading assertions.

Gallego, now a member of the House Armed Services Committee, received a classified briefing on May 17—and the following day, he told the Washington Post, “What I saw was a lot of misinterpretation and wanting conflict coming from the administration and intelligence community. Intel doesn’t show existential threats. Even what it shows, it doesn’t show threats to U.S. interests.”

The claim that Iran poses a major threat to the U.S. in 2019, according to Gallego, is mainly being advanced by National Security Adviser John Bolton and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. On Saturday, Gallego took to Twitter and warned, “I get the same intel as Cotton. He is greatly exaggerating the situation to spur us to war. Don’t fall for it.”

President Donald Trump has been highly critical of President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry on Iran policy, terminating their arms agreement with the Iranian government. But Trump has, at times, been quite critical of neocons as well. And according to the Washington Post, Trump has reportedly become frustrated with Boltonas well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over Iran—believing them to be unnecessarily hawkish with that country.

“Deterrence is important to contain bad actors like Iran, but there has to be a fine line between deterrence and escalation,” Gallego told the Washington Post. “We can’t automatically go to war because a 17-year-old fires an AK-47 at U.S. interests.”

After serving in the Arizona State Senate for four years, Gallego was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014 and was reelected in 2016 and 2018.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/this-right-wing-senator-just-said-the-u-s-could-quickly-win-a-war-against-iran-with-two-strikes/

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/13/17113952/rex-tillerson-fired-tom-cotton-cia-gina-haspel

Tom Cotton was supposed to be CIA director. He isn’t — and that’s trouble for Trump.

When you’re so unpopular you can’t recruit your top ally in Congress.

By Dylan Scott@dylanlscottdylan.scott@vox.com Mar 13, 2018, 12:40pm EDT

President Donald Trump with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). Zach Gibson/Pool/Getty Images

There was something off about President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday.

Back in the fall, the line of succession was supposed to look like this:

The Trump White House already had a plan to replace Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and to replace Pompeo with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).

Cotton was Trump’s “favorite” to take over the intelligence agency, per the New York Times.

If asked to serve, Cotton “does his duty when the country calls,” a friend of his told Axios.

But on Tuesday, when the president finally decided to fire Tillerson, it didn’t go quite according to plan. Pompeo was indeed elevated to the State Department — but Cotton was left in the Senate. Instead, Gina Haspel was named as Trump’s new CIA director. She will be, notably, the first woman nominated to the post and is a seasoned spy who briefly oversaw a torture black site in Thailand during the George W. Bush years, per CBS News.

So what happened? It depends on whom you ask. But the inescapable lesson is this: Trump’s administration has become so radioactive that the president can’t bring in one of his party’s most promising stars, one of his closest allies in the Republican establishment, to take such a prominent post.

The White House is in the midst of a scary staffing crisis, shedding officials who have mustered at least some experience running the federal government and failing to attract top talent to replace them. Cotton, whatever the reason for his being skipped over for the CIA directorship, is just the latest example of how the poisonous environs created by Trump are undermining his ability to build his own administration.

Why Gina Haspel is CIA director instead of Tom Cotton

There are at least three different theories out there to explain why Trump decided to tap Haspel to lead the CIA instead of Cotton. They aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive either; it could have been a combination of the following:

The White House didn’t want to open up Cotton’s Arkansas Senate seat after the GOP’s shocking loss in the Alabama Senate race and other special elections.

Cotton started to find the job less attractive given the possibility that Trump, a historically unpopular president, could lose in 2020.

With Cotton looking ahead to his own presidential campaign someday, staying in the Senate is a better platform for building and keeping a national profile than leading a covert intelligence agency.

Eliana Johnson

@elianayjohnson

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton was at one point favorite to take over CIA. White House became hesitant to put another safe Senate seat on the table, source close to Cotton tells me, and job became less attractive to him as the window he’d serve in it shrunk assuming Trump loss in 20

259

5:24 AM - Mar 13, 2018

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Ben Pershing

@benpershing

The fact that Tom Cotton is staying in the Senate rather than moving to the CIA is probably better for his long-term presidential hopes. @AdamWollner laid out the case back in January. ($$) https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/662277/cotton-which-road-leads-white-house?mref=search-result …

5:27 AM - Mar 13, 2018

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However you look at it, the first two theories tell the same story: The national political environment is so unfavorable to Republicans that the White House had real fears that they could lose a Senate seat in Arkansas (a state Trump won by 27 points in 2016). And Cotton, as fervent a Trump true believer as you will find in the United State Congress, is harboring real doubts that his president can win again in 2020.

Why it’s important that Cotton was passed over

The wildest part is neither of those lines of thinking is illogical.

In December, Republicans lost an open Senate seat — one that Trump had also opened up by picking Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general — in Alabama, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by an even bigger margin than he did in Arkansas. Sure, that might have been in part because the GOP nominee was a credibly accused child predator, but the Republican establishment has proven pretty bad at getting its preferred nominee elected in primaries. It was apparently too big a risk.

On Cotton’s end, looking ahead to 2020 and his own presidential ambitions, he should absolutely be wary of attaching himself too tightly to Trump. This is a president who, at the end of his first year in the White House, had the lowest approval rating ever even as the economy continued to perform relatively well. That is quite a feat, given how tightly the economy and presidential approval ratings are usually linked.

Javier Zarracina/Vox

It is certainly true that the Senate probably is a better launching pad for a presidential campaign whenever Cotton decides to run — George H.W. Bush is the only CIA director to reach the White House. But that was already true back in October and November when the Cotton-to-CIA hype was its hottest and his friends were telling Axios that he would serve if called.

Something changed. The simplest explanation is that Trump’s political standing, even within his own party, has eroded to such a degree that the Arkansas Senate seat could be in jeopardy and Cotton now doubts the president’s reelection viability.

In Langley, maybe this doesn’t matter much. Haspel is certainly qualified, from a résumé point of view, and seems to share Cotton’s comfort with torture.

But the strange case of Tom Cotton and the CIA is emblematic of Trump’s struggle to attract, as he loves to say, the best people. It is a fierce ouroboros: Trump’s incompetence feeds his struggle to recruit his preferred candidates. Given the trajectory of his presidency, it is probably only going to get worse.

IN THIS STORYSTREAM

Trump White House firings, resignations, and ousters

Trump is having a tough time finding his next chief of staff

Tom Cotton was supposed to be CIA director. He isn’t — and that’s trouble for Trump.

Rex Tillerson has been fired. Experts say he did damage that could last “a generation.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/18/is-there-a-more-dangerous-member-of-congress-than-tom-cotton/

RESHUFFLING OF President Trump’s foreign policy apparatus, reported by The New York Times on Thursday, would see Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ushered out the door, to be replaced by current director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo.

That opening at the CIA would, in turn, be filled by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas.

Is there a more dangerous member of Congress than Tom Cotton?

The hawkish Republican senator and former U.S. Army captain has never hidden his relentless obsession with confronting Iran. He has led the charge on Capitol Hill to dismantle the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic while constantly banging the drum for tougher sanctions and even airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. With apologies to Winston Churchill, Cotton wants “war-war” not “jaw-jaw” — and he seems to have won over the know-nothing president of the United States. Last week, President Donald Trump refused to certify to Congress that the Iran nuclear deal is in the U.S. national interest and warned that U.S participation in that agreement could “be cancelled by me, as president, at any time.”

You might call Cotton, who is now being touted as the next director of the CIA, the “Trump whisperer.” In fact, according to the Weekly Standard, in a recent meeting with his top national security and foreign policy advisers, “having failed to receive the decertification option from his own team, Trump called Senator Tom Cotton and put him on speakerphone. The president asked Cotton to make the case for decertifying the Iran deal. Cotton took five minutes and walked Trump and his team through the case, emphasizing one point in particular: re-certifying the deal would be declaring that it was in the national security interest of the United States, something Cotton understood that Trump didn’t believe.”

The Weekly Standard report added that Trump “left the phone call” convinced that the decision to decertify was “the right one.”

Got that? The reality TV star who now occupies the Oval Office defied the advice of his own inner circle, including Defense Secretary James Mattis; ignored the pleas of America’s closest allies; and dismissed the evidence offered by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the deal. Instead, he decided to go with the advice of a 40-year-old freshman senator from Arkansas, who has zero expertise in Middle East diplomacy and none in the field of nuclear proliferation.

If Cotton’s service in Iraq is being held up as evidence of his patriotism, then all to the good. But patrolling dangerous neighborhoods in Baghdad is not the equivalent of a training in foreign policy, just as serving as a deckhand on a ship isn’t much of an education in ship building. And it can’t be said that by living hard realities Cotton was drawn to his ultra-conservative politics. No, he’s been an outspoken conservative since he arrived on Harvard’s college campus. Cotton gives the impression of the type of right-wing student who loved little more than to debate and enrage liberals, arming himself with as many factoids as possible to embarrass his hapless opponent. He started as a young man with the view of the world he has today and built credentials around it. Don’t be fooled.

Lest we forget, this is the same Cotton who was accused of “treachery”and “mutiny” after penning a 2015 “open letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in which he asked them effectively to ignore the foreign policy of the president of the United States, because the next one might undo it. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time,” he warned.

This is the same Cotton who compared the Iran nuclear negotiations to the “appeasement” of Nazi Germany in the 1930s; the same Cotton who shot to prominence in conservative circles after writing a letter to the New York Times from Iraq in 2006, calling for three of the paper’s journalists to be put “behind bars” for their coverage of a secret Bush administration program (one of those reporters, James Risen, is now a colleague of mine at The Intercept); the same Cotton who once said his only objection to Guantánamo Bay was that “there are too many empty beds”; the same Cotton who claims to enjoy eating birthday cake every day of the week. (OK, admittedly, this last point is not relevant to his knee-jerk hawkishness, but it’s still worth noting. What kind of maniac eats birthday cake every single day?)

IN MANY WAYS, Cotton is the GOP foreign policy equivalent of House Speaker Paul Ryan: disingenuous, ignorant, and out of his depth, yet feted by the D.C. press corps as a Very Serious Person — a resume and a vocabulary as a substitute for seriousness.

There is, however, nothing serious about him — despite his two degrees from Harvard. Like Ryan, Cotton’s policy ideas fall apart the minute they are applied to the real world. “The policy of the United States should be regime change in Iran,” Cotton declared in June, before explaining how he believed the United States should “support internal domestic dissent” in Iran by backing minority ethnic groups, including Arabs, Turkmen, and Baloches, who “aren’t enthusiastic about living in a Persian Shia despotism.”

This is madness. Have we forgotten how much blood was spilled in Iraq thanks to such a nakedly sectarian “divide and rule” strategy? Are we supposed to ignore the way in which outside powers stirred up “internal domestic dissent” in Syria, by arming and funding vicious jihadist groups?

Then again, though Cotton may now be the most hawkish senator in the United States — step aside John McCain and Lindsey Graham — we should perhaps thank him for his bluntness. Remember: Every time former President Barack Obama or a member of his administration framed the argument over the nuclear deal as a choice between diplomacy or war, Republicans would cry foul. This, they would say, was a false choice; critics of the deal merely wanted a better deal.

But Cotton is clear about regime change. He is clear about airstrikes. He is clear about wanting to crush Iran. Consider his recent remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations where, referring to the impact of sanctions on Iran’s economy, Cotton said: “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees, you drive him to the ground and choke him out,” later adding, “If they’re on their knees in surrender, then you accept their surrender.”

This is the kind of language you might expect from a tinpot African dictator trying to suppress a domestic revolt — or maybe from a teenager obsessed with playing “Call of Duty” on his Playstation — and not from a leading member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The idea that Iran is about to “surrender” to the United States anytime soon is laughable. Equally absurd is Cotton’s claim that “calibrated strikes” against the Islamic Republic, modeled on Bill Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox four-day bombing of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1998, would put a halt to the Iranian nuclear program. “If we are forced to take action,” the senator told his audience at the CFR, “the United States has the ability to totally destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.”

This is next-level stupidity. First, a preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would, in the words of former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden, “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent – an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon and that would build it in secret.”

Second, it is impossible to “destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” without invading and occupying the country, and rounding up and executing every single scientist working on the nuclear program.

Third, Iran in 2017 is not Iraq in 1998. Why wouldn’t the Iranians retaliateagainst U.S. interests, both in the region and beyond? How many U.S. lives is Cotton willing to sacrifice?

Perhaps the former U.S. Army captain and (maybe) future director of the CIA should have a quiet word with an actual expert: retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni, who, as head of CENTCOM, organized Operation Desert Fox. Speaking about the potential fallout from a similar set of airstrikes against Iran, back in 2009, Zinni asked the following questions:

After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next? What happens if they decide, in their hardened shelters with their mobile missiles, to start launching those? What happens if they launch them into U.S. bases on the other side of the Gulf? What happens if they launch into Israel, or somewhere else? Into a Saudi oil field? Into Ras Laffan, with all the natural gas? What happens if they now flush their fast patrol boats, their cruise missiles … and they sink a tanker, an oil tanker? And of course, the economy of the world goes absolutely nuts. What happens if they activate sleeper cells? The MOIS, the intelligence service — what happens if another preemptive attack by the West, the U.S., and Israel, they fire up the streets and now we got problems. Just tell me how to deal with all that, OK?

Zinni concluded his remarks with a stark warning to hawks like Cotton, who seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing: “Like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.”

Lies are the currency of the American right wing, so ubiquitous in politics and media that many have dubbed the phenomenon a "post-truth" crisis.

So it was genuinely surprising Monday when Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — himself a hard-line member of the conservative movement and is in many ways a radical figure in his own right — called out a member of his own party for spreading fake news. His denunciation of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) came in response to tweet thread about the pending criminal justice reform bill in the Senate, which is spurring divisions among members of the Republican caucus.

In his own tweet about the bill over the weekend, Cotton had spread fears about the bill, saying "it gives early release to 'low level, nonviolent' criminals like those convicted of assaulting police, even with deadly weapons," and to "criminals who steal passports & immigration docs from aliens who have been trafficked to keep them in captivity." He also said there have been no hearings on the bill.

"I highly respect my colleague from Arkansas but everything in his tweet and this thread is 100% Fake News," Lee said in response to Cotton's tweets.

He continued:

Mike Lee

@SenMikeLee

Replying to @SenMikeLee

First, the House Judiciary committee passed the First Step Act out of committee on May 9 of this year, and the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the highly similar Sentencing and Corrections Act out of committee on Feb 15 of this year. These are not new policies. 2/

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12:24 PM - Nov 19, 2018

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Mike Lee

@SenMikeLee

Replying to @SenMikeLee

Second, and more importantly, the First Step Act does not “give early release” to anyone. Anyone claiming it does, does not understand how the bill works. 3/

1,565

12:24 PM - Nov 19, 2018

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Mike Lee

@SenMikeLee

Replying to @SenMikeLee

What the First Step Act does do is encourage rehabilitation by incentivizing inmates to participate in recidivism reduction programs by giving them time credits that can help them qualify for prerelease custody. 4/

1,490

12:25 PM - Nov 19, 2018

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Mike Lee

@SenMikeLee

Replying to @SenMikeLee

Nothing in the First Step Act gives inmates early release. It only incentivizes participation in recidivism reduction programs. At all times the Bureau of Prisons retains all authority over who does and does not qualify for early release. 5/

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Mike Lee

@SenMikeLee

Nov 19, 2018

Replying to @SenMikeLee

Mike Lee

@SenMikeLee

If @SenTomCotton has good faith problems with this bill then he should welcome a full and open debate on the Senate floor where he can offer amendments to provisions he finds objectionable. But first this bill needs to be brought to the Senate floor so debate can begin. /END

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12:25 PM - Nov 19, 2018

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It was a stern rebuke to the Cotton, who has a long history of false statements and blatant lies. Cotton is also one of the most anti-immigrant members of Congress and has preposterously suggested that the United States has "under-incarceration" problem. In light of the fact that the United States has one of the largest incarcerated populations per capita in the world, and given the vast racial disparities that plague the system, it's unreasonable to interpret his views as driven by anything other than deep-seated racism.

https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary?cid=N00033363&cycle=2014

2013-18

Club for Growth $457,924 $457,924 $0

2 Elliott Management $147,900 $147,900 $0

3 Stephens Group $130,000 $120,000 $10,000

4 Goldman Sachs $124,649 $104,649 $20,000

5 Senate Conservatives Fund $81,210 $76,210 $5,000

6 Citadel LLC $45,450 $45,450 $0

7 Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher $44,900 $42,400 $2,500

8 Crow Holdings $42,200 $42,200 $0

9 Koch Industries $41,300 $31,300 $10,000

10 Wells Fargo $37,422 $28,422 $9,000

11 McKinsey & Co $36,200 $36,200 $0

12 MCNA Dental Plans $34,200 $34,200 $0

13 Formation 8 $32,300 $32,300 $0

14 Citizens for Prosperity in America Today $31,299 $21,300 $9,999

15 Kirkland & Ellis $30,050 $30,050 $0

16 Mountaire Corp $29,200 $29,200 $0

17 Crownquest Operating $28,600 $28,600 $0

18 Arvest Bank Group $28,400 $13,400 $15,000

19 Murphy Oil $28,150 $23,150 $5,000

20 Affiliated Managers Group $27,280 $27,280

Club for Growth $457,924 $457,924 $0

Elliott Management $137,900 $137,900 $0

Stephens Group $104,300 $94,300 $10,000

Senate Conservatives Fund $81,210 $76,210 $5,000

Goldman Sachs $50,549 $40,549 $10,000

2014?

Club for Growth

$457,924 $457,924 $0

2 Elliott Management

$137,900 $137,900 $0

3 Stephens Group

$104,300 $94,300 $10,000

4 Senate Conservatives Fund

$81,210 $76,210 $5,000

5 Goldman Sachs

$50,549 $40,549 $10,000

6 Koch Industries Yes

$41,200 $31,200 $10,000

7 Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher

$40,650 $38,150 $2,500

8 Citadel LLC

$35,050 $35,050 $0

9 McKinsey & Co

$33,500 $33,500 $0

10 Crow Holdings

$31,400 $31,400 $0

11 Citizens for Prosperity in America Today

$31,299 $21,300 $9,999

12 Crownquest Operating

$28,600 $28,600 $0

13 Murphy Oil

$28,150 $23,150 $5,000

14 Kirkland & Ellis

$27,550 $27,550 $0

15 Wells Fargo

$25,522 $23,022 $2,500

16 Dillard's Inc

$24,900 $24,900 $0

17 Arvest Bank Group

$23,400 $13,400 $10,000

18 Devon Energy

$20,900 $10,900 $10,000

19 Affiliated Managers Group

$20,800 $20,800 $0

19 Boich Companies

$20,800 $20,800 $0

19 Arkwest Communications

$20,800 $20,800

2014

Paul Singer, $5.3 million, Republican

Singer, a New York hedge fund manager pejoratively called a "vulture capitalist" for his firm's ownership of Argentine debt, is the top individual Republican political donor of the cycle. He was the driving force behind New York's legalization of gay marriage, and has spent millions on legalization efforts in other states, including Maryland and New Hampshire. This cycle, he’s also supporting Republicans opposed to same-sex marriage, such as Rep. Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Alaska Senate candidate Dan Sullivan and South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham.

Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, $5 million, Republican

Since 2010, the Uihleins, owners of the Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline, have given millions to local and national tea party organizations and Republican candidates. In 2012, they supported Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign to fight a recall and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate bid. This year, they’ve given to the Senate campaigns of Rep. Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Col. Rob Maness in Louisiana. “I’m a conservative Republican, and I’m trying to help people who believe as I do in limited government and free markets,” Richard Uihlein told Crain’s Chicago Business. “I’m not one to hide from that.”

Robert and Diana Mercer, $3.71 million, Republican

Robert Mercer, a New York hedge fund manager, spent millions in 2012 contributing to GOP establishment groups like American Crossroads. This cycle, he’s also spent big on tea party Republicans. According to disclosure records, Mercer, 67, and his wife Diana have contributed to the Senate campaigns of Chris McDaniel in Mississippi, Greg Brannon in North Carolina, Joni Ernst in Iowa and Rep. David Vitter in Louisiana.

test run camb anal?

CNN) -- Cambridge Analytica, the data company Donald Trump's campaign hired during the 2016 presidential election, has been under a magnifying glass this week after a whistleblower claimed that the firm misused the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users.

The firm is partly owned by GOP donor and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his family, and has ties to former and current Trump advisers. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is the firm's former vice president, and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway consulted for the company.

But Trump isn't the only prominent GOP client to pay for services from the firm. Here are other Republicans who have hired Cambridge Analytica. There have been no allegations of unethical behavior by Cambridge Analytica on behalf of these Republican candidates or groups.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton

Cotton paid some $20,000 for Cambridge Analytica's consulting services from 2013 through 2014 as he was campaigning for the Senate.

Sen. Thom Tillis and the North Carolina Republican Party

Tillis and the North Carolina GOP spent $345,000 for "microtargeting" from 2014 through 2015, geared at helping Tillis defeat Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan in 2014, the most expensive US Senate race in history at the time. Cambridge Analytica's website touts the success of their efforts in the race, saying they "were able to design and deploy messages tailored to these audiences according to their particular psychographic profiles."

Make America Number 1 Super PAC

The Mercer-backed Keep the Promise I/Make America Number 1 super PAC paid $1,476,484 to Cambridge Analytica from 2015 through 2016. The PAC funded a series of pro-Ted Cruz ads during the 2016 presidential campaign. The PAC was also led by Conway prior to her joining the Trump campaign.

John Bolton Super PAC

Former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is being considered to replace H.R. McMaster as White House national security adviser. According to FEC filings, Bolton's super PAC doled out $1,152,299 for Cambridge Analytica's work from 2014 through 2016. All of the services billed are for "research" and "survey research."

Ted Cruz and Ben Carson

During their 2016 presidential campaigns, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson solicited Cambridge Analytica for media services, survey research, web services and database management. The Cruz campaign directly spent $5.8 million for the firm's services. In addition, Keep the Promise II super PAC, which is associated with the "Keep the Promise" network of the Mercer-backed PACs, was funded by Cruz supporter and Texas billionaire Toby Neugebauer. The PAC paid $570,000 for Cambridge Analytica's services -- the largest expenditure for the PAC during the election cycle.

Carson, meanwhile, spent $438,065 for the firm's work.

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/tom-cottons-cease-and-desist-letter-activist-raises-serious-first-amendment-questions

In October, Stacey Lane — a human resources professional of 19 years, got in the mail a cease-and-desist letter from Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark. The letter, in an envelope addressed to Lane, said that all communication “must cease and desist immediately with all offices of U.S. Senator Tom Cotton.”

“Healthcare was really big issue before I got the letter. I did what I could to call senators and congressmen and raise the concerns I had,” Lane told Salon.

The letter — now getting attention in the national media — is raising questions about whether or not it's possible to bar a person from petitioning their government's representatives.

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Lane says she’d call the office once or twice a week, usually during times that preceded a major vote or legislative action. There would be several weeks where she wouldn’t call at all.

“My calls were purposeful typically surrounding a major vote or legislative action or call to action via the various activist groups. I was not a serial, daily caller-just-to-call type [of] person,” Lane said.

According to Tom Cotton’s office, Lane — a member of Ozark Indivisible, an activist group part of the Resistance movement against the Trump administration, used vulgar language on multiple occasions. The final incident, which prompted officials in Cotton’s office to administer a cease and desist, was when Lane allegedly called a 19-year-old intern a ct. According to Cotton’s office, the letter was issued based on the guidance of the U.S. Capitol Police, who has not returned Salon’s request for immediate comment.

When the cease and desist letter started to make noise on Twitter, John Noonan, ?Senior Counselor for Military and Defense Affairs in Cotton’s office, tweeted about the event to set the record straight to anyone who criticized the move — like the ACLU.

[No reason this national security stuff can't be fun. @SenTomCotton. Alumnus @JebBush @MittRomney. Ex-USAF nuke guy]

This went out to a single constituent, not a group.

That constituent called a 19 year old intern a c*.

Constituent had multiple warnings.

We have a very different understanding of "harassment." https://t.co/gJdFYviELw

— John Noonan (@noonanjo) January 18, 2018

Lane told Salon she didn’t recall calling the intern a ct though, it’s a word she’s maybe used “two times in my life.”

“Have I used colorful language? Yes, but it’s nothing more than I see our president using,” Lane told Salon.

Cotton’s office issued a statement about the matter saying, “If an employee of Senator Cotton receives repeated communications that are harassing and vulgar, or any communication that contains a threat, our policy is to notify the U.S. Capitol Police’s Threat Assessment Section and, in accordance with their guidance, send a cease and desist letter to the individual making the harassing or threatening communication.”

Indeed, vulgar language can be rattling, but issuing a cease and desist veers into the realm of prior restraint, explained David Snyder, executive director of First Amendment Coalition.

“This letter is inappropriate, and I would say it’s borderline unconstitutional,” Snyder told Salon. “This kind of speech, as offensive as it may be and as vulgar as it is, is just part of the game; it’s part of what happens in a democracy.”

Snyder added that protests, by nature, are not polite.

Of course, the first Amendment doesn’t protect threatening language where a person’s individual safety is at risk.

“If this staffer had a legitimate concern for personal safety then this might be someone the office should report to the Capitol Police and let them deal with it from there,” Snyder said.

When Salon asked Cotton’s office if this cease and desist letter was a violation of the First Amendment, they said they didn’t have a comment.

Wayne B Giampietro, General Counsel to the First Amendment Lawyers Association, suggested that a tactic like this could be a form of intimidation.

“Anyone who wants to try to intimidate someone can send a cease and desist letter. Whether that letter is worth the paper its written on is another story,” he told Salon. “Unless the profanities are a direct and imminent threat to the lawmaker, they are almost certainly protected by the First Amendment.”

Lane says when she received the letter she felt like it was a threat.

It was a tactic to suppress my voice,” she told Salon.

Indivisible, the activist group Lane is part of, has had a tumultuous relationship with Cotton and his office, which the Arkansas Times has been following. Salon spoke to another Indivisible activist who had been arrested in his office following a protest. A video has also surfaced on Facebook of protesters being kicked out of Cotton’s office.

Cotton, 40, is the youngest serving U.S. senator. Before his election to the Senate he served one term in the House. Cotton has been rumored to be named the next CIA director.

lcv 0/3%

http://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/tom-cotton

Undermining Critical Habitat for Wildlife | League of Conservation ...

scorecard.lcv.org/.../2015-128-undermining-critical-ha...

League of Conservation Voters

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) offered an amendment to S. Con. Res. 11, the Senate version of the FY16 budget, which would undermine the protection of ...

Tom Cotton Blocks Dying Appointee to 'Inflict Pain' on President Obama

www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/.../tom-cotton-block-dying-appointee/

Esquire

Jun 7, 2016 - We note it here because it involves Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated pen-pal of the mullahs from the state of Arkansas, who is ...

Missing: lcv

Chair of the imbecile caucus: Sen. Tom Cotton proudly stands at the ...

www.salon.com/.../chair_of_the_imbecile_caucus_sen_tom_cotton_proudly_sta...

Salon

Jun 8, 2016 - Cotton's spiteful blockade of recently deceased Obama nominee Cassandra Butts sums up what's wrong with the GOP.

years ago a friend who had graduated Georgetown and worked briefly in Washington explained why he had left the city and politics. In D.C., he said, people would kill a good policy because of a personal vendetta against the person presenting it, even if they knew that policy would result in net positives for society. My buddy quickly became so disillusioned that he quit to pursue a career in a field without so many poisonous vipers: He moved to Hollywood to write for television.

And this was in the late 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s second term. Washington was a model of bonhomie then compared to the polarization of today.

I thought of my friend when I read this Frank Bruni column in the New York Times on Monday. Bruni traced the story of Cassandra Butts, a graduate of Harvard Law School and longtime friend of President Obama who had served as Deputy White House Counsel early in his administration. In February of 2014, the president nominated Butts to be the ambassador to the Bahamas. In keeping with their tradition of saying no to everything Obama proposes, Republicans in the Senate put a hold on Butts’ confirmation. She was still waiting for them to lift it when she died two weeks ago after a short bout with leukemia.

The senator behind the hold was Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has predicated his entire brief Senate career on being an irredeemable dickhead. According to Bruni, Butts once went to Cotton to ask why he wouldn’t lift the hold on her nomination.

[H]e explained that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president.

Cotton’s spokeswoman did not dispute Butts’s characterization of that meeting, and stressed, in separate emails, that Cotton had enormous respect for her and her career.

That’s nice of him. Maybe Cotton can eulogize Butts at her funeral. Seems like the least he could do after keeping her twisting in the wind for over two years – 835 days, to be exact – just because he wanted to “inflict special pain” on President Obama.

It’s not that Butts was unqualified to serve as ambassador to the Bahamas. With all due respect to the Bahamas, it’s not exactly a nation with a complicated geopolitical situation. Butts was a trained lawyer – in fact, she and Cotton graduated from the same law school – who had worked in the White House and on Capitol Hill for a decade. She was the consummate Washington professional for whom such ambassadorships often serve as rewards for hard work and loyalty to a presidential administration.

Some people might have a problem with the less-than-egalitarian nature of this system, but that was not Cotton’s complaint. He was upset about a leak from the Secret Service when he first placed the hold on Butts, but by the end he was not keeping it there due to some principled good-government crusade. He didn’t have a particular ideological grievance against Butts – well, he probably did, but nothing that made her unqualified to serve as ambassador to an island nation with zero strategic value beyond being a popular honeymoon spot for besotted newlyweds. It wasn’t as if Obama had appointed her to be the ambassador to Iran, a nation Tom Cotton would turn into Beirut circa 1983 before he would ever consider talking to its government.

No, Cotton kept this hold for two reasons. The first is that he is a nasty, small-minded, arrogant, repugnant, self-righteous, testosterone-fueled warmongering jackhole with an over-inflated sense of his own value both to the nation’s political process and humanity in general.

Second, Cotton is a perfect creature of what the Republican Party has evolved into over the last 40 years, a change that has reached its nadir (maybe) in the Obama era. It is a party with no coherent ideological beliefs, no governing philosophy, and no interest in developing either beyond the usual platitudes about cutting taxes and keeping government small. It is a party of nihilism. It is a party of angry toddlers stamping their feet and holding their breath until they either get what they want or turn blue.

This nihilistic approach has led the base to nominate Donald Trump, who is the ultimate expression of the modern GOP’s id: An overgrown, racist toddler coated in Cheeto dust. And now the party’s leaders are shocked, SHOCKED to find themselves stuck with him and staring down the barrel of a potential crushing in this fall’s general election.

There has long been a strain of thought that if only our leaders in Washington would spend more time together, eating meals and attending cocktail parties, they would find common ground on some of the issues bedeviling the nation. Maybe then they could hammer out compromises, engage in the legislative log-rolling that has been part of our system since the first Congress convened.

But it’s hard to see how, say, President Obama inviting Cotton over to the White House for a beer would have changed his mind on Cassandra Butts. The junior senator from Arkansas doesn’t see the president as a legitimate chief executive, nor does he see any value in holding to the informal norms that help our government to function in the first place. All he sees is an enemy to be crushed at all costs. As a former soldier, maybe he thinks of the now-deceased Cassandra Butts spending the last two years of her life in nomination limbo as collateral damage. I’d say he should be ashamed, if I thought he was capable of such an emotion.

Our list of the 10 candidates who received the highest percentage of the money from elite donors includes many candidates from wealthy states, and nationally-known candidates like Sens.

Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as well as new members who won high-profile races in 2014 like Sens. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2015/04/the-political-one-percent-of-the-one-percent-in-2014-mega-donors-fuel-rising-cost-of-elections

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/04/1327105/-Tom-Cotton-channels-his-inner-Jesse-Helms-in-new-immigrant-bashing-ad#

Extremist Republican Tom Cotton, joined by an assortment of corporate lobbyists, proudly announced today his endorsement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It is another good reason — a very good reason — to vote against Tom Cotton.

It is NOT, as you might think, really an umbrella organization for all the little chambers around the country that labor to land business. It is a fully integrated part of the Republican machine and anonymously funded. It can be found on the wrong side of every populist issue — from wages and worker protection to the environment and fair taxes. Source Watch notes:

... the New York Times reported in October 2010 that half of the Chamber's $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 big-money donors, many of whom enlisted the Chamber's help to fight political and public opinion battles on their behalf (such as opposing financial or healthcare reforms, or other regulations). The Chamber is "dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries," according to James Carter, executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce.

Kochs involved?

You betcha.

Drill baby drill. Where there's a Koch there's a Cotton. He's proud of his 92 percent chamber voting record, an affront to day-laboring Arkansans.

The U.S. Chamber is so bad, Source Watch notes:

The U.S. Chamber's partisan, corporate-funded (and often untrue) campaign attacks have compelled many local Chambers of Commerce to disassociate from the U.S. Chamber. Despite the U.S. Chamber's attempts to portray itself as a community of small businesses and local Chambers of Commerce, the interests the U.S. Chamber served in the 2010 elections were those of its large corporate donors. More than 40 local chambers issued statements during the campaign distancing themselves from the U.S. Chamber, including chambers in the "battleground states" of Iowa and New Hampshire. Some chambers are considering what Politico calls the "extraordinary" step of ending their affiliation with the U.S. Chamber and quitting in protest.

Hailing from Arkansas, 37-year-old Senator Cotton boasts the title of being the youngest member of the Senate, but he spouts the old warmongering rhetoric of 78-year-old Senator John McCain. From Guantanamo to Iran, food stamps to women’s rights, here are ten reasons why Tom Cotton is a dangerous dude.

He penned an underhanded letter to the leaders of Iran that sparked the trending hashtag #47Traitors. On March 9th, Cotton and 46 of his Republican colleagues went behind President Obama’s back by signing an “informative” letter to Iran, saying that a nuclear deal would not last because the next president could reverse it. Secretary John Kerry, one of the lead negotiators in the talks, called the letter “utterly disgusting” and “irresponsible.” Two dozen editorial boards slammed the letter and over 200,000 people signed a petition asking the senators to be charged for violating the Logan Act, a law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.

Senator Cotton said the only problem he has with Guantanamo Bay prison is that “there are too many empty beds.” Ignoring waterboarding, indefinite detention, forced feeding and other torturous acts, Tom Cotton insists that the US should be "proud" of how it treats the "savages" detained in Gitmo. As far as Cotton is concerned, "[the prisoners] can rot in hell. But as long as they don’t do that, then they can rot in Guantanamo Bay." This is counter to the position of many other Senators and President Obama, who has promised time and time again to close the prison. There are still dozens of men held at Gitmo who have been cleared for release, but that doesn’t seem to bother Senator They-Can-Rot-in-Hell.

He has compared the negotiations of the UN Security Council (P5+1) with Iran to the “appeasement of Nazi Germany.”This accusation is ridiculous. Rouhani’s Iran is not Hitler’s Germany. Despite Cotton’s claims that “there are nothing but hardliners in Tehran,” Rouhani is a reformist, someone we need to work with to defeat ISIL. And the ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran are a far better ––and safer–– approach than pushing Iran to the brink of war with the US (and Israel). For once, there is actually hope for a peaceful solution, something that certainly was not an option with Nazi Germany.

He thinks the use of killer drones should be expanded. Killer drones have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths in countries we’re not even at war with, like Pakistan and Yemen, and have led to an expansion of extremist groups. Senator Cotton makes the argument of many other pro-droners: that drone pilots are safer than air pilots, and casualties are reduced. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Drone pilots still suffer the psychological trauma associated with attacks, and the “collateral damage” of drone strikes means that families and children lose their lives along with the targeted terrorists. (Note: only 2% of all people killed by drone strikes have been confirmed “high-value” targets.) The last thing we need is the expansion of drone warfare, Tom.

He claims that “bombing makes us safer.” While in some masochistic, twisted logic that might make sense in the short term, historically speaking US military intervention has led to more extremism–– as with the formation of ISIS after the invasion of Iraq ––and turned local populations against the United States. Ultimately, bombing other countries just fosters more hate and anti-American sentiment. Bombing might not make us safer, but it certainly makes Tom Cotton’s friends in the defense industry a whole lot richer. Just 24 hours after his notorious letter to Iran became public, Cotton was the guest of honorat an event hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association, a lobbying and professional group for defense contractors.

He uses fear-mongering to call for a crackdown on immigrants and a clampdown on the Mexican border. Senator Cotton says drug cartels in Mexico are ready to expand into human trafficking and even terrorism, and could infiltrate our southern border and “attack it right here in places like Arkansas.” He’s made the wild accusation that Hezbollah is collaborating with locals in Mexico to “cross our borders and attack us here.” Ignoring the fences, drones, cameras and patrols that constantly survey the border, he maintains that the border is wide open. “As long as our border is open and it's defenseless, then it's not just an immigration issue, it's a national security issue.” Be afraid, says Cotton, very afraid--so I can keep feeding the national security state!

He received $700,000 for his senate campaign from the Emergency Committee for Israel.That’s correct -- $700,000! Such an exorbitant amount of money ensures that Cotton is one of the most pro-Israel senators in Congress. During the 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza, when over 500 Palestinian were killed, Cotton called the Israeli defense force “the most moral, humanitarian fighting force in the world.” In December he said Congressshould consider supplying Israel with B-52s and so-called “bunker-buster” bombs for a possible strike against Iran.

As an Army Lieutenant in 2006, Cotton called for the prosecution of two New York Times journalists for espionage.From his early days, Cotton has not been a fan of expository journalism. When the New York Times published an article about how the government was tracking terrorist financing, Cotton called for the journalists to be imprisoned. This news story got a lot of heat from various conservative outlets, but before he was even running for office, Cotton took it upon himself to publicize his grievances in a sarcasticletter to journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. It seems that Cotton’s letter to Iran a few days ago was not the first of its kind.

He thinks food-stamp recipients are “addicts.”Senator Cotton hates food stamps. In his own words, he thinks the system is “riddled with fraud and abuse” and “has resulted in long-term dependency.” This is coming from the senator of Arkansas, which ranked number one in the number of residents who suffer from food insecurity. If Cotton had his way, there would be much harsher restrictions on food stamps, and the overall budget for welfare would be cut severely. Considering the high level of poverty in Arkansas, Cotton is actually voting against the interests of the people he is supposed to represent. If he’s concerned that the system is “riddled with fraud and abuse,” an audit of the Pentagon should be at the top of his to-do list.

10. He has opposed legislation to expand women’s rights.Senator Cotton voted against equal pay legislation and the Violence Against Women Act. While Senator Cotton’s website will say that the vote was taken out of context, and that the Senator supports harsh punishment for sexual assault, a vote is a vote. If that’s the case, then why would he vote against an act that would give women more resources in the case of abuse or assault? And why would he vote against legislation that would push for equivalent pay? No matter what defense Cotton’s team comes up with, there’s really no logic or excuse to vote against women’s rights.

Rep. Alan Grayson says Sen. Cotton is “already on his way to marking himself as the premiere warmonger of the 114th Congress.” Heather Digby Parton from Salon called him“Ted Cruz with a war record, Sarah Palin with a Harvard degree, Chris Christie with a Southern accent.” Whatever your characterization, this much is clear: this freshman senator is an arrogant bully and needs a time out.

Hillary Clinton also weighed in on the controversy surrounding a Republican letter to Iran aiming to undermine the ongoing nuclear talks. An open letter from 47 Republican senators warned the Iranian government the deal could be nixed by a Republican Congress or future Republican president.

Hillary Clinton: "The recent letter from Republican senators was out of step with the best traditions of American leadership. And one has to ask: What was the purpose of this letter? There appear to be two logical answers. Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander-in-chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy. Either answer does discredit to the letters’ signatories."

According to the website Lobe Log, the senator who spearheaded the letter, freshman Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, received nearly $1 million in donations to his election campaign efforts last year from the Emergency Committee for Israel, run by neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol. The Intercept reports Cotton was set to appear at a secretive meeting of weapons contractors one day after sending the letter on Monday.

fac so:

Rep. Tom Cotton has attracted nearly $58 million, with more than $35 million of that coming from super PACs and other outside groups. While much less than the money total for North Carolina's senate seat, Arkansas has only a quarter of the voters in North Carolina, adding up to more than $34 in election money per voter so far.

Kentucky, where incumbent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell leads over Democratic challenger Allison Grimes, more than $67 million has flooded into the race. With just over 3 million voters, that means the Kentucky race has attracted more than $21 per voter to date.

Louisiana's battle between Democratic incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu and Republican challenger Bill Cassidy has seen nearly $40 million from the candidates and outside groups. With just under 2 million registered voters, that puts it nearly on par with North Carolina's Senate race at $13.56 per voter.

Georgia may be the biggest surprise: With with Democrat Michelle Nunn pulling even with Republican opponent David Perdue in the polls, the race has attracted just under $36 million, according to the latest available reports. That is not only the lowest raw total of any of the battleground Senate races in the South: Given Georgia's more than 6 million voters, it's also by far the lowest in per-voter cost at $5.91.

In response, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his Democratic colleagues are trying to turn the Koch-linked money against their Republican opponents. The Democrats' strategy seeks to tie GOP Senate candidates to the agenda of Koch groups by highlighting how specific policies advocated by Republicans will aid billionaires and hurt everybody else.

Barasky points to Arkansas Senate candidate Tom Cotton's vote against the farm bill as an example. Rep. Cotton, a Republican, was the only member of the Arkansas congressional delegation to vote against that bill, which Americans for Prosperity openly opposed. The Koch group has spent nearly $2 million on the Arkansas Senate race.

The Washington Post reports on Arkansas as ground zero of the nuclear battle by financial titans to purchase control of the U.S. Senatefor Republicans. The Koch political forceshave spent at least $1.4 million already on misleading ads targeting Sen. Mark Pryor and put ground forces in the field. Democrats say they'll fight back.

And still Rep. Tom Cotton, Pryor's Republican challenger, is so weird that he can't break away in opinion polling.

The Kochs have spent $30 million in swing Senate races this year. And that's just chump change. Here's that stunning Pro Publica article on the nearly $400 million the Kochs spent on elections in 2012, a pittance of which gave them solid control of the Arkansas Senate.

But back to the Washington Post. It reveals the Kochs have already poured $500,000 into Arkansas legislative races this year in hopes of mopping up after the move to a Republican majority in 2012. If you hate Obama you'll love the Kochs' message. Lots do, apparently.

The Koch/Republican combine thinks it's stolen a page from Obama in Arkansas...

The Democratic Party kept up its drumbeat today against Republican Rep. Tom Cotton, noting his junketing on the tab of conservative special interest groups that back issues he's supported, such asprivatization of Medicare. The party notes, too, that despite a flood of independent dark money advertising against U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, a recent independent poll shows the race tied 46-46 among likely voters.

You can find the full details of Cotton's luxury travels here.

In short: Cotton has, among others, junketed to Florida, Sea Island, Ga., and Baltimore on the tab of the Club for Growth, Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, all bankrolled by conservative tycoons. He's done as they wished in voting for turningMedicare into a voucher system — the death knell of universal health coverage for older Americans and, at the same time, a windfall for the private insurance industry. The insurance industry angle prompts questions from the Democratic Party on why Cotton won't identify the clients he worked for as a private consultant at McKinsey, the world's biggest and richest consulting firm.

Give Cotton credit. He's repeatedly made clear his desire to dismantle the U.S. social safety net. He's a believer in Medicare privatization. Anybody who thinks that battle was won for good years ago doesn't understand the staying power of big money and the belief that misleading messaging will eventually win the day.

A good example is a big new ad buy from another dark money group dishonestly depicting Mark Pryor and other Democrats as enemies of seniors because of efforts to rein in costs of the Medicare Advantage program, a taxpayer-subsidized program that enriches insurance companies. (Ernie Dumas explained that cynical ploy this week.) The group buying their ads won't say where their money comes from — it's a byproduct of the perversion of the nonprofit portion of the tax code and the pernicious fallout of the Citizens United corporate personhood ruling. But Source Watch can tell you most of what you need to know about American Action Network, the source of the secretly funded attack advertising: Republicans, billionaires. ark times

Koch Network - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Koch_Network

Jan 27, 2015 - Joni Ernst, Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, and Colorado Rep. Cory Gardner, and remarks by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

National Federation of Independent Business - SourceWatch

sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Federation_of...Business

Tom Cotton (R-AK), who is challenging Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) for his seat; and for Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC). All in all, the organization spent $1,409,688 in the ...

Americans for Prosperity - SourceWatch

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Americans_for_Prosperity

Tom Cotton credited AFP for shifting the political landscape in Arkansas in recent years, saying ""Americans for Prosperity in Arkansas has played a critical role ...

Another reason to vote against Tom Cotton: US Chamber of ...

www.arktimes.com/.../another-reason-to-vote-against-to...

Arkansas Times

Oct 17, 2014 - Extremist Republican Tom Cotton, joined by an assortment of corporate lobbyists, proudly ... The U.S. Chamber is so bad, Source Watch notes:.

Shocker: NFIB endorses Tom Cotton - Arkansas Times

www.arktimes.com/.../shocker-nfib-endorses-tom-cotton

Arkansas Times

Jul 1, 2014 - The secret Tom Cotton news conference from which tried — but failed — to exclude the Arkansas Times was for his ... From Source Watch:.

Tom Cotton - Small business needs a fighter in the Senate....

https://www.facebook.com/TomCottonAR/posts/819009298144331

Lance Click I am a Small Business Owner, and I am voting for Tom Cotton too! 6 · September 11 .... National Federation of Independent Business - SourceWatch.

Tom Cotton - Arkansans don't give up, but ObamaCare is...

https://www.facebook.com/TomCottonAR/posts/828314417213819

Anita McCormick Yes,to voting for Tom Cotton ... Tom Cotton will NEVER be small business! ..... National Federation of Independent Business - SourceWatch.

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