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see B3 BIG BEUT BILL, A // JAMMED THRU crypto 7 25

SEE GOP STEAL ELECTION LUTTIG

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see cleta vote suppress

see gt replacement theory

see xian nat’l

see retaliate

SEE HATES AMERICA NO KINGS = HAMAS 10 25

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2 24 ymail 95K$ aipac

see ADF xmas BS

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On Thursday, a former federal judge detailed what he deemed “the final battle for America’s democracy,” laying out President Donald Trump’s plan to seize power on January 3, 2027. This is according to attorney and former U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Luttig, who warns that “Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all.”

“Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021,” asserts Luttig. “Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021. That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.”

Over the course of his second term, says Luttig, Trump has taken steps to “seize control of the midterms” to ensure that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress. As Trump himself declared in February, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’ ... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” And the Republicans, notes Luttig, “have dutifully fallen in line … So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.”

The core of the plan involves a Republican plot to claim the election was rigged after they lose. According to Luttig, “This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker [Mike] Johnson (R-LA) removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor.

McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.”

“The constitutional crisis will begin, warns Luttig, when “sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.” Such action will be met with lawsuits arguing that the clerk must perform its mandated action, which will work their way through appeals. “The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when,” says Luttig, the court orders the elected Democratic representatives be seated and the clerk refuses. “Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”

From there, the matter would end up before the Supreme Court, which would be forced to answer “perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?” Should the Court decide to side with Republican claims of fraud, Luttig concludes, “two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America.”

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Monday that he still supports Rep. Max Miller, (R-OH) despite the severe domestic abuse allegations against the Ohio congressman.

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Because this is a family newspaper, I cannot quote the piquant term that Brandon Herrera, a Republican House candidate in Texas, used to refer to children in a 2023 video. I can only report that he called them “trophies” for getting a man to ejaculate. Nor, alas, am I allowed to repeat the obscenities that Herrera, a gun influencer, used to explain why the opinions of mothers are without value. I can only say that he argued, essentially, that getting pregnant requires no special skill. Two weeks ago, ahead of a fund-raiser that Mike Johnson, the House speaker, was holding for Herrera, The Austin American-Statesman reached out to Herrera’s campaign about these resurfaced comments. Herrera’s team responded with a crude visual pun that, once again, is too vulgar for me to describe here.

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BLINDSIDED BY TRUMP PULL HOUSING BILL SiGN 6 26?

Ralph Reed Says Mike Johnson Became House Speaker By 'Divine Appointment' | People For

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Mike Johnson Used The 'Rededication' Prayer Rally To Mobilize Pastors For The Midterms

[VID]

05/27/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

When the Trump administration held its National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving gathering on the National Mall earlier this month, it was quite obvious that the event was designed to mobilize conservative Christian voters ahead of the midterm elections.

That was confirmed when right-wing evangelist David Herzog appeared on the Elijah Streams program last week and revealed that pastors in attendance were invited to attend a private gathering with House Speaker Mike Johnson before the event where they were encouraged to mobilize their congregations for the midterms.

"They invited us," Herzog reported. "It was an invitation to be here and get this special briefing from the Speaker of the House and [MAGA pastor Lorenzo Sewell]."

Herzog said that Johnson stressed that pastors are key to ensuring that the effort to "rededicate" the nation to God succeeds

"What he came down to was the reason why we need you pastors here is because you guys are the difference that can decide if this thing is going to go one way or the other," he said. "Basically, he's saying we need the pastors and the leaders, the Christian leaders, to get on board because if you guys don't get on board and spread this thing, it's not going to shift the way it needs to shift."

"They see the importance of the church as the missing link," Herzog added. "You could have a good politician, you could have a good president, you could even pass the right laws, but if the church is asleep at the wheel, nothing going to happen. And then it's also connected to the midterms. I think they want the church to pray, fast, and also mobilize the people to really wake up and be active."

"He was waking up the pastors and the leaders saying, 'Guys, wake up. We need you to be part of this awakening, to spread it to your churches, to pray, and to vote, everything so that we can continue with what God has put Trump in it to do,'" Herzog said.

"The midterms are coming up and if that is lost, and Trump is a lame duck president, he can't really do much more," Herzog warned. "If the Democrats start taking over—you got New York City and an Islamic mayor of a city? You got that in parts of Michigan. In Texas, they're trying to make a Sharia law region—evil's at the door. We have this little sliver of time right now—a president that's for Israel, for the church—we maybe have a year, two years. If we maximize this time, we can not just see a spiritual awakening of conservatism, but actual revival, harvest, people coming to the Lord."

"Basically, that was his main message," Herzog revealed. "You guys have to really take this seriously. We're doing all this for you guys. We're giving you the baton."

Herzog claimed that Johnson also promised those pastors in attendance that the Trump administration has billions of dollars it wants to funnel to right-wing churches to carry out social programs.

"What they were saying was, 'Guys, we have money for you guys for ministries that are helping the poor, that are helping this, that are helping that,'" he said. "There's tons of money just sitting there. We'd rather you guys do those programs. Basically, it's putting the position of power in the church's hand, kind of like Daniel was in a position of power and Joseph. They're saying we want you guys to have those positions, not those who are against God's plans and ideals."

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RECYCLED VID OF HIM BADLY READING THEN MISINTERP BIBLE ~ THE BISH BARBER?

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[Christian Nationalism ## Much-Hyped ‘Rededication’ of U.S. to God Can’t Draw Trump Off the Golf Course

President Trump called for an event "rededicating" America to God, but he couldn't be bothered to show up for it.

https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/much-hyped-rededication-us-god-cant-draw-trump-golf-course

05/18/2026

by

Peter Montgomery

*Commentary

Trump administration officials and Christian nationalist leaders hyped Sunday’s event to “rededicate America as one nation under God” as a historic moment and turning point for the nation, but President Donald Trump skipped it to go golfing.

The same was true for the Saturday evening worship gathering organized by musician and MAGA activist Sean Feucht on the grounds of the Washington Monument; while his followers gathered, Trump went golfing.

The snub was particularly noteworthy because Trump owes his election victories to the overwhelming support he got from conservative Christian voters, thanks in part to religious-right figures telling their audiences over and over again that Trump was anointed by God to lead and save America.

Religious-right figures who helped promote the event made a big deal out of the spiritual importance of Trump as president calling for the nation’s rededication to God. Dominionist anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ activist Lou Engle has organized many prayer events over the years that drew much bigger crowds, but he said that this one was special: “This solemn assembly is different than any other solemn assembly, for the president of the United States has called this day.”

But the president couldn’t even be bothered to make a video greeting for this “historic” moment like Vice President J.D. Vance did. Instead, organizers played a video of Trump reading a scripture passage from a religious-right organized Bible-reading marathon event a few weeks ago. Engle added that when Trump read that passage, “he opened a door for the greatest awakening America has ever seen.” He called it “a hinge of history moment.”

If Trump cared enough to think that a gathering of “prophetic” leaders might call him out the way Old Testament prophets called out unjust political leaders, he needn’t have worried. None of the speakers calling for personal and national repentance suggested that Trump should repent for his cruelty or corruption. As the Religion News Service noted, neither Sen. Tim Scott nor religious-right activist Alevda King, who spoke about the Black church’s central role in the Civil Rights Movement, mentioned the current MAGA assault on the Voting Rights Act.

Even White House Faith Office Director Paula White didn’t attend in person, sending a short video.

:{:{Ben Carson, who was secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the first Trump administration and is now National Advisor for Nutrition, Health, and Housing at the Department of Agriculture, did show up in person. He was one of a few speakers who talked about the need for national unity. There are “forces” that want Americans to think they are one another’s enemies, Carson said. “We are not enemies.” He did not acknowledge Trump’s central role in creating bitter divisions or his ongoing demonization of his political opponents as traitors—or for that matter his religious-right backers’ portrayal of Trump opponents as demonic.}:

And if the organizers of the event were really interested in promoting national unity, or transcending politics as House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed, they would have created an interfaith event that celebrated America’s exceptional religious liberty and religious pluralism. Instead they created an event overwhelmingly dominated by MAGA Christians.}:

MAGA pastor Franklin Graham delivered a video diatribe about the moral state of the country, quoting scriptural warnings about people being lovers of money, arrogant, abusive, heartless, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, and more. While Graham said this list could apply to America today, he ignored the obvious fact that all those traits apply to the president he unwaveringly promotes.

Samuel Rodriguez, a MAGA pastor, New Apostolic Reformation figure, and head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, gave an opening prayer. He spoke for about four minutes, calling for love and justice but failing to utter a single word about the immigrants and other people in their communities who have been terrorized by the Trump administration’s brutal mass deportation efforts. So much for prophets speaking truth to power.

MAGA pundit Eric Metaxas used his time on the platform at the Sunday rally and the Saturday worship service to promote his new book about the American revolution.

At Feucht’s worship on Saturday, Metaxas claimed that every single one of the founding fathers understood that the national narrative of the revolution was, “We are re-establishing the Sinai covenant.” That kind of claim doesn’t bode well for the credibility of his book, but then, there wasn’tmuch hope for that anyway.

On Sunday, Metaxas said God’s hand had guided American leaders beginning with George Washington. After talking about the British burning the White House during the War of 1812, he added jokingly, “It’s hard to believe it that it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand. It’s extraordinary. We only had to wait 200 years.”

The actual “prayer of rededication” was delivered by Speaker Johnson, who invoked God’s support for the MAGA war on wokeness and truth-telling history:

In recent years we’ve seen sinister ideologies sow confusion and discord among our people. We’ve witnessed attacks on our history, on our heroes, and the cherished moral and spiritual identity of this nation. These forces insist to the young and impressionable that our story, the American story, is one of oppression and hypocrisy and failure, and that this story can only be understood through the lens of our sins. Father, we reject that. We rebuke it in your name. … We turn to you once again to save us from these afflictions, to deliver us from the forces of evil, oppression, injustice, and tyranny both within our borders and beyond our shores.

In asking for deliverance from oppression and injustice, Johnson was apparently not thinking of the authoritarian abuses of power that mark the Trump administration, because his only mention of Trump was to pray that God would “continue to bless our president with the wisdom, prudence, and strength to govern our nation in accordance with your will.”

Neither the smaller-than-expected attendance nor Trump’s apparent disinterest in the “rededication” ceremony mean that the rest of us should ignore that the increasingly aggressive Christian nationalism of the administration and the MAGA movement threatens Americans’ religious freedom and the rights of people seen as undeserving by right-wing Christian nationalists.

// RWW

05/18/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

And the public may never know who their money was spent on.

Nine connected Polymarket accounts have raked in more than $2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. military actions in what digital detectives from the data analytics firm Bubblemaps have identified as a potentially egregious case of insider trading.

Speakers cast America as ‘morally rotten’ and sinful while embracing the ‘Christian nationalist’ label.

President Donald Trump's free eight-hour Rededicate 250 prayer event held at the National Mall in D.C. Sunday drew a notably sparse crowd, with Reuters photos capturing numerous empty seats.

The ancestors of today’s Christian nationalists weren’t the leaders of Christian America — they were the heretics.

The Christian worship performance scheduled for the National Mall is a religious show.

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Mike Johnson Says ‘Rededicate 250’ Event ‘Transcends Politics’; So Why Are All the Speakers MAGA Christians?

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson addressing the 2026 National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance (Image from CBN News coverage)

News & Analysis

05/15/2026

by

Peter Montgomery

A letter from Speaker of the House Mike Johnson promoting this weekend’s Christian nationalist ceremony to “rededicate” America to God was sent out by Freedom 250 Thursday evening.

In the email from Freedom 250, which President Donald Trump set up to wrest control of the national celebrations from the bipartisan and congressionally authorized America 250to promote himself and MAGA ideology, Johnson called Sunday’s day-long event “a unique moment for believers" and “a call for unity, repentance, and hope, and one that truly transcends politics.”

That is classic Trumpian gaslighting.

First of all, an event seeking to unify the actually country might in some way recognize the religious pluralism that is an essential part of what makes America exceptional, along with our Constitution’s protections of religious freedom and prohibitions on government-established religion or religious tests for public office.

Instead, every speaker listed in the schedule sent out by Freedom 250 is a Christian; most are evangelical and Pentecostal Trump boosters, along with a couple of right-wing Catholics and other denominations represented. Earlier speaker lists included a rabbi, perhaps as “Judeo-Christian” window-dressing, but he was not included in Thursday’s Freedom 250 email.

It’s a bad joke for Johnson to claim that Sunday’s event “transcends politics,” given that every speaker listed in the Freedom 250 email is a vocal supporter of President Trump, many of them on record declaring him to be anointed by God and some, like White House Faith Office Director Paula White, claiming that Trump’s opponents are enemies of God or demonic agents of Satan.

In reality, this is another opportunity for Trump to posture as a defender of the faith and bask in the adoration of his most loyal supporters at a time when his public support has hit record lows. And it is an opportunity for Christian nationalists to continue to send the false and exclusionary message that the only “real” Americans are the right kind of Christians, at a time when Christian-right and MAGA officials are trying to claim that Muslims and other non-Christians do not deserve the protection of the First Amendment.

The “moment of rededication” will be led by Johnson, along with former Archbishop of New York City Timothy Dolan, MAGA Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, and dominionist New Apostolic Reformation figure Lou Engle. Engle is a longtime anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ activist who led prayers that God would knock off Supreme Court justices to create vacancies for Trump to fill. In an Engle teaching guide called “The Keys to Dominion,” he preached:

“The church’s vocation is to rule history with God…The same authority that has been given to Christ Jesus for overwhelming conquering and dominion has been given to the saints of the most high….We’re God’s rulers upon the earth…We will govern over kings and judges will have to submit…We’re called to rule! To change history! To be co-regents with God!”

Christians, secularists, and other Americans who reject the MAGA movement’s increasingly aggressiveChristian nationalism are speaking up in opposition to the “rededication.” This week, the Interfaith Alliance projected messages supporting religious freedom for all on the walls of the National Gallery of Art......

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Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is being targeted by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), CNN reported Friday.

Loudermilk is known for being the lawmaker who gave tours to Jan. 6 attackers casing the U.S. Capitol ahead of the attack. After years of allegations against him, he was appointed chair of the Republican Party's investigation into the Jan. 6 committee.

Hutchinson was the aide who said that U.S. Secret Service agents faced off against President Donald Trump, lunging at the steering wheelof the security vehicle, trying to get them to take him to the Capitol to march with his MAGA supporters. Normally, the president rides in a limousine, but on that day, he delivered a speech from the White House Ellipse and rode in an SUV.

Hutchinson also witnessed former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows burning documents in his office fireplace. At one point, he was burning so many documents that Meadows' wife noticed a smell in his clothing and said it was costing them a hefty dry cleaning bill.

Loudermilk is demanding that the Justice Department bring charges against Hutchinson for lying to Congress about these incidents. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) signed off on the demand.

It will be a catch-22 for Loudermilk, however, because a trial claiming Hutchinson lied under oath would mean that Hutchinson would have access to information and witnesses who would be forced to answer questions under oath. She could call the Secret Service agents, Meadows and even Trump himself. Thus far, there has never been a trial for Trump on Jan. 6, only an investigation by the Justice Department. While there were charges ultimately filed, they were dropped after Trump won the 2024 election.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been concerned about Loudermilk's efforts, it was reported last year. He fears that subpoenaing Hutchinson could bring to light "embarrassing information" as well as sexually explicit text messages she allegedly received when she was working in the White House during Trump's first presidency.

For years, Republicans have alleged that Hutchinson lied about her account and in her book about what she experienced on Jan. 6 and beyond. Johnson has been the one worried about the can of worms it might open.

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trump 0 for 9? texas? ark

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is now dealing with a razor-thin margin in the Republican’s House voting edge, and can only afford one defection on a party-line vote to pass legislation favored by his side of the aisle.

That has created a dilemma: Will Republicans who have been primary losers still be motivated to show up for House votes?

Congress reporter Olivia Beavers noted in a tweet that there’s “broader concern among senior Rs” about whether Republican primary losers are “motivated enough to fly back for votes each week they are in session.”

In another tweet, reporter Reese Gorman put a finer point on it, citing Texas Republicans Dan Crenshaw and Wesley Hunt, who are “both out of jobs now and one (Hunt) rarely showed in the first place, what’s to motivate them to keep coming back?”

The New York Times reports that concern over the thin Republican margin has been part of the dynamic since President Trump’s 2025 triumph. Republicans like Crenshaw, who occasionally reach across the aisle, gain outsize power, although there are consequences for bucking the party leaders. Crenshaw was the only Texas Republican not to get an endorsement in his primary election from President Donald Trump Trump.

Major legislation can’t come to the House floor without a vote to set the debate ground rules. With thin margins, Republicans won’t be able to move their agenda forward. Under House rules, tie votes fail. Which means that a lot of GOP hopes rest on under-motivated lame ducks getting on a plane....

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GRIN CLAP W JDV SOTU

MMA

The North Koreans do a more nuanced show than Sean Hannity’s take on Trump’s State of the Union

The Fox host raved about Trump’s “iconic,” “uplifting,” “patriotic,” “glowing,” “powerful,” “very unique” speech

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 02/25/26

The Wall Street Journal published a report from Korea Bureau Chief Timothy W. Martin early Wednesday morning detailing how the “unbridled flattery” North Korean state media provides Kim Jong Un “underscores the dictator’s need to establish cult-of-personality supremacy as a smokescreen for his nation’s woes.”

That also happens to serve as a handy description of the role performed by the Journal’s corporate cousins at Fox News, the propaganda outlet whose servile treatment of President Donald Trump helps the deeply and increasingly unpopular American leader rally his core supporters.

Martin wrote that Kim had received “lavish praise in the regime’s largest newspaper” for a meaningless accomplishment, citing an editorial which called the dictator “the greatest person in the world,” praised his “unimaginable achievements,” and stated, “Our future is infinitely bright and promising!”

Such language, while overwrought, frankly pales in comparison to the unabashed sycophancy Fox star and Trumpist operative Sean Hannity provided in response to Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday. His coverage wasin line with that of his fellow Fox propagandists, but serves as an instructive window into how the network works to “establish cult-of-personality supremacy,” as Martin put it in the North Korean context.

Hannity launched his post-speech show by declaring that “moments ago, President Trump wrapped up yet another iconic, uplifting, patriotic State of the Union,” and devoted the rest of his broadcast to lavishing the president with praise and hosting others to do the same.

In a monologue interspersed with lengthy clips from the president’s speech, the Fox host said Trump had “championed our country and the achievements of you, the American people.”

“Now clearly tonight was not about the Democratic Party, in fact it wasn’t about either party,” Hannity claimed of a speech in which Trump called Democrats “sick” and “crazy” and accused them of “destroying our country.”

“Instead,” the host continued, “President Trump delivered a glowing speech highlighting the triumphs, the struggles, the bravery of so many American people.”

Hannity concluded his monologue by declaring, “Now, under President Trump’s leadership, America's full potential is on lock, and the state of our union, thankfully, is strong.”

Video

Citation

From the Feburary 24, 2026, edition of Fox News' Hannity

The Fox host kept laying it on thick during a series of interviews with Republican leaders, who likewise showered the president with accolades.

“Let's go to some observations,” he told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). “The president said the nation is back, bigger, stronger than ever before, golden age of America, that he inherited a nation in crisis, a turnaround for the ages, talked about the border, talked about inflation, talked about interest rates, talked about gas prices, talk about mortgage rates, talked about safety and security around the globe.”

“This was not your typical laundry list that you often get at a State of the Union. This was deep, impactful, profound success stories and he took the time to tell all of them in a very different manner,” he continued. “I thought it was very unique tonight.”

Johnson replied, “I thought it was unique. I think it was the best State of the Union speech I’ve seen.”

“What made tonight so powerful is he did everything he said he was going to do and then some,” Hannity later marveled to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). “A lot of politicians use words, he’s actions.”

Like Johnson, Jordan told Hannity that Trump’s “amazing” State of the Union had been “by far the best one” he’d seen.

Hannity closed out his coverage with more fawning over the president’s address from a panel of former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway (“one of Trump's best speeches”), Fox host Trey Gowdy (“it was almost like our 250th birthday party started tonight”), and former Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus (“one of the greatest, most triumphant speeches ever given by a president").

Hannity has taken over the role played in Trump’s first term by then-Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who told viewers that Trump’s White House featured “sunlight beaming throughout the place, and on almost every face” and at one point signed off, “Have a great weekend. The president makes such a thing possible for us all.”

As Fox News President Jay Wallace said of Dobbs at the time, “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

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Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told a room full of Republican donors that their narrow majority in the House may be in serious jeopardy.

According to Jake Sharman at Punch Bowl News, Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.) "may have a terminal diagnosis."

Multiple sources relayed the story to Sherman, who noted that the 73-year-old lawmaker said he would not run for reelection but would not leave before the end of his term.

The GOP has already lost Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who quit at the beginning of the year.

There are several other lawmakers who've announced their retirements but have not yet left office, and others who are running for offices back home and intend to leave their seats at the end of the term.

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) is under heavy pressure to resign after an extramarital affair ended with the woman committing suicide. Her family is now speaking out against him. Gonzales very narrowly won his last election.

Gonzales said earlier this week that he would not resign and Johnson has indicated he has no intention of pushing Gonzales out.

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Republicans say their 'razor-thin' majority leaves scandal-plagued members 'untouchable'

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BAD FAITH BS ON SHUTDOWN 10 25

Mike Johnson tries to give Bible lesson to Pope Leo XIV

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AUMF 5 SEN GOP

12 PLUS DEFECT ON ACA? 1 26 HUGE LOSS ON EPSTEIN FILES

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House GOP majority 'down to almost nothing' as yet another Republican retires

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Republicans have had complete control of the federal government for nearly a year now, and after months of chaos, scandal and infighting, they have little "to show for it," according to a new analysis from MS NOW.

The GOP won a trifecta in the 2024 election, as Donald Trump returned to the presidency, while the party held onto its House majority by a thread and took back the Senate. The Supreme Court has also had a 6-to-3 majority of conservative justices appointed by Republicans since 2020, effectively giving the party control in all corners of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government.

Despite this, MS NOW's Hayes Brown on Monday argued that "it’s impressive how little the GOP managed to get done legislatively" despite all that power. Most of the year's legislative achievements were wrapped up in the sweeping and unpopular Big Beautiful Bill spending package, while Trump himself made a grab for all the power he could for the presidency with little to no pushback from Congress or the Supreme Court.

In total, Congress passed only 61 bills in 2025, with over a third of them, 22, focused solely on overturning rules and regulations introduced under former President Joe Biden. Two others were focused on renaming federal buildings. The House set a record for the least amount of votes undertaken within the first year of a new Congress in the 21st Century, 362, with Speaker Mike Johnson frequently calling recesses "early when faced with revolts from his caucus." The Senate, meanwhile, spent most of its year confirming Trump's various nominees as opposed to crafting new legislation.

By comparison, 97 bills were passed out of both chambers of Congress in 2017, Trump's first year as president, when the GOP had a similar trifecta, with the two-year session ultimately passing 344 bills by the end of 2018.

"President Donald Trump spent this year barreling forward in myriad directions, enthusiastically stretching executive power to previously untested boundaries as he implements his agenda," Brown wrote. Little of the president’s energy was spent working with Congress, however, to try to turn his policies into law. Even at times when more leadership could have helped guide an internally divided party, Trump left the heavy lifting to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D."

The lack of legislation was compounded by the fact that the Big Beautiful Bill "contained most of the GOP’s legislative priorities," with Johnson and Thune spending most of the first half of the year hammering out its details. Anything not included in that bill was largely left to the wayside.

Brown also predicted that, as is common for divided Congresses, things could slow down even further if Democrats retake that House majority in the 2026 midterms, as many have predicted they will do.

"Which points up another sad truth: For lawmakers deciding whether to stay or go, this largely wasted year could actually be a high point of productivity," Brown concluded.

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'He just lied': Johnson skewered by colleagues as House closes — again

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an 11 25 pretty civil i apprec you too tried to get her to tALK/GET OFF CAMERA; HE HAS PRESSER EVERY DAY TO BLAME DEMS FOR SHUTDN

House speaker complains as Dem rep interrupts presser to accuse him of 'lying'

David Badash

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rww

11/04/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Plenty of conservatives, especially Jewish ones, abhor Fuentes’s growing clout. But by cheering on Donald Trump as he promoted conspiracy theories and systematically destroyed bulwarks against nativism and bigotry in the Republican Party, they helped make Fuentes’s rise possible.

BEN SHAPIRO DID SOMETHING UNIQUE on Monday. Not only did he open his show with a fiery intervention in the right’s roiling feud over white nationalist Nick Fuentes—he devoted his entire show to the topic.

White nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes went on a hateful and unhinged rant against Fox host Mark Levin this week, openly calling for his deportation for comments he made in support of Israel.

The far-right activist and former congressional candidate has repeatedly criticized defense officials on her website and social media accounts while boasting of her close ties to President Donald Trump.

Mike Johnson has a reflex. When asked about a major breaking news event that is dominating headlines and conversations around Capitol Hill’s proverbial water coolers — usually the president’s latest authoritarian endeavor or national humiliation — Johnson defaults to pretending he has no access to the internet, newspapers, or staff who are quite literally paid to keep him informed.

Back in the early 2000s, when we were outraged by the excesses of authoritarian dilettantes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a friend suggested I start a blog. I had been a lawyer, but was eager to change careers. Having studied the rise of the Christian right as a college student in the 1980s, I was now watching their aspirations unfold in real time. I wanted to investigate, expose, weigh in on all the things other people were missing. I was accustomed to writing fast. I was built to blog.

American public education, though historically rooted in Christian ideals, has long navigated tensions among denominational differences and, in modern times, secularism. The growing influence of Christian nationalism—a movement blending Protestant religious identity with political ideology—threatens this balance.

---

---

AN 10 25

NO LNX

Trump has successfully mounted a coup thanks to one man

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hands President Donald Trump a gavel after Trump signed his signature bill of tax breaks and spending cuts, ahead of the Fourth of July celebrations, at the White House in Washington, Friday, July 4, 2025. Alex Brandon/Pool via REUTERS

:{:{Thom Hartmann October 27, 2025 }:

:

“No political truth is of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty: The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

—James Madison, Federalist 47

“All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating of these in the same hands, is precisely the definition of despotic government. An ELECTIVE DESPOTISM was not the government we fought for; but one ... in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” (emphasis Jefferson’s)

— Thomas Jefferson, commentary on Federalist 48

Speaker Mike Johnson, presumably on the orders of Donald Trump, has unconstitutionally shut down the House of Representatives for over a month. The result is that Trump can now do pretty much whatever he wants without restraint.

He’s effectively King of America, at least for the moment. No limits, no constraints, no oversight. It’s the coup that finally worked.

If there is any one principle the Founders of this nation agreed on, it was that the first and primary function of Congress is to prevent a president from seizing king-like powers. It’s repeated over and over throughout their writings and carved into the Constitution itself.

That historical reality notwithstanding, “King” Donald has decided, all by himself, to demolish a large chunk of The People’s White House and replace it with a replica of Vladimir Putin’s Winter Palace’s Grand Throne Room so he can entertain billionaires with large, high-dollar fundraisers at the taxpayers’ expense without having to travel all the way to Mar-a-Largo.

He didn’t bother to get permission from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, nor did he submit plans for what people are now calling the “Epstein Ballroom” to the National Capital Planning Commission as any other historic building in D.C. would do. Loopholes in the law apparently allowed him to do this, however, because previous generations of lawmakers never imagined a president would be so insane as to one day demolish parts of the White House without consulting Congress or the people, so they saw no need to forbid it.

Which leaves only Congress as the single agency that could have thwarted Trump’s imperial plans. As any Constitutional scholar will tell you — as would Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson or Father of the Constitution James Madison — that’s at the foundation of their job.

Congress is supposed to have oversight over the president, to constrain him with laws, budgets, and hearings, and keep his behavior within the law. Like they did when Richard Nixon was bugging the Democratic National Committee, or when Bill Clinton tried covering up his affair, or George W. Bush engaged in illegal torture after lying us into two wars.

They should be demanding answers about Trump’s lawless “murders” (quoting Colombia’s president) of people in the Caribbean, his imposing tariffs in violation of Article I of the Constitution, or his ICE agency’s brutality and illegal warantless arrests.

But to do that — even to have prevented his unilateral tearing down part of the White House — the House of Representatives would have to convene oversight hearings and create such a public uproar that Trump would back down, and there’s a real possibility that could have happened, particularly as Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Rep. Thomas Massey (R-KY) are starting to stand up to Trump.

The only problem is that Congress is on vacation. Apparently because Trump ordered it: we all know that if he wanted the House open, it would be open today.

Johnson has shut down the House by sending everybody home and then dragging out the recess. The growing concern is that he’s doing this at Trump’s demand in order to eliminate congressional oversight and thus enhance his now-near-dictatorial power.

Johnson has kept the chamber in indefinite recess during a government shutdown — the first Speaker in history to do so — while refusing to hold even pro forma sessions, seat a duly elected member (Adelita Grijalva, of Arizona), or allow continuing resolutions to reach the floor.

This is against the law — the supreme law — of the land. There is no joint resolution with the Senate allowing for a recess longer than three days, nor has the Senate passed such a standalone resolution. Article I, §5, cl.4 of the Constitution reads:

“Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”

Congress didn’t even suspend its functioning for weeks like this during the Civil War or WWII; it’s literally never happened before.

So why would Johnson take this unprecedented step? What’s the emergency that’s greater than the War of 1812, WWI, 9/11, or any other crisis?

One possible answer is that it’s all about increasing Trump’s power as potentate, so he can do whatever he wants — like demolishing part of the White House — with no criticism or examination, no hearings or testimony, no experts or historians, from the House of Representatives.

By halting committee work, freezing discharge petitions through this naked (and unconstitutional) calendar manipulation, and withholding any date for Congress to reconvene, Johnson — obviously fulfilling Trump’s demand — has placed the entire legislative branch into a political form of suspended animation.

Why does Trump want this? Why does he care about the House of Representatives enough to put Mike Johnson in this difficult, illegal situation? This threat to Johnson’s legacy as Speaker?

The House, which only “exists” as a functional body when formally in session (normal or pro forma), has been rendered incapable of introducing bills, issuing subpoenas, or performing any oversight whatsoever of the executive branch, from Trump to Stephen Miller to Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, or anybody else.

And even if the Senate were to step in and “legalize” Johnson’s recess, his dragging it out this long or longer would still have the same impact on weakening what’s left of our democracy and handing more and more uncountable power to Trump.

What Johnson has pulled off is a “procedural” coup: he (with Trump) now controls whether Congress exists at all. His keeping the House in recess concentrates extraordinary power in the Speaker’s office and, by extension, in Trump, whose directives Johnson slavishly follows.

With the calendar erased and committees paralyzed, transparency and accountability over the executive and judicial branches has disappeared; the public can’t track missed votes, can’t demand action, and federal agencies like Vought’s CBO and Noem’s ICE can operate entirely unchecked.

Border Czar Tom Homan suddenly has no oversight. Whatsoever. Ditto for Bondi, Noem, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, Patel, Miller, etc.

They can do whatever they damn well please, particularly since they appear to believe they’ll get pardoned if they get caught breaking the law.

Furthermore, the longer this paralysis continues, the more it normalizes an unbalanced government in which the president acts without legislative restraint.

If this continues, or Johnson falls into a pattern of repeatedly recessing Congress whenever Trump requires him to, Trump might as well declare himself king.

Without the House, even the Senate can’t act in a meaningful way; the Constitution requires that all legislation involving money — including any laws or resolutions that may tie Trump’s hands (since virtually all actions must be paid for) — must originate in the House. (Article 7, Clause 1: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives…”)

Without ever proclaiming it out loud, Mike Johnson has accomplished what open insurrection never could: the methodical, bureaucratic nullification of Congress itself, eliminating its ability to perform oversight over Trump.

All without even a peep or notice from the mainstream press, who are instead fixated on the government shutdown, seemingly thinking it’s the same thing as, or part of, the House recess.

If Johnson doesn’t back down, or if he does temporarily but this becomes a regular thing, our republic will have been really and truly turned into a kingdom — complete with a massive new throne room — before our very eyes.

---

KFF FACT CHECK AN 10 25

...

Our Ruling

Vance said, “Democrats are threatening to shut down the entire government because they want to give hundreds of billions of dollars of health care benefits to illegal aliens.”

Immigrants in the U.S. illegally are largely ineligible for the federally funded health care programs Medicare and Medicaid, and they cannot seek coverage in the Affordable Care Act marketplace or apply for subsidies.

The Democrats’ budget proposal would not change that.

The Democrats want to restore access to certain health care programs to legal immigrants who will lose access under the Republican tax and spending law — among other measures aimed at making Medicaid and Affordable Care Act insurance plans easier to keep.

Their proposal would not grant federally supported health care benefits to people in the U.S. illegally, because they did not have access to them in the first place. The small amount of funding designated for Emergency Medicaid reimburses hospitals that provide emergency care to immigrants who would be eligible for Medicaid if not for their immigration status. Finally, we did not find evidence for Vance’s assertion that Democrats want “hundreds of billions” in health benefits for migrants in the country illegally.

We rate the statement False.

---

an 10 25

Facing growing backlash from Democrats and even lawmakers from his own party — as well as GOP voters — for sending the House into recess during the shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson is turning his anger toward Democrats and the broader left.

As Politico reported on Friday, Johnson is “dead set on keeping the House out of session as long as it takes to pressure Senate Democrats” on the shutdown, to pass the House’s continuing resolution to fund the government.

The Speaker suggested tensions are so high in the halls of Congress right now that he thinks Democrats need to be “physically separated” from Republicans.

“Emotions are high. People are upset — I’m upset,” Johnson said on Thursday. “Is it better for them, probably, to be physically separated right now? Yeah, it probably is, frankly.”

Johnson, who was set to host a now-postponed private Palm Beach, Florida “retreat” and fundraiser this weekend, went even further on Friday morning.

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“We’re so angry about it,” he told Fox News. “I mean, I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people,” the Speaker said, emphatically, of Democrats. “They’re playing games with real people’s lives.”

“The theory we have right now — they have a hate-America rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. ”

“And it’s being told to us that they won’t be able to re-open the government until after that rally, ’cause they can’t face their rabid base,” Johnson said, adding that he is “beyond words.”

Johnson appeared to be referring to the “No Kings” rally, a protest against authoritarianism, which is not only being held in Washington, D.C. on October 18, but nationwide.

---

RWW

10/06/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Last month, the White House issued two executive orders that direct federal law enforcement to start cracking down on the political opposition. One of the two memos prompted some confusion and mockery for its attempt to designate “antifa” a terrorist organization. But the second has gone largely unnoticed in the mainstream press.

Back in 2000, a Michigan entrepreneur named Ron DeHaas co-founded Covenant Eyes, an anti-porn internet accountability software program that has since grown to more than 2 million users. The idea, he said at the time, was to protect his teenage stepsons from sexual temptation online. Its effectiveness has been lauded by many, including Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson. But this past Aug. 13, one of those stepsons was arrested at a meeting spot in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he thought he would find a 14-year-old girl interested in having sex with him.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump expanded his war on free speech, the left, and ordinary Americans. It’s going to get worse.

The White House aide equates opposition to Trump’s agenda with terrorism—and pushes for the use of state power to suppress it.

Douglas Wilson’s rising influence shows how the past is at the center of today’s culture wars.

The Supreme Court refused to hear the far-right commentator’s censorship case.

---

---}:

MMA

January 6 “false flag” claim made it to the president

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/29/25

The right-wing conspiracy theory that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents who were deployed to respond to the riotous mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, had actually incited the crowd in a “Fedsurrection” spread through the right-wing conspiracy echo chamber over the weekend and reached President Donald Trump in just over 36 hours after its inception.

Elements of the right-wing media, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, spent years concocting an alternate narrative of January 6 in which the rioters were heroes, any violence was actually caused by federal agents, and the resulting prosecutions of perpetrators constituted a brutal campaign of government repression.

Following Trump’s return to office, his pardoning of the rioters, and the firings and demotions of prosecutors and FBI agents who handled their cases, this is effectively the position of the United States government.

Given those dynamics — and the president’s willingness to promote any lie, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it fits his biases — false claims supporting the narrative of January 6 as an “inside job” can spread with alarming speed.

Late on September 25, right-wing journalist John Solomon’s Just the News outlet published a story with the headline “FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns.’”

“The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to ‘wokeness’ and allowed its employees to become ‘pawns in a political war,’ according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years,” Solomon and Steven Richards wrote in the article’s first paragraph.

Solomon and Richards did not reveal until the story’s 11th paragraph that the agents had been deployed “after the violence started.” The pair lifted up complaints from FBI agents that in an emergency situation — in which thousands of people had laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers and threatening the safety of the entirety of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, who were assembled to count the electoral votes — those agents had been hurriedly assigned riot control duties even if they lacked training and gear for that purpose.

Solomon and JustTheNews both shared the story on X using the text of the headline. And right-wing conspiracy theorists quickly responded by assuming that the report fit their assumption that January 6 was a false flag operation.

Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, said of the story: “The question this begs is; was there sedition or conspiracy committed on the part of the DOJ & FBI at the time?”

“You don’t just have 274 FBI agents or employees show up to execute this massive of a ‘fedsurrection.’ This required foreknowledge (intent),” he added.

MAGA poster Bill Mitchell likewise claimed that the FBI agents had been “infiltrators.”

Trump himself quickly adopted this misreading of the JustTheNews report. He posted to a Truth Social midday on September 27 that “it was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed… 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.” He added that the reporting showed that “FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials,’” and demanded the identities of the FBI agents involved.

Trump’s post brought a new wave of right-wing conspiracymongering over the report, with various MAGA figures claiming that it showed there had been a “Fedsurrection” in which FBI agents acted as “provocateurs.”

FBI Director Kash Patel stepped in to try to tamp down the situation. Without admitting that Trump was wrong, he said in a statement to Fox News Digital that “Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” for which he blamed “corrupt leadership.”

Faced with the same situation, presumably Patel would have allowed the January 6 insurrection to proceed, rather than violating standards by sending FBI agents to quell it?

By Sunday morning, the false claim about the FBI agents had been thoroughly baked into mainstream GOP discourse.

When CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) whether rule of law applies “to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6,” Johnson replied, “I’m glad you brought that up,” citing “new information over the last couple of days” about how “there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.”

Tapper quickly cut him off, saying that according to Patel, “They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. They weren’t — it wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested.”

But Johnson, who was among the members of Congress evacuated to a secure location during the riots, replied, “Well, Jake, wait a minute. Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions.”

He added: “There's videos, and it's always been disputed, what involvement some of those persons engaged in, what involvement they had. Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions. But they should be answered.”

Johnson went on to say that a House subcommittee newly established to reinvestigate the attack would get to the bottom of the situation.

The campaign by the Trump administration and MAGA media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict political violence as purely a phenomenon of the left raises some obvious questions, among them, “What about January 6?” A pro-Trump mob, summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president and incited by his calls for them to “fight,” descending on the U.S. Capitol and assaulting numerous law enforcement officers while sending Congress into hiding would surely seem to qualify.

The answer is that on the right, the January 6 rioters have been reimagined as the good guys.

//

  1. ### January 6 and the people who knew better

01/06/25 2:12 PM EST

  1. ### The right’s propaganda machine gets its Jan. 6 pardons

01/20/25 7:59 PM EST

  1. ### Sean Hannity once celebrated the FBI “rank and file.” Now he’s touting Trump’s purge.

02/05/2

---

MOSES MIKE? 9 25

AN 9 25

'Why we mounted a revolution': Backlash as Johnson tells Dems to 'yield' to Trump

an 9 25

As the Epstein files controversy continues to capture headlines, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is offering a vigorous defense of President Donald Trump. Johnson is claiming that Trump was an informant for the FBI in its investigation of billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling CNN that Trump considered Epstein's crimes a "terrible, unspeakable evil."

During an appearance on The Bulwark's vodcast posted early Monday morning, September 8, journalist Will Sommer drew a parallel between Johnson's defense of Trump and the far-right conspiracy cult QAnon.

Host Sarah Longwell — a conservative consultant, Never Trumper and founder of the group Republican Accountability —told Sommer that Johnson is claiming Trump "was on the side of the angels here," asking, "Is this real? Was Donald Trump an Epstein informant?"

READ MORE: 'Deeply disloyal': Trump is plotting to oust his most persistent critic in the GOP

Epstein responded, "Mike Johnson is kind of trying to keep the heat off Trump here in terms his relation to Epstein. And he makes this remark that — I think at least in the Republican Party among the leaders — had never been heard before: this idea that Trump cooperated with the FBI or was an informant against Epstein. But what's funny is that this kind of harkens back to this really popular QAnon and sort of broader Trump grass roots rationalization of why we have these videos of Trump hanging out with Epstein, why they were such close buddies at one point."

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Sommer continued, "And they say: Well, maybe he was an FBI agent or an agent of Q, what have you — going inside the Epstein organization to take it down, take down the pedophile ring from the inside."

The QAnon conspiracy movement emerged in 2017 during Trump's first presidency, claiming that the United States' federal government had been hijacked by an international cabal of child sex traffickers, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was put in the White House to fight the ring. Q, the cult claimed, was the person giving QAnon information about efforts to fight the cabal.

QAnon viewed Trump as an heroic figure in the battle against the cabal. Past supporters of QAnon ranged from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) to Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. Jake Angeli or The QAnon Shaman — who was among the pro-Trump rioters who invaded the White House on January 6, 2021.

READ MORE: A dangerous group of whacko militants threatens to destroy Florida as we know it

When Longwell asked Sommer if there was "any evidence to support" Johnson's claim that Trump was an FBI informant in its Epstein investigation, he laughed and responded, "There's zero evidence."

READ MORE:'He was an FBI informant': Mike Johnson makes stunning admission about Trump

AN 9 25

Amid escalating intra-party conflict, President Donald Trump and his allies are orchestrating a high-stakes primary challenge against Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Ky.), who has frequently criticized the president over key policy issues.

CNN reported Sunday that Trump's super PAC, Kentucky MAGA, is revving up to flood Massie’s district with resources and attacks designed to topple the lawmaker, who is up for reelection next year.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) lambasted his Kentucky colleague for undermining party unity. “He is actively working against his team almost daily now and seems to enjoy that role. So he is, you know, deciding his own fate,” Johnson told CNN.

READ MORE:Arkansas farmers are facing catastrophe — and Trump is the reason why

"Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team are sending their clearest signals to date that their conservative colleague will have to fend for himself as Trump’s allies prepare to dump millions into Massie’s district to purge him from the Northeastern Kentucky district he’s represented for nearly 13 years. In interviews with CNN, five members of House GOP leadership declined to offer their backing for Massie’s reelection bid – and Johnson would not say if he’d support his colleague," the report said.

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Massie is pushing fiercely to force the release of files related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, needing just two more GOP signatures for a discharge petition that would bypass leadership. Earlier, he bucked the party line on crucial votes, most recently ambushing a continuing resolution aimed at preventing a government shutdown, as well as lampooning Trump’s domestic priorities for ballooning the deficit.

Meanwhile, Trump’s apparatus is hard at work. His MAGA-aligned super PAC, launched in June, is staffed by veterans Tony Fabrizio and Chris LaCivita. They have pledged to spend “whatever it takes” to replace Massie in the May 2026 primary.

Trump has not yet found a challenger to take on the Kentucky Republican. According to the report, "Trump and his team are still searching for a candidate who can go toe-to-toe with the 54-year-old Massie, who has burnished a brand of a party maverick not afraid to break from his leadership and the president of his own party – namely on issues of government spending and budget deficits. But Trump views Massie as a deeply disloyal actor in a party where he demands unflinching support."

READ MORE:Irony oozes from Trump's latest self-made scandal

But Massie isn’t going down quietly. In mid‑July, his campaign announcedthat it had more than $1.7 million in its war chest for his reelection, including a solid $584,000 raised between April and June. He claims financial resilience and backing from high-profile backers, including tech billionaire and former Trump advisor, Elon Musk.

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ADF say xmas BS 10 yrs? see john oliver 525

appeAL tO HEAVEN FLAG

===

RECALL TRUMP COUP 1

===

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NOTE 7 25 TULSI GABBARD DEFLECTION EPSTEIN ACCUSE BO OF TREASON RUSSIA-GATE

SO DEM ELECTION INTERFERENCE?!

// ?

rww

07/24/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

In resurfaced video testimony, Jeffrey Epstein was asked if he and Donald Trump ever spent time with young girls.

Is perpetrating heinous crimes against children too big a hurdle for a political alliance of convenience? Maybe not.

Candace Owens doubled down on her claim that French First Lady Brigitte Macron was born a man on Wednesday after French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife filed a defamation lawsuit against the right-wing commentator accusing her of spreading the conspiracy theory that Brigitte was born “Jean-Michel Trogneux.”

Trump appointed far-right loyalist Paul Ingrassia to head a Justice Department office responsible for keeping politics out of the civil service.

The GOP's Jan. 6 probe in the last Congress was an embarrassing dud. Rather than learn an obvious lesson, the party is going to give it a second try.

The conservative legal movement used Trump’s first term to seize control of the federal courts. Will it use his second term to rewrite the Constitution entirely?

maddow ref

doj arg pardon covers later gun case?

Almost immediately after Donald Trump pardoned Jan. 6 criminals, including convicted felons who violently clashed with police, congressional Republicans were asked for their reactions. They mostly tried to adopt a forward-thinking posture.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for example, said in response to questions about the pardons, “We’re looking at the future, not the past.” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, similarly added, “I’m ready to move forward.”

This was a badly flawed reaction for a variety of reasons, but House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed his party’s preferred talking point anyway. “The president’s made a decision, we move forward,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters on the third day of the new Trump era. Johnson added, “We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward.”

As it happens, that wasn’t altogether true. GOP officials didn’t want to look back at Trump’s pardons from January 2025, but they most certainly want to look back at the insurrectionist violence from January 2021. NBC News reported:

House Republicans are moving to create a new select subcommittee to ‘continue Congress’ investigation’ of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, chaired by Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga. The House will have to vote on the resolution to establish the subcommittee, which would fall under the Judiciary Committee.

The House speaker — the one who said, “We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward” after Trump put violent criminals back on American streets — boasted this week that his party should further investigate Jan. 6 because “there is clearly more work to be done.”

In reality, it’s not nearly as “clear” as the GOP leader wants the public to believe.

In case anyone needs a refresher, it was just a few years ago, as the Republican majority in the House got to work, when the party decided it was time for a new, GOP-friendly investigation into the Jan. 6 attack. The endeavor would be led by Loudermilk, who faced some uncomfortable questions about a controversial Capitol tour the day before the riot.

After launching his own Jan. 6 probe, the Georgia Republican’s first step was simple: He exonerated himself.

In the months that followed, Loudermilk said he intended to determine “what really happened” on Jan. 6, indifferent to the fact that we already learned what really happened.

More than a year after launching the partisan probe, Loudermilk and his GOP colleagues released a report on their findings, which was effectively meaningless and broke no new ground. The document appeared to be designed to undermine the bipartisan House Jan. 6 committee from the previous Congress, but it failed, and even most Republicans blew it off as irrelevant.

Loudermilk and his cohorts set out to discredit earlier findings and expose shocking new details that would alter the public’s understanding of the assault on the Capitol, but the partisan bombshell was a dud.

In the months that followed, Loudermilk continued to engage in half-hearted efforts — he even asked the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation into former House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney for foolish reasons that collapsed under scrutiny — but by any fair measure, the entire endeavor was a failure.

Congressional Democrats barely bothered to push back against Loudermilk’s “investigation” for the most insulting of reasons: They saw it as too boring and pitiful to warrant a full-throated response.

It’s against this backdrop that the House Republican leaders settled on a brilliant idea: Johnson wants the same congressman who failed in his Jan. 6 investigation in the last Congress to keep going with another Jan. 6 investigation in the current Congress — all while telling the public that GOP lawmakers are “looking forward” and leaving Jan. 6 in the rearview mirror. He said this week that Republicans “are proud” to be “exposing false narratives” from the Jan. 6 committee in the 117th Congress.

MAGA activists who are expecting blockbuster revelations should probably start lowering their expectations now.

---

said release, then 180 then shut down hse

an 7 25

During a press conference on Tuesday morning, July 22, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) announced that he was cutting the week's legislative activities short and sending lawmakers in order avoid a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. And he blamed Democrats, accusing them of "endless efforts to politicize the Epstein investigation" and adding, "We're not going to play political games with this."

Johnson's announcement drew plenty of criticism online, with many social media users accusing him of running interference for President Donald Trump.

Mother Jones' Kiera Butler, in a biting article, argues that far-right "Christian nationalism" is influencing that decision and others from the House speaker.

READ MORE: The guy who really controls the MAGA cult isn't Donald Trump

"On Tuesday," Butler explains, "House Speaker Mike Johnson, in a departure from his previous calls for transparency, announced that he would not ask for a vote on whether the files pertaining to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein should be released…. It's impossible to truly know what prompted Johnson's about-face, but it's worth noting that he has long been connected to the New Apostolic Reformation — a charismatic evangelical movement that teaches that Christians are called to take 'dominion' over all aspects of society, including the government. Johnson has publicly acknowledged that NAR has had a 'profound influence' on his life, according to a report issued by the Congressional Freethought Caucus last year."

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Butler adds, "It's also worth noting that arguably the most influential and visible NAR leader, a Texas business strategist named Lance Wallnau, has been outspoken in recent weeks in his defense of Trump on the Epstein issue. On July 14, Wallnau told his 100,000 YouTube followers that he believed that Trump was acting in the best interest of the country by not releasing the files."

The Mother Jones reporter notes, however, that Wallnau isn't the only far-right evangelical "Christian nationalist influencer" who is closely allied with MAGA Republicans.

"Another prominent Christian nationalist influencer, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, has also arrived at a belief in Trump's innocence —but from a different perspective," Butler observes. "Webbon isn’t connected with the NAR like Johnson and Wallnau — instead, he's a member of the TheoBros, a network of Christian nationalist Millennial influencers. Many of them believe that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, and that the Ten Commandments should replace the U.S. Constitution."

READ MORE:Fox host quickly ends interview with Senate Republican after he freezes mid-sentence

Butler continues, "Like NAR, the TheoBros are also well-connected to Republican politicians. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a TheoBros-aligned church, and (Vice President JD) Vance has socialized with members of the movement as well."

Webbon, according to Butler, isn't shy about expressing "antisemitic views."

In a November 2, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter, Webbon wrote, "I hate Judaism, but I love Jews and wish them a very pleasant conversion to Christianity. If you really want to know my full thoughts on the modern nation/state of Israel, you can watch the new series I recently published with @BonifaceOption…. Christ Is King."

Webbon told Mother Jones he stands by "everything I've said about Judaism. It is a pernicious evil."

READ MORE:'Could hear Donald say it': Epstein's brother says this line reveals closeness with Trump

*Kiera Butler's full article for Mother Jones is available at this link.

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robt r

an 7 25

Anyone wanting to understand the brouhaha over Pam Bondi’s refusal to turnover (or even acknowledge) the Epstein files need look no further than what the Supreme Court just did.

In McMahon v. New York the Supremes gave Trump a simple way to revoke federal spending authorized by Congress: just fire everyone responsible for implementing that spending.

The high court is allowing Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to fire over half the people who work for the Department of Education until there’s a full hearing on the constitutionality of their action. But by then it will be too late to save much of the department.

Note that the Supreme Court made this astounding decision on its so-called “shadow docket” where it doesn’t even have to explain itself (the only record we have is Justice Sotomayor’s dissent).

No matter that Congress created the Department of Education; apparently, Trump can effectively end it. No matter that Congress in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits a president from unilaterally refusing to spend money that has been authorized by Congress; apparently, Trump can disregard the Act.

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Trump now has unbridled power to repeal federal laws by the simple expedient of firing federal employees who implement them.

Why? How? On what basis? Who’s behind this? We don’t know. We may never know.

Which gets us to the brouhaha over Jeffrey Epstein.

For years, Trump has talked darkly of a “deep state” — a secret cabal intent on destroying America by harming the nation’s children.

Such as, perhaps, six justices who let him shut down the Education Department without even setting out their reasons?

Recall “Pizzagate,” the QAnon conspiracy theory that in 2016 allegedly linked Democrats to a ring of child sex-traffickers. It’s still around but has morphed into a less partisan conspiracy theory involving an alleged worldwide elite of child sex-traffickers.

Jeffrey Epstein and his death fit perfectly. Many right-wing media personalities have posited that the billionaire convict was murdered in prison as part of a cover-up of a sprawling sex-trafficking conspiracy.

Senior Trump administration officials built up great fanfare around the release of the supposed Epstein “client list.”

Even JD Vance accused the government of hiding the list. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case,” Vance said, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”

But that was back in 2021, before Vance became part of the, um, conspiracy.

In February of this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged the existence of Epstein’s client list. She said the client list is “sitting on my desk right now.”

Now the Trump-Vance administration says Epstein’s client list doesn’t exist.

The Epstein case illustrates Trump’s “deep state” no less than does an unsigned “shadow docket” Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to wipe out the Department of Education.

The phrase “Epstein didn’t kill himself” — a rebuttal to the official explanation of Epstein’s death — has taken on a cultural meaning way beyond the facts of the case. It means an unaccountable elite doing evil things in secret.

Trump built his political base on that premise. Once in office, he said time and again, he would expose that unaccountable, secret, evil elite.

No wonder 70 percent of voters believe “law enforcement is withholding information about powerful people connected to Epstein,” including 61 percent of Trump voters. And 58 percent of voters said Trump “maybe was or definitely was” involved in a cover-up.

Conspiracy theories thrive when elites act in secret. I have no idea whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered. But Wired Magazine’s metadata — showing that the FBI’s “raw” surveillance video from the night Epstein killed himself is seemingly missing 2 minutes and 53 seconds — got my attention.

As did the Supreme’s bonkers secret decision in McMahon.

And I’m no conspiracy theorist.

After hyping the promised release, a joint FBI and Department of Justice report last week said they had found no evidence of a list — or that Epstein, who died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019, had been murdered — prompting outcry from within MAGA circles.

As Bondi faces heightened scrutiny for her repeated attempts to dodge questions about the Epstein files, Loomer also teased that “there are people in the White House who agree with me that Pam [Bondi] spent too much time on Fox News and her statements were inconsistent and undermined what messaging is today about the Epstein files.”

Other prominent MAGA-aligned supporters of the president have also warned that Trump could see significant damage to his standing among his base if he does not change course.

Sixty-three percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday said that they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files. Republicans were also nearly split. Just 40 percent said they support how he’s handled the files, with 36 percent disapproving and another 20 percent not offering an opinion.

Mike Flynn — who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term — wrote in a lengthy X post on Wednesday that Trump needed to “gather your team and figure out a way to move past this.”

“The roll out of this was terrible, no way around that,” Flynn wrote. “Americans want America to be successful, therefore, WE NEED YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”

Elon Musk — with whom Trump had a blowup fight last month in which Musk accused Trump of being named in the Epstein files — criticized his former boss for trying to paint the whole situation as a hoax.

“He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday.

The MAGA meltdown over Epstein “could be his Afghanistan going into the fall,” Mark Mitchell, head of polling and operations at Rasmussen Reports, told Steve Bannon Tuesday on his “War Room” podcast.

“People are trying to say this isn’t a big deal,” Mitchell said. “People are trying to say nobody wants this Epstein information out. It’s an absolute misdirection. This is horrifying. And if it isn’t corrected, it threatens derailing Trump’s agenda, getting rid of his political capital.”

“This is not about a guy who died in 2019, this is about a representation of two-tier justice and about unaccountable government,” Mitchell told Bannon.

On Wednesday, conservative political commentator John Solomon told Bannon that he had interviewed the president, and that Trump supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate elements of the Epstein case as part of a broader look into a supposed deep state conspiracy to punish the Republican Party.

“I think he’s frustrated by all the social media chatter by people who don’t really know what’s in the Epstein files,” Solomon said. “He was very pointed about that, let’s stay focused on the things that matter to the American people. ‘I want the answers to Epstein like everyone’, he said, so let the prosecutor do that.”

The Epstein fiasco also prompted Speaker Mike Johnson to split with Trump on Tuesday, calling for the Department of Justice to release all the information it has on the sex offender in the name of “transparency.”

“It’s a very delicate subject, but you should put everything out there, let the people decide it,” Johnson told conservative commentator Benny Johnson, adding that Bondi should explain her previous claims of having the elusive Epstein “client list.”

Just a day prior, the Louisiana Republican had defended Bondi, choosing to defer to the Trump administration instead of criticizing the attorney general.

But Trump appears to remain unmoved despite growing rebellion within his MAGA cohort.

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump repeated his claims that the whole ordeal was a “hoax” peddled by Democrats and once again defended Bondi’s handling of the case.

“She’s done very good. She says ‘I gave you all the credible information,’ and if she finds any more credible information, she’ll give that too. What more can she do than that?” Trump said, adding that he had “lost a lot of faith in certain people” over their outcry on the administration’s approach to the issue.

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https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/conflicted-new-report-exposes-trump-s-crypto-connections-243308613599

trump fam made more money on crypto than in whole hist of co in real estate?!

memecoin 2 bit players www hustlers, got hacked; liberty financial 500m$ 400m real money in trump pocket; had no product

1/2 hse paid 4B$ fine money launder

stablecoin USD1 world lib fin; backed 1:1 with real US dollars, used by drug traffic; bill does nothing on laundering; anon wallet

jamie dimond JPM 20k empl on compliance; tether has 150 ppl TOTAL

140m$ war chest sherrod b 40m$ , num 1 more than oil/gas see politico

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still saying 300 yr get SS but now fixed!

raw 625

Late-night Trump brag shattered by 'damning' report issued just hours later

// an 6 25

An analysis by Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler shows the Trump administration is still wheeling out lies months after they’ve been outed.

“This is an example of how, even after falsehoods are exposed, the spin machine keeps working,” wrote Kessler, referring to a March 4 post by President Donald Trump that “government databases list … 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them.”

In February, the Washington Post published an article documenting the truth of the matter, that Social Security databases rely on an almost 70-year-old computer programming language called COBOL, which doesn’t have a standardized way to store dates.

READ MORE: 'Stop the foolishness': Susan Collins in the hot seat as she navigates Trump's second term

This means ancient programmers assigned a default date, such as 1875, to people lacking birth information, many of them seniors born before a reliable federal birth recording program was in place. But when Musk’s DOGE team scanned Social Security systems, “they were shocked to find people listed in the system with absurd ages because of the limitations of an old programming language,” writes Kessler.

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People familiar with Social Security’s systems were already aware of the issue, of course. The Social Security Administration has automatically terminated the benefits of people once they reach age 115 since 2015. Kessler reports the U.S. Office of Inspector General had recommended a cleanup of the system in 2023, but Social Security deferred the project because it would “divert resources” from other important work and “would have limited or no benefit to the administration.” A 2023 IG report found the vast majority of beneficiaries who lacked a birth date had already died and been purged from the system anyhow. Plus, any major overhaul could introduce new errors to the system.

Still, the notion of wrongdoers scamming Social Security was “an irresistible talking point,” says Kessler, so much so that DOGE bragged of fixing the “problem” late last month on social media: “After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased.”

“The post was carefully worded,” said Kessler. “It did not claim that 12 million people had received improper payments. Instead, it said that these people had been marked as deceased. In other words, DOGE appears to have implemented the plan suggested by the IG two years ago.”

READ MORE:Swing state voters beg their Republican senator to protect them from the Trump grift-ocracy

Despite that, Kessler said Trump supporters eagerly greeted the news and used it to justify the president's “original false claim.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was one of many cheerleaders jumping aboard a non-moving train, claiming: "No more 300-year-olds getting Social Security checks because of Elon Musk. Thank God President Trump had the wisdom to put Elon in place."

The train included other personalities such as right-wing entertainer Sean Hannity, and Speaker Mike Johnson.

“… [W]ithin the echo chamber of the pro-Trump universe, a problem that never existed now has been fixed,” Kessler said.

READ MORE: MAGA rhetoric backfires as far-right activist suggests violence against trump admin officials

Read the original Washington Post report at this link.

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06/02/2025 RWW

by

Kyle Mantyla

Trump repost on Truth Social: “There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020. #Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see. >#Democrats dont know the difference.”

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RWW

05/15/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Twin celebrations of U.S. President Donald Trump's birthday and the Army's 250th anniversary will include as many as 25 tanks rolling through Washington in a celebration that will cost $25 million to $45 million, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

As an academic who has devoted considerable time to studying Christian nationalism and WallBuilders, I feel compelled to warn Hoosiers that you should be alarmed that WallBuilders’ selective reading of American history might be accorded any legitimacy.

The hyper-partisan “Stop the Steal” activist is confronting a disciplinary investigation that could threaten his law license.

“Disgraceful,” “skeezy,” and “problematic”: Some on the right aren’t sold on Trump’s new jet.

[Laura] Loomer exemplifies the danger — to Trump’s own fortunes as well as the country’s — of how he often sizes up potential allies. He looks not at the quality of their ideas but at the audacity of their provocations, not at how nicely they play with others but at how reliably they rile their followers. That’s a fine approach if you’re just owning the libs and staging a carnival. But if you mean to govern? The freak show gets in the way.

With Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” of tax and Medicaid cuts up for consideration, abortion might be the last thing on anyone’s mind. But a provision buried in the bill is Republicans’ latest attempt to stop losing on reproductive rights.

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AN RAW 5 245

NO LNX

'A bumpy ride': Republican extremists and moderates unite to defy Trump

Matt Lasloand Raw StoryMay 15, 2025

A long-simmering Republican Party feud is threatening to derail President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Representatives from either ideological end of the GOP U.S. House conference, hard right and moderate center, told Raw Story on Wednesday work on the GOP’s contentious spending bill, covering tax and spending cuts and enshrining Trump's hardline immigration policy, remains a long way from done.

“This one isn't real close,” said Andy Harris (R-MD), chair of the hard-right Freedom Caucus. “It’s not ready for prime time.”

“This as it stands, I’ve been very clear, does not have my support,” said Mike Lawler (R-NY), a prominent moderate demanding a raise in the cap on SALT, the state and local tax deduction key to Republicans from prosperous, Democratic-led states.

“I know the speaker is trying,” Lawler added. “I know he's going to continue to negotiate in good faith. But as this stands right now, I am a no, and so they're going to need to come up with a solution quickly if they want to stay on the schedule they have.”

Speaker Mike Johnson first wanted to get the budget — containing all Trump's spending priorities in “one big beautiful bill” – done by Memorial Day, towards the end of May. Amid marathon mark-up sessions and seemingly endless negotiations, that target has slipped to the next big holiday: July 4.

Republicans control the House 220-213, with two Democratic seats vacant. Johnson cannot afford many nos.

A main aim of the Republican measure, which when passed will have to be reconciled with a Senate version, is to extend tax cuts passed under the first Trump administration in 2017. It’s also needed to fund the deportation force Trump is bent on unleashing nationwide.

Right-wingers want to secure such tax cuts while slashing federal spending and reducing the federal deficit. More moderate members see the need to raise the SALT cap and threats to impose major cuts to Medicaid as threatening serious damage back home.

Other members of the Freedom Caucus voiced their skepticism to Raw Story.

“I'm not flexing this because I'm trying to get something to South Carolina,” said Ralph Norman (R-SC). “I'm trying to get the math in order to get this country back on track financially. And it just hadn't happened.”

Eric Burlison, of Missouri, predicted ongoing “negotiations and discussions” and voiced support for Ron Johnson, the rightwing Wisconsin senator who on Tuesday said the bill could go down “like the Titanic.”

“Ron Johnson, he has doubts on this, and he's right to have doubts,” Burlison said, adding that he “expect[s] the Senate to be more squishy than us.”

Republicans control that chamber 53-47.

Burlison said the budget talks presented “an opportunity to fix Medicaid … an opportunity to do a lot of reform that we're leaving on the table.

“This Medicaid situation is unsustainable,” he said, before raising a familiar Republican boogeyman: “California has figured it out. California gets more money from the federal government and Medicaid than Florida spends on their entire state budget.

“It's crazy … they're gaming the system, they're gaming the federal government, and then this bill is going to lock in that gamesmanship that blue states like California and New York have been playing and that's what's frustrating to me.

“We have the opportunity to fix this stuff or get the United States government on a financially balanced footing, and we're not taking advantage of this opportunity.”

Jason Smith (R-MO) is chair of the House Ways and Means Committee — one of the most stressful jobs on Capitol Hill right now.

He insisted that “we’re gonna get it done” and if it’s “a bumpy ride, the whole ride, everyone should expect that.”

“I’m OK for whatever passes the bill,” Smith said, adding: “I will do whatever is necessary. I've said it all along … I'll do whatever this takes.”

Lawler and his fellow New Yorker Nick LaLota would like Smith and other leaders to give ground on SALT.

“People are passionate to support their constituency,” said LaLota, who held his Long Island seat last year by beating the CNN host John Avlon.

“Their passion [is] to put this great country back on the right track. That that passion has led to some frustrations is totally fine. I think we'll get there.

“I think we all want to come to a deal ultimately, but it's got to be a deal that's both good for my constituents and the country.

“My constituents helped pay for the 2017 tax cuts when [Republican leaders] capped SALT unfairly at $10,000. The bill was placed on districts like mine to pay for the rest of the nation's prosperity. We can't make that mistake” again."

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A bill proposed by Republican lawmakers in the House late Sunday that aims to drastically cut Medicaid funding is being criticized as "a handout to the rich."

The bill introduced stricter rules for recipients, including mandatory work requirements and more frequent eligibility reviews. Issued by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the proposal comes in advance of a likely lengthy committee hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

While the legislation did not provide detailed budget figures, it estimated potential savings of approximately $900 billion.

READ MORE:The one thing that makes Melania Trump 'exactly like her husband': analysis

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that this action will result in approximately 13.7 million people losing their health insurance coverage by the year 2034.

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Reacting to the news, Sen Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on the social platform X: "Every dollar cut from Medicaid is a dollar ripped from health care and given to billionaires. Giving a handout to the rich while making it harder for millions of people to get health care is disastrous."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote: "Republicans just unveiled their 'big, beautiful bill,' which will take Medicaid & health insurance away from 13.7 million Americans, shutter hospitals & cause premiums to skyrocket across the country. Insane. Call your Member of Congress at 202-224-3121 and demand they vote NO."

Matt McDermott wrote: "While America slept, House Republicans quietly unveiled their Medicaid plan. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says it strips health insurance from 13.7 million Americans."

READ MORE:'Under cover of night,' Republicans unveil plan to kick over 8 million off healthcare

Many social media users have also expressed concerns over the development.

User @ChetterHert wrote: "The House GOP has 'unveiled' its latest betrayal of working Americans: a bill to slash Medicaid and rip healthcare away from millions. Meanwhile, the wealthy elite enjoy tax breaks and private jets. This isn't fiscal responsibility, its legislative cruelty!"

User @pinklionheart wrote: "I'm starting to think republicans lie."

User @mashekjim wrote: "THEY. DON'T. CARE. Cruelty is the point."

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'Under cover of night,' Republicans unveil plan to kick over 8 million off healthcare

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told members to just pretend no amend to big b bill? raise had if for cutting kid cancer res or deport them? jordan comm chr

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Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, speaking at an Anchorage event on Thursday, had harsh words for much of her Republican Party but praise for a rare GOP member who, like her, is willing to criticize President Donald Trump: Alaska’s senior U.S. senator.

“I can’t be here in Alaska and not mention the incredible courage of Sen. Lisa Murkowski,” Cheney said near the start of her event, held at a packed theater in the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts.

“You see it almost every day. There are very few Republicans who will be consistently counted on to do the right thing. And she’s one of a very small group,” Cheney said.

The former U.S. House member from Wyoming – and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney – spoke at a lecture hosted by the University of Alaska Anchorage and Alaska World Affairs Council. She took questions from veteran journalist Elizabeth Arnold, who teaches at UAA.

Like Murkowski, Cheney voted to impeach Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and opposed him in other ways.

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Unlike Murkowski, who was reelected in 2022 over a Trump-backed challenger, Cheney lost her seat in the GOP primary to a Trump loyalist, Harriet Hageman, who now represents Wyoming’s single House district.

That was after Cheney co-chaired the congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and Trump’s role in it, and after she had been stripped of her GOP leadership role by fellow House Republicans because of her opposition to Trump’s actions.

She is aghast that Trump, now back in the White House, has pardoned those rioters, including those who attacked police officers – and that Republicans in office have gone along with those pardons.

“When you hear the Republicans, any Republicans, saying that they are the party that supports law enforcement, you know, please go back and look at the videos of Jan. 6,” Cheney said. "Remind those Republicans that Trump watched the events unfold on television for three hours without trying to stop the riot."

"He watched police officers get brutally beaten by people who were carrying his flag; they were doing it in his name … And then, when he came into office, he pardoned all of those people,” she said.

The Republican Party as a whole — with a few exceptions like Murkowski – has betrayed its convictions and even the U.S. Constitution to become “a personality cult” loyal only to Trump, Cheney said.

Today’s GOP is “something we haven’t seen in this country before,” she said. “The party has walked away from the Constitution,” said the former House member, who noted that she grew up as a Republican and cast her first vote for President Ronald Reagan.

Cheney spent much of her speech calling out House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican leaders of Congress who she said have enabled Trump’s attacks on the rule of law and other bad actions.

“The problem with Mike is that he’s fundamentally dishonest,” she said.

And they have enabled rank incompetence and corruption in the Trump administration, the most serious of which is Trump’s attack on the rule of law.

Voters should take action to counter the cult-like devotion that has given Trump and his administration ”carte blanche,” Cheney said.

“That’s why it’s crucially important that in 2026, the Republicans lose the majority in the House and the Senate,” she said.

She also called on the audience and public at large to continue protesting Trump administration actions, writing letters to the editor, contacting members of Congress and state legislators and even consider running for office to replace bad officials.

It was a message embraced by the event audience. Many of those attending Cheney’s address had walked over to the theater after attending a May Day anti-Trump protest held a few blocks away on downtown Anchorage’s Park Strip. Several times during the event, the audience erupted in applause and cheers.

Cheney herself has continued to be politically active since losing her House seat.

She started a political action committee and has been supporting candidates she believes will counter the Trump movement – most notably, former Vice President Kamala Harris, who wound up losing the 2024 presidential election. She wrote a book, titled “Oath and Honor,” that details the confrontations she had with fellow congressional Republicans over the efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results. She has also been teaching at the University of Virginia and traveling the country to speak at events like that held Thursday in Anchorage.

Returning to elective office remains a possibility, she said. “I don’t know if I will end up being a candidate again myself. But it’s certainly not something that I’m ruling out,” she said.

That statement was greeted with enthusiastic audience applause, and some follow-up back-and-forth quips to close the evening.

“Clearly, I should move here to Alaska,” Cheney said in response to the applause.

“We have ranked choice voting,” Arnold said.

“And you have one good senator,” Cheney replied.

“We have room for one more,” an audience member called out.

GET THE MORNING HEADLINES. SUBSCRIBE

Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

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AN 4 25

SIGNAL?

'Extraordinary step': Johnson changing House rule to prevent national security 'investigation'

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an 4 25

Everyone’s talking about noncitizen voting as if it’s a big thing. Some prominent public officials will lead you to believe that there are such gaping holes in voter registration systems that they enable large numbers of noncitizens to vote and swing the results of elections, and that the issue deserves urgent attention.

*This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

“This will be one of the most important votes that members of this chamber will ever take in their entire careers,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said as he advocated for passage of the SAVE Act in Congress. “Should Americans and Americans alone determine the outcome of American elections? Or should we allow foreigners and illegal aliens to decide who sits in the White House and in the people’s House and in the Senate?”

These seem like good questions. But what about the tacit assumptions behind them? Are noncitizens actually casting ballots and deciding elections?

Researchers and election officials call the incidence of noncitizen voting “vanishingly rare” or “almost non-existent.” But those phrases can feel vague in the face of the political rhetoric that’s driving accelerating efforts to tighten voter registration.

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By the numbers, there’s no evidence that suggests that noncitizens voting in U.S. elections is a widespread problem, or even a medium-sized one. Election officials, audits, and years of academic research all tell the same story: It’s rare, and understandably so, because risks are so high compared with the reward. Noncitizens who vote illegally are subject to criminal penalties, including prison time and loss of their residency status.

Lots of people have looked for noncitizens who’d be willing to take this risk for the sake of a vote. So far, they’ve found very few.

Take Ohio. The secretary of state’s office there last year flagged 621 noncitizens who might have voted — over a 10-year span. This was in a state with more than 8 million registered voters.

In Iowa, a 2024 review identified 35 noncitizens who had voted last year and 277 who were registered — out of nearly 2.3 million voters. These numbers were initially much higher based on incomplete state data, but once officials cross-checked them with federal immigration records, the numbers dropped sharply.

Georgia in 2024 found 20 noncitizens on its rolls after a statewide audit of more than 8 million voters. Nine had voted. All were referred for removal from the voter rolls and possible prosecution.

A recent review in Michigan found 15 potential noncitizen voters in last year’s presidential election, out of more than 5.7 million ballots cast.

So the numbers are small. But many Republicans say that even one vote cast by a noncitizen is too many. That’s why we’re still seeing legislation like the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote — such as a certified copy of a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, or naturalization documents — rather than just an attestation under oath. For many Americans, such as those born in rural or non-hospital settings, these documents can be hard to find or expensive to replace.

President Donald Trump’s new executive order on elections also calls for requiring documentary proof of citizenship, though it has some important differences from the SAVE Act.

Trump, who lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, has long claimed that voting by noncitizens sways election results. He and allies have based many of their assertions on a 2014 analysis by political scientists Jesse Richman and colleagues that claimed 6.4% of ballots were cast by noncitizens in the 2008 election, when Barack Obama swamped John McCain by more than 9 million votes. That analysis has been widely denounced as a flawed interpretation of earlier survey results. The researchers behind the original survey, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study have since said their data was never meant to support those conclusions.

That didn’t stop Kansas from using the Richman study as the backbone of its defense in a 2018 federal trial over the state’s proof-of-citizenship law. It didn’t go well. The judge, appointed by George W. Bush, called Richman’s testimony “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed” and tossed it aside.

Meanwhile, the court found that the law had stopped more than 31,000 eligible Kansans from registering — many of them young voters — while identifying just 39 noncitizens who had registered over two decades. Most of those registrations were due not to fraud but administrative errors. The court struck down the law.

The SAVE Act would revive this approach at the federal level, and then leave big parts of the implementation to the states. They’d decide what to do if, say, the name on a voter’s ID doesn’t match his or her birth name. Some states might go all in with strict requirements, while others take a lighter touch. That leaves infinite room for inconsistency, confusion and disenfranchisement — all to solve a problem that (see above) is pretty small.

Two former Republican secretaries of state, John Merrill (Alabama) and Trey Grayson (Kentucky), recently wrote an op-ed for Bloomberg in which they say Trump’s executive order could create unintended consequences, citing Kansas’ experience with impeding eligible voters as an example.

Those interested in “getting the citizenship issue right can look to the states for promising pathways forward,” they say, such as proposed legislation that would allow election officials to more easily check voters’ citizenship status.

But if the idea is to seek a solution based on data rather than rhetoric, the horse may have left the barn.

Fortunately, the two officials wrote, noncitizen voting is historically rare. “Yet those in charge of administering elections must contend with the fact that a critical mass of the voting public harbors serious concerns about election integrity in general, and noncitizen voting in particular.”

*Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica atjhuseman@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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an 4 25

'Hospitals are going to close': Johnson insisted he won’t 'touch Medicaid — but now pushes deep cuts

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04/14/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla RWW

Trump has spent months talking about deporting American criminals. The White House has said it’s a real idea. Maybe we should take the threat seriously.

Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest and detention reveal what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level.

What explains the Trump administration’s radical reversal toward Moscow?

President Donald Trump launched a new attack on 60 Minutes, this time demanding regulatory retribution over recent segments on Ukraine and Greenland — calling on “highly respected” FCC chair Brendan Carr to “impose the maximum fines and punishment” possible on “out of control” network CBS.

Bannon's comments come after Trump shared he's "not joking" about an unconstitutional third-term.

Court documents filed this week suggest some insurrectionists could receive a check for their troubles.

On January 3, 2025, Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson was re-elected to be Speaker of the House. In his acceptance speech, he quoted a prayer that he said Thomas Jefferson said every day during his presidency and every day of his life thereafter. There is a problem with this story. The prayer was written 56 years after Jefferson died. Jefferson never said the prayer even one day of his life.

This past week David and Tim were invited to the White House as part of a team planning special faith focused events for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Last week, an 8-year-old girl became the second child and the third person to die of measles in the current outbreak. But it was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, who dominated the news cycle.

Andrew Isker compares Jews to "foster children," who cannot be trusted with the family credit card. C.Jay Engel argues Jews "have largely operated at odds with the Old American way of life."

As Kristan Hawkins, president of the national anti-abortion group Students for Life, tours college campuses, she has grown accustomed to counterprotests from abortion rights activists. But more recently, fellow abortion opponents, who call themselves abortion abolitionists, are showing up to her booths with signs, often screaming “baby killer” at her while she speaks with students. Hawkins has had to send alerts to donors asking them to help pay for increased security.

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an 4 25

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is blaming what he calls “young men” playing video games instead of working, as he defends Republicans’ plan to gut Medicaid—slashing what Democrats say is $880 billion from the vital health program that provides medical care to one in five Americans.

“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed — what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled,” said the Speaker. Johnson’s own Louisiana district has a disproportionately high rate of Americans on the life-saving program: CBS News this week reported Medicaid is a “lifeline” for people in his district.

Johnson blamed what he suggested is a large number of male gamers on Medicaid for “draining resources.”

“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day,” he again declared.

READ MORE: ‘Giant Grift’: Calls for Trump Insider Trading Probe Surge Over ‘Corruption’ Questions

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“We have a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid. Just one tiny example. The estimate is $51 billion a year, in Medicaid is lost to fraud. That’s unconscionable,” the Louisiana GOP lawmaker claimed.

But rather than target professionals who may be bilking the system, or other factors including paperwork errors, Johnson has chosen to repeatedly target what he claims are “29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games.”

The nonpartisan health policy organization KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) reported in February that “data show most Medicaid adults are working or face barriers to work. Many Medicaid adults who are working low-wage jobs are employed by small firms and in industries that have low employer-sponsored insurance offer rates.”

KFF also reports that the vast majority of adult Medicaid recipients under the age of retirement (65) are already working, with no work requirement.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that adding a work requirement would only serve as a barrier to Medicaid participation, and therefore spending, but would not increase the employment levels for otherwise eligible recipients.

“In Arkansas,” KFF reports, “implementing Medicaid work requirements resulted in more than 18,000 people losing coverage.”

Adding work requirements also increases monitoring and implementation costs at the state level.

Critics blasted Johnson.

READ MORE: ‘Pump and Dump’: Market Manipulation Questions Swirl Over Trump Tariff Pause

“Of course, nothing says ‘dignity’ like ripping healthcare away from poor people based on outdated, classist stereotypes,” wrote Wall Street investment banker Evaristus Odinikaeze. “Young men on Medicaid aren’t ‘playing video games all day,’ they’re often underpaid, overworked, or struggling in a rigged economy. This is just MAGA cruelty dressed up as moral judgment.”

Annie Shoup of the nonprofit Protect Our Care wrote: “We know that people on Medicaid who are able to work already do. This will only hurt people and prevent them from getting the health care they deserve, including caregivers who are staying at home caring for family members.”

The organization Social Security Works added, “Medicaid pays for two-thirds of nursing home care in America. That’s what Mike Johnson wants to rip away from seniors and people with disabilities.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

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an 4 25

With President Donald Trump's tariff proposals causing considerable anxiety in the stock market, a combination of business leaders — including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon — and economists (including Paul Krugman and Robert Reich) fear the possibility of a recession.

If a recession occurs, many Americans will need help from the federal government — be it food assistance via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or health insurance through Obamacare.

But according to Brendan Duke (senior director for federal budget policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities), the 2025 federal budget being proposed by Republicans in Congress is designed to erode and undermine — not fund — the United States' social safety net.

READ MORE:'Compete mess': Trump slammed as Wall St. CEO says policies will 'probably' cause recession

In a Q&A interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega published on April 10, Duke warned, "Everywhere you look, you see an attack on core government functions. The Trump Administration is trying to degrade the Social Security Administration's ability to provide elderly and disabled Americans the benefits they're entitled to. They are firing people working at the National Weather Service who provide the data for the weather report you see on your phone. They're hamstringing billions of dollars of cancer research by putting on leave the people who make sure that the research dollars go to cancer researchers."

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Duke added, "The goal is not to let all of the horrible things distract you from doing your job, though. It's critical that people whose job it is to protect the programs that low- and moderate-income people rely on focus on the threats and opportunities that are appearing."

Duke cited specific safety-net programs that GOP lawmakers are targeting for major cuts.

"The plans being talked about right now, such as cutting Medicaid and SNAP to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, are part of the standard conservative playbook," Duke told DeVega. "The difference is that our fiscal situation has gotten worse over the last 25 years — we're a long way off from the Clinton budget surpluses — so they feel pressure to cut programs instead of putting tax cuts for rich people on the credit card."

READ MORE:Donald Trump has an addiction: WSJ

Duke continued, "We're still at the stage where they aren't providing specifics of how they're going to cut these programs, but the House Republican budget sets them on a course to cut Medicaid by 10 percent and SNAP by 20 percent. Those are enormous cuts. Some of the goodies they are planning to give to rich people include allowing high-income business owners to write off 20 percent of their profits, doubling the amounts the heirs of the largest estates can inherit tax-free from $14 million to $28 million per couple, and enacting hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks for businesses that don't need a tax break."

READ MORE:GOP’s defense of 'Dear Leader' Trump’s 'idiocy' resembles famous suicide cult: analysis

*Chauncey DeVega's full Salon interview with Brendan Duke is availableat this link.

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benny j livestream sou? 3 25 SMIRK AT LIES/ SCORING; HAD TEXT CUED UP TO TOSS AL GREEN JDV SIGNALS GESTAPO; SANG WE SHALL O DURING CENSURE W DOZ OF DEMS

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february 2025 an

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is struggling to corral rogue members of the House Republican Conference during this week's Congressional recess to support his budget resolution. But his chances of success appear to be dwindling by the day.

That's according to a Tuesday article in Politico, which reported that there are at least a dozen House Republicans on the fence about the budget bill for various philosophical reasons. And because the House Republican majority is so slim, Johnson can only afford to lose one vote if he hopes to get the bill to the Senate without any Democratic votes.

Among those opposed, seven of them are specifically worried about the bill's proposal to cut billions of dollars in support for state Medicaid programs. Even though Johnson aims to sell the bill as Republicans' opportunity to help pass Trump's legislative agenda, one Republican anonymously told Politico that they were concerned the bill would actually "undermine the basic care provided by Medicaid," and pointed to Trump's promises to not touch the program that provides health insurance for low-income residents.

READ MORE:'No more of the nonsense': GOP reps hint at 'consequences' if Johnson crosses 'red lines'

The speaker's resolution would cut roughly $2 trillion in federal spending across all agencies, though some hardline Republicans like Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) have said the proposed cuts aren't steep enough. And other members of the conference are opposed to a provision in the legislation that would raise the debt ceiling.

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an 4 25

NOTUS is reporting that emotions are running high in Republican meetings over a GOP budget threatening to add up to $5.8 trillion to the nation’s deficit and potentially raise the nation’s debt to 214% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2054

Republicans typically run on lowering national debt and the deficit under Democratic administrations, and a few of them are apparently having a difficult time switching gears for President Donald Trump, who also significantly raised the deficit under his last administration.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) met in a closed-door meeting with House Republicans on Tuesday, with a handful of lawmakers pressing Johnson to conference the House and Senate Republican budgets. Johnson allegedly opposes a conference because he is in a hurry to pass the budget. Johnson hopes to fast-track the budget through the Senates “reconciliation” process, in which budget-related legislation can pass with a simple 51-vote majority.

READ MORE:'Gum up the works': Senator singlehandedly halting confirmation of over 300 Trump nominees

Parts of the budget, according to NOTUS, include an unpopular executive action agenda that halts funding for many public services and investments, while hollowing out and politicizing civil service divisions. In addition, it includes sweeping tariffs that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities claims will “cost low- and moderate-income families hundreds if not thousands of dollars, more than offsetting whatever modest tax cuts they may receive from tax legislation.”

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The rising tension between GOP members over the controversial budget and the recent battle over a petition allowing new mothers to vote by proxy is prompting Republican infighting. At one point, Rep. W. Gregory Steube (R-Fla.) called Speaker Johnson a liar and said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus!" according to three sources.

High tension could potentially alienate precious Republican votes. Johnson can only afford to lose four votes on Trump’s budget assuming unified Democratic opposition. Both he and Trump are aiming to prevent any further GOP defections.

NOTUS reports Johnson urged Republican House members to stay in town until the budget is adopted, possibly delaying a two-week recess slated for Friday.

READ MORE:Member of Congress Trump picked for Cabinet threatened Johnson 'not to stand in her way'

Click here to read NOTUS' full report.

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an 4 25

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is struggling to gain the confidence of his House Republican conference as he confronts colleagues in the Senate to navigate one of the most challenging pieces of legislation — a budget resolution to pave the way for the implementation of President Donald Trump's agenda.

Passed by the Senate last week, the framework details Trump’s legislative agenda of tax cuts, border funding and energy policy.

A reportpublished by Punchbowl Tuesday said Johnson has failed to get the support he needs and it is uncertain if he will be able to secure enough votes to pass the budget resolution this week.

ALSO READ:'Panicked calls': Trump’s own advisers 'unnerved' by 'horrific start for the economic policy team'

The legislation gives Senate Republicans excessive power, allowing them to cut hundreds of billions more than the House GOP is requesting.

"Speaker Mike Johnson has a rebellion on his hands. And this is supposed to be the easy part of passing President Donald Trump’s agenda," the Punchbowl report said.

"Johnson wants House Republicans to trust him to win a showdown with Senate Republicans. That’s a huge ask," it added.

House GOP leadership estimates reportedly indicate there could be as many as twelve dissenting votes. Johnson can only afford to lose three Republicans on this strictly party-line vote.

This discontent is said to be emerging from unexpected factions within the GOP conference. Members of the Budget Committee — including its chair, Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) — as well as traditional leadership allies are expressing their inability to support the compromise resolution passed by the Senate on Saturday.

ALSO READ:'I think you’ll be surprised': GOP senator wants to force Republicans to vote on DOGE cuts

According to The Hill, Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), who are members of the House Budget Committee, told GOP lawmakers during a call Sunday afternoon that they will oppose the budget resolution. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) echoed the sentiment, calling the framework “junk.”

The House must approve the resolution in its current form, or it will need to return to the Senate for further discussion, which would also involve another vote-a-rama.

Leaders of the Republican Party in both the House and Senate, along with the White House, have made it clear that they do not intend to make any changes to this resolution.

ALSO READ:Senate GOP’s newest strategy now puts them in 'immediate conflict with the House': report

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an 4 25

How Mike Johnson’s behavior exposes GOP push to 'force women out of public life': analysis

Alex Henderson

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an 3 25

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is now hoping to sneak through language in a must-pass government funding bill that could kneecap Congress' ability to check a president's ability to impose tariffs.

According to a Tuesday article in Politico, Republicans are now aiming to prevent Democrats from forcing an up-or-down vote on President Donald Trump's controversial tariffs. The threat of double-digit tariffs on imported goods from Canada, China and Mexico has already spooked investors worried about a dip in consumer spending. This has resulted in a sharp slide in financial markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite and the S&P 500 all recently posting some of their worst performances in years.

Trump has imposed the tariffs based on a national state of emergency he declared shortly after taking office relating to fentanyl and undocumented immigrants coming across the U.S. border. Politico is reporting that Democrats have already filed bills aiming to end that national emergency, which could force Republicans to go on the record defending the tariffs ahead of what's likely to be a close midterm election year.

READ MORE:After stocks plunge, CNN supercut exposes Trump predicting 'economic crash' unless he won

Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) and Gregory Meeks (R-N.Y.) observed that the National Emergencies Act "allows Congress to introduce a privileged resolution to terminate the authority, which must be brought to the House for a floor vote within 15 days." In order to circumvent Democrats, Republicans have since inserted language into a bill that has to pass in order to keep the government funded that prevents a vote to end the national emergency.

Politico reported that Republicans aim to declare that the remaining days in the first session of the 119th Congress "no not qualify as calendar days" in order to prevent DelBene's and Meeks' privileged resolutions from moving forward. This would serve as a loophole around the National Emergencies Act that makes it so Democrats can't force their opponents to go on the record defending the costly tariffs.

"Guess what [Republicans] tucked into this rule, hoping that nobody would notice?” House Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said. "They slipped in a little clause letting them escape ever having to debate or vote on Trump’s tariffs. Isn’t that clever?"

Republicans have defended the measure by saying it "simply prevents the Democrats from limiting the president’s authority." But Democrats say passing the bill with that rule included would make it virtually impossible for Congress to have a say in tariff policy. Congress aims to vote on the rule Tuesday evening.

READ MORE:Lindsey Graham pitches major change to Social Security benefits — without specifics

Click here to read Politico's report in full.

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RWW

03/06/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Evangelical pastor Steve Berger’s political influence campaign operates out of his D.C. townhouse. In addition to House Speaker Mike Johnson living there, a prominent Trump ally, Rep. Andy Ogles, has the keys.

On the Mar. 5, 2025 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan interviewed Ian Carroll, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist. Throughout the show, Rogan and Carroll pushed the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, as well as conspiracies about the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and vaccines.

The president's address to Congress included a line designed to go viral in the right-wing misinformation machine.

The Senate Education Appropriations subcommittee presented its budget recommendation for the Oklahoma State Department of Education Wednesday, which nixed a $3 million request by the agency to place Bibles in classrooms.

Dan Bongino is hawking prepper products and paranoia en route to the FBI.

REF PPUB

For a project explicitly designed to influence Congress, Steve Berger’s operation has left a scant paper trail. The archconservative evangelical pastor, who started a D.C. nonprofit a few years ago to shape national policy, does not file lobbying reports. His group does not show up in campaign finance records.

There is a simple way to glimpse his effort’s expanding reach in Washington, however: Pay attention to who is walking out the front door of his Capitol Hill townhouse. New evidence suggests Berger may be running what amounts to a group house for conservative lawmakers, with multiple members of Congress living with him at his organization’s headquarters.

The six-bedroom, $3.7 million home is owned by a multimillion-dollar Republican donor.

Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican who is among President Donald Trump’s most aggressive allies in Congress, has been at the house on multiple days over the past two weeks, according to people who live in the area. Video reviewed by ProPublica showed Ogles leaving the townhouse with bags on Feb. 27. As he left, he locked up the front door and pocketed the keys to the house.

As ProPublica reported last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson is living in the townhouse. And Dan Bishop, a former congressman from North Carolina now nominated for a powerful post in Trump’s White House, appears to have lived there until recently as well.

Berger has said his goal is to “disciple” members of Congress so what “they learn is then translated into policy.” He has claimed to have personally spurred legislation, saying a senator privately credited him with inspiring a bill.

What We’re Watching

During Donald Trump’s second presidency, ProPublica will focus on the areas most in need of scrutiny. Here are some of the issues our reporters will be watching — and how to get in touch with them securely....

[PIX]

Berger, Bishop and Ogles did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Johnson previously said the speaker pays fair-market rent for the part of the townhouse he occupies but didn’t answer questions about the specific rate. He said Johnson has not spoken to the pastor about “any matter of public policy.”

Ogles is in only his third year in Congress, but he’s drawn attention for his bombastic displays of fealty to Trump. He recently introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution so that Trump could serve a third term as president. He’s filed articles of impeachment against multiple judges who’ve ruled against the new administration. (Last week, Elon Musk posted a video of Ogles touting his impeachment efforts, set to the beat from the rap song “Shook Ones, Pt. II.”)

Ogles’ short tenure is also notable for the pace of scandal that’s followed it. He has faced allegations that he inflated his resume, claiming alternatively to have been an economist, a member of law enforcement and an expert on international sex trafficking, NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reported. (Ogles has acknowledged at least one mistake on his resume but said that “my body of work speaks for itself.”)

Last year, the FBI seized his phone during an investigation and obtained a search warrant to review records associated with his personal email address. Federal investigators were seeking evidence related to potential campaign finance violations, according to a court filing. The scope of the FBI investigation remains unclear.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for Ogles’ rise in politics than Lee Beaman, the Tennessee businessman who owns the Capitol Hill townhouse. When Ogles announced a short-lived Senate bid in 2017, Beaman said he planned to raise $4 million to support the run. Beaman, whose wealth derives from a large car dealership chain, then served as campaign treasurer in Ogles’ successful 2022 run for the House.

Rep. Andy Ogles appeared on stage at Steve Berger’s 60th-birthday party last year. Credit:via Facebook

Beaman and Berger have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, in areas including foreign affairs, fuel efficiency standards and removing barriers to firing federal employees. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results. (Beaman did not respond to requests for comment. ProPublica could not determine whether he and the pastor have discussed policy issues with Ogles during his time in Congress.)}:

In sermons, Berger has devoted long stretches to attacking the separation of church and state, as well as COVID-19 vaccines. The pastor used violent language to describe his disdain for “LGBTQ+ Pride” parades and “drag queen story hour” during an interview for a podcast in 2022, according to unpublished footage obtained by ProPublica.

“If I was left to myself, I’d take a baseball bat and beat the hell out of every single one of them. And not feel bad about it,” Berger said. “I have to go, ‘You know what? That’s probably not the will of God, is it?’ And obviously it’s not.”

Beyond his ownership of the townhouse, Beaman’s role in the pastor’s influence project is unclear. After Beaman purchased the house in 2021, a lawyer sought to change it from a single-family dwelling to a “boarding house/rooming house,” according to Washington, D.C., property records. Around that time, Berger’s nonprofit group, Ambassador Services International, registered the home as its address.

Members of Congress are allowed to live anywhere, as long as they pay fair-market rent, experts said. Discounts on rent are generally seen as improper gifts and prohibited by House ethics rules.

Beaman has said he got to know Ogles when Ogles was the Tennessee director of Americans for Prosperity, part of the Koch brothers’ political network. Beaman and Ogles joined forces to fight a mass transit project in Nashville and reportedly worked together on a successful effort to repeal the estate tax in their home state. After leaving the Koch network, Ogles served four years as the mayor of a Middle Tennessee county with a population of roughly 100,000. He held that role until 2022, when he was elected to Congress.

Ogles’ 2022 campaign was the subject of a blistering House ethics report released this year. The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics concluded that there is “substantial reason to believe” that Ogles’ campaign had accepted illegally large donations and then falsely reported that the funds had come from Ogles himself. Ogles has said he is “confident that any reporting problem was at worst an honest mistake.” (Beaman was not named in the report and has not been accused of wrongdoing.)

The report said that Ogles refused to cooperate with the investigation. It recommended that the House Ethics Committee issue a subpoena to the congressman.

Do you have any information we should know about Steve Berger, Rep. Andy Ogles or Speaker Mike Johnson? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.

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02/28/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Instead of a cordial and respectful diplomatic gathering, Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy more closely resembled a shouting match.

The Defense Department’s new chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, held a tense meeting with reporters in which he asked if they were “rooting” for President Donald Trump and questioned why it would be unfair to expect them to cheer on the MAGA leader, according to a report.

In 2021, Steve Berger, an evangelical pastor who has attacked the separation of church and state as “a delusional lie” and called multinational institutions “demonic,” set off on an ambitious project. His stated goal: minister to members of Congress so that what “they learn is then translated into policy.” His base of operations would be a six-bedroom, $3.7 million townhouse blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Recently, the pastor scored a remarkable coup for a political influence project that has until now managed to avoid public scrutiny. He got a new roommate.

The far-right influencer’s return to America has sparked new divisions among some of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters.

The Trump administration reportedly pressed Romania to free Tate — signaling that the sexual abuse of women won’t just be brushed under the rug, but rewarded.

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SUPPORT WH AMBUSH

OMFG // BONDI LIFT SANCTIONS USSR DAY ONE?!

A prominent Republican congressman, the former House Intelligence Committee chair, appeared shocked on national television when he learned that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a top Pentagon agency, U.S. Cyber Command, to suspend operations and planning against Russia’s cyber offensives.

Secretary Hegseth’s “stand down” order, while allegedly temporary, is expected to “last for the foreseeable future,” according to The Record (https://therecord.media/hegseth-orders-cyber-command-stand-down-russia-planning), a cybersecurity news site which first reported the news.

CNN (https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/02/politics/us-cyber-operations-russia-suspend/index.html) reported that a senior U.S. official called Hegseth’s order “a major blow.”

According to the network, “planning for such operations takes time and research to carry out. The concern, the official said, is that the pause on offensive cyber operations against Russia will make the U.S. more vulnerable to potential cyberattacks from Moscow, which has a formidable cadre of hackers capable of disrupting U.S. critical infrastructure and collecting sensitive intelligence.”

READ MORE: World Leaders Rush to Support Zelenskyy as Americans Debate Trump’s Allegiance (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/02/world-leaders-rush-to-support-zelenskyy-as-americans-debate-trumps-allegiance/https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/02/world-leaders-rush-to-support-zelenskyy-as-americans-debate-trumps-allegiance/)

The development has received widespread coverage over the weekend.

“Russia is not a significant cyber threat to the U.S. anymore, Trump’s new Defense Secretary says,” the science and technology website Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/trumps-defense-secretary-hegseth-orders-cyber-command-to-stand-down-on-all-russia-operations-2000570343) reported. “The policy shift represents a complete 180-degree turn from America’s posture over the past decade, which has consistently considered Russia one of the top cybersecurity threats. Credible reporting and government investigations have shown that Russia has hacked into U.S. systems countless times.”

Experts were also stunned.

Veteran cyber expert James Lewis, formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said “it’s delusional to think” the stand down order “will turn Russia and the FSB \the Russian security agency] into our friends,” [The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia-hacking-cyber-security) reported. “They hate the U.S. and are still mad about losing the cold war. Pretending otherwise won’t change this.”

The order appears to extend past the Department of Defense, suggesting it may have originated at the highest levels of the executive branch.

Analysts at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) received a new priorities directive that included China, but not Russia, The Guardian also reported. One source “said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.”

“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” that source said. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.”

READ MORE: ‘What the Hell Is This?’: GOP Group’s Andrew Tate Invitation Draws Bipartisan Outrage (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/02/what-the-hell-is-this-gop-groups-andrew-tate-invitation-draws-bipartisan-outrage/)

“People are saying Russia is winning,” they added. “Putin is on the inside now.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) has decades of defense experience in Congress, having served on several committees on the armed forces and veterans affairs, and as Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence until January—when Speaker Mike Johnson unexpectedly removed him from that critical position. He is a strong supporter of Ukraine and opposes Russia.

At the time of his removal, The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol remarked (https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1879693874408652891), “If you’re going to sell out Ukraine to Putin, makes sense to get Turner out of the way first.”

Last year, Turner was also one of a few House Republicans who “were warning about how elements of their party had been infected by Russian propaganda,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted (https://x.com/AaronBlake/status/1896546415675076857) on Monday. (Video of Turner from last year here (https://x.com/CNNSOTU/status/1776984100592636247).) Turner, he added, “was removed 7 months later as chair of the House intel committee.”

In February 2024, Turner issued a “national security threat” warning on Russia’s activities in space so dire that President Biden’s National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby was forced to deliver a statement (https://x.com/therecount/status/1758210523156373615) from the White House press briefing room.

On Sunday’s “Face the Nation,” CBS News’ Margaret Brennan told Congressman Turner (video below), that “CBS has confirmed these reports that Defense Secretary Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to temporarily halt cyber operations and planning against Russia. The Washington Post reports that that’s as long as the negotiations continue. There are no negotiations under way. Does this concern you? Have you been briefed on this?”

A stunned and stammering Rep. Turner delivered his response.

“I can’t – I don’t – no, I’m not – unaware of that. And I don’t believe that that would be – there are too many, I’m certain, considerations there for that to be an accurate statement, so blanket,” he said, according to the official CBS transcript (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-full-transcript-03-02-2025/).

“But they have ordered Cyber Command to halt cyber operations,” Brennan reiterated.

“Considering what I know that – that – considering what I know what – what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would, I’m certain, not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States’ operations,” Turner insisted, despite multiple news reports confirming the stand down order.

“I’m confident, considering what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that the United States, the status against Russia would not be that, considering what we are facing from Russia operations,” Turner added.

Watch the video below or at this link (https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2025/03/considering-what-we-are-facing-us-cyber-defense-halt-against-russia-stuns-republican/).

---ly:Merriweather"):

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TELLS GUYS NO MORE TOWN HALLS

rww

02/27/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Malcolm Ferguson @ The New Republic: Andrew Tate Is on His Way to the U.S. Thanks to Trump

The misogynist facing charges of human trafficking is on a plane back to the United States.

Angry White Men: Christian Nationalist Podcasters Interview Holocaust Denier Ron Unz

As part of a new interview series, white Christian nationalists C. Jay Engel and Andrew Isker spoke with Ron Unz about Charles Lindbergh and World War II. A well-known Holocaust denier, Unz has written that the Holocaust was a “hoax” and that Jews have a “notorious tendency to lie and dissemble.”

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: GOP Congressman: It's OK if Elon fires you since "God has a plan and purpose for your life"

Republican Congressman Mark Alford of Missouri offered thoughtless religious platitudes to his constituents.

Janna Brancolini @ The Daily Beast: Johnson Tries to Shrug Off Anti-DOGE Town Halls as the Work of ‘Paid Protesters’

> Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed Wednesday that Americans who attended recent rowdy Republican town halls were “paid protesters.”

Ahmad Austin Jr. @ Mediaite: Trump Says He Doesn’t Remember Calling Zelenskyy a Dictator When Confronted in Oval Office: ‘Did I Say That?’

President Donald Trump on Thursday acted as though he had no recollection of calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.”

Annabelle Timsit @ The Washington Post: Transgender troops will be removed from U.S. military, Pentagon says

The previous Trump administration effectively banned transgender people from joining, but the new memo says currently serving transgender troops will be discharged.

aoc applaud chips act gaff

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tries the shield gaetz from ethics report release

11 24

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just days before trump said cherish medicare, then endorse cut?!

an 2 25

Democrats are voicing strong opposition to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget framework, which narrowly passed Tuesday night by a razor-thin margin of 217-215.

The framework is widely expected to cut $880 billion from Medicaid, a program that helps one in four Americans, and another $230 billion from SNAP, which helps feed about one in eight Americans — while raising the debt ceiling by $4 trillion to provide a massive $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, largely for the wealthiest of Americans. People making less than $200,000 a year could effectively see their taxes rise, because Johnson’s legislation does not renew tax cuts from 2017. Johnson’s budget, supported by President Donald Trump, requires a minimum of $2 trillion in cuts to the federal budget.

Every Republican except one voted for Johnson’s budget legislation. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the only holdout, refusing to give in to pressure from GOP leadership.

Every Democrat present voted against the bill. Only one was not present due to his battle against cancer.

READ MORE: House GOP: Federal Employees Are ‘Bloated Bureaucrats’ Who ‘Do Not Deserve Their Jobs’

But every other Democrat showed up and stood firm.

“After 3 surgeries, a blood clot, an infection, & being hospitalized for over a week – the moment I was discharged from the hospital, I immediately rushed to the airport so I could fly to D.C. and vote NO on Republicans’ disastrous budget plan. I’m proud to stand with @HouseDemocrats to fight Republican’s extreme agenda,” wrote U.S. Rep. Kevin Mullin, (D-CA).

Republicans refused to allow U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO), out on maternity leave, to vote by proxy, so she traveled across the country with her four-week old newborn, Sam, to vote against the GOP budget.

I have a message for Donald Trump: nobody fights harder than a mom.

Republican leadership may have denied my ability to vote by proxy but that didn’t stop us from voting against this disastrous budget that strips away health care and food for seniors, veterans, kids and… pic.twitter.com/rfoKNoyeVJ

— U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen (@RepPettersen) February 26, 2025

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), largely seen as the loudest and most consistent voice on the left opposing President Donald Trump’s agenda, tore into Republicans.

“Good morning. The House voted yesterday to kick millions of off their health care, close rural hospitals, and shut down addiction clinics. All in order to afford a giant tax cut for Elon Musk, Donald Trump and their billionaire and corporate friends,” he charged Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Senator Murphy denounced the GOP’s “greed” at an outdoor press conference.

Calling the Republicans’ budget framework “the most massive transfer of wealth and resources from poor people in the middle class to the billionaires and corporations in the history of this country,” Murphy (video below) said, “You’re talking about 880 billion dollars of cuts to Medicaid.”

“Now I get it, like, $880 billion. Like, what does that mean? Right? That’s a huge number, nobody understands. Let me tell you what that means. That that means that sick kids die in this country. That means that hospitals in depressed communities and rural communities close their doors. Right? That means that drug and addiction treatment centers disappear. All across this country.”

:{READ MORE: Refusing to Publicly Reveal DOGE Head, White House Says It’s Been ‘Incredibly Transparent’

“That means that millions of working families who have insurance today, because by the way, 24% of Americans get their health care from Medicaid, they all of a sudden don’t have their health care tomorrow,” he continued, adding, “the scope of this greed is something that we have never ever seen before in this country, and we should not accept it as normal in the United States of America.”

24% of Americans get their health insurance from Medicaid.

Seniors. Working families. Millions of kids.

Republicans voted tonight to burn Medicaid to the ground.

And for what? To fund a giant tax cut for their billionaire friends.

A moral abomination. pic.twitter.com/Xez9GmzJlC

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 26, 2025

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) explained how Johnson’s budget legislation came together, and all the things Republicans voted against.

He said Democrats asked Republicans to “vote against tax breaks for people earning over $100 million per year.”

“Every Republican vote no,” he said, regarding that proposal, as well as on protections for large numbers of Americans who need support.

Republicans voted against assuring “the American people that they’re not gonna steal school meals from kids in order to give tax breaks for millionaires,” and on protecting Medicaid, which McGovern noted, “covers 41% of all births in the United States.”

“Nearly half of children with special healthcare needs and five in eight nursing home residents,” he said, are also covered by Medicaid.

“Democrats offered an amendment preventing tax giveaways for people earning over $1 million a year. Every Republican voted no,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. “We even offered an amendment preventing tax cuts for people with a net worth of over, get this, $1 billion. Every Republican voted no.”

McGovern: Democrats offered an amendment to protect Medicaid. Every Republican voted no.

Democrats offered an amendment to extend tax cuts for people making under $400,000 while ensuring that corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. Every Republican voted no.… pic.twitter.com/IiuC8skXc2

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 25, 2025

Watch the videos above or at this link.

===

===

VOODOO TAX CUT

AN 2 25

A Washington Post columnist rebuked Republicans on Thursday night over their budget plans, which she said sounded like it was hatched by cold-hearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

Catherine Rampell, a vocal critic of President Donald Trump's economic plans, wrote Thursday that the GOP is eyeing taking food and health care away from the poor to subsidize tax cuts for the rich.

"That might sound like a stale, Scroogy stereotype. But it's not an exaggeration: It's laid out, in black and white, in GOP budget plans released this week," she said.

Republicans have sought for years to shrink government health programs and food supplements, she noted, and now they're "desperate to extend and expand" Trump's 2017 tax cuts. That means they're "especially motivated" this time around to "shred the safety net," as they have to find savings "somewhere," said Rampell.

Given the massive dollar amounts on Trump's economic agenda, his party now must fill a gaping budget hole.

"They claim they'll do it through a combination of fake math, nonbinding promises and shanking the poor," she chided. That includes what the writer called "ludicrous economic assumptions to paper over" the House's massive revenue losses in its budget plan, such as assuming productivity growth will, in the words of Manhattan Institute fellow Jessica Reidl, "magically nearly double" and then remain there forever.

The budget also includes a "wistful throwback" to the Reagan era "magic asterisk," she said, pointing to $3 trillion in "unspecified" savings government-wide.

Rampell called out three pieces specifically and decoded them: Forthcoming cuts by the Agricultural Committee — which oversees food stamps and farm supports — to the tune of $230 billion; looming cuts to Medicaid, included in materials distributed just last month by the GOP's budget committee chair; and planned cuts of $880 billion from the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and parts of Medicare.

" Trump has his enemies list, and lawmakers have theirs. The latter might just include your ability to feed your family," she concluded.

---

RWW

01/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Last week, Richard Rogers of the America First Policy Institute appeared on "The Jim Bakker Show," where he reported that the Trump administration would be appointing a "faith director" to serve under every Cabinet member who would be tasked with ensuring that anti-Christian policies are not enacted.

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On Wednesday, Christian nationalist worship leader and right-wing political activist Sean Feucht posted a video in which he reported something similar, claiming that the Trump administration intends to assign a "government-sanctioned intercessor" to every Cabinet member who will be responsible for praying for them and shaping their decisions.

Returning from the inauguration, Feucht complained again about the remarks delivered by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde at the National Prayer Service held at the Washington National Cathedral before bragging that he had been invited to hold worship services inside the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth and inside the U.S. Capitol by House Speaker Mike Johnson.

But that was only the beginning.

"I can't wait to tell you guys the God connections," Feucht marveled. "Mind boggling. I got invited to do worship at the Pentagon with my friend Pete Hegseth. I got invited by Speaker Mike Johnson to go into the Capitol and worship. I mean, it's crazy guys."

"It's wide open, right now," he continued. "Our government has people in it now—I've never seen this and never heard of this before—where worship is being invited in and the Trump team actually has a faith department where every Cabinet member has almost like an intercessor, like a government-sanctioned intercessor, that's responsible to pray and integrate faith and prayer and decision making into every facet of the government."

"It's absolutely unprecedented.," Feucht rejoiced.

Video URL

IFrame Content

It is unclear if the "faith director" positions mentioned by Rogers are the same as the "government-sanctioned intercessor" positions mentioned by Feucht, but either way, this is further evidence of the deep influence of dominionist and Christian nationalist activists within the MAGA movement as well as the impact that institutions like the America First Policy Institute are already having on the federal government under Trump.

===

rww

01/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

An aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson advised Republican colleagues against subpoenaing former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson as part of their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack in an effort to prevent the release of sexually explicit texts that lawmakers sent her.

The president’s pardoned 1,500 individuals, including offenders convicted of violently assaulting police.

L. Brent Bozell III wrote a letter last year defending his son L. Brent Bozell IV, who was charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Donald Trump declared on the campaign trail that he’d be a “crypto president” during his second term. He said he’d make America “the crypto capital of the planet” and a “bitcoin superpower.” His sudden and wholehearted embrace of cryptocurrency thrilled the industry, but just days before taking office, Trump surprised his crypto supporters with a cash grab that’s shameless even by his standards.

Donald Trump’s Week One actions on abortion appear to be just as brazen and trollish as his attempts on the campaign trail to convince voters he’d moderated on abortion.

The 17-year-old who killed a female student at a high school in Nashville before taking his own life was an African-American Reserve Officers' Training Corp member who hated Black people and identified as involuntarily celibate, according to a manifesto apparently posted by him online.

===

// benghazi bs biden impeach

we are looking fwd got laugh on pardons?

an 1 25

no lnx

'We're gonna come get you now:' Threats flood J6 committee members after Trump pardons

Matt Laslo and Raw Story January 23, 2025

WASHINGTON — The threats are back.

Since President Donald Trump issued sweeping pardons — along with 14 communications — on Monday for the roughly 1,500 people convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol and attacking law enforcement four years ago, there’s been an uptick in threats to the members who served on the January 6 Select Committee.

"Well, already the crazy calls have started coming back," a former member of the committee told Raw Story. The member is not being named due to safety concerns.

"Are you getting threats?" Raw Story asked.

ALSO READ: Inside the parade of right-wing world leaders flocking to D.C. for Trump's inauguration

"Oh yeah,” the member said. “Several members have indicated that since the pardon that they're getting, 'Hey, we're gonna come get you now' and that kind of thing."

"So has your office gotten them?" Raw Story inquired.

"Oh, yeah," they said.

"Does that worry you though?" Raw Story pressed.

"Personal safety is a concern, I think, for a lot of people," the committee member continued. "It puts the public at risk when you put people who have been convicted of assaulting law enforcement back on the streets and you kind of embolden the conduct that they did, like it was somehow okay? So you legitimize bad behavior by people who broke into the Capitol and did all kinds of crazy stuff."

While the former select committee member doesn’t think the threats are coming from those who’ve been pardoned, they’re bracing for what’s to come.

"Some of the folks that he pardoned are still a clear and present danger to the public, members of Congress, staff here on the Hill," the committee member said. "Some of them, as you know, have already publicly said that they're not going to change.”

That’s a far different tune than House Speaker Mike Johnson is singing this week.

Earlier Wednesday, the speaker unveiled a new Jan. 6 subcommittee intended to “uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people,” according to his statement.

“House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is still more work to be done,” Johnson’s office released in a statement.

While the speaker’s office didn’t expound on what they now term "false narratives," the former January 6 Select Committee member told Raw Story the only falsehoods they’ve heard this week have come out of the White House — and now Republicans in Congress.

"You know, we had 140 people get hurt. Obviously, some lost their lives. Now to pretend like that was nothing, that what you saw with your own eyes somehow didn't happen, I'll just say, it's a blot on this institution,” the committee alum said. “It's a blot on the people who support people like that being pardoned."

===

maga mike gop pretzel flips jdv, deflect

Johnson flip-flops on Trump Jan. 6 rioter pardons — then orders probe into committee

rww

01/22/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

As senators weigh the Pentagon nominee's fate, the former Fox News host is dealing with yet another personal controversy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said Congress will be “looking” into former President Joe Biden’s pardons for his family shortly after defending President Donald Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.

[Ross] Ulbricht is free now, solely because libertarians supported Trump and this is the payoff they asked for. That's how our president operates, ladies and gentlemen.

Several singers in the choir’s track he produced assaulted cops on January 6th.

“The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars."

At a rally the day before the ceremony, the Girls Gone Bible podcasters called on God to condemn Trump’s critics.

===

rww

01/06/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

“WHAT WAS THE FBI DOING PLANNING January 6th for a year?” Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director, asked that question during a November 25, 2022 episode of his Kash’s Corner podcast for the Epoch Times. It was no slip of the tongue. As the title of that episode suggested—“What Did the FBI Know Before Jan. 6?”—Patel spent considerable time trying to cast the FBI as a villain responsible for January 6th.

Details about Utah-based Robert Kinch, who backed ‘race war’, suggest rightwing militia has retained links with police.

A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.

In September, Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection.

Neo-Nazis and white nationalists have been emboldened by Trump’s reelection.

Embattled MorningStar Ministries is facing backlash for platforming disgraced preacher Todd Bentley at their recent Vision conference. Bentley was disqualified from ministry in 2020 by a panel of charismatic Christian leaders. The panel made the decision based on numerous firsthand reports of Bentley’s “steady pattern of ungodly and immoral behavior” over the course of almost 20 years, including reports of sexual abuse. Despite the reports, MorningStar gave Bentley a platform at their Vision conference Dec. 29-31.

On Friday (Jan. 3), Speaker Mike Johnson stood before the U.S. House of Representatives on the opening day of the 119th Congress and read what he called “Thomas Jefferson’s prayer.” However, as first reported by A Public Witness, that’s not true. Other outlets followed in noting the problem with Johnson’s claim, which Monticello deems as “spurious.”

===

an 12 24

Republicans are already revealing their eagerness to cut earned benefits for millions of Americans, if one House Republican is to be believed.

In a recent interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) said that he aims to convince his fellow lawmakers that "hard decisions" need to be made about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if his party is to succeed in its goal of making sweeping budget cuts.

"75 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary," McCormick said, referencing the three programs that provide income and health insurance to retirees, low-income Americans and the disabled. "There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved and we know how to do it. We just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on."

READ MORE:**Lawmaker vows 'strong resistance' if Musk agency recommends Social Security or Medicare cuts**

New Republic writer Hafiz Rashid highlighted McCormick's interview to make the point that Republicans are "chomping at the bit at some of their favorite targets" in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's victory. And he noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also mentioned the possibility of making cuts to those three programs in order to fatten the Pentagon budget, along with "the infamous conservative manifesto Project 2025."

"While McCormick pledges to talk to the Democrats about such cuts, the GOP is unlikely to get much traction with the opposing party, especially since Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House where a single vote or two could tank their legislative agenda.," Rashid wrote. "Even if the GOP manages to win over a couple of Democrats, any plans to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid will get pushback from powerful organizations such as the AARP. Older voters who rely on the programs also make up the base of the Republican Party, and politicians from both parties should be wary of provoking them."

Notably, McCormick didn't mention one of his party's more costly goals: Extending Trump's 2017 tax cut package that overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the rich. Politico estimated that an extension would require roughly $4.6 trillion over 10 years, which even some Republicans were worried about.

Watch the video of McCormick's comments below, or by**clicking this link.**

READ MORE:['Biggest challenge': Even Republicans are nervous about Trump's new $4.6 trillion tax cut

===

mike j jokes about ~ ACA

an 11 24

having secured control of both chambers of the U.S. Congress and the White House starting in January, Republicans are making no secret of their intention to pursue sweeping healthcare cuts that would raise costs and imperil insurance coverage for millions of people across the country.

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), chairman of the House Budget Committee, told reporters earlier this week that the GOP is looking to use the filibuster-evading reconciliation process to pursue cuts to "mandatory programs"—a category that includes Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, noted in response to Arrington's comments that Republicans attempted to cut both Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that help enrollees afford health insurance.

The Republican Study Committee, of which Arrington is a member, proposed eliminating the ACA tax credits in its 2025 budget proposal—a move that could result in around 4 million peoplelosing insurance.

:{The tax credits are set to expire next year, meaning Republicans could just do nothing and allow them to lapse.

Last time Republicans had a federal trifecta, they tried and failed to fully repeal the ACA—an effort that sparked a wave of civil disobedience on Capitol Hill.

Both President-elect Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on the campaign trail that they're looking to try again.

"We're going to replace it," Trump said during his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in September—while admitting that he did not have a fully formed alternative plan.

Johnson, for his part, said during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania last month that "healthcare reform's going to be a big part of the agenda." When a voter posed the question, "No Obamacare?" Johnson replied in the affirmative, "No Obamacare."

"The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work," he added, "and we've got a lot of ideas on how to do that."

Sarah Lueck and Allison Orris of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote Wednesday that Trump's return to the White House and the GOP's capture of both chambers of Congress poses "big risks to people's ability to access and afford health coverage in Medicaid and the marketplaces."

"While Republicans have moved away from talking about their plans for changing health coverage in the U.S. as 'repeal,'" Lueck and Orris added, "Trump's first term and Republicans' recently released policy agendas suggest they may pursue policies that would have much the same result: higher costs for people, reduced access to care for vulnerable groups, and more people who are uninsured."

an 11 24

alternet NO LNX

Mike Johnson’s running for his life – and possibly Trump’s

Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives gestures during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Matt Laslo November 02, 2024

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — The foliage is spectacular, but there’s little respite in upstate New York for people trying to escape this year’s elections. Yard signs are everywhere, and if you flip on a TV or YouTube, chances are you’ll hear ominous music before an ad accuses one member of Congress or another of being either a “sellout” or “so extreme, it’s dangerous.”

“I'm here today to cut through the BS that you see on television,” first-term Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) told local upstate New York business owners recently.

Good luck with that.

While there are lots of loud pro-Trump signs up here, the presidential contest is a sideshow even in rural parts of this blue state. The main event here is the fight for control of the House of Representatives, evidenced by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) once again crisscrossing the same sprawling upstate New York district Friday.

The two party leaders know their personal futures — and those of their respective parties, including potentially the presidency itself — are on the line in battleground districts like these from coast to coast. Still, the two leaders have been paying particular attention to New York contests of late, for good reason.

ALSO READ: Inside the grift that could cost Donald Trump the election

“The final battleground”

While this year’s Senate map is favorable for Republicans and gives them a solid chance of recapturing the chamber Tuesday, Democrats only need four more House seats to win back the majority. And as many as seven races are up for grabs across the Empire State.

Even Democrats who are all-in for Vice President Kamala Harris say that in the event her blue wall—Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—fails and Trump recaptures the White House, the House of Representatives is Democrats' last potential check on the twice-impeached former president and the GOP he’s remade in his populist image.

“They're really intense — ground game! They matter. It's the balance of power in the House,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) — who many New Yorkers barely know is up for reelection this year — told Raw Story this fall. “We have to win the House because the House is the final battleground to prevent the horrible things that a Trump presidency would do.”

In 2020, Trump and his allies filed some 60 lawsuits after the election. This year, roughly a week ahead of Election Day, Democratic lawyer Marc Elias reported there were “199 active voting and election cases pending in 40 states,” and the conservative-leaning Roberts Supreme Court already ruled in Trump's favor on one of them challenging a last-minute purge of the voter rolls in Virginia.

With the Trump campaign suing early and often nationwide, challenging everything from mail-in ballots and state voter rolls to drop boxes and overseas ballots, Democrats argue their party needs the House majority back because they don’t trust Johnson in the speaker’s chair when the election is certified Jan. 6, 2025.

Democrats say that’s all the more true after Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally, where former President Donald Trump hinted at an election secret—“...we will tell you what it is when the race is over…”—he shared with Speaker Johnson.

With the election mere days away, party leaders' final push in upstart New York is telling, but it may not be enough.

Embattled congressional incumbents across the region have been working hard to maintain their brand identities since the 2022 midterms, but the 2024 election cycle is testing whether moderates are now mere mythical creatures.

“They don't blame that on House Republicans”

During halftime at a recent home Mahopac High School football game, after a short speech, suitless Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) walked through a sea of his voter’s children, pausing for an occasional selfie in this exurb of New York City.

“Is that Mike Lawler?” a couple of giggling young girls ask.

“How are you?” Lawler replies.

“When six-year-olds know who you are, it’s like — it says something,” Lawler says through a fatherly, if slightly depressed, laugh. “I don't hide. You have to be present.”

And Lawler’s, seemingly, been everywhere. He’s held nearly 1,000 events across his district in the past 21 months. Children recognize him from all the ads he’s in these days, even as many parents know him for regularly appearing on local television or CNN, whether he’s speaking on behalf of the more liberal wing of his far-right party or, say, apologizing for wearing blackface in college.

Outside groups and his opponent, former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), have spent countless millions of dollars portraying Lawler as a rubber-stamp for Speaker Johnson, his colleague’s far-right agenda and Washington dysfunction. That’s precisely what Lawler doesn’t want his constituents to know him for, even as this Congress has been one big ball of GOP-fueled dysfunction.

Lawler’s party is in the majority, but it can’t fund the government without relying on Democrats. Lawmakers nearly defaulted on the nation’s debt last summer. And Republicans shut down Congress itself for some three weeks last fall as the party bitterly battled behind closed doors over former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s replacement.

“Like, what's your pitch?” Raw Story asked as the marching band took the field. “Because there's been so much dysfunction in the House…”

“You guys — the media — zeros in on that. That's not where people are. They're looking at the actual substance of the issues,” Lawler told Raw Story. “The affordability crisis? They don't blame that on House Republicans, they blame that on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The border crisis? They don't blame that on House Republicans, they blame that on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

While Republicans across the northeast used to inhabit the moderate middle, in recent years at the federal level most have evolved into something many New Yorkers barely recognize.

New York Republican’s Trumpian turn

Take Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). After winning in 2014, the conservative Club for Growth described her as “very much a liberal” because she advocated for things like conservatives leading on climate change. She was hailed as the youthful future of the GOP.

In 2015, she became the youngest female member of Congress in history (a record she relinquished to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in 2019). The Republican Policy Committee created a new Taskforce on Millennials for her to chair. And she’s risen in the ranks since.

She transformed in the first Trump administration, and then, in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Stefanik replaced former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in House GOP leadership. Climate change is now a curse to her, as she tries to curry favor with Trump by moving the Republican Conference even further to the right.

Earlier in this Congress, Stefanik teamed up with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) when the two introduced companion measures to expunge Trump’s impeachments (even as many legal scholars say that’s impossible).

While Stefanik represents a sprawling, seemingly safe rural seat bordering Canada, incumbent Republicans who live closer to New York City have also been turning heads this cycle by mirroring Trump.

From moderate to MAGA

While MAGA is en vogue in today’s GOP, following Donald Trump’s lead gets expensive real quick in the suburbs of New York City, where Trump made a name for himself on Page Six over the decades.

The Trump effect has played a big role in why Molinaro — the Republican congressman who promised to “cut through the BS” up top — has found himself locked in a roughly $38.4 million rematch with his Democratic opponent, Harvard-educated lawyer Josh Riley.

In 2022, Molinaro beat Riley by a mere 2%, and they’re neck and neck again. This is why both Johnson and Jeffries are spending Friday in New York’s 19th district as the race for the speaker’s gavel heats up in the final hours.

Molinaro is a former Dutchess County town executive known for being pragmatic, at least in the past. He gained respect statewide in 2018 for running for the state Republican Party and challenging then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a strong, if young, moderate conservative.

Molinaro held his own, in part by keeping Trump at a distance, like when he called Cuomo a “schoolchild” after the governor pressed him on Trump in their debate. Back then, he refused to say whether or not he voted for Trump. After two years in Washington, the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School named him the second most bipartisan House member.

But his critics say something changed this election cycle. The Molinaro running in 2024 is all-in on Trump. He now pushes the party line on immigration and policing.

But he really turned heads for refusing to remove his tweet on X that perpetuates the Springfield, Ohio migrant conspiracy, even after upwards of 30 bomb threats were called in to schools and government buildings in the formerly sleepy midwestern town.

Molinaro’s tweet on X spreading lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio that he’s refused to take down since posting it Sept. 9, 2024.

“Congressman, you've been criticized for amplifying unfounded claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were capturing and eating pets,” a moderator asked in their October debate. “What is your response to the criticism that your claims are both inflammatory and dangerous?”

“You've missed all of the year and a half of us arguing for real border security,” Molinaro replied. “I voted for the strictest border security policy in generations, and the president of the United States chose not to negotiate.”

“He wouldn't answer the question as to whether he stands by a dangerous and harmful conspiracy theory that he's been peddling,” Riley told the audience. “Maybe you're embarrassed about it. I would be if those words had come out of my mouth.”

That’s far from the middle-of-the-road conservative upstate New Yorkers knew when he first became a small town mayor. Still, that’s the Molinaro many residents remember — despite all the accusations flying in what’s become the 4th most expensive House race in 2024.

“These are our people. These are our people from our community, and they are present locally — they try and be present locally,” Jennifer — a regional executive who asked we withhold her last name to keep politics out of her business — told Raw Story after the candidate’s forum.

No place for bipartisanship in 2024 election

The record of incumbent Republicans in these parts is complicated.

The delegation was pivotal in forcing GOP leaders to let the House vote to expel former Rep. George Santos (R-NY). And they’ve teamed up with Democrats on locally essential measures, like cleaning up the Hudson River, which Reps. Lawler, Molinaro and Pat Ryan (D-NY) collaborated on.

But 2024 isn't about bipartisanship. It’s about winning and expanding the party.

“I certainly want a Democratic majority,” Ryan told Raw Story after he and Molinaro addressed the Ulster County Chamber of Commerce candidate’s forum. “Marc and I have worked together. Like, we are genuinely friends on the human level — we've taken our kids to Blippi shows together — but we disagree on a whole lot of stuff.”

While many GOP incumbents have tried to distance themselves from party infighting and the ensuing Washington dysfunction, Democrats have been making the case that moderate Republicans are extinct. But Ryan goes further and has been running against Speaker Johnson himself.

“I always try to remind people, one of the most — if not the most — important votes you take as members is who will be speaker. And we've seen [fmr. Speaker Kevin] McCarthy fail to deliver anything. Now we've seen Johnson — who represents the most extreme right-wing in the party — be selected as a speaker, the guy who authored the national abortion ban bill, was a legal architect of Jan. 6, attacked LGBTQ rights,” Ryan said. “When I tell people that they almost sort of sit up.”

For their part, the GOP has painted upstate New York Democrats as far-left radicals. Ryan’s been criticized for campaigning with Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), especially after he — gasp! — hugged her at an October event.

The Democrat brushes the barbs aside, in part by regularly bragging about standing up nationally to the Biden administration on, say, immigration while also pushing back locally against Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) on unpopular measures like congestion pricing in New York CIty.

What presidential contest?

That doesn’t mean the incumbent wants to talk about this year’s Democratic presidential nominee, as the audience learned at the candidate’s forum.

“You’re all smart, educated, informed people, I’m not here to talk about the presidential race,” Ryan said. “In a pretty unusual way, I’ve been willing to stand up and speak truth to my party in a way that doesn’t happen that often these days in our politics.”

“This is the difference between speaking one way and actions,” his GOP challenger, former NYPD officer Alison Esposito, replied. “The congressman has been a rubber-stamp for the failed Biden-Harris administration on many levels.”

“I’m actually not gonna unpack it mistruth by mistruth, what I am gonna remind everybody is, my opponent didn’t actually answer the question whatsoever,” Ryan replied. “I am gonna vote for Kamala Harris.”

While Esposito didn’t tell the audience who she was voting for, in the hall afterward, she told Raw Story she was backing Trump.

“I'm not voting for Harris, I'm not. Absolutely, yeah, I'm voting for Trump,” Esposito told Raw Story. “[Ryan] has no policy to stand on, so he needs to make this election about MAGA, Trump, abortion — existential threats.”

MAGA’s on the ballot

In the campaign's final week, Speaker Johnson also has events scheduled with a candidate in New Jersey, a candidate North Carolina, a candidate in Virginia and a fundraiser with a Connecticut candidate (who’s thought to have no real chance of winning, wealthy friends and all).

After traversing his home state, Minority Leader Jeffries is heading to Alabama to help former Obama aide Shomari Figures try and pick up the newly redrawn Black-majority seat that resulted from the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting a GOP drawn electoral map last year. Then Jeffries is off to Michigan where three seats are in play.

With its staggering seven seats in play, New York has been, basically, one-stop shopping for both parties since the midterms, but with this year’s razor-thin polling margins, the Empire State is now the epicenter of Election 2024.

“If Trump wins, is your pitch to voters, we need the House to be a check on him?” Raw Story asked.

“Absolutely, absolutely,” House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) told Raw Story on the campaign trail recently. “No matter what happens at the top of the ticket, we need the House.”

But more so, Democrats have come to see the House as the fount of extremism in today’s Washington, as it’s been the chamber legitimizing and magnifying Trump’s message, conspiracies and all. And they especially don’t trust today’s conspiracy-peddling House majority in charge when the House is tasked with certifying the election on Jan. 6, 2025.

That’s why across the northeast — once the land of clear-headed, if brash, political titans dotted throughout U.S. history — voters are being told America needs them.

“We’ve had a do-nothing Congress that is also one that has true extremism in its leadership,” Clark said. “The so-called moderates go along with the most extreme parts of that agenda, so winning the House is absolutely crucial to continuing to put solutions before the American people and not just MAGA extremism.”

NOW READ: Fox News is the reason the race is close

===

an 10 24

Johnson tries to backtrack after 'no Obamacare' backlash

msg trump allude to secret plan we will do well

===

AN 10 24

Donald Trump’s six-hour Madison Square Garden rally Sunday night, filled with “anger, vitriol and racist threats,” began almost immediately with the “joke heard around the world“—an attack calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean“—and ended with 80 minutes of Donald Trump telling “scores of lies.”

The racist broadside was from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who also told the MAGA crowd: “And these Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do, they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”

As Mediaite reported, Hinchcliffe, pointing to a Black man in the audience, “went with what seemed like an off-the-cuff ‘joke.'”

“That’s cool,” he said, “a Black guy with a thing on his head. What the hell is that, a lamp shade? Look at this guy! Oh, my goodness. Wow! I’m just kidding, that’s one of my buddies. We had a Halloween party last night. We had fun — we carved watermelons together. It was awesome!”

READ MORE: ‘Ten-Cent Dictator’: Trump Threatens Mass Arrests of Opponents in ‘Cease and Desist’ Post

The New York Times called it: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.”

“The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing,” the paper of record declared.

But during those 80 minutes Donald Trump made one statement that has constitutional law and other experts concerned.

Referencing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Trump said: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

Suggesting the comment was “potentially…sinister,” Politico Playbook reported it “could be a reference to the House settling a contested election.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson in her popular Substack newsletter wrote: “It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote.”

“Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024,” she added, “this seems his likely plan.”

READ MORE: ‘Cowardice’: Washington Post Faces Backlash After Refusing to Endorse in Presidential Race

Professor of law Melissa Murray, a constitutional law expert and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, appears to agree.

“So, the plan is to have an Electoral College tie (which will likely require contesting swing state vote counts),” she writes. “A tie in the Electoral College will then require a vote in the House of Representatives, where the GOP, led by Speaker Johnson, has a (thin) majority….”

Harvard University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus Laurence Tribe, considered “the Nation’s preeminent constitutional scholar,” delivered a warning.

“At his racist MSG rally, Trump spoke of the ‘little secret’ he and Mike Johnson would unveil after the people’s Nov 5 votes have been cast. He made clear it would involve the House — and how he plans to use its 50’State delegations to wreak havoc and hand him back ‘his’ power.”

Attorney Jacob Glick, who served as investigative counsel on the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack wrote: “Trump hinting at ‘secret’ with Mike Johnson to be revealed post-election.”

“Clearest indication yet that if Trump loses,” Glick added, “the plan is to sow enough doubt about election results in key states so that the House can declare a contingent election and proclaim Trump the victor.”

Constitutional and civil rights attorney Andrew L. Seidel, pointing to the clips of Trump’s remarks, wrote: “I *think* this was to Mike Johnson and, if so, he’s signaling that Republicans will try to do the thing that keeps me up at night: screw around with the Electoral College votes so that the House itself votes on the president instead. Each state gets one vote. Trump wins with 26.”

“This is known as the Contingent Election of the President and was—although many people still don’t fully realize it—part of the goal behind January 6th,” he added.

The Nation’s justice correspondent, Elie Mystal, pointing to the clip below, asked: “What is he confessing to here?”

Watch the video below or at this link.

===

msg

COMM DR 10 24

From start to finish, Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night was a torrent of bigotry and fascistic rhetoric, with the former president and a bizarre lineup of preceding speakers trashing Puerto Ricans and Palestinians, condemning the press, and casting their political opponents as a satanic "enemy from within."

The New York City event, held on the second to last Sunday before the November 5 election, amounted to a closing pitch for a candidate who has pledged to wield the power of the federal government—including the U.S. military—against those he views as obstacles to his ascent to power and his political project, which includes a large-scale deportation campaign, massive deregulation for industry, and another round of tax cuts for the wealthy.

"When I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy," Trump said Sunday, characterizing Democratic nominee Kamala ^Harris and other party leaders as mere "vessels" for the "radical left machine," which the former president called "massive, vicious, [and] crooked."

"It's just this amorphous group of people. But they're smart and they're vicious. And we have to defeat them," said the Republican nominee, who falsely claimed the U.S. is an "occupied country" facing a "migrant invasion" that only he can stop.

While the rally featured familiar bloviating from Trump about crowd sizes and other petty obsessions—as well as absurd speakers such as Hulk Hogan and Dr. Phil—historians and other observers were horrified by what they described as the authoritarian ambitions that were front and center and shamelessly expressed Sunday night.

"The point here is that fascism is on full display, openly: no dog whistles, no plausible deniability," said Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University whose work has focused on the white supremacist movement in the United States.

"It's a show of power and another attempt to make this look and feel normal," Belew added. "And it will not just magically disappear after the election, regardless of the outcome. In fact, it might be worth thinking through the very likely possibility that this kind of display suggests that this candidate and this movement don't care that much about the outcome."

One journalist called Trump's event "the most overtly fascist mass rally in New York since 1939"—referring to a pro-Nazi rally held that year at Madison Square Garden—and criticized media coverage of the former president's remarks, pointing to a now-changed USA Today headline as a particularly stark example.

House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) appearance at the rally made clear that Trump and the leadership of the Republican Party are in sync as the GOP pursues full control of Congress on November 5 and lays the groundwork to enact the former president's agenda.

"We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we're going to do really well with the House. Right?" Trump said late Sunday, pointing to someone in the audience—possibly Johnson.

"He and I have a secret," Trump added, in remarks carried live by all three major cable news networks. "We'll tell you what it is when the race is over."

Other speakers at the rally included far-right pundit Tucker Carlson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and billionaire Elon Musk, who has funneled roughly $118 million into the 2024 campaign in support of Trump.

"I'm not just MAGA," Musk said, pointing to his black hat. "I'm dark, gothic MAGA."

MSG fail 10 24 no pix twt

Popular, famous, and highly-influential Latino stars, and superstars including Bad Bunny, Luis Fonsi, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, are lashing out at Donald Trump after his six-hour Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday served up racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic rhetoric. A New York Times headline described it as "Trump's racist rally."...

===

an 10 24

Republican election officials are currently being sued in multiple states for purging eligible voters just before Americans go to the polls in November. Now, one watchdog group fighting back argues the purges are part of a larger GOP strategy.

According to the Independent, voters in both Alabama and Tennessee are suing their respective secretaries of state after finding out they had been removed from voter rolls for being "non-citizens." One of the plaintiffs, 49 year-old Alabama resident James Cozzad, is a registered Republican who voted in the 2016 and 2020 elections without incident. In a lawsuit filed in federal court, Cozzad said he had been "racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue."

"It feels like they are trying to make me think I’ve broken the law — just for trying to exercise my right to vote. While I hope it was just a mistake, I think if they were just trying to verify something, they would have done so long before the election," he continued. "Now I can understand why some people feel as though their vote isn’t worth casting."

READ MORE:**The Purge is real: Inside the GOP's 2024 playbook to disenfranchise voters**

The Independent further reported that thousands more voters have been purged from the rolls in states with Republican election chiefs — including Virginia, where the Department of Justice alleges Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth Kelly Gee has also removed thousands of voters. Even though there is no evidence that non-citizens have tried to vote in the Old Dominion State, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin bragged about kicking approximately 6,000 voters from the rolls for allegedly being illegal immigrants.

These voter purges are notably taking place during the so-called "quiet period," in which states are barred from making drastic changes to their election systems and voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Watchdog group Protect Democracy attorney Anna Dorman is arguing that Republican secretaries of state — along with GOP groups filing frivolous lawsuits in the courts — are acting in "bad faith" and that their arguments are "not strong on the merits."

"Their sole purpose is to use the legitimacy of the court system to launder conspiracy theories and make them feel more legitimate, so that if the election results don’t go the way these people want in November, they have some additional conspiracies to put forward to try to undermine peaceful transfer of power," Dorman told the Independent.

The outlet reported that GOP-aligned groups have filed nearly 100 election-related lawsuits in 2024 alone, which are largely what Protect Democracy calls "zombie lawsuits." The group uses that term to describe litigation that will almost certainly get thrown out at first glance due to there being no factual basis to plaintiffs' claims of fraudulent activity.

READ MORE:**Deep-red state removed 28% of registered voters from its rolls in massive purge**

“They’re part of a messaging strategy, not a legal strategy,” a Protect Democracy report read. “Regardless of whether this legal strategy will get anywhere, in any courtroom, it telegraphs a clear intent to subvert the election if Donald Trump loses.”

Earlier this year, both former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago to announce an initiative aimed at curbing non-citizen voting. Johnson unsuccessfully tried to include legislation that would require voters show proof of citizenship (like a birth certificate or a U.S. passport) upon registering to vote in the latest must-pass government funding bill. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated there are several million U.S. citizens who would not be able to meet that burden of proof due to difficulty locating or obtaining citizenship documents, meaning they would be disenfranchised.

Click here to read the Independent's report in its entirety.

READ MORE:['They're just coming after us': Project 2025 org is now harassing voter registration groups

RS

punked or just does not care BS?

*real* Florida family walking through floodwaters as they return home after Hurricane Helene. AP

There has been no shortage of gut-wrenching photographs from communities in the southeast devastated by Hurricane Helene, which caused extreme flooding and killed at least 215 people — pictures of houses destroyed, families trapped on rooftops, wreckage from mudslides and roads washed out by torrential rains. But rather than focus on the actual victims or damage, many right-wing influencers and politicians have extended their sympathies to a nonexistent girl and her puppy (who is also not real).

The AI-generated image they’re sharing depicts a crying girl in a boat, seemingly alone except for the little dog she’s clutching. She wears a lifejacket and appears to be adrift on floodwaters caused by a major storm. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah posted the picture on X on Thursday, writing “Caption this photo,” apparently inviting his followers to vent their outrage at the Biden-Harris administration for allowing American children to suffer such misery on their watch. After users pointed out that he’d fallen for AI slop, he deleted the picture. (The image originated on the Trump web forum Patriots.win, where several users immediately recognized it as the product of an AI model.)

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Others, however, have left the misleading picture up on their social media accounts — and some are defending it as an accurate representation of Helene’s effects even though it’s fake. Far-right conspiracy theorist and Donald Trump associate Laura Loomer called the image “sad,” quote-tweeting a post from Buzz Patterson, columnist for the conservative blog RedState, who wrote of the picture: “Our government has failed us again.” Neither have taken their posts down as of press time. Amy Kremer, RNC National Committeewoman for the Georgia GOP and co-founder of Women for Trump, tweeted on Thursday that the image had been “seared into my mind.”

Informed that she was not looking at an authentic photo, Kremer doubled down. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she replied. “There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic. So I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

A large anonymous blue-check account on X that routinely attacks Democrats did remove the picture but similarly argued: “Even though that image was AI, it spoke a truth about the disregard Harris and Biden have for ordinary Americans, as evidenced by their criminal non-response to Helene.” Another X user posted a since-deleted screenshot of a more succinct response from an apparent family member advised that the image was bogus. “Who cares,” they answered.

The little girl and her puppy — there are AI-generated variants of the more viral image floating around as well — have been widely presented by MAGA world as evidence of a failed disaster response in the aftermath of Helene. Similar fake images depict girls or women clutching Bibles as floods rage around them. Trump himself is pushing lies about the U.S. government not being able to fund relief efforts, adding an overtone of racism with the groundless claim that the White House “stole” money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and “spent it all on illegal migrants.” (The irony being that in 2019, the Trump administration itself redirected millions in disaster funds, during hurricane season, to pay for detention centers at the border.)

...

===

an 9 24

no twt?

In the hours after far-right **U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins** posted a racist tweet attacking Haitian immigrants, top Republicans including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, moved to protect their fellow Louisiana Congressman.

Zeteo media correspondent Justin Baragona posted a screenshot of Higgin’s widely-condemned tweet, which read: “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”

Higgins’ comment about “our President and VP” referred to Republican nominees Donald Trump and JD Vance, who are facing criminal charges for “pet-eating” lies attacking Haitians in the state of Ohio.

MSNBC host, legal contributor and correspondent Katie Phang remarked: “Higgins doesn’t try to hide the racism or the xenophobia. Instead, he decides that full bore ’round ‘em up and string ‘em up’ energy was the way to go.”

Congressman Higgins has not apologized, and appears unrepentant.

READ MORE: ‘Hostile Takeovers’: Trump Says Immigrants Are Using ‘Massive Machine Gun-Type Equipment’

“Despite the backlash and ultimate decision to take down the post after he said he prayed on it, Higgins told CNN he stood by his demeaning comments,” the news network reported.

“It’s all true,” Higgins said of his post. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.”

“It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”

House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued a strong statement condemning Higgins, his remarks, and “extreme MAGA Republicans.”

“The disgusting statement by Clay Higgins about the Haitian community is vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the United States House of Representatives,” Jeffries’s statement begins. “He must be held accountable for dishonorable conduct that is unbecoming of a Member of Congress. Clay Higgins is an election-denying, conspiracy- peddling racial arsonist who is a disgrace to the People’s House. This is who they have become. Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clay Higgins and Project 2025. The extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are unfit to govern.”

Saying he had “heard about” the tweet, Speaker Johnson told reporters, “Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and a colleague from Louisiana, and a very frank and outspoken person. He’s also a very principled man. And, I think, he tweeted – I didn’t even see it but he tweeted something today about Haitians.”

The Speaker appeared to dismiss a reporter when she interjected that Rep. Higgins had “told them to get out of the country by Jan 20th.”

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“Well, OK,” Johnson responded, seemingly irritated by the reporter’s remark. “He was approached on the floor by colleagues who said that was offensive. He said he went to the back – I just talked to him about it – he said he went to the back and he prayed about it, and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down. That’s what you want a gentleman to do. I’m sure he probably regrets the language he used. But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around here.”

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U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, quickly moved to have the House censure Congressman Higgins, but House Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise, also from Louisiana, defended Higgins.

READ MORE: ‘Ain’t Taking Anybody’s Jobs’: Trump Blasted Over Haitian Lies, This Time in Pennsylvania

Scalise, who reportedly once boasted he was “David Duke without the baggage“—a reference to the former KKK Grand Wizard whom Higgins reportedly supported in a Louisiana gubernatorial race—stood on the House floor and opposed the motion to censure Higgins.

“First of all, the tweet has been deleted already, and removed, but I object to the motion,” Scalise said, as roars of anger from the House grew loud. “And if we want to go through every comment, tweet from the other side, we’ll be happy to do it.”

Scalise was interrupted, as he had not been recognized to speak on the floor.

“You would be appalled by some of the things that have not been removed,” Scalise continued, after his microphone appeared to be cut off.

IFrame Content

U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who last year was in the running to be Speaker of the House and this year rumored to have been on Donald Trump’s vice presidential shortlist, and U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), tried to minimize the impact of Higgins’ attack on Haitians.

“Both Reps. Byron Donalds and Wesley Hunt said they don’t think Higgins’s post hurt Donald Trump with Black voters,” Semafor’s Kadia Goba reported.

Congressman Hunt told her, “Everybody knows who they’re going to vote for at this point.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

did not cave to trump demand shutdn 9 24

rnc teleprompter fail

boebert mtg fuckery?

Mike Johnson’s summer plans derailed by Boebert, MTG and other far-right friends - Alternet.org

---

will try fuckery

an 7 24

Only three days after Donald Trump gave his presidential acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — and eight days after Trump survived an assassination attempt — the United States' already-turbulent presidential race was rocked by another major development: President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

Inan article published on July 22, Wired's David Gilbert emphasizes that Biden's announcement has sent MAGA conspiracy theorists into overdrive.

On X, formerly Twitter, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), for example, posted, "The Democrat Party forced the Democrat nominee off the ballot, just over 100 days before the election."

READ MORE: Kentucky's Andy Beshear 'auditions' for Kamala Harris' running mate

Gilbert notes, however, that Biden was the presumptive nominee — not the official nominee, as the 2024 Democratic National Convention isn't until August.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) tweeted, "Joe Biden succumbed to a coup by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Hollywood donors, ignoring millions of Democratic primary votes. Donald Trump took a bullet for democracy."

Similarly, far-right Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) tweeted, "The coup is complete."

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) echoed the "coup" theme as well, tweeting, "There's a soft civil war happening in the deep state and the elites in power. The Democrats, the IC (intelligence community), and their activists in the media have been lying to us saying there's nothing wrong with Biden for years. Next, they start a coup against him demanding he drop out of the race when they couldn’t hide it anymore."

READ MORE: Trump's tone is 'noticeably different' with possible Harris debate: analysis

But attorney Marc Elias, known for his expertise on elections, pointed out that there is nothing coup-like about replacing Biden with another candidate before the Democratic convention.

Responding to Speaker Johnson's post, Elias tweeted, "If your lawyers are telling you that they can prevent the DNC from nominating its candidate of choice, they are idiots."

READ MORE: Can Kamala win?

The full Wired article is available at this link.

---

an 6 24

Speaker Johnson asks SCOTUS to delay Steve Bannon’s prison sentence: 'Wrongfully constituted'

rww 6 24 team trump $ ltr logo]

House Speaker Mike Johnson accused Democrats of trying to “destroy the American dream” in a fundraising email sent to right-wing activists Thursday morning. Johnson, who told Christian nationalist lawmakers last year that God put him in power as an American “Moses,” wrote, “The radical Left hates our freedom, they hate our Judeo-Christian values, and they hate our Constitution.”

Johnson has led congressional Republicans in supporting former President Donald Trump’s efforts to discredit his recent criminal prosecution and conviction. Johnson continued the attack in today’s email, writing, “They manipulated a coordinated political hitjob to escalate a cluster of bogus charges to 34 felony convictions – with the help of a Biden-minion judge and prosecutor!”

Johnson wrote that the 2024 election is not only the most important in our lifetimes, but “the most important election in our country’s history.” He asked for cash to “Expose the Democrats for their failures and attempts to destroy the American dream, and fundamentally change our great country.” He accused the left of “attempting to bring in a legion of illegal immigrants and turn them into voters by neglecting the border.”

Johnson’s email is headed by a “Team Trump Official” logo. It is raising money for his own campaign account and for a joint Trump-RNC fundraising committee. The default allocation for a $100 contribution is $95 to Johnson and $5 to the Trump National Committee JFC President.

===

6 24 maga mike rant about biden slow on XO border but no mention he killed bill for trump

after trump convict said his pals on scotus upset

===

an 6 24

alternet-NO LNX

Republicans are playing a dangerous game by weaponizing ignorance

Sabrina Haake, Raw StoryJune 15, 2024

Donald Trump’s felony convictions are fueling another disinformation campaign, this one equal in destructive force to his Big Lie. Orchestrating a unified response reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his Trump acolytes are weaving Trump’s criminality into a false indictment of the American legal system.

Republicans are falsely blaming Joe Biden for outcomes over which a sitting U.S. president has no control: convictions of Trump on 34 felony counts, pursued by an independently elected DA, pursuant to a state criminal code, as determined by 12 independent jurors, selected with the help of Trump’s own trial team.

The GOP’s target? Low-information voters.

Their weapon? Blatant disinformation.

Their allies? Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine.

Their illiberal objective tracks the geopolitical strategies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and strongman dictators adversarial to democratic systems in general: Weakening institutions through chaos that exhausts voters, allowing oligarch-backed extremists to seize power, peacefully or otherwise, amid the mayhem.

Feigned outrage to entertain the masses

The performative outrage in this week’s program includes eight Republican senators vowing retaliation for Trump’s convictions by opposing any legislation authored by Democrats; they also promise to withhold Senate confirmations.

Meanwhile, Johnson revealed his “three-pronged approach” to retaliation, including withholding congressional appropriations for the Department of Justice. Declaring that Republicans would “do everything we can” to exact revenge for Trump, Johnson and his Republican colleagues are currently pursuing legislation that would allow Trump to pardon himself of state crimes if he retakes the presidency.

Johnson has also suggested the "Trump-ed up" Supreme Court would “step in” to overturn Trump’s state convictions, the irony of simultaneously claiming that Biden controls the judiciary apparently over his head.

Advocating illegal acts is itself illegal.

Trump strategists Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon — the latter headed to prison soon himself — are openly urging Republican officeholders to use their offices to attack Democrats. They clearly need reminding — almost as much as they need fast, effective counsel — that using public resources for partisan purposes violates federal law.

Demanding that Republican district attorneys open investigations into Democrats, they urge attorneys general in Republican-controlled states to target Democrats for unspecified crimes.

Jeff Clark, the former Trump Justice Department official indicted in the Georgia election case, has broadened the call, urging “brave” district attorneys in conservative areas to file lawsuits in federal court against anyone involved in criminal cases against Trump.

Openly advocating illegal acts, and doing so in writing no less, suggests these fools have themselves for clients.

Republicans’ gaslighting campaign is reckless

Trump, for his part, is priming Fox News viewers for violence in the event he is sentenced to serve time in prison, saying, "I'm not sure the public would stand for (my potential prison sentence) ... You know, at a certain point, there's a breaking point."

The right’s gaslighting-of-the-uninformed campaign is working, as evidenced by online demands for bloody revenge. In trying to dox the jurors in Trump’s Manhattan hush money case, one of Trump’s supporters posted, “Hang everyone. 1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to Washington and hang everyone. That's the only solution.”

A Proud Boys writer chimed in, “Now you understand. To save your nation, you must fight. The time to respond is now. Franco Friday has begun.”

Without considering what comes next when the rule of law is hobbled — paramilitary hillbillies rounding up foreigners come to mind, as do drug cartels dropping roadside bombs from drones — Republicans are defending Trump by viciously attacking the judge, jurors, prosecutor, evidentiary rulings, jury instructions, the attorney general, the Department of Justice and mainstream media; they have also threatened to end the career of any GOP candidate who dares to voice respect for the American legal system.

So much for “law and order.”

Like a man blaming his wife as he kicks her down the stairs, Trump tells anyone who will listen — which apparently includes most media outlets — that Democrats have “forced” him to “take revenge” against government adversaries. Salivating over the possibility that he will finally get to imprison his political foes, brandishing his prison shiv, Trump told Newsmax, “It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them…”

One is almost tempted to have compassion for Melania.

From whence does the GOP’s amnesia come?

Republican outrage is overplayed, as if everyone has forgotten about Trump’s well-documented criminality, played out over decades.

In 1998, the Treasury Department imposed the then-largest fine of $477,000 on Trump Taj Mahal casino for money laundering; Trump admitted that he pocketed millions of dollars raised from charity; he was ordered to pay $2 million for diverting donations from a televised fundraiser for veterans; in 2023, a civil jury adjudicated him a rapist; he was previously found to have engaged in business fraud to the tune of $354 million dollars.

When his niece Mary Trump sued him for allegedly defrauding her out of tens of millions of dollars — she said Trump extorted her by threatening to withhold medical coverage from a severely disabled nephew — she declared “Fraud was not just the family business — it was a way of life.”

Despite his consistent criminality and organized crime connections, Trump’s felony convictions hit differently, triggering the GOP’s kamikaze declaration of war as three more criminal trials and 54 combined felony counts loom.

Democrats must punch back harder

Republicans are using disinformation as a weapon against uninformed voters to keep them aligned with Trump. Their ploy seems to be working, as Trump informally reported a $52.8 million haul in online donations in the first 24 hours after the verdict was announced.

Instead of confessing to the obvious that Trump’s criminality is driving his legal woes — not Biden, not the “Deep State,” not rigged justice — MAGA Republicans would prefer to round up Trump’s adversaries as political prisoners.

After Trump’s deadly mob wanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence to block Trump’s 2020 loss, they are lusting for another fight; historically, coups are regularly attempted more than once.

It is clear that the United States is under siege by illiberal forces, aided by a relentless propaganda machine committed to fomenting violence. My money is on the justice system — and on voters being smart enough to detect the ruse.

The politically moderate sports announcer Colin Cowherd recently summed it up: “If everybody in your circle is a felon, maybe it’s not rigged. Maybe the world isn’t against you… Trump’s campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons… It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Here's to slapping back.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

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'Stupid, ridiculous self-righteous crap': Iowa grandma scorches Republicans’ six-week abortion ban ›

GOP senators slam House Republicans for 'ridiculous' antics at Trump hush money trial ›

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scott perry

GOP rep who had phone seized by FBI as part of J6 investigation now has oversight over it

w ronny jaCKSON

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Johnson demands all Trump prosecutions cease, vows to use Congress 'in every possible way' - Alternet.org

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FINALLY PUT UKRAINe BILL UP BUT SPLIT iT, added tiktok, all passed? MTG loses it?

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hen Rep. Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House last year, Christian nationalist religious-right activist Rick Green was “literally in tears” because, he said, Johnson “is one of our guys.”

“We’ve been praying for this,” Green gushed at the time. “We’ve been praying for leaders that have a fear of God, that we know have a foundation of biblical truth.”

“This is a moment to stop what you are doing and thank God for this happen,” he declared.

IFrame Content

But the elation of that moment is now long gone as Green, like many others in the right-wing movement, has soured on Johnson.

Green, founder of Patriot Academy and a co-host of the radio program “WallBuilders Live” with religious-right pseudo-historians David and Tim Barton, appeared on the “FlashPoint” program last night where he declared that he has lost faith after the GOP House Speaker orchestrated a bipartisan bill to secure foreign aid to Israel and Ukraine.

“I will admit I was wrong,” Green said. “I’ve known him for over 10 years. I believe he is a man of faith. He’s been a great constitutional attorney. He was a great congressman before being Speaker. And for the first few months, I kept saying, ‘Okay, I’m gonna give him a little more rope, give him a little bit more rope. He keeps kicking this stuff [down the road]; that’s not how I would do it but I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and in the closed-door meetings and what he’s learning. I’m going to trust his judgment for a little while.’ No more.

Green said that the foreign aid bill has “caused me to lose faith.”

“I know Johnson’s in an impossible position,” he said. “One vote majority. It’s an impossible job. All that good stuff. But I was wrong about his demeanor. I thought his demeanor would be perfect for the job right now. It’s not. You need a fighter. You need a Newt Gingrich-type or a Donald Trump-type in the speakership that’s going to take it to the mat and say, ‘We seal the border or you getting no funding for anything else. We will shut down the federal government.’ And frankly, I think that would probably be a blessing to most people in America right now with the way that it’s running things.”

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House Republicans will now have one more vacant seat to fill this November after yet another member of the majority announced his retirement on Thursday.

Rep. Jake LaTurner (R-Kansas), who was first elected in 2020, stated he would not be seeking a third term in the House of Representatives this fall. In a statement posted online, LaTurner alluded to the stress of the job itself as well as the current wave of "dysfunction" plaguing the lower chamber of Congress.

"[T]he busy schedule of serving in and running for Congress has taken a toll," LaTurner said. "The unrepeatable season of life we are in, where our kids are still young and at home, is something I want to be more present for."

READ MORE:Another GOP rep announces retirement while Mike Johnson reels from legislative losses

"Undoubtedly, the current dysfunction on Capitol Hill is distressing, but it almost always has been; we just didn't see most of it," LaTurner continued, adding that he remains "optimistic about the future of this country."

LaTurner's retirement makes him the 14th House Republican to announce his decision to leave the 118th U.S. Congress, according to Ballotpedia's tally of departures. While LaTurner will remain in the House until the 118th Congress gavels out at the end of 2024, others have not waited in leaving Washington. Tomorrow, Rep. Mike Gallagher — a 4-term House Republican — is officially leaving the House with six months to go before Election Day, citing constant threats from critics.

"This is more just me wanting to prioritize being with my family," Gallagher said this week. "I signed up for the death threats and the late-night swatting, but they did not. And for a young family, I would say this job is really hard."

Of the 14 Republicans who have announced their retirements, 11 have done so since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) won the gavel last fall. Some of those departures include high-ranking members, including committee chairs and members from districts considered safe seats not at risk of flipping in November.

READ MORE:4-term House Republican announces retirement, joining growing GOP congressional exodus

Johnson can currently only afford to have two defections from his own party in order to pass legislation, assuming full attendance. His majority suffered a significant blow after Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-New York) won a special election in February to replace former Rep. George Santos (R-New York), who was expelled following a damning report from the House Committee on Ethics.

The trend of House GOP retirement announces may still continue. After longtime Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colorado) announced his sudden departure from the House of Representatives in March, he suggested others may soon follow suit.

"I think it's the next three people that leave that they're going to be worried about," Buck said of his GOP colleagues.

Click here to read LaTurner's full retirement announcement.

READ MORE:[House Republicans' majority shrinks even further after GOP rep announces surprise resignation

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the relentless exodus of House Republicans is continuing unabated in 2024, with five members of the majority announcing their pending departures from Congress in just the past two weeks. Now, a sixth will join them.

On Wednesday, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-South Carolina) posted a statement to X (formerly Twitter) announcing that he would not seek an eighth term in the House of Representatives.

"Representing the 3rd District of South Carolina in this capacity has been a privilege and honor," Duncan wrote. "Now, it is time for another man or woman to serve our District in the next Congress. I will not seek reelection to the US House of Representatives."

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has seen his majority slowly dwindle since the House Republican Conference handed him the speaker's gavel last October. In January, Reps. Larry Bucshon (R-Indiana), Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado), Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Missouri) and Greg Pence (R-Indiana) all announced their decision to not run for another term in Congress. This came after former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) departed the House at the end of 2023, and after the House expelled former Rep. George Santos (R-New York) following a damning House Ethics Committee report.

One Republican's exit will come much sooner than the gathering of the 119th Congress next January. Congressman Bill Johnson will leave the House at the end of this week to start his new job as president of Youngstown State University. This means that Speaker Johnson will have one less Republican vote to count on as he attempts to cobble together a government spending plan prior to the February 2 deadline to avoid a federal government shutdown.

In addition to February 2, Johnson has a more immediate task of passing a bill to keep open the handful of government agencies whose funding is due to expire on January 19. He has already faced threats from far-right members of the House, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), to strip him of the gavel for his efforts to seek out a bipartisan agreement with Democrats.

According to Ballotpedia, Jeff Duncan's retirement from Congress would make him the 17th House Republican to not seek reelection. 22 House Democrats are also not seeking reelection in 2024.

READ MORE:Yet another House Republican announces retirement as Johnson fights to keep majority

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2x?

Mike Johnson 'says out loud' what other white Christian nationalists feel about America: sociologist

Alex Henderson

'Unnecessary surrender': Johnson wants lawmakers to ignore judge’s order to create Black district

Carl Gibson

Mike Johnson’s 'Christian Zionism' is 'fueled by fantasies of a cataclysmic war': analysis

Alex Henderson

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house Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has not shied away from sharing his far-right, evangelical Christian faith during his nearly eight years in Congress.

Earlier this week, Religious News Service reported members of the Congressional Forethought Caucus sent a letter to Johnson on Thursday, February 15, expressing their concerns "about Jack Hibbs — the far-right Christian nationalist Johnson chose to lead the House's opening prayer on January 30."

Last weekend, Politico reports, the House Speaker used his presentation during a Republican retreat as an opportunity to focus "on declining church membership and the nation’s shrinking religious identity, according to" two people who were in the room.

READ MORE:'Fight' or 'deal': House Republicans now 'expecting a government shutdown'

Johnson's speech "took on a surprisingly religious tone," according to the report, as, "Rather than outlining a specific plan to hold and grow the majority, these people said, Johnson effectively delivered a sermon."

Furthermore, Politico notes, "The speaker contended that when one doesn’t have God in their life, the government or 'state' will become their guide, referring back to Bible verses, both people said. They added that the approach fell flat among some in the room."

Calling Johnson's presentation "horrible," one person told the news outlet, "I'm not at church."

They added, "I think what he was trying to do, but failed on the execution of it, was try to bring us together. The sermon was so long he couldn't bring it back to make the point."

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alternet- no lnx

Home | Trumpsters who want a civil war hope they can create enough chaos to fulfill their fantasies

How to reverse 'democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking': author

Thom Hartmann

February 21, 2024

America is under assault, and, in the 9th year since Trump burst on the political scene, it’s happening so often now that it’s becoming normalized. This is a very real danger to the survival of our republic.

And they’re getting more brazen: this past weekend a group of mask-clad Nazis marched through downtown Nashville complete with swastikas and racist chants. The media treated it like “just another day.”

Republicans who run Texas are in open defiance of the US Supreme Court and the federal government over who has legal responsibility for enforcing our immigration laws and protecting our borders. It’s the most significant challenge to federal authority since the Nullification Crisis of 1832 that led us straight toward the Civil War.

And, indeed, it’s stirring up pro-new-civil war rhetoric among the racist base of the GOP. Televangelist Andrew Wommack, a big Republican supporter who called COVID a hoax “hyped by liberals as an opportunity to come against Trump,” on his Truth & Liberty podcast recently promoted the idea, along with replacing the US Constitution with the Christian Bible:

“I’ve actually had people say that if Trump was to be elected if we got a conservative Congress, that they fear that we would have another civil war,” Wommack told a caller. “And you know what? I don’t want a civil war, I don’t know anybody that does, but would it be worth it? To turn this nation back? I believe it would.”

Having been caught in the middle of a civil war years ago in Uganda (and having had one of my colleagues killed in it by stray gunfire into our refugee camp), I can say with a pretty high level of certainty that anybody who’s pushing civil war here in America has never experienced one.

Nikki Haley has been swatted twice, been physically attacked on stage, and is now being stalked at campaign events by Putin-loving Trump followers who are outraged that she’s calling for more military aid for Ukraine.

Jacob Ware, author of Guns, God, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in Americaand a consultant to the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC):

“I think intent to commit violence is high across the political spectrum, but especially on the far right. And in the United States, we always have the capability to conduct violence because of our gun laws. There’s a very poisonous mix being brewed with the great potential for violence in 2024 and beyond.”

Just days after Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled that Trump had committed sedition and therefore couldn’t be on that state’s ballot, she was swatted at home. Judges Tanya Chutkin and Arthur Engoron have also been targeted by fascist Trump followers.

A Trump devotee armed with a hammer broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, to death; on the campaign trail, Trump regularly refers to the incident as if it was some sort of victory for him and his people, joking about it in a way that some interpret as encouragement for future similar attacks on Democrats.

Another apparent Trump follower, just last month, murdered and decapitated his own father because he was a federal employee and, therefore, part of the “deep state” that Trump has repeatedly called on to be destroyed.

An October survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that fully 23 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.” The Institute’s CEO, Melissa Deckman, told the CBC:

“You have political leaders like Donald Trump who are not willing to ratchet down that rhetoric — in fact, they're doing the very opposite. In that context, I’m not surprised to see that Nikki Haley is asking for more security.”

When The Washington Post looked into the problem, they found that people running for Congress increased their spending on security by over 500 percent between the time Trump lost in 2020 and last November’s midterms.

The Brennan Center for Justice questioned over 1,700 state and local elected officials in all 50 states and found that fully 40 percent reported being threatened or physically attacked in the three years since Trump lost. Ninety percent said they’d been “harassed, intimidated, or stalked,” and one in ten state legislators reported that a person with a weapon had tried to intimidate them on one or more occasion.

Fascist Republicans are apparently getting what they want out of these intimidation tactics: one-in-five state officials, and almost half of local elected officials report that because of the threats they’re less willing to involve themselves in any way with “controversial” issues like abortion, immigration, or gun control.

Last year, Republican anti-abortion extremist Philip Buyno loaded his car with a hatchet, flares, matches, and bottles and cans filled with gasoline, then drove to the offices of an Illinois reproductive care clinic, Affirmative Care Solutions.

He repeatedly rammed his car into the front entrance of the building, destroying the main entrance and damaging the building’s foundation, and told police that when he got out of jail he was going to “finish the job.”

Buyno told police he was a member of a “rescue group” along with Matt Trewhella and Dan Holman; Trewhella signed the “Justifiable Homicide Statement” supporting people who murder abortion doctors, while Holman has defended using murder as a way to stop abortion.

Last week an openly Nazi group marched in front of the home of Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. In Idaho, a group of 31 hateful white supremacists had the case against them dismissed because FBI agents and local prosecutors had “accidentally” bungled evidence and interrogations.

Last week, a Tennessee man was arrested for trying to participate in a plot with two Texas men to visit the southern border and murder Border Patrol agents along with any immigrants they could find. One of them was in possession of six semiautomatic firearms, over 20 magazines, and around 1,800 rounds of ammunition.

The border has been inundated with immigrants ever since Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson held a press conference to inform people in South and Central America that “the US border is wide open.” NPR reported on it, noting in their headline, “The border crisis is helping to mainstream a dangerous conspiracy theory.”

Johnson has openly promoted that hateful and antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory” that says wealthy Jews are funding the entrance of millions of Hispanics into our country so they can illegally vote for Democrats.

“If you’re scratching your head,” Johnson told his followers, “you’ve seen the video, you see droves of people, 2.4 million people coming over the border illegally, the president allowing it, the Democrats in charge of Congress are allowing it. The deal is they're going to turn them into voters.”

The Great Replacement Theory, a warmed-over reboot of Hitler’s theories about Jews and Gypsies, now has a huge following in the Republican Party and among Trump supporters.

Recently a “convoy” of armed white supremacists calling themselves “God’s Army” made its way to the southern border, echoing Trump’s (and Hitler’s) rhetoric that dark-skinned immigrants “poison the blood” of a country and intend to “replace” white men in the workplace and bedroom.

The FBI had to evacuate the Border Patrol processing center in Eagle Pass because of threats; a few days later Paul Faye Sr., identified as a “militia sniper,” was arrested for planning to murder Border Patrol agents. His hope was it would cause what he called a “domino effect” in which white men all over the country would take out their weapons and begin a mass slaughter of federal employees, much like the scenario from the novel Turner Diaries that inspired Tim McVeigh.

Faye credited the Great Replacement Theory as his main inspiration, as did the Trump followers and racists who murdered Jews in Pittsburgh, Black shoppers in Buffalo, and Hispanics in El Paso. The Theory was also the basis for Republicans’ impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a detail rarely mentioned in our media.

As the pro-democracy, pro-immigration group America’s Voice noted last month:

“Speaker Johnson, who was an instrumental supporter of Trump’s attempted coup, is far from alone as a Member of Congress promoting the conspiracy meant to undermine the faith in the democratic process.

“America’s Voice has identified 120 Members of Congress who amplified the replacement and invasion conspiracy in their official capacity just this last year.

“We identified over 1,040 times top GOP candidates, officials, or outfits that pushed the bigoted fiction in just the last year. We also identified this disturbing practice more than 700 times in 2022.

“In 2023 the Republican House majority also brought 13 witnesses to Congressional hearings who had promoted replacement and invasion conspiracies and even one witness who participated in Jan. 6 was asked by the Republicans to serve as a witness on one of their anti-immigrant hearings.”

Even candidates for the Senate are getting into the act, as American Journal News noted with their headline about the man who wants to take on Bob Casey for the US Senate this November:

“Republican David McCormick invests millions in website that platforms Holocaust denial.”

The Michigan House of Representatives just stripped Republican Representative Josh Schriver of his committee assignments for publicly promoting the Replacement Theory. Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist, a regular guest on my radio program, said:

“Rep. Schriver’s peddling of the racist ‘replacement theory’ is a deplorable demonstration of his fear of a dynamic and diverse Michigan future where all of our people in every community can succeed.”

Rolling Stone has discovered that fascist street gangs (“militias”) are embracing a new tactic, showing up on the scene of mass shootings and other mass casualty events to do their recruiting. Trace reporter Sonny Sone lays it out:

“According to geolocated footage reviewed by the magazine, members of a right-wing militia called Patriots for America — whose volunteers patrol the southern border with long guns and regularly espouse conspiracy theories targeting migrants — were on the scene, and spent almost 10 minutes beyond the police line, while law enforcement responded to the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.

“Last fall, armed neo-Nazis responded to the mass-casualty gun rampage in Lewiston, Maine, and gained access to the shooter’s registered address.”

The highly publicized mass shooting at Joel Ornsteen’s megachurch last week was allegedly committed by a woman steeped in antisemitic writings. That same week, the FBI arrested a Minnesota man who was a member of the Aryan Freedom Network, an openly Nazi group of Trump supporters, for conspiring to modify semiautomatic weapons into full automatic mode for the “coming race war.”

Two weeks ago, police in Massachusetts arrested a second man in connection with four fires set at Jewish community centers and Jewish-owned businesses. Rabbi Avi Bukiet, one of the victims of the attacks, said the fires were, “a domestic terror attack fueled by antisemitic motivations.”

In Maine, a man and his son were arrested last week for painting swastikas on public street corners. In Dallas, a Jewish city councilwoman’s home was defaced with antisemitic and anti-abortion graffiti. Two days later the Hillel Center for Jewish students at Brown University in Rhode Island was on the receiving end of threats of violence. White supremacy stickers popped up on street signs in Stillwater, MN.

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, residents woke up to find White Lives Matter flyers in their mailboxes. The hateful screeds quoted America First leader Charles Lindbergh and mentioned an “anti-white trend” that “will continue to increase unless White people come together to Defend and support their common interests.”

The screed demands, the Rocket Miner newspaper reports:

“[T]hat white people ‘band together to preserve their European blood’ and ‘guard against dilution by foreign races’ because ‘harmonious coalescence is virtually impossible. America’s founding population has gradually been overtaken by a wave of immigration from all around the world which share no connection with American heritage, culture and history.”

In Ashville, NC a white supremacist shut off the power to a local restaurant and left racist material for people stumbling out to find on the front porch, provoking County Commissioner Al Whitesides to say:

“What concerns me is not just what’s alleged here but what you see in America going on all over the country. If you’re African-American, if you’re Jewish, we’re living in an environment in 2024 that I didn’t think in the ‘60s that I would see today.”

In Austin, Texas last week a white supremacist named Bert James Baker stabbed a victim because of the color of his skin or his national origin. Mustafaa Carroll, the interim executive director for CAIR, told reporters:

“Baker repeatedly screamed the N-word and other obscenities, opened a passenger door, pulled one of the victims out of the car and physically attacked him.”

The father of the victim told reporters: “We came into the U.S. after the American dream. And my dream, and our dream, was not a big house or a big car. We want to live in peace and tranquility. We want to be able to cast our opinion without being jeopardized of being killed or shot or even harassed.”

Meanwhile, here in Portland, Oregon a man tried to set several people of color on fire, screaming racial epithets at them.

Almost everything in this article is from the past two weeks or thereabouts: the racist Trump followers who want a second civil war call this an “acceleration,” and hope they can create enough chaos that they can finally fulfill their adolescent fantasies about fighting in a “noble” civil war.

Will they get the conflict they so desperately want (and thought they were getting on January 6th)? I’m skeptical: to paraphrase President Eisenhower, their numbers are small and they are stupid.

Nonetheless, we must be vigilant if America is to survive as a pluralistic, multiracial society…

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newsweek 2023 oct

Mike Johnson's Campaign Contributions From Company Tied to Russia

a group of Russian nationals were able to donate to newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson's campaign in 2018 by funneling the money through a U.S. company.

The Texas-based American Ethane company previously donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of Louisiana Republicans including Johnson, who was voted by the House to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker on Wednesday following three weeks of GOP chaos in the lower chamber.

While American Ethane was run in 2018 by American John Houghtaling, 88 percent of the firm was owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, and Andrey Kunatbaev.

Johnson's previous Russian campaign donations have been brought up as people criticize the Republican following his election to House Speaker, a position which is second in line to the presidency behind the vice president.

Johnson's office has been contacted for comment via email.

One of the men behind the company, Nikolaev, an oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was also found to have financially backed Maria Butina, a Russian citizen who lived in Washington D.C. Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2019 after admitting to acting as an unregistered foreign agent to infiltrate conservative political groups and influence foreign policy to Russia's benefit before and after the 2016 election.

Johnson's former campaign manager, Jason Hebert, previously told The Advocate that the campaign returned the money given to them by American Ethane in 2018 once it was "made aware of the situation."

Sharing a subpoena issued as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation in 2018, Los Angeles-based attorney Ronald Lebow posted on X (formerly Twitter): "Besides being supportive of the attempted coup, Johnson received money from Russian Oligarchs and was known to Marina Butina, the Russian spy/go between funneling money from Putin to the NRA and Republicans like Johnson."

Fellow X user @Davegreenidge57 wrote: "Putin pal Konstantin Nikolaev, who handled Russian spy Maria Butina, was also the principal stockholder in American Ethane Co. when they donated over $37,000 to Mike Johnson's election campaign. Does anyone else think that might be a problem?"

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maga mike said no ukr $ w/o border, got border lankford sinema, than trump said kill bill i want issue so 180; kpfa maga mike $ from 2 russian olig

In response, Cornyn quote-tweeted Paxton's post (https://twitter.com/JohnCornyn/status/1757412800488407479), writing, "Ken, your criminal defense lawyers are calling to suggest you spend less time pushing Russian propaganda and more time defending longstanding felony charges against you in Houston, as well as ongoing federal grand jury proceedings in San Antonio that will probably result in further criminal charges."

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https://www.alternet.org/johnson-border/

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