He’s not running as a Democrat. The deadline for filing as an independent in WV is August 1, and your application can be challenged if you changed parties in the last two months. So this move was purely to preserve his ability to step into the race for Governor or Senate at the last minute, if he thought he could win.
I think that’s a coincidence. The real deadline is June 1, because there is another deadline in WV for independant candidates to file for the ballot on Aug 1, and those applications can be challenged if the candidate changes parties in the two months prior to the application. So by doing this as late as possible in May, he preserves the right to run for Governor or Senate as an Independant.
And like it or not, if he ran for either of those seats, he would win, and would be better than any Republican who might have won in his place. And if he ran for Senate and won, there is a very good chance that the party he decides to Caucus with will determine which side controls the Senate. So if he wins, he wil still be very popular with the establishment on both sides.
You can expect Chuck to give him any committee chairmanship he wants if it means Chuck can get to 50-50 (where committees are equally balanced, and the VP breaks ties) or 51-49 (which gives Democrats the majority on committees regardless of who is the VP). If Democrats keep all their seats then also gain TX or FL, then Manchin’s vote is not as critical and Chuck is in better position to make him irrelevant.
With the billionaires backing him, it’s going to be on us as individual Americans to make sure Trump doesn’t end up in the White House again. That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating
Jail in NYC is Rikers Island, which is so notorious that they’ve been trying to close it down for years. He’s not gaining anything with a short sentence.
No way his sentence is that high. He is a first time offender, and people caught on these types of charges typically get probation.
I think a few years’ probation is appropriate, then he will have to campaign (and maybe even be President) while having to report to some probation officer in NYC the whole time. He might force the issue by deliberately skipping out on his meetings and double dare the judge to throw him in jail.
Yes, everything you wrote is true, but does not change the fact that none of these 34 charges dealt with election interference directly. That will have to be done separately. I think this verdict is making that other prosecutor very happy, though, if his Jan 6 case ever goes to trial.
Bill Pruitt, a former producer for The Apprentice whose NDA just expired after 20 years, writes in Slate that Donald Trump used the n-word during the production of the show — and there are tapes of him doing it.
I don’t think he’d have lost a single vote if he just admitted he paid a pornstar for sex. Hell, with the way Republicans act he probably would have gained votes.
This might be where his insistence on denying everything finally backfires on him. Because if he didn’t deny that it happened, the Prosecution would not have needed to bring Daniels onto the stand. While the act itself is not a crime, his insistence on having his lawyers deny it, in the face of graphic evidence, will serve to convince the jury that he is a liar, and make them less likely to find his other explanations credible.
In those impeachment, though, he had the protection of 40+ Republican Senators who were afraid of how voting against their guy would affect their reelection. Here, his fate is being decided by 12 Manhattanites who have never met him and have been instructed to set aside their personal opinions on the matter.
I’m not gonna take issue with the bulk of the piece, because the author is correct. If you are doing Christianity right, you should be opposed to all war. But we have thousands of years of history that proves that even the people in charge of Christianity often got that wrong, also, so at least Biden is in good company.
But I will continue to argue with
Almost no other Democratic candidate would have Biden’s unique vulnerabilities.
Yes, Biden is old, but it’s simply ignoring reality to think that any other candidate would have a better shot against Trump. Harris? Dean Phillips? The General Election lets everyone vote, not just Progressives. A Democratic candidate will need to get enough votes in enough states to run the Electoral College gauntlet, and like it or not, Biden is still the best shot at that. He’s done it before, after all.
They are avoiding it, by holding the early roll call. Which also has the convenient side effect of formalizing the nomination before the convention, eliminating any unpleasantness at the convention itself.
Which shows how useless it is for the Ohio Republicans to be dragging their feet. The Democratic Nominee was always going to be on the ballot in Ohio. All the Republicans are doing is wasting everyone’s time, and giving 24-hour news stations more meaningless things to use to fill time.
There are only 35 uncommitted delegates so far, vs. 3600+ Biden delegates. I doubt the uncommitted folks will be heard even if they had the normal vote.
An interesting historical footnote: before Reagan won in 1980, Democrats had maintained control of both houses of Congress since the 1954 election. That’s 26 consecutive years. Go back even further and Republicans had managed to take control of Congress only twice between 1932 and 1954. And it didn’t matter whether a Republican or Democrat was President – Congress was reliably controlled by Democrats, with only a handful of exceptions over nearly 50 years.
This is why we still talk about the “Reagan Revolution”. It’s not just about Reagan himself, but about the new ability of Republicans to win enough seats to have a say in Congress. And even then, Republicans couldnt win the House until 1995 and Newt Gingrich became the first Republican Speaker since 1955.
President Joe Biden is taking fresh steps to help keep gas prices from climbing. For Republicans to see this as “disgusting” and “disgraceful” is bizarre.
I remember when Republicans had no problem sending out tax rebate checks we couldn’t afford with GWB’s signature on them, so this is a bit less disgraceful by comparison.
Biden is unique in that he seems to know how to deal with people like Trump one-on-one. I think he likes to think of himself as someone who can stand up to a bully. Hillary certainly couldn’t.
I think this debate is unique, in that the two candidates aren’t really going to debate on policies. It is performative for both of them. What they say matters less than how convincing they are in saying it.
Biden is betting that a lot of his problem in the polls is due to concerns over his age. If he can parry Trump’s verbal shots while showing the same energy he did in the SOTU, then he may start turning those polls around. But it’s a bet, it’s not a certainty at all.
I wonder if they scheduled the debate early on purpose, so that if Biden has a poor showing his oncologist will all of a sudden diagnose him with cancer in his $ORGAN, reluctantly leading him to bow out.
You don’t seem to remember the last debates. Biden did a very good job standing up to Trump’s gish gallop. “Will you shut up, man?” was probably the first time in years that Donald Trump was rebuked to his face, and it stuck. Biden needs another strong moment like that.
If you’ve followed the trial that closely, then you know that first-time offenders are not always given jail time for this. And in spite of the large number of individual counts, the prosecution is basing their case on only a few actions. The judge may order some charges served concurrently if they are tied to the same action. If he is found guilty on all counts, then if he goes to jail at all it will likely only be for a short term.
And while politics is not supposed to factor into sentencing at all, from a political point of view a short sentence is the worst possible outcome for people who don’t want to see the US turn into a fascist state. Because it means that Trump can play the Martyr card, and convince his fans that Biden is out to get him, in spite of the facts.
Inflation will shoot up like never before and Republicans will again get assaulted at the polls.
You are assuming Republican voters are rational. They have a long history of voting against their own interests, because their leaders convince the voters that the real problem is the liberals/feminists/gays/immigrants/etc…
Inflation will shoot up and it will be Someone Else’s Fault.
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer....
It is legitimately such a weird economy, because by all the standard broad metrics it is doing fine, but on an individual basis it varies widely. Cost of living has shot up with inflation, but wages generally didn’t go up to match, particularly for people who kept the same employer throughout the Pandemic until now.
The only metric that is important is how far their paycheck goes, and it simply doesn’t go as far anymore.
It might be that, because of the new gig economy, the number of shitty jobs has increased. Unemployment might be low, but “underemployment” might be high (if there is a way to even track that at all). I bet there are a lot of people who feel trapped in their jobs right now, and that doesn’t help consumer confidence.
I wish people would make up their mind. Is he incapable of stringing two sentences together, or is he some sort of evil Capitalist oil baron? They can’t both be right.
The rest were just bureaucratic filler that most of the jury probably couldn’t care less about.
Which was itself part of the defense strategy. In similar cases, the two sides would agree on the validity of certain pieces of evidence, making those technical witnesses unnecessary. But Trump probably told his lawyers not to admit to anything, which probably drew the trial out for a week or two, and forced the prosecution to have to cover every detail, in the hopes the jury would find it all too overwhelming.
Worse yet, I am afraid that Trump would die in office, then VP Donald Trump Jr would become President for 2 more terms, then by the time Eric is ready to takeover they will have already held the Constitutional Convention that turns the country into a benevolent Trump oligarchy, in which the title of “President” becomes hereditary, just as the Founders intended.
“This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” Karoline Leavitt, the campaign press secretary, said in a statement.
Treasury secretary came out against the proposed global levy, which proponents say would stop the rich from shifting wealth into countries where they can avoid paying the tax
The devil is in the details here. For the super-rich, wealth is an extremely hard thing to quantify. Once a true wealth tax is established, all it will do is increase billable hours for financial professionals who know how to hide wealth in tax sheltered vehicles. And that will get litigated every year, when the bill is due. If you want to go after the extremely wealthy, I think the right place to do it is with a strong inheritance tax. That only gets litigated once, and the bill is paid by people who did not accumulate that wealth themselves. It also dilutes generational wealth, which is a good thing.
Plus, the US is unique in that it taxes citizens on their worldwide holdings, anyway. While there are offshore tax havens, they work a lot differently than the tax havens a wealth tax would target.
It’s easy to say “We should tax the wealthy”, but hard to make good policy that can’t be gamed, especially when attempting to do it across multiple wealthy countries.
Republicans have been manufacturing outrage at the border to score political points on a regular basis, like that migrant caravan which convenes every four years like a Fox News political convention.
However, this recent crisis is a bit different, as we have numbers that show that there have been an increase in asylum claims at the border vs. before the Pandemic, which is overwhelming the courts that handle this sort of thing. If someone makes it over the border and claims asylum, it can take years to get a hearing, and in the meantime they can live and work here. That was not the intent behind the asylum process.
Some Senators on both sides realized this, and used the opportunity to try and fix the asylum process. Yes, it also reduces the types of people who could claim asylum. But it also addresses critical staffing shortages in CBP and other agencies who have to deal with the influx of migrants on a daily basis.
So, this is an evidence-based attempt to make things better. So, of course, Trump is against it, because using immigration as a campaign plank matters more to him than fixing the problem. As much as he complains about it, having the problem to talk about is more valuable to him than fixing it.
Just because Republicans keep saying something doesn’t make it “evidence”…
Maybe this does:
A Sober Assessment of the Growing U.S. Asylum Backlog
At the end of FY 2012, over 100,000 asylum cases were pending in the Immigration Court’s backlog. A decade later, the backlog had grown over 7-fold to over 750,000 cases in September at the end of FY 2022. Since then, in just the first two months of FY 2023 (October-November 2022), the asylum backlog jumped by over 30,000 new cases and now totals 787,882. See Figure 1.
Ethics guidelines aren’t supposed to just prevent conflicts of interest, they are supposed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. What you suggest is perfectly reasonable for someone who is not in a position where their day job can move the stock market. I’m surprised he didn’t put his holdings in a blind trust. It seems the prudent thing to do.
There was a lot of effort put in to changing how those machines work, based largely on the work of a few independant researchers in the early 2000’s. Newer machines are more secure, auditable, and have a documented paper trail of all votes that can be recounted. These companies had to be shamed into doing the right thing, but at least they did it.
Many machines now are paper based, the machines just scan the paper and deposit it in a lockbox, and the physical paper can be recounted if necessary. These are the machines I use in my district.
The ballot is scanned right in front of you, and if you made a stray mark that would cause the ballot to be invalidated, or it detects an over/under vote, it informs you so that you have a chance to destroy the ballot and re-vote if necessary.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC has launched its first ads attacking Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District. The ads claim that Bowman “has his own agenda” and refuses to work with President Joe Biden....
Manchin leaves Democratic Party, files as independent (thehill.com)
Joe Manchin leaves the Democratic Party, files as independent (www.axios.com)
Why Megadonors Are Unfazed by Donald Trump’s Guilty Verdict | Money flowed into the former president’s re-election campaign from Wall Street and Silicon Valley following Thursday’s historic conviction (www.nytimes.com)
With the billionaires backing him, it’s going to be on us as individual Americans to make sure Trump doesn’t end up in the White House again. That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating
Mary Trump says her uncle "absolutely" should go to jail (www.newsweek.com)
After Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in Manhattan on Thursday, his estranged niece has said he should “absolutely” go to jail....
Breaking: Trump Verdict Livethread
Jury HAS reached a verdict. 11 hours, 43 minutes....
For 20 Years, I Couldn’t Say What Donald Trump Did on the Set of The Apprentice. Now I Can. (slate.com)
Bill Pruitt, a former producer for The Apprentice whose NDA just expired after 20 years, writes in Slate that Donald Trump used the n-word during the production of the show — and there are tapes of him doing it.
Descartes and the deep state: what 17th-century philosophy reveals about Trump and QAnon (theconversation.com)
First Lady Jill Biden: "Those Polls Are Going To Turn," "Americans Are Going To Choose Good Over Evil" (www.realclearpolitics.com)
Analysis: The unusual turnout dynamic that could decide the 2024 election | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)
Live Updates: Jury to Consider Felony Charges Against Trump (www.nytimes.com)
For comparison, coverage from:...
Biden’s Empty Christianity (www.counterpunch.org)
Democrats plan to nominate Biden virtually to avoid missing Ohio's ballot deadline (www.nbcnews.com)
Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office (www.texastribune.org)
Republicans enraged by Biden’s efforts to keep gas prices lower (www.msnbc.com)
President Joe Biden is taking fresh steps to help keep gas prices from climbing. For Republicans to see this as “disgusting” and “disgraceful” is bizarre.
Biden and Trump both see opportunity in June debate, but they’re preparing in different ways | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)
Trump on Biden’s continued candidacy: ‘I doubt he will even be running’ (www.thehill.com)
Republican National Committee’s headquarters evacuated after vials of blood are addressed to Trump (apnews.com)
Republicans close ranks against Senate border security deal (thehill.com)
Majority of Americans wrongly believe US is in recession – and most blame Biden (www.theguardian.com)
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer....
Trump says he is open to restrictions on contraception before backing away from the statement (apnews.com)
Joe Biden, master oil trader (www.economist.com)
Trump pitch to oil companies turns off two-thirds of likely voters, poll finds [Saul Elbein | 05/21/24 | The Hill] (thehill.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/15647864...
Trump defense rests at New York hush money trial, ex-president doesn’t testify (www.cnbc.com)
A Hidden Variable in the Presidential Race: Fears of ‘Trump Forever’ | Undecided voters are concerned that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’ll never leave. (www.bloomberg.com)
It’s almost like Trump tried a coup to avoid leaving office the last time around.
Live Updates: Trump’s Lawyers Are Expected to Rest Case in Criminal Trial (www.nytimes.com)
For comparison coverage from:...
Trump's social media account shares a campaign video with a headline about a 'unified Reich' (apnews.com)
A Global Tax on Billionaires? Janet Yellen Says ‘No’ (www.wsj.com)
Treasury secretary came out against the proposed global levy, which proponents say would stop the rich from shifting wealth into countries where they can avoid paying the tax
Biden accuses Trump of 'coming for your health care' in new campaign ad (www.npr.org)
Schumer announces Senate to vote this week on previously blocked bipartisan border bill | CNN Politics (www.cnn.com)
Justice Alito sold Bud Light stock amidst anti-trans boycott effort (www.lawdork.com)
Don't fall for MAGA's "election integrity" con job (www.salon.com)
Outside Groups Spent $285,000 Backing Jamaal Bowman. AIPAC Alone Just Dropped Nearly $2 Million to Attack Him. (theintercept.com)
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC has launched its first ads attacking Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic primary in New York’s 16th Congressional District. The ads claim that Bowman “has his own agenda” and refuses to work with President Joe Biden....
LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Now at 7.6% (news.gallup.com)
ENDLESS Legend is Currently Free to Claim on Steam (store.steampowered.com)
Offer ends on May 23rd.