Politics

ORLANDO, Fla. — Diversity, equity and inclusion programs were abolished Tuesday from Walt Disney World’s governing district, now controlled by appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis, in an echo of the Florida governor’s agenda which has championed curtailing such programs in higher education and elsewhere.

The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District said in a statement that its diversity, equity and inclusion committee would be eliminated, as would any job duties connected to it. Also axed were initiatives left over from when the district was controlled by Disney supporters, which awarded contracts based on goals of achieving racial or gender parity.

Glenton Gilzean, the district’s new administrator who is African American and a former head of the Central Florida Urban League, called such initiatives “illegal and simply un-American.” Gilzean has been a fellow or member at two conservative institutions, the James Madison Institute and the American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network, as well as a DeSantis appointee to the Florida Commission on Ethics.

“Our district will no longer participate in any attempt to divide us by race or advance the notion that we are not created equal,” Gilzean said in a statement. “As the former head of the Central Florida Urban League, a civil rights organization, I can say definitively that our community thrives only when we work together despite our differences.”

An email was sent seeking comment from Disney World.

Last spring, DeSantis, who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, signed into law a measure that blocks public colleges from using federal or state funding on diversity programs.

DeSantis also has championed Florida’s so-called “Stop WOKE” law, which bars businesses, colleges and K-12 schools from giving training on certain racial concepts, such as the theory that people of a particular race are inherently racist, privileged or oppressed. A federal judge last November blocked the law’s enforcement in colleges, universities and businesses, calling it “positively dystopian.”

The creation of the district, then known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, was instrumental in Disney’s decision to build a theme park resort near Orlando in the 1960s. Having a separate government allowed the company to provide zoning, fire protection, utilities and infrastructure services on its sprawling property. The district was controlled by Disney supporters for more than five decades.

Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor emeritus, said he was surprised that the matter was decided internally, rather than by a public vote of the five members appointed by DeSantis to the district’s board who have promised repeatedly to be more transparent than their predecessors.

“This is an issue of public importance,” said Foglesong, who wrote a definitive account of Disney World’s governance in his book, “Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.”

The DeSantis appointees took control of the renamed district earlier this year following a yearlong feud between the company and DeSantis. The fight began last year after Disney, beset by significant pressure internally and externally, publicly opposed a state law banning classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades, a policy critics call “Don’t Say Gay.”

As punishment, DeSantis took over the district through legislation passed by Republican lawmakers and appointed a new board of supervisors to oversee municipal services for the sprawling theme parks and hotels. Disney sued DeSantis and his five board appointees in federal court, claiming the Florida governor violated the company’s free speech rights by taking retaliatory action.

Before the new board came in, Disney made agreements with previous oversight board members who were Disney supporters that stripped the new supervisors of their authority over design and development. The DeSantis-appointed members of the governing district have sued Disney in state court in a second lawsuit stemming from the district’s takeover, seeking to invalidate those agreements.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who became Democratic heroes as members of the so-called “Tennessee Three,” are hoping to once again reclaim their legislative seats Thursday after they were expelled for involvement in a gun control protest on the House floor.

The young Black lawmakers were both reinstated by local officials, but only on an interim basis. To fully take back their positions, they must advance through a special election. Both easily cleared their primary election in June, and now face general election opponents for districts that heavily favor Democrats.

Jones, who lives in Nashville, is up against Republican candidate Laura Nelson. Meanwhile, Pearson, from Memphis, faces independent candidate Jeff Johnston.

The four count indictment Special Counsel Jack Smith handed down against Donald Trump alleges that on Jan. 6, approximately two hours after the mob broke into the Capitol, “the Defendant” joined others in the outer Oval Office to watch the attack on television.

“See, this is what happens when they try to steal an election. These people are angry. These people are really angry about it. This is what happens,” the Defendant said.

This is what Trump wanted. He wanted his supporters to be angry, furious, and incensed if he lost the 2020 election. This was the whole point. This is what Trump wanted from the moment he began lying about a “stolen” election months BEFORE the 2020 election. He wanted violence. He wanted chaos. He wanted his supporters to be so damn pissed off that they would use violence to keep him in office.

He wanted, as Smith spelled out in the indictment, “...to create an intense atmosphere of mistrust and anger.” This was always his plan. Violence was always his ace in the hole if everything else he tried to do to keep himself in power failed.

Please don’t breeze past this fact: The former President of the United States believed violence was ultimately how he could execute his attempted coup. He incited that violence for months, and he exploited that violence on Jan. 6.

You can’t read this 45-page indictment and not understand that Donald Trump tried everything he could to overturn the election results, knowing his argument was based on nothing, and that he’d use his power as Commander in Chief of the armed forces to remain in office. (I repeat: Trump wanted to use the military.)

“This was his plan all along. He wanted, he needed, depended upon, encouraged, and incited violence. And he was prepared to order the military to act violently on his behalf.”

Per the indictment, when Trump was warned by his Deputy White House Counsel on Jan. 3 that there was no “outcome-determinative fraud in the election,” and that if Trump remained in office there would be “riots in every major city in the United States,” the unnamed co-conspirator 4 responded, “Well [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

The indictment paints a picture of Trump and his co-conspirators systematically trying everything possible to overturn the election results—making false claims, pushing election officials in various states to ignore the vote counts, creating slates of fraudulent electors, and then pressuring top officials in the Justice Department to lie and conduct sham investigations.

None of it worked.

Trump’s penultimate play to stay in power was to pressure the vice president to fraudulently alter the election results. And Trump, true to form, repeatedly threatened violence to try to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to do something he had no authority to do.

On Jan. 5, in one of the last of his many attempts to pressure the VP, Trump “grew frustrated” and told the VP that if he didn’t do what Trump wanted he’d “have to publicly criticize the VP.” Upon hearing this, the VP’s chief of staff “was concerned for the Vice President’s safety and alerted the head of the Vice President’s Secret Service detail.”

With none of his overtures to the VP working, Trump and his co-conspirators employed their final play to keep Trump in power: They unleashed the dogs of violence.

On the morning of Jan. 6, he directly incited his supporters to engage in violence to stop the proceedings at the Capitol. In his speech that morning, he lied to his supporters. He falsely told them that the vice president had the authority to stop the proceedings and that the VP might in fact alter the election results. Co-Conspirators 1 and 2 also lied about the VP in their speeches that morning to the same crowd. Trump then directed his supporters to go to the Capitol to obstruct the certification proceeding and exert pressure on the VP to take the fraudulent actions Trump already knew the VP had previously refused to do.

Violence. This was the traitor’s final play.

It's really what underlined everything Trump had done and said from that moment in July 2020 when he said the only way he could lose the election was if it were stolen. He planted the seeds of violence before a vote had even been cast. In the indictment, Jack Smith says the whole point of the Defendant’s lies was to be “destabilizing.” To cause violence.

“We fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump charged his supporters that morning as he pointed them to the Capitol and told them to go “take back their country.” And of course, the coward promised to go to the Capitol with them, but never did.

When violence unfolded at the Capitol, Trump refused to stop it. He smiled and watched it.

People have long been confused about why Trump just sat there in the White House all afternoon, completely unperturbed by what was happening. There should be no confusion: This is what he wanted. This was the plan.

And during the violence, he continued to spur it on, attacking the VP by tweet, accusing him of not having the courage to act. “See...this is what happens when you steal an election...these people are angry,” said the President of the United States, knowing it was all a lie.
A photo including Pro-Trump Supporters at the U.S Capitol Building

Later that night, the indictment alleges, Trump and his cronies further exploited the violence of that day. “As violence ensued, the Defendant and Co-Conspirators exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on these claims.” They were still calling lawmakers to further perpetuate the Big Lie, even after the violence at the Capitol.

One of the most frightening lines in the indictment was a reference to a Jan. 4 conversation between the defendant's senior counsel and co-conspirator 2, during which the senior advisor said no one would support the defendant’s proposal to have the VP alter the election results, and if VP did it, “You’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic.
A photo including activists and allies at the New York Public Library calling for the Indictment of Donald Trump

In other words, violence was “necessary.” This, in essence, was Trump’s doctrine.

Judge Tonya Chutkin, who’s been chosen to preside over Trump's trial for this indictment and who has presided over a number of the trials for the Jan. 6 defendants, said this during one of those earlier Jan. 6 trials: “It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power, and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment.”

This is what Donald Trump did. This was his plan all along. He wanted, he needed, depended upon, encouraged, and incited violence. And he was prepared to order the military to act violently on his behalf.

It's bad enough that Trump refused to concede and accept his election loss. It’s bad enough that he refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power. It’s bad enough that he lied about the election and tried to pressure others to engage in fraudulent activities to overturn the election. But it’s traitorous that he relied on the threat of violence rather than concede he lost a free and fair election in the United States of America.

We cannot, we must not become so inured to Trump’s madness that we normalize what he’s done. He tried to violently overthrow our government, and as Judge Chutkin said, he “must be met with absolutely certain punishment.”

Trump’s ass belongs in jail.

#politics

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the false narrative surrounding police "defunding" and crime, and investigate what cops have really been up to since the s...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A lawsuit filed Wednesday asks Wisconsin’s newly liberal-controlled state Supreme Court to throw out Republican-drawn legislative maps as unconstitutional, the latest legal challenge of many nationwide that could upset political boundary lines before the 2024 election.

The long-promised action from a coalition of law firms and voting rights advocacy groups comes the day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court flipped from a conservative to liberal majority, with the start of the term of a justice who said that the Republican maps were “rigged” and should be reviewed.

“John [Eastman] and Rudy [Giuliani] gave a lot of counsel,” one Trump advisor says ominously. “Other people can decide how sound it was”

For fellow redditfugees, you may remember a time when a certain brilliant citizen journalist topped /r/politics with their exquisitely detailed posts on American politics and an amazingly buttery username. Well, today I found out that @PoppinKREAM is now on the Fediverse. I'd like to propose a toast to the work of the best citizen journalist I've ever read. May your work here eclipse your accomplishments on Reddit. Salud PoppinKREAM!

#politics

Indictment is the first to emerge from special counsel Jack Smith’s probe of the underpinnings of the Jan. 6 riot and the campaign to reverse Joe Biden’s victory.

A grand jury indicted former president Donald Trump Tuesday for a raft of alleged crimes in his brazen efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election — the latest legal and political aftershock stemming from the riot at the U.S. Capitol two and a half years ago.

The four-count, 45-page indictment accuses Trump of three distinct conspiracies, charging that he conspired to defraud the U.S., conspired to obstruct an official proceeding and conspired against people’s rights.
“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment charges.

A spokesman for the former president, Steven Cheung, accused the current administration of trying to interfere with the 2024 election by targeting the current GOP frontrunner.

About 5 p.m., reporters observed a prosecutor with special counsel Jack Smith’s office and the foreperson of a grand jury that has been active for many months examining the events surrounding Jan. 6 deliver the indictment to a magistrate judge in federal court in Washington, D.C.

That grand jury panel gathered Tuesday, and left the courthouse in the afternoon. The indictment is the first known charge or charges to be filed in the special counsel probe of the machinations that led up to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and its aftermath.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya accepted the grand jury return, saying, “I do have one indictment return before me, and I have reviewed the paperwork in connection with this indictment.”

The indictment could mark a major new phase in Smith’s investigation of the former president and his aides and allies, coming nearly two months after Trump and his longtime valet were indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents and scheming to prevent government officials from retrieving them.

Trump, who has pleaded not guilty in the documents case, denies all wrongdoing related to the 2020 election as well. He announced on social media on July 18 that his lawyers had been told he was a target in the election-focused probe.

Smith was tapped in November to take charge of the both high-profile investigations, after Trump launched his 2024 presidential election campaign and Attorney General Merrick Garland — an appointee of President Biden — concluded that an independent prosecutor should oversee the probes.

A state grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., is also considering whether to file broad charges against Trump and his lawyers, advocates, and aides over their efforts to undo the 2020 election results. A decision on that front is expected in August, although previous plans to announce a charging decision have been delayed. Michigan and Arizona are also investigating aspects of the efforts to block Biden’s victory in their states.

Trump, who is the first former president charged with a crime, is facing a remarkable challenge: as a leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he is likely to be juggling campaign events with court hearings and criminal trials for months on end.

In additional to the Justice Department and Fulton County probes, he is scheduled for trial in March on New York state charges of falsifying business records in connection with hush-money payments during the 2016 election.

Smith’s elections-related investigation has proceeded along multiple tracks, people familiar with the matter have told The Washington Post, with prosecutors focused on ads and fundraising pitches claiming election fraud as well as plans for “fake electors” who could have swung the election to Trump.

A key element of the investigation is determining to what degree Republican operatives, activists and elected officials — including Trump — understood that their claims of massive voter fraud were false at the time they were making them.

Each track raises tricky questions about where the line should be drawn between political activity, legal advocacy and criminal conspiracy.

A key area of interest for Smith has been the conduct of a handful of lawyers who sought to turn Trump’s defeat into victory by trying to convince state, local, federal and judicial authorities that Biden’s 2020 election win was illegitimate or tainted by fraud.
Investigators have sought to determine to what degree these lawyers — particularly Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as then-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark — were following specific instructions from Trump or others, and what those instructions were, according to the people familiar with the matter, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

The Post has reported that Giuliani, a personal attorney for Trump who took over his campaign’s legal efforts after the 2020 election, coordinated the fake-elector effort. Ellis helped him urge state legislatures to reject certified Biden results, while Eastman argued to Trump that Vice President Mike Pence could accept alternate slates when certifying the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Chesebro wrote several memos on the fake-elector strategy. Olsen urged lawsuits to overturn the election results in several states, and Clark pressed Trump’s fraud claims from within the Justice Department.

In case of paywall:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign notched a major victory Saturday when members of the California Republican executive committee voted to parcel out convention delegates based on the statewide vote next year — doing away with the state’s longtime system of awarding them by congressional district, which had been perceived as a more level playing field for lower-tiered candidates.

The new rules give Trump a shot at clinching all of the state’s 169 delegates — more than any other state — while at the same time making it harder for a challenger like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to make it a two-person race.

The dramatic shift in the rules, which came during a closed-door meeting Saturday in Irvine, was denounced as an underhanded political maneuver by allies of DeSantis, Trump’s leading opponent for the nomination, who tried to prevent the change and are now reconsidering their investments in the state.

“Smoke-filled backrooms do not reflect the will of or benefit voters in any state. Yet across the country games are afoot to enhance the potential outcome of primary elections for one former president who half of the Republican electorate no longer wants as the party leader,” Ken Cuccinelli, founder of the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, said in a statement. “Even with these asinine primary rules changes, we remain confident Governor DeSantis will become the Republican nominee and 47th president of the United States.”

Several other key states have been making revisions to their delegate selection rules that could benefit Trump, after top Trump advisers launched an early effort to court state officials who have significant autonomy in deciding how their states select delegates.

Louisiana Republicans have moved to strengthen the role of candidates in selecting delegates, a change that comes after Trump won the state primary in 2016 but was not able to secure a majority of the delegates. Nevada Republicans have said they will not recognize the statewide primary, which Democrats voted to set for Feb. 6, but will instead hold a smaller party-run caucus around the same time to pick delegates — a move that will narrow the number of voters who are decisive in that state. In Michigan, where Democrats are forcing a primary in February in violation of Republican rules, the state party has said it expects to award most of its delegates at party-run caucuses in early March.

In Idaho, a Trump-friendly state where lawmakers eliminated the March presidential primary as a cost-saving measure, the GOP is now planning to hold a caucus before Super Tuesday that would make it the fifth state on the primary calendar. Republicans in North Dakota, where Gov. Doug Burgum (R) has launched his own presidential campaign, have also left open the possibility of moving that state’s caucuses to the first days of March, before most states enter the process.

The Trump campaign immediately expressed support Saturday for the California rules change, highlighting language that will allow any candidate who gets more than 50 percent of the statewide vote on March 5 to claim all of the state’s 169 delegates. County election officials will start mailing ballots on Feb. 5, 2024, before the Nevada primary but after the expected dates of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

“We are pleased the California Republican Party readopted a winner-take-all provision, and we look forward to competing across California to win all of its delegates, just as President Trump did in 2016 and 2020. Always Back Down and Ron DeSantis suffered a humiliating defeat as they tried to manipulate the party rules,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung, intentionally misnaming the DeSantis super PAC, said in a statement. “President Trump looks forward to working with the California Republican Party to Make America Great Again as he continues to dominate statewide polling by over 50%.”

The most recent RealClearPolitics average of state polls in California shows Trump with 49 percent of the vote, compared with 23 percent for DeSantis and 7 percent for former vice president Mike Pence. No other candidate is polling over 5 percent in the state.

Top GOP officials in California had argued that the rules change was necessary to align the state’s delegate selection process with Republican National Committee guidelines, which require states that fall early on the primary calendar to award some of their delegates proportionally. Under the California GOP’s new rules, any candidate who receives a majority of votes statewide — 50 percent plus 1 — will win all of the at-large and congressional district delegates, as well as the alternates.

If no candidate wins a majority in California, the delegates will be apportioned among all of the candidates in a way that reflects the statewide vote. Even if Trump does not clear the threshold that allows him to win all the state’s delegates, he could be helped by the fact that many of the lower-tier candidates will be able to pick up delegates across the state, which could prolong the primary and complicate the hopes of a top rival like DeSantis.

“If Trump is cruising into Super Tuesday — and sitting well in most states, including California, that take over 50 percent of the vote — then it’s great for him and it will end the nomination process,” said California Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, referring to a blizzard of primaries on March 5 that will include California. “However, if he doesn’t get 50 percent, it gives a substantial delegate haul to any number of candidates. Then it’s a scenario where the race could extend well beyond Super Tuesday. … It seems a little risky. It’s aggressive for the Trump campaign to want this change.”

California — a state where it is exorbitantly expensive to advertise on television — has long awarded delegates with a winner-take-all system by congressional district, giving lower-tier and more moderate Republican candidates a chance to build out their field programs as they seek delegates in districts that are favorable to them. But the Golden State delegate tallies often haven’t mattered, because the state’s primary fell later on the presidential nominating calendar.

Under the old system of apportionment by congressional district, campaigns “would have been hyperfocusing and targeting certain congressional districts where you could do well as a candidate,” said Tim Lineberger, a California political consultant who worked for the Trump campaign in the 2016 cycle but is now unaligned with any campaign.

“You’ll probably see more TV versus ground campaigns” under the new rules, he said. “But California is notoriously expensive, so I think it’s going to be cost-prohibitive to some of the lower-polling candidates.”

California GOP Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement after Saturday’s vote that the rules change means that “Republican presidential candidates will not only be encouraged to spend real time campaigning in our state and making their case to voters, but Republican voters will equally be encouraged to turn out to support their chosen candidate to help them win delegates.”

In Nevada, several Silver State political consultants said there are concerns that the lack of clarity around when that state will hold its caucus — as well as the potential voter confusion over the fact that there will be both a caucus and a primary — could diminish the state’s influence after years in which Nevada proudly touted its status as the “first in the West” state.

The state’s GOP chairman, Michael J. McDonald, has long had a close relationship with Trump, and the former president recently endorsed two people who won the county chairman jobs in the state’s two most populous counties, Washoe and Clark. McDonald did not return calls seeking clarity on Nevada’s process.

The state is considered the most Trump-friendly of the early primary contests, in part because of its lower share of college-educated and churchgoing voters. But Nevada is also notoriously difficult to poll because of the state’s transient population. Republican voters have been loyal to Trump, who lost the state to Biden by 33,596 votes in 2020, and he has maintained his strength in rural areas. But his style has alienated many moderate voters in the narrowly divided state, contributing to his loss in the 2020 presidential contest.

Sigal Chattah, a Republican committeewoman in Nevada who has not made an endorsement in the presidential primary, said the decision to shun the state primary was not made to favor any candidate or campaign.

Nevada Republicans objected to the Democrats’ move to force the state to hold a primary, which they do not want to participate in. Instead they are pursuing legal action to ensure they can hold a GOP caucus and award delegates through that process.

“Without a disclosure telling voters that participation in the [primary] is irrelevant for the nomination, that is the grossest exercise of voter suppression,” she said. “You are defrauding Nevada Republican voters.”

The leadership of the Idaho Republican Party, which is closely aligned with Trump, recently voted to choose its delegates through a caucus system — a move that could also benefit the former president. The Republican State Central Committee adopted a proposal at its June meeting to schedule the caucus so that Idaho Republicans would vote fifth among the early contests and before Super Tuesday, though no formal date has been set. That could give Trump, who won the state with nearly 64 percent of the vote in the 2020 presidential contest, another early win next year.

Some members of the central committee also want the state legislature to restore Idaho’s March presidential primary, which was eliminated by the legislature to save more than $2 million. The central committee passed a resolution asking lawmakers to restore the primary to March, but the governor would have to call a special session to make that possible. Idaho Republican Chairwoman Dorothy Moon, who did not respond to calls for comment, said in a statement after the June meeting that the caucus proposal adopted was a strike against the “wealthy and powerful” who “want to manipulate our electoral systems to rig outcomes that favor their interests.”

The three senior campaign advisers to Trump all have significant delegate-counting experience. In 2016, Susie Wiles served on the convention rules committee, Chris LaCivita helped run the delegate process for the Republican National Committee, and Brian Jack served as the Trump campaign’s delegate director.

Jack worked for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the most powerful Republican in California, during the 2022 midterm elections. They have encouraged Trump to build close relationships with state party chairs, whom the former president has been known to call regularly, invite to rallies and sometimes host at Mar-a-Lago.

In a statement, DeSantis spokesman Andrew Romeo said: “We’re putting an organization together that can win in any state, in any format, anytime, and anywhere. Game on.”

Newly released emails from the Ariz. Senate show a Republican volunteer telling 'audit' leaders that Giuliani's office had contacted her about effort.
Selected excerpts below:

Phoenix Republican Linda Brickman wrote Senate "audit" leaders on April 11, 2021, and told them Giuliani's office called her and asked for her help on the recount.

"I was just asked to help on the AZ Audit starting on April 22nd for 15 days," Brickman said in her email. "This is all under the authorization of Christina Bobb, who works with Rudy."

Bobb, who serves as one of Trump's lawyer, reported on the "audit" while working for the far-right One America News Network. She also acted as a go-between for Trump and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, the lead contractor on the ballot review.

The email is the latest evidence of Trump's long reach into the ballot review and demonstrates how his allies instigated the deeply flawed recount of 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County and later used it to promote unproven claims of election fraud to a national audience.

Brickman's email stating Giuliani's office and Bobb authorized her work on the audit seemed to catch other officials off guard.

"Having just received a call from Rudy Giuliani's office a few moments ago, I thought I would quickly fill you in," Brickman wrote.

Officials with the ballot review pushed back and advised her only the Senate liaison could schedule volunteers: "If your information or invitation doesn't come from Ken Bennett or Julie Fisher to be an volunteer observer, please disregard it," they wrote from the Senate's "audit" email account.

It appears the response did not affect her participation in the "audit." On her LinkedIn page, she prominently notes her role "as a member of the AZ Audit team as an Observer to help secure Election Integrity in our State."

Brickman is a Republican activist who joined the Arizona Tea Party Patriots Association in 2011, worked on Ted Cruz's presidential campaign and served as an Arizona delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention in 2016.

Bobb is a former U.S. Marine who worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration. She is best known as the former host of "Weekly Briefing" on One America News Network, which she joined in 2020.

Bobb became a central figure in the classified documents investigation and the federal indictment of Trump. When federal agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in an Aug. 8 search, Bobb confronted them as a senior lawyer on Trump's legal team. Bobb in 2022 had signed a document affirming that all classified material in the former president's possession was returned to federal authorities.

A Signal chat offers a rare glimpse inside the DeSantis campaign.

Text in case of paywall:

If it wasn't clear already, long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some Republican fans — including some who are willing to spend millions backing his campaign.

According to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, the majority of the $9.8 million raised by American Values 2024 — a super PAC backing Kennedy's campaign — came from Timothy Mellon, who gave $5 million to the group in April, days before Kennedy officially launched his campaign.

Mellon cited Kennedy's "bipartisan support" in a statement to CNBC on his contribution to the super PAC.

"He's the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption [and] he's the one Democrat who can win in the general election," said Mellon.

In addition to Kennedy, Mellon has given handsomely to Republican candidates and campaigns in recent years.

That includes:

• $20 million in contributions to America First Action, a super PAC that supported former President Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign.
• $45 million to Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
• $30 million to Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Mellon also contributed $53 million to an effort led by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to build a wall on the US-Mexico border, effectively funding the entire venture himself.

The grandson of famous banking magnate Andrew Mellon and an heir to the family fortune, Mellon once wrote in a self-published autobiography that welfare programs are "slavery redux" and described Black people as becoming "even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations" in the 1980s.

The other major donor to the group was Gavin De Becker, a well-known security professional who recently defended Kennedy from accusations of anti-Semitism and racism after he speculated that COVID-19 had been genetically engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. De Becker contributed $4.3 million to American Values 2024.

Super PACs can accept unlimited political contributions and are barred from officially coordinating with campaigns — though in recent years, that line has become increasingly blurred.

Recently polling has shown Kennedy trailing Biden, and his unfavorablility has risen among Democrats as he's endured greater media scrutiny.

“You’re going to let him put all of his strange gods up in the White House?”

“The movants’ asserted ‘injuries’ that would open the doors of the courthouse to their claims are either insufficient or else speculative and unrealized,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the nine-page ruling.

"Open Socialism (OS) is a rethink of how to manage a society. It starts with an optimistic base concept that focuses on broad scale cooperation, but then layers on processes and ideas to keep people motivated and prevent corruption. It looks at human nature through the lens of our evolution and attempts to recapture the good parts of a tribal society, but in a way that can work on a grand scale. It borrows heavily from modern team and culture management, in particular the open source model."

I saw no discussion regarding this political ideology, so I thought it might be best to ask here.

Open Socialism website: https://opensocialism.com/
Open Socialism Github: https://github.com/open-socialism/open-socialism-site

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI should stop using a U.S. spy database of foreigners’ emails and other communications for investigating crimes that aren’t related to national security, a group of White House intelligence advisers recommended in a report released Monday.

The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board’s findings come as the White House pushes Congress to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before its expiration at the end of this year. U.S. intelligence officials say Section 702 enables investigations of Chinese and Russian espionage, potential terrorist plots, and other threats.

But spy agencies also end up capturing the communications of U.S. citizens and businesses, and a series of intelligence mistakes at the FBI has fanned bipartisan criticism of the bureau that has strongly colored the debate over renewing the law.

The advisory board says the FBI made “inappropriate use” at times of Section 702 information. Those include queries for a U.S. senator and state senator’s names without properly limiting the search, looking for someone believed to have been at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and doing large queries of names of protesters following the 2020 death of George Floyd.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Arkansas from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors.

Matthew Alvarez distanced himself from the violent comments, adding: ""That is not something that I agree with, obviously."

Michigan attorney alleges organization, named an extremist group by Southern Poverty Law Center, in violation of non-profit status

Hundreds of conservative operatives outlined a plan that Donald Trump, or any Republican, could use to purge climate action from the federal government.

After Jared Williams was elected Augusta DA, a lawyer and state lawmaker made an unusual proposal: that the whitest county split from the circuit

Since 1870, the Augusta judicial circuit has been home to the criminal justice system of a three-county area on Georgia’s border with South Carolina. In that time, no African American has been elected district attorney of the circuit – until 2020, when a Black lawyer named Jared Williams upset a conservative, pro-police candidate with just more than 50% of the vote.

But that historic win was short-lived. The day after his election, a lawyer and state lawmaker in the area proposed something unusual: that the circuit’s whitest county separate itself from the Augusta circuit, creating a new judicial circuit in Georgia for the first time in nearly 40 years. ‘[The taskforce is] one more element in a years-long Republican strategy at the national, state and local level to undermine the confidence in our elections.’

“Does the board of commissioners want to be there [sic] own judicial circuit,” Barry Fleming, a Republican state legislator from nearby Harlem, asked the Columbia county commission chair, Doug Duncan, in a text message.

Duncan supported the plan, and in December 2020 issued a resolution asking the area’s lawmakers, including Fleming, to introduce legislation that would separate Columbia county from the judicial circuit it had been a part of for 150 years. Fleming’s bill passed with bipartisan support.

The split caused the disenfranchisement of the old circuit’s Black voters, voting advocacy organization Black Voters Matter Fund contended in a lawsuit that was eventually dismissed by the state supreme court. Those voters had chosen Williams, who ran on a pledge to uphold criminal justice reforms such as not prosecuting low-level marijuana possession, a crime which disproportionately affects Black and minority communities.

Instead of Williams, Black voters in Columbia county got as their prosecutor Bobby Christine, a Trump-appointed US attorney who was appointed by the Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Christine then chose Williams’s opponent as his chief deputy.

Voting advocates say the circuit split is an example of the type of minority rule that Republicans are accused of engaging in across the US.

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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6863279

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/6863278

These candidates are really the only challengers to Biden in the primaries. All of their campaigns are extremely long shots (but not impossible in my opinion- if we decided we liked them more than Biden they could win). Let's all have a civilized discussion/debate over them. Let's try to not focus too heavy on their perceived inability to beat Biden but focus on them as actual candidates.

my take

MW: I recently watched an interview with Marianne Williamson who I'd never heard of before (I'm sure there's a reason media doesn't cover her). She really impressed me with her views, especially on neoliberalism. She heavily reminds me of Bernie and isn't running just for the sake of it or as a protest like some other long shot candidates do. In my opinion she deserves everyone's vote in the primaries, at least. She is also very talented at oration.

CW: I'll be honest, I know very little about him and need to do more research.

RFK JR: He's literally a clown. He's a nepo baby and all his views are inconsistent, harmful, and crackpot. He has no shot at winning.