VIDEO OF THE DAY: EARTHQUAKE: Republicans suffer HUGE LOSS in special election
Don't look now, but a Democratic union leader just flipped a Trump +17 district in the Fort Worth Suburbs. Taylor Rehmet defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss with 57.2% of the vote despite being outspent 20 to 1, flipping Texas state Senate district 9 for the first time since 1991. This is a THIRTY point swing.
“When a grassroots union organizer like Taylor Rehmet overperforms by almost 20 points and forces a runoff, it couldn’t be any clearer that voters are tired of Republican bullshit,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Kendall Scudder said in a statement after the November race. This is very, very, very good news for November. Let's organize, mobilize, and flip this entire country blue! LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
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Senate Democrats’ ICE proposals are a huge and inexcusable whiff
Perry Bacon, The New Republic: "The horrible killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and the resulting national outrage have given congressional Democrats perhaps their best chance so far to rein in President Trump’s misuse of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies. But they are totally squandering this opportunity. They have coalesced around a lackluster list of reforms that fully addresses neither the current situation in Minneapolis nor the broader problem of Trump essentially creating a fascist national police force. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are on the verge of a temporary agreement to provide funding for the Department of Homeland Security and several other federal agencies to prevent a government shutdown.
But Senate Democrats say they won’t agree to long-term funding for ICE and the broader DHS unless three core Democratic demands are met: a requirement that ICE agents wear body cameras and proper identification and not masks; a new code of conduct for how agents use force and independent investigations if they are accused of violating those rules; and the end of roving patrols by ICE officers and requirements that they have warrants and work with state and local police. That’s not nearly enough. Body cameras are just not useful. As we’ve seen across the country, as local police officers increasingly wear them, law enforcement agencies are able to put up all kinds of barriers to the release of the footage. And there is no evidence that officers behave better because they fear abuse being caught on tape. Similarly, while I hate the image of masked agents on American streets, many ICE agents seem quite comfortable showing their faces and making threatening comments to people protesting them. There is no evidence that unmasked ICE agents will be less abusive. Trying to end roving ICE patrols is a solid idea that actually gets at the abuses of the last year. ICE agents, instead of targeting specific sites or individuals accused of immigration crimes, seem to be essentially driving around cities looking for Latino-looking people. That proposal should have been joined by a long list of substantive demands.
Most immediately, there is no way that Democrats should sign onto DHS funding until Customs and Border Protection and ICE personnel are completely gone from Minneapolis. The killings of Renee Nicole Good and Pretti and the siege of Minneapolis are the immediate cause of this crisis. Trump fully withdrawing forces from the city would be an important acknowledgment that his administration’s policies in the Twin Cities have been autocratic and deadly. The Senate Democrats’ demands are so meager that ICE and CBP could likely remain in Minneapolis even if the party’s conditions are met. Second, Democrats should be doing much more to stop ICE from terrorizing communities and creating a climate of fear for not only illegal immigrants but legal ones too. Banning ICE from enforcement actions at houses of worship, day cares, courts, and hospitals is essential. A proposal from House Democrats to bar ICE from detaining American citizens should have been included in the Senate proposal too. Third, Democrats should use this funding fight to limit Trump from using CBP and ICE as a national police force and, really, a standing army. Democrats should insist that Customs and Border Protection agents, whose job is to defend the border, are never be sent to nonborder areas like Chicago and Minneapolis.
We are seeing the usual Democratic fear and reflexive centrism. Party leaders think talking about affordability is their salvation and crime, and immigration their Kryptonite. There is little evidence for that second view. There is a moral case for forcing major changes to Trump’s immigration policies and increasingly an electoral one too. If a newly hired ICE agent kills someone in Chicago or Denver, a body camera will not keep that person alive and almost certainly won’t ensure that their killer faces any jail time. The Democrats are pushing reforms that they know won’t work because they are doing performative, perfunctory opposition to try to quiet their base, instead of real legislating and fighting to dismantle Trump’s ICE and CBP. It’s a huge whiff on one of the defining issues of this era. The time to end invasions of American cities and monstrous raids was yesterday, not 2029."
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Newsom’s new maps opens up MAJOR opportunity to unseat California’s “Mini-Trump”
Marni von Wilpert for Congress: The new maps pushed through by California Governor Gavin Newsom to fight back against Trump’s efforts to rig the midterms has opened up the perfect opportunity to get rid of one of his most loyal acolytes in the House, the infamously corrupt Darrel Issa. Progressive federal labor attorney Marni von Wilpert is launching her bid to take advantage of this newly competitive district and unseat Issa for good. A proven winner, von Wilpert flipped a City Council seat from red to blue, fought to ban ghost guns, prosecuted the opioid industry, and took on price gougers driving up costs for families, and helped write the PRO Act to strengthen unions. This fight isn’t going to be easy, but the new maps have given us an opportunity to steal a seat we didn’t have before. We can’t afford to squander this advantage in elections where every last seat could mean the difference between holding the tide against Trump or allowing fascism to take over. Will you make a donation to help win this critical race?
The farcical case against Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for protest reporting
David Bralow, The Intercept: "The FACE Act was written with a very specific purpose: to protect those seeking abortions without restricting First Amendment-protected speech. Passed in 1994 under President Bill Clinton, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act arose after a horrific string of attacks on reproductive care facilities and providers across the United States. Decades later, the Trump administration is twisting this law to chill dissent by prosecuting journalists for the crime of reporting. Two journalists, former CNN host Don Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort, were arrested Friday after covering a recent protest at a Minneapolis-area church. According to the Department of Justice, Lemon’s crime was a start-to-finish livestream reporting on the protest, beginning with an organizing meeting and concluding with the protest itself at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
As for Fort, the only allegation proffered by federal prosecutors is that she and Lemon approached the pastor — who has a day job running the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office — in 'close proximity' and tried to oppress and intimidate him by 'peppering him with questions.' Such actions, prosecutors allege, are violations of the FACE Act, which includes a provision focused on houses of worship. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi brought these charges despite the fact that the FACE Act protects 'expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) from the jeopardy of prosecution.'
That language clearly did not confuse a federal magistrate and an appellate court when they refused to issue a warrant. So the Justice Department convinced a grand jury to indict them. Looking at video of the protest, it’s clear that these journalists weren’t interfering, obstructing, or intimidating in ways that would violate the FACE Act. Covering a protest — even one inside a church — isn’t a crime. And asking questions — including difficult ones — isn’t a violation of religious freedom. These are things all journalists do, which is precisely what makes this prosecution so chilling."
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The new right openly pines for Manifest Destiny 2.0
Conor Lynch, Jacobin: "Over the past decade, conservatives have railed incessantly against 'woke' educators for indoctrinating young people into believing that the United States was forged through conquest, racial domination, and imperial violence, all of which is historically uncontroversial. In red states, legislators have introduced and passed bills to restrict what can be taught in the classroom about the country’s history, barring discussion of concepts related to race, ethnicity, color, or any topics that promote a 'negative account or representation' of the country’s history. Just last March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that denounced all historical perspectives casting US history in a 'negative light,' declaring that historical education should instead focus on the country’s 'unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.' Yet a noticeable shift has taken place in the year since then. Where conservatives once sought to obscure or soften America’s shameful history of conquest and subjugation, many now appear eager to reclaim it instead.
Indeed, a growing faction on the Right now celebrates these historical realities openly while recasting empire not as a moral failure but as a legacy worth resurrecting. This process has accelerated amid the Trump administration’s open embrace of what Matt Huber calls “gangster imperialism,” which many on the Right appear to have taken as permission to openly celebrate the country’s violent imperial past. Consider recent comments from right-wing pundit Matt Walsh during a recent podcast discussing the possible annexation of Greenland with fellow conservatives Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles. It was amusing, Walsh observed, that people would get so upset by the United States attempting to 'grow the empire . . . by force.' After all, the country as it is 'currently constituted' became what it is 'through purchasing land [and] in some cases going to war, taking it by force, displacing people, kicking them out and taking the land ourself. That’s how this country came to be.
We conquered this land . . . because we knew the American empire should reign.' This open acknowledgment of America’s imperial past reflects a new candor about the aims of US foreign policy, which President Trump and his team made clear after the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Unlike nearly every previous administration, the Trump administration has made little effort to cloak its interventionist agenda in the language of democracy or human rights. Instead, it has openly embraced the language and logic of empire, asserting an imperial right to intervene in the affairs of sovereign nations and to simply take their natural wealth. In his acclaimed history of the Jacksonian era, historian Daniel Walker Howe notes that the 'ideology of American expansion' legitimized 'the assertion of force by the strong and the destruction or expropriation of those who resisted.' Today that ideology is making a comeback, this time under the auspices of billionaire oligarchs and right-wing ideologues who envision a twenty-first century where their freedom to dominate others, plunder resources, and indulge their darkest fantasies is virtually without limit. Though Trump has since backed off his maximalist demands and threat to seize Greenland by force — no doubt in response to the collapsing stock and bonds markets — the Right’s newfound embrace of expansionism appears to be only just beginning."
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