Hey! The What A Day team will be taking a few days off to rest, recharge, and remind some Californians to stop a recall. Have a great Labor Day, and see you back in the inbox on Tuesday, January 7.

America’s interminable war in Afghanistan may be over, but if we’ve learned anything over the last decade, the GOP campaign to weaponize the war against the president who oversaw its conclusion has only just begun. Time for Kevin McCarthy to earn his Purple Fart. 
 

• In a Tuesday address, President Biden defended his decision not to extend the withdrawal deadline as the only option other than sending in more troops and risking more American lives: “That was the real choice, between leaving and escalating. I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not going to extend a forever exit.” Biden hailed the success of the unprecedented evacuation effort, and pushed back hard on GOP criticism: “There is no evacuation from the end of a war that you can run without the kind of complexities, challenges, and threats that we faced. None.”
   
• Biden also reiterated that Americans and Afghan allies who didn’t make it out in the final days won’t be disregarded. “The bottom line, 90 percent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave. And for those remaining Americans, there is no deadline. We remain committed to get them out if they want to come out.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday that an estimated 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan and want to leave.
   
• While Republicans have continued flailing away at their Bidenghazi drum—McCarthy claimed on Tuesday that the Biden administration’s evacuation effort was “probably the biggest failure in American government on a military stage in my lifetime”—it’s not clear that they’re getting the traction they want. On the one hand, Biden’s approval rating has dropped precipitously. On the other hand, the New York Times finally wrenched itself out of its rural diner booth to go talk to some swing voters in California, and found that even some 2020 Trump voters weren’t prepared to blame Biden for 20 years of mistakes in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the voters interviewed were a little preoccupied with the whole “GOP-fueled explosion of COVID cases” situation. 

In the absence of any real outrage, Republicans have sought to manufacture some with a little help from their credulous friends in the media. 
 

• Last Thursday, Politico reported that the U.S. military had provided the Taliban with a “kill list” of American citizens, residents, and Afghan allies who were trying to escape the country. Donald Trump and other Republicans amplified the story with gusto. Just one tiny issue: The story appears to be bunk, presumably planted by Biden’s enemies in Congress. Blinken said on Sunday that “the idea that we shared lists of Americans or others with the Taliban is simply wrong” and on Monday, the American University of Afghanistan denied a New York Times report that its president had said the U.S. gave the Taliban a list of students who wanted to leave. 
   
• The denials and corrections haven’t gotten nearly as much attention as the original, outrage-provoking misinformation, if you can believe it! The same goes for a claim circulating in right-wing social media swamps that the Taliban has seized $83 billion in U.S. weaponry (or $85 billion, in Trump’s garbled retelling). That claim is patently untrue, which didn’t stop Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) from repeating it in a Tuesday press conference when asked about, let’s see here, hurricane damage in his home state of Louisiana. 

We shouldn’t be surprised that Republicans would point to nonexistent scandals in Afghanistan to distract from the mess they’ve created at home, but neither should we accept it as a matter of course. Biden’s decision to stand his ground is a good start; the sooner Democrats line up behind him and news outlets start aggressively fact-checking—ideally before publishing right-wing lies in the first place—the better off we’ll be. 

What's happening in Texas at this moment should concern all of us – whether you live in the state or elsewhere.

Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to order this summer, overtly aimed at reviving a slew of anti-civil rights bills that were blocked in the state's last regular session.

The bills in this new session attack voter rights, transgender rights, reproductive freedom, critical race theory, and much more. They're blatantly consistent with similar attacks that we've seen unfold across the states this year – and it has led many lawmakers to temporarily leave Texas to break quorum and block such bills from passing.

At this urgent time, alongside our Texas affiliate and advocates like you, the ACLU is moving fast – both at the legislature and in court – and we need advocates like you with us. Add your name today to join the fight.

Here's what you should know so far:

• Defending abortion access: As events continued to unfold in the legislature's special session, the ACLU and the ACLU of Texas filed a lawsuit with partners challenging Senate Bill 8 – a blatantly unconstitutional law that bans abortion at six weeks, before many know they’re pregnant. The bill also authorizes private citizens to sue anyone who provides an abortion beyond six weeks, abortion funds that assist patients with paying for their health care beyond six weeks, and those who help someone get an abortion beyond six weeks, including clergy or counselors who advise patients and even someone who drives a patient to their appointment including family members, friends, and rideshare drivers. This law passed earlier this year and will go into effect in the state on September 1 unless we stop it.

• Safeguarding the vote: In the first two days of the special session, lawmakers made it clear that voter suppression was a priority by introducing two restrictive voting bills: Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3. While our affiliate teams testified in the Texas House and Senate and joined grassroots efforts to push back against these extreme measures, ACLU and ACLU of Texas also began representing Mr. Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man who faces decades in prison after the state recently accused him of voting when ineligible for what was at worst an innocent mistake.

• Protecting transgender youth: In addition to abortion bans and suppressive voting restrictions, roughly a dozen pieces of anti-transgender bills have made their way into the Texas legislature again during this session, including several that would ban trans youth from their right to play school sports. While our teams on the ground work with fellow activists to fight against these bills, our legal team is also prepping to litigate if any of these cruel and unnecessary bills should become law, just as we have in four other states so far this year.

What happens in one state like Texas can have a ripple effect across all of them, especially at a time when lawmakers are clearly leveraging state law for their own anti-civil liberties agenda. We need you on our team as we keep fighting in all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico – add your name today to join us so we can act quickly at a moment's notice, wherever we're needed.

In your state and nationwide, we will not stop being there for people's rights. And it's dedication like yours that fuels that fight. So please stay tuned and sign up to stay tuned on future fights.

Onward,

The ACLU Team

Hurricane Ida’s death toll has risen to at least four, with two people killed and 10 others injured in Mississippi after a section of highway collapsed late on Monday. While the upgraded levee system in New Orleans prevented the worst flooding, the city’s power grid wasn’t quite so resilient: It could be weeks before electricity is restored to some areas, and more than a million people were left without power on Tuesday as the National Weather Service issued a heat advisory for the area. Louisiana officials have urged those who evacuated to stay away for the time being. In other extreme weather adventures, California’s Caldor fire forced the evacuation of South Lake Tahoe on Monday, with communities just across the Nevada border warned to get ready to leave. Before this year, no fire was known to have burned through one side of the Sierras to the other, according to Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter. In the last month alone, both the Dixie and Caldor fires have crossed that line of defense. 

• Republicans in the Texas legislature have given final approval to their extreme voter-suppression and election-subversion bill and sent it to Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) desk for his signature. 
   
• The Florida Department of Education has withheld funds from two school districts that implemented mask requirements, in spite of a judge’s decision blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on those requirements. The Biden administration has said that those schools can use federal funds from the American Rescue Plan to make up the difference. 
   
• The January 6 committee has asked telecommunications companies to preserve the phone records of several GOP House members, Donald Trump, and Trump’s beautiful family. House Minority Leader and Guy With Nothing To Hide Kevin McCarthy threatened the companies not to comply: “A Republican majority will not forget.”
   
• John Pierce, a lawyer representing 17 defendants charged with storming the Capitol, has mysteriously vanished. One colleague of his said he’d been hospitalized with coronavirus and was on a ventilator.
   
• In addition to fantasizing about busting Capitol rioters out of jail at a GOP event on Sunday, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) said there will be “bloodshed” if elections continue to be “rigged.” This is evidently fine by GOP leaders.
   
• Anyway, here’s Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) admitting on tape just a couple days ago that the Big Lie is, y’know, a big lie. Johnson states that Trump lost in Wisconsin because “51,000 Republicans didn’t vote for him,” and that there’s “nothing obviously skewed about the results.”
   
• Michigan Republicans have launched their effort to institute new voter-ID requirements by circumventing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) with a petition drive, but they’ll probably reverse course when they hear all that stuff Ron Johnson said.
   
• The Waukesha, WI, school board has reversed its decision to opt out of a universal free meal program, after finding that the nation did not look kindly upon logic like “low-income kids will get addicted to food.”
   
• Disgraced short-lived Jeopardy! host Mike Richards has also lost his executive producer gig at the show. A smarmy Icarus for our times. 

Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) has launched an effort to stop Democrats from closing a tax loophole for the rich in their reconciliation package—a loophole that she called “one of the biggest scams in the history of forever” all of four months ago. At the moment, capital gains aren’t taxed at death, and when heirs sell assets they inherited, they only have to pay taxes on the difference between the sales price of the investment and the value when they recieved it. If billionaires simply hold onto their assets until their dick-shaped spaceships finally explode, they and their heirs avoid paying huge sums in taxes. Democrats have proposed a capital-gains tax at death to shut that down and generate billions in tax revenue to fund Biden’s social and environmental priorities. Heitkamp, now the chair of a new group called Save America’s Family Enterprises (SAFE), has launched a six-figure ad campaign to kill that proposal, claiming that it will hurt middle-class families, and Black and Latino people in particular. This is malarkey in its purest form: The capital-gains loophole overwhelmingly benefits the ultrawealthy, who are overwhelmingly white. Heitkamp herself used to know that, before somebody started paying her to forget.

In 2021 mental health is finally a thing, especially as people are not feeling like their normal selves. Let’s support one another and talk openly. Whether or not therapy is your thing, knowing it’s available and affordable is important, for you or perhaps a loved one.  

Millions of people are trying and loving online therapy. It doesn’t have to be sitting around just talking about your feelings.

So, what is therapy, exactly? It’s whatever you want it to be.

You can privately talk to someone if your stress is too much to manage, you’re battling a temper, having relationship issues, anxiety, depression, etc… Whatever you need, there’s no more shame in these normal human struggles. We take care of our bodies, why not our minds, too? Without a healthy mind, being truly happy and at peace is HARD.

BetterHelp is customized online therapy that offers video, phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist, so you don’t have to see anyone on camera if you don’t want to. It’s much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours.

It’s always a good time to invest in yourself, because you are your greatest asset. See if online therapy is for you by heading to BetterHelp.com/crooked for 10% off your first month.

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler warned on Tuesday that unions will consider pulling support for Democrats (cough, Kyrsten Sinema) who refuse to reform the filibuster to pass the PRO Act.

A federal judge has rejected a right-wing effort to block Washington state’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. 

President Biden is considering commuting the sentences of certain nonviolent drug offenders who were released to home confinement during the pandemic. 

The UN Environment Program announced Monday that the world has officially done away with leaded gasoline.