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- Former Republican congressman and intelligence officer Denver Riggleman on Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)
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So much for that “bloodbath.”
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Blessings be, Democrats kept the Senate. For now. First, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) was declared the winner in his reelection bid in Arizona late Friday. Then, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) cinched the Democratic majority, defeating her Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, after all votes were counted. Laxalt hails from a Nevada political dynasty, but he was also Nevada’s secretary of state who helped boost disgraced former president Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election, and, as such, suffered a similar fate to many election deniers last Tuesday. Cortez Masto, the most endangered Dem going into midterms, also ran a solid ground game, traveling to Nevada’s rural districts and soliciting support from local Republican officials.
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The Senate election wasn’t the only big news to come out of Nevada; voters there also narrowly approved a ballot measure making sweeping changes to their state’s election system. The measure establishes open-primary elections in which the top five candidates advance and then a ranked-choice voting system for general elections both state and federal, excluding presidential elections. Supporters of the measure say that this will empower unaffiliated voters who could not previously vote in the closed-primary elections, while the most common opposition argument continues to be that ranked-choice voting is too confusing.
- So Dems are at 50 in the Senate. With Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote, the majority is theirs, but no one should grow complacent now, particularly with another Georgia runoff in our immediate future. 51-49 is a lot more comfortable than 50-50, and it gives pesky little defectors like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kirsten Sinema (D-AZ) less power to gum up legislation. It will also make Senate committee investigations and judicial confirmations easier to bear, while leaving the Democratic caucus less vulnerable to COVID-related absences. The Georgia runoff will be held on December 6, with early voting starting on November 28 through December 2, thus far on weekdays only. Georgia is barred from holding early voting on the second Saturday before a runoff if the preceding Thursday or Friday are state holidays. Saturday the 26th falls two days after Thanksgiving, and one day after a state holiday commemorating Robert E. Lee’s birthday (the official name was changed to “State Holiday” in 2015, but come on, Georgia). The law restricting Saturday early voting after holidays was passed in 2016, and opposed by voting-rights advocates.
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In short, we need Warnock back in his seat for a full term.
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Dems are now projected to lose the House of Representatives, with Republicans expected to take a slim three-seat majority (thanks again, New York State Democratic Party), which means the January 6 Committee will be dissolved, as will all other House investigations of Trump. However, if Warnock retains his seat, the upper chamber will gain the power to subpoena records and persons related to these investigations. This is important because even though Trump is two years out of office, information about his corruption hasn’t stopped being exposed. A new report released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee today found that the governments of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Turkey, China, and Malaysia collectively spent more than $750,000 at the former Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, “at sensitive times for those countries’ relations with the United States.” Kinda sounds like another way of saying bribery, doesn’t it?
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A new report from the New York Times makes it crystal clear that Trump sicced the IRS on his enemies like former FBI director James Comey and Comey’s former deputy Andrew McCabe, both of whom received rare, “random,” highly intrusive audits. Trump and the IRS have denied wrongdoing, but the fact that Comey and McCabe were selected for these “random” audits in a group of 5,000 out of 153 million returns, is too much of a coincidence to have actually been one. In an interview with the Times, Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly confirmed that this was no accident, and was instead the result of explicit demands from the former president. So maybe that should be looked into, as well! But there’s more that Democrats could do in Biden’s lame duck session than just investigate Trump further. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wrote, many progressives would like to see Senate Democrats eliminate the debt ceiling, and finally neutralize a mechanism whose only purpose is to allow Republicans to hold the global economy hostage in order to extract concessions for themselves and their wealthy friends at the expense of the rest of us.
Regardless of which way Georgia goes on December 6, the work has just begun. But Dems should do everything in their power to keep Warnock in his seat, or else we’re going to see the swearing in of the first senator with CTE, and Republicans will benefit from a power imbalance on Capitol Hill in the runup to the 2024 election.
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Crooked Coffee is all about making your life a little less chaotic, so we just launched three limited edition holiday boxes to make gift giving easy. Each box is filled with full-sized bags of delicious medium and dark roast coffee, and a fun activity that isn’t scrolling through Twitter. Pick from 3 different boxes for 3 types of people: the Extremely Online Box with witty magnetic poetry for your fridge, the Craft Lovers Box with a learn-to-crochet kit inside, and the Home Baker Box with the insta-famous apple cider donut kit from Farmsteady that’s so popular it’s almost always out of stock. Plus, this Holiday Season, every order from Crooked Coffee will support Vote Save America’s Every Last Vote fund to make sure every voice can be heard in the face of unprecedented voter suppression.
There’s a limited quantity, so head to crooked.com/coffee to shop before we sell out.
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American intelligence officials have compiled a classified report detailing extensive efforts by the United Arab Emirates to manipulate the U.S. political system. The activities covered in the National Intelligence Council report include illegal and legal attempts to steer American foreign policy to advance the interests of the oil-rich Arab autocracy. UAE’s covert (and not always so covert) campaign spanned multiple presidential administrations, and exploited the American political system’s reliance on campaign contributions, susceptibility to lobbying firms, and lax enforcement of disclosure laws to manipulate government action. This report is remarkable because it centers on the influence operations of an allied nation rather than an adversary. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment when asked about the report, and the UAE’s ambassador to Washington said he is “proud of the UAE’s influence and good standing in the U.S.” The UAE enjoys a more privileged standing here than other Arab nations, and many believe that activities like those detailed in this report have flourished due to Washington’s unwillingness to reform foreing influence laws, while other activities in the report more closely resemble espionage. The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, and hundreds of millions more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many of which happen to produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests. Sounds bad!
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The U.S. is opening an external investigation into the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank back in May. Israel’s minister of defense Benny Gantz says that Israel will not be cooperating. Classic response from someone with nothing to hide!
Forty-eight thousand academic workers in the University of California system went on strike today over the university’s bargaining practices with their union.
MAGA nightmare Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) is planning to challenge House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in his next bid for the Speaker’s gavel, endangering the national popcorn supply.
With a new supermajority in the state legislature, Florida Republican leaders confirmed they are discussing the pursuit of further restrictions on abortion in the state, which already has a highly restrictive 15 week ban with no exceptions for rape and incest.
Flu season is looking scary as hell this year - be sure to get your shot! And stay away from me!
The Director of the CIA met with his Russian counterpart in Turkey today to warn the Kremlin against the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Disgraced former president Donald Trump has sued the January 6 committee to try to get out of his subpoena, but Republicans are just gonna dissolve the committee anyhow (covering up crimes is their thing) so it’ll probably be moot.
In a new interview with ABC’s David Muir, former Vice President Mike Pence said that former president Trump’s rhetoric on January 6 was “reckless” and endangered him, his family, “and everyone at the Capitol building.” Thank you, Mike, for saying this nearly two years after it would’ve actually been an honorable and useful thing to do, now that you’re selling a book.
Three football players at the University of Virginia were fatally shot on Sunday night at the Charlottesville, VA, campus.
At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, with founder Sam Bankman-Fried having secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds to his own trading company. Who could have seen this coming except everyone?
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The Virginia Department of Education proposed revisions to the commonwealth’s history and social-science learning standards late Friday night, and folks, they’re not good. The state Board of Education had been scheduled to vote on the guidelines in August, but held off to give its five new members—all appointees of Gov. Glenn Yougkin (R-VA)—additional time to review the standards and allow for additional public comment. The original guidelines were developed over months in consultation with museums, historians, academics, political scientists, geographers, economists, teachers, parents, and students. The new standards…weren’t. The Virginia DOE said that the new standards “will recognize the world impact of America’s quest for a ‘more perfect Union’ and the optimism, ideals and imagery captured by Ronald Reagan’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ speech.” The immediate Reagan reference provides a, uh, subtle hint about this new curriculum’s political bent.
The standards were, thus, criticized by educators as a politically motivated interference in the ability of teachers to do their jobs and deliver impartial academic instruction. The president of the Virginia Education Association, a union representing more than 40,000 education workers in the commonwealth wrote that the standards, “are full of overt political bias, outdated language to describe enslaved people and American Indians, highly subjective framing of American moralism and conservative ideals, coded racist overtures throughout, requirements for teachers to present histories of discrimination and racism as ‘balanced’ ‘without personal or political bias,’ and restrictions on allowance of ‘teacher-created curriculum,’ which is allowed in all other subject areas.” Once again the “Facts don’t care about your feelings!!!” crowd has decided to rewrite history that makes them uncomfortable.
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