You're not doing anyone any good by talking about the stuff you're supposed to not be watching.
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(Image removed from quote.)http://kandisstaylor.com/endorsements/
Previously on The Bire USA Politics thread:Quote from: benjipwns, http://www.thebore.com/forum/index.php?topic=47891.msg3026052#msg3026052(Image removed from quote.)She has a PhD.
(Image removed from quote.)She has a PhD.
Consumer prices rose 8.5% in March, slightly hotter than expected and the highest since 1981Headline CPI in March rose by 8.5% from a year ago, the fastest annual gain since December 1981 and one-tenth of a percentage point above the estimate.Real worker earnings fell by another 0.8% during the month as the cost of living outpaced otherwise strong pay gains.Still, due to the surge in inflation, real earnings, despite rising 5.6% from a year ago, weren’t keeping pace with the cost of living. Real average hourly earnings posted a seasonally adjusted 0.8% decline for the month, according to a separate Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
(Image removed from quote.)
How is that not a joke account
Censorship battles’ new frontier: Your public libraryConservatives are teaming with politicians to remove books and gut library boardshttps://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/04/17/public-libraries-books-censorship/All is going according to plan in America.
In its recently passed $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill, Congress included just $75 million for election security. That’s a fraction of what lawmakers authorized in 2020 and an amount experts say is nowhere near sufficient to address the needs ahead of the next election.At the center of this failure is the Brennan Center, an influential liberal think tank and advocacy organization. Based in New York City, the Brennan Center rarely gets public scrutiny, but it plays an outsize role in the strategic direction of the movement pushing for voting rights and election reform. That flows partly from its massive war chest, which has skyrocketed over the last decade: Between 2010 and 2020, its net earnings grew from $196,000 to $58 million. Its assets jumped from $8 million to $90 million.That financial firepower, coupled with the credibility in Washington that it has built over the years, gives the Brennan Center effective veto power over the voting rights advocacy coalition it leads. In Congress, revisions to election and voting laws are often met with the question, “What does the Brennan Center think?”
This made the Brennan Center’s decision to pull back on the effort to fund elections all the more consequential. Its political attention and lobbying shifted to passing the Freedom to Vote Act, the Democrats’ comprehensive voting rights bill that would, among other things, expand voter registration, ban partisan gerrymandering, weaken state-level voter ID requirements, and restore preclearance, a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Brennan Center played a key role in crafting the omnibus legislation, including its earlier iterations like the “For the People Act.”In a letter sent to congressional leadership in late July, a coalition of 19 national advocacy groups, including the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Mi Familia Vota, urged Congress to allocate $20 billion for election infrastructure, citing the hundreds of local election officials, mayors, and secretaries of state who had begged for that amount earlier in the month. “As the individuals and leaders closest to the administration of fair and secure elections, they have collectively called for federal support in meeting the immense needs they face,” the national groups wrote. “We write to add our voices to that important ask.”The Brennan Center declined to sign.“It was one of the most jaw-dropping moments of my professional life,” said one election reform lobbyist whose organization signed the letter and who requested anonymity to describe the coalition’s private discussions.Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said his organization “felt that the dollar amount that the letter was asking for did not make sense based on our expertise and research and policy analysis … that it was too much,” though he could not say what a better figure would be. “My colleagues on this who are aligned certainly thought it was too much, and we thought the dollar amount was too high to be asking for at that time,” he added.The timing of the ask also didn’t strike them as appropriate, Waldman said. “It was in the heat of the fight for the [For the People] Act, which we regard as the most important voting rights legislation in half a century. … I thought that [the request] was a distraction and a detour from the very hard fight needed to pass voting rights legislation.”His comments about the size of the request for election funding reflected a departure from the Brennan Center’s previous public statements, a fact noticed by both this reporter and the organization’s press shop. The following day, a Brennan Center spokesperson, Alexandra Ringe, who had been listening in on our interview, called to ask if I would consider taking Waldman’s statements about the size of the election funding request off the record, saying they would not go over well with their coalition partners. I declined.In a subsequent email, Ringe wrote that Waldman had “misremembered the decision-making related to the sign-on letter” and that fear of distracting from the Freedom to Vote Act was the sole factor in the Brennan Center’s decision not to sign. Waldman himself followed up to say that he had misspoken in our previous conversation, reiterating that the organization chose not to sign the letter “because of our concerns … that it would distract from the final push for voting rights legislation.”
The Election Infrastructure Initiative, a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, puts the tab to fully modernize U.S. elections at $53 billion over the next 10 years. The initiative has called on Congress to allocate less than half of that, $20 billion. That ask has been endorsed in letters by secretaries of state, mayors, and election administrators. In a February poll by Data for Progress, nearly three-quarters of respondents supported congressional spending to upgrade state and local voting equipment and security systems.Many local election leaders have struggled to understand why the Brennan Center — a group with the ear of influential Democrats in Congress — dropped prioritization of election funding over the last year, particularly after helping elevate their concerns during the pandemic. Moreover, while the Freedom to Vote Act would push many election reforms that are needed and overdue, those changes would not come cheap. Advocates worried that chaos could come from a slew of new unfunded mandates.Jessica Huseman, one of the country’s leading voting rights journalists, detailed many of these concerns publicly last spring in a Daily Beast op-ed. The For the People Act “was written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows,” Huseman wrote, noting that it was packed with deadlines and obligations that would be impossible for election officials to meet. “The sections of the bill related to voting systems … show remarkably little understanding of the problems the authors apply alarmingly prescriptive solutions to.”The Brennan Center quickly issued a defense of the bill it had helped draft, publishing a response to Huseman’s piece on its website. The center defended the amount authorized in funding for upgrades and maintenance. But “there have been millions in authorized funding that has never been appropriated,” Huseman, who currently serves as editorial director of Votebeat, told me. “Looking specifically to voting, the funding promised in the Help America Vote Act took 15 years to actually become appropriated, even though the states were on the hook for the requirements long before this. This is the origin of the anxiety for state election administrators, and I think it’s a well-founded concern.”“Brennan Center gets way over their skis on election policy,” said one national election reformer who has partnered with the organization on research and requested anonymity because their organization shares some of the same funders as the Brennan Center. “They’ve been great [at] fleshing out the more liberal position on voting rights, but when it comes to election administration … they are not that connected to the election officials community … and they haven’t really wrestled with the implications of what they advocate for.”“The charitable answer is they didn’t want to have a fight about money until after the bill had passed, but you can easily pass the bill and not win the money,” said the election lobbyist, who was shocked that the center didn’t join the July letter.
Throughout July, as Senate Democrats prepared their $3.5 trillion social spending request, lawmakers assured state and local election officials that their proposal would include billions for election funding. A Politico story published just four days before the package was unveiled confirmed that lawmakers were eyeing as much as $15 to $20 billion for that purpose and felt confident that they could deliver, even as their voting rights bill remained stalled.But at the eleventh hour the funding was pulled, at the urging of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had “abruptly” changed her mind, as Huseman reported in a detailed ticktock of the negotiations. Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., the author of the For the People Act, had convinced Pelosi that authorizing election funding would reduce their leverage to pass his bill, the same argument the Brennan Center used to justify not signing the coalition letter.Leading negotiations in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was angry. She felt blindsided by Pelosi’s move, per Huseman’s sources, even as spokespersons for both House leaders defended the last-minute cuts. The spokespersons told Huseman that election funding would require more “safeguards” to ensure it couldn’t be used for voter suppression, but top federal elections experts say there is no history of misspending those funds. “After all,” Huseman wrote, “it costs far less money to close polling locations and remove drop boxes, and state legislatures across the country have been doing this without any additional spending since the 2020 election.” (Klobuchar, Pelosi, and Sarbanes did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment for this story.)“All of the money that’s been released has been for specific purposes,” Kathleen Hale, a political scientist who directs the Election Administration Initiative at Auburn University, told The Intercept. “It’s all been audited; I’ve been doing this for the last 15 years, and there’s absolutely nothing going on like that.”While it was becoming too late in the negotiations process to pivot to funding elections in the infrastructure deal, the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act was looking increasingly doomed in the Senate. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., made it clear that she was not willing to gut the filibuster — a legislative move that would have been required to ensure the bill’s passage. A Punchbowl News survey of senior congressional staffers found that even among Democratic staff, just 12 percent thought the bill had a shot.Some leaders urged Congress to push forward with a narrower bill, abandoning demands like public financing of elections, to which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had expressed strong opposition. Others within the voting rights coalition faced immense pressure to stay quiet when they raised concerns about technical language in the statute, saying the Brennan Center in particular warned that even private deliberations could derail passage of the bill itself.
Election funding and election subversion are not unrelated issues. While immediate fears about subversion have been tied to rogue election clerks and state legislators, poorly funding elections heightens risk too. “Inadequately funded elections can lead to foreign or domestic actors tampering with our voting technology, voter registration databases, or machines that count ballots,” said Hasen. “And when funding is inadequate it creates opportunities for mistakes to happen and creates opportunities for people to try to manipulate things without oversight.”
His band was okay though
Trucker Itinerant Circus going wellhttps://twitter.com/ZTPetrizzo/status/1518438352017580032
The message – one of more than 2,000 texts turned over by Meadows to the House select committee investigating January 6 and first reported by CNN – shows that some of Trump’s most ardent allies on Capitol Hill were pressing for Trump to return himself to office even after the Capitol attack.“In our private chat with only Members several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call Marshall [sic] law,” Greene texted on 17 January. “I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next.”
Meadows did not appear to respond to Greene’s text.
