Who will Joe Biden pick as running mate?

Who will Joe Biden pick as running mate?

U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has vowed to choose a woman as his running mate.

And there are fresh calls for him to name to a black candidate, as protests against racial injustice sweep the U.S. and the world.

Here are some of the top names in the mix.

For Senator Kamala Harris, it could be the next best thing after dropping out of the presidential race herself.

She eventually endorsed Biden but irked some in his camp when she criticized Biden in a primary debate on NBC for his past opposition to school busing.

The daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, Harris could win over black voters, a crucial part of the Democratic base.

Another contender, Amy Klobuchar, could have the opposite effect, some black leaders say.

The 60-year-old senator is a white moderate and previously served as the top prosecutor for Minnesota, but her record on police misconduct could weigh against her.

The officer charged with killing George Floyd was involved in a fatal shooting in 2006.

A decision was taken not to charge Derek Chauvin on that occasion.

It happened while Klobuchar was county attorney, although she took no part in the case.

But Klobuchar could help Biden appeal to moderate and working-class white voters in potential Midwestern battlegrounds like her home state.

"I have won in the reddest of red congressional districts and with some ease. And I've done it by going not just where it's comfortable, but where it's uncomfortable."

Another prospect is Atlanta Major Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Biden praised her leadership during the unrest that swept Georgia and she was also one of Biden’s strongest backers, having endorsed him early in the primary in June of 2019.

In contrast, U.S. Representative Val Demings of Florida only endorsed Biden in March this year.

But she’s still touted as high on the short list.

Demings has a lower national profile, but she helped manage the House impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

Elected in 2016 as a congresswoman in Florida, another key election battleground, she previously served as the first female police chief in Orlando.

Other notable contenders for vice president include Senator Elizabeth Warren, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams.

The vetting process is underway and expected to wrap up by July - as the larger fight looms for the November 3rd election.


Posted in Uncategorized

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Excerpts from Trump’s race speech; ditching the ‘welfare queen’ myth

The Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a regular feature of Daily Kos.

For a portion of my years at the Los Angeles Times, one of my assignments was helping to find and syndicate columnists and edit or supervise the editing of their work. Not columnists published in the Times itself but at other newspapers. I inherited a lot of them, almost exclusively white and mostly conservatives including Mona Charen, Cal Thomas, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, and Armstrong Williams, with a handful of moderates or liberals like Robert Reno, William Pfaff, and Jesse Jackson. 

This part of my job was a constant battle with my bosses. Every time I tried to recruit a liberal woman or another person of color, I was told “we already have” syndicated women or we already have a Black columnist. Molly Ivins? I had been told to try to recruit columnists from other syndicates, the kind of raiding all syndicates engaged in at the time, and she was one of my first efforts. She had told me early on in our discussions that if our contract was better than her soon-to-expire contract with Creators Syndicate, she’d sign with us. But “we already have three women,” I was told by my bosses. That wasn’t the argument when I suggested anyone as a possible Latino columnist. We had no syndicated Latinos, liberal or otherwise, when I arrived at the Times and none when I left. They claimed there was not a big enough audience for a syndicated Latino columnist. I did manage to recruit and get approved the lesbian columnist Deb Price.

This situation wasn’t solely bias on the part of my superiors. I heard the same rap from dozens of editorial page and op-ed page editors when trying to interest them in someone I had managed to get past the bosses: “We already have a Black columnist,” “we already have a woman columnist (even though half the time they were talking about Erma Bombeck). 

If I had tried to put forward a columnist as far to the left as, say, Cal Thomas is to the right, I would have been laughed out of the room. In the two decades since then, scores of newspapers have folded and the survivors have deeply downsized their staffs and slashed the number of syndicated columnists when they haven’t eliminated them completely. While there has been somewhat of a shift on some newspaper op-ed pages, the majority of columnists today still range from moderate to ultra-conservative, with rare exceptions, and the proportion who are women or people of color is still far below what it should be. That shift is disturbing to certain folks. As Alex Shepard writes below, “the opinion pages were safe spaces for white, reactionary writers” in the past,” and they aren’t happy with the direction things are going. 

Alex Shepard at The New Republic writes—The Real Snowflakes on the Op-Ed Page:

For years, conservative and centrist columnists have been depicting college campuses as if they were the settings of horror movies. A virus is incubating and spreading. Every year, more and more people are infected with wokeness. The stakes might be small—a misconstrued story about Chinese food and Oberlin College is frequently cited—but, these writers argued, something much scarier is afoot. Every year, more snowflakes enter the real world, spreading cancel culture through every strata of society. Soon, the whole world will be a campus.

The furor following The New York Times’ publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed was, for many of these writers, a vindication. During a town hall meeting on Friday at the Times, in which staffers voiced their outrage and concerns, op-ed columnist Bari Weiss took a victory lap. She tweeted that the debates about political correctness on campus—the debates she had warned about—were now on the front door of the country’s leading newspaper, as well as “other publications and companies across the country.” New York magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan has spent the last week tweeting variations of “We all live on campus now,” the headline of a column he wrote in 2018. National Review was somehow even more histrionic: The headline to a Tuesday David Harsanyi column about the Cotton op-ed described recent events without irony as a “Cultural Revolution.” The big issue for these writers wasn’t systemic racism or police brutality. It was the return of Maoism.

These arguments rest on the idea that liberal democracy is under threat—from an increasingly authoritarian right wing, sure, but also from an increasingly dogmatic left. Sullivan has recirculated a 2019 diatribe about Ibram X. Kendi’’s bestseller How to Be an Anti-Racist, whose recent presence on bestseller lists he has bemoaned. “They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech,” he wrote.

Despite all the paeans to liberal democracy, Sullivan and Weiss’s project is a small one. Other anxieties are apparent. For decades, the opinion pages were safe spaces for white, reactionary writers. These writers are lashing out at a loss of impunity, and a rise in editorial standards, that is making opinion journalism stronger.

So Kaepernick kneeling was disrespectful to the vets & members of the U.S. military. However, removing statues of men who took up arms against & murdered/commanded forces who murdered soldiers in the U.S. military is un-American. pic.twitter.com/4fUX8HCHBs

— Angela NotValdez Doe (@soygatita11) June 11, 2020

Mara Gay at The New York Times writes—Good Riddance to One of America’s Strongest Police Secrecy Laws:

Protest works.

The large street demonstrations in scores of cities and towns across the country are bringing sudden and sweeping changes to police practices and accountability.

Minneapolis is preparing to disband and rebuild its police department.

California is poised to ban the use of police chokeholds.

Dozens of cities are considering redirecting millions in taxpayer funds from America’s heavily militarized police departments to education, health care, housing and other needs of black and Hispanic neighborhoods that have been underinvested in for generations.

New York took a step toward reform with the repeal Tuesday evening of a state law known as 50-a, a decades-old measure that has allowed the police to keep the disciplinary and personnel records of officers secret. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign the bill. [...]

In New York State, the repeal must be the beginning of changes to policing, not the end. The violent response to largely peaceful protests has pulled back the curtain on what black Americans already knew: that local police departments across the United States, including in New York, are too often abusive and unaccountable to the very people they are supposed to serve. It is time for far-reaching reform.

Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Here is Trump’s speech on race — word for word, alas:

President Trump’s planned address to the nation on race, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan reports, is being written by none other than Stephen Miller, a Trump aide and aficionado of white nationalism.

This is bound to raise a fuhrer. What next? Paul Manafort drafting a presidential address on business ethics?

But Miller can stand down. Trump has already given his remarks on race — many times, in fact. Here they are, entirely in Trump’s own words, excerpted:

I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks. Oh, look at my African American over here. Look at him. [...]

Why do we need more Haitians? Why are we having people from all these shithole countries come here? We should have more people from places like Norway.

An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud. His grandmother in Kenya said, “Oh, no, he was born in Kenya.” A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.

That�s Native American Taliban to you, Theodore, because Native Americans are the ones who toppled it. pic.twitter.com/9AuslCm4i4

— Brett Chapman (@brettachapman) June 11, 2020

As someone born in Georgia the same year two Black World War II veterans and their wives were lynched 60 miles east of Atlanta by 20 men who fired 60 bullets at them and then cut the fetus out of Mae Dorsey, who was seven months pregnant, I find the removal Confederate monuments, ripping down of Confederate battle flags displayed in public spaces, and the renewed drive to rename the 10 U.S. military bases named for Confederate traitors refreshing even though this is all symbolic.

The neo-Confederates and other promoters of the Lost Cause are obviously unhappy with this shift away from tolerance for these symbols. Unhappy with this tearing down of what they dare call “American heritage.” I suspect a goodly proportion of them will be even unhappier with the punishment meted out when the transformation of U.S. policing ends impromptu lynchings like George Floyd’s.

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones writes—Donald Trump, Like the Confederacy, Is Picking the Wrong Hill to Die On. All your bases are belong to the US:

The US military, the New York Times pointed out in an editorial last month, has 10 bases named for former Confederate officers. They include Camp Beauregard, named for the officer who fired on Fort Sumter to start the Civil War; Fort Pickett, named for the person most synonymous in American military history with futile slaughter; Fort Lee, named for the person who ordered that slaughter and ultimately lost the war; and Fort Gordon, named for a person many people are saying was a Klansman. In recent weeks, as protesters have pushed governments across the world to remove monuments to notorious racists—or taken the matter into their own hands—these bases have once again been a target for criticism. On Tuesday, retired General David Petraeus and former CIA chief David Petraeus argued in The Atlantic that the time had come to “remove the name of traitors” from American bases.

But President Donald Trump, who is an idiot, has a different point of view. On Wednesday, he responded that changing the names of these bases would rewrite the nation’s “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom”:

Just to make sure the message was clear, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany followed up with a statement arguing that changing the names would insult soldiers who died overseas

John Nichols at The Nation writes—Georgia Shows How Serious the Threat of Voter Suppression Will Be This November:

Georgia is now ground zero for voter suppression. The state’s largest newspaper summed up the crisis on the morning after Tuesday’s primary election in the state descended into chaos: “‘Complete Meltdown.’” Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, ticked off the evidence of “a system that is failing” voters: “malfunctioning machines, long lines, polling sites that opened late and insufficient numbers of back up paper ballots in Georgia.”

LaTosha Brown, the cofounder of the group Black Voters Matter, tweeted early Wednesday morning: “Georgia’s Elections were a HOT MESS! Last voter walked out at 12:37am in Union City.” Brown and her group provided support for voters who waited five or more hours to cast ballots in predominantly African American precincts, while noting that in suburban precincts there were fewer lines. Referring to the stark disparity, she said, “I come over to this [suburban polling place], and white folks are strolling in. On my side of town, we brought stadium chairs.” [...]

The Georgia primary was such a fiasco, such an overwhelming affront to the basic premises of American democracy, that it cries out for a response. But that response cannot begin or end in one state. 

Trump holding first major rally during covid in Tulsa, site of horrible massacre of blacks in 1921, on Juneteenth, is equivalent to Reagan kicking off 1980 campaign in Neshoba County Mississippi where KKK murdered Goodman, Chaney & Schwerner & saying �I believe in states rights�

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) June 11, 2020

Every vote that Never Trumpers shave from Donald Trump’s re-election total with their advertising and frequent cameos on cable TV is good news. But after Trump is ousted, we can count on all or most of them returning to their previous gigs pushing the extremist agenda the Republicans have been crafting for the past 40-50 years, depending on how you count. 

Jason Sattler at USA Today writes—What Never Trump Republicans deserve: The thanks of a grateful nation, and nothing more:

Key ”Never Trump” Republicans have figured out something obvious that eluded them in 2016: Stopping Donald Trump requires getting behind the one person who can finish the job — the Democratic nominee for president. They should be rewarded for this insight with the defeat of Donald Trump. And that’s it.

The Lincoln Project is made up of some of the right’s top political operatives and anti-Trump voices. They include George Conway, Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson, who has nailed Trump’s reverse-Midas touch with the coinage “Everything Trump Touches Dies” — earning him, in turn, a couple of bestsellers and a lot of coin. Before he decided to turn fire on his party’s standard-bearer, the GOP strategist helped elect lots of Republicans and torched lots of Democrats, including Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran whom Wilson helped brand as soft on terror. [...]

Democrats should feel zero obligation to put a Never Trumper in the Cabinet or on any federal court. Maybe Wilson should get a Kennedy Center Honor for coming up with “Cheeto Jesus,” but that’s it.

No olive branch should be offered beyond a joint effort to reform the executive power that allowed a bunker inspector like Trump to veer the presidency so close to dictatorship. Any appeasement beyond that could be disastrous.

John Feffer at Responsible Statecraft writes—The descent of America:

[...] Donald Trump didn’t suddenly introduce racism into U.S. foreign policy. As I wrote back in January 2018, “Trump was only putting into words an underlying principle of U.S. foreign policy. For decades, the United States has treated countries like ‘shitholes’ even if policymakers haven’t called them such, at least not in public.” Racism is reflected in U.S. budget priorities, in the minuscule size of foreign aid programs, in the pattern of U.S. interventions, in the racial composition of the U.S. Army’s “essential workers” (otherwise known as grunts), and even in the Pentagon’s militarization of domestic policing. Trump certainly didn’t create any of these dynamics, though he has often aggravated them.

Still, the current president’s elevation of racism is not simply rhetorical. There is method to his mania.

Trump is using racism as a tool to destroy whatever lingering commitment the United States has to liberal internationalism. The latter philosophy inspired Americans to help create the United Nations, launch the Peace Corps, administer foreign aid programs, and collaborate with other countries to fight global warming. This liberal internationalism has always had its defects, from paternalism to naivete. But it’s a damn sight better than the illiberal nationalism that Trump offers as an alternative.

Trump’s deployment of racism at home and abroad cuts the legs out from under liberal internationalism. No other country can take America’s human rights rhetoric seriously. No other country can accept America’s claim to impartiality as a broker of peace deals, climate deals, any deals. First put your own house in order, they will say. [...]

Newly released body camera footage from an arrest in Oklahoma City last year shows a suspect saying �I can�t breathe,� and an officer responding "I don't care," before the man died at a hospital. https://t.co/pH4ly7Nr70

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 11, 2020

Diallo Brooks at OtherWords writes—A Bittersweet JuneteenthOur ancestors were emancipated on Juneteenth, but we're still fighting for true freedom in this country:

Over the past two weeks of national protests, I have heard some people decry our criminal justice system as broken. They’re right that the system is unjust, but it’s important to understand what black folks learn the hard way: The system wasn’t built to protect us, because anti-black racism is at the core of our country’s foundation.

Even during its ugliest and most violent expressions, in other words — even when our brethren are killed — our justice system has functioned exactly as it was intended.

For more than 400 years, black Americans have been targeted and murdered in cold blood simply for being black. In the 17th century, slaves and free black Americans alike were under constant surveillance to “detect, prevent, investigate, and prosecute black alleged misconduct,” according to a brief published by the American Constitution Society.

Following our ancestors’ freedom from bondage, anti-black surveillance was codified for nearly a century through a dizzying array of Jim Crow laws that criminalized our blackness, caused widespread poverty, and generally kept us “in our place.” [...]

These profound injustices have come to the fore during this moment of acute crisis.

Tara Lachapelle at Bloomberg writes—#MeToo Made Hollywood Better. So Can This National Movement:

If corporate America and Hollywood struggled in how to respond to #MeToo, race and racial bias have been even more difficult for them to navigate. And for the same reasons: a lack of diversity up top. The broad response to the recent protests continues to oscillate between encouraging and awkward. American businesses — from fast food and makeup, to retailers and streaming-video services — flooded Instagram last week with black squares in support of the protests (though those that used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag unintentionally drowned out posts from protest organizers). They promised, vaguely, to help effect change, and in some cases are putting money behind that promise.

Some media companies are taking it a step further. On Wednesday, AT&T Inc.’s HBO Max removed the movie classic “Gone With the Wind” from its app because of the film’s racist depictions. ViacomCBS Inc.’s Paramount Network canceled “Cops,” a show that was entering its 33rd season and has been criticized for glorifying police while promoting racist stereotypes. It's a start.

But just like with #MeToo, this isn't about hiding away past bad behavior or troubling history in some dusty case under lock and key. It's about hiring and promoting more women, black people and others of color — and giving them a platform for expressing themselves. 

After Orange County's sheriff said he wouldn't enforce a health officer�s order to wear masks and she began receiving threats from residents, Dr. Nichole Quick became the seventh senior health official to resign in California since the pandemic began. https://t.co/p7HaSetxDp

— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) June 11, 2020

Jhumpa Bhattacharya, Aisha Nyandoro and Anne Price at The Nation write—If Black Lives Matter, the ‘Welfare Queen’ Myth Must Go:

Breonna Taylor and Atatiana Jefferson were both killed by the police while inside their homes for the crime of being a black woman in America. Police officers in Oakland, Calif. chose to storm into a home with riot gear and guns drawn where unhoused black mothers from Moms4Housing were providing shelter for their children in the cold winter months.

While there is less national attention paid to black women, police brutality and state-sponsored violence against black women is long-standing and pervasive.

Why do government decision-makers and police officers respond to black women with violence and indifference? Because the ever-pervasive welfare queen myth has taught us to devalue the lives and humanity of black women, making them expendable and not fully human. The term, introduced in the 1970s by Ronald Reagan, refers to women who allegedly misuse or collect excessive welfare payments. Thanks to decades of dog-whistle politics, the term has become synonymous with being black and female in America. That is the uncomfortable truth we have to grapple with.

Along with fueling ever growing inequality on racial and gender lines, the welfare queen myth is literally killing black women at the hands of our nation’s government. [...]

Black women never recovered from the Great Recession, and if we don’t change course and embark on a campaign to eradicate this narrative, the aftermath of the pandemic will be far worse. If we truly want to build an economic and political system in which black life is valued, we must finally delete the welfare queen out of existence.

The editorial board of The Washington Post concludes—Trump is spreading a dangerous conspiracy theory about antifa:

PRESIDENT TRUMP spread a deranged and dangerous conspiracy theory this week when he accused a 75-year-old man pushed to the ground by police in Buffalo of faking the force of his fall — as well as attempting to “scan” the cops. The man, claimed the president, was “antifa,” a member of a militant activist network known for violent tactics.

This allegation was entirely baseless, a shameful smear of a victim of state violence. It was also part of a pattern. The White House, with the help of Attorney General William P. Barr, is inventing a domestic terror threat from whole cloth, blaming the loose, left-wing anti-fascist, or antifa, movement for the unrest roiling the country these past weeks. The only thing that’s missing is the evidence.

Certainly, much of the property destruction and looting that has accompanied these mass demonstrations against racism have come from people with outside agendas, some political and some merely opportunistic. And certainly, antifa has smashed plenty of windows in recent years — on Inauguration Day in Washington, for example, or in Charlottesville, or at the University of California at Berkeley. Finally, it is certainly possible that individuals making mayhem at protests sympathize with antifa, or even consider themselves antifa affiliates.

Yet experts point out that disrupting demonstrations in general alignment with antifa’s goal of dismantling white supremacy is hardly the group’s ideological bailiwick. They’ve also pointed out that the group isn’t much of a group at all: that antifa is too diffuse and too small to mount a coordinated co-option campaign.

Florida�s coastal waterways are being threatened by the Trump administration, again. There�s no way in hell we will stand for this. https://t.co/fUMhFeMdrg

— Commissioner Nikki Fried (@NikkiFriedFL) June 10, 2020

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer writes—Why it took a police killing, and not a dictatorial president, to finally fill America’s streets:

The remarkable images that came out of Washington, D.C. this weekend were, in some ways, a near-fulfillment of the political fantasies of the large but loosely aligned group called “the Resistance” that had literally started forming in the pre-dawn hours of November 9, 2016 — vowing to protest, impede and eventually end the presidency of Donald Trump by virtually any means necessary.

Now, nearly 41 months into Trump’s term, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue appeared under siege, literally surrounded by tens of thousands of chanting, occasionally singing protesters. In response, the 45th president has surrounded his palace with a new insurmountable fence, and had even famously retreated to the White House bunker for a short time, in fear of the crowd. On the surface, it looked very much like what one clique on the left — the faction that has protested Trump’s unfitness from 2017′s Women’s March straight through his impeachment trial this year — had prayed for, a Hong Kong-style protest aimed at bringing an end to Trumpism.

Except there was just one thing — the hordes out in the streets of D.C. (and literally hundreds of other U.S. cities and towns) this weekend weren’t there to protest Trump, not really. The much deeper issues of systemic racism in America, enforced by violent policing and illustrated by the killing of one man, George Floyd, on a Minneapolis street corner, brought out thousands of Millennials/Gen Z’ers and people of color who’d once viewed the Trump “resistance” as more their mom’s fight.

Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—What Republicans Really Mean When They Talk About “Law and Order”:

It is worth remembering what Donald Trump said about law enforcement during his speech at the 2016 Republican convention.

An attack on law enforcement is an attack on all Americans. I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order our country.

I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done. In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate.

For a party that vacillated between being post-truth and post-policy, the mantra of “law and order” has always served as a dog whistle to the racists in their ranks, which effectively rallied the troops when Trump promised to crack down on “those people.”

The president is now deluding himself about garnering support from people of color by planning to give a speech on race relations in America. But reports suggest that his favorite white supremacist—Stephen Miller—will write the speech. That is most likely a recipe for disaster.

2 Brazil governors under fire in probes of COVID spending

2 Brazil governors under fire in probes of COVID spendingRÍO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Two Brazilian governors came under more fire Wednesday over allegations of corruption related to COVID-19 spending, with one having his home raided and another set to face an impeachment process. Federal police raided the government palace of Para state in the Amazon region as well Gov. Helder Barbalho’s home as part of an investigation into alleged fraud in the purchase of ventilators for treating COVID-19. The search order targeted a total of 23 addresses in six states and Brazil’s federal district in Brasilia, police said in a statement.


Posted in Uncategorized

Ousted State Department watchdog tells lawmakers he’s unaware if Pompeo probes were stopped

Former State Department watchdog Steve Linick — ousted last month by President Donald Trump amid ongoing inquiries into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — told lawmakers last week that he has no idea whether the Pompeo probes were halted once he left the department in mid-May.

"I would have no indication one way or the other," Linick told lawmakers last week during a private, virtual interview held by the House Foreign Affairs and Oversight Committees, according to a 253-page transcript released Wednesday.

The acknowledgment had Democratic lawmakers fretting that Linick's investigations into whether Pompeo and his wife misused State Department resources, as well as of Pompeo's handling of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, may have been stopped or slowed down by the new leader of the inspector general's office.

Linick told lawmakers that he was shocked by his removal, which came abruptly on May 15. He said he had just concluded a coronavirus briefing with staffers that morning when Undersecretary Brian Bulatao and Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, senior aides to Pompeo, asked him for a meeting.

"The deputy said to me: The president decided to exercise his power to remove you," Linick recalled.

Linick was then placed on administrative leave, losing access to his office and files. He was allowed back in the following day, with an escort, to reclaim his personal effects.

Linick's interview is the first in an ongoing review by congressional Democrats into allegations that Pompeo sought the watchdog's removal to blunt the ongoing reviews of his conduct.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump told reporters he removed Linick at Pompeo's request, but he provided no details about the rationale, despite a legal requirement to do so. His letter to Congress, required by law, simply stated that he had lost confidence in Linick. He later told reporters he had no knowledge of Linick or his performance — only that he had been appointed to the post by President Barack Obama.

Linick noted that the State Department informed Congress that the reviews were still ongoing, but he acknowledged that his successor, acting inspector general Stephan Akard, would have discretion over whether to continue it and how many resources to put into it. Akard has raised flags on Capitol Hill on both sides of the aisle because he is retaining his position as a senior State Department aide, in addition to the acting inspector general role. That dual-hatted position could jeopardize whistleblower protections or other confidential information that would normally be shared with the inspector general's office, lawmakers have warned.

Much of Linick's interview focused on allegations by Pompeo aides that Linick was suspected in the 2019 leak of an internal review to The Daily Beast, one that accused senior State Department officials of exacting political retaliation on some employees. Linick and a slew of his senior aides were ultimately cleared by the Pentagon inspector general, who he tapped to conduct the review.

The report of that investigation was provided to lawmakers, and Republicans raised questions about whether it was thorough enough and whether the Pentagon watchdog, Glenn Fine, was a neutral investigator. Fine was demoted by Trump in April after he was tapped by colleagues to monitor the federal coronavirus response. He resigned from his post last month.

Linick accused Bulatao, in particular, of "bullying" him and said he had never been given any indication that his performance was in question. Though Trump needs no cause to remove an inspector general, Linick said he never got any explanation for why the president might have lost confidence in him.

Linick also recounted his role in providing documents to Congress during the House's late-2019 impeachment inquiry and said he had been unaware that the files he turned over were the only ones provided by the State Department to lawmakers during that inquiry.

"When the impeachment proceedings started and the issues began concerning the whistleblower and so forth, I realized I was sitting on documents that might be relevant to that, and, in accordance with my obligations and to make sure that the right folks had the documents, I provided them to the Hill," Linick said.

Posted in Uncategorized

Armstead, Hutchison reelected to West Virginia Supreme Court

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Incumbent justices Tim Armstead and John Hutchison won back their seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court on Tuesday, two years after an impeachment scandal involving their predecessors.

Armstead, a former Republican speaker of the House of Delegates, won a 12-year term by defeating two candidates, ...

Posted in Uncategorized

Trump is doing everything possible to make safe red-state Senate seats competitive

Senate Democrats are looking like winners in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and North Carolina. Their leads are so large at this point that it’s hard to see, absent scandal, how they won’t win. Democrats are also looking good in the next tier of races, tied or leading in Iowa, both Georgia seats, and Montana. Kansas and Texas are in the third tier, which is lean or likely Republican, but within the realm of possibility. 

And then there are the fourth-tier races—those that are “likely or safe Republican.” While some early polling looks encouraging, it would be really tough for Democrats to pick up absent a massive Democratic wave. And here, I’m mostly talking about challenges in Kentucky and South Carolina, and our incumbent senator in Alabama. And yet, Trump’s national polling collapse threatens Republican holds on these seats even if they remain safely red in the presidential race. 

Alabama has been considered a lost cause almost from the moment that Democratic incumbent Doug Jones won the seat in a 2017 special election 50-48.3—a margin of just 22,000 votes—against a child predator, someone who even admitted approaching teenage girls while he was in his 30s. It has seemed inconceivable that Democrats would ever hold that seat during a presidential year in a state that gave Trump a 61-34 victory in 2016. 

And certainly Civiqs’ daily tracker of Trump’s job approvals in Alabama shows his job approval rating hovering in the 60-40 range for the last three years. But look what suddenly happened: 

That’s a fall from +20 net approvals during impeachment to single digits +9 today, or a net 11-point drop. That outpaces the drops we’ve seen nationally (around a net 5-point drop). 

The drop is even bigger in Kentucky, the third most pro-Trump state after Wyoming and West Virginia. 

That’s a drop from his high-water mark of around +25 net approvals (60-35) to +13 today (54-41), or a net 12-point drop.

The last of these three tough fourth-tier Senate states is South Carolina:

The drop here is actually in line with national results: a 5-point drop from +8 net approvals to +3 (50-47). 

Now, Trump will win all three of these states. And he’ll win them all easily. That’s not the point here. 

The point is that for Democrats to have any chance, they’ll need ticket splitters or voters who don’t fill the ballot past the presidential contest. The stronger the pro-Trump vote is, the tougher that task becomes.

In 2008, incumbent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is the current Republican leader in the Senate, won his election race 53-47. That same year, on the same ballot, John McCain defeated Barack Obama 57-41. McConnell ran 10 points behind the top of the ticket. 

So yeah, if Trump wins Kentucky along the same lines as his 63-33 victory in 2016, then the Democrats won’t defeat McConnell, period. But as we’ve seen in recent polling, Trump’s share of the Biden versus Trump vote is closely correlated to his personal ratings. If Trump’s popularity continues to falter in the state (and the pandemic and job losses aren’t going anywhere any time soon), that presidential race could tighten, and that hill Democrats must climb gets easier and easier. Same goes for Alabama, South Carolina, and pretty much every single other state. 

Can Democrats win these three states? If the election were today, they wouldn’t. But given Trump’s inability to show anything akin to leadership in these critical times, the more he falls, the better our chances. 

You want to chip in and help? It wouldn’t be a bad idea, so here you go!

‘Ugh’: Republicans cringe after Trump’s attack on 75-year old protester

If there was ever a tweet from President Donald Trump that Senate Republicans didn’t want to touch, it’s this one.

For four years, Senate Republicans have endured a regular gantlet of reporters’ questions about Trump tweets, ranging from attacks on their own colleagues to telling a handful of congresswomen of color to “go back” to the countries they came from.

Trump’s tweet Tuesday morning attacking a 75-year old protester in Buffalo — who was shoved by the police and bled from his head after falling — stunned some in a caucus that’s grown used to the president’s active Twitter feed. After examining a print-out of the tweet, Sen. Lisa Murkowski gasped: “oh lord, Ugh.”

“Why would you fan the flames?” she said of the president’s tweet. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

But though the moderate Murkowski was nearly rendered speechless, the missive mostly failed to get a rise out of Senate Republicans. Many know Trump will tweet something else soon they will be asked to respond to, even if the Buffalo tweet seemed a new frontier for Trump’s insult-laden social media persona.

“It’s a serious accusation, which should only be made with facts and evidence. And I haven't seen any,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) “Most of us up here would rather not be political commentators on the president’s tweets. That’s a daily exercise that is something you all have to cover... Saw the tweet. Saw the video. It’s a serious accusation.”

But those senators were the rare ones speaking out. Even Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who marched with Black Lives Matters protesters and voted to oust Trump from office in the impeachment trial, seemed exasperated.

“I saw the tweet,” Romney said. “It was a shocking thing to say and I won’t dignify it with any further comment.”

Many GOP senators declined Tuesday to respond to Trump’s tweet suggesting Martin Gugino, the Buffalo protester, “could be an ANTIFA provocateur.’ The president added, without evidence, that Gugino may have been trying to “set up” the police officers who hurt him. The tweet did not come up at the Republicans' weekly lunch, according to an attendee.

Republican senators have a well-worn playbook by now if they don’t want to wade into the latest tweet-fueled controversy by saying they hadn’t seen Trump’s latest comments. Still, even when provided paper copies of the president’s tweet on Tuesday, many declined to view them.

Sens. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) declined to comment on the tweet, saying they hadn’t read it. When asked whether they wanted to see the tweet, both showed little interest. Sen Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he had “no information about that man or who he is.”

Other senators said they’ve stopped paying attention to Trump’s tweets altogether. Citing what he called a longstanding policy about Trump, Sen Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said: “I don’t comment on the tweets.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who read a reporter’s printout of the tweet, said he knows “nothing of the episode,” which occurred last week and prompted widespread outrage. The Buffalo police department later suspended the two police officers involved without pay, and the Erie County District Attorney charged the officers with assault. Both pleaded not guilty and were released without bail.

But Cramer suggested he’s long accepted the president’s communication style.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is going to change his behavior,” Cramer said. “I’ll say this: I worry more about the country itself than I do about what President Trump tweets”

Trump’s tweets questioning Gugino’s credibility come amid a nationwide reckoning about police brutality in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Senate Republicans have urged the president to take on a more unifying tone but so far Trump has proven resistant.

Last week, peaceful protesters were cleared outside of the White House with tear gas so that the president could pose for a photo outside of a church, prompting a rare Republican rebuke.

The president’s latest attack on Gugino highlights the complicated prospects of Congress getting anything done when it comes to police reform. Democrats unveiled a sweeping police reform package Monday that would ban chokeholds and limit “qualified immunity” for police officers, among other provisions. Romney said Monday that he’s planning to introduce his own police reform bill and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is also working on a proposal.

While Republicans have offered criticism of Trump’s handling of the protests, GOP senators see little upside in getting into a public argument with the president these days.

When asked about Trump’s tweet, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.) merely replied: “I think it would best if the president did not comment on issues that are before the courts.”

Andrew Desiderio contributed to this report.

Posted in Uncategorized

Senate Republicans refuse to even look at Trump’s tweet smearing 75-year-old attacked by police

This morning Donald Trump smeared a 75-year-old American citizen attacked by police in one of the impeached president’s most delusional tweets yet, and that is saying something. "Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?" tweeted the conspiracy-promoting crackpot who has barricaded himself in the White House. (A phone. The man was holding what is known in common circles as a "phone.")

For three years, Senate Republicans have evaded questions about Trump's most grotesque behaviors by insisting that they, America's most powerful lawmakers, have not seen them. It is such a tired game that reporters like Politico's Burgess Everett and Andrew Desiderio are printing out Trump's statements to show them to shut-in senators. The result? Senate Republicans refusing to even look at the paper as they flee.

Multiple reporters pressed Republican senators for their thoughts on Trump now peddling insane conspiracy theories about an American citizen who has been hospitalized after being assaulted by Buffalo police force.

Sen. Marco Rubio: "I didn't see it, you're telling me about it, I don't read Twitter, I only write on it." (Rubio "liked" another of Trump's tweets only four days ago, one of at least 1,663 tweets known to have been read by Sen. Insert Bible Verse.)

Sen. Dan Sullivan: “I don’t want to comment right now. I’m on my way to a meeting. I’ll see it when I see it.”

Sen. John Cornyn going for the cornpone I-am-an-idiot routine: "You know, a lot of this stuff just goes over my head."

Sen. Kelly Loeffler: Fled to an elevator.

Sen. Cory Gardner: Didn't "want" to look at it. Fled.

Sen. Ted Cruz: “I don’t comment on the tweets.” (Sen. Cruz does, however, comment on other presidential tweets.)

Sen. Lamar Alexander: “Voters can evaluate that. I’m not going to give a running commentary on the president’s tweets.”

Sen. Susan Fret-Level Collins: “I think it would best if the president did not comment on issues that are before the courts.”

Breaking Republican ranks with unusual admissions that they do at least know how to read:

Sen. John Thune: “Most of us up here would rather not be political commentators on the president’s tweets. That’s a daily exercise that is something you all have to cover.” But: “It’s a serious accusation, which should only be made with facts and evidence. And I haven't seen any yet.”

Sen. Mitt Romney: “It was a shocking thing to say. And I won’t dignify it with any further comments.”

With the exception of Romney, each of these Republican senators, and all the others, voted to dismiss impeachment charges brought against Donald Trump with similar defenses. They claimed they had not seen the evidence of Trump's actions, and that they were simply too busy to bother reading it when presented. It is based on cowardice, for the most part, but also on a more transactional calculation: So long as they support Trump, no matter what radicalism, authoritarian proclamations, promotion of violence, or crimes he may commit, the party can continue recrafting America into something more pleasing to their own racist eyes.

There has been no bottom, even after an attack on an American church so that Trump could commandeer it out from under clergy for his own purposes. There will not be one any time soon. They have betrayed their country countless times now; there is no going back.

�In case you didn�t see the tweet...� pic.twitter.com/eoYHYW02dz

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) June 9, 2020

Team Trump ‘Desperately’ Wants Bush to Endorse Biden. Some Dems Love the Idea, Too.

Team Trump ‘Desperately’ Wants Bush to Endorse Biden. Some Dems Love the Idea, Too.President Donald Trump and his political lieutenants are privately hoping that former President George W. Bush will endorse Joe Biden this cycle, creating a bizarre confluence of interests with an increasing number of Democrats who are hoping for the same.To Team Trump, a Bush endorsement of Biden would allow them to hitch a formerly unpopular GOP president and the personification of dynastic politics to the Democratic Party’s 2020 ticket. They believe that Bush’s backing would drive the progressive wing of the party into a tizzy, especially if the Democratic nominee were to accept and promote it, creating internal strife for Biden at a time when he needs unity. According to two people familiar with his private remarks on the matter, Trump has said it would be “fun” if he could effectively run against both Bush and Biden. These sources with knowledge of the president’s thinking say he views both Biden and Bush as emblematic of the political establishment that he successfully ran against in the last election, and that Trump continues to harbor a visceral distaste for members of the Bush family and administration.“We would LOVE him to officially endorse Biden,” messaged a source close to the White House adding it “would be such a gift to us” citing the 43rd president’s legacy on trade, big government policies, and “constant war.”One senior Trump campaign official even said that some on the team “desperately” wanted the 43rd president of the United States to come out for Biden 2020, as it would make for easy messaging fodder. “I imagine we want it about as much as a lot of Biden people would not want it,” the official said.Bush certainly left the White House as a deeply unpopular figure, under the cloud of disastrous wars, various scandals, and a cratered economy. But his standing has improved in his years away from the political scene, including among Democratic voters. And on the few occasions he has waded back into public life, he has conveyed a more socially conscious approach to national affairs, including offering his recent support for ending systemic racism in police forces. Over time, the previously unthinkable has begun to happen, with prominent Democrats warming up to him and—now—the idea that an endorsement from him could provide an assist to the Democrats’ White House chances. “Our task is to build the broadest coalition possible,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a leading House progressive and former co-chair of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) presidential campaign, told The Daily Beast about a hypothetical endorsement. “I began my career in public service running against Bush’s war in Iraq in 2004. But no one doubts his commitment to tolerance and inclusiveness.”Khanna argued that Bush is in a “different moral league” than Trump, particularly in regard to the latter’s fondness for promoting “divisiveness” and “fearmongering.” “His endorsement would help to highlight the enormous stakes in 2020 for our democracy,” he said. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a top Biden booster, said he would “welcome” the endorsement, arguing that the public embracing of a high-profile Republican could have an electoral upside in critical swing states. “Ninety percent of Trump’s vote is the base. And the base isn’t going to care what George Bush says,” Rendell said. “Then there’s the 10 percent of Independents, suburban Republicans that stuck with him. … The question is: what effect does a George Bush endorsement have with them? I’d say, it adds weight to the entire picture that’s growing. I don’t think there’s any blowback on our side.”Ellen Defends Laughing It Up With George W. Bush at Cowboys GameIt is unclear if Bush will end up endorsing anyone for president this year, and he could very well sit on the sidelines and merely refuse to publicly support Trump’s reelection. According to a New York Times story published this weekend, Bush “won’t support the re-election of Mr. Trump.” But a Bush spokesperson told The Texas Tribune that the detail in the Times’ piece was “false.”Bush is hardly a Republican turncoat, having fundraised for conservative House and Senate candidates in the 2018 midterm elections in an effort to help preserve GOP congressional majorities—which, had it been successful in the House, would have preserved Trump’s sway on Capitol Hill. But his distaste for Trump has been evident for some time. And, in this case, the animus goes both ways. Two White House officials said they simply couldn’t care what Bush did or didn’t do ahead of this election, casting him as a trivial media obsession. “Elections are about the future, not the past,” said Ed Brookover, a former senior Trump adviser during the 2016 race. “President Bush performed well during his two terms, but people judge today’s candidates in today’s world. President Trump receives support from many voters who supported President Bush, as well as voters he pulled into his own orbit. President Trump’s policies and actions represent a new brand of leadership, which America has been needing for quite a while.”Dubya Was Bad, but the Donald Might Be Worse: Richard ClarkeFor Biden, the risks of accepting a Bush endorsement are fairly clear. The association with the Iraq War (which Biden supported), the use of torture, and the handling of Hurricane Katrina, alone, represents a heaping of political baggage that could outweigh any benefit. And some progressives were clear that they would struggle with having a president they had deeply reviled in their proverbial corner. “George W. Bush is a war criminal who lied to the American people in order to illegally invade a country. If nothing else, for that reason alone, I would never support accepting his endorsement,” said Charlotte Clymer, a LGBTQ activist who previously backed Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and has since thrown her weight behind Biden. But even Clymer found a bigger upside to the idea of an endorsement for party purposes, saying she wouldn’t be surprised to see Biden accept it “in order to remove our greatest national security threat in modern history: Donald Trump.”And among more establishment Democrats, the choice to welcome a potential boost from Bush now was seen as a no-brainer. “No one can ever accuse me of being a fan of former President George W. Bush,” said Jim Manley, a longtime senior Democratic Senate aide who served as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman during the latter Bush years. “But as far as I’m concerned, it would be fantastic if he were to come out and support the vice president. It would serve as a powerful rebuke to the current president.”James Carville, a former top adviser to President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign who is now advising the pro-Biden Democratic group American Bridge, responded enthusiastically about the prospect of a Bush endorsement for the presumptive Democratic nominee.“I fought with these guys during impeachment, I fought with these guys on the Iraq War, I fought with these guys left and right,” Carville said. “We’re in a different situation now. We have a deadly pathogen that’s infected this country and we got to get rid of it.”Put another way, Carville said: “What did Churchill say? ‘If Hitler invaded hell, I would side with the devil.’” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.


Posted in Uncategorized

Romney to offer alternative bill on police reform

Sen. Mitt Romney announced plans on Monday to introduce a bipartisan police reform bill in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, slamming congressional Democrats for their sweeping legislation that has yet to draw Republican support.

The Utah Republican, who marched with Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington on Sunday, is working with a handful of GOP senators on a bill aimed at garnering broad support from members of both parties and both chambers.

“The fact that it has no Republican sponsors, the fact that there was no effort to contact any of us to have us weigh in on the legislation, suggests it’s designed to be a message piece, as opposed to a real piece of legislation,” Romney said of the Democrats’ proposal.

Romney — who won praise from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike on Monday for joining the nationwide demonstrations — said he had talked with Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only African American Republican senator, among other GOP lawmakers.

The plan is in its early stages and has yet to be written into legislative text, but Romney said he’s aiming to create “supervisory” boards to determine whether unnecessary force or racial profiling was employed by a police officer, in addition to new training programs aimed at combating racial bias.

The Democratic proposal includes creating a “National Police Misconduct Registry,” developing a national standard on the use of force, and limiting the transfer of surplus military equipment to local police departments.

“We’ll try and fashion something that has broader bipartisan appeal,” Romney said. “If there’s injustice, we want to correct that. If there is prejudice, we want to change that. If there’s bias, we hope to give people a different perspective and that we can provide a sense of equality among our people.”

Romney also spoke emotionally about his decision to march with a group of Christian church leaders through the streets of Washington on Sunday, adding that one of his sons and some of his grandchildren also participated in protests. He also said he looked to his father, the late George Romney, whose tenure as governor of Michigan in the 1960s included marching with African Americans who were demanding racial equality.

“One of the fundamental principles of Christianity is that we’re all sons and daughters of the same God,” Romney said. “And a fundamental principle of this country is that we’re entitled to equal rights under the law and that we’re all esteemed as brothers and sisters. I stated the obvious, which is black lives matter.”

“Our whole family is very animated about the bias and the prejudice that too often still exists in a country, which is the land of the free and which was founded upon the principle that all men are created in the image of God, and are equal under the law,” he added.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, marches with a crowd singing

Romney declined to respond to President Donald Trump’s recent Twitter jabs, which were aimed at mocking Romney for joining the protests. Romney has long criticized Trump, and he was the only Republican who voted to remove the president from office in the impeachment trial earlier this year. Trump has largely alienated Romney as a result, and continues to go after him on Twitter.

“Tremendous sincerity, what a guy,” Trump tweeted in response to a video of Romney speaking with a reporter at the protests. “Hard to believe, with this kind of political talent, his numbers would ‘tank’ so badly in Utah!”

Despite Trump’s assertions, Romney’s approval rating has spiked in his home state in recent months. He said he hoped his efforts could bring more African American voters into the Republican Party.

“My party obviously has an embarrassingly small share of African American votes,” Romney said. “I certainly did in my election and we have since. And I’d like to see that change. But that isn’t what motivated me to stand up and speak. I saw a heinous murder carried out by a person with a badge. And I know that’s an outlier. ... But when there’s a bad apple, it’s got to be pointed out and addressed.”

Romney did not vote for Trump in 2016, instead writing in his wife Ann. On Monday, he said he planned to “stay quiet” on his 2020 vote.

“I’m not going to be describing who I’ll be voting for, I don’t imagine,” he said. “My plan is to stay quiet on that.”

Posted in Uncategorized