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    Wins for Kemp and Carr in Georgia show Trump’s grip on GOP slipping

    Wins for Kemp and Carr in Georgia show Trump’s grip on GOP slippingThe former president had sought to oust the governor as part of his crusade to punish those involved in his 2020 defeat Georgia governor Brian Kemp won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, easily overcoming a challenge from former senator David Perdue in a resounding setback for Donald Trump.The Associated Press projected Kemp the winner over Perdue, one of a trio of Georgia races on Tuesday night that revealed limits to Trump’s power over the party he has remade in his image. As part of a post-presidential crusade to punish the Republicans he blames for his 2020 defeat, Trump had sought to oust Kemp along with the state’s Republican attorney general and Republican secretary of state.US midterm primaries: five key races to look out forRead moreFueled by retribution after the officials refused to overturn the results of the presidential election in Georgia – a contest that multiple reviews determined was won by Joe Biden – Trump courted Perdue, who fully embraced the myth of a stolen election. But Trump’s imprimatur was not enough. Polling in the final weeks of the race showed him trailing far behind the incumbent governor, whose conservative agenda drew the support of many of the state’s big donors and political leaders.Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who memorably denied Trump’s request that he “find” votes in 2020, appeared poised to secure the party’s nomination for re-election against the Trump-backed congressman Jody Hice.Meanwhile, Georgia’s Republican attorney general Chris Carr beat back a challenge from John Gordon, who made Trump’s stolen election myth a central plank of his campaign.Kemp will now face Democrat Stacey Abrams, setting the stage for a rematch of their showdown in 2018, when she narrowly lost the governorship but emerged as a rising star on the left and a prominent advocate for voting rights. The race for governor of Georgia is expected to be one of the fiercely fought contests of the cycle.Bee Nguyen, a state representative and ally of Abrams, appears poised to clinch the Democratic nomination for secretary of state while Carr will face Democratic state senator Jen Jordan in the race for attorney general.Once deeply Republican, Abrams is credited as a leading architect of the party’s expanding electoral power in Georgia, culminating in last year’s election of two Democratic senators.Trump’s misses in Georgia come as Republicans still await the results of a nail-bitingly close Senate race in Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon who Trump endorsed, is running neck-and-neck with David McCormick, a hedge fund executive.Even in the races where Trump’s preferred candidates lost, the election results so far this primary season are a testament to how entrenched Trump’s big lie has become. In Pennsylvania last week, Republicans nominated Doug Mastriano, one of the most prominent spreaders of misinformation about the 2020 election, putting him in striking distance of the governor’s office.In a sign that not every race was going against Trump in the state, former football star Herschel Walker won the Republican nomination for Senate in what is already shaping up to be a marquee race that could determine control of the evenly-divided chamber.Riding Trump’s endorsement and his own celebrity in a state where football often seems to reign supreme, Walker managed to deflect questions about his academic and business achievements and a history of violence against his ex-wife. Walker, who is Black, will face incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, a longtime civil rights champion and the state’s first Black senator who is running for a full term after winning the seat in a special election in 2021.In the north-west corner of the state, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene cruised to victory in a primary that tested conservatives’ tolerance for her extremist brand of politics, a week after voters in North Carolina ousted her ideological ally, congressman Madison Cawthorn.While much of the focus was on Republicans, two popular Democratic incumbents reflective of the coalition that powered Biden’s victory in the state squared off in the newly redrawn seventh district. In the end, congresswoman Lucy McBath prevailed in the race over fellow House Democrat, congresswoman Carolyn Bourdeaux to win the party’s nomination, the Associated Press projected.McBath was recruited to run for office after her 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed. Since his death, McBath has been an outspoken advocate for stricter gun laws.McBath’s victory came just hours after a shooting occurred at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left at least 18 children dead.Georgia is one of several states holding primary elections on Tuesday.In Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former White House press secretary under Trump, secured the Republican nomination in the race to become the state’s next governor. Sanders is heavily favored to win the general election in November to replace the current Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, who is term-limited.If elected, Sanders will follow in the footsteps of her father, former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who led the state from 1996 to 2007.In Alabama, the retirement of long-serving Republican senator Richard Shelby, set off another expensive intra-party power struggle for the seat. According to the Associated Press, the primary race was headed for a runoff in June between Katie Britt, the former leader of the Business Council of Alabama, and Republican congressman Mo Brooks, who came in second. Trump initially endorsed Brooks, but rescinded his support when their relationship soured.Meanwhile, in Texas, George P Bush, the former president’s nephew, failed to take down the embattled attorney general, Ken Paxton, in a runoff election that tested the strength of the Bush family’s political dynasty.Paxton, who was endorsed by Trump after leading an unsuccessful lawsuit that asked the US supreme court to overturn the 2020 election, despite no evidence of widespread fraud, is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation related to allegations of corruptions and, separately, was indicted in 2015 for securities fraud. He has denied wrongdoing.And in a competitive Democratic runoff for a House seat in south Texas, centrist congressman Henry Cuellar was in the fight for his political life against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros. As of early Wednesday, the race was too close to call.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaRepublicansUS politicsStacey AbramsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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    US midterm primaries: five key races to look out for

    US midterm primaries: five key races to look out forElections will test Trump’s enduring hold over Republican party while a progressive tries to unseat a Democratic centrist in Texas It is election night in America as a swath of primary races take place in states ranging from Georgia to Texas to Alabama.Here are some key races to watch out for:Progressive v anti-abortion Democrat: Texas faces pivotal primary runoffRead moreGorgia governor: A big blow for Trump?Trump’s preferred candidate for the Georgia governor’s race is former senator David Perdue but he is badly trailing incumbent Brian Kemp by a significant margin.Trump’s thirst for revenge over Kemp for refusing to block Joe Biden’s win in Georgia, or support the big lie that the election was stolen, became calcified in his backing of Perdue, but if polls prove accurate and his preferred candidate goes down, the value of the once-coveted Trump endorsement will be further eroded.Mike Pence, the once-loyal deputy tipped for his own White House run in 2024, amplified his divergence from Trump by rallying for Kemp in Kennesaw on Monday night. “When you say yes to Governor Brian Kemp tomorrow, you will send a deafening message all across America that the Republican party is the party of the future,” Pence said in another stinging rebuke for Trump’s backwards-looking obsession with his 2020 election defeat.Pence is among a number of senior Republicans who are working to achieve that, however inadvertently. At a conservative conference in Florida in February, Pence said Trump was wrong to think the election could be overturned, and that to try to do so was “un-American”.Georgia secretary of state: Big lie or not?The race in Georgia for the hitherto little-known position of secretary of state has assumed national importance as the holder of that post effectively runs the state’s elections – and Georgia is of paramount importance now in presidential elections.The race on the Republican side is between the incumbent Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who became nationally known for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results, and his Trump-backed challenger and big lie peddler, Congressman Jody Hice.There has been record turnout during early voting, and polls show a close race between Hice and Raffensperger.Georgia Senate: How will Herschel Walker do?One of the biggest Trump-endorsed winners is likely to be the former NFL star Herschel Walker, who is handily placed to win the Republican nomination for senator in Georgia.Walker is, as journalist Justin Glawe observed in this profile for the Guardian, a relatively rare political being: a Black, Trump-supporting Republican with a base consisting largely of white conservatives.Already a household name from his years in football, Walker went into the election with an almost certainly unassailable lead, ahead in some polls by more than 55 points, according to Real Clear Politics.Some Republican opponents have questioned the electability of Walker, a close friend of Trump, according to the Associated Press. He has a history of violence against women and has made multiple gaffes on the campaign trail. He also skipped the primary debates. He has been open about his long struggle with mental illness and acknowledged violent urges.Texas congressional race: A new leftist or will centrism triumph?Texas 28 is a heavily gerrymandered, predominantly Latino congressional district that rides the US-Mexico border, including the city of Laredo, before sprawling across south-central Texas to reach into San Antonio.During the primary election in March, voters there were so split that barely a thousand votes divided the incumbent centrist Democrat Henry Cuellar from insurgent progressive Jessica Cisneros, while neither candidate received the majority they needed to win.As Alexandra Villarreal wrote for the Guardian: “Now, the runoff has come to represent not only a race for the coveted congressional seat, but also a referendum on the future of Democratic politics in Texas and nationally.“The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, House majority whip, James E Clyburn, and House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, have thrown the full-throated support of the Democratic establishment behind Cuellar, while endorsements from progressive icons such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have elevated Cisneros as a rising star on the national stage.”Alabama Senate: Can a Republican ditched by Trump still win?In Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is looking to show that a Republican can not only survive having the endorsement of Donald Trump taken away, but actually thrive without it.The rightwing politician was a happy Trump follower but made the mistake of saying it was time to look ahead to future elections and not focus on Trump’s loss in 2020’s election – which Trump falsely says was stolen from him.That was enough for a furious Trump to pull his backing. But Brooks remains competitive in a race that seems likely to head to a runoff next month, with no candidate winning more than 50%.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansDemocratsexplainersReuse this content More

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    The American right is whitewashing Hungary’s nasty, autocratic regime | Jan-Werner Mueller

    The American right is whitewashing Hungary’s nasty, autocratic regimeJan-Werner MüllerUS conservatives are signaling their commitment to authoritarianism loud and clear by holding this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest – the first-ever outside the US In political analysis, sometimes the hardest thing is to see what’s staring you right in the face. Putin put in writing what he was going to do this spring – we just could not believe it, or we thought we’d prove our savviness by identifying some completely counterintuitive twist to the story of an invasion foretold. A similar challenge is posed by American conservatives communicating their commitment to authoritarianism loud and clear by holding this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Budapest – the first ever outside the US: the autocratic leader of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is the main attraction, with plenty of European far-right party leaders as supporting acts. Could these American ingenues abroad just be duped by a leader intent on selling his kleptocratic autocracy as the last bastion of authentic conservatism or, as he likes to put it, real “Christian Democracy”? Maybe there’s some twist? Or perhaps, as Cpac’s hero Trump once proclaimed, it is what it is: from Tucker Carlson down, these figures are aware that Hungary has exited the democratic world; they just repeat the Orbán regime’s talking points when confronted with evidence for it. They end up cheerfully endorsing Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in Europe.Orbán has long tried to promote his regime internationally as a model of “illiberal democracy.” The idea is that the leader enjoys overwhelming support from the people, while implementing a decidedly anti-liberal agenda in matters of immigration and social policy: rewarding people financially for procreation, legally cementing traditional notions of marriage and affirming the supreme value of the nation-state against “globalists” allegedly “opening all borders.” Such a stance has resonated with conservatives who felt that the right kept suffering endless culture war defeats in western Europe and North America; the ideology espoused by the self-proclaimed “plebeian” Orbán has also provided a template for a newly fashioned “national conservatism” that seeks to combine nationalism with state intervention in economy and morality.Orbán’s self-declared illiberalism, just like Putin’s attacks on “obsolete liberalism,” laid a trap: instead of focusing on his party’s systematic capture of the state and economy – creating an oligarchy-friendly autocracy that in many ways resembles Russia – critics were dragged (or belligerently entered) on to Orbán’s preferred battleground: culture and morality. He and his allies could triumphantly charge that the very liberals celebrating diversity and tolerance were zealots determined to destroy conservative ways of life. Never mind that “liberal nihilists” (Orbán’s words) in Brussels do not dictate to EU member states how to regulate abortion or, for that matter, immigration – like so many far-right populists, Orbán has been adept at creating a community defined by imaginary common victimhood. Those allegedly intent on victimizing Hungary could change over time – one year, it was migrants, then George Soros, then Brussels. What had to remain constant was a sense of mortal threat, where national existence is at stake day and night.Hungary (and Poland) have been lavished with attention by conservatives who, from the safety of prestigious chairs at North American universities, lament their status as victims of “cancel culture” and the alleged “soft totalitarianism” of the US left: the land of the Magyars became an anti-liberals’ Disneyland – where you can still tell who’s a man and who’s a woman! – or even, as a Hungarian government official put it, a “conservative safe space.” Voices that are ubiquitous in western debates – like British-born historian Niall Ferguson – would visit Budapest to bemoan the fate of free speech in US academia, suggesting that the situation had started to resemble Stalinist Poland. Such a performance of victimhood was all the more remarkable because it was staged in front of the very prime minister who had forced Hungary’s best university to leave (inviting a Chinese university to open a branch instead), radically reduced media pluralism (leaving a few tiny liberal outlets in place for the sake of plausible deniability) and reshaped the cultural scene in the name of promoting nationalist values.It is tempting not to see things for what they are: perhaps all these intellectuals are just what used to be known as “useful idiots” – similar to the polit-tourists who went to the Soviet Union and came back with good news about workers joyously building socialism. But the latter were usually duped – whereas at least some of the conservatives enjoying their pálinka in one of Budapest’s Scruton cafes (named after the conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton) appear to know full well what is happening in their new favorite ideological holiday destination. They are simply willing to sacrifice democracy for the realization of their favorite Catholic natural law precepts, or for stopping what Orbán, among many other conspiracy theorists, identifies as the “great replacement” – substituting Muslims for the last real Christians on the old continent.Critics are usually brushed aside with the charge that left-liberal Orbánophobes just happen to be frustrated that their desire for a “woke autocracy” remains unrealized in a far-away country about which they know little; to boot, they are accused of being not just intolerant, but, deep down, anti-democrats: after all, how can they call a man who has won four consecutive elections decisively (generating a two-thirds majority in parliament on each occasion) an autocrat? What’s more, how can they mind the fact that he is building up a middle-class constituency (or so the justification of corruption by Orbán’s in-house intellectuals runs) – or, if that doesn’t sound right, how about the fact that everyone is corrupt anyway, in eastern Europe?If such rationalizations sound curiously Trumpist, that’s because they are. After all, the conservative and religious fellow travelers of the 45th president also were never short of reasons to excuse his power- and money-grabbing. Nobody is denying that Orbán has genuine followers, just like Trump does. Yet Orbán’s claim to a great democratic mandate is dented by the fact that recent elections, while being free, have been utterly unfair: the main opposition candidate was literally given five minutes on state TV during the entire campaign; state resources were shamelessly used to promote the governing party; and, not least, the electoral system is rigged in the incumbents’ favor. Contrary to the cliche of a crazy left cancelling anyone who disagrees, the problem is not that states cannot set their own immigration policies, or that there can be no debate about family policy – it’s that Orbán has unleashed one hate campaign after another, most recently with a government “protect the children” campaign associating homosexuality with pedophilia.Had Trump ever built a political theme park, it may well have resembled Orbánistan. Hungary provides a preview of plans for the US – if one cares to look.
    Jan-Werner Mueller teaches at Princeton and is a Guardian US columnist. His most recent book is Democracy Rules
    TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansViktor OrbánHungarycommentReuse this content More

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    Joe Biden says US recession ‘is not inevitable’ despite rampant inflation – as it happened

    Joe Biden is warning Americans that the fight against inflation is “going to be a haul”, and that relief for soaring prices of goods, services and especially gasoline is unlikely to be immediate.But the president, speaking in Tokyo earlier today as he launched a new trade deal with 12 Indo-Pacific nations, told reporters that he doesn’t believe a recession is “inevitable”.Biden is acutely aware that the inflation crisis is uppermost in voters’ minds ahead of November’s midterm elections. There was little comfort for him in a bleak new CBS poll released Monday that finds 69% of the country thinks the economy is bad, and 77% saying they’re “pessimistic” about the cost of goods and services in the coming months.“This is going to be a haul. This is going to take some time,” Biden told reporters in Tokyo. In response to a reporter’s question specifically about a recession, Biden said he did not think it was “inevitable”. With his own approval ratings at the lowest point of his presidency, Biden is under pressure to try to reverse the situation and avoid Democrats losing control of one, or both chambers of Congress ion November’s midterms. That he is focused on the crisis back home while on tour in Asia would appear to back up his assertion last week that inflation was his “top domestic priority”. Critics have been quick to point out that, last summer, Biden and acolytes including treasury secretary Janet Yellen were insistent that high inflation would likely only be temporary.But it has continued to spiral, with the annual inflation rate still close to a 40-year high according to figures earlier this month. My colleague Lauren Gambino has this look at how the president is attempting to tackle inflation as the clock runs down on the midterms. The message for voters seems to be that if you think things are bad now, Republicans at the wheel would be much worse:Biden pitches Democrats as saviors for US economy ahead of midterm electionsRead moreIt’s a wrap on Monday’s US politics blog. Thanks for joining us.Joe Biden sought to allay rising fears of a recession in the US, but admitted during a press conference in Tokyo that the fight against inflation and soaring prices “is going to be a haul”.But it was the president’s comments on Taiwan, and his pledge that the US would defend the island if it was attacked by China, that raised eyebrows and caused some confusion. White House aides were forced to step in and insist nothing had changed in the US approach to China.Here’s what else we followed:
    Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis suffered defeat at the appeals court over his law attempting to ban social media companies from removing politicians, and fining them $250,000 a day if they did.
    The House ethics committee is launching an inquiry into allegations that extremist Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn improperly promoted a cryptocurrency in which he had a financial interest, and engaged in an improper relationship with a staffer.
    The Washington DC attorney general is suing Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over “data harvesting” related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
    A Covid-19 vaccine for children younger than five appears closer after Pfizer-BioNTech said clinical trials showed three low doses generated a strong immune response, and was safe and well-tolerated.
    The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election result.
    Please join us again tomorrow on a big day for US politics, including intriguing midterm primary elections in Georgia, Texas and several other states.Water restrictions are coming to California, the state’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom warned Monday, if residents do not drastically reduce usage during an ongoing severe drought.“We all have to be more thoughtful about how to make every drop count,” Newson said in a statement about his meeting today with leaders of California’s largest urban water providers.“Californians made significant changes since the last drought but we have seen an uptick in water use, especially as we enter the summer months”.Until now, the agencies have had the power to set rules for water use in the cities and towns they supply, the Associated Press says, even as California enters its third year of severe drought.But Newsom says the lack of significant rain and snow from January to March, this year the driest in at least a century, and Californians not responding to his earlier calls for water conservation, are forcing a rethink. A spokesperson for Newsom’s office said the administration would reassess conservation progress in “a few weeks”. Read more:California water use leaps 19% in March, amid one of the driest months on record Read moreAnother day, another scandal for outgoing North Carolina congressman Madison Cawthorn.The US House ethics committee is investigating allegations that Cawthorn may have improperly promoted a cryptocurrency in which he had a financial interest that he didn’t disclose, and engaged in an improper relationship with a staffer in his office, a statement from the panel said Monday. Democratic Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar will serve as the chairwoman of the panel leading the investigation, and Republican Mississippi congressman Michael Guest will be its ranking member, the statement added. The committee’s statement contained no other details into the allegations against Cawthorn.A pro-Donald Trump firebrand, Cawthorn has had his seat in the US House for one term but last week conceded defeat in a Republican primary challenge from North Carolina state legislator Chuck Edwards. His term, which began in 2021, is due to expire this upcoming January before giving way to the victor of the midterm election on 8 November. Edwards’ Democratic rival in that race is Jasmine Beach-Ferrara.Several Republican leaders abandoned Cawthorn’s side after he alleged on a podcast that he’d gotten invites to orgies during his time in Washington and had seen leading but unnamed political heavyweights in the nation’s capital abuse cocaine. He also drew ire from some quarters after calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a “thug” following Russia’s invasion of his country in February.Furthermore, police stopped Cawthorn, 26, on driving citations three times, and he was caught with guns at airport checkpoints at least twice since last year, including last month. And videos during the primary campaign’s final weeks depicted Cawthorn in sexually suggestive poses.After conceding his loss, Cawthorn went on Instagram and called for “dark forces” of former president Trump’s Make America Great Again movement to take revenge against the Republican establishment. He wrote that he was “on a mission now to expose those who says and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal.”“The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end,” Cawthorn added in his post, which thanked Trump for sticking by him, along with various other Republican congressional figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar and Rand Paul. Cawthorn’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis has been handed a court defeat over his crusade to end what he calls censorship by social media companies.A three-judge appeals panel said key parts of DeSantis’s May 2021 law prohibiting politicians and prominent persons from being “deplatformed” was unconstitutional, the Orlando Sentinel reports.The 11th circuit court of appeal refused to lift an injunction placed earlier by a Donald Trump-appointed district court judge, who disagreed with DeSantis’s assertion that big tech companies had no right to remove content or users. “Put simply, with minor exceptions, the government can’t tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it,” the court wrote in its 67-page opinion, the Sentinel said.When DeSantis signed it into law last year, free speech experts countered it was a blatant contravention of the first amendment to the US constitution, and predicted it would fall under legal challenge.Like other DeSantis “culture war” legislation, including his controversial “don’t say gay” bill and banning of “woke” math textbooks in classrooms, critics say it ignored real issues facing Floridians and was designed instead to appeal to the Republican base.The ruling strikes down $250,000 a day fines DeSantis wanted imposed on social media companies who banned political candidates. The judges allowed minor parts of the law to stand, including the right to a 60-day review period for those who are removed.Here’s a reminder of what Florida’s big tech law was about:Florida governor signs law against tech firms de-platforming politiciansRead moreLet’s take a quick look at where the day stands:
    Joe Biden caused confusion by stating the US would defend Taiwan if the disputed island was attacked by China. But White House aides are stressing nothing has changed.
    The Washington DC attorney general is suing Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over “data harvesting” related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
    A Covid-19 vaccine for children younger than five appears closer after Pfizer-BioNTech said clinical trials showed three low doses generated a strong immune response, and was safe and well-tolerated.
    The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election result.
    Joe Biden says the fight against inflation is “going to be a haul”, with immediate relief for soaring prices of goods, services and gasoline unlikely. But the president also said he doesn’t believe a recession is “inevitable”.
    My colleague David Smith has taken this look at the confusion created by Joe Biden’s comments at a press conference in Tokyo earlier appearing to undercut the US position of “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan.At a lunchtime Pentagon briefing, defense secretary Lloyd Austin said Biden’s comments were intended to stress the US commitment was “to help provide Taiwan the means to protect itself” rather than direct military intervention, and there was no change in the US’ “one China” policy.The somewhat routine press conference in Tokyo was winding down when the question came. “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”Many past American presidents would have deflected, demurred, declined to give a straight answer. Not Joe Biden. “Yes,” he replied bluntly, adding: “That’s the commitment we made.”Reporters at the scene were taken aback. Sebastian Smith, the White House correspondent for Agence France-Presse, tweeted that Biden’s answer “really raised adrenaline levels in that palace briefing room right now. Next we all get to try and explain what it all actually means.”One possible meaning is that America has abandoned its long-held position of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan. But Biden may have delivered not so much strategic clarity as strategic confusion. That would be on brand for a president who has made a habit of speaking without a diplomatic filter.China considers the democratic island of Taiwan its territory under its “one-China” principle, and says it is the most sensitive and important issue in its relationship with Washington.This is where strategic ambiguity comes in. While the US is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has never directly promised to intervene militarily in a conflict with China – but also never promised to stay out.This deliberate vagueness has – so far – helped deter China from invading Taiwan while also helping deter the self-ruled island from declaring full independence. Either scenario would trigger a major geopolitical crisis.Read the full story:Biden’s Taiwan vow creates confusion not clarity – and raises China tensionsRead moreThe fate of millions of women and American families hangs in the balance next month as we await the final ruling from the US supreme court in a pivotal case out of Mississippi, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health that includes a request for the historic abortion decision Roe v Wade to be struck down in its entirety.And millions of words have already been written about this, especially since the unprecedented leak in early May, via Politico, of the draft opinion written by hyper-conservative associate justice Samuel Alito and joined by four other right-leaning justices to give a super-majority in favor of overturning the national right to an abortion in the US.Here is the latest, very striking cover of New York Magazine.The Supreme Court will likely overturn Roe v. Wade, and the legal right to abortion will disappear in half the U.S. Abortion itself will not — and never has. In our new issue, we’ve compiled a practical guide to accessing an abortion, today and tomorrow https://t.co/RCi5xrH6T6 pic.twitter.com/8OmdsKUdjc— New York Magazine (@NYMag) May 23, 2022
    In warrior journalism mode, the magazine has an extraordinary article and interactive, noting:“The legal right to abortion is likely to disappear in half the country in a matter of weeks. Abortion itself, and the need for it, will not, and never has. The question is what it will cost medically, financially — and criminally……“…..What we’re offering here is not medical advice but a pathway to understanding your options and liabilities with a comprehensive guide to getting an abortion in the U.S. now. It will be regularly updated online to bring you the information you need.”You can read the magazine article, buy its The Cut section, here.On the subject of coronavirus and especially for all our blog readers who are missing Donald Trump not being on Twitter, here is the former president’s latest splurge on his little platform, Truth Social.Meanwhile on Truth Social this morning, Trump is slamming Dr. Birx and her scarf collection. Birx just came out with a book about the WH Covid response and talks about issues with Trump during the pandemic, like his comment about injecting bleach. pic.twitter.com/PIOOq4MRY9— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) May 23, 2022
    This recalls a tragic episode all around. Many look back at the moment they wish then-White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx had leapt out of her seat in 2020 and, physically if necessary, gagged or hustled Trump off the media briefing stage to stop him suggesting to Americans that perhaps things like sunlight and bleach taken “inside” the body could get rid of Covid-19. Or at least emphatically contradicted him at the podium.Last month Birx told ABC that the whole debacle was “a tragedy on many levels” as she was talking about the book she has out about her role during the pandemic, when she resorted to driving all around the country talking to state and local officials about how to curb the raging virus spread.Here’s the response to Trump’s latest words, from conservative commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin.He’s such a petty, small man. Factcheck: he never fired Dr. Birx. https://t.co/3HgrTzbbYw— Alyssa Farah Griffin 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@Alyssafarah) May 23, 2022
    US Senator Jeff Merkley has announced he has contracted the coronavirus. The Oregon Democrat attributed the mildness of his current symptoms to the fact that he is fully vaccinated and boosted.He urged everyone in the US to get similarly protected and warned, on Twitter: “Covid is still among us.”pic.twitter.com/r5XmUosx7i— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) May 23, 2022
    The US pushed through the world’s most successful program to develop vaccines against Covid in record time, approving the first safe and effective dose for emergency use in December, 2020, less than a year into the pandemic.Unfortunately, the country also has lost a million people to the virus, more than any other nation on record.The New York Times noted, using Australia as an example, that: “If the United States had the same Covid death rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives would have been saved.” The article noted a number of characteristic that influenced this number, including socio-political factors such as people’s collective trust in institutions and each other.Washington DC’s attorney general has sued Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the Facebook co-founder personally responsible for his alleged role in allowing the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of millions of Americans during the 2016 election cycle.The suit, filed in the capital by the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to unknowingly gather the personal data of US voters in an attempt to help Donald Trump’s election campaign.“This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release. NEW: We’re suing Mark Zuckerberg for his role in Facebook’s misleading privacy practices and failure to protect millions of users’ data.Our investigation shows extensive evidence that Zuckerberg was personally involved in failures that led to the Cambridge Analytica incident.— AG Karl A. Racine (@AGKarlRacine) May 23, 2022
    Washington DC’s attorney general has sued Mark Zuckerberg, seeking to hold the Facebook co-founder personally responsible for his alleged role in allowing the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of millions of Americans during the 2016 election cycle.The suit, filed in the capital by the District of Columbia attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to unknowingly gather the personal data of US voters in an attempt to help Donald Trump’s election campaign.“This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release.“This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including chief executives, will be held accountable for their actions.”Meta declined to comment.Racine has previously sued Facebook’s parent company, Meta, under the District of Columbia’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act. The act makes individuals responsible for violations if they knew about them at the time.The suit against Zuckerberg is based on hundreds of thousands of documents, including depositions from employees and whistleblowers, that have been collected as part of its ongoing litigation against Meta.“Since filing our landmark lawsuit against Facebook, my office has fought tooth and nail against the company’s characteristic efforts to resist producing documents and otherwise thwart our suit. We continue to persist and have followed the evidence right to Mr Zuckerberg,” said Racine.Read the full story:Zuckerberg sued by DC attorney general over Cambridge Analytica data scandalRead moreA firearms “buyback” hosted by California’s Sacramento police department to get weapons off the streets proved so popular that it ran out of money within 45 minutes, The Hill reports.Cops said they recovered 134 firearms during the weekend gas-for-guns buyback that offered a $50 gas gift card per weapon turned in. The event was scheduled to run five hours, but supplies of the gift cards didn’t last even one, and it closed down after four.Among the guns received were at least one assault weapon, numerous components for “ghost guns” and multiple illegally configured firearms, police said in a Facebook statement on Sunday. Police chief Kathy Lester said: “I truly believe violent crime prevention is a shared responsibility and today’s overwhelming community participation is evidence of the success we can achieve together”. Due to overwhelming response, we have exhausted our supply of gift cards for today’s gun exchange. We will still be accepting firearms but unfortunately we will not be providing gift cards from this point on. This event will be ending one hour early and will run until 4 p.m. pic.twitter.com/o9u7EohLXX— Sacramento Police (@SacPolice) May 21, 2022
    Read more about the scourge of California’s “ghost gun” plague here:Ordered online, assembled at home: the deadly toll of California’s ‘ghost guns’Read moreStarbucks is joining the exodus of western companies from Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine, Reuters is reporting.The company will exit the Russian market after nearly 15 years as the Seattle-based coffee chain closes its 130 stores operated by its licensee Alshaya Group. It has almost 2,000 employees in the country.Starbucks’ decision to wind down its operation in Russia is different to the approach some other foreign companies have taken, Reuters says.McDonald’s last week said it was selling its restaurants in Russia to local licensee Alexander Govor to be rebranded under a new name, but will retain its trademarks, while French carmaker Renault is selling its majority stake in Russia’s biggest vehicle manufacturer with an option to buy back the stake.Other western companies, including Imperial Brands and Shell, are cutting ties with the Russia market by agreeing to sell their assets in the country or handing them over to local managers.Starbucks to exit Russia after nearly 15 years https://t.co/Y74uo47vti pic.twitter.com/qXoV4Gw073— Reuters (@Reuters) May 23, 2022
    The Guardian’s Alexandra Villarreal reports from Texas on the battle between a mainstream Democrat and progressive challenger that could shape the party’s approach to midterm elections in the state:Two nearly identical text boxes appear on the respective campaign websites for Henry Cuellar and Jessica Cisneros, the Democrats locked in a heated primary runoff to represent south Texas in Congress.Cuellar’s text box warns voters that Cisneros “would defund the police and border patrol”, which “would make us less safe and wreck our local economy”. Cisneros, in turn, blasts Cuellar for opposing “women’s right to choose” amid a nationwide crackdown on reproductive care.The parallel advisories read like shorthand for the battle that’s brewing among Democrats in Texas, where centrist incumbents like Cuellar are facing a mushrooming cohort of young and progressive voters frustrated by the status quo. “I want people to take away from what we’re doing … people-power – people – can go toe-to-toe with any kind of corporate special interest,” Cisneros told the Guardian. “And that we still have power over what we want our future and our narrative to be here in Texas, despite all odds.”Texas-28 is a heavily gerrymandered, predominantly Latino congressional district that rides the US-Mexico border, including the city of Laredo, before sprawling across south-central Texas to reach into San Antonio. During the primary election in March, voters there were so split that barely a thousand votes divided Cuellar from Cisneros, while neither candidate received the majority they needed to win.Now, the runoff on 24 May has come to represent not only a race for the coveted congressional seat, but also a referendum on the future of Democratic politics in Texas and nationally.Read the full story:Progressive v anti-abortion Democrat: Texas faces pivotal primary runoffRead moreApproval of a Covid-19 vaccine for children younger than five appears closer after Pfizer-BioNTech said Monday that a clinical trial showed three low doses generated a strong immune response, and was safe and well-tolerated.The companies said they plan to soon ask global regulators to authorize the shot for the age group, children for whom no vaccine is currently approved in most of the world, Reuters reports. Submission of data to the US food and drug administration (FDA) should come later this week.The trial involved giving 1,678 children ages six months to under five years smaller doses of the vaccine than given to older children and adults. “The study suggests that a low 3mg dose of our vaccine, carefully selected based on tolerability data, provides young children with a high level of protection against the recent Covid-19 strains,” BioNTech’s chief executive, Ugur Sahin, said in a statement.We published data indicating that a low dose of 3 µg of our #mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, carefully selected based on tolerability data, is effective and provides children under 5 years of age with a high level of protection against the recent #COVID19 strains. https://t.co/EenuqWzVLt pic.twitter.com/VyDDKqJJg8— BioNTech SE (@BioNTech_Group) May 23, 2022
    Vaccine take up in the US for the five to 11 age group is still at a worryingly low level, officials say, fueling fears of a summer surge of coronavirus cases among children.The FDA and federal centers for disease control and prevention signed off on booster shots for those children earlier this month. It could be seen as proof that Donald Trump’s popularity among Republicans is on the wane, or you could take it as a worthless straw poll of a few hundred already skewed voters. But either way, the former president finished second to Florida governor Ron DeSantis in a survey of Wisconsin Republicans as to who they want as their party’s 2024 presidential nominee.The result, a 122-104 win for DeSantis over Trump in a poll of 325 Republican activists at the Wisconsin state party’s weekend convention, reported by wispolitics.com, is hardly scientific proof of anything.But it does confirm the perception of DeSantis, who has signed into law a raft of “culture war” legislation in his state in recent weeks, as a rising star in Republican circles.The one-time Trump protégé, who faces a reelection fight as Florida’s governor in November, has long been considered a likely 2024 presidential contender. His recent policy “wins”, such as the “don’t say gay” bill outlawing classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation, and the “racist” gerrymandering of Florida’s congressional maps has won him support from deep within Trump’s Maga base.In the Wisconsin poll of 2024 favorites, the only other politician to reach double figures was Nikki Haley, with a distant 24 votes. STRAW POLL NEWS: Wisconsin GOP activists are split on Donald Trump running for president in ’24.Even with him in the mix, @RonDeSantisFL was backed by a plurality of party activists who voted in the @wispolitics straw polls.See the full results:https://t.co/z80adZyizc— JR Ross (@jrrosswrites) May 21, 2022
    The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election results, according to sources familiar with the inquiry.The hearings are set to be a pivotal political moment for the country as the panel aims to publicly outline the potentially unlawful schemes that tried to keep the former president in office despite his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.According to a draft schedule reviewed by the Guardian, the select committee intends to hold six hearings, with the first and last in prime time, where its lawyers will run through how Trump’s schemes took shape before the election and culminated with the Capitol attack.“We want to paint a picture as clear as possible as to what occurred,” the chairman of the select committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson, recently told reporters. “The public needs to know what to think. We just have to show clearly what happened on January 6.”The select committee has already alleged that Trump violated multiple federal laws to overturn the 2020 election, including obstructing Congress and defrauding the United States. But the hearings are where the panel intends to show how they reached those conclusions.According to the draft schedule, the June public hearings will explore Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, starting and ending with prime-time hearings at 8pm on the 9th and the 23rd. In between, the panel will hold 10am hearings on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 21st.The select committee appears to be planning for the hearings to be extensive affairs. The prime-time hearings are currently scheduled to last between 1.5 and 2 hours and the morning hearings between 2 and 2.5 hours.A select committee member will lead each of the hearings, the sources said, but top investigative lawyers who are intimately familiar with the material will primarily conduct the questioning of witnesses to keep testimony tightly on track.Read the full story:Capitol attack panel to hold six public hearings as it aims to show how Trump broke lawRead moreJoe Biden is warning Americans that the fight against inflation is “going to be a haul”, and that relief for soaring prices of goods, services and especially gasoline is unlikely to be immediate.But the president, speaking in Tokyo earlier today as he launched a new trade deal with 12 Indo-Pacific nations, told reporters that he doesn’t believe a recession is “inevitable”.Biden is acutely aware that the inflation crisis is uppermost in voters’ minds ahead of November’s midterm elections. There was little comfort for him in a bleak new CBS poll released Monday that finds 69% of the country thinks the economy is bad, and 77% saying they’re “pessimistic” about the cost of goods and services in the coming months.“This is going to be a haul. This is going to take some time,” Biden told reporters in Tokyo. In response to a reporter’s question specifically about a recession, Biden said he did not think it was “inevitable”. With his own approval ratings at the lowest point of his presidency, Biden is under pressure to try to reverse the situation and avoid Democrats losing control of one, or both chambers of Congress ion November’s midterms. That he is focused on the crisis back home while on tour in Asia would appear to back up his assertion last week that inflation was his “top domestic priority”. Critics have been quick to point out that, last summer, Biden and acolytes including treasury secretary Janet Yellen were insistent that high inflation would likely only be temporary.But it has continued to spiral, with the annual inflation rate still close to a 40-year high according to figures earlier this month. My colleague Lauren Gambino has this look at how the president is attempting to tackle inflation as the clock runs down on the midterms. The message for voters seems to be that if you think things are bad now, Republicans at the wheel would be much worse:Biden pitches Democrats as saviors for US economy ahead of midterm electionsRead moreGood morning! Welcome to a new week, and Monday’s US politics blog. Joe Biden is in Japan, but has his attention focused on a crisis back home, claiming that a recession in the US “is not inevitable”. That’s despite raging inflation, runaway gas prices and a particularly despondent new CBS poll that finds 69% of the country thinks the economy is bad, and 77% saying they’re “pessimistic” about the cost of goods and services in the coming months.If there’s one thing Biden doesn’t have, of course, it’s time, with November’s midterm elections looming fast and the president’s personal approval ratings below 40%. We’ll take a look at his plans to try to reverse a desperate situation a little later in today’s blog.Here’s what else is happening:
    The 6 January House panel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his election defeat to Joe Biden will hold six public hearings next month to lay out the former president’s illegal scheming to remain in power.
    The US Senate convenes later today, and Democrats in the chamber are moving towards a vote on Thursday on the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act approved by the House last week in the aftermath of the massacre of 10 Black people by an alleged white supremacist in Buffalo, New York.
    Today should have seen the end of the Trump-era Title 42 immigration policy halting refugees at the southern border because of Covid-19, but a federal judge blocked the Biden administration on Friday. The justice department is appealing the move.
    Title 42 is also standing in the way of a Covid-19 relief package making any headway in Congress. Republicans won’t budge on approving a deal to fund vaccines, tests and treatments without a vote to keep the immigration policy in place, despite a sharp recent rise in cases.
    We’re expecting one or more more minor rulings from the US supreme court today, ahead of what will be the blockbuster decision of the session in the coming weeks: whether the panel overturns the 1973 Roe v Wade protecting abortion rights.
    It’s the final day of campaigning in Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas ahead of tomorrow’s primaries. Former vice-president Mike Pence will rally in Kennesaw tonight for Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom Pence’s former boss Donald Trump wants to take down for rejecting his election lies. More

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    Rudy Giuliani calls Democrat a 'jackass' during pro-Israel parade – video

    Donald Trump’s one-time lawyer Rudy Giuliani hurled profanities at a person attending a parade in New York City, calling him a jackass and saying: ‘You are probably as demented as Biden.’
    The video of the former New York mayor’s verbal clash had garnered more than 440,000 views on Monday morning, just two days after he reportedly met for hours with the US House committee investigating the deadly Capitol riots on 6 January 2021

    ‘You are a jackass’: video of Rudy Giuliani rant at Israel parade goes viral More

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    Joe Biden says US recession ‘is not inevitable’ despite rampant inflation – live

    Joe Biden is warning Americans that the fight against inflation is “going to be a haul”, and that relief for soaring prices of goods, services and especially gasoline is unlikely to be immediate.But the president, speaking in Tokyo earlier today as he launched a new trade deal with 12 Indo-Pacific nations, told reporters that he doesn’t believe a recession is “inevitable”.Biden is acutely aware that the inflation crisis is uppermost in voters’ minds ahead of November’s midterm elections. There was little comfort for him in a bleak new CBS poll released Monday that finds 69% of the country thinks the economy is bad, and 77% saying they’re “pessimistic” about the cost of goods and services in the coming months.“This is going to be a haul. This is going to take some time,” Biden told reporters in Tokyo. In response to a reporter’s question specifically about a recession, Biden said he did not think it was “inevitable”. With his own approval ratings at the lowest point of his presidency, Biden is under pressure to try to reverse the situation and avoid Democrats losing control of one, or both chambers of Congress ion November’s midterms. That he is focused on the crisis back home while on tour in Asia would appear to back up his assertion last week that inflation was his “top domestic priority”. Critics have been quick to point out that, last summer, Biden and acolytes including treasury secretary Janet Yellen were insistent that high inflation would likely only be temporary.But it has continued to spiral, with the annual inflation rate still close to a 40-year high according to figures earlier this month. My colleague Lauren Gambino has this look at how the president is attempting to tackle inflation as the clock runs down on the midterms. The message for voters seems to be that if you think things are bad now, Republicans at the wheel would be much worse:Biden pitches Democrats as saviors for US economy ahead of midterm electionsRead moreIt could be seen as proof that Donald Trump’s popularity among Republicans is on the wane, or you could take it as a worthless straw poll of a few hundred already skewed voters. But either way, the former president finished second to Florida governor Ron DeSantis in a survey of Wisconsin Republicans as to who they want as their party’s 2024 presidential nominee.The result, a 122-104 win for DeSantis over Trump in a poll of 325 Republican activists at the Wisconsin state party’s weekend convention, reported by wispolitics.com, is hardly scientific proof of anything.But it does confirm the perception of DeSantis, who has signed into law a raft of “culture war” legislation in his state in recent weeks, as a rising star in Republican circles.The one-time Trump protégé, who faces a reelection fight as Florida’s governor in November, has long been considered a likely 2024 presidential contender. His recent policy “wins”, such as the “don’t say gay” bill outlawing classroom discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation, and the “racist” gerrymandering of Florida’s congressional maps has won him support from deep within Trump’s Maga base.In the Wisconsin poll of 2024 favorites, the only other politician to reach double figures was Nikki Haley, with a distant 24 votes. STRAW POLL NEWS: Wisconsin GOP activists are split on Donald Trump running for president in ’24.Even with him in the mix, @RonDeSantisFL was backed by a plurality of party activists who voted in the @wispolitics straw polls.See the full results:https://t.co/z80adZyizc— JR Ross (@jrrosswrites) May 21, 2022
    The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol is expected to stage six public hearings in June on how Donald Trump and some allies broke the law as they sought to overturn the 2020 election results, according to sources familiar with the inquiry.The hearings are set to be a pivotal political moment for the country as the panel aims to publicly outline the potentially unlawful schemes that tried to keep the former president in office despite his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden.According to a draft schedule reviewed by the Guardian, the select committee intends to hold six hearings, with the first and last in prime time, where its lawyers will run through how Trump’s schemes took shape before the election and culminated with the Capitol attack.“We want to paint a picture as clear as possible as to what occurred,” the chairman of the select committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson, recently told reporters. “The public needs to know what to think. We just have to show clearly what happened on January 6.”The select committee has already alleged that Trump violated multiple federal laws to overturn the 2020 election, including obstructing Congress and defrauding the United States. But the hearings are where the panel intends to show how they reached those conclusions.According to the draft schedule, the June public hearings will explore Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, starting and ending with prime-time hearings at 8pm on the 9th and the 23rd. In between, the panel will hold 10am hearings on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 21st.The select committee appears to be planning for the hearings to be extensive affairs. The prime-time hearings are currently scheduled to last between 1.5 and 2 hours and the morning hearings between 2 and 2.5 hours.A select committee member will lead each of the hearings, the sources said, but top investigative lawyers who are intimately familiar with the material will primarily conduct the questioning of witnesses to keep testimony tightly on track.Read the full story:Capitol attack panel to hold six public hearings as it aims to show how Trump broke lawRead moreJoe Biden is warning Americans that the fight against inflation is “going to be a haul”, and that relief for soaring prices of goods, services and especially gasoline is unlikely to be immediate.But the president, speaking in Tokyo earlier today as he launched a new trade deal with 12 Indo-Pacific nations, told reporters that he doesn’t believe a recession is “inevitable”.Biden is acutely aware that the inflation crisis is uppermost in voters’ minds ahead of November’s midterm elections. There was little comfort for him in a bleak new CBS poll released Monday that finds 69% of the country thinks the economy is bad, and 77% saying they’re “pessimistic” about the cost of goods and services in the coming months.“This is going to be a haul. This is going to take some time,” Biden told reporters in Tokyo. In response to a reporter’s question specifically about a recession, Biden said he did not think it was “inevitable”. With his own approval ratings at the lowest point of his presidency, Biden is under pressure to try to reverse the situation and avoid Democrats losing control of one, or both chambers of Congress ion November’s midterms. That he is focused on the crisis back home while on tour in Asia would appear to back up his assertion last week that inflation was his “top domestic priority”. Critics have been quick to point out that, last summer, Biden and acolytes including treasury secretary Janet Yellen were insistent that high inflation would likely only be temporary.But it has continued to spiral, with the annual inflation rate still close to a 40-year high according to figures earlier this month. My colleague Lauren Gambino has this look at how the president is attempting to tackle inflation as the clock runs down on the midterms. The message for voters seems to be that if you think things are bad now, Republicans at the wheel would be much worse:Biden pitches Democrats as saviors for US economy ahead of midterm electionsRead moreGood morning! Welcome to a new week, and Monday’s US politics blog. Joe Biden is in Japan, but has his attention focused on a crisis back home, claiming that a recession in the US “is not inevitable”. That’s despite raging inflation, runaway gas prices and a particularly despondent new CBS poll that finds 69% of the country thinks the economy is bad, and 77% saying they’re “pessimistic” about the cost of goods and services in the coming months.If there’s one thing Biden doesn’t have, of course, it’s time, with November’s midterm elections looming fast and the president’s personal approval ratings below 40%. We’ll take a look at his plans to try to reverse a desperate situation a little later in today’s blog.Here’s what else is happening:
    The 6 January House panel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his election defeat to Joe Biden will hold six public hearings next month to lay out the former president’s illegal scheming to remain in power.
    The US Senate convenes later today, and Democrats in the chamber are moving towards a vote on Thursday on the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act approved by the House last week in the aftermath of the massacre of 10 Black people by an alleged white supremacist in Buffalo, New York.
    Today should have seen the end of the Trump-era Title 42 immigration policy halting refugees at the southern border because of Covid-19, but a federal judge blocked the Biden administration on Friday. The justice department is appealing the move.
    Title 42 is also standing in the way of a Covid-19 relief package making any headway in Congress. Republicans won’t budge on approving a deal to fund vaccines, tests and treatments without a vote to keep the immigration policy in place, despite a sharp recent rise in cases.
    We’re expecting one or more more minor rulings from the US supreme court today, ahead of what will be the blockbuster decision of the session in the coming weeks: whether the panel overturns the 1973 Roe v Wade protecting abortion rights.
    It’s the final day of campaigning in Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas ahead of tomorrow’s primaries. Former vice-president Mike Pence will rally in Kennesaw tonight for Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp, whom Pence’s former boss Donald Trump wants to take down for rejecting his election lies. More

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    America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forces | Robert Reich

    America’s billionaire class is funding anti-democratic forcesRobert ReichBillionaire donors are pushing an unsettling agenda for America – backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy itself Decades ago, America’s monied interests bankrolled a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism and constitutional democracy.Today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America – backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting and even questioning the value of democracy.Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15m to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”Thiel has donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions.Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, which includes Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote. As Thiel wrote:
    The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
    Rubbish. If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are drowning democracy in giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates who repeat Trump’s big lie.Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s rich ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?Last Tuesday night, Doug Mastriano, a January 6 insurrectionist and Trump-backed big lie conspiracy theorist, won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania (the fourth largest state in the country, and the biggest state that flipped from 2016 to 2020). Mastriano was directly involved in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election by sending an “alternate” slate of pro-Trump electors to the electoral college – despite the fact that Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes.If Mastriano wins in November, he will appoint Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will oversee the 2024 election results in one of the most important battleground states in the country.Meanwhile, the major annual event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) – the premier convening organization of the American political right – was held this past week in Budapest.That’s no accident. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have become a prominent source of inspiration for America’s anti-democracy movement. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, describes Orbán’s agenda as that of a “Trump before Trump”.Orbán has used his opposition to immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and religions other than Christianity as cover for his move toward autocracy – rigging Hungary’s election laws so his party stays in power, capturing independent agencies, controlling the judiciary and muzzling the press.He remains on good terms with Vladimir Putin and has refused to agree to Europe’s proposed embargo of Russian oil.Tucker Carlson – Fox News’s progenitor of white replacement theory – broadcast his show from Budapest. Trump spoke remotely. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows also spoke (although he refuses to speak to the House committee investigating the January 6 assault on American democracy).If America and the world should have learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s, it’s that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – which in turn lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.Peter Thiel may define freedom as the capacity to amass extraordinary wealth without paying taxes on it, but most of us define it as living under the rule of law with rights against arbitrary authority and a voice in what is decided.If we want to guard what is left of our freedom, we will need to meet today’s anti-democracy movement with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of self-government from authoritarian strongmen like Trump and his wannabes, and from big money like Peter Thiel’s.
    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
    TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansSilicon ValleyPeter ThielcommentReuse this content More