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      Pittsburgh official goes viral by rebuking Ted Cruz – and looking like Jeff Daniels

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      Rich Fitzgerald, the elected executive of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, has achieved viral internet fame – for rebuking the Republican senator Ted Cruz but also for looking remarkably like the Emmy-winning actor Jeff Daniels.
      When Joe Biden took the US back into the Paris climate accord this week, Cruz, from Texas, repeated a familiar rightwing complaint, saying the new Democratic president was “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh”.
      Such barbs have been deflected before – not least by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, who reacted to Trump’s Paris withdrawal in 2017 by committing the city to the accord’s ambitious climate-related goals.
      Fitzgerald, a Democrat who attended Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, told local TV Cruz’s tweet was “outrageous”.
      “You know,” he said, “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s a climate denier. He was a Covid denier. We believe in science round here, and why Senator Cruz thinks he could tell Pittsburgh … we’re doing just fine.”
      Fitzgerald also pointed out Cruz’s role in encouraging Trump’s baseless claims that the presidential election was stolen, and his objections to electoral college results even after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, leaving five dead. Cruz nurtures presidential ambitions of his own but now faces calls for expulsion from the Senate.
      “This is a guy who was really part of the insurrection,” Fitzgerald said, “part of the denial of elections. So I don’t think this guy has any credibility. So, we’ll run what we need to do here, senator, and keep your nose out of our business.”
      Fitzgerald’s words reached a huge audience but, such are the ways of the internet, perhaps more for his distinct resemblance to the star of The Newsroom and To Kill a Mockingbird than for his appropriately Aaron Sorkin-esque decision to face down a rightwing bully.

      Jason Stapley
      (@jstaples01)
      He does have a Jeff Daniels vibe, should have ended the interview yelling this: https://t.co/sojkSlnyRL pic.twitter.com/ZcHEvtckvb

      January 22, 2021

      “Some days just shine down,” wrote Ryan Deto, a news editor for the Pittsburgh City Paper. “Rich Fitzgerald went viral for criticising Ted Cruz … then everyone on Twitter called him Jeff Daniels, and Daniels started to trend. #blessed.”
      Writing for the City Paper, Deto praised Fitzgerald’s “yinzer accent” and asked: “With his floppy mop of red hair and dad-like demeanour, who can fault anyone from making the comparison?”
      He also recounted another “humorous celebrity story” about the county executive, revealing: “A fun fact about Fitzgerald is that he once sang on stage with John Cougar Mellencamp at the Star Lake Amphitheater, just outside of Pittsburgh.
      “Jeff Daniels will never have that much yinzer cred.”
      Helpfully, in April 2019 the same paper offered readers a guide to “the yinzer vocabulary”. “Yinz”, it explained, is Pittsburgh for “y’all”. More

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      Capitol riot prompts top US firms to pull funding for leading Republicans

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      [embedded content]
      Republicans who voted to block Joe Biden’s confirmation as president have been deserted by some of the biggest corporations in the US, as some leading rightwing politicians begin to face potential consequences for the Capitol riot on Wednesday.
      A slew of companies, including Citigroup, one of the biggest banks in the US, and the Marriott hotel chain, said they would halt donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the presidential election.
      The desertion comes after riots at the Capitol on Wednesday. Despite mobs storming the building, egged on by Donald Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud, 147 Republicans voted to reject Joe Biden’s electoral victory later that same day. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were among those to dissent, along with scores of House representatives.
      “At the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, we continuously evaluate our political contributions to ensure that those we support share our values and goals,” said Kim Keck, president and CEO of BlueCross BlueShield, a sprawling healthcare company.
      “In light of this week’s violent, shocking assault on the United States Capitol, and the votes of some members of Congress to subvert the results of November’s election by challenging Electoral College results, BCBSA will suspend contributions to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy.”
      The companies’ donations amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could have a lasting impact on future elections. The political committee arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bluepac, alone donated $246,750 to Republican officials during the 2020 elections, according to Opensecrets.org.
      In a memo to staff, Citigroup said it had donated $1,000 to Hawley’s campaign – citing a “significant employee presence” in the senator’s state of Missouri, the Wall Street Journal reported. Hawley, with Cruz, has become one of the highest-profile objectors to the certification of Biden’s win, and has perpetuated hoaxes about voter fraud. There are growing calls for both men to resign.
      ‘We want you to be assured that we will not support candidates who do not respect the rule of law,’ wrote Candi Wolff, head of Citi’s global government affairs.
      ‘We intend to pause our contributions during the quarter as the country goes through the presidential transition and hopefully emerges from these events stronger and more united.’
      The Marriott hotel chain said it would also suspend donations from its political action campaign to lawmakers who opposed the presidential election results. Marriott gave $1,000 to Hawley’s election campaign and $1,000 to his leadership committee, Mother Jones reported.
      “We have taken the destructive events at the Capitol to undermine a legitimate and fair election into consideration and will be pausing political giving from our Political Action Committee to those who voted against certification of the election,” the company said in a statement.
      Boston Scientific, a medical device company, and the parent company of Commerce Bank also said they would not donate to the Republicans who attempted to overturn the election result. “At this time, we have suspended all support for officials who have impeded the peaceful transfer of power,” a spokesperson for Commerce Bancshares told the Popular Information newsletter.
      CVS, Exxon Mobil, FedEx and Target all said they were reviewing future political donations, according to multiple reports, as were Bank of America, Ford and AT&T.
      In a further blow to Donald Trump and the Republican party, the digital payment company Stripe said it would stop processing payments for Trump’s campaign website, company sources told the Wall Street Journal.
      Trump has raised more than $200m since the election, as his team has appealed for donations based on Trump’s false claims of election fraud. More

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      Don't blame Trump for the chaos in Washington DC. Blame his enablers | Lawrence Douglas

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      The Trump supporters who stormed the Congress were not the only insurrectionists in the Capitol building yesterday; a sizeable number were already gathered in the lawmakers’ chambers well before any barriers were breached. In contrast to the agitators in their MAGA hoodies and army fatigue coats, these insurrectionists were seated in their crisp suits when Nancy Pelosi gaveled the opening of the joint session. They are products of our elite schools: Stanford and Yale Law School, Princeton and Harvard Law. They are fully aware that Trump decisively lost a fair election. Yet they have opportunistically chosen to ally themselves with a potentially mortal attack on our democracy.Yet blaming Trump for the violence is pointless. Those who have followed this president knew he would never concede defeat. For the last two months, Trump has essentially become our subversive-in-chief, working overtime to overturn a democratic election. Yesterday, Mitch McConnell finally said, “back in your cage”— overlooking the fact that for years he had fed and nurtured the beast. Yet McConnell’s belated defense of democracy rings heroic compared to the tinny sounds emerging from Ted Cruz.Cruz is already positioning himself as Trump 2.0; as a smoother, more intelligent and articulate demagogue. Trump lies in gross profusion; Cruz dresses his lies in the mantle of reasoned argument. Yesterday, we heard him speak of a “better way” that would help lawmakers avoid two “lousy” choices. The first lousy choice was “setting aside the election”. Only that choice wasn’t lousy, it was seditious – and two-thirds of congressional Republicans were, before the ugly scenes, scurrying to embrace it.The second lousy choice was the one mandated by our constitutional democracy – certifying the results that had been duly ratified by the states and upheld by the courts. What makes that choice lousy? The fact, Cruz said, that “nearly half the country believes the election was rigged”.Well, yes, but perhaps the senator might have mentioned that this is only because of the disinformation that he and the president have been force-feeding the American people. In a gesture of grand statesmanship, Cruz then proposed a third alternative—the creation of an electoral commission like the one forged to resolve the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. Never mind that the Hayes-Tilden commission was confronted with a genuine electoral dispute involving states that had submitted dueling electoral certificates. Here there is no dispute, except the bogus one Cruz has helped invent. Cruz’s proposal is a perfect expression of Trumpian politics: lie often enough and you can create your own potent reality.No sooner had Cruz finished his speech and that potent reality was on all-too visible display. We can already imagine the indignant denials and reverse-accusations that Cruz would deploy should anyone try to draw a line from his stance to the violence that followed. How dare you? If anything, it’s the Democrats who are to blame. This is what happens when you ignore the legitimate concerns of millions of Americans. It appears that Wednesday’s violence has shocked some congressional Republicans into rethinking the wisdom of this particular exercise in constitutional brinkmanship. But whether any real lessons have been learned remains to be seen.We are not Germany in 1933. But we may be Munich, 1923. On 8 November of that year, a couple of thousand Nazis staged a failed putsch to topple the Weimar Republic. Ten years later the same insurrectionists seized power in Germany – through electoral means.Lawrence Douglas is the James J Grosfeld professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought, at Amherst College, Massachusetts More

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      'Traitors and patriots': Republican push to keep Trump in power seems doomed

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      All 12 Republican senators who have pledged not to ratify the electoral college results on Wednesday, and thereby refuse to confirm Joe Biden’s resounding victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election, declined to defend their move on television, a CNN host said on Sunday.
      “It all recalls what Ulysses S Grant once wrote in 1861,” Jake Tapper said on State of the Union, before quoting a letter the union general wrote at the outset of a civil war he won before becoming president himself: ‘There are [but] two parties now: traitors and patriots.’
      “How would you describe the parties today?” Tapper asked.
      The attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat seems doomed, a piece of political theatre mounted by party grandees eager to court supporters loyal to the president before, in some cases, mounting their own runs for the White House.
      Nonetheless on Saturday Ted Cruz of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin led 11 senators and senators-elect in calling for “an emergency 10-day audit” of results in states where the president claims electoral fraud, despite failing to provide evidence and repeatedly losing in court.
      The senators followed Josh Hawley of Missouri – like Cruz thought likely to run for president in 2024 – in pledging to object to the electoral college result. A majority of House Republicans are also expected to object, after staging a Saturday call with Trump to plan their own moves.
      Democrats control the House and senior Senate Republicans are opposed to the attempt to disenfranchise millions – many of them African Americans in swing states – seemingly guaranteeing the attempt will fail. Nonetheless, Vice-President Mike Pence, who will preside over the ratification, welcomed the move by Cruz and others.
      A spokesman for Biden, Michael Gwin, said: “This stunt won’t change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on 20 January, and these baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts, and election officials from both parties.”
      Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee now a senator from Utah, said: “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our democratic republic.
      “…More Americans participated in this election than ever before, and they made their choice. President Trump’s lawyers made their case before scores of courts; in every instance, they failed.
      “…Adding to this ill-conceived endeavour by some in Congress is the president’s call for his supporters to come to the Capitol on the day when this matter is to be debated and decided. This has the predictable potential to lead to disruption, and worse.”
      Encouraged by Trump, far-right groups including the Proud Boys are expected to gather in Washington on Wednesday. More

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      Ted Cruz and other Republican senators oppose certifying election results

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      Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from states where Donald Trump has contested his defeat by Joe Biden, “unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit” of such results is completed.
      The move is largely symbolic and unlikely to overturn the presidential election. Nonetheless, it adds to a sense of deepening crisis affecting US democracy.
      Trump has refused to concede, though Biden won more than 7m more votes nationally and took the electoral college by 306-232, a margin Trump called a landslide when he won it over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
      The Trump campaign has lost the vast majority of more than 50 lawsuits it has mounted in battleground states, alleging electoral fraud, and before the supreme court.
      On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a suit lodged by a House Republican which attempted to give the vice-president, Mike Pence, who will preside over the certification of the electoral college result on Wednesday, the power to overturn it.
      Nonetheless, the senators and senators-elect who issued a statement on Saturday followed Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri in committing to challenging the result.
      Objections are also expected from a majority of House Republicans. Objections must be debated and voted on but as Democrats control the House and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other senior Republicans have voiced opposition, the attempt to disenfranchise a majority of Americans seems doomed to fail.
      On Saturday, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she would vote to certify the results, writing: “The oath I took at my swearing-in was to support and defend the constitution of the United States, and that is exactly what I will do.”
      But Cruz and Johnson were joined by Senators James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana). Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed on.
      “The election of 2020,” they said, “like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
      No hard evidence for such claims has been presented. Federal officials including former attorney general William Barr and Christopher Krebs, a cyber security chief fired by Trump, have said the election was secure.
      Regardless, the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
      The senators made reference to the contested election of 1876, which ended in the appointment of such a commission.
      “We should follow that precedent,” they said.
      Most well-informed observers would suggest otherwise, given that process put an end to post-civil war Reconstruction and led to the institution of racist Jim Crow laws across the formerly slave-owning south.
      In August, the Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “The election of 1876 would not have been disputed at all if there hadn’t been massive violence in the south to prevent black people from voting and voter suppression like we have today. Now, voter suppression is mostly legal.”
      Presciently, given baseless claims that voting under a pandemic was abused by Democrats, he added: “Today, I can certainly see the Trump people challenging these mail-in ballots: ‘They’re all fraudulent, they shouldn’t be counted.’ Challenging people’s voting.”
      Cruz, like Hawley, is prominent among Republicans expected to run for president in 2024, and thus eager to appeal to supporters loyal to Trump. On Saturday, Christine Pelosi, daughter of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a member of the Democratic National Committee, referred to the bitter 2016 primary when she tweeted: “Ted Cruz is defending Trump’s assaults on democracy with more energy than he defended his own family against Trump’s assaults on his wife and father.”
      The Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote: “The exact same Senate GOP that refused to allow a single witness during President Trump’s impeachment trial now wants to … call a bunch of witnesses to ‘investigate’ Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.”
      Biden did not immediately comment. In Congress, the Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal branded the statement “pathetic”, “un-American” and “an attack on our democracy”. Amy Klobuchar, from Minnesota, said Biden “will be inaugurated on 20 January, and no publicity stunt will change that”. More

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      Trump loyalists aim to block Biden's goal to rejoin Iran and Paris agreements

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      Two prominent Trump loyalists in the US Senate, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, are reportedly pressing the president to submit the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate agreement to the chamber for ratification, in a last-minute attempt to scupper Democratic plans to take America back into the accords.In a letter obtained by RealClearPolitics, Cruz, from Texas, urges both Trump and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, to plant the seeds of an eventual showdown over the two critical international agreements in the early days of the Biden administration.As Cruz describes it, by submitting the pacts to the Senate, Trump could pave the way for a vote that would fail to achieve the two-thirds needed to ratify them – thus blocking Joe Biden’s efforts to bring the US back in line with international allies.Cruz sets out the cynical ploy in his letter. He begins by praising Trump’s decision to pull America out of both the 2015 Iran deal, which restricted its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, and the 2016 Paris accords on reducing global emissions of pollution responsible for the climate crisis.“I urge you now to remedy the harm done to the balance of powers by submitting the Iran deal and the Paris agreement to the Senate as treaties,” Cruz writes. “Only by so doing with the Senate be able to satisfy its constitutional role to provide advice and consent in the event any future administration attempts to revive these dangerous deals.”Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris agreement “on day one of my presidency”. He has similarly indicated he would revive the Iran nuclear deal as a top foreign policy objective – in both cases using his executive powers rather than relying on Congress.Cruz hopes that his tactic would cut across Biden’s intentions by declaring the accords foreign treaties which require two-thirds ratification in the Senate. Failure to achieve that margin – an impossible target in a narrowly divided chamber – would undercut any unilateral Biden move.Graham has been ploughing a similar furrow. In a stream of tweets last week the senator from South Carolina said he had been working hard “to secure a vote in the US Senate regarding any potential decision to reenter the Iran nuclear deal”.He added: “The Senate should go on the record about whether it would support or oppose this decision. Also believe Senate should be on record in support or opposition to any decision to reenter Paris climate accord.” More

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      Republicans express fears Trump will lose presidential election

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      Ted Cruz fears an election “bloodbath”. His fellow top Republican senator Thom Tillis is talking in terms of a Joe Biden presidency. And even Mitch McConnell, the fiercely loyal Senate majority leader, won’t go near the White House over Donald Trump’s handling of coronavirus protocols.Individually, they could arguably be seen as off-the-cuff comments from Trump’s allies attempting to rally support for the US president just days ahead of a general election that opinion polls increasingly show him losing.But collectively, along with pronouncements from several other Republicans appearing to distance themselves from Trump, his administration and its policies, it reflects growing concern inside the Republican party’s top tier that 3 November could be a blowout win for Joe Biden and the Democrats.“I think it could be a terrible election. I think we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress, that it could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions,” Cruz, the junior senator for Texas and former vocal critic of Trump, said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday.“I am worried. It’s volatile, it’s highly volatile,” he added, although he did say he also saw the possibility of Trump re-elected “with a big margin”.Tillis, one of several Trump associates who contracted Covid-19 apparently at a super-spreader White House event two weeks ago, faces a tough fight for re-election as senator for North Carolina, and raised the prospect of a Trump defeat during a debate against Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham.“The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the senate,” he said, inadvertently suggesting he thought a Democratic victory next month could be a done deal. “Checks and balances does resonate with North Carolina voters,” he added.Elsewhere, Republican displeasure at Trump is becoming increasingly evident, especially among candidates locked in tight election races of their own.Martha McSally, the Arizona senator trailing the former Nasa astronaut Mark Kelly by a significant margin, attacked Trump for his repeated attacks on her predecessor, John McCain. “Quite frankly, it pisses me off when he does it,” she said in a debate this week. The Texas senator John Cornyn slammed Trump this week for “creating confusion” over coronavirus and “letting his guard down” as the pandemic spread across the nation.McConnell’s comments, meanwhile, about why he has not been to the White House for at least two months could be seen in a different context, given he is 78 and in the same at-risk demographic as the already infected president.“My impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” he said.But dissent from the staunch Trump ally has been almost unheard of through the four years of the presidency. McConnell’s words seem to reflect the threat that a nationwide backlash to Trump’s pandemic handling poses to the Republican senate majority. More