Voters Overwhelmingly Support Biden Infrastructure Plan As GOP Plots Obstruction

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A day after Senate Republicans blocked debate on a bipartisan infrastructure deal, a new poll shows about two-thirds of American voters back the framework.

On Thursday, Navigator Research released a survey of 1,000 registered voters, finding 66 percent supported the plan — agreed upon in June by President Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of senators — which would invest $579 billion in transportation, broadband, and water system infrastructure. That framework was backed by 86 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and a 46 percent plurality of Republicans.

Although 11 Republican senators agreed on the outlines of a deal in June, every single one of them — and the entire GOP caucus — voted on Wednesday to filibuster a motion to start debate on the bill. Because the motion required a three-fifths supermajority vote, the Democratic majority was stymied in its attempt to even take the plan up for consideration. Attempts to salvage an agreement are ongoing. Continue reading.

Twitter announces massive growth after banning Trump

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Social media giant Twitter has announced a massive level of growth and increase in users.

According to CNBC, Twitter revenue increased 74% this quarter, and 28% in the previous quarter. CNBC calls it “the strongest growth since 2014.”

The company banned Donald Trump on January 8, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” it said in its announcement explaining its reasons for the permanent suspension two days after Trump incited the January 6 insurrection. Continue reading.

Sen. Ted Cruz’s COVID-19 ’Guarantee’ Comes Back To Haunt Him Exactly 1 Year Later

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The Texas Republican’s prediction was “utterly, completely, in every possible conceivable way wrong,” said MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Thursday reminded Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of his exactly year-old “astoundingly, beautifully wrong” prediction that Democrats would forget about the COVID-19 pandemic if Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

“If it ends up that Biden wins in November — I hope he doesn’t, I don’t think he will — but if he does, I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors will say everything’s magically better,” Cruz predicted.

“You won’t even have to wait for Biden to be sworn in,” the Donald Trump apologist continued. “All they’ll need is Election Day and suddenly their willingness to just destroy people’s lives and livelihoods, they will have accomplished their task. That’s wrong, it’s cynical and we shouldn’t be a part of it.” Continue reading.

Trump wants to punish GOP critic — but he’s having trouble finding someone who can actually do it

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Donald Trump is laser focused on punishing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in a Republican primary race.

The ex-president’s advisers have been pressing potential challengers on their ability to raise money and the strength of their campaign organizations, hoping to find a single candidate to take down Cheney, reported Politico.

“Trump’s analysis is correct that we need to get it down to a two-person race, and at that point, the challenger is likely to win, based on the polling we’ve done,” said David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth. Continue reading.

Trump Expected His SCOTUS Picks to ‘Deliver’ on Election and ‘Disappointed’ They Didn’t: Report

Former President Donald Trump is disappointed with Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett for not standing by him over his charges of election fraud.

This is according to Washington Post’s Carol Leonnig, who revealed this bit of reporting during a Friday morning appearance on CNN’s New Day in promotion of I Alone Can Fix This, the Trump tell-all she co-wrote with Philip Rucker.

John Avlon brought up a recent CNN report that showed the Trump Department of Justices allegedly buried over 4,000 tips it received during the contentious nomination of Kavanaugh amid charges of sexual misconduct. Continue reading.

Republicans invoke ‘policy secession’ to ‘nullify’ Biden’s victory in GOP states: analysis

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Republican-controlled state legislatures are going hard to the far right, explained Ron Brownstein on Thursday.

Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and CNN political analyst, was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Gross said, “you describe this pattern of red state, very conservative legislation as remaking the country? So can you expand on that? How do you think it’s remaking the country or trying to?” Continue reading.

A Deadly Political Divide

Two Americas are on display as political conversations turn to vaccines and election results. 

Listen in on a late 20th century conversation about politics, and the banter might be about whether trickle-down economics works, or whether the federal government ought to be paying people welfare without imposing a work requirement. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and the debate might be a bit more personal, with cultural issues like abortion, gay marriage and gun control dominating the conversation and defining the two sides.

Today, the political divide has become more drastic, and more dire, with implications for life-vs.-death and democracy-vs.-autocracy. America, recovering from a deadly pandemic and a painful political campaign season, is increasingly divided into two starkly different camps: those who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID and those who got their shots; and those who think the 2020 election was rigged and those who are convinced the nation barely averted a turn toward an autocratic government.

Pollsters, accustomed to asking such quaint queries as “Do you support such-and-such?” and “Do you think the country is headed in the right direction or wrong direction?” are now posing questions they never imagined they’d ask – or have to ask. Continue reading.

Opinion: Some Republicans are pushing people to get vaccinated. It may be too late.

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There is one striking thing that distinguishes this pandemic from all previous ones in history — the speed with which humankind came up with a vaccine. It is unprecedented and still breathtaking that, within months of the arrival of a novel coronavirus, scientists were able to develop and test several vaccines that proved to be highly effective at preventing serious illness. But what science has given, politics seems to be taking away. Despite having ample supplies of the vaccine, the United States is stuck with roughly 60 percent of the adult population fully vaccinated, ensuring that the pandemic will linger, perhaps forever. Given the tools to end this tragedy, we are choosing to live with it.

As the Economist points out, the anti-vax movement in America today is unprecedented. There have always been people who objected to vaccinations, but they were on the fringe, a smattering of naysayers. The price of these rejectionists was usually small — a few outbreaks of measles every now and then. This time, it’s different. In the midst of a raging pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 Americans, we’ve seen the rise of a vast right-wing conspiracy theory about the vaccines. It has been stoked by influential figures in the conservative media and tolerated, even encouraged, by powerful Republican politicians.

The results are damning. As of June, 86 percent of Democrats had received at least one dose, compared with 52 percent of Republicans. All the states with the lowest levels of vaccination — Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Wyoming and Louisiana — voted heavily for Donald Trump. Barely half of Republican House members report being vaccinated. Continue reading.

We Now Know What the FBI Did With the 4,500 Kavanaugh Tips It Collected in 2018

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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has spent nearly three years attempting to understand the nature of the FBI’s “supplemental investigation” of claims that emerged against Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in the summer of 2018. The senator’s attempts to get answers from either the Trump White House or the FBI were largely unsuccessful while Trump was still in office. But Whitehouse kept trying—almost as soon as Merrick Garland was sworn in as attorney general, Whitehouse asked him to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how serious the FBI supplemental investigation really was.

Whitehouse asked Garland to explain why there was no mechanism for witnesses to report their accounts to the FBI, and why, after the FBI decided to create a “tip line,” nobody was ever told how the tips were evaluated. In his March letter to Garland, Whitehouse described that tip line as “more like a garbage chute, with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster.” Whitehouse asked Garland to explain “how, why, and at whose behest” the FBI conducted a “fake” investigation that violated standard procedures. Whitehouse also asked Garland to probe into the tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt that mysteriously vanished from Kavanaugh’s life in 2016.

And it seems he has finally gotten at least some answers. On Wednesday morning, Whitehouse’s office released a June 30 letter from FBI Assistant Director Jill C. Tyson. The letter is a response to an even older request sent by Whitehouse (and Sen. Chris Coons) asking similar questions about the supplemental background investigation—this one, sent to the FBI in August 2019. Among other revelations, Tyson’s letter indicates that the FBI’s supplemental investigation happened at the direction of the White House, that the most “relevant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received were referred back to White House lawyers in the Trump administration, and that in the days of the follow-up investigation, 10 people were interviewed (it doesn’t say this, but other reporting has confirmed that neither Christine Blasey Ford nor Kavanaugh were among these 10 people). The letter clarifies that this was a supplemental background check, not a criminal investigation because that is what was sought by the White House counsel’s office. Continue reading.

Rep. Ronny Jackson tries to play gotcha with the press on Democrats and vaccines — but it backfires

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U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) is demanding the media hold the Democrats’ “feet to the fire” and find out “how many” Democrats in the House and Senate “are willing to say whether or not they’ve been vaccinated?”

When told by a reporter every Democrat in the House and Senate is fully vaccinated, Jackson wanted “evidence.”

The press, especially CNN, has kept a running tally for months of every member of the House and Senate and their vaccination status. Continue reading.