The federal government said Friday that it is legal for companies to require workers to get coronavirus vaccines. Companies can also offer unlimited rewards to workers to get vaccinated, as long as the employer doesn’t administer the vaccine.
Why it matters: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finally cleared legal questions tied to how employers can increase the country’s vaccination rates. View the post here.
Senate Republicans on Friday blocked legislation to form a commission to probe the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Senators voted 54-35 on the House-passed bill, falling short of the 10 GOP votes needed to get it over an initial hurdle and marking the first successful filibuster by Republicans in the 117th Congress.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Susan Collins(Maine), Bill Cassidy (La.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.) broke ranks and voted to advance the legislation. Continue reading.
A majority of likely voters in Arizona oppose the audit state Senate Republicans forced of some 2.1 million ballots cast in the state’s 2020 presidential elections, according to a poll released Thursday by a GOP consulting firm in the state, a fact Republican analysts say could be problematic for the party in the coming midterm elections.
The poll found 55 percent of voters don’t support the hand recount of some 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, the state’s largest. Democrats overwhelmingly oppose it, but so do 68 percent of unaffiliated voters.
What’s more, 44.5 percent of likely voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported the audit, leading Chuck Coughlin, a Republican who is the president and CEO of the firm that conducted the poll, to say it proves the audit is a political liability for the GOP. Continue reading.
Georgia Republicans earlier this year passed new voting restrictions, leading corporations including Major League Baseball to protest. What followed was a big to-do about whether that was an overreaction. The bill didn’t exactly match up with Democrats’ claims of a modern-day “Jim Crow,” and many of the new provisions were within the mainstream of even blue states.
But the bill was also watered-down from much-bolder proposals that had previously passed, including one transparently targeted at limiting voter drives by Black churches. Mix in the effort’s proximity to Republicans losing the state for the first time in 28 years — and to similar efforts in other GOP-controlled states despite no proof of actual, significant voter fraud — and it wasn’t difficult to draw conclusions about why this was done.
And there was perhaps one part of the law that best drove home how much this was aimed at gaming the system. It removed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) from the state election board. This effectively allowed the GOP-controlled state legislature to appoint a majority of the board. Continue reading.
Wisconsin Republicans are particularly nihilistic, and they have been ever since the arrival of Scott Walker in the state’s politics.
[State Assembly Speaker Robin] Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials.
“Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos said…Vos said he is hiring three form er law enforcement officers along with an attorney who will oversee them. As contractors with the Legislature, they will have subpoena power. Anyone they subpoena will be immune from criminal prosecution, he said.
Wisconsin Republicans are peculiarly nihilistic, and they have been ever since the arrival of Scott Walker in the state’s politics. (Thanks again, Charlie Sykes). Wisconsin cops have a history of being particularly biased and violent. So to oversee the farce, Vos is bringing some of these people out of retirement, handing them subpoena power, and turning them loose to ratfck an election result that most of them likely believe was the product of some sort of magical swindle they learned about 1o minutes ago on the radio. Continue reading.
A Minnesota man has pleaded guilty this Tuesday to attacking an elderly couple over a Joe Biden campaign sign, CBS Minnesota reports.
Mark Anthony Ulsaker took a plea deal, dropping the second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and assaulting a peace officer charge against him. He instead is guilty of two counts of making threats of violence.
On Nov. 8, 2020, Ulsaker allegedly stopped his pickup truck at a street corner in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, where the couple stood with the Biden sign and swore at them. After parking his truck, he ran at the couple with a golf club. Continue reading.
I got a response from a concerned reader and citizen yesterday that I’d like to discuss today. It was in reaction to Tuesday’s piece about Alan Wolfe, the political scientist and sociologist who seemed to predict, in 2004, the Republicans’ turn toward fascism. He wrote in an obscure supplement to an obscure journal only niche readers saw, but reading this 17-year-old essay is like reading a profile of the Republican Party in 2021.
In my piece, I said the pundit corps still seems to hesitate using the word “fascism” even after all we’ve seen. I said that’s probably because it calls to mind images of gas chambers. It doesn’t take genocide to make a fascist, though. As Wolfe made so clear, all it takes is a totalizing worldview in which everyone in the out-group is the enemy.
To which my concerned citizen pointed out something worth dwelling on: “Hesitancy to call the GOP ‘fascist’ is justified in many minds because so many GOP elites aver that they are simply giving lip-service to MAGA and don’t really believe in it.” Continue reading.
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – On Thursday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer will keynote the DFL Party’s 2021 Founders Day Dinner. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith and Governor Tim Walz will also be speaking during the event.
Members of the media will be able to tune in to the virtual dinner at dfl.org/founders. We ask that you do not share this link with people outside of your media outlet. Members of the public looking for more information and to order tickets should visit www.dflfoundersday.com.
WHAT: A virtual fundraising dinner to celebrate the founding of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
WHO:
WHEN: 5:30 PM on Thursday, June 3rd
WHERE: Virtual – members of the media can tune in at dfl.org/founders
For decades, the GOP claimed the mantle of an economically conservative party and exploited societal issues such as racism and abortion to bolster their electoral support. Yet over the past few years, a reversal has occurred, such that the GOP’s cultural identity now eclipses any pretense of an economic agenda. As an example, just this week, Fox News declared, “Critical Race Theory Replaces Economy as Top Issue.”
Over the course of the 1980s through the 2000s, American conservative thought was often framed as primarily economically oriented. The Republican Party, however, gained electoral support by appealing to societal resentments. From Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” to encouraging turnout with anti-LGBTQ legislation, the GOP augmented cultural wars. It knew how to exploit culture to win elections and power.
Yet during all this time, the GOP had an economic agenda—”fiscal conservatism”—that appealed to voters less moved by resentment. This agenda revolved around deregulation of industry, reductions in government spending and tax cuts. The GOP also had an even broader vision: deconstruction of the social safety net as established by the New Deal and the Great Society. From Reagan to Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush, Republican leaders mounted attacks on the safety net, largely centered on privatization and incentives to encourage Americans to choose other options. Continue reading.
NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s spur-of-the-moment decision to travel to New York for a mixed martial arts fight in 2019 cost taxpayers more than $250,000, as the Secret Service had to scramble to provide security for the president on a particularly busy weekend in the city, according to federal records.
The records, which were obtained by the New York Daily News in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal that the Secret Service was only given a one-week heads up on Trump’s one-night stay in Manhattan for an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 2, 2019.
The late notice appears to have caused a logistical headache for the Secret Service, which had to find hotel rooms for dozens of agents protecting Trump on the same weekend as the New York City Marathon. Continue reading.
