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BY BRIAN BEUTLER & CROOKED MEDIA Friday, September 6, 2019 |
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| —Amy “Snow Woman” Klobuchar, quite a few times
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| WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT DONALD |
| President Trump’s multi-day obsession with “proving” Hurricane Dorian once threatened the state of Alabama (ed note: it did not) has evolved from another one of the president’s deranged episodes into a genuinely scary glimpse into the future. Let us explain.
How’d this all begin? Several years ago on Sunday, Trump tweeted, “In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Within minutes, the National Weather Service issued a correction to avoid setting off an unnecessary panic. “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east." And with that we were off to the races.
What happened next? Grab a seat!
Isn’t this a distraction? No. The fact that the most powerful man in the world is doing crazy things is never a distraction. And the specific way he’s being crazy is particularly alarming. Trump has just gone to dangerous lengths to avoid conceding an easily-corrected mistake during a natural disaster. What happens if he gets caught making another error during a national security crisis? What if on election night he claims victory prematurely, before a full vote tally shows his opponent won? The story is important because it’s a reminder that Trump’s dishonesty and narcissism prevent him from doing his job, and the consequences of that are potentially devastating. That's the point Democrats and people covering this story should be making. |
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| The Justice Department’s antitrust division launched an investigation of Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen after the car companies reached a July agreement with California to adhere to the state’s vehicle emissions standards, which are higher than the nationwide emissions standards the Trump administration has proposed. The antitrust division is supposed to investigate companies engaged in anti-competitive behavior, but Trump has used it as a weapon to punish his political enemies—in this case, car companies that aligned with California (Trump’s most hated state). Good to know the Justice Department can do something about collusion though! |
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| The economy added a disappointing 130,000 jobs in August, according to the Department of Labor, and 25,000 of those were temporary Census workers—yet more evidence that the economy is slowing down.
The House Judiciary Committee has widened its quiet impeachment inquiry beyond the contents of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to include “questions over whether the President is enriching himself while violating the emoluments clause in the Constitution, reports Trump dangled pardons to officials who were at risk of breaking immigration laws and his involvement in hush-money payments to [c]over his alleged extramarital affairs.” Good, now let’s get the House on record endorsing this impeachment inquiry.
The Republican Parties of Nevada, Arizona, South Carolina, and Kansas intend to cancel their presidential primaries and caucuses, seemingly to protect President Trump from several nascent primary challenges.
ThinkProgress, the editorially independent progressive news site housed since 2005 in the Democratic-aligned think tank Center for American Progress, has been shut down and will be converted into a landing page for writing by the think tank’s scholars.
Investigators have discovered the chemical vitamin E acetate in nearly all of the cannabinoid vaping products linked to recent instances of severe lung disease that they’ve tested.
A federal judge appointed by President Clinton will take senior status on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, creating a vacancy that will allow Trump to flip the ideological balance of the court. Do better at protecting us, liberal judges.
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will not run for president. Tens of consultants are heartbroken. Seriously though, this is one of the best pieces of news Democrats have received all year. Schultz is extremely wealthy, and his spoiler campaign could have tipped the election to Trump. Now it’s over.
Was the widely-panned 1994 Street Fighter movie actually good? |
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| The New Yorker has obtained tens of thousands of files and emails that belonged to Thomas Hofeller, the recently deceased Republican operative who trained the modern GOP how to gerrymander states. The files contain extensive evidence that Republicans, particularly in North Carolina, used race-based voting data to divvy up black voters among districts such that they’d remain disproportionately white and GOP-leaning, in violation of the Constitution. In Greensboro, NC, Republicans drew a district line through the nation’s largest historically black college to guarantee the city would be represented by two Republicans in perpetuity. Fortunately, a North Carolina court just invalidated the state’s gerrymander, but Hofeller disseminated these tactics to Republicans in states across the country.
This is the same Thomas Hofeller who advised Republicans to add a citizenship question to the decennial Census, because it “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” That earlier revelation drove the Supreme Court’s decision this year to stop the Trump administration from including a citizenship question in the 2020 Census. After Hofeller died in 2018, his estranged daughter discovered these incriminating files on his hard drive.
Want to help stop Republicans from doing Hofeller’s dirty work all over again? Click here → |
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| Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX) has endorsed expanding gun background checks to encompass sales between strangers, which would effectively close the so-called “gun-show loophole” that exempts private purchases from government scrutiny. Such a policy would have flagged the gunman who murdered seven people across Midland and Odessa, TX. He failed a background check when he attempted a traditional purchase, before acquiring the weapon he used in a private sale.
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