President Biden met Wednesday with warring Democrats in an urgent effort to rescue his first-term agenda from potential collapse, attempting to broker a political truce that would foster passage of roughly $4 trillion in new economic spending initiatives.

Biden’s three high-stakes meetings — with party leaders and top members of the Democrats’ liberal and moderate factions — came five days before the House planned to take up a package to improve the nation’s infrastructure that could be doomed unless Democrats of all stripes unify behind it.

The internal tussle between Democratic centrists and liberals is set to come to a head Monday, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has promised to hold a vote on a bipartisan bill to improve the nation’s roads, highways, pipes, ports and Internet connections. The package is urgently advocated by Democratic centrists, who hope it will show swing voters that Democrats can deliver on nuts-and-bolts issues.

The party’s liberals are equally passionate about a separate, $3.5 trillion spending bill that proposes sweeping overhauls to the country’s health care, education, immigration and climate laws, along with a slew of new programs to help low-income Americans. Some centrists reject that price tag as exorbitant — but liberals insist they won’t support the infrastructure bill without it, leaving Democratic leaders facing a dilemma.

To the delight of his loyal fans and dismay of his equally fierce critics, former two-term Republican Gov. Paul LePage will announce his bid to unseat Maine’s incumbent Gov. Janet Mills on Wednesday during a rally at the Augusta Civic Center.

LePage’s longtime campaign media consultant, Brent Littlefield, has pitched a kinder, gentler LePage and says the former governor in recent months has been on a statewide listening tour, meeting with small groups and hearing them out, largely in private settings or in visits to fairs and festivals over the summer.

But LePage is likely to have a hard time keeping the door closed on his political past. During his eight years in Blaine House, LePage became one of Maine’s most colorful and controversial governors. He and Mills, who served as the state’s attorney general during his tenure, were frequently at sharp odds – even to the point of LePage hiring private attorneys to represent his office in lawsuits against the federal government when Mills refused to do so.

Mark Brewer, professor and political science department chair at the University of Maine, said LePage may try to offer a new persona but most Mainers will remember his litany of controversial statements.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill is disputing claims cybercriminals “flipped” 100,000 votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

The claims came from Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and an adviser to former president Trump. Lindell has been touring states in an effort to prove the election was stolen from Trump via computer manipulation. He visited Merrill and Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey last week, saying he planned to run “tests” on the state’s voter rolls.

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“All our (voting) machines are custom-built. There’s no modem component. You can’t influence them through a cell phone or a landline. There’s no way they can be probed or numbers manipulated,” Merrill told AL.com.

Merrill said Lindell purchased a copy of Alabama’s voting rolls, a service that’s available to anyone. Any analysis that shows manipulation is wrong, he added.

The porn industry needs protection. From Congress, that is.

A trade organization for the adult entertainment industry has hired a D.C. lobbying firm to build its relationships with lawmakers and to advocate on behalf of key policies that affect the industry. Most notably it is trying to beat back major changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a shield for internet platforms that safeguards them from liability for what their users post. The provision has become a flashpoint for conservatives after former President Donald Trump seized on the issue as a means of firing back at the platforms that have policed his posts.

Like the large and powerful social media companies, the porn industry says that Section 230 is key to its ability to exist. The same law that protects Instagram and YouTube from being sued over illegal content posted by its users — such as threats or hate speech — also protects sites like PornHub and OnlyFans from their own unlawful content, like child pornography or revenge porn. But many lawmakers of both parties, who have yet to reach a broad consensus on what legislation should look like, want to strip parts or all of that protection away.

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade organization for the adult entertainment industry, has enlisted two lobbyists at Clarity Consulting, a D.C.-based lobbying firm: Keith Nelson, a former Republican Hill staffer and Bush White House alumnus, along with Shawn Delaney, a longtime lobbyist with Democratic ties. In doing so, it became the first group to register to lobby on behalf of the porn industry in Washington.

As the U.S. resettles tens of thousands of Afghan refugees following a frenetic military withdrawal that Republicans condemned, their party is still struggling for a unified response.

The Donald Trump-inspired right flank of the party is veering toward an anti-refugee message with nativist undertones, warning that assistance to Afghans fleeing their nation's fall to the Taliban risks an influx of unvetted new arrivals. And the political oxygen that small but vocal number of Republicans consume is overshadowing colleagues with a more nuanced take on the impending refugee crisis.

A government funding bill passed by the House on Tuesday evening that funds Afghan resettlement programs only exacerbated those tensions. GOP lawmakers argue that the Biden administration botched the evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies from the country and can’t be trusted to properly vet the tens of thousands of refugees coming into the U.S. — but they're not on the same page about how widely to open America’s arms to the influx of vulnerable new arrivals.

As a pool of potential refugees grows, "there’s always concerns that a terrorist organization can take advantage of a mass movement of people,” Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a brief interview. “But I don’t know how that gets better by not providing funding for it.”

An autopsy confirmed the body found in a Wyoming nation park two days ago was Gabby Petito, with the cause of her death declared a homicide, officials said Tuesday.

Federal investigators immediately pledged to find the killer in the bizarre case, where the 22-year-old victim’s boyfriend went missing one week ago and remained in the wind. Petito’s body was discovered this past Sunday, weeks after she disappeared while on a cross-country trip with “person of interest” Brian Laundrie.

“The FBI and our partners remain dedicated to ensuring anyone responsible or complicit in Ms. Petito’s death is held accountable for their actions,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Michael Schneider of the Denver office.

A rueful National Park ranger, weeks after warning Petito about the dangers of a “toxic” relationship with her boyfriend, said she now wonders if a more forceful message was needed when the two crossed paths last month.

I have listened to innumerable speeches from Donald Trump, read every tweet that the man has issued, consumed years’ worth of right-wing conspiracies online and in person, and I can say this with absolute certainty: MyPillow C.E.O. Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium, held last week in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was the most illogical, confusing, mind-melting event that I have ever been to in my life, even by the high standards set by our former president.

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The stage of the South Dakota Military Heritage Center was what one expects from a large MAGA gathering these days: a 20-foot tall American flag draped overhead, cameras and correspondents from OAN, Newsmax, Right Side Broadcasting Network; smaller bloggers waving handheld tripods in the face of mask-wearing journalists, fishing for “gotcha” moments; pro-Trump wannabe local and statewide politicians shilling their campaigns. Even Steve Bannon was there to lend his nationalist imprimatur to the event, broadcasting his show War Room livefrom a box seat, and at one point doing a panel with “Brother Lindell”; elsewhere, QAnon personality InTheMatrixx was taking innumerable selfies between recording his podcast.

There were numerous “experts” who came onstage to gesture at alleged conspiratorial lines between the Chinese Comunist Party, George Soros, Hunter Biden, and the omnipresent technology that helped tabulate elections, and the son of Brazilian President and Trumpian autocrat Jair Bolsonaro, who made his own video alleging voter fraud in South America. There was even Ron Watkins, the conspiracy theorist of 8chan renown, who came in over Skype to try to find holes in a random snippet of “forensic images” of software from Mesa County, the Colorado district whose election office was investigated, in an apparent attempt to prove that someone had deleted something at some point. “There’s a lot of smoke, there must be a fire,” his co-host kept repeating, as Watkins struggled to stay connected to the audio.

But the star of the show was Lindell himself—mustachioed, belligerent, and wildly angry at everyone he thought was out for him, from tech billionaires like “Mark Zuckerbuck,” to Fox News hosts, to a 22-year-old reporter from Salon named Zach Petrizzo, whom he summoned to the stage to debate him (and then quickly rescinded the invite once Petrizzo agreed). Billion-dollar lawsuits would not deter him, nor would the “antifa attacks” that he saw lurking around every corner, because, as he proudly declared numerous times: “I’ve got the biggest mouth!”

Perhaps that is why the vast majority left the symposium before the symposium’s end, disappointed and deflated. It wasn’t because of the hilariously bad tech issues, which Lindell waved away with claims of hacking (whether it was Soros, antifa, or the CCP was unclear). I heard the story of a state senator who’d showed up, listened to Lindell ramble for several hours, then abruptly got up and took his staff home. A cybersecurity expert specializing in the “packet captures” of Lindell’s obsession—forensic data that captures IP addresses, which could, in short, determine whether data from a malicious actor had made its way into a voting machine—told me that nearly all of his colleagues had left early, and that they had never been given any data at all to scrutinize.

House Speaker Tina Kotek is pulling back on a deal to grant minority Republicans equal say in the state’s new political maps.

OPB has learned that Kotek told her caucus on Monday that she would appoint a new committee, with Democrats outweighing Republicans, in order to pass a new congressional map likely to give Democrats control of five of the state’s six seats.

That’s contrary to an agreement the House speaker cut with Republicans earlier this year, when she agreed to give them parity on the House Redistricting Committee, thereby requiring some GOP buy-in for any plan the committee took up.

Kotek explained to her members in caucus that she’d hoped that even split would result in consensus, but that Republicans ultimately refused to grant a “courtesy” vote that would allow Democrats’ plan to pass out of committee and to the House floor, where Democrats could easily approve it.