Twitter is demanding that Rep. Devin Nunes’ lawyer pay its legal fees in a new court filing responding to one of the Republican congressman’s attempts to identify anonymous people who heckle him online.

Nunes is suing Twitter in a Virginia court, but the new filing is part of a lawsuit that is not related to the California lawmaker.
Nunes’ attorney, Steven S. Biss, also represents former public relations executive Trevor Fitzgibbon. Fitzgibbon is suing a former colleague who accused him of sexual assault, Jesselyn Radack.

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress/article240046358.html#storylink=cpy

In an indication that Republicans would most like to run against Bernie Sanders in the November general election, Trump-supporting leaders in South Carolina are urging GOP voters to support the Vermont senator in the state’s primary on Feb. 29.

It’s a clear effort to damage Joe Biden’s candidacy further as the former VP will be relying even more on South Carolina following his lackluster performance in the chaotic Iowa caucus.

According to The Hill, “The plan – orchestrated by Greenville GOP chairman Nate Leupp and several other prominent Republican Party leaders – revolves around GOP leadership’s belief that Sanders poses the least amount of challenge to President Trump in November’s general election and its goal of getting the Palmetto State’s Democratic lawmakers to agree to close the state’s primaries.”

Independent Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders saw his support among black voters crater by more than half in a national poll amid a roiling controversy over his decision to brag about an endorsement by comic Joe Rogan, and stand by it after the comic’s history of bigoted remarks emerged.

Sanders was enjoying a bit of a surge with black voters in the weekly Economist/YouGov poll, going from 12 percent three weeks ago to 17 percent the following week in a poll that was taken two days after Sanders tweeted a video of Rogan praising the candidate’s consistency and saying he would “probably” vote for Sanders.

But in the most recent poll, taken Sunday through Tuesday of this week, Sanders’ support among black voters has plunged to eight percent.

There’s no way of telling exactly what caused the swing, but the Rogan controversy began to erupt just before last week’s poll was taken, as past comments by Rogan — including a clip in which he compared a black neighborhood to the fictional Planet of the Apes — began circulating, and the Sanders campaign responded by standing by their embrace of the endorsement in spite of those comments.....

Elsewhere in the same poll, former Vice President Joe Biden maintained a massive lead among black voters, but his support did slip slightly, from 46 to 43 percent, while former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg — who has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars on ads so far — surged from three to 11 percent, and Mayor Pete ticked up three points with black voters — from one percent to four. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was the only other candidate in double digits with black voters, maintaining 14 percent in both polls.

As Democrats select their 2020 presidential nominee, a constellation of left-leaning groups is looking ahead, laying groundwork for huge voter turnout in November by filing an avalanche of voting-rights lawsuits against state laws they say suppress participation in elections.
The groups, including state and national party committees as well as outside nonprofits, are spending millions of dollars to fight voter-registration purges, ID requirements and rules regarding signature-matching and ballot order, and they are also hiring voter protection staffers and recruiting and training volunteers in key states.

Democratic donors are flooding the wide-reaching legal effort with millions of dollars not only to help defeat President Donald Trump in 2020 but to affect elections all the way down the ballot — from the Senate and the House to the governorships and state legislative races that will shape redistricting and the next 10 years of state political maps.

“The next decade is really on the line here,” said Patrick Rodenbush, communications director for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “No matter who we nominate to be president, no matter who wins in the fall, if we don’t get redistricting right, that next president is gonna be hobbled by a gerrymandered House of Representatives and state legislatures around the country to try to block their agenda.”

Republicans capitalized at the state level in the last census-year election, a midterm election bookended by the election and reelection of Barack Obama. In interviews, Democrats cited Obama’s 2008 election as the impetus for a Republican push to enact new restrictions and regulations on voting — ones that often affect Democratic constituencies.

“From 1965 up until 2009, it became relatively easier to vote in the United States,” said Aneesa McMillan, Priorities USA’s strategic communications and voting rights director. “What you saw after the election of Barack Obama were these laws essentially targeting the folks who made up the Obama coalition.

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton furthered her comments discrediting Sen. Bernie Sanders as a viable presidential candidate on Thursday, insinuating that his potential failure to "deliver the moon" would detract from efforts to rebuild public trust.

When asked by talk show host Ellen DeGeneres if she wanted to address her prior remarks about the Vermont independent, Clinton noted that while she originally made them about a year and a half ago, "I have a pretty clear perspective about what it's going to take to win, and as I said earlier, that's what I think the key calculation for any voter has to be."

"You've got to be responsible for what you say, and what you say you're going to do," Clinton added. "We need to rebuild trust in our fellow Americans and in our institutions, and if you promise the moon and you can't deliver the moon, then that's going to be one more indicator of how, you know, we just can't trust each other."

Sanders' campaign declined to comment Thursday. When Clinton's previous remarks surfaced last month, Sanders said in a statement that his focus was President Donald Trump: "Together, we are going to go forward and defeat the most dangerous president in American history."

Clinton's comments Thursday come as Sanders is in a near-tie with former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses. As of Thursday afternoon, with 97% of precincts reporting, Buttigieg remained the leader of the race, with 26.2% of state delegates, while Sanders closely trailed with 26.1%.

Clinton's prior comments about Sanders, her 2016 opponent in the Democratic primary, were aimed directly at his core campaign appeal -- that he's a political outsider pitching revolutionary change.

A half-dozen women of color have departed Elizabeth Warren’s Nevada campaign in the run-up to the state’s caucuses with complaints of a toxic work environment in which minorities felt tokenized and senior leadership was at loggerheads.

The six staffers have left the roughly 70-person Nevada team since November, during a critical stretch of the race. Three of them said they felt marginalized by the campaign, a situation they said didn’t change or worsened after they took their concerns to their superiors or to human resources staff.

“During the time I was employed with Nevada for Warren, there was definitely something wrong with the culture,” said Megan Lewis, who joined the campaign in May and departed in December. “I filed a complaint with HR, but the follow-up I received left me feeling as though I needed to make myself smaller or change who I was to fit into the office culture.”

Another recently departed staffer, granted anonymity because she feared reprisal, echoed that sentiment. “I felt like a problem — like I was there to literally bring color into the space but not the knowledge and voice that comes with it,” she said in an interview.
She added: “We all were routinely silenced and not given a meaningful chance on the campaign. Complaints, comments, advice, and grievances were met with an earnest shake of the head and progressive buzzwords but not much else.” A third former staffer who was also granted anonymity said those descriptions matched her own experience.

Come to find out, Trump had 10 million fewer viewers for this State of the Union than he did last year. It was a drop of 21% from last year.

The 37.7 million who watched Obama during his reelection year in 2012 slightly topped Trump at the same point in his presidency, Nielsen said.

So, Obama keeps the record for the speech before reelection. And the largest crowd at the inauguration.
Just thought you’d want to know.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has dealt with stuttering throughout his life, said he keeps in contact and works with many people who stutter.

“I deal with about 15 stutterers I keep in contact with all the time,” Biden said.
Biden was asked at the CNN town hall what advice he would give a college student who has struggled with stuttering since he was a young child. The question led the former vice president to open up more publicly about his own struggles than he has before in the 2020 race -- and acknowledge that he still stutters at times.

“You know, stuttering, when you think about it, is the only handicap that people still laugh about. That still humiliate people about. And they don’t even mean to,” Biden said.

“The point I make to these young people that I still work with, is that in fact it’s critically important for them not to judge themselves by their speech. (To) not let that define them,” Biden said.

“What I say to anybody out there, and any of the people you work with, young people who stutter, I'll give you my phone number, not a joke, and they can call me. I’ll give you a private number, ” Biden said.

The Texas Democratic Party plans to announce Thursday that it is partnering with Fair Fight Action, the advocacy nonprofit organization started by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, to launch an expansive voter-protection program.

Texas’s voter registration and participation rates are among the lowest in the country, which Democrats have long blamed, at least partly, on cumbersome registration rules and Republican-backed laws that they say make it much more difficult for Texans — especially those who are young, nonwhite or low-income — to vote.

“They just put up hurdle after hurdle for voters, and we need to be working year round,” said Rose Clouston, who was hired recently to be the state party’s first voter-protection director....

As part of the new voter-protection effort, Texas Democrats have hired two full-time staff members, plan to add two more in the next month and could continue to grow the team in the months ahead. The party will also create a voter-protection council that will pull together the many groups and individuals who are already working on these issues. During the general election this fall, the party plans to send volunteers to polling locations across the state to observe the process, answer questions from voters and ensure that all votes are counted properly.

The party has launched a hotline, 844-TX-VOTES, that Texans may call to receive information about registering and voting, or to report any irregularities or obstacles they encounter while trying to vote. In years past, the party has operated such a hotline just ahead of elections, but now the service will be available year round.