Mercers, Peter Thiel drop millions to back "Hillbilly Elegy" author

Billionaires who bankrolled Trump donate more than $10 million to super PAC supporting J.D. Vance's Ohio campaign

The Mercer family and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel are backing a possible Senate run by "Hillbilly Elegy" author J.D. Vance after bankrolling former President Donald Trump.

Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who were instrumental in Trump's 2016 rise, made a "significant contribution" to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC formed last month to back Vance's likely bid, Bryan Lanza, a spokesman for the PAC and a former Trump aide, told the Cincinnati Enquirer. The Mercers have also funded the far-right news outlet Breitbart, the far-right social network Parler, the Brexit campaign and such right-wing lawmakers as Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who pushed false claims about the election ahead of the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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Vance, a fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute who has described himself as a "nationalist," has considered running for a Senate seat in Ohio since 2018 and drew support from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., according to BuzzFeed News. He ultimately chose not to challenge incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in 2020, but quickly catapulted into the conversation after Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, announced that he would not seek re-election in 2022.
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The financial support comes as Vance has increasingly begun to echo right-wing talking points about "identity politics," which he recently told Fox News' resident white nationalist Tucker Carlson are "destroying our society."

Vance's Twitter timeline has also become "basic Tucker Carlson Threats to America content," wrote Georgetown professor Don Moynihan, noting that Vance frequently focuses on criticism of cancel culture, immigrants, and woke elitists while "studiously" avoiding any criticism of Trump, the Big Lie, white nationalism or the Capitol riot.
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source: https://www.salon.com/2021/03/16/mercers-peter-thiel-drop-millions-to-back-hillbilly-elegy-authors-possible-senate-run/

Anyone here from FL Congressional District 26?

Rep Carlos Jimenez was just on NPR discussing Biden's border immigration status, quoting "border patrol", blaming Biden for everything Jimenez claims is bad.

I noticed this district supported trump after voting for Obama and Hillary and that it tends to flip back and forth at the Congressional level.

Does anyone have any insight into why the voters flipped between parties? Is there any chance of winning this seat in 2022?

A short history of the filibuster: Rarely a tool for good -- and never a tool of democracy

The filibuster is not some sacred institution and isn't in the Constitution — it's a dumb, anti-democratic mistake
By Matthew Rozsa

It's hard to imagine literally talking for an entire day, but that is what happened during the longest filibuster in Senate history. The year was 1957 and Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina white supremacist best known for running as a third-party presidential candidate nine years earlier, talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes to stall a major civil rights bill. It was the first major civil rights legislation since the 19th century, so Thurmond droned on and on and on. Nothing he said was particularly memorable, but he was determined to stop even the modest voting reforms contained in the proposed legislation.

On two occasions, however, Thurmond hit a snag: He had to go to the bathroom.
.. .
Unfortunately for America, the filibuster still exists — and may still be used to strip people of their voting rights. In fact, the filibuster itself could be fairly described as the single worst feature of U.S. Senate procedure. It exists because of a thoughtless error and has only infrequently been used for positive ends.
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That brings us to the present. Even though President Biden's COVID-19 stimulus relief package is wildly popular, not a single Republican senator voted for it. McConnell, it is obvious, plans on trying to thwart Biden's agenda in the same way that he made life miserable for Democrats during the Obama era. While Democrats were able to push Biden's bill through via the budget reconciliation process, they won't be able to do so for most of the new president's agenda. Their only option, if they hope to get anything meaningful done, is to repeal the filibuster entirely, much as Republicans repealed it in 2017 relating to the confirmation of Supreme Court justices.

But in a 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker, Democrats can only repeal the filibuster if every single Democratic senator votes to do so.
. . .
If the filibuster were actually some venerable bulwark of democracy, enshrined in the Constitution and protecting good government, maybe a case for it could be made. None of that's true: It was born of absent-mindedness and has mostly been used as a tool of oppression. To preserve democracy — and basic human decency — the filibuster has got to go.

Source: https://www.salon.com/2021/03/14/a-short-history-of-the-filibuster-rarely-a-tool-for-good--and-never-a-tool-of-democracy/

Opinion: Here's the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans

Excellent article by Jennifer Rubin that says what most Democrats know is true.

While it is possible that New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) will ride out the burgeoning scandal involving multiple complaints of sexual harassment and concealment of nursing home deaths due to covid-19, Democrats are trying their level best to dump him
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This is what a responsible party does. Its members assess the magnitude of credible evidence of wrongdoing, the severity of the alleged conduct, and the moral and political cost of defending a scoundrel, and then put decency and good governance ahead of tribal loyalty. This is not a weakness; it affords them moral authority and reaffirms the trust that voters place in elected officials.

The Republicans time and again have shown that they would never do such a thing.
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The irony is that the GOP used to fancy itself as the party of personal responsibility and public rectitude. Now it is a party of professional victims, wallowing in the myth of anti-White racism, incensed when presented with the concept of implicit bias and ready to smear women of color nominated for key posts for the same conduct that Republicans tolerated from White men. (Perplexed that police groups could support a progressive woman of color such as Vanita Gupta, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas actually accused her defenders last week of coercing police organizations into giving enthusiastic endorsements, an allegation entirely without support, fiercely denounced by police groups and revealing of his own biases about police and civil rights leaders.)
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Opinion: Joe Biden's covid-19 relief bill is an extraordinary achievement

Opinion by Helaine Olen

The just-signed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act is incredibly popular. Polling shows that 7 out of 10 Americans support it. A majority of men and women say they are in favor of it. People of all ages, races and income brackets give it a thumbs up in large numbers.

This is extraordinary. In a nation where people who need to rely on welfare to get by are routinely derided as “takers,” Joe Biden and congressional Democrats sold the nation on the largest expansion of the social safety net since the Great Society initiatives of the 1960s, and they did it in less than two months.

Republicans have been left in the dust, reduced to whining about how the plan is not “prudent” — to quote Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.) — when they aren’t falsely attempting to take credit for parts of it, as Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker did.

Here’s the secret: By ignoring decades of so-called Washington wisdom about the need for narrowly targeted aid and small steps forward, this legislation allows us to sidestep our societal tripwires around race, poverty and who we think is deserving of a government assist.

The American Rescue Plan assumes that almost everyone can use a helping hand. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, roughly 85 percent of adults and children will receive a stimulus payment — meaning, as Biden said in his Thursday night speech, that “a typical family of four earning about $110,000 will get checks for $5,600.” The yearlong expansion of the earned-income tax credit will significantly reduce child poverty, and the additional child tax credit will impact more than 90 percent of households with children under the age of 17. And for those who receive their health insurance through a federal exchange, not only are subsidies upped for two years but premium payments also are capped at 8.5 percent of household income. There’s $39 billion in aid for child-care centers, and $29 billion in help for restaurants.
...
Now our new president has raised the bar — and then some — for what kind of help Americans can expect from our government in future economic downturns. Yes, many of the benefits for individuals and families are temporary, but, it’s almost certain that the expansion will create a large constituency for making them permanent. This bill is a remarkable and amazing achievement.

There goes Ari Melber again.

Interrupting a conversation about covid relief with Michelle Goldberg and Eugene Robinson to interject rap “Moneybag Joe” and hip hop.

I still can’t figure him out.

Anti-Transgender legislation in Iowa didn't make it out of the "funnel"

It's been a tough legislative session, but one important positive is that every single, terrible anti-transgender bill didn't make it past last Friday's "funnel" deadline.
It was appalling and harmful that these bills were ever introduced:
• Legislation that would ban trans kids from competing in sports with other students of the same gender.
• A bill that would prohibit doctors from giving gender-affirming care to minors.
• Legislation that would ban students at school from using the restroom that matches their gender.
• So-called "religious freedom" legislation that would allow businesses and others to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals, among others, because they felt their religion permits them to do so.

It seems that collectively the Iowa Legislature has gotten the memo that these discriminatory laws are bad for the economy. States that have passed laws that brutally discriminate against LGBTQ communities have been boycotted and seen their economies damaged.
We also hope the Iowa Legislature has also gotten this crucially fundamental message: LGBTQ and transgender people belong in Iowa and they deserve to be treated with the same respect and equal treatment as anyone else.



source: ACLU Iowa Alert

Rachel Maddow Names The 'Petty' Donald Trump Move She'd Love To See Joe Biden Copy

This is so damn hilarious. If only wishing could made it happened.

“Get petty for once. It’s OK. This is a big effing deal,” the MSNBC anchor urged President Joe Biden.
President Joe Biden apparently isn’t planning on following in the footsteps of his predecessor, ex-President Donald Trump, in terms of having his name plastered on stimulus checks aimed at assisting Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow thinks he should.

“It’s obviously sort of a petty move for a president to do something like that,” Maddow said Tuesday. “But honestly, as I get older, as I live through more and more years of Republican governance, I’m getting more and more petty all the time about stuff like this.”

Maddow noted how GOP presidents “put their name on everything” and Democratic presidents are “all modest.”

“If I was a Democratic president, I would put my name on that check with a big hologram on it, too, so it glowed when you open the envelope,” she said. “I’d make it like one of those greeting cards that plays a song when you pull it out of the envelope and it would sing my name.”

“I would put sequins on the thing,” she continued. “It would be all about remembering which party made this happen and which party all voted against it.”

“But like I said, as I develop an increasingly severe case of the O-L-D, I’m getting cattier and pettier with each passing day, and Biden is not doing that,” Maddow concluded. “It’s why somebody like him is president and nobody asks my advice on these things. Get petty for once. It’s OK. This is a big effing deal, as someone once said.”

Andrea Sahouri, IA reporter, judge is granting a defense request to include a spoliation instruct

"The judge is granting a defense request to include a spoliation instruction, telling the jury that, if they find police and prosecutors intentionally destroyed or failed to preserve body camera video of the arrests, they are allowed to infer the evidence not preserved would have been favorable to the defense.

"When I look at the totality of the evidence, I believe there is substantial evidence that a jury could infer that there was intentional spoliation of evidence," Judge Lawrence McLellan said."

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2021/03/10/des-moines-register-reporter-andrea-sahouri-trial-verdict-george-floyd-black-lives-matter-protest/6933685002/

Latino civil rights group [LULAC] sues over Iowa's new election law

I'm so proud LULAC is working with Marc Elias on this lawsuit.

A Latino civil rights group, backed by Democratic attorneys, says it has filed a lawsuit challenging a new Iowa law shortening the state's early and Election Day voting, among other restrictions.

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the law Monday, saying it would create transparency, accountability and give Iowans greater confidence in their elections.

But the suit argues that the law, which cuts the number of early voting days by 9 and gives Iowans one less hour to vote on Election Day, violates the Iowa Constitution's protections for the right to vote, free speech, free assembly and equal protection.
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"Taken as a whole, the bill targets and restricts virtually every aspect of the voting process — registering to vote, requesting and submitting absentee ballots and even in-person voting on Election Day," the lawsuit states.