It turns out Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been scamming the United States Postal Service for decades, almost making it seem like sabotaging the institution has become his life’s work. A 20-year-old audit of contracts for mail equipment transport unearthed by NBC News shows that his old company was awarded multiple contracts in noncompetitive bids.
The first debate in Maine’s hotly contested Senate race is in the books, happening this past Friday night. It provided a clarifying moment for voters in the state, according to the state’s preeminent political commentator, Bill Nemitz. There weren’t fireworks, but there was a dogged determination on the part of Republican Susan Collins to dodge the issue of this election: Donald Trump.
While Mitch McConnell wasted even more time this week with another symbolic coronavirus “relief” bill, states are struggling to come up with a solution for saving bars and restaurants while still keeping their populations safe. They remain the establishments hit hardest by the economic disaster that came with the pandemic, and the help they need is nowhere in sight.
She’s still not saying whether she supports Donald Trump’s reelection out loud, but Maine Sen. Susan Collins is demonstrating to the Trumper base, in every way she can, that she’s with him all the way. As if not declaring her fealty to Trump will help her hang on to non-Republican votes, her game is embarrassingly transparent.
It’s a close race between Donald Trump and Facebook for which is most dangerous to America’s political and social systems. Combined, they’re a disaster. The Trump campaign, in conjunction with Trump’s denials of having had a series of mini-strokes (which no media organization had reported), has been running Facebook ads that have doctored images of Joe Biden, in which he’s made to look older.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared proudly: “We are the firewall against Nancy Pelosi’s agenda” in a pre-recorded video for Thursday night’s Republican National Convention (RNC). McConnell didn’t want to appear on Donald Trump’s stage, though he had no problem lying like Trump. Particularly with this line: “They want to tell you when you can go to work. When your kids can go to school.
It’s the big night at the RNC, with the Hatch-Act-Breaker-in-chief speaking from the South Lawn of the White House behind many, many layers of bunker. And flags. Very subtle with the flags. Tonight’s lineup of course has multiple Trumps, with Ivanka doing her thing along with various and sundry people who will probably yell stuff. Rudy Giuliani will be there, so yes, there will be yelling. Ben Carson will bring the yawns.
On the day that more than two dozen Republican ex-lawmakers, including Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, announce they won’t vote for Donald Trump, Sen. Susan Collins is displaying an astounding degree of cowardice about Trump. Astounding and cowardly, even for her! For months, Collins has been refusing to say whether or not she’ll support Trump. She’s refused to say if she voted for him in May’s primary (his was the only name on the Republican ballot).
The Republican National Convention is sure to be full of more truly horrific surprises tonight, but here’s what they say is going to happen. Melania Trump will “headline,” and maybe she’ll finally fulfill that promise to explain her immigration status. But probably not. Also, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will break every norm that every secretary of state has observed, and appear to endorse his boss, flouting a policy he himself put in place.
The Trump campaign was slapped back hard by a federal district court judge in Pennsylvania Sunday in its attempt to keep the state from conducting a safe and fair election in November. The judge effectively stopped Trump’s effort to keep the state from expanding mail-in voting and installing ballot drop boxes, staying the suit while state court cases about voting are in the works.
The House will break its recess and convene Saturday to pass H.R. 8015, the Delivering for America Act to inject the U.S. Postal Service with $25 billion emergency funds and restore the service’s operations to pre-coronavirus and pre-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s dismantling of it. So far, that’s it. That’s all the plan Congress has to do anything this month, while they remain on recess.
The Supreme Court announced this week when it will hear the consolidated cases on the Affordable Care Act. California v. Texas basically challenges whether the plaintiffs in Texas v. California have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the law, as well as the actual constitutionality of the law. The ‘when’ is interesting: Nov. 10, exactly one week after the election.
It’s the first night of what will probably be the strangest Democratic National Convention ever. The one normal thing, though, is us watching it from home and talking to each other about it. So here’s a thread to do that. Sen. Bernie Sanders and former First Lady (and most popular woman in America) Michelle Obama are scheduled to being speaking at 10:00 PM ET. You can watch this, and every other event, online at this portal.
Just to emphasize how absolutely racist and white supremacist Donald Trump and his administration will be to try to win this election, the Department of Justice has determined that Yale University discriminates against white applicants, continuing the administration’s war on affirmative action and a 21st-century, diverse society.
Remember when Susan Collins—just six months ago—so infamously declared that she didn’t need to vote to impeach Donald Trump because “I believe that the president has learned from this case. […] The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”
You have to wonder if she has any personal regrets about her three years’ worth of support for Trump. Right now, she’s the Republican canary in the Trump coal mine.
Michelle Obama encapsulated what an awful lot of Americans woke up feeling Thursday morning, the day after Sen. Kamala Harris became Joe Biden’s running mate for the White House. “You get used to it, even as a little girl—opening the newspaper, turning on the TV, and hardly ever seeing anyone who looks like you. You train yourself to not get your hopes up,” Obama wrote. “[I]t always feels like someone is waiting to tell you that you’re not qualified.
And we hear from the trailblazer herself, Sen. Kamala Harris, the next vice president of these soon-to-be-great-again United States:
.@JoeBiden can unify the American people because he’s spent his life fighting for us. And as president, he’ll build an America that lives up to our ideals. I’m honored to join him as our party’s nominee for Vice President, and do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief.
Sen. Susan Collins is concerned. While her colleague from Maine, the independent Sen.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell likes to talk about an “epidemic of lawsuits” that will come “on the heels of the pandemic we’re already struggling with” to justify the liability protections line in the sand he created for a coronavirus relief bill. That’s the ultimatum he came up with after his “let the states go bankrupt” bottom line was roundly rejected by even Republicans. He soon pivoted to pushing the U.S.
While Republicans are in rebellion against each other over saving the lives and economic health of America, Politico is on the hunt for a “Dems in Disarray” story. They think they found one in a push by delegates to the Democratic National Convention to include a “Medicare for All” plank in the national platform, which they’re trying to make into a big deal break between presumptive nominee Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sen. Susan Collins’ schtick is getting really, really old. All the way back in September 2018, she was throwing her own pity party about all the mean people pledging their loose change to help defeat her in 2020. She’s still at it, trying to make the amazing display of democracy on the part of small dollar donors into something nefarious. It’s a bribe, she says in an extremely convoluted message to would-be donors.
Cities and states, scrambling again for adequate personal protective equipment and medical supplies to meet the resurgent coronavirus, are also having to scrap for dwindling federal funds. The $150 billion passed in the CARES Act back in March was not large enough and had too many restrictions, and since April, Sen. Mitch McConnell has refused to consider any further aid, blocking the follow-up HEROES Act the House passed in May.
“Gosh,” The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney, seems to ponder in his latest missive about the 2020 race for presdient, “it sure seems like Donald Trump is having a harder time making attacks against Joe Biden stick than with Hillary Clinton.” One just can’t imagine how that could possibly be. “By a combination of design and circumstance, Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has managed so far to deny Mr.
This isn’t the kind of news Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Marco Rubio want to see about the continually problematic Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) they got into this spring’s coronavirus relief bill: The U.S. Roman Catholic Church got at least $1.4 billion in those loans “with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.
The coronavirus surge in the West and the South is likely going to exacerbate the already vast racial disparities the disease has exposed in the U.S., the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) warns. “As of July 8th, we identified 33 states as hotspots (experiencing recent increases in cases and an increasing positivity rate or positivity rate over 10%), 23 of which were in the South and West,” KFF writes of their latest analysis.
If fundraising translates into votes, Mitch McConnell’s Senate majority is toast. Okay, we all know that it doesn’t work that way, but fundraising translates to enthusiasm and enthusiasm can definitely translate to votes. So, yes, Majority Leader McConnell’s freak-out over the filibuster is well-founded, and will be intensified now that fundraising information for the second quarter has been released.
How on-brand can the Trump team get? They are again letting payday lenders be as predatory as they want to be, lending to consumers at ridiculous interest rates—sometimes as high as several hundred percent—without verifying that the borrower has the ability to repay the loan.
It’s all grift all the time in Trump world. And very, very swampy. A Public Citizen analysis has uncovered 40 Trump-connected lobbyists—including five former administration officials—securing more than $10 billion in coronavirus aid from the federal government and says that former administration officials lobbying violates Trump’s own ethics policy. (I know, right? Trump and ethics in the same sentence.
Virginia continued to demonstrate the critical importance of state houses and governorships with a handful of new, progressive laws passed by the Democratic legislature and signed by a Democratic governor that came into effect July 1. Abortion rights, LGBTQ+ civil rights, the decriminalization of pot, an end to incarcerating juveniles for life—all happened in the state because of Virginia’s 2019 flip of the legislature to Democrats.
The whole goddamned lot of Donald Trump’s crew needs to be impeached, including Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar. He’s been traveling around the country since April, but not to respond to the raging pandemic. He’s been going, Politico reports, “to key battlegrounds in the 2020 campaign: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Maine and North Carolina, as well as two trips apiece to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.