We expected folks like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to offer jailed insurrectionists the victim card. They staged a photo-op protest at the jail where some of them are being held last month to paint the rioters as mistreated political prisoners.
Now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is joining the whitewashing movement.
Continue reading “Where Things Stand: Cruz Hops On The ‘Poor Insurrectionists!’ Train”
Colorado’s secretary of state on Thursday accused a Republican county official of allowing an unauthorized person to access the county’s voting machines — leading to a leak of sensitive information into the right-wing fever swamps.
The “special counsel” of an investigation into Wisconsin’s election system attended pillow magnate Mike Lindell’s flop “Cyber Symposium” this week.
Continue reading “Lead Of Wisconsin Election Probe Attended MyPillow Guy’s ‘Cyber Symposium’”
With a gaggle of House ‘moderates’, led by the meddling Josh Gottheimer, now trying to strong-arm Nancy Pelosi into decoupling the long-linked infrastructure bills, I’m reminded of a night back in 2010. Republicans made Democrats wait some six months to seat Al Franken after he defeated Norm Coleman in Minnesota in 2008. That finally gave them 60 votes in the Senate, enough to pass what we now know as Obamacare. But now it’s January 19th, 2010. Long-serving Senator Ted Kennedy died the previous August and now there’s a special election to fill his seat. Shockingly, the race is called for Republican Scott Brown. Out of the blue, Republicans have won back their ability to filibuster Obamacare just as its near the negotiation finish line.
Fuck.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Nine moderate House Democrats are threatening to withhold votes from the $3.5 trillion reconciliation resolution for infrastructure if the bipartisan infrastructure bill doesn’t get passed first.
New – In letter, nine House Dem moderates threaten to withhold support for their party's budget resolution until Speaker Pelosi changes course and instead allows their chamber to first vote on the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan the Senate approved this week. pic.twitter.com/H5N6oyiV6i
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) August 13, 2021
The Census Bureau released its highly anticipated data yesterday, giving some major insights into how the country’s demographics have shifted over the past 10 years–and what the new congressional map could look like.
Vast swaths of rural America–and an outright majority of all counties–lose population, per Census pic.twitter.com/7sU8ZS8wIS
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 12, 2021
David Wasserman, editor of the Cook Political Report, and New York Times reporter Nate Cohn lay out some other key points in the new data:
Early read: based on the strong urban and weaker rural numbers I'm seeing, this is a *much* more favorable Census count than minority advocacy groups/Dems had feared.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 12, 2021
Some notable state data-points: Georgia just 50.1% non-Hispanic white, and probably majority minority by now
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) August 12, 2021
Fascinating demographic breakdown by state from Census Bureau. Lots of states w/ higher-than-expected non-white counts, including FL/GA/NJ/NY now nearly 50%+ non-white. pic.twitter.com/DavJeI2qbM
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 12, 2021
Rip McIntosh, an octogenarian adviser of right-wing youth organization Turning Points, resigned from another prestigious organization this week after TPM and the Informant discovered he had been publishing astonishingly racist newsletters.
The Pentagon is sending thousands of Marines into Afghanistan to evacuate U.S. citizens and American embassy personnel as Taliban forces sweep through the country.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved a third dose of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines for immunocompromised people.
Incoming New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) confirmed that she’s running for a full term in 2022, telling the TODAY Show, “I’m prepared for this.”
In a potential sign that COVID-19 restrictions might actually survive the right-leaning Supreme Court, the Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a request to block Indiana University’s vaccine mandate yesterday.
they mad pic.twitter.com/DQHoRbCPlr
— Erin And A Half Ryan (@morninggloria) August 13, 2021
But on the other hand, Barrett and the rest of SCOTUS’s conservative majority blocked part of New York’s eviction moratorium on Thursday.
Trump’s Save America PAC has hired two of the ex-president’s former senior campaign aides in Iowa who worked for his campaign in 2016 and 2020.
Someone should’ve asked Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) if he smelled toast during this interview:
Rep. Louie Gohmert warned OAN viewers about the "hundreds and thousands" of "Flamers," aka birds who survive windmills but wind up spontaneously combusting after flying over solar farms in the Southwest US. This is how the green new deal will bring the nation down. pic.twitter.com/FYaw8ivElT
— Bee (@mount_bees) August 12, 2021
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Republican-led legislatures continue blanketing the states they control in laws that make it harder to vote. Census data has been released, starting the clock on the redistricting process which Republicans disproportionately use for partisan advantage. The midterms creep closer, curtailing the time Democrats have to put voting reforms in place.
And Congress is in recess.
Continue reading “Voting Rights Activists Cling To Hope In ‘Race Against Time’”
If you’re already a member you can get TPM with no ads at all ever for just four dollars more a month, just the price of a ritzy cappuccino at your local coffee shop. The site gets faster, cleaner. It’s a very different experience. And right now we’ll let you test drive Prime AF for two weeks at no charge. This is a great improvement to your site experience and it is also a big help for TPM. It’s as simple as clicking one button to turn on the trial and one to turn it off if it’s not for you. Can you give it a try? I promise you’ll love the difference and it’s a big help to our operation. Just click right here.
ABC News got its hands on some private messages that it says Matt Gaetz’s buddy Joel Greenberg allegedly sent. The messages, ABC reports, were turned over to federal investigators, and reportedly show Greenberg arranging a meet up between himself, Gaetz, and women who were allegedly paid for sex.
Things are looking increasingly bad — and gross — for the congressman.
State Republicans are ramping up their attacks on school mask requirements as local officials defy GOP governors’ ban on mandates.
Now Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott are threatening those local officials on Twitter and taking their fight to the courts. This all comes as the COVID-19 Delta variant runs rampant through their states, overwhelming hospitals with new cases.
Follow our live coverage below:
Mike Lindell is having a hard time.
As of Thursday morning, the last day of his “Cyber Symposium” in Sioux Falls, Lindell still had not shown anything close to the conclusive cyber evidence he’d promised that Donald Trump won the 2020 election with millions of votes to spare.
What’s more, Lindell said he’d been “attacked” Wednesday night. The MyPillow CEO didn’t offer any detail, but he told the symposium crowd: “I just want everyone to know all the evil that’s out there.”
At the end of the day, that seems to be the theme from Lindell’s symposium: Evil is out there. Somewhere. I just can’t tell you anything about it. Trust me.
So, what happened to Lindell’s latest marquee election fraud event? Here are five points:
The main event at Lindell’s gathering was supposed to be a haul of “PCAPs,” or packet captures: snapshots of internet traffic. Lindell promised they would show a successful Chinese effort to flip the U.S. election.
But a member of Lindell’s own “red team” went on-record with the Washington Times Wednesday throwing cold water on the whole idea: The storied PCAPs weren’t being made available to researchers.
“So our team said, we’re not going to say that this is legitimate if we don’t have confidence in the information,” the red team member, Joshua Merritt told the Times. (You may remember Merritt from his pseudonym in Sidney Powell’s legal filings: “Spyder.”)
Independent cyber security expert Robert Graham, who’s attending the conference, was even more blunt. Computer experts expecting to examine evidence were instead presented with indecipherable piles of computer characters. “All day Mike Lindell has been on stage saying the cyber experts are happily working on packet captures. We are not. We haven’t been given the packet captures we were promised,” Graham wrote Wednesday. This remained true on Thursday.
Merritt also told the Times that Lindell was using data from Dennis Montgomery — a name that likely set off red flags.
Montgomery was behind the so-called “Hammer and Scorecard” theory, an early favorite among election conspiracy theorists, which posited that a supercomputer was been able to flip massive amounts of ballots.
The conspiracy theorist has a record: He once received millions of dollars in federal contracts after convincing the government that he could decode secret al Qaeda messages in public al Jazeera broadcasts — a proposal that didn’t pan out. His own former lawyer described him as a “con man” to The New York Times.
Montgomery may have been able to help decode the messy data he provided for Lindell’s symposium. But as the Washington Times noted, “Mr. Montgomery reportedly suffered a stroke on the eve of the symposium and has not been in contact with Mr. Lindell’s team or any cyber experts at the symposium.”
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Lindell for defamation, seeking $1.3 billion. And while Lindell had filed a motion to dismiss the suit, news broke Wednesday afternoon: A judge had said the suit could proceed, writing that Dominion had “adequately alleged that Lindell made his claims knowing that they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth.” The symposium’s livestream captured what followed:
moments after a federal judge ruled that dominion's lawsuits against mike lindell, sidney powell, giuliani, and others can proceed, lindell himself hustles off stage pic.twitter.com/rNbK4iyFyJ
— John Whitehouse+ (@existentialfish) August 11, 2021
With the “evidence” piece of his symposium falling flat, Lindell increasingly resorted to calling out members of the audience. That included Salon’s Zachary Petrizzo, who Lindell initially offered an opportunity for an interview on-stage, then backtracked a couple hours later.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, in a late-night text and at the event yesterday, stated he wants me to interview him from the main stage (and he wants to interview me?) – I've obliged with the request. Just need a time and day!
— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) August 11, 2021
So I've told Mike Lindell that I would be happy to ask him questions from the stage, so I followed up on when it's going to happen, and the pillow maven lost his cool, texting me, "Lose my number. You are a cancer to our country." Don't know why he's backing down from his offer!
— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) August 11, 2021
Lindell also took to reading unfavorable coverage of the event live. Here he is reading a Washington Post article. The pillow magnate even went after Graham, the cyber security expert, throwing down the gauntlet but ultimately, again, not following through:
39/ Wait, what? I’ll come on stage and defend my findings. It’s just that we techies are sitting in breakout rooms in the back and I wasn’t aware of the live feed. I’m out front now. Let’s go!https://t.co/VhimzXi8Sc
— Robᵉʳᵗ Graham @ Sioux Falls cyber symposium (@ErrataRob) August 10, 2021
49/ he called me a coward claiming I ran away — I’ve been sitting here in front the entire time waiting for him to call me onstage to discuss the packet captures
— Robᵉʳᵗ Graham @ Sioux Falls cyber symposium (@ErrataRob) August 11, 2021
On Thursday, Lindell called out Larry Johnson, a writer for the far-right website Gateway Pundit. The site has promoted Lindell’s work and the article in question was skeptical of Merritt, not Lindell, but Lindell didn’t seem to know that: “The red team’s checking into this Larry Johnson. Sounds like he’s CIA,” Lindell said. (Funny enough, Larry Johnson did formerly work for the CIA.)
Mike Lindell rushed the stage to push back against a Gateway Pundit article calling out his fake data and claims the source, a "cyber expert" Mike himself hired, is CIA pic.twitter.com/SKCquBZWvN
— z3dster (@z3dster) August 12, 2021
Grasping at straws, Lindell opened Thursday’s final symposium day with an old workhorse: Antifa.
Phil Waldron, an old Lindell and Giuliani associate, began by saying that the symposium’s security team had discovered “disruptors inside, trying to get people ejected” and “really radical folks outside, trying to penetrate.”
“This is typical insurrection-type activities,” Waldron added. “This is part of the color revolution.”
“We’ve got antifa things, or people that have infiltrated, they’re telling me this morning,” Lindell added separately, before referring to the alleged attack he endured Wednesday night.
“And you know what, I would have said, “No, we’re going to keep going.’ But after what happened to me last night, I’m going, ‘I don’t want that.’ We want to be safe here.”
