This is quite a statement in Walker’s defense from many vantage points.
Newt Gingrich: “I think he is the most important Senate candidate in the country because he’ll do more to change the Senate just by the sheer presence, by his confidence, by his deep commitment to Christ,” Gingrich said. “You know, he’s been through a long, tough period. He suffered a lot of concussions coming out of football.”
On Monday, the Daily Beast dropped a bombshell report in which an ex-girlfriend of Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker revealed that the supposedly “pro-life” candidate had paid for her to get an abortion in 2009. The woman backed up her account with a receipt from the abortion clinic, a bank deposit receipt from a signed $700 check Walker had given her for the procedure, and even a “get well” card he had allegedly sent her that bore his signature.
Continue reading “Herschel Walker And GOP Scramble To Do Major Damage Control After Explosive Paid Abortion Allegation”My friend Steve Clemons, now of Semafor, says that RNC officials believe the Dobbs backlash is fading and popular concern is refocusing on inflation and economic woes. That’s one strain of argument we’ve heard a lot recently and it’s what you’d expect people at the RNC to say. But it’s also potentially in line with recent polling which has showed some ebb of the Democratic momentum which started in the aftermath of Dobbs and accelerated with declining gas prices.
Meanwhile, today OPEC+ — led by Saudi Arabia — announced a substantial lowering of production which seems certain to spike gas prices. The White House had been pulling out all the stops trying to prevent that, unsuccessfully. File that away in your folder of whether Saudi Arabia is an ally of the United States or of the GOP.
All this said, the actual picture on the ground seems muddled.
Continue reading “Crystal Ball Remains Cloudy”The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on Wednesday to a request from the DOJ to speed up the government’s bid to block a Trump-friendly judge’s intervention in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
Continue reading “11th Circuit Gives DOJ Most Of What It Asked For In Expediting MAL Appeal”Abortion is murder…until there’s a Senate seat on the line, apparently.
Continue reading “Right-Wing Figures Suddenly Drop Abortion Militancy After Walker Revelation”Last October, we learned that the “brains” of a voting machine in Adams Township, Michigan had gone missing. Now we know a little more about what happened to it.
The scan unit tablet, which hosts sensitive election data and vendor software, went missing shortly after Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson banned Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott from overseeing municipal elections. Scott had allegedly refused to run accuracy tests on the voting machine due to unfounded fears that it would erase 2020 election data.
Reuters reported this week that the equipment was found by the state police locked away in a cabinet in Scott’s office.
Scott was also reportedly involved in a second election security breach. According to Reuters, the Republican clerk had handed confidential voter data to an information-technology expert named Benjamin Cotton.
Cotton appears to be a recurring contact for multiple people involved in breaches: In a sworn statement for an Arizona lawsuit, he said that he’d examined election systems in Coffee County, Georgia, and Mesa County, Colorado — the sites of two high-profile election breaches over the past year.
Scott’s lawyer Stefanie Lambert Junttila disclosed the second breach in an affidavit back in July, though it was first reported by Reuters this week. Junttila is another regular in the coordinated national attack on election security: Trump lawyer Sidney Powell enlisted the Michigan attorney as part of her “Kraken” team to verify the debunked claim that the 2020 election was rigged against the former president.
As Scott’s legal representative, Junttila cast Cotton as an expert who analyzed the township’s voting data for irregularities. That data was pulled from the township’s electronic pollbook, which holds confidential information such as voters’ drivers licenses and birthdays. Scott admitted to handing the data to Cotton in a board meeting on August 8th, Reuters reported, citing a video it obtained.
Junttila later claimed on a conservative podcast that Cotton had found “strong circumstantial evidence” of a rigged election, but Hillsdale County clerk Marney Kast, who replaced Scott, denied the claim. “I am not sure what records Mr. Cotton was looking at,” she said, but the number of voters matched the number of names in the pollbook.
Scott and Cotton are being investigated by a special prosecutor in Michigan for their alleged attempts to gain unauthorized access to the equipment, alongside nine other people, Reuters reported.
In a June email obtained by the outlet, a detective recommended that the state’s attorney general consider unspecified charges against Scott for her role in one of the breaches.
The breaches fit into a growing pattern of threats to election integrity from poll workers nationwide. Michigan is one of a few states that has seen a spate of such incidents. Last week, for example, another Michigan man inserted his own personal USB drive into an electronic poll book in Kent County. He’s since been charged with two felonies.
From TPM Reader JS …
Continue reading “Musings and Big Pictures”I think you’re spot on that climate is the underlying stressor. Since we live in such a complex society, it’s usually hard to see down to the fundamentals how easy it is to disturb. Covid showed that just a few failures can rapidly spread. We’re never that far away from a collapse.
But what impressed me about a book I recently read about the collapse of Sub-Roman Britain was a phrase the author repeated, and I’m not sure it’s his, anyway, it was “the four horseman ride together.” In other words, some natural disasters happens, say, a famine, and then disease results, then war, and so on. I’m struck that, apparently, one day, the government just stopped sending bullion to back coins, and a warlord took almost the entire army to Gaul to where they had a mint to get the soldiers their pay and just never went back.
Because of the Holiday, no podcast this week. We’ll be back next week.
Ex-NFL star and Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker’s allies reportedly were really, really hoping this day wouldn’t come.
Continue reading “Herschel Walker’s Team Bet That Paid Abortion Story Wouldn’t Come Out. Oops.”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) on Tuesday signed off on the Republican-controlled state legislature’s restriction on giving federal pandemic relief funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to hospitals that offer gender-affirming care.
Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, a leader in Trump’s fake elector scheme in her state who was a fake elector herself, pleaded the Fifth and refused to answer “every substantive question” she was asked during her deposition with the House Jan. 6 Committee, an attorney for the committee said during a court hearing on Tuesday.
With barely a month left before the midterms, Republicans seemingly have little choice but to stick by GOP Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker as their man even after an ex-girlfriend came forward with literal receipts and a “get well soon” card revealing that the self-proclaimed anti-abortion candidate had paid for her to get an abortion (Walker has denied her claims).
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has signed laws that purportedly cement his illegal annexation of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in Ukraine after Russia’s legislature rubber-stamped fake “treaties” to absorb those areas.
“Annexations show the depth of Putin’s imperial delusion” – The Washington Post
Trump is taking his fight over the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid to the Supreme Court, asking it to vacate the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling that lifted Judge Aileen Cannon’s block on the documents.
With a conservative majority eager to further slash the already-tattered Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Merrill v. Milligan redistricting case on Tuesday (check out our liveblog here).
In a massive U-turn, Tesla CEO Elon Musk proposed to buy Twitter on Monday at the price of $54.20 per share, the amount he’d originally agreed to months ago before abruptly trying to worm his way out of the $44 billion deal. Musk was scheduled to go to trial this month in Twitter’s lawsuit against him in response to the billionaire, who had claimed the social media giant had misled him about spam bots, trying to backtrack on the deal.
Anyway:
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