‘Congressional Workers Union’ Announces Effort To Organize Congressional Staffers

A group of congressional staffers on Friday announced an effort to unionize the Capitol’s press officers, policy wonks and constituent case workers, saying it was time to give staffers a voice in the workplace. 

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Yet Another GOP Colorado Election Clerk Faces Probe Over Potential Voting Security Breach

We’re now at three Republican county clerks in Colorado who are facing questions over allegedly unauthorized copies of election system data.

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New York Republicans Sue Over Democrats’ Dramatic Congressional Gerrymander

A Republican-led group of voters is challenging the newly approved congressional districts in New York, arguing in a lawsuit that the new districts are unlawfully gerrymandered in Democrats’ favor. 

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What Would Happen If Ukraine Implemented The Peace Deal Russia Wants?

Encircling Ukraine with thousands of troops, Russia has set up a standoff that’s led many to predict imminent military action.

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Never Mind …

I think public opinion, which is currently sour on the direction of the country and thus on the Democrats as well, isn’t mostly driven by jobs numbers or other government statistics. It’s more fundamentally driven by lived experience. And a lot sucks right now, even though there’s been a lot of positive economic news. Having said that, there’s really no question the consistently flawed jobs tabulations have hurt Joe Biden significantly. Again and again we’ve found out that a slackening recovery was actually a series of counting errors. The reports are “revised” later. But those revisions, in the nature of things, don’t get a fraction of the attention that the monthly reports do. I’m basically certain there’s no funny business going on. At least in broad outlines the cause seems pretty clear: the chaos of the pandemic has at least temporarily broken our system of tabulating jobs numbers.

Journalists have taken way too long to absorb this fact.

Arizona GOPer Compares Not Letting Legislature Throw Out Election Results To Lynching

Not giving a state legislature the power to freely throw out election results as it pleases is similar to mob murder, according to the Arizona state Republican who sponsored a bill to give the legislature that power.

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RNC Moves To Censure Cheney And Kinzinger, Bizarrely Accuses Them Of Trying To Help Dems In Midterms

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.

Comply Or Else

The Republican National Committee’s resolutions committee unanimously approved a draft resolution to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), the only two Republicans on the House Jan. 6 Committee, for “utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes” on Thursday night. The resolution was reportedly watered down from a full-on call for their expulsion.

  • The resolution describes the committee’s investigation as a “persecution” of “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” in what’s arguably the RNC’s most egregious effort to whitewash the Capitol insurrection and Trump’s attempted election steal to date.
  • It paints Cheney and Kinzinger’s participation in the panel as a betrayal to the GOP and accuses them of “advancing a political agenda to buoy the Democrat Party’s bleak prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.”
  • The resolution will be put to a vote by the full 168member committee today. RNC chair Ronna McDaniel told the Washington Post that she expects it to pass “overwhelmingly.”
  • Cheney and Kinzinger responded to the move with defiance on Thursday night:
    • “I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,” Cheney tweeted.
    • Kinzinger asserted in an official statement that “conspiracies and toxic tribalism hinder their ability to see clear-eyed.”

Georgia County DA Expects Grand Jury To Get Busy In Summer

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday that the special grand jury in her investigation into Trump’s election plot is expected to see a lot of activity in June and July, and that she’ll likely gather all the information she needs to move forward within a year.

Trump Cronies Drew Up Scheme To Use NSA To Steal Election

Several Trump allies circulated a memo mapping out a way for the then-president to order a team to sift through the National Security Agency’s electronic communications data, searching for something that could be cast as proof to support MAGAland’s lies about foreign election meddling. 

Florida Seniors’ Voter Registration Unknowingly Changed To GOP

Several elderly residents at a South Florida public housing building were shocked to discover this week that their party affiliation had been switched to Republican without their knowledge when they received new voter registration forms.

  • The seniors received those forms after staffers of a third-party voter registration organization who were wearing Republican Party of Florida caps knocked at their doors and offered to help them register.
  • This has happened to South Florida seniors before: Florida outlet Local 10 News reported in December that an 84-year-old Miami resident who was a lifelong Democrat received a voter registration form that marked her as a Republican–and the “third-party voter registration organization” that had helped her with the paperwork was actually the Republican Party of Florida.

Biden Admin Shelves Plan To Vaccinate Migrants At Border, Hoping To Discourage Crossings

CBS News reports that the Biden administration mulled a plan to vaccinate migrants against COVID-19, but shelved it and stuck with the Trump-era policy of rapid explusions out of fear that doing so would cause more people to come to the border.

GOPers Continue To Shamelessly Take Credit For BIF

The Right-Wing Media Cesspit

Ever since Biden stepped into the presidency, the well-established conveyor belt between Fox News and Republican hacks has kicked into overdrive: Fox has hired at least nine editors who all came from either the Trump administration, the Republican National Committee, a state GOP organization or a GOP lawmaker’s office, according to a Media Matters analysis. And most of them cover politics.

Must-Read

“Federal prosecutors saw a plea deal for Arbery’s killers as racial justice. His family thought otherwise.” – The Washington Post

GOP Sen. Refuses To Talk To Military Journo Because Constituents Apparently Don’t Read Her Outlet

Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) brushed off a question from a Military.com reporter, Rebecca Kheel, after she told him which outlet she worked for on Thursday. “Okay none of my constituents read it, so I don’t feel like answering it,” Young, who used to be in the Navy, told her.

  • Kheel reported later on Thursday that the GOP senator had called her to apologize.
  • Also, Military.com has 130,000 readers in Indiana, according to Kheel.

Eat The Rich

A historic Dutch bridge in Rotterdam will be temporarily taken apart this summer so that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ 417-foot superyacht can pass on the river.

  • Bezos’ 417-foot superyacht will be the biggest sailing yacht in the world after it’s done being built.
  • Bezos’ 417-foot superyacht will probably cost more than $500 million to build and will include what Bloomberg News calls a “support yacht with a helipad.”
  • Bezos’ 417-foot superyacht wi— oh look, there’s an event on Facebook called “Throwing eggs at superyacht Jeff Bezos,” and about 500 people say they’re going, according to the New York Times.

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Report: Pence Aides Didn’t Discuss Talks With Trump In Jan. 6 Committee Interviews

Top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly declined to discuss direct conversations with former President Trump during recent interviews with the Jan. 6 Committee, according to CNN.

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Where Things Stand: Keep Talking Trump, Schiff’s Collecting ‘Evidence’

You know the news by now: Over the weekend, former President Trump told a crowd of supporters that if he runs/wins in 2024 he will pardon insurrectionists charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. It’s egregious enough on its own, but a report surfaced yesterday revealing that Trump’s been talking about this for a while: in the waning days of his presidency, just after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol trying to do a coup, Trump was obsessing over the idea of potentially offering a blanket pardon to his supporters who attacked the Capitol.

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