Happy Arden Fair Day!
Sen. McConnell Is–Mitcher Lonely:
Not even Peter Thiel will return his calls:
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s grand vision for a Republican sweep in the midterm elections is not going according to plan. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that billionaire Peter Thiel, who funded the insurgent primary campaigns of J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, rejected McConnell’s request for a cash injection in the Arizona general. The news came just days after the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC linked to McConnell, abandoned $8 million in ad buys it had reserved in Arizona.
Shortly after Vance won his primary in early May, McConnell reportedly called Thiel to inform him of the SLF’s funding problems and to ask for additional support. But according to the Post, that request was rebuffed, even though Thiel has long-standing personal relationships with both candidates and previously poured $15 million each into the super PACs backing their respective primary campaigns.
During more recent conversations about the Arizona race, McConnell alleged that the Ohio race has proven to be more costly than the SLF had planned––the super PAC has already poured more than $26.7 million into the race, according to data from AdImpact cited by CBS––and needed Thiel to “come in, in a big way, in Arizona,” proposing that Thiel match the SLF’s spending, according to the Post. McConnell and the SLF also reportedly gave Thiel the option to personally take over the canceled ad reservations that it had lined up for Masters. Both options were apparently rejected by Thiel, who expressed concern that such arrangements might be weaponized as Democratic talking points. Instead, Thiel reportedly plans on supporting Masters’s beleaguered campaign by hosting additional fundraisers.
The latest FiveThirtyEight polling data puts Masters almost eight points behind Democratic incumbent senator Mark Kelly, while the race between Vance and Representative Tim Ryan, the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee in Ohio, is in a dead heat.
The Empty Classified Folders. We do know that the records were, at best, haphazardly kept, if they were kept at all:
The new detail is tantalizing for a host of reasons, including that the separation of classified documents from their folders is something the National Archives has previously described as being “of most significant concern.”
We know very little about what this means right now, though, and experts say it doesn’t necessarily mean the documents are missing, as some Trump critics theorized. What it does seem to reinforce is how sloppily classified information was handled.
MAGAts Can Dish It Out. Can’t Take It:
“Biden risks backlash” from people who routinely call him a communist groomer pedophile hitler is, to be sure, an unsurprising development–Rick Wilson.
Biden’s Masterstroke?:
And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.
They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.
Biden violated the rules of the extremists’ game that say Republicans get to use Democrats as punching bags and Democrats must never punch back. Biden did.
About fucking time. Namby-pamby Democrats–GTFO.
RIP: Barbara Ehrenreich. She fought against injustice her entire life:
The news that Ehrenreich had died on 1 September was released by her son, Ben Ehrenreich, on Friday. He accompanied the announcement with a comment redolent of his mother’s spirit: “She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.”
Ehrenreich battled over a half a century as a writer committed to resisting injustice and giving a voice to those who were typically unheard.
In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, her 2001 bestseller, she wrote an immersive experience of living as a low-waged worker in Key West, Florida.
The book helped spread awareness of an economy in which it was necessary to work two or three jobs to survive, and acted as a catalyst of the minimum wage movement.
Later, she used her name and energy to try to give low-income and other disadvantaged groups a direct voice to tell their own stories.
She founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project which supports independent journalists to write about their lives including in poor rural areas of the US.
She, my friends, was a Great American.
Carney’s Cronies Peddle Their Medicare Myths. I’m sorry. As soon as I see that Claire DeMatteis is an author on a piece, I simply can’t read it with an uncritical mind. She and Carney deserve each other.
What do you want to talk about?