Show me your plan....

Biden’s message to McCarthy ahead of critical White House meeting: Show me your plan

By Phil Mattingly

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s position that cuts to Medicare and Social Security are not on the table in exchange for a debt ceiling increase has drawn skepticism from his primary negotiating partner: The White House.

McCarthy is set to meet with President Joe Biden on Wednesday in a face-to-face that has already been subject to positioning and political messaging, moves that both sides hope will shape the fight to raise the debt limit over the next few months. White House officials have been steadfast that there will be no negotiations on the matter while House Republicans have framed Wednesday’s meeting as the beginning of debt ceiling talks.

Biden, asked by CNN what his message to McCarthy would be in that meeting, said it would be “show me your budget and I’ll show you mine.”

The statement carried echoes of the push by White House officials and congressional Democrats to force Republicans to put a plan on the table – even as they insist there will be no negotiations on the matter.

In the absence of a concrete plan, which Republicans have broadly said will focus on spending cuts, White House officials have pressed for the political upper hand in calling into question McCarthy’s commitment to leave Medicare and Social Security untouched given the position of some members in the conference.

“As they vote for even more tax welfare for the rich, Republicans across the House conference are demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security as ransom for not triggering an economic crisis,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN. “Yesterday Speaker McCarthy claimed he opposed this but then immediately winked his approval for Medicare and Social Security cuts all the same, under the guise of ‘strengthening’ the programs. Is that their only plan? We have yet to see another.”

Bates was referencing McCarthy’s appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” where the California Republican said he wanted “to find a reasonable and responsible way that we can lift the debt ceiling, but take control of this runaway spending.”

Asked about Social Security and Medicare, McCarthy said he wanted to “take those off the table,” but also referenced a broad House GOP policy agenda laid out before the midterm elections that secured his narrow majority.

“If you read our Commitment to America, all we talk about is strengthening Medicare and Social Security,” McCarthy said. “I know the president doesn’t want to look at it, but we have to make sure we strengthen those.”

McCarthy’s pledge, which is backed by former President Donald Trump, provides a window into the complex political dynamics House Republicans confront as they press for negotiations while still working to coalesce around a proposal to put on the table.

White House officials have closely monitored – and wasted no time responding – to House Republican preferences they see as both non-starters on the policy front and politically advantageous.

In a memo to “interested parties” dated Monday that was written by National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young, Biden’s top economic advisers said the president intends to pose two questions to McCarthy on Wednesday when the two men meet: Whether McCarthy will commit to the US not defaulting on its financial obligations and when McCarthy and House Republicans will release their budget.

Deese and Young went on to cast McCarthy as an “outlier,” pointing to previous bipartisan efforts to raise the debt limit, including under the previous administration and quoting a 1987 radio address on the matter from Republican President Ronald Reagan.

Biden, the officials wrote, “will seek a clear commitment from Speaker McCarthy that default – as well as proposals from members of his Caucus for default by another name – is unacceptable.”

They added, “President Biden will ask Speaker McCarthy to publicly assure the American people and the rest of the world that the United States will, as always, honor all of its financial obligations.”

Deese and Young called on McCarthy and House Republicans to “transparently lay out to the American people their fiscal and economic proposals in the normal budget process” as the White House has previously questioned McCarthy’s commitment to leaving Social Security and Medicare untouched.

The White House has closely coordinated with congressional Democrats in the effort to push Republicans to put unveil their own proposal, even as they’ve maintained a united front on the leadership level in opposition to any actual negotiations.

More broadly, there remain significant questions about whether House Republicans can find the necessary 218 votes for anything given the strident opposition held by some in the conference about raising the debt ceiling at all.

Still, the focus on Medicare and Social Security even as McCarthy has moved to take changes off the table underscores the view inside the White House of the political salience of the programs.

White House officials point to the framing of “strengthening” the programs as a euphemism for structural changes they oppose. Absent a clear House Republican proposal, that has become a central line of attack in a debate that is still in its early stages – with potentially dramatic consequences ahead.

“Now, as they vote for even more tax welfare for the rich, Republicans across the House Conference are demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security as ransom for not triggering an economic crisis,” Bates said.

Failure and liar...

George Santos tells House Republicans he wants off of his committees until issues are resolved

By Manu Raju, Melanie Zanona and Fredreka Schouten

Rep. George Santos told the House GOP conference on Tuesday behind closed doors he wants off of his two committees until his issues are resolved, three members told CNN.

The New York Republican who has faced calls for his resignation for false statements – including regarding his professional experience, education history and identity – is a member of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Committee on Small Business. Federal prosecutors are also investigating Santos’ finances, and he continues to face a myriad of questions about his personal finances.

He was first elected last fall.

Santos declined to speak to reporters as he left the meeting.

Santos met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday night.

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told CNN that it was Santos’ decision that he made on his own to “abstain” from the committees. She said he told the conference he would step aside from the committees as the GOP is trying to oust Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Democrats have cited the mounting false statements and scrutiny facing Santos as an example of hypocrisy for Republicans booting Omar and two other House Democrats – California Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell – off committee assignments. While Schiff and Swalwell were able to be ejected from the House Intelligence Committee unilaterally by McCarthy, Omar’s position on House Foreign Affairs will need a vote on the House floor, one that Republican leaders have yet to force.

“He just felt like there was so much drama really over the situation, and especially what we’re doing to work to remove Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee,” Greene told CNN.

She added: “But Mr. Santos’ statement in there was just saying that he spoke with Speaker McCarthy and made this decision on his own.”

Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams, a Republican from Texas, said that he thinks Santos “probably made the right decision” to step down from his committee assignments until the questions about his past and his financial irregularities are resolved.

Leaving his office late last week on Capitol Hill, Santos told a reporter that he would put together a news conference “soon” to “address everything.”

“We’ll give you all the answers to everything you’re asking for,” he said.

In recent days, Santos has faced a series of questions regarding his campaign finances, including inquiries about donors as well as campaign disbursements, including dozens of expenses his campaign has reported at exactly $199.99, one cent below the threshold above which the campaign is required to retain receipts.

The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC that describes his disbursements as “odd and seemingly impossible.” It notes that one of the $199.99 expenses was purported to be for a “hotel stay” at the luxury W Hotel South Beach in Florida in October 2021, where the lowest-price room typically would have cost more than $700.

Last week, Santos also filed a slew of amended reports with the FEC that only added to the confusion about the source of loans he has said he made to his campaign.

In some filings, the campaign did not check boxes denoting that two six-figure loans came from the candidate’s personal funds.

Comet ZTF

Comet ZTF has a distinctive shape. The now bright comet visiting the inner Solar System has been showing not only a common dust tail, ion tail, and green gas coma, but also an uncommonly distinctive antitail. The antitail does not actually lead the comet -- it is just that the head of the comet is seen superposed on part of the fanned-out and trailing dust tail. The giant dirty snowball that is Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has now passed its closest to the Sun and tomorrow will pass its closest to the Earth. The main panel of the featured triple image shows how Comet ZTF looked last week to the unaided eye under a dark and clear sky over Cáceres, Spain. The top inset image shows how the comet looked through binoculars, while the lower inset shows how the comet looked through a small telescope. The comet is now visible all night long from northern latitudes but will surely fade from easy observation during the next few weeks.

Blocks more gun carry law

Federal judge blocks more of New Jersey's new gun carry law

The order issued by U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb temporarily lifts the blanket prohibition on carrying guns in public parks, on beaches and in casinos.

By DANIEL HAN

A federal judge on Monday blocked more of New Jersey’s gun carry law from being enforced, less than a month after she blocked other sections of the newly-enacted law.

The order issued by U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb — an appointee of former President George W. Bush — temporarily lifts the blanket prohibition on carrying guns in public parks, on beaches and in casinos. A prior order Bumb issued earlier this month blocked sections of the law that prohibited guns from being carried in places where alcohol is served, in public libraries or museums, entertainment facilities and on private property where the owner does not give explicit permission. It also blocked restrictions on how guns are carried in vehicles.

The earlier order remains in effect.

The new law, which Gov. Phil Murphy signed in December, revamped the state’s gun carry application process and requirements, and established “sensitive places” where guns could not be carried. The law was in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June which drastically expanded the scope of who could carry guns outside the home.

A legal challenge was filed immediately after Murphy signed the measure into law.

New York enacted a similar law prohibiting where guns can be carried, but that law is also the subject of ongoing litigation.

Gun rights groups did not get everything they sought from Bumb. For example, the judge said the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the prohibition of guns being carried in zoos, medical facilities, airports and on movie sets. Gun rights groups also wanted her to block the prohibition of carrying guns on playgrounds. Bumb denied that request, declaring that playgrounds were analogous to schools — area courts have suggested guns cannot be carried.

Challenges to those provisions of the law, however, are expected to resurface in later phases of the litigation.

“This marks the beginning of the end for Governor Murphy’s blatantly unconstitutional new carry law, which is going down in flames,” Scott Bach, executive director of the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, said in a statement. “Murphy has clearly demonstrated that constitutional issues are indeed above his pay grade.”

In her 46-page opinion, Bumb, sitting in Camden, wrote that the state failed to provide evidence that some “sensitive places” defined in the law were analogous to “a historical tradition of firearm regulation,” the legal standard for bearing guns being carried somewhere.

Democratic leaders have insisted the new law is consistent with the constitution and the Supreme Court’s June ruling. Senate President Nick Scutari and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, who played a key role in crafting the law, had their motion to intervene in the case to defend the law approved on Monday.

“Our law pursues common sense boundaries that keep dangerous weapons out of places of learning and recreation where there are children, families, and folks going about their lives in peace,” Coughlin said in a statement. “I am disappointed, but we have joined the lawsuit to ensure our voice is heard in the legal process and look forward to the full law taking effect to keep our communities safe.”

In separate statements, spokespeople for Murphy and Attorney General Matt Platkin also said they were “disappointed” by Bumb’s ruling.

“We are disappointed that the court invalidated common-sense restrictions on the right to carry firearms in public, which are fully consistent with the Second Amendment,” Murphy spokesperson Tyler Jones said. “We look forward to being able to appeal the ruling and are confident that it will be reversed.”

“We are disappointed that the court has undermined important and longstanding protections against firearms violence in our public parks and in casinos,” Platkin said. “Today’s order is bad for public safety and inconsistent with the Second Amendment. But these orders remain temporary, and we look forward to pressing our case, including ultimately on appeal.”

History....

What’s Really in the AP African-American Studies Class DeSantis Rejected?

A close look at the course reveals just the sort of interdisciplinary rigor students need to succeed.

By JOSHUA ZEITZ

n the latest escalation of America’s ever-present political culture war, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the state would bar public schools from participating in a pilot of the College Board’s new AP course on African American Studies. In a move that stoked considerable controversy, the governor and his administration denounced the curriculum as “woke,” “contrary to Florida law” and an exercise in “indoctrination.”

Citing specific curricular units that address Black Queer theory and the sociological concept of intersectionality, which holds that a matrix of advantages and disadvantages create an invisible power structure in society, DeSantis argued, “Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids. And so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that’s a political agenda. … We believe in education, not indoctrination.”

More fundamentally, the governor held that Black “history” shouldn’t be taught as a standalone course. Florida law already mandates that Black history be covered in the standard U.S. history curriculum.

None of this comes as a surprise. DeSantis has built his political brand on eradicating “wokeness” in Florida’s public schools and universities. But is there something to his critique?

POLITICO Magazine asked me to evaluate the curriculum on its merits. Several themes emerge.

First, out of more than 100 units, the governor has identified three or four that may sound sketchy to people unfamiliar with the topic. But the focus on this handful of examples creates a highly selective and distorted view of the curriculum.

Second, he describes the class as “history,” when in fact it is an interdisciplinary curriculum that exposes students to college-level subject matter they almost certainly don’t encounter in standard U.S. and world history classes.

Third, and most importantly, the curriculum makes a lot more sense if you consider its topline objective: arming students with a range of analytical and critical thinking skills. If you believe that the purpose of a quality education is to prepare kids to thrive in the real world, the AP African American Studies is a win. The subject matter is rigorous, and the texts and other source material are challenging. Isn’t that exactly what a twenty-first century education should look like?

The AP African American Studies course covers 102 topics that span four broad units.

Much like college-level survey in Jewish Studies, Irish Studies, Catholic Studies or Western Civilization, it is interdisciplinary, meaning it explores a particular theme — in this case, the African American experience — through multiple academic lenses, including history, literature, music, philosophy, economics and art.

While it is certainly true that Florida students already study some fundamentals of Black history, they are unlikely to learn about African linguistic diversity or how to parse maps of the Songhai Empire in their U.S. or world history courses. They may read excerpts by former enslaved people like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, but probably won’t encounter Olaudah Equiano’s captivity narrative, analyze the intersection of European and African art or locate connections between Harlem Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and visual artists like James Van Der Zee and Aaron Douglas. We can fairly intuit that they won’t encounter writing by Black feminists like Nikki Giovanni or parse Molefi Kete Asante’s work on Afrocentricity.

This is no knock against Florida’s public schools. According to its mission statement, the AP curriculum “enables willing and academically prepared students to pursue college-level studies.” By design, the curriculum operates a level or two above a standard high school program.

Of the 102 units, most are — or should be — noncontroversial.

The first unit, “Origins of the African Diaspora,” offers a bright tapestry of subjects around African culture, history, linguistics, art and economics, as well as the process behind — and experience of — enslavement (including the role of Black Africans in that tragedy). It would require a feat of political gymnastics to find issue with units on “Exploring Africa’s Geographic Diversity,” “Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Bantu Dispersals” or “Visualizing Early Africa.”

The second unit, “Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance,” is also standard fare, with topics that include “African Explorers in the Americas,” “Origins and Overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” “Fleeing Enslavement” and “Black Women’s Rights & Education.”

And so it goes with the third unit, “The Practice of Freedom,” which covers such topics as Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the early civil rights movement. Notwithstanding the current vogue for banning literature in schools — a troubling development that is hardly specific to Florida — it would take a particularly narrow mind to find fault with modules on “Everyday Life in Literature,” “The Rise and Fall of Harlem” or “Music and the Black National Experience.”

It’s unit four, “Movements and Debates,” that opens the door more than just a crack to conservative criticism, though most of the unit continues the curriculum’s chronological arc, exploring subjects like civil rights, the Black Arts Movement, student protests, Black women’s history, music and religion and faith. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

To be sure, many culture warriors will object to topics and texts that strike most people as unproblematic. Voices like Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Ta-Nehisi Coates and bell hooks offend the sensibilities of some white Americans. They push the boundaries of the conversation about race in ways that challenge ideas about “American exceptionalism,” progress and national innocence. Similarly, raw representations of white violence against Black persons, families and institutions — be they historical texts, paintings, songs or sociological tracts — make a lot of conservatives uncomfortable. They complain that broaching these subjects teaches white children to feel implicated by the actions of earlier generations. This concern assumes that students are especially brittle and incapable of dealing with the subject matter.

But the back half of unit four also contains topics that may cause some parents — and not just conservatives — to raise an eyebrow: “Intersectionality and Activism,” “Black Queer Studies,” “‘Postracial’ Racism and Colorblindness,” “Incarceration and Abolition,” “Movements for Black Lives” and “The Reparations Movement.” These topics drive at extremely polarizing political debates, including what if anything the country owes its Black citizens, whether the criminal justice system is fair and unbiased and the meaning of sexuality. Even outside an AP course, these are fraught topics.

One need not agree with DeSantis that the AP course is a study in indoctrination to wonder: Why would you teach these topics to 17-year-olds? Are they not in fact … “woke?”

The answer to this last question is a resounding: Yes! Also: So what?

With the obvious caveat that a curriculum is only as good, and unbiased, as the person teaching it, one can’t assess the value of individual topics without first understanding the objectives behind the course.

According to the College Board, the curriculum sets out to help students foster five critical skill sets:

1. “Applying Disciplinary Knowledge” — meaning the mastery of key historical, sociological, economic, artistic and political frameworks.
2. “Written Source Analysis” — the ability to conduct close readings and comparisons of texts, including a critical understanding of context, point of view and bias.
3. “Data Analysis” — being able to “identify and describe trends in data.”
4. “Visual Analytics” — everything from how to read and analyze a map, to understanding “perspective, purpose and context” in art.
5. “Argumentation” — how to “articulate a defensible claim,” “support an argument using specific and relevant evidence” and “use reasoning to guide the audience through a well-supported argument.”

These aren’t soft skills. They’re what it takes to thrive in college or the 21st century workforce: How to co-exist in a pluralistic democracy. How to exercise responsible citizenship. How even to cope with the basic trials and travails of modern life. In 2023, the three Rs alone — reading, writing, arithmetic — simply don’t suffice.

Still, why have high school juniors and seniors study works on intersectionality, reparations and the carceral state? Aren’t these controversial topics? Aren’t they inherently political?

Well, yes. That’s the point. They’re complicated works of sociology and philosophy. They’re highly contested polemics. We read them to sharpen our capacity for analysis and argument. Contra Gov. DeSantis, being assigned a text is not an exercise in indoctrination.

How do I know this? Because reading Friedrich Nietzsche in college did not turn me into a nihilist any more than reading Albert Camus made me an existentialist. I read Ross Douthat’s New York Times column regularly, and yet I have neither changed my party affiliation to Republican nor converted to Catholicism.

We expose students to knotty, complicated and controversial ideas because it helps them sharpen the five critical skill sets that the College Board identified in the course prospectus.

If a student takes the AP course on African American Studies and is ultimately able to develop an empirical, well-constructed, knock-down argument against reparations or prison reform, that’s as much of a win as the opposite outcome. I might not like where the student landed, but the curriculum did its job.

That’s the idea behind the AP’s course in African American Studies: use a topic that captures the interest of a large number of students to introduce them to a range of interdisciplinary methodologies and teach them to analyze and make sense of our very complicated world.

The professionals who designed the AP’s curriculum parsed over 100 college syllabi, including courses from all eight Ivy League universities and 20 state flagship institutions. They held focus groups and conversations with 132 college faculty members and 28 college and high school students. The pilot program reflects the deep thought and concern behind its development.

Importantly, the course is elective. Students and their parents choose whether to apply for enrollment. No one has to be in the room.

But Florida may already have won the battle.

Recently, the College Board signaled its intent to revise the African American Studies curriculum. Doing so would pose a great disservice to students, teachers and parents in other states who are eager to pilot the program. It would also cause many educators and parents rightfully to question just who designs the AP curriculum: education professionals, or politicians?

In response to a broader movement to ban certain texts in public school classrooms, the novelist Stephen King recently tweeted: “Hey, kids! It’s your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don’t want you to read.”

One might say the same of the AP African American Studies course. Why don’t they want you to take that class?

Banished from office

Liz Truss Crashes the (Republican) Party

The former British prime minister, banished from office after a disastrous rollout of her tax-cut plan, finds new allies in American conservatives.

By ALEXANDER BURNS

In her 49 days as Britain’s prime minister, Liz Truss terrified financial markets, sundered her party and doomed her government in a crusade to remake the British economy with slashing tax cuts. When she resigned, her economic vision was in ruins and Truss looked finished as a political force.

Yet on a visit to Washington before the winter holidays, Truss indicated she did not see things that way. Far from abandoning her ideological ambitions, the former prime minister used her trip as a research expedition to inform a comeback. Conferring with Republican lawmakers and activists, Truss said she remained determined to rouse Britain from economic stagnation — and intimated that she did not trust her successor, Rishi Sunak, a more technocratic Tory, to do the job.

Truss conceded she had made mistakes: She had not done enough to build support for her ideas and had moved too abruptly on an agenda that shocked the country. Truss did not put it this way, but she had tried to transplant American-style anti-tax politics onto British soil and she had failed.

If Truss had reconsidered the soundness of a program that sent the pound plunging, triggered emergency actions by the Bank of England and drew open scorn from the Biden administration, she did not say so. To the contrary, she seemed to believe her defective strategy of borrowing Republican ideas could be improved by borrowing more Republican ideas.

And in Washington, Truss found a new one she admired: the Republican Study Committee, an influential body within the House of Representatives that serves as an ideological anchor for the GOP and a clearinghouse for government-shrinking policies. In a meeting with Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the group’s chair, Truss said she wanted to create a similar caucus in Westminster to “house all of their ideas into a collective group, in order to hold the current prime minister accountable,” according to Hern.

Truss floated a few names for that entity. One, Hern told me, was the “Conservative Growth Group.”

Weeks later, my colleague Eleni Courea reported that a handful of MPs, including Truss and several former ministers, had gathered to toast the creation of a group with precisely that name.

Truss’ Washington tour came at a moment of trial for conservative movements on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain and the United States, small-government ideology is facing a renewed test of relevance in an age of populism and interventionist economic policy. The austerity-minded conservatism of the Great Recession gave way years ago in both countries to the spirit of culture war and nostalgic nationalism, leaving lawmakers who truly want to roll back government marginalized even within right-leaning parties.

If Truss has lately taken inspiration from the Republican Party in a narrow, tactical way, American conservatives might draw some bigger lessons from her tribulations.

Here, Republicans are contemplating their own adventure in economic reengineering. Having abandoned fiscal restraint during the Trump presidency, they are now demanding spending reductions from President Biden in a fight over raising the statutory limit on government borrowing. If Democrats do not agree to some form of cuts, then Republicans have threatened to risk a calamitous national default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

There is not much evidence that Republicans have a strategy for prevailing in that confrontation, or for avoiding the kind of market panic that broke Truss’ government. Republicans did not campaign in the midterm elections on a defined blueprint for downsizing government. Like Truss, they are pursuing structural changes to their country’s finances without an electoral mandate.

Unlike Truss, Republicans still have time to adjust course.

The conservatives Truss met in Washington did not seem inclined to see her as a Ghost of Christmas Future — a grim embodiment of what happens when you try to revise the relationship between taxpayers and their government without first persuading voters to go along with you. They welcomed her, instead, like a pal who has fallen on hard times.

Accompanied by two colleagues — Jake Berry, the former Conservative Party chairman, and Brandon Lewis, a former minister — Truss visited Capitol Hill and advocacy groups like Americans for Tax Reform. The voluble activist Grover Norquist, a self-described Truss fan, told me he urged her to focus relentlessly on lowering tax rates and avoid other factional disputes within her party. That, he said, is how you build a diverse bloc of support for cutting taxes.

“You do one issue. You do Jack Kemp. You do, ‘We’re the lower-rate people,’” said Norquist, who displays a 1990s-vintage Tory poster in his office (“New Labour, New Taxes”).

In Britain’s immediate political environment, this is not obviously good advice. Sunak has dismissed a fresh push for tax cuts as impracticable; his government is beset by labor strife, crises in health care and the cost of living, mounting ethics scandals and apocalyptic polling brought on in part by Truss herself. A read-my-lips anti-tax message does not look like much of a route to relevance for a former prime minister now returned to the back benches.

But it was a door-opener for Truss in Washington. Hern told me his session with Truss was scheduled to last 15 minutes and then unspooled over more than an hour as he, a 61-year-old Tulsa entrepreneur who amassed a fortune as an owner of McDonald’s franchises before joining Congress in 2018, outlined his legislative playbook for Truss, a lifelong activist who at 47 has served in Parliament for more than a decade, including as foreign secretary.

Hern told me they bonded over a shared view that their countries were on a dangerous path. Referring to Truss as having been “prime minister of what once was a great nation,” Hern credited her with trying to “save Great Britain” even though her attempt misfired.

“I think she felt like she tried to do too much, too soon, and didn’t have a following,” he said.

When I asked Hern if Truss’ fate could inform the debt ceiling fight, it did not sound like he had considered the idea before. But he did not wholly dismiss it.

Truss, he said, tried to impose her plans in a “top-down” fashion that would never work here. Hern said Republicans had to have a “hard conversation” with Americans about how the government spends money.

A congressional aide who met with Truss said she expressed fear that Britain’s conservative movement could “disappear entirely.” Truss did not quite say she expected Conservatives to get wiped out in the next election, according to this aide, but she warned that Britain’s volatile electorate has a way of obliterating political parties in a manner that seldom happens in the United States.

I imagine much of Truss’ party would find it galling to think of their toppled premier plotting in America to revive her unpopular agenda and squeeze her struggling successor. So, it was not too surprising that a spokesman for Truss declined to make her available, sniffing that her office would not provide “running commentary” on her activities.

But one of her traveling companions was more forthright about their mission in America.

Berry, a veteran MP from the band of Northern England known as the “red wall” for its historic tilt toward Labour, told me in late January that it was painfully apparent his party had “failed over a significant period of time” in the task of explaining “why we are conservatives in a compelling way.” His baleful outlook reflected a widespread sense in Britain that the Tories’ imagination and credibility is depleted after a dozen years in power.

Berry, who is 44, said his country now needed “sort of a Marshall Plan for conservatism,” invoking the American aid program that rebuilt Europe after World War II. Republicans, he said, had been admirably successful at forging mass support for cutting taxes and trusting the private sector to govern itself. The British right could use a kind of intellectual rescue mission on that front.

What the Republican Party has not done any better than its British counterpart, however, is persuading voters to give up cherished federal spending in order to balance the public ledger, while holding down taxes. The one neat trick to modern American conservatism has been campaigning on tax cuts while embracing deficits and debt that would be intolerable for nearly any other country — certainly for the United Kingdom. This most powerful weapon in the Republican arsenal cannot simply be leased to besieged British conservatives.

It may not be easy to discard for Americans like Hern either, no matter how sincerely they want to jolt their country from its fiscal laxity. Voters here are accustomed to living in a land of low taxes, loose expenditures and staggering public debts. If Republicans want to engage Americans in a demanding reassessment of that formula, there is not much time to do that before the debt-ceiling fight reaches a climax.

They, too, could find that they have tried to do too much, too soon, without a sufficient following.

Seemingly rejects request

Biden seemingly rejects request to send U.S. F-16s to Ukraine

But the administration has yet to hold high-level discussions about arming Kyiv with the jets, a U.S. official said later.

By ALEXANDER WARD

The United States will not be sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine — at least not now.

Asked by a reporter outside the White House Monday if the U.S. would transfer the warplanes that Kyiv is pushing hard to receive, President Joe Biden responded: “No.”

The short remark is likely to send shockwaves across the Atlantic, following days of seeming momentum toward sending the fighter jets eastward. It could also sour relations with Kyiv when officials there were already feeling positive about a coordinated U.S.-German decision last week to send main battle tanks to the front lines.

But a U.S. official, when asked about Biden’s remark, said “there has been no serious, high-level discussion about F-16s.” In other words, it doesn’t appear that Biden’s pronouncement is the result of an internal policy review and instead is the current stance of the ultimate decision maker. That official spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal internal matters.

It’s also unclear from the video of the short exchange if the president’s “no” meant “never” or “not now.” The administration has said repeatedly that decisions about security assistance depend on battlefield realities in Ukraine. In a Thursday interview with MSNBC, deputy national security adviser Jon Finer said the U.S. would be discussing fighter jets “very carefully” with Kyiv and its allies.

“We have not ruled in or out any specific systems,” he added.

Another possibility is that the U.S. could approve the re-export of F-16s from third-party countries that operate them, a requirement for the transfer of the American-made warplanes.

Discussions about sending F-16s to Ukraine are gaining steam at the Pentagon, with one U.S. Defense Department official telling POLITICO last week: “I don’t think we are opposed.”

Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy, said Monday that Poland would be willing to provide its F-16s to Ukraine in coordination with NATO. Yet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly rejected any F-16-related requests emanating from Kyiv.

“The question of combat aircraft does not arise at all,” Scholz said in an interview with Tagesspiegel published on Sunday. “I can only advise against entering into a constant competition to outbid each other when it comes to weapons systems.”

Worsening political crisis

Peace Corps evacuates volunteers from Peru amid worsening political crisis

The volunteers are being “temporarily evacuated” to another post, per a Peace Corps spokesperson.

By ALEXANDER WARD and NAHAL TOOSI

The Peace Corps has evacuated its volunteers from Peru amid a political crisis that has included deadly crackdowns by the government on its citizens.

Troy Blackwell, a spokesperson for the Peace Corps, confirmed the relocation but not the destination.

“Peace Corps/Peru has temporarily evacuated all volunteers to another Peace Corps post,” Blackwell said in an email. “The safety and well-being of Peace Corps volunteers is our top priority. We are closely monitoring the security situation with local partners on the ground and the U.S. Embassy in Lima.”

A person familiar with the move, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive withdrawal, said the volunteers are headed to the Peace Corps’ post in Ecuador.

The decision comes after weeks of popular unrest against a government that has taken over following a failed December coup attempt by a Peruvian president facing impeachment. The South American country has had a politically tumultuous few years, cycling through several presidents amid various corruption and other scandals.

Peace Corps volunteers often work in areas far from national capitals and with less immediate protections than U.S. diplomats — meaning they are sometimes the first group of U.S. workers to be evacuated when unrest hits.

Though the U.S. has issued some travel alerts for Peru, there’s no current indication that the U.S. Embassy in Peru, U.S. Agency for International Development officials or other government agents are leaving the country.

The Peace Corps has a long, though somewhat intermittent history in Peru. Hundreds of volunteers cycled through the country between 1962 and 1975, when the program closed due to political and economic instability. It returned to the country in 2002.

Analysts are fearful that the situation in Peru — and the conditions that allowed Peace Corps volunteers to work there — aren’t set to improve.

“The government has doubled down on the crackdowns,” said Jo-Marie Burt, a professor of Latin America studies at George Mason University. “Things are going to get worse before they get better.”

Literally that asshole 4th grader who says "My daddy's going to get you..."

Trump sues Woodward over audiobook recordings

The former president said he did not agree for his voice to be used as an audiobook when he was interviewed for journalist Bob Woodward's book "Rage."

By OLIVIA OLANDER

Former President Donald Trump sued journalist Bob Woodward on Monday, alleging that an audiobook published using interview tapes from their conversations violated his rights and copyright interests.

The lawsuit accuses Woodward of “systematic usurpation, manipulation, and exploitation of audio,” by publishing “The Trump Tapes,” Woodward’s 2022 audio compilation of his conversations with Trump.

Trump’s copyright interests and “rights he holds as an interviewee” were violated by the audiobook, the lawsuit alleges. He is requesting damages and a declaration of his copyright interests, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Fla.

The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Florida. It also named as defendants Simon & Schuster — the audiobook’s publisher — and Paramount, Simon & Schuster’s parent company.

Woodward and Simon & Schuster said in a joint statement on Monday evening that the lawsuit was “without merit,” since the interviews were recorded on the record with Trump’s consent.

“Moreover, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump’s own words,” the statement said. “We are confident that the facts and the law are in our favor.”

Central to the lawsuit’s argument is the claim that Trump never agreed for his voice to be used in an audiobook when he was interviewed for Woodward’s 2021 book on his presidency, “Rage.” Woodward received Trump’s consent to be recorded and “repeatedly informed him that such interviews were for the sole purpose of a book,” the lawsuit said.

“When it came to treating President Trump fairly, Mr. Woodward talked the talk, but he failed to walk the walk,” the suit said.

Legal Nightmare......

Trump’s Latest Legal Nightmare: A Grand Jury Is Reportedly Investigating the Stormy Daniels Payoff

After high-profile convictions of Trump’s companies, the former president himself may be facing legal jeopardy.

RUSS CHOMA

Fresh off securing convictions against the Trump Organization in a tax fraud case, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly once again investigating Donald Trump over an alleged hush money payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign.

The New York Times reported on Monday that Bragg’s prosecutors are preparing to present evidence to grand jurors in the hopes of bringing criminal charges against Trump personally. Trump’s longtime fixer, Michael Cohen, was seen going into Bragg’s office earlier this month, and the Times said in its report that numerous other potential witnesses have been contacted by investigators or were spotted going into the building where the grand jury meets. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges, admitting he paid Daniels $130,000 in 2016 to cover up an alleged extra-marital affair Trump had with Daniels in 2006. (Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.) Cohen said he made the payments to help the Trump campaign and with Trump’s support.

Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance Jr., aggressively pursued possible criminal charges against Trump but was unable to pressure any top Trump Organization executives to testify against their boss. With Trump rarely putting anything in writing, witness testimony was seen as a requirement. Instead, Vance was able to obtain indictments against two Trump-owned companies and Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, on tax fraud charges. Vance stepped down from the DA job—which is an elected position—at the end of his term, and Bragg inherited the ongoing investigation. In his first months in office, he appeared reluctant to pursue charges against Trump personally and dropped the original grand jury investigation.

Bragg’s opinion on the case may have taken a turn as the prosecutions of Weisselberg and the Trump companies progressed. Weisselberg pleaded guilty, and in December, following a month-long trial, a jury quickly returned guilty verdicts on all counts against the companies. Prosecutors initially tried to avoid focussing on Trump personally, but by the end of the trial, they argued that even though Trump himself was not on trial, his company was built on a “culture of fraud.” Jurors who were interviewed after the case seemed to have bought that narrative and said they strongly disliked Trump’s attorneys.

Bragg sat in on key moments of the trial, and following sentencing earlier this month—during which the judge imposed the maximum fine of $1.6 million—Bragg hinted strongly that he was revisiting the idea of pursuing Trump. 

“The sentencing today closes this important chapter of our ongoing investigation into the former president and his businesses,” Bragg told reporters at the time. “We now move on to the next chapter.”

He didn’t elaborate, but the new grand jury appears to be that next chapter.

DeSantis is a pussy... Pussy boy, afraid of Orange turd...

DeSantis is backing down from a fight with Trump

Opinion by Dean Obeidallah

“I pity the fool who runs against President Trump,” failed GOP Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake tweeted this weekend as the former President kicked off his first 2024 presidential campaign event.

Fans of “Rocky III” will instantly recognize the iconic line that Lake, an election-denying Trump acolyte, borrowed as the same famous phrase uttered by James “Clubber” Lang, a vicious, hard-hitting boxer played in the 1982 film by Mr. T.

In a memorable scene from the film, ahead of an imminent fight with Rocky Balboa, Clubber Lang is asked by a reporter whether he hates the eponymous boxing legend, portrayed by Sylvester Stallone.

“No, I don’t hate Balboa. But I pity the fool,” Clubber Lang snarls before casting a menacing look straight into the camera.

It’s hard to know for sure who the “fool” is that Lake was referring to, but my guess would be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who seems to be biding his time ahead of a possible White House run. DeSantis appears — at least for the moment — to pose the greatest threat to Trump’s bid to repeat as the Republican Party’s presidential standard-bearer.

In the past, Trump has mocked the Florida governor as “Ron DeSanctimonious.” The former President mercilessly slammed DeSantis again on Saturday, first at a South Carolina campaign rally and then in remarks to the media. On his campaign plane, Trump berated DeSantis as “very disloyal” and accused him of “trying to rewrite history” in recent pronouncements about Covid-19 policy in Florida.

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 04:  U.S. President Donald Trump (R) speaks as he joined by House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) (L) in the Rose Garden of the White House on January 4, 2019 in Washington, DC. Trump hosted both Democratic and Republican lawmakers at the White House for the second meeting in three days as the government shutdown heads into its third week.  (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Trump isn't the author of the right's worsening chaos

“I had governors that decided not to close a thing and that was up to them,” Trump said. He also took aim at DeSantis’ shifting position on vaccines, saying the Florida governor had “changed his tune a lot.”

DeSantis has, in fact, “changed his tune” on Covid-19.

In March 2020, in response to the rapidly spreading pandemic, the Florida governor issued an executive order closing bars and nightclubs, and urged people to follow US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines limiting gatherings on beaches to no more than 10 people.

But his recent remarks and pronouncements have veered sharply away from sensible, government-imposed Covid-19 protections in what appears to be a desperate bid to appeal to the GOP’s Covid-denying base voters ahead of an anticipated presidential run.

DeSantis has come out against lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccines and other measures meant to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The supposition by many political observers is that the about-face has largely been motivated by an impending White House bid.

But any potential run inevitably means a face-off with Trump, who is, as yet, the only Republican to have formally announced in the race. “Rocky III” marked the 40th anniversary of its release last year, but the 2024 GOP nominating campaign might be Rocky vs. Clubber Lang all over again.

There’s another moment in the film that springs to mind as I consider a possible Trump vs. DeSantis showdown. That’s the scene where Clubber Lang, having lost his boxing title, trash-talks Rocky in an effort to goad him into a fight.

Lang confronts Rocky at a press conference, publicly mocking the champ for refusing to fight a “real man,” and screaming out to the assembled crowd: “If he ain’t no coward, why won’t he fight me then?”

In many ways, it seems as if we have the same scenario playing out now, with Trump as the challenger and DeSantis as the champ — even if that stands reality on its head to some degree since Trump once occupied the White House and DeSantis would be the newbie in national politics.

But if the former President is not exactly an underdog in the White House nomination contest, he certainly has been on the ropes of late, with polls showing a certain Trump fatigue among many voters in his party who would rather someone else be the GOP nominee.

Trump is doing everything he can to taunt DeSantis into fighting him, from calling him an “average” governor to claiming that the only reason the “politically dead” DeSantis was even elected governor in the first place was because of his endorsement.

As Rocky did at first with Lang, DeSantis has tried to remain above the fray. After winning reelection as Florida governor in November, DeSantis dismissed Trump’s criticism as “noise,” explaining that “when you are getting things done, yeah, you take incoming fire. That’s just the nature of it.”

But if DeSantis runs in 2024, he’ll need to show the red meat-loving GOP base that he can punch back against Trump. And if the past is any guide, he’ll need to do that soon. If he wants evidence of the perils of holding back against Trump, he need look no further than his fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio.

During the 2016 GOP presidential race, Trump and Rubio were among the Republicans vying for the opportunity to square off against the eventual Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Early in the primary campaign, Trump established himself as the GOP contender to beat.

At first, Rubio didn’t attack Trump directly. That changed when Rubio faced a “do or die” moment, finding himself in third place behind Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the delegate count, with little time to make up ground ahead of a March 2016 primary in his home state of Florida.

That’s when Rubio finally took the gloves off, calling Trump “an embarrassment” and a demagogue. But it was too little, too late for Rubio, who lost the Florida GOP primary, and ended up dropping out of the race the next day.

No one has ever accused DeSantis of being meek. He’s more than capable of firing back at Trump. He has a track record of lashing out at critics, slamming everything from the “corporate media” to Big Tech. In fact, last year DeSantis invoked another classic film, “Top Gun,” in a campaign ad to explain his battle plan in political dogfights.

Wearing a flight suit and seated in the cockpit of a fighter jet as the “Top Gov,” DeSantis revealed his “rules of engagement,” declaring, “No. 1 — don’t fire unless fired upon, but when they fire, you fire back with overwhelming force.” He continued: “No. 2 — never, ever back down from a fight.”

So far, “Top Gov” has failed to live up to either of these dictates.

Trump repeatedly opens fire upon DeSantis, who has failed to respond, with the “overwhelming force” that he vowed he would unleash. In fact, DeSantis hasn’t fired back at all. It appears the Florida governor is backing down from the fight.

Perhaps DeSantis — a Harvard Law School graduate and former federal prosecutor — is waiting to see if Trump is criminally indicted, in the hopes he doesn’t have to meet him on the field of battle. Just last week, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis told a judge that “decisions are imminent” in her investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to interfere in the 2020 election in Georgia.

There’s also special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump over the January 6, 2021, attack and the trove of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago that might yield charges. While Trump can still legally run for president while under indictment — or even if convicted of a crime — as a practical matter it would likely be devastating to his election prospects.

But barring prosecution of the former President, if DeSantis wants to win in 2024, he can’t keep ducking Trump’s barbs. DeSantis should remember that even though in “Rocky III” the iconic fighter lost his title early in the film to the menacing and cruel Clubber Lang, the “Italian Stallion” prevailed in the end.

But to prevail, you have to put up a fight. There could come a time when GOP voters view DeSantis’ refusal to defend himself and punch back as a sign of weakness.

The longer he is silent in the face of Trump’s barrage of punches, the more likely people will ask themselves, as Rocky’s nemesis did: If he ain’t no coward, why won’t he fight?

Ukrainian

Bakhmut has been "a living hell" as paratroopers replace Wagner fighters, Ukrainian commander says

From CNN's Kostan Nechyporenko and Radina Gigova

The "constant" fighting in and around the eastern Ukraine city of Bakhmut has been "a living hell" as Russian forces try to take control of the Kostiantynivka-Bakhmut highway, a Ukrainian commander said in an interview on Ukrainian television Monday.  

"Because for five or six months, near Bakhmut has been a living hell. The enemy is constantly attacking. And we can observe more about how the weather is changing, which, by the way, has a great impact on the combat capability, morale, and living conditions of each soldier," said Volodymyr Nazarenko, deputy commander of the "Svoboda" battalion of the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade of Ukraine's National Guard.

He said he couldn't say for certain whether Russian forces are making a full-scale offensive and whether their tactics have changed, but that it seems Wagner fighters have now been replaced by Russian paratroopers. 

Nazarenko went on to say the Ukrainian fighters "are doing an incredible job" and are "real heroes."

"The enemy is trying to take control of the Kostiantynivka-Bakhmut highway. They are not successful in it. Our fighters are doing their best: The Armed Forces and the National Guard are doing an incredible job; they are real heroes. And the enemy is suffering huge, huge losses," he said.

CNN has not been able to independently verify the claims about the losses. 

"What we see is that Wagner is almost completely destroyed. They have now been replaced by paratroopers, who also suffer losses almost every day, not only in manpower but also in armored vehicles," he added. 

The three Stooges all in one...

Trump struggled with identity at his first public campaign stop

Trump tried to cast himself as both a great Republican leader and the ultimate outsider.

By Ben Jacobs

The South Carolina statehouse’s second floor is a study in profound historical contradictions. A full plaque engraved with the state’s resolution seceding from the Union in 1860 faces a portrait of Mary McLeod Bethune. A statue of John C. Calhoun stands feet away from where Nikki Haley announced that Tim Scott would be the first Black senator since Reconstruction and where she, years later, finally removed the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds.

It’s also the place where Donald Trump tried to brand himself as both an incumbent and an insurgent while being neither.

In the first public event since he announced his 2024 presidential campaign, the former president struggled to achieve the synthesis of the anti-establishment impulses that helped him capture the presidency in 2016 or the air of total control and inevitability that led him to avoid any serious primary challenge in 2020 despite colossal midterm losses — and the first of what would be two impeachments.

Introducing Trump, first-term Rep. Russell Fry declared, “Never before in the history of the South Carolina primary has a presidential candidate received this much support this early in the day.”

More than a year before the primary, Trump unveiled the backing of the state’s governor, lieutenant governor, senior senator, and three of its six Republican members of Congress. It would be an astonishing lineup of endorsements for an insurgent candidate. When Trump was endorsed by then-Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster in 2016, that alone made national headlines. But Trump is no longer a political outsider: He is a former president. If he went to any state before his 2020 reelection bid where half of the congressional delegation didn’t show up, he would be viewed as weak.

The question is how to interpret just what the former president’s political strength is right now. No defeated former president has mounted a comeback bid since Grover Cleveland, who was controversial for his support for lower tariffs as opposed to, say, inspiring an attack on the US Capitol in an effort to overturn a presidential election. Other Republicans, of course, see Trump as vulnerable. It was pointed how he appeared in a space with such political significance to potential rivals like Nikki Haley or Tim Scott and while other potential rivals like Ron DeSantis sniff around.

Joe Wilson, a longtime Republican Congress member in the state, told Vox that Trump was “much stronger” than he was in 2016 when he faced his last competitive primary election in the Palmetto State. Wilson, who was supporting Trump, thought that the former president had “a real leg up” based on his record in the White House and cited what “he did for our country for jobs, for economic development, for national security, for the military, to the courts.”

The challenge is whether Trump can recapture the magic that helped propel his unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign this time around. His speech was a familiar mix of bellicose rhetoric off a teleprompter and an array of Trumpian riffs where he informed attendees about topics like the Taliban’s treatment of dogs and the fact that he, a millionaire real estate developer, is not much of a cook.

It also laid bare the contradictions facing his campaign. He started off with a denunciation of “RINOs” while standing next to Sen. Lindsey Graham, a comparative moderate in the modern Republican Party — the sort of Republican Trumps needs to win the nomination again. Graham was later heckled by the crowd because he did not accept Trump’s false claims about the 2020 elections. Trump went on to denounce electric cars next to McMaster, who has pushed for South Carolina’s automotive industry to become a center of EV manufacturing.

Earlier in the day, Trump spoke at the New Hampshire state GOP convention. There, the former president tried to reinforce his commitment to the race after not campaigning publicly for months, telling the crowd, “I’m more angry now and I’m more committed now than I ever was,” in the course of a Trump stemwinder of the type the former president often delivered in 2016.

The question is just how committed he will be in the course of the nearly two years remaining in the 2024 campaign. The former president is no longer the television personality who can lob bombs freely at all comers ranging from elected officials to Rosie O’Donnell based on his moods and the promise that his much-touted real estate expertise can solve all problems.

But he also isn’t the all-powerful president of the United States with all the resources that provides. Trump is caught in a middle ground without any measuring stick to gauge how he’s doing or precedent to put him in perspective. Instead, he has to navigate a maze of contradictions where it’s hard to tell just what Trump is or how he fits in — save, of course, the fact that no one is confusing him with Grover Cleveland.

Another California Shooting

At Least Three Killed, Four Injured in Another California Shooting

JULIA LURIE

At least three people have been killed and four injured after a shooting early Saturday morning in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Benedict Canyon. Two of those wounded are in critical condition, reports the Los Angeles Times. No suspect has been publicly identified.

The shooting took place outside a “gathering” at a short-term rental property, according to LAPD Sgt. Bruce Borihanh. “We called it a gathering, until we can interview some of the people that were here to determine exactly what kind of gathering it was,” he told reporters.

The news culminates a week of staggering gun violence in California. On January 21, a gunman killed 11 people at a dance studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park. Three days later, seven people were shot at two landscaping nurseries in the city of Half Moon Bay.

First State to Pass Bill Enshrining Abortion Rights

Minnesota Becomes First State to Pass Bill Enshrining Abortion Rights Post-Dobbs

“These are our values,” said the bill’s lead author. “This is what we believe.”

NOAH LANARD

After more than 14 hours of debate, the Minnesota Senate passed a bill on Saturday that would establish a “fundamental right” to abortion in the state. Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has said he will sign the Protect Reproductive Options Act, known as the PRO Act, into law. The move makes Minnesota the first state to pass a law guaranteeing the right to abortion in the wake of the Dobbs decision, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

Abortion is already legal in Minnesota as a result of a 1995 state Supreme Court decision. The bill will not have a major impact on Minnesotans’ current access to abortions, but would make it harder to restrict abortion rights in the future.

“What we saw was a need after Roe v. Wade was struck down this past summer, to codify the rights we currently have in Minnesota into the statutory law to provide that extra layer of protection,” said the bill’s lead author, Rep. Jen McEwen of Duluth.

The PRO Act passed the state Senate 34-33 on a party line vote. Democrats rejected numerous Republican amendments, Minnesota Public Radio reports. 

“We have a duty to answer the call of Minnesotans to truly protect those reproductive freedoms, to enshrine them not simply in case law, but in our statutory law,” McEwen said. “These are our values, this is the practice in Minnesota. This is what we believe.”

First State of 2023 to Ban Gender-Affirming Care

Utah Just Became the First State of 2023 to Ban Gender-Affirming Care

It’s probably not the last.

JULIA LURIE

On Saturday, Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation banning gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth and placing an indefinite moratorium on hormone treatment for minors who haven’t yet been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

While Utah is the first state of 2023 to limit gender-affirming care, it is not likely the last: A barrage of state bills brought by Republican lawmakers this year seeks to control the lives of transgender children. More than 150 such bills are being considered in at least 25 states, according to the New York Times, including proposals to ban transitional health care, restrict drag shows, and prevent teachers from using the names and pronouns that match the gender identities of their students.

Some of the bills, which are backed by longtime GOP operatives and Christian nationalist groups, have nearly identical language, suggesting a common template. Those organizing the legislative push include the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Policy Alliance, the American Principles Project, and the Heritage Foundation.

“This is a political winner,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, according to the Times. Schilling argued that more midterm voters might have come out had Republicans not “shied away” from the issue.

Last year, Gov. Cox made headlines when he vetoed a bill that would have limited the participation of transgender kids in school sports. But in a statement about the recent legislation, he argued for pausing “permanent and life-altering treatments.” He added, “While we understand our words will be of little comfort to those who disagree with us, we sincerely hope that we can treat our transgender families with more love and respect as we work to better understand the science and consequences behind these procedures.”

Major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychiatric Association, agree that gender-affirming care is key to improving health outcomes for transgender individuals, especially youth. Such care is associated with dramatically reduced rates of suicide, depression and anxiety, and substance use.

In a letter on Friday, the ACLU of Utah urged Cox to veto the bill. “By cutting off medical treatment supported by every major medical association in the United States, the bill compromises the health and well-being of adolescents with gender dysphoria,” it read. “It ties the hands of doctors and parents by restricting access to the only evidence-based treatment available for this serious medical condition and impedes their ability to fulfill their professional obligations.”

Sen. Mike Kennedy, the Republican lawmaker and family physician who sponsored the bill, expects the legislation to be litigated. “I’m afraid that I’m going to be working on this for the rest of my political life,” he said on the state Senate floor.

A legal review by Utah’s state legislature, obtained by the Salt Lake Tribune, suggested that the legislation could be deemed unconstitutional if brought before a federal court. 

Don’t Seem to Exist.

We Tried to Call the Top Donors to George Santos’ 2020 Campaign. Many Don’t Seem to Exist.

The list of matters to investigate keeps growing.

NOAH LANARD and DAVID CORN

In September 2020, George Santos’ congressional campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800—the maximum amount—to his first bid for a House seat. Their listed address was 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey.

A search of various databases reveals no one in the United States named Victoria or Jonathan Regor. Moreover, there is nobody by any name living at 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson. That address doesn’t exist. There is a New Mexico Street in Jackson, but the numbers end in the 20s, according to Google Maps and a resident of the street.

Santos’ 2020 campaign finance reports also list a donor named Stephen Berger as a $2,500 donor and said he was a retiree who lived on Brandt Road in Brawley, California. But a spokesperson for William Brandt, a prominent rancher and Republican donor, tells Mother Jones that Brandt has lived at that address for at least 20 years and “neither he or his wife (the only other occupant [at the Brandt Road home]) have made any donations to George Santos. He does not know Stephen Berger nor has Stephen Berger ever lived at…Brandt Road.”

The Regor and Berger contributions are among more than a dozen major donations to the 2020 Santos campaign for which the name or the address of the donor cannot be confirmed, a Mother Jones investigation found. A separate $2,800 donation was attributed in Santos’ reports filed with the Federal Election Commission to a friend of Santos who says he did not give the money.

Under federal campaign finance law, it is illegal to donate money using a false name or the name of someone else. “It’s called a contribution in the name of another,” says Saurav Ghosh, the director for federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “It’s something that is explicitly prohibited under federal law.”

These questionable donations, which account for more than $30,000 of the $338,000 the Santos campaign raised from individual donors in 2020, have not been previously cited in media reports. Mother Jones identified them by contacting (or trying to contact) dozens of the most generous donors to Santos’ 2020 campaign, which he ended up losing by 12 points. 

Santos did not respond to a detailed list of questions Mother Jones sent to his lawyer and his congressional office that included names of donors whose identities could not be verified.

The donations are the latest in the Long Island fabulist’s seemingly endless series of political mysteries. Santos has already been caught lying about various elements of his biography including the schools he attended, his religion, his previous employment, his family history, his mother’s death, and having been a volleyball star. He also has yet to explain how he acquired the more than $700,000 he loaned his most recent congressional campaign. 

During the 2020 campaign, he reported making only $55,000 a year in salary in a federal financial disclosure. Yet in September 2022, he reported that he had made between $3.5 million and $11.5 million from a company he had formed in 2021 after the Florida investment firm where he worked was accused in a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission of operating a Ponzi scheme. Soon after, as Mother Jones has reported, Santos and other veterans of the Florida company—none of whom were named in the SEC’s complaint—created a political consulting company that recruited Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s most recent Republican challenger as a client.

The contribution is one of more than a dozen major donations to the 2020 Santos campaign for which the name or the address of the donor cannot be confirmed, a Mother Jones investigation found. 

During Santos’ first run for Congress, only about 45 people maxed out to his campaign during the primary and general elections. In nine instances, Mother Jones found no way to contact the donor because no person by that name now lives at the address listed on the reports the Santos campaign filed with the FEC. None had ever contributed to a candidate before sending Santos the maximum amount allowed, according to FEC records. Nor have any of these donors contributed since. The Santos campaign’s filings list the profession of each of these donors as “retired.”

Two other donors who contributed $1,500 and $2,000, respectively, were listed in Santos’ FEC filings as retirees residing at addresses that do not exist. One was named Rafael Da Silva—which happens to be the name of a Brazilian soccer player.

Another suspicious donation was attributed to a woman who shares the name of a New York doctor who has made dozens of donations to Democrats. The Manhattan address listed for this donation does not exist. The doctor did not respond to a request for comment.

The donations came to the Santos campaign through WinRed, an internet-based service many GOP candidates use to receive contributions. A GOP operative familiar with WinRed confirmed that a person must list his or her name and occupation when donating through the site to comply with federal election laws, but the credit card he or she uses does not have to match that name. 

An additional maxed-out donor to Santos’ 2020 campaign tells Mother Jones that he did not make the $2,800 contribution attributed to him on Santos’ FEC filings. This person, who asked not to be identified, says that he had made a small contribution to Santos in early 2020. Santos, he notes, is a friend who supported him while he went through a divorce and battled cancer. 

His small contribution via WinRed does appear in an FEC filing, and he says that this week he located a record of it on his debit card statement. He adds that he could find no record on his debit or credit card statements of the $2,800 attributed to him in both WinRed and Santos FEC filings. The initial small dollar donation that he made on WinRed accurately listed his employment information. The $2,800 WinRed contribution made months later listed a different place of work for him: an aborted hand sanitizer venture that only he and Santos had worked on together.

Last week, the friend contacted Santos about the $2,800 donation. Santos, he says, warned him about speaking to reporters and asserted that the media was pursuing clicks, not the truth. According to the friend, Santos told him over the phone that any donation he didn’t agree to would be reimbursed.

After the friend subsequently advised Santos to talk to Mother Jones for this story, Santos texted him, “I’m letting my legal team handle this stuff. I’ve never been involved in the financial aspect or the filing aspects of the campaign.”

One of the eight supposed retirees who contributed the maximum amount to Santos is Carlos Suarez. He is listed in Santos’ FEC filings as residing in a two-unit building in Flushing, New York. According to a resident at that address, no one named Carlos Suarez lives there. She says she does not know anyone by that name. A Nexis search found no Carlos Suarez residing within the zip code.

A second retiree named Steven Caruso who topped out to Santos is listed on Santos’ FEC records as living on West Fingerboard Road in New York City. There is no West Fingerboard Road in Manhattan, but there is one on Staten Island. The home there that corresponds to the street address on the FEC filings belongs to a Polish immigrant. He tells Mother Jones that no Steven Caruso lives at his address and that he knows nobody by that name. Public records show no Steven Caruso ever residing at the address. 

The retirees listed as big donors for Santos include Jason and Lesley Goodman. They jointly donated $5,600 in late September 2020. A search of public records unearthed no one named Lesley Goodman living in New York. According to Santos’ FEC filings, the Goodmans reside at 220 Central Park South, a luxury skyscraper on Billionaires’ Row. The building’s penthouse sold for a record-breaking $238 million in 2019. Two employees at 220 Central Park South said that no one named Jason Goodman lives in that building.

These donations suggest a troubling pattern. In campaign filings, names and addresses of contributors are occasionally wrongly recorded. Campaigns do have an obligation to file accurate reports, and they often make efforts to confirm information for major donors, people with whom they want to maintain contact. It is unusual to find a significant number of high-level donors on a campaign filing who cannot be identified or located. The existence of such donations raises questions about the source of these contributions. Talking Points Memo has also reported a case of a Santos donor being charged for contributions he or she did not approve.

Brett Kappel, a campaign finance attorney with the law firm Harmon Curran, explains that it is a campaign treasurer’s duty to examine contributions for evidence of illegality. “If the treasurer determines that a contribution was made illegally in the name of another person,” Kappel says, “the treasurer is supposed to refund the contribution within thirty days.”

Nancy Marks, a veteran Republican campaign operative, served as Santos’ treasurer in 2020 and 2022. On Wednesday, Santos’ campaign committees filed paperwork with the FEC stating that Thomas Datwyler was replacing Marks. (Marks did not respond to requests for comment.)

But as Mother Jones reported, Datwyler’s attorney said that Datwyler had told Santos’ team that he did not want the job. For now, Santos appears to be effectively without a treasurer. On Friday, Datwyler sent a letter to the FEC requesting the commission refer the matter to the “appropriate law enforcement agency to determine whether a crime has occurred.” Also that day, the Justice Department asked the FEC to hold off on any enforcement action against Santos, according to the Washington Post—a sign the feds are proceeding with their investigation of Santos.

If any of these contributions becomes of interest to the local, state, and federal investigators now mounting probes of Santos, these investigators could potentially obtain records from WinRed that include the credit card numbers used to make these donations and determine if the names of the donors match those of the credit card holders. Gerrit Lansing, who launched WinRed in 2019, and other executives at his company did not respond to a request for comment.

Mother Jones did contact several top donors to Santos’ first campaign who confirmed they had made their contributions. One reported giving to the Santos campaign in 2020 after requesting that a campaign fundraiser have someone from the National Republican Congressional Committee contact him and vouch for Santos. Within an hour, the donor said, a man who identified himself as being with the NRCC called to affirm its support for Santos. “I had and still have no reason to believe the call was not legitimate,” the donor says.

The Santos fundraiser later arranged for this donor to have breakfast with Santos at a restaurant about an hour’s drive from the donor’s home. The donor arrived for the meeting, but Santos stood him up and, afterward, ignored his calls, according to the donor. Santos later phoned this donor to ask for more money. He did not give again.

NGC 6355

Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are less than 200 left. Over the eons, many globular clusters were destroyed by repeated fateful encounters with each other or the Galactic center. Surviving relics are older than any Earth fossil, older than any other structures in our Galaxy, and limit the universe itself in raw age. There are few, if any, young globular clusters left in our Milky Way Galaxy because conditions are not ripe for more to form. The featured image shows a Hubble Space Telescope view of 13-billion year old NGC 6355, a surviving globular cluster currently passing near the Milky Way's center. Globular cluster stars are concentrated toward the image center and highlighted by bright blue stars. Most other stars in the frame are dimmer, redder, and just coincidently lie near the direction to NGC 6355.

Let the side-show begin...

Trump hits DeSantis: He's a Covid skeptic phony

The former president slams the Florida governor — and potential 2024 rival — as he hits the campaign trail in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

By MERIDITH MCGRAW

Since announcing in November, Donald Trump had an unconventional start to his third presidential campaign: He did not campaign at all.

That’s now changing, and part of the reason the former president is holding his first formal campaign events of 2024 in New Hampshire and South Carolina this weekend is that others may be forcing his hand.

In recent days, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called Trump and suggested she would be announcing her decision to enter the presidential race soon, a conversation that a person familiar with it described as cordial.

“She called me and said she’d like to consider it. And I said you should do it,” Trump told reporters, noting that Haley once said she would not get in the race if Trump runs again.

But Haley may be only a modest challenge for Trump going forward. He also is on a collision course with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to jump into the race.

On Saturday, Trump took his sharpest swings at DeSantis to date, accusing the governor of “trying to rewrite history” over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump said DeSantis, who has been openly skeptical about government efforts to vaccinate people against the virus, “promoted the vaccine as much as anyone.” He praised governors who did not close down their states, noting that DeSantis ordered the closure of beaches and business in some parts of the state.

“When I hear that he might [run] I think it’s very disloyal,” Trump said.

As for the polls showing DeSantis beating him in key nominating states, Trump was dismissive.

“He won’t be leading, I got him elected,” he said. “I’m the one that chose him.”

For months Trump has been tucked away at his resort in Palm Beach, where he has hosted parties, sent out missives on his social media site Truth Social, played golf, and plotted out his next steps.

When he re-emerged on Saturday, flying to New Hampshire on his rehabbed Trump-branded 757 plane, he was determined to showcase himself as a candidate who still has the star power that catapulted him to the White House in 2016, and could once again elbow out a full field of Republican challengers.

“They said ‘he’s not doing rallies, he is not campaigning. Maybe he’s lost his step,’” Trump said at a meeting of the New Hampshire Republican Party. “I’m more angry now, and I’m more committed now than I ever was.”

Unlike 2020, when he ran unopposed as president, Trump is expected to have a field of Republican challengers to deal with this time around, beyond Haley. In anticipation of a crowded field, Trump’s campaign has compiled research on different potential candidates, according to an adviser. But Trump himself brushed off concerns that he is in danger of not securing the nomination. “I don’t think we have competition this time either, to be honest,” he said.

At the New Hampshire GOP meeting, Trump announced outgoing New Hampshire GOP Chair Stephen Stepanek would help oversee his campaign in the first-in-the-nation primary state.

And later in the day, at an appearance at the South Carolina statehouse, Trump announced endorsements from close ally and occasional golf buddy Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Republican Gov. Henry McMaster — a notable display of political muscle in Haley’s home state.

“The good news for the Republican Party is there are many, many talented people for years to come, but there is only one Donald Trump,” Graham said. “How many times have you heard we like Trump’s policies but we want somebody new. There are no Trump policies without Donald Trump.”

But Republican activists in New Hampshire are plainly divided. As Stepanek rejoins the Trump campaign, outgoing Vice Chair Pamela Tucker was recruiting volunteers for Ron to the Rescue, a super PAC formed after the midterms to boost DeSantis if he runs for president.

“We’re not never-Trumpers. We’re people who supported Trump. We love Trump. But we also know, more importantly, that we need to win. And Ron DeSantis has proven it time and time again now he can win elections,” Tucker said in an interview.

Matt Mayberry, a former congressional candidate and past New Hampshire GOP vice chair who supported Trump and has appeared at rallies with him in the state, said he isn’t taking sides yet in the still-forming primary.

“Let them all come,” he said.

Walter Stapleton, a GOP state representative from Claremont, sat toward the back of the auditorium wearing a Trump hat. But he said he, too, was undecided as to whom he’s backing in 2024.

“We have to put a candidate there that can win and maybe draw some of the independents and some of the voters from the other side of the aisle. I think DeSantis is the runner for that,” Stapleton said. “But I’m always willing to see if Trump will change his tack … and come across more balanced and more reasonable.”

During his speech in New Hampshire, Trump doled out red meat to a friendly crowd. The crowd roared with applause when he said that, if elected, he would “eliminate federal funding for any school that pushes critical race theory or left-wing gender ideology,” and support “direct election of school principals by the parents.”

His speech in New Hampshire echoed policy prescriptions he has released over the past several weeks in the form of video addresses, on issues such as education and protecting Social Security and Medicare. His team has seen those pronouncements as a way to maneuver back onto the political stage without having to organize the signature rallies that defined Trump’s prior bids.

Saturday, however, was about preparing for life back on the trail. The day comes as Trump has dipped in recent polling from New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Despite those surveys, Trump — the only declared candidate — consistently leads in national polls against a field of potential challengers, including DeSantis, his former vice president Mike Pence, and former members of his cabinet, including Mike Pompeo and Haley.

Trump said he welcomes the competition. “My attitude is, if they want to do it, they should do it. I have a good relationship with all of them.”

Trump was joined Saturday by some familiar faces from his White House days, including social media guru Dan Scavino, political director Brian Jack, and Jason Miller, as well as his campaign’s new top lieutenants, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita. The campaign has grown in recent months with a series of new hires and the establishment of a campaign headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida, not far from Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago.

Along with staff from the Trump-allied Make America Great Again PAC, there are around 40 people working on Trump’s campaign or with the aligned PAC, according to multiple advisers.

There is a push for the campaign to be scrappier than it was in 2020, when a massive operation worked out of a slick office building in Arlington, Virginia. And that ethos, according to an adviser, extends to how Trump will approach fundraising with a focus on small-dollar donations over big donor events.

The Trump campaign will still be working with longtime adviser Brad Parscale’s Nucleus to send out emails but is also working with an entirely new vendor in 2020 — Campaign Inbox — to help with digital fundraising.

Both Trump and his team seemed eager on Saturday to get back to the hustle and bustle of his time in the White House, and there were signals he has kept his same habits. Following Trump on the plane on Saturday were his assistants — Natalie Harp, the young OAN-anchor turned aide, and Walt Nauta, who carried a giant stack of newspapers on board for Trump to read through on the flight. Margo Martin, a former White House press aide who has worked for Trump in Florida since his 2020 loss, watched from the tarmac as Trump boarded the plane with a wave.

“We need a President who is ready to hit the ground running on day one, and boy am I hitting the ground running,” Trump said later in the day.

Fighter jets

Scholz doubles down on refusal of fighter jets for Ukraine

‘The question of combat aircraft does not arise at all,’ German chancellor tells Tagesspiegel.

BY JONES HAYDEN

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz doubled down on his rejection of demands by Kyiv to supply Ukraine with fighter jets on the heels of Berlin’s agreement to send battle tanks.  

“The question of combat aircraft does not arise at all,” Scholz said in an interview with Tagesspiegel published on Sunday. “I can only advise against entering into a constant competition to outbid each other when it comes to weapons systems.”

His comments come after a top Ukrainian official said on Saturday that Kyiv and its Western allies were engaged in “fast-track” talks on possibly sending military aircraft as well as long-range missiles to help fight the invasion by Russia.

Scholz last week ruled out providing fighter jets, citing the need to prevent further military escalation. “There will be no fighter jet deliveries to Ukraine,” he said on Wednesday, soon after Germany and the U.S. agreed to provide advanced tanks for Kyiv’s war effort.

Ukraine renewed its request for the fighter aircraft almost immediately after Berlin and Washington announced the tanks. Berlin said Germany and its European allies will send about 80 Leopard 2 tanks.

“If, as soon as a decision has been made, the next debate starts in Germany, this does not look very serious and shakes the confidence of the citizens in government decisions,” Scholz told Tagesspiegel. “Such debates should not be conducted for reasons of domestic political profiling. It is important to me now that all those who have announced their intention to supply battle tanks to Ukraine do so,” he said.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Saturday that Kyiv was in talks with allies about aircraft, but that some partners have a “conservative” attitude on arms deliveries. Without citing any partners by name, he said this attitude was “due to fear of changes in the international architecture.”