Crooked Media - What A Day: Caucus block

- House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy furiously re-writing his sound bites to protect Trump

Democrats know they face a difficult map in 2024, and a Republican Party willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way. So the DNC is trying to shift its calculus to meet the moment. 
 

• After a contentious and crowded 2020 Democratic primary, many members of the party’s base were left with lingering frustrations about the order of state primary elections and the effect it naturally has on the trajectory of the primary overall. No disrespect to Iowa, but it strikes many as nonsensical to have a state that is so racially homogeneous compared to the rest of the country, and one which perhaps more importantly Democrats don’t seem to win anymore in general elections, in the first-in-the-nation spot. There’s also the issue that Iowa uses a convoluted caucus system requiring a time commitment from voters so substantial it can be unintentionally disenfranchising. Iowa Dems have promised to make changes to the caucuses so they more closely resemble primaries in the hopes of keeping their prized status, but that has yet to be seen. So the Democratic National Committee is moving to amend the calendar. The thinking is: Why does this extremely-White, Republican-dominated state have the coveted first slot in determining candidate selection when it is so unrepresentative of the Democratic Party electorate? 

• Now before New Hampshire (traditionally second on the calendar) gets too excited, it basically has all the same problems as Iowa, except Dems are more likely to win in the Granite State once the general rolls around. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee will meet later this week to discuss the issue and are expected to move forward with the new calendar at the meeting, which will then go before the full DNC for a vote in January or early February. There are rumblings among DNC members of frustration with the White House, which has been silent thus far on the rules change. Two midwestern states jockeying to bump Iowa out of first on the calendar are Minnesota and Michigan: both are Democratic strongholds with demographics much more representative of the rest of the country and key groups who need to be won over in the hopes of clinching a national election. Lawmakers in Nevada are lobbying for their state to leapfrog New Hampshire, as a small but diverse state with narrow margins in general elections.    

• Changing the primary calendar will mark a fundamental break with Republicans after almost twenty years of a fairly linked primary season. But Republicans are, as we know, never above changing the rules to benefit themselves. Florida’s top Republican leaders signaled that they are willing to change state law to ease the way for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to run for president in 2024. DeSantis was re-elected to a second four-year term earlier this month, and the new state House Speaker and Senate President both agreed that it would be a “good idea” to clarify that DeSantis would not have to resign should he become GOP nominee. I guess we all have different opinions on what “good ideas'' are. DeSantis has not declared his intentions to run in 2024, but he’s clearly considering it, and many see his candidacy as likely if not certain, because we as a nation are being punished by a vengeful God??

Now we must unfortunately turn our attention to the Republican who has announced his 2024 bid: Donald Trump. 
 

• Trump’s 2024 campaign is off to a seriously rocky start. He announced the week after midterm elections in which most of his hand-picked candidates suffered humiliating losses, already a psychotic choice. This week, Trump has been at the center of a media firestorm because of his dinner with Kanye West and prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. Fuentes was a guest of Ye, and the stock line of Republicans trying to cover for the former president is that Trump allegedly “didn’t know who [Fuentes] was” but that obscures Trump’s continued friendly relationship with Kanye amidst the rapper’s past month of very public antisemitic tirades, as well as the fact that he didn’t so much as attempt to condemn anything Fuentes believes. The fallout from this dinner has sent the Trump campaign scrambling to control the damage and tighten the reins on who has access to the former president. Maybe that would work better if their candidate didn’t espouse ideas shared by some of the most vile figures in the country.

• A federal judge ruled yesterday that former president Donald Trump cannot claim presidential immunity to avoid a lawsuit that accuses him of civil rights violations in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump had previously stated that he was “absolutely immune” from such legal consequences and that his post-election activities in 2020 were part of an effort to “protect and defend the Constitution.” Lol. But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed with challengers that Trump’s actions were “purely political.” The ruling has yet to determine whether Trump and the RNC are liable for civil rights violations. Fingers crossed! 

Will 2024 be a shitshow? Almost certainly. But the Democratic Party is at the very least trying to make much-needed improvements as we look ahead. Republicans, meanwhile, are doubling down on their worst tendencies, as expected.

Crooked and Duolingo just released a brand new limited series podcast together, hosted by audio journalist Ahmed Ali Akbar. Radiolingo investigates all of the ways that language shapes our world and how the world shapes our language. Each episode explores a different way language plays a role in our life. From swearing to subtitles and everything in between.
 

Listen today and subscribe to Radiolingo, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

(Content warning: sexual assault of minors)

A yearlong investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel exposed the complicity of Florida’s child welfare system in underage sex trafficking. The inquiry relied on evidence found in government records, state and federal lawsuits, and interviews with victims, and concluded that when the state’s child welfare system takes in a girl, the odds that she will be trafficked for sex increase. Girls in foster care and sex trafficking victims already share many of the same vulnerabilities such as a history of abuse or exploitation, instability at home, emotional fragility, and negligent parenting. Particularly damning for Florida is that the state exploited a loophole so it could keep sending vulnerable girls to group homes, despite a federal law that discourages their use. Florida also voted to privatize the state foster care system in 1998, making it more difficult to identity parties responsible for children who fall through the cracks and are then sexually victimized, as the system is now a web of private contractors and sub-contractors. Reports of child sex trafficking to the Florida Abuse Hotline have greatly increased in recent years. Broward County Public Defender Gordon Weekes wrote in a letter to the head of Florida’s DCF back in 2014 alleging that child-welfare workers knew girls in group homes were targeted by sex traffickers, but the issue has gone largely unaddressed. Weekes went even further, saying, “Knowingly placing highly vulnerable foster care girls in such an environment without protection is tantamount to state-sponsored human trafficking, and it must be stopped.”

Under the direction of new CEO Elon Musk, Twitter has rolled back a policy aimed at tackling Covid misinformation on the platform. I’m sure that will go over extremely well and have no adverse consequences!

The House plans to vote tomorrow to block a potential American rail strike after President Biden warned of the seismic consequences of U.S. rail grinding to a halt. Joe and his trains! The man loves trains. 

Election officials in Luzerne County, PA have deadlocked on whether to send their official vote tallies, preventing the county from certifying its election results. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced plans to reform the country’s immigration system and citizenship laws in an effort to attract skilled workers to fill job vacancies, currently at an all-time high. 

Senior European Union officials are accusing the United States of profiting from the war in Ukraine through gas and weapons sales. “War profiteering?” said Dick Cheney somewhere, ears ringing. 

Five Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops today in the occupied West Bank in one of the most violent days in months of carnage there and in east Jerusalem.

Chinese universities sent students home en masse and police were deployed in Beijing and Shanghai to prevent more protests today after crowds angered by severe anti-Covid restrictions called for leader Xi Jinping to resign. Authorities have eased some controls in response to the biggest show of public dissent in China in decades, as the “zero-Covid” strategy involving confining millions of people to their homes for months at a time using increased surveillance and detention for enforcement was, if you can believe it, a controversial decision. Public tolerance of the restrictions has eroded as some people confined to their homes have struggled to access food and medicine. This extremely-strict policy has been instrumental in keeping Covid numbers in China lower than those of the United States and other world powers, but global health experts say it’s unsustainable.

Founder of the right-wing militia the Oath Keepers Stewart Rhodes was found guilty of seditious conspiracy today for his involvement in planning and executing the January 6 insurrection. We love this song.

The Respect for Marriage Act cleared the Senate in a vote of 61-36, one step closer to codifying same-sex and interracial marriage into federal law. 

The federal government announced yesterday that it will spend $250 million over the next four years on environmental cleanup and restoration work around the Salton Sea, a Southern California lake that is fed by the depleted Colorado River.